Are you serious? I'll bet you $100 the FBI runs the damn conference.
Every year, predictably, a large number of hackers (and, admittedly, a much greater number of wannabes) show up in Vegas. They get drunk and chatty, and spill their guts to each other on the latest techniques. Why would the feds rain on that parade? It's like a tap directly into the hacker underworld.
You don't need fancy math to answer the first question. There are 360 1-degree lines, therefore the distance between the lines at the equator is 1/360th of the circumference of the earth, i.e., 24900/360 = 69.16 miles.
The US government released rights recently to allow for satellite imaging of the earth down to 1/2 meter resolution.
You write this ridiculous sentence so casually. No, the US cannot prevent anyone from launching a satellite and photographing any area of the planet they wish. Perhaps they can shoot down or destroy a satellite which is doing things they don't like, but that's just Might, it isn't Right. The depth of your delusion is sickening. The US does not rule the earth.
I see no reason I'd buy this thing for that much money when you can pick up a Kameleon at any Radio Shack for about $60. I don't see anything significant the Sony remote can do that this thing can't do, and the Kameleon remote just looks cool. The buttons are actually just images and the panel reconfigures itself for each device. Feels like Star Trek!
However, if you're selecting remotes based on how many colors the display has and whether it runs Linux, I think you're beyond my help, though:-) Go ahead and spend your $700.
The horizon is about 35 miles away. If you get much further than that you are in an airplane.
Maybe in Nebraska, but I've personally stood on a mountain top and seen nearly 200 miles (196 miles to be exact, the distance between the summit of Strawberry Mountain and Mount Hood in Oregon). It depends where you're standing, and what you're looking at.
If you're driving a stick a great way to freak out tailgaters is to put in the clutch and shift into reverse.
I know for a fact I'd strip my reverse gear in my Outback (and probably ruin the gearbox) if I did that. I wouldn't suggest actually trying this at highway speeds unless you know how your transmission behaves:-)
Now, I have thrown it into reverse (accidentally!) while doing 75 in a Toyota Tundra once. Rear wheels started burning up and I realized and corrected within a second, but I bet the guy behind me wet his shorts.
I'm not sure why so many people are assuming I do this in the left-hand lane (I've even been moderated "Troll" at least once, heh), but I was referring mostly to roads with one lane in either direction. Rural roads. I wasn't even imagining freeways.
I'm sure most of the angrier respondants are your typical road-rage asshole.
I usually handle tailgaters by slowing down to about half the speed limit, and continuing to slow down until they either get the point and back off, or get fed up and blow past me.
Seriously, the danger from tailgating is that they might rear-end you (duh). If you slowly reduce your speed this greatly reduces the risk of a high-speed read end collision while simultaneously giving them a great incentive to stop tailgating. They're doing it because they think it'll get them to their destination faster. I simply make it clear to them that they'll NEVER get there if they insist on tailgating me.
In my experience, most people get the hint and back off.
The transmitter can only pump out so much juice, and as far as I know the gain of the antenna can't boost the TX power (only direct it)
The thing that matters physically is not the total power but the power density (i.e., the amount of energy passing through a given surface area per unit time).
Think of power as force, and power density as pressure. Imagine a 15 pound textbook sitting on your chest. Not so bad, is it? Now, imagine pressing the tip of a pencil into your arm with the weight of that same 15 pound textbook. It wouldn't be pleasant.
With a highly directional antenna it's possible to produce truly dangerous power densities.
I know this is off-topic, but why is it that if I save a PNG file with a resolution of something like 300 pixels/inch, and then re-open it, it comes back in as 299.999 dpi?
See this portion of the PNG spec. The image resolution is stored in the PNG file as an integer number of pixels per meter.
There are 39.3700787 inches in a meter. Thus, a 300 pixels-per-inch image is 11811.02361 pixels-per-meter. However, the PNG can only store an integer number of pixels per meter. Thus, 11811.02361 gets rounded to 11811.
Convert back to inches. What is 11811 / 39.3700787? Why, it's 299.9994 pixels-per-inch!
That's why 100 pixels per centimeter works perfectly. It's in metric.
Stop using this silly "inch" things, and your problem will vanish.
Could anyone on the know tell the rest of us why is it that digital cameras choose JPG as the compressed format instead of PNG?
PNG doesn't handle photographs well. The compression in PNG comes from the zlib compression library. It is based on detecting repetitive patterns. In a photograph there do not tend to be repetetive patterns, because of the nature of the scene being photographed, and because of noise in the camera's light detecting instrument, which tends to break up any patterns.
PNG has a set of predictive filters which can be applied to an image to attempt to increase the compression effectiveness. However, these are simplistic and are designed to be optimal for non-photographic images.
Looks to me like PNG would typically provide better image resolution for a similar filesize. Maybe I am wrong.
Yeah, wrong, but that's okay:-)
And also, is GIF an option now that it is free again?
No. GIF is an indexed-mode format, and only supports 8-bit palettes. In other words, a GIF can only have 256 colors. Nobody would ever want to store photographs in such a format.
Because it wasn't nearly as important to make software updates as easy as possible before Internet access became widespread and thus the issue of being secure against network-based attacks became important.
In other words, you're saying the idea was years ahead of its time? That sounds like a highly non-obvious idea to me.
It's so easy today to say it's an "obvious" idea to send software updates over a network with user selection and confirmation. But was it really so obvious in the early 1990's?
I hate software-related patents as much as the next guy, but the continual cry of "That's obvious" is getting tiring. If it was so obvious, why was there such a long period of time between the patent and when MS and Apple started using a similar system? Clearly, it took them years before they "saw the light."
But all Russians do have a middle name. It is derived from their father's first name.
I'm aware of the tradition, but the fact remains that she had no legal middle name when she was born in the (then) USSR. Her middle name from her father, if she had one, would be Andreevna, but this appears on no legal document anywhere on the planet.
What bothers me is that the INS (no longer called INS, I suppose, but I can't remember what it is now) feels they can dictate to foreign nationals what their names should look like.
Let me start by saying most of your points are good and valid. However, I flew off the handle here:
Not only is it bad netiquette to send massive attachments...
Oh, fuck off with this, will you? I'll send whatever the hell I damn well please to my friends. If none of us mind large attachments, who the hell are you to tell us what we can and cannot send to each other?
The concept of "netiquette" is dead and gone, along with the dream of a "commerce-free" Internet. Usenet is the last bastion of the old ways. Get over it already. We're not an exclusive little club anymore. We don't have a set of commandments written in reverse pig latin on stone tablets.
In other words, this guy wants to force us to install egress firewalls on our home networks in the name of "stopping spam?" Can anybody else see how terrible this idea is?
With a firewall in the cable modem itself, the cable company will be able to remotely configure it, and conceivably stop any kind of traffic they want to stop. Don't want you using P2P applications? Just firewall those ports! It's not like you "own" the cable modem anyway (most people just lease one). And even if you do own, they can just write a clause into the contract giving them rights to remotely configure it.
Before you know it, cable modems without such firewalls will be banned from the network.
Sorry, I'm not installing any piece of hardware that I don't own, is under direct control of the cable company, and can be used to filter my outgoing traffic. Not in a fucking million years. And definitely not in the name of "stopping spam."
"Stop spam" has become the cyber equivalent of "Save the children." It seems we're willing to throw away far too much in return for too little benefit.
I don't understand why people consider the name to be some kind of sacrosanct, unchangeable moniker. I've had trouble cashing checks which were written out to "Joe Smith" but out of habit I endorsed as "Joe M. Smith" (including my middle initial). That isn't my real name, by the way. I got evil looks, apparently for daring to sign my middle initial. I find this odd, considering your signature doesn't legally have to look anything at all like the printed version of your name (I could sign my name "Sandra Cook" if I wanted). Yet they give me shit about an extra initial. Go figure.
And Dog help you if you choose, for whatever reason, to change the way you sign your name. There are legitimate reasons for this (such as having an index finger amputated).
Another big one: Do I use my middle initial when ordering things online with a credit card? The form says, "Must match the name on the card." Well, the name on the card is "Joe M Smith." WITHOUT the dot after the middle initial. So am I supposed to enter "Joe M Smith" or "Joe M. Smith?" As far as I'm concerned: who the FUCK cares?
Oh, and get this. My girlfriend immigrated here from Israel. She has no middle name. She is of Russian descent. What does INS tell her? "You HAVE to have a middle name. All Russians have a middle name." Wow, I'm glad they know so much about Russian culture, but unfortunately, they're wrong as hell. So she simply made one up on the spot: she used her nickname (the name she actually goes by) as her middle name. So her name is now "Raisa Raya." How retarded.
Oh, and on top of that, the INS thinks she's a MALE. She received her selective service draft card a few weeks ago! Fucking hilarious.
At least in the lingo I'm familiar with, "razorback" is also used to refer to an assymetrical sand dune. From one side it looks gently sloping, but from the other the dropoff from the peak is very steep. Like an arete, only made of sand instead of rock.
Razorback dunes can be dangerous for people playing with offroad vehicles in the sand. It looks like a normal dune from one side, so you approach the top too quickly and end up falling off the steep side. People die that way.
I assume they are speaking of something similar here...
I'm not asking them to answer, I'm asking them to let the question remain visible at least for a few minutes so that somebody who does know might see it and tell us. It's not that complicated.
Probably yes. Hydrogen and oxygen are among the most abundant elements in the universe.
The unusual thing about Earth is that the environment is at the triple point of water. Water is able to exist as a gas, liquid, and solid all together in the same environment. This is only possible in a narrow range of temperatures and pressures. So water is probably very common. Liquid water, OTOH, is not.
As for why water is important for life, see one of my older comments.
At this point, I am sure you are White American, because only White Americans feel the need to bring race into a question where race was never an issue.
Get real. A penchant for irrelevance is not limited to whites or Americans. Here on Slashdot, we specialize in mentioning Linux in the most unlikely of circumstances. If we follow your logic, apparently that means we all hate Linux.
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That's an MTBF of almost 10 years.
7% chance of failure per year is 93% chance of NOT failing per year. How many years until chance of not failing falls to 50% (in other words, MTBF)?
0.93^n = 0.5
n * log(0.93) = log(0.5)
n = log(0.5) / log(0.93) = 9.5 years.
Can that really be right?
Every year, predictably, a large number of hackers (and, admittedly, a much greater number of wannabes) show up in Vegas. They get drunk and chatty, and spill their guts to each other on the latest techniques. Why would the feds rain on that parade? It's like a tap directly into the hacker underworld.
You don't need fancy math to answer the first question. There are 360 1-degree lines, therefore the distance between the lines at the equator is 1/360th of the circumference of the earth, i.e., 24900/360 = 69.16 miles.
You write this ridiculous sentence so casually. No, the US cannot prevent anyone from launching a satellite and photographing any area of the planet they wish. Perhaps they can shoot down or destroy a satellite which is doing things they don't like, but that's just Might, it isn't Right. The depth of your delusion is sickening. The US does not rule the earth.
However, if you're selecting remotes based on how many colors the display has and whether it runs Linux, I think you're beyond my help, though :-) Go ahead and spend your $700.
Maybe in Nebraska, but I've personally stood on a mountain top and seen nearly 200 miles (196 miles to be exact, the distance between the summit of Strawberry Mountain and Mount Hood in Oregon). It depends where you're standing, and what you're looking at.
I know for a fact I'd strip my reverse gear in my Outback (and probably ruin the gearbox) if I did that. I wouldn't suggest actually trying this at highway speeds unless you know how your transmission behaves :-)
Now, I have thrown it into reverse (accidentally!) while doing 75 in a Toyota Tundra once. Rear wheels started burning up and I realized and corrected within a second, but I bet the guy behind me wet his shorts.
I miss that truck, it never failed me once.
I'm sure most of the angrier respondants are your typical road-rage asshole.
Seriously, the danger from tailgating is that they might rear-end you (duh). If you slowly reduce your speed this greatly reduces the risk of a high-speed read end collision while simultaneously giving them a great incentive to stop tailgating. They're doing it because they think it'll get them to their destination faster. I simply make it clear to them that they'll NEVER get there if they insist on tailgating me.
In my experience, most people get the hint and back off.
The thing that matters physically is not the total power but the power density (i.e., the amount of energy passing through a given surface area per unit time). Think of power as force, and power density as pressure. Imagine a 15 pound textbook sitting on your chest. Not so bad, is it? Now, imagine pressing the tip of a pencil into your arm with the weight of that same 15 pound textbook. It wouldn't be pleasant.
With a highly directional antenna it's possible to produce truly dangerous power densities.
See this portion of the PNG spec. The image resolution is stored in the PNG file as an integer number of pixels per meter.
There are 39.3700787 inches in a meter. Thus, a 300 pixels-per-inch image is 11811.02361 pixels-per-meter. However, the PNG can only store an integer number of pixels per meter. Thus, 11811.02361 gets rounded to 11811.
Convert back to inches. What is 11811 / 39.3700787? Why, it's 299.9994 pixels-per-inch!
That's why 100 pixels per centimeter works perfectly. It's in metric.
Stop using this silly "inch" things, and your problem will vanish.
PNG doesn't handle photographs well. The compression in PNG comes from the zlib compression library. It is based on detecting repetitive patterns. In a photograph there do not tend to be repetetive patterns, because of the nature of the scene being photographed, and because of noise in the camera's light detecting instrument, which tends to break up any patterns.
PNG has a set of predictive filters which can be applied to an image to attempt to increase the compression effectiveness. However, these are simplistic and are designed to be optimal for non-photographic images.
Looks to me like PNG would typically provide better image resolution for a similar filesize. Maybe I am wrong.
Yeah, wrong, but that's okay :-)
And also, is GIF an option now that it is free again?
No. GIF is an indexed-mode format, and only supports 8-bit palettes. In other words, a GIF can only have 256 colors. Nobody would ever want to store photographs in such a format.
How is it rude and inconsiderate to exchange multi-megabyte email attachments between people who have all agreed to do so? Please, explain.
In other words, you're saying the idea was years ahead of its time? That sounds like a highly non-obvious idea to me.
I hate software-related patents as much as the next guy, but the continual cry of "That's obvious" is getting tiring. If it was so obvious, why was there such a long period of time between the patent and when MS and Apple started using a similar system? Clearly, it took them years before they "saw the light."
I'm aware of the tradition, but the fact remains that she had no legal middle name when she was born in the (then) USSR. Her middle name from her father, if she had one, would be Andreevna, but this appears on no legal document anywhere on the planet.
What bothers me is that the INS (no longer called INS, I suppose, but I can't remember what it is now) feels they can dictate to foreign nationals what their names should look like.
Not only is it bad netiquette to send massive attachments...
Oh, fuck off with this, will you? I'll send whatever the hell I damn well please to my friends. If none of us mind large attachments, who the hell are you to tell us what we can and cannot send to each other?
The concept of "netiquette" is dead and gone, along with the dream of a "commerce-free" Internet. Usenet is the last bastion of the old ways. Get over it already. We're not an exclusive little club anymore. We don't have a set of commandments written in reverse pig latin on stone tablets.
With a firewall in the cable modem itself, the cable company will be able to remotely configure it, and conceivably stop any kind of traffic they want to stop. Don't want you using P2P applications? Just firewall those ports! It's not like you "own" the cable modem anyway (most people just lease one). And even if you do own, they can just write a clause into the contract giving them rights to remotely configure it.
Before you know it, cable modems without such firewalls will be banned from the network.
Sorry, I'm not installing any piece of hardware that I don't own, is under direct control of the cable company, and can be used to filter my outgoing traffic. Not in a fucking million years. And definitely not in the name of "stopping spam."
"Stop spam" has become the cyber equivalent of "Save the children." It seems we're willing to throw away far too much in return for too little benefit.
And Dog help you if you choose, for whatever reason, to change the way you sign your name. There are legitimate reasons for this (such as having an index finger amputated).
Another big one: Do I use my middle initial when ordering things online with a credit card? The form says, "Must match the name on the card." Well, the name on the card is "Joe M Smith." WITHOUT the dot after the middle initial. So am I supposed to enter "Joe M Smith" or "Joe M. Smith?" As far as I'm concerned: who the FUCK cares?
Oh, and get this. My girlfriend immigrated here from Israel. She has no middle name. She is of Russian descent. What does INS tell her? "You HAVE to have a middle name. All Russians have a middle name." Wow, I'm glad they know so much about Russian culture, but unfortunately, they're wrong as hell. So she simply made one up on the spot: she used her nickname (the name she actually goes by) as her middle name. So her name is now "Raisa Raya." How retarded.
Oh, and on top of that, the INS thinks she's a MALE. She received her selective service draft card a few weeks ago! Fucking hilarious.
The government is a decrepit pile of shit.
Wow, did you break a sweat while posting that?
Razorback dunes can be dangerous for people playing with offroad vehicles in the sand. It looks like a normal dune from one side, so you approach the top too quickly and end up falling off the steep side. People die that way.
I assume they are speaking of something similar here...
I'm not asking them to answer, I'm asking them to let the question remain visible at least for a few minutes so that somebody who does know might see it and tell us. It's not that complicated.
Probably yes. Hydrogen and oxygen are among the most abundant elements in the universe.
The unusual thing about Earth is that the environment is at the triple point of water. Water is able to exist as a gas, liquid, and solid all together in the same environment. This is only possible in a narrow range of temperatures and pressures. So water is probably very common. Liquid water, OTOH, is not.
As for why water is important for life, see one of my older comments.
Where do you SUGGEST we ask?
I reiterate the parent's question: What the FUCK is going on with Slashdot?
Get real. A penchant for irrelevance is not limited to whites or Americans. Here on Slashdot, we specialize in mentioning Linux in the most unlikely of circumstances. If we follow your logic, apparently that means we all hate Linux.