If you even read the whole summary, you'd note that the Russians began it by charging to use "their" resources. U.S. astronauts can't use Russian facilities either without incurring a hefty bill. Both sides are being petty children.
Looking purely at the numbers, by the third week the worldwide box office receipts are $148,909,463. The production cost was around $130,000,000. Factor in publicity and a few non-production costs and they are probably around break even right now. Anything they earn from here on out is profit.
Paranoid much? This is for Flash developers to avoid doing stupid things with an app that endangers their site, perhaps with a few checks to help avoid exposing their customers to additional risk. Why on Earth do you think there is an ulterior motive here?
Keep in mind there are already loads of.NET security analyzers out there. TFA notes that the current Flash analyzers are frequently not up to date with the latest Flash releases. Is it so horrible of them to try and be helpful?
I believe the idea is to check for Flash apps that are dangerous to the server, not the client. For example, you don't want to have the admin password to your database stored as a string inside your flash app.
From what I've heard, the problem is that it's expensive to train nurses, and the schools can't get enough money to do so. Even if they are at or over capacity, it's still possible for the capacity itself to be less than the eventual demand for trained nurses.
Who disciplines them? Other police? Ever heard of the Blue Wall of Silence? Police rarely police their own except in extreme cases (usually involving corruption, and sometimes not even then). Prosecutors aren't going to discipline them either, and the only recourse a judge has is to disallow evidence. Defense attorneys, TV dramas notwithstanding, do not have the magical ability to have legitimate evidence thrown out. If the cops play by the rules, then there is no problem. Given their greater than usual powers, they need to be subject to greater than usual standards. Which would you rather have, a single drug user let go due to the actions of a single overzealous cop, or a whole department of cops bound by no rules except the ones they make themselves?
The rules are in place to prevent you from making your decision based on that information. You know the whole rule about illegal search and seizure? If you make your decision based on knowledge obtained in an illegal search and publicized in the media, when it was clearly illegal and prohibited at trial, you remove one of the constraints preventing us from descending into a police state. If the police can get convictions through arbitrary, illegal searches, they will. Even if you are innocent, arbitrary illegal searches could tie you to any number of crimes through circumstantial evidence. The rules don't just protect the defendant, they protect our whole system of justice from going out of control.
I should also point out that what makes this "magic" rather than just another private key encryption scheme is that the secret data you need to transmit is:
Different for every message
Substantially longer than the message (assuming you don't want to give away too much in the "public" part of the message)
If you've gone that far, you may as well use a one-time pad. At least then you only have to deal with magically transmitting an amount of data equal to the message. In addition, you could bulk transmit a whole bunch of pads, while this technique prevents you from coming up with the secret until you already have a message ready to send.
Every link related to this is apparently owned by this group/person arxiv. The details are far too sparse to make much sense of, but as far as I can tell, the approach is:
Alice write a message as "DNA" (really, just two bit blocks which happen to be designated as ACTG)
Using a transcription algorithm, bits of the message are chopped out and produce a protein (really, just a subset of the message).
Magic happens (specifically, Alice manages to send the information for reinserting the chopped out sequences in some unspecified manner)
Bob reproduces original message
I have to assume some additional manipulation of the transcribed message so you aren't just giving Eve large segments of your message for free, but even then, it seems like a hell of a lot of work to disguise yet another scheme to protect data via the magic transmission of additional secret data.
Anyone see where I misread this? Even if we assume that the "DNA" is the key and not the message, I'm still not seeing how you avoid the "magic" step.
Important distinction: A belief in creationism doesn't prevent you from engaging in science (though depending on how literally you hew to it, it may be an impediment to certain aspects of biology), but it's directly antithetical to scientific modes of thought. Scientific modes of thought require you to start from evidence, develop theories, and test them. None of that applies to creationism. If an all powerful deity did manage to create the world in seven days, he made a pretty impressive back story for it. As I noted in another response though, you could just as easily say the world started five minutes ago, and all our memories were created with it. It's a great theory, but without either evidence or any way to test it, it's not science.
You can't prove the universe existed five minutes ago either, without relying on some basic assumptions of stasis. As I said, if we have a deity who constantly tinkers with physical laws, this all goes out the window, but then, if you're assuming that, you're already thrown scientific thinking out the window.
As soon as your friend shows how the decay of a radioactive isotope can be significantly affected by external stimuli that could reasonably be expected to be encountered on this planet (for example, the core of a star manages to create radioactive elements, but I think it may be hard to prove this was occurring inside fossilized bones), I'll take her seriously. Until then, she's not thinking scientifically, starting from evidence and forming theories, she's thinking religiously, starting from belief, and discarding evidence.
First off, we don't use carbon dating for the dates more than a few tens of thousands of years ago (it's pretty useless beyond 60000 years), rather, we use potassium-argon or uranium-lead, but I get your point.
Regardless, we aren't operating in a vacuum here. For short dates (such as those relevant to the age of humans) it is possible to calibrate if other physical evidence was preserved (I seem to recall using tree rings as an secondary calibration cue). And we do acknowledge the lack of accuracy, it's why we don't give exact dates, but rather a range (usually X years before present +-Y for the range).
I never said we know that dates down to the tens, or even thousands place. But it would take a hell of a deviation to make 1 million and 65 million come within striking distance of one another. We do test in an ongoing fashion, how these isotopes decay, and there has been no change in the time we've been able to observe, nor is there any evidence for an external factor that would accelerate or decelerate decay that I am aware of, only minor adjustments due to sample contamination. If you want to argue that the decay of various isotopes changes randomly, and more importantly, significantly, over time, be my guest, but unless you have some basis for your claims its not scientific thinking, it's wishful.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
*does double take* Opinion question? Whether humans (who have been around for less than a million years no matter how loosely you define human) and dinosaurs (which have been dead for over 60 million years unless you call crocodiles and/or birds dinosaurs) lived together is opinion? What definition of opinion are you using?
Claiming religious belief is absurd. If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
And no, this is no strawman. The rough periods in which dinosaurs and humans lived are so far apart and clearly established, that the only way to have them live together would be if we had a deity who interceded in direct physical ways constantly. And if you accept that, then the scientific method is just as worthless as if you regularly deny the visual evidence of 6 billion people the world over when it comes to the color of the grass and the sky.
You do realize that the missile defense system is a joke, right? Particularly if you actually expect it to be able to stop a Russian nuclear attack. Agreeing not to deploy an expensive and useless system to prevent another country from actually getting nuclear weapons is a great idea. We save money, give up nothing of consequence, and maybe prevent Iran from acquiring nukes.
My impression has been that, of those five you mention, most of them don't want homework to count more, they just want less of the test grade to be shoved into a single, high pressure exam. Having smaller, weekly quizzes or more in class projects reduces the odds that a single bad day in finals week wrecks your grade. It also reduces the tendency to only cram for the one test and not pay attention the rest of the semester.
I remember grade school homework as 90% busy work. Forcing students who already understand the material to spend time repeatedly demonstrating their understanding just makes them bored and frustrated. I'm equally against monolithic tests that count for huge portions of the grade (memories of the year I caught a nasty cold at the beginning of finals week come to mind).
You say your job is mostly homework. Are you really doing it at home? If so, I pity you. If it's just homework "style" though, keep in mind, you're performing it in a work environment without distractions and for compensation. Homework is done outside the work environment, and the rewards are small, while the alternate activities available are frequently far more engaging.
You're reading into my comment too much. All I'm saying is that because marriage is denied to gay couples right now, they actually get better treatment under company rules. It's an unintended consequence of the idiotic "no marriage for gays" policy most of the country follows.
Seconded. In my experience, MS is one of the most gay friendly employers out there. They are extremely clear that sexual orientation is a protected class and that all benefits can be shared with either a spouse or same sex domestic partner (which in a sense is more advantageous to gay people, since I can't share my benefits with my girlfriend unless I marry her). As the blog post itself indicates, the Human Rights Campaign (that would normally get on the case) "says Microsoft has a positive image with them." Without additional evidence, I'm inclined to think there were other reasons for the ban.
How so? In theory, the sales tax is levied based on the state providing the opportunity to make the sale (police, business regulation, etc.). Sellers from out of state aren't subject to its laws, nor do they benefit from the state's services. If anything, sales tax should apply in the state of incorporation, but in that case, every online retailer would reincorporate in Delaware and Oregon. Both of which would be happy to host them because they'd get the income taxes off the new employment brought to the area, without having to actually do any real work.
Has something changed recently that makes all these states think Quill Corp. v. North Dakota no longer applies? Are they just following New York's lead and hoping the opinion is reversed? This is 17 year old case law; I don't see what would have changed to warrant reversing the precedent.
Not entirely. You're forgetting the cost of media markets. The cost of advertising in L.A. and S.F. is much higher than Des Moines. Iowa happens to be pretty close to a swing state, so people care about it right now, but they wouldn't if it were more partisan in either direction. More partisan small states (like Kansas, Oklahoma or Maryland) are completely ignored now. Under a national popular vote, they would be more attractive targets, because every voter swung in those states would count, and it would be cheaper to talk to the smaller markets.
Given that Win7 is supposed to have a smaller number of services running by default, and a number of optimizations to boot, you probably won't get worse perf on Win7. I can't guarantee better perf, but when you're operating with that little memory, *any* improvement in Win7's memory usage will have a noticeable effect (of course, if you are disabling unnecessary Vista services yourself you'll probably get a lot of the benefit).
As for drivers, you should be fine. They aren't changing the driver model for Win7, so Vista drivers will work with it.
You exaggerate the effect of latency grotesquely. Getting less than 1 ms of latency is not necessary; humans can't perceive or react fast enough for that to make a huge difference. When the human eye has a rough "frame rate" of 25 fps, providing input more quickly than roughly double that (or 50 fps) will simply mean that roughly half the information is lost. 50 fps translates to about 20ms between frames. 5-10 ms latency on an LCD (typical for computer monitors) is still sufficient to convey "real time" information to a player, particularly given that mean human response time for visual imagery is roughly 180-200 ms. Humans simply don't perceive time quickly enough for that to matter.
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If you even read the whole summary, you'd note that the Russians began it by charging to use "their" resources. U.S. astronauts can't use Russian facilities either without incurring a hefty bill. Both sides are being petty children.
Looking purely at the numbers, by the third week the worldwide box office receipts are $148,909,463. The production cost was around $130,000,000. Factor in publicity and a few non-production costs and they are probably around break even right now. Anything they earn from here on out is profit.
Paranoid much? This is for Flash developers to avoid doing stupid things with an app that endangers their site, perhaps with a few checks to help avoid exposing their customers to additional risk. Why on Earth do you think there is an ulterior motive here?
Keep in mind there are already loads of .NET security analyzers out there. TFA notes that the current Flash analyzers are frequently not up to date with the latest Flash releases. Is it so horrible of them to try and be helpful?
I believe the idea is to check for Flash apps that are dangerous to the server, not the client. For example, you don't want to have the admin password to your database stored as a string inside your flash app.
From what I've heard, the problem is that it's expensive to train nurses, and the schools can't get enough money to do so. Even if they are at or over capacity, it's still possible for the capacity itself to be less than the eventual demand for trained nurses.
Nursing will be overpopulated? When it costs at least half what a medical degree costs, but pays substantially less?
Who disciplines them? Other police? Ever heard of the Blue Wall of Silence? Police rarely police their own except in extreme cases (usually involving corruption, and sometimes not even then). Prosecutors aren't going to discipline them either, and the only recourse a judge has is to disallow evidence. Defense attorneys, TV dramas notwithstanding, do not have the magical ability to have legitimate evidence thrown out. If the cops play by the rules, then there is no problem. Given their greater than usual powers, they need to be subject to greater than usual standards. Which would you rather have, a single drug user let go due to the actions of a single overzealous cop, or a whole department of cops bound by no rules except the ones they make themselves?
If only you'd written this while the story was still fresh, you might have got a few people to bite. Too bad.
The rules are in place to prevent you from making your decision based on that information. You know the whole rule about illegal search and seizure? If you make your decision based on knowledge obtained in an illegal search and publicized in the media, when it was clearly illegal and prohibited at trial, you remove one of the constraints preventing us from descending into a police state. If the police can get convictions through arbitrary, illegal searches, they will. Even if you are innocent, arbitrary illegal searches could tie you to any number of crimes through circumstantial evidence. The rules don't just protect the defendant, they protect our whole system of justice from going out of control.
Does your sense of curiosity outweigh that?
If you've gone that far, you may as well use a one-time pad. At least then you only have to deal with magically transmitting an amount of data equal to the message. In addition, you could bulk transmit a whole bunch of pads, while this technique prevents you from coming up with the secret until you already have a message ready to send.
Every link related to this is apparently owned by this group/person arxiv. The details are far too sparse to make much sense of, but as far as I can tell, the approach is:
I have to assume some additional manipulation of the transcribed message so you aren't just giving Eve large segments of your message for free, but even then, it seems like a hell of a lot of work to disguise yet another scheme to protect data via the magic transmission of additional secret data.
Anyone see where I misread this? Even if we assume that the "DNA" is the key and not the message, I'm still not seeing how you avoid the "magic" step.
Important distinction: A belief in creationism doesn't prevent you from engaging in science (though depending on how literally you hew to it, it may be an impediment to certain aspects of biology), but it's directly antithetical to scientific modes of thought. Scientific modes of thought require you to start from evidence, develop theories, and test them. None of that applies to creationism. If an all powerful deity did manage to create the world in seven days, he made a pretty impressive back story for it. As I noted in another response though, you could just as easily say the world started five minutes ago, and all our memories were created with it. It's a great theory, but without either evidence or any way to test it, it's not science.
You can't prove the universe existed five minutes ago either, without relying on some basic assumptions of stasis. As I said, if we have a deity who constantly tinkers with physical laws, this all goes out the window, but then, if you're assuming that, you're already thrown scientific thinking out the window.
As soon as your friend shows how the decay of a radioactive isotope can be significantly affected by external stimuli that could reasonably be expected to be encountered on this planet (for example, the core of a star manages to create radioactive elements, but I think it may be hard to prove this was occurring inside fossilized bones), I'll take her seriously. Until then, she's not thinking scientifically, starting from evidence and forming theories, she's thinking religiously, starting from belief, and discarding evidence.
First off, we don't use carbon dating for the dates more than a few tens of thousands of years ago (it's pretty useless beyond 60000 years), rather, we use potassium-argon or uranium-lead, but I get your point.
Regardless, we aren't operating in a vacuum here. For short dates (such as those relevant to the age of humans) it is possible to calibrate if other physical evidence was preserved (I seem to recall using tree rings as an secondary calibration cue). And we do acknowledge the lack of accuracy, it's why we don't give exact dates, but rather a range (usually X years before present +-Y for the range).
I never said we know that dates down to the tens, or even thousands place. But it would take a hell of a deviation to make 1 million and 65 million come within striking distance of one another. We do test in an ongoing fashion, how these isotopes decay, and there has been no change in the time we've been able to observe, nor is there any evidence for an external factor that would accelerate or decelerate decay that I am aware of, only minor adjustments due to sample contamination. If you want to argue that the decay of various isotopes changes randomly, and more importantly, significantly, over time, be my guest, but unless you have some basis for your claims its not scientific thinking, it's wishful.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
*does double take* Opinion question? Whether humans (who have been around for less than a million years no matter how loosely you define human) and dinosaurs (which have been dead for over 60 million years unless you call crocodiles and/or birds dinosaurs) lived together is opinion? What definition of opinion are you using?
Claiming religious belief is absurd. If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
And no, this is no strawman. The rough periods in which dinosaurs and humans lived are so far apart and clearly established, that the only way to have them live together would be if we had a deity who interceded in direct physical ways constantly. And if you accept that, then the scientific method is just as worthless as if you regularly deny the visual evidence of 6 billion people the world over when it comes to the color of the grass and the sky.
You do realize that the missile defense system is a joke, right? Particularly if you actually expect it to be able to stop a Russian nuclear attack. Agreeing not to deploy an expensive and useless system to prevent another country from actually getting nuclear weapons is a great idea. We save money, give up nothing of consequence, and maybe prevent Iran from acquiring nukes.
My impression has been that, of those five you mention, most of them don't want homework to count more, they just want less of the test grade to be shoved into a single, high pressure exam. Having smaller, weekly quizzes or more in class projects reduces the odds that a single bad day in finals week wrecks your grade. It also reduces the tendency to only cram for the one test and not pay attention the rest of the semester.
I remember grade school homework as 90% busy work. Forcing students who already understand the material to spend time repeatedly demonstrating their understanding just makes them bored and frustrated. I'm equally against monolithic tests that count for huge portions of the grade (memories of the year I caught a nasty cold at the beginning of finals week come to mind).
You say your job is mostly homework. Are you really doing it at home? If so, I pity you. If it's just homework "style" though, keep in mind, you're performing it in a work environment without distractions and for compensation. Homework is done outside the work environment, and the rewards are small, while the alternate activities available are frequently far more engaging.
Even trying to bread a frog ... is at best an artificial solution, and one that historically has never worked on any grand scale.
I disagree. I've successfully managed to bread frogs en masse, you just have to have a really large fryer. Delicious and crispy!
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
You're reading into my comment too much. All I'm saying is that because marriage is denied to gay couples right now, they actually get better treatment under company rules. It's an unintended consequence of the idiotic "no marriage for gays" policy most of the country follows.
Seconded. In my experience, MS is one of the most gay friendly employers out there. They are extremely clear that sexual orientation is a protected class and that all benefits can be shared with either a spouse or same sex domestic partner (which in a sense is more advantageous to gay people, since I can't share my benefits with my girlfriend unless I marry her). As the blog post itself indicates, the Human Rights Campaign (that would normally get on the case) "says Microsoft has a positive image with them." Without additional evidence, I'm inclined to think there were other reasons for the ban.
How so? In theory, the sales tax is levied based on the state providing the opportunity to make the sale (police, business regulation, etc.). Sellers from out of state aren't subject to its laws, nor do they benefit from the state's services. If anything, sales tax should apply in the state of incorporation, but in that case, every online retailer would reincorporate in Delaware and Oregon. Both of which would be happy to host them because they'd get the income taxes off the new employment brought to the area, without having to actually do any real work.
Has something changed recently that makes all these states think Quill Corp. v. North Dakota no longer applies? Are they just following New York's lead and hoping the opinion is reversed? This is 17 year old case law; I don't see what would have changed to warrant reversing the precedent.
Not entirely. You're forgetting the cost of media markets. The cost of advertising in L.A. and S.F. is much higher than Des Moines. Iowa happens to be pretty close to a swing state, so people care about it right now, but they wouldn't if it were more partisan in either direction. More partisan small states (like Kansas, Oklahoma or Maryland) are completely ignored now. Under a national popular vote, they would be more attractive targets, because every voter swung in those states would count, and it would be cheaper to talk to the smaller markets.
Given that Win7 is supposed to have a smaller number of services running by default, and a number of optimizations to boot, you probably won't get worse perf on Win7. I can't guarantee better perf, but when you're operating with that little memory, *any* improvement in Win7's memory usage will have a noticeable effect (of course, if you are disabling unnecessary Vista services yourself you'll probably get a lot of the benefit).
As for drivers, you should be fine. They aren't changing the driver model for Win7, so Vista drivers will work with it.
You exaggerate the effect of latency grotesquely. Getting less than 1 ms of latency is not necessary; humans can't perceive or react fast enough for that to make a huge difference. When the human eye has a rough "frame rate" of 25 fps, providing input more quickly than roughly double that (or 50 fps) will simply mean that roughly half the information is lost. 50 fps translates to about 20ms between frames. 5-10 ms latency on an LCD (typical for computer monitors) is still sufficient to convey "real time" information to a player, particularly given that mean human response time for visual imagery is roughly 180-200 ms. Humans simply don't perceive time quickly enough for that to matter.