You should be able to see that 16 and 32 aren't "random" at all, they're powers of 2. Another extremely common ratio of Imperial units is 12, which is a highly divisible number.
Metric is particularly suited to decimal notation. Imperial units are particularly suited to fractions.
Yes, there are some weird Imperial units. No, nobody really uses them. There are lots of weird units, period.
I don't think he means the pictures that come free in the frames, but rather the low-quality art prints and posters you can find at many decorating-oriented stores. You know, like what every college kid has hanging in his room.
I don't think this a good business idea either, but nor do I agree that computer monitors are good enough. They're a lot more convenient, yes, and they're a lot brighter, which can often be very useful. However, the resolution of most computer monitors is less than the resolution of even an 8x10, you can only view the picture wherever your monitor is, and you can only see them when the monitor isn't being used for something else. There's a lot of value in prints suitable for putting up on a wall or even just printing out 8x10 enlargements and putting them in a cheap frame. (Not that prints are strictly better than electronic viewing, either. There is no beating the convenience of viewing on a screen, and online sharing blows away print sharing. They just both have their uses.)
There are a bunch of problems, though. The kind of pictures people take with their smartphones rarely make particularly good prints; they're good for sharing, which the smartphone already has a lock on. Nice prints are an infrequent buy. There are already cheap and decent home printers, cheap online print services, and high-quality online semi-professional print labs. That pretty much covers all the prints you'd want. (I don't even bother with cheap online print services any more. Something that I would print a 4x6 of, I instead just share online. Impulse enlargements get printed at home. Anything worth looking good gets mailed to me from a pro lab for only $2 for an 8x10.)
You're thinking of "temperature" as only being a measure of the (average) kinetic energy of a collection of particles. However, in physics, it has a more general definition.
So, the short answer to "it doesn't make sense to have less than zero motion" is that that's not what's happening at all. So no worries.
you could even make it time sensitive; at daytime, the system is locked down and at 11pm and later, its opened up. whatever - the plugin can handle more capable 'policies' than simple unix file perms.
It's true that there's not a simple way to make weird, arbitrary behaviors tied to file permissions. But that's not really what he was asking for. There are two users here, one of which should be able to access a set of files and one of which shouldn't.
the plugin can handle more capable 'policies' than simple unix file perms
Simple permissions and ACLs aren't the same, though in this case, simple permissions would probably work fine.
if the parent does a good job, the kid won't even KNOW that there are extra files around. even if he gets root, unless he knows how to undo this FUSE stuff, 'ls -laR' still won't expose all the hidden files.
Well, (a) he'd need root and (b) if he knows how to get root on a Unix system and does so, you're pretty much hosed. There are so many ways around this it's not even funny, but it doesn't matter, because root really bypasses most reasonable access-control mechanisms.
I will point out, though, that there is actually a permission for preventing people from knowing that there are the locked files.
Right. That's a Monsanto issue. Even Monsanto using GMOs to control the food supply is a different issue from whether they're safe. GMO is a technology, and when people abuse that technology, the problem is the abuse (and the people), not the technology.
When people talk about whether GMOs are safe, they're talking about whether the fundamental technology produces things that are safe and also if the individual changes that are made are safe. The former is just GMO in general, the latter is particular GMO crops.
If people are making GMO modifications that are only useful for evil, that's a different issue. If they're using those evil modifications to be evil, that's a still-different issue. But Monsanto isn't actually doing either of those. (While they have the "Terminator" gene, their products don't use it.) They simply make GMO products and, separately, are dicks.
Two minor points. By "minor", I really mean "critical".
The USPTO doesn't control whether you can file a patent. You can file pretty much anything you want, even if there's blatantly prior art. They're only in charge of whether you're awarded the patent. Check the summary to see which one this is!
The claims are not for any stylus containing circuitry, but for a much more specific invention.
People call Americans idiots for using non-metric units, but you can't remember two numbers? Christ, nearly every American remembers at least one of those, and most of us remember the other one.
Incidentally, neither 0C nor 32F are very useful if you want to know if "it" is going to freeze. It depends a lot on what "it" is.For example, water on the ground can easily freeze at an air temperature of around 37F.
People have lived quite happily on aircraft before wireless devices were invented and they can continue to do so with their wireless devices turned off.
People have lived happily without planes, too. The fact that you can manage without something isn't a very good reason to ban it.
If the wireless industry wants to be on aircraft let them pay for the testing to prove that they won't kill people.
We're talking about any electronics here, not just mobile phones, so it's the "electronics industry", not the "wireless industry". The current regulations require an unnecessarily large amount of testing, to the point that it creates a de facto ban on all devices.
We'll just squeeze an extra column into the periodic table between manganese and iron. Natrium: 25.5 protons.
Natrium, chemical symbol Na. Atomic number: 11. Also known as: sodium.
More efficient to build the rail gun into the giant rock and lob the spacecraft with a giant rail gun.
Not really. For one, you'd be forced to deliver momentum to the rocket only during the brief period where the rocket is actually in the rail gun. Giving it a substantial amount of momentum means subjecting it to very high acceleration, which tends to be bad for its contents and structure. For another, you're forced to deliver an equal amount of momentum to the rock (opposite direction), which then has to be undone to keep the thing stationary.
Energy is energy. Put the solar energy into an engine like an ION thruster and it'll be more efficient than making hydrogen.
You can't put light in a box and store it on a rocket. You can't even put electricity in a box and store it on a rocket, you need some way -- usually chemical -- of storing the energy. Rocket fuel is pretty efficient in that regard. An ion thruster ("ion", not "ION") uses electricity, so it would only really be worthwhile if you have the solar power generation on the rocket. Except using solar power to drive a rocket is really slow, which creates its own serious engineering problems. Splitting water, you can concentrate years' worth of solar energy into a portable fuel.
The fact that all forms of energy are not equally-useful is one of the reasons we're not all driving electric cars and flying electric planes.
nuclear engines work wherever you are
Except in space, they have nothing to push against. You have to shed mass, preferably at high velocities, to move a rocket. That mass is fuel, whether combustible or not, and it tends to run out. (Nuclear power plants also are a bit on the complicated side. There are nuclear power sources that are uncomplicated -- RTGs -- and they already use these in satellites. They provide very little power, though.)
The energy to split apart hydrogen from oxygen in water always exceeds or equals the energy received by burning the hydrogen. Welcome to physics.
Yes, but hydrogen and oxygen are more useful as rocket fuel than sunlight, electricity, or water. Plus, the rocket that's to be refueled doesn't have to haul the water, fuel, or energy to the refueling point. Welcome to engineering.
Also, they're going to tow out a bunch of fuel and supplies, let's say halfway to Mars. Then they're going to launch a 2nd spacecraft and stop there to go get it. I have an idea. How about they put all the supplies on the first spacecraft instead and don't make a pitstop then just deal with the extra weight, which sounds easier than lassoing an asteroid.
Great idea. I bet the people at NASA have never thought of your "build a bigger rocket" solution.
Re:I've felt like this for years, too
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
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· Score: 1
They've had the molded pieces for at least 20 years now. They used to be more generic things, like pirate ships and such, but they were still molded pieces designed to make a particular object that came with instructions on how to make that object.
Utility patents are for a method of doing something, not the general concept of the something that's being done. It's even in the language, which is in TFS here: a "method and apparatus for providing translucent images on a computer display". The patent is on a particular technique for "providing translucent images".
Sometimes patents are broadly-worded enough to cover most conceivable implementations of the thing they describe, but I'm going to bet that since the patent itself cites multiple instances of prior art for other ways of drawing translucent images that this isn't the case here.
I meant that in order for a person to send you postal mail, they end up finding out where you live. Although that's not strictly true either -- you can have a PO box.
Not at all. You have a problem with graph scales, which is fair, because everyone who draws a graph apparently sucks at graph scales.
The hockey stick graph is over a fairly long time scale. As a result, variations on a short time scale are invisible. It makes global warming look like a very fast temperature increase. It is, compared to the historical rate of temperature increases over long time scales.
On shorter timescales, there's a huge amount of variability -- seasonal, year-to-year, El Nino cycles, etc. The effect of global warming is relatively small on these time scales, resulting in some years being particularly hot and others being not so hot. Incidentally, this graph is pretty popular, too, and looks like a gradually-increasing noisy sinusoid.
The influence of global warming on short timescales, relative to the influence of other effects, is small enough that if you pick appropriate endpoints for a graph, you can say all sorts of inaccurate and misleading things about trends. ("In the past 13.5 years, the average temperature has actually decreased!") You'll see those graphs a lot, too.
Insane compute power wouldn't cut it. It needs to be a fundamental but previously-undiscovered flaw in the AES design, or a brand-new mathematical or computational trick that the designers could not have conceived of.
This isn't a known-key attack. You start off with a large set of data that you know to contain the key.
Also, Elcomsoft likes calling everything "cracking". Pretty much anything that is not simply using the original software with the regular password or key is "cracking".
Security articles pretty much always dramatically overstate what they are capable of. Generally "cracked" gets used any time something is decrypted and the person who encrypted it didn't intend for it to be.
It sounds like it should be super easy, since the encryption key is "just sitting in memory", but it's not. A lot of those programs actively take steps to try to prevent the key from being captured from memory. Elcomsoft is by no means the first person to demonstrate this attack, but they like to aggressively promote whenever they make tools for applying techniques that researchers have already developed.
That would, in fact, basically be magic. Which is why it's always likely that an article that says some encryption "is cracked" usually has some big caveats. Or they're actually talking about something that is not, in fact, "cracked" at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What pair of Imperial units is a factor of 34?
You should be able to see that 16 and 32 aren't "random" at all, they're powers of 2. Another extremely common ratio of Imperial units is 12, which is a highly divisible number.
Metric is particularly suited to decimal notation. Imperial units are particularly suited to fractions.
Yes, there are some weird Imperial units. No, nobody really uses them. There are lots of weird units, period.
All systems of units are arbitrary.
I don't think he means the pictures that come free in the frames, but rather the low-quality art prints and posters you can find at many decorating-oriented stores. You know, like what every college kid has hanging in his room.
I don't think this a good business idea either, but nor do I agree that computer monitors are good enough. They're a lot more convenient, yes, and they're a lot brighter, which can often be very useful. However, the resolution of most computer monitors is less than the resolution of even an 8x10, you can only view the picture wherever your monitor is, and you can only see them when the monitor isn't being used for something else. There's a lot of value in prints suitable for putting up on a wall or even just printing out 8x10 enlargements and putting them in a cheap frame. (Not that prints are strictly better than electronic viewing, either. There is no beating the convenience of viewing on a screen, and online sharing blows away print sharing. They just both have their uses.)
There are a bunch of problems, though. The kind of pictures people take with their smartphones rarely make particularly good prints; they're good for sharing, which the smartphone already has a lock on. Nice prints are an infrequent buy. There are already cheap and decent home printers, cheap online print services, and high-quality online semi-professional print labs. That pretty much covers all the prints you'd want. (I don't even bother with cheap online print services any more. Something that I would print a 4x6 of, I instead just share online. Impulse enlargements get printed at home. Anything worth looking good gets mailed to me from a pro lab for only $2 for an 8x10.)
You're thinking of "temperature" as only being a measure of the (average) kinetic energy of a collection of particles. However, in physics, it has a more general definition.
So, the short answer to "it doesn't make sense to have less than zero motion" is that that's not what's happening at all. So no worries.
you could even make it time sensitive; at daytime, the system is locked down and at 11pm and later, its opened up. whatever - the plugin can handle more capable 'policies' than simple unix file perms.
It's true that there's not a simple way to make weird, arbitrary behaviors tied to file permissions. But that's not really what he was asking for. There are two users here, one of which should be able to access a set of files and one of which shouldn't.
the plugin can handle more capable 'policies' than simple unix file perms
Simple permissions and ACLs aren't the same, though in this case, simple permissions would probably work fine.
if the parent does a good job, the kid won't even KNOW that there are extra files around. even if he gets root, unless he knows how to undo this FUSE stuff, 'ls -laR' still won't expose all the hidden files.
Well, (a) he'd need root and (b) if he knows how to get root on a Unix system and does so, you're pretty much hosed. There are so many ways around this it's not even funny, but it doesn't matter, because root really bypasses most reasonable access-control mechanisms.
I will point out, though, that there is actually a permission for preventing people from knowing that there are the locked files.
Views for filesystems are called users, groups, and file permissions. (Or, if you want to get fancy, ACLs.)
Right. That's a Monsanto issue. Even Monsanto using GMOs to control the food supply is a different issue from whether they're safe. GMO is a technology, and when people abuse that technology, the problem is the abuse (and the people), not the technology.
When people talk about whether GMOs are safe, they're talking about whether the fundamental technology produces things that are safe and also if the individual changes that are made are safe. The former is just GMO in general, the latter is particular GMO crops.
If people are making GMO modifications that are only useful for evil, that's a different issue. If they're using those evil modifications to be evil, that's a still-different issue. But Monsanto isn't actually doing either of those. (While they have the "Terminator" gene, their products don't use it.) They simply make GMO products and, separately, are dicks.
Well, that's true. Whether GMOs are safe and whether Monsanto are a bunch of jerks are entirely separate issues.
Two minor points. By "minor", I really mean "critical".
The USPTO doesn't control whether you can file a patent. You can file pretty much anything you want, even if there's blatantly prior art. They're only in charge of whether you're awarded the patent. Check the summary to see which one this is!
The claims are not for any stylus containing circuitry, but for a much more specific invention.
Perhaps you're looking for a feature like lists.
People call Americans idiots for using non-metric units, but you can't remember two numbers? Christ, nearly every American remembers at least one of those, and most of us remember the other one.
Incidentally, neither 0C nor 32F are very useful if you want to know if "it" is going to freeze. It depends a lot on what "it" is.For example, water on the ground can easily freeze at an air temperature of around 37F.
People have lived quite happily on aircraft before wireless devices were invented and they can continue to do so with their wireless devices turned off.
People have lived happily without planes, too. The fact that you can manage without something isn't a very good reason to ban it.
If the wireless industry wants to be on aircraft let them pay for the testing to prove that they won't kill people.
We're talking about any electronics here, not just mobile phones, so it's the "electronics industry", not the "wireless industry". The current regulations require an unnecessarily large amount of testing, to the point that it creates a de facto ban on all devices.
We'll just squeeze an extra column into the periodic table between manganese and iron. Natrium: 25.5 protons.
Natrium, chemical symbol Na. Atomic number: 11. Also known as: sodium.
More efficient to build the rail gun into the giant rock and lob the spacecraft with a giant rail gun.
Not really. For one, you'd be forced to deliver momentum to the rocket only during the brief period where the rocket is actually in the rail gun. Giving it a substantial amount of momentum means subjecting it to very high acceleration, which tends to be bad for its contents and structure. For another, you're forced to deliver an equal amount of momentum to the rock (opposite direction), which then has to be undone to keep the thing stationary.
Energy is energy. Put the solar energy into an engine like an ION thruster and it'll be more efficient than making hydrogen.
You can't put light in a box and store it on a rocket. You can't even put electricity in a box and store it on a rocket, you need some way -- usually chemical -- of storing the energy. Rocket fuel is pretty efficient in that regard. An ion thruster ("ion", not "ION") uses electricity, so it would only really be worthwhile if you have the solar power generation on the rocket. Except using solar power to drive a rocket is really slow, which creates its own serious engineering problems. Splitting water, you can concentrate years' worth of solar energy into a portable fuel.
The fact that all forms of energy are not equally-useful is one of the reasons we're not all driving electric cars and flying electric planes.
nuclear engines work wherever you are
Except in space, they have nothing to push against. You have to shed mass, preferably at high velocities, to move a rocket. That mass is fuel, whether combustible or not, and it tends to run out. (Nuclear power plants also are a bit on the complicated side. There are nuclear power sources that are uncomplicated -- RTGs -- and they already use these in satellites. They provide very little power, though.)
The energy to split apart hydrogen from oxygen in water always exceeds or equals the energy received by burning the hydrogen. Welcome to physics.
Yes, but hydrogen and oxygen are more useful as rocket fuel than sunlight, electricity, or water. Plus, the rocket that's to be refueled doesn't have to haul the water, fuel, or energy to the refueling point. Welcome to engineering.
Also, they're going to tow out a bunch of fuel and supplies, let's say halfway to Mars. Then they're going to launch a 2nd spacecraft and stop there to go get it. I have an idea. How about they put all the supplies on the first spacecraft instead and don't make a pitstop then just deal with the extra weight, which sounds easier than lassoing an asteroid.
Great idea. I bet the people at NASA have never thought of your "build a bigger rocket" solution.
They've had the molded pieces for at least 20 years now. They used to be more generic things, like pirate ships and such, but they were still molded pieces designed to make a particular object that came with instructions on how to make that object.
You can still buy just regular legos.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Utility patents are for a method of doing something, not the general concept of the something that's being done. It's even in the language, which is in TFS here: a "method and apparatus for providing translucent images on a computer display". The patent is on a particular technique for "providing translucent images".
Sometimes patents are broadly-worded enough to cover most conceivable implementations of the thing they describe, but I'm going to bet that since the patent itself cites multiple instances of prior art for other ways of drawing translucent images that this isn't the case here.
I meant that in order for a person to send you postal mail, they end up finding out where you live. Although that's not strictly true either -- you can have a PO box.
Not at all. You have a problem with graph scales, which is fair, because everyone who draws a graph apparently sucks at graph scales.
The hockey stick graph is over a fairly long time scale. As a result, variations on a short time scale are invisible. It makes global warming look like a very fast temperature increase. It is, compared to the historical rate of temperature increases over long time scales.
On shorter timescales, there's a huge amount of variability -- seasonal, year-to-year, El Nino cycles, etc. The effect of global warming is relatively small on these time scales, resulting in some years being particularly hot and others being not so hot. Incidentally, this graph is pretty popular, too, and looks like a gradually-increasing noisy sinusoid.
The influence of global warming on short timescales, relative to the influence of other effects, is small enough that if you pick appropriate endpoints for a graph, you can say all sorts of inaccurate and misleading things about trends. ("In the past 13.5 years, the average temperature has actually decreased!") You'll see those graphs a lot, too.
Is this different from Linkedin's paid messages as those are work/career context that has a precedent?
One is on Facebook and the other is on LinkedIn.
Is this different from Postal mail?
The search feature is different, delivery is faster, the cost is higher, and in the end the person doesn't know where you live.
I don't want to make long lost friends pay to send me a message
They can send you a friend request at no charge.
Seems to me that I should be able to let anybody contact me
I believe that's called making your e-mail address public.
How does Facebook deserve this money?
They're managing to convince people to pay it. Naturally!
Insane compute power wouldn't cut it. It needs to be a fundamental but previously-undiscovered flaw in the AES design, or a brand-new mathematical or computational trick that the designers could not have conceived of.
This isn't a known-key attack. You start off with a large set of data that you know to contain the key.
Also, Elcomsoft likes calling everything "cracking". Pretty much anything that is not simply using the original software with the regular password or key is "cracking".
Security articles pretty much always dramatically overstate what they are capable of. Generally "cracked" gets used any time something is decrypted and the person who encrypted it didn't intend for it to be.
It sounds like it should be super easy, since the encryption key is "just sitting in memory", but it's not. A lot of those programs actively take steps to try to prevent the key from being captured from memory. Elcomsoft is by no means the first person to demonstrate this attack, but they like to aggressively promote whenever they make tools for applying techniques that researchers have already developed.
That would, in fact, basically be magic. Which is why it's always likely that an article that says some encryption "is cracked" usually has some big caveats. Or they're actually talking about something that is not, in fact, "cracked" at all.