Re:hard part; not so; air may be transparent
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 2
actually, for the laser to be efficient, it MUST
emit light which is hardly ever absorped in air.
therefore, no superheating of air...
Air is indeed almost transparent at the wavelengths of interest -- notably visible light -- but it is not *perfectly* transparent. And even 0.1% absorption of a beam designed to vaporize a significant portion of a steel artillery shell in a fraction of a second is going to be auite suffient to superheat the air along the beam path.
Hey, any laser powerful enough to damage or divert artillery shells is going to make *thunder* when it fires. It's the same effect as lightning -- superheated air shocks away from the beam, then slams back in when the beam cuts off. That's way more impressive than zzzzt-whoosh-bleem, far as I'm concerned.
There's water ice on Pluto, Charon, and indeed just about all the larger outer-planet moons. Water ice is pretty much ubiquitous on solid objects far enough from stars. It's made of two of the commonest elements, after all.
The way we use heat to generate electricity is by converting linear motion into rotational motion in a generator. We don't create the linear motion, really... You make water hot and give it only one place to go, and when it expands it goes there. Same deal with geothermal energy, even wind energy (though heat isn't involved in creating the linear motion, there).
Yes it is. Winds are driven by atmospheric pressure differences, which are in turn created by temperature differences, which are created by uneven heating of the Earth by the Sun.
Seriously speaking, if they think at all like us, they will figure that the number has some special property and start testing it. Testing a number for primeness goes much faster than searching for new primes. Having discovered that it is indeed prime, they will know just how clever we are and hopefully be so impressed that they will decide not to devour us.
Here's my take on the definition, in a rather roundabout form.
For most of human history, if you didn't like things (government, economics, society) where you were, you could (at least in theory) walk a few hundred miles and find something completely different. A wanderer could, during his lifetime, sample dozens of entirely novel and separate ways of living. Renegades and outcasts could hope for a new home and a new start away from the powers that oppressed them.
Globalism is the end of that possibility. A uniform global economy and society erodes cultural differences and leaves no alternatives open to those who dislike the single society that remains.
The positive side of globalism is that it offers opportunities to those previously trapped under sadistic or merely uncaring domains. Globalism is slowly wiping out e.g. female genital mutilation, which is certainly a very good result.
The negative side, beyond the abstract harm of having no alternatives for the misfits, is that we become a monoculture in the biological sense, losing our memetic diversity and thus being more prone to societal "disease". A varied pool of cultures has more chance of weathering unexpected stresses than a single culture.
Anyway, that's my take on the issue. The other positions posted on this thread have also been intriguing.
But does it really make sense to defend our rights by taking them away? This question is rather urgent in the USA right now, as our civil liberties are being quickly eroded by anti-terrorism measures, all being sold as being essential to protecting "freedom". At what point do we give up so much freedom to protect freedom that there is scant freedom left to protect?
Censorship is one of those weapons which it is simply too dangerous to give to any power. It is far too easy to abuse, for too little real benefit. If you ban Nazi propaganda on the net, do you really imagine that people won't find it elsewhere, or even on now-illegal web sites outside the reach of European authorities? If anything, you'll add to the feeling of persecution and solidarity against attack that helps groups cohere and grow.
The only productive way to fight information is with more information, not less. If you disagree with right-wing propaganda, then start cranking out left-wing propaganda, or attention-grabbing critiques of right-wing propaganda. Do you truly believe that the only way to protect your teenagers is to keep them ignorant? Let them see and choose. Provide guidance and put all the facts out there. Give them alternatives.
The irony would be amusing were this subject not so important.
To all of those people - will you please not talk about things you don't understand? It's very easy to talk about freedom of speech whilst being very far away from the real issues, posting comfortably over your DSL link. Right here, right now, teenagers are being seduced into neo-fascist ideological groups every day. In France alone, there are local governments which have started banning books and newspapers that oppose them; Germany saw hundreds of attacks on blacks and non-Germans, with many of them dying in the attacks. [my emphasis]
Read that bold part again. Apparently, the author of this post abhors censorship of unwelcome ideas if his opponents are doing it, but encourages those with whom he agrees to censor all they want.
And that, my friends, is what's wrong. Everybody "knows" what content is "wrong" -- but no two people agree on the cut. So, for the safety of our right to self-expression, we must make the distasteful but necessary choice to allow all speech, even that which we know to be false and vicious. To do otherwise is to become as bad as our enemies, as the quote above vividly demonstrates.
What is the sound of one LinuxWorld story illustrating its own point, grasshopper?
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request
GET/site-stories/2001/1025.errorhandling.html.
Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Build a hugh radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, its the only place in the galaxy where you wouldn't pick up noise from us earthlings.
To quote the very end of the relevant Pink Floyd album, "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." The moon rotates once every 28 days, during which period it also completes one trip around the Earth (relative to an inertial frame of reference). So there is no "dark side"; the moon has a day-night cycle just like Earth's, only slower. (There may be permanently shadowed areas inside polar craters, but this hardly counts as a "side".) The "it's all dark" addendum is surprisingly good astronomy, too; the moon's surface is one of the darkest in the solar system, roughly comparable to rough asphalt in color and albedo (reflectivity).
What the moon does have is a far side. Because it is tidally locked to Earth, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same, so that it keeps one hemisphere permanently turned earthward, and the other permanently turned away. (Actually, there is a small amount of "rocking" (libation) which means we see a little more than half the moon as the edges rock into view, but this is a small (less than 10%) effect.)
And yes, the lunar farside would be a reasonable place to put some kinds of astronomical gear, but in general, deep space is better. Modern beam-forming is good enough to exclude most off-beam signals, and you can build arbitrarily large and delicate structures in microgravity. Building these at e.g. L4/5 or in an L1 halo orbit makes a lot of sense. The moon could still play a major role in such an effort, as a source of raw materials. A mining operation with a Heinlein-style electromagnetic mass driver could sling payloads of e.g. aluminum and oxygen up to a construction team building a large antenna elsewhere in Earth's neighborhood.
If you go into the store claiming your CD doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the best they will do is provide you with a replacement of the same item.
Even better! "Nah, this one didn't work either, may I have another, please?"..."Nope, this one won't play either, how about we try one more?"..."Sorry, still no luck, have any more of those?" Next thing you know the entire store allotment has been opened and returned to the distributor.
Tape copies are analog, so they degrade with each copy. Chains of three or more copies on standard consumer equipment result in sound quality poor enough that most people consider it unacceptable.
Sharing tape copies requires transfer of physical media. A single non-rights-managed digital file can be distributed to thousands of people in a matter of minutes, limited only by bandwidth. Tape copies, even with high-speed dupe decks and the like, take much longer to create -- and distribution is at the speed of face-to-face meetings or postal mail.
That's why tape copying is no longer seen as a threat, relative to the dangers of digital media copying.
To be finicky about it, yes, his post was not a felony -- but that's not what I originally said in any case. He described the commission of a felony. That is, if he actually built a circumvention applet as he claimed, then in so doing he committed a felony. "Commercial advantage" is pretty broad, and can include something as simple as *enabling* the use of copyrighted material without permission, even if you personally do not make commercial use of that material. Just ask Dmitri Skylarov.
How so? He described creating a circumvention device to overcome security protecting copyrighted intellectual property from unpermitted use. Creation of such circumvention devices is expressly illegalized by the DMCA. So on what basis are you claiming otherwise?
Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong? I mean, obviously the sight of the WTC in these movies may be upsetting to some people, but in my opinion, wiping them out of movies and tv shows like they never even existed is extremely disrespectful to the memories of those who lost their lives in the disaster.
I definitely agree. It sometimes reminds me of the Orwellian vision of continuously altered history, in which all records were updated to reflect the current version of truth, making it look as if there had never been a different one. I understand that the surface purpose of this editing is to avoid pangs of unpleasant emotion, but I'm not sure if avoidance is the healthiest course.
I'm reminded of Jessica Mitford's analysis of the funeral industry, which has so sanitized and commercialized death that families have no practical connection to the corpses of their loved ones, and thus often have difficulty dealing with the reality of the event. Sometimes exposure rather than avoidance is the fastest path to acceptance of a tragedy.
Since I'm not keen on running code from "John Doe" I wanted to see what it did and thus decompiled the applet. It took me about 15 minutes to CP (cut'n paste) the decoding code into a new app which created link pages in normal HTML without an applet.
Just for the record, you do realize that you're now a felon under the DMCA, right? Not to say anything about the ethics of the situation, but The Man could throw you in the stripey hole for years, should this come to their attention.
Pretty absurd, huh? Write your congresscritters. Contribute to EFF. Fight to reverse the DMCA, before you end up fighting for reduced bail.
6) We all liked how they made it seem like this is the first time they've really gone away from Earth. Thing is, you'd think they had already been doing that with ships that could do less than Warp-5 and as a result would have at least met a FEW more species and learned stuff from them. It seems like the Vulcans hold a monopoly on information in this series.
Definitely a consistency problem there. They had a character who had grown up on human-operated interstellar freighters, so clearly we've been out among the stars for at least decades before the time of the Enterprise mission. But if this were so, you'd think Starfleet would be less "babes in the woods" about who and what lives nearby, what their habits are, and so forth.
In a similar vein, putting the Klingon homeworld 4 days from Earth at warp 4.5 is just plain wrong. That puts the capitals of Klingon and Federation space about six hours apart by Kirk's era. Hard to see how one or the other world (or both) avoided obliteration during the rather long war between the two.
Quibbles aside, though, I was pleasantly surprised by the pilot. I'll definitely be tuning in to see if they can grow the show into something great.
It's much better to fix your own security problems, and not depend on some worm that says it's white.
Of course. However, we all pay the price (direct, in network slowdowns, and indirect, in the threat of government regulation) for sites which do not fix their own security problems. How should we respond?
An instructive analogy: Suppose you notice that your neighbor's house is on fire. This is obviously a big problem for your neighbor, but it's also a big potential problem for you -- left uncontrolled, the fire could easily spread to your house. You try to alert your neighbor, but get no response. Does it make sense for you to call 911? Perhaps even use your own garden hose to try to control the fire? Of course; anyone would do this, and nobody would say you were doing anything wrong.
On an internet thriving with worms of all greyscale values, properly administered sites won't need to worry about them, and improperly administered sites will hopefully get dogpiled so quickly that they'll either be forcibly patched or crash in minutes. When the vast majority of sites are being properly administered, all flavors of worm will starve for lack of prey.
Having had to play through some real stinkers of games before
How many more helpless gamers will we allow to be bullied by the fascist Game Enforcement Agency? Well I remember that midnight knock at my door, and the trenchcoated goons who swarmed into my home and forced me at gunpoint to play Eleventh Hour. I screamed "But it's a stinker!", hoping for mercy, but it was no use. They made me play through the entire thing, twice. I was left a broken man.
Encryption tool installation and use are still too complicated for the average user out there. I have been a software professional for 20 years, and it took me a couple of hours of fiddling to get PGP configured properly for Eudora. Most people will not be able to do so without expert help, and most people do not have expert help available.
The only realistic way to achieve widespread email encryption is to build it into the primary mail clients -- Outlook, Eudora, the major webmail services. I don't see much chance of that happening, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, any laser powerful enough to damage or divert artillery shells is going to make *thunder* when it fires. It's the same effect as lightning -- superheated air shocks away from the beam, then slams back in when the beam cuts off. That's way more impressive than zzzzt-whoosh-bleem, far as I'm concerned.
There's water ice on Pluto, Charon, and indeed just about all the larger outer-planet moons. Water ice is pretty much ubiquitous on solid objects far enough from stars. It's made of two of the commonest elements, after all.
You know, this gives a whole new meaning to "microbrew".
They'll probably figure it's our Galactic ICQ number.
Seriously speaking, if they think at all like us, they will figure that the number has some special property and start testing it. Testing a number for primeness goes much faster than searching for new primes. Having discovered that it is indeed prime, they will know just how clever we are and hopefully be so impressed that they will decide not to devour us.
Here's my take on the definition, in a rather roundabout form.
For most of human history, if you didn't like things (government, economics, society) where you were, you could (at least in theory) walk a few hundred miles and find something completely different. A wanderer could, during his lifetime, sample dozens of entirely novel and separate ways of living. Renegades and outcasts could hope for a new home and a new start away from the powers that oppressed them.
Globalism is the end of that possibility. A uniform global economy and society erodes cultural differences and leaves no alternatives open to those who dislike the single society that remains.
The positive side of globalism is that it offers opportunities to those previously trapped under sadistic or merely uncaring domains. Globalism is slowly wiping out e.g. female genital mutilation, which is certainly a very good result.
The negative side, beyond the abstract harm of having no alternatives for the misfits, is that we become a monoculture in the biological sense, losing our memetic diversity and thus being more prone to societal "disease". A varied pool of cultures has more chance of weathering unexpected stresses than a single culture.
Anyway, that's my take on the issue. The other positions posted on this thread have also been intriguing.
Censorship is one of those weapons which it is simply too dangerous to give to any power. It is far too easy to abuse, for too little real benefit. If you ban Nazi propaganda on the net, do you really imagine that people won't find it elsewhere, or even on now-illegal web sites outside the reach of European authorities? If anything, you'll add to the feeling of persecution and solidarity against attack that helps groups cohere and grow.
The only productive way to fight information is with more information, not less. If you disagree with right-wing propaganda, then start cranking out left-wing propaganda, or attention-grabbing critiques of right-wing propaganda. Do you truly believe that the only way to protect your teenagers is to keep them ignorant? Let them see and choose. Provide guidance and put all the facts out there. Give them alternatives.
Read that bold part again. Apparently, the author of this post abhors censorship of unwelcome ideas if his opponents are doing it, but encourages those with whom he agrees to censor all they want.
And that, my friends, is what's wrong. Everybody "knows" what content is "wrong" -- but no two people agree on the cut. So, for the safety of our right to self-expression, we must make the distasteful but necessary choice to allow all speech, even that which we know to be false and vicious. To do otherwise is to become as bad as our enemies, as the quote above vividly demonstrates.
Or just run
rm -rf /home/mozilla/*
The best way to handle errors is to eliminate their possibility.
...and in that moment, he became enlightened.
What the moon does have is a far side. Because it is tidally locked to Earth, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same, so that it keeps one hemisphere permanently turned earthward, and the other permanently turned away. (Actually, there is a small amount of "rocking" (libation) which means we see a little more than half the moon as the edges rock into view, but this is a small (less than 10%) effect.)
And yes, the lunar farside would be a reasonable place to put some kinds of astronomical gear, but in general, deep space is better. Modern beam-forming is good enough to exclude most off-beam signals, and you can build arbitrarily large and delicate structures in microgravity. Building these at e.g. L4/5 or in an L1 halo orbit makes a lot of sense. The moon could still play a major role in such an effort, as a source of raw materials. A mining operation with a Heinlein-style electromagnetic mass driver could sling payloads of e.g. aluminum and oxygen up to a construction team building a large antenna elsewhere in Earth's neighborhood.
Most astronomers had previously ignored these stars, which had been modded down heavily for posting annoying "First star!" messages.
Even better! "Nah, this one didn't work either, may I have another, please?"..."Nope, this one won't play either, how about we try one more?"..."Sorry, still no luck, have any more of those?" Next thing you know the entire store allotment has been opened and returned to the distributor.
Nothing like the Zen experience of having the first moderation your comment gets be "-1 Overrated". :)
Yes, but hacking your client to filter it is a DMCA violation.
That's why tape copying is no longer seen as a threat, relative to the dangers of digital media copying.
To be finicky about it, yes, his post was not a felony -- but that's not what I originally said in any case. He described the commission of a felony. That is, if he actually built a circumvention applet as he claimed, then in so doing he committed a felony. "Commercial advantage" is pretty broad, and can include something as simple as *enabling* the use of copyrighted material without permission, even if you personally do not make commercial use of that material. Just ask Dmitri Skylarov.
How so? He described creating a circumvention device to overcome security protecting copyrighted intellectual property from unpermitted use. Creation of such circumvention devices is expressly illegalized by the DMCA. So on what basis are you claiming otherwise?
I definitely agree. It sometimes reminds me of the Orwellian vision of continuously altered history, in which all records were updated to reflect the current version of truth, making it look as if there had never been a different one. I understand that the surface purpose of this editing is to avoid pangs of unpleasant emotion, but I'm not sure if avoidance is the healthiest course.
I'm reminded of Jessica Mitford's analysis of the funeral industry, which has so sanitized and commercialized death that families have no practical connection to the corpses of their loved ones, and thus often have difficulty dealing with the reality of the event. Sometimes exposure rather than avoidance is the fastest path to acceptance of a tragedy.
Just for the record, you do realize that you're now a felon under the DMCA, right? Not to say anything about the ethics of the situation, but The Man could throw you in the stripey hole for years, should this come to their attention.
Pretty absurd, huh? Write your congresscritters. Contribute to EFF. Fight to reverse the DMCA, before you end up fighting for reduced bail.
Definitely a consistency problem there. They had a character who had grown up on human-operated interstellar freighters, so clearly we've been out among the stars for at least decades before the time of the Enterprise mission. But if this were so, you'd think Starfleet would be less "babes in the woods" about who and what lives nearby, what their habits are, and so forth.
In a similar vein, putting the Klingon homeworld 4 days from Earth at warp 4.5 is just plain wrong. That puts the capitals of Klingon and Federation space about six hours apart by Kirk's era. Hard to see how one or the other world (or both) avoided obliteration during the rather long war between the two.
Quibbles aside, though, I was pleasantly surprised by the pilot. I'll definitely be tuning in to see if they can grow the show into something great.
Of course. However, we all pay the price (direct, in network slowdowns, and indirect, in the threat of government regulation) for sites which do not fix their own security problems. How should we respond?
An instructive analogy: Suppose you notice that your neighbor's house is on fire. This is obviously a big problem for your neighbor, but it's also a big potential problem for you -- left uncontrolled, the fire could easily spread to your house. You try to alert your neighbor, but get no response. Does it make sense for you to call 911? Perhaps even use your own garden hose to try to control the fire? Of course; anyone would do this, and nobody would say you were doing anything wrong.
On an internet thriving with worms of all greyscale values, properly administered sites won't need to worry about them, and improperly administered sites will hopefully get dogpiled so quickly that they'll either be forcibly patched or crash in minutes. When the vast majority of sites are being properly administered, all flavors of worm will starve for lack of prey.
How many more helpless gamers will we allow to be bullied by the fascist Game Enforcement Agency? Well I remember that midnight knock at my door, and the trenchcoated goons who swarmed into my home and forced me at gunpoint to play Eleventh Hour. I screamed "But it's a stinker!", hoping for mercy, but it was no use. They made me play through the entire thing, twice. I was left a broken man.
Fight the GEA!
The only realistic way to achieve widespread email encryption is to build it into the primary mail clients -- Outlook, Eudora, the major webmail services. I don't see much chance of that happening, of course.