Ten years ago when I worked at quote.com we had a E4K (I believe) running part of our site. The power went out one day and I literally had to pick up the server and walk/run with it to the other end of the building so that we could plug it in and get the web site up and running.
After that day, I had some inkling of what they meant when they said "Big Iron".
Is the Nader camp worried that the presidential campaigns being waged by major brand beverages (Miller Lite, Bud, Captain Morgan's) might detract from their share of the vote?
The Register must be wrong about this. I used to work at Akamai, and I feel pretty damn sure that no one crashed those servers by getting *on* them to run the 20-line snippet of code that locks the kernel (assuming we're talking about the kernel lock exploit that was being widely discussed recently; it requires shell access).
What is much more likely is that somebody found a way to DDOS the Akamai top-level name servers, or that configuration files containing incorrect/conflicting/nefarious information were pushed out to the top-levels.
Knowing how many stages and checks there are in the Akamai deployment procedures, and how much monitoring there is of the network health, I would be astonished if someone managed to foobar the top-levels with a bad configuration. A co-wortker of mine did it once, a long time ago, so I guess it *could* happen, but it was one of those perfect-storm sorts of things. And even then, it just slowed things down a little - certainly not enough to make the news like this.
(F = ma ran into a couple of problems a while back. Some guy named Albert studied the results of some experiments by some other guys named Michaelson and Morley, and decided that at high speeds, the concepts "m" and "a" started to get a little freaky. "d" and "t" were found to be pretty dicey as well.)
The parent post is right: quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. By successful, I mean that it (a) accurately predicted measurements that were not explainable by previous theories, (b) has not predicted any results that are demonstrably incorrect, and (c) did all of this with a fairly simple (minimal) formulation.
Those three statements can be made about any solid theory, but QM has one unique characteristic. Unlike (say) Mendellian genetics, which challenges us with the difficult (but tractable) problem of "How did a biochemical mechanism for inheritence of traits ever come to be?", QM challenges us with "Why does the universe behave in a way which is contrary to our fundamental sense of reality?" This is not a knock against the theory, though. It just raises the deeper question: "Why should we assume that *our* fundamental sense of reality f-ing matters?" Despite almost a century of incomplete attempts to understand what quantum mechanics "means", the theory itself keeps on keepin' on - unfailingly accurate in its predictions, blithely indifferent to its metaphysical ramifications.
A different post in this thread makes the key point for grasping the various interpretations of QM: they are just *interpretations*. They have no bearing on what is "real" or "not real". All that is real (AFAWCT) is that the predictions of QM are accurate. Whether that means phantom universes, wave-particle duality, or little green men, is really of no importance until one of those interpretations leads to novel, verifiable predictions.
The article was not only an atrocious and pompous bit of writing, it was bad reporting. To represent this scientist's thesis as "novel" or even "scientific" just shows that the author doesn't know beans about the history of quantum physics.
Disclaimer: IWOAPUTDCB (I was only a physicist until the Dot-com boom).
During the U of C scavenger hunt in the spring of 1991, one of the items that I was responsible for finding was one of the (many) decorative banners that covered a construction area outside the Ohio State Building in Columbus.
My girlfriend and I were spotted by police during the heist, which resulted in a short and successful chase through some of the parking lots and streets of downtown Columbus. Well, sort of successful. I clipped the bumper of a box truck during the getaway and staved in the door of the car I was driving.
But since I was going to be scavenger hunting in Ohio for the next 48 hours, I didn't want to keep worrying about being pulled over for evading arrest by some cop who thought I might be a terrorist or something. So I went to the nearest police station and turned myself in.
The desk sargeant there listened to my story (completely nonplussed I might add), and asked, "Is this some sort of sorority thing?" What a deflating question for a 19 year-old guy.
Nonetheless, after a $50 fine (which I am pretty sure went into his beer fund, but I wasn't going to argue because I had just talked my way out of a much more serious problem) he let me keep the banner. And because I told the police that other people would be coming to steal more stuff from the state house, I don't believe that anyone else got one of those banners.
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An associative operation is one where A(BC) = (AB)C.
I think your statement that implication is not an associative operation is true:
Just because premise A implies that "B implies C" does not mean that that the premise "A implies B" always implies C.
Since that has nothing to do with your original point, I think you mean "implication is not a commutative operation", as in:
"A implies B" does not mean "B implies A"
Because in operator-speak, the word "commutative" means AB = BA.
(All the grammar nazis in the world drown out the good work of the operation nomenclature nazis.)
Ten years ago when I worked at quote.com we had a E4K (I believe) running part of our site. The power went out one day and I literally had to pick up the server and walk/run with it to the other end of the building so that we could plug it in and get the web site up and running.
After that day, I had some inkling of what they meant when they said "Big Iron".
...or confuse it with French ware. Which wouldn't be bad, because who could possibly be against those hot little maid's outfits?
Is the Nader camp worried that the presidential campaigns being waged by major brand beverages (Miller Lite, Bud, Captain Morgan's) might detract from their share of the vote?
The Register must be wrong about this. I used to work at Akamai, and I feel pretty damn sure that no one crashed those servers by getting *on* them to run the 20-line snippet of code that locks the kernel (assuming we're talking about the kernel lock exploit that was being widely discussed recently; it requires shell access).
What is much more likely is that somebody found a way to DDOS the Akamai top-level name servers, or that configuration files containing incorrect/conflicting/nefarious information were pushed out to the top-levels.
Knowing how many stages and checks there are in the Akamai deployment procedures, and how much monitoring there is of the network health, I would be astonished if someone managed to foobar the top-levels with a bad configuration. A co-wortker of mine did it once, a long time ago, so I guess it *could* happen, but it was one of those perfect-storm sorts of things. And even then, it just slowed things down a little - certainly not enough to make the news like this.
Gosh, I think we use all of the laws of physics every day. I haven't seen where I can go to opt out of any of them.
(F = ma ran into a couple of problems a while back. Some guy named Albert studied the results of some experiments by some other guys named Michaelson and Morley, and decided that at high speeds, the concepts "m" and "a" started to get a little freaky. "d" and "t" were found to be pretty dicey as well.)
The parent post is right: quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. By successful, I mean that it (a) accurately predicted measurements that were not explainable by previous theories, (b) has not predicted any results that are demonstrably incorrect, and (c) did all of this with a fairly simple (minimal) formulation.
Those three statements can be made about any solid theory, but QM has one unique characteristic. Unlike (say) Mendellian genetics, which challenges us with the difficult (but tractable) problem of "How did a biochemical mechanism for inheritence of traits ever come to be?", QM challenges us with "Why does the universe behave in a way which is contrary to our fundamental sense of reality?" This is not a knock against the theory, though. It just raises the deeper question: "Why should we assume that *our* fundamental sense of reality f-ing matters?" Despite almost a century of incomplete attempts to understand what quantum mechanics "means", the theory itself keeps on keepin' on - unfailingly accurate in its predictions, blithely indifferent to its metaphysical ramifications.
A different post in this thread makes the key point for grasping the various interpretations of QM: they are just *interpretations*. They have no bearing on what is "real" or "not real". All that is real (AFAWCT) is that the predictions of QM are accurate. Whether that means phantom universes, wave-particle duality, or little green men, is really of no importance until one of those interpretations leads to novel, verifiable predictions.
The article was not only an atrocious and pompous bit of writing, it was bad reporting. To represent this scientist's thesis as "novel" or even "scientific" just shows that the author doesn't know beans about the history of quantum physics.
Disclaimer: IWOAPUTDCB (I was only a physicist until the Dot-com boom).
During the U of C scavenger hunt in the spring of 1991, one of the items that I was responsible for finding was one of the (many) decorative banners that covered a construction area outside the Ohio State Building in Columbus.
My girlfriend and I were spotted by police during the heist, which resulted in a short and successful chase through some of the parking lots and streets of downtown Columbus. Well, sort of successful. I clipped the bumper of a box truck during the getaway and staved in the door of the car I was driving.
But since I was going to be scavenger hunting in Ohio for the next 48 hours, I didn't want to keep worrying about being pulled over for evading arrest by some cop who thought I might be a terrorist or something. So I went to the nearest police station and turned myself in.
The desk sargeant there listened to my story (completely nonplussed I might add), and asked, "Is this some sort of sorority thing?" What a deflating question for a 19 year-old guy.
Nonetheless, after a $50 fine (which I am pretty sure went into his beer fund, but I wasn't going to argue because I had just talked my way out of a much more serious problem) he let me keep the banner. And because I told the police that other people would be coming to steal more stuff from the state house, I don't believe that anyone else got one of those banners.
Now who says the U of C isn't a fun place?
Yahoo!'s search engine computes the correct 'top link' when you search for litigious bastards. Must be superior technology.