If they're the same as the Southern Baptists, it's no wonder the US is scared witless. <sarcasm>
Seriously, it doesn't matter who ends up with control, what matters is that there will now be a highly unstable period in which the prior owners of the hardware could potentially walk off with it and/or sell it to someone it shouldn't. It's absolutely certain, in any dictatorship, that there'll be people in the old regime who will absolutely not want the new regime having any such device.
...is only a problem because students learn to pass a test and the test is written with that objective in mind. If exams forced critical thinking and reasoning, rather than recitation, there would be nothing to look up (apart from "standard forms" and those should be provided with any competent exam anyway).
Can't speak for others, but I understand what you mean. And, yes, the easier something is, the harder it is to maintain security. Sandboxing all autorun code might help but that would degrade the ease-of-use.
The speed of light (really, the speed that the speed of photons are asymptotic to as the density of the medium decreases, such that at a theoretical zero density you would have C - the speed of light in the theoretic sense that physicists use the term) is fixed. The zero point is also fixed.
The question, then, is the size of the unit. If we were defining units completely from scratch, then you would forget about trying to find what is close to the meter but rather use entirely fundamental units in the manner of SI (in other words, you only ever use base units, never multiples or fractions).
Ideally, you'd have an SI-like set of these "core units" for time, distance, mass and all other absolutely fundamental units. You then rebuild the SI composite units (such as force, power, etc) from these core units.
The meter would then be defined as a very specific fraction of the core unit for distance, the second would be defined as a very specific fraction of the core unit for time, etc.
In practice, what is used are universal phenomena that will hold the same value everywhere, tied to fundamental constants, in a manner such as to produce definitions of metric units that are also universal and invariant, but are arbitrary to some extent. The choice of caesium for time is not ideal, because we use carbon-12 to define molecular weights, and inconsistent units isn't SI.
However, the principle is nonetheless sound. A given isotope of caesium will be the same the universe over. The speed of light is also the same the universe over.
The "ideal" that is desired by physicists is to tie everything to only fundamental constants (c, pi, e, the golden number, the Feigenbaum constant, etc), with absolutely no need to use any arbitrary physical objects. Currently, it is disputed as to whether this is even possible in theory. However, if it could be achieved then the definitions obtained through this process would be entirely valid and usable in any universe (assuming one of the multiverse theories is correct) and anything derived from first principles in which these definitions can be inserted is also going to be multiversal.
In the case of galaxies, most of this wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. There's no obvious invariant that you can tie to a fundamental constant. But there ARE invariants, if the current models are correct. Any galaxy that exists or ever could exist is believed to form around a supermassive black hole essentially as an accretion disk, such that the density within the disk is sufficient to form stable stars AND that these stars will remain within the accretion disk within the full stellar lifetime. The accretion disk model implies that the center of gravity and center of rotation of the black hole is within itself, as is the center of gravity and the center of rotation of the galaxy itself.
There are ring galaxies, however, so we have to make one minor change to this. The dust that eventually forms the galaxy must have either a decaying or stable orbit, so as to form the disk or a ring. (Typically ring galaxies are formed from the centre exploding, but how they get to that state doesn't matter too much. You've a decaying orbit or a stable orbit, and the center of that orbit is the black hole.)
Far as I know, this definition would not apply to globular clusters, or even be close.
There is no current owner of fish.co, so plenty.of.fish could buy it.
Second, it's not cyber-squatting if you're selling a subdomain. I'd regard it as far more ethical and far more in line with the notion of a domain heirarchy to encourage even-handed reselling of subdomains.
Third, why would there be any track of hits? There may be a certain number of hostname lookups (not usually tracked by anyone), but nobody would go through anyone else. All the fish.co owner would be doing is renting a prefix, just the same as any top level domain owner does.
Fourth, if I wanted to call foul on DNS abuse, I'd call foul on having businesses own one domain name per product plus their own corporate domain name, all coming directly off the TLD. It makes reusing common words extremely difficult, it clutters the TLD, it makes searches slow, and it is bloody stupid. It also isolates the product from the brand, effectively de-branding what is being sold, which even hurts those following the practice.
Why bother with hyphens? plenty.of.fish doesn't use any more characters and is arguably more readable. Yes, it means you have to worry about "fish" being taken, but fish.co is currently listed as available (it's a parked address) so plenty.of.fish.co would be a perfectly good registration. For now.
The main benefit of having it done like this is that whoever owns fish.co can resell names from that without conflicting with their own site. You can't really do the same with offish.com.
The creating an account page was broken when I tried the site, the tech support sent abusive mail, so I now regard them as a bunch of juveniles. A dating site that is actually usable has to be their first priority, competent and friendly tech support needs to be their next.
No, but I would consider a scientific definition to require some very specific collection of theories and to not require non-theorized constructs of any kind. (Thus, requiring a planet to be a specific size or in a specific location is NOT a scientific definition; requiring it to have certain properties that a well-defined group of planetary-like objects will all share and all definitely non-planetary-objects will not possess is a scientific definition.)
It's the same way we define fundamental properties like distance in terms of fundamental constants. Distance is defined relative to the speed of light, for example.
I agree it would require more teachers - I'd reckon a ratio of 1:10 would be about right - and that it would require far better pay. And I also agree that almost nobody would be willing to accept the cost, even though it would produce a far superior workforce and therefore a far superior economy. It'd be tough to push an idea like this through even if you could prove beyond doubt that the extra money made would offset the entire additional cost -- and I'm not completely sure it would.
I disagree on a number of your points. I argue that education should first and foremost be concerned with maximizing the ability of each individual (within reason - resources are finite). Let being "better people" be a product of better understanding rather than a product of what the teaching generation thinks might be better.
I also argue that maximal education will take care of the job market. The job market shifts, so teaching to what is needed now won't help. It takes 18-20 years to get through the educational system from start to finish (excluding PhDs and medical qualifications). Trying to optimize for where we might be 18 years from now is a joke - futurologists can't even get technology right a single decade ahead. Worse, people will remain in the job market for 30+ years and will often have very little supplemental education in that time. The world moves on, but employees generally don't. To counter this, people need transferrable skills and research skills - neither of which are particularly valuable to the market per se but which will enable people to remain valuable by staying current on their own.
Education cannot be treated as competition, I agree, but not entirely for the reason you give. When a person learns to compete, they learn the skills to exploit the rules. A trivial example is sprinting. Why do racers lean forwards at the end? Easy - they can use their height to have some part of them cross the line before their feet do. A 6' tall athlete can then gain an advantage over a 5' tall athlete, even when their speed on the ground is absolutely identical.
When students study, they're studying how to get the best grade, which means giving the desired answer (whether or not the answer is correct), memorizing key words that can be used to score bonus marks, learning the standard forms of exam questions, researching past papers for patterns, etc. Actually knowing the subject is worth very little.
If you want education to be effective, grading must be on the advancement that individual has made in their knowledge relative to where they were previously, with respect to where you would expect their understanding to be given what they were taught. In a theoretical maximal education system, a student who has been taught as much as that given student could be expected to learn and understand should score 100% in respect to where they should be from where they were. Anything further shows greater understanding than had been expected and the student is therefore being under-taught.
The syllabus should define core areas that have to be understood before anything else can be truly comprehended (in the same way the trunk of a tree is what allows you to have branches), but that is all it should define. Different people learn different concepts at different rates with different prior knowledge being required. If you want to get close to maximizing how much you learn, you can't be shoved into branches that hold no interest and provide no momentum. It will merely damage your interest in the subject and therefore hinder your ability to learn the things you do well.
There's plenty of evidence that the brain will develop (and expand) in heavily utilized areas, which strongly suggests that not only is the brain accomodating the specific information but is also increasing the capacity to learn more.
I argue that it is in eliminating teaching practices that damage ability and focussing on areas that enhance capacity that education can do the most good. It should not only increase the ability to learn but also increase how long you will be able to learn rapidly and increase the effective lifespan of the brain before aging causes impaired ability.
Yes. The message is that most Americans have their brains in 1810, imagine the Wild West actually existed (and should be reproduced as much as possible, whether the rest of the population enjoys breathing or not), hate the idea that school should involve learning things - and, indeed, hate school. The President is no genius but has figured out that perhaps this isn't the ideal direction.
NASA is no more geared to commercial spaceflight than Red Bull's Formula 1 team is geared to making SUVs. NASA is, however, geared towards research and design, non-terrestrial physical sciences, deep space communications, etc.
Specialists are capable of going further in a specific field than any generalist. It would be suicide for them to try and compete with fly-by-night rocket groups that can launch satellites from disused oil rigs. It is seriously doubtful they could seriously battle for the LEO passenger market, or even with the Russians on the millionaires-in-space front. Frankly, I don't think they should.
NASA should not go commercial. They should invest more on ion drive research (how else will we get TIE fighters?), more on reliable landers (reusable spacecraft and/or colonies won't be possible until we improve the reliability aspect), more on deep space missions (commercial vendors won't bother mining asteroids until we find asteroids that we can profitably reach and mine - nickle isn't nearly valuable enough), more on alternative launch technologies (turbine-assisted ramjets, ski-jump ramps, cannon-assisted ramjets - all areas NASA is working on or have done), more on computational fluid dynamics (it's bad enough designing aircraft for atmospheres you can actually test in).
These are areas where the commercial value is next to zero until AFTER the results are in. The private sector won't invest in this stuff. Or if it does, not nearly enough. But the private sector can do bugger all until those results are indeed in.
NASA should be devolved from the Government, much in the same way the BBC is devolved from the British Government (via charter and as a source of funding but not under the control of nor under the sole funding of), but it should not be privatised or seek to use commerce to make the gap between what it needs and what scraps the politicians will give it after funding military escapades.
As far as Laptops are concerned, non-Windows basically means the XO. Which, since the latest version uses ARM, also means non-Intel, which precludes all binary-only software for Linux even if you wanted Linux and not some other OS.
At the very least, then, they are saying that there are interesting subsets of the problem-space that are not truly NP but have been classed as such because the general case was.
This could lead to some very interesting consequences.
I won't say every asymmetrical encryption algorithm relies on the factoring problem, as there are asymmetrical algorithms which are proof against even quantum computing attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're the same as the Southern Baptists, it's no wonder the US is scared witless. <sarcasm>
Seriously, it doesn't matter who ends up with control, what matters is that there will now be a highly unstable period in which the prior owners of the hardware could potentially walk off with it and/or sell it to someone it shouldn't. It's absolutely certain, in any dictatorship, that there'll be people in the old regime who will absolutely not want the new regime having any such device.
...is only a problem because students learn to pass a test and the test is written with that objective in mind. If exams forced critical thinking and reasoning, rather than recitation, there would be nothing to look up (apart from "standard forms" and those should be provided with any competent exam anyway).
Can't speak for others, but I understand what you mean. And, yes, the easier something is, the harder it is to maintain security. Sandboxing all autorun code might help but that would degrade the ease-of-use.
The speed of light (really, the speed that the speed of photons are asymptotic to as the density of the medium decreases, such that at a theoretical zero density you would have C - the speed of light in the theoretic sense that physicists use the term) is fixed. The zero point is also fixed.
The question, then, is the size of the unit. If we were defining units completely from scratch, then you would forget about trying to find what is close to the meter but rather use entirely fundamental units in the manner of SI (in other words, you only ever use base units, never multiples or fractions).
Ideally, you'd have an SI-like set of these "core units" for time, distance, mass and all other absolutely fundamental units. You then rebuild the SI composite units (such as force, power, etc) from these core units.
The meter would then be defined as a very specific fraction of the core unit for distance, the second would be defined as a very specific fraction of the core unit for time, etc.
In practice, what is used are universal phenomena that will hold the same value everywhere, tied to fundamental constants, in a manner such as to produce definitions of metric units that are also universal and invariant, but are arbitrary to some extent. The choice of caesium for time is not ideal, because we use carbon-12 to define molecular weights, and inconsistent units isn't SI.
However, the principle is nonetheless sound. A given isotope of caesium will be the same the universe over. The speed of light is also the same the universe over.
The "ideal" that is desired by physicists is to tie everything to only fundamental constants (c, pi, e, the golden number, the Feigenbaum constant, etc), with absolutely no need to use any arbitrary physical objects. Currently, it is disputed as to whether this is even possible in theory. However, if it could be achieved then the definitions obtained through this process would be entirely valid and usable in any universe (assuming one of the multiverse theories is correct) and anything derived from first principles in which these definitions can be inserted is also going to be multiversal.
In the case of galaxies, most of this wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. There's no obvious invariant that you can tie to a fundamental constant. But there ARE invariants, if the current models are correct. Any galaxy that exists or ever could exist is believed to form around a supermassive black hole essentially as an accretion disk, such that the density within the disk is sufficient to form stable stars AND that these stars will remain within the accretion disk within the full stellar lifetime. The accretion disk model implies that the center of gravity and center of rotation of the black hole is within itself, as is the center of gravity and the center of rotation of the galaxy itself.
There are ring galaxies, however, so we have to make one minor change to this. The dust that eventually forms the galaxy must have either a decaying or stable orbit, so as to form the disk or a ring. (Typically ring galaxies are formed from the centre exploding, but how they get to that state doesn't matter too much. You've a decaying orbit or a stable orbit, and the center of that orbit is the black hole.)
Far as I know, this definition would not apply to globular clusters, or even be close.
There is no current owner of fish.co, so plenty.of.fish could buy it.
Second, it's not cyber-squatting if you're selling a subdomain. I'd regard it as far more ethical and far more in line with the notion of a domain heirarchy to encourage even-handed reselling of subdomains.
Third, why would there be any track of hits? There may be a certain number of hostname lookups (not usually tracked by anyone), but nobody would go through anyone else. All the fish.co owner would be doing is renting a prefix, just the same as any top level domain owner does.
Fourth, if I wanted to call foul on DNS abuse, I'd call foul on having businesses own one domain name per product plus their own corporate domain name, all coming directly off the TLD. It makes reusing common words extremely difficult, it clutters the TLD, it makes searches slow, and it is bloody stupid. It also isolates the product from the brand, effectively de-branding what is being sold, which even hurts those following the practice.
Why bother with hyphens? plenty.of.fish doesn't use any more characters and is arguably more readable. Yes, it means you have to worry about "fish" being taken, but fish.co is currently listed as available (it's a parked address) so plenty.of.fish.co would be a perfectly good registration. For now.
The main benefit of having it done like this is that whoever owns fish.co can resell names from that without conflicting with their own site. You can't really do the same with offish.com.
Strange. I thought it sounded more like a line from Regular Show.
The creating an account page was broken when I tried the site, the tech support sent abusive mail, so I now regard them as a bunch of juveniles. A dating site that is actually usable has to be their first priority, competent and friendly tech support needs to be their next.
No, but I would consider a scientific definition to require some very specific collection of theories and to not require non-theorized constructs of any kind. (Thus, requiring a planet to be a specific size or in a specific location is NOT a scientific definition; requiring it to have certain properties that a well-defined group of planetary-like objects will all share and all definitely non-planetary-objects will not possess is a scientific definition.)
It's the same way we define fundamental properties like distance in terms of fundamental constants. Distance is defined relative to the speed of light, for example.
What does my 20th level hamster (with Power Word Squeak) mimic?
Depends. If they wear white, they have ultraviolet privs.
I agree it would require more teachers - I'd reckon a ratio of 1:10 would be about right - and that it would require far better pay. And I also agree that almost nobody would be willing to accept the cost, even though it would produce a far superior workforce and therefore a far superior economy. It'd be tough to push an idea like this through even if you could prove beyond doubt that the extra money made would offset the entire additional cost -- and I'm not completely sure it would.
I disagree on a number of your points. I argue that education should first and foremost be concerned with maximizing the ability of each individual (within reason - resources are finite). Let being "better people" be a product of better understanding rather than a product of what the teaching generation thinks might be better.
I also argue that maximal education will take care of the job market. The job market shifts, so teaching to what is needed now won't help. It takes 18-20 years to get through the educational system from start to finish (excluding PhDs and medical qualifications). Trying to optimize for where we might be 18 years from now is a joke - futurologists can't even get technology right a single decade ahead. Worse, people will remain in the job market for 30+ years and will often have very little supplemental education in that time. The world moves on, but employees generally don't. To counter this, people need transferrable skills and research skills - neither of which are particularly valuable to the market per se but which will enable people to remain valuable by staying current on their own.
Education cannot be treated as competition, I agree, but not entirely for the reason you give. When a person learns to compete, they learn the skills to exploit the rules. A trivial example is sprinting. Why do racers lean forwards at the end? Easy - they can use their height to have some part of them cross the line before their feet do. A 6' tall athlete can then gain an advantage over a 5' tall athlete, even when their speed on the ground is absolutely identical.
When students study, they're studying how to get the best grade, which means giving the desired answer (whether or not the answer is correct), memorizing key words that can be used to score bonus marks, learning the standard forms of exam questions, researching past papers for patterns, etc. Actually knowing the subject is worth very little.
If you want education to be effective, grading must be on the advancement that individual has made in their knowledge relative to where they were previously, with respect to where you would expect their understanding to be given what they were taught. In a theoretical maximal education system, a student who has been taught as much as that given student could be expected to learn and understand should score 100% in respect to where they should be from where they were. Anything further shows greater understanding than had been expected and the student is therefore being under-taught.
The syllabus should define core areas that have to be understood before anything else can be truly comprehended (in the same way the trunk of a tree is what allows you to have branches), but that is all it should define. Different people learn different concepts at different rates with different prior knowledge being required. If you want to get close to maximizing how much you learn, you can't be shoved into branches that hold no interest and provide no momentum. It will merely damage your interest in the subject and therefore hinder your ability to learn the things you do well.
There's plenty of evidence that the brain will develop (and expand) in heavily utilized areas, which strongly suggests that not only is the brain accomodating the specific information but is also increasing the capacity to learn more.
I argue that it is in eliminating teaching practices that damage ability and focussing on areas that enhance capacity that education can do the most good. It should not only increase the ability to learn but also increase how long you will be able to learn rapidly and increase the effective lifespan of the brain before aging causes impaired ability.
Oh, that's easy. "If you're close enough to read this, you're in a deathtrap".
It *is* a feature. Since nobody RTFMs, actually having the link invisible saves on eye muscle movement.
Yes. The message is that most Americans have their brains in 1810, imagine the Wild West actually existed (and should be reproduced as much as possible, whether the rest of the population enjoys breathing or not), hate the idea that school should involve learning things - and, indeed, hate school. The President is no genius but has figured out that perhaps this isn't the ideal direction.
I think the 1 may be unnecessary.
I accidentally set fire to a dot matrix once - the paper somehow wrapped itself from the output back in, causing the motor to jam and ignite.
NASA is no more geared to commercial spaceflight than Red Bull's Formula 1 team is geared to making SUVs. NASA is, however, geared towards research and design, non-terrestrial physical sciences, deep space communications, etc.
Specialists are capable of going further in a specific field than any generalist. It would be suicide for them to try and compete with fly-by-night rocket groups that can launch satellites from disused oil rigs. It is seriously doubtful they could seriously battle for the LEO passenger market, or even with the Russians on the millionaires-in-space front. Frankly, I don't think they should.
NASA should not go commercial. They should invest more on ion drive research (how else will we get TIE fighters?), more on reliable landers (reusable spacecraft and/or colonies won't be possible until we improve the reliability aspect), more on deep space missions (commercial vendors won't bother mining asteroids until we find asteroids that we can profitably reach and mine - nickle isn't nearly valuable enough), more on alternative launch technologies (turbine-assisted ramjets, ski-jump ramps, cannon-assisted ramjets - all areas NASA is working on or have done), more on computational fluid dynamics (it's bad enough designing aircraft for atmospheres you can actually test in).
These are areas where the commercial value is next to zero until AFTER the results are in. The private sector won't invest in this stuff. Or if it does, not nearly enough. But the private sector can do bugger all until those results are indeed in.
NASA should be devolved from the Government, much in the same way the BBC is devolved from the British Government (via charter and as a source of funding but not under the control of nor under the sole funding of), but it should not be privatised or seek to use commerce to make the gap between what it needs and what scraps the politicians will give it after funding military escapades.
Yeah, turns out the mercury used was driving the hatters mad.
If you're using Nulfs2 for the filesystem the logs are on, then you can determine if data within the logs have been altered.
Alternatively, if the logging daemon writes events to a logger on another machine, then logs could only ever be appended to and never altered.
In this day and age, it seems pitiful that anyone would use a setup where the logs could be faked.
As far as Laptops are concerned, non-Windows basically means the XO. Which, since the latest version uses ARM, also means non-Intel, which precludes all binary-only software for Linux even if you wanted Linux and not some other OS.
At the very least, then, they are saying that there are interesting subsets of the problem-space that are not truly NP but have been classed as such because the general case was.
This could lead to some very interesting consequences.
Less practical, but this one should be just fine
I won't say every asymmetrical encryption algorithm relies on the factoring problem, as there are asymmetrical algorithms which are proof against even quantum computing attacks.