Actually the idea of baptizing an alien brings up some interesting theological questions. You have to remember why Christians get baptized in the first place: to remove original sin. You know, the sin of Adam and Eve eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. If you stop and think about that assuming that aliens can be baptized has a few problems to it.
Is he assuming that any alien's that we meet had a similar fall, and need to be redeemed? Or is he assuming that Adam and Eve's sin has somehow tainted the aliens across interstellar distance (after all, it is supposed to taint us across thousands of years of time, why not distance as well)? Or is he thinking that Adam and Eve were the original ancestors of all intelligent beings (in a spiritual sense, I'm thinking along the lines of Adam and Eve being the first souls rather than the first humans)? Or did he just forget what the actual purpose of baptism was when a journalist asked him a question that he wasn't really prepared for?... yes, that seems most likely. Drat it all, I thought I was on to something here.
they're "we need to figure out a way of quickly producing these exotic materials on a large enough skill to fill the demand that the military is going to have for these.".
And then the military contract is fulfilled and there's a high-tech, extremely niche product factory just sitting there waiting to be re-purposed. There's also the knowledge of how to set up a large scale manufacturing facility to create those materials. Basically, there's another tool in the company's toolbox and when the next problem pops up the new knowledge and abilities might just be able to solve it better than the old ones. That's how derivative technologies make it to the market.
Military hardware is not civilian hardware. Just to get a data link into a modern plane you would need to crack the encryption, crack the radio network to allow you in, and even then you'd still have to crack the actual systems on the plane itself. Now if you meant jamming, that is somewhat easier, but I can assure you that the military radios have ways to prevent that as well.
Even assuming an absolute worst case scenario, a single usable takeoff point in the entire world, conflict on the other side of the planet, and a cruise speed of 50 mph it would take a whopping 10 days to reach it's destination. And if they can really stay up for 5 years straight, you could have a fleet of them spread around the world ready to be deployed to nearby conflict zones.
If you want to use your bank issued cards you do. Sudden transactions thousands of miles away from your home area is a huge red flag for theft prevention algorithms. If they can't get a hold of you to verify the transaction (and if you're on vacation they probably won't be able to) they will cancel your card or at least put a hold on it until they can talk to you directly.
Your entire argument is based on the ideas that the created software is worthless and that the users didn't go out of their way to instal the software. Wonderful, but I'm sure you'll be modded up simply for taking the 'BSA is evil' side of the debate.
Alternatively again, I dig a whole for the express purpose of turning it into a swimming pool and charging people for its use. I finish the pool and sell admission to thousands of people but at night, after we're all closed up, hundreds climb over the fence and swim for free.
My point was that the pirated software had value to the the people who are pirating it, not that every piece of functionality was available in a free piece of software. If there is no free alternative available then there is all the more reason that the software has value since there is no replacement for it.
By the way, why try to make something a "right" when one can already sue for damages based on simple law that already covers this topic anyway, theft.
Because as has been pointed out on this site many, many times, theft implies denying access to the stolen item by taking it away. The implication being that creating a copy of something for your own use cannot really be theft since the original copy is still completely usable and available to others. There is also laws that say that content creators have a right to control who copies and distributes their creations, it's called 'copyright', maybe you've heard of it?
That's a bit of a false dichotomy, this isn't a glazier breaking the neighbors window (the vendors forcing the users to pay for something they don't need or want), it is the neighbor breaking into the glaziers and taking windows for his new house without paying (the users taking from the vendor without paying). And yes, I'm aware that nothing is 'broken' or 'stolen' in this case, but I've always had a problem with that argument; obviously the pirated software has value over the free alternatives, why else would the risk the legal consequences of using it illegally. It might not be technologically feasible for a content owner to force everyone to pay for their use, but it should be the right of the content owner to do so if they choose to.
("We shall fight oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... er sister, sorry")
First, the relative rarity of mod points encourages people to take it seriously. It also encourages the most active, most interesting posters to give up posting once in a while to moderate. Most other sites use a mod system that allows so many votes per article but still don't allow you to post and mod the same article. That means that the most frequent posters will seldom mod and that there can be people who only ever mod articles without ever commenting on them.
Second, attaching a reason to the mods encourages people to actually think about why they are modding the way that they are. As many people say, there is no "-1 I Disagree" mod, in order to mod someone down you have to be saying that they are actively trying to derail the conversation. Of course, lots of modders will ignore that and mod however they want, but I think that it does make at least some people stop and think before they accuse someone else of being flamebait or a troll.
This is exactly what people on both sides of the "Google is/isn't evil debate" don't realize enough. Google doesn't give you anything for free, they give you things in exchange for being able to collect information about you and sell it to advertisers. Without your information, I doubt they'd even be able to keep the servers running, let alone make a profit. But, Google also doesn't just take your information and give nothing in return, you get some really great services that are better than the vast majority of the competition.
You should be making a conscious decision when you use their services: is this service worth more to me than the privacy I lose by using it. If the answer is 'yes' that is fine, for what it's worth the answer has almost always been yes for me. If Google starts to abuse their knowledge about me then that answer will change. If Google's services aren't competitive then that answer will change.
Can anyone give me a good reason why the reviewers get information about the author in the first place? Granted, there are disciplines that are closed knit to the point that the reviewers would recognize the author based on their past work, but in most cases I would think not knowing who the author is would address at least some of the issues that they highlighted here. It's hard to obscure the rest of the review process but limiting nepotism should be relatively simple.
To answer my own question (yes, I know I should have looked before asking in the first place) the most efficient digit extraction algorithm known is O(n^2), so I imagine finding the Two-quadrillianth digit would still take quite a while.
Backing up even farther, I thought you could calculate a specified digit of pi without calculating all those that came before it. Or do the numbers simply get so big that even regular operations like multiplication and division start to take extreme amounts of computing power?
Even the journalists that focus their entire career on tech subjects often don't gain any appreciable expertise in the field. Besides, journalists aren't meant to be experts, they're meant to know exactly enough that they know when they should be asking questions. That usually isn't that much but for whatever reason (maybe they don't want to look stupid, maybe they don't want to appear to be dumbing down the article) journalists are quite reluctant to do so when it comes to technology issues.
Look at it this way, if someone had claimed to have invented something that... I don't know, neutralized the pepper spray that the riot police were using to break up the demonstrations. Do you really think that the journalist would have just taken them at their word, published stories to the effect that they were saving the world from tyranny? They would have wanted pictures of it in use, to talk to people who had used it successfully, maybe even interviewed a local chemist for his take on it. For whatever reason, technology stories just don't get the same level of scrutiny that other topics do.
That makes sense for the homegrown terrorist working alone, but doesn't do much to explain the abnormally high percentage of engineers in the ranks of organized terrorism. I suspect that the real cause is a combination of factors but basically comes down to money. Engineers that are unable to find work will be jaded to the whole system, they haven't achieved the success that they were promised and worked hard to get. Engineers that do have work are much more likely to be online where the recruiters hang out, more likely to be able to travel without arousing suspicion, and more likely to gather materials and designs without getting caught. It's also probable that recruiters actively search out those with useful skills, that alone might account for a lot of the difference.
Changing the background color helps but light still gets through, put your monitor to an all black screen and turn out the lights and it's still bright even in most cases to see by (unless you've got one of those fancy ones that automatically turn off part or all of the back light... but I digress). I would think if you switched the e-reader app to be white text on black background (which is IMO easier to read anyway) it wouldn't be so bad. The Android Kindle app allows that but like I said, I have some major sleep issues and if I'm falling asleep by 3AM I'm not going to do anything to risk that.
I get 3-4 days of medium/heavy use out of my Moto Droid as of the Froyo update, before that 4 days would have really been pushing it. It depends a lot on where you are and what kind of reception you are getting. I get my best battery life over the weekends when I spend a lot of time at home, slightly less during the week when I'm at work where the coverage inside is spotty, and abysmal (less than 1 day) if I'm somewhere with little to no coverage.
White light coming off a screen is a cooler light, with more of the blues that fire off your body's "it's daytime" responses. An incandescent bulb (and even a 'warm light' CFL) have more reds and yellows which have less effect on your body. For a lot (probably the vast majority) of people it probably doesn't matter much but I have trouble falling asleep before 3AM as it is, even being careful about all the things that people who have sleep issues should be careful about. I imagine that it would be possible to create a utility to make your phone's screen warmer at night and cooler during the day, I have similar software installed on my computers at home, but I haven't seen anything for phones that does so.
For myself, no emissive display cell phone will ever take place of a reflective display e-reader (or a physical book for that matter). I spend far too much time staring at a computer screen throughout the day, when I lay down in bed to read for an hour the last thing I want is an emissive screen shining straight into my eyes. First and foremost eyestrain becomes an issue (for me at least) but there's also the issue of bright white light screwing with your circadian rhythms (something that I struggle with enough already).
Aha, it's all part of a conspiracy on the part of/b/ to lure in pedos so that they can be hunted down (something that the/b/ board is almost scary good at if you believe some of the things you hear). On the other hand, given the amount of questionable age porn on/b/, I doubt that's the case.
The blog post calls it 'overspecialization for a specific test'. The results certainly do look... shall we say, concerning? Adding in a single 'true' statement sent the execution time from 1ms to 22.6ms with nearly identical results by adding in an extra return statement. It does start to look like someone hard coded the engine to spit out the correct answer when it encountered the benchmark. I'd be interested to see the results of the other JS engines and if they have similar anomalies with minor changes to the benchmarking code.
I would argue that it's a useless warning, in that 99.99% of the time people see Pedobear, it's as a joke. It would be like saying that many domestic abusers wear baseball caps, therefor you should be on the lookout for baseball caps because any time you see one someone will beat your spouse when you're not looking.
"Integrated into Windows 7" just means that the rendering and java script engines will be used to render things in the OS. Or do you really think that they should be required to let you change what is really very basic OS behavior?
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Actually the idea of baptizing an alien brings up some interesting theological questions. You have to remember why Christians get baptized in the first place: to remove original sin. You know, the sin of Adam and Eve eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. If you stop and think about that assuming that aliens can be baptized has a few problems to it.
Is he assuming that any alien's that we meet had a similar fall, and need to be redeemed? Or is he assuming that Adam and Eve's sin has somehow tainted the aliens across interstellar distance (after all, it is supposed to taint us across thousands of years of time, why not distance as well)? Or is he thinking that Adam and Eve were the original ancestors of all intelligent beings (in a spiritual sense, I'm thinking along the lines of Adam and Eve being the first souls rather than the first humans)? Or did he just forget what the actual purpose of baptism was when a journalist asked him a question that he wasn't really prepared for?... yes, that seems most likely. Drat it all, I thought I was on to something here.
Then put a pin or password on your phone and/or install an application that allows you to perform a remote wipe if you lose it.
they're "we need to figure out a way of quickly producing these exotic materials on a large enough skill to fill the demand that the military is going to have for these.".
And then the military contract is fulfilled and there's a high-tech, extremely niche product factory just sitting there waiting to be re-purposed. There's also the knowledge of how to set up a large scale manufacturing facility to create those materials. Basically, there's another tool in the company's toolbox and when the next problem pops up the new knowledge and abilities might just be able to solve it better than the old ones. That's how derivative technologies make it to the market.
Military hardware is not civilian hardware. Just to get a data link into a modern plane you would need to crack the encryption, crack the radio network to allow you in, and even then you'd still have to crack the actual systems on the plane itself. Now if you meant jamming, that is somewhat easier, but I can assure you that the military radios have ways to prevent that as well.
Even assuming an absolute worst case scenario, a single usable takeoff point in the entire world, conflict on the other side of the planet, and a cruise speed of 50 mph it would take a whopping 10 days to reach it's destination. And if they can really stay up for 5 years straight, you could have a fleet of them spread around the world ready to be deployed to nearby conflict zones.
If you want to use your bank issued cards you do. Sudden transactions thousands of miles away from your home area is a huge red flag for theft prevention algorithms. If they can't get a hold of you to verify the transaction (and if you're on vacation they probably won't be able to) they will cancel your card or at least put a hold on it until they can talk to you directly.
Your entire argument is based on the ideas that the created software is worthless and that the users didn't go out of their way to instal the software. Wonderful, but I'm sure you'll be modded up simply for taking the 'BSA is evil' side of the debate.
Alternatively again, I dig a whole for the express purpose of turning it into a swimming pool and charging people for its use. I finish the pool and sell admission to thousands of people but at night, after we're all closed up, hundreds climb over the fence and swim for free.
My point was that the pirated software had value to the the people who are pirating it, not that every piece of functionality was available in a free piece of software. If there is no free alternative available then there is all the more reason that the software has value since there is no replacement for it.
By the way, why try to make something a "right" when one can already sue for damages based on simple law that already covers this topic anyway, theft.
Because as has been pointed out on this site many, many times, theft implies denying access to the stolen item by taking it away. The implication being that creating a copy of something for your own use cannot really be theft since the original copy is still completely usable and available to others. There is also laws that say that content creators have a right to control who copies and distributes their creations, it's called 'copyright', maybe you've heard of it?
That's a bit of a false dichotomy, this isn't a glazier breaking the neighbors window (the vendors forcing the users to pay for something they don't need or want), it is the neighbor breaking into the glaziers and taking windows for his new house without paying (the users taking from the vendor without paying). And yes, I'm aware that nothing is 'broken' or 'stolen' in this case, but I've always had a problem with that argument; obviously the pirated software has value over the free alternatives, why else would the risk the legal consequences of using it illegally. It might not be technologically feasible for a content owner to force everyone to pay for their use, but it should be the right of the content owner to do so if they choose to.
("We shall fight oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... er sister, sorry")
I think it comes down to two things.
First, the relative rarity of mod points encourages people to take it seriously. It also encourages the most active, most interesting posters to give up posting once in a while to moderate. Most other sites use a mod system that allows so many votes per article but still don't allow you to post and mod the same article. That means that the most frequent posters will seldom mod and that there can be people who only ever mod articles without ever commenting on them.
Second, attaching a reason to the mods encourages people to actually think about why they are modding the way that they are. As many people say, there is no "-1 I Disagree" mod, in order to mod someone down you have to be saying that they are actively trying to derail the conversation. Of course, lots of modders will ignore that and mod however they want, but I think that it does make at least some people stop and think before they accuse someone else of being flamebait or a troll.
This is exactly what people on both sides of the "Google is/isn't evil debate" don't realize enough. Google doesn't give you anything for free, they give you things in exchange for being able to collect information about you and sell it to advertisers. Without your information, I doubt they'd even be able to keep the servers running, let alone make a profit. But, Google also doesn't just take your information and give nothing in return, you get some really great services that are better than the vast majority of the competition.
You should be making a conscious decision when you use their services: is this service worth more to me than the privacy I lose by using it. If the answer is 'yes' that is fine, for what it's worth the answer has almost always been yes for me. If Google starts to abuse their knowledge about me then that answer will change. If Google's services aren't competitive then that answer will change.
Can anyone give me a good reason why the reviewers get information about the author in the first place? Granted, there are disciplines that are closed knit to the point that the reviewers would recognize the author based on their past work, but in most cases I would think not knowing who the author is would address at least some of the issues that they highlighted here. It's hard to obscure the rest of the review process but limiting nepotism should be relatively simple.
To answer my own question (yes, I know I should have looked before asking in the first place) the most efficient digit extraction algorithm known is O(n^2), so I imagine finding the Two-quadrillianth digit would still take quite a while.
Backing up even farther, I thought you could calculate a specified digit of pi without calculating all those that came before it. Or do the numbers simply get so big that even regular operations like multiplication and division start to take extreme amounts of computing power?
Even the journalists that focus their entire career on tech subjects often don't gain any appreciable expertise in the field. Besides, journalists aren't meant to be experts, they're meant to know exactly enough that they know when they should be asking questions. That usually isn't that much but for whatever reason (maybe they don't want to look stupid, maybe they don't want to appear to be dumbing down the article) journalists are quite reluctant to do so when it comes to technology issues.
Look at it this way, if someone had claimed to have invented something that... I don't know, neutralized the pepper spray that the riot police were using to break up the demonstrations. Do you really think that the journalist would have just taken them at their word, published stories to the effect that they were saving the world from tyranny? They would have wanted pictures of it in use, to talk to people who had used it successfully, maybe even interviewed a local chemist for his take on it. For whatever reason, technology stories just don't get the same level of scrutiny that other topics do.
That makes sense for the homegrown terrorist working alone, but doesn't do much to explain the abnormally high percentage of engineers in the ranks of organized terrorism. I suspect that the real cause is a combination of factors but basically comes down to money. Engineers that are unable to find work will be jaded to the whole system, they haven't achieved the success that they were promised and worked hard to get. Engineers that do have work are much more likely to be online where the recruiters hang out, more likely to be able to travel without arousing suspicion, and more likely to gather materials and designs without getting caught. It's also probable that recruiters actively search out those with useful skills, that alone might account for a lot of the difference.
Changing the background color helps but light still gets through, put your monitor to an all black screen and turn out the lights and it's still bright even in most cases to see by (unless you've got one of those fancy ones that automatically turn off part or all of the back light... but I digress). I would think if you switched the e-reader app to be white text on black background (which is IMO easier to read anyway) it wouldn't be so bad. The Android Kindle app allows that but like I said, I have some major sleep issues and if I'm falling asleep by 3AM I'm not going to do anything to risk that.
I get 3-4 days of medium/heavy use out of my Moto Droid as of the Froyo update, before that 4 days would have really been pushing it. It depends a lot on where you are and what kind of reception you are getting. I get my best battery life over the weekends when I spend a lot of time at home, slightly less during the week when I'm at work where the coverage inside is spotty, and abysmal (less than 1 day) if I'm somewhere with little to no coverage.
White light coming off a screen is a cooler light, with more of the blues that fire off your body's "it's daytime" responses. An incandescent bulb (and even a 'warm light' CFL) have more reds and yellows which have less effect on your body. For a lot (probably the vast majority) of people it probably doesn't matter much but I have trouble falling asleep before 3AM as it is, even being careful about all the things that people who have sleep issues should be careful about. I imagine that it would be possible to create a utility to make your phone's screen warmer at night and cooler during the day, I have similar software installed on my computers at home, but I haven't seen anything for phones that does so.
For myself, no emissive display cell phone will ever take place of a reflective display e-reader (or a physical book for that matter). I spend far too much time staring at a computer screen throughout the day, when I lay down in bed to read for an hour the last thing I want is an emissive screen shining straight into my eyes. First and foremost eyestrain becomes an issue (for me at least) but there's also the issue of bright white light screwing with your circadian rhythms (something that I struggle with enough already).
Aha, it's all part of a conspiracy on the part of /b/ to lure in pedos so that they can be hunted down (something that the /b/ board is almost scary good at if you believe some of the things you hear). On the other hand, given the amount of questionable age porn on /b/, I doubt that's the case.
The blog post calls it 'overspecialization for a specific test'. The results certainly do look... shall we say, concerning? Adding in a single 'true' statement sent the execution time from 1ms to 22.6ms with nearly identical results by adding in an extra return statement. It does start to look like someone hard coded the engine to spit out the correct answer when it encountered the benchmark. I'd be interested to see the results of the other JS engines and if they have similar anomalies with minor changes to the benchmarking code.
I would argue that it's a useless warning, in that 99.99% of the time people see Pedobear, it's as a joke. It would be like saying that many domestic abusers wear baseball caps, therefor you should be on the lookout for baseball caps because any time you see one someone will beat your spouse when you're not looking.
"Integrated into Windows 7" just means that the rendering and java script engines will be used to render things in the OS. Or do you really think that they should be required to let you change what is really very basic OS behavior?