OK, we're getting somewehre. But what do those two statements have to do with each other? The first sentence makes sense. The second however, may sometimes be an outcome, yet it certainly should not be mentioned as part of the rule.
Again, you make no sense. What two statements are you talking about? Use quotes, man...
I guess, you state that the second sentence you quoted should not be part of the rule. I fail to understand you. That IS the rule.
Lets use a quote here.. Hmm.. Quick web search reveals.. well, quite a lot really.. Ahh, this one's good:
Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar; William of Occam. Ockham was the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born. The principle states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Sometimes it is quoted in one of its original Latin forms to give it an air of authenticity. "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" "Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora" "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" In fact, only the first two of these forms appear in his surviving works and the third was written by a later scholar. William used the principle to justify many conclusions including the statement that "God's existence can not be deduced by reason alone." That one didn't make him very popular with the Pope.
Okay, I misquoted Occam's razor a bit in my original post. Still, not bad.
Anyway, be a bit more descriptive in your questions, and I'll try to be more helpful in my answers.:-)
Amazingly enough, you're still wrong, but it's not your fault.
Occam's razor doesn't mean quite what you think it does.
Imagine an apple fell on your head. Theory A is that the Earth as a mass created some force which acted on the apple. Theory B suggests that the direction in which the apple grew and the force with which the wind was blowing cause it to happen.
You're not understanding the fundamental concept. Occam's razor is to pick the simpler "method" in all cases. The whole "entities" thing seems to be confusing you.
Given your example, the easiest explanation is "things fall down". But why do things fall down? Well, loads of possibilities there..
Which is simpler? "A force exists that makes two object attract each other," or "thousands of invisible fairies are pushing the apple really hard"?
The force idea assumes that there's something fundamental going on that you don't understand. There's plenty of evidence for that. The fairy idea assumes that there's a hell of a lot more going on than you understand, and probably more than you wanted to know about as well.:-) Now instead of explaining gravity, you must explain where all these damn fairies came from.
Occam's razor says, basically, to never explain a phenomena with another phenomena for which you also have no explanation. That is what is meant by "Don't unnecessarily multiply entities."
They're basically pulling this stuff square out of their arse.
1. They can't actually see the things, just get info on distance from the "wobble" effect.
2. Not being able to see them, they can't get any kind of spectroscopic data to make a guess at atmosphere.
3. Without an idea of the atmosphere, there's no chance in hell of guessing surface temperature. Period.
The so-called "habitable zone" is based entirely on distance from the star in question (and the star details, of course). By that measure, the Earth is in the habitable zone (would always be too cold, the atmosphere traps the heat coming in).
That Steven Vogt guy who says one planet is around 108 degrees is completely full of it. It may be that if it's airless, but atmosphere plays a huge role in temperature.
Also, pressure plays a role in what point water becomes liquid or not. Not everything is about temperature.
BTW, if it's airless, there's no liquid water there anyway, having boiled away into space.:-)
it's still a bothersome question to those of us who are scientifically litterate and want to know: Where did it all come from?
Perhaps you need to evaluate your question instead.
In this case, he's given a fairly good explanation. While the question wasn't answered, the question was shown to have no meaning.
You want to know where it all came from, and in this definition of the universe, it didn't come from anywhere. In all point of fact, the universe could be said to not to exist, except to the people living in it.:-)
When you say that it's not fair to ask about "before", the answer may be mathematically corrrect, but it isn't really any more satisfying than attributing it all to some randomly selected tribal diety.
This is true, but why do you assume that your question has any valid answer at all? Why does there need to be a "first cause" of sorts? Is it too much to ask that you accept the existance of the universe and move on? Perhaps it is...
Do you prefer truth or satisfaction? In this case, it may not be possible to get both.
Several people mentioned that this guy was just defending a product review... Actually, not.
Basically, the original post said that the guy had seen the product (video chipset i think) at a trade show (comdex?) and that it looked pretty crappy there, but that it could be for reasons other than the product itself.
Then this guy from the company concerned starts an email conversation with the poster of the article, saying why it didn't look as good as it could.
It gets pretty involved from here, but basically the marketing guy lied in his emails, then posted two messages using anon accounts to discredit the original poster. ("I saw that, he's full of shit!" type of thing) He used the tactic of making the first post look like it was written by an idiot, agreeing with the article, then the second post (a reply) looks more intelligent, and backs the company and the product.
Original article poster checks IP's on the posts, sees they're the same, and posts a note saying to be warned as both these posts were made by the same guy.
Then the marketing guy sends another e-mail to the article poster and says "found my IP's out, eh? pretty smart" or something to that effect.
Naturally, this is pretty appalling to the original article poster.
I mean here's a marketing guy trying to defend his product. A noble cause, nothing wrong with that, but the tactics used are nothing short of disgusting. Admittedly, used right they WORK, but still...
I think this is a case of someone just being caught in the act. Obviously, the marketing guy is a bit clueless, since he admitted his guilt via e-mail, and didn't realize how disturbing this was to the internet user psyche.
Marketing tactics have done stuff like this for decades. The "rumor mill" and "word of mouth" is a well-known phenomenon. Commercials and advertising will notify an audience your product exists. Product reviews will get a select few to buy. Word of mouth can get the entire population to go for it.
Just look at the movies, for example. How many of you have seen a movie because a friend recommended it? Hell, usually that's the only reason I'll see a movie. Reviews often just don't have that much impact.
But many years ago on the Usenet, someone discovered the secret to easy word of mouth on the 'net. Anonymity.
Bit sad, really. I think a product will sell itself, if it's a good product.
Well, first off, if your encryption uses any built-in random number generator, toss it, it's crap.
Any good encryption program generates it's own random numbers from a random input source. PGP did this (still does, AFAIK) by getting keystrokes from the user, and using timings between them to generate a randomized sequence.
If a program uses the clock as the seed, it's probably not using a second, BTW, but the tick timer. There's a lot of ticks in a second.
Still, it's not an infinite number, and a good way to crack any encryption is to attack the random number generator. If you know the seed, you can generate the same key, and decrypt the message.
I recall that back on the C64, whenever I needed a good random number (the built in one was crap), I turned on one of the sound channels, set it to generate a lot of static, turned the volume off, and grabbed a number from the static. Worked pretty well, and didn't need a seed value. Still not truly random, but good enough.
According to chief executive Martin Manley, the company broke the law when it tried to rectify complaints from some clients who said they weren't receiving email messages from Amazon. In tracking such messages to determine the problem, the company unlawfully captured the messages, although Manley said it did not read them.
Okay, let's first set the ground rules here...
According to their web site, Alibris is not wholy a bookstore.
Alibris uses the Internet to enable hundreds of independent booksellers around the world to sell treasured books to consumers, libraries, wholesalers, and retail stores.
My guess is that the predecessor of Alibris mostly specialized in a book-finding service.. Anyone have any information on that?
Anyway, looks like the e-mail system they had allowed users to get an email with them to try to find old and rare books and so forth. Sounds kinda cool actually.
Probably they had some mail problems with Amazon, and set the thing to intercept messages to see what was wrong.
I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. An e-mail provider must be able to look at messages to resolve problems in routing or what have you. Perhaps not actual message content, but that's hard to distinguish, since the info they need and the info that should be private are not wholly separated.
There's a big difference here though. They're not looking at a planet, like you'd look at Mars. They're looking at a star.
The difference of angle between the star and the planet from over 50 light years away is way too small to see. So, they point the instruments at the star, then record everything. The stuff that varies on a cycle of 3.3 days they say is from the planet or due to it. Then it's a matter of analysis.
Do you know all the crazy stuff that happens in a star? The fusion cycle is ridiculous. All kinds of wacky things happening. Carbon exists in stars (albeit for a very short period of time) sometimes. You get all sorts of wacky spectral lines from different stars. Anything that star is putting out is going to cancel the signal we can say is from that planet. Probably the only reason we can see O, Si, and Mg is that that is extremely unlikely stuff to find in a star.
Yes, if you can see the planet directly, get reflected light directly, then you can analyse the hell out of it. But we're not seeing the planet. We're seeing the star, and filtering the planet out of that.
-Magnesium, silicon and oxygen found (no proportions given out). -Huge planet. 4 Jupiter masses -3.3 day year
Well, if it's 4 J-masses, and whips that fast around it's sun, I'd bet it's always facing the same side towards the sun. Probably causes some pretty damn spetacular tides on that sun too (think solar matter waves 1000 miles high:-)...
Now oxygen != life guaranteed. They give no clue on how much O^2 has been found, nor if it's cool enough to be O^2 in the first place. If the place is too hot, molecules might not be an option. This is a possibility since it's mighty close to the sun, remember?
Still cool. Probably the only reason they can get any light off it it because it is so close to it's sun, and gets enough light to reflect well. Also, it's damn lucky that the ecliptic planes cross just right to see it at all.
Life is probably out. Jupiter is what, 20 G's? and this thing is around 80? Nah. My best guess: it's so damn hot and massive that it's nearly a star anyway. Give it a few hundred years or so, it'll crash into the star itself, and give the astronomers some real eye-candy.
Okay, okay, you CAN have your coordinate axes any way you please, but they're still at right angles to one another. It's just a matter of remapping the axes however you want.
So, yes, you can curve your dimensions. But it's easier (for most applications) not to think of them that way. I could use spherical coordinates to describe how to build a building, but I don't because it's not very useful. It's easier to do with rectangular dimensions.
Now, as to a real dimension being curled, lets use your tube analogy. Can one traverse around the tube (in one dimension, mind), ending up back where you started? Sure. Can you do that in reality? Well, that depends on whether the universe is closed or not. I have yet to see a satisfactory answer either way on that issue.
I hoped that someone would take that bait. Groups of protestors have tried to shut down various particle accelerators using that exact claim. "If they rip open space or make a black hole, it will destroy the world/universe!" BZZT.
I perfectly well realize that. I was simply writing a comment based on the wonderful novels of Terry Pratchett. In other words, it was a joke.:-)
If I'm not mistaken, any black hole with less than 3 solar masses (about) can't sustain it's mass via input matter, because of loss due to quantum tunnelling, correct? Or am I on crack again?
Long answer: You can say that any number divisible by 2 with no remainder is even. That makes zero even. You can also say any number divisible by 2 with a remainder of 1 is odd. That makes zero even.
If you want to talk binary, the Least Significant Bit determines even or oddness, zero being even, one being odd. This makes zero even. Of course, that's just another way of saying the same as above.
If you want to talk properties of even numbers, let's start with multiplication: Ev * Ev = Ev Ev * Od = Ev Od * Od = Od Zero times anything is zero. So, 0 * Ev = 0 0 * Od = 0 As you can see, zero must be even by this method.
Or how about addition? Ev + Ev = Ev Ev + Od = Od Od + Od = Ev Zero plus something = something. So, 0 + Ev = Ev 0 + Od = Od Again, zero must be even.
Describes the buffer overflow AOL is using in some pretty good detail. Here's the basic idea:
When AIM connects to the AOL server, the AOL server sends back a message containing x86 executable code. This overflows a buffer in the AIM client, and the code gets run. This code creates a packet to send back to the AOL server. If the AOL server doesn't see the packet, then it assumes you're not using AIM, and boots you.
What MS's client did was see the packet containing the code, and generate the reply message WITHOUT overflowing a buffer or executing that code. But, AOL can just tweak that code on the server a bit and have a different reply get generated, while MS's client has to get updated to use that new code.
Nevertheless, this is pretty damn reprehensible on the part of AOL. If they don't want MS customers using their servers, sue the shit outta M$, don't exploit holes in your own code to do it. You fix bugs, not exploit them.
A dimension is at right angles to all other dimensions. Not curled up, or anything of that sort. A small dimension (around 1 mm or what have you) is enough to hold an infinite number of 3 dimensional universes, because a 3 dimensional universe has zero size in that dimension.
Tricky shit, huh?
Anyway, this postulates that gravitons do travel along a 4th dimension (not time, thank you) to affect other universes. If that's the case, then that's probably what's on the other side of the singularity of a black hole. A different universe. Of course, I'm just making this all up as I go along, but it's still pretty interesting.:-)
Is it just me or does this article read a bit like a Terry Pratchett novel?:-)
I thought this was particularly entertaining:
``You might produce nothing but black holes,'' Dr. Lykken said. ``So physics could look very surprising in this scheme.'' Such mini-black holes would probably go poof in a instant, producing a burst of radiation that scientists could immediately recognize as a black hole's signature. ``You'd say, `Aha! I've made a black hole,'''' Dr. Lykken commented.
"Oh dear, I appear to have accidentally ripped the fabric of space-time. Damn.":-P
When some bright lad tries to split the graviton, I'm outta here.
For something like SETI@home (or distributed.net or whatever else you like), there's a very good reason to keep the clients binary-only. Namely, there is no oracle for verifying that a block of search space was actually searched by the client that claims to have searched it. Abuse of this was seen by the DES challenge and distributed.net before; open-sourcing SETI@home would lead to even worse abuses.
You're right. Distributed.net had that exact problem. They found a way to fix it. The client is STILL open-source. See? Simple, huh?
Not entirely open source, they left out the part you would need to report results back. But that's the part we really don't care about. Everyone wants the algorithms optimized. I just think the SETI@home people should get a clue.
SETI is science... distributed.net is engineering. There is a big difference, and science does things the way it does it for a reason. SETI needs the results to be as solid as possible.
The main thing with the SETI client _should_ be not to make sure it finds a signal, but to make sure it doesn't miss one. I agree with this part of it.
However, this is data analysis. Pure and simple. Run an algorithm on a lot of signals. Easy. No one questions the algorithm. What is questioned is the implementation. If I can take an algorithm and optimize it to run faster on a particular processor, then I must still get the same results. Otherwise, the algorithm is no longer the same.
And it's not a question of some hacked program finding a signal. ANY signal found will be subjected to the most intense scrutiny even before it's announced. Then it'll be scrutinized again afterward. And other signals from that sky area will be looked at, at various times going back years. No, a false signal will be eliminated pretty quickly. The thing to watch for is a false negative.
I don't think open source is the cure-all answer here, but I think the people running seti@home have not given thought to the fact that people running the client are the kind of people who really, really know computers. They know algorithms. They know the internet. They are smarter than the average bear. And they don't like people telling them you cannot know this, or you cannot know that. The SETI people need to explain their position better, or count on a lot of people leaving the project.
I wanted to take a look to see exactly what the heck these patches do, but I'll be damned if I can find any. The best of search engines (several), and I can't find them anywhere. First time I've found myself unable to find something like this.
If people would read the FAQ on SETI@HOME it tells why they are NOT open sourcing it. If the client is open source then the data that is sent back to the servers can be faked, and even if it can be faked that calls the whole study into question since anyone could send back a bad packet to get points (and it would probably happen) and they would have no way of knowing.
You're missing the point. People are faking data NOW. It's done already. The client has been hacked.
Open source is not a lack of security, it's a big plus. If they want a way to make it much more difficult to fake packets back, why don't they talk to d.net? I know d.net had to deal with that problem in the past. So come on already.
I agree that you mainly want to be sure that the data is valid, but that does not preclude optimizing the client for speedups. They gave the source to Intel to optimize for P2 and P3's already. They won't give it to AMD (or haven't yet). They're deliberately withholding it from people who can make the improvements, and do it securely.
All it's really doing is FFT's anyway, which really lends itself well to optimization on various CPUs. Just a load of floating point, although 3dNow! instructions probably won't help much, since those are single precision only, I think. You'd want double for something where you have that many significant bits.
Found this interesting tidbit yesterday. The plural form of virus is "viruses". viri is the nominative plural form of the Latin vir, which means man. See: http://doriath.perl.com/misc/virus.html
Secondly, while I think Tom Christensen is a genius, I must say that in this case, he's just being annoying.
Thirdly, anyone who corrects my speech in front of me generally loses a tooth. I don't stand for that crap from grown adults.:-)
Language is a flexible, growing, evolving entity. It's not static. It's not about "correctness". It's about communicating your thoughts from one person to another. If I say the word "virii" and the other person understands me, then to hell with the OED.
Frankly, I find that people who care about the correctness of a certain word (I find "ain't" to be a damn useful word), *generally* don't have the intelligence to understand much of anything else anyway. Especially those bastards that try to correct your pronounciation of a word. Oooh, those guys piss me off.
FWIW, Dell should do what everyone else does. Create a base install, virus scan the hell out of it, then ghost the sucker onto every machine needed. If they're actually installing software in the normal fashion, I'd be awfully surprised.
Frightening as it may seem to you, most people have moved beyond the 1970's computing paradigms. As (I should really say if) Linux becomes more popular, the viruses will proliferate. Unless you can convince people to get all nostalgic and embrace the TTY non-GUI.
It's not about the GUI, it's about the security permissions. You can run any damn window manager/GUI you want, but if you routinely login as root, you're an idiot who deserves whatever happens. If you're not root, you shouldn't have permission to access any files you don't need, and then only with the minimal permissions you need. That, in fact, is pretty much the point of a multi-user system.
Of course, it's awfully difficult to explain to a windoze luser why they can't delete the system files, and why they're not allowed to edit/etc/passwd, and why they can't run that administration tool. The multi-user aspect just doesn't make sense to the average Joe User, esp. if it's a machine on their desktop. I've encountered this before: "Multi-user? Who else is using my computer??!?"
Any operating system is vulnerable to a virus. Period. Linux has very few viruses. There are none that I know of that can hose your system unless you're running as root (idiot). While I concede it may be possible to integrate a root security breach into a virus, so that it could do what it damn well pleased, I don't think any like this exist yet. And even so, once the security hole would be patched (quickly), that virus would no longer proliferate well.
Slashdot Mirror
A nice *shiny* nickel too!
:-)
I'll even toss in some dryer lint. How about it Hemos?
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OK, we're getting somewehre. But what do those two statements have to do with each other? The first sentence makes sense. The second however, may sometimes be an outcome, yet it certainly should not be mentioned as part of the rule.
:-)
Again, you make no sense. What two statements are you talking about? Use quotes, man...
I guess, you state that the second sentence you quoted should not be part of the rule. I fail to understand you. That IS the rule.
Lets use a quote here.. Hmm.. Quick web search reveals.. well, quite a lot really.. Ahh, this one's good:
Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar; William of Occam. Ockham was the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born.
The principle states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Sometimes it is quoted in one of its original Latin forms to give it an air of authenticity.
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora"
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
In fact, only the first two of these forms appear in his surviving works and the third was written by a later scholar. William used the principle to justify many conclusions including the statement that "God's existence can not be deduced by reason alone." That one didn't make him very popular with the Pope.
Okay, I misquoted Occam's razor a bit in my original post. Still, not bad.
Anyway, be a bit more descriptive in your questions, and I'll try to be more helpful in my answers.
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Amazingly enough, you're still wrong, but it's not your fault.
:-) Now instead of explaining gravity, you must explain where all these damn fairies came from.
Occam's razor doesn't mean quite what you think it does.
Imagine an apple fell on your head. Theory A is that the Earth as a mass created some force which acted on the apple. Theory B suggests that the direction in which the apple grew and the force with which the wind was blowing cause it to happen.
You're not understanding the fundamental concept. Occam's razor is to pick the simpler "method" in all cases. The whole "entities" thing seems to be confusing you.
Given your example, the easiest explanation is "things fall down". But why do things fall down? Well, loads of possibilities there..
Which is simpler? "A force exists that makes two object attract each other," or "thousands of invisible fairies are pushing the apple really hard"?
The force idea assumes that there's something fundamental going on that you don't understand. There's plenty of evidence for that. The fairy idea assumes that there's a hell of a lot more going on than you understand, and probably more than you wanted to know about as well.
Occam's razor says, basically, to never explain a phenomena with another phenomena for which you also have no explanation. That is what is meant by "Don't unnecessarily multiply entities."
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They're basically pulling this stuff square out of their arse.
:-)
1. They can't actually see the things, just get info on distance from the "wobble" effect.
2. Not being able to see them, they can't get any kind of spectroscopic data to make a guess at atmosphere.
3. Without an idea of the atmosphere, there's no chance in hell of guessing surface temperature. Period.
The so-called "habitable zone" is based entirely on distance from the star in question (and the star details, of course). By that measure, the Earth is in the habitable zone (would always be too cold, the atmosphere traps the heat coming in).
That Steven Vogt guy who says one planet is around 108 degrees is completely full of it. It may be that if it's airless, but atmosphere plays a huge role in temperature.
Also, pressure plays a role in what point water becomes liquid or not. Not everything is about temperature.
BTW, if it's airless, there's no liquid water there anyway, having boiled away into space.
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it's still a bothersome question to those of us who are scientifically litterate and want to know: Where did it all come from?
:-)
Perhaps you need to evaluate your question instead.
In this case, he's given a fairly good explanation. While the question wasn't answered, the question was shown to have no meaning.
You want to know where it all came from, and in this definition of the universe, it didn't come from anywhere. In all point of fact, the universe could be said to not to exist, except to the people living in it.
When you say that it's not fair to ask about "before", the answer may be mathematically corrrect, but it isn't really any more satisfying than attributing it all to some randomly selected tribal diety.
This is true, but why do you assume that your question has any valid answer at all? Why does there need to be a "first cause" of sorts? Is it too much to ask that you accept the existance of the universe and move on? Perhaps it is...
Do you prefer truth or satisfaction? In this case, it may not be possible to get both.
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Several people mentioned that this guy was just defending a product review... Actually, not.
Basically, the original post said that the guy had seen the product (video chipset i think) at a trade show (comdex?) and that it looked pretty crappy there, but that it could be for reasons other than the product itself.
Then this guy from the company concerned starts an email conversation with the poster of the article, saying why it didn't look as good as it could.
It gets pretty involved from here, but basically the marketing guy lied in his emails, then posted two messages using anon accounts to discredit the original poster. ("I saw that, he's full of shit!" type of thing) He used the tactic of making the first post look like it was written by an idiot, agreeing with the article, then the second post (a reply) looks more intelligent, and backs the company and the product.
Original article poster checks IP's on the posts, sees they're the same, and posts a note saying to be warned as both these posts were made by the same guy.
Then the marketing guy sends another e-mail to the article poster and says "found my IP's out, eh? pretty smart" or something to that effect.
Naturally, this is pretty appalling to the original article poster.
I mean here's a marketing guy trying to defend his product. A noble cause, nothing wrong with that, but the tactics used are nothing short of disgusting. Admittedly, used right they WORK, but still...
I think this is a case of someone just being caught in the act. Obviously, the marketing guy is a bit clueless, since he admitted his guilt via e-mail, and didn't realize how disturbing this was to the internet user psyche.
Marketing tactics have done stuff like this for decades. The "rumor mill" and "word of mouth" is a well-known phenomenon. Commercials and advertising will notify an audience your product exists. Product reviews will get a select few to buy. Word of mouth can get the entire population to go for it.
Just look at the movies, for example. How many of you have seen a movie because a friend recommended it? Hell, usually that's the only reason I'll see a movie. Reviews often just don't have that much impact.
But many years ago on the Usenet, someone discovered the secret to easy word of mouth on the 'net. Anonymity.
Bit sad, really. I think a product will sell itself, if it's a good product.
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Well, first off, if your encryption uses any built-in random number generator, toss it, it's crap.
Any good encryption program generates it's own random numbers from a random input source. PGP did this (still does, AFAIK) by getting keystrokes from the user, and using timings between them to generate a randomized sequence.
If a program uses the clock as the seed, it's probably not using a second, BTW, but the tick timer. There's a lot of ticks in a second.
Still, it's not an infinite number, and a good way to crack any encryption is to attack the random number generator. If you know the seed, you can generate the same key, and decrypt the message.
I recall that back on the C64, whenever I needed a good random number (the built in one was crap), I turned on one of the sound channels, set it to generate a lot of static, turned the volume off, and grabbed a number from the static. Worked pretty well, and didn't need a seed value. Still not truly random, but good enough.
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According to chief executive Martin Manley, the company broke the law when it tried to rectify complaints from some clients who said they weren't receiving email messages from Amazon. In tracking such messages to determine the problem, the company unlawfully captured the messages, although Manley said it did not read them.
Okay, let's first set the ground rules here...
According to their web site, Alibris is not wholy a bookstore.
Alibris uses the Internet to enable hundreds of independent booksellers around the world to sell treasured books to consumers, libraries, wholesalers, and retail stores.
My guess is that the predecessor of Alibris mostly specialized in a book-finding service.. Anyone have any information on that?
Anyway, looks like the e-mail system they had allowed users to get an email with them to try to find old and rare books and so forth. Sounds kinda cool actually.
Probably they had some mail problems with Amazon, and set the thing to intercept messages to see what was wrong.
I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. An e-mail provider must be able to look at messages to resolve problems in routing or what have you. Perhaps not actual message content, but that's hard to distinguish, since the info they need and the info that should be private are not wholly separated.
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There's a big difference here though. They're not looking at a planet, like you'd look at Mars. They're looking at a star.
The difference of angle between the star and the planet from over 50 light years away is way too small to see. So, they point the instruments at the star, then record everything. The stuff that varies on a cycle of 3.3 days they say is from the planet or due to it. Then it's a matter of analysis.
Do you know all the crazy stuff that happens in a star? The fusion cycle is ridiculous. All kinds of wacky things happening. Carbon exists in stars (albeit for a very short period of time) sometimes. You get all sorts of wacky spectral lines from different stars. Anything that star is putting out is going to cancel the signal we can say is from that planet. Probably the only reason we can see O, Si, and Mg is that that is extremely unlikely stuff to find in a star.
Yes, if you can see the planet directly, get reflected light directly, then you can analyse the hell out of it. But we're not seeing the planet. We're seeing the star, and filtering the planet out of that.
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Okay, let's summarize:
:-)...
-Magnesium, silicon and oxygen found (no proportions given out).
-Huge planet. 4 Jupiter masses
-3.3 day year
Well, if it's 4 J-masses, and whips that fast around it's sun, I'd bet it's always facing the same side towards the sun. Probably causes some pretty damn spetacular tides on that sun too (think solar matter waves 1000 miles high
Now oxygen != life guaranteed. They give no clue on how much O^2 has been found, nor if it's cool enough to be O^2 in the first place. If the place is too hot, molecules might not be an option. This is a possibility since it's mighty close to the sun, remember?
Still cool. Probably the only reason they can get any light off it it because it is so close to it's sun, and gets enough light to reflect well. Also, it's damn lucky that the ecliptic planes cross just right to see it at all.
Life is probably out. Jupiter is what, 20 G's? and this thing is around 80? Nah. My best guess: it's so damn hot and massive that it's nearly a star anyway. Give it a few hundred years or so, it'll crash into the star itself, and give the astronomers some real eye-candy.
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Oops. I forgot to post the definition of prime.
A prime number is a number that is divisible by exactly two numbers. One, and itself.
1 is only divisible by one number.
Anyway, the other respondant is correct. One is not prime because it is defined as not prime for convienence.
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Okay, okay, you CAN have your coordinate axes any way you please, but they're still at right angles to one another. It's just a matter of remapping the axes however you want.
So, yes, you can curve your dimensions. But it's easier (for most applications) not to think of them that way. I could use spherical coordinates to describe how to build a building, but I don't because it's not very useful. It's easier to do with rectangular dimensions.
Now, as to a real dimension being curled, lets use your tube analogy. Can one traverse around the tube (in one dimension, mind), ending up back where you started? Sure. Can you do that in reality? Well, that depends on whether the universe is closed or not. I have yet to see a satisfactory answer either way on that issue.
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I hoped that someone would take that bait. Groups of protestors have tried to shut down various particle accelerators using that exact claim. "If they rip open space or make a black hole, it will destroy the world/universe!" BZZT.
:-)
I perfectly well realize that. I was simply writing a comment based on the wonderful novels of Terry Pratchett. In other words, it was a joke.
If I'm not mistaken, any black hole with less than 3 solar masses (about) can't sustain it's mass via input matter, because of loss due to quantum tunnelling, correct? Or am I on crack again?
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Short answer: Even.
Long answer:
You can say that any number divisible by 2 with no remainder is even. That makes zero even. You can also say any number divisible by 2 with a remainder of 1 is odd. That makes zero even.
If you want to talk binary, the Least Significant Bit determines even or oddness, zero being even, one being odd. This makes zero even. Of course, that's just another way of saying the same as above.
If you want to talk properties of even numbers, let's start with multiplication:
Ev * Ev = Ev
Ev * Od = Ev
Od * Od = Od
Zero times anything is zero. So,
0 * Ev = 0
0 * Od = 0
As you can see, zero must be even by this method.
Or how about addition?
Ev + Ev = Ev
Ev + Od = Od
Od + Od = Ev
Zero plus something = something. So,
0 + Ev = Ev
0 + Od = Od
Again, zero must be even.
Pretty much any way you slice it, zero is even.
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1 is not prime because it is only divisible by one number, namely, itself.
:-)
0 is not prime because it is divisible by an infinite number of numbers, namely, any number other than itself.
Ho hum.
Time to go be as odd as possible.
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http://www.ozemail.com.au/~geoffch/s ecurity/aim/
Describes the buffer overflow AOL is using in some pretty good detail. Here's the basic idea:
When AIM connects to the AOL server, the AOL server sends back a message containing x86 executable code. This overflows a buffer in the AIM client, and the code gets run. This code creates a packet to send back to the AOL server. If the AOL server doesn't see the packet, then it assumes you're not using AIM, and boots you.
What MS's client did was see the packet containing the code, and generate the reply message WITHOUT overflowing a buffer or executing that code. But, AOL can just tweak that code on the server a bit and have a different reply get generated, while MS's client has to get updated to use that new code.
Nevertheless, this is pretty damn reprehensible on the part of AOL. If they don't want MS customers using their servers, sue the shit outta M$, don't exploit holes in your own code to do it. You fix bugs, not exploit them.
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One thing you must remember about dimensions:
:-)
A dimension is at right angles to all other dimensions. Not curled up, or anything of that sort. A small dimension (around 1 mm or what have you) is enough to hold an infinite number of 3 dimensional universes, because a 3 dimensional universe has zero size in that dimension.
Tricky shit, huh?
Anyway, this postulates that gravitons do travel along a 4th dimension (not time, thank you) to affect other universes. If that's the case, then that's probably what's on the other side of the singularity of a black hole. A different universe. Of course, I'm just making this all up as I go along, but it's still pretty interesting.
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Is it just me or does this article read a bit like a Terry Pratchett novel? :-)
:-P
I thought this was particularly entertaining:
``You might produce nothing but black holes,'' Dr. Lykken said. ``So physics could look very surprising in this scheme.'' Such mini-black holes would probably go poof in a instant, producing a burst of radiation that scientists could immediately recognize as a black hole's signature.
``You'd say, `Aha! I've made a black hole,'''' Dr. Lykken commented.
"Oh dear, I appear to have accidentally ripped the fabric of space-time. Damn."
When some bright lad tries to split the graviton, I'm outta here.
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For something like SETI@home (or distributed.net or whatever else you like), there's a very good reason to keep the clients binary-only. Namely, there is no oracle for verifying that a block of search space was actually searched by the client that claims to have searched it. Abuse of this was seen by the DES challenge and distributed.net before; open-sourcing SETI@home would lead to even worse abuses.
You're right. Distributed.net had that exact problem. They found a way to fix it. The client is STILL open-source. See? Simple, huh?
Check out http://www.distributed.net/source/...
Not entirely open source, they left out the part you would need to report results back. But that's the part we really don't care about. Everyone wants the algorithms optimized. I just think the SETI@home people should get a clue.
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SETI is science... distributed.net is engineering. There is a big difference, and science does things the way it does it for a reason. SETI needs the results to be as solid as possible.
The main thing with the SETI client _should_ be not to make sure it finds a signal, but to make sure it doesn't miss one. I agree with this part of it.
However, this is data analysis. Pure and simple. Run an algorithm on a lot of signals. Easy. No one questions the algorithm. What is questioned is the implementation. If I can take an algorithm and optimize it to run faster on a particular processor, then I must still get the same results. Otherwise, the algorithm is no longer the same.
And it's not a question of some hacked program finding a signal. ANY signal found will be subjected to the most intense scrutiny even before it's announced. Then it'll be scrutinized again afterward. And other signals from that sky area will be looked at, at various times going back years. No, a false signal will be eliminated pretty quickly. The thing to watch for is a false negative.
I don't think open source is the cure-all answer here, but I think the people running seti@home have not given thought to the fact that people running the client are the kind of people who really, really know computers. They know algorithms. They know the internet. They are smarter than the average bear. And they don't like people telling them you cannot know this, or you cannot know that. The SETI people need to explain their position better, or count on a lot of people leaving the project.
Just my $0.02
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I wanted to take a look to see exactly what the heck these patches do, but I'll be damned if I can find any. The best of search engines (several), and I can't find them anywhere. First time I've found myself unable to find something like this.
Any tips, anyone?
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If people would read the FAQ on SETI@HOME it tells why they are NOT open sourcing it. If the client is open source then the data that is sent back to the servers can be faked, and even if it can be faked that calls the whole study into question since anyone could send back a bad packet to get points (and it would probably happen) and they would have no way of knowing.
You're missing the point. People are faking data NOW. It's done already. The client has been hacked.
Open source is not a lack of security, it's a big plus. If they want a way to make it much more difficult to fake packets back, why don't they talk to d.net? I know d.net had to deal with that problem in the past. So come on already.
I agree that you mainly want to be sure that the data is valid, but that does not preclude optimizing the client for speedups. They gave the source to Intel to optimize for P2 and P3's already. They won't give it to AMD (or haven't yet). They're deliberately withholding it from people who can make the improvements, and do it securely.
All it's really doing is FFT's anyway, which really lends itself well to optimization on various CPUs. Just a load of floating point, although 3dNow! instructions probably won't help much, since those are single precision only, I think. You'd want double for something where you have that many significant bits.
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From the Otto is a Rat Bastard Department:
...
:-)
Found this interesting tidbit yesterday. The plural form of virus is "viruses". viri is the nominative plural form of the Latin vir, which means man. See: http://doriath.perl.com/misc/virus.html
Okay, firstly, that URL is wrong. It should be http://language.perl.com/misc/virus.html
Secondly, while I think Tom Christensen is a genius, I must say that in this case, he's just being annoying.
Thirdly, anyone who corrects my speech in front of me generally loses a tooth. I don't stand for that crap from grown adults.
Language is a flexible, growing, evolving entity. It's not static. It's not about "correctness". It's about communicating your thoughts from one person to another. If I say the word "virii" and the other person understands me, then to hell with the OED.
Frankly, I find that people who care about the correctness of a certain word (I find "ain't" to be a damn useful word), *generally* don't have the intelligence to understand much of anything else anyway. Especially those bastards that try to correct your pronounciation of a word. Oooh, those guys piss me off.
FWIW, Dell should do what everyone else does. Create a base install, virus scan the hell out of it, then ghost the sucker onto every machine needed. If they're actually installing software in the normal fashion, I'd be awfully surprised.
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Frightening as it may seem to you, most people have moved beyond the 1970's computing paradigms. As (I should really say if) Linux becomes more popular, the viruses will proliferate. Unless you can convince people to get all nostalgic and embrace the TTY non-GUI.
/etc/passwd, and why they can't run that administration tool. The multi-user aspect just doesn't make sense to the average Joe User, esp. if it's a machine on their desktop. I've encountered this before: "Multi-user? Who else is using my computer??!?"
It's not about the GUI, it's about the security permissions. You can run any damn window manager/GUI you want, but if you routinely login as root, you're an idiot who deserves whatever happens. If you're not root, you shouldn't have permission to access any files you don't need, and then only with the minimal permissions you need. That, in fact, is pretty much the point of a multi-user system.
Of course, it's awfully difficult to explain to a windoze luser why they can't delete the system files, and why they're not allowed to edit
Any operating system is vulnerable to a virus. Period. Linux has very few viruses. There are none that I know of that can hose your system unless you're running as root (idiot). While I concede it may be possible to integrate a root security breach into a virus, so that it could do what it damn well pleased, I don't think any like this exist yet. And even so, once the security hole would be patched (quickly), that virus would no longer proliferate well.
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What the hell do they expect but for me to put "varies" on everything?
Funny to be replying to myself, but..
I got accepted into the beta.. sweeeeet!
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