Working at a University, this is not a subject I'm not unfamiliar with. We've had lots of discussions about this. Everyone always talks about how many zillions of "pieces of information" are out there. The number of web pages in existence is always brandied about.
Where can I attend these meetings, where people speak in triple negatives and much brandy is available?
It's more general than that, see vaxen, facetious plural of Vax. The "en" plural form is probably just hearkening back to the Germanic influences on old English.
It really isn't a question WHETHER we will be able to read old digital data in the future. After all, humans invented these formats, flawed as they may be, and humans can decipher them with enough effort. We can crack cryptography -- a deliberate attempt to make it as difficult as possible to decipher certain information. So it's hard to imagine any data format that could not be deciphered in the future with some honest effort.
Instead it is a question of whether the data is WORTH the effort. From an anthropological standpoint, this is valuable historical data, and its value is not decreased by our inability to interpret it. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied even if we don't know what it means. It will not erode or decay like other historical artifacts, if we put in the small effort required to preserve it. Assuming humanity doesn't self-destruct, there will be plenty of time in the future for historians to decipher and interpret the data when a need arises for it.
Wasn't there some politician in an eastern state who recently suggested placing un-fenced PLAYGROUNDS in the middle of the medians of busy turnpikes? In the belief that the immediate presence of unprotected children would motivate drivers to slow down? Can anybody recall what I'm talking about?
Makes me think that we should stop to think that maybe we don't have all the answers, and maybe we shouldn't necessarily go and fuck with things in such radical ways.
But that's exactly what the researcher is saying! The idea is to send the message to world governments, "Look, either we take definitive action NOW to reduce our global impacts or a few decades down the road we might be reduced to whacked-out ideas like THIS as our only feasible option."
I don't think the researcher thinks this is a "good" idea, merely one possibility to mitigate devastating effects should they actually come to pass. Does this idea scare you? Good, I think that's sort of the point.
I submit that anybody who posts to Slashdot about the other people's need to "get a life" should spontaneously explode from sheer force of concentrated hypocrisy.
Or would they instead collapse into a singularity of suckitude? I need to schedule some lab time.
The shock wave doesn't have anything to do with it. The effect occurs because at speeds close to the speed of sound (both above AND below) there is an extreme amplification of the temperature gradient in the air around the wing. At subsonic speeds there is no shock wave, and yet these clouds form at subsonic as well as supersonic speeds. So it cannot be that the shock wave causes the evaporation of the cloud.
The cloud evaporates simply because when the disturbance passes, the air returns to its equilibrium state, the temperature rises back up, and the water evaporates.
How/why does the condensation follow the jet, instead of leaving a trail like you would expect? (Or at least like I would expect).
If you read the article, it is explained that the condensation occurs because the air cools in regions of transient extremely low pressure. These regions are "attached" to the aircraft and so the cloud follows it. When the aircraft passes, the air returns to its equilibrium pressure, the temperature increases accordingly and the cloud evaporates.
Also, what the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days when the only articles that get over 500 comments are political or Sony-related and something cool like this gets less than 10 comments?
Everyone here that makes a reply of the form "An open access point should be treated as an invitation to use it", please also post your home address.
Why would they do that? That would be, as you say, an INVITATION to come into their homes. On the other hand, that's EXACTLY what an unsecured access point is doing. Broadcasting a very clear, unequivocal invitation: "I'm here, my SSID is such and such and my channel is such and such, please associate at will."
If Slashdotters don't want Internet freaks coming into their homes into the middle of the night, they will rightly refrain from posting their home addresses here. Similarly, if home wireless users do not want their access points broadcasting a CLEAR, UNEQUIVOCAL INVITATION to use their services, they will configure them accordingly.
However, the restrictions on carryon luggage didn't seem to be solving any actual security problem and don't really seem intended to.
The whole idea of a suicide terrorist blowing up an airplane from the inside is ABSURD anyway. If you want to take down a plane and you don't care if you live or die, just get a goddamn rocket launcher and stand right outside the airport, and blow up the plane right as it takes off. How fucking hard is that?
Maybe DHS will come knocking on my door tomorrow... I spoke aloud a completely obvious plan any moron could accomplish but yet somehow the "dangerous" terrorists haven't figured out yet. Clearly I am an enemy of the state.
What you are saying is that it is illegal to think about carrying a crime out. There should be nothing illegal about that. However, if you go about carrying those plans out, then it becomes a crime.
As somebody else pointed out, it comes down to intend. If you fantasize about killing your mother, mention the idea in passing to friends, then you're caught a block from your mother's house with a gun on you... It's going to be hard to clear yourself.
Hell, in some states you can be convicted of a crime when you haven't done anything illegal -- if you BELIEVED it was illegal at the time you did it. It's all about what's going on in the noggin' that counts.
Point is just because you have a copy of the anarchists cookbook and are suspected as a terrorist does not mean you are one.
It does however indicate that you are a moron (rhetorial "you", not You "you"). The Anarchist's Cookbook is more like a suicide manual than a terrorist manual. Anybody following the directions in that book deserves a violent self-inflicted death.
Correct... Or rather, go check the average salaries of physicists.
Who cares what their salaries are? How much is a 100 megaton thermonuclear weapon worth? What cost would we pay if we had never developed them and the USSR did? Who made it possible? Thought so. There's more to the concept of "worth" than the salary.
Of course not. An uninformed vote will be insignificantly different from a random vote
This sounds totally wrong to me. If you are, for instance, a Democrat and always vote for Democrats no matter what, then this is also "uninformed voting" (because you are only paying attention to the party, not the person or the issues), and it is DEFINITELY not random.
I'd say most people who vote a straight ticket are uninformed. What are the chances that EVERY Democratic candidate is the best choice?
Mod that up to +5. If enough people just "vote randomly" then the effect will, by the law of large numbers and/or the asymptotic equipartition property and/or (insert impressive mathematical/statistical result here), contribute uniformly to either side, thus cancelling out as the parent says. This also moves the vote closer to 50/50, but doesn't affect the victory margin.
I don't understand this "50/50" thing you mention. On the Oregon ballot, for instance, there are three candidates for Governor. Wouldn't random voting result in something closer to a triple split? Or are you saying that people who vote randomly never vote for third parties?
Show up to vote, but only vote on the candidates / questions that I am familar with. For example, 4 years ago I only voted for 1 candidate and left the rest of the ballot blank. Today I left about 1/3rd of the ballot blank.
I agree, but NOT FOR BALLOT MEASURES. Government office is a temporary position, but ballot measures seldom are reversed even if they do obvious harm once passed. When in doubt, VOTE AGAINST CHANGING YOUR STATE'S CONSTITUTION.
This is a big problem in Oregon. Too many things, in my opinion, are placed on the ballot as Constitutional amendments. I vote against most of these things, even if I fundamentally agree with the measures. The Constitution is not a dumping ground for piecemeal amendments. These issues should go through the normal legislative process.
If you don't vote, you have no right to complain about the results of the elections. It's like blaming the mechanic for your car breaking down because "you just didn't have the time" to see to the proper maintenance of your car.
Sure I do. What if I didn't vote for any candidate because THEY ALL SUCK and I don't want ANY of them in power? I lose the right to complain about my government because I refuse to subscribe to the "lesser of two evils" philosophy?
Is that somehow better? You would rather have an uninformed voter basically fill in dots (pull levers/push buttons/touch a screen) at random? That's not a democracy, that's chaos
It's always chaos. Look at the pre-election poll numbers. They bounce around all over the place like Brownian motion. When an election is held, the people vote however they felt that day -- that very instant. It's like taking a quantum measurement -- you're measuring a real value, but that value is ill-defined before the measurement. Had you measured that electron a microsecond later, it may have had some completely different position. In the same way, if you hold the election on November 8 instead of November 7, you won't get the same results. Does the final poll reflect what people REALLY want?
Now toss into the mix the fact that politicians of all species habitually say one thing and do another. Is casting your vote for a candidate really an effective way of emphasizing YOUR particular issues?
And think about the two-party system we've got going here. The races are usually neck and neck. Whether it goes D or R is mainly up to the whims of small number of voters who break the tie. WHIMS, right? How is this any better than random? If people were winning by 10% or 20% you might say they had a legitimate mandate.
Eh? I guess my sentence wasn't clear. I said that trading protection from crackers for enhanced privacy is a fair trade. I agree with you. Seems you interpretted my comment reverse to what I meant.
Slashdot Mirror
Working at a University, this is not a subject I'm not unfamiliar with. We've had lots of discussions about this. Everyone always talks about how many zillions of "pieces of information" are out there. The number of web pages in existence is always brandied about.
Where can I attend these meetings, where people speak in triple negatives and much brandy is available?
It's more general than that, see vaxen, facetious plural of Vax. The "en" plural form is probably just hearkening back to the Germanic influences on old English.
It really isn't a question WHETHER we will be able to read old digital data in the future. After all, humans invented these formats, flawed as they may be, and humans can decipher them with enough effort. We can crack cryptography -- a deliberate attempt to make it as difficult as possible to decipher certain information. So it's hard to imagine any data format that could not be deciphered in the future with some honest effort.
Instead it is a question of whether the data is WORTH the effort. From an anthropological standpoint, this is valuable historical data, and its value is not decreased by our inability to interpret it. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied even if we don't know what it means. It will not erode or decay like other historical artifacts, if we put in the small effort required to preserve it. Assuming humanity doesn't self-destruct, there will be plenty of time in the future for historians to decipher and interpret the data when a need arises for it.
Wasn't there some politician in an eastern state who recently suggested placing un-fenced PLAYGROUNDS in the middle of the medians of busy turnpikes? In the belief that the immediate presence of unprotected children would motivate drivers to slow down? Can anybody recall what I'm talking about?
Makes me think that we should stop to think that maybe we don't have all the answers, and maybe we shouldn't necessarily go and fuck with things in such radical ways.
But that's exactly what the researcher is saying! The idea is to send the message to world governments, "Look, either we take definitive action NOW to reduce our global impacts or a few decades down the road we might be reduced to whacked-out ideas like THIS as our only feasible option."
I don't think the researcher thinks this is a "good" idea, merely one possibility to mitigate devastating effects should they actually come to pass. Does this idea scare you? Good, I think that's sort of the point.
I submit that anybody who posts to Slashdot about the other people's need to "get a life" should spontaneously explode from sheer force of concentrated hypocrisy.
Or would they instead collapse into a singularity of suckitude? I need to schedule some lab time.
The shock wave doesn't have anything to do with it. The effect occurs because at speeds close to the speed of sound (both above AND below) there is an extreme amplification of the temperature gradient in the air around the wing. At subsonic speeds there is no shock wave, and yet these clouds form at subsonic as well as supersonic speeds. So it cannot be that the shock wave causes the evaporation of the cloud.
The cloud evaporates simply because when the disturbance passes, the air returns to its equilibrium state, the temperature rises back up, and the water evaporates.
How/why does the condensation follow the jet, instead of leaving a trail like you would expect? (Or at least like I would expect).
If you read the article, it is explained that the condensation occurs because the air cools in regions of transient extremely low pressure. These regions are "attached" to the aircraft and so the cloud follows it. When the aircraft passes, the air returns to its equilibrium pressure, the temperature increases accordingly and the cloud evaporates.
Also, what the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days when the only articles that get over 500 comments are political or Sony-related and something cool like this gets less than 10 comments?
Sounds like this would get anoying realy quick. What's wrong with just running Nagios or the like?
You can continue monitoring while you go to the bathroom. Wait, do you take your laptop in the bathroom with you? Nevermind.
Everyone here that makes a reply of the form "An open access point should be treated as an invitation to use it", please also post your home address.
Why would they do that? That would be, as you say, an INVITATION to come into their homes. On the other hand, that's EXACTLY what an unsecured access point is doing. Broadcasting a very clear, unequivocal invitation: "I'm here, my SSID is such and such and my channel is such and such, please associate at will."
If Slashdotters don't want Internet freaks coming into their homes into the middle of the night, they will rightly refrain from posting their home addresses here. Similarly, if home wireless users do not want their access points broadcasting a CLEAR, UNEQUIVOCAL INVITATION to use their services, they will configure them accordingly.
However, the restrictions on carryon luggage didn't seem to be solving any actual security problem and don't really seem intended to.
The whole idea of a suicide terrorist blowing up an airplane from the inside is ABSURD anyway. If you want to take down a plane and you don't care if you live or die, just get a goddamn rocket launcher and stand right outside the airport, and blow up the plane right as it takes off. How fucking hard is that?
Maybe DHS will come knocking on my door tomorrow... I spoke aloud a completely obvious plan any moron could accomplish but yet somehow the "dangerous" terrorists haven't figured out yet. Clearly I am an enemy of the state.
What you are saying is that it is illegal to think about carrying a crime out. There should be nothing illegal about that. However, if you go about carrying those plans out, then it becomes a crime.
As somebody else pointed out, it comes down to intend. If you fantasize about killing your mother, mention the idea in passing to friends, then you're caught a block from your mother's house with a gun on you... It's going to be hard to clear yourself.
Hell, in some states you can be convicted of a crime when you haven't done anything illegal -- if you BELIEVED it was illegal at the time you did it. It's all about what's going on in the noggin' that counts.
Point is just because you have a copy of the anarchists cookbook and are suspected as a terrorist does not mean you are one.
It does however indicate that you are a moron (rhetorial "you", not You "you"). The Anarchist's Cookbook is more like a suicide manual than a terrorist manual. Anybody following the directions in that book deserves a violent self-inflicted death.
People considering going into physics today.
Because as we all know, the point of science is to make as much money as possible?
Correct... Or rather, go check the average salaries of physicists.
Who cares what their salaries are? How much is a 100 megaton thermonuclear weapon worth? What cost would we pay if we had never developed them and the USSR did? Who made it possible? Thought so. There's more to the concept of "worth" than the salary.
Is physics worth it? I don't see a huge market for physics PhD's outside of academia. So clearly physics is a worthless pursuit.
Nothing will get done. Bush still has the VETO stamp.
Bush: I veto this pathetic liberal bill!
Democratic House: Okay, we'll stop passing bills to fund the Iraq war.
Bush: D'oh!
Of course not. An uninformed vote will be insignificantly different from a random vote
This sounds totally wrong to me. If you are, for instance, a Democrat and always vote for Democrats no matter what, then this is also "uninformed voting" (because you are only paying attention to the party, not the person or the issues), and it is DEFINITELY not random.
I'd say most people who vote a straight ticket are uninformed. What are the chances that EVERY Democratic candidate is the best choice?
Mod that up to +5. If enough people just "vote randomly" then the effect will, by the law of large numbers and/or the asymptotic equipartition property and/or (insert impressive mathematical/statistical result here), contribute uniformly to either side, thus cancelling out as the parent says. This also moves the vote closer to 50/50, but doesn't affect the victory margin.
I don't understand this "50/50" thing you mention. On the Oregon ballot, for instance, there are three candidates for Governor. Wouldn't random voting result in something closer to a triple split? Or are you saying that people who vote randomly never vote for third parties?
If you flip a coin 50 million times, you can be pretty sure the result falls within 24.9-25.1M range.
A spread of 200,000 votes is way more than enough to have tipped many elections in US history.Show up to vote, but only vote on the candidates / questions that I am familar with. For example, 4 years ago I only voted for 1 candidate and left the rest of the ballot blank. Today I left about 1/3rd of the ballot blank.
I agree, but NOT FOR BALLOT MEASURES. Government office is a temporary position, but ballot measures seldom are reversed even if they do obvious harm once passed. When in doubt, VOTE AGAINST CHANGING YOUR STATE'S CONSTITUTION.
This is a big problem in Oregon. Too many things, in my opinion, are placed on the ballot as Constitutional amendments. I vote against most of these things, even if I fundamentally agree with the measures. The Constitution is not a dumping ground for piecemeal amendments. These issues should go through the normal legislative process.
Assuming a uniform probability distribution on parties, they will cancel each other out.
Just like when you flip a coin 100 times you are guaranteed to get 50 heads and 50 tails. Oh wait, no you're not.
If you don't vote, you have no right to complain about the results of the elections. It's like blaming the mechanic for your car breaking down because "you just didn't have the time" to see to the proper maintenance of your car.
Sure I do. What if I didn't vote for any candidate because THEY ALL SUCK and I don't want ANY of them in power? I lose the right to complain about my government because I refuse to subscribe to the "lesser of two evils" philosophy?
(I did vote. This is for the sake of argument.)
Is that somehow better? You would rather have an uninformed voter basically fill in dots (pull levers/push buttons/touch a screen) at random? That's not a democracy, that's chaos
It's always chaos. Look at the pre-election poll numbers. They bounce around all over the place like Brownian motion. When an election is held, the people vote however they felt that day -- that very instant. It's like taking a quantum measurement -- you're measuring a real value, but that value is ill-defined before the measurement. Had you measured that electron a microsecond later, it may have had some completely different position. In the same way, if you hold the election on November 8 instead of November 7, you won't get the same results. Does the final poll reflect what people REALLY want?
Now toss into the mix the fact that politicians of all species habitually say one thing and do another. Is casting your vote for a candidate really an effective way of emphasizing YOUR particular issues?
And think about the two-party system we've got going here. The races are usually neck and neck. Whether it goes D or R is mainly up to the whims of small number of voters who break the tie. WHIMS, right? How is this any better than random? If people were winning by 10% or 20% you might say they had a legitimate mandate.
Eh? I guess my sentence wasn't clear. I said that trading protection from crackers for enhanced privacy is a fair trade. I agree with you. Seems you interpretted my comment reverse to what I meant.