I think that it does. In Europe, funding in many countries has been ruthlessly cut for sports that don't look likely to yield golds. This leads to situations where gynastic teams (for example) will try incredibly high-scoring routines in the last round to nab a gold (and some more funding for the next four years) only to fail and lose the bronze that they could have secured.
If you know your funding just depends on getting a medal, you'll probably consolidate your third place, rather than going all out for a tiny chance of gold.
I agree with you on things like baseball and basketball (as far as I know they're not even shown here) but surely the American broadcaster (NBC?) is showing all the swimming and running and things?
Here in the UK, most of the attention is given to swimming, running, cycling, weightlifting, etc. Sports that don't really belong in the Olympics (tennis for example) tend only to get shown if we're in them (though they are often available on the red button). Considering the Olympics is the pinnacle for these events, I'm surprised there isn't a big audience in the US, especially consider that you're the second in the rankings.
Seriously? We are all over these Olympics here in the UK. Everyone I know is watching. It could be because we're at an amazing third place, but still.
Besides, what's not to like? The record for most golds ever and most golds at a single games has been broken. The 100m record has been destroyed by someone who only ran flat-out 85m and had one shoe undone and lots of events have been really exciting.
Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?
I imagine it's to put the US first. Personally I think it's a ridiculous way of ordering things. It encourages playing safe for bronzes, which is boring and contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.
Then again we've got to remember that no official table exists and it's not in the Olympic spirit. Personally, I think an official one should be made just to settle things once and for all. It's all well and good saying people shouldn't rank the countries, but they do and it affects both tactics and funding.
An (America-centric) article on the subject can be found here.
Your computation actually has some errors in it. The amount of energy required to increase the earth's speed from what it is (about 30,000 m/s) by 1 m/s is not the same as the amount of enery needed to increase it from 0 to 1 m/s (which is what you computed, except that you also made a mistake by a factor of 2).
er... I was accelerating it radially, at midsummer or midwinter? *wipes brow*
I was actually wondering about this at the time. I took my reference frame to be ours (rather than assuming the Sun is stationary). I have a feeling this wasn't valid, but could someone enlighten me?
Are you afraid this will affect the Earth's orbit around the Sun? The change will be negligible --- the energy we'd need to mess up the orbits dangerously is far beyond us.
I though it was well within our current power to fuck up the Earth's orbit. Given that the whole time I was growing up we were constantly told we could "blow up the Earth 20 gazillion times over" I was under the impression that we could fairly easily knock it off kilter.
When people say we could blow up the entire Earth, they really mean we could cover the surface of the Earth in nuclear explosions. It would kill all of us, but the Earth wouldn't care. It would just keep trundling along as ever.
Some maths: Suppose we wanted to increase the speed of the Earth by 1m/s. Kinetic energy = mass * speed^2, so (as the mass of the Earth is 5.9736*10^24 kg) we'd need 5.9736*10^24 joules. A megaton explosion is 4.184*10^15 J, so we'd need the equivalent of about a billion megatonnes of TNT. That's about one hundred million pretty big nukes (assuming all the energy of the nukes goes into the Earth's movement, which it wouldn't). And that's just to accelerate the Earth by 1m/s. And when you add to that the fact that the Earth's orbit is stable (so we need a lot of movement to do any real damage), you can see how little we could really do.
Well all mass exerts a gravitational pull on all mass, so yes they affect each other.
Are you afraid this will affect the Earth's orbit around the Sun? The change will be negligible --- the energy we'd need to mess up the orbits dangerously is far beyond us.
Aren't we the fun one! Now if you're going to play the "/. is for geniuses" card, there's a few things we need to get straight.
I was outright embarassed by the content.
At first I thought you'd added the italics to emphasise someone else's spelling error. How wrong I was...
Attempting to "entertain" the more intelligent types with the same sort of filth/LCD* they see on their television is a counterproductive goal.
I'm assuming that by LCD you mean lowest common denominator. Crappy things appeal to the LCD, they aren't the LCD themselves... Oh and counter-productive is hyphenated.
Of course, you'll accuse me of being a pedant, but I'm not the one attacking a website for adding a section to which I will not be forced to go.
Exactly. I really don't understand how video games are any different from VHS or DVD or the web. All can be used for kid-friendly fun. All can be used to watch people getting killed / touched in rude places.
I don't understand where this whole "games are for kids" thing came from anyhow. The early arcade games (e.g. Space Invaders) which popularised the medium were played by twenty-somethings not pre-teens.
Wow... You really don't get why people were annoyed, do you? We (citizens of the rest of the world) weren't annoyed about space junk; frankly most of us couldn't care less about orbitting debris. What we were concerned about is that two countries have shown that they have the means and the will to destroy satellites, which makes global peace that little bit less secure.
But by all means put it down to "US bashing". After all, why should the US have to live up to the same standards as everyone else when it can go around bullying everyone, right?
Running a TOR exit point will get your IP on all kinds of black lists and you will soon find you can't use your internet connection normally, you get strange timeouts, captchas whenever you try to search Google and so on.
Very true. I've played around with Tor and a number of sites (understandably) ban all tor exit nodes from contributing. Wikipedia is an obvious example.
While NBC may well have done what they are accused of (I wouldn't know, the BBC had it all live and unedited), it's not the most insulting thing they've done.
They bribed the Chinese organisers of the Olympics to put certain events early in the morning (local time). The swimming starting soon is an example. Why? So they would be during prime time in America. This sound fair enough, until you realise that prime time in America is THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IN EUROPE. So we get to miss half the events, just so it's a little more convenient for the Yanks. I mean, it's not like we invented the Olympics or anything...
While using credit cards and shrinky dink plastic is clever, is this story particularly surprising? The article states that a photo of the key in question is required. If I asked the average man on the street if it was possible to replicate a key from a photo of it if you were sufficiently determined, I'd imagine they would say yes.
Suppose we have an encryption system. It takes a message m and a key k and outputs e=c(m,k), our encrypted message (c being our encryption function).
Security by obscurity would be keeping the function c secret. Although this sounds like a good idea, it's actually a very bad one. Because noone but you knows how it works, noone will test it and it could be open to attack without you knowing. All it would then take is an enterprising person to reverse engineer the function and screw you over (without you having the faintest idea).
For best security, the function c should be freely available. Then any security holes can be found. It should be very difficult to find k or m from e, despite the function c being public knowledge. (Examples include AES, PGP, DES [now no longer secure due to brute-force methods].)
Going back to our door example (yet again): a properly secure system might be a big beefy lock which has undergone lots of testing. Security through obscurity would be some kind of custom-built electronic hidden lock that you can't see. Although that sounds more secure, it hasn't been thoroughly tested and could in fact be easily bypassed.
GP said they are always looking for evidence to back up or refute theories. That's exactly what they are doing with evolution. Except (and here's the kicker) the fossil record backs up evolution. No evidence has been found that contradicts evolution.
I can't understand why people act like science is a religion. Science is about finding the truth through experiment and observation. If creationism was correct then guess what: SCIENCE WOULD AGREE.
Security through obscurity does, in fact, keep things secure for a period of time. Hell, password protection is security through obscurity.
I think you may be misunderstanding the phrase "security through obscurity". Password protection is not security through obscurity because the system essentially says "I'll let you in with the password. What is it?" The system tells you exactly what's going on and that you need a password.
An analogy with a door: A large padlock is like a password. It's clear how it works, but you need the key to get in. Security through obscurity might be only having the door open if you touched a particular part of it. It'll fool people for a bit, but once they've realised what to do, it's blown wide open.
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I think that it does. In Europe, funding in many countries has been ruthlessly cut for sports that don't look likely to yield golds. This leads to situations where gynastic teams (for example) will try incredibly high-scoring routines in the last round to nab a gold (and some more funding for the next four years) only to fail and lose the bronze that they could have secured.
If you know your funding just depends on getting a medal, you'll probably consolidate your third place, rather than going all out for a tiny chance of gold.
I agree with you on things like baseball and basketball (as far as I know they're not even shown here) but surely the American broadcaster (NBC?) is showing all the swimming and running and things?
Here in the UK, most of the attention is given to swimming, running, cycling, weightlifting, etc. Sports that don't really belong in the Olympics (tennis for example) tend only to get shown if we're in them (though they are often available on the red button). Considering the Olympics is the pinnacle for these events, I'm surprised there isn't a big audience in the US, especially consider that you're the second in the rankings.
Seriously? We are all over these Olympics here in the UK. Everyone I know is watching. It could be because we're at an amazing third place, but still.
Besides, what's not to like? The record for most golds ever and most golds at a single games has been broken. The 100m record has been destroyed by someone who only ran flat-out 85m and had one shoe undone and lots of events have been really exciting.
Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?
I imagine it's to put the US first. Personally I think it's a ridiculous way of ordering things. It encourages playing safe for bronzes, which is boring and contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.
Then again we've got to remember that no official table exists and it's not in the Olympic spirit. Personally, I think an official one should be made just to settle things once and for all. It's all well and good saying people shouldn't rank the countries, but they do and it affects both tactics and funding.
An (America-centric) article on the subject can be found here.
I had no idea that Randall Munroe invented stick figures!
Your computation actually has some errors in it. The amount of energy required to increase the earth's speed from what it is (about 30,000 m/s) by 1 m/s is not the same as the amount of enery needed to increase it from 0 to 1 m/s (which is what you computed, except that you also made a mistake by a factor of 2).
er... I was accelerating it radially, at midsummer or midwinter? *wipes brow*
I was actually wondering about this at the time. I took my reference frame to be ours (rather than assuming the Sun is stationary). I have a feeling this wasn't valid, but could someone enlighten me?
I though it was well within our current power to fuck up the Earth's orbit. Given that the whole time I was growing up we were constantly told we could "blow up the Earth 20 gazillion times over" I was under the impression that we could fairly easily knock it off kilter.
When people say we could blow up the entire Earth, they really mean we could cover the surface of the Earth in nuclear explosions. It would kill all of us, but the Earth wouldn't care. It would just keep trundling along as ever.
Some maths: Suppose we wanted to increase the speed of the Earth by 1m/s. Kinetic energy = mass * speed^2, so (as the mass of the Earth is 5.9736*10^24 kg) we'd need 5.9736*10^24 joules. A megaton explosion is 4.184*10^15 J, so we'd need the equivalent of about a billion megatonnes of TNT. That's about one hundred million pretty big nukes (assuming all the energy of the nukes goes into the Earth's movement, which it wouldn't). And that's just to accelerate the Earth by 1m/s. And when you add to that the fact that the Earth's orbit is stable (so we need a lot of movement to do any real damage), you can see how little we could really do.
Hope that makes sense!
Well all mass exerts a gravitational pull on all mass, so yes they affect each other.
Are you afraid this will affect the Earth's orbit around the Sun? The change will be negligible --- the energy we'd need to mess up the orbits dangerously is far beyond us.
Aren't we the fun one! Now if you're going to play the "/. is for geniuses" card, there's a few things we need to get straight.
I was outright embarassed by the content.
At first I thought you'd added the italics to emphasise someone else's spelling error. How wrong I was...
Attempting to "entertain" the more intelligent types with the same sort of filth/LCD* they see on their television is a counterproductive goal.
I'm assuming that by LCD you mean lowest common denominator. Crappy things appeal to the LCD, they aren't the LCD themselves... Oh and counter-productive is hyphenated.
Of course, you'll accuse me of being a pedant, but I'm not the one attacking a website for adding a section to which I will not be forced to go.
Exactly. I really don't understand how video games are any different from VHS or DVD or the web. All can be used for kid-friendly fun. All can be used to watch people getting killed / touched in rude places.
I don't understand where this whole "games are for kids" thing came from anyhow. The early arcade games (e.g. Space Invaders) which popularised the medium were played by twenty-somethings not pre-teens.
Don't forget Grim Fandango, possibly the most overlooked videogame gem ever.
Wow... You really don't get why people were annoyed, do you? We (citizens of the rest of the world) weren't annoyed about space junk; frankly most of us couldn't care less about orbitting debris. What we were concerned about is that two countries have shown that they have the means and the will to destroy satellites, which makes global peace that little bit less secure.
But by all means put it down to "US bashing". After all, why should the US have to live up to the same standards as everyone else when it can go around bullying everyone, right?
If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
Ask the Africans starving to death due to desertification.
Running a TOR exit point will get your IP on all kinds of black lists and you will soon find you can't use your internet connection normally, you get strange timeouts, captchas whenever you try to search Google and so on.
Very true. I've played around with Tor and a number of sites (understandably) ban all tor exit nodes from contributing. Wikipedia is an obvious example.
So unless you're greek, you have no special claim to the games.
That was kind of my point --- it's the middle of the night for all of Europe, including Greece.
While NBC may well have done what they are accused of (I wouldn't know, the BBC had it all live and unedited), it's not the most insulting thing they've done.
They bribed the Chinese organisers of the Olympics to put certain events early in the morning (local time). The swimming starting soon is an example. Why? So they would be during prime time in America. This sound fair enough, until you realise that prime time in America is THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IN EUROPE. So we get to miss half the events, just so it's a little more convenient for the Yanks. I mean, it's not like we invented the Olympics or anything...
While using credit cards and shrinky dink plastic is clever, is this story particularly surprising? The article states that a photo of the key in question is required. If I asked the average man on the street if it was possible to replicate a key from a photo of it if you were sufficiently determined, I'd imagine they would say yes.
Well, to be fair, the Nazis committed their atrocities *after* being awarded the games.
UK != England. If you're going to insult a country, at least get its name right.
Indeed. In fact, the code used for CDs can cope with 4000 consecutive bits being unreadable. Quite remarkable!
Here in the UK, there's a meat company called Bernard Matthews, which is based in Norfolk and commonly known to be "Norfolk 'n' good"!
I think maybe I explained it badly.
Suppose we have an encryption system. It takes a message m and a key k and outputs e=c(m,k), our encrypted message (c being our encryption function).
Security by obscurity would be keeping the function c secret. Although this sounds like a good idea, it's actually a very bad one. Because noone but you knows how it works, noone will test it and it could be open to attack without you knowing. All it would then take is an enterprising person to reverse engineer the function and screw you over (without you having the faintest idea).
For best security, the function c should be freely available. Then any security holes can be found. It should be very difficult to find k or m from e, despite the function c being public knowledge. (Examples include AES, PGP, DES [now no longer secure due to brute-force methods].)
Going back to our door example (yet again): a properly secure system might be a big beefy lock which has undergone lots of testing. Security through obscurity would be some kind of custom-built electronic hidden lock that you can't see. Although that sounds more secure, it hasn't been thoroughly tested and could in fact be easily bypassed.
Temperature been slightly below average today? GLOBAL WARMING DOESN'T EXIST!!!
Wow, way to fail to read a sentence correctly.
GP said they are always looking for evidence to back up or refute theories. That's exactly what they are doing with evolution. Except (and here's the kicker) the fossil record backs up evolution. No evidence has been found that contradicts evolution.
I can't understand why people act like science is a religion. Science is about finding the truth through experiment and observation. If creationism was correct then guess what: SCIENCE WOULD AGREE.
Security through obscurity does, in fact, keep things secure for a period of time. Hell, password protection is security through obscurity.
I think you may be misunderstanding the phrase "security through obscurity". Password protection is not security through obscurity because the system essentially says "I'll let you in with the password. What is it?" The system tells you exactly what's going on and that you need a password.
An analogy with a door: A large padlock is like a password. It's clear how it works, but you need the key to get in. Security through obscurity might be only having the door open if you touched a particular part of it. It'll fool people for a bit, but once they've realised what to do, it's blown wide open.