And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
How the hell is that a "win-win" for them? Driving sales of your product down by pissing off your customers, then pushing legislation that will further piss off your customers, sounds like firing a semi-automatic weapon repeatedly into your foot. What do they expect people to say? "Geez, I'm so PISSED OFF I think I'm gonna go BUY A CD!"
You might be right, but it's a freaking hard problem in any case.
There's a simple formula for calculating how far you will miss by if the laser is misaligned: e = d tan t where t is the angle of misalignment and d is the distance from the laser to the target. Disclaimer: this formula is only accurate for extremely small angles, but those are the kind we're dealing with here.
Say, for example, you're shooting at a missile that's 1500 meters away, and you are misaligned by 15 arc minutes (0.25 degrees). The laser will miss the rocket by 6.5 meters, according to the formula. That's a significant error.
Not only do you have the difficulty of tracking the rocket to within sub-meter accuracy, you also have the problem of keeping the laser in constant alignment to extremely low tolerances, for a long enough period of time to actually destroy the target.
The Subscriber must not attach any device that permits access to services in violation of the Subscription Agreement. In addition, federal and state laws prohibit the possession, use, or attempted use of any equipment to receive any Buckeye services except as expressly provided by the Subscription Agreement.
And from the Subscription Agreement:
3. Additional personal computers in my home may not be connected to the Service unless I notify Buckeye in advance and pay an additional monthly charge.
So, it looks like you can't connect a Linux box? The TOS says you cannot even *possess* a piece of hardware that could violate the SA, even if you don't actually *attempt* to violate the SA. Most out-of-the-box Linux installations are NAT-capable and therefore appear to be in violation of this legalese...
What is the best way to effectively vote "I do not want any of these people to be in office?" Is there something I can do (not necessarily by voting) that would have this effect? Or are people of my opinion simply impotent in this process?
Why should I vote for a human when a Mynah bird is just as skilled at parroting lobbyist propoganda?
Case modding is slowly becoming more mainstream [...] I think case modding is rapidly becoming to computers what hot rodding is to cars. More and more people are customising their systems to add some individuality, which is hardly surprising given the prevalence of beige...
Just like a market sprang up to take advantage of idiot teenage kids by selling them coffee cans mufflers for $300 a piece, I'm sure an industry will also spring up to sell heatsinks engraved with Wozniak's autograph and licked by Torvalds' pet goat for $500 a pop.
No wait, how many of these teeny bopper leet-freaks even know who Woz is?
No, here are the two fundamental problems of computer science:
Many programmers confuse "coding" with "computer science."
Most of said programmers are too stupid to realize they are doing this.
You don't need a computer to do computer science, you know...
Contrast ratio == Whatever
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 2
I don't know about all this "contrast ratio" crap. Sure, my Iiyama 18" panel has a 400:1 ratio, while my Hitachi 19" CRT has a 600:1.
But the Iiyama has much blacker blacks and whiter whites than the CRT. BY FAR. I cannot STAND to look at the Hitachi unless absolutely necessary. Compared to the LCD, the CRT looks blurry and washed out. My eyes actually ache after looking at it for a while.
Statistics are not everything. Go to a retail store and have an actual LOOK at a screen before you buy it. Who cares what some number says, if your EYES are telling you it looks awesome?
Since there's 48 bits of entropy(minus a small range for multicast addresses and broadcast), the odds are effectively 2^48.
Not really, since (as you say) the first 8 bits of address specify the manufacturer. Not all the possible 8-bit codes are assigned.
Plus, if you're building a network from scratch, its likely all the NICs are from the same manufacturer, therefore the first 8 bits are all identical, and you really only have 40 bits of unique address.
If there's someone who's clearly cheating, why not let the game participants (from BOTH sides) vote to kick him out?
"FuckStar31337 is using a wireframe hack. Press K to cast your Kick Vote."
Sure, I could get booted out of games arbitrarily by assholes, but I wouldn't want to play with said assholes, anyway. Not that I've even played a game since about 1999...
Assuming the Wow! signal is a typical
SETI-like transmission, then we can expect valid SETI hits to be
very strong, high intermittent signals which appear once (as the
transit beam sweeps past Earth), and never repeat again.
So, in other words, they admit that they can never fulfill their own requirements (namely, the repeatability requirement).
I've had this argument many times. First, there's lots of evidence that biological brains are heavily chaotic, which ANNs traditionally are not. Second, brains are extremely recurrent in ways that could never be simulated by traditional computers -- there are simply too many links. Third, the human brain is not based merely on reward and punishment. When I sit in a chair at night, pondering whether I agree or not with what Bush has done today, there's no clear source of reward or punishment. Yet, at the end of the day, my brain has changed. ANNs have no ability to self-contemplate and change in this way.
Fourth, when an ANN is trained, every weight in the network is changed. In a biological brain, particular links form and are destroyed, but learning is not a global process. I'm not a neuroscientist, so if I'm wrong, someone please point that out.
Fifth, you can ask a human why he/she came to a particular conclusion. You can't ask an ANN why it reached a particular conclusion. Sometimes, analysis is possible on smaller networks. But for multi-layer networks with thousands of hidden units, this becomes impossible. I really don't think it's a question of computational power. I have a deep sense that somehow, biobrains are fundamentally different from their mathematical cousins.
I won't claim that ANNs have no place in thinking machines. But having worked with them extensively, I feel that, although they are extremely valuable computational tools, they are not a magic wand. Many pattern recognition and data organization tasks can be much better performed by traditional symbolic algorithms.
Some speakers can make it up to 130dB but will start to distort at 110dB, where as some wont distort up to 115dB but can only go to 125dB. Which one would you rather have?
Um, my sense of hearing?
Im tired of people doing stupid things with speakers.
First off, there's no proof of this. The brain certainly appears to be asynchronous, but there's no evidence to suggest that there isn't some kind of internal, distributed clocking mechanism that keeps the individual parts working together. There's not enough evidence either way.
Async logic might very well bring large neural net research into practicality.
Why does everyone seem to think that ANNs are the way toward "true AI?" ANNs are superb pattern matching machines. They can predict, and are resilient to link damage to some degree. But they do not think. ANNs have nothing to do with what's really going on in a biological brain, except that they are made of many interacting simple processing elements. The biological brain inspired ANN, but that's all.
In theory, you could tell how far the signal travelled through air by examining the dispersion of the wave at the receiver. Different frequencies travel at slightly different speeds through a medium (but not through vacuum), causing the different frequencies to spread in time. In theory you can use this to tell how far the wave travelled.
The effect may be far too small to use in practice, though.
The first station pinpoints your position on the surface of a sphere in 3D space. The second station pinpoints you on a different sphere. The intersection of these two spheres will be a circle in space. Now, a third station pinpoints you on yet another sphere. The intersection of this sphere with the circle will be a set of two points. In order to tell which point, you need a fourth station.
Radiation. How do you think they cool things in space?
It's a trade-off. In air, heat can be taken off by conductive transfer: heat goes from heatsink into air, then the air flows away. However, in air, radiative cooling is not as effective because the air molecules reflect the radiation in all directions, and some of it goes back into the hot object. In vacuum you have no conductive cooling but there's nothing standing in the way of radiation.
In vacuum, you want a heatsink where all the radiative surfaces face out into space (not toward each other like a conduction heatsink), and the material has a high emmissivity (silver, gold are often used).
He has some measure of "protection" from the Liedenfrost effect -- if cold N2 gets on his relatively hot hand, it'll flash-boil and create a thin cushion of gaseous N2 that should protect his hand from the liquid to some degree. This can be demonstrated by a competent professional by pouring a small drop into the palm of the hand.
Now, if his fingers slipped and the cup of N2 fell over his hand, he'd be out of luck... Wearing gloves in that case isn't enough protection, because the liquid will just run down the glove, under the cuff of the shirt, onto the arm. The best thing to do is manipulate the N2 dewar with a long pair of tongs...
People have done dumber things before, like dousing their head in alcohol (to kill lice) then lighting up a cigarette...
If you've disassembled the output of a good optimizing compiler lately, you'd see that it usually produces pretty good code.
Indeed. Try looking at the gcc-optimized assembly for the following:
x ^= y;
y ^= x;
x ^= y;
It may not be immediately obvious, but if you work it out you'll see that this swaps x and y.
The compiler, of course, figures this out and just uses an XCHG instruction (on x86, at least).
I do not get it.
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If these companies are willing to spend the money and effort to set up a honeypot, why aren't they willing to spend the money and effort to secure their wireless networks in the first place?!
Mostly PCL5 (HP Printer Control Language). For example, most of the bills you receive in the mail are coded in PCL which is automatically generated by specialized software. Mortgage origination software is almost entirely PCL based, as well. The forms you fill out for the IRS every year are typeset in PCL. This is because most PCL capable laser printers are pixel-identical in their reproduction, and all HP PCL5 printers are perfectly pixel-exact.
I happen to know, since the company I work for is the major player in the legal/mortgage PCL imaging market -- we produce the only full-function high-performance PCL5 and PCL6 (and HPGL/2, and CALS, etc) viewers available. And believe me, lawyers and banks stay the hell away from PDF. I don't want to plug the company too hard, so I won't name it...
A lot of digital cameras still suffer from rather severe Chromatic Aberrations, and ccd noise.
Actually, chromatic aberration is caused by the lens -- whether the camera is CCD or film makes no difference. Perhaps the digitals you've used just had crappy lenses (made of cheaper glass)?
The point about CCD noise is a good one, though. A CCD cell can hit saturation even in low-light conditions if the exposure time is long enough, and there are other effects like electron spill that can contaminate the image near really bright objects. In the future, though, CCD materials will no doubt improve (wider bandgaps, tighter electron wells, quicker drainage times).
When digital really does start surpassing film, try to set your bias aside and at least give it a shot...
To get truly ubiquitous precise layout, Postscript/PDF should be used.
They should most certainly not be used. Ask any lawyer or mortgage broker. If, for example, the margins of the document are off by a millimeter, their document is no longer a legal document. PDF absolutely sucks at doing this. NO ONE in their right mind who needs absolutely precise document reproduction uses PDF.
Slashdot Mirror
How the hell is that a "win-win" for them? Driving sales of your product down by pissing off your customers, then pushing legislation that will further piss off your customers, sounds like firing a semi-automatic weapon repeatedly into your foot. What do they expect people to say? "Geez, I'm so PISSED OFF I think I'm gonna go BUY A CD!"
There's a simple formula for calculating how far you will miss by if the laser is misaligned: e = d tan t where t is the angle of misalignment and d is the distance from the laser to the target. Disclaimer: this formula is only accurate for extremely small angles, but those are the kind we're dealing with here.
Say, for example, you're shooting at a missile that's 1500 meters away, and you are misaligned by 15 arc minutes (0.25 degrees). The laser will miss the rocket by 6.5 meters, according to the formula. That's a significant error.
Not only do you have the difficulty of tracking the rocket to within sub-meter accuracy, you also have the problem of keeping the laser in constant alignment to extremely low tolerances, for a long enough period of time to actually destroy the target.
This accomplishment is no laughing matter!
And from the Subscription Agreement:
So, it looks like you can't connect a Linux box? The TOS says you cannot even *possess* a piece of hardware that could violate the SA, even if you don't actually *attempt* to violate the SA. Most out-of-the-box Linux installations are NAT-capable and therefore appear to be in violation of this legalese...
How would this get interpretted in court?
Why should I vote for a human when a Mynah bird is just as skilled at parroting lobbyist propoganda?
Not as much as I miss the great 1D games such as "Linear Boy" and "Lack of Dimension."
Just like a market sprang up to take advantage of idiot teenage kids by selling them coffee cans mufflers for $300 a piece, I'm sure an industry will also spring up to sell heatsinks engraved with Wozniak's autograph and licked by Torvalds' pet goat for $500 a pop.
No wait, how many of these teeny bopper leet-freaks even know who Woz is?
You don't need a computer to do computer science, you know...
But the Iiyama has much blacker blacks and whiter whites than the CRT. BY FAR. I cannot STAND to look at the Hitachi unless absolutely necessary. Compared to the LCD, the CRT looks blurry and washed out. My eyes actually ache after looking at it for a while.
Statistics are not everything. Go to a retail store and have an actual LOOK at a screen before you buy it. Who cares what some number says, if your EYES are telling you it looks awesome?
What alt-tag would you include on the goatse.cx image?
Not really, since (as you say) the first 8 bits of address specify the manufacturer. Not all the possible 8-bit codes are assigned.
Plus, if you're building a network from scratch, its likely all the NICs are from the same manufacturer, therefore the first 8 bits are all identical, and you really only have 40 bits of unique address.
"FuckStar31337 is using a wireframe hack. Press K to cast your Kick Vote."
Sure, I could get booted out of games arbitrarily by assholes, but I wouldn't want to play with said assholes, anyway. Not that I've even played a game since about 1999...
Assuming the Wow! signal is a typical SETI-like transmission, then we can expect valid SETI hits to be very strong, high intermittent signals which appear once (as the transit beam sweeps past Earth), and never repeat again.
So, in other words, they admit that they can never fulfill their own requirements (namely, the repeatability requirement).
Rather daunting, isn't it...
Fourth, when an ANN is trained, every weight in the network is changed. In a biological brain, particular links form and are destroyed, but learning is not a global process. I'm not a neuroscientist, so if I'm wrong, someone please point that out.
Fifth, you can ask a human why he/she came to a particular conclusion. You can't ask an ANN why it reached a particular conclusion. Sometimes, analysis is possible on smaller networks. But for multi-layer networks with thousands of hidden units, this becomes impossible. I really don't think it's a question of computational power. I have a deep sense that somehow, biobrains are fundamentally different from their mathematical cousins.
I won't claim that ANNs have no place in thinking machines. But having worked with them extensively, I feel that, although they are extremely valuable computational tools, they are not a magic wand. Many pattern recognition and data organization tasks can be much better performed by traditional symbolic algorithms.
Um, my sense of hearing?
Im tired of people doing stupid things with speakers.
Such as deafening themselves?
First off, there's no proof of this. The brain certainly appears to be asynchronous, but there's no evidence to suggest that there isn't some kind of internal, distributed clocking mechanism that keeps the individual parts working together. There's not enough evidence either way.
Async logic might very well bring large neural net research into practicality.
Why does everyone seem to think that ANNs are the way toward "true AI?" ANNs are superb pattern matching machines. They can predict, and are resilient to link damage to some degree. But they do not think. ANNs have nothing to do with what's really going on in a biological brain, except that they are made of many interacting simple processing elements. The biological brain inspired ANN, but that's all.
The effect may be far too small to use in practice, though.
Unless someone can point out a flaw in my logic.
Radiation. How do you think they cool things in space?
It's a trade-off. In air, heat can be taken off by conductive transfer: heat goes from heatsink into air, then the air flows away. However, in air, radiative cooling is not as effective because the air molecules reflect the radiation in all directions, and some of it goes back into the hot object. In vacuum you have no conductive cooling but there's nothing standing in the way of radiation.
In vacuum, you want a heatsink where all the radiative surfaces face out into space (not toward each other like a conduction heatsink), and the material has a high emmissivity (silver, gold are often used).
Now, if his fingers slipped and the cup of N2 fell over his hand, he'd be out of luck... Wearing gloves in that case isn't enough protection, because the liquid will just run down the glove, under the cuff of the shirt, onto the arm. The best thing to do is manipulate the N2 dewar with a long pair of tongs...
People have done dumber things before, like dousing their head in alcohol (to kill lice) then lighting up a cigarette...
Indeed. Try looking at the gcc-optimized assembly for the following:
x ^= y;
y ^= x;
x ^= y;
It may not be immediately obvious, but if you work it out you'll see that this swaps x and y.
The compiler, of course, figures this out and just uses an XCHG instruction (on x86, at least).
If these companies are willing to spend the money and effort to set up a honeypot, why aren't they willing to spend the money and effort to secure their wireless networks in the first place?!
I happen to know, since the company I work for is the major player in the legal/mortgage PCL imaging market -- we produce the only full-function high-performance PCL5 and PCL6 (and HPGL/2, and CALS, etc) viewers available. And believe me, lawyers and banks stay the hell away from PDF. I don't want to plug the company too hard, so I won't name it...
Actually, chromatic aberration is caused by the lens -- whether the camera is CCD or film makes no difference. Perhaps the digitals you've used just had crappy lenses (made of cheaper glass)?
The point about CCD noise is a good one, though. A CCD cell can hit saturation even in low-light conditions if the exposure time is long enough, and there are other effects like electron spill that can contaminate the image near really bright objects. In the future, though, CCD materials will no doubt improve (wider bandgaps, tighter electron wells, quicker drainage times).
When digital really does start surpassing film, try to set your bias aside and at least give it a shot...
To get truly ubiquitous precise layout, Postscript/PDF should be used.
They should most certainly not be used. Ask any lawyer or mortgage broker. If, for example, the margins of the document are off by a millimeter, their document is no longer a legal document. PDF absolutely sucks at doing this. NO ONE in their right mind who needs absolutely precise document reproduction uses PDF.
Do you think this is due to the /. effect, or is it because of the UUNET/WorldCom debacle?
At any rate, I wonder how much money it just cost him to have his site unreachable for basically an entire business day...