one thing i hate is having to "e-mail with subject \"help\" to receive a list of possible commands", each of which, I gather, includes sending an e-mail with a certain subject, then receiving an e-mail in confirmation of it. Blech!
Whatever you use, make sure it has a clean web interface, and configure it to include a link at the end of each e-mail sent to the group to the effect of "Click here to change or configure your mailing list membership."
It seems to address what you want, but is fairly recent! This means that solutions might not exist in the wild yet!!!
However, its very recentness also indicates that the issues it addresses (and you are trying to address) are still of very real significance in existing technologies.
So either all's well thanks to this solution, or you'll have to roll your own.
I believe your parent referred to the fact that its parent said "1000+" rather than "1024+" bits. Because 1024 seems more "round" to him/her than 1000 does.
It's more important for me to have my state, a very small and often forgotten place, to wield some degree of power in Washington. Fuck you! It's the largest state in the U.S. I wish I had a state that large--but all you do is complain about it. Spoiled brat.
It is an exciting time now, but don't kid ourselves that this is the golden age of advances. We're still doing the same thing, just slightly faster. Give me a call when we have anti-gravity devices, holodecks, and transporters.
There's something ironic in that sentence, but I can't put my finger on what. I'll give you a call when I figure it out.
No, I just like the sound of it. It's playful. My eleven year old brother said to me the sentence "This cheat gives you INFINITY LIFE!!!" I liked it. He said: "OOOOH! It evoluted!!" haha, because he thought that was the term, since the game said "evolution". I correct him, of course, but I like how playful some "wrong" things sound. I'm a human bean, after all, [sic:)], and not some grammatical machine. I'll call something non-sequiturial, if I think it doesn't follow, and use strong verbs with an -ed suffix, although I can't think of one that I tend to do with just now... I say that I like Boston enough to want to live in it for keeps, or that "You know what they say: there are only two ways to skin a cat: head to tail and tail to head", before adding, "But you know what? That's more than one way!", in a context where a normal person would just say "there's more than one way to skin a cat." Sometimes I go the other way, and use the original form of an expression that has come down to us differnetly, for example saying, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" (rather than "the proof is in the pudding", taking pudding to mean desert, or the end), and when whereas a normal person might say "The best laid plans...", signifying the idiom "the best laid plans of mice and men", I'll quote the full phrase: "You know what they say: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang oft a-gley." With a heavy bobby burnsy accent. Same for shakespearean quotes common in the language, and, especially, Alexander Pope. Other times, I'll put a twist on it. If I don't want to talk about religion any more, I'll say: "Silly mortal! Don't question Gods's plan, The proper study of mankind is MAN." If someone tells me they like Chevre (goat's cheese), I will say, "You know the reason we even are able to milk cows at all today is because we have the practice from back when we were goatherds. It's like airplanes -- you couldn't have them if it weren't for the pioneers in dirigibles." But of course Pope put it more succinctly with: True ease in milking comes from milking goats, As he flies best who also ably floats.
Anyway, that's all. The only reason I use [sic] when misquoting or misdeclining or misspelling purposefully is to stave off the hordes of ravenous pedants who lurk around slashdot and other places, much like yourself, actually.
Sometimes I'll be tricky, and say something that the pedants find objectionable but really makes sense: "Hopefully, I say, we should be finished by tomorrow." (Because some old schoolers don't use hopefully except as an adverb; not as a sentence-modifyer.)
You might be paying less/on average/ but bad scenarios are a lot worse. The reason we pay insurance companies more money than they give out is for the guarantee that we will never have to individually pay more than the average that each person puts in, (minus the surcharge). It's like the state lottery: sure, on average I'd rather keep my dollar than get 40 cents for it, but a dollar a week doesn't make any difference to me one way or another, whereas whoever wins the lottery gets a big increase in lifestyle, and that person COULD be me. I'm willing to pay 60 cents for the CHANCE to pool my 40 cents with the 40 cents of everyone else who plays. Likewise, if a business is about to fail miserably, it can try something really risky, that either will make it go bankrupt a few months earlier, or end up keeping it afloat. Risk management FREQUENTLY deals with worst-case scenarios as well as "expected return", ie, what you call average. That's why I'd rather walk 15 minutes and arrive exactly on time to an appointment than take the bus, for which I have to wait, and arrive on average 6 minutes earlier. (Because buses come every n minutes, but I don't know when the last one came.)
the U.S., as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry. When the U.S. says: "You, as a citizen, are not allowed to circumvent insuring your automobile, say by having infinity cash [sic] that you're willing to use to pay for any damages that you might inflict, but must go through a PRIVATE, government regulated insurance agency in order to use the public roads..." Except for satellite and other wireless communications, ALL VoIP in Panama (as elsewhere) goes through wires that sit on the Government's land (that would be everything). If I can't use a public road except by playing by the rules of regulated private companies, (even if I know of a cheaper alternative), why should Panamians be allowed to use data lines going through public land, except by playing by the rules of a regulated private company?
Okay, that's the most contrived example I could think of. I don't think there's a closer equivalent -- some candidates were Edison (the electric company) - run public schools (look it up -- but you're not required to go to one, since you can homeschool) and private appraisals mandated in certain cases by the government.
Bad "spam"-like messages are bad. Good spamlike messages are not bad. A good spam-like message I consciously opted in to receive is indistinguishable from a welcome business proposal or newsletter.
Does this system know what businesses I've given my credit card to? Because EVERY ONE of those businesses has a right to e-mail me, so long as there is a clear opt-out link at the bottom of their e-mail.
If I trust a company enough to give it my credit card number, and I like it enough to do business with it, IT HAS A RIGHT TO SEND ME E-MAIL TO INFORM ME OF ITS PRODUCTS, as long as I choose to let it. Good businesses won't abuse the privilege, and I won't end up clicking the opt-out link.
The only thing this system is good for is filtering SOME penile-enlargement shady fly-by-night header-spoofing, open-relay-using shady shamster.
Oh, but that's the ONLY thing that the article defines as SPAM: Let's take a quick look inside the mind of someone who responds to a spam [sic]. This person is either astonishingly credulous or deeply in denial about their sexual interests. In either case, repulsive or idiotic as the spam seems to us, it is exciting to them.
So this is not spam-filtering software; rather, it's software to filter pornographic messages that fit a certain low-level sales pitch. Lovely.
Big deal! You do the crime, you do the time. It's like those posts we always read whenever copyright infringement comes up: "You're stealing. Saying, 'Can I borrow that CD for a sec?', popping it into your CD drive, ripping a track, and giving it back to your friend is NO DIFFERENT from breaking into my house and stealing my computer. If one gets you in jail, so should the other."
Likewise: What these people did, stealing bandwidth, is NO DIFFERENT from what it would be if, instead of just modifying some hardware in the privacy of their own homes, they BROKE INTO Fort Knox, weilding NUCLEAR WEAPONS LACED WITH BIOCHEMICAL WARFARE and stole BULLION BANDWIDTHS!!!
It's no different, and I for one am GLAD, do you hear? glad with all my heart to see these CRIMINALS finally come to justice.
An EULA by a private organization is NO DIFFERENT from a constitutionally sound law passed by a majority of our elected senate and subject to the scrutiny, [1] of an impartial office whose members are appointed by a democratically elected leader (and subject to approval by our democratically elected senate.)
I don't know about you, but I'll be GLAD when my tax dollars go toward knocking my door down for modding my xbox (which will be specifically illegalificated by the EULA). I'll be laughing all the way to the electric chair! And then have my sentence compounded (two consecutive electrocutions?) for sitting in the electric chair in a non-authorized way!
How beautiful the world will be when EULA's reign supreme!
~Robert.
[1] against the standard of a sacred document detailing our most cherished rights, and being the only thing separating us from a fascist regime appointed by the majority -- Hitler was elected, don't-ya-know.
Other voting systems abound. One alternative is the instant runoff... And it's verypopular. I was just reading about it because of some person's sig on slashdot in support of it. Hopefully the person will post to this story.... -Robert.
Also, from the faq: "Who uses IRV? Many places. Ireland to elects its president, Australia to elect its House of Representatives, and the American Political Science Association to elect its president. Cambridge MA uses a variant of IRV to elect its city council, and literally hundreds of jurisdictions, organizations and corporations use IRV around the world."
That's right. I used the value of the eath's diameter for its radius. Substituting half of the value in my original calculations, I come up with: 11.294 KM/s.
Also, remember that I used an upper bounds; I said that an object would fall "less than 10 meters" in 1 second, since at the end of the second it would be going 9.8 m/s^2, so even if it acccelerated constantly at the greatest speed it will reach, it will only go less than 10 meters.
More precisely, this value is: distance = initial distance + initial velocity * time + 1/2 g times time squared.
So, d = 1/2 (9.8), or 4.9. I guess if I'd had a better conceptual understanding, I would have realized initially that after 1 second, the total displacement is just half the acceleration, since I have enough calculus to know that the derivative of a quadratic is just twice linear, and at this point we start at 0, so the graph isn't translated at all.
Anyway, if instead of 0.01 for 10 meters, I add 0.0049 KM to the original 12756 KM (now 12756/2), my answer becomes: 7.905 KM/s.
In other words, almost precisely your "8.3 km/sec or thereabouts".
So, I had just two problems. 1. I used the diameter of the Earth for its radius. 2. I did not look up the simple formula to get a more precise value than my upper bounds, and did not have the conceptual framework to quickly realize that calculation isn't necessary.
Actually, I wonder now whether my answer isn't more correct than your 8.3 km/sec...I seem to be using more precise numbers, because you're using 7000 km, whereas 12756/2 is actually 6378 KM. (And the former number comes from NASA). Actually, now that I think about it, when I put in 14000 for 12756 in my calculations, my answer is 8.282. In other words: Our methods produce an equally correct result.
I do wonder though why you say something like "not a bad way to do the calculation, without access to calculus." I'm in calculus 1 now, and it might be helpful if you told me what in calculus would have helped me carry out the calculations.
-Robert.
PS. It occurs to me that "7.905 KM/s" is a number I arrived at using NASA's very precise "The diameter of the Earth at the equator is 12,756 kilometers (km)" [good, apparently, to 5 significant digits] and the accepted number 9.8 m/s for g, on average.
Googling "7.905 KM/s" returns two links, the second of which says: " See if you can show that the orbital velocity at the Earth's surface (i.e. the speed required for a frictionless train moving through an Equatorial tunnel to be in free fall all the way around the Earth) is 7.905km/s." This page is in the webspace of Jess Brewer, who appears to be a serious researcher at the University of British Columbia.
Googling/sec instead of/s, I get a page at Purdue University reading "Thus for Earth, vc = 7.9 km/sec (~ 5 miles/second) (to achieve a circular orbit about the Earth)" and another (cache) by a different professor carrying out the same calculations. Both professors are physicists. Searching "7.90 km/s" (ie with one fewer sigfig) returns "v_cir = [ G M_E/ R_E]^{1/2} = 7.90 km s^{-1} " here. This is also an academic site. Rounding to 7.91 returns no relavant matches, but 7.9 (as many sig. fig.s as we had from g ~ 9.8) returns too many for me to look through. Adding "orbit" I find this page says "Remember: near earth orbital velocity is 7.9 km/s." Sounds authoritative.
I used to think about this a lot, for the following reason: Imagine if we had a tube at ground level going all the way around the Earth.
If the tubes are vacuums, you can continually accelerate an object within them, since there is no terminal veolicity at constant acceleration the way there is from air. (At least at nonrelativistic speeds.)
Now let's calculate what orbital speeds are at sea level. At sea level, if you start out with zero downward momentum, you fall less than 10 meters in 1 second. If during that time you shoot forward far enough in a straight line that the Earth's curviture lifts you 10 feet, you've achieved orbit. NASA gives the Earth's diameter at the equator as 12,756 KM. Now the following calculation is REALLY easy using a diagram, but a bit tricky to describe. It uses only the pythagorean theorem. Draw a circle, and two radii, one due west, one appreciably north. Draw a tangent at the circumference where the westerly radius touches (tangents are at right angles with radii). Now extend the second radius until it touches the tangent line. You should have a triangle whose hypotenuse is 12,756 KM + 10 M, of which one leg is 12,756 KM, and the other leg unknown. The other leg (along the tangent line) represents how much we need to move forward in 1 second, and we calculate it by taking the square root of the difference between 12,756.01 squared and 12,756 squared. This number is 15.972. In other words, by MY calculation (I'm fresh out of high school though, so YMMV), orbiting at sea level requires you to go 15.972 miles in a single second. Compare that with the Space shuttle's "velocity of 27,880 km per hour" (/3600 seconds-per-hour) = 7.744. In other words, at an altitude of 322 KM, it can take nearly twice as long fall the same amount, which is explained by lower value of acceleration-due-to-gravity at that height. (Repeating our calculations above, substituting 12,756+322 for 12,756, we get sqrt( (12756+322+0.01)^2 - (12756+322)^2 ) = 16.172 KM, versus the 15.972 we had at ground level. However, to cover the same 10 feet, it now has a longer time to fall.
ANYWAY, the upshot of all this is that if you can accelerate something to 15.972 KM/s or (57,499.2 KM/h or (x0.62) 35,649 miles per hour, it will coast its way along without needing anything under it, and without consuming further gas.
This could be a really great way to deliver packages. Draw a circumference at sea level that goes through a lot of interesting places, lay down a vacuum line (it doesn't actually need to support anything!! All it needs to do is be thin plastic that holds its shape at 1 atmosphere crush) all around it, then start this huge, heavy monolithic Delivery Bird sailing around at 35,649 mph, reaching every point along your line every fifteen minutes. I'm not sure how you get packages (including passengers) on and off the thing, but it sure sounds cool.
Device drivers take up memory to load. So, include enough RAM for the driver on the device itself, so that each device adds its weight to the bus. </ironic> You're advocating something very similar....think about it.
Because SPAM has a marginal cost of $0, to both sender and receiver.
It doesn't REALLY cost anyone anything more that you're sending 100,000 pieces of mail versus 1000 to a campus-wide discussion group, EXCEPT for the time that the 100,000 people receiving it must spend deleting the mail.
Honestly, in this day and age a 2,000 byte e-mail is NO load on our servers or infrastructure.
It is a load only on the receiving party.
What I might like to see implemented though is this: I will run a public in-box to which you must deposit 30 cents with each e-mail you send to it. My friends can just get it back at an appropriate time (since the micropayment architecture allows for zero-fee transactions, they're just entries in a database), or via the e-mails that I send to them in reply, and the businesses that I do business with can just charge me 30 cents more to pay for the privilege of learning about their product, but the businesses that I DON'T want anything to do with will either stop bothering me, or pay me nicely for my time -- I'll glance at 20 subjects, decide I'm not interested in any of them, and wa-la, I've made $6 in ten seconds. This will have a bunch of good effects: 1. Illegal spam will be traceable to a source, since SOMEBODY's account is making me those micropayments. 2. I will see more products I'm interested in, since companies will have 0 cost of printing advertising materials, only the shipping. Whereas I get some interesting postal junk mail now, I will get more interesting junk e-mail if you remove the cost of printing. Also, instead of the advertisers paying the us postal service, they will be paying me. 3. I will be paid back for what I'm paying my ISP in order for it to uphold my end of the mail infrastructure. 4. etc.
It also shouldn't be that hard to establish this kind of a micro-payment system. Imagine this: Here is a nonprofit company, xyz, that keeps monetary entries in a database, you can make any transaction for free, but you can only deposit or withdraw money in increments of $50. This keeps enough money in xyz's bank to pay, via interest, the transaction costs of writing out and receiving checks.
This is also a good way of paying artists. I'll send you 5 cents, and when enough people have sent you five cents, you can get a check out of it.
(Of course, to start sending people 5 cents, I will first have to deposit $50, but that's a small detail...also, if I REALLY want my $1.50 out, I can give it to someone I know who has over $50, so that the next time they take out money, they'll take out that much more and give it to me.)
We can even do it so that you don't even need to register to start receiving payments. I can simply mail cmdrtaco@slashdot.org $0.05, and he won't even know about it unless his e-mail receives more than $5, at which time he'll be reminded, once, via e-mail, that he has that much in, and that when it reaches $50, he can withdraw it. Authenticating the e-mail works the same way it does today for sending a gift-certificate to an e-mail address via amazon. You send an only-usable-once URL that requires information from the e-mail in which it appears in order to authenticate.
The best part is, a lot of e-mails might only ever receive less than $50, because people stop caring or the e-mail becomes shut down. In this case, the money just stays in xyz's coffers, to help finance the operation, until the end of time, or until the paying party retracts the money (since it is to an UNVERIFIED e-mail), whichever comes first.
It's a lot better than paypal, which "charges a transaction fee just for changing a number in one of its databases", to paraphrase someone I read on slashdot earlier.
What do we all think? Micropayments for everyone? (Miniature american flags for others.)
I know a BUNCH of famous people I'd instantly donate a dollar or two to, of whom presently I have only the e-mail address...
This brings up an interesting question, which is whether I can help out a friend by routing her IRC traffic or his for her/him, if I have a large server up a lot. I'm not sure I would do it open-to-the-public, but as something for a friend, why not?
2) Anyone who gets posted to slashdot and hangs out on IRC probably has enough techie friends that one of them would be willing to host such a service.
So, a better ask-slashdot might be: How do I route around draconian ban-by-subnet IRC policies?
"scanned from books with expired copyrights" Did you know, whoever scans it automagically has the copyrights to the scan itself. It's like when the New York Philharmonic plays Mozart. Sure, the music's out of copyright (not that the United States EVER honored copyrights from the seventeenth century -- it couldn't, cuz' it didn't exist), but each "instantiation" isn't. Photos of famous paintings are the same way.
So, CAREFUL. Just because Raphael has been more than seventy years dead (or however copyright might read today), doesn't mean that the photographer of the photo you're looking at of one of his painting's is! (That should be rephrased for clarity, but whatever, 3.0 parses it.)
Likewise, just because the Penguin Classic you're eyeing has a title from the ninteenth century doesn't mean that the particular typography of the book is out of copyright. Only when you hold in your hand a book whose author, and the copyright holder of anything cited "used with permission", has been seventy years dead, can you use extracts from that book, and even then only if you make it yourself.
In other words, go take a picture of a tree and make it purdy with photoshop. It'll save you trouble.
Given sufficient quantities of caffeine, humans working in shifts need only about three hours of sleep a day for 4-5 days. Of course you were able to stay up for 27 hours. But if you had had 3 hours of sleep after the first 18, your next six would have been far more productive than the 9 hours you actually got to code. Also, you'd be amazed how SMART taking a 3-hour break, with code swimming around your head, will make you. I think if there's a team up continuously, hard at work on an exciting project, then 5-7 days of 3 hours a night ought to be doable. Personally, I have done this (but without a team) on a few weekends, when I had very exciting code I was working on. A semi-recent experience: came home friday (not this past one) and coded till 4 in the morning, fell asleep at the keyboard until the sun woke me seven-ish, saw my project on the screen (well, under the screensaver), so I got up, drank a bit of coffee, and sat down and coded continuously until the afternoon, ate something, coded more. I didn't have incentive to finish by monday and be really tired during the beginning of the week, so i went to bed around 9 and slept till 9 in the morning (thus friday and saturday averaged to 7.5 hours of sleep), but I know that I could have again gotten only a few hours of sleep and coded all of sunday as well. I think that 48 minus 6 (for sleep) hours of continuous coding is about the extent someone can do without really really pushing herself or himself.
So, take-home lesson: When people say that it really makes a difference to take a break from coding once in awhile, to get your head together and get a big picture of the project, maybe realize some of your mistakes while you still have time to change them, they mean it.
TAKE BREAKS, PEOPLE!!!! At the very least, sleep 3 hours out of every twenty four.
(On the other hand, I believe that six-hour nights are sustainable indefinitely.)
Slashdot Mirror
one thing i hate is having to "e-mail with subject \"help\" to receive a list of possible commands", each of which, I gather, includes sending an e-mail with a certain subject, then receiving an e-mail in confirmation of it. Blech!
Whatever you use, make sure it has a clean web interface, and configure it to include a link at the end of each e-mail sent to the group to the effect of "Click here to change or configure your mailing list membership."
is this version NP-hard?
Also: What if you sneeze?
...this abstract for you.
It seems to address what you want, but is fairly recent! This means that solutions might not exist in the wild yet!!!
However, its very recentness also indicates that the issues it addresses (and you are trying to address) are still of very real significance in existing technologies.
So either all's well thanks to this solution, or you'll have to roll your own.
I believe your parent referred to the fact that its parent said "1000+" rather than "1024+" bits. Because 1024 seems more "round" to him/her than 1000 does.
I know, I was just teasin' :)
It's more important for me to have my state, a very small and often forgotten place, to wield some degree of power in Washington.
Fuck you! It's the largest state in the U.S. I wish I had a state that large--but all you do is complain about it. Spoiled brat.
It is an exciting time now, but don't kid ourselves that this is the golden age of advances. We're still doing the same thing, just slightly faster. Give me a call when we have anti-gravity devices, holodecks, and transporters.
There's something ironic in that sentence, but I can't put my finger on what. I'll give you a call when I figure it out.
thanks.
That's the long and short of it, yes.
No, I just like the sound of it. It's playful. My eleven year old brother said to me the sentence "This cheat gives you INFINITY LIFE!!!" I liked it. He said: "OOOOH! It evoluted!!" haha, because he thought that was the term, since the game said "evolution". :)], and not some grammatical machine.
I correct him, of course, but I like how playful some "wrong" things sound. I'm a human bean, after all, [sic
I'll call something non-sequiturial, if I think it doesn't follow, and use strong verbs with an -ed suffix, although I can't think of one that I tend to do with just now...
I say that I like Boston enough to want to live in it for keeps, or that "You know what they say: there are only two ways to skin a cat: head to tail and tail to head", before adding, "But you know what? That's more than one way!", in a context where a normal person would just say "there's more than one way to skin a cat."
Sometimes I go the other way, and use the original form of an expression that has come down to us differnetly, for example saying, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" (rather than "the proof is in the pudding", taking pudding to mean desert, or the end), and when whereas a normal person might say "The best laid plans...", signifying the idiom "the best laid plans of mice and men", I'll quote the full phrase:
"You know what they say:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang oft a-gley."
With a heavy bobby burnsy accent.
Same for shakespearean quotes common in the language, and, especially, Alexander Pope.
Other times, I'll put a twist on it. If I don't want to talk about religion any more, I'll say:
"Silly mortal! Don't question Gods's plan,
The proper study of mankind is MAN."
If someone tells me they like Chevre (goat's cheese), I will say,
"You know the reason we even are able to milk cows at all today is because we have the practice from back when we were goatherds. It's like airplanes -- you couldn't have them if it weren't for the pioneers in dirigibles."
But of course Pope put it more succinctly with:
True ease in milking comes from milking goats,
As he flies best who also ably floats.
Anyway, that's all.
The only reason I use [sic] when misquoting or misdeclining or misspelling purposefully is to stave off the hordes of ravenous pedants who lurk around slashdot and other places, much like yourself, actually.
Sometimes I'll be tricky, and say something that the pedants find objectionable but really makes sense:
"Hopefully, I say, we should be finished by tomorrow."
(Because some old schoolers don't use hopefully except as an adverb; not as a sentence-modifyer.)
Anyway, toodles.
You might be paying less /on average/ but bad scenarios are a lot worse. The reason we pay insurance companies more money than they give out is for the guarantee that we will never have to individually pay more than the average that each person puts in, (minus the surcharge).
It's like the state lottery: sure, on average I'd rather keep my dollar than get 40 cents for it, but a dollar a week doesn't make any difference to me one way or another, whereas whoever wins the lottery gets a big increase in lifestyle, and that person COULD be me. I'm willing to pay 60 cents for the CHANCE to pool my 40 cents with the 40 cents of everyone else who plays.
Likewise, if a business is about to fail miserably, it can try something really risky, that either will make it go bankrupt a few months earlier, or end up keeping it afloat.
Risk management FREQUENTLY deals with worst-case scenarios as well as "expected return", ie, what you call average. That's why I'd rather walk 15 minutes and arrive exactly on time to an appointment than take the bus, for which I have to wait, and arrive on average 6 minutes earlier. (Because buses come every n minutes, but I don't know when the last one came.)
Fun stuff.
the U.S., as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry. When the U.S. says: "You, as a citizen, are not allowed to circumvent insuring your automobile, say by having infinity cash [sic] that you're willing to use to pay for any damages that you might inflict, but must go through a PRIVATE, government regulated insurance agency in order to use the public roads..."
Except for satellite and other wireless communications, ALL VoIP in Panama (as elsewhere) goes through wires that sit on the Government's land (that would be everything). If I can't use a public road except by playing by the rules of regulated private companies, (even if I know of a cheaper alternative), why should Panamians be allowed to use data lines going through public land, except by playing by the rules of a regulated private company?
Okay, that's the most contrived example I could think of. I don't think there's a closer equivalent -- some candidates were Edison (the electric company) - run public schools (look it up -- but you're not required to go to one, since you can homeschool) and private appraisals mandated in certain cases by the government.
Anyway, uh, yeah, HOW DARE THEY.
Bad "spam"-like messages are bad. Good spamlike messages are not bad. A good spam-like message I consciously opted in to receive is indistinguishable from a welcome business proposal or newsletter.
Does this system know what businesses I've given my credit card to? Because EVERY ONE of those businesses has a right to e-mail me, so long as there is a clear opt-out link at the bottom of their e-mail.
If I trust a company enough to give it my credit card number, and I like it enough to do business with it, IT HAS A RIGHT TO SEND ME E-MAIL TO INFORM ME OF ITS PRODUCTS, as long as I choose to let it. Good businesses won't abuse the privilege, and I won't end up clicking the opt-out link.
The only thing this system is good for is filtering SOME penile-enlargement shady fly-by-night header-spoofing, open-relay-using shady shamster.
Oh, but that's the ONLY thing that the article defines as SPAM:
Let's take a quick look inside the mind of someone who responds to a spam [sic]. This person is either astonishingly credulous or deeply in denial about their sexual interests. In either case, repulsive or idiotic as the spam seems to us, it is exciting to them.
So this is not spam-filtering software; rather, it's software to filter pornographic messages that fit a certain low-level sales pitch. Lovely.
Robert.
Big deal! You do the crime, you do the time.
It's like those posts we always read whenever copyright infringement comes up: "You're stealing. Saying, 'Can I borrow that CD for a sec?', popping it into your CD drive, ripping a track, and giving it back to your friend is NO DIFFERENT from breaking into my house and stealing my computer. If one gets you in jail, so should the other."
Likewise: What these people did, stealing bandwidth, is NO DIFFERENT from what it would be if, instead of just modifying some hardware in the privacy of their own homes, they BROKE INTO Fort Knox, weilding NUCLEAR WEAPONS LACED WITH BIOCHEMICAL WARFARE and stole BULLION BANDWIDTHS!!!
It's no different, and I for one am GLAD, do you hear? glad with all my heart to see these CRIMINALS finally come to justice.
An EULA by a private organization is NO DIFFERENT from a constitutionally sound law passed by a majority of our elected senate and subject to the scrutiny, [1] of an impartial office whose members are appointed by a democratically elected leader (and subject to approval by our democratically elected senate.)
I don't know about you, but I'll be GLAD when my tax dollars go toward knocking my door down for modding my xbox (which will be specifically illegalificated by the EULA). I'll be laughing all the way to the electric chair! And then have my sentence compounded (two consecutive electrocutions?) for sitting in the electric chair in a non-authorized way!
How beautiful the world will be when EULA's reign supreme!
~Robert.
[1] against the standard of a sacred document detailing our most cherished rights, and being the only thing separating us from a fascist regime appointed by the majority -- Hitler was elected, don't-ya-know.
Other voting systems abound. One alternative is the instant runoff...
And it's very popular. I was just reading about it because of some person's sig on slashdot in support of it. Hopefully the person will post to this story....
-Robert.
Also, from the faq:
"Who uses IRV? Many places. Ireland to elects its president, Australia to elect its House of Representatives, and the American Political Science Association to elect its president. Cambridge MA uses a variant of IRV to elect its city council, and literally hundreds of jurisdictions, organizations and corporations use IRV around the world."
That's right. I used the value of the eath's diameter for its radius. Substituting half of the value in my original calculations, I come up with: 11.294 KM/s.
/sec instead of /s, I get a page at Purdue University reading "Thus for Earth,
:)
Also, remember that I used an upper bounds; I said that an object would fall "less than 10 meters" in 1 second, since at the end of the second it would be going 9.8 m/s^2, so even if it acccelerated constantly at the greatest speed it will reach, it will only go less than 10 meters.
More precisely, this value is:
distance = initial distance + initial velocity * time + 1/2 g times time squared.
So, d = 1/2 (9.8), or 4.9. I guess if I'd had a better conceptual understanding, I would have realized initially that after 1 second, the total displacement is just half the acceleration, since I have enough calculus to know that the derivative of a quadratic is just twice linear, and at this point we start at 0, so the graph isn't translated at all.
Anyway, if instead of 0.01 for 10 meters, I add 0.0049 KM to the original 12756 KM (now 12756/2), my answer becomes: 7.905 KM/s.
In other words, almost precisely your "8.3 km/sec or thereabouts".
So, I had just two problems.
1. I used the diameter of the Earth for its radius.
2. I did not look up the simple formula to get a more precise value than my upper bounds, and did not have the conceptual framework to quickly realize that calculation isn't necessary.
Actually, I wonder now whether my answer isn't more correct than your 8.3 km/sec...I seem to be using more precise numbers, because you're using 7000 km, whereas 12756/2 is actually 6378 KM. (And the former number comes from NASA).
Actually, now that I think about it, when I put in 14000 for 12756 in my calculations, my answer is 8.282.
In other words: Our methods produce an equally correct result.
I do wonder though why you say something like "not a bad way to do the calculation, without access to calculus." I'm in calculus 1 now, and it might be helpful if you told me what in calculus would have helped me carry out the calculations.
-Robert.
PS. It occurs to me that "7.905 KM/s" is a number I arrived at using NASA's very precise "The diameter of the Earth at the equator is 12,756 kilometers (km)" [good, apparently, to 5 significant digits] and the accepted number 9.8 m/s for g, on average.
Googling "7.905 KM/s" returns two links, the second of which says:
" See if you can show that the orbital velocity at the Earth's surface (i.e. the speed required for a frictionless train moving through an Equatorial tunnel to be in free fall all the way around the Earth) is 7.905km/s."
This page is in the webspace of Jess Brewer, who appears to be a serious researcher at the University of British Columbia.
Googling
vc = 7.9 km/sec (~ 5 miles/second)
(to achieve a circular orbit about the Earth)" and another (cache) by a different professor carrying out the same calculations.
Both professors are physicists.
Searching "7.90 km/s" (ie with one fewer sigfig) returns "v_cir = [ G M_E/ R_E]^{1/2} = 7.90 km s^{-1} " here. This is also an academic site.
Rounding to 7.91 returns no relavant matches, but 7.9 (as many sig. fig.s as we had from g ~ 9.8) returns too many for me to look through. Adding "orbit" I find this page says "Remember: near earth orbital velocity is 7.9 km/s." Sounds authoritative.
So you see, my calculations are quite correct.
I used to think about this a lot, for the following reason:
Imagine if we had a tube at ground level going all the way around the Earth.
If the tubes are vacuums, you can continually accelerate an object within them, since there is no terminal veolicity at constant acceleration the way there is from air. (At least at nonrelativistic speeds.)
Now let's calculate what orbital speeds are at sea level. At sea level, if you start out with zero downward momentum, you fall less than 10 meters in 1 second. If during that time you shoot forward far enough in a straight line that the Earth's curviture lifts you 10 feet, you've achieved orbit. NASA gives the Earth's diameter at the equator as 12,756 KM. Now the following calculation is REALLY easy using a diagram, but a bit tricky to describe. It uses only the pythagorean theorem.
Draw a circle, and two radii, one due west, one appreciably north. Draw a tangent at the circumference where the westerly radius touches (tangents are at right angles with radii). Now extend the second radius until it touches the tangent line. You should have a triangle whose hypotenuse is 12,756 KM + 10 M, of which one leg is 12,756 KM, and the other leg unknown. The other leg (along the tangent line) represents how much we need to move forward in 1 second, and we calculate it by taking the square root of the difference between 12,756.01 squared and 12,756 squared.
This number is 15.972. In other words, by MY calculation (I'm fresh out of high school though, so YMMV), orbiting at sea level requires you to go 15.972 miles in a single second. Compare that with the Space shuttle's "velocity of 27,880 km per hour" (/3600 seconds-per-hour) = 7.744. In other words, at an altitude of 322 KM, it can take nearly twice as long fall the same amount, which is explained by lower value of acceleration-due-to-gravity at that height. (Repeating our calculations above, substituting 12,756+322 for 12,756, we get sqrt( (12756+322+0.01)^2 - (12756+322)^2 ) = 16.172 KM, versus the 15.972 we had at ground level. However, to cover the same 10 feet, it now has a longer time to fall.
ANYWAY, the upshot of all this is that if you can accelerate something to 15.972 KM/s or (57,499.2 KM/h or (x0.62) 35,649 miles per hour, it will coast its way along without needing anything under it, and without consuming further gas.
This could be a really great way to deliver packages.
Draw a circumference at sea level that goes through a lot of interesting places, lay down a vacuum line (it doesn't actually need to support anything!! All it needs to do is be thin plastic that holds its shape at 1 atmosphere crush) all around it, then start this huge, heavy monolithic Delivery Bird sailing around at 35,649 mph, reaching every point along your line every fifteen minutes. I'm not sure how you get packages (including passengers) on and off the thing, but it sure sounds cool.
So, in conclusion, it's too cool to work.
Device drivers take up memory to load. So, include enough RAM for the driver on the device itself, so that each device adds its weight to the bus.
</ironic>
You're advocating something very similar....think about it.
or democracy, ICANN begins the process of subverting the Internet toward its own nefarious private goals.
In keeping with these changes, ICANN announces that it will be changing its name to reflect its new mission to become:
Universal Controller of All Network Traffic.
(Headline: ICANN changes name to UCANT).
Credit.
What's wrong with seawalls?
WHAT'S WRONG WITH SEAWALLS???
I am shocked and outraged that you would show such an utter lack of consideration, Taco.[1]
Well if you don't know why seawalls are bad by now (and ones that are ILLEGAL too, I might add), I sure as hell won't be the one to tell you.
Humph.
[1] Yes, all editors are taco.
Because SPAM has a marginal cost of $0, to both sender and receiver.
It doesn't REALLY cost anyone anything more that you're sending 100,000 pieces of mail versus 1000 to a campus-wide discussion group, EXCEPT for the time that the 100,000 people receiving it must spend deleting the mail.
Honestly, in this day and age a 2,000 byte e-mail is NO load on our servers or infrastructure.
It is a load only on the receiving party.
What I might like to see implemented though is this:
I will run a public in-box to which you must deposit 30 cents with each e-mail you send to it. My friends can just get it back at an appropriate time (since the micropayment architecture allows for zero-fee transactions, they're just entries in a database), or via the e-mails that I send to them in reply, and the businesses that I do business with can just charge me 30 cents more to pay for the privilege of learning about their product, but the businesses that I DON'T want anything to do with will either stop bothering me, or pay me nicely for my time -- I'll glance at 20 subjects, decide I'm not interested in any of them, and wa-la, I've made $6 in ten seconds.
This will have a bunch of good effects:
1. Illegal spam will be traceable to a source, since SOMEBODY's account is making me those micropayments.
2. I will see more products I'm interested in, since companies will have 0 cost of printing advertising materials, only the shipping. Whereas I get some interesting postal junk mail now, I will get more interesting junk e-mail if you remove the cost of printing. Also, instead of the advertisers paying the us postal service, they will be paying me.
3. I will be paid back for what I'm paying my ISP in order for it to uphold my end of the mail infrastructure.
4. etc.
It also shouldn't be that hard to establish this kind of a micro-payment system. Imagine this:
Here is a nonprofit company, xyz, that keeps monetary entries in a database, you can make any transaction for free, but you can only deposit or withdraw money in increments of $50. This keeps enough money in xyz's bank to pay, via interest, the transaction costs of writing out and receiving checks.
This is also a good way of paying artists. I'll send you 5 cents, and when enough people have sent you five cents, you can get a check out of it.
(Of course, to start sending people 5 cents, I will first have to deposit $50, but that's a small detail...also, if I REALLY want my $1.50 out, I can give it to someone I know who has over $50, so that the next time they take out money, they'll take out that much more and give it to me.)
We can even do it so that you don't even need to register to start receiving payments. I can simply mail cmdrtaco@slashdot.org $0.05, and he won't even know about it unless his e-mail receives more than $5, at which time he'll be reminded, once, via e-mail, that he has that much in, and that when it reaches $50, he can withdraw it. Authenticating the e-mail works the same way it does today for sending a gift-certificate to an e-mail address via amazon. You send an only-usable-once URL that requires information from the e-mail in which it appears in order to authenticate.
The best part is, a lot of e-mails might only ever receive less than $50, because people stop caring or the e-mail becomes shut down. In this case, the money just stays in xyz's coffers, to help finance the operation, until the end of time, or until the paying party retracts the money (since it is to an UNVERIFIED e-mail), whichever comes first.
It's a lot better than paypal, which "charges a transaction fee just for changing a number in one of its databases", to paraphrase someone I read on slashdot earlier.
What do we all think? Micropayments for everyone? (Miniature american flags for others.)
I know a BUNCH of famous people I'd instantly donate a dollar or two to, of whom presently I have only the e-mail address...
Marvellous...
(yes, voila.)
This brings up an interesting question, which is whether I can help out a friend by routing her IRC traffic or his for her/him, if I have a large server up a lot. I'm not sure I would do it open-to-the-public, but as something for a friend, why not?
2) Anyone who gets posted to slashdot and hangs out on IRC probably has enough techie friends that one of them would be willing to host such a service.
So, a better ask-slashdot might be:
How do I route around draconian ban-by-subnet IRC policies?
Philosophers ask WHY. Engineers ask HOW.
"scanned from books with expired copyrights"
Did you know, whoever scans it automagically has the copyrights to the scan itself. It's like when the New York Philharmonic plays Mozart. Sure, the music's out of copyright (not that the United States EVER honored copyrights from the seventeenth century -- it couldn't, cuz' it didn't exist), but each "instantiation" isn't. Photos of famous paintings are the same way.
So, CAREFUL. Just because Raphael has been more than seventy years dead (or however copyright might read today), doesn't mean that the photographer of the photo you're looking at of one of his painting's is! (That should be rephrased for clarity, but whatever, 3.0 parses it.)
Likewise, just because the Penguin Classic you're eyeing has a title from the ninteenth century doesn't mean that the particular typography of the book is out of copyright. Only when you hold in your hand a book whose author, and the copyright holder of anything cited "used with permission", has been seventy years dead, can you use extracts from that book, and even then only if you make it yourself.
In other words, go take a picture of a tree and make it purdy with photoshop. It'll save you trouble.
I guess there's only two of you.
BTW, our sigs conflict.
Given sufficient quantities of caffeine, humans working in shifts need only about three hours of sleep a day for 4-5 days.
Of course you were able to stay up for 27 hours. But if you had had 3 hours of sleep after the first 18, your next six would have been far more productive than the 9 hours you actually got to code.
Also, you'd be amazed how SMART taking a 3-hour break, with code swimming around your head, will make you.
I think if there's a team up continuously, hard at work on an exciting project, then 5-7 days of 3 hours a night ought to be doable.
Personally, I have done this (but without a team) on a few weekends, when I had very exciting code I was working on.
A semi-recent experience: came home friday (not this past one) and coded till 4 in the morning, fell asleep at the keyboard until the sun woke me seven-ish, saw my project on the screen (well, under the screensaver), so I got up, drank a bit of coffee, and sat down and coded continuously until the afternoon, ate something, coded more. I didn't have incentive to finish by monday and be really tired during the beginning of the week, so i went to bed around 9 and slept till 9 in the morning (thus friday and saturday averaged to 7.5 hours of sleep), but I know that I could have again gotten only a few hours of sleep and coded all of sunday as well.
I think that 48 minus 6 (for sleep) hours of continuous coding is about the extent someone can do without really really pushing herself or himself.
So, take-home lesson:
When people say that it really makes a difference to take a break from coding once in awhile, to get your head together and get a big picture of the project, maybe realize some of your mistakes while you still have time to change them, they mean it.
TAKE BREAKS, PEOPLE!!!!
At the very least, sleep 3 hours out of every twenty four.
(On the other hand, I believe that six-hour nights are sustainable indefinitely.)