I would have thought that Hillis would have easily understood a massively parallel distributed implementation of a clock, even if it is completely virtualized.
If you look at difference image from yesterday and today, it is apparant
that the image is split into a 4x4 grid of smaller pieces. As far as
I can see, these re-arrange into 4 chunks of 2x2 each. One is a figure silhouetted in a doorway, head cocked to the left. Another is a figure in an atheletic stance, possibly with a weapon on his shoulder. A third involves something white in roughly a shape like:
I agree. With a difference of a few hours (from 5 to 10.5 hours on the site, in my case) you can pick out features. I'm using paint shop pro in windows, methodology is to do image arithmatic of a symmetric difference between two images, threshold the result at about 32/255, and and this mask with the later image.
Looks like maybe there is a person standing in the lower right, dark silhouetted in a doorway?
Perhaps the more distinctive thing is the palette -- lots of purples and blues and greens, with some white linear features in the central parts.
You are right that the famous "tank guy" wasn't run over by the tanks, but there most definately are reports of people being run over. See this article in the Guardian, for example. A survivor whose legs were crushed by a tank as he fled Tiananmen square reports that five others were run over and killed.
If only other politicians had enough backbone to use tax money in ways that benefit all the people who paid for it, instead of ingraining a monopoly...
But from a Darwinian perspective, it is a better strategy for politicians to use tax money in ways that benefit the people who will pay for their re-election. At least that's how it works at the national
level, where elections are about big budget campaigns.
I go off on similar rants about the (utter lack of) usability of my current Samsung phone. I don't know if I'd go as far as a tractor, but I'd certainly like to bludgeon that designer with a clue-by-four. On the other hand, the Motorola I had one phone generation ago was fairly well designed. It didn't have much for fancy features, but it was very easy to use for making calls, which is what I wanted it for anyway (duh)...
In general, it seems that the because of the way everything is bundled together there is very little market pressure to make the phones more usable. This is an area where the technology will really take off when and if the marketplace is much more open. The US with its monopoly-dominated market will probably keep way behind the more competitive open-market places like Hong Kong!
Someone really should mod this original poster up -- it isn't offtopic
at all! The story is about an upgrade to Firefox to cure some security-related crash issues. The poster is experiencing other crash issues. (And remember that any crash has a good chance of being a security issue).
No biggie if you don't uninstall first, but you'll end up with the older version still in the Windows Add/remove programs list.
This is a known issue: this is Bug 247884 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2478 84 -- not clickable since bugzilla blocks links from slashdot). It is targetted to be fixed by release 1.1. The main issue under discussion seems to be how to do this cleanly and not mess up advanced users (read: developers) who want to have multiple versions of the browser installed side-by-side to aid in regression testing and such.
It is the least impressive of Einstein's work of 1905 although, curiously, the most cited.
Random theory: perhaps this is related to the bike shed effect. The observation for this effect is that "getting permission to build a billion-dollar atomic power plant is easy, but a proposal to build a cheap bicycle shed will founder under the weight of endless discussion." This is theorised to be because "an atomic plant is so vast, expensive, and complicated that people cannot grasp it, rather than try, they'll fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked details before it got that far. However, everyone knows all about bicycle sheds, and feels no inhibition against debating their pettiest details without limit."
Perhaps more people work on diffusion effects of sugar in water because this is a more down-to-earth thing to think about drinking your coffee in the morning...
Yes, and this Romanian Internet Scrabble Club has been around for a number of years now (at least 4, from personal experience), has a good population of tournament-level players, a reasonable interface, TWL98/OSPD/SOWPODS (as well as French, Romanian, etc. ) dictionaries,...
I guess Romania has proven to be a bit beyond the reach of Hasbro lawyers. Which is good for us!
If you want to read someone knowledgeable, levelheaded, and intelligent about the TWA flight 800 investigation, and the actual physical evidence in that crash, check out testimony of metallurgist William Tobin in the congressional hearing on the matter. Mr. Tobin was one of the lead scientific investigators of the recovered wreckage. A sample quote:
Senator Grassley. What were some of the characteristics
which negated the missile theory?
Mr. Tobin. Well, probably the most prominent--actually,
there were two main areas negating the missile theory. One, of
course, again, is the absence of impulsive loading, or very
high-speed fracture and failure mechanisms.
But second was there were serious issues with every theory,
or almost every theory, as to access of an external missile to
the fuel, to the fuel tank. Even with, as I indicated earlier,
if one would focus on an area where we did not recover all of
the fuel tank, there were components nearby that would have
blocked or at least recorded passage of any externally
penetrating object. And if that were not the case, there were
many layers, including the external underbelly of the aircraft,
and that was recovered almost--a huge portion of that was
recovered.
So that, basically, the only plausible theory for some of
the missiles to have occurred would have been if there were
missiles such that could maybe get through a 1- or 2-inch
opening, make an immediate left, go 90 degrees through a seam,
and then maybe take another 90-degree right, and then maybe
reverse itself and come back over. But those were some of the
considerations.
This is the voice of reason in a case where reason is ignored...
Much like "wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to take the existing manual process for carding cotton and trivially transform it into a purely mechanical process?". Any competent engineer could have come up with the cotton gin even at the time if presented with this exact problem.
One big difference is, if engineer A and engineer B hole themselves up in their own barns and independently work out a machine to card cotton, they will probably come up with noticably different implementations so that the patent that A gets will not conflict with the patent that B gets. On the other hand, the "one click" patent doesn't cover a particular implementation of one click shopping, it covers any implementation of one click shopping. So in the shopping example, the patentable invention pretty much is the question, like you say, but in the mechanical example it isn't.
The constitution purpose of patents is to incourage innovators to innovate. When patents cover the innovation of merely asking new questions, does this encourage invention? No! It just gets in the way of people who actually want to do something with ideas. That's the big problem with the current system...
At least at the local Panera, their free wireless connection comes equipped with the SonicWall "firewall" which blocks visits to web sites based on substrings contained in the url. The list of substrings includes things like "sm" and "cum" -- so for instance you can't google for "cosmonaut" or "accumulator" or visit the Southern Methodist University web pages. Unless, of course, you take the care to use the escape codes %xx in place of one or more of these letters...
Just wondering, is this paragon of stupidity in place at other Panera locations?
Am I the only one who noticed that in the process of requesting
torrent mirrors, the original poster admitted that even they hadn't watched the videos? So now, not only does everyone else on slashdot post without bothering to RTFA (or in this case WTFV), now even the article submitters don't bother! Wow.
Novakyu wrote:...I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error?...where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
Okay, I'll bite, even though this is dangerously close to feeding a troll... First of all, your account of what makes a "good scientific theory" seems to only allow theories about systems
confined to very limited spaces, time scales, energy levels, and complexities. Can we have a "good scientific theory" in the area of astrophysics? We're never going to reproduce a neutron star in the laboratory. We can't experiment on a black hole. We better hope we never see a supernova up close and personal. We can only make models, and compare this to what we see in the (long ago and far away)
universe through powerful telescopes. This isn't signifacantly different from the evolutionary science of making models and comparing this to what is observed in the (long ago and nearby) fossil record.
Yes, there are some differences. Biological systems pack a lot of complexity in a small space, and this complexity limits the extent to which numerical predictions can be made. On the other hand, at the bottom level of DNA and simple cellular processes, the theory of evolution has underpinnings that can and have been tested to the highest standards of scientific methodology. For an example:
Hypothesis: this particular sequence of DNA is the gene for a particularly sweet ear of corn.
Prediction: if the DNA is copied into a standard variety of corn,
the modified kernels will have a 10-12% increase in sugar content.
Experiment: use a modified virus to copy the DNA segment, grow some of the modified and unmodified corn in the same conditions, test
resulting sugar content.
This kind of thing is being done all the time by agro companies. This is down and dirty basic science. For a more cutting edge example:
Hypothesis: mutations accumulate in human mitochondrial DNA at a fairly steady rate of number of mutations per generation.
Prediction: for people whose genealogy is known for many generations, the number of differences in their mitochondrial DNA will correlate well with the number of generations to their last common maternal ancestor.
Prediction: for a large sample of a regional population, the variations in mitochondrial DNA will point to a small number of maternal ancestors at some time corresponding to establishment of that population or a major environmental hardship for that population.
Experiment: gather DNA samples from people with known genealogies
and samples of regional poplulations. Check the correlations, verify the predictions.
This particular avenue of hypothesis/prediction/experiment I've been hearing about in the last couple years.
My point is that there is tons of science being done in evolutionary theory that matches your hypothesis/prediction/experiment model, as well as tons that is the gather data/classify examples "stamp collecting" model. There is no "lack of unambiguous experimental evidence", as you put it, nor is there a lack of unambiguous observational evidence. The only lack is in your knowledge of that evidence.
AMD is there with 64-bit, but what does that really buy you? More memory address space? How many people at home really want over 4 GB of RAM
64-bit does indeed offer more address space, which is an advantage to those needing more now/soon. But it has more important advantages;... You can more easily/directly share an address space with everyone getting a large portion.
Indeed. Do you know why when you start a program you have to wait several (or maybe even 10 or 15) seconds before it is ready for you
to use? One of the biggest reasons for this is that your OS can't just load the program from the disk to memory and jump right into
executing it, because the program is linked to maybe a dozen different
shared libraries. This dynamic linking requires the OS to go through
the entire program fixing addresses for calls to these library functions before it is ready to run. If you have tons of address space, the OS could assign each library its own chunk of addresses permanently and do the dynamic linking at program install time instead
of run time.
The point: even without adding more RAM to your 64-bit computer, an
intelligent OS could take advantage of the extra address space in ways
that would have immediately apparant benefits.
As many people above pointed out, there is interesting meta-data contained in the JPEG comments sections of these files. This meta-data,
for instance, tells that the file contains Exif meta-data, was produced by a Canon Powershot G3 with ACD Systems Digital Imaging, and gives a timestamp for the file. A tool like photoshop would change this meta-data. For instance,
the shrunken image in the Astromonomy Picture of the Day site reports that it was produced by Adobe ImageReady.
Yes, of course it would be possible for someone to use a JPEG tagger program to alter the meta-data of a photoshopped file. But would you think to do this? I wouldn't have. And for a mundane sort of mystery like this picture presents, why would you bother? There is no fame or fortune to be had by this photographer. Would you go not only to the trouble to photoshop the streak and flash into the picture, but also to cover your tracks by restoring the meta-data to fool people who look at the file with a binary editor or JPEG comment reader?
On the other hand, this does raise an interesting question of how could one check that an image had been digitally edited? Modern digital cameras usually are configured to compress the image (to JPEG or some other compressed form) before they even store it to flash memory. I wonder if there are particular tell-tale signs of repeated
JPEG compression, like what would happen when the compressed camera image is decompressed, edited, and recompressed. It also may be possible to figure out which software produced the JPEG file by quirks
of different implementations of the JPEG compression algorithm. The JPEG standard leaves room for different compressors to choose different data to discard to perform lossy compression, and it may be
possible to determine from which data remains enough information to figure out what software produced the file.
Get the "Tab X" extension. That will give you the "close tab" button in each individual tab. I'm sure there is a switch tab key also, but I can't tell you what it is...
Yeah, but a lot of modern email viruses just exploit the part of the system between the keyboard and the chair. Unfortunately no-one has
worked out how to issue auto-updates for this part of the system...
Dealing with TRUE mass market desktop applications is something the Open Source community is just now broaching. Several million installs of a piece of software that is probably the most commonly used thing on somebody's desktop - that's getting seriously mainstream. And mainstream means dealing with mainstream idiocy, infantile children, illiterate adults, and all the other annoying people in between. I'm not saying we shouldn't care about user friendliness, on the contrary, I'm saying that it's hard to maintain user friendliness supported by the community when the community stops being a bunch of tech-saavy hackers and starts being a bunch of idjits.
The parent message is insightful! As this advertising campaign shows,
the great success of Firefox has been its ability to reach out to people, to have a larger community. But a larger community means a different set of community dynamics. Its like the change from a frontier settlement to an established city. For the community dynamics to work well you need to put more institutional structure in place, like police, or maybe even the tax man. And in the process you lose some of the closeness of the community.
On the other hand, I think there are solutions. Mozillazine just needs to adapt to have better moderation, to get more useful comments and discussion to more prominent positions. Maybe even they should switch to something more like a wiki format for discussion less transient than the day-to-day babble.
But yes, it will be interesting to see how this develops. I really do expect to see free/open source software take over -- eventually -- for all of the mainstream uses. But it will be a long bumpy ride between here and there. This is just the beginning!
I think the first of those images especially is much more interesting than the "flatter than a pancake" altitude reading in the original post.
You can see a lot of surface detail (unfortunately in a region where
we don't yet have optical imaging). Look at the left side of the
'diversity' image. Notice the large dark circular feature? Circular
feature == crater on a moon like Titan. That is something that we hadn't seen in the optical images. Then notice the bright area inside
the crater rim. On these radar images, bright area == roughed up surface. Notice the little squiggly white bit going down from the bright area to the center of the crater? That has got to be an erosion channel from liquid running down into the crater. Then look at the center of the crater. You see another feature with very smooth
edges, shaped sort of like a peanut. Any guesses as to what that is?
My guess is a pool of the liquid that ran down. Very exciting image!
RTFA. Really, do. It's funny. You'll like it. And if you're not a slashdot regular, probably it will be your first introduction to the fact that electronic voting is an issue that you should be concerned about. Of course, its not very informative, but it will at least lead you to think about hackers as a concern for e-voting. And you'll be participating in a modern American phenomenon -- using comedians as a major source of information about current issues. Yay USA!
You're wrong. Do a bit of web browsing about the threat of nuclear
terrorism sometime. Try this paper for a start. What you're missing is that there is another
critical factor determining the efficiency -- for what time period the
assembly is critical. A group with limited resources trying to build
a nuclear bomb for the first time is likely to aim for a device with
a minimum of technical sophistication. This means one of two designs, corresponding to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One was the "gun design," so named because a slug of uranium is shot into another subcritical mass of uranium. The other is the "implosion design," where a hollow sphere of plutonium is surrounded by shaped charges of convential explosive, which when detonated compress the plutonium into a super-critical density. The problem with these designs is that if you do a shoddy job building the thing, the nuclear
chain reaction will take off when the fissionable material is only partway to the final "assembled" state. Then most likely the nuclear explosion blasts the parts back apart before they ever reach the final assembled state, and this flying apart of the material makes things subcritical again before much of the nuclear energy is released. This can lead to arbitrarily small yields. This is particularly likely (or maybe almost inevitable) if a bomb is built with the less-refined "reactor grade" materials as opposed to the more-refined "weapons grade" materials. The less-refined material has a far greater proportion of undesirable isotopes which randomly decay releasing extra neutrons which will start the chain reaction before the optimal stage of assembly.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have thought that Hillis would have easily understood a massively parallel distributed implementation of a clock, even if it is completely virtualized.
xxxxxxxxxx
xx....x..x
xxx...x..x
xxX...x..x
xxxxxxxxxx
The fourth is just greens and blues and purples without any high contrast things standing out.
See here for the un-permuted diff image.
With seven more hours of data, more detail is starting to show...
Okay, I uploaded a diff image to wikipedia. Take a peek at this to see what I mean. Surely one of you must recognise this game...
I agree. With a difference of a few hours (from 5 to 10.5 hours on the site, in my case) you can pick out features. I'm using paint shop pro in windows, methodology is to do image arithmatic of a symmetric difference between two images, threshold the result at about 32/255, and and this mask with the later image. Looks like maybe there is a person standing in the lower right, dark silhouetted in a doorway? Perhaps the more distinctive thing is the palette -- lots of purples and blues and greens, with some white linear features in the central parts.
You are right that the famous "tank guy" wasn't run over by the tanks, but there most definately are reports of people being run over. See this article in the Guardian, for example. A survivor whose legs were crushed by a tank as he fled Tiananmen square reports that five others were run over and killed.
If only other politicians had enough backbone to use tax money in ways that benefit all the people who paid for it, instead of ingraining a monopoly ...
But from a Darwinian perspective, it is a better strategy for politicians to use tax money in ways that benefit the people who will pay for their re-election. At least that's how it works at the national
level, where elections are about big budget campaigns.
In general, it seems that the because of the way everything is bundled together there is very little market pressure to make the phones more usable. This is an area where the technology will really take off when and if the marketplace is much more open. The US with its monopoly-dominated market will probably keep way behind the more competitive open-market places like Hong Kong!
Someone really should mod this original poster up -- it isn't offtopic at all! The story is about an upgrade to Firefox to cure some security-related crash issues. The poster is experiencing other crash issues. (And remember that any crash has a good chance of being a security issue).
This is a known issue: this is Bug 247884 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2478 84 -- not clickable since bugzilla blocks links from slashdot). It is targetted to be fixed by release 1.1. The main issue under discussion seems to be how to do this cleanly and not mess up advanced users (read: developers) who want to have multiple versions of the browser installed side-by-side to aid in regression testing and such.
Random theory: perhaps this is related to the bike shed effect. The observation for this effect is that "getting permission to build a billion-dollar atomic power plant is easy, but a proposal to build a cheap bicycle shed will founder under the weight of endless discussion." This is theorised to be because "an atomic plant is so vast, expensive, and complicated that people cannot grasp it, rather than try, they'll fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked details before it got that far. However, everyone knows all about bicycle sheds, and feels no inhibition against debating their pettiest details without limit."
Perhaps more people work on diffusion effects of sugar in water because this is a more down-to-earth thing to think about drinking your coffee in the morning...
I guess Romania has proven to be a bit beyond the reach of Hasbro lawyers. Which is good for us!
- Senator Grassley. What were some of the characteristics
which negated the missile theory?
This is the voice of reason in a case where reason is ignored...Mr. Tobin. Well, probably the most prominent--actually, there were two main areas negating the missile theory. One, of course, again, is the absence of impulsive loading, or very high-speed fracture and failure mechanisms.
But second was there were serious issues with every theory, or almost every theory, as to access of an external missile to the fuel, to the fuel tank. Even with, as I indicated earlier, if one would focus on an area where we did not recover all of the fuel tank, there were components nearby that would have blocked or at least recorded passage of any externally penetrating object. And if that were not the case, there were many layers, including the external underbelly of the aircraft, and that was recovered almost--a huge portion of that was recovered.
So that, basically, the only plausible theory for some of the missiles to have occurred would have been if there were missiles such that could maybe get through a 1- or 2-inch opening, make an immediate left, go 90 degrees through a seam, and then maybe take another 90-degree right, and then maybe reverse itself and come back over. But those were some of the considerations.
- Much like "wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to take the existing manual process for carding cotton and trivially transform it into a purely mechanical process?". Any competent engineer could have come up with the cotton gin even at the time if presented with this exact problem.
One big difference is, if engineer A and engineer B hole themselves up in their own barns and independently work out a machine to card cotton, they will probably come up with noticably different implementations so that the patent that A gets will not conflict with the patent that B gets. On the other hand, the "one click" patent doesn't cover a particular implementation of one click shopping, it covers any implementation of one click shopping. So in the shopping example, the patentable invention pretty much is the question, like you say, but in the mechanical example it isn't.The constitution purpose of patents is to incourage innovators to innovate. When patents cover the innovation of merely asking new questions, does this encourage invention? No! It just gets in the way of people who actually want to do something with ideas. That's the big problem with the current system...
At least at the local Panera, their free wireless connection comes equipped with the SonicWall "firewall" which blocks visits to web sites based on substrings contained in the url. The list of substrings includes things like "sm" and "cum" -- so for instance you can't google for "cosmonaut" or "accumulator" or visit the Southern Methodist University web pages. Unless, of course, you take the care to use the escape codes %xx in place of one or more of these letters...
Just wondering, is this paragon of stupidity in place at other Panera locations?
Am I the only one who noticed that in the process of requesting torrent mirrors, the original poster admitted that even they hadn't watched the videos? So now, not only does everyone else on slashdot post without bothering to RTFA (or in this case WTFV), now even the article submitters don't bother! Wow.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? ...where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
Okay, I'll bite, even though this is dangerously close to feeding a troll... First of all, your account of what makes a "good scientific theory" seems to only allow theories about systems confined to very limited spaces, time scales, energy levels, and complexities. Can we have a "good scientific theory" in the area of astrophysics? We're never going to reproduce a neutron star in the laboratory. We can't experiment on a black hole. We better hope we never see a supernova up close and personal. We can only make models, and compare this to what we see in the (long ago and far away) universe through powerful telescopes. This isn't signifacantly different from the evolutionary science of making models and comparing this to what is observed in the (long ago and nearby) fossil record.
Yes, there are some differences. Biological systems pack a lot of complexity in a small space, and this complexity limits the extent to which numerical predictions can be made. On the other hand, at the bottom level of DNA and simple cellular processes, the theory of evolution has underpinnings that can and have been tested to the highest standards of scientific methodology. For an example:
- Hypothesis: this particular sequence of DNA is the gene for a particularly sweet ear of corn.
- Prediction: if the DNA is copied into a standard variety of corn,
the modified kernels will have a 10-12% increase in sugar content.
- Experiment: use a modified virus to copy the DNA segment, grow some of the modified and unmodified corn in the same conditions, test
resulting sugar content.
This kind of thing is being done all the time by agro companies. This is down and dirty basic science. For a more cutting edge example:- Hypothesis: mutations accumulate in human mitochondrial DNA at a fairly steady rate of number of mutations per generation.
- Prediction: for people whose genealogy is known for many generations, the number of differences in their mitochondrial DNA will correlate well with the number of generations to their last common maternal ancestor.
- Prediction: for a large sample of a regional population, the variations in mitochondrial DNA will point to a small number of maternal ancestors at some time corresponding to establishment of that population or a major environmental hardship for that population.
- Experiment: gather DNA samples from people with known genealogies
and samples of regional poplulations. Check the correlations, verify the predictions.
This particular avenue of hypothesis/prediction/experiment I've been hearing about in the last couple years.My point is that there is tons of science being done in evolutionary theory that matches your hypothesis/prediction/experiment model, as well as tons that is the gather data/classify examples "stamp collecting" model. There is no "lack of unambiguous experimental evidence", as you put it, nor is there a lack of unambiguous observational evidence. The only lack is in your knowledge of that evidence.
- AMD is there with 64-bit, but what does that really buy you? More memory address space? How many people at home really want over 4 GB of RAM
64-bit does indeed offer more address space, which is an advantage to those needing more now/soon. But it has more important advantages;Indeed. Do you know why when you start a program you have to wait several (or maybe even 10 or 15) seconds before it is ready for you to use? One of the biggest reasons for this is that your OS can't just load the program from the disk to memory and jump right into executing it, because the program is linked to maybe a dozen different shared libraries. This dynamic linking requires the OS to go through the entire program fixing addresses for calls to these library functions before it is ready to run. If you have tons of address space, the OS could assign each library its own chunk of addresses permanently and do the dynamic linking at program install time instead of run time.
The point: even without adding more RAM to your 64-bit computer, an intelligent OS could take advantage of the extra address space in ways that would have immediately apparant benefits.
Yes, of course it would be possible for someone to use a JPEG tagger program to alter the meta-data of a photoshopped file. But would you think to do this? I wouldn't have. And for a mundane sort of mystery like this picture presents, why would you bother? There is no fame or fortune to be had by this photographer. Would you go not only to the trouble to photoshop the streak and flash into the picture, but also to cover your tracks by restoring the meta-data to fool people who look at the file with a binary editor or JPEG comment reader?
On the other hand, this does raise an interesting question of how could one check that an image had been digitally edited? Modern digital cameras usually are configured to compress the image (to JPEG or some other compressed form) before they even store it to flash memory. I wonder if there are particular tell-tale signs of repeated JPEG compression, like what would happen when the compressed camera image is decompressed, edited, and recompressed. It also may be possible to figure out which software produced the JPEG file by quirks of different implementations of the JPEG compression algorithm. The JPEG standard leaves room for different compressors to choose different data to discard to perform lossy compression, and it may be possible to determine from which data remains enough information to figure out what software produced the file.
Get the "Tab X" extension. That will give you the "close tab" button in each individual tab. I'm sure there is a switch tab key also, but I can't tell you what it is...
Yeah, but a lot of modern email viruses just exploit the part of the system between the keyboard and the chair. Unfortunately no-one has worked out how to issue auto-updates for this part of the system...
The parent message is insightful! As this advertising campaign shows, the great success of Firefox has been its ability to reach out to people, to have a larger community. But a larger community means a different set of community dynamics. Its like the change from a frontier settlement to an established city. For the community dynamics to work well you need to put more institutional structure in place, like police, or maybe even the tax man. And in the process you lose some of the closeness of the community.
On the other hand, I think there are solutions. Mozillazine just needs to adapt to have better moderation, to get more useful comments and discussion to more prominent positions. Maybe even they should switch to something more like a wiki format for discussion less transient than the day-to-day babble.
But yes, it will be interesting to see how this develops. I really do expect to see free/open source software take over -- eventually -- for all of the mainstream uses. But it will be a long bumpy ride between here and there. This is just the beginning!
I think the first of those images especially is much more interesting than the "flatter than a pancake" altitude reading in the original post. You can see a lot of surface detail (unfortunately in a region where we don't yet have optical imaging). Look at the left side of the 'diversity' image. Notice the large dark circular feature? Circular feature == crater on a moon like Titan. That is something that we hadn't seen in the optical images. Then notice the bright area inside the crater rim. On these radar images, bright area == roughed up surface. Notice the little squiggly white bit going down from the bright area to the center of the crater? That has got to be an erosion channel from liquid running down into the crater. Then look at the center of the crater. You see another feature with very smooth edges, shaped sort of like a peanut. Any guesses as to what that is? My guess is a pool of the liquid that ran down. Very exciting image!
RTFA. Really, do. It's funny. You'll like it. And if you're not a slashdot regular, probably it will be your first introduction to the fact that electronic voting is an issue that you should be concerned about. Of course, its not very informative, but it will at least lead you to think about hackers as a concern for e-voting. And you'll be participating in a modern American phenomenon -- using comedians as a major source of information about current issues. Yay USA!
You're wrong. Do a bit of web browsing about the threat of nuclear terrorism sometime. Try this paper for a start. What you're missing is that there is another critical factor determining the efficiency -- for what time period the assembly is critical. A group with limited resources trying to build a nuclear bomb for the first time is likely to aim for a device with a minimum of technical sophistication. This means one of two designs, corresponding to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One was the "gun design," so named because a slug of uranium is shot into another subcritical mass of uranium. The other is the "implosion design," where a hollow sphere of plutonium is surrounded by shaped charges of convential explosive, which when detonated compress the plutonium into a super-critical density. The problem with these designs is that if you do a shoddy job building the thing, the nuclear chain reaction will take off when the fissionable material is only partway to the final "assembled" state. Then most likely the nuclear explosion blasts the parts back apart before they ever reach the final assembled state, and this flying apart of the material makes things subcritical again before much of the nuclear energy is released. This can lead to arbitrarily small yields. This is particularly likely (or maybe almost inevitable) if a bomb is built with the less-refined "reactor grade" materials as opposed to the more-refined "weapons grade" materials. The less-refined material has a far greater proportion of undesirable isotopes which randomly decay releasing extra neutrons which will start the chain reaction before the optimal stage of assembly.