Q1. Can't be C and can't be D - these aren't stable because they don't orbit the primary. also there is no way to distinguish between C and D if we assume there is a planet at the centre of the circle. Can be A or B. Planets tend to have circular orbits but there's no theoretical reason why they can't have a highly eliptical orbit and moons orbit so close to the primary that the "wobble" wont be visible. (although the graph isn't drawn to scale so they could have drawn a wobble on A)
Q19. Huh? Radio signals are analogue.
Q20. A obviously not true. B&C Hearing deteriorates with age and, barring things like digital hearing aids (if they exist), digital technology has no effect on what you can hear. So I assume they are referring to the loudness war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
And those aren't even the worst!
Q5,6,7 and 8 are all appalling. Q7 is obviously there at the request of the government to soften people up. Q2. We can take photographs of a moon because it is electromagnetic. Is this even a sentence? Attempting to make a sentence out of it: We can take photographs of a moon because it affects electromagnetic waves.
"No, there's no such thing as a trade deficit, EVER!"
Rubbish.
China lends money to the US in return for interest plus the capital repayment at some point in the future. The interest that the US has to pay is a reflection of how risky that investment is for the Chinese. The trade in this case is an exchange of risk for interest, NOT an exchange of risk plus capital for interest (unless you are presupposing that the US is going to renege on repaying it's T bills)
The US then uses those funds to buy _consumables_ from the Chinese. The US now has a deficit because it still owes the money that it borrowed but it no longer has the asset to repay it.
While the US economy is growing this might not be a problem because the net assets of the US might be growing faster than the outflux of money. But there is still a trade deficit.
The same logic applies if the US uses reserves to buy the consumables. Both sides might agree that doing the deal is better for them than not doing the deal but the US still sees a net outflow of assets and this is what is called a trade deficit.
Subversion should have proper branching and merging.
The key requirement of any reasonable VCS is that any developer can checkin their version of the code at any time (without having to make any special preparations) and any developer can recover that version at any later time.
As soon as the problems this causes are solved (and they're not all easy to solve) your VCS can fairly trivially be made distributed.
Starting from the premise that the VCS will be distributed forces the requirement to be able to checkin to be true because there is a use case where the developer can guarantee that there are no other changes in the repository between them going their checkout and them doing their checkin and therefore there cannot be any conflicts at checkin time.
(It is possible to design a crippled distributed VCS where all the conflicts MUST be resolved at push/pull synch time but that would then violate the second half of the requirement where every checked in version must be available to everybody. If every version is going to be available after a synch then there can be no need to require any conflicts to be resolved at synchup time.)
Both teens looked down and nodded. "Yes, " said Harry glumly. "We had to go to a different section of Dragon's Alley for it, some shop called Lord Chumley's Marital Accoutrements and Novelties for the Gentleman.
You didn't OCR that - you dictated it to your secretary!
Everybody knows Chumley is spelled Cholmondeley (except your secretary;-)
"One advantage of scoring only correct answers is that it removes a psychological pressure to not guess, and scoring guessing is actually a fairly good way of determining knowledge level. If you know nothing about the answer, you'll get it right 50% of the time. If you know just a little bit about a question, you may raise that to 60%, if you're familiar with it, you might get it right 80% of the time, and if you know it solid you'll get it right 95-100% of the time. If someone only answers when they feel very sure of the answer, you lose some of that ability to discriminate between knowledge levels."
I think the underlying problem he's trying to bring up is that on "very hard" tests there will be some questions "everybody" can answer and some questions "nobody" can answer.
The extreme outliers on either end will be correctly filtered by the test but the majority in the middle will be sorted more by random noise that by knowledge.
For tests where the "pass mark" is "top 30% of takers" with a large proportion of the takers answering basically the same questions and guessing on the rest the excellent people will correctly pass, the useless people will correctly fail but the rest will pass/fail based as much on luck as on knowledge.
Your example merely demonstrated that politicization of science and scientific consensus are indeed real problems by your assumption that the scientific proof for global warming is as substantial as it is for our theories on gravity. It's not, but many people believe it is because the media told them so.
You're right. With gravity we've done the experiment so when you jump off that 100 story building and say "I'm ok" as you pass the tenth floor we know that you're really in trouble.
With global warming its more a case of the scientists saying "I know we've got away with it so far but we're pretty sure it's really going to hurt once we actually reach the ground and we're rapidly approaching the point where there may be absolutely nothing we can do to mitigate the effects of that crash"
Scientists are saying "you'd better open that parachute pretty darn quick" while the global warming deniers are still arguing about whether they fell or they were pushed.
Infact, a quick google turns up http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/6704046.html - which just mentions RGBW and points out that all three of the RGB values will have to be interpolated at the white pixel.
I've certainly discussed this idea with people at least a year ago completely independent of any research done at Kodak. Four colour sensors, CYGM and RGBE, have been around for years.
Other ideas that have been played with are non regular (fractal) CFAs.
An obvious further extension to what Kodak has done (assuming it isn't what they have done) is to have something like RYYB (bayer but with G replaced with Luminance). This ought to capture still more light. Infact, as CCDs tend to be more sensitive towards the red end of the spectrum RYYG might be even better or even Yellow-Magenta-Luminance.
All of these add processing complexity (and might add too much noise).
IANAL. This issue has been coming up recently over the bank charges issue.
AIUI, the basic issue is that in B2C contracts where the customer is not able to negotiate the contract the terms must be "fair".
If a term is unfair then the customer is able to ignore it and sign the contract as if the term didn't exist at all. The customer doesn't even have to point out the term is unfair or delete it.
What happens next is that the customer does something in violation of that term - as far as the customer is concerned the term doesn't exist.
The business then sues the customer based on that term.
The courts then have to decide whether the term is "fair". If it is then the customer gets done as if the term had existed from the start i.e. "I thought it was unfair" isn't a defence. If it isn't fair then the contract continues to stand without the unfair term.
With the bank charges cases at the moment the argument is that the amounts of the charges for breach of contract do not represent the banks costs in any way or form. As a result of this many people are saying the charges are unfair and therefore the term in the contract does not stand and therefore the banks are not allowed to charge penalties for going overdrawn. (Interest is a separate clause which I don't think people are trying to say is unfair). In the majority of cases when customers have demanded their money back the banks have caved in. In a couple it's gone to court and there has been results both ways but no precident has been set. Until (and if) it gets to a higher court we won't actually know if the terms are fair or unfair in general or what level of penalty charge would be considered fair.
Tim.
Re:Distributed version control gaining ground in F
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
·
· Score: 1
The distributed system is basically a centralized system where EVERY COPY HAS FULL REVISION HISTORY.
No. The fundamental feature of a distributed VCS is that you can ALWAYS commit your current state and get back to it.
Once you have this feature, any centralized VCS can trivially be converted into a DVCS because on every commit you _DO_NOT_CARE_ what anybody else might have done to the repository.
Infact, the problem that DVCS have to solve is that they do NOT have a full revision history because if you commit to the trunk in your repo and I commit to the trunk in my repo we are both completely oblivious to the other commit until we merge (my statements above immediately follow from this)
### why would you choose a license where vendors can close their deviations from the standard implementation.
Because you want them to use your standard in the first place.
And when Microsoft extends your kerberos standard but doesn't publish what their extensions mean so nobody else can support their extensions?
You want your standard to be "free" you need to "GPL" your standard. You want your code to be free, you need to "GPL" your code. You want your users to be free you need to "BSD" your standard or your code.
A lot of electronics whistles. Even at 36 I can still hear the whistle from most powersupplies but it's now sufficiently close to the threshold of hearing that I can easily ignore it (but I still sometimes notice I've left my laptop charger plugged in because I hear it when I'm stting silently)
20 years ago the whistle from a telly in the next room was irritating and the noise from computer monitors that had been left on (but were displaying nothing) was enough to drive me out of the room again. (I've still got an old 12" B&W monitor that I use occasionally but I'm now far more likely to notice I've left it switched on because of the green light on the front than because I hear it)
I wonder if some of the complaints people have are nothing more than subconsciously hearing this noise without actually realising it's there.
have the capability (if certain theoretical models are accurate enough) to generate very tiny (around nine millimeters)
9 millimeters? That's huge.
You'd need a mass of about 6x10^24kg to get a Schwartzchild radius of 9mm.
Microscopic (much smaller than a proton) black holes, yes but 9mm just doesn't sound credible unless you've got some very outlandish theories about black holes.
(I've just been to read your link - a 9mm hole is what is left when the entire Earth is consumed by a microscopic black hole.)
Not necessarily. It could also mean that Firefox users are more self-confident and thus have a higher probability of clicking on the link, because they know it can't harm them anyways...
Ha! I was going to suggest that firefox users are more "educated" and less likely to click on a link.
On the whole though I'd assume that there were the roughly same proportion of idiots in each camp
We're going to aggree there very quickly. I have no problem with seeing it as an extra road bump. That's a sane and realistic attitude, and every bit helps, obviously.
It's more than that. It makes the current type of worm/virus/whatever that spends its time scanning for more machines to infect pointless and worthless.
Count how many "hits" you've had from random port scanners on all ports in all the time you've been connected to the internet.
Divide that by the difference in address space size between ipv4 and ipv6 and in an ipv6 world, the number of hits like this will be zero.
You're still vulnerable if an attacker knows you are there.
ipv6 may become an excuse not to upgrade vulnerable services (which is bad) but currently our bigger problem is that most people don't upgrade vulnerable services at all and those of us that do are quite literally[1] being drowned out by the people who dont.
[1] I had a machine DOSd off the internet by another persons machine on the same subnet that, once it was infected with one of the SQLserver worms, proceeded to overload the router with its scanning for more hosts to infect.
The ability of a wide spread 0-day vulnerability to scan and infect every vulnerable host on the internet in a few minutes (or even a few millenia) will have gone.
I can (kinda) understand how n qubits can store every number between 1 and 2^n, and I can (very vaguely) imagine how that allows one to perform calculations on all those numbers simultaneously. Assuming all of that is true and good, what would one do with the output? For example, let's say I take sqrt(1 to 2^n) and get glurg as a result. Does glurg really hold the sqrt of all those numbers, and if so, how do I access them individually?
Those aren't the sorts of problem you ask to a quantum computer. Even if you could do that it would take you ages to read out all 2^n answers, so why bother, just use a classical computer.
Where quantum computers shine is when you know the answer lies between 1 and 2^n but you have no idea which number.
So you set up your QC with all the numbers between 1 and sqrt(N) and then ask the computer - what is a factor of N. It can test them all in parallel and give you the one result you want.
Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?
Unless this is the sort of thing you've been doing before, it's unlikely you'd be able to do that - I'd have expected you'd need some time to work out the answers. I know I would, and I've been programming for 25+ years.
Similar to the sorts of questions I've been asked at job interviews for other companies. They're also the sorts of questions we pose to one another at the end of our team meetings.
The first question is quite easy to answer -ish. I guess they meant 'as efficiently as possible' - not as 'effectively as possible' (in which case, as long as you got the right answer you'd meet the requirements). To get the basic concept isn't hard, but to get it "as efficiently as possible" you'd need some thought, which would be hard on the phone. (You go up in steps (eg 10 floors at a time) until the first marble breaks, then go back a step and go up one floor at a time until the second marble breaks - the "hard" bit is knowing what size steps to use for the first part to be most efficient)
The first question is very vague and poorly structured but gives an excellent opportunity to mumble^Wtalk while your thinking.
"Well the obvious solution is to start on floor one dropping the marble and then climb the stairs to the next floor. The problem with this solution is that once you get high enough you will probably need to climb all the way down after each drop to see if the marble has broken - although we'd probably have lost it unless we have someone at the bottom so we can assume we don't need to climb down again.
If we only have stairs then this is quite likely to be the best solution. Any other solution is going to involve going back down again which is likely to make it slower. Going up two floors at a time might be faster because once the first marble breaks you'll only have to go down one floor to test that one and never have to reclimb. However, our time is still going to be dominated by the climbing.
If we have a lift then we need to reconsider. It will depend on how long it takes to call the lift. Riding the lift to the 50th floor and dropping the first marble and then working up one floor at a time either from here or the bottom will require climbing up to fifty flights with up to two waits for the lift.
Of course, we could prop the lift door open, then we'll never need to wait for it (although there's still the danger that it will decide it's going down when we want to go up). So we could go up 10 floors (square root of number of floors). That would give us 19 drops (10 to floor 100 then 9 from 91 to 99) worst case. However we could also solve the problem for a building with 109 floors in the same number of drops. Going up 10 floors at a time to floor 50 and then 9 floors at a time to floor 95 gives us a worst case of 5 (drops to floor 50) +5 (drops to floor 95) +8 (drops from 87-94) =18
And I've just realised a problem with my very earliest assumption - you're going to have to go back down to collect the marble after two drops anyway. This means an optimum solution will probably have bigger steps at the bottom and smaller steps at the top. I'd need more information on things like lift speeds and need to run simulations to give a better answer than that."
(That was written exactly as I was thinking - an interviewer might pick up on the having to retrieve the marble after each drop (or two) or might allow me to continue my thoughts. If they did interrupt me early on I'd probably not get to the final paragraph above.)
For the 3rd question I'd have difficulty. AFAICS you'd have to use some form of compression to be able to do it (you have to hold 8M characters in 2M RAM - you could convert the phone numbers to 'real' numbers, but that'd still be 4MB in 2MB RAM). I reckon I'd be able to do it, but I'd guess it would take at least several hours to work out the nitty gritty - which sounds dumb for a phone interview.. (There's a
Seeing as how central maths is to any science subject, I can't believe anyone considering doing a science degree would not do maths A level.
I read physics at Oxford (1989-1992). I remember one of my tutors saying that the following years applicants was the first time he'd ever seen anybody applying to do physics at Oxford who hadn't done A level maths.
So it's been heading downhill for at least 17 years:-(
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
It's a rather peculiar artifact of the way schools are ranked in "league tables" nowadays. Schools get graded based on how many students get A-C in GCSE (age 16) and top grades in A-levels. (at 18)
The usual (was) to do 9 or 10 O levels (now GCSEs) and 3 A levels. I actually did 5 A levels although this was unusual at the time. I did maths, further maths, physics, chemistry and music. Now the music was an extra and I was never going to get a great grade for it (I actually got a D although I was hoping for a C - pass is A to E). Nowadays the school would probably demand I didn't take that fifth A level because it will pull the schools average down. I also took my A level maths a year early. The school might now decide to not allow that because it increases the risk I might not get an A.
Likewise, a school that's got a student doing say, maths, physics, chemistry and predicted BAA might be encouraged to drop the maths and do general studies instead so they can get AAA. This is worse for the student but it's better for the school.
Initial calculation - work out the lengths of each edge - the entire mesh forms a kite shaped prism.
(i) Calculate the numeric values of the vectors B->D, and A1->C, then calculate the dot product. That should equal zero.
Mostly I did it the way you've described but this first part was so easy I spend a lot of time trying to see a trivial solution for the other parts. (When I finally worked it all out and got arccos(sqrt(3)/sqrt(5)) for (iii) I decided that there perhaps wasn't a simple solution for (ii))
I was also somewhat confused by the wording. The only "square prism" I've ever come across is more commonly called a cuboid. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SquarePrism.html agrees with me. Right prism is what they mean.
I also don't see the relevance of "foot of perpendicular is E" (but see my solution to (i) below)
For i:
Let E be the origin. Define a cartesian set of axes. ED define the X axis, EA the Y axis and the perpendicular to E the Z axis.
Now BD only has a component in the X axis while A1C only has components in the Y and Z axes therefore their dot product must be zero and thus BD and A1C must be perpendicular as they are both of non-zero length. QED.
But let's call a spade a spade, and recognize that both the US gov't and the EU have a "homer" agenda that pushes them to punish 'foreigners' far more than they scrutinize themselves.
Some of us refuse to go lower than Valrhona, usually in the 60-70% cocoa, with Dark Chocolate Noir Orange 64% Cocoa being our favorite (purchased in 1/2 lb bars.)
Why eat shitty chocolate when you can have good stuff? My SO finds that if we buy crappy chocolate, she just eats more of it and isn't satisfied. Good chocolate like the above satisfies her in an ounce or two (or three) serving size, so she eats less and enjoys more.
Break a bit off. Let it slowly dissolve on the tongue and savour that bitter chocolate taste unspoiled by added sugars and fats. (The very first time you eat it you can't really believe it's chocolate but once you've had a few bits you can only taste the impurities in cheap chocolate).
Slashdot Mirror
see the physics GCSE paper here: http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/exampaper.pdf
Just a few comments.
Q1. Can't be C and can't be D - these aren't stable because they don't orbit the primary. also there is no way to distinguish between C and D if we assume there is a planet at the centre of the circle. Can be A or B. Planets tend to have circular orbits but there's no theoretical reason why they can't have a highly eliptical orbit and moons orbit so close to the primary that the "wobble" wont be visible. (although the graph isn't drawn to scale so they could have drawn a wobble on A)
Q19. Huh? Radio signals are analogue.
Q20. A obviously not true. B&C Hearing deteriorates with age and, barring things like digital hearing aids (if they exist), digital technology has no effect on what you can hear. So I assume they are referring to the loudness war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
And those aren't even the worst!
Q5,6,7 and 8 are all appalling. Q7 is obviously there at the request of the government to soften people up.
Q2. We can take photographs of a moon because it is electromagnetic.
Is this even a sentence? Attempting to make a sentence out of it: We can take photographs of a moon because it affects electromagnetic waves.
Tim.
"No, there's no such thing as a trade deficit, EVER!"
Rubbish.
China lends money to the US in return for interest plus the capital repayment at some point in the future. The interest that the US has to pay is a reflection of how risky that investment is for the Chinese. The trade in this case is an exchange of risk for interest, NOT an exchange of risk plus capital for interest (unless you are presupposing that the US is going to renege on repaying it's T bills)
The US then uses those funds to buy _consumables_ from the Chinese. The US now has a deficit because it still owes the money that it borrowed but it no longer has the asset to repay it.
While the US economy is growing this might not be a problem because the net assets of the US might be growing faster than the outflux of money. But there is still a trade deficit.
The same logic applies if the US uses reserves to buy the consumables. Both sides might agree that doing the deal is better for them than not doing the deal but the US still sees a net outflow of assets and this is what is called a trade deficit.
Tim.
Subversion should have proper branching and merging.
The key requirement of any reasonable VCS is that any developer can checkin their version of the code at any time (without having to make any special preparations) and any developer can recover that version at any later time.
As soon as the problems this causes are solved (and they're not all easy to solve) your VCS can fairly trivially be made distributed.
Starting from the premise that the VCS will be distributed forces the requirement to be able to checkin to be true because there is a use case where the developer can guarantee that there are no other changes in the repository between them going their checkout and them doing their checkin and therefore there cannot be any conflicts at checkin time.
(It is possible to design a crippled distributed VCS where all the conflicts MUST be resolved at push/pull synch time but that would then violate the second half of the requirement where every checked in version must be available to everybody. If every version is going to be available after a synch then there can be no need to require any conflicts to be resolved at synchup time.)
Tim.
Both teens looked down and nodded. "Yes, " said Harry glumly. "We had to go to a different section of Dragon's Alley for it, some shop called Lord Chumley's Marital Accoutrements and Novelties for the Gentleman.
;-)
You didn't OCR that - you dictated it to your secretary!
Everybody knows Chumley is spelled Cholmondeley (except your secretary
Tim.
"One advantage of scoring only correct answers is that it removes a psychological pressure to not guess, and scoring guessing is actually a fairly good way of determining knowledge level. If you know nothing about the answer, you'll get it right 50% of the time. If you know just a little bit about a question, you may raise that to 60%, if you're familiar with it, you might get it right 80% of the time, and if you know it solid you'll get it right 95-100% of the time. If someone only answers when they feel very sure of the answer, you lose some of that ability to discriminate between knowledge levels."
I think the underlying problem he's trying to bring up is that on "very hard" tests there will be some questions "everybody" can answer and some questions "nobody" can answer.
The extreme outliers on either end will be correctly filtered by the test but the majority in the middle will be sorted more by random noise that by knowledge.
For tests where the "pass mark" is "top 30% of takers" with a large proportion of the takers answering basically the same questions and guessing on the rest the excellent people will correctly pass, the useless people will correctly fail but the rest will pass/fail based as much on luck as on knowledge.
Tim.
Your example merely demonstrated that politicization of science and scientific consensus are indeed real problems by your assumption that the scientific proof for global warming is as substantial as it is for our theories on gravity. It's not, but many people believe it is because the media told them so.
You're right. With gravity we've done the experiment so when you jump off that 100 story building and say "I'm ok" as you pass the tenth floor we know that you're really in trouble.
With global warming its more a case of the scientists saying "I know we've got away with it so far but we're pretty sure it's really going to hurt once we actually reach the ground and we're rapidly approaching the point where there may be absolutely nothing we can do to mitigate the effects of that crash"
Scientists are saying "you'd better open that parachute pretty darn quick" while the global warming deniers are still arguing about whether they fell or they were pushed.
Tim.
Ah. Ok. They've presumably done something like
RGRY
GBYB
RYRG
YBGB
Tim.
Infact, a quick google turns up http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/6704046.html - which just mentions RGBW and points out that all three of the RGB values will have to be interpolated at the white pixel.
Tim.
Depends when the idea was originally.
I've certainly discussed this idea with people at least a year ago completely independent of any research done at Kodak. Four colour sensors, CYGM and RGBE, have been around for years.
Other ideas that have been played with are non regular (fractal) CFAs.
An obvious further extension to what Kodak has done (assuming it isn't what they have done) is to have something like RYYB (bayer but with G replaced with Luminance). This ought to capture still more light. Infact, as CCDs tend to be more sensitive towards the red end of the spectrum RYYG might be even better or even Yellow-Magenta-Luminance.
All of these add processing complexity (and might add too much noise).
Tim.
IANAL. This issue has been coming up recently over the bank charges issue.
AIUI, the basic issue is that in B2C contracts where the customer is not able to negotiate the contract the terms must be "fair".
If a term is unfair then the customer is able to ignore it and sign the contract as if the term didn't exist at all. The customer doesn't even have to point out the term is unfair or delete it.
What happens next is that the customer does something in violation of that term - as far as the customer is concerned the term doesn't exist.
The business then sues the customer based on that term.
The courts then have to decide whether the term is "fair". If it is then the customer gets done as if the term had existed from the start i.e. "I thought it was unfair" isn't a defence. If it isn't fair then the contract continues to stand without the unfair term.
With the bank charges cases at the moment the argument is that the amounts of the charges for breach of contract do not represent the banks costs in any way or form. As a result of this many people are saying the charges are unfair and therefore the term in the contract does not stand and therefore the banks are not allowed to charge penalties for going overdrawn. (Interest is a separate clause which I don't think people are trying to say is unfair). In the majority of cases when customers have demanded their money back the banks have caved in. In a couple it's gone to court and there has been results both ways but no precident has been set. Until (and if) it gets to a higher court we won't actually know if the terms are fair or unfair in general or what level of penalty charge would be considered fair.
Tim.
The distributed system is basically a centralized system where EVERY COPY HAS FULL REVISION HISTORY.
No. The fundamental feature of a distributed VCS is that you can ALWAYS commit your current state and get back to it.
Once you have this feature, any centralized VCS can trivially be converted into a DVCS because on every commit you _DO_NOT_CARE_ what anybody else might have done to the repository.
Infact, the problem that DVCS have to solve is that they do NOT have a full revision history because if you commit to the trunk in your repo and I commit to the trunk in my repo we are both completely oblivious to the other commit until we merge (my statements above immediately follow from this)
Tim.
### why would you choose a license where vendors can close their deviations from the standard implementation.
Because you want them to use your standard in the first place.
And when Microsoft extends your kerberos standard but doesn't publish what their extensions mean so nobody else can support their extensions?
You want your standard to be "free" you need to "GPL" your standard. You want your code to be free, you need to "GPL" your code. You want your users to be free you need to "BSD" your standard or your code.
Tim.
A lot of electronics whistles. Even at 36 I can still hear the whistle from most powersupplies but it's now sufficiently close to the threshold of hearing that I can easily ignore it (but I still sometimes notice I've left my laptop charger plugged in because I hear it when I'm stting silently)
20 years ago the whistle from a telly in the next room was irritating and the noise from computer monitors that had been left on (but were displaying nothing) was enough to drive me out of the room again. (I've still got an old 12" B&W monitor that I use occasionally but I'm now far more likely to notice I've left it switched on because of the green light on the front than because I hear it)
I wonder if some of the complaints people have are nothing more than subconsciously hearing this noise without actually realising it's there.
Tim.
have the capability (if certain theoretical models are accurate enough) to generate very tiny (around nine millimeters)
9 millimeters? That's huge.
You'd need a mass of about 6x10^24kg to get a Schwartzchild radius of 9mm.
Microscopic (much smaller than a proton) black holes, yes but 9mm just doesn't sound credible unless you've got some very outlandish theories about black holes.
(I've just been to read your link - a 9mm hole is what is left when the entire Earth is consumed by a microscopic black hole.)
Tim.
Interesting, given that Firefox has a 12% market share that 15% of the people that clicked use Firefox.
And there were no netscape users that clicked although your link gives 12% to netscape too.
The clickthrough stats give 73% to IE6, your link gives 56%
That gives Firefox a 15% share.
Not necessarily. It could also mean that Firefox users are more self-confident and thus have a higher probability of clicking on the link, because they know it can't harm them anyways...
Ha! I was going to suggest that firefox users are more "educated" and less likely to click on a link.
On the whole though I'd assume that there were the roughly same proportion of idiots in each camp
Tim.
The comments give the browser stats:
335 - some version of IE
52 - Some version of Firefox
5 - other
That gives Firefox a 15% share.
Tim.
We're going to aggree there very quickly. I have no problem with seeing it as an extra road bump. That's a sane and realistic attitude, and every bit helps, obviously.
It's more than that. It makes the current type of worm/virus/whatever that spends its time scanning for more machines to infect pointless and worthless.
Count how many "hits" you've had from random port scanners on all ports in all the time you've been connected to the internet.
Divide that by the difference in address space size between ipv4 and ipv6 and in an ipv6 world, the number of hits like this will be zero.
You're still vulnerable if an attacker knows you are there.
ipv6 may become an excuse not to upgrade vulnerable services (which is bad) but currently our bigger problem is that most people don't upgrade vulnerable services at all and those of us that do are quite literally[1] being drowned out by the people who dont.
[1] I had a machine DOSd off the internet by another persons machine on the same subnet that, once it was infected with one of the SQLserver worms, proceeded to overload the router with its scanning for more hosts to infect.
The ability of a wide spread 0-day vulnerability to scan and infect every vulnerable host on the internet in a few minutes (or even a few millenia) will have gone.
Tim.
I can (kinda) understand how n qubits can store every number between 1 and 2^n, and I can (very vaguely) imagine how that allows one to perform calculations on all those numbers simultaneously. Assuming all of that is true and good, what would one do with the output? For example, let's say I take sqrt(1 to 2^n) and get glurg as a result. Does glurg really hold the sqrt of all those numbers, and if so, how do I access them individually?
Those aren't the sorts of problem you ask to a quantum computer. Even if you could do that it would take you ages to read out all 2^n answers, so why bother, just use a classical computer.
Where quantum computers shine is when you know the answer lies between 1 and 2^n but you have no idea which number.
So you set up your QC with all the numbers between 1 and sqrt(N) and then ask the computer - what is a factor of N. It can test them all in parallel and give you the one result you want.
Tim.
Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?
Unless this is the sort of thing you've been doing before, it's unlikely you'd be able to do that - I'd have expected you'd need some time to work out the answers. I know I would, and I've been programming for 25+ years.
Similar to the sorts of questions I've been asked at job interviews for other companies. They're also the sorts of questions we pose to one another at the end of our team meetings.
The first question is quite easy to answer -ish. I guess they meant 'as efficiently as possible' - not as 'effectively as possible' (in which case, as long as you got the right answer you'd meet the requirements). To get the basic concept isn't hard, but to get it "as efficiently as possible" you'd need some thought, which would be hard on the phone. (You go up in steps (eg 10 floors at a time) until the first marble breaks, then go back a step and go up one floor at a time until the second marble breaks - the "hard" bit is knowing what size steps to use for the first part to be most efficient)
The first question is very vague and poorly structured but gives an excellent opportunity to mumble^Wtalk while your thinking.
"Well the obvious solution is to start on floor one dropping the marble and then climb the stairs to the next floor. The problem with this solution is that once you get high enough you will probably need to climb all the way down after each drop to see if the marble has broken - although we'd probably have lost it unless we have someone at the bottom so we can assume we don't need to climb down again.
If we only have stairs then this is quite likely to be the best solution. Any other solution is going to involve going back down again which is likely to make it slower. Going up two floors at a time might be faster because once the first marble breaks you'll only have to go down one floor to test that one and never have to reclimb. However, our time is still going to be dominated by the climbing.
If we have a lift then we need to reconsider. It will depend on how long it takes to call the lift. Riding the lift to the 50th floor and dropping the first marble and then working up one floor at a time either from here or the bottom will require climbing up to fifty flights with up to two waits for the lift.
Of course, we could prop the lift door open, then we'll never need to wait for it (although there's still the danger that it will decide it's going down when we want to go up).
So we could go up 10 floors (square root of number of floors). That would give us 19 drops (10 to floor 100 then 9 from 91 to 99) worst case. However we could also solve the problem for a building with 109 floors in the same number of drops. Going up 10 floors at a time to floor 50 and then 9 floors at a time to floor 95 gives us a worst case of 5 (drops to floor 50) +5 (drops to floor 95) +8 (drops from 87-94) =18
And I've just realised a problem with my very earliest assumption - you're going to have to go back down to collect the marble after two drops anyway. This means an optimum solution will probably have bigger steps at the bottom and smaller steps at the top. I'd need more information on things like lift speeds and need to run simulations to give a better answer than that."
(That was written exactly as I was thinking - an interviewer might pick up on the having to retrieve the marble after each drop (or two) or might allow me to continue my thoughts. If they did interrupt me early on I'd probably not get to the final paragraph above.)
For the 3rd question I'd have difficulty. AFAICS you'd have to use some form of compression to be able to do it (you have to hold 8M characters in 2M RAM - you could convert the phone numbers to 'real' numbers, but that'd still be 4MB in 2MB RAM). I reckon I'd be able to do it, but I'd guess it would take at least several hours to work out the nitty gritty - which sounds dumb for a phone interview.. (There's a
Seeing as how central maths is to any science subject, I can't believe anyone considering doing a science degree would not do maths A level.
:-(
I read physics at Oxford (1989-1992). I remember one of my tutors saying that the following years applicants was the first time he'd ever seen anybody applying to do physics at Oxford who hadn't done A level maths.
So it's been heading downhill for at least 17 years
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
6 95.stm
It's a rather peculiar artifact of the way schools are ranked in "league tables" nowadays. Schools get graded based on how many students get A-C in GCSE (age 16) and top grades in A-levels. (at 18)
The usual (was) to do 9 or 10 O levels (now GCSEs) and 3 A levels. I actually did 5 A levels although this was unusual at the time. I did maths, further maths, physics, chemistry and music. Now the music was an extra and I was never going to get a great grade for it (I actually got a D although I was hoping for a C - pass is A to E). Nowadays the school would probably demand I didn't take that fifth A level because it will pull the schools average down. I also took my A level maths a year early. The school might now decide to not allow that because it increases the risk I might not get an A.
Likewise, a school that's got a student doing say, maths, physics, chemistry and predicted BAA might be encouraged to drop the maths and do general studies instead so they can get AAA. This is worse for the student but it's better for the school.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6588
"Pupils are being discouraged from taking A-level maths as schools in England chase higher places in the league tables, scientists have claimed."
Tim.
Initial calculation - work out the lengths of each edge - the entire mesh forms a kite shaped prism.
(i) Calculate the numeric values of the vectors B->D, and A1->C, then calculate the dot product. That should equal zero.
Mostly I did it the way you've described but this first part was so easy I spend a lot of time trying to see a trivial solution for the other parts. (When I finally worked it all out and got arccos(sqrt(3)/sqrt(5)) for (iii) I decided that there perhaps wasn't a simple solution for (ii))
I was also somewhat confused by the wording. The only "square prism" I've ever come across is more commonly called a cuboid. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SquarePrism.html agrees with me. Right prism is what they mean.
I also don't see the relevance of "foot of perpendicular is E" (but see my solution to (i) below)
For i:
Let E be the origin. Define a cartesian set of axes. ED define the X axis, EA the Y axis and the perpendicular to E the Z axis.
Now BD only has a component in the X axis while A1C only has components in the Y and Z axes therefore their dot product must be zero and thus BD and A1C must be perpendicular as they are both of non-zero length. QED.
Tim.
But let's call a spade a spade, and recognize that both the US gov't and the EU have a "homer" agenda that pushes them to punish 'foreigners' far more than they scrutinize themselves.
Where did you get this idea from?
Record EU fine for lift 'cartel'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6383913.stm
Tim.
Some of us refuse to go lower than Valrhona, usually in the 60-70% cocoa, with Dark Chocolate Noir Orange 64% Cocoa being our favorite (purchased in 1/2 lb bars.)
p ?pf_id=HCPURISTSLABS. It's pricy but worth it. You probably wouldn't want to eat more than a few grammes at at time.
Why eat shitty chocolate when you can have good stuff? My SO finds that if we buy crappy chocolate, she just eats more of it and isn't satisfied. Good chocolate like the above satisfies her in an ounce or two (or three) serving size, so she eats less and enjoys more.
Hotel Chocolat http://www.hotelchocolat.co.uk/ (a fairly new chain in the UK) do some 100% chocolate Hacienda Iara Organic Dark 100% £4.25 for 75g http://www.hotelchocolat.co.uk/productmixmatch.as
Break a bit off. Let it slowly dissolve on the tongue and savour that bitter chocolate taste unspoiled by added sugars and fats. (The very first time you eat it you can't really believe it's chocolate but once you've had a few bits you can only taste the impurities in cheap chocolate).
Tim.