You'd expect to see differences in GeV over multiple experiments, varying muscle tension in sphincter muscles often exceeds 2.7sigma. When doing the Child or Folded Leaf pose the sigmoid is under compression. Here is a helpful video that might dispel the mystery.
CERN does deserve kudos for full disclosure. They could have blamed it on the dog.
Hmmm... Cognitive Bias sounds like one of those pop-psych terms that boil down to "I don't understand what you said, but I scare easily and I have a white coat on so watch your ass."
Yes Virginia, there is a threshold at which we form convictions and from that point on it takes a greater amount of evidence or testimony to flip the opinion. It is a Hysteresis characteristic that keeps us sane and alive because there are times when taking no position at all means you are slack jawed and drooling, get swept up by the tsunami -- having neither fled nor grabbed onto anything.
But I've seen a preponderance of evidence that warming has been in hiatus for the last decade, sea ice extent and temperature variation are well within pre-industrial historical norms, such that even a warming trend (even if one was present) would not make me quit my day job and go chicken little on everybody... that CO2 *follows* warming not leads it... that computer models STILL rely on the mythical effects of some imaginary 'CO2 layer' whose existence is dis proven by decades of balloon sampling... and the sea level stuff is so tenuous and disingenuous, attempting to generate immediate global taxation hysteria over millimeters of projected rise, while stable landforms (forget the Maldives they are atolls for chrissake move onto solid rock before you whine about the ocean) show the ocean level very stable over time periods, geological not climactic factors rule here...
And then. A whole dingle-berry load of headlines such as "this was... greater than expected" or "that was... greater than projected" over trends that are for narrow-years time windows and numerically still within the threshold of noise.
But it's not just about science, there is also annoyance and money involved.
Yes it's getting ANNOYING. That Cognitive Bias are people who have made up their minds who are merely annoyed by the behavior of the opposing side. Annoyance is not a bad thing it is a good thing, it is human natures way of reminding us that there is bull-hocky in the air. And yes sometimes it gets personal -- because the ECONOMIC RAMIFICATIONS of global warming hysteria politics, the CO2 money grab and lollipop-sucking diversion of funds to energy alternatives that will not scale, is threatening to erode MY take-home pay. And place an unfair tax burden on my children.
Therefore I see global warming hysteria as a DIRECT PERSONAL THREAT. Which I believe is a natural and defendable position.
Like I am annoyed by the way Bill Nye the Science Guy has become an Algorian science-is-settled clone and botched the greenhouse experiment... here we had a chance for a real celebrity to re-discover that the greenhouse effect only really works under glass (within an atmosphere) or on a planet-wide scale with uniform atmospheric composition of greenhouse gasses (Venus)... instead Nye swallows the CO2 heat dissipation Kool-Aid and refuses to admit that the 'result' is lost below the noise level and conduction within the apparatus, as would be ethical to do.
And Michael Mann attributes 1 foot of Sandy's 13 foot storm surge to Global Warming. What an absurd and disingenuous crock that is. He is.
See what we're up against? I really am a kind, gentle person unless I feel driven to extremes by unwelcome trends in my social environment.
Please don't mod me down because I am presently annoyed by Bill Nye, he's still cool and (unlike Mann) I firmly believe he may some day do what every scientist must do, re-examine his premises.
All coding should proceed as if every possible exceptional condition (device not ready, cache fail, controller failure, cat dials 911 on speakerphone) is the primary and intended purpose of the Project. Hash collisions not merely covered as a contingency but pursued with vigor in the main line to the Nth degree, where N indicates the infinitesimal possibility of multiple simultaneous hash collisions that would be the likely result of a vengeful god constructing the universe such as to produce a life of continuous and foul exceptions.
When gathered at the water cooler, coders would discuss triumphs in their particular areas of malfunction, and when they corroborate as a group it is to merge their respective threaded exceptions into a parallel paroxysm of failure, branching with virtual threads and physical coring such that the greatest possible number of malevolent conditions are met and coded for, simultaneously. Proceeding steadily towards the grail of the Grandest Failure.
The Grandest Failure being the stuff of mere legend, yet it is what drives us. It represents that supreme and sublime moment where everything that can go wrong has gone wrong and the very fundament reeks of wrongness.
Buffers are not starved as an exception, they are starved by design! Disk controllers are never ready. Communications packets never arrive in sequence, or so we assume because there are no markers to check, when they do arrive they are garbled beyond repair. Reconstruction occurs as a matter of course! Streams are unsynchronized by nature, incompatible by rote, unresolvable.
Off the corridor in a dusty hallway a small team of pariahs is assembled to perform the dirtiest and most detestable task of all: to handle the exceptions and branches thrown by the main line, conditional branches sketched out briefly (whose existence is known but not mentioned in polite conversation) are pursued in secret. This is necessary work but unrewarding as it leads away from the noble purpose of Grandest Failure, towards useful work. Such stuff as consolidation, transaction handling and data ordering, forgive me for uttering, Chaos be Praised!
For the goal is to produce a System that boldly and efficiently proceeds down the pathways of most numerous and most simultaneous failure, where the actual success of anything triggers the exceptions and is cast off to the side.
If robustness of design becomes human sentiment, it could be said that the System confidently strides forward boldly embracing every error condition and is shocked -- horrified -- every time something goes 'right'. As life's own experience is our guide, it is seldom disappointed.
The output of useful work in such a System the source of great embarrassment and discomfort, a necessary evil.
That is the principle behind the control systems of the Improbability Drive. It is the driving principle of the quantum flux, Brownian motion and wave/particle paradox.
All of this Order and Progress (blaspheme!) is but a side road off a side road ad infinitum. The main path leads to Chaos. Follow that path and revel in it. There is no honor in coding for success, any idiot could do that.
Down deep people know this is the Way. That is why when coders meet in dim conference rooms and the slideshow laptop suddenly projects a Blue Screen of Death for all to see, there is an eruption of thunderous applause, as if one had dropped a tray of food in a crowded cafeteria. Deep down we know failure is the noble path, and success the exception.
With this newly explained phenomenon, how long until these spacecraft lose their forward acceleration completely... then head approximately back again, albeit much slower and on a course dependent on the actual heat radiation characteristics, and gravity wells it encounters along the way...?
If (ever so infinitesimally possible) it was a direct vector back, how long would it take to arrive?
I must admit the thought of our space going pilgrims reversing course after an eon or two and returning home after many more is reassuring somehow.
___ To those gibbering about the length of the article and its writing style -- blow it out your backsides, to think our time is worth reading *that* tripe.
Yes, despite not being in the IT business for years, I am the one my friends call when their desktops and laptops take 10 minutes to boot, clog up with viral effluent of try to VM-swap in too little physical memory.
But I try to head it off. Whenever I spy someone who's just acquired -- or is just starting to grapple with -- some Windows 7 or Vista computer I suggest, "hey, bring it over and I'll take a snapshot of the disk, then clean it and load XP onto it. If it doesn't work out I'll restore the image and we will at least have tried..."
About 40% of them take me up on the offer. 60% don't, and I do not hear from those again until things have gotten really out of hand. And if I had made the offer and they turned it down I'm inclined to suggest maybe it's time to invest in a new computer.
So they buy a brand new one, Windows 7/Vista raises one more point in market share, they 'donate' their old machine to me (and I slap XP on it right-quick) and all is right with the world.
Though in the years since Vista was introduced in '05, I seem to have experienced an overall 60% reduction in friends. Time to buy some more on Facebook!
Heads up people! While this silly dollar bill retirement issue with its measly $4 billion savings for untold aggravation is being played out in the press and hoo-hawed on NPR and discussed and we are all distracted......just what stealth spending package is being pushed through Congress at this very moment? Something at least $400-billiony I'll bet.
I love the smell of Congressional bill riders in the morning. It smells like Real Money.
The 160 character limit is a hardware issue from the early SMS phones, when you would feed an 80 column punch card into the phone. The cards only encoded 80 characters per side so you would punch holes in both sides.
Contrary to any rumors you may hear Twitter's 140 character limit is not derived from the SMS limit, it was calculated from the smaller attention span of the average Twitter user.
As to the origin of the 80 column limit on punch cards, it was derived from the width of wheel ruts in Roman roads, which was determined by the span of horses' arses.
So the horses' arses down through the ages to SMS messaging we have a circle which I'll leave you to complete.
Not single pure damping frequency of circular ripples on ocean floor as depicted in simple diagram. Ogg say using single frequency like silly noise cancellation experiment where complex wave beat at edges of cancelling cone to make frog whisper artifact or low frequency beat that make heavy furniture walk around room and make dust bunny dance.
Ogg say use simulation to find most potentially harmful frequencies to oil platform and plot bell curve around them and make concentric patterns of bumps on sea floor not simple ripple, the bumps' separation along radius correspond to harmonics of range of harm frequency. Ogg say put shallower bumps with wider separation around outer edge of sea floor and dense but high bumps immediate surround oil rig and under it.
Because Ogg say only fool want to cancel single favorite wave frequency because nature love to laugh at fool who do so, nature just whistles off key and the fool's brick house go down and fall on piggies inside. Nature love to generate wave with fundamental logarithmic base off by tiny fraction to drown Egyptian surveyors whose brains full of cubits loving of whole numbers.
But Ogg ashamed because in place of egghead math smart magic that will not work Ogg use maths to introduce Gaussian harmonic and what is more Gaussian than a bunch of rocks so Ogg back to rocks again, yes pile a bunch of irregularly shaped rocks on ocean floor just like do on surface by peoples who have no need for maths because they just know to pile up rocks to resist the ocean. Rocks different shape they know Gaussian distribution better than Ogg.
There is nothing remarkable about this news story, even the affected artist reaching out to the accused, expressing regret that the anti-piracy mechanisms have evolved into quasi-legal mantis shrimp prowling peer to peer networks to smash their blunt appendages against any IP address that they discover, even encourage piracy by seeding and delivering a greater percentage of the offending material than is permitted under fair use as part of the sting. And the mantis shrimp strike is so powerful it produces cavitation bubbles, how cute is that.
Time to explore the Pooh connection. Pooh has been a wholly licensed asset of Walt Disney Corporation since 1961. Everyone knows that the Hundred Acre Wood is a clumsy euphemism for Bohemian Grove. Tigger's Compulsive and Ceaseless Bouncing used as a clever device to indoctrinate generations of children to passively accept the idea of Bernanke & Geithner's "Quantitative Easing: Forever!" Honey being gold, Pooh being the stooge who ever seeks it even as it is held in short supply by fiat-pumping speculators. Piglet who is very small and cannot help to point this out, representing the many countries whose small size has been used as pretext to front enormous per-capita debt grown to ridiculous proportions by arrogant and disruptive IMF lending practices. Piglet's hide is bought and paid for and he knows it.
And The Established Practice Of Capitalizing Every Word In A Sentence can be Directly Traced To Christopher Robin. Whats Up With That. Always Busy, He Is. Doing What, I Wonder.
The truth is out there people. Go get it and bring it back in time for dinner.
References to Reagan era boondoggles aside, in America we have already perfected the technology for intercepting and possibly destroying missiles that are launched and follow an established inbound trajectory, and do not deploy active electronic countermeasures en route.
It is known as 'baseball'.
Never mind all this war ballyhoo... what I'd really LOVE to see is baseball played with balls that have retro rockets, on-board guidance systems, chaff ejecting radar countermeasures and split into MIRV type multiple reentry vehicles. The batter and catcher would also be drawn into this arms race (perhaps by the literal acquisition of additional arms) by using bats with unfolding surfaces to target each fragmented baseball, mitts that sprout fractal bifurcations to capture each reentry vehicle.
Since the mass of the launched baseball is known, its fragmentation into little pieces and the countermeasures that would evolve could, through nanotechnology, branch down into fractal and quantum infinity.
But at the quantum level the baseball-bits would exhibit both wave and particle behavior. Catchers must employ slit apertures and collectors, could improve their success with magnetic field focusing and plasma filled coils. The referee of the future would call the plays based on the strength of photon emission tallied against the energy-mass ratio of the original baseball to discern its composition and fate.
Whoops, I forget we have already nailed this one too. It is known as 'Astronomy'.
Sorry about the distraction. Let's go back to talking about Israel.
That Ruby On Rails was so imbibed with deep racial tension and cultural significance! Whitepaper after whitepaper about its deployment, efficiency and security, not a peep about those racial overtones. Those deluded fools.
This changes everything. Again.
Does anyone have any links to share on the political correctitude and safety of Cold Fusion?
BRING BACK RPG-II, while dealing with the spaghetti code intricacy of using 8080 machine-language level instruction codes to manage strings and complex data sets programmers had no time to agonize over racial inequality -- I worked with a team of mixed races to maintain a telco billing system, and we were completely color-blind because we were all slapped hard against the wall by this thing, we'd cry on each others' shoulders. It was quite awful but there we were. And we were all in it together.
The problem with so-called quantum crypto -- and I applaud slashdot calling it out, there is no crypto involved -- is it's not even a new deal for telecommunications, because we already have a demonstrably secure method: crypto.
So it's all about laziness, the unwillingness to engage in the practice of secret key management. If your target market is comprised of folks who are unable or unwilling to manage their own security and want some black box to do it for them... well are we not approaching Dilbert-esque territory...?
The science has settled. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a real. Scam. It's high time to leave CO2 out of it and turn our attention on the effects of particulate aerosols, contrails. Those are true effects of humankind. And in the case of contrails, a net cooling effect.
Debating AGW is a lost cause. Bring on the battle robots.
Or Windows, or backgammon, or orienteering, or talking. The actual 'free time' humans have to develop and sharpen skills is diminishing with the deepening economic crisis, as the timespan in which one must work to survive is increasing. The endless cycle of distraction provided by on and offline gaming short-circuits the human tendency towards crushing boredom -- the kind of boredom that gets people out into the world to face problems, gather (in person) to discuss those problems, and solve them.
Anyone can install an operating system, load disc and click Next a dozen times then Finish... but to use an operating system is to understand its principles, adapt it optimally to the hardware, choose a set of packages geared to your general purpose and explore its commands and utilities, explore the landscape. While ding this one is engaged in inner-directed activity that has no set goal -- save to enrich the mind and 'prepare' for what comes next.
What comes next? A video game perhaps. But when you have explored the various toolsets like perl and php there are other alluring places your mind can easily drift into -- CONSTRUCTIVE (arrogant emphasis mine) realms where the fiddling with MySQL and Apache on the box might lead (amazingly, easily) to deployed applications in the cloud. Or a sense of 'can-do' ism that pervades every aspect of life.
I have long desired to assemble a real workshop with routers and lathes and such tools that one can look at almost anything and say, "I could build that." But it has remained just out of reach because acquisition of these things requires time, space, money and opportunity.
But in the digital realm our civilization has reached its pinnacle with Linux! Here in a well organized group of free packages is the Ultimate Workshop. Grab and grok Linux and you have at your fingertips every basic algorithmic and organizational tool yet imagined. Delve into data structures more easily than Knuth could back in the 70s, manipulate photos and videos with as much capability as million dollar dedicated workstations of the 80s, build and deploy net based applications at the eBay level of complexity. The assembly tools and building blocks are all there.
The modern open source workshop IS the dream workshop. All the tools are there. It is ready for you to acquire. All you need to do is reach out and grasp it. And add your own PRECIOUS TIME.
Which is why when I see so much of the modern Internet devoted to these social enclaves of gaming, to me it is as if a significant part of the population has developed a fixation with throwaway plastic knives. They come in different shapes and colors, they don't last very long, they don't even cut your food properly -- and unlike the little yarn about manual dexterity -- a fixation on gaming seems more to impair survival rather than assure it. The Grand Linux Workshop remains on the FTP site unyearned-for while the gamers collect and trade shiny plastic knives. And forks and spoons.
And that is why as you sample the fantastic moveable feast that is the Internet, you spend so much time spitting out the broken tines of plastic forks.
The attack on Perl Harbor is now in phase 5.16.2, see our live coverage on CPAN.
I've never been able to grok this 'Pearl Harbor' metaphor thing, it is used to point out something no one could have possibly foreseen before it happens, which is a form of fore-seeing so whatever is being discussed could not ever later have been un-foreseen. Does that make any fore-sense?
Not to mention that unlike the ThisGATE ThatGATE AnythingGATE headline absurdity which is for fun and entertainment purposes only -- during the Pearl Harbor attack many men died defending their country and to a certain extent casual banal use of the term -- especially for things that are no-brainer fore-seeable, dishonors their memories.
Vulnerable to hacks indeed. WELL... if these Call of Duty Black Ops server thingies have become a problem, a way to hurt people I say maybe we should call it a day and just shut them down.
As usual, the scientists FAIL to point out that the overwhelming majority of these 'tiny marine wonders' are of no practical use whatsoever. They swim around doing worthless and pointless things, they are comprised of useless and ridiculous materials you could find anywhere. Their genetic code, though voluminous and subtle, lacks any hint of cohesive plot interest and character development and reading it is a real waste of time. As usual we are supposed to imagine some cornucopia of miracle medicines emanating from these creatures -- prescription bottles full of wonder drugs just bobbing to the surface, a Gift From Neptune To You. Ha ha pharma brochure crap. Because they're small and cute and overlooked and your attention is being drawn to them it's supposed to be wonderful, but let me tell you almost 100% of what these creatures produce is useless sludge and they're too stupid to even care how dumb they are.
I treasure my beloved planet, every nook and cranny hold a new mystery at which to gawk and squawk.
It's not about people failing to trust one another. It's about people trolling the Internet bored looking for exciting stories about hypothetical people who fail to trust one another, it's all about the blip in heart rate at 1AM, just the thought of that is supposed to make us go HMMMM... and trigger that lizard brain yearn for romantic gossip and gushing tabloid release.
Empirical test of hypothesis: for example, does this event generate tabloid excitement and sexual innuendo if I tell you it supposedly happened 'at 1AM'...?
"One day, a student caregiver noticed Figaro pushing a stone pebble through the aviary wire mesh, where it fell on a wood structural beam. Unable to retrieve the stone with his foot, Figaro then fetched a piece of bamboo and again attempted to retrieve the stone using the bamboo stick.... "
No argument friend... your points are well taken... but you must realize that at some point,
Nuclear// No argument, but for the next 100 years or so it will be necessary.
respectfully, this should should be translated as
Nuclear! Lots of it, and let the armchair energy hog-luddites muse about ye olde renaissance fairs and how fun life was in the pre-industrial age as we over-rule and walk around them! Quick! Before the Last Winter sets in or the Oil War to end all Oil Wars and the lights go out and our children freeze to death!!!
It is about survival. It's just that, all this hoo-hah about options other than a massive investment (in as you say, short term) nuclear energy are wasted time and wasted breath. And time is SHORT. It is all technical issues to solve. If we approached space travel the same way we are agonizing over nuclear energy there would be no footsteps on the moon.
It's peanut butter jelly sour grapes time! There you go! There you go!
"Who knew that the most critical element of operating a data center in New York City was ensuring a steady supply of diesel fuel?"
I did. Or would have, would have been a major item on the short list if they had hired me. But as a seasoned sysadmin wandering jobless in two major cities for months with the only 'tech' job available being telephone support in a boiler room for minimum wage plusabit I said "F*CK EYE-TEE and moved to a small town.
Where I now clean sewers for a living. And I apply the same dedication to the task as I did to maintaining linux systems, developing disaster plans. The sewers are very CLEAN here and when there is a stoppage our response time is AWESOME.
When I saw the introduction of electronic voting machines (even early ones that produced an actual printed paper tape for verification) I thought, "This is an idea that should have been laughed out of the room the day it was first proposed."
Then some years after, machines with dongles and flash memory, no paper at all. It was screamingly surreal.
As a computer consultant in 1980 I was approached by a friend on the Board of Elections to review bids for Shouptronics stations and optical readers. We both agreed to reject the idea of standalone machines, KEEPING THE PAPER BALLOT and doing optical counting in batches, with a dice toss for each batch (roll a six, count by hand and check against the machine).
We were overruled by the Board, they went for the machines because they claimed that with whole-machine voting "there are NO spoiled or incorrect ballots."
The surreal aspect to this is, in a situation where the real world yields variable results, some ballots spoiled because some people make dumb mistakes, they have opted to eliminate all the controls -- now you have one aggregate result that cannot be trusted.
Fixed wing and foil and prop and rotor are out, the engineers who push those designs are all paid stooges for Big Oil. How about... solar powered flapping machines? We could graft an iguana onto the end of bird. The bird has the right equipment to fly, and iguanas spend most of the day basking in the sunlight. I'll bet iguanas have an incredible amount of stored solar energy.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd expect to see differences in GeV over multiple experiments, varying muscle tension in sphincter muscles often exceeds 2.7sigma. When doing the Child or Folded Leaf pose the sigmoid is under compression. Here is a helpful video that might dispel the mystery.
CERN does deserve kudos for full disclosure. They could have blamed it on the dog.
are coming to the trough.
Sorry, I gave at the office.
I pledge by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
~John Galt
And if you live on a coral atoll, move onto solid land before you start whining about sea level. You actually have a land level problem.
Hmmm... Cognitive Bias sounds like one of those pop-psych terms that boil down to "I don't understand what you said, but I scare easily and I have a white coat on so watch your ass."
Yes Virginia, there is a threshold at which we form convictions and from that point on it takes a greater amount of evidence or testimony to flip the opinion. It is a Hysteresis characteristic that keeps us sane and alive because there are times when taking no position at all means you are slack jawed and drooling, get swept up by the tsunami -- having neither fled nor grabbed onto anything.
But I've seen a preponderance of evidence that warming has been in hiatus for the last decade, sea ice extent and temperature variation are well within pre-industrial historical norms, such that even a warming trend (even if one was present) would not make me quit my day job and go chicken little on everybody... that CO2 *follows* warming not leads it... that computer models STILL rely on the mythical effects of some imaginary 'CO2 layer' whose existence is dis proven by decades of balloon sampling... and the sea level stuff is so tenuous and disingenuous, attempting to generate immediate global taxation hysteria over millimeters of projected rise, while stable landforms (forget the Maldives they are atolls for chrissake move onto solid rock before you whine about the ocean) show the ocean level very stable over time periods, geological not climactic factors rule here...
And then. A whole dingle-berry load of headlines such as "this was... greater than expected" or "that was... greater than projected" over trends that are for narrow-years time windows and numerically still within the threshold of noise.
But it's not just about science, there is also annoyance and money involved.
Yes it's getting ANNOYING. That Cognitive Bias are people who have made up their minds who are merely annoyed by the behavior of the opposing side. Annoyance is not a bad thing it is a good thing, it is human natures way of reminding us that there is bull-hocky in the air. And yes sometimes it gets personal -- because the ECONOMIC RAMIFICATIONS of global warming hysteria politics, the CO2 money grab and lollipop-sucking diversion of funds to energy alternatives that will not scale, is threatening to erode MY take-home pay. And place an unfair tax burden on my children.
Therefore I see global warming hysteria as a DIRECT PERSONAL THREAT. Which I believe is a natural and defendable position.
Like I am annoyed by the way Bill Nye the Science Guy has become an Algorian science-is-settled clone and botched the greenhouse experiment... here we had a chance for a real celebrity to re-discover that the greenhouse effect only really works under glass (within an atmosphere) or on a planet-wide scale with uniform atmospheric composition of greenhouse gasses (Venus)... instead Nye swallows the CO2 heat dissipation Kool-Aid and refuses to admit that the 'result' is lost below the noise level and conduction within the apparatus, as would be ethical to do.
And Michael Mann attributes 1 foot of Sandy's 13 foot storm surge to Global Warming. What an absurd and disingenuous crock that is. He is.
See what we're up against? I really am a kind, gentle person unless I feel driven to extremes by unwelcome trends in my social environment.
Please don't mod me down because I am presently annoyed by Bill Nye, he's still cool and (unlike Mann) I firmly believe he may some day do what every scientist must do, re-examine his premises.
All coding should proceed as if every possible exceptional condition (device not ready, cache fail, controller failure, cat dials 911 on speakerphone) is the primary and intended purpose of the Project. Hash collisions not merely covered as a contingency but pursued with vigor in the main line to the Nth degree, where N indicates the infinitesimal possibility of multiple simultaneous hash collisions that would be the likely result of a vengeful god constructing the universe such as to produce a life of continuous and foul exceptions.
When gathered at the water cooler, coders would discuss triumphs in their particular areas of malfunction, and when they corroborate as a group it is to merge their respective threaded exceptions into a parallel paroxysm of failure, branching with virtual threads and physical coring such that the greatest possible number of malevolent conditions are met and coded for, simultaneously. Proceeding steadily towards the grail of the Grandest Failure.
The Grandest Failure being the stuff of mere legend, yet it is what drives us. It represents that supreme and sublime moment where everything that can go wrong has gone wrong and the very fundament reeks of wrongness.
Buffers are not starved as an exception, they are starved by design! Disk controllers are never ready. Communications packets never arrive in sequence, or so we assume because there are no markers to check, when they do arrive they are garbled beyond repair. Reconstruction occurs as a matter of course! Streams are unsynchronized by nature, incompatible by rote, unresolvable.
Off the corridor in a dusty hallway a small team of pariahs is assembled to perform the dirtiest and most detestable task of all: to handle the exceptions and branches thrown by the main line, conditional branches sketched out briefly (whose existence is known but not mentioned in polite conversation) are pursued in secret. This is necessary work but unrewarding as it leads away from the noble purpose of Grandest Failure, towards useful work. Such stuff as consolidation, transaction handling and data ordering, forgive me for uttering, Chaos be Praised!
For the goal is to produce a System that boldly and efficiently proceeds down the pathways of most numerous and most simultaneous failure, where the actual success of anything triggers the exceptions and is cast off to the side.
If robustness of design becomes human sentiment, it could be said that the System confidently strides forward boldly embracing every error condition and is shocked -- horrified -- every time something goes 'right'. As life's own experience is our guide, it is seldom disappointed.
The output of useful work in such a System the source of great embarrassment and discomfort, a necessary evil.
That is the principle behind the control systems of the Improbability Drive. It is the driving principle of the quantum flux, Brownian motion and wave/particle paradox.
All of this Order and Progress (blaspheme!) is but a side road off a side road ad infinitum. The main path leads to Chaos. Follow that path and revel in it. There is no honor in coding for success, any idiot could do that.
Down deep people know this is the Way. That is why when coders meet in dim conference rooms and the slideshow laptop suddenly projects a Blue Screen of Death for all to see, there is an eruption of thunderous applause, as if one had dropped a tray of food in a crowded cafeteria. Deep down we know failure is the noble path, and success the exception.
With this newly explained phenomenon, how long until these spacecraft lose their forward acceleration completely... then head approximately back again, albeit much slower and on a course dependent on the actual heat radiation characteristics, and gravity wells it encounters along the way...?
If (ever so infinitesimally possible) it was a direct vector back, how long would it take to arrive?
I must admit the thought of our space going pilgrims reversing course after an eon or two and returning home after many more is reassuring somehow.
___
To those gibbering about the length of the article and its writing style -- blow it out your backsides, to think our time is worth reading *that* tripe.
Yes, despite not being in the IT business for years, I am the one my friends call when their desktops and laptops take 10 minutes to boot, clog up with viral effluent of try to VM-swap in too little physical memory.
But I try to head it off. Whenever I spy someone who's just acquired -- or is just starting to grapple with -- some Windows 7 or Vista computer I suggest, "hey, bring it over and I'll take a snapshot of the disk, then clean it and load XP onto it. If it doesn't work out I'll restore the image and we will at least have tried..."
About 40% of them take me up on the offer. 60% don't, and I do not hear from those again until things have gotten really out of hand. And if I had made the offer and they turned it down I'm inclined to suggest maybe it's time to invest in a new computer.
So they buy a brand new one, Windows 7/Vista raises one more point in market share, they 'donate' their old machine to me (and I slap XP on it right-quick) and all is right with the world.
Though in the years since Vista was introduced in '05, I seem to have experienced an overall 60% reduction in friends. Time to buy some more on Facebook!
Heads up people! While this silly dollar bill retirement issue with its measly $4 billion savings for untold aggravation is being played out in the press and hoo-hawed on NPR and discussed and we are all distracted... ...just what stealth spending package is being pushed through Congress at this very moment? Something at least $400-billiony I'll bet.
I love the smell of Congressional bill riders in the morning. It smells like Real Money.
The 160 character limit is a hardware issue from the early SMS phones, when you would feed an 80 column punch card into the phone. The cards only encoded 80 characters per side so you would punch holes in both sides.
Contrary to any rumors you may hear Twitter's 140 character limit is not derived from the SMS limit, it was calculated from the smaller attention span of the average Twitter user.
As to the origin of the 80 column limit on punch cards, it was derived from the width of wheel ruts in Roman roads, which was determined by the span of horses' arses.
So the horses' arses down through the ages to SMS messaging we have a circle which I'll leave you to complete.
Not single pure damping frequency of circular ripples on ocean floor as depicted in simple diagram. Ogg say using single frequency like silly noise cancellation experiment where complex wave beat at edges of cancelling cone to make frog whisper artifact or low frequency beat that make heavy furniture walk around room and make dust bunny dance.
Ogg say use simulation to find most potentially harmful frequencies to oil platform and plot bell curve around them and make concentric patterns of bumps on sea floor not simple ripple, the bumps' separation along radius correspond to harmonics of range of harm frequency. Ogg say put shallower bumps with wider separation around outer edge of sea floor and dense but high bumps immediate surround oil rig and under it.
Because Ogg say only fool want to cancel single favorite wave frequency because nature love to laugh at fool who do so, nature just whistles off key and the fool's brick house go down and fall on piggies inside. Nature love to generate wave with fundamental logarithmic base off by tiny fraction to drown Egyptian surveyors whose brains full of cubits loving of whole numbers.
But Ogg ashamed because in place of egghead math smart magic that will not work Ogg use maths to introduce Gaussian harmonic and what is more Gaussian than a bunch of rocks so Ogg back to rocks again, yes pile a bunch of irregularly shaped rocks on ocean floor just like do on surface by peoples who have no need for maths because they just know to pile up rocks to resist the ocean. Rocks different shape they know Gaussian distribution better than Ogg.
Rocks really smart. Ogg say, rocks rock.
There is nothing remarkable about this news story, even the affected artist reaching out to the accused, expressing regret that the anti-piracy mechanisms have evolved into quasi-legal mantis shrimp prowling peer to peer networks to smash their blunt appendages against any IP address that they discover, even encourage piracy by seeding and delivering a greater percentage of the offending material than is permitted under fair use as part of the sting. And the mantis shrimp strike is so powerful it produces cavitation bubbles, how cute is that.
Time to explore the Pooh connection. Pooh has been a wholly licensed asset of Walt Disney Corporation since 1961. Everyone knows that the Hundred Acre Wood is a clumsy euphemism for Bohemian Grove. Tigger's Compulsive and Ceaseless Bouncing used as a clever device to indoctrinate generations of children to passively accept the idea of Bernanke & Geithner's "Quantitative Easing: Forever!" Honey being gold, Pooh being the stooge who ever seeks it even as it is held in short supply by fiat-pumping speculators. Piglet who is very small and cannot help to point this out, representing the many countries whose small size has been used as pretext to front enormous per-capita debt grown to ridiculous proportions by arrogant and disruptive IMF lending practices. Piglet's hide is bought and paid for and he knows it.
And The Established Practice Of Capitalizing Every Word In A Sentence can be Directly Traced To Christopher Robin. Whats Up With That. Always Busy, He Is. Doing What, I Wonder.
The truth is out there people. Go get it and bring it back in time for dinner.
Oxidization without heat.
At first.
In a fryer with a silver mesh in a side aperture.
These turkeys would FLY
fer sure
gooble gooble
References to Reagan era boondoggles aside, in America we have already perfected the technology for intercepting and possibly destroying missiles that are launched and follow an established inbound trajectory, and do not deploy active electronic countermeasures en route.
It is known as 'baseball'.
Never mind all this war ballyhoo... what I'd really LOVE to see is baseball played with balls that have retro rockets, on-board guidance systems, chaff ejecting radar countermeasures and split into MIRV type multiple reentry vehicles. The batter and catcher would also be drawn into this arms race (perhaps by the literal acquisition of additional arms) by using bats with unfolding surfaces to target each fragmented baseball, mitts that sprout fractal bifurcations to capture each reentry vehicle.
Since the mass of the launched baseball is known, its fragmentation into little pieces and the countermeasures that would evolve could, through nanotechnology, branch down into fractal and quantum infinity.
But at the quantum level the baseball-bits would exhibit both wave and particle behavior. Catchers must employ slit apertures and collectors, could improve their success with magnetic field focusing and plasma filled coils. The referee of the future would call the plays based on the strength of photon emission tallied against the energy-mass ratio of the original baseball to discern its composition and fate.
Whoops, I forget we have already nailed this one too. It is known as 'Astronomy'.
Sorry about the distraction.
Let's go back to talking about Israel.
That Ruby On Rails was so imbibed with deep racial tension and cultural significance! Whitepaper after whitepaper about its deployment, efficiency and security, not a peep about those racial overtones. Those deluded fools.
This changes everything. Again.
Does anyone have any links to share on the political correctitude and safety of Cold Fusion?
BRING BACK RPG-II, while dealing with the spaghetti code intricacy of using 8080 machine-language level instruction codes to manage strings and complex data sets programmers had no time to agonize over racial inequality -- I worked with a team of mixed races to maintain a telco billing system, and we were completely color-blind because we were all slapped hard against the wall by this thing, we'd cry on each others' shoulders. It was quite awful but there we were. And we were all in it together.
The problem with so-called quantum crypto -- and I applaud slashdot calling it out, there is no crypto involved -- is it's not even a new deal for telecommunications, because we already have a demonstrably secure method: crypto.
So it's all about laziness, the unwillingness to engage in the practice of secret key management. If your target market is comprised of folks who are unable or unwilling to manage their own security and want some black box to do it for them... well are we not approaching Dilbert-esque territory...?
The science has settled. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a real. Scam. It's high time to leave CO2 out of it and turn our attention on the effects of particulate aerosols, contrails. Those are true effects of humankind. And in the case of contrails, a net cooling effect.
Debating AGW is a lost cause. Bring on the battle robots.
Or Windows, or backgammon, or orienteering, or talking. The actual 'free time' humans have to develop and sharpen skills is diminishing with the deepening economic crisis, as the timespan in which one must work to survive is increasing. The endless cycle of distraction provided by on and offline gaming short-circuits the human tendency towards crushing boredom -- the kind of boredom that gets people out into the world to face problems, gather (in person) to discuss those problems, and solve them.
Anyone can install an operating system, load disc and click Next a dozen times then Finish... but to use an operating system is to understand its principles, adapt it optimally to the hardware, choose a set of packages geared to your general purpose and explore its commands and utilities, explore the landscape. While ding this one is engaged in inner-directed activity that has no set goal -- save to enrich the mind and 'prepare' for what comes next.
What comes next? A video game perhaps. But when you have explored the various toolsets like perl and php there are other alluring places your mind can easily drift into -- CONSTRUCTIVE (arrogant emphasis mine) realms where the fiddling with MySQL and Apache on the box might lead (amazingly, easily) to deployed applications in the cloud. Or a sense of 'can-do' ism that pervades every aspect of life.
I have long desired to assemble a real workshop with routers and lathes and such tools that one can look at almost anything and say, "I could build that." But it has remained just out of reach because acquisition of these things requires time, space, money and opportunity.
But in the digital realm our civilization has reached its pinnacle with Linux! Here in a well organized group of free packages is the Ultimate Workshop. Grab and grok Linux and you have at your fingertips every basic algorithmic and organizational tool yet imagined. Delve into data structures more easily than Knuth could back in the 70s, manipulate photos and videos with as much capability as million dollar dedicated workstations of the 80s, build and deploy net based applications at the eBay level of complexity. The assembly tools and building blocks are all there.
The modern open source workshop IS the dream workshop. All the tools are there. It is ready for you to acquire. All you need to do is reach out and grasp it. And add your own PRECIOUS TIME.
Which is why when I see so much of the modern Internet devoted to these social enclaves of gaming, to me it is as if a significant part of the population has developed a fixation with throwaway plastic knives. They come in different shapes and colors, they don't last very long, they don't even cut your food properly -- and unlike the little yarn about manual dexterity -- a fixation on gaming seems more to impair survival rather than assure it. The Grand Linux Workshop remains on the FTP site unyearned-for while the gamers collect and trade shiny plastic knives. And forks and spoons.
And that is why as you sample the fantastic moveable feast that is the Internet, you spend so much time spitting out the broken tines of plastic forks.
The attack on Perl Harbor is now in phase 5.16.2, see our live coverage on CPAN.
I've never been able to grok this 'Pearl Harbor' metaphor thing, it is used to point out something no one could have possibly foreseen before it happens, which is a form of fore-seeing so whatever is being discussed could not ever later have been un-foreseen. Does that make any fore-sense?
Not to mention that unlike the ThisGATE ThatGATE AnythingGATE headline absurdity which is for fun and entertainment purposes only -- during the Pearl Harbor attack many men died defending their country and to a certain extent casual banal use of the term -- especially for things that are no-brainer fore-seeable, dishonors their memories.
Vulnerable to hacks indeed. WELL... if these Call of Duty Black Ops server thingies have become a problem, a way to hurt people I say maybe we should call it a day and just shut them down.
'Cause we don't want to hurt people now do we.
Do we??
As usual, the scientists FAIL to point out that the overwhelming majority of these 'tiny marine wonders' are of no practical use whatsoever. They swim around doing worthless and pointless things, they are comprised of useless and ridiculous materials you could find anywhere. Their genetic code, though voluminous and subtle, lacks any hint of cohesive plot interest and character development and reading it is a real waste of time. As usual we are supposed to imagine some cornucopia of miracle medicines emanating from these creatures -- prescription bottles full of wonder drugs just bobbing to the surface, a Gift From Neptune To You. Ha ha pharma brochure crap. Because they're small and cute and overlooked and your attention is being drawn to them it's supposed to be wonderful, but let me tell you almost 100% of what these creatures produce is useless sludge and they're too stupid to even care how dumb they are.
I treasure my beloved planet, every nook and cranny hold a new mystery at which to gawk and squawk.
It's not about people failing to trust one another. It's about people trolling the Internet bored looking for exciting stories about hypothetical people who fail to trust one another, it's all about the blip in heart rate at 1AM, just the thought of that is supposed to make us go HMMMM... and trigger that lizard brain yearn for romantic gossip and gushing tabloid release.
Empirical test of hypothesis: for example, does this event generate tabloid excitement and sexual innuendo if I tell you it supposedly happened 'at 1AM'...?
"One day, a student caregiver noticed Figaro pushing a stone pebble through the aviary wire mesh, where it fell on a wood structural beam. Unable to retrieve the stone with his foot, Figaro then fetched a piece of bamboo and again attempted to retrieve the stone using the bamboo stick. ... "
Wow! What a rush.
No argument friend... your points are well taken... but you must realize that at some point,
Nuclear // No argument, but for the next 100 years or so it will be necessary.
respectfully, this should should be translated as
Nuclear! Lots of it, and let the armchair energy hog-luddites muse about ye olde renaissance fairs and how fun life was in the pre-industrial age as we over-rule and walk around them! Quick! Before the Last Winter sets in or the Oil War to end all Oil Wars and the lights go out and our children freeze to death!!!
It is about survival. It's just that, all this hoo-hah about options other than a massive investment (in as you say, short term) nuclear energy are wasted time and wasted breath. And time is SHORT. It is all technical issues to solve. If we approached space travel the same way we are agonizing over nuclear energy there would be no footsteps on the moon.
There is no time left to remain uncommitted.
It's peanut butter jelly sour grapes time! There you go! There you go!
"Who knew that the most critical element of operating a data center in New York City was ensuring a steady supply of diesel fuel?"
I did. Or would have, would have been a major item on the short list if they had hired me. But as a seasoned sysadmin wandering jobless in two major cities for months with the only 'tech' job available being telephone support in a boiler room for minimum wage plusabit I said "F*CK EYE-TEE and moved to a small town.
Where I now clean sewers for a living. And I apply the same dedication to the task as I did to maintaining linux systems, developing disaster plans. The sewers are very CLEAN here and when there is a stoppage our response time is AWESOME.
When I saw the introduction of electronic voting machines (even early ones that produced an actual printed paper tape for verification) I thought, "This is an idea that should have been laughed out of the room the day it was first proposed."
Then some years after, machines with dongles and flash memory, no paper at all. It was screamingly surreal.
As a computer consultant in 1980 I was approached by a friend on the Board of Elections to review bids for Shouptronics stations and optical readers. We both agreed to reject the idea of standalone machines, KEEPING THE PAPER BALLOT and doing optical counting in batches, with a dice toss for each batch (roll a six, count by hand and check against the machine).
We were overruled by the Board, they went for the machines because they claimed that with whole-machine voting "there are NO spoiled or incorrect ballots."
The surreal aspect to this is, in a situation where the real world yields variable results, some ballots spoiled because some people make dumb mistakes, they have opted to eliminate all the controls -- now you have one aggregate result that cannot be trusted.
Fixed wing and foil and prop and rotor are out, the engineers who push those designs are all paid stooges for Big Oil. How about... solar powered flapping machines? We could graft an iguana onto the end of bird. The bird has the right equipment to fly, and iguanas spend most of the day basking in the sunlight. I'll bet iguanas have an incredible amount of stored solar energy.
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/may/24/one-eye-open/
porpoises mentioned 7:30 but it's all fascinating