Regarding checks, with their watermarks, UV-readable text,and what not, I don't think they would fall under the category of 'absurdly easy to fake'.
Considering that you don't need to pass off a watermarked check to someone in real life to drain money from someone's account (you only need the account number and routing number off the check), yes, they absolutely are absurdly easy to fake.
Also, there's no guarantee that when someone writes you a check that they have the funds to cover it, because it isn't processed right then and there. These two factors put together have led the vast majority of merchants to simply refuse checks today.
There's absolutely no excuse for banks to not have rolled out a checking system that uses much larger one-time-use account numbers and allows merchants to verify that the check won't bounce. They've been twiddling their thumbs.
Alas, in order to guarantee that a black box machine has counted your vote correctly means that you must be able to verify your vote.
Not quite. Others must be able to verify votes (do a recount). They don't need to know whose votes are whose to do this. You can have a voter input their decisions to a computer interface, print off the decisions in a format so that the same information (i.e. no magic barcodes) is easily both computer and human-readable, and also unambiguous, have the voter put their printoff in a ballot box or through an optical scanner, and you then have the option of doing an automated recount or a manual one. The only part of the process that members of all major parties can't simultaneously supervise is the voter making their decision.
If you're paying a lot of money for software odds are you are being taken advantage of.
I concur. There are many things that can cause software to suck - one of them is the number of users who have tested it. If you're running a $10 million software package, chances are that you're one of a few dozen or a few hundred other companies doing so. If it's complex overreaching software like an ERP or CRM package, you'll likely run into several new bugs every day. It's also likely that you will be the very first customer to hit many of these bugs.
Bonus points if your software is built with lots of third-party widgets that your vendor can't effectively report bugs to.
Do you have a reference for your statement that you need at least a 1xRAM swap file because Linux writes a complete copy of physical memory there?
Whoa, didn't think I'd run into Stephen Colbert here. *Waves!*
Linux runs fine without swap. It also runs fine with less swap than RAM. I'm just saying that in certain situations it'll be faster if Linux can immediately reuse RAM for something else (because it's already swapped out) than if it can't. That something else might be an application or it might be file system cache (priority for this is tuned with the swappiness sysctl). The easy way to make sure you always have enough swap to take advantage of this is to have at least as much swap as RAM.
It doesn't really make sense for the OS to write to disk parts of physical memory holding read-only pages like the kernel, libc, your GNOME libraries, the Firefox executable, etc.
Not everyone's RAM is mostly full of clean mmap()'d pages. It depends on what you're using the computer for. And of course most of libc would never get swapped out - even if marked dirty, it'd be on the bottom of any least-recently-used algorithm's list.
I am thinking of reducing the amount of swap on my primary compute server
For best performance, don't reduce your swap below the amount of RAM you have, unless you want to get rid of it entirely. The reason is that Linux 2.2.x and later will, when your disks are idle, preemptively copy your physical memory to swap - that way if you do run out of RAM, all Linux has to do is reuse that RAM for other things - your application's virtual memory has already been written out to disk. This can't work as well if the swap space isn't there for it.
With 2.0.x and earlier, I would have recommended you pick the amount of virtual memory you think you need, subtract the amount of physical memory you have, and set up that much swap. With 2.2.x and later, I recommend you pick the amount of virtual memory you think you need, and set up that much swap.
For what it's worth, Windows NT derivatives do the same thing.
Sure, because the heat of 326 suns concentrated on the roof wouldn't create ANY problems at all.....no, not on an asphault roof....none that I can think of.
You attach the mirrors to the roof and put the solar cell at the focus of the mirrors, a few feet up, on a pole.
Cooling systems move about 15 times the power than what they draw.
Not quite. If you're thinking of SEER, it's a bastardized ratio with BTUs/hour on one side and Watts on the other. Since there's 3.413 BTUs/h in one watt, a 15 SEER AC unit moves 4.4 times as much power as it draws (that is, it has a Coefficient of Performance, or COP, of 4.4).
I would have thought Solar power would have been a better idea.
I was thinking the same thing. Concentrated Solar Power would be a good fit, too, considering there are no clouds on the moon and you have a decent heat rejection source available (just dig and bury coolant pipe). The only moving parts would be the heliostats (for which some failure rate would be acceptable) and hermetically sealed pumps and turbines. It should be possible to make some of it (such as the heliostat mirrors) from regolith, too.
recently, there were 'multiple exposure' (roughly) algorithms being used to 'look thru' the heat, pollution and general waviness of the sky
Yeah, I noticed the lucky imaging article right after I clicked submit. Come to think of it, I've seen such compositing in action in a couple APOD pictures - specifically this solar eclipse picture and this Milky Way lake reflection picture. I don't think those photographers were trying to eliminate atmospheric effects in those particular shots, but they sure did turn out well.
and even *with* diffraction, you can overcome it with sharpening.
A lot of astronomers are already leery of things like lossy image compression - they don't want to find that their new discovery was really just some image processing artifact. Although, I can understand wanting to make a picture as sharp as possible to show to the general public afterwards.
Let me remind you that there are locations in the Netherlands which are more than two times below sea level compared to that of New Orleans. New Orleans is of course much more prone to storms than the aforementioned place but I do not see why technology could not solve this [reinforcement] issue.
More, they won't support a system that doesn't have the latest updates
In my career I've gotten that from Cisco and Dell too. At least with the Cisco incident it was a software bug, not a part replacement.
If you want to pay for enterprise support. go ahead. You can definitely pay for it.
If you want to get the support you need, you need to find people with the knowledge, skill, and means to care about and fix your problem, even if it's otherwise a waste of time for the vendor.
And that's what makes the whole damn industry such a crapshoot.
You can use standard window units - but the key is insulation - you have to have a very well insulated and sealed room.
No, you don't. If you cool the room with A/C to the same temperature as any other office room, and it's right next to other office rooms, then there is no temperature gradient and no heat will move through even the flimsiest wall. On the other hand, when your A/C unit eventually fails, it'll get much, much hotter in a well-insulated room.
Sealing may help the A/C unit maintain humidity, if that's a problem for you.
They put emotional issues in those bills, like "Ban child murder", then when you vote against it, you are pro killing children.
Then make it your platform to vote against any duplicitously-titled bill too.
I believe I heard that GWB was actually threatening to veto some other bills critical to the dems if it wasn't passed,
Who cares. He won't be in office forever. If a bill is a good idea and it's written properly and it has widespread support, it'll eventually get passed, regardless of who's wiping who else's whatever. Maybe that means a politician won't be able to take credit for something this election year. You know what? We voted them in so they could think about our legacy, not theirs.
I think Obama's "yea" vote on the bill that contained the wiretapping indemnity was more a problem of our current system of multi-issue bills than a true expression of Obama's ideals.
I agree that multi-issue bills are a problem, but I think it's better to just not pass a mixed-bag bill than to live with the results of it.
If a majority in Congress agreed, it might keep the bills that are introduced more focused.
Do the math... I doubt your ultralight would ever make it to the necessary altitude. 12 Hours X 60 Minutes X 60 Seconds = 43,200 seconds to climb 100,000 feet... Your plane would need to climb at greater than 2.31 feet per second to make it to 100,000ft in a 12 light cycle.
2.31ft/s (0.7m/s) for a 10kg plane is 70 watts. Add in a foot per second to cancel out drag and you're at 100 watts. Such a 10kg plane could have upwards of 500 watts of solar panels (and produce a good fraction of that during the day).
Tough to do with a plane that flys at a walking pace.
First off, if you've watched electric RC gliders, you'd know that optimal glide speed and climb speed are very different. Second, air pressure at 40000 feet is less than a quarter of sea level air pressure, meaning those speeds would be at least twice as fast as they would be at sea level.
They tried it with Sunrise and Sunrise II back in the 70s (and that's where I'm getting the 10kg and 500 watt figures from). Supposedly, command and control problems prevented them from getting above 20000 feet. I expect those problems could be easily solved today.
The plane was flown to use thermals as much as possible during the day, but it was tiring work.
Perhaps for military use it's desirable to fly that low, but another way to get a solar plane flying forever is to get it light enough and get the sink rate low enough (1 foot/second) that it can glide all night (100000 feet -> 40000 feet) and still be in the lower stratosphere by sunrise. That way you don't need batteries, and you'll always be above the clouds and weather.
A plane designed for this will be flimsy and fly extremely slowly near ground (slower than walking speed), so it'd have to be launched and retrieved during calm weather, but once up, there would be very little to go wrong - at most latitudes it could circle in one spot indefinitely.
it sounds like it won't produce as much heat as the conventional gas compression method.
That, again, depends on the efficiency. Any heat pump creates a certain amount of heat in the process of moving a (hopefully much larger) amount of heat. HeatDumped = ElectricityUsed + HeatRemoved.
For example, assume a hot side of 300K and a cold side of 270K. Your max theoretical efficiency will be 1/(1-(270/300))=10 (a coefficient of performance - COP - of 10, meaning 10 watts were moved for every one watt of electricity used). Wikipedia says that Peltiers only achieve about 5-10% of this (or 0.5 to 1.0 COP) and compressors can achieve 40-60% of this (or 4 to 6 COP with the temperatures assumed above). It'll be interesting to see how this measures up.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that you don't need to pass off a watermarked check to someone in real life to drain money from someone's account (you only need the account number and routing number off the check), yes, they absolutely are absurdly easy to fake.
Also, there's no guarantee that when someone writes you a check that they have the funds to cover it, because it isn't processed right then and there. These two factors put together have led the vast majority of merchants to simply refuse checks today.
There's absolutely no excuse for banks to not have rolled out a checking system that uses much larger one-time-use account numbers and allows merchants to verify that the check won't bounce. They've been twiddling their thumbs.
Never mind.
the pardoned person need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime
Dubya won't be president when Ted is sentenced on February 25th. Can he still pardon him? (I don't know - I'm asking).
Not quite. Others must be able to verify votes (do a recount). They don't need to know whose votes are whose to do this. You can have a voter input their decisions to a computer interface, print off the decisions in a format so that the same information (i.e. no magic barcodes) is easily both computer and human-readable, and also unambiguous, have the voter put their printoff in a ballot box or through an optical scanner, and you then have the option of doing an automated recount or a manual one. The only part of the process that members of all major parties can't simultaneously supervise is the voter making their decision.
I concur. There are many things that can cause software to suck - one of them is the number of users who have tested it. If you're running a $10 million software package, chances are that you're one of a few dozen or a few hundred other companies doing so. If it's complex overreaching software like an ERP or CRM package, you'll likely run into several new bugs every day. It's also likely that you will be the very first customer to hit many of these bugs.
Bonus points if your software is built with lots of third-party widgets that your vendor can't effectively report bugs to.
Whoa, didn't think I'd run into Stephen Colbert here. *Waves!*
Linux runs fine without swap. It also runs fine with less swap than RAM. I'm just saying that in certain situations it'll be faster if Linux can immediately reuse RAM for something else (because it's already swapped out) than if it can't. That something else might be an application or it might be file system cache (priority for this is tuned with the swappiness sysctl). The easy way to make sure you always have enough swap to take advantage of this is to have at least as much swap as RAM.
Not everyone's RAM is mostly full of clean mmap()'d pages. It depends on what you're using the computer for. And of course most of libc would never get swapped out - even if marked dirty, it'd be on the bottom of any least-recently-used algorithm's list.
Anyway, you can search for "linux swap cache" for more references if you want, but here's two: 1. Linux automatically moves RAM reserved by programs but not really used in swap so that this ram can serve the better purpose of having more cached memory.
2. There are times when a page is both in a swap file and in physical memory. This happens when a page that was swapped out of memory was then brought back into memory when it was again accessed by a process. So long as the page in memory is not written to, the copy in the swap file remains valid.
I just wrote it this afternoon. Wait - how old does that make me?
For best performance, don't reduce your swap below the amount of RAM you have, unless you want to get rid of it entirely. The reason is that Linux 2.2.x and later will, when your disks are idle, preemptively copy your physical memory to swap - that way if you do run out of RAM, all Linux has to do is reuse that RAM for other things - your application's virtual memory has already been written out to disk. This can't work as well if the swap space isn't there for it.
With 2.0.x and earlier, I would have recommended you pick the amount of virtual memory you think you need, subtract the amount of physical memory you have, and set up that much swap. With 2.2.x and later, I recommend you pick the amount of virtual memory you think you need, and set up that much swap.
For what it's worth, Windows NT derivatives do the same thing.
You attach the mirrors to the roof and put the solar cell at the focus of the mirrors, a few feet up, on a pole.
If your roof sees a decent number of sunny days each year, you can use heliostat mirrors to get that.
Not quite. If you're thinking of SEER, it's a bastardized ratio with BTUs/hour on one side and Watts on the other. Since there's 3.413 BTUs/h in one watt, a 15 SEER AC unit moves 4.4 times as much power as it draws (that is, it has a Coefficient of Performance, or COP, of 4.4).
I was thinking the same thing. Concentrated Solar Power would be a good fit, too, considering there are no clouds on the moon and you have a decent heat rejection source available (just dig and bury coolant pipe). The only moving parts would be the heliostats (for which some failure rate would be acceptable) and hermetically sealed pumps and turbines. It should be possible to make some of it (such as the heliostat mirrors) from regolith, too.
Yeah, I noticed the lucky imaging article right after I clicked submit. Come to think of it, I've seen such compositing in action in a couple APOD pictures - specifically this solar eclipse picture and this Milky Way lake reflection picture. I don't think those photographers were trying to eliminate atmospheric effects in those particular shots, but they sure did turn out well.
A lot of astronomers are already leery of things like lossy image compression - they don't want to find that their new discovery was really just some image processing artifact. Although, I can understand wanting to make a picture as sharp as possible to show to the general public afterwards.
It means a car shows up as 4 pixels by 12 pixels. The top of your head is part of a single pixel along with a square foot of sidewalk.
Google already has higher-res data for populated areas of several countries from aircraft reconnaisance. The satellites are for everything else.
Unfortunately, there is a physical limit to how good an image taken from 400 miles away can be.
A couple differences: Parts (10-20%) of New Orleans are settling an inch a year, while parts of the Netherlands are settling a tenth or a quarter of an inch a year. 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level, so efforts to preserve it will have steady national support. Only a small section of the Mississippi river delta is below sea level. Still, towns in the Netherlands are in fact being told they can't build anything new. And there are mitigation efforts that work for river flooding that won't work for hurricane flooding, such as floating foundations. All in all, the Netherlands has good reason to take their situation much more seriously than New Orleans does, and it shows in what they have done.
In my career I've gotten that from Cisco and Dell too. At least with the Cisco incident it was a software bug, not a part replacement.
If you want to pay for enterprise support. go ahead. You can definitely pay for it.
If you want to get the support you need, you need to find people with the knowledge, skill, and means to care about and fix your problem, even if it's otherwise a waste of time for the vendor.
And that's what makes the whole damn industry such a crapshoot.
No, you don't. If you cool the room with A/C to the same temperature as any other office room, and it's right next to other office rooms, then there is no temperature gradient and no heat will move through even the flimsiest wall. On the other hand, when your A/C unit eventually fails, it'll get much, much hotter in a well-insulated room.
Sealing may help the A/C unit maintain humidity, if that's a problem for you.
Then make it your platform to vote against any duplicitously-titled bill too.
Who cares. He won't be in office forever. If a bill is a good idea and it's written properly and it has widespread support, it'll eventually get passed, regardless of who's wiping who else's whatever. Maybe that means a politician won't be able to take credit for something this election year. You know what? We voted them in so they could think about our legacy, not theirs.
I agree that multi-issue bills are a problem, but I think it's better to just not pass a mixed-bag bill than to live with the results of it.
If a majority in Congress agreed, it might keep the bills that are introduced more focused.
2.31ft/s (0.7m/s) for a 10kg plane is 70 watts. Add in a foot per second to cancel out drag and you're at 100 watts. Such a 10kg plane could have upwards of 500 watts of solar panels (and produce a good fraction of that during the day).
First off, if you've watched electric RC gliders, you'd know that optimal glide speed and climb speed are very different. Second, air pressure at 40000 feet is less than a quarter of sea level air pressure, meaning those speeds would be at least twice as fast as they would be at sea level.
They tried it with Sunrise and Sunrise II back in the 70s (and that's where I'm getting the 10kg and 500 watt figures from). Supposedly, command and control problems prevented them from getting above 20000 feet. I expect those problems could be easily solved today.
Perhaps for military use it's desirable to fly that low, but another way to get a solar plane flying forever is to get it light enough and get the sink rate low enough (1 foot/second) that it can glide all night (100000 feet -> 40000 feet) and still be in the lower stratosphere by sunrise. That way you don't need batteries, and you'll always be above the clouds and weather.
A plane designed for this will be flimsy and fly extremely slowly near ground (slower than walking speed), so it'd have to be launched and retrieved during calm weather, but once up, there would be very little to go wrong - at most latitudes it could circle in one spot indefinitely.
Yes, there is.
Not saying this discovery wouldn't be useful, though.
It's another text editor.
For starters, my car keys.
It can be done, but it requires duplicating contacts in an axially-symmetric way.
I would have been happy with a trapezoidal or semicircular connector.
That, again, depends on the efficiency. Any heat pump creates a certain amount of heat in the process of moving a (hopefully much larger) amount of heat. HeatDumped = ElectricityUsed + HeatRemoved.
For example, assume a hot side of 300K and a cold side of 270K. Your max theoretical efficiency will be 1/(1-(270/300))=10 (a coefficient of performance - COP - of 10, meaning 10 watts were moved for every one watt of electricity used). Wikipedia says that Peltiers only achieve about 5-10% of this (or 0.5 to 1.0 COP) and compressors can achieve 40-60% of this (or 4 to 6 COP with the temperatures assumed above). It'll be interesting to see how this measures up.