To a gross approximation, electromagnetic waves can only interact with objects at least as large as their wavelength. The reason why this is so depends on a lot of mathematics, but can be demonstrated using other types of waves. Go to the beach and stick a pencil in the path of an incoming wave. Does it affect the wave? Not at all. Now stick something the size of a skyscraper in the path of the wave. The wave definitely reacts to that (specifically, it diffracts as it passes around the object).
At 60 GHz, the wavelength in air is about 5 millimeters. So (again, to a gross approximation), objects, especially conductive objects, which are about 5 mm or larger in size will interact with the wave. In practice the objects can be even smaller, but it's a good rule of thumb to within an order of magnitude.
Let's assume he "only" sent spam to 200,000 people. Thse people took 5 seconds of worktime to delete it. Ballpark an estimate 15$ hourly wage and you've got 4,000$ of lost productivity here. Now realize that,according to the article, it's likely to be closer to 2,000,000,000 than to 200,000. Possibly even more.
If that's your argument, then explain why the money should go to Microsoft instead of the people who's time was wasted.
And where do you think those radionucleotides came from?
Not OUR sun... So it's "solar" in the sense of "star power" but not in the sense of "comes from Sol, our star." I think it's a useful distinction to make. If the sun burned out we'd still have that power.
Umm, because the Department of Pre-crime is fictional?
That's just plain misdirection. Are you saying that the purpose of law enforcement is not to prevent crime? It's only purpose is to catch perpetrators after the fact? If the enforcers know enough to capture the criminals within days, and yet had no inkling whatsoever of what was going to happen, that's a big fucking failure of the system.
And yet, the British seem to have captured many people involved in 7/7 and the subsequent bombings.
You say this like it's a good sign. Shouldn't this piss you off? It took merely days to run these people down after the bombs exploded. If it was so fucking easy, why didn't they prevent it from ever happening?
At least bin Laden has proven that he's wily enough to escape the biggest manhunt in the last couple hundred years. Finding out that the WTC had been destroyed by morons, and worse, that our government couldn't even prevent an attack by a bunch of morons, might have been too much for me to handle.
"metre" and "meter" are two completely different things. You can have a parking meter, but not a parking metre (unless you have a very short car).
He wasn't objecting to spelling "meter" as "metre," he was objecting to spelling "metre" as "meter." Check any American dictionary. It's a proper spelling in American English.
Especially when you start mouthing off when you were in the wrong.
If the dictionary is wrong, then everything's fucking wrong. I believe it's you who is wrong.
(Oh, and in the spirit of others treating you the way you treat others, would it be okay for me to deride you as a 'joke' for not knowing that, conveniently deciding to not take anything you say seriously?)
The guy's a joke for plenty more reasons than that. I picked one I thought seemed funny. Touche.
Or at least admit that British English and American English are different, asswipe. Some moron doesn't pipe up every time we spell "color" instead of "colour," so why do you harp on this "metres" bullshit? Fuck off.
Let them breed. The 90% that survives are obviously more cancer-resistant than the others. In a few generations, cancer rates will be at acceptable levels.
Death from cancer usually occurs later in life, usually long after a person has had children. If what you were saying was workable, we'd also have a very low incidence of cancer here on Earth, and we know that isn't the case.
The first thing I did when my Mac Mini arrived, since it doesn't come with a mouse of its own, was to plug in my wireless three-button scroll wheel mouse. Worked perfectly.
You sound like an idiot. I hear there are special schools to help you folks out.
But the good thing is, it's my choice. If the ISP starts blocking it, I may never know that I lost something that was supposed to get through. At work, that could cost money. Not good.
Very true, but once again, it's merely a failure of the system. There's absolutely no reason to assume that ISPs are purposefully blocking certain political viewpoints. It's ludicrous.
ISPs shouldn't block anything at all except by protocol/standard - for example dropping mail not properly sent when using SPF or similar. But blocking based on content, etc. is not proper.
Oh, so now you're the judge of what is and is not a "proper" service for a company to offer to its customers? I believe Bayesian mail filtering is a perfectly reasonable service to offer to those customers who want it. But hey, according to you that isn't "proper," so I must be a moron.
If the customer doesn't like it, he/she can ask for the service to be discontinued or switch to another company.
You wouldn't sign up for that, would you? So why do people put up with third-party spam filters that do the same thing?
You said you won't explain what criteria you use. There are some mail filtering systems where this indeed is the case, but a Bayesian or other statistical system is open for examination. The criteria are probabilities. As somebody who has designed these kinds of filtering systems, I have absolutely no problem handing the decision-making over. I know how it works. And I know how it screws up, when it does.
The fact of the matter is that political email is rife with HTML and requests for donations (as an insightful poster pointed out below). In fact, a reasonable person would probably conclude that most political email *is* spam, albeit spam that you might actually want to see. Since the filter is not a mind reader, it can't tell the difference.
If you want to receive political email, why not create an unfiltered email account specifically for that purpose?
I use Thunderbird's Bayesian spam filter, and guess what? It fucks up sometimes. Usually, it screws up on messages that contain HTML elements (the VAST majority of HTML email I receive is spam, so this is no surprise) or "spammy" words.
Does political mail look like spam? Oh God, yes. Again, no surprise that a Bayesian style filter might get confused.
Should we chuck automated email filtering? This problem has always existed. Important messages have a small chance of being miscategorized. If that's not acceptable to you, don't use those filters, or switch to an email provider that doesn't filter your mail that way.
"Partisan" spam filtering is a farce. What the hell could the ISP possibly gain by surpressing political viewpoints? It's a software fuckup.
Let's just ignore the rest of your (pointless, offtopic) rant for the time being. The idea that the majority, which is essentially a mass of ignorant people, could somehow decide accurately what is and is not the best way to do something, is ludicrous. As Richard Feynman used to say (I paraphrase): "The average of a bunch of stupid opinions is not a smart opinion."
Even worse is when your opinion is force-fed to you by a legally declared monopoly power.
The remainder of your post is a childish, emotionally charged rant irrelevant to the basic issue here, which is that industry standards (in ANY field, not just software) shouldn't be dictated on a whim by monopolistic entities.
I think we all overestimate Acid 2's ability to accuratly test standards complience. "Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification."
No doubt. In fact, one can imagine a theoretical browser which specifically detects (possibly by MD5 or some other sort of fingerprint) whether it is rendering Acid2, and in that case returns a correctly rendered version of the test, while breaking catastrophically on all other input. This is an extreme example but it demonstrates why a single test is never sufficient to verify conformance to a specification.
The fundamental problem, however, is that no number of pre-selected tests can ever prove that a specification is actually implemented correctly. They can only show that the results of those particular tests are as expected. The only way to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt is to have a black box which can generate unique tests on demand -- and if you had such a black box, you'd already have a fully correct implementation of the given specification.
In the face of that, putting faith in a single test like Acid2 is totally misguided.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
No. Anthropomorphization is an insidiously dangerous thing. Object DO NOT want to fall to the ground. They merely do. To impart, even metaphorically, the idea that inanimate objects have a will subtly taints the thought processes of even the most advanced thinkers, and it is absolutely disasterous to those who have not yet learned the entire suite of critical thinking skills, namely, children.
Saying that something happens because it "wants" to is a cop out which releases you from the responsibility of CORRECTLY explaining what's actually going on. If nobody knows why something is the way it is, then that should be admitted, rather than explaining away the phenomenon by saying that it "wants" to happen.
For a much more eloquent explanation of why anthropomorphization (also known appropriately as The Pathetic Fallacy) is so dangerous, see Alistair B. Fraser's page on Bad Science. (I don't agree with Fraser on everything, but I do on this.)
Sorry, I'd assumed that if you go to the same school, you'd be able to physically reach each other more easily than that. Is there only one school for the entire city, or something?
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is obvious -- remove all oxygen from the atmosphere!
That way you can build an encryption/switching stack on top of that [...]
In Perl, apparently.
He seems to be saying that "We shouldn't try to figure shit out until we've got shit all figured out." Is he missing a cerebral hemisphere?
At 60 GHz, the wavelength in air is about 5 millimeters. So (again, to a gross approximation), objects, especially conductive objects, which are about 5 mm or larger in size will interact with the wave. In practice the objects can be even smaller, but it's a good rule of thumb to within an order of magnitude.
If that's your argument, then explain why the money should go to Microsoft instead of the people who's time was wasted.
Not OUR sun... So it's "solar" in the sense of "star power" but not in the sense of "comes from Sol, our star." I think it's a useful distinction to make. If the sun burned out we'd still have that power.
That's just plain misdirection. Are you saying that the purpose of law enforcement is not to prevent crime? It's only purpose is to catch perpetrators after the fact? If the enforcers know enough to capture the criminals within days, and yet had no inkling whatsoever of what was going to happen, that's a big fucking failure of the system.
You say this like it's a good sign. Shouldn't this piss you off? It took merely days to run these people down after the bombs exploded. If it was so fucking easy, why didn't they prevent it from ever happening?
At least bin Laden has proven that he's wily enough to escape the biggest manhunt in the last couple hundred years. Finding out that the WTC had been destroyed by morons, and worse, that our government couldn't even prevent an attack by a bunch of morons, might have been too much for me to handle.
He wasn't objecting to spelling "meter" as "metre," he was objecting to spelling "metre" as "meter." Check any American dictionary. It's a proper spelling in American English.
Especially when you start mouthing off when you were in the wrong.
If the dictionary is wrong, then everything's fucking wrong. I believe it's you who is wrong.
Oh boo hoo. Shove a stick in it, robot.
The guy's a joke for plenty more reasons than that. I picked one I thought seemed funny. Touche.
"Expert?" The dude can't even spell "LZW" correctly. The guy's a joke.
Or at least admit that British English and American English are different, asswipe. Some moron doesn't pipe up every time we spell "color" instead of "colour," so why do you harp on this "metres" bullshit? Fuck off.
My second thought was to imagine a group of snappy-looking bellhops asking "We'll be happy to carry your Knoppix CDs up to the room for you, sir."
Death from cancer usually occurs later in life, usually long after a person has had children. If what you were saying was workable, we'd also have a very low incidence of cancer here on Earth, and we know that isn't the case.
Your family and friends holding your hand and comforting you as you die?
You sound like an idiot. I hear there are special schools to help you folks out.
Very true, but once again, it's merely a failure of the system. There's absolutely no reason to assume that ISPs are purposefully blocking certain political viewpoints. It's ludicrous.
Oh, so now you're the judge of what is and is not a "proper" service for a company to offer to its customers? I believe Bayesian mail filtering is a perfectly reasonable service to offer to those customers who want it. But hey, according to you that isn't "proper," so I must be a moron.
If the customer doesn't like it, he/she can ask for the service to be discontinued or switch to another company.
You said you won't explain what criteria you use. There are some mail filtering systems where this indeed is the case, but a Bayesian or other statistical system is open for examination. The criteria are probabilities. As somebody who has designed these kinds of filtering systems, I have absolutely no problem handing the decision-making over. I know how it works. And I know how it screws up, when it does.
The fact of the matter is that political email is rife with HTML and requests for donations (as an insightful poster pointed out below). In fact, a reasonable person would probably conclude that most political email *is* spam, albeit spam that you might actually want to see. Since the filter is not a mind reader, it can't tell the difference.
If you want to receive political email, why not create an unfiltered email account specifically for that purpose?
Does political mail look like spam? Oh God, yes. Again, no surprise that a Bayesian style filter might get confused.
Should we chuck automated email filtering? This problem has always existed. Important messages have a small chance of being miscategorized. If that's not acceptable to you, don't use those filters, or switch to an email provider that doesn't filter your mail that way.
"Partisan" spam filtering is a farce. What the hell could the ISP possibly gain by surpressing political viewpoints? It's a software fuckup.
Let's just ignore the rest of your (pointless, offtopic) rant for the time being. The idea that the majority, which is essentially a mass of ignorant people, could somehow decide accurately what is and is not the best way to do something, is ludicrous. As Richard Feynman used to say (I paraphrase): "The average of a bunch of stupid opinions is not a smart opinion."
Even worse is when your opinion is force-fed to you by a legally declared monopoly power.
The remainder of your post is a childish, emotionally charged rant irrelevant to the basic issue here, which is that industry standards (in ANY field, not just software) shouldn't be dictated on a whim by monopolistic entities.
No doubt. In fact, one can imagine a theoretical browser which specifically detects (possibly by MD5 or some other sort of fingerprint) whether it is rendering Acid2, and in that case returns a correctly rendered version of the test, while breaking catastrophically on all other input. This is an extreme example but it demonstrates why a single test is never sufficient to verify conformance to a specification.
The fundamental problem, however, is that no number of pre-selected tests can ever prove that a specification is actually implemented correctly. They can only show that the results of those particular tests are as expected. The only way to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt is to have a black box which can generate unique tests on demand -- and if you had such a black box, you'd already have a fully correct implementation of the given specification.
In the face of that, putting faith in a single test like Acid2 is totally misguided.
No. Anthropomorphization is an insidiously dangerous thing. Object DO NOT want to fall to the ground. They merely do. To impart, even metaphorically, the idea that inanimate objects have a will subtly taints the thought processes of even the most advanced thinkers, and it is absolutely disasterous to those who have not yet learned the entire suite of critical thinking skills, namely, children.
Saying that something happens because it "wants" to is a cop out which releases you from the responsibility of CORRECTLY explaining what's actually going on. If nobody knows why something is the way it is, then that should be admitted, rather than explaining away the phenomenon by saying that it "wants" to happen.
For a much more eloquent explanation of why anthropomorphization (also known appropriately as The Pathetic Fallacy) is so dangerous, see Alistair B. Fraser's page on Bad Science. (I don't agree with Fraser on everything, but I do on this.)
Sorry, I'd assumed that if you go to the same school, you'd be able to physically reach each other more easily than that. Is there only one school for the entire city, or something?