A car, or a human, goes at a certain speed. It's clear that however fast a human or a car moves, it's always possible to go 10 mph faster.
Chess is all about not screwing up and giving the other guy an advantage. You want to develop your pieces, get through the middlegame, and reach a predictable endgame with no deficit in material and position. If you can do that, you're all set! It isn't clear that it's always going to be possible to do better than that. There may be a fundamental limit on how well it is possible to play chess.
Computer play might reach a point where pushing the horizon further away by 10 ply doesn't make an appreciable difference in the moves it makes. Once your play is perfect, you can't get any better. To take your analogy further, it might be that both the human and the car have reached some sort of fundamental limit like the speed of light, where the variation in outcome is dependent on minor deviations in human play during the game.
If you look at the chart in the article, it appears that the quality of human and computer play converged in 1999. The matches have all been resulting in draws since then, as if the winners were reduced to random variables. So it looks like some humans have been effectively playing perfect games, and now we have computers that play perfect games too.
If you are going to use a diffraction grating, then why dont you use a CD ?
Because the whole point of doing it with a ruler is that it's interesting that you can do it at all. You can then brag that you measured the wavelength of light with a ruler, and people either won't believe you or will want to know how you did it. (Unless of course they don't care, or ask you "Huh? Wavelength of what?")
I did the rapidly rotating octagonal mirror experiment in college. I got 2x10^8 m/s which is pretty slow. Either the mirror speed was off, or between runs I might have jostled the paper on the wall with the pencil marks marking the beam position.
You can measure the wavelength of light pretty easily with a ruler. But it has to be one of those shiny metal rulers, and it has to have black millimeter marks. Shine your laser onto the black marks at a shallow angle, measure the positions of the diffraction spikes that are reflected onto the wall, and from that, calculating the wavelength is trivial. It works pretty well.
Allegations that the new Diebold touch screen voting systems are insecure, because they store votes in an easily modifiable Access.mdb file with no password protection or referential integrity, have been dismissed as sour grapes on the part of the hole punching industry.
"People love the systems", said a representative for Diebold. "Security and accuracy are guaranteed by pretty flashing lights."
Even then I knew it would be bad to not have a clear president, but can you imagine if the debate was still continuing on 9/11/01?
Oh please, knock it off with the 9/11 exploitation. The attack probably wouldn't have happened in the first place if Bush hadn't undermined the war on terrorism by diverting resources from it during his first 8 months in 2001 in favor of pork projects like the missile defense boondoggle. The Clinton administration had the war in Afghanistan essentially set up and ready to go, but they deferred it to the incoming administration, which promptly adopted the mantle of undoing every executive action of the previous 8 years as part of its ideology. Ironically, Bush gets high points for his handling of the "war on terrorism" even though he pulled the plug on it. It took 19 guys with boxcutters to make him realize that thwarting terrorist attacks is important.
And even if the debate had still been raging at the time of the terrorist attack, so what? What do you think would have been done differently? The initial response to 9/11 had bipartisan support.
Even if the above is completely true, it was only possible because the election was incredibly close. If more than 50% of people got out and voted maybe it wouldn't have been so close.
I acknowledge your point; the election was essentially a tie. But our electoral system doesn't have a concept of a tie. If there is a "tie" you just count the votes more and more carefully until the margin is greater than the error in your count, so that the tie is broken. That's what the law says. There is no provision allowing the Supreme Court to "break a tie" with a disgraceful decision such as Bush vs. Gore.
An exhaustive recount completed months after the election showed that Bush did indeed get a couple hundred more votes than Gore. But at the moment that the court interfered with the recount and announced Bush the winner, this was by no means certain. They wanted to select the next president. Even if the result of a later recount happens to tip in their favor, this does not exonerate them. At the time, nobody knew what the outcome of a recount would be. The five majority justices rung the bell with their actions; subsequent events cannot unring it for them.
Doctor David Banner: file trader, scientist; searching for a way to download the hidden copyrighted files that all you little liars know you have. Then an accidental overdose of typical SBC service alters his body chemistry. And now, when David Banner hears any news about SBC, whether it has to do with their patent abuse, layoffs and overseas outsourcing, or the general degradation in service quality that occurs whenever SBC takes over an outfit, a startling metamorphosis occurs.
The Creature is driven by rage, and wanted for sharing a file he didn't upload. David Banner is believed to be dead, and he must let the world think that he is dead because those bastards can sue you for $100,000 per copyright violation, until he can find a way to control the raging spirit that dwells within him...
But now David's eyebrows are merely raised in suspicion. What is SBC's motive in acting in the interests of their customers? What's in it for them? What are they up to? The Creature does not understand.
You don't even need electricity for that. Just mix beryllium with a good source of alpha particles like radium. Beryllium 9 undergoes an (alpha,n) fusion reaction with an incident alpha particle, generating carbon 12 and a loose neutron.
Beryllium 9 is great because it's essentially two helium nuclei held together by a loose neutron with a very low binding energy (1.66 MeV). It's almost the nuclear equivalent of an alkali metal. You can even pop the thing apart with a gamma ray if you don't want to bother with alpha emitters. For those who worry about berylliosis, boron 11 also works. The (alpha,n) reaction yields nitrogen 14.
This was the setup that Chadwick used for detecting the neutron in 1932. Back then neutrons were referred to as "beryllium radiation" (sort of like how electrons were first called "cathode rays") and were wrongly thought to be some sort of strongly penetrating photons. Chadwick surrounded his beryllium source with wax and measured the energies of the protons that got knocked out by elastic collisions. Wax is a great moderator because it's full of protons, and the neutron slams into a proton in the wax and loses all its energy like a billiard ball. The neutron that emerges from the wax is a slow neutron. Slow neutrons are generally much more useful than fast neutrons because they spend more time in your fissionable material, and there is no Coulomb barrier that they need to overcome so they react with nuclei very easily.
I shouldn't say too much more or else I'll get myself placed on the Bush Administration's new list of 100,000 maniacs. But if you're building a fission bomb, these reactions are really handy because your implosion doesn't last very long and you need to get hold of lots of slow neutrons in a hurry. If you're building a nuclear reactor for power generation, you're under less of a tight schedule and can probably wait a millisecond or two for neutrons from cosmic rays or spontaneous fissions to get your pile going.
It is amazing how difficult it is to form an intelligent response to this article.
Well what can you say about it? If this were merely a case of entertainment posing as a news story, that would be one thing. But this is advertising, pretending to be entertainment posing as a news story. It's not even infotainment, it's advertainment.
So far all the Segway stories I've seen on Slashdot (aside from the San Francisco sidewalk controversy) have had the character of guerrilla marketing. "Hey, we got to play with a Segway for a week, here are some movies of us having fun with it!" Other products appear on Slashdot this way, but usually only when their users have made strange or noteworthy modifications that the designers never intended. Like creating a case for it made of Legos, or incorporating it as a part in a rail gun, or running a free operating system on it.
This thing has been on the market for years now. At this point we should only be seeing Segway stories when people do similar things to Segways. If someone modified a Segway by installing a feeding tube, so that the rider could suck a high calorie substance like gravy through the tube while simultaneously avoiding exercise, that would be a cool Segway story. Another newsworthy modification might be converting the Segway from electric to diesel. Using the product normally, in the manner that was intended by the manufacturer, is simply not worth our attention. (Dressing up like a butler while you do it is cute, but hardly changes this.)
I think stories that are essentially guerrilla marketing, or that are about guerrilla marketing, should have their own icon. I'm picturing a gorilla on a Segway.
I guess that a massive majority of the general population knows to use google, but the fact that IE defaults to MSN (and much of that massive majority doesn't know how to stop it) is scary.
It isn't straightforward- you have to do a bunch of registry edits to make IE automatically submit search requests to google.com instead of msn.com. (See here for details on how to do this.)
Some ISPs like to put banners in IE's title bar (e.g. "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters - Brought to you by Verizon!") You can get rid of this (when you're finished cleaning the spyware off your non-computer-savvy relatives' computers, that is) by going to \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main and deleting or editing a REG_SZ key there called "Window Title", which is usually put there by ISP software installations. Mine says "This is a necessary piece of the operating system!"
Ironically, I find the only thing that makes IE usable at all for me is the current Google toolbar, which implements the popup-blocking that Microsoft neglected to include in their user-hostile browser. With no popup blocking, simple everyday computer tasks like surfing for porn are like walking in quicksand.
I would suggest re-photographing the famous (or infamous) "face" on Mars. I know NASA already did that once, but at a different angle and under different lighting coniditions, which resulted in an image that is hard for many to correlate with the earlier, fuzzy "face" photo.
You don't see the face in NASA's latest pic? It's not as obvious as it was in the previous image but you could do a little Photoshop job on it and imagine what a better picture would look like.
I get the feeling someone at NASA considers the "face" an annoyance...
Wouldn't it be fun if clouds were turtles? Wouldn't it be fun if the laundry on the bedroom chair was a friendly monster? Wouldn't it be fun if rock mesas on Mars were faces or interplanetary monuments? Clouds, though, are small water droplets, floating on air. Laundry is cotton, wool, or plastic, woven into garments. Famous Martian rock mesas known by names like the Face on Mars appear quite natural when seen more clearly, as the above recently released photo shows. Is reality boring?
They get a lot of publicity from the face, mostly from credulous simpletons who ascribe some sort of actual importance to it, and I bet this annoys them to no end- they're trying to attract everyone's attention to the actual science they're doing, and all they get asked about are the findings relevant to mysticism and pseudoscience.
Except that packets from w32.Blaster have spoofed source IP addresses, so this idea wouldn't work at all.
I know you're just screwing around, but seriously, if I were in a development team with a programmer that sounded like you, I'd be mortified. You don't seem to have the proper respect for the code you're writing. A good programmer fears the code he writes. Almost every line of it might come back to screw you. Your program had better be 100% bug free if you release it using this distribution model, because there is no 1.0.1 release of a worm or a virus. If you find a bug or make improvements, the versioning problems are insoluble.
Ordinarily you're right. A superconductor will set up countercurrents and expel an externally applied magetic field. This is the Meissner effect.
Unless the magnetic field intensity reaches a certain threshold. In a Type II superconductor, the field may penetrate the superconductor by organizing itself into thin "flux bundles" or vortices, each carrying a discrete amount of flux equal to h/2e. These penetrate the superconductor like millions of little needles. In fact, they arrange themselves in a regular periodic array like a 2-D lattice. And if you increase the temperature of the material enough, this "crystal" undergoes a phase transition- it "melts"- and the vortices can flow past each other like a liquid! (The "melting" point of a flux-bundle crystal is not to be confused with the superconductor's critical temperature, Tc.)
Strengthening the external field will increase the density of vortices. The conduction electrons moving through the superconductor encounter them, and the field inside them exerts a JxB force on the current. By Newton's Third Law, the vortices themselves experience an equal and opposite force, called the Lorentz force. They have some mobility, so the current effectively pushes them sideways through the superconductor. (This motion is called "creep", and it can be slowed down by superconductor impurities- since the vortices can become "pinned" to defects in the material.) But this means we have time-varying magnetic fields. By Faraday's Law we now have an induced electric field antiparallel to the current. This means the system has nonzero longitudinal dissipative resistivity- you have to exert a force to push the current through and thus the superconductivity is destroyed.
Generally this is considered a bad thing, which is why people add impurities to superconductors so that the vortices are "pinned" in place and do not move. You can make superconductors that can handle much higher currents this way.
How long until someone runs in a California gubernatorial recall election while aboard the International Space Station?
The list of candidates for this upcoming recall election was finalized yesterday, and people in space are hardly represented at all. There are 155 candidates on the ballot, so you would think that at least a few of them would be in orbit around the earth right now. But not a single one of them is currently in free fall at the moment, and in fact, not a single member of this opportunist whack-pack has ever been in space at all. In fact, the most space experience any of them has involves a starring role in a Hollywood movie set on Earth and Mars.
Davis, for his part, has never been in space either, and has a consistent record of not hiring spacemen to work for him. In fact, whatever the outcome of the recall election, one thing is certain: the future governor of California will not be running the state from orbit. Is this the kind of future we want for California? Think of the children.
There may be issues with California state law. In a transparently cynical attempt to keep the spacefaring community out of the California political process, the state may require that the candidate appear in person to sign papers registering for the ballot. The 65 signatures can be collected remotely, and the $3500 transferred by wire, so why should the signature remain as an insurmountable problem? I'm sure reasonable states like Texas allow a person to register for the ballot while in space. Other roadblocks thrown in the path of astronauts seeking to join the recall ballot include a 15-day California residency requirement. Davis supporters argue that this is simply to restrict the election to California residents. But when your orbiting spacecraft has been entering and leaving the borders of the state of California at least once a day for hundreds of days, it becomes pretty hypocritical for someone to insist that you haven't racked up your 15.
Voters are tired of "politics as usual". It's time for someone with a fresh perspective on the issues in Sacramento. From 240 miles up, moving by at 17000 miles per hour, through a little glass porthole.
I'm much more in favor of individuals making unlimited donations but no group donations at all, no NRA, no labor unions, no Greenpeace, and no Halibutron, since they can't vote, they should not be able to fund canidates, but that might get some people in a tizzy on both sides of the asile and Nader wouldn't like it either.
And no churches, handing out "voter guides" to their armies of obedient sheep. If they're going to enter the political sphere that way, they can start paying taxes like the rest of us.
Living in a police state doesn't have to be oppressive- it can be fun-pressive!
The Internet offers no anonymity. So just print out the code on a locally connected printer (not a network printer). Wait until nightfall, then go to a conspicuous area on campus that is free of security cameras. Buy a can of spray paint (NOT online- that would be stupid!) and spray the working exploit code onto a wall of a building.
Be sure to provide comments and please make sure the code compiles before you spray it.
Then go home and throw your computer into a vat of nitric acid. And that's that!
"Recently, the US Supreme Court denied his appeal, with the notion that obscenity is a state-level affair, despite the First Amendment being a Federal law."
The First Amendment is not a "Federal law", nor is it a law at all. It defines rights guaranteed to citizens which cannot be abrogated by the federal government, nor the states, nor local governments.
Of course the JVM must be a native executable for the platform on which it runs. That's a very, very different thing from saying it's written in C.
I was speaking loosely. By "written in C" I meant "written in a language that is compiled to native executable code and not JVM bytecode". The actual source language is irrelevant. You can write your code in Java and compile it to a native executable if you want, but the result could still have been "written in C" as far as the person using the executable is concerned unless the source code is available to him.
Of course, there is nothing about Java as a language that makes it unsuitable for generating native executables, but naturally there is intense marketing pressure from Sun to associate Java the language as being useful only with Java the emulated platform. Although with native compilers it's quite possible to write "C programs" in Java.:)
The javac compiler is in Java (and can be accessed programatically at runtime on systems where javac is around). So your statement is true for the compiler.
Last I heard java.util.zip was a thin JNI wrapper around the ZLIB library. (They were talking about reimplementing in Java, but I don't know if they ever did.) So jar is mostly C except for a thin Java wrapper.
Of course the JVM itself is written in C. If it were written in Java, it would need another JVM underneath it at the machine interface layer.
There are cases involving callback mechanisms where throwing an Exception is the only appropriate way to stop some process that is not under the control of your own code. Say you're parsing an XML document, and you are only interested in the information in the header elements. An exception is a good way to stop a SAX parser from reading past the header information as it parses the file. If you had to scan the headers of many XML documents, it might even make sense to create a workhorse SAXException for this purpose.
Everyone understands the color system. It's a pointless token measure that is useful for political leverage. It makes them look like they're doing something about terrorism and threats. "Look here, pretty colors!"
When things start looking bad, they can just notch it up a color and call it a day.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one with embarrassing stuff sitting in the Google Groups archive...
REDMOND, WASHINGTON, U.S.A., 1995 MAR 31 (NB) -- Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) Chairman Bill gates has named this "Microsoft Bob Day." Bob is the nerdy looking guy with the black plastic-frame glasses who, according to Microsoft "gives new meaning" to the computer term "user friendly"
Today is Microsoft Bob Day because it is the first day the user interface software of that name will be available in retail outlets. Microsoft hopes every IBM-compatible user in the country will welcome Microsoft Bob into their home and/or office. Bob features animated personal guides that navigate users through Bob's eight applications.
Microsoft may see Bob as a "simpler" user interface, but retailers see it as a sales tool, with several mass market retailers featuring Bob promotions. Sears stores are offering consumers the opportunity to meet Bob via exclusive "technology makeovers." Through April 30, 1995, the national chain is offering a personal consultation to help assess your level of computer knowledge and experience. The consultation is designed to show that with Microsoft Bob's help just about anyone can be a "techno-whiz."
CompUSA is so enamored with Microsoft Bob it will offer two days -- April 29 and 30 -- of Bob demos and promotions in all its retail outlets. "Bob allows us to talk to an even broader mix of customers," said Larry Mondry, CompUSA executive vice president of merchandising. The underlying philosophy of Microsoft Bob may be "simplicity of use," but it won't run on a simple PC. As a minimum you need Windows 3.1 or higher, a 486 or higher microprocessor, eight megabytes (MB) of memory, 30MB of available hard disk space, a Super VGA 256-color monitor, and a mouse of comparable pointing device. That eliminates many of the PCs in homes and small offices that have 4MB of memory, unless the owner is willing to upgrade. If you want Bob to send your electronic-mail or pay your bills online you will also need a modem. Microsoft also calls a sound card and speakers "recommended options."
Microsoft is banking heavily on Bob's ease of use. As a result there is no manual with the software. Each user can choose one of the animated helpers Bob provides, which include a dog, a cat, "Scuz" the teenager, a parrot, and a "friendly dragon."
Microsoft Bob's opening screen is a red front door with a brass door knocker and your personal animated helper to suggest, through pointing and text messages, where you should go. Interestingly, while the guy with the friendly smile and the heavy glasses is the namesake of the program, he doesn't actually appear in the software.
The eight functions Bob brings to your home or office are a letter writer, calendar, checkbook/financial management program, household manager for managing household information, address book, e-mail, a quiz game called GeoSafari, and a financial guide that provides financial information and tips. The various programs are integrated so you can write a letter and pull in the appropriate address from the address book, then send the letter electronically via e-mail.
Bob may be a gamble for Microsoft. The company hopes users will accept the cartoonish look-and-feel of the program intended to make computing easier, but it remains to be seen if experienced computer users will be attracted to the program.
When Bill Gates introduced Microsoft Bob in January at the Consumer Electronics Show he pointed out that Bob is for both new users and users who have a computer but don't make use of it because it requires too much in the way of learning skills and pouring through manuals. "Using Bob, people will learn faster and easier and even learn more about application features they would not otherwise become familiar with," said Gates.
Bob uses a relatively new user interface technique, called a
Slashdot Mirror
A car, or a human, goes at a certain speed. It's clear that however fast a human or a car moves, it's always possible to go 10 mph faster.
Chess is all about not screwing up and giving the other guy an advantage. You want to develop your pieces, get through the middlegame, and reach a predictable endgame with no deficit in material and position. If you can do that, you're all set! It isn't clear that it's always going to be possible to do better than that. There may be a fundamental limit on how well it is possible to play chess.
Computer play might reach a point where pushing the horizon further away by 10 ply doesn't make an appreciable difference in the moves it makes. Once your play is perfect, you can't get any better. To take your analogy further, it might be that both the human and the car have reached some sort of fundamental limit like the speed of light, where the variation in outcome is dependent on minor deviations in human play during the game.
If you look at the chart in the article, it appears that the quality of human and computer play converged in 1999. The matches have all been resulting in draws since then, as if the winners were reduced to random variables. So it looks like some humans have been effectively playing perfect games, and now we have computers that play perfect games too.
If you are going to use a diffraction grating, then why dont you use a CD ?
Because the whole point of doing it with a ruler is that it's interesting that you can do it at all. You can then brag that you measured the wavelength of light with a ruler, and people either won't believe you or will want to know how you did it. (Unless of course they don't care, or ask you "Huh? Wavelength of what?")
Using a CD might be easier, but misses the point.
I did the rapidly rotating octagonal mirror experiment in college. I got 2x10^8 m/s which is pretty slow. Either the mirror speed was off, or between runs I might have jostled the paper on the wall with the pencil marks marking the beam position.
You can measure the wavelength of light pretty easily with a ruler. But it has to be one of those shiny metal rulers, and it has to have black millimeter marks. Shine your laser onto the black marks at a shallow angle, measure the positions of the diffraction spikes that are reflected onto the wall, and from that, calculating the wavelength is trivial. It works pretty well.
In related news...
.mdb file with no password protection or referential integrity, have been dismissed as sour grapes on the part of the hole punching industry.
Allegations that the new Diebold touch screen voting systems are insecure, because they store votes in an easily modifiable Access
"People love the systems", said a representative for Diebold. "Security and accuracy are guaranteed by pretty flashing lights."
Even then I knew it would be bad to not have a clear president, but can you imagine if the debate was still continuing on 9/11/01?
Oh please, knock it off with the 9/11 exploitation. The attack probably wouldn't have happened in the first place if Bush hadn't undermined the war on terrorism by diverting resources from it during his first 8 months in 2001 in favor of pork projects like the missile defense boondoggle. The Clinton administration had the war in Afghanistan essentially set up and ready to go, but they deferred it to the incoming administration, which promptly adopted the mantle of undoing every executive action of the previous 8 years as part of its ideology. Ironically, Bush gets high points for his handling of the "war on terrorism" even though he pulled the plug on it. It took 19 guys with boxcutters to make him realize that thwarting terrorist attacks is important.
And even if the debate had still been raging at the time of the terrorist attack, so what? What do you think would have been done differently? The initial response to 9/11 had bipartisan support.
Even if the above is completely true, it was only possible because the election was incredibly close. If more than 50% of people got out and voted maybe it wouldn't have been so close.
I acknowledge your point; the election was essentially a tie. But our electoral system doesn't have a concept of a tie. If there is a "tie" you just count the votes more and more carefully until the margin is greater than the error in your count, so that the tie is broken. That's what the law says. There is no provision allowing the Supreme Court to "break a tie" with a disgraceful decision such as Bush vs. Gore.
An exhaustive recount completed months after the election showed that Bush did indeed get a couple hundred more votes than Gore. But at the moment that the court interfered with the recount and announced Bush the winner, this was by no means certain. They wanted to select the next president. Even if the result of a later recount happens to tip in their favor, this does not exonerate them. At the time, nobody knew what the outcome of a recount would be. The five majority justices rung the bell with their actions; subsequent events cannot unring it for them.
Doctor David Banner:
file trader, scientist;
searching for a way to download the hidden copyrighted files that all you little liars know you have.
Then an accidental overdose of typical SBC service alters his body chemistry.
And now, when David Banner hears any news about SBC,
whether it has to do with their patent abuse, layoffs and overseas outsourcing, or the general degradation in service quality that occurs whenever SBC takes over an outfit,
a startling metamorphosis occurs.
The Creature is driven by rage,
and wanted for sharing a file he didn't upload.
David Banner is believed to be dead,
and he must let the world think that he is dead because those bastards can sue you for $100,000 per copyright violation,
until he can find a way to control the raging spirit that dwells within him...
But now David's eyebrows are merely raised in suspicion.
What is SBC's motive in acting in the interests of their customers?
What's in it for them? What are they up to?
The Creature does not understand.
You don't even need electricity for that. Just mix beryllium with a good source of alpha particles like radium. Beryllium 9 undergoes an (alpha,n) fusion reaction with an incident alpha particle, generating carbon 12 and a loose neutron.
Beryllium 9 is great because it's essentially two helium nuclei held together by a loose neutron with a very low binding energy (1.66 MeV). It's almost the nuclear equivalent of an alkali metal. You can even pop the thing apart with a gamma ray if you don't want to bother with alpha emitters. For those who worry about berylliosis, boron 11 also works. The (alpha,n) reaction yields nitrogen 14.
This was the setup that Chadwick used for detecting the neutron in 1932. Back then neutrons were referred to as "beryllium radiation" (sort of like how electrons were first called "cathode rays") and were wrongly thought to be some sort of strongly penetrating photons. Chadwick surrounded his beryllium source with wax and measured the energies of the protons that got knocked out by elastic collisions. Wax is a great moderator because it's full of protons, and the neutron slams into a proton in the wax and loses all its energy like a billiard ball. The neutron that emerges from the wax is a slow neutron. Slow neutrons are generally much more useful than fast neutrons because they spend more time in your fissionable material, and there is no Coulomb barrier that they need to overcome so they react with nuclei very easily.
I shouldn't say too much more or else I'll get myself placed on the Bush Administration's new list of 100,000 maniacs. But if you're building a fission bomb, these reactions are really handy because your implosion doesn't last very long and you need to get hold of lots of slow neutrons in a hurry. If you're building a nuclear reactor for power generation, you're under less of a tight schedule and can probably wait a millisecond or two for neutrons from cosmic rays or spontaneous fissions to get your pile going.
It is amazing how difficult it is to form an intelligent response to this article.
Well what can you say about it? If this were merely a case of entertainment posing as a news story, that would be one thing. But this is advertising, pretending to be entertainment posing as a news story. It's not even infotainment, it's advertainment.
So far all the Segway stories I've seen on Slashdot (aside from the San Francisco sidewalk controversy) have had the character of guerrilla marketing. "Hey, we got to play with a Segway for a week, here are some movies of us having fun with it!" Other products appear on Slashdot this way, but usually only when their users have made strange or noteworthy modifications that the designers never intended. Like creating a case for it made of Legos, or incorporating it as a part in a rail gun, or running a free operating system on it.
This thing has been on the market for years now. At this point we should only be seeing Segway stories when people do similar things to Segways. If someone modified a Segway by installing a feeding tube, so that the rider could suck a high calorie substance like gravy through the tube while simultaneously avoiding exercise, that would be a cool Segway story. Another newsworthy modification might be converting the Segway from electric to diesel. Using the product normally, in the manner that was intended by the manufacturer, is simply not worth our attention. (Dressing up like a butler while you do it is cute, but hardly changes this.)
I think stories that are essentially guerrilla marketing, or that are about guerrilla marketing, should have their own icon. I'm picturing a gorilla on a Segway.
It gives me that slight edge I need for getting that "First Post!" on an IIS server.
I guess that a massive majority of the general population knows to use google, but the fact that IE defaults to MSN (and much of that massive majority doesn't know how to stop it) is scary.
It isn't straightforward- you have to do a bunch of registry edits to make IE automatically submit search requests to google.com instead of msn.com. (See here for details on how to do this.)
Some ISPs like to put banners in IE's title bar (e.g. "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters - Brought to you by Verizon!") You can get rid of this (when you're finished cleaning the spyware off your non-computer-savvy relatives' computers, that is) by going to \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main and deleting or editing a REG_SZ key there called "Window Title", which is usually put there by ISP software installations. Mine says "This is a necessary piece of the operating system!"
Ironically, I find the only thing that makes IE usable at all for me is the current Google toolbar, which implements the popup-blocking that Microsoft neglected to include in their user-hostile browser. With no popup blocking, simple everyday computer tasks like surfing for porn are like walking in quicksand.
You don't see the face in NASA's latest pic? It's not as obvious as it was in the previous image but you could do a little Photoshop job on it and imagine what a better picture would look like.
I get the feeling someone at NASA considers the "face" an annoyance...
They get a lot of publicity from the face, mostly from credulous simpletons who ascribe some sort of actual importance to it, and I bet this annoys them to no end- they're trying to attract everyone's attention to the actual science they're doing, and all they get asked about are the findings relevant to mysticism and pseudoscience.
Except that packets from w32.Blaster have spoofed source IP addresses, so this idea wouldn't work at all.
I know you're just screwing around, but seriously, if I were in a development team with a programmer that sounded like you, I'd be mortified. You don't seem to have the proper respect for the code you're writing. A good programmer fears the code he writes. Almost every line of it might come back to screw you. Your program had better be 100% bug free if you release it using this distribution model, because there is no 1.0.1 release of a worm or a virus. If you find a bug or make improvements, the versioning problems are insoluble.
Ordinarily you're right. A superconductor will set up countercurrents and expel an externally applied magetic field. This is the Meissner effect.
Unless the magnetic field intensity reaches a certain threshold. In a Type II superconductor, the field may penetrate the superconductor by organizing itself into thin "flux bundles" or vortices, each carrying a discrete amount of flux equal to h/2e. These penetrate the superconductor like millions of little needles. In fact, they arrange themselves in a regular periodic array like a 2-D lattice. And if you increase the temperature of the material enough, this "crystal" undergoes a phase transition- it "melts"- and the vortices can flow past each other like a liquid! (The "melting" point of a flux-bundle crystal is not to be confused with the superconductor's critical temperature, Tc.)
Strengthening the external field will increase the density of vortices. The conduction electrons moving through the superconductor encounter them, and the field inside them exerts a JxB force on the current. By Newton's Third Law, the vortices themselves experience an equal and opposite force, called the Lorentz force. They have some mobility, so the current effectively pushes them sideways through the superconductor. (This motion is called "creep", and it can be slowed down by superconductor impurities- since the vortices can become "pinned" to defects in the material.) But this means we have time-varying magnetic fields. By Faraday's Law we now have an induced electric field antiparallel to the current. This means the system has nonzero longitudinal dissipative resistivity- you have to exert a force to push the current through and thus the superconductivity is destroyed.
Generally this is considered a bad thing, which is why people add impurities to superconductors so that the vortices are "pinned" in place and do not move. You can make superconductors that can handle much higher currents this way.
How long until someone runs in a California gubernatorial recall election while aboard the International Space Station?
The list of candidates for this upcoming recall election was finalized yesterday, and people in space are hardly represented at all. There are 155 candidates on the ballot, so you would think that at least a few of them would be in orbit around the earth right now. But not a single one of them is currently in free fall at the moment, and in fact, not a single member of this opportunist whack-pack has ever been in space at all. In fact, the most space experience any of them has involves a starring role in a Hollywood movie set on Earth and Mars.
Davis, for his part, has never been in space either, and has a consistent record of not hiring spacemen to work for him. In fact, whatever the outcome of the recall election, one thing is certain: the future governor of California will not be running the state from orbit. Is this the kind of future we want for California? Think of the children.
There may be issues with California state law. In a transparently cynical attempt to keep the spacefaring community out of the California political process, the state may require that the candidate appear in person to sign papers registering for the ballot. The 65 signatures can be collected remotely, and the $3500 transferred by wire, so why should the signature remain as an insurmountable problem? I'm sure reasonable states like Texas allow a person to register for the ballot while in space. Other roadblocks thrown in the path of astronauts seeking to join the recall ballot include a 15-day California residency requirement. Davis supporters argue that this is simply to restrict the election to California residents. But when your orbiting spacecraft has been entering and leaving the borders of the state of California at least once a day for hundreds of days, it becomes pretty hypocritical for someone to insist that you haven't racked up your 15.
Voters are tired of "politics as usual". It's time for someone with a fresh perspective on the issues in Sacramento. From 240 miles up, moving by at 17000 miles per hour, through a little glass porthole.
I'm much more in favor of individuals making unlimited donations but no group donations at all, no NRA, no labor unions, no Greenpeace, and no Halibutron, since they can't vote, they should not be able to fund canidates, but that might get some people in a tizzy on both sides of the asile and Nader wouldn't like it either.
And no churches, handing out "voter guides" to their armies of obedient sheep. If they're going to enter the political sphere that way, they can start paying taxes like the rest of us.
Waxman likes bad science as long as it is used to support his agenda. This is all politics, and nothing more.
Exactly. Anyone who criticizes this administration has an "agenda" and that alone proves that they are not to be trusted.
Living in a police state doesn't have to be oppressive- it can be fun-pressive!
The Internet offers no anonymity. So just print out the code on a locally connected printer (not a network printer). Wait until nightfall, then go to a conspicuous area on campus that is free of security cameras. Buy a can of spray paint (NOT online- that would be stupid!) and spray the working exploit code onto a wall of a building.
Be sure to provide comments and please make sure the code compiles before you spray it.
Then go home and throw your computer into a vat of nitric acid. And that's that!
"Recently, the US Supreme Court denied his appeal, with the notion that obscenity is a state-level affair, despite the First Amendment being a Federal law."
The First Amendment is not a "Federal law", nor is it a law at all. It defines rights guaranteed to citizens which cannot be abrogated by the federal government, nor the states, nor local governments.
Except in Texas. Don't mess with Texas.
What a shame it's greater than 120 characters- you could have used it for your sig!
Oh well, I guess the Ann Coulter thing will have to do.
Of course the JVM must be a native executable for the platform on which it runs. That's a very, very different thing from saying it's written in C.
:)
I was speaking loosely. By "written in C" I meant "written in a language that is compiled to native executable code and not JVM bytecode". The actual source language is irrelevant. You can write your code in Java and compile it to a native executable if you want, but the result could still have been "written in C" as far as the person using the executable is concerned unless the source code is available to him.
Of course, there is nothing about Java as a language that makes it unsuitable for generating native executables, but naturally there is intense marketing pressure from Sun to associate Java the language as being useful only with Java the emulated platform. Although with native compilers it's quite possible to write "C programs" in Java.
The javac compiler is in Java (and can be accessed programatically at runtime on systems where javac is around). So your statement is true for the compiler.
Last I heard java.util.zip was a thin JNI wrapper around the ZLIB library. (They were talking about reimplementing in Java, but I don't know if they ever did.) So jar is mostly C except for a thin Java wrapper.
Of course the JVM itself is written in C. If it were written in Java, it would need another JVM underneath it at the machine interface layer.
There are cases involving callback mechanisms where throwing an Exception is the only appropriate way to stop some process that is not under the control of your own code. Say you're parsing an XML document, and you are only interested in the information in the header elements. An exception is a good way to stop a SAX parser from reading past the header information as it parses the file.
If you had to scan the headers of many XML documents, it might even make sense to create a workhorse SAXException for this purpose.
Everyone understands the color system. It's a pointless token measure that is useful for political leverage. It makes them look like they're doing something about terrorism and threats. "Look here, pretty colors!"
When things start looking bad, they can just notch it up a color and call it a day.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one with embarrassing stuff sitting in the Google Groups archive...
REDMOND, WASHINGTON, U.S.A., 1995 MAR 31 (NB) -- Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) Chairman Bill gates has named this "Microsoft Bob Day." Bob is the nerdy looking guy with the black plastic-frame glasses who, according to Microsoft "gives new meaning" to the computer term "user friendly"
Today is Microsoft Bob Day because it is the first day the user interface software of that name will be available in retail outlets. Microsoft hopes every IBM-compatible user in the country will welcome Microsoft Bob into their home and/or office. Bob features animated personal guides that navigate users through Bob's eight applications.
Microsoft may see Bob as a "simpler" user interface, but retailers see it as a sales tool, with several mass market retailers featuring Bob promotions. Sears stores are offering consumers the opportunity to meet Bob via exclusive "technology makeovers." Through April 30, 1995, the national chain is offering a personal consultation to help assess your level of computer knowledge and experience. The consultation is designed to show that with Microsoft Bob's help just about anyone can be a "techno-whiz."
CompUSA is so enamored with Microsoft Bob it will offer two days -- April 29 and 30 -- of Bob demos and promotions in all its retail outlets. "Bob allows us to talk to an even broader mix of customers," said Larry Mondry, CompUSA executive vice president of merchandising.
The underlying philosophy of Microsoft Bob may be "simplicity of use," but it won't run on a simple PC. As a minimum you need Windows 3.1 or higher, a 486 or higher microprocessor, eight megabytes (MB) of memory, 30MB of available hard disk space, a Super VGA 256-color monitor, and a mouse of comparable pointing device. That eliminates many of the PCs in homes and small offices that have 4MB of memory, unless the owner is willing to upgrade. If you want Bob to send your electronic-mail or pay your bills online you will also need a modem. Microsoft also calls a sound card and speakers "recommended options."
Microsoft is banking heavily on Bob's ease of use. As a result there is no manual with the software. Each user can choose one of the animated helpers Bob provides, which include a dog, a cat, "Scuz" the teenager, a parrot, and a "friendly dragon."
Microsoft Bob's opening screen is a red front door with a brass door knocker and your personal animated helper to suggest, through pointing and text messages, where you should go. Interestingly, while the guy with the friendly smile and the heavy glasses is the namesake of the program, he doesn't actually appear in the software.
The eight functions Bob brings to your home or office are a letter writer, calendar, checkbook/financial management program, household manager for managing household information, address book, e-mail, a quiz game called GeoSafari, and a financial guide that provides financial information and tips. The various programs are integrated so you can write a letter and pull in the appropriate address from the address book, then send the letter electronically via e-mail.
Bob may be a gamble for Microsoft. The company hopes users will accept the cartoonish look-and-feel of the program intended to make computing easier, but it remains to be seen if experienced computer users will be attracted to the program.
When Bill Gates introduced Microsoft Bob in January at the Consumer Electronics Show he pointed out that Bob is for both new users and users who have a computer but don't make use of it because it requires too much in the way of learning skills and pouring through manuals. "Using Bob, people will learn faster and easier and even learn more about application features they would not otherwise become familiar with," said Gates.
Bob uses a relatively new user interface technique, called a