I want to make a linked list in Java. Ooops, no pointers, sorry.
So? It's trivial to code a linked list in Java. The "no pointers" FUD is just that, FUD. References to objects in Java can be used for just about anything you'd use a pointer for in C++.
I suspect that the environmental and other collateral damage would be somewhat on par with an asteroid hit.
I guess it depends on the size of the asteroid.:-)
Certainly it wouldn't be anything like the dinosaur-killer event, which has been estimated as being of the order of one million megatons. That's gotta hurt, Bob.
As I noted, and someone else reiterated, nukes larger than this have been detonated in the atmosphere by the Soviet Union.
One kilogram of antimatter let loose anywhere on the surface of the Earth, or in the atmosphere, will be enough to destroy an entire continent.
Nope. I think you may have misunderstood what your professor was saying. Total annihilation of 1 kilogram of matter will produce about 8.9E16 Joules of energy (E=mc^2). There are about 4.2E12 Joules in a kiloton of TNT equivalent, so this is roughly equivalent to a 21000 kiloton, or 21 megaton nuclear bomb. A big bang, certainly, but not anywhere near enough to destroy a whole continent. Many nukes of that size (and larger.... 50 MT and up) have been detonated, and as far as I know all the major continents are still here.:-)
Of course, the kilo of antimatter will also wipe out a kilo of normal matter, doubling the yield, but that's still not enough to vaporize a continent.
I wouldn't hire you, on the expectation that you would expect to get considerably more money for those three letters, when I feel that if anything they would be a detriment to me having you on the team. (All recent PhD grads are now welcome to direct themselves to/dev/null. I'm entitled to my opinion, which comes only from my experience.
Actually, it sounds more like insecurity about your own educational background than "experience", and no, I don't have a Ph.D.
Of interest only to film students and people who claim to like his movies because it makes them seem more film literate.
Right. No one could possibly have tastes different from yours.
Kubrick made movies for people who:
a) had an attention span longer than that of a fruit fly.
b) were comfortable with moral ambiguities and liked to think about their philosophical implications.
Since you apparently don't fall into either category, by all means stick to the Armageddon/Star Wars type films, where there's a cut every 50 milliseconds and you can tell the bad guys by looking for the one who's wearing black.
There is not, at present, any reason to believe that telomerase is active in most cancer cells
Bullshit. There's all kinds of evidence that telomerase is active in the vast majority of cancers. Even the most cursory search on Medline will show this to be the case. Just a few references (of literally hundereds):
Detection of circulating carcinoma cells by telomerase activity.
Gauthier LR, Granotier C, Soria JC, Faivre S, Boige V, Raymond E, Boussin FD.
Br J Cancer. 2001 Mar;84(5):631-5.
Telomerase has been shown to be a marker of epithelial cancer cells.... we have detected telomerase activity in HEC from 11/15 (73%) patients with stage IIIB or IV non-small cell lung
cancer (NSCLC) patients and from 8/11 (72%) stage C or D (Dukes classification) colon cancer patients.
Telomerase activity and expression of human telomerase RNA component and human telomerasereverse transcriptase in lung carcinomas.
Kumaki F, Kawai T, Hiroi S, Shinomiya N, Ozeki Y, Ferrans VJ, Torikata C.
Hum Pathol. 2001 Feb;32(2):188-95.
Telomerase activity in lung carcinomas was detected in 107 of 115 (93%) lung carcinomas, but
not in any adjacent noncancerous tissues
Telomerase activity in soft-tissue and bone sarcomas.
Aogi K, Woodman A, Urquidi V, Mangham DC, Tarin D, Goodison S.
Clin Cancer Res. 2000 Dec;6(12):4776-81.
Thirty (81%) of the 37 primary sarcoma samples contained telomerase activity, and four of the six carcinoma metastases were also positive. Conversely, telomerase activity was detectable in only one of seven benign lesions and in none of the 12 normal connective tissue controls.
Telomeres (of which there are thousands, as I recall, on the end of each chromosome) are duplicated by a different mechanism. So, when a cell copies it's DNA, a telomere is lost,
The "telomere" normally refers to the entire structure.
However, for complicated reasons which, I'm afraid, you computer types really wouldn't understand
Yeah, whatever. So you're a graduate student, are you? Please tell me it isn't in mol bio or anything medicine related.
Slashdot doesn't even want women to read the site anymore..... if we want women (particularly inteligent ones) to read this site and participate in the community.... then you should try and see things from another perspective before you post such stuff.
I just showed the message to my wife and she laughed her ass off.
Trust me, the women who get offended by such things are not the ones you want to be around. They tend to be stupid and humorless; the antithesis of "inteligent".
Sorry, that's crap. I'm no fan of Bill Gates (to put it very mildly) but this is not mathematically possible. Let's say Bill is worth $80 billion -- the most recent figures I've been able to find range from $70 to $90 billion, but we're just ballparking here. $80 billion divided by 120 million is $666 (scary!). Does Nader seriously believe that 120 million of us (nearly half the population!) have net worths of less than 700 bucks? Most of us own more than that in gadgets and CDs, not even considering items like cars and houses.
There are two possibilities here, neither of which is very good.
1. Nader is lying.
2. Nader can't do simple arithmetic
Neither says much for his desirability as a president.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Before firing off a rebuttal to a comment, you should sit down and think... "Huh. Is he making a joke?" If he was making a joke, it was a poor one. In order for a troll to be funny (if indeed they ever are; personally the novelty of trolling wore off for me about 1985 or so. It's a juvenile activity, after all) the troll needs to present a position so ludicrous (and original) that it's hard to imagine a person seriously holding that opinion. That's not the case here, what with so much privacy paranoia running around the net.
The followup ("the government will hunt down the techies if they enter their ") gets a little closer to the right idea, although that one fails on the originality front. Overall rating: *yawn*. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Ever wonder why every country besides the US has a particular TLD (e.g..co.uk,.cz,.to,.cx)? Why is there not a.us TLD? There is, and has been for many years. It's not as popular as.com,.org., and.edu, but.us sites are out there. In particular, many state and city government web sites can be found in the.us domain. Try www.state.il.us or www.ci.urbana.il.us, for instance. Registering in.us is by no means restricted to government sites, though. Registering in.us is generally much cheaper than registering in a Big Three TLD, and may even be free. See www.nic.us for more information. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
The membership application requires a valid, non-anonymous e-mail address, as well as postal address.
Sure they do. How are they supposed to send you information if you don't have email? How are they supposed to verify that you're a resident of a specific country without knowing your physical address?
I'm interested in how you think those needs could be met in an alternative manner.
Clearly, in this case there is a legitimate need for this sort of information. Remember, we're talking about voting rights in an international organization.
If it really bothers you, it's trivial to arrange for alternate email addresses, and not all that difficult for physical ones. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
When I'm doing product/service comparisons I normally throw out any options that make it hard for me to get a price.
Absolutely, especially the reprehensible "call for pricing" scam. A fair translation of "call for pricing" is "call so our salesdroid can decide how far he can stick it in, and whether or not lubricants will be required". It's annoying anywhere, but when it's on a web page.... why would I want to "call for pricing" when I'm searching for something on the web? If I wanted to deal over the phone, wouldn't I use the phone in the first place? And what about all the people who're accessing the web over their only phone line? Does the company really think the customers will terminate their connection to call some high-pressure salescritter sitting in a boiler room? It ain't happenin', bucko.
Sales and marketing types need to learn to take this stuff into account if they're going to sell online. The customer they just alienated doesn't have to drive to a different store. He doesn't even have to pick up the phone and call a different store. Generally there's another vendor with a real web page that's selling what the customer wants, and the search engines are only a click away. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
At least when I listen to the radio I get ten, Ten, TEN songs in a ROW on NONSTOP-ROCK WSUX!!!.
You can bet this has more to do with WSUX not being able to sell all their advertising blocks rather than any altruistic desire they have to avoid annoying you with commercials. If they could sell the air time, they would.
I agree that this format is doomed, though. As others have noted, software to strip out the ads will be on the net within minutes of the first one of these being released. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
sometimes I telnet to an open smtp port, and try to fake mail.. is this a bad thing?
Not in my opinion. An open SMTP port is an invitation for a user client to connect and send mail. The service may not be intended for relaying, but there's no way to be sure of that.
In this case you're using a service provided in exactly the way it was intended. It just happens that the "client" consists of a human typing in the commands from a keyboard. You're not doing anything that couldn't be done with a flexible SMTP client.
Using SMTP to send mail (even in an unorthodox fashion) != cracking. Using a flaw in the SMTP server to gain root on the remote system == cracking.
As far as the activities you describe at work, I suppose it would depend on whether your employer had authorized you to do those things. Running some variant of crack software against a password file is a common sysadmin task. It all depends on motivation and authorization. Just because I might pay a locksmith to break into my car doesn't make it all right for someone else to break in and take the stereo.
The easiest gig I ever had involved a pediatrician who paid me and my partner to break into his Xenix box. Seems that the good doctor had installed a modem so he could work from home, but neglected to change the default root password. Some demon-dialer found the number of his dialup, noted the poor security, and helpfully set a root password for him. Of course, the anonymous benefactor didn't bother to let the doctor know what the new password was, which meant that the doctor couldn't run anything as root. In particular, he couldn't run his billing software. Oops. A doctor with a whole month of bills he's not able to collect is an unhappy doctor.
We loaded a bunch of cracking software onto the box, then wandered off to bullshit while it did its job, racking up a lovely hourly rate for essentially doing nothing. Fortunately, numerous other security holes turned up, so we were able to get root and fix the problem. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
An IBM OS/360 mainframe when I was twelve. It had BASIC and PL/I in interactive mode, IIRC, and FORTRAN and COBOL for batch use.
The first one I owned was a COSMAC ELF built from the plans in the August 1976 in Popular Electronics (yeah, I'm an old bastard. Sue me.) It ate up the money saved from a whole summer's worth of part-time employment. At that, I couldn't afford the two digit hex display, and had to make do with 8 LEDs tied directly to the data bus. The 1802 was actually quite a nice chip for the time.... 16 bit registers (vs. 8 bit for competitors such as the 6502 and 8080), CMOS technology, and it came in a nice rad-hardened ceramic package. I understand that RCA sold a buttload of these to the military for satellite applications, but it never really caught on in the PC world. A cursory examination of parts suppliers indicates that most of the parts from the above schematic are still available. Might make a nice retrocomputing project....hmmm. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
The hell we're not. DNA is software. It's a coding scheme for assembling amino acids into a specific sequence to produce proteins. Each amino acid is coded for by a specific three-unit sequence of DNA bases (with some coding redundancy). DNA (more precisely, the information coded by that DNA. The physical DNA is a substrate for the information in exactly the same way that the pits on a CD are a substrate) is a software program that when loaded on to the proper hardware (a cell) will cause that hardware to perform particular functions.
DNA implements a coding scheme just like ASCII or Unicode. It's not an "analogy", it's a fact.
My greatest fear is simply that the genome will be modified at all.
So we should ban evolution altogether, then? -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Even at 100% efficiency, according to my calculations, you would need 62.5 million joules of energy per kilogram to reach Space from Earth
62.5 megajoules/kg would give you a velocity of about 11 km/s, which is approximately escape velocity for the earth. This sounds like a lot of energy, but it really isn't all that much. 62.5 megajoules is the same as 62,500 kilowatt-seconds, or about 17 kWH.
Including taxes, Illinois Power is currently charging me around 13.7 cents per kWH at residential rates, so this much electricity would cost only around $2.00. A 100 kg person-sized mass could be launched for a couple of hundred bucks in electric charges.
Of course, you'd have to add on the cost to lift a life-support system, and take into account that this thing is not going to be anywhere near 100% efficient. On the other side of the coin, big industrial users can get electricity for a *lot* less than the residential rate.
That's equivalent, per pound, to taking something that weighs a million pounds and lifting it twenty feet!
I think your calculations are off a little bit here. I'm getting more like 9.4 feet. -- WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Garbage collection: Contrary to popular belief, Java's GC isn't exactly the best thing since sliced bread. There's a fairly large industry providing third-party garbage collection tools for Java. Can't remember any of them off the top of my head, but I do know that some of them are wealthy enough to afford full-page ads in Communications of the ACM.
AFAIK, Java doesn't specify what kind of garbage collector is used, so saying that "Java's" garbage collection isn't all that great doesn't make much sense. M$, Sun, and Netscape all use different technologies, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that IBM is using still another. There are many, many, garbage collection algorithms, all of which involve different tradeoffs and have different scenarios that make them shine. Which one works best depends on just how the objects are being created and what kind of objects they are (one that works well for a program that's creating tons of small, short-lived objects is unlikely to be the best choice for a program that's making a few huge, long-lived objects). Garbage collection is a very active research area, and I think Sun did the right thing by not tying Java to a specific garbage collection model.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to make a linked list in Java. Ooops, no pointers, sorry.
So? It's trivial to code a linked list in Java. The "no pointers" FUD is just that, FUD. References to objects in Java can be used for just about anything you'd use a pointer for in C++.
I guess it depends on the size of the asteroid. :-)
Certainly it wouldn't be anything like the dinosaur-killer event, which has been estimated as being of the order of one million megatons. That's gotta hurt, Bob. As I noted, and someone else reiterated, nukes larger than this have been detonated in the atmosphere by the Soviet Union.
Nope. I think you may have misunderstood what your professor was saying. Total annihilation of 1 kilogram of matter will produce about 8.9E16 Joules of energy (E=mc^2). There are about 4.2E12 Joules in a kiloton of TNT equivalent, so this is roughly equivalent to a 21000 kiloton, or 21 megaton nuclear bomb. A big bang, certainly, but not anywhere near enough to destroy a whole continent. Many nukes of that size (and larger.... 50 MT and up) have been detonated, and as far as I know all the major continents are still here. :-)
Of course, the kilo of antimatter will also wipe out a kilo of normal matter, doubling the yield, but that's still not enough to vaporize a continent.
Actually, it sounds more like insecurity about your own educational background than "experience", and no, I don't have a Ph.D.
Stanley Kubrick
Alfred Hitchcock
Martin Scorcese
Did win Best Director:
Kevin Costner
I think that about wraps up the idea that Academy Awards are some sort of quantitative measure of movie quality.
Kubrick made movies for people who:
a) had an attention span longer than that of a fruit fly. b) were comfortable with moral ambiguities and liked to think about their philosophical implications.
Since you apparently don't fall into either category, by all means stick to the Armageddon/Star Wars type films, where there's a cut every 50 milliseconds and you can tell the bad guys by looking for the one who's wearing black.
Bullshit. There's all kinds of evidence that telomerase is active in the vast majority of cancers. Even the most cursory search on Medline will show this to be the case. Just a few references (of literally hundereds):
Telomeres (of which there are thousands, as I recall, on the end of each chromosome) are duplicated by a different mechanism. So, when a cell copies it's DNA, a telomere is lost,
The "telomere" normally refers to the entire structure.
However, for complicated reasons which, I'm afraid, you computer types really wouldn't understand
Yeah, whatever. So you're a graduate student, are you? Please tell me it isn't in mol bio or anything medicine related.
I just showed the message to my wife and she laughed her ass off. Trust me, the women who get offended by such things are not the ones you want to be around. They tend to be stupid and humorless; the antithesis of "inteligent".
There are two possibilities here, neither of which is very good.
1. Nader is lying.
2. Nader can't do simple arithmetic
Neither says much for his desirability as a president.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Airplane accident.
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WordSocket Voice BBS Software
The followup ("the government will hunt down the techies if they enter their ") gets a little closer to the right idea, although that one fails on the originality front. Overall rating: *yawn*.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Ever wonder why every country besides the US has a particular TLD (e.g. .co.uk, .cz, .to, .cx)? Why is there not a .us TLD? There is, and has been for many years. It's not as popular as .com, .org., and .edu, but .us sites are out there. In particular, many state and city government web sites can be found in the .us domain. Try www.state.il.us or www.ci.urbana.il.us, for instance. Registering in .us is by no means restricted to government sites, though. Registering in .us is generally much cheaper than registering in a Big Three TLD, and may even be free. See www.nic.us for more information.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Sure they do. How are they supposed to send you information if you don't have email? How are they supposed to verify that you're a resident of a specific country without knowing your physical address?
I'm interested in how you think those needs could be met in an alternative manner.
Clearly, in this case there is a legitimate need for this sort of information. Remember, we're talking about voting rights in an international organization.
If it really bothers you, it's trivial to arrange for alternate email addresses, and not all that difficult for physical ones.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Absolutely, especially the reprehensible "call for pricing" scam. A fair translation of "call for pricing" is "call so our salesdroid can decide how far he can stick it in, and whether or not lubricants will be required". It's annoying anywhere, but when it's on a web page.... why would I want to "call for pricing" when I'm searching for something on the web? If I wanted to deal over the phone, wouldn't I use the phone in the first place? And what about all the people who're accessing the web over their only phone line? Does the company really think the customers will terminate their connection to call some high-pressure salescritter sitting in a boiler room? It ain't happenin', bucko.
Sales and marketing types need to learn to take this stuff into account if they're going to sell online. The customer they just alienated doesn't have to drive to a different store. He doesn't even have to pick up the phone and call a different store. Generally there's another vendor with a real web page that's selling what the customer wants, and the search engines are only a click away.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
You can bet this has more to do with WSUX not being able to sell all their advertising blocks rather than any altruistic desire they have to avoid annoying you with commercials. If they could sell the air time, they would.
I agree that this format is doomed, though. As others have noted, software to strip out the ads will be on the net within minutes of the first one of these being released.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Not in my opinion. An open SMTP port is an invitation for a user client to connect and send mail. The service may not be intended for relaying, but there's no way to be sure of that.
In this case you're using a service provided in exactly the way it was intended. It just happens that the "client" consists of a human typing in the commands from a keyboard. You're not doing anything that couldn't be done with a flexible SMTP client.
Using SMTP to send mail (even in an unorthodox fashion) != cracking. Using a flaw in the SMTP server to gain root on the remote system == cracking.
As far as the activities you describe at work, I suppose it would depend on whether your employer had authorized you to do those things. Running some variant of crack software against a password file is a common sysadmin task. It all depends on motivation and authorization. Just because I might pay a locksmith to break into my car doesn't make it all right for someone else to break in and take the stereo.
The easiest gig I ever had involved a pediatrician who paid me and my partner to break into his Xenix box. Seems that the good doctor had installed a modem so he could work from home, but neglected to change the default root password. Some demon-dialer found the number of his dialup, noted the poor security, and helpfully set a root password for him. Of course, the anonymous benefactor didn't bother to let the doctor know what the new password was, which meant that the doctor couldn't run anything as root. In particular, he couldn't run his billing software. Oops. A doctor with a whole month of bills he's not able to collect is an unhappy doctor.
We loaded a bunch of cracking software onto the box, then wandered off to bullshit while it did its job, racking up a lovely hourly rate for essentially doing nothing. Fortunately, numerous other security holes turned up, so we were able to get root and fix the problem.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
The first one I owned was a COSMAC ELF built from the plans in the August 1976 in Popular Electronics (yeah, I'm an old bastard. Sue me.) It ate up the money saved from a whole summer's worth of part-time employment. At that, I couldn't afford the two digit hex display, and had to make do with 8 LEDs tied directly to the data bus. The 1802 was actually quite a nice chip for the time.... 16 bit registers (vs. 8 bit for competitors such as the 6502 and 8080), CMOS technology, and it came in a nice rad-hardened ceramic package. I understand that RCA sold a buttload of these to the military for satellite applications, but it never really caught on in the PC world. A cursory examination of parts suppliers indicates that most of the parts from the above schematic are still available. Might make a nice retrocomputing project....hmmm.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
The hell we're not. DNA is software. It's a coding scheme for assembling amino acids into a specific sequence to produce proteins. Each amino acid is coded for by a specific three-unit sequence of DNA bases (with some coding redundancy). DNA (more precisely, the information coded by that DNA. The physical DNA is a substrate for the information in exactly the same way that the pits on a CD are a substrate) is a software program that when loaded on to the proper hardware (a cell) will cause that hardware to perform particular functions.
DNA implements a coding scheme just like ASCII or Unicode. It's not an "analogy", it's a fact.
My greatest fear is simply that the genome will be modified at all.
So we should ban evolution altogether, then?
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
The guys who did the microwave sail have a web page at Microwave Sciences, Inc. There are some abstracts on there, but not the full papers, unfortunately.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
62.5 megajoules/kg would give you a velocity of about 11 km/s, which is approximately escape velocity for the earth. This sounds like a lot of energy, but it really isn't all that much. 62.5 megajoules is the same as 62,500 kilowatt-seconds, or about 17 kWH.
Including taxes, Illinois Power is currently charging me around 13.7 cents per kWH at residential rates, so this much electricity would cost only around $2.00. A 100 kg person-sized mass could be launched for a couple of hundred bucks in electric charges.
Of course, you'd have to add on the cost to lift a life-support system, and take into account that this thing is not going to be anywhere near 100% efficient. On the other side of the coin, big industrial users can get electricity for a *lot* less than the residential rate.
That's equivalent, per pound, to taking something that weighs a million pounds and lifting it twenty feet!
I think your calculations are off a little bit here. I'm getting more like 9.4 feet.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
AFAIK, Java doesn't specify what kind of garbage collector is used, so saying that "Java's" garbage collection isn't all that great doesn't make much sense. M$, Sun, and Netscape all use different technologies, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that IBM is using still another. There are many, many, garbage collection algorithms, all of which involve different tradeoffs and have different scenarios that make them shine. Which one works best depends on just how the objects are being created and what kind of objects they are (one that works well for a program that's creating tons of small, short-lived objects is unlikely to be the best choice for a program that's making a few huge, long-lived objects). Garbage collection is a very active research area, and I think Sun did the right thing by not tying Java to a specific garbage collection model.