I'll agree that the electromagnetic absorpotion due to a single photon is small.
But a cell phone release more than 1 photon, and the total energy and absorpotion of the electromagnetic wave is much larger than one photon.
And might be sufficient to cause heating of tissue and other effects given a sufficient period of direct exposure to a sufficiently strong cell signal.
It makes no difference. This is a fundamental result that was explained byEinstein about a hundred years ago!
This is basic, TV documentary level quantum mechanics. Two photons that are too weak individually do NOT add up to a strong photon, contrary to naive expectations based on classic mechanics, where two weak waves can add up to a bigger wave.
The way to think about it is this: The ability of a photon to break apart molecular bonds is based on either heating or excitation. Heating is classical, but the power levels used by cell phones are far way too weak for this to occur, and humans are water cooled. Excitation is quantum mechanical, and there is a cut-off based on the wavelength of light. Adding two photons will not change their wavelength. Any number of microwave photons added together will not become a UV photon.
People take far more damage from the Sun than all other sources combined. If you want something to panic about, be more concerned about the huge unshielded fusion reactor that's bathing you in ionizing radiation with a power of hundreds of watts per square.
Emeril Lagasse suffers from the same problem as the article writer. They both think that one ingredient is the key to a winning formula. BAM! Just add some EVOO or in this case turn the difficulty all the way up.
The secret, which isn't a secret at all, is that balanced gameplay is the true Sangreal of gaming. Pitting a newbie against a grizzled Korean veteran in Starcraft isn't going to give anyone a challenge or make them feel like they want to come back to the game again. It's only when the players are evenly matched or only slightly mismatched that gameplay becomes exciting. It is the thrill of being able to beat a game but with enough challenge that victory isn't guaranteed.
I totally agree. One of the brilliant things about Supreme Commander is that it matches you against players of equal skill. When I played RTS games before, games were always one of two types: I rolled over the enemy effortlessly, which is boring, or I got crushed like a bug, which is just as boring, and frustrating too. In SC, once it learns your rank, every game is a constant uphill struggle against an opponent you can almost but not quite defeat. It's brutal, but that's what makes it a fun challenge!
Meanwhile, games like Valve's TF2, L4D, and L4D2, which are highly dependent on not just your own player skill, but the skill of your teammates has zero in the way of skill level based match ups. There's nothing worse than a game with some 13 year old idiot in it. There's always that one prepubescent who got the game 10 minutes ago, but thinks he can do whatever the fuck he wants, including run the wrong way, ignore his team, etc...
I like to think of this analogy: imagine how stupid it would be if the world championship game of, say, football, had one team member replaced by a fucktard who just does "whatever he feels like", because, you know, "it's just a game", and there would be absolutely nothing the other players could do about it. Does that sound like a good game to you?
Unfortunately, this is the state of almost all team PC and Console gaming right now. Players with literally 10 years of experience play side-by-side with mouthbreathers who struggle to tie their own shoelaces in the morning, and have difficulty in grasping advanced concepts like "pressing a button fires the weapon". It's common to see 50:1 point ratios on TF2 servers between players, which is just insane, if you stop and think about it.
Many people would argue that this is what clans are for, but clan games are usually very small, are played only on a subset of the maps, and are few and far between. There's just no opportunity to play, say, a 32-player game for 4 or 5 hours straight with clan-level players only.
Define rational. Is money your primary or only measure? Only in the short term? The next quarter, maybe the next year?
A project like this, if it took off, could be quite good for expanding the usage of the Java language. It might not be a success or a big success, but calling it a blue-sky project seems a bit unfair. Unless of course value is only defined by the next quarter.
Except that it's forcing a restriction that isn't going to work for real-world game development.
On the server side, Project Darkstar applications must be delivered as Java Byte Code. (source)
The issue is that practically all real-time 3D PC or console games are written in C++. The server is not usually a totally isolated module, because it shares a lot of common code with the client. It would have the same network communication stack, it has to load the same resources, it has to do much of the same 3D maths, apply AI and game logic, etc... All of that is often shared with the client code base. It's not unusual for 50% or more shared code between the two. If the client is written in C++, and the server is in Java, expect that to drop to 5% or less. At best, developers could embed the Java runtime into the client-side for some scripted logic, like WoW does with Lua.
And a nearly exact same function is available in an automatic- it is called PUT THE TRANSMISSION IN NEUTRAL!!
Options:
1) Neutral (I have yet to see a car without one) 2) Brakes (which will fade if not applied hard and soon enough) 3) Emergency/Parking brakes (not very powerful, but helps) 4) Cut ignition (on some cars- must be in neutral first)
I am sorry, but I simply *refuse* to believe that all 4 options were unavailable to the people having major run-away car problems from what was most probably a mechanical problem with the throttle pedal.
I think most cases are just poor drivers that don't actually know how to drive, but are licensed anyway, because the state can't afford to not license idiots on the grounds of merely being stupid. That would exclude too many people.
There was an incident here in Australia recently with a runaway car with a stuck throttle, and it was mentioned on a popular morning talk radio show hosted by 2 guys and 1 girl. The guys couldn't believe the car couldn't be stopped (using any one of the methods you mentioned), but the girl said that she wouldn't have come up with any of those methods on her own!
This sparked a listener "call in" vote to see who would or wouldn't have thought to stop the car using neutral/e-brake/engine-off/etc...
It was interesting that something like 50% of the female callers admitted they wouldn't have thought of trying anything like that. I suspect that it's not that more female drivers don't know how to drive, it's just that fewer male callers would admit to not knowing how to drive.
Some people have an attitude that once they've acquired a skill up to a "bare minimum" level required to satisfy their immediate needs, then any further self education is just pointless. These are the same people who never learn how to cut & paste when using a computer, and have all their electronics blinking "12:00".
The glasses I got for Avatar don't seem to be linearly polarised.
That's because they used circular polarizers. One clockwise, and one counter-clockwise. They're more expensive to make than linear polarizers, but don't resulting in ghosting if you tilt your head. I guess they got the filters cheap enough.
I can't believe this came from educated scientists.
Our communications signals are getting weaker, sure, but we still have other sources of clearly artificial radiation that are just as powerful as before. For example, military and weather radar. We regularly send out radar pusles powerful enough to compute the range to other planets in the solar system. Similarly, the Deep Space Network sends out powerful signals on various frequencies using highly directional beams when communicating with space probes.
I still don't understand how all of these deniers get modded so high. They present all kinds of disinformation and logical fallacies. Aren't most slashdotters trained in the ways of logic? Don't most of our jobs depend upon using logic correctly? I love that you mentioned peak-oil, because the predictions made by that model are extremely dire, yet almost no one knows about it. Basically the model asserts that oil is a finite resource and thus the graph of oil production vs. time will be shaped like a bell curve. After the peak, oil demand out paces oil production, and the shit really hits the fan. Oil is so energy dense that it is basically miracle juice, and humans have grown addicted to the stuff. Our economy is almost completely oil dependent, our food (shipping, fertilizing, pesticides), our power (mining, shipping, maintenance), our toys (mining, shipping, plastics), and a lot of people have jobs that require driving to. At this point, our economy consumes 30 billion barrels of oil a year, but we discover less than 4 billion barrels a year. Basically, in the near future peak-oil will cause wall street to collapse (from skyrocketing oil prices) and the power grid will shut down forever. So, all I can suggest is you might want to learn to live without power now before it's too late because at this point there is no stopping the the oil crash. Source.
It basically says that most policy makers don't understand the implications of the exponential growth curve.
I figured out the same thing myself, because I studied maths & physics at uni, and I noticed the same misunderstanding. I remember a Telstra (an australian telco) executive saying that they weren't going to invest in international bandwidth because the "current levels were sufficient to meet demand at the current rate of growth", even though bandwidth demand was clearly following a steep exponential curve.
In case you guys are wondering, this is what a moderate denier looks like. He looks like he's making sense, and his position seems perfectly rational and thought out, but that just makes it all the more dangerous because it's still wrong and full of logical fallacies.
I grew up in the military industrial complex. You know what the military did every time they wanted a shiny new toy? They created this big boogy man. Back then it was the "Soviets have this new Mig-25 that goes Mach 3+. We must have something to counter it". "The Soviets have this new T-80 tank, we need something to counter it". And the thing of it was the Military damn well knew that the T-80 was a dressed up T-72 and that the F-15 would beat a MIG-25 any day of the week. Yeah, the MIG-25 could go Mach 3....once before the engines had to be replaced. And the people in the defense industry as well as the DOD knew this, but they played the boogey man to Congress and the American people.
I'm sorry, but I see the same thing happening with this whole Environmental and Global Warming thing. Are there real problems out there? Should be trying not to pollute? Yes. But the tactics these people are using remind me too much of what I saw from the Defense industry.
Basically, you're saying that you've noticed that when people lie to you, the common thing is that they use words. Scientists... also use words, hence they must also be liars!
Err.. no. The techniques are similar in the sense that group 'A' is crying wolf when there is no wolf, and group 'B' is crying wolf because everyone's about to get eaten.
... and group 'A' sells wolf hunting equipment, while group 'B' has bite marks.
These predictions reminds me of an article around 1900 that claimed that if trends continue, the horse manure on the streets of chicago would be 6 ft. deep by 1930. It never happened, the automobile came along and replaced horses. And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem with these predictions. The longer the predicted , the less likely the prediction is to be correct. Things change and I don't believe we have a model yet that works.
"I read a prediction by an idiot once, hence, all people making predictions must also be idiots."
or
"Some people failed at making a prediction, so all predictions are actually impossible to make."
I don't believe a working model can be created either. Show me one of these ecological dire predictions that I remember hearing in the 1970's and 1980's that have come to pass. I remember the presentations back then saying New York would be underwater by 2010! What about global dimming back in the 1970's? Whatever happened to that?
None of these models can even begin to take into account uncertainty.
On the contrary, ALL scientific models take into account uncertainty. That's easy. The reason those old models were inaccurate was precisely because the uncertainties were so great. There was less data, it was of lower quality, and the analytical techniques just weren't there yet.
That does not mean that current predictions are just as uncertain. The work of thousands of scientists over the last few decades has been to reduce those uncertainties. They've been measuring glaciers with GPS, drilling cores in ice, collecting tree ring data from around the world, analyzing satellite imaging data, etc...
The result is still uncertain. For example, the actions of humans themselves is very hard to predict. We don't know exactly what the post-peak-oil curve will look like. We don't know if nuclear power will contribute significantly to energy use in the near future or not. Fusion might become cheap and practical. There might be some disease that wipes out 95% of people.
However, if things continue as they are going now, including the seemingly unstoppable exponential growth in population, then we're boned. This is clear to anyone who's seen the evidence and can c
I'm white and speak Japanese without an accent (Dave Specter has me beat on vocabulary, but he sounds horrible). I get the same initial shock when I open my mouth. If they're under 15, they just tend to stare for a minute. After a couple sentences, most people calm down and everything is normal. However, when I leave I often hear whispered comments about how much of a shock the experience was.
I've had a bit of the reverse of that.
I'm Hungarian, which is a very complex and difficult language to learn. Foreign speakers are extremely rare, and it's even less common for them to be better than "barely intelligible". If I hear some character who supposedly speaks 'dozens of langauges' try to talk Hungarian in a movie, it sounds like they're mumbling something vaguely Hungarian-like. On top of that, Hungary has very few immigrants from distant lands, we only ever get people coming across from neighboring countries, so you don't really get non-European looking people speaking the language.
I've been shocked a few times. I met an asian person once who spoke fluent Hungarian. I thought my brain was melting. I was basically speechless for a minute. There can't be much more than a hundred asian speakers of the language on the planet. Children of ambassadors, linguists, that kind of thing.
I'm not implying they could get into orbit with this vehicle as it obviously will require atmosphere for the rotor blades to be effective, but in a general sense. Specifically getting a launch vehicle as far into the atmosphere as possible before switching to a different means of propulsion like a typical rocket.
Achieving orbit is about speed ('delta v'), NOT altitude. It takes much more energy to get the horizontal speed to the required level than to reach the required altitude. Getting above the atmosphere helps, but not all that much.
"I was once asked to turn encryption off on a highly sensitive authentication system for the HR/Finance/Payroll system of one of our country's biggest institutions. I just told the manager that it's not his call to make, because he simply does not understand the implications of that decision to make it.
Unfortunately, saying things like that is a personal risk to me, because there's nothing I can point to that will back me up."
If there's nothing there to back you up, then you are running things solely based on your own opinion, which, right or wrong, is a risk to you.
If you have encryption policies in place, for a reason, then document them and get them signed off by senior management...... and then you have your backup.
But that's my whole point: senior management is simply not competent to understand the issues and risks involved. They're suits that got promoted into a position in a bureaucracy simply through seniority and ass-kissing. Some of these guys struggle with the complexities of sending an email!
When there's only one right answer, asking for the input or permission of any senior manager is just opening up the possibility that they'll chose something else, which is by definition going to be wrong.
The problem is that even if I do my best to avoid such a situation, sometimes it comes up anyway, and then there's nothing I can do. Management essentially pulls rank to override my expertise, and I can't point to an IT industry "code of practice" to back up my expert opinion, because there's no such thing.
What ends up giving way? Quality. And it pisses me off. I can't do my job properly. Code reviews, unit/mock/functional testing, analysis, UML *all* have to give way because of all the above and just to get it out on time. Maintenance costs increase, but as long as it's out of the door it's OK. Would you build a house without blueprints? Would you remove an accountant's calculator from their desk because *you* don't work that way? Nope. [Excuse the crude analogies, they still get the point across]
I've been in much the same position a few times, where some 'suit' decided that every single aspect of an IT project is always a 'business decision', and hence, up to him, and only him.
I like to remind people like of a few things:
- I'm the IT expert, they're paying me for my expertise, not to press buttons. They can press the buttons themselves if they don't need my input. - Surprisingly few things in an IT project are actually 'business' decisions. Usually there is one 'right' way and many 'wrong' ways to do a task.
Unfortunately, there's no authoritative lists of things that are Wrong, guidelines on how to do things right, or legally recognized certifications for people who work in IT. The end result is that everyone thinks they can 'contribute', even when their contributions are actively dangerous. Other industries have fixed this decades ago, but IT is still too immature for this kind of thing. For example:
- You have to pass an exam before you can become a lawyer. - You have to pass multiple exams, and do years of mandatory on-site practical training under a senior doctor to become a doctor yourself. - If you ask an electrician to wire your house mains in an unsafe way, it's not a "business decision", they'll just tell you that it's not an approved wiring design, and they won't do it. An electrician that does wire your house unsafely can be sued, and will most likely lose their license.
My favorite analogy: When talking to a surgeon, the patient gets to decide if they want the surgery or not, and if there's 2 or 3 alternative surgeries that are possible, they can make the decision between them with guidance from the surgeon. The patient does not get to decide if the surgeon is going to use antibiotics or not. They do not get to decide on the level of lighting in the surgical theatre. There are a million and one things they simply do not get a say in. The patient is not the expert. The patient does not know what is best for them. That's the role of the highly trained professionals.
IT should be the same.
I was once asked to turn encryption off on a highly sensitive authentication system for the HR/Finance/Payroll system of one of our country's biggest institutions. I just told the manager that it's not his call to make, because he simply does not understand the implications of that decision to make it.
Unfortunately, saying things like that is a personal risk to me, because there's nothing I can point to that will back me up.
Yes. 250W is only "twice as much power as you provide" if you're taking it very easy. Based on measurements provided by the exercise bikes at my gym, I know I'm able to produce around a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.
OTOH, there are regulatory reasons for the motor being 250W: at least here in the UK, you'd need a full drivers licence, annual vehicle inspection and all-around crash helmet to ride it if it were more powerful. It should also be designed so that the motor cannot make the bike go faster than 15mph.
Errr... according to this:
Lance Armstrong can ride up the mountains in France generating about 500 watts of power for 20 minutes, something a typical 25-year-old could do for only 30 seconds. A professional hockey player might last three minutes and then throw up. (source)
...it sounds like you're either an olympic-level athlete... who reads slashdot... or your gym equipment is severely miscalibrated. I've tried those bikes at the gym, and 250W is my limit for a 10-15 minute stretch, and I'm by no means unhealthy. Are you sure those weren't imperial units? I know the UK has switched to metric, in theory, but I know some of you poms still get confused. 8)
And I just can’t imagine what that “horrible tearing” is, of which you speak.
I looked for it. I really did. Checked if it is really off. But I just can’t see it.
So I can just as well jump into my very own ultra-egocentric bubble, and say that I just can’t imagine why anyone would think there is a point to vsync.
If it doesn't occur on your setup, it doesn't mean it doesn't occur for other people.
It certainly doesn't mean you should be rude, or imply that others are just imagining things. Vsync tearing issues are very visible when they do occur, try google:
VLC is a poor choice. Media Player Classic Home Cinema supports Windows's DirectShow media playback system, and supports hardware accelerated decoding, hardware accelerated rendering, codecs other than those included with MPC-HC, etc.
Most importantly, I think it's the only video player out there that supports vsync to avoid horrible 'tearing' while playing video.
I just can't imagine why anyone would think it's a good idea to play a video with vsync off, but every other player seems to do it.
Gotta agree with Consolas--all programming issues aside, lowercase "g" is gorgeous.
If only Consolas wasn't a M$ product. Or to put it the way I really think, if only Consolas was open source...Since it's not, I use Liberation Mono on a big screen and Droid Sans Mono at home.
AFAIK, fonts can't be copyrighted. You should be able to use any MS font anywhere.
Was it ordinary when it was done for the very first time? Just because it's obvious now, after becoming commonplace, doesn't mean it wasn't a big leap for the person who came up with it. I can assume that wasn't you, even if you could tell us a story about how you dreamed that your camera could do that at some point when you were 4 years old so it must totally be obvious and not worthy or patenting.
Done for the the first time is not the same as 'patentable'.
Why is that so hard to understand?
A new arrangement of existing parts and common techniques is NOT a big innovation that requires government protection. According to that standard EVERY unique piece of software should be patentable, because every program is a "novel arrangement of instructions".
In my point of view, very few patents should be granted, and only for technologies that took at least 6 months of full time research to develop. An idea that you can just brainstorm in a meeting room in 10 minutes should never be patentable, that's just absurd.
Bitlocker has no performance impact, it uses the TPM chip.
Wrong. While Bitlocker utilizes the TPM to ensure a secure boot and automatic unlocking (if so desired), the TPM chip is NOT used to handle the actual encryption/decryption.
BitLocker in Windows 7 will support the new Core i3/i5 AES extensions for faster encryption, though.
Good point, apparently there is a 30-40% hit on very low-end netbooks (Intel Atom, etc...), but on modern CPUs it appears to be about 10-15% at most.
I doubt most office workers would notice that, but if you had an SSD, I suppose you'd think twice before turning it on, unless you had a CPU to match!
Using encryption has its drawbacks: * you must provide a meaningful key management * you lose speed of your machines for number crunching * you can easily lose data in the event of hardware corruption * access to data is a bit harder even for legitimate purposes * many systems (for example Active Directory domain controller.vs. ipsec) doesn't work well with encryption * skills of your systems management must be higher
I know you probably mean well, but every one of those statements is basically false.
- Active Directory + Bitlocker OR AD + Encrypting File System (EFS) both do automatic key management, key escrow, etc... - Bitlocker has no performance impact, it uses the TPM chip. Also, most CPUs are MUCH faster at encryption than disks are at reading or writing data, so it's not a bottleneck even for software-only systems. - hardware corruption causes data loss anyway, encryption just ensures that you only ever get valid data. In that respect, it's a little like ZFS -- encryption also provides integrity, as well as security. - Access to data on encrypted volumes is NOT harder. It's usually transparent. If you have proper backup procedures in place, you need never access data in non-standard ways. Speaking of which, your backups should be encrypted too! - AD works well with encryption, and has its own built in. It's already reasonably secure for most applications, and doesn't really need further encryption. The only AD related protocol that had issues with ipsec is DNS, but Windows 7 and 2008 R2 now support that as well. - If you're already deploying Windows Vista or 7 SOEs, adding in Bitlocker trivial, it's basically a checkbox. Deploying ipsec is admittedly a little harder, but it's not exactly rocket science.
I've implemented extensive encryption before, and it wasn't hard, and the users never noticed. From what I've seen, the lack of encryption is not caused by technical issues, but laziness and politics.
Security is one of those things that's not a problem day to day, just like backups. The users don't notice, and nobody complains to the managers about it, so it must not be a problem, right?
You only need security on those rare occasions when there's a hack, or a laptop gets stolen, or some intern sells 10 petabytes of old backup tapes full of customer data on eBay for $35. Of course, when those things happen, it's already too late to implement security. The breach has already occurred. There's no going back in time to tick checkboxes.
In case you're wondering just how common data breaches are, check out this list of the publicly known ones:
If that doesn't scare you, think about how many more there are that the public didn't find out about. Chances are good that your personal data has been leaked to God-knows-who, probably several times, because of lazy IT admins and inept managers.
I'm a consultant. I have honestly NEVER encountered any user at any company encrypting disk/usb/cd/dvd/email.
Where I work (company has over 10^5 employees worldwide), whole disk encryption is standard on all laptops. It is uncommon on desktops, however, and not compulsory on removable devices. All remote access is always encrypted, and requires the correct encryption package and authorizations. A similar situation existed at the place I worked before (about 3.10^4 employees worldwide).
Due to the support and policy infrastructure needed, I suspect encryption is much commoner in large organizations than small ones. How the statistics on use of encryption (TFA says 27%) are formed is another matter.
I've been to about 100 organisations, and I've seen only 2 with widespread encryption, and only 1 with 100% encryption.
If you count every organisation that uses SOME encryption, maybe 27%, but even then, how many small businesses use serious security?
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Actually, the cause of failure is well known, just read the Wiki article. They were testing emergency shutoff procedures, specifically the ability of the steam turbines to continue operating the cooling water pumps using their rotational inertia, like a flywheel. They stuffed up the test procedure. Operators with little understanding of the complex interactions of the nuclear poisons created during low power operation put the reactor into a dangerous configuration.
Man, forget about his Foundation series. Why not his Robot stories?
The FX work would be childs-play these days. Tell the stories that take place behind the walls of US Robotics & Mechanical Men. Susan Calvin. Their field test guys (whose names I cant recall at the moment). HUGE scope for additional stories, some intersting science-fiction, even some interesting issues on human-machine rights.
Hollywood tried, and they made "I, robot", which is basically an action movie where Will Smith takes his shirt off so that a smoking hot Susan Calvin, played by the airhead model Bridget Moynahan, can stare at his manly shoulders and learn about love.
To quote Adams: it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Asimov's works.
Let's get a Consider Phlebas or Matter (or whatever) movie to kick-off a whole Culture series. Superb books that, while holding a chronology, can be read in whatever order you find them.
I second that.
Any of Iain Bank's works would be fantastic if done right, but his books are so complex that I think Hollywood would entirely miss the subtle themes of betrayal and abuse of power and turn the whole thing into LOUD EXPLOSIONS... IN SPACE!
I hope that Banks refuses to give out the movie rights until he's approached by someone decent like Peter Jackson.
And now even browsers are being optimized for n-cores.:)
For all the talk around this... I seldom see my browser consuming much CPU for any significant stretch of time. The exceptions are badly written javascript and Flash. The changes being made to browsers (re: multi core) are not so much focused on speed as stability.
It's not meant to. Browser performance is not measured in 'average' CPU usage, but 'latency'.
This basic misunderstanding of performance is why us developers know what processors to pick, while everyone else looks at the task manager of an idle machine as evidence that its processor is obviously sufficient! 8)
This wouldn't be Microsoft's first date related blunder. Did anyone ever experience the excel date quirk? Apparently MS didn't realise 1900 wasn't a leap year. A by product of this is that your dates gain 4 years if you open them on Mac Office. What about the Zune's effort with the 366th day of 2008? Although I think this just requires a different marketing strategy, a mobile email device that can help me travel into the future? I'll take two please.
All joking aside, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
Slashdot Mirror
What about 1 million cell phone photons?
I'll agree that the electromagnetic absorpotion due to a single photon is small.
But a cell phone release more than 1 photon, and the total energy and absorpotion of the electromagnetic wave is much larger than one photon.
And might be sufficient to cause heating of tissue and other effects given a sufficient period of direct exposure to a sufficiently strong cell signal.
It makes no difference. This is a fundamental result that was explained by Einstein about a hundred years ago!
This is basic, TV documentary level quantum mechanics. Two photons that are too weak individually do NOT add up to a strong photon, contrary to naive expectations based on classic mechanics, where two weak waves can add up to a bigger wave.
The way to think about it is this: The ability of a photon to break apart molecular bonds is based on either heating or excitation. Heating is classical, but the power levels used by cell phones are far way too weak for this to occur, and humans are water cooled. Excitation is quantum mechanical, and there is a cut-off based on the wavelength of light. Adding two photons will not change their wavelength. Any number of microwave photons added together will not become a UV photon.
People take far more damage from the Sun than all other sources combined. If you want something to panic about, be more concerned about the huge unshielded fusion reactor that's bathing you in ionizing radiation with a power of hundreds of watts per square.
Emeril Lagasse suffers from the same problem as the article writer. They both think that one ingredient is the key to a winning formula. BAM! Just add some EVOO or in this case turn the difficulty all the way up.
The secret, which isn't a secret at all, is that balanced gameplay is the true Sangreal of gaming. Pitting a newbie against a grizzled Korean veteran in Starcraft isn't going to give anyone a challenge or make them feel like they want to come back to the game again. It's only when the players are evenly matched or only slightly mismatched that gameplay becomes exciting. It is the thrill of being able to beat a game but with enough challenge that victory isn't guaranteed.
I totally agree. One of the brilliant things about Supreme Commander is that it matches you against players of equal skill. When I played RTS games before, games were always one of two types: I rolled over the enemy effortlessly, which is boring, or I got crushed like a bug, which is just as boring, and frustrating too. In SC, once it learns your rank, every game is a constant uphill struggle against an opponent you can almost but not quite defeat. It's brutal, but that's what makes it a fun challenge!
Meanwhile, games like Valve's TF2, L4D, and L4D2, which are highly dependent on not just your own player skill, but the skill of your teammates has zero in the way of skill level based match ups. There's nothing worse than a game with some 13 year old idiot in it. There's always that one prepubescent who got the game 10 minutes ago, but thinks he can do whatever the fuck he wants, including run the wrong way, ignore his team, etc...
I like to think of this analogy: imagine how stupid it would be if the world championship game of, say, football, had one team member replaced by a fucktard who just does "whatever he feels like", because, you know, "it's just a game", and there would be absolutely nothing the other players could do about it. Does that sound like a good game to you?
Unfortunately, this is the state of almost all team PC and Console gaming right now. Players with literally 10 years of experience play side-by-side with mouthbreathers who struggle to tie their own shoelaces in the morning, and have difficulty in grasping advanced concepts like "pressing a button fires the weapon". It's common to see 50:1 point ratios on TF2 servers between players, which is just insane, if you stop and think about it.
Many people would argue that this is what clans are for, but clan games are usually very small, are played only on a subset of the maps, and are few and far between. There's just no opportunity to play, say, a 32-player game for 4 or 5 hours straight with clan-level players only.
Define rational. Is money your primary or only measure? Only in the short term? The next quarter, maybe the next year?
A project like this, if it took off, could be quite good for expanding the usage of the Java language. It might not be a success or a big success, but calling it a blue-sky project seems a bit unfair. Unless of course value is only defined by the next quarter.
Except that it's forcing a restriction that isn't going to work for real-world game development.
On the server side, Project Darkstar applications must be delivered as Java Byte Code. (source)
The issue is that practically all real-time 3D PC or console games are written in C++. The server is not usually a totally isolated module, because it shares a lot of common code with the client. It would have the same network communication stack, it has to load the same resources, it has to do much of the same 3D maths, apply AI and game logic, etc... All of that is often shared with the client code base. It's not unusual for 50% or more shared code between the two. If the client is written in C++, and the server is in Java, expect that to drop to 5% or less. At best, developers could embed the Java runtime into the client-side for some scripted logic, like WoW does with Lua.
And a nearly exact same function is available in an automatic- it is called PUT THE TRANSMISSION IN NEUTRAL!!
Options:
1) Neutral (I have yet to see a car without one)
2) Brakes (which will fade if not applied hard and soon enough)
3) Emergency/Parking brakes (not very powerful, but helps)
4) Cut ignition (on some cars- must be in neutral first)
I am sorry, but I simply *refuse* to believe that all 4 options were unavailable to the people having major run-away car problems from what was most probably a mechanical problem with the throttle pedal.
I think most cases are just poor drivers that don't actually know how to drive, but are licensed anyway, because the state can't afford to not license idiots on the grounds of merely being stupid. That would exclude too many people.
There was an incident here in Australia recently with a runaway car with a stuck throttle, and it was mentioned on a popular morning talk radio show hosted by 2 guys and 1 girl. The guys couldn't believe the car couldn't be stopped (using any one of the methods you mentioned), but the girl said that she wouldn't have come up with any of those methods on her own!
This sparked a listener "call in" vote to see who would or wouldn't have thought to stop the car using neutral/e-brake/engine-off/etc...
It was interesting that something like 50% of the female callers admitted they wouldn't have thought of trying anything like that. I suspect that it's not that more female drivers don't know how to drive, it's just that fewer male callers would admit to not knowing how to drive.
Some people have an attitude that once they've acquired a skill up to a "bare minimum" level required to satisfy their immediate needs, then any further self education is just pointless. These are the same people who never learn how to cut & paste when using a computer, and have all their electronics blinking "12:00".
The glasses I got for Avatar don't seem to be linearly polarised.
That's because they used circular polarizers. One clockwise, and one counter-clockwise. They're more expensive to make than linear polarizers, but don't resulting in ghosting if you tilt your head. I guess they got the filters cheap enough.
I can't believe this came from educated scientists.
Our communications signals are getting weaker, sure, but we still have other sources of clearly artificial radiation that are just as powerful as before. For example, military and weather radar. We regularly send out radar pusles powerful enough to compute the range to other planets in the solar system. Similarly, the Deep Space Network sends out powerful signals on various frequencies using highly directional beams when communicating with space probes.
I still don't understand how all of these deniers get modded so high. They present all kinds of disinformation and logical fallacies. Aren't most slashdotters trained in the ways of logic? Don't most of our jobs depend upon using logic correctly? I love that you mentioned peak-oil, because the predictions made by that model are extremely dire, yet almost no one knows about it. Basically the model asserts that oil is a finite resource and thus the graph of oil production vs. time will be shaped like a bell curve. After the peak, oil demand out paces oil production, and the shit really hits the fan. Oil is so energy dense that it is basically miracle juice, and humans have grown addicted to the stuff. Our economy is almost completely oil dependent, our food (shipping, fertilizing, pesticides), our power (mining, shipping, maintenance), our toys (mining, shipping, plastics), and a lot of people have jobs that require driving to. At this point, our economy consumes 30 billion barrels of oil a year, but we discover less than 4 billion barrels a year. Basically, in the near future peak-oil will cause wall street to collapse (from skyrocketing oil prices) and the power grid will shut down forever. So, all I can suggest is you might want to learn to live without power now before it's too late because at this point there is no stopping the the oil crash. Source.
I like this video.
It basically says that most policy makers don't understand the implications of the exponential growth curve.
I figured out the same thing myself, because I studied maths & physics at uni, and I noticed the same misunderstanding. I remember a Telstra (an australian telco) executive saying that they weren't going to invest in international bandwidth because the "current levels were sufficient to meet demand at the current rate of growth", even though bandwidth demand was clearly following a steep exponential curve.
Australia is still bandwidth starved. 8(
In case you guys are wondering, this is what a moderate denier looks like. He looks like he's making sense, and his position seems perfectly rational and thought out, but that just makes it all the more dangerous because it's still wrong and full of logical fallacies.
I grew up in the military industrial complex. You know what the military did every time they wanted a shiny new toy? They created this big boogy man. Back then it was the "Soviets have this new Mig-25 that goes Mach 3+. We must have something to counter it". "The Soviets have this new T-80 tank, we need something to counter it". And the thing of it was the Military damn well knew that the T-80 was a dressed up T-72 and that the F-15 would beat a MIG-25 any day of the week. Yeah, the MIG-25 could go Mach 3....once before the engines had to be replaced. And the people in the defense industry as well as the DOD knew this, but they played the boogey man to Congress and the American people.
I'm sorry, but I see the same thing happening with this whole Environmental and Global Warming thing. Are there real problems out there? Should be trying not to pollute? Yes. But the tactics these people are using remind me too much of what I saw from the Defense industry.
Basically, you're saying that you've noticed that when people lie to you, the common thing is that they use words. Scientists... also use words, hence they must also be liars!
Err.. no. The techniques are similar in the sense that group 'A' is crying wolf when there is no wolf, and group 'B' is crying wolf because everyone's about to get eaten.
... and group 'A' sells wolf hunting equipment, while group 'B' has bite marks.
These predictions reminds me of an article around 1900 that claimed that if trends continue, the horse manure on the streets of chicago would be 6 ft. deep by 1930. It never happened, the automobile came along and replaced horses. And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem with these predictions. The longer the predicted , the less likely the prediction is to be correct. Things change and I don't believe we have a model yet that works.
"I read a prediction by an idiot once, hence, all people making predictions must also be idiots."
or
"Some people failed at making a prediction, so all predictions are actually impossible to make."
I don't believe a working model can be created either. Show me one of these ecological dire predictions that I remember hearing in the 1970's and 1980's that have come to pass. I remember the presentations back then saying New York would be underwater by 2010! What about global dimming back in the 1970's? Whatever happened to that?
None of these models can even begin to take into account uncertainty.
On the contrary, ALL scientific models take into account uncertainty. That's easy. The reason those old models were inaccurate was precisely because the uncertainties were so great. There was less data, it was of lower quality, and the analytical techniques just weren't there yet.
That does not mean that current predictions are just as uncertain. The work of thousands of scientists over the last few decades has been to reduce those uncertainties. They've been measuring glaciers with GPS, drilling cores in ice, collecting tree ring data from around the world, analyzing satellite imaging data, etc...
The result is still uncertain. For example, the actions of humans themselves is very hard to predict. We don't know exactly what the post-peak-oil curve will look like. We don't know if nuclear power will contribute significantly to energy use in the near future or not. Fusion might become cheap and practical. There might be some disease that wipes out 95% of people.
However, if things continue as they are going now, including the seemingly unstoppable exponential growth in population, then we're boned. This is clear to anyone who's seen the evidence and can c
I'm white and speak Japanese without an accent (Dave Specter has me beat on vocabulary, but he sounds horrible). I get the same initial shock when I open my mouth. If they're under 15, they just tend to stare for a minute. After a couple sentences, most people calm down and everything is normal. However, when I leave I often hear whispered comments about how much of a shock the experience was.
I've had a bit of the reverse of that.
I'm Hungarian, which is a very complex and difficult language to learn. Foreign speakers are extremely rare, and it's even less common for them to be better than "barely intelligible". If I hear some character who supposedly speaks 'dozens of langauges' try to talk Hungarian in a movie, it sounds like they're mumbling something vaguely Hungarian-like. On top of that, Hungary has very few immigrants from distant lands, we only ever get people coming across from neighboring countries, so you don't really get non-European looking people speaking the language.
I've been shocked a few times. I met an asian person once who spoke fluent Hungarian. I thought my brain was melting. I was basically speechless for a minute. There can't be much more than a hundred asian speakers of the language on the planet. Children of ambassadors, linguists, that kind of thing.
I'm not implying they could get into orbit with this vehicle as it obviously will require atmosphere for the rotor blades to be effective, but in a general sense. Specifically getting a launch vehicle as far into the atmosphere as possible before switching to a different means of propulsion like a typical rocket.
Achieving orbit is about speed ('delta v'), NOT altitude. It takes much more energy to get the horizontal speed to the required level than to reach the required altitude. Getting above the atmosphere helps, but not all that much.
"I was once asked to turn encryption off on a highly sensitive authentication system for the HR/Finance/Payroll system of one of our country's biggest institutions. I just told the manager that it's not his call to make, because he simply does not understand the implications of that decision to make it.
Unfortunately, saying things like that is a personal risk to me, because there's nothing I can point to that will back me up."
If there's nothing there to back you up, then you are running things solely based on your own opinion, which, right or wrong, is a risk to you.
If you have encryption policies in place, for a reason, then document them and get them signed off by senior management...... and then you have your backup.
But that's my whole point: senior management is simply not competent to understand the issues and risks involved. They're suits that got promoted into a position in a bureaucracy simply through seniority and ass-kissing. Some of these guys struggle with the complexities of sending an email!
When there's only one right answer, asking for the input or permission of any senior manager is just opening up the possibility that they'll chose something else, which is by definition going to be wrong.
The problem is that even if I do my best to avoid such a situation, sometimes it comes up anyway, and then there's nothing I can do. Management essentially pulls rank to override my expertise, and I can't point to an IT industry "code of practice" to back up my expert opinion, because there's no such thing.
What ends up giving way? Quality. And it pisses me off. I can't do my job properly. Code reviews, unit/mock/functional testing, analysis, UML *all* have to give way because of all the above and just to get it out on time. Maintenance costs increase, but as long as it's out of the door it's OK. Would you build a house without blueprints? Would you remove an accountant's calculator from their desk because *you* don't work that way? Nope. [Excuse the crude analogies, they still get the point across]
I've been in much the same position a few times, where some 'suit' decided that every single aspect of an IT project is always a 'business decision', and hence, up to him, and only him.
I like to remind people like of a few things:
- I'm the IT expert, they're paying me for my expertise, not to press buttons. They can press the buttons themselves if they don't need my input.
- Surprisingly few things in an IT project are actually 'business' decisions. Usually there is one 'right' way and many 'wrong' ways to do a task.
Unfortunately, there's no authoritative lists of things that are Wrong, guidelines on how to do things right, or legally recognized certifications for people who work in IT. The end result is that everyone thinks they can 'contribute', even when their contributions are actively dangerous. Other industries have fixed this decades ago, but IT is still too immature for this kind of thing. For example:
- You have to pass an exam before you can become a lawyer.
- You have to pass multiple exams, and do years of mandatory on-site practical training under a senior doctor to become a doctor yourself.
- If you ask an electrician to wire your house mains in an unsafe way, it's not a "business decision", they'll just tell you that it's not an approved wiring design, and they won't do it. An electrician that does wire your house unsafely can be sued, and will most likely lose their license.
My favorite analogy: When talking to a surgeon, the patient gets to decide if they want the surgery or not, and if there's 2 or 3 alternative surgeries that are possible, they can make the decision between them with guidance from the surgeon. The patient does not get to decide if the surgeon is going to use antibiotics or not. They do not get to decide on the level of lighting in the surgical theatre. There are a million and one things they simply do not get a say in. The patient is not the expert. The patient does not know what is best for them. That's the role of the highly trained professionals.
IT should be the same.
I was once asked to turn encryption off on a highly sensitive authentication system for the HR/Finance/Payroll system of one of our country's biggest institutions. I just told the manager that it's not his call to make, because he simply does not understand the implications of that decision to make it.
Unfortunately, saying things like that is a personal risk to me, because there's nothing I can point to that will back me up.
Surely humans can produce well in excess of 250W.
Yes. 250W is only "twice as much power as you provide" if you're taking it very easy. Based on measurements provided by the exercise bikes at my gym, I know I'm able to produce around a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.
OTOH, there are regulatory reasons for the motor being 250W: at least here in the UK, you'd need a full drivers licence, annual vehicle inspection and all-around crash helmet to ride it if it were more powerful. It should also be designed so that the motor cannot make the bike go faster than 15mph.
Errr... according to this:
Lance Armstrong can ride up the mountains in France generating about 500 watts of power for 20 minutes, something a typical 25-year-old could do for only 30 seconds. A professional hockey player might last three minutes and then throw up. (source)
...it sounds like you're either an olympic-level athlete... who reads slashdot... or your gym equipment is severely miscalibrated. I've tried those bikes at the gym, and 250W is
my limit for a 10-15 minute stretch, and I'm by no means unhealthy. Are you sure those weren't imperial units? I know the UK has switched to metric, in theory, but I know some of you poms still get confused. 8)
And I just can’t imagine what that “horrible tearing” is, of which you speak.
I looked for it. I really did. Checked if it is really off. But I just can’t see it.
So I can just as well jump into my very own ultra-egocentric bubble, and say that I just can’t imagine why anyone would think there is a point to vsync.
To me, vsync makes as much sense, as this: http://www.audio-consulting.ch/?Parts:Woodlenses
If it doesn't occur on your setup, it doesn't mean it doesn't occur for other people.
It certainly doesn't mean you should be rude, or imply that others are just imagining things. Vsync tearing issues are very visible when they do occur, try google:
vsync tearing
VLC is a poor choice. Media Player Classic Home Cinema supports Windows's DirectShow media playback system, and supports hardware accelerated decoding, hardware accelerated rendering, codecs other than those included with MPC-HC, etc.
Most importantly, I think it's the only video player out there that supports vsync to avoid horrible 'tearing' while playing video.
I just can't imagine why anyone would think it's a good idea to play a video with vsync off, but every other player seems to do it.
Gotta agree with Consolas--all programming issues aside, lowercase "g" is gorgeous.
If only Consolas wasn't a M$ product. Or to put it the way I really think, if only Consolas was open source...Since it's not, I use Liberation Mono on a big screen and Droid Sans Mono at home.
AFAIK, fonts can't be copyrighted. You should be able to use any MS font anywhere.
Don't quote me on that, I'm not a lawyer.
Was it ordinary when it was done for the very first time? Just because it's obvious now, after becoming commonplace, doesn't mean it wasn't a big leap for the person who came up with it. I can assume that wasn't you, even if you could tell us a story about how you dreamed that your camera could do that at some point when you were 4 years old so it must totally be obvious and not worthy or patenting.
Done for the the first time is not the same as 'patentable'.
Why is that so hard to understand?
A new arrangement of existing parts and common techniques is NOT a big innovation that requires government protection. According to that standard EVERY unique piece of software should be patentable, because every program is a "novel arrangement of instructions".
In my point of view, very few patents should be granted, and only for technologies that took at least 6 months of full time research to develop. An idea that you can just brainstorm in a meeting room in 10 minutes should never be patentable, that's just absurd.
Wrong. While Bitlocker utilizes the TPM to ensure a secure boot and automatic unlocking (if so desired), the TPM chip is NOT used to handle the actual encryption/decryption.
BitLocker in Windows 7 will support the new Core i3/i5 AES extensions for faster encryption, though.
Good point, apparently there is a 30-40% hit on very low-end netbooks (Intel Atom, etc...), but on modern CPUs it appears to be about 10-15% at most.
I doubt most office workers would notice that, but if you had an SSD, I suppose you'd think twice before turning it on, unless you had a CPU to match!
Using encryption has its drawbacks: .vs. ipsec) doesn't work well with encryption
* you must provide a meaningful key management
* you lose speed of your machines for number crunching
* you can easily lose data in the event of hardware corruption
* access to data is a bit harder even for legitimate purposes
* many systems (for example Active Directory domain controller
* skills of your systems management must be higher
I know you probably mean well, but every one of those statements is basically false.
- Active Directory + Bitlocker OR AD + Encrypting File System (EFS) both do automatic key management, key escrow, etc...
- Bitlocker has no performance impact, it uses the TPM chip. Also, most CPUs are MUCH faster at encryption than disks are at reading or writing data, so it's not a bottleneck even for software-only systems.
- hardware corruption causes data loss anyway, encryption just ensures that you only ever get valid data. In that respect, it's a little like ZFS -- encryption also provides integrity, as well as security.
- Access to data on encrypted volumes is NOT harder. It's usually transparent. If you have proper backup procedures in place, you need never access data in non-standard ways. Speaking of which, your backups should be encrypted too!
- AD works well with encryption, and has its own built in. It's already reasonably secure for most applications, and doesn't really need further encryption. The only AD related protocol that had issues with ipsec is DNS, but Windows 7 and 2008 R2 now support that as well.
- If you're already deploying Windows Vista or 7 SOEs, adding in Bitlocker trivial, it's basically a checkbox. Deploying ipsec is admittedly a little harder, but it's not exactly rocket science.
I've implemented extensive encryption before, and it wasn't hard, and the users never noticed. From what I've seen, the lack of encryption is not caused by technical issues, but laziness and politics.
Security is one of those things that's not a problem day to day, just like backups. The users don't notice, and nobody complains to the managers about it, so it must not be a problem, right?
You only need security on those rare occasions when there's a hack, or a laptop gets stolen, or some intern sells 10 petabytes of old backup tapes full of customer data on eBay for $35. Of course, when those things happen, it's already too late to implement security. The breach has already occurred. There's no going back in time to tick checkboxes.
In case you're wondering just how common data breaches are, check out this list of the publicly known ones:
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm
If that doesn't scare you, think about how many more there are that the public didn't find out about. Chances are good that your personal data has been leaked to God-knows-who, probably several times, because of lazy IT admins and inept managers.
I'm a consultant. I have honestly NEVER encountered any user at any company encrypting disk/usb/cd/dvd/email.
Where I work (company has over 10^5 employees worldwide), whole disk encryption is standard on all laptops. It is uncommon on desktops, however, and not compulsory on removable devices. All remote access is always encrypted, and requires the correct encryption package and authorizations. A similar situation existed at the place I worked before (about 3.10^4 employees worldwide).
Due to the support and policy infrastructure needed, I suspect encryption is much commoner in large organizations than small ones. How the statistics on use of encryption (TFA says 27%) are formed is another matter.
I've been to about 100 organisations, and I've seen only 2 with widespread encryption, and only 1 with 100% encryption.
If you count every organisation that uses SOME encryption, maybe 27%, but even then, how many small businesses use serious security?
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Actually, the cause of failure is well known, just read the Wiki article. They were testing emergency shutoff procedures, specifically the ability of the steam turbines to continue operating the cooling water pumps using their rotational inertia, like a flywheel. They stuffed up the test procedure. Operators with little understanding of the complex interactions of the nuclear poisons created during low power operation put the reactor into a dangerous configuration.
Man, forget about his Foundation series. Why not his Robot stories?
The FX work would be childs-play these days. Tell the stories that take place behind the walls of US Robotics & Mechanical Men. Susan Calvin. Their field test guys (whose names I cant recall at the moment). HUGE scope for additional stories, some intersting science-fiction, even some interesting issues on human-machine rights.
Hollywood tried, and they made "I, robot", which is basically an action movie where Will Smith takes his shirt off so that a smoking hot Susan Calvin, played by the airhead model Bridget Moynahan, can stare at his manly shoulders and learn about love.
To quote Adams: it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Asimov's works.
There are robots at some point.
Iain Banks
Word.
Let's get a Consider Phlebas or Matter (or whatever) movie to kick-off a whole Culture series. Superb books that, while holding a chronology, can be read in whatever order you find them.
I second that.
Any of Iain Bank's works would be fantastic if done right, but his books are so complex that I think Hollywood would entirely miss the subtle themes of betrayal and abuse of power and turn the whole thing into LOUD EXPLOSIONS... IN SPACE!
I hope that Banks refuses to give out the movie rights until he's approached by someone decent like Peter Jackson.
And now even browsers are being optimized for n-cores. :)
For all the talk around this... I seldom see my browser consuming much CPU for any significant stretch of time. The exceptions are badly written javascript and Flash. The changes being made to browsers (re: multi core) are not so much focused on speed as stability.
It's not meant to. Browser performance is not measured in 'average' CPU usage, but 'latency'.
This basic misunderstanding of performance is why us developers know what processors to pick, while everyone else looks at the task manager of an idle machine as evidence that its processor is obviously sufficient! 8)
This wouldn't be Microsoft's first date related blunder. Did anyone ever experience the excel date quirk? Apparently MS didn't realise 1900 wasn't a leap year. A by product of this is that your dates gain 4 years if you open them on Mac Office. What about the Zune's effort with the 366th day of 2008?
Although I think this just requires a different marketing strategy, a mobile email device that can help me travel into the future? I'll take two please.
All joking aside, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
Reading about the details behind such things can reduce a grown programmer to tears. (the bit about 1900 issue is towards the middle)