So, they're not talking about the PIN in the meaning you expect when discussing phones, but about a security code that has no connection with the GSM PIN. Or, in other words, you don't have to use that key when you put your iPhone's SIM in another phone.
Why can't people keep consistency? Calling a security code "PIN" when discussing cell phones is like calling a DVD "hard disc". It's not technically wrong (it's a "personal identification number", or a hard, disc-shaped object), but the word has a completely different usual meaning when used in context.
If you try three wrong PINs, your SIM card is locked; so probably they don't do this. Unless, of course, people are using PIN for something entirely different from what PIN means when discussing GSM phones.
The GSM standard defines a PIN as an access number for your SIM card. It has nothing to do with your phone's contents. Most phones allow you to set up a security key, which is needed either to turn on the phone every time (even if you have your SIM set up not to need a PIN), or when you change the SIM.
I don't know if this is actually the same PIN defined by the GSM standard or if it's another, Apple-specific key; but when you're talking about phones, PIN is connected to the SIM, or to the phone line, not to the phone contents.
The problem is that there wasn't an 1% extra (remember, this result is "we get an 1% asymmetry on a certain system", not "there is an 1% asymmetry on the Universe); there was something like 10 000 000 000 antiprotons for 10 000 000 001 protons; we get 10 billion annihilations and a single proton out of that. It would be easier to explain if the asymmetry was bigger: we'd have to add some feature to our standard model, but that's not hard. The hard part is to make the asymmetry so small, but still bigger than zero. There are features on the SM that make this non-zero, but they're not enough. Maybe this D0 result agrees with some theory that predicts a matter/antimatter asymmetry that matches our observed value batter, but I don't think this result will hold.
They submitted a paper saying that they see a difference of around three sigma from what the SM predicts; they claim nothing more than that. Besides, we need to see the whole picture here: previous experiments agree with the SM prediction within 1-sigma, which is as good as it gets, while their result is a bit off. Their best fit disagrees more with the current combined BaBar/Belle best result than the SM prediction does to the BaBar/Belle numbers. This, combined with the fact that we've seen even bigger signals on the "b" sector simply die after some more data was collected, makes me say "bah" and wait. When they get to a seven-sigma disagreement, I'll be impressed; but I doubt they will. I believe D0's final paper on this will agree much better with the SM.
However, see section 6.1 from TFA (the actual EFF article, not the news piece): technologies used to "enhance privacy" may be counterproductive. Using those technologies (FlashBlock, Privoxy, changing your UA) is very uncommon, so the average entropy of browsers using those technologies is high. They add that they didn't try to fingerprint NoScript usage any further, but it is very possible to do so if users allow scripts from some important sites.
That fact doesn't expropriate Nokia but at some point they could come under pressure that those are patents that should be made available on RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.
That's the point: Nokia offered to license the patents under RAND terms to Apple (the same terms they offer other companies, including those that don't have so many GSM-related patents such as Samsung/LG/HTC), and Apple refused to pay. This is the reason Nokia sued: Apple wanted to use their patented technologies without licensing them.
If only someone could implement a system that points from one page to another, a "link" between them if you will. Maybe some text or image where the user could click and be redirected to some other page. Would that be even possible?
Now more seriously, how often do you type the URL for a site in a language you can't speak? Even if you do that sometimes, I'd say you would be able to get there by a Google search written in your native charset. I don't see this as a big issue.
Then people will say, "Look how Gimp quickly put together a crappy imitation of Photoshop's content aware!"
It's a lose-lose situation now, unless Resynth gets much better and offers results at least as good as Photoshop's in every situation, which is probably not going to happen anyway: since the algorithms have different strong points, each will be better in a different situation.
IIRC, Chrome and IE8 do the same on Windows 7; I believe it was part of Microsoft's HIG for Win7. Probably the next Firefox will do the same, too.
BTW, that behaviour could be a good idea if Windows implemented a good program switcher and a window switcher for a given task, like Exposé. Alt-Tab to the program you want, then Ctrl+Alt+Tab to select the window (*not* the tab) you want on that program, Ctrl+Tab to select a tab of that window, with the option of selecting a tab directly from the taskbar. If you have a lot of programs with a lot of windows and a lot of tabs, that would be the simplest way to get to a single tab. However, since Windows's Alt+Tab / Super+Tab switchers aren't that good if you have many open windows, they have taken the only good option to select a given window; I believe they'll improve on that for the next version(s).
However, the performance difference between the old Saturn chips and the current ARMs is tremendous. The Saturn was outdated when I bought a 48G, 12 years ago. Emulating that Saturn on a current ARM is as hard as emulating a Z80; it puts almost no strain on the system.
IMHO, 1.4 was the last good release (as in "I'd use it over anything that was available at the time"). Right now, KDE3.5, KDE4.4, OS X and even Windows 7 offer more than Gnome. I jumped from Gnome to KDE right after the train-wreck that was Gnome 2.0; I've tried Gnome every couple of releases after that and it definitely improved a lot since 2.0, but everything else also improved a lot. Maybe 3.0 will be better (and I will try it, despite the current version of Gnome-shell on Debian Sid being awful), but I don't have much hope.
GR (or actually, the Newtonian approximation) has been tested down to distances of ~1mm; for two ~1kg masses, that would be a force of ~10^-4 N. We don't want to get "G" to a better precision (well, we do, but that's not the point of those experiments); we want to see if at small distances the force deviates from the expected (1/r) behaviour. Such a deviation would mean that there are more than 4 spacetime dimensions (with the extra dimensions being compactified, meaning they have a size of only a small fraction of a meter). If we could reliably measure gravity down to some yN, we could test it at REALLY small distances. That would be a real test for extra dimensions, and indirectly a real test for string theory*.
* = of course, string theorists will always get the size of their extra dimensions to something orders of magnitude smaller than whatever can be tested; after all, they can't have a falsifiable theory, can they?
"RPM-based" != "Fedora-based", and "rpm" != "yum". You are saying Debian is better than Fedora, but nothing of what you said applies to general RPM packages. In fact, you can use apt to handle RPMs (Conectiva used it a long time ago, and now at least PCLinuxOS does so). In fact, I see no significant advantages between.deb and.rpm; there are more differences when comparing the higher level tools (apt, yum, zypper, etc).
I remember some years ago when I installed Fluxbox on a 16MB, 100MHz Pentium. I had a 450MHz Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM running Windows 98, and I thought it was pretty fast - until I saw Fluxbox on that old Pentium. Really, INSTANT responses. My desktop would open cmd.exe in under a second; that old bastard underpowered Pentium would open xterm instantly. Menus would have that usual fast-but-not-instant feeling on my desktop: the time between clicking on a menu and it opening was perceivable, but not anything you'd complain about; a couple of refreshes at most, some 0.1s maybe. On that Pentium, I couldn't perceive any lag at all. That was running full XFree86.
Puppy also uses a very fast WM, one that trades most of the features offered by full desktop environments like Windows or KDE for sheer speed and a small memory footprint. I can easily see it being faster on a PIII-class machine than Windows XP on a dual core, just like Fluxbox on that piece of shit P100 would run circles around my P2.
Google The Big Bang Theory torrent: 98% of the first page are copyright infringement (and the remaining 2% are Mininova, which gained a big PageRank when it had illegal torrents). How is that different from searching "The Big Bang Theory" on a torrent specialized site such as Isohunt? But they go after Isohunt and not Google, when the exact same query gives the exact same results. And yes, "The Big Bang Theory" in a torrent-only search is the same as "The Big Bang Theory torrent" in a general search.
Shame on me for exaggerating. The point is that you use your phone closer to your eyes than your monitor. That is why the resolution difference between an iPhone and a N900/Droid/Nexus One/HD2/etc is so clear.
You use your computer display at a distance of ~50cm, while your phone is at ~10cm. This means that, if the pixel density was equal, a pixel from the monitor would look ~5x smaller than a pixel from the phone.
In other words, as you get closer to something, you can see smaller and smaller details. You can't see well 0.1mm structures at ~50cm, but you can see even smaller detail than that at ~10cm; and 0.1mm structures are what you would get from a 254 ppi display. You eyes don't care about the size of a structure; they care about the angular size they cover, and that angular size gets bigger as you get closer to it.
If we could figure out where exactly a cosmic ray would hit and build a full range detector like CMS around that exact point, and know exactly the cosmic ray's energy, and which particle it hit WITHOUT using data from the detector to estimate that, then yes, we could just use cosmic rays. We'd probably need quite some time (of the order of centuries) to accumulate the amount of data the LHC will give us in a month, unless we could move that detector really fast around the Earth and up and down to get the events to happen directly inside it.
Building the LHC is much more practical, faster, and cheaper than the alternative. You can do some pretty interesting science with cosmic rays (I know, I work with some of them), but not the same kind of science you can get from a collider.
Slashdot Mirror
I expected more from Slashdot. Yeah, I know, I must be new here.
So, they're not talking about the PIN in the meaning you expect when discussing phones, but about a security code that has no connection with the GSM PIN. Or, in other words, you don't have to use that key when you put your iPhone's SIM in another phone.
Why can't people keep consistency? Calling a security code "PIN" when discussing cell phones is like calling a DVD "hard disc". It's not technically wrong (it's a "personal identification number", or a hard, disc-shaped object), but the word has a completely different usual meaning when used in context.
If you try three wrong PINs, your SIM card is locked; so probably they don't do this. Unless, of course, people are using PIN for something entirely different from what PIN means when discussing GSM phones.
The GSM standard defines a PIN as an access number for your SIM card. It has nothing to do with your phone's contents. Most phones allow you to set up a security key, which is needed either to turn on the phone every time (even if you have your SIM set up not to need a PIN), or when you change the SIM.
I don't know if this is actually the same PIN defined by the GSM standard or if it's another, Apple-specific key; but when you're talking about phones, PIN is connected to the SIM, or to the phone line, not to the phone contents.
The problem is that there wasn't an 1% extra (remember, this result is "we get an 1% asymmetry on a certain system", not "there is an 1% asymmetry on the Universe); there was something like 10 000 000 000 antiprotons for 10 000 000 001 protons; we get 10 billion annihilations and a single proton out of that. It would be easier to explain if the asymmetry was bigger: we'd have to add some feature to our standard model, but that's not hard. The hard part is to make the asymmetry so small, but still bigger than zero. There are features on the SM that make this non-zero, but they're not enough. Maybe this D0 result agrees with some theory that predicts a matter/antimatter asymmetry that matches our observed value batter, but I don't think this result will hold.
They submitted a paper saying that they see a difference of around three sigma from what the SM predicts; they claim nothing more than that. Besides, we need to see the whole picture here: previous experiments agree with the SM prediction within 1-sigma, which is as good as it gets, while their result is a bit off. Their best fit disagrees more with the current combined BaBar/Belle best result than the SM prediction does to the BaBar/Belle numbers. This, combined with the fact that we've seen even bigger signals on the "b" sector simply die after some more data was collected, makes me say "bah" and wait. When they get to a seven-sigma disagreement, I'll be impressed; but I doubt they will. I believe D0's final paper on this will agree much better with the SM.
However, see section 6.1 from TFA (the actual EFF article, not the news piece): technologies used to "enhance privacy" may be counterproductive. Using those technologies (FlashBlock, Privoxy, changing your UA) is very uncommon, so the average entropy of browsers using those technologies is high. They add that they didn't try to fingerprint NoScript usage any further, but it is very possible to do so if users allow scripts from some important sites.
That fact doesn't expropriate Nokia but at some point they could come under pressure that those are patents that should be made available on RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.
That's the point: Nokia offered to license the patents under RAND terms to Apple (the same terms they offer other companies, including those that don't have so many GSM-related patents such as Samsung/LG/HTC), and Apple refused to pay. This is the reason Nokia sued: Apple wanted to use their patented technologies without licensing them.
If only someone could implement a system that points from one page to another, a "link" between them if you will. Maybe some text or image where the user could click and be redirected to some other page. Would that be even possible?
Now more seriously, how often do you type the URL for a site in a language you can't speak? Even if you do that sometimes, I'd say you would be able to get there by a Google search written in your native charset. I don't see this as a big issue.
Then people will say, "Look how Gimp quickly put together a crappy imitation of Photoshop's content aware!"
It's a lose-lose situation now, unless Resynth gets much better and offers results at least as good as Photoshop's in every situation, which is probably not going to happen anyway: since the algorithms have different strong points, each will be better in a different situation.
So does Unix "talk", but I'd be surprised if those systems had more regular users than Wave.
Six billion people using one extra kWh of energy in the same day? What could possibly go wrong with that?
Well, no IM system that people actually use shows each character as it is typed.
Seriously, who uses Google Wave regularly? Or Google Buzz, for that matter?
IIRC, Chrome and IE8 do the same on Windows 7; I believe it was part of Microsoft's HIG for Win7. Probably the next Firefox will do the same, too.
BTW, that behaviour could be a good idea if Windows implemented a good program switcher and a window switcher for a given task, like Exposé. Alt-Tab to the program you want, then Ctrl+Alt+Tab to select the window (*not* the tab) you want on that program, Ctrl+Tab to select a tab of that window, with the option of selecting a tab directly from the taskbar. If you have a lot of programs with a lot of windows and a lot of tabs, that would be the simplest way to get to a single tab. However, since Windows's Alt+Tab / Super+Tab switchers aren't that good if you have many open windows, they have taken the only good option to select a given window; I believe they'll improve on that for the next version(s).
However, the performance difference between the old Saturn chips and the current ARMs is tremendous. The Saturn was outdated when I bought a 48G, 12 years ago. Emulating that Saturn on a current ARM is as hard as emulating a Z80; it puts almost no strain on the system.
The iPhone's raison d'être is to make Apple more money. Anything it may offer is just a way to make that happen.
IMHO, 1.4 was the last good release (as in "I'd use it over anything that was available at the time"). Right now, KDE3.5, KDE4.4, OS X and even Windows 7 offer more than Gnome. I jumped from Gnome to KDE right after the train-wreck that was Gnome 2.0; I've tried Gnome every couple of releases after that and it definitely improved a lot since 2.0, but everything else also improved a lot. Maybe 3.0 will be better (and I will try it, despite the current version of Gnome-shell on Debian Sid being awful), but I don't have much hope.
GR (or actually, the Newtonian approximation) has been tested down to distances of ~1mm; for two ~1kg masses, that would be a force of ~10^-4 N. We don't want to get "G" to a better precision (well, we do, but that's not the point of those experiments); we want to see if at small distances the force deviates from the expected (1/r) behaviour. Such a deviation would mean that there are more than 4 spacetime dimensions (with the extra dimensions being compactified, meaning they have a size of only a small fraction of a meter). If we could reliably measure gravity down to some yN, we could test it at REALLY small distances. That would be a real test for extra dimensions, and indirectly a real test for string theory*.
* = of course, string theorists will always get the size of their extra dimensions to something orders of magnitude smaller than whatever can be tested; after all, they can't have a falsifiable theory, can they?
LSB dictates RPM packages, or at least highly encourages their usage.
"RPM-based" != "Fedora-based", and "rpm" != "yum". You are saying Debian is better than Fedora, but nothing of what you said applies to general RPM packages. In fact, you can use apt to handle RPMs (Conectiva used it a long time ago, and now at least PCLinuxOS does so). In fact, I see no significant advantages between .deb and .rpm; there are more differences when comparing the higher level tools (apt, yum, zypper, etc).
I remember some years ago when I installed Fluxbox on a 16MB, 100MHz Pentium. I had a 450MHz Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM running Windows 98, and I thought it was pretty fast - until I saw Fluxbox on that old Pentium. Really, INSTANT responses. My desktop would open cmd.exe in under a second; that old bastard underpowered Pentium would open xterm instantly. Menus would have that usual fast-but-not-instant feeling on my desktop: the time between clicking on a menu and it opening was perceivable, but not anything you'd complain about; a couple of refreshes at most, some 0.1s maybe. On that Pentium, I couldn't perceive any lag at all. That was running full XFree86.
Puppy also uses a very fast WM, one that trades most of the features offered by full desktop environments like Windows or KDE for sheer speed and a small memory footprint. I can easily see it being faster on a PIII-class machine than Windows XP on a dual core, just like Fluxbox on that piece of shit P100 would run circles around my P2.
Google The Big Bang Theory torrent: 98% of the first page are copyright infringement (and the remaining 2% are Mininova, which gained a big PageRank when it had illegal torrents). How is that different from searching "The Big Bang Theory" on a torrent specialized site such as Isohunt? But they go after Isohunt and not Google, when the exact same query gives the exact same results. And yes, "The Big Bang Theory" in a torrent-only search is the same as "The Big Bang Theory torrent" in a general search.
Shame on me for exaggerating. The point is that you use your phone closer to your eyes than your monitor. That is why the resolution difference between an iPhone and a N900/Droid/Nexus One/HD2/etc is so clear.
You use your computer display at a distance of ~50cm, while your phone is at ~10cm. This means that, if the pixel density was equal, a pixel from the monitor would look ~5x smaller than a pixel from the phone.
In other words, as you get closer to something, you can see smaller and smaller details. You can't see well 0.1mm structures at ~50cm, but you can see even smaller detail than that at ~10cm; and 0.1mm structures are what you would get from a 254 ppi display. You eyes don't care about the size of a structure; they care about the angular size they cover, and that angular size gets bigger as you get closer to it.
If we could figure out where exactly a cosmic ray would hit and build a full range detector like CMS around that exact point, and know exactly the cosmic ray's energy, and which particle it hit WITHOUT using data from the detector to estimate that, then yes, we could just use cosmic rays. We'd probably need quite some time (of the order of centuries) to accumulate the amount of data the LHC will give us in a month, unless we could move that detector really fast around the Earth and up and down to get the events to happen directly inside it.
Building the LHC is much more practical, faster, and cheaper than the alternative. You can do some pretty interesting science with cosmic rays (I know, I work with some of them), but not the same kind of science you can get from a collider.