I also forgot to mention that my cellphone hardly works at all inside, either. I have to literally lean up against a window, or go to one of about 5 "magic spots" in the house where it works. If I waver more than a few inches in any direction, instant dropped call.
If this is in fact the real impact site, shouldn't there be elevated iridium levels in the lake sediments, as is usually found at other impact sites? I guess "prove" is too strong a term, but I'd challenge anyone to find an alternate explanation for elevated iridium, if found.
What confuses me is that OFDM was specifically designed to be resistant against multipath. I feel embarrassed now -- I've actually implemented OFDM before, and it hadn't occurred to me that if I just turn the data rate down, the guard interval gets longer, potentially long enough to completely ameliorate the multipath effects. I was under the impression that 802.11 automatically negotiated such things, but maybe not? I'm going to try that the second I get home.
I have issues at home with this. The roof of my house is made of aluminum (not that cheap corrugated stuff like on a barn, but interlocking strips). This wreaks absolute HAVOC on WiFi signals inside my house.
If I put an access point at one end of the house, I can't pick it up AT ALL from the other end. I'm not talking microscopic SNR, I'm talking ZERO SNR. It's like I don't even have an access point. I'm lucky to get a quarter of the rated bandwidth if I'm only one room away.
For a while I had a ridiculous setup consisting of an access point and two repeaters just to get the signal to the other end of the house. TWO REPEATERS. That's THREE HOPS to travel about 100 feet. And of course, the concommitant loss in data rate due to the repeater action. After a few weeks of that (and even that setup was flaky at best) I said "Fuck it" and dragged a CAT-5e cable across the house. The wife hates it but at least I can use the Internet.
I have no idea how exactly the metal roof is destroying the signal, whether it is causing severe multipath or simply absorbing it completely, but it does it quite effectively.
Modded consoles are not only used for copyright circumvention, but to enable the hardware to do other stuff that it couldn't do before. Since I bought the console, I own the hardware, I should be allowed to extract any added value from it I want, right?
I understand the pirated games part, but how can he possibly be charged with anything about modding consoles? Sure, the console manufacturer doesn't want you to do it, and (in the case of the Xbox 360) they'll go to great lengths to prevent you from doing it (that's their "right"). They can't make it illegal though, can they? That's just stupid.
Hello, DMCA? The modded console is a copyright circumvention device.
If you can create an alternative means of encoding sound that takes less space and sounds equally good (in a double-blind test), then it's a better method for holding music.
Hmm. A format that takes less space and is determined by double blind tests to not reduce sound quality. Excellent idea. I propose we call this newfangled invention "psychoacoustic compression."
4 megawatts is a little over 5000 horsepower. Hell, a funny car produces almost 3000 horse more than that. Don't be awed by the word "mega." And comparisons to electrical consumption aren't very relevant anyway.
We very nearly destroyed ourselves once already by creating a technology the ramifications of we were not ready mentally or nationally to cope with (a|h-bomb, cold war, aside: the first h-bomb was tested before scientists were able to determine if it would or would not ignite the atmosphere).
I think the very fact that we did NOT blow ourselves to hell with nukes proves that at least we were not totally UNREADY for such things. I hear people all the time talk about how horrific the 20th century was because of some nuclear apocalypse that DIDN'T happen. The fact, is the leaders of the superpowers were smart enough and sane enough to know what would happen. Can't anybody see this as a SUCCESS rather than a failure?
First of all, while you may only have had to hunt/gather a few hours a day to survive 20,000 years ago, you also only lived until 35 and that's if you're lucky.
True. But how long did those 35 years feel? I know assuredly that when I spend a week out in the wilderness, I feel like I have lived more moments than a week spent at work in front of a computer. If I had to choose between living to be 100 and spending the majority of my life inside an office, or only living to 35 but knowing for certain that I could do whatever I wanted during that time, I would quite probably pick the latter.
That's not to say that the life of a caveman was continually happy and carefree. But to live in a world that is by-and-large unpopulated, in a wild state, free to do whatever I choose and live and die by my own choices -- that would be worth a shortened life span, for me at least.
Style is often cyclical, so just imagine those hairdos coming back in the year XXXX.
Yeah. But what really gets me is how movie makers are so embedded in their contemporary culture that they don't even realize it. Looking back now at Bladerunner, it's easy to say "Why on earth would they assume that people still dressed like that?" But at the time I'm sure it wasn't even consciously considered.
Sometimes I wish they'd mix it up a little bit, but then you run the risk of just looking dorky. Most attempts I've seen at "futuristic" clothing or whatever have looked like something out of a comedy show. I guess it's a hard problem.
Perhaps the fact that the GPL is so inherently complicated that news agencies can never seem to get it right, is itself pointing to a problem somewhere? Hmm.
I second that on ING Direct. It's not the top rate in the whole country, but I feel it's reliable, and it's giving 4.50% APY at the moment. Of course, when you throw taxes into the calculation, it's just barely scraping above the inflation rate.
Their business plan is profit by loaning money. They do that by trying to get as much money out of people as possible, and a person who already has money is likely a good risk, just as a person who always pays bills is a good risk.
But assuming that a person with money is low-risk is a bad assumption. You have to really put yourself in the mindset of the lender. If the person has a bunch of cash, but they're asking for a loan, that means that cash is somehow tied up -- otherwise they wouldn't need the loan. Therefore you can't count on that money, in and of itself, to repay the loan -- it's tied up. It just doesn't count for anything, except possibly the basic computation of whether you can make even a single payment.
On the other hand, if you also have a good track record of repaying debts, then you are statistically less likely to fail to make the payments on another loan, regardless of what sort of assets you may have.
As you pointed out, the business plan is to profit by lending. Your financial astuteness doesn't matter, what does matter is whether you can be counted on to make the payments. There is definitely a relationship between the two, but your past history of paying debts (and bills aren't debts) is a much stronger piece of evidence.
I had the same experience: no credit history whatsoever, even though I owned a house outright and had another house-worth of money in stock.
But that doesn't mean ANYTHING to a lender. They don't care what kind of assets you have, they care about YOUR DEBT-PAYING BEHAVIOR. They want to know if they're going to get their money back. You could have a billion bucks, but if your credit history shows that you never pay your debts, that billion dollars doesn't matter because they're NEVER GOING TO SEE IT. Besides, if you've got a billion dollars, what do you need their money for?
And I think this is all quite reasonable. Why would I loan you money without seeing evidence that OTHER people have loaned you money in the past and you actually paid them back?
The "grown up job that doesn't pay cash" is really the only big problem
It's not the only problem. Only an idiot keeps their savings in cash form. Why? Inflation. If you have savings and they aren't earning AT LEAST the contemporary rate of inflation plus tax, you are LOSING BUYING POWER.
Banks are INSURED these days. If you have no debit card (and thus no debit card for someone to steal), and no check book (or you keep your checks locked in a safe), HOW ON EARTH could the bank not be SAFE?
The submitter of the article is a doofus who probably wouldn't mind losing his housing anyway, since he is apparently a paranoid ascetic who would probably fit right in with the ranting lunatics living on the streets downtown.
In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data.
Problem solved, then. When they request the key, give the wrong one. The data will then decrypt into random garbage. You say "Yep, that's what it is." How can they prove otherwise?
The trick is to select a cryptosystem that does NOT do data fingerprinting (i.e., a system that will let you know if you've chosen the wrong key).
It now seems the police will be unable to confiscate computer systems as evidence. Since doing so requires powering the system off, this loses the contents of RAM, and the confiscating officers are therefore contaminating the evidence rendering it unusable in court?
I'll go out on a limb here and call it bad parenting.
I think it's unfair to brand all parents of "problem" kids as failed parents. A personality is built on both nature AND nurture. Some people might turn out bad no matter how hard their parents try. Hoisting the responsibility off the wrongdoers and onto their parents doesn't put enough blame on the actual perpetrators of evil deeds.
This is not only not "secret" or "personal" information, it's the exact opposite.
Information specifically made to be displayed at all times and acessible to all.
Nobody claimed otherwise. The BIG difference is that if I want to write down the plate numbers of the porn shop customers, I have to physically go there and wait. This might be a discouragement to me. On the other hand, if I can do it automatically by consulting a global camera database, it becomes trivial and I'm much more likely to do it.
The purpose of license plates is to identify drivers and their vehicles. I still don't think that means it's appropriate to use them to be able to automatically track everybody's movements. That's not their PURPOSE.
Such absolute statements aren't always helpful. What does "optimization" mean? Is the choice of the language itself an optimization? Many things are probably simpler to code up in a scripting language like Python than they would be in C. But does that mean that by choosing C I've already committed the sin of premature optimization?
What if I need to store a mapping between strings and integers? I could use a list of pairs, or a binary tree, or a hash table. The hash table is probably the most "efficient" of the three, depending on circumstances. But am I sinning by choosing it, when in theory a list of pairs could also work? "Don't prematurely optimize" does not mean the same thing as "Pick the slowest of all available techniques."
Brilliant. You know another place I have found unblurred licence plates. Out on the street, their are hundreds of them. Surely this is some privacy violation. Something needs to be done, think of the children.
Yeah, but Google streets lets you look at a SPECIFIC LOCATION. What if I sat outside some freakish porn shop and wrote down the license plates of everybody who parked out front? Do people have a right not to have some person publish the fact that they stopped at "Whips and Grips R Us?" Maybe not, but it's still a mean-spirited sort of thing to do, and Google probably shouldn't facilitate it.
Slashdot Mirror
I get your point, but that still amounts to about $118 billion, which is hardly a drop in the bucket, its relative value to GDP notwithstanding.
I also forgot to mention that my cellphone hardly works at all inside, either. I have to literally lean up against a window, or go to one of about 5 "magic spots" in the house where it works. If I waver more than a few inches in any direction, instant dropped call.
If this is in fact the real impact site, shouldn't there be elevated iridium levels in the lake sediments, as is usually found at other impact sites? I guess "prove" is too strong a term, but I'd challenge anyone to find an alternate explanation for elevated iridium, if found.
Hah. The WRT54G is precisely the AP I've been using. I guess it's time to upgrade.
What confuses me is that OFDM was specifically designed to be resistant against multipath. I feel embarrassed now -- I've actually implemented OFDM before, and it hadn't occurred to me that if I just turn the data rate down, the guard interval gets longer, potentially long enough to completely ameliorate the multipath effects. I was under the impression that 802.11 automatically negotiated such things, but maybe not? I'm going to try that the second I get home.
I have issues at home with this. The roof of my house is made of aluminum (not that cheap corrugated stuff like on a barn, but interlocking strips). This wreaks absolute HAVOC on WiFi signals inside my house.
If I put an access point at one end of the house, I can't pick it up AT ALL from the other end. I'm not talking microscopic SNR, I'm talking ZERO SNR. It's like I don't even have an access point. I'm lucky to get a quarter of the rated bandwidth if I'm only one room away.
For a while I had a ridiculous setup consisting of an access point and two repeaters just to get the signal to the other end of the house. TWO REPEATERS. That's THREE HOPS to travel about 100 feet. And of course, the concommitant loss in data rate due to the repeater action. After a few weeks of that (and even that setup was flaky at best) I said "Fuck it" and dragged a CAT-5e cable across the house. The wife hates it but at least I can use the Internet.
I have no idea how exactly the metal roof is destroying the signal, whether it is causing severe multipath or simply absorbing it completely, but it does it quite effectively.
Modded consoles are not only used for copyright circumvention, but to enable the hardware to do other stuff that it couldn't do before. Since I bought the console, I own the hardware, I should be allowed to extract any added value from it I want, right?
I don't disagree. Yet the law is what it is.
I understand the pirated games part, but how can he possibly be charged with anything about modding consoles? Sure, the console manufacturer doesn't want you to do it, and (in the case of the Xbox 360) they'll go to great lengths to prevent you from doing it (that's their "right"). They can't make it illegal though, can they? That's just stupid.
Hello, DMCA? The modded console is a copyright circumvention device.
If you can create an alternative means of encoding sound that takes less space and sounds equally good (in a double-blind test), then it's a better method for holding music.
Hmm. A format that takes less space and is determined by double blind tests to not reduce sound quality. Excellent idea. I propose we call this newfangled invention "psychoacoustic compression."
4 megawatts is a little over 5000 horsepower. Hell, a funny car produces almost 3000 horse more than that. Don't be awed by the word "mega." And comparisons to electrical consumption aren't very relevant anyway.
We very nearly destroyed ourselves once already by creating a technology the ramifications of we were not ready mentally or nationally to cope with (a|h-bomb, cold war, aside: the first h-bomb was tested before scientists were able to determine if it would or would not ignite the atmosphere).
I think the very fact that we did NOT blow ourselves to hell with nukes proves that at least we were not totally UNREADY for such things. I hear people all the time talk about how horrific the 20th century was because of some nuclear apocalypse that DIDN'T happen. The fact, is the leaders of the superpowers were smart enough and sane enough to know what would happen. Can't anybody see this as a SUCCESS rather than a failure?
First of all, while you may only have had to hunt/gather a few hours a day to survive 20,000 years ago, you also only lived until 35 and that's if you're lucky.
True. But how long did those 35 years feel? I know assuredly that when I spend a week out in the wilderness, I feel like I have lived more moments than a week spent at work in front of a computer. If I had to choose between living to be 100 and spending the majority of my life inside an office, or only living to 35 but knowing for certain that I could do whatever I wanted during that time, I would quite probably pick the latter.
That's not to say that the life of a caveman was continually happy and carefree. But to live in a world that is by-and-large unpopulated, in a wild state, free to do whatever I choose and live and die by my own choices -- that would be worth a shortened life span, for me at least.
Style is often cyclical, so just imagine those hairdos coming back in the year XXXX.
Yeah. But what really gets me is how movie makers are so embedded in their contemporary culture that they don't even realize it. Looking back now at Bladerunner, it's easy to say "Why on earth would they assume that people still dressed like that?" But at the time I'm sure it wasn't even consciously considered.
Sometimes I wish they'd mix it up a little bit, but then you run the risk of just looking dorky. Most attempts I've seen at "futuristic" clothing or whatever have looked like something out of a comedy show. I guess it's a hard problem.
there is no more perfect science fiction movie to me
Except for those god-awful '80s hairdos and makeup... Barf.
Perhaps the fact that the GPL is so inherently complicated that news agencies can never seem to get it right, is itself pointing to a problem somewhere? Hmm.
I second that on ING Direct. It's not the top rate in the whole country, but I feel it's reliable, and it's giving 4.50% APY at the moment. Of course, when you throw taxes into the calculation, it's just barely scraping above the inflation rate.
Their business plan is profit by loaning money. They do that by trying to get as much money out of people as possible, and a person who already has money is likely a good risk, just as a person who always pays bills is a good risk.
But assuming that a person with money is low-risk is a bad assumption. You have to really put yourself in the mindset of the lender. If the person has a bunch of cash, but they're asking for a loan, that means that cash is somehow tied up -- otherwise they wouldn't need the loan. Therefore you can't count on that money, in and of itself, to repay the loan -- it's tied up. It just doesn't count for anything, except possibly the basic computation of whether you can make even a single payment.
On the other hand, if you also have a good track record of repaying debts, then you are statistically less likely to fail to make the payments on another loan, regardless of what sort of assets you may have.
As you pointed out, the business plan is to profit by lending. Your financial astuteness doesn't matter, what does matter is whether you can be counted on to make the payments. There is definitely a relationship between the two, but your past history of paying debts (and bills aren't debts) is a much stronger piece of evidence.
I had the same experience: no credit history whatsoever, even though I owned a house outright and had another house-worth of money in stock.
But that doesn't mean ANYTHING to a lender. They don't care what kind of assets you have, they care about YOUR DEBT-PAYING BEHAVIOR. They want to know if they're going to get their money back. You could have a billion bucks, but if your credit history shows that you never pay your debts, that billion dollars doesn't matter because they're NEVER GOING TO SEE IT. Besides, if you've got a billion dollars, what do you need their money for?
And I think this is all quite reasonable. Why would I loan you money without seeing evidence that OTHER people have loaned you money in the past and you actually paid them back?
The "grown up job that doesn't pay cash" is really the only big problem
It's not the only problem. Only an idiot keeps their savings in cash form. Why? Inflation. If you have savings and they aren't earning AT LEAST the contemporary rate of inflation plus tax, you are LOSING BUYING POWER.
Banks are INSURED these days. If you have no debit card (and thus no debit card for someone to steal), and no check book (or you keep your checks locked in a safe), HOW ON EARTH could the bank not be SAFE?
The submitter of the article is a doofus who probably wouldn't mind losing his housing anyway, since he is apparently a paranoid ascetic who would probably fit right in with the ranting lunatics living on the streets downtown.
In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data.
Problem solved, then. When they request the key, give the wrong one. The data will then decrypt into random garbage. You say "Yep, that's what it is." How can they prove otherwise?
The trick is to select a cryptosystem that does NOT do data fingerprinting (i.e., a system that will let you know if you've chosen the wrong key).
It now seems the police will be unable to confiscate computer systems as evidence. Since doing so requires powering the system off, this loses the contents of RAM, and the confiscating officers are therefore contaminating the evidence rendering it unusable in court?
I'll go out on a limb here and call it bad parenting.
I think it's unfair to brand all parents of "problem" kids as failed parents. A personality is built on both nature AND nurture. Some people might turn out bad no matter how hard their parents try. Hoisting the responsibility off the wrongdoers and onto their parents doesn't put enough blame on the actual perpetrators of evil deeds.
This is not only not "secret" or "personal" information, it's the exact opposite. Information specifically made to be displayed at all times and acessible to all.
Nobody claimed otherwise. The BIG difference is that if I want to write down the plate numbers of the porn shop customers, I have to physically go there and wait. This might be a discouragement to me. On the other hand, if I can do it automatically by consulting a global camera database, it becomes trivial and I'm much more likely to do it.
The purpose of license plates is to identify drivers and their vehicles. I still don't think that means it's appropriate to use them to be able to automatically track everybody's movements. That's not their PURPOSE.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
Such absolute statements aren't always helpful. What does "optimization" mean? Is the choice of the language itself an optimization? Many things are probably simpler to code up in a scripting language like Python than they would be in C. But does that mean that by choosing C I've already committed the sin of premature optimization?
What if I need to store a mapping between strings and integers? I could use a list of pairs, or a binary tree, or a hash table. The hash table is probably the most "efficient" of the three, depending on circumstances. But am I sinning by choosing it, when in theory a list of pairs could also work? "Don't prematurely optimize" does not mean the same thing as "Pick the slowest of all available techniques."
Brilliant. You know another place I have found unblurred licence plates. Out on the street, their are hundreds of them. Surely this is some privacy violation. Something needs to be done, think of the children.
Yeah, but Google streets lets you look at a SPECIFIC LOCATION. What if I sat outside some freakish porn shop and wrote down the license plates of everybody who parked out front? Do people have a right not to have some person publish the fact that they stopped at "Whips and Grips R Us?" Maybe not, but it's still a mean-spirited sort of thing to do, and Google probably shouldn't facilitate it.