What amazingly transparent adolescent sexual frustration. "Oh, women find me abhorrent, so I'll vent my spleen on the American symbol of desirability." No wonder they don't let more 18 year olds write for newspapers. JonKatz has done it again, ladies and germs: he's found profundity in an intellectual vacuum, and proferred it to us as something worthwhile. Slashdot is really going down the tubes these days.
One major aspect of using commercial digital cameras that will get you when trying to make quantitative measurements is what's known as anti-blooming. One of the problems with CCDs is that when you start saturating a particular pixel, the charge from that pixel can "leak out" onto other pixels, causing "blooming", where you get extra electrons in pixels around pixels that absored a lot of photons. The solution to this is to have hardware anti-blooming, which automagically compensates for this (I'm not sure how.) However, the end effect of this is that your image is no longer linear: the number of electrons is not strictly proportional to the number of photons, because some of the ones with larger numbers of photons have been siphoned off to prevent blooming. In scientific applications, blooming is prevented by using low light levels to keep the camera well below the saturation limit, but anti-blooming is used in commercial applications whree the light level isn't well defined, so that you always get pretty (if not accurate) pictures. This will kill you if you're trying to use a commercial camera to take spectroscopic data. One good mid-range solution is to use amateur astronomy cameras, like those produced by Starlight Xpress. These cameras have no anti-blooming, are internally cooled, and have very small pixels and large arrays. The down side is that they're slow to read out, but in many scientific applications (like spectroscopy) this isn't necessarily a huge problem.
JonKatz attempts to read profundity into every nit and detail of the internet. As such, everything he says necessarily lacks profundity. JonKatz tries to elevate every miniscule brain fart into a Copernican revolution. As such, every one of his "revelations" becomes simply a waste of time. And the more often he claims to have discovered or uncovered or recovered something insightful, the less we believe him. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Why the f*ck is LANL working on this shit? Does this benefit national security or humankind? Why is the government investing money at a national lab that designs nuclear weapons into studying how to rebroadcast high quality digital signals that nobody wants anyway? * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
There are lots of reasons why the most lethal agent possible does not make it the best possible biological weapon. The ideal biological weapon would:
1) Kill only your adversary, not you. Total lethality is a Bad Thing(tm) in biological weapons. Being able to vaccinate your troops against a weapon makes it much more usable. Particularly if you can somehow be the only group with the vaccine.
2) Stop being deadly immediately after being used. Something that's very lethal and very contagious is bad, because after you've killed everybody, the resources that you've just conquered are inaccessible, due to the fact that they're contaminated. This is one of the reasons that anthrax spores are so practical from a biological weapons standpoint: they become inactivated after settling to the ground, which happens mere hours after they're used.
3) Be very hardy. The agent has to withstand being flown up in a missle and explosively aeresolized upon detonation.
For these reasons, and a lot of others, nobody is ever going to "accidentally" create the "perfect" biological weapon. Seriously, do you guys just put whatever pops into your head into those little summaries you write? It's very geeklike to make sweeping generalizations about topics about which you know nothing, but in the case of posting "news" you sort of have an obligation to at least consider the possibility of your own ignorance before just sucummbing to the usual diarrhea of the mouth (or fingers, as the case may be.)
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
"Self-assembling"! "Superconducting"! "DNA"! Now all it needs is to be "overclocked", run "Java", and use "XML."
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Instrumenting code debuggers suck for tracking down memory leaks. They're slow, and innacurate. Try Great Circle from Geodesic Systems instead. It's a full featured debugging and deployment garbage collector for C/C++ based on the Boehm collector, that can be integrated with only a relink. It's pretty nifty.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work for Geodesic Systems, but I no longer do, nor do I have any stake in the company, except some friends.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Math isn't a science. The fact that there are provable assertions in mathematics is, in fact, one of the things that fundamentally separates it from sciences. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Out of curiosity, what is the point of all these (admittedly redundant) articles about how bad censorware is at telling the difference between porn and non-porn? If one believes that censorship is a Bad Thing(tm), then attacking the efficacy of censorware is essentially a non-sequitor. By attacking the technical feasibility of censorware, you're implicitly saying that, if it worked properly, you'd be fine with it. Is that really the case? Or is this just a roundabout way of attacking censorship? * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Nobody ever "proves" anything in any science. Particularly not when making speculative calculations about millenia old animals about whom we only have fossil information. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
How typical. We automatically reject as invalid the results of research that criticizes our lifestyle and choices, and automatically accept results as valid from research which condones our current mode of behavior. With this sort of filtering mechanism, we are guaranteed to never have to change our views, morals, ethics, or lifestyle again. This is quite convinient for the pseudo-rationalists who populate the threads of Jon Katz articles. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Even the theater has been corporatized, dominated by big-bucks, mass-marketed musicals and other super-productions.
I sincerely doubt that Jon Katz has ever actually been to the theatre in a major city, or even looked beyond the listings at the Times Square ticket booths. There is a plethora of highly creative, subversive, revolutionary theatre in New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. To say that the theatre is "dominated" by "mass-marketed musicals" implies that only those things which are highly funded and attended strongly by people from Schaumburg should be considered influential, which says more about Mr. Katz's own perception of money than it does about the theatre. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
What do you think Slashdot should do if faced with that kind of choice?
When did this go from being primarily a discussion forum to becoming primarily a metadiscussion forum? This question belies the self-serving, self-centeredness of the Slashdot crew. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
I think this is a load of crap. Nobody has yet convinced me that "free software" is a particularly ethical pursuit. RMS likes to claim that it is, but his arguments seem rather specious to me. If you consider the degree of suffering in the world, and then consider the people who free software "helps", I think it's fairly obvious that free software does not do very much to reduce suffering. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You'd be a much better physicist if you bought yourself a TECHNICAL book on finance (which means more than what is sold to commerce and MBA students) and read it.
Oh, you mean a book like Options, Futures, and Derivative Securities? In what way do you see learning about the Black-Scholes equation benefitting me as a physicist? Perhaps you'd be a better whiny MBA if you stuck to whining about things that you actually understand.
For what it's worth, I disparage the "Nobel" prize for economics because it's not a real Nobel prize. If economists want to be self-serving, they should at least choose to do so in a way that isn't blatantly misleading. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Why does this warrant coverage when some Yale weenie decides to pronounce it? Everybody's been saying variations of this for five years now. Eventually, one of them will be right, not because they said something different, but because they'll say it just before the market crashes, and then they'll herald themselves as a prophet, and they'll win a "Nobel" award. How exciting. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Close. The civilian signal has an intentional "drift," and the degree and sign of the drift is encrypted and transmitted out of band, basically. There are some good web pages on how this all works, which I can't find at the moment, unfortunately. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Re:Some aluminum foil will foil this scheme
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 1
Darn, I was hoping to be the first person to post this!;) Okay, yes, for all the wonderous discussion on this topic, this is the basic reason why this scheme doesn't work. Enclosing the device in a "Faraday cage", which is basically any metal box, will totally disable the transmission capability. This is the same reason you lose your cell phone conversation when you get into an elevator. Sometimes I wonder if this is Slashdot, or SlashskippedphysicsinhighschoolbecauseIwasinthecom puterlab. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
wow, and then you and the 3 other individuals out there who actually use LISP could have a great time!!
Actually, I don't use Lisp, because I don't do AI programming. But, if I was purporting to do AI programming, as the people at the supposed BioOS project are purporting to do, I'd damn sure want to learn Lisp. So there are a thousand bozos who know Perl. So what? You can have a thousand bozos working on your project, as opposed to three people who know what they're doing. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Another thing: What twit thinks Perl is an ideal language for their propsed "BioOS"? Their supposed justification is that it needs to be a high level language, therefore, Perl is the best choice. That doesn't sound very well thought out to me. I'd have chosen Lisp, personally, for all the reasons that John Koza uses Lisp in Genetic Programming. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Was I the only one who found the entries extremely boring? Perl is such a forgiving language that it doesn't take a great deal of work to get something that will run, so you're left with attempting to make it look neat, which most of the entiries didn't do, or make it clever and amusing, which most of them didn't do. The exception was Damon Harper's entry, which at least required some work and ingenuity, except that it doesn't run as it claims to on my system. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Just about as ethical as it was for QNX to put a non-secure encryption algorithm into their products.
That's idiotic. There's a difference between doing something stupid and doing something unethical. For instance: your above comment was stupid. That doesn't mean you can be sued for libel, because it wasn't malicious, which would have made it unethical. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
We've been supporting Netscape and IE pretty much transparently for quite a while. We used to use mostly dynamically generated HTML (generated by the server), but in the past year or so, we've been using JavaScript, and haven't come across many inconsistencies between the browsers. It even works fairly well on WebTV, or so I'm told. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Something worth considering, if it's practical, is to have your product use JavaScript and a web browser as its GUI. We have a cross-platform product that supports six different platforms, and rather than dealing with proprietary GUIs and GUI translator tools, we have an HTTP server that handles some special CGI commands, and serves the GUI as JavaScript. Since the GUI is the bulk of the platform-dependent code in many systems, this reduced the amount of platform dependent code that we needed significantly. On the other hand, our product has all sorts of other platform dependencies that have their own difficulties, so this approach clearly doesn't handle all of these problems. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You're either a liar, or an idiot. Again, look at the Visor product details page. The Visor Solo sells for $150, the same price as the Palm IIIe. This unit comes with 2MB, and no cradle. For $180, you can get the Visor Solo, 2MB, and a USB cradle. For $250, you can get the Visor Deluxe, with 8MB, cradle, and your choice of colors. If you had bothered to read the URL I supplied, you'd know this. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Slashdot Mirror
What amazingly transparent adolescent sexual frustration. "Oh, women find me abhorrent, so I'll vent my spleen on the American symbol of desirability." No wonder they don't let more 18 year olds write for newspapers. JonKatz has done it again, ladies and germs: he's found profundity in an intellectual vacuum, and proferred it to us as something worthwhile. Slashdot is really going down the tubes these days.
One major aspect of using commercial digital cameras that will get you when trying to make quantitative measurements is what's known as anti-blooming. One of the problems with CCDs is that when you start saturating a particular pixel, the charge from that pixel can "leak out" onto other pixels, causing "blooming", where you get extra electrons in pixels around pixels that absored a lot of photons. The solution to this is to have hardware anti-blooming, which automagically compensates for this (I'm not sure how.) However, the end effect of this is that your image is no longer linear: the number of electrons is not strictly proportional to the number of photons, because some of the ones with larger numbers of photons have been siphoned off to prevent blooming. In scientific applications, blooming is prevented by using low light levels to keep the camera well below the saturation limit, but anti-blooming is used in commercial applications whree the light level isn't well defined, so that you always get pretty (if not accurate) pictures. This will kill you if you're trying to use a commercial camera to take spectroscopic data. One good mid-range solution is to use amateur astronomy cameras, like those produced by Starlight Xpress. These cameras have no anti-blooming, are internally cooled, and have very small pixels and large arrays. The down side is that they're slow to read out, but in many scientific applications (like spectroscopy) this isn't necessarily a huge problem.
JonKatz attempts to read profundity into every nit and detail of the internet. As such, everything he says necessarily lacks profundity. JonKatz tries to elevate every miniscule brain fart into a Copernican revolution. As such, every one of his "revelations" becomes simply a waste of time. And the more often he claims to have discovered or uncovered or recovered something insightful, the less we believe him.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Why the f*ck is LANL working on this shit? Does this benefit national security or humankind? Why is the government investing money at a national lab that designs nuclear weapons into studying how to rebroadcast high quality digital signals that nobody wants anyway?
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
There are lots of reasons why the most lethal agent possible does not make it the best possible biological weapon. The ideal biological weapon would: 1) Kill only your adversary, not you. Total lethality is a Bad Thing(tm) in biological weapons. Being able to vaccinate your troops against a weapon makes it much more usable. Particularly if you can somehow be the only group with the vaccine. 2) Stop being deadly immediately after being used. Something that's very lethal and very contagious is bad, because after you've killed everybody, the resources that you've just conquered are inaccessible, due to the fact that they're contaminated. This is one of the reasons that anthrax spores are so practical from a biological weapons standpoint: they become inactivated after settling to the ground, which happens mere hours after they're used. 3) Be very hardy. The agent has to withstand being flown up in a missle and explosively aeresolized upon detonation. For these reasons, and a lot of others, nobody is ever going to "accidentally" create the "perfect" biological weapon. Seriously, do you guys just put whatever pops into your head into those little summaries you write? It's very geeklike to make sweeping generalizations about topics about which you know nothing, but in the case of posting "news" you sort of have an obligation to at least consider the possibility of your own ignorance before just sucummbing to the usual diarrhea of the mouth (or fingers, as the case may be.)
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
"Self-assembling"! "Superconducting"! "DNA"! Now all it needs is to be "overclocked", run "Java", and use "XML."
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Instrumenting code debuggers suck for tracking down memory leaks. They're slow, and innacurate. Try Great Circle from Geodesic Systems instead. It's a full featured debugging and deployment garbage collector for C/C++ based on the Boehm collector, that can be integrated with only a relink. It's pretty nifty. DISCLAIMER: I used to work for Geodesic Systems, but I no longer do, nor do I have any stake in the company, except some friends.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Math isn't a science. The fact that there are provable assertions in mathematics is, in fact, one of the things that fundamentally separates it from sciences.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Out of curiosity, what is the point of all these (admittedly redundant) articles about how bad censorware is at telling the difference between porn and non-porn? If one believes that censorship is a Bad Thing(tm), then attacking the efficacy of censorware is essentially a non-sequitor. By attacking the technical feasibility of censorware, you're implicitly saying that, if it worked properly, you'd be fine with it. Is that really the case? Or is this just a roundabout way of attacking censorship?
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Nobody ever "proves" anything in any science. Particularly not when making speculative calculations about millenia old animals about whom we only have fossil information.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
How typical. We automatically reject as invalid the results of research that criticizes our lifestyle and choices, and automatically accept results as valid from research which condones our current mode of behavior. With this sort of filtering mechanism, we are guaranteed to never have to change our views, morals, ethics, or lifestyle again. This is quite convinient for the pseudo-rationalists who populate the threads of Jon Katz articles.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
I sincerely doubt that Jon Katz has ever actually been to the theatre in a major city, or even looked beyond the listings at the Times Square ticket booths. There is a plethora of highly creative, subversive, revolutionary theatre in New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. To say that the theatre is "dominated" by "mass-marketed musicals" implies that only those things which are highly funded and attended strongly by people from Schaumburg should be considered influential, which says more about Mr. Katz's own perception of money than it does about the theatre.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
When did this go from being primarily a discussion forum to becoming primarily a metadiscussion forum? This question belies the self-serving, self-centeredness of the Slashdot crew.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
I think this is a load of crap. Nobody has yet convinced me that "free software" is a particularly ethical pursuit. RMS likes to claim that it is, but his arguments seem rather specious to me. If you consider the degree of suffering in the world, and then consider the people who free software "helps", I think it's fairly obvious that free software does not do very much to reduce suffering.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Oh, you mean a book like Options, Futures, and Derivative Securities? In what way do you see learning about the Black-Scholes equation benefitting me as a physicist? Perhaps you'd be a better whiny MBA if you stuck to whining about things that you actually understand.
For what it's worth, I disparage the "Nobel" prize for economics because it's not a real Nobel prize. If economists want to be self-serving, they should at least choose to do so in a way that isn't blatantly misleading.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Why does this warrant coverage when some Yale weenie decides to pronounce it? Everybody's been saying variations of this for five years now. Eventually, one of them will be right, not because they said something different, but because they'll say it just before the market crashes, and then they'll herald themselves as a prophet, and they'll win a "Nobel" award. How exciting.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Close. The civilian signal has an intentional "drift," and the degree and sign of the drift is encrypted and transmitted out of band, basically. There are some good web pages on how this all works, which I can't find at the moment, unfortunately.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Darn, I was hoping to be the first person to post this! ;) Okay, yes, for all the wonderous discussion on this topic, this is the basic reason why this scheme doesn't work. Enclosing the device in a "Faraday cage", which is basically any metal box, will totally disable the transmission capability. This is the same reason you lose your cell phone conversation when you get into an elevator. Sometimes I wonder if this is Slashdot, or SlashskippedphysicsinhighschoolbecauseIwasinthecom puterlab.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Actually, I don't use Lisp, because I don't do AI programming. But, if I was purporting to do AI programming, as the people at the supposed BioOS project are purporting to do, I'd damn sure want to learn Lisp. So there are a thousand bozos who know Perl. So what? You can have a thousand bozos working on your project, as opposed to three people who know what they're doing.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Another thing: What twit thinks Perl is an ideal language for their propsed "BioOS"? Their supposed justification is that it needs to be a high level language, therefore, Perl is the best choice. That doesn't sound very well thought out to me. I'd have chosen Lisp, personally, for all the reasons that John Koza uses Lisp in Genetic Programming.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Was I the only one who found the entries extremely boring? Perl is such a forgiving language that it doesn't take a great deal of work to get something that will run, so you're left with attempting to make it look neat, which most of the entiries didn't do, or make it clever and amusing, which most of them didn't do. The exception was Damon Harper's entry, which at least required some work and ingenuity, except that it doesn't run as it claims to on my system.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
That's idiotic. There's a difference between doing something stupid and doing something unethical. For instance: your above comment was stupid. That doesn't mean you can be sued for libel, because it wasn't malicious, which would have made it unethical.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
We've been supporting Netscape and IE pretty much transparently for quite a while. We used to use mostly dynamically generated HTML (generated by the server), but in the past year or so, we've been using JavaScript, and haven't come across many inconsistencies between the browsers. It even works fairly well on WebTV, or so I'm told.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Something worth considering, if it's practical, is to have your product use JavaScript and a web browser as its GUI. We have a cross-platform product that supports six different platforms, and rather than dealing with proprietary GUIs and GUI translator tools, we have an HTTP server that handles some special CGI commands, and serves the GUI as JavaScript. Since the GUI is the bulk of the platform-dependent code in many systems, this reduced the amount of platform dependent code that we needed significantly. On the other hand, our product has all sorts of other platform dependencies that have their own difficulties, so this approach clearly doesn't handle all of these problems.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You're either a liar, or an idiot. Again, look at the Visor product details page. The Visor Solo sells for $150, the same price as the Palm IIIe. This unit comes with 2MB, and no cradle. For $180, you can get the Visor Solo, 2MB, and a USB cradle. For $250, you can get the Visor Deluxe, with 8MB, cradle, and your choice of colors. If you had bothered to read the URL I supplied, you'd know this.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *