Granted, that does stop him from (as h4rr4r suggested) putting it on a pole in the yard (probably pretty hard to argue that the grass is historic and would be irreparably damaged).
Sorry, that falls under the common area owned by the landlord. IANAL, but I've helped a few friends iron out details on this with their landlords and/or homeowner's associations. This particular case, however, appears to be a lost one. GGP could probably hang a dish outside his window, assuming his window was facing in the correct direction (which, in his case, it is not) and he could do so safely while not making it a permanent installation. But he's in the "rare exception" list that has no legally-protected solution for installing a dish. He can only make a temporary installation in the areas he has rented, and he doesn't control any areas that would allow him to receive signal.
However, a phased array could still be a winning solution there, because current units tend to be pretty small and subtle compared to a dish, and may not be as objectionable as a dish. Most of them are relatively small sealed discs that can be mounted on any flat surface at a variety of angles as long as they are pointed somewhat vaguely in the direction of the South sky (as seen from North America), and can be painted to match the surrounds in many cases. So the landlord (and historical district) might not object to a small disc mounted on the South side of the building roof with a wire running around to his window, for example, where actually screwing a DirectTV dish might be somewhat more controversial.
Of course, phased array units don't come cheap.
A couple of "first I found on Google" examples of phased-array satellite units currently available (I'm not recommending for or against these specific units at all, just a couple of examples of currently-available tech):
So instead of one larger disc-shaped unit like the ones pictured above you could deploy a handful of really tiny units over a larger area and have them phase together to pick up a better signal. Put them far enough apart, and you could easily reproduce the effect of a 15-foot or even larger directional dish and resolve signal through some fairly significant material or interference.
In that case, the person who started this discussion might be able to get a signal, even through a roof, with enough phased elements spread over a large enough area. He'd have all of the bits inside his area of control and installed temporarily (and not have a 15-foot dish sitting in the middle of his living room that might upset his wife).
Alternatively, he might be able to get approval for a half-dozen flat bits of painted metal to be temporarily glued to the corners of the roof, with thin subtle wires run to his window, since none of the installations are considered permanent and would not affect the historic nature of the house in any way.
The problem is that the dish weighs 25 pounds, offers significant wind resistance, cannot be used while the vehicle is in motion, needs to be aimed at a satellite each time the RV is moved, and depends on geosynchronous satellites or continuous aiming with a servomotor. It's also ugly, but that's an aesthetic problem, not a practical one.
The advantage of phased array systems like this would be that you don't need to deploy and aim the dish once you reach your destination. You simply turn the system on, and the handful of flat metal pads glued directly to the roof of your RV (plus possibly a couple or three on each side if you're in high latitudes) can pick up the signal without moving anything around. The pads can be utterly unobtrusive, installed permanently, and offer no wind resistance at all.
There are no moving parts because the array is "aimed" only in a virtual sense by software. You'll still need a good bit of surface area to pick up a useful signal, but that surface area can be flat and spread over a larger area in smaller bits (you don't need one big contiguous dish, just a few squares or rectangles of surface area). It can even track a moving satellite and keep it in view (or track a moving or geosync sat while you are driving down the road).
No wind resistance when driving, no moving parts to wear out or replace. Just a few metal bits glued flat to the roof, wired to a computer that compensates for the time difference between the various signals. You could get signal from multiple satellites in different parts of the sky simultaneously, or based on which one happens to be in the clearest view at the moment, without carrying around a sky chart and signal meter or depending on a complex array of servos to do it for you.
Phased arrays are not new. It just takes a lot of number-crunching and a lot of power, which up until now has been accomplished more cheaply by hammering out a parabolic dish and aiming at a stationary target, saving all that number-crunching.
This guy's algorithm and chip design may (or may not) make it cheap enough to be practical for routine use.
There has already been a remake (season 3) where they addressed a bunch of additional issues, but in both of their original attempts they failed to do what they usually like to do in more recent shows - keep scaling up until you get the result stated in the myth.
That gives them some of the coolest moments of the show, like firing a car on a huge rocket sled to try and cut it in half on a reinforced blade on the plow myth, for example. And the show is about entertainment as well as (sometimes questionable) science.
Back to the choice of this particular myth for yet another revisit, which on the surface seems stupid.. I mean, why remake an already-twice-debunked myth?
Oh, wait, they have to scale up now to demonstrate the result.
What could possibly scale up to the kinds of solar focus you'd need to ignite a trireme?
Why, an existing solar conversion plant, of course! They have acres and acres of modern mirrors and can melt, well, anything you want to melt.
Highlight the power of harnessing solar energy by burning the shit out of a full-scale trireme, and show off a modern solar conversion plant at the same time, and give you a real idea of the amount of power available at one. Entertainment AND green energy win!
Now that you mention a possible political agenda, the choice of the Archimedes Mirror is a perfect one. Not to show the safety of solar power (though I'm sure the whole "this is safer because if it has a problem you shutter the mirrors and it burns itself out quickly" point will be driven home), but the amount of power available to harness out of it. By making a trireme explode into flame over a few dozen points simultaneously, perhaps?
I'm probably wrong, but I'm really looking forward to what they plan to do with their Presidential bully pulpit.
Sails have several major things going against them as an attack vector. First, they tend to be pretty light in color, so a good bit of the light reflects rather than being absorbed. Second, they tend to flap and/or move more erratically, making it simultaneously harder to focus on a specific place. Third, a sail fire is non-fatal to the ship itself, and is a lot easier to put out than a pitch fire. If you want to set a trireme on fire, aim low and aim at pitch. It's dark, it doesn't move a lot, and once you ignite it it burns like a sunovabitch.
More importantly, their initial tests were not testing the actual flammability of the material, but what temperatures could be achieved using bronze shields that had been shaped as half-decent mirrors. Their maximum temperature at 60 feet using 400 square feet of bronze was about 200 degrees (not only not enough to ignite dry material, but not enough to boil water). Even dry paper, as Ray Bradbury taught us all, ignites at around 451 degrees. The Mythbusters were shooting for 600 degrees to guarantee ignition, and even once they added a bunch of additional mirrors they only got 280.
They did revisit it, by the way. An MIT team was challenged to repeat the experiment at 100 feet, and they were actually able to ignite the boat at 75 feet. Using modern glass mirrors (not bronze) to ignite a dry boat (not damp) located on a rooftop in full sun and at optimal angle (so if you had an Eastern shore, you'd better hope the enemy was attacking in the mid-morning hours).
It wasn't just busted because they couldn't set a boat on fire at a reasonable distance, but because they could only set it on fire with non-period materials under optimal circumstances using potentially thousands of troops, where a simple flaming arrow could be fired by a single person, start a much more aggressive fire, and work over at least three times the distance (100 yards isn't a terribly long arrow shot).
Frankly, I'm with a few other people, it's a great idea getting the Mythbusters involved in getting kids into science (because, as flawed as it is, the show really does push experimentation and questioning your assumptions, which is the foundation of science). It's just that doing so by doing a THIRD take on a myth that is so obviously debunked is.. well.. a little foolish.
The Mythbusters don't always get it right the first time, but they have demonstrated that they are VERY open to disproving their own prior results, and have done so on more than one occasion. They aren't experts in anything they do, but they are good scientists, in that they make an honest effort to control for variables and don't appear to instantly dismiss theories and feedback they don't agree with. They subject it to experimentation.
Plus, of course, there's almost always a satisfying explosion.:)
Last week called. They want 10/10/10 (official launch date of Ubuntu 10.10) back.:)
Seriously, if 10.10 isn't "finished" (which, after testing it, I'd argue you have a decent point) then why did they release it last week? When will it be "finished", because I don't see a date for that on Ubuntu's web site.
There were several multi-touch gestures, but it would have been nice to have him move his hand a little more slowly and make it more obvious which finger(s) were on the screen at any time. For example, he appeared to call up the desktop split view by using two fingers, and tapping all five fingers of one hand on the screen seemed to call up a tasklist or somesuch.
As the article itself stated, the multi-touch gesture library is very limited at the moment in 10.10, but 11.04 should expand that library considerably.
Can it do pinch zoom? Two finger scrolling or one finger? Will two fingers simulate a right-click? (It's a mostly desktop OS, so unlike in iOS right clicking is probably pretty useful). I'm sure I could find out the answers, but if you're going to make a promo video for "multi-touch" show me some "multi-touching".
From the article:
One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them. But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.
So I'd say, no, it doesn't have more than just what they demonstrated
At least not yet. But you'll probably have a lot of them delivered by, interestingly enough, Natty Narwhal (which is odd because Narwhals don't look like they'd be too interested in multitouch).
Given that I'm sure the multitouch library will expand even more significantly for 11.10, I'd like to make a suggestion for the name: Omnipotent Octopus.
I think the implication is that "low-yield" generally means "unprofitable", so the honestly involved in the claimed results a scientific endeavor has a lot to do with how much profit is expected from said results.
Note that TFS says "major improvements", not "improvements". Pharma/Med companies generally only profit significantly from "major improvements".
If research were to uncover a drug that is 1% more effective in preventing hayfever than existing prescription meds, that would be an "improvement". Hardly a "major" one, but an improvement. But it costs a lot of money to put a drug to market.
So I, as the company that employs that scientist, have five choices:
1. Fund a completely honest study and safety testing at a cost of $X so the product can go to market and the consumer will say "1% improvement? Ho, hum, I'm happy with what I have." I lost money, but maybe a few patients ended up with a better quality of life.
2. Decide it's unprofitable, but publish the results so anyone can freely use it, since it's not worth the effort for me to pursue it. Maybe someone else can use it as a foundation to improving the state of medicine. I won't profit from it, but the world might be a better place.
3. Continue funding the project in the hopes that further advances become more profitable. Maybe I'll make money someday, maybe I won't. Ya rolls the dice, ya takes yer chances.
4. Tell the scientist to stop wasting time on it, assign them to another project, and have their notes shredded so at least competitors can't use it for something.
5. Fund a study that demonstrates a completely revolutionary breakthrough in effectiveness, advertise it as such, push it for a lot of off-label uses, send some doctors some nice pens, hope the placebo effect holds when people switch to it, and milk that mooing cash cow as long as my patent holds out, then shove it to OTC and come out with a very-slightly-tweaked new version of it immediately thereafter that has a couple of random letters after the name in the hopes I can get people to think it's a different med, and repeat the cycle as many times as there are two-letter combinations.
I've ranked them in ascending order of likelihood.
I don't think Arudino-based devices would get a free pass just because they used an Arudino as one component. The sticker could appear on the Arudino, but not on the locked-down devices that people build from them.
In fact, I don't see this sticker appearing on vendor-locked (AT&T, Verizon, etc) Android-based phones. An unlocked Android phone might get an FSF sticker because you can do what you want with it, but the one Verizon sells you certainly shouldn't deserve that same labeling, unless Verizon included a rootkit CD and instructions with the phone, and continued to support phones once rootkitted.
I agree. While I like this movement overall, I don't think they should be shooting for this kind of exclusivity.
"Works with Windows" and "Made for Mac" are marketing stickers. In fact, they are exactly the same kind of marketing sticker the FSF wants to use.
It's the hardware inside the box that should count for the FSF endorsement, not the labels on the box. If I can hack the hardware and do what I want with it, why in hell would I care that the manufacturers have entered marketing agreements with Microsoft or Apple?
Then *gasp* don't buy that product. Wow, that was hard, right?
Precisely the action that this endorsement is designed to support. Helping to make it easier for people to decide what to buy and what to avoid, based on their personal preferences. If you don't care about how "free (as in speech)" the item you are buying is, you'll ignore the sticker and buy based on what you DO care about. If you do care (either way), you can either prefer or avoid products with that sticker, in accordance with your own preferences.
If this works, and I'm not saying it will, but if it does, it basically means that people who have a preference (either way) about locked-down products will use the FSF endorsement as a guide to the products they do want. Exactly like the way some people currently look for "Works with Windows", "Fair Trade", "Organic", "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", or "Underwriters Lab" stickers on a product currently to help determine if the item they are purchasing meets their purchasing preferences.
It's simply the fact that choosing a numbering system that is based on tens cannot precisely represent every possible number we want to represent. So we use symbols for those special somethings like pi, the square root of negative one, and we have clumsy but workable notation for things that repeat infinitely like 1/3.
We use portions of ten because we have ten fingers. If we had six fingers, we'd have no problem with thirds (2 + 2 + 2 = 10) but expressing five sixths in decimal would totally fuck with our finite heads.
Having said that, for all finite numbers, decimal is very damned good, but we should not pretend that it can accurately represent every value. Some numbers can be expressed in decimal if we introduce infinite ellipses. 1/3 is 0.3..., 3/3 is 0.9... or 1. We cannot express some numbers, like pi, because (as far as we know) they never happen to repeat. They are not neatly divisible into tidy little tens or tenths. Therefore we have symbols to represent them, and you replace the symbol with an appropriately-precise value for any real-world applications.
We have enough digits of pi to perform any calculation we as a species are likely to need to perform. If we need more, we'll crunch them out. We're OK with an approximation of it (hell, most people are OK with 3.14 as a value, some calculations like estimating paint coverage are perfectly OK with "about three and a quarter", some fast estimates are acceptable with "between three and four". Just a few more digits could calculate the circumference of the Earth to within a few feet, so we're pretty good, and a few more and we're into "distance to other solar systems within a few millimeters" territory). People who need more precise approximations of it use them. But few people pretend that pi is truly represented by any number they enter into their calculators. It's just "good enough that I bought enough paint without buying too much", "good enough so my building won't fall down" or "good enough to achieve orbit."
The problem is that you cannot "floor" or "ceiling" 0.9... into anything but 1.0.
It's already 1.0. "flooring" it would give you 1.0.
The "..." means there is an infinite number of nines. It does not mean "for a finite number of nines".
For a decimal place with any finite number of nines, the gap between it and 1.0 decreases as you increase the number of nines. For any arbitrarily large finite number of nines, you don't have 1. For infinite lines, you do.
Let me put it a simpler way.
What's three thirds? 1.
How do you express one third in decimal? 0.3...
What do you get when you multiply one third by three in decimal? 0.9...
What is the difference between three thirds in fractions (3 * 1/3 = 1) and three thirds in decimal (0.3.. * 3 = 0.9...)? Only the notation used to express the number.
With an infinite number of nines, 0.999... is precisely equal to one. The ellipses mean that there are already an infinite number of nines, not an arbitrarily large finite number of them. "..." is not "approaches infinity", it's "infinity."
You are confusing the concepts of "for an increasingly large finite number of nines" and "for an infinite number of nines". The ellipses mean infinity, they don't mean "really, really big finite number".
I agree that, for any finite number of nines, the numbers are approximate, and your formula holds pretty well if "..." meant "a finite repeat of nines". A decimal place with three nines after it is not equal to one. A decimal place with eleventy gazillion nines after it is not 1. A decimal place with eleventeen brazillion nines after it is not 1.
0.9... does not represent any of those. It represents a decimal place with an infinite number of nines after it. As you increase the number of nines, the number approaches 1.0. The problem is that the ellipses mean you've REACHED an infinite number of nines, therefore you have reached 1.0.
Let's put it another way. The stated proof is way too complex. I'm a programmer, I like simple. Let's do a much simpler proof.
What is three times one third? (3 * 1/3)? That very easily translates to 3/3, which, would you agree, is three thirds? Would you agree that three thirds is equal to one? See, in fractions, this is easy.
But let's express that in decimal. In decimal, you'd express 1/3 as 0.3..., right?
So if you take three thirds, you have (3 * 0.3...) = 0.9...
Is there some magical property to cutting things in thirds that makes the sum of the thirds not equal to the whole it came from? No. Three thirds is one. Therefore, 0.9... is 1.0.
If I take a pie and cut it into absolutely precise thirds (with no waste on the knife), I have three thirds of a pie. I can express each third as 0.3... of a pie. All three, when I moosh them back together, make three thirds, or 0.9... of a pie. But if I look at the pie, I have the whole pie, which is 1.0 pies.
It's the fact that you are handling something in decimal that is not, in fact, perfectly expressable in decimal. 0.9... is three thirds of 1.0, the same as 0.3... is one third of 1.0
Do you check your email over WiFi? Have you configured your email to check over a secured connection (hint: very, very few ISPs actually support this!)?
There are a surprising number of services that do not use SSL (POP/SMTP for email, Instant Messenger, plain old FTP, etc), and even those that do sometimes only protect the actual login process.
I don't mean to sound paranoid, but you may be revealing more of your "secret" data than you think. Security is not accomplished using a single layer of protection. Particularly not when the single layer is woefully incomplete.
Sure, and once you crack the encryption (assuming there is any) you wait for the first machine to send the first packet of data to the WiFi access point, which (conveniently) has a recognized MAC address!
MAC address filtering isn't a bad idea, it's just not an effective one. It's a great extra layer of protection, but it's only the slightest bit effective if you also encrypt the control stream so a would-be hacker can't simply look for a known-good one.
Plus, and just as importantly, once the hacker can decrypt the data going over the wire, he or she may not give a shit about actually connecting to your access point. They can just record everything you send and receive, and even if you use SSL for all passwords on the Web and such they can still usually get URLs and often (because very few ISPs support encrypted email checking) your email address, password, and the contents of any email. Not to mention instant messages, the contents of any non-encrypted web pages, etc.
but the black live line only had a few nicks in the insulation, so either the black vinyl doesn't taste good or squirrels are smarter than rabbits.
I'd venture a guess that the second squirrel was a lot smarter than the first one. I'd bet that at least a couple of the nicks somewhere were all the way through, and somewhere out there there's a squirrel with some interesting facial marks that all the other squirrels have nicknamed "Sparky".
Though, I suppose you could simply make the Ethernet port an autodetect. If it doesn't see a simple DHCP network on the port, it hosts a 192.168.1.x LAN on that port so you can plug a computer into it and configure it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, that does stop him from (as h4rr4r suggested) putting it on a pole in the yard (probably pretty hard to argue that the grass is historic and would be irreparably damaged).
Sorry, that falls under the common area owned by the landlord. IANAL, but I've helped a few friends iron out details on this with their landlords and/or homeowner's associations. This particular case, however, appears to be a lost one. GGP could probably hang a dish outside his window, assuming his window was facing in the correct direction (which, in his case, it is not) and he could do so safely while not making it a permanent installation. But he's in the "rare exception" list that has no legally-protected solution for installing a dish. He can only make a temporary installation in the areas he has rented, and he doesn't control any areas that would allow him to receive signal.
However, a phased array could still be a winning solution there, because current units tend to be pretty small and subtle compared to a dish, and may not be as objectionable as a dish. Most of them are relatively small sealed discs that can be mounted on any flat surface at a variety of angles as long as they are pointed somewhat vaguely in the direction of the South sky (as seen from North America), and can be painted to match the surrounds in many cases. So the landlord (and historical district) might not object to a small disc mounted on the South side of the building roof with a wire running around to his window, for example, where actually screwing a DirectTV dish might be somewhat more controversial.
Of course, phased array units don't come cheap.
A couple of "first I found on Google" examples of phased-array satellite units currently available (I'm not recommending for or against these specific units at all, just a couple of examples of currently-available tech):
http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp?mc=06&p=KVHA7&d=KVH-TracVision-A7-InMotion-SUVMiniVan-DIRECTV-Satellite-TV-Antenna-System-(A7)&c=Satellite%20Dishes%20for%20SUVs&sku=
http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp?mc=06&p=01-0263-04&d=KVH-TracVision-R6-ST-InMotion-Statellite-TV-Antenna-System-w-Integrated-12V-DirecTV-Receiver-(R6ST)&c=Satellite%20Dishes%20for%20SUVs&sku=
So instead of one larger disc-shaped unit like the ones pictured above you could deploy a handful of really tiny units over a larger area and have them phase together to pick up a better signal. Put them far enough apart, and you could easily reproduce the effect of a 15-foot or even larger directional dish and resolve signal through some fairly significant material or interference.
In that case, the person who started this discussion might be able to get a signal, even through a roof, with enough phased elements spread over a large enough area. He'd have all of the bits inside his area of control and installed temporarily (and not have a 15-foot dish sitting in the middle of his living room that might upset his wife).
Alternatively, he might be able to get approval for a half-dozen flat bits of painted metal to be temporarily glued to the corners of the roof, with thin subtle wires run to his window, since none of the installations are considered permanent and would not affect the historic nature of the house in any way.
According to TFA, the "new idea" appears to be using purpose-built specialized processors and a more efficient algorithm.
The problem is that the dish weighs 25 pounds, offers significant wind resistance, cannot be used while the vehicle is in motion, needs to be aimed at a satellite each time the RV is moved, and depends on geosynchronous satellites or continuous aiming with a servomotor. It's also ugly, but that's an aesthetic problem, not a practical one.
The advantage of phased array systems like this would be that you don't need to deploy and aim the dish once you reach your destination. You simply turn the system on, and the handful of flat metal pads glued directly to the roof of your RV (plus possibly a couple or three on each side if you're in high latitudes) can pick up the signal without moving anything around. The pads can be utterly unobtrusive, installed permanently, and offer no wind resistance at all.
There are no moving parts because the array is "aimed" only in a virtual sense by software. You'll still need a good bit of surface area to pick up a useful signal, but that surface area can be flat and spread over a larger area in smaller bits (you don't need one big contiguous dish, just a few squares or rectangles of surface area). It can even track a moving satellite and keep it in view (or track a moving or geosync sat while you are driving down the road).
No wind resistance when driving, no moving parts to wear out or replace. Just a few metal bits glued flat to the roof, wired to a computer that compensates for the time difference between the various signals. You could get signal from multiple satellites in different parts of the sky simultaneously, or based on which one happens to be in the clearest view at the moment, without carrying around a sky chart and signal meter or depending on a complex array of servos to do it for you.
Phased arrays are not new. It just takes a lot of number-crunching and a lot of power, which up until now has been accomplished more cheaply by hammering out a parabolic dish and aiming at a stationary target, saving all that number-crunching.
This guy's algorithm and chip design may (or may not) make it cheap enough to be practical for routine use.
just in time for my presentation to the reagents
I bet he'll get a reaction.
Actually, you raise an interesting point.
There has already been a remake (season 3) where they addressed a bunch of additional issues, but in both of their original attempts they failed to do what they usually like to do in more recent shows - keep scaling up until you get the result stated in the myth.
That gives them some of the coolest moments of the show, like firing a car on a huge rocket sled to try and cut it in half on a reinforced blade on the plow myth, for example. And the show is about entertainment as well as (sometimes questionable) science.
Back to the choice of this particular myth for yet another revisit, which on the surface seems stupid.. I mean, why remake an already-twice-debunked myth?
Oh, wait, they have to scale up now to demonstrate the result.
What could possibly scale up to the kinds of solar focus you'd need to ignite a trireme?
Why, an existing solar conversion plant, of course! They have acres and acres of modern mirrors and can melt, well, anything you want to melt.
Highlight the power of harnessing solar energy by burning the shit out of a full-scale trireme, and show off a modern solar conversion plant at the same time, and give you a real idea of the amount of power available at one. Entertainment AND green energy win!
Now that you mention a possible political agenda, the choice of the Archimedes Mirror is a perfect one. Not to show the safety of solar power (though I'm sure the whole "this is safer because if it has a problem you shutter the mirrors and it burns itself out quickly" point will be driven home), but the amount of power available to harness out of it. By making a trireme explode into flame over a few dozen points simultaneously, perhaps?
I'm probably wrong, but I'm really looking forward to what they plan to do with their Presidential bully pulpit.
Sails have several major things going against them as an attack vector. First, they tend to be pretty light in color, so a good bit of the light reflects rather than being absorbed. Second, they tend to flap and/or move more erratically, making it simultaneously harder to focus on a specific place. Third, a sail fire is non-fatal to the ship itself, and is a lot easier to put out than a pitch fire. If you want to set a trireme on fire, aim low and aim at pitch. It's dark, it doesn't move a lot, and once you ignite it it burns like a sunovabitch.
More importantly, their initial tests were not testing the actual flammability of the material, but what temperatures could be achieved using bronze shields that had been shaped as half-decent mirrors. Their maximum temperature at 60 feet using 400 square feet of bronze was about 200 degrees (not only not enough to ignite dry material, but not enough to boil water). Even dry paper, as Ray Bradbury taught us all, ignites at around 451 degrees. The Mythbusters were shooting for 600 degrees to guarantee ignition, and even once they added a bunch of additional mirrors they only got 280.
They did revisit it, by the way. An MIT team was challenged to repeat the experiment at 100 feet, and they were actually able to ignite the boat at 75 feet. Using modern glass mirrors (not bronze) to ignite a dry boat (not damp) located on a rooftop in full sun and at optimal angle (so if you had an Eastern shore, you'd better hope the enemy was attacking in the mid-morning hours).
It wasn't just busted because they couldn't set a boat on fire at a reasonable distance, but because they could only set it on fire with non-period materials under optimal circumstances using potentially thousands of troops, where a simple flaming arrow could be fired by a single person, start a much more aggressive fire, and work over at least three times the distance (100 yards isn't a terribly long arrow shot).
Frankly, I'm with a few other people, it's a great idea getting the Mythbusters involved in getting kids into science (because, as flawed as it is, the show really does push experimentation and questioning your assumptions, which is the foundation of science). It's just that doing so by doing a THIRD take on a myth that is so obviously debunked is.. well.. a little foolish.
The Mythbusters don't always get it right the first time, but they have demonstrated that they are VERY open to disproving their own prior results, and have done so on more than one occasion. They aren't experts in anything they do, but they are good scientists, in that they make an honest effort to control for variables and don't appear to instantly dismiss theories and feedback they don't agree with. They subject it to experimentation.
Plus, of course, there's almost always a satisfying explosion. :)
Last week called. They want 10/10/10 (official launch date of Ubuntu 10.10) back. :)
Seriously, if 10.10 isn't "finished" (which, after testing it, I'd argue you have a decent point) then why did they release it last week? When will it be "finished", because I don't see a date for that on Ubuntu's web site.
There were several multi-touch gestures, but it would have been nice to have him move his hand a little more slowly and make it more obvious which finger(s) were on the screen at any time. For example, he appeared to call up the desktop split view by using two fingers, and tapping all five fingers of one hand on the screen seemed to call up a tasklist or somesuch.
As the article itself stated, the multi-touch gesture library is very limited at the moment in 10.10, but 11.04 should expand that library considerably.
No, you're just not touching it the right way.
Can it do pinch zoom? Two finger scrolling or one finger? Will two fingers simulate a right-click? (It's a mostly desktop OS, so unlike in iOS right clicking is probably pretty useful). I'm sure I could find out the answers, but if you're going to make a promo video for "multi-touch" show me some "multi-touching".
From the article:
One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them. But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.
So I'd say, no, it doesn't have more than just what they demonstrated
At least not yet. But you'll probably have a lot of them delivered by, interestingly enough, Natty Narwhal (which is odd because Narwhals don't look like they'd be too interested in multitouch).
Given that I'm sure the multitouch library will expand even more significantly for 11.10, I'd like to make a suggestion for the name: Omnipotent Octopus.
I think the implication is that "low-yield" generally means "unprofitable", so the honestly involved in the claimed results a scientific endeavor has a lot to do with how much profit is expected from said results.
Note that TFS says "major improvements", not "improvements". Pharma/Med companies generally only profit significantly from "major improvements".
If research were to uncover a drug that is 1% more effective in preventing hayfever than existing prescription meds, that would be an "improvement". Hardly a "major" one, but an improvement. But it costs a lot of money to put a drug to market.
So I, as the company that employs that scientist, have five choices:
1. Fund a completely honest study and safety testing at a cost of $X so the product can go to market and the consumer will say "1% improvement? Ho, hum, I'm happy with what I have." I lost money, but maybe a few patients ended up with a better quality of life.
2. Decide it's unprofitable, but publish the results so anyone can freely use it, since it's not worth the effort for me to pursue it. Maybe someone else can use it as a foundation to improving the state of medicine. I won't profit from it, but the world might be a better place.
3. Continue funding the project in the hopes that further advances become more profitable. Maybe I'll make money someday, maybe I won't. Ya rolls the dice, ya takes yer chances.
4. Tell the scientist to stop wasting time on it, assign them to another project, and have their notes shredded so at least competitors can't use it for something.
5. Fund a study that demonstrates a completely revolutionary breakthrough in effectiveness, advertise it as such, push it for a lot of off-label uses, send some doctors some nice pens, hope the placebo effect holds when people switch to it, and milk that mooing cash cow as long as my patent holds out, then shove it to OTC and come out with a very-slightly-tweaked new version of it immediately thereafter that has a couple of random letters after the name in the hopes I can get people to think it's a different med, and repeat the cycle as many times as there are two-letter combinations.
I've ranked them in ascending order of likelihood.
Yes. With any luck, they might actually observe the elusive "Gotthard Particle".
I don't think Arudino-based devices would get a free pass just because they used an Arudino as one component. The sticker could appear on the Arudino, but not on the locked-down devices that people build from them.
In fact, I don't see this sticker appearing on vendor-locked (AT&T, Verizon, etc) Android-based phones. An unlocked Android phone might get an FSF sticker because you can do what you want with it, but the one Verizon sells you certainly shouldn't deserve that same labeling, unless Verizon included a rootkit CD and instructions with the phone, and continued to support phones once rootkitted.
I agree. While I like this movement overall, I don't think they should be shooting for this kind of exclusivity.
"Works with Windows" and "Made for Mac" are marketing stickers. In fact, they are exactly the same kind of marketing sticker the FSF wants to use.
It's the hardware inside the box that should count for the FSF endorsement, not the labels on the box. If I can hack the hardware and do what I want with it, why in hell would I care that the manufacturers have entered marketing agreements with Microsoft or Apple?
Then *gasp* don't buy that product. Wow, that was hard, right?
Precisely the action that this endorsement is designed to support. Helping to make it easier for people to decide what to buy and what to avoid, based on their personal preferences. If you don't care about how "free (as in speech)" the item you are buying is, you'll ignore the sticker and buy based on what you DO care about. If you do care (either way), you can either prefer or avoid products with that sticker, in accordance with your own preferences.
If this works, and I'm not saying it will, but if it does, it basically means that people who have a preference (either way) about locked-down products will use the FSF endorsement as a guide to the products they do want. Exactly like the way some people currently look for "Works with Windows", "Fair Trade", "Organic", "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", or "Underwriters Lab" stickers on a product currently to help determine if the item they are purchasing meets their purchasing preferences.
Correct. thanks. :)
It's simply the fact that choosing a numbering system that is based on tens cannot precisely represent every possible number we want to represent. So we use symbols for those special somethings like pi, the square root of negative one, and we have clumsy but workable notation for things that repeat infinitely like 1/3.
We use portions of ten because we have ten fingers. If we had six fingers, we'd have no problem with thirds (2 + 2 + 2 = 10) but expressing five sixths in decimal would totally fuck with our finite heads.
Having said that, for all finite numbers, decimal is very damned good, but we should not pretend that it can accurately represent every value. Some numbers can be expressed in decimal if we introduce infinite ellipses. 1/3 is 0.3..., 3/3 is 0.9... or 1. We cannot express some numbers, like pi, because (as far as we know) they never happen to repeat. They are not neatly divisible into tidy little tens or tenths. Therefore we have symbols to represent them, and you replace the symbol with an appropriately-precise value for any real-world applications.
We have enough digits of pi to perform any calculation we as a species are likely to need to perform. If we need more, we'll crunch them out. We're OK with an approximation of it (hell, most people are OK with 3.14 as a value, some calculations like estimating paint coverage are perfectly OK with "about three and a quarter", some fast estimates are acceptable with "between three and four". Just a few more digits could calculate the circumference of the Earth to within a few feet, so we're pretty good, and a few more and we're into "distance to other solar systems within a few millimeters" territory). People who need more precise approximations of it use them. But few people pretend that pi is truly represented by any number they enter into their calculators. It's just "good enough that I bought enough paint without buying too much", "good enough so my building won't fall down" or "good enough to achieve orbit."
The problem is that you cannot "floor" or "ceiling" 0.9... into anything but 1.0.
It's already 1.0. "flooring" it would give you 1.0.
The "..." means there is an infinite number of nines. It does not mean "for a finite number of nines".
For a decimal place with any finite number of nines, the gap between it and 1.0 decreases as you increase the number of nines. For any arbitrarily large finite number of nines, you don't have 1. For infinite lines, you do.
Let me put it a simpler way.
What's three thirds? 1.
How do you express one third in decimal? 0.3...
What do you get when you multiply one third by three in decimal? 0.9...
What is the difference between three thirds in fractions (3 * 1/3 = 1) and three thirds in decimal (0.3.. * 3 = 0.9...)? Only the notation used to express the number.
Infinity is hard.
With an infinite number of nines, 0.999... is precisely equal to one. The ellipses mean that there are already an infinite number of nines, not an arbitrarily large finite number of them. "..." is not "approaches infinity", it's "infinity."
You are confusing the concepts of "for an increasingly large finite number of nines" and "for an infinite number of nines". The ellipses mean infinity, they don't mean "really, really big finite number".
I agree that, for any finite number of nines, the numbers are approximate, and your formula holds pretty well if "..." meant "a finite repeat of nines". A decimal place with three nines after it is not equal to one. A decimal place with eleventy gazillion nines after it is not 1. A decimal place with eleventeen brazillion nines after it is not 1.
0.9... does not represent any of those. It represents a decimal place with an infinite number of nines after it. As you increase the number of nines, the number approaches 1.0. The problem is that the ellipses mean you've REACHED an infinite number of nines, therefore you have reached 1.0.
Let's put it another way. The stated proof is way too complex. I'm a programmer, I like simple. Let's do a much simpler proof.
What is three times one third? (3 * 1/3)? That very easily translates to 3/3, which, would you agree, is three thirds? Would you agree that three thirds is equal to one? See, in fractions, this is easy.
But let's express that in decimal. In decimal, you'd express 1/3 as 0.3..., right?
So if you take three thirds, you have (3 * 0.3...) = 0.9...
Is there some magical property to cutting things in thirds that makes the sum of the thirds not equal to the whole it came from? No. Three thirds is one. Therefore, 0.9... is 1.0.
If I take a pie and cut it into absolutely precise thirds (with no waste on the knife), I have three thirds of a pie. I can express each third as 0.3... of a pie. All three, when I moosh them back together, make three thirds, or 0.9... of a pie. But if I look at the pie, I have the whole pie, which is 1.0 pies.
It's the fact that you are handling something in decimal that is not, in fact, perfectly expressable in decimal. 0.9... is three thirds of 1.0, the same as 0.3... is one third of 1.0
Infinity is hard.
Do you check your email over WiFi? Have you configured your email to check over a secured connection (hint: very, very few ISPs actually support this!)?
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?Guid=b454828c-37a6-459a-9191-2a1b0f2bb20e http://www22.verizon.com/ResidentialHelp/FiOSInternet/Email/Setup%20And%20Use/QuestionsOne/85515
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19960885-northeast-Verizon-FIOS-and-Outlook-2003-Setup -- note the quote "Server Requires Authentication should not be checked."
There are a surprising number of services that do not use SSL (POP/SMTP for email, Instant Messenger, plain old FTP, etc), and even those that do sometimes only protect the actual login process.
I don't mean to sound paranoid, but you may be revealing more of your "secret" data than you think. Security is not accomplished using a single layer of protection. Particularly not when the single layer is woefully incomplete.
Not to be pedantic, but... oh, hell, I'll be pedantic.
Your open-and-isolated WAP is not secured. It's isolated.
Your LAN is secured from your WAP. Your WAP is not secured.
Sure, and once you crack the encryption (assuming there is any) you wait for the first machine to send the first packet of data to the WiFi access point, which (conveniently) has a recognized MAC address!
MAC address filtering isn't a bad idea, it's just not an effective one. It's a great extra layer of protection, but it's only the slightest bit effective if you also encrypt the control stream so a would-be hacker can't simply look for a known-good one.
Plus, and just as importantly, once the hacker can decrypt the data going over the wire, he or she may not give a shit about actually connecting to your access point. They can just record everything you send and receive, and even if you use SSL for all passwords on the Web and such they can still usually get URLs and often (because very few ISPs support encrypted email checking) your email address, password, and the contents of any email. Not to mention instant messages, the contents of any non-encrypted web pages, etc.
whipper blades
They come standard on cars now? Those kinky Floridians.
but the black live line only had a few nicks in the insulation, so either the black vinyl doesn't taste good or squirrels are smarter than rabbits.
I'd venture a guess that the second squirrel was a lot smarter than the first one. I'd bet that at least a couple of the nicks somewhere were all the way through, and somewhere out there there's a squirrel with some interesting facial marks that all the other squirrels have nicknamed "Sparky".
That's a tougher one.
Though, I suppose you could simply make the Ethernet port an autodetect. If it doesn't see a simple DHCP network on the port, it hosts a 192.168.1.x LAN on that port so you can plug a computer into it and configure it that way.