A couple of years ago, I ran into a couple of Brits in a backwoods cabin (the kind of place you snowshoe into with a fifth of good whiskey and an itching to have a good time). After we'd all had a bit too much to drink, I asked one of the Brits "So, what's the deal with all the joking about British oral hygiene?"
He looked at me a bit funny, as if he didn't know what I meant, and then said "What's with you Americans being so obsessed with how straight and white your teeth are?"
It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps it is WE (Americans) who are oddballs when it comes to our teeth. Most other people on the planet are happy just for the fact that they haven't fallen out yet. Here, people spend thousands of dollars on tooth-whitening regimens. People in other nations laugh at our stupidity.
Has it occurred to you that this might not be a joke? Technically, I see no reason why what they are claiming shouldn't be possible. There is nothing on the site that might give away the fact that it's a hoax. The last site update was (apparently) on 3/28/2005.
The first power supply is only required to run a clock for 1000 years. After that time, it will activate the "real" power supply which will broadcast the beacon.
This way, you don't have to design a power supply which is capable of lasting 1000 years AND giving a reasonably big power output.
What it was, was ass-kissing cleverly disguised as "respect." With the current glut of technically savvy people, due to the tech bubble, this sort of ass-kissing is no longer required. You can be replaced at the drop of a hat.
True respect is earned because of the kind of person you are, not the things that you do (insofar as those things are not a part of who you are). Comport yourself with honor, be respectful of others, and you will earn their respect in turn. That you think having some inscrutable technical knowledge should earn you respect is, frankly, revolting.
because without a really good reason for turning it off they're just like "quick go to about:config and turn it off!"
The "really good reason" is frickin' obvious. It wastes your bandwidth, and it wastes the sites' bandwidth. Loading a page that you're never going to read is just rude. It's sort of like hitting "Reload" on a site out of spite. Sure, it's convenient for you. So is cutting in line, but that doesn't mean it's right.
If you buy a license to broadcast over specific wavelengths, the Feds will happily track down unauthorized broadcasters, arrest and possibly even fine & imprison them.
Yeah, and instead of using a secure encryption scheme, you can just depend on the DMCA to bust people who crack your code, right?
What is the CPU actually doing right after the computer is crashed?
It depends on a lot of things. If the crash is due to a hardware failure, the machine might hang inside a device driver, waiting for an IO acknowledgement that will never come. Sometimes the OS deliberately halts the machine, such as when it receives a double-fault inside kernel space. Back in the DOS days, a bad address (usually a result of a buffer overflow) would shoot the machine into la-la land, executing random garbage until it either reached a HLT instruction or got stuck in a loop.
Again, in the days of DOS, it was tons of fun when you accidentally used a far NULL pointer, since that meant overwriting the interrupt vector table -- the next time a timer interrupt came in (18.2 times a second, to be precise) the CPU would happily fly off into dreamworld.
On most MODERN operating systems, however, the system deliberately halts itself as soon as it realizes that something is terribly wrong. The risks of executing random code are simply too great.
The 'assets' of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," a lawyer for a Shanghai-based Internet game company was quoted as saying.
So is money, which for the most part is just data in computer systems.
When's the last time you walked into a cutlery store and exchanged a virtual sword for a real one? There's a big difference.
Money is not "data," it is "value." That value is REPRESENTED by data, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
You won't find your direction and focus anywhere else. You'll spend you first year feeling dazed and confused ANYWAY. How are you going to "find your focus" if you're not going to school? School is where the learning happens, so how will you know what you like and don't like unless you just go, and try things out?
The university environment will provide much better guidance than you could ever provide for yourself. If you take a year off, you'll probably end up just hanging out, and come a year later you'll still have no clue what you want to do. At that point, you'll go to university and figure it out. So why waste the year? Go NOW.
On the other hand, if you're on some kind of soul-seeking quest, that can only be done on your own. But it sounds like you're trying to figure out what you want to study. The best place to figure that out is at the university.
Visit one of your friends who is recommending monster cable, listen to his system. Swap the cables with lower-end ones, and see if you can tell the difference.
Actually, a better experiment would be to swap the cables when your friend isn't looking, and see if HE notices. Also, wear Kevlar.
Now, some annecdotal evidince. I recently replaced all the cables from my $250 receiver to my $300 surround speakers. The stock cable was 20 guage aluminum. The new stuff is 12 guage copper. My system now sounds better.
That, I can believe. Aluminum has nowhere near the conductivity of copper, and on top of that, it was a thinner wire. The result is a lower voltage at the other end of the cable than you would have had with copper, which means that some component somewhere needs to amplify more. Amplification introduces noise. I'm not surprised at all.
I doubt you could tell the difference, however, between a 12 gauge copper wire and a 12 gauge "oxygen free" copper wire.
Wrong. The credit card company does not have insurance against fraud. They instead pass the cost to the merchant, who should have realized that fraud was occurring and stopped the sale.
Say you lost your signed credit card and some nefarious type found it. With about 2 minutes of practice they would be able to forge your sig good enough to get by the minimum-wage-high-school-attending cashier so why bother with this lame security device from our distant past.
It was NEVER intended as a security device. Read the credit card receipt sometime. It has language to the effect of "By signing I agree to pay back the balance of this purchase." You're signing a contract, not participating in a security scheme.
Anyway, who gives a shit? All decent cards have full fraud protection. If somebody steals your card, you cancel it, get another card, and forget about it. It's not like it has your social security number printed on it...
The assemblage of warez kiddies hardly deserves to be referred to as a "community" or "scene." A band of petty thugs and assholes, more like it. People with such little worth as human beings that they need a support group of like-minded idiots to help them forget their wretchedness.
I'm not talking about people who use pirated software, I'm talking about people who actually think they stand on some high pillar and command respectful legions just because they can push more bits than some other dipshit.
I was thinking along the same lines... For a fitness function, some combination of sequence length and Levenshtein distance between the source and transformed source strings?
The obvious would be a simple linear combination: a1 * Len(P) + a2 * Lev(Src, P(Src))
Where P is the editing sequence, P(Src) is the result of running P on the source string, and Lev is the distance between the source and target.
a1, a2 could be manually tuned, or superselected by some appropriate method.
The latter half of the last sentence is an implicit justification of copyright infringement. If you are (a) unwilling to state your position on the matter and (b) arguing a point that supports copyright infringement, it logically follows that you feel your opinions differ from mine (hence the reticence to disclose them).
For a person who apparently prides himself for objectivism and clear thinking, you aren't really shining here. My opinion has no bearing on the conversation, but to appease the beast, here it is:
I work at a commercial software company. We have a total of 55 employees. Our code is most definitely not open source, and we use copyright to retain control of our products. Given that we are in a niche market, we have not yet had significant problems with piracy. Nevertheless, we take certain steps to make it more difficult to pirate our software. I have been involved in the development of those measures.
When I was in college, I used to download MP3s. Mostly, these were legal music files from MP3.com (now defunct, at least as it was back then). Yes, there were some illegal files in there. In the last several years, the total number of MP3s I have downloaded illegally is precisely zero. I fully see the hypocracy of saying one thing and doing another, so I do not participate in that activity.
However, my personal ethics aside, I am capable of understanding, if not agreeing with, the viewpoints of other people. A very smart person (I forget who) once said that wisdom is being able to entertain a notion without agreeing with it. That's all I'm doing here.
If you don't wish to be categorized in this manner, perhaps you should state your fucking opinion and remove the doubt.
Perhaps it is you who should stop categorizing people based on a lack of evidence. You sing the praises of the legal system, a system based on the assumption of innocence, and yet while doing this you accuse me of unethical behavior merely because I did not find it relevant to state my opinion. In my book, that's "hypocracy."
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Also, stock market != savings account...
He looked at me a bit funny, as if he didn't know what I meant, and then said "What's with you Americans being so obsessed with how straight and white your teeth are?"
It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps it is WE (Americans) who are oddballs when it comes to our teeth. Most other people on the planet are happy just for the fact that they haven't fallen out yet. Here, people spend thousands of dollars on tooth-whitening regimens. People in other nations laugh at our stupidity.
I think you've jumped the gun.
This way, you don't have to design a power supply which is capable of lasting 1000 years AND giving a reasonably big power output.
I see... By making something illegal, you can prevent criminals from doing it. That's genius.
True respect is earned because of the kind of person you are, not the things that you do (insofar as those things are not a part of who you are). Comport yourself with honor, be respectful of others, and you will earn their respect in turn. That you think having some inscrutable technical knowledge should earn you respect is, frankly, revolting.
The "really good reason" is frickin' obvious. It wastes your bandwidth, and it wastes the sites' bandwidth. Loading a page that you're never going to read is just rude. It's sort of like hitting "Reload" on a site out of spite. Sure, it's convenient for you. So is cutting in line, but that doesn't mean it's right.
Yeah, and instead of using a secure encryption scheme, you can just depend on the DMCA to bust people who crack your code, right?
Get real.
You trust your credit cards, personal information, and bank account to it, so why wouldn't it be good enough here?
It depends on a lot of things. If the crash is due to a hardware failure, the machine might hang inside a device driver, waiting for an IO acknowledgement that will never come. Sometimes the OS deliberately halts the machine, such as when it receives a double-fault inside kernel space. Back in the DOS days, a bad address (usually a result of a buffer overflow) would shoot the machine into la-la land, executing random garbage until it either reached a HLT instruction or got stuck in a loop.
Again, in the days of DOS, it was tons of fun when you accidentally used a far NULL pointer, since that meant overwriting the interrupt vector table -- the next time a timer interrupt came in (18.2 times a second, to be precise) the CPU would happily fly off into dreamworld.
On most MODERN operating systems, however, the system deliberately halts itself as soon as it realizes that something is terribly wrong. The risks of executing random code are simply too great.
When's the last time you walked into a cutlery store and exchanged a virtual sword for a real one? There's a big difference.
Money is not "data," it is "value." That value is REPRESENTED by data, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
The university environment will provide much better guidance than you could ever provide for yourself. If you take a year off, you'll probably end up just hanging out, and come a year later you'll still have no clue what you want to do. At that point, you'll go to university and figure it out. So why waste the year? Go NOW.
On the other hand, if you're on some kind of soul-seeking quest, that can only be done on your own. But it sounds like you're trying to figure out what you want to study. The best place to figure that out is at the university.
Why, you're absolutely right. It's a myth. This guy must have FAKED all those photos!
No, because they would get very HOT, and the efficiency goes down dramatically with increasing temperature.
Actually, a better experiment would be to swap the cables when your friend isn't looking, and see if HE notices. Also, wear Kevlar.
That, I can believe. Aluminum has nowhere near the conductivity of copper, and on top of that, it was a thinner wire. The result is a lower voltage at the other end of the cable than you would have had with copper, which means that some component somewhere needs to amplify more. Amplification introduces noise. I'm not surprised at all.
I doubt you could tell the difference, however, between a 12 gauge copper wire and a 12 gauge "oxygen free" copper wire.
Wrong. The credit card company does not have insurance against fraud. They instead pass the cost to the merchant, who should have realized that fraud was occurring and stopped the sale.
Actually, the site seems to be holding up pretty well. Must be running Debian Woody.
It was NEVER intended as a security device. Read the credit card receipt sometime. It has language to the effect of "By signing I agree to pay back the balance of this purchase." You're signing a contract, not participating in a security scheme.
Anyway, who gives a shit? All decent cards have full fraud protection. If somebody steals your card, you cancel it, get another card, and forget about it. It's not like it has your social security number printed on it...
I'm not talking about people who use pirated software, I'm talking about people who actually think they stand on some high pillar and command respectful legions just because they can push more bits than some other dipshit.
Erf... That should have been a2 / Lev(Src, P(Src))
The obvious would be a simple linear combination: a1 * Len(P) + a2 * Lev(Src, P(Src))
Where P is the editing sequence, P(Src) is the result of running P on the source string, and Lev is the distance between the source and target.
a1, a2 could be manually tuned, or superselected by some appropriate method.
Is it your brain? ;-)
Yeah... I got dynamic programming and memoization confused.
For a person who apparently prides himself for objectivism and clear thinking, you aren't really shining here. My opinion has no bearing on the conversation, but to appease the beast, here it is:
I work at a commercial software company. We have a total of 55 employees. Our code is most definitely not open source, and we use copyright to retain control of our products. Given that we are in a niche market, we have not yet had significant problems with piracy. Nevertheless, we take certain steps to make it more difficult to pirate our software. I have been involved in the development of those measures.
When I was in college, I used to download MP3s. Mostly, these were legal music files from MP3.com (now defunct, at least as it was back then). Yes, there were some illegal files in there. In the last several years, the total number of MP3s I have downloaded illegally is precisely zero. I fully see the hypocracy of saying one thing and doing another, so I do not participate in that activity.
However, my personal ethics aside, I am capable of understanding, if not agreeing with, the viewpoints of other people. A very smart person (I forget who) once said that wisdom is being able to entertain a notion without agreeing with it. That's all I'm doing here.
If you don't wish to be categorized in this manner, perhaps you should state your fucking opinion and remove the doubt.
Perhaps it is you who should stop categorizing people based on a lack of evidence. You sing the praises of the legal system, a system based on the assumption of innocence, and yet while doing this you accuse me of unethical behavior merely because I did not find it relevant to state my opinion. In my book, that's "hypocracy."