I (still) have a Nokia Symbian based phone and turned off all email updates, GPS map updates etc before going on a trip to China. After one week I got an SMS warning me of large "roaming charges" despite only using the phone for sending a handful of SMSes. Either I missed some automatic update/sync that should have been turned off (unlikely) or the phone checks/updates something which can't be turned off.
Either way, a firewall application would have helped me to: A) Be sure the phone isn't auto-doing anything. B) Find which application/system component is misbehaving.
With "smarter" phones and applications we need better tools for monitoring and control.
Personally, I hope he gets extradited to Sweden. Not because I think he's a bad guy or guilty of any crime but because it is the only way to see if the world is as bat-shit-crazy as he claims.
If he is extradited to Sweden and held until America makes up a good enough excuse to get him extradited to America, then I have to buy a bunker and stockpile cans of soup. I hope he's wrong but the only way to find out is to get him extradited.
In the best case, he's sent to Sweden, the prosecutor/court find the case to be way too weak/silly to proceed and he's set free. Then we can all go back to trusting the (Swedish) authorities and hope for a better future.
If not, then the world is much more scary than I thought and the chances of a war/rebellion/other are greater than I could ever imagine. Hence the bunker and soup.
Sacrificing Assange is a small price to pay to find out if the conspiracy theories are true.
Imagine what the patent system had been like if someone had been allowed to patent: "Process for making vague statements and forcing others to pay for using, doing or making anything roughly matching any such statement". I just invented the meta-patent: A patent on the patent system.
Too bad there is plenty of prior art in the American legal system.
That's good news for Lonesome George and his species(assuming you could get male and female offspring from a single father). Sure, there would be heavy inbreeding but it would not be worse than most European royal families.
Nope, you've got that wrong. Take two really thick pieces of glass. Shoot light through one and a neutrino throught the other... Guess which one comes out the other side first?
There is nothing special about light which prevents other objects from travelling faster than light in a medium.
Actually, a photon has zero rest mass. It has energy and to an observer it is a massive object since it bends spacetime just like any other massive object.
You could probably make up some kind of thought experiment about photons with energy mc^2 in a black box being indistinguishable from apples of mass m in a black box...
Ok, so here's my personal rant: Why are all the non-linear optics experiments ALWAYS misinterpreted as having something to do with spacetime or relativity?
A optical black hole is NOT a black hole. It's a piece of glass. Radiation from such an optical black hole is NOT Hawking radiation . It just happens to have the same explanation.
Just because light in a vacuum "happens" to travel at the fastest possible speed ("the speed of light" = c) doesn't mean that when light is slowed down, the maximum speed is somehow slowed down. Spacetime is completely unaffected by the bending/stretching/slowing down of light. You CAN travel faster than the speed of light in a piece of glass but you CAN NOT travel faster than the theoretical speed limit known as "the speed of light" / c.
Light isn't special. It is just another particle (photons). It doesn't affect spacetime in any way except by the gravitational force which happens to be tiny since it is so light (pun not intended).
There is a chicken and car analogy that should appeal to the crowd here:
An analogy, says McCall, is a chicken crossing a busy road. Once the chicken steps onto the road cars must stop to let it pass, but as soon as it leaves the other side the cars would accelerate to catch up with the traffic ahead. To an observer farther down the road, the stream of passing cars would display no evidence of having slowed down.
So, there is no magical disappearing of time or events or 4D cloaking of spacetime. That's just bullshit from some journalist who doesn't understand what spacetime or 4D means... Not more than a recorded tv program is cloaking space time.
This would be a very interesting experiment if they make it work. Not so much because it may prove/disprove a holographic universe but because there is such a lack of experiments to test anything at all within (modern) theoretical physics.
The theoretical models has been far ahead of the experiments since the 1950s (i.e. the models are more accurate than the experiments). Any experimental results at all would be most welcome.
Theories without experimental support is just guessing **cough** string theory **cough**. (It doesn't have to be strong support, just something simple like "the noise should have a distribution X and Behold! It has.")
Put the black hole in an empty box. The particles that escape the event horizon will eventually find their way out of the box, i.e. radiation comes out of the box.
Because of energy conservation, the contents of the box must loose energy and thus mass. Since there is nothing in the box except a black hole, it must loose mass.
By the way, even if this experiment and their conclusions hold water, it is not a proof of black hole evaporation or Hawking radiation. It would be more like a proof of concept.
In the experiment, they've created a pseudo-event-horizon from which light can't escape. It's only a light event horizon though. Shoot a bullet through their material and you will definately see it go through the event horizon without any problems.
The similarities to a real black hole is that photon pairs created on the pseudo-event-horizon should create radiation if Hawkings reasoning about real black holes is correct. So, it would show that Hawkings thought experiment had some merit but not that black holes necessarily radiate.
As far as I know Hawking Radiation and black hole evaporation have not been ruled out. The effect is just so small that there is no experimental evidence of it.
Actually, you'd better hope black holes evaporate or the black holes the LHC might create may destroy the earth! I for one use a tin foil hat just to be safe.
I believe a leap hour which would occur every 6000 years would be easier to handle than a leap second occuring every second year (approx).
The leap hour could be announced a couple of hundred years in advance giving plenty of time for lazy programmers to update their COBOL apps.
Question is, what do we gain from keeping the leap second? I can't think of a single reason to keep it. Just admit it was a mistake to begin with. Who cares if we are perfectly aligned with the celestial bodies or not?
No, it is not the same thing. PI can be determined algorithmically but there is no algorithmic way of predicting leap seconds since they are added whenever it is deemed necessary.
Thus, you can not write a program that "handles" leap seconds without constant outside input (for example internet connection and wikipedia). I would be much annoyed if my wrist watch wanted to connect to wikipedia every couple of months...
I consider the leap second a big mistake since it makes it inaccurate to talk about future time. I can state that "X seconds have passed since 2008" but not "Y seconds will pass until 2012". A leap hour every couple of 100 years (as the article mentions) would cause much less trouble.
OK, so instead of computing the covariance matrices using standard matrix inversion methods, they estimate it using stochastic methods and the algorithm is massively parallelisable.
So, the massive speedup is compared to standard matrix inversion techniques, probably in combination with the extra speed from parallelisation.
Sounds like a great algorithm. I guess it "saves energy" just like quicksort "saves energy" compared to bubblesort...
My thought exactly. Sperms are not evolving unless there is some evolutionary selection taking place.
Without the selection pressure, they're just mutating, not evolving.
For example, assume in some species the information content of the Y is not used at all (the lack of a double X makes a male). Then the Y can change as much as it wants without affecting any trait of the species, thus not affecting survivability.
Maybe the conclusion from the study is that the Y just isn't very important...
I think he just proved there is not much intelligent life on earth.
"The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy"
Assume the chance of finding love in the UK is 10%, then the chance of finding intelligent life anywhere in our galaxy is 0.1%. That makes intelligent life on earth (subset of our galaxy) less likely than 0.1%! That explains a lot...
Do you mean "every single" as in "every slashdotter without a partner" or as in "every slashdotter there is"? Oh, never mind. Just realised it's the same thing.
I second TiddlyWiki, or rather the MPTW version of it which supports tagging of tags (each tag is an editable wiki page). It's the best note tracking/organizing tool I've found (yet). I can't praise it enough.
Main benefits: * Single html file. No need to contact the IT department and ask them to setup a server for you (or explain what a server is). * Works anywhere (if you have a decent browser) * Easy to write long or short notes (tiddlers) and organise them (tags). * Small enough to put in version control with the rest of your code (single html file! again!)
Drawbacks: * Can not be safely used by more than 1 person at a time (single html, remember) * No integrated bugtracker/svn/cvs etc. You have to organise yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
I (still) have a Nokia Symbian based phone and turned off all email updates, GPS map updates etc before going on a trip to China. After one week I got an SMS warning me of large "roaming charges" despite only using the phone for sending a handful of SMSes. Either I missed some automatic update/sync that should have been turned off (unlikely) or the phone checks/updates something which can't be turned off.
Either way, a firewall application would have helped me to:
A) Be sure the phone isn't auto-doing anything.
B) Find which application/system component is misbehaving.
With "smarter" phones and applications we need better tools for monitoring and control.
An article about a "beauty re-touch" function without pictures? How useless is that!
I found two examples on the internets and the most obvious difference is a blurring/smoothing filter applied to the regions with skin tones. I'm not convinced this makes anyone more beautiful (the womans white teeth look a bit creepy).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/workshop/5432481125/
http://panasonic.net/avc/lumix/compact/fx78_fx77/img/touch/retouch_image.jpg
I think I still prefer the brown-paper-bag-over-the-head approach for making people beautiful. That, or beer.
Personally, I hope he gets extradited to Sweden. Not because I think he's a bad guy or guilty of any crime but because it is the only way to see if the world is as bat-shit-crazy as he claims.
If he is extradited to Sweden and held until America makes up a good enough excuse to get him extradited to America, then I have to buy a bunker and stockpile cans of soup. I hope he's wrong but the only way to find out is to get him extradited.
In the best case, he's sent to Sweden, the prosecutor/court find the case to be way too weak/silly to proceed and he's set free. Then we can all go back to trusting the (Swedish) authorities and hope for a better future.
If not, then the world is much more scary than I thought and the chances of a war/rebellion/other are greater than I could ever imagine. Hence the bunker and soup.
Sacrificing Assange is a small price to pay to find out if the conspiracy theories are true.
Imagine what the patent system had been like if someone had been allowed to patent:
"Process for making vague statements and forcing others to pay for using, doing or making anything roughly matching any such statement".
I just invented the meta-patent: A patent on the patent system.
Too bad there is plenty of prior art in the American legal system.
That's excellent! Then the inbreeding would be down to somewhere between "European aristocracy" and "redneck".
That's good news for Lonesome George and his species(assuming you could get male and female offspring from a single father). Sure, there would be heavy inbreeding but it would not be worse than most European royal families.
Yes, but that would make the patent more readable. It might even make the patent valid!
Nope, you've got that wrong. Take two really thick pieces of glass. Shoot light through one and a neutrino throught the other... Guess which one comes out the other side first?
There is nothing special about light which prevents other objects from travelling faster than light in a medium.
Actually, a photon has zero rest mass. It has energy and to an observer it is a massive object since it bends spacetime just like any other massive object.
You could probably make up some kind of thought experiment about photons with energy mc^2 in a black box being indistinguishable from apples of mass m in a black box...
Ok, so here's my personal rant:
Why are all the non-linear optics experiments ALWAYS misinterpreted as having something to do with spacetime or relativity?
A optical black hole is NOT a black hole. It's a piece of glass. Radiation from such an optical black hole is NOT Hawking radiation . It just happens to have the same explanation.
Just because light in a vacuum "happens" to travel at the fastest possible speed ("the speed of light" = c) doesn't mean that when light is slowed down, the maximum speed is somehow slowed down. Spacetime is completely unaffected by the bending/stretching/slowing down of light. You CAN travel faster than the speed of light in a piece of glass but you CAN NOT travel faster than the theoretical speed limit known as "the speed of light" / c.
Light isn't special. It is just another particle (photons). It doesn't affect spacetime in any way except by the gravitational force which happens to be tiny since it is so light (pun not intended).
I found another article about the article which makes more sense: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44320
There is a chicken and car analogy that should appeal to the crowd here:
An analogy, says McCall, is a chicken crossing a busy road. Once the chicken steps onto the road cars must stop to let it pass, but as soon as it leaves the other side the cars would accelerate to catch up with the traffic ahead. To an observer farther down the road, the stream of passing cars would display no evidence of having slowed down.
So, there is no magical disappearing of time or events or 4D cloaking of spacetime. That's just bullshit from some journalist who doesn't understand what spacetime or 4D means... Not more than a recorded tv program is cloaking space time.
This would be a very interesting experiment if they make it work. Not so much because it may prove/disprove a holographic universe but because there is such a lack of experiments to test anything at all within (modern) theoretical physics.
The theoretical models has been far ahead of the experiments since the 1950s (i.e. the models are more accurate than the experiments). Any experimental results at all would be most welcome.
Theories without experimental support is just guessing **cough** string theory **cough**. (It doesn't have to be strong support, just something simple like "the noise should have a distribution X and Behold! It has.")
Similar energetic collisions happen in the upper atmosphere because of cosmic radiation. That's why you need the tin foil hat! (not tin foil shoes)
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/safety-en.html
Put the black hole in an empty box. The particles that escape the event horizon will eventually find their way out of the box, i.e. radiation comes out of the box.
Because of energy conservation, the contents of the box must loose energy and thus mass. Since there is nothing in the box except a black hole, it must loose mass.
By the way, even if this experiment and their conclusions hold water, it is not a proof of black hole evaporation or Hawking radiation. It would be more like a proof of concept.
In the experiment, they've created a pseudo-event-horizon from which light can't escape. It's only a light event horizon though. Shoot a bullet through their material and you will definately see it go through the event horizon without any problems.
The similarities to a real black hole is that photon pairs created on the pseudo-event-horizon should create radiation if Hawkings reasoning about real black holes is correct. So, it would show that Hawkings thought experiment had some merit but not that black holes necessarily radiate.
[citation needed]
As far as I know Hawking Radiation and black hole evaporation have not been ruled out. The effect is just so small that there is no experimental evidence of it.
Actually, you'd better hope black holes evaporate or the black holes the LHC might create may destroy the earth! I for one use a tin foil hat just to be safe.
I'm more interested in the protocol than the code. If the protocol is vulnerable to attacks/fraud then it is a show stopper.
If the ruby-web-stuff-code contains bugs and security holes, I'll just write my own (read: wait for someone else to do it).
I couldn't find any relevant info about the protocol in TFA. Am I missing something?
I believe a leap hour which would occur every 6000 years would be easier to handle than a leap second occuring every second year (approx).
The leap hour could be announced a couple of hundred years in advance giving plenty of time for lazy programmers to update their COBOL apps.
Question is, what do we gain from keeping the leap second? I can't think of a single reason to keep it. Just admit it was a mistake to begin with. Who cares if we are perfectly aligned with the celestial bodies or not?
No, it is not the same thing. PI can be determined algorithmically but there is no algorithmic way of predicting leap seconds since they are added whenever it is deemed necessary.
Thus, you can not write a program that "handles" leap seconds without constant outside input (for example internet connection and wikipedia). I would be much annoyed if my wrist watch wanted to connect to wikipedia every couple of months...
I consider the leap second a big mistake since it makes it inaccurate to talk about future time. I can state that "X seconds have passed since 2008" but not "Y seconds will pass until 2012".
A leap hour every couple of 100 years (as the article mentions) would cause much less trouble.
OK, so instead of computing the covariance matrices using standard matrix inversion methods, they estimate it using stochastic methods and the algorithm is massively parallelisable.
So, the massive speedup is compared to standard matrix inversion techniques, probably in combination with the extra speed from parallelisation.
Sounds like a great algorithm. I guess it "saves energy" just like quicksort "saves energy" compared to bubblesort...
Not conspiracy, proven fact.
The only "fact" you've shown is the existance of an email with some statements and opinions.
There is nothing showing that any manipulation or redefinition of peer review literature has actually taken place (or ever will).
I think you over estimate the power and influence this "Phil Jones" has.
My thought exactly. Sperms are not evolving unless there is some evolutionary selection taking place.
Without the selection pressure, they're just mutating, not evolving.
For example, assume in some species the information content of the Y is not used at all (the lack of a double X makes a male). Then the Y can change as much as it wants without affecting any trait of the species, thus not affecting survivability.
Maybe the conclusion from the study is that the Y just isn't very important...
I think he just proved there is not much intelligent life on earth.
"The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy"
Assume the chance of finding love in the UK is 10%, then the chance of finding intelligent life anywhere in our galaxy is 0.1%.
That makes intelligent life on earth (subset of our galaxy) less likely than 0.1%!
That explains a lot...
Do you mean "every single" as in "every slashdotter without a partner" or as in "every slashdotter there is"?
Oh, never mind. Just realised it's the same thing.
I second TiddlyWiki, or rather the MPTW version of it which supports tagging of tags (each tag is an editable wiki page). It's the best note tracking/organizing tool I've found (yet). I can't praise it enough.
Main benefits:
* Single html file. No need to contact the IT department and ask them to setup a server for you (or explain what a server is).
* Works anywhere (if you have a decent browser)
* Easy to write long or short notes (tiddlers) and organise them (tags).
* Small enough to put in version control with the rest of your code (single html file! again!)
Drawbacks:
* Can not be safely used by more than 1 person at a time (single html, remember)
* No integrated bugtracker/svn/cvs etc. You have to organise yourself.