See, the way the publishing biz operates, it works similarly to many areas in our society (like electoral politics, and the private sector, for two): If you've already got the "name" and you've got lots of money (or a couple of bestsellers in the hole), you're practically guaranteed to stay a success. If, on the other hand, you have to compete against the "brand names" and everybody else submitting their work 'over-the-transom', your chances of achieving even that first foot-in-the-door publication are very small. Your talent, or lack thereof, isn't usually much of a deciding factor.
I don't see how this state of affairs is the publishing industry's fault. If anything, it is the fault of the consuming public. People, which are generally stupid creatures, care more that an author is well-known and popular, than whether his writing is worth any more than the paper it's written on. If authors continue to succeed, even when their work doesn't merit success, then it's because the sheep-like public continue purchasing their trash -- NOT because the publishing company chooses to market it.
On the flip side, if an unknown author can't get his life's work published, even though it's an amazing piece of literature, that's probably because the publisher has (correctly) realized that the aforementioned sheep-like public won't realize what they've got.
Hell, if I was a publisher, I'd act precisely the same way. Why waste money marketing an intellectual masterpiece if its content is going to be lost on the vast majority of idiots? Conversely, why shouldn't I publish garbage, if people are choosing to buy such garbage? It's just sane business practice.
If you're really upset at the state of publishing, then go scream at your idiot mom/brother/boss. They're the ones pumping the money into this drivel. People read what they like. Unfortunately, what they seem to like most is brain-dead, lifeless, putrid trash.
You know when you've misplaced something in your house (my favorite pencil, for a recent example from my own life, though "house" is maybe being charitable)
Heh. When that happens to me, most of the time it turns out to be in my left hand. One time I caught myself tapping the desk with it, muttering "Where the hell is my pencil?"
This is a difficult matter, and it's not unique to this particular case.
All technology (hell, even nuclear technology) can be used for good and bad purposes. I can imagine many uses for RF tags that I would actually appreciate. For example, as I walk to my car, it automatically unlocks and starts the engine. Or, the front door of my home automatically unlocks for me as I grasp the doorknob. When I enter a room, the lights automatically adjust to my preferred lighting level. Provided the tag is embedded within my body, there's not much risk of it being stolen.
But as everyone here points out, there are many possible nefarious uses for such a device. And indeed, there are nefarious uses for any technology. I could use wall current to electrocute you, blind you with a laser, or carve an "anarchy" symbol into your forehead with the sharp edge of a broken silicon wafer (ok, that's a little facetious, but you get the point).
My question for everyone is, how much are we willing to limit our technological advancements because of possible risks?
Let me give another example that might sound silly. Scientists are, right now, dreaming up technology to move asteroids around. One day we might use this to bring them closer, and mine them for materials. We could also use it to push an incoming asteroid out of a collision course with Earth.
A sufficiently funded terrorist, however, could also use this technology to take the world hostage. Or, if he's having a bad day, he could endanger the survival of the human race by actually doing it, and flinging a huge rock toward Earth. Should we stop developing this asteroid-moving technology because of this risk?
When does scientific and technological advancement become irresponsible?
You made my mind zoom back to a web project I did in college. Did we make the same mistake?
No. Turns out we were stashing user-uploaded files as blobs in the DB, not as actual files in the webroot. If someone uploaded a PHP file, and then tried to view it, the server would set Content-Type as a JPG image, and the user would probably either see garbage or the actual PHP source.
Is the cracker an adult? Full force of law should be brought to bear.
If he/she is a minor, however, I think state of mind should have some sway over the consequences. You'd be surprised just how effective a simple visit by law enforcement personnel can be in "adjusting" the cracker's attitude.
In 1997 I was caught dorking around in school district systems. In my adolescent mind I thought it was all fun and games. Until I was hauled into a room by several very serious looking detectives and interrogated. Bad-cop-good-cop games, the whole works. This was quite possibly the fastest attitude readjustment I've ever experienced.
The detectives, I think, had some sympathy for my plight. His boss wanted to bust me hard and basically ruin my life. I was hauled before the head honcho (don't know exactly who he was or what his title was) and was given a stern lecture. I was asked if I'd ever used drugs or done anything violent. In the end, I was let go with 40 hours of community service to the school district and a warning to not get caught "so much as pinging" the district machines.
When my computer was returned to me from evidence, an entire year later, I found that the detective had upgraded the CPU and put 16 megs of RAM into it. I guess I made an impact on him, as well.
Now, on the other hand, if you've got a script kiddie, and he's whining and bitching and making life hard for investigators, and basically has a "fuck you copper" attitude, then I say... Bust him, throw him in the lockup, and let him think about how much of an asshole he is for a few months. Let him out, and if he does it again, hit him with the full force of adult penalties. Breaking-and-entering, defacement of property, theft of property, the whole works. Fuck up his life and let him figure out why it happened.
I was given a wonderful second chance, and I haven't wasted it. I was just being a stupid kid. People who scoff at the opportunities that law enforcement is trying to give them deserve prison.
Heh. Work out the math using a 120 gig drive with those kind of costs.
To lease a 120 gig drive at the same rate per megabyte would cost $860,160,000. For the purposes of that calculation I assumed 1024 megs per gig.
Almost a BILLION dollars per year. Crazy.
Work it out a different way. I picked up a 60 gig drive for about $75. That's about one-tenth of a cent per meg. (0.122 cents to be precise). This means the cost per meg has gone down by a factor of 5.7 million.
So, yes, there could be a password in it, but there could as well be a snippet of executable code or binary data, or whatever.
No! It would most likely be data from some other packet that was sent or received previously. The OS doesn't allocate network buffers willy-nilly, it tries to reuse the buffers if possible. This means the memory used to send a short packet is most likely going to be reused from a previous network buffer. Meaning the data out on the wire is probably going to be someone else's network traffic that you shouldn't have seen.
I agree that the problem would be much less severe if you really were getting bytes from random spots in memory, but that isn't what happens. Operating systems tend to allocate a big chunk of memory for buffers, then reuse it over and over.
Heh. Too bad you apparently didn't go beyond "first term HS E&M."
w = f/(2*Pi)
h-bar = h*2*Pi.
Which trivially leads to:
hf = h-bar * w.
Thus, E = hf = h-bar w. The equations are identical.
Omega is much more commonly used than frequency in quantum mechanics. This is because QM is based in a large part on Fourier theory, which has factors of 2*Pi all over the place. It makes the math less messy.
The equation governing wavelength, energy, and Boltzmann's constant is E=hw
Whoops, I think you're confused. w (which is actually an omega) is angular frequency, not wavelength. And h is really h-bar, which is Planck's constant over 2 Pi, not Boltmann's constant.
You have to remember that the straight line is a line through space-time, not just space. The path of the Moon, for instance, isn't a closed loop. It's really a straight line, and the space-time around Earth has been curled into a helix by its mass. The geodesic isn't a circle, it looks more like a spiral staircase where the vertical direction is time.
Don't try to push the rubber sheet analogy too far. General relativity weaves space and time together, which really can't be shown visually.
I see this on the science shows all the time. It is a nice visual representation of the theory but gravity is what causes things to fall into depressions. It seems there is something wrong with illustrating a theory on why things fall towards other things by showing something falling into a depression.
Bingo. There is a better way to think about it, while still using similar imagery.
Imagine a large rubber sheet. Using a magic marker, draw a nice straight line across the sheet. Now, using your finger, create a depression in the sheet, somewhere near the line. You'll see that the line is "pulled into" the depression, by the curvature of the rubber sheet.
The thing is, the line is still "straight." According to general relativity, gravity isn't really a force. Objects always move in straight lines called "geodesics" (unless subjected to non-gravitational forces), but they appear to curve through space because space-time itself is curved.
You don't need an external gravity to "pull" objects into the space-time depression. They "pull" themselves in, because they are actually traveling in straight lines through curved space-time.
For the state medical exams, and for the state bar exams, the relevant association sets the standards, and they keep them high enough to safeguard the incomes of the ones who've already made it through. Any ``protection'' which the public gets is is a happy accident.
You know, I'm not a doctor nor do I know one personally, but for some reason your comment really ticks me off.
Do you REALLY believe that? That the field of medicine exists solely to line the pockets of a few individuals who were steadfast enough to make it through some kind of obstacle course? I've met many doctors, and I've met a few who didn't seem to care for their patients (at least to the degree I care for others myself). But the great majority of doctors, I think, care deeply about the wellfare of their patients on an abstract, nonpersonal level.
Re:Isn't the issue in this area $/MIPS?
on
New SGI Altix 3000
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you have heavily interrelated datasets, like in just about any thermal dynamics/plasma/weather problem, then there is so much interdependancy between adjacent "cells" that each work unit needs information from adjacent work units constantly. Spread that system out on a cluster solution and you're DOA because your communications between boxes are horrendously slow, with latencies measured in milliseconds instead of nanoseconds.
You've obviously never actually researched how distributed finite-element simulations work, because you're absolutely wrong.
In most physical FE methods, each cell interacts only with its 6 nearest neighbors. Yes, the computation requires information that spans across cells, but there's no reason to assign a different CPU to each cell. The cells can be grouped into blocks and assigned to processors that way.
Remember that surface area increases slower than volume. As the sizes of your cell groups increase, there is more volume within them per unit surface area. And since data only needs to be communicated across the SURFACE of each cell group per simulation timestep, the method actually gets MORE efficient as you make the simulation bigger.
So your "obscene" number of transactions turn out to be highly localized in space, which minimizes communication overhead. In fact, if your cell blocks are box-like in shape, then each block requires only 6 logical communication links to the adjacent boxes. This could be realized by a traditional switching fabric, or with actual physical links.
... why not just change the log format to not include any personally trackable data (IP address, username, any cookie info, etc). Using Apache, this is very simple with the CustomLog directive.
That still isn't perfect. The personally identifiable info might not be purposefully written to disk, but it might get paged out during swapping. So a real asshole (i.e. a DA somewhere) might be able to recover some of it from your swap partition.
Tachyon's, the result of solving Einstein's equations for an object travelling faster than light, would have negative mass (but positive energy) and would travel backwards through time.
I believe the equation you are referring to is:
E = m*c^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).
If v > c, then (1-v^2/c^2) < 0 and the denominator becomes imaginary. Thus in order for the particle to have real energy it must have imaginary mass.
I think imaginary mass is even harder to envision than negative mass.
What is "95" percent level of confidence" based on?
They assume that the true age of the universe is a random variable taking on values from a continuous distribution. The actual pdf of this distribution is just a guess based on all the available evidence.
The range of dates is said to have 95% confidence because 95% of the total probability mass of this pdf lies between those two values. In other words, there is a 95% chance that any particular universe, selected at random according to the pdf, will have an age within those bounds.
If that sounds kind of silly, that's because it is. You can only push statistics so far (e.g., assuming some underlying pdf) before you start getting ridiculous.
Antihydrogen and hydrogen both have the same mass (assuming CPT symmetry is not violated), so a total of 440000 * 1.00794 / 6.022e23 * 9e18 = 6.6 J would be released if the antihydrogen totally annihilated with hydrogen.
1.00794 is atomic mass of hydrogen in AMU, 6.022e23 is Avogadro's number, 9e18 is the speed of light squared. The constants are off the top of my head so I may be slightly off on the hydrogen atomic mass.
6.6 joules is a quite noticeable amount of energy, equivalent to a 5 gram bullet travelling around 50 meters per second.
Clearly, Americans are truly losing their sense of older, formal English. What she said was perfectly correct. She was speaking in the subjunctive tense.
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I don't see how this state of affairs is the publishing industry's fault. If anything, it is the fault of the consuming public. People, which are generally stupid creatures, care more that an author is well-known and popular, than whether his writing is worth any more than the paper it's written on. If authors continue to succeed, even when their work doesn't merit success, then it's because the sheep-like public continue purchasing their trash -- NOT because the publishing company chooses to market it.
On the flip side, if an unknown author can't get his life's work published, even though it's an amazing piece of literature, that's probably because the publisher has (correctly) realized that the aforementioned sheep-like public won't realize what they've got.
Hell, if I was a publisher, I'd act precisely the same way. Why waste money marketing an intellectual masterpiece if its content is going to be lost on the vast majority of idiots? Conversely, why shouldn't I publish garbage, if people are choosing to buy such garbage? It's just sane business practice.
If you're really upset at the state of publishing, then go scream at your idiot mom/brother/boss. They're the ones pumping the money into this drivel. People read what they like. Unfortunately, what they seem to like most is brain-dead, lifeless, putrid trash.
Heh. When that happens to me, most of the time it turns out to be in my left hand. One time I caught myself tapping the desk with it, muttering "Where the hell is my pencil?"
I'm losing it, man. Really losing it.
All technology (hell, even nuclear technology) can be used for good and bad purposes. I can imagine many uses for RF tags that I would actually appreciate. For example, as I walk to my car, it automatically unlocks and starts the engine. Or, the front door of my home automatically unlocks for me as I grasp the doorknob. When I enter a room, the lights automatically adjust to my preferred lighting level. Provided the tag is embedded within my body, there's not much risk of it being stolen.
But as everyone here points out, there are many possible nefarious uses for such a device. And indeed, there are nefarious uses for any technology. I could use wall current to electrocute you, blind you with a laser, or carve an "anarchy" symbol into your forehead with the sharp edge of a broken silicon wafer (ok, that's a little facetious, but you get the point).
My question for everyone is, how much are we willing to limit our technological advancements because of possible risks?
Let me give another example that might sound silly. Scientists are, right now, dreaming up technology to move asteroids around. One day we might use this to bring them closer, and mine them for materials. We could also use it to push an incoming asteroid out of a collision course with Earth.
A sufficiently funded terrorist, however, could also use this technology to take the world hostage. Or, if he's having a bad day, he could endanger the survival of the human race by actually doing it, and flinging a huge rock toward Earth. Should we stop developing this asteroid-moving technology because of this risk?
When does scientific and technological advancement become irresponsible?
Don't believe me? Check out this. Look at the section called "Microscopic View of Copper Wire".
The electric FIELD in the wire moves at nearly the speed of light. The electrons THEMSELVES are barely moving at all!
I have.
XFree86 "supports" it, if you mean, it'll work with Nvidia's closed-source driver. Runs fine here...
Sorry, but I just can't get my ideological blood churning over a video driver..
Actually I think the phrase is "take this tack," where "tack" is a nautical term referring to how the ship is oriented with respect to its sails.
By taking a particular "tack," you are choosing a particular direction of travel, or goal if you will.
Sorry, just thought I'd throw in some totally useless trivia.
No. Turns out we were stashing user-uploaded files as blobs in the DB, not as actual files in the webroot. If someone uploaded a PHP file, and then tried to view it, the server would set Content-Type as a JPG image, and the user would probably either see garbage or the actual PHP source.
If he/she is a minor, however, I think state of mind should have some sway over the consequences. You'd be surprised just how effective a simple visit by law enforcement personnel can be in "adjusting" the cracker's attitude.
In 1997 I was caught dorking around in school district systems. In my adolescent mind I thought it was all fun and games. Until I was hauled into a room by several very serious looking detectives and interrogated. Bad-cop-good-cop games, the whole works. This was quite possibly the fastest attitude readjustment I've ever experienced.
The detectives, I think, had some sympathy for my plight. His boss wanted to bust me hard and basically ruin my life. I was hauled before the head honcho (don't know exactly who he was or what his title was) and was given a stern lecture. I was asked if I'd ever used drugs or done anything violent. In the end, I was let go with 40 hours of community service to the school district and a warning to not get caught "so much as pinging" the district machines.
When my computer was returned to me from evidence, an entire year later, I found that the detective had upgraded the CPU and put 16 megs of RAM into it. I guess I made an impact on him, as well.
Now, on the other hand, if you've got a script kiddie, and he's whining and bitching and making life hard for investigators, and basically has a "fuck you copper" attitude, then I say... Bust him, throw him in the lockup, and let him think about how much of an asshole he is for a few months. Let him out, and if he does it again, hit him with the full force of adult penalties. Breaking-and-entering, defacement of property, theft of property, the whole works. Fuck up his life and let him figure out why it happened.
I was given a wonderful second chance, and I haven't wasted it. I was just being a stupid kid. People who scoff at the opportunities that law enforcement is trying to give them deserve prison.
To lease a 120 gig drive at the same rate per megabyte would cost $860,160,000. For the purposes of that calculation I assumed 1024 megs per gig.
Almost a BILLION dollars per year. Crazy.
Work it out a different way. I picked up a 60 gig drive for about $75. That's about one-tenth of a cent per meg. (0.122 cents to be precise). This means the cost per meg has gone down by a factor of 5.7 million.
No! It would most likely be data from some other packet that was sent or received previously. The OS doesn't allocate network buffers willy-nilly, it tries to reuse the buffers if possible. This means the memory used to send a short packet is most likely going to be reused from a previous network buffer. Meaning the data out on the wire is probably going to be someone else's network traffic that you shouldn't have seen.
I agree that the problem would be much less severe if you really were getting bytes from random spots in memory, but that isn't what happens. Operating systems tend to allocate a big chunk of memory for buffers, then reuse it over and over.
w = f*2*Pi
h-bar = h/(2*Pi)
And not the other way around.
<shrug> The notation varies, but the idea is always the same. Don't get caught up in the particular names of particular variables...
w = f/(2*Pi)
h-bar = h*2*Pi.
Which trivially leads to:
hf = h-bar * w.
Thus, E = hf = h-bar w. The equations are identical.
Omega is much more commonly used than frequency in quantum mechanics. This is because QM is based in a large part on Fourier theory, which has factors of 2*Pi all over the place. It makes the math less messy.
Whoops, I think you're confused. w (which is actually an omega) is angular frequency, not wavelength. And h is really h-bar, which is Planck's constant over 2 Pi, not Boltmann's constant.
But the actual equation is correct :-)
Don't try to push the rubber sheet analogy too far. General relativity weaves space and time together, which really can't be shown visually.
Bingo. There is a better way to think about it, while still using similar imagery.
Imagine a large rubber sheet. Using a magic marker, draw a nice straight line across the sheet. Now, using your finger, create a depression in the sheet, somewhere near the line. You'll see that the line is "pulled into" the depression, by the curvature of the rubber sheet.
The thing is, the line is still "straight." According to general relativity, gravity isn't really a force. Objects always move in straight lines called "geodesics" (unless subjected to non-gravitational forces), but they appear to curve through space because space-time itself is curved.
You don't need an external gravity to "pull" objects into the space-time depression. They "pull" themselves in, because they are actually traveling in straight lines through curved space-time.
You know, I'm not a doctor nor do I know one personally, but for some reason your comment really ticks me off.
Do you REALLY believe that? That the field of medicine exists solely to line the pockets of a few individuals who were steadfast enough to make it through some kind of obstacle course? I've met many doctors, and I've met a few who didn't seem to care for their patients (at least to the degree I care for others myself). But the great majority of doctors, I think, care deeply about the wellfare of their patients on an abstract, nonpersonal level.
You've obviously never actually researched how distributed finite-element simulations work, because you're absolutely wrong.
In most physical FE methods, each cell interacts only with its 6 nearest neighbors. Yes, the computation requires information that spans across cells, but there's no reason to assign a different CPU to each cell. The cells can be grouped into blocks and assigned to processors that way.
Remember that surface area increases slower than volume. As the sizes of your cell groups increase, there is more volume within them per unit surface area. And since data only needs to be communicated across the SURFACE of each cell group per simulation timestep, the method actually gets MORE efficient as you make the simulation bigger.
So your "obscene" number of transactions turn out to be highly localized in space, which minimizes communication overhead. In fact, if your cell blocks are box-like in shape, then each block requires only 6 logical communication links to the adjacent boxes. This could be realized by a traditional switching fabric, or with actual physical links.
That still isn't perfect. The personally identifiable info might not be purposefully written to disk, but it might get paged out during swapping. So a real asshole (i.e. a DA somewhere) might be able to recover some of it from your swap partition.
I think to most people that was pretty clear :-)
I believe the equation you are referring to is:
E = m*c^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).
If v > c, then (1-v^2/c^2) < 0 and the denominator becomes imaginary. Thus in order for the particle to have real energy it must have imaginary mass.
I think imaginary mass is even harder to envision than negative mass.
They assume that the true age of the universe is a random variable taking on values from a continuous distribution. The actual pdf of this distribution is just a guess based on all the available evidence.
The range of dates is said to have 95% confidence because 95% of the total probability mass of this pdf lies between those two values. In other words, there is a 95% chance that any particular universe, selected at random according to the pdf, will have an age within those bounds.
If that sounds kind of silly, that's because it is. You can only push statistics so far (e.g., assuming some underlying pdf) before you start getting ridiculous.
Whoops. Forgot that AMU is given in grams per mole, not kilograms. The true energy is one thousand times smaller: 6.6 millijoules.
1.00794 is atomic mass of hydrogen in AMU, 6.022e23 is Avogadro's number, 9e18 is the speed of light squared. The constants are off the top of my head so I may be slightly off on the hydrogen atomic mass.
6.6 joules is a quite noticeable amount of energy, equivalent to a 5 gram bullet travelling around 50 meters per second.
Maybe the thinks it makes her sound royal.