If (1) your kernel did a perfect job of keeping a single process/thread confined to a single CPU and (2) none of your processes/threads were sharing the same memory then a dual cache would perform about the same as a single cache.
Surely there's a synchronization cost if both cpus are accessing the same resource.
I started "throwing around qualifications because of the parents comment that creationists couldn't pass science classes at a decent school, thus I put forth the argument that I as a creationist not only did pass those classes, but went on to do Grad work in a respected research field...
I have lots of university colleagues at various levels. The fact that some of them have religious convictions doesn't mean they're less intelligent in their field; we all have character flaws (eg i respond to increasingly-offtopic posts on slashdot).
You've at least formed some kind of argument, although i must admit that how any apparent weakness in the theory of fossilization corresponds to conclusions about something as preposterous as creationism is unclear (and for your information those who study fossilization are well aware that rock strata can be mixed). You quote a book as evidence---there are bad science books for sure; however, there are no logically sound creationist books at all.
For me there is far too much circular logic in evolutionary theories, and far too many people trying to make a name for themselves and falsifying evidence to do so..
You feel logical flaws are unique or especially prevalent in evolutionary theory over every other area? Science is not a perfect theory---in fact it's not a theory at all, it's a process of investigation, that tries to correct logical flaws over time. It's not exactly like creationism manages to avoid fame/money-seeking charlatans or circularity (perhaps the great logical leaps and lapses involved make it a acyclic?). One has to consider the preponderance of evidence, and the level of confidence in the logical connections involved. Evolution may or may not fit all the facts, but creationism has no evidence (except as established circularly), and no coherent logic.
Using an auto-dialler (an Automatic Dialling and Announcing Device, or ADAD) for solicitation--charitable donations, promotions, sales, etc.--is forbidden by the CRTC
Yes, in theory, just like jay-walking & littering are illegal. I had a particularly persistent 'unknown number' using an autodialer. When i called the phone company about it, they were real reluctant to do anything involving effort on their part, like tracing the call. Good luck getting anyone interested in an international version of the same insignificant (at least to the phone co) problem.
Even if a company is blocking call ID, your phone company can probably trace the call.
But they really don't want to. Bell insisted i first try to trace it myself using their $0.50 service for one-shot call trace (ineffective). They then wanted detailed logs, and to get the police involved. At that point i wasn't sure which was going to suck up more of my time, the telemarketers or the people who were supposed to help eliminate those problems.
The only way to avoid phone spam is to not get a phone. The only way to hurt phone spammers is to waste their money----a sufficient number of tarpits would at least make it less cost-effective. Unfortunately, you need that sufficient number, and slowing telemarketers down also ties up your phone line.
Your mouse doesn't move only along the x,y axes; you can move at any angle you like and the mechanism interprets the actual x,y delta. Using the scroll wheel for z would allow you to only move along the z axis. It would be as easy and pleasant as drawing diagonal lines on an etch-a-sketch.
From "first47snertt" i may not guess "discover50snertr", but i might guess "discover*". If i found out both of those i might guess "amazonNNsnert?" for your amazon password, and if we add in "amazon48snertn" i'm pretty sure i'd find your password for slashdot real fast.
The problem is that your algorithm, or any such algorithm a human would use, represents a form of data compression on the password (if your narrative is 'longer' than the password, then just remember the password). Thus your decompressed passwords have less information density. As well, although your personal system may be arbitrarily difficult in practice to crack, i'd be surprised if most people's algorithms didn't converge on just a few actual styles (as above).
You know, ther is this nice thing called decimals. So the temperature goes from 0.5 degreed Celcius to 4.5 degrees Celsius.
I had a choice of choice of celsius or fahrenheit for the replacement of the heating control of a house. I chose celcius, only to be surprised that (like the fahrenheit model) it allowed temperature settings of integer degrees only---presumably due to limitations of the lcd display. The coarser temperature adjustment was noticeable compared to the previous control.
Oz, New Zealand, India, South Africa & hundreds of Islands (plus maybe even Canada?), they were all quite used to Imperial but had no problems going over to metrics.
Actually, although Canada has switched to the metric system, it was not entirely an easy transition. People (businesses) had to be forced to use metric through threat of law. I (vaguely) recall tv images of a gas station owner avowing to never switch to metric, and being arrested for it.
But I'd agree that the US would not be (is not) even as willing to change. Witness the relative reactions to the introduction of the coins in place of paper currency. In the US the Susan B. Anthony dollar was shunned, whereas Canadians quite quickly took to the loonie.
It's kind of funny that americans would latch onto a system of measurement they inherited from a former enemy as some sort symbol of national identity.
Why? I thought that you were a law-abiding citizen. Or did you mean that you obey the laws which you consider to be reasonable?;-)
You were kidding i guess, but it's actually an interesting point. There's the 'formal' or specified system, and the 'actual' system or the rough, real-world approximation of the formal system. Almost none of us perfectly obey the formal system, but of course most of us obey the actual system. The actual system adheres to the perceived spirit of the formal system, but is not fully-specified. Crossing the street illegally, but safely is an example, as is not signalling a lane change when no other cars are around.
It is likely not the case that the parent poster is deciding on which laws to obey in complete isolation. It is quite likely they do respect the actual system, and so the choice of which law to obey is in fact a collective one, with some variance.
That is more myth than truth....they target not the plentiful system but the easiest.
You are quite right. But that's most important only to why windows is targetted, and not why virii in this context are such a problem. Moreover, targetting is undoubtedly correlated with perceived success, so another key factor is how well the virus "does."
To be successful, it only seems reasonable that a virus needs both a vulnerable host design, and a reasonable number of potential hosts within reach of each other. Propagation won't be effective if there are too few victims, too poorly connected. Better connectivity is at least loosely implied by abundance---it doesn't have to be a monoculture, but the more like one it is the better it is for viral transmission.
It's a tradeoff between the easy and the plentiful, with i agree a strong emphasis on the easy. Thinking about it further, there are probably a number of other weights in the equation too: chance of punishment for the virus writer, impact of each individual infection, peer-acceptance (windows=bad, linux=good),...
hmm: weight these factors, empirically test & refine, publish master equation of virus writer motivation, enjoy eternal fame...
The public airwaves must maintain the highest standards of decency so that any and everyone can listen without being offended.
As has already been pointed out, the definitions of decency are not universal. The problem is then that your proposed property generates only the empty set.
In fact, i think it can be a theorem, with the following lemma:
Lemma 1:A broadcast that maintains only the highest standard of decency is bland.
Proof: Self evident.
Theorem:There are no broadcasts that maintain only the highest standard of decency.
Proof: Suppose there are, and let b be such a broadcast. By Lemma 1 b is bland. Blandness is offensive, and so b does not actually uphold the highest standard of decency. q.e.d.
..buy an Apple. Never turn the thing off, just close the lid.
I've no idea whether it actually crashed the OS or not, but having watched a few people stand at a podium to deliver a presentation only to discover that their apple laptop won't talk to the data projector after waking from hibernation, i'm quite sure not everyone shares your confidence in apple.
You cant believe that this wasn't tested before it was decided upon.
Conspiracy theories are by nature unassailable. However, according to the article there is a simple reason why it wasn't tested, and that is that it was an unexpected effect, for which there was no test:
Most equipment and IC manufacturers perform reliability tests when adopting new encapsulation materials, and when shipping or receiving components. Even so, almost no problems were found at all this time, because this type of problem has never been experienced before. As one manufacturer commented, "This is the first example of this failure mode in the world. It's something that cannot be detected by existing reliability tests."
In that time not ONCE has he gotten a legitimate order form Malaysia nor Vietnam. Each and every single time it's a case of fraud, which ultimately results in chargebacks. In case you didn't know, the merchant eats the chargeback + fine from their merchant account providers. Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover...
So, with the high risk of fraud, my friend has been forced to ban everyone from those 2 countries.
Credit cards are convenient, but other forms of payment exist too. What prevented your friend there from accepting money orders? Cheques? Western-Union money transfers? There's lots of ways to pay for something (even from an international location) that do not involve credit cards. Extra overhead/costs can be charged to the consumer, with suitable delays to make sure the money is indeed in the vendor's hands.
If the overhead or delays make it unattractive to international buyers then fine, but cutting everyone off just because of credit card fraud seems ill-considered.
Anyone see anything on bear pond's site that confirms the sfgate article's claims? Their security/privacy policy does talk about keeping your info private & opt-in etc, but i was unable to find anything explicitly mentioning the option to have them destroy all records of your transaction, or any discussion of document retention policy.
(I wonder if they have a video camera in their store, and if so would they edit it to remove your image too?)
Rest assured i think it's as ridiculous as do you. But not because of any reasoning that taxation has or ever will consistently follow a logical principle. Governments have never had a problem taxing relatively arbitrary practices; there's perhaps a bias towards taxing wealth (at least in name) and transactive behaviour, but counter-examples certainly exist to fungibility as any guiding principle (eg television receiver taxes in parts of europe).
Casting shadows over other people's land does raise some legal problems, but these people aren't building giant towers on their property lines in order to "steal" the light from neighbors. They have solar collectors on their roofs and gather light that wasn't going, nor could potentially go, anywhere else.
Well, no. But just because it's not being fully exploited doesn't mean its a permanently unconstrained resource. Even going with the theory that no one but you can use it (ie ignoring consideration of shadows, which makes for a very big caveat) it doesn't seem to me that this sort of taxation is in contradiction to past or present practices. The differences you're emphasizing just do not seem like a valid basis for evaluating a potential tax source.
...is there any way for the RIAA to "shut down" Fasttrack?
Fasttrack is proprietary, so any guess may be correct. However, they do describe their network as formed from regular nodes and 'supernodes' that act as directory services for the regular nodes. Registration is used to find the initial supernode(s), but after that it is p2p (and supernodes can appear/disappear).
So, perhaps you could shut it down by demanding kazaa tells you about all the supernodes it knows about, and following the links. That will not get everyone, since links are transitory by nature in p2p, and so being exhaustive would be impossible. Alternatively, you could demand kazaa release all the registrant names, and use those as a starting point. But not everyone will have registered (you can find your way onto the network without registering), not everyone will have been entirely truthful when they did register (credit cards will help, but not guarantee), and besides that's a lot more work.
Alternatively, you could force ISPs to filter out Kazaa traffic. This works poorly; ISPs will not filter their traffic for just anyone (and there are costs/tradeoffs involved), and people would just hide the traffic some other way anyway.
So, there is no 100% way in a technical sense. Of course there are lots of imperfect solutions, and there may be a balanced level of enforcement that would keep it out of the mainstream---the answer could be yes in a pragmatic sense.
Mp3s etc still have some relevance today, but i don't see my personal use of them doing anything but decreasing to zero. I've recorded ~30Gig of mp3s at 5:1. Had i recorded as.wavs, that would be a paltry ~120Gig, and i would not need to be concerned about quality, mp3 royalties, patent royalties etc...(not to mention that a lossless format can function as a backup too)
My home network is certainly fast enough to serve.wavs; only drawback is in portable player capacity, but even that is ever-increasing.
Sadly, the inverse of that statement is also true: they will only go away if no one buys it. Despite my lack of purchasing anything from any of the stores that send me junk mail (real and email), i continue to get it. My vain hope the flow will eventually stop is permanently countered by the vain hopes of legions of businesses that i will finally break down and buy their product, sustained by excessively short memories and a steady trickle of similar-enough but less-discriminating consumers...
Slashdot Mirror
If (1) your kernel did a perfect job of keeping a single process/thread confined to a single CPU and (2) none of your processes/threads were sharing the same memory then a dual cache would perform about the same as a single cache.
Surely there's a synchronization cost if both cpus are accessing the same resource.
Chong was charged in court. I didn't keep track of the outcome.
He was sentenced to 9 months in prison for it.
I started "throwing around qualifications because of the parents comment that creationists couldn't pass science classes at a decent school, thus I put forth the argument that I as a creationist not only did pass those classes, but went on to do Grad work in a respected research field...
I have lots of university colleagues at various levels. The fact that some of them have religious convictions doesn't mean they're less intelligent in their field; we all have character flaws (eg i respond to increasingly-offtopic posts on slashdot).
You've at least formed some kind of argument, although i must admit that how any apparent weakness in the theory of fossilization corresponds to conclusions about something as preposterous as creationism is unclear (and for your information those who study fossilization are well aware that rock strata can be mixed). You quote a book as evidence---there are bad science books for sure; however, there are no logically sound creationist books at all.
For me there is far too much circular logic in evolutionary theories, and far too many people trying to make a name for themselves and falsifying evidence to do so..
You feel logical flaws are unique or especially prevalent in evolutionary theory over every other area? Science is not a perfect theory---in fact it's not a theory at all, it's a process of investigation, that tries to correct logical flaws over time. It's not exactly like creationism manages to avoid fame/money-seeking charlatans or circularity (perhaps the great logical leaps and lapses involved make it a acyclic?). One has to consider the preponderance of evidence, and the level of confidence in the logical connections involved. Evolution may or may not fit all the facts, but creationism has no evidence (except as established circularly), and no coherent logic.
Thus allowing upright primates to observe potential predators long before their quadrapedal buddies.
And therefore for their predators to observe them.
Using an auto-dialler (an Automatic Dialling and Announcing Device, or ADAD) for solicitation--charitable donations, promotions, sales, etc.--is forbidden by the CRTC
Yes, in theory, just like jay-walking & littering are illegal. I had a particularly persistent 'unknown number' using an autodialer. When i called the phone company about it, they were real reluctant to do anything involving effort on their part, like tracing the call. Good luck getting anyone interested in an international version of the same insignificant (at least to the phone co) problem.
Even if a company is blocking call ID, your phone company can probably trace the call.
But they really don't want to. Bell insisted i first try to trace it myself using their $0.50 service for one-shot call trace (ineffective). They then wanted detailed logs, and to get the police involved. At that point i wasn't sure which was going to suck up more of my time, the telemarketers or the people who were supposed to help eliminate those problems.
The only way to avoid phone spam is to not get a phone. The only way to hurt phone spammers is to waste their money----a sufficient number of tarpits would at least make it less cost-effective. Unfortunately, you need that sufficient number, and slowing telemarketers down also ties up your phone line.
ScrollUp--Scrolldown == Z
Your mouse doesn't move only along the x,y axes; you can move at any angle you like and the mechanism interprets the actual x,y delta. Using the scroll wheel for z would allow you to only move along the z axis. It would be as easy and pleasant as drawing diagonal lines on an etch-a-sketch.
...or take it out of its container and expose it to light/air.
Phew! I was worried it would key off something very common, that i might accidentally expose it to.
From "first47snertt" i may not guess "discover50snertr", but i might guess "discover*". If i found out both of those i might guess "amazonNNsnert?" for your amazon password, and if we add in "amazon48snertn" i'm pretty sure i'd find your password for slashdot real fast.
The problem is that your algorithm, or any such algorithm a human would use, represents a form of data compression on the password (if your narrative is 'longer' than the password, then just remember the password). Thus your decompressed passwords have less information density. As well, although your personal system may be arbitrarily difficult in practice to crack, i'd be surprised if most people's algorithms didn't converge on just a few actual styles (as above).
You know, ther is this nice thing called decimals. So the temperature goes from 0.5 degreed Celcius to 4.5 degrees Celsius.
I had a choice of choice of celsius or fahrenheit for the replacement of the heating control of a house. I chose celcius, only to be surprised that (like the fahrenheit model) it allowed temperature settings of integer degrees only---presumably due to limitations of the lcd display. The coarser temperature adjustment was noticeable compared to the previous control.
Oz, New Zealand, India, South Africa & hundreds of Islands (plus maybe even Canada?), they were all quite used to Imperial but had no problems going over to metrics.
Actually, although Canada has switched to the metric system, it was not entirely an easy transition. People (businesses) had to be forced to use metric through threat of law. I (vaguely) recall tv images of a gas station owner avowing to never switch to metric, and being arrested for it.
But I'd agree that the US would not be (is not) even as willing to change. Witness the relative reactions to the introduction of the coins in place of paper currency. In the US the Susan B. Anthony dollar was shunned, whereas Canadians quite quickly took to the loonie.
It's kind of funny that americans would latch onto a system of measurement they inherited from a former enemy as some sort symbol of national identity.
Why? I thought that you were a law-abiding citizen. Or did you mean that you obey the laws which you consider to be reasonable? ;-)
You were kidding i guess, but it's actually an interesting point. There's the 'formal' or specified system, and the 'actual' system or the rough, real-world approximation of the formal system. Almost none of us perfectly obey the formal system, but of course most of us obey the actual system. The actual system adheres to the perceived spirit of the formal system, but is not fully-specified. Crossing the street illegally, but safely is an example, as is not signalling a lane change when no other cars are around.
It is likely not the case that the parent poster is deciding on which laws to obey in complete isolation. It is quite likely they do respect the actual system, and so the choice of which law to obey is in fact a collective one, with some variance.
That is more myth than truth....they target not the plentiful system but the easiest.
...
You are quite right. But that's most important only to why windows is targetted, and not why virii in this context are such a problem. Moreover, targetting is undoubtedly correlated with perceived success, so another key factor is how well the virus "does."
To be successful, it only seems reasonable that a virus needs both a vulnerable host design, and a reasonable number of potential hosts within reach of each other. Propagation won't be effective if there are too few victims, too poorly connected. Better connectivity is at least loosely implied by abundance---it doesn't have to be a monoculture, but the more like one it is the better it is for viral transmission.
It's a tradeoff between the easy and the plentiful, with i agree a strong emphasis on the easy. Thinking about it further, there are probably a number of other weights in the equation too: chance of punishment for the virus writer, impact of each individual infection, peer-acceptance (windows=bad, linux=good),
hmm: weight these factors, empirically test & refine, publish master equation of virus writer motivation, enjoy eternal fame...
The public airwaves must maintain the highest standards of decency so that any and everyone can listen without being offended.
As has already been pointed out, the definitions of decency are not universal. The problem is then that your proposed property generates only the empty set.
In fact, i think it can be a theorem, with the following lemma:
Lemma 1: A broadcast that maintains only the highest standard of decency is bland.
Proof: Self evident.
Theorem: There are no broadcasts that maintain only the highest standard of decency.
Proof: Suppose there are, and let b be such a broadcast. By Lemma 1 b is bland. Blandness is offensive, and so b does not actually uphold the highest standard of decency. q.e.d.
..buy an Apple. Never turn the thing off, just close the lid.
I've no idea whether it actually crashed the OS or not, but having watched a few people stand at a podium to deliver a presentation only to discover that their apple laptop won't talk to the data projector after waking from hibernation, i'm quite sure not everyone shares your confidence in apple.
Conspiracy theories are by nature unassailable. However, according to the article there is a simple reason why it wasn't tested, and that is that it was an unexpected effect, for which there was no test:
i work with a guy who went to work for the nsa (that's right, super-spook central)...
If they are allowed to say they work for the NSA, then surely they do not really work for the NSA.
In that time not ONCE has he gotten a legitimate order form Malaysia nor Vietnam. Each and every single time it's a case of fraud, which ultimately results in chargebacks. In case you didn't know, the merchant eats the chargeback + fine from their merchant account providers. Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover...
So, with the high risk of fraud, my friend has been forced to ban everyone from those 2 countries.
Credit cards are convenient, but other forms of payment exist too. What prevented your friend there from accepting money orders? Cheques? Western-Union money transfers? There's lots of ways to pay for something (even from an international location) that do not involve credit cards. Extra overhead/costs can be charged to the consumer, with suitable delays to make sure the money is indeed in the vendor's hands.
If the overhead or delays make it unattractive to international buyers then fine, but cutting everyone off just because of credit card fraud seems ill-considered.
So, anybody know how to make any decent browser never time out? Mac OS X browser preferred, but I'll take Linux or Windows in a pinch.
wget might do what you need. The -T option lets you play with the timeout if 15 minutes isn't enough.
Anyone see anything on bear pond's site that confirms the sfgate article's claims? Their security/privacy policy does talk about keeping your info private & opt-in etc, but i was unable to find anything explicitly mentioning the option to have them destroy all records of your transaction, or any discussion of document retention policy.
(I wonder if they have a video camera in their store, and if so would they edit it to remove your image too?)
Rest assured i think it's as ridiculous as do you. But not because of any reasoning that taxation has or ever will consistently follow a logical principle. Governments have never had a problem taxing relatively arbitrary practices; there's perhaps a bias towards taxing wealth (at least in name) and transactive behaviour, but counter-examples certainly exist to fungibility as any guiding principle (eg television receiver taxes in parts of europe).
Casting shadows over other people's land does raise some legal problems, but these people aren't building giant towers on their property lines in order to "steal" the light from neighbors. They have solar collectors on their roofs and gather light that wasn't going, nor could potentially go, anywhere else.
Well, no. But just because it's not being fully exploited doesn't mean its a permanently unconstrained resource. Even going with the theory that no one but you can use it (ie ignoring consideration of shadows, which makes for a very big caveat) it doesn't seem to me that this sort of taxation is in contradiction to past or present practices. The differences you're emphasizing just do not seem like a valid basis for evaluating a potential tax source.
...but my using sunlight doesn't take away from anyone else potential use.
What, is everything around you transparent? If your building casts a shadow on my solar panel i think it is certainly taking away my potential use.
Unfortunately, in an urban setting sunlight is a limited resource.
...is there any way for the RIAA to "shut down" Fasttrack?
Fasttrack is proprietary, so any guess may be correct. However, they do describe their network as formed from regular nodes and 'supernodes' that act as directory services for the regular nodes. Registration is used to find the initial supernode(s), but after that it is p2p (and supernodes can appear/disappear).
So, perhaps you could shut it down by demanding kazaa tells you about all the supernodes it knows about, and following the links. That will not get everyone, since links are transitory by nature in p2p, and so being exhaustive would be impossible. Alternatively, you could demand kazaa release all the registrant names, and use those as a starting point. But not everyone will have registered (you can find your way onto the network without registering), not everyone will have been entirely truthful when they did register (credit cards will help, but not guarantee), and besides that's a lot more work.
Alternatively, you could force ISPs to filter out Kazaa traffic. This works poorly; ISPs will not filter their traffic for just anyone (and there are costs/tradeoffs involved), and people would just hide the traffic some other way anyway.
So, there is no 100% way in a technical sense. Of course there are lots of imperfect solutions, and there may be a balanced level of enforcement that would keep it out of the mainstream---the answer could be yes in a pragmatic sense.
oops, 5x30=150. it's early.
Mp3s etc still have some relevance today, but i don't see my personal use of them doing anything but decreasing to zero. I've recorded ~30Gig of mp3s at 5:1. Had i recorded as .wavs, that would be a paltry ~120Gig, and i would not need to be concerned about quality, mp3 royalties, patent royalties etc...(not to mention that a lossless format can function as a backup too)
.wavs; only drawback is in portable player capacity, but even that is ever-increasing.
My home network is certainly fast enough to serve
If nobody buys it, they'll go away.
Sadly, the inverse of that statement is also true: they will only go away if no one buys it. Despite my lack of purchasing anything from any of the stores that send me junk mail (real and email), i continue to get it. My vain hope the flow will eventually stop is permanently countered by the vain hopes of legions of businesses that i will finally break down and buy their product, sustained by excessively short memories and a steady trickle of similar-enough but less-discriminating consumers...