wonder if a study has ever been done on water vapor emissions?
There has, and the upshot is that water vapor stays in the air for a week or two, whereas CO2 has a residence time of at least decades. For climate purposes, water vapor is essentially always in equilibrium with current temperature, whereas the CO2 sinks can't keep up with human production.
Carbon dioxide isn't the strongest greenhouse gas (metric ton for metric ton), but it is the one that will stay in the atmosphere for years, driving water vapor as a secondary effect.
Or maybe automated entirely; at least in some cases, if the code can be effectively profiled the computer may be able to determine how to parallelize it and the programmer may not have to worry about it.
Not with common languages. Automatic parallelization relies on the computer knowing what data is going to be touched by what process when. In a flowchart, that's simple enough, but the common computing languages (C and its derivatives included) don't offer enough guarantees to reliably parallelize, especially without throwing "restrict" and "const" keywords everywhere.
In a way, the automatic parallelization problem is similar to the problem of high-level optimization of dynamic languages, like Python. The language is powerful, but parallelization (and, in the case of interpreted languages, high-performance compilation) require knowing exactly what is happening in a way that the language doesn't normally provide.
The notion that your machine is only findable by raw brute-force scanning is pretty laughable. Yes, it's one of the easiest and most non-brainer methods, but it's not the only one.
And on a dense IP space like IPv4, it's also the fastest method of scanning and spreading. For a worm propagating in its initial phases, its rate of growth is determined by how many "hits" it gets over N probes. By moving from IPv4 to IPv6, the search space goes from "very dense" to "highly sparse". If the worm still propagated by random probes, its growth rate would decrease by a factor of ~ 2^96 -- to essentially nil.
This means that a hypothetical IPv6 worm would have to use some sort of passive scanning. This algorithm is much harder to implement, and it also implies that there must be a continuous connection path for the worm to spread. Since, for example, web connections (between servers) are isolated (foobar.com does not talk to yahoo.com does not talk to google.com), this implies that entire categories of worms are essentially impossible to develop.
"Of course, consumers are too cheap and conservative to pay extra for a bank that offers such security features on its own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing these extra costs onto the consumers, otherwise it'll never happen."
Welcome to a race to the bottom. Customers, by and large, are not educated about computers; the Slashdot audience is remarkable in its education. This state is not the problem -- we Slashdotters by and large aren't well-educated in, for example, car engines.
Customers do not have the capability to make a correct risk assessment. Therefore, they discount the risk of phishing, and so security features are not a selling point. Thus, the security features will happen when:
Governments mandate it, or
Banks themselves, rather than customers, are held completely liable for phishing losses.
The latter change is perhaps more likely, but that also would require a change in government regulations. This situation is a classic case of market failure, because the ultimate consumers are uneducated and cannot make an informed, rational choice. The "rational man" ideal of economics doesn't exist.
Surely if my tax dollars pay part of the tuition for the student copy writing everything he does as part of his education, then we deserve a portion of anything made from it.
As a grad student at a Canadian university, let me tell you: pay us more if you ("the public") want to take a stake in our work. We're paid at essentially a subsistence level, not at a "work for hire" level.
A web app on a website is a source code usage, not distribution. The code runs on the web server and never leaves it.
There's little difference between running a binary on your computer and interacting with it and running a binary on someone else's computer and interacting with it. A web-app is no different than an app displayed through remote X-Windows. If you want to get legalistic, I could argue that putting the web app on the website isn't usage so much as performance.
In addition, the latest drafts that I'd seen only require source-code downloading if the original software had a comparable feature. This isn't putting new requirements on web-apps, it's preventing people from taking away rights that the original author had granted to the viewer.
It doesn't try to conserve vorticity better. It defines a discrete analog of continuous vorticity and it guarantees that this is precisely conserved (up to machine precision). The whole point of this work, and related work, is to define discrete systems where discrete analogs of standard theorems of calculus hold exactly.
You're right, I made a mistake when I said that. What their model does do, is introduce (limited) numerical diffusion into the vorticity; that's a natural consequence of any explicitly-conserving scheme. Treating vorticity rather than velocity is the defining characteristic, and that's definitely neat. It's still not as revolutionary as the original article hypes it up, but that's just journalism for you.
What the CFD-literate Slashdotters will want to read is the actual paper (warning, pdf) that the article is based upon.
It's a neat method, but it's nothing revolutionary. The upshot is that their method tries to conserve vorticity (fluid spin) better than the other methods currently used for graphics, with the aim of getting rid of hacks that are now necessary to Make Things Look Good. The entire spin (no pun intended) in the article about "equations for computers, not for people" is journalistic sensationalism.
All told, it's a vorticity-based Finite Element Method, which is solved as a sparse linear system. Cool pictures, though.
I'd tell you how many, but my computer isn't powerful enough to calculate log_10(2003663613 * 2^195,000 ± 1)
Because of the properties of log (log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b)), the answer's quite easy: it's approximately 58710.1509793 (continued for a while) ± 1/(2003663613 * 2^195,000)/log_e(10). The ± 1 bit is relatively easy to account for -- a Taylor series expansion of log_e(x + 1) ~= log(x) + 1/x for very large x.
No, Newton's totally correct. He just didn't consider that the universe was non-constant.
Spatially speaking, the universe is constant -- far more than Newton expected, in fact. The key insight of Special Relativity is that the universe, including the speed of light, is constant and the same in an arbitrary reference frame.
It should be very easy to convert the photographs to 3D.
No, it is not, full stop. Depth-from-parallax is hard enough for computer vision, depth from a single photograph is mathematically ambiguous.
We, the ones with the wetware, can do it only because we're familiar with environments and composition -- we know that rooms are usually square, houses go behind the trees, and people tend not to be 23 feet tall. Even then, we are fallible: consider optical illusions.
For those of us who aren't programming geniuses- what would you use to store a monetary amount, besides a floating-point format?
Without the use of any libraries? Integers -- just use cents as the base unit of currency, and convert to dollars strictly on input and display.
If you're dealing with amounts of cents that could possibly start overflowing even a 32-bit int (that is, billions of cents, or tens of millions of dollars), then the application's important enough to be worth the cost of further research on the matter.
Interesting... I pay my balance off every month, and they raise my credit line.
So, is it because they like me, or because they hope i'll spend more and _not_ be able to pay it off in one month?
Both. By regularly paying off your bill, you demonstrate that you're a good credit risk. The bank is hoping that you'll be stuck with a running balance and pay their interest fees on it, but they're also confident that if/when you do, you'll make regular payments and not default.
I don't filter out google text ads because they really don't bother me.
I've filtered out the occasional google text ad, but only on a per-site basis. Most of them don't bother me at all, but the occasional site (often a php forum) has them in such an obnoxious place (and in such a huge frame) that it makes the page less readable. When that happens, the iframe goes bye-bye.
It is definitely not a toy. He said people might be able to buy one in the U.S. next year (paying double so half could buy a kid in another country one).
Presuming that it's as portable as you'd expect, I'd buy one. My current academic environment has me stuck on thin X-terms, logging into Solaris servers. Really nice idea, but the login environment was state-of-the-art about 15 years ago. I don't know about you, but I'd really like something better than a 256-color palletized display.
It could be worse, though; I could be a native-CJK speaker and need/want Asian-character input. I don't think that's even possible on the environment as it's set up.
A $200-laptop that I could haul around with me would be an excellent "thick terminal" replacement. Running local desktop, browser, and any application of substance would get run over remote-X as before.
You know, I've never understood why people are so adamant about this. Where I work, all of our desktops have direct, public IPs. As far as I've heard that's caused about zero security issues, as we have a firewall.
Agreed. People think that NAT is the only way to have a idiot-proof external-facing security, but they're confusing NAT and a simple stateful firewall. It's easy enough to do. A NAT implementation basically requires a stateful firewall to be useful, and it's often people's first exposure to said firewall. It's no more difficult (and in fact it's easier) to have a stateful firewall in a non-NAT environment, though.
The one unique security advantage that NATs have is that it's difficult (and with enough paranoia in the configuration impossible) to tell from which computer behind a NAT router a given connection is coming from. The amount of information leaked in this manner is trivial, and if you're in a situation where somebody would actually gain a benefit from knowing that IP X visits website Z at 8am, whlie IP Y visits the same website at 9:30am, then you need similarly paranoid worker procedures.
With health care, the single-payer system obliterates the demand curve. It completely decouples it from price on both macro and microeconomic scales. This causes a market failure and creates a shortage. Countries with single-payer systems solve the shortage with government control. Everyone still pays too much, but at least most people can get a minimum of care, because some (or even many) are denied access.
Yes, government control can cause shortages, but your definition of 'shortage' is the economic one ('demand unmet at the current price point') rather than the dictionary one ('demand unmet').
A regulated health care system often results in waiting lists for some procedures (which ones and how long depends on which system in particular), while a market system offers a procedure immediately (or nearly so) for the right price. Unfortunately, the 'right price' is too high for some segment of the population (represented by the demand curve being only nearly ineslastic), so the underserved remains so nearly indefinitely.
This problem is only compounded because health care isn't a classic consumer good; it has long-term effects that makes it nearly a capital investment. A person who receives neither timely nor effective health care is likely to be chronically ill and ineffective at work. No work means no money, and no money means little/no health care.
In the limit of infinitely flexible medical supply, the answer would be a two-tier system; basic medical services would be offered to all, while queue-jumping would be sold at a price. Unfortunately for the industrialized countries of the world, the supply of doctors and nurses isn't infinite -- a two-tier system would drive "medicial supply" from the first tier into the private tier and create a doctor shortage.
Sorry, not true. It's the heat that kills the filament, not the "shock" of turning it on. The filament is simply a resistor. There is no damage done to it by cycling it on or off. In fact, solid state dimmers, the kind you can buy at home depot from Lutron or Leviton, reduce the light of the bulb by altering the ratio of on and off while cycling the power to the bulb 120 times per sec (or 2x the frequency of the power source).
Not exactly true. The fillament isn't just an anonymous resisitve element. The fillament is, more or less, a metallic wire, and as such is subject to all the normal stresses. Simply heating up the tungsten in the fillament doesn't hurt the wire very much, because there's no changing stresses involved -- it heats up, but doesn't melt, so no real harm.
In contrast, rapid heating and cooling of the fillament, like you get when it turns on and off, is a repeated stress on the wire. The heating causes physical change in length (hotter things expand), and the cooling causes it to return to its normal size. Eventually, the stress breaks the wire somewhere (through a process probably much like metal fatigue), often right at the junction between one end of the fillament and the rest of the bulb. Have you ever broken a wire by bending it back and forth at the same place, repeatedly?
So, why don't solid-state dimmer switches cause as much of a problem? The fillament has some measure of heat capacity, so it retains heat (enough to emit light) for a good fraction of a second after current is cut. Oscillating the current at some 60/120 times a second doesn't cause much change in the temperature. If it did, you'd see the light from a dimmed bulb flicker, since the output is directly proportional to temperature.
Besides, AC current doesn't provide a steady heating load to a resistive element -- the current only peaks twice a cycle (one positive, one negative). A solid state dimmer would change the level of those peaks, but the simple fact of running a bulb off of AC, rather than fully rectified DC already means that the current through the bulb goes through full, rapid swings.
completely agree. However, you clearly haven't seen any modern pornography. It's not just naked human beings. It's guys cumming on womens faces saying, "Take that bitch, want some more?" This kind of material can be very harmful to kids. It provides for a horrendous role model that some children adopt and it causes a number of problems in their ability to develop relationships with the opposite sex. It warps their ideas of love and sex.
This isn't a problem of porn per-se, it's a problem with porn's underground nature.
Currently, porn is in the middle of a "race to the bottom," from economic theory. The barrier to entry for making porn is almost nonexistant anymore (ditigal camera, computer, voila), so pornography is ironically one of the freest markets around -- at least on the Internet. In meatspace, though, pornography is still regulated and "hidden" -- witness strict zoning laws on everything from strip clubs to adult bookstores. With limited access in meatspace and the stigma still attached to actually getting caught with porn, there's no quality filtering of the sort done by nearly every middleman.
The upshot of the environment is that it's difficult for porn to compete on "quality" -- the Interweb thingy makes it comparatively easy to find porn from innumerable sources. Simultaneously, the sheer volume of what's available "for free" (with or without copyright violations attached) means that there's no incentive for the porn consumer to have "brand loyalty," so to speak.
Thus, porn has to compete on getting your attention now. This means that porn has to arouse (no pun intended) the strongest response in its viewers in the shortest time. The strongest human emotions are lust (check), fear, anger, and disgust. The latter three are what the "weird-shit" porn goes for -- and it does it reasonably well. (Porn mostly goes for "fear" in empathy, as in "girl gets 'raped'." Since true fear is generally incompatible with lustful feelings, my guess is that most people would respond with a degree of misogyny, rather than empathetic fear that the situation would normally evoke.)
Evocation of lust is pretty much peaked in porn, at least at the price porn has to be budgeted (that is, cheap). Any good writing that would lead to more complicated expressions is expensive, and also requires good acting and directing; these are all priced out by the market. I think that this is why we see so much anal sex in porn -- it's one of the last taboos.
The problem with young people viewing the "weird-shit" porn is exactly what the consensus opinion says it is -- youngsters are going to get their first exposure to sexuality in an environment that's actually designed to provoke feelings of anger, fear, and disgust. Without a healthy, open exposure to sexuality in broader society, kids will of course think that the "weird-shit" is what's normal... which doesn't bode well for their first few times at bat.
The answer to the problem of porn isn't to eliminate porn. The Internet isn't going back in the bottle, and porn's availability is probably here to stay. The answer is to deliberately introduce kids to healthy expressions of sexuality in an open way, so that they can see the weird shit in porn for what it really is, rather than interpret it as the "standard" expression of sexuality.
Modern sex-ed courses (at least in the States, where I grew up), do absolutely none of this. The basic anatomy lesson is worthless, and the STD treatment is about as effective as saying "here's the fun bits, but if you touch them your hands will fall off." Unfortunately, this is often the only "official" exposure to sex that most kids ever have, before they try it themselves for better or for worse.
To use a loose analogy, imagine if violence-as-expressed-in-modern-films (Terminator-esque) was the only expression of violence that kids ever saw, and then you hand them a machine gun on their 18th birthdays. Fortunately for the health of everyone in
Baldur's Gate II [gives] you a huge world to explore, plenty of well-drawn NPCs to argue with or get romantic with...
*shudder*
Not really -- it's only as "creepy" as a fantasy novel with romantic subplot. Baldur's Gate II was extremely well-written, and the overall experience was like a novel wrapped up with D&D game mechanics. Most notably, the NPC's behaved in a believable way, with inner conflicts and personality flaws.
The sex, if it happened, was entirely "offstage", referred to only in dialogue, and occured only within the framework of a deeper romantic subplot.
RFID range is dependant on the sensitivity of the receiver, so even though they only put out a small signal, RFIDs have a theoretical infinite range.
No it's not. According to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, there's a theoretical maximum transfer rate at a given bandwidth and noise floor.
The bandwidth of an RFID response is, of course, constant. By contrast (and ignoring entirely that RFIDs are passively powered) the relative signal strength of the RFID at the receiver decays approximately with the square of the distance.
Given some information content I and noise floor N, there's a minimum signal to noise ratio for the RFID bandwidth such that the RFID's information can be (mostly) completely recovered. This necessarily implies a maximum range on receipt.
Of course, beyond this range you could still recover some portion of the information. You'd then need to fire the RFID many times to, statistically, recover the entire thing. This of course requires infinite refires, and thus infinite time, at infinite range. Which is beyond the realm of plausibility and utility.
I just tried it on IE And it works, seems like it's a problem with my version of Firefox (perhaps a conflict with one of my extensions?)
Make sure you're accepting the relevant cookies from [www.]google.com; it sounds like Firefox is rejecting them, causing Google to load default content.
Random chance. If you took a survey of human beings, you would find that some have more genes than others. Oops. For example, there are people running around with XYY, rather than just XX or XY. What would happen if somehow the XYY's decided to only mate with one another. After a few hundred generations, it may be possible that the XYY's could not mate with the rest of us. Instant species! And a species with one more gene.
Slight problem; people with XYY genes all develop male, so if they mated with each other there wouldn't be any children at all.:)
Slashdot Mirror
There has, and the upshot is that water vapor stays in the air for a week or two, whereas CO2 has a residence time of at least decades. For climate purposes, water vapor is essentially always in equilibrium with current temperature, whereas the CO2 sinks can't keep up with human production.
Carbon dioxide isn't the strongest greenhouse gas (metric ton for metric ton), but it is the one that will stay in the atmosphere for years, driving water vapor as a secondary effect.
Not with common languages. Automatic parallelization relies on the computer knowing what data is going to be touched by what process when. In a flowchart, that's simple enough, but the common computing languages (C and its derivatives included) don't offer enough guarantees to reliably parallelize, especially without throwing "restrict" and "const" keywords everywhere.
In a way, the automatic parallelization problem is similar to the problem of high-level optimization of dynamic languages, like Python. The language is powerful, but parallelization (and, in the case of interpreted languages, high-performance compilation) require knowing exactly what is happening in a way that the language doesn't normally provide.
And on a dense IP space like IPv4, it's also the fastest method of scanning and spreading. For a worm propagating in its initial phases, its rate of growth is determined by how many "hits" it gets over N probes. By moving from IPv4 to IPv6, the search space goes from "very dense" to "highly sparse". If the worm still propagated by random probes, its growth rate would decrease by a factor of ~ 2^96 -- to essentially nil.
This means that a hypothetical IPv6 worm would have to use some sort of passive scanning. This algorithm is much harder to implement, and it also implies that there must be a continuous connection path for the worm to spread. Since, for example, web connections (between servers) are isolated (foobar.com does not talk to yahoo.com does not talk to google.com), this implies that entire categories of worms are essentially impossible to develop.
Welcome to a race to the bottom. Customers, by and large, are not educated about computers; the Slashdot audience is remarkable in its education. This state is not the problem -- we Slashdotters by and large aren't well-educated in, for example, car engines.
Customers do not have the capability to make a correct risk assessment. Therefore, they discount the risk of phishing, and so security features are not a selling point. Thus, the security features will happen when:
The latter change is perhaps more likely, but that also would require a change in government regulations. This situation is a classic case of market failure, because the ultimate consumers are uneducated and cannot make an informed, rational choice. The "rational man" ideal of economics doesn't exist.
As a grad student at a Canadian university, let me tell you: pay us more if you ("the public") want to take a stake in our work. We're paid at essentially a subsistence level, not at a "work for hire" level.
There's little difference between running a binary on your computer and interacting with it and running a binary on someone else's computer and interacting with it. A web-app is no different than an app displayed through remote X-Windows. If you want to get legalistic, I could argue that putting the web app on the website isn't usage so much as performance.
In addition, the latest drafts that I'd seen only require source-code downloading if the original software had a comparable feature. This isn't putting new requirements on web-apps, it's preventing people from taking away rights that the original author had granted to the viewer.
You just described Common Lisp.
You're right, I made a mistake when I said that. What their model does do, is introduce (limited) numerical diffusion into the vorticity; that's a natural consequence of any explicitly-conserving scheme. Treating vorticity rather than velocity is the defining characteristic, and that's definitely neat. It's still not as revolutionary as the original article hypes it up, but that's just journalism for you.
What the CFD-literate Slashdotters will want to read is the actual paper (warning, pdf) that the article is based upon.
It's a neat method, but it's nothing revolutionary. The upshot is that their method tries to conserve vorticity (fluid spin) better than the other methods currently used for graphics, with the aim of getting rid of hacks that are now necessary to Make Things Look Good. The entire spin (no pun intended) in the article about "equations for computers, not for people" is journalistic sensationalism.
All told, it's a vorticity-based Finite Element Method, which is solved as a sparse linear system. Cool pictures, though.
Because of the properties of log (log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b)), the answer's quite easy: it's approximately 58710.1509793 (continued for a while) ± 1/(2003663613 * 2^195,000)/log_e(10). The ± 1 bit is relatively easy to account for -- a Taylor series expansion of log_e(x + 1) ~= log(x) + 1/x for very large x.
Spatially speaking, the universe is constant -- far more than Newton expected, in fact. The key insight of Special Relativity is that the universe, including the speed of light, is constant and the same in an arbitrary reference frame.
No, it is not, full stop. Depth-from-parallax is hard enough for computer vision, depth from a single photograph is mathematically ambiguous.
We, the ones with the wetware, can do it only because we're familiar with environments and composition -- we know that rooms are usually square, houses go behind the trees, and people tend not to be 23 feet tall. Even then, we are fallible: consider optical illusions.
Not if you use an IDE cable with the write pins removed.
Without the use of any libraries? Integers -- just use cents as the base unit of currency, and convert to dollars strictly on input and display.
If you're dealing with amounts of cents that could possibly start overflowing even a 32-bit int (that is, billions of cents, or tens of millions of dollars), then the application's important enough to be worth the cost of further research on the matter.
Both. By regularly paying off your bill, you demonstrate that you're a good credit risk. The bank is hoping that you'll be stuck with a running balance and pay their interest fees on it, but they're also confident that if/when you do, you'll make regular payments and not default.
I've filtered out the occasional google text ad, but only on a per-site basis. Most of them don't bother me at all, but the occasional site (often a php forum) has them in such an obnoxious place (and in such a huge frame) that it makes the page less readable. When that happens, the iframe goes bye-bye.
Presuming that it's as portable as you'd expect, I'd buy one. My current academic environment has me stuck on thin X-terms, logging into Solaris servers. Really nice idea, but the login environment was state-of-the-art about 15 years ago. I don't know about you, but I'd really like something better than a 256-color palletized display.
It could be worse, though; I could be a native-CJK speaker and need/want Asian-character input. I don't think that's even possible on the environment as it's set up.
A $200-laptop that I could haul around with me would be an excellent "thick terminal" replacement. Running local desktop, browser, and any application of substance would get run over remote-X as before.
Agreed. People think that NAT is the only way to have a idiot-proof external-facing security, but they're confusing NAT and a simple stateful firewall. It's easy enough to do. A NAT implementation basically requires a stateful firewall to be useful, and it's often people's first exposure to said firewall. It's no more difficult (and in fact it's easier) to have a stateful firewall in a non-NAT environment, though.
The one unique security advantage that NATs have is that it's difficult (and with enough paranoia in the configuration impossible) to tell from which computer behind a NAT router a given connection is coming from. The amount of information leaked in this manner is trivial, and if you're in a situation where somebody would actually gain a benefit from knowing that IP X visits website Z at 8am, whlie IP Y visits the same website at 9:30am, then you need similarly paranoid worker procedures.
Yes, government control can cause shortages, but your definition of 'shortage' is the economic one ('demand unmet at the current price point') rather than the dictionary one ('demand unmet').
A regulated health care system often results in waiting lists for some procedures (which ones and how long depends on which system in particular), while a market system offers a procedure immediately (or nearly so) for the right price. Unfortunately, the 'right price' is too high for some segment of the population (represented by the demand curve being only nearly ineslastic), so the underserved remains so nearly indefinitely.
This problem is only compounded because health care isn't a classic consumer good; it has long-term effects that makes it nearly a capital investment. A person who receives neither timely nor effective health care is likely to be chronically ill and ineffective at work. No work means no money, and no money means little/no health care.
In the limit of infinitely flexible medical supply, the answer would be a two-tier system; basic medical services would be offered to all, while queue-jumping would be sold at a price. Unfortunately for the industrialized countries of the world, the supply of doctors and nurses isn't infinite -- a two-tier system would drive "medicial supply" from the first tier into the private tier and create a doctor shortage.
Not exactly true. The fillament isn't just an anonymous resisitve element. The fillament is, more or less, a metallic wire, and as such is subject to all the normal stresses. Simply heating up the tungsten in the fillament doesn't hurt the wire very much, because there's no changing stresses involved -- it heats up, but doesn't melt, so no real harm.
In contrast, rapid heating and cooling of the fillament, like you get when it turns on and off, is a repeated stress on the wire. The heating causes physical change in length (hotter things expand), and the cooling causes it to return to its normal size. Eventually, the stress breaks the wire somewhere (through a process probably much like metal fatigue), often right at the junction between one end of the fillament and the rest of the bulb. Have you ever broken a wire by bending it back and forth at the same place, repeatedly?
So, why don't solid-state dimmer switches cause as much of a problem? The fillament has some measure of heat capacity, so it retains heat (enough to emit light) for a good fraction of a second after current is cut. Oscillating the current at some 60/120 times a second doesn't cause much change in the temperature. If it did, you'd see the light from a dimmed bulb flicker, since the output is directly proportional to temperature.
Besides, AC current doesn't provide a steady heating load to a resistive element -- the current only peaks twice a cycle (one positive, one negative). A solid state dimmer would change the level of those peaks, but the simple fact of running a bulb off of AC, rather than fully rectified DC already means that the current through the bulb goes through full, rapid swings.
This isn't a problem of porn per-se, it's a problem with porn's underground nature.
Currently, porn is in the middle of a "race to the bottom," from economic theory. The barrier to entry for making porn is almost nonexistant anymore (ditigal camera, computer, voila), so pornography is ironically one of the freest markets around -- at least on the Internet. In meatspace, though, pornography is still regulated and "hidden" -- witness strict zoning laws on everything from strip clubs to adult bookstores. With limited access in meatspace and the stigma still attached to actually getting caught with porn, there's no quality filtering of the sort done by nearly every middleman.
The upshot of the environment is that it's difficult for porn to compete on "quality" -- the Interweb thingy makes it comparatively easy to find porn from innumerable sources. Simultaneously, the sheer volume of what's available "for free" (with or without copyright violations attached) means that there's no incentive for the porn consumer to have "brand loyalty," so to speak.
Thus, porn has to compete on getting your attention now. This means that porn has to arouse (no pun intended) the strongest response in its viewers in the shortest time. The strongest human emotions are lust (check), fear, anger, and disgust. The latter three are what the "weird-shit" porn goes for -- and it does it reasonably well. (Porn mostly goes for "fear" in empathy, as in "girl gets 'raped'." Since true fear is generally incompatible with lustful feelings, my guess is that most people would respond with a degree of misogyny, rather than empathetic fear that the situation would normally evoke.)
Evocation of lust is pretty much peaked in porn, at least at the price porn has to be budgeted (that is, cheap). Any good writing that would lead to more complicated expressions is expensive, and also requires good acting and directing; these are all priced out by the market. I think that this is why we see so much anal sex in porn -- it's one of the last taboos.
The problem with young people viewing the "weird-shit" porn is exactly what the consensus opinion says it is -- youngsters are going to get their first exposure to sexuality in an environment that's actually designed to provoke feelings of anger, fear, and disgust. Without a healthy, open exposure to sexuality in broader society, kids will of course think that the "weird-shit" is what's normal... which doesn't bode well for their first few times at bat.
The answer to the problem of porn isn't to eliminate porn. The Internet isn't going back in the bottle, and porn's availability is probably here to stay. The answer is to deliberately introduce kids to healthy expressions of sexuality in an open way, so that they can see the weird shit in porn for what it really is, rather than interpret it as the "standard" expression of sexuality.
Modern sex-ed courses (at least in the States, where I grew up), do absolutely none of this. The basic anatomy lesson is worthless, and the STD treatment is about as effective as saying "here's the fun bits, but if you touch them your hands will fall off." Unfortunately, this is often the only "official" exposure to sex that most kids ever have, before they try it themselves for better or for worse.
To use a loose analogy, imagine if violence-as-expressed-in-modern-films (Terminator-esque) was the only expression of violence that kids ever saw, and then you hand them a machine gun on their 18th birthdays. Fortunately for the health of everyone in
*shudder*
Not really -- it's only as "creepy" as a fantasy novel with romantic subplot. Baldur's Gate II was extremely well-written, and the overall experience was like a novel wrapped up with D&D game mechanics. Most notably, the NPC's behaved in a believable way, with inner conflicts and personality flaws.
The sex, if it happened, was entirely "offstage", referred to only in dialogue, and occured only within the framework of a deeper romantic subplot.
No it's not. According to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, there's a theoretical maximum transfer rate at a given bandwidth and noise floor.
The bandwidth of an RFID response is, of course, constant. By contrast (and ignoring entirely that RFIDs are passively powered) the relative signal strength of the RFID at the receiver decays approximately with the square of the distance.
Given some information content I and noise floor N, there's a minimum signal to noise ratio for the RFID bandwidth such that the RFID's information can be (mostly) completely recovered. This necessarily implies a maximum range on receipt.
Of course, beyond this range you could still recover some portion of the information. You'd then need to fire the RFID many times to, statistically, recover the entire thing. This of course requires infinite refires, and thus infinite time, at infinite range. Which is beyond the realm of plausibility and utility.
I just tried it on IE And it works, seems like it's a problem with my version of Firefox (perhaps a conflict with one of my extensions?) Make sure you're accepting the relevant cookies from [www.]google.com; it sounds like Firefox is rejecting them, causing Google to load default content.
Slight problem; people with XYY genes all develop male, so if they mated with each other there wouldn't be any children at all. :)