"Let's say I have a CAPTCHA farm where I have 500 guys willing to sit all day typing in letters. I want you to come up with a system design for a service architecture using a REST-based interface where the input is an image file and I can charge $1 buck a pop by accepting POST requests from scumbags all over the Internet and routing the images to the 500 crappy web browsers I have set up in tents for these people." Then you throw the whiteboard marker over to them and watch them madly scribble boxes and clouds and stick figures.
If they do well with that question then you come at them with the followup: "OK, now say I want to lay off these 500 workers and have my service farm its work off to a distributed network of your grandmothers' compromised PCs. How would you design the messaging architecture and what sort of learning algorithm would you use?" Then maybe needle at them a bit about how the billing system works.
If your insurance company pays for it though, then they have a perfect right to see the results.
Excuse me? You paying for something doesn't mean you get to see it. You see my premium check. End of story. I paid to have people waterboarded, but I didn't get to watch the videotape.
Layering still more legislation on top of medical record privacy law is just going to add complexity to a system which is already drowning under its own administrative overhead.
When you set up a stupid system with a flawed design that's doomed to fail, you have to accept that you're going to be spending most of your time on bug fixes and patches. There's no way to clean up this mess, and just to keep it working will require additional layers of complexity to be added constantly into the foreseeable future. just to keep working.
We channel all health care costs through private insurers who are not only free to collude with providers to get better prices for themselves at the cost of the uninsured, but who can also raise rates, drop coverage, or refuse to provide coverage for any reason since they are competing with each other. If "they have a perfect right to see the results" whenever they pay for a test, then this obviously isn't going to work.
One of my wife's stupid friends is with some guy who is starting to show symptoms of Huntingtdon's disease. They're afraid to get him tested, because of the insurance.
The government thinking it can tell you what you may or may not do with your own body is much more of a problem than mere eavesdropping.
I agree with this but remember that buying and selling weed isn't the same as actually smoking it. Not in California anyway- that's right where they split hairs.
If other western countries all jump off a cliff does that mean the US government should jump off the white house roof?
If all the other Western nations are jumping off a cliff, you'd think that would be a clue, hmmm, maybe there's a reason why they're jumping off that cliff. But noooo, we have to be different and jump off the White House.
Except that preventing someone from buying weed isn't quite the same as listening in on their phone calls and reading their mail without a warrant.
Now if the Fourth Amendment had only protected the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, rolling papers, and effects... well actually you'd need more than mere Constitutional Amendments to safeguard your right to inhale sticky bud around here. A chapter in Leviticus might do the trick.
Well? Well what? You're listening to my phone calls and it's not a secret. I told you, you're not allowed to sue me unless you know my secret. But I do! No you don't. I DO! No you don't. Look, I don't want you spying on me. Well, that's a secret. Aha. If it's a secret, I must be a terrorist, so it's not a secret anymore! I got you! No you haven't. Yes I have. If it's an official government secret that you're spying on me, I must be a terrorist. Not necessarily. I could be listening to your phone calls in my spare time.
Actually, the classified hardware/software will burn up on reentry. Their more concerned about the full tank of hydrazine that would survive a normal reentry and create a hazardous materials nightmare near a populated area.
That's certainly believable if you can take Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey at his word:
Yesterday, Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey said the satellite's tank full of hydrazine rocket propellant was the main reason the military was planning to blast the orbiter. There's a small but real risk that the hydrazine tank could rupture, releasing a "toxic gas" over a "populated area," causing a "risk to human life."
Apparently man-made objects containing hydrazine propellant frequently rain down from the sky without incident, according to rocket scientists and space security experts who "scoff" at this rationale. And Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright doesn't seem too impressed either. But surely our Deputy National Security Advisor knows something about hydrazine that we don't.
Now who is this man James Jeffrey, you may ask?
It took more than two months, but the White House has finally found a new deputy national security adviser. And in the end, the administration didn't have to look very far. President Bush will appoint Ambassador James Jeffrey, a high-level State Department official who coordinates its Iran policy, according to people familiar with the matter. Jeffrey's appointment will be made later today, these people said. In his new post, Jeffrey will be National Security Adviser Steve Hadley's No. 2 and run most of the day-to-day operations of the National Security Council. The administration's new war czar, Deputy National Security Adviser Army Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, will take part in regular deputy's meetings chaired by Jeffrey. Jeffrey, a blunt-spoken and often-profane diplomat, will replace J.D. Crouch, an architect of the administration's controversial Iraq surge who resigned in May. Jeffrey has spent more time in Iraq than any other senior administration official. Prior to assuming his State Department post, he was the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from June 2004 to March 2005, and as U.S. charge d'affaires to Iraq from March to June 2005. A colleague of Jeffrey's said that the White House would likely prove to be a better fit than the State Department had been. The colleague noted that Jeffrey is a staunch neoconservative, which left him often sharply at odds with other high-level State Department officials. Most of the neocons who once populated the administration left their posts in recent years as the Iraq war went off the skids. At the White House, though, Jeffrey will be able to work closely with two of the other surviving neocons: Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams and David Wurmser, one of Vice President Dick Cheney's top foreign policy staffers.
Source: Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2007, four months before the information in the Iran NIE would be exposed, having been known to the White House since 2006.
You're going to see a lot of very tiny coal-fired power plants integrated on a single square chip 5 mm to a side. You scratch a pencil across and it heats up and starts emitting thousands of tiny wisps of sulfur dioxide. I'm going to use them on camping trips as battery chargers.
A few years ago I got the idea to write code that fed massive scene files into POV-Ray. There are probably better tools nowadays but POV-Ray had the virtue of a simple scene description language that I was already familiar with. It's easy to create code to generate it.
I made a heart out of the sextic (huhhuhhuhhuh) polynomial
(2xx+2yy+zz-1)^3 - xxzzz/10 - yyzzz = 0
and had POV-Ray create a bunch of scene files by rotating this thing through 180 degrees to create an animated heart GIF. (This was back in the Dark Ages when the web was full of animated GIFs.) There were probably a thousand other animated hearts out there but this one was mine.
I got the idea to do space filling of the unit sphere with thousands and thousands of small boxes or smaller spheres, playing around with the lighting to see if I could create something vaguely moonlike with inside-out craters. I tried doing this with thousands of hearts but got bitten in the ass by a bug in POV-Ray's polynomial rendering code where it trips over a planar singularity in the heart equation, so every little heart ends up with an unromantic slit running across its equator. There were just too many to fix by hand.
The most interesting image from this technique came from a routine that recursively generated spheres, invoking itself six times per sphere to create smaller spheres on the top, bottom, left, right, front, and back, each of which then does the same thing, to a depth of 5 or 6. You end up with a Sierpinski octahedron.
All this stuff has been done to death by others. I wish I were good at drawing comics.
Basically it seems they've discovered that islanders who make boats with holes in the bottom don't show up at surrounding islands to tell everyone how great their boats are.
This has implications for today's modern global culture too. Aliens on other planets won't be greeted by humans arriving in spaceships to tell them about their own dandy ideas.
Please note first of all that I am not the submitter of this article- I just saw it now. But something like this happened to me a few months ago with an order that I placed on Amazon. I did get an email within a few days alerting me of the cancellation although my attempt to get further information was unsuccessful.
Where's the screenshot of the item being offered for $31? Where's the printout of the placed order?
Since I am not in the habit of taking product page screenshots whenever I order things from Amazon, I can't provide a screenshot of the item being offered at the price I saw when I ordered it. However I can give you screenshots of my email exchanges with Amazon:
The original order confirmation dated November 29. The cancellation email that arrived two days later. I sent them an email in an attempt to follow up on this, which probably went in the bit bucket. The order history for my account. Notice that no trace of the canceled order remains in my account history. I bought my mother a sweater in October, and myself an LCD monitor in January, and nothing appears in between. I don't really know whether cancellations are actually retained in one's account history, and I'm not inclined to order something and cancel it just to find out, but it struck me as a little weird.
You are aware that companies don't have to honor prices that are obvious misprints, right? (And that a 75-CD limited edition import CD set being sold for $31 is an obivous misprint, right?)
I don't know for sure whether the article submitter is in the United States or not, or if this was a U.S. based transaction at all, and I am not a lawyer. But I did consult one in a nonofficial capacity who told me that regardless of misprints, in the United States what Amazon did in my case was a violation of federal law. I didn't pursue the matter since the price really was a steal and I'd be too embarrassed to make a fuss about it.
Man, next time I have a beef with some company, remind me to completely make some shit up about them and post it as an article here on Slashdot. I'm usually not one to gripe about the job the editorial staff does here, but you guys really drop the ball in a major way on this one. Whether you like Amazon.com or not, with nothing to back it up, this borders on outright libel.
Say what you want about the correctness of Amazon's cancellation policy, but I see no reason to doubt this story.
If there's only two parties than one party always will be too powerful. If on the other hand there were truly more parties (forget about the marginal parties that exist), then they would be forced to compromise, something that has been lacking for (at least) the last seven years.
I read this on Slashdot all the time. All the time. We need more parties! Yes, they would be nice. However this isn't going to happen. And you can't blame the two parties themselves for this (not both of them, anyway) because of the way the U.S. Constitution is constructed. This is really the Constitution's fault.
The Constitution does not explicitly mandate a two party system, but it sets up an electoral system using proportional representation, in which a district is represented by whoever wins a plurality of votes. A two-party political system will naturally emerge from this as a mathematical certainty. Straight out of game theory.
Let's say we have three parties here, the A Party, the B Party, and the C Party. Your district holds an election with candidates A, B, and C. Candidate A gets 30,000 votes, candidate B gets 20,000, and candidate C gets 20,000. Who goes to Washington to represent you? Candidate A.
Generally in a 3+ party system, one party will be far more distinctive (crazy) than the other two- of all three, it holds positions that are the furthest from those which are desired by the public at large. If this party is B or C, and A won, then we have no problem- candidate A is your representative, and mostly represents the majority opinion (A voters + B voters, or A voters + C voters). If the "distinctive" party is A, we have a disaster. Because the majority of voters in the district split their votes across two parties, they lost the representation that they chose.
Since most people who would vote for B or C will realize this (fearing that A might win), there is no way to balance this seesaw- the three-party situation is inherently unstable. The non-A people will panic and they generally all run to B, or all run to C, whichever one looks like a more likely win. And the result is a political system in which you don't vote for the candidate you prefer- you vote against the one you fear. Hence two parties.
In a parliamentary system, your district might send 7 guys to the capital- three from A, two from B, and two from C. Let's say the B party and the C party are much more politically aligned with each other than they are with A. They can cut deals and make compromises, so that the will of the majority of voters (on the issues where they agree) are generally well represented, even if parties B and C individually failed to win a plurality of votes. They together won a majority, which is what really matters.
The Constitution enjoys an undeservedly good reputation, mostly because of its Amendments that allegedly let us own guns, shoot off our mouths, and be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects. These are the parts we usually think of and speak fondly about. But these could be tacked on to any Constitution, even one that sucks as much as ours. And whatever else you can say about Bush, it's clear that he's done an excellent QA job on this thing and the structural deficiencies within it now lay fully exposed for all to see. If he can leverage plurality support among the public to get majority support in Congress, and can appoint judges of his choosing to lifetime positions, one psychotic man can effectively end the rule of law- giving us a virtual dictatorship that nevertheless operates within the structure of a representative democracy.
I know you're all like "bullshit!" by now but this exists in nature. Ever heard of a tornado? It would be kinda like how a tornado gets so much energy. There are opposing forces caused by air pressure that should just about cancel each other out and do nothing. But the energy of Earth turning and air's resistance to turning with Earth because of its gaseous state combined with the fact that the inertia isn't in a straight line causes more rotational energy in the opposite direction than would be exerted if Earth wasn't there. The air draws power from the Earth's rotation by resisting wanting to turn with Earth, just like I mentioned how a generator could work.
None of this makes any sense. You're confusing energy with momentum. Air simply doesn't have "resistance to turning with Earth because of its gaseous state" and has no problem turning with the Earth.
These storms get their energy from the sun. In the more straightforward case of a hurricane, the sun is causing northward/southward movement by heating air at equatorial latitudes (and charging it with water vapor) more than the air closer to the poles (which stays cooler and drier). Due to the increased pressure the equatorial air moves toward the poles, and displaces colder air which moves toward the equator. (The water's heat of fusion helps maintain the pressure gradient by buffering thermal energy- it continues to heat the wet air as it moves poleward, and keeps the dry air cool as it crosses warm water which vaporizes and robs it of its heat.) The "Coriolis force" appears to cause circular motion, but it's a false force that's an artifact of the rotating coordinate system we like to use. In a non-rotating coordinate system, the air is retaining the linear easterly momentum that it had at the equator, so when it reaches higher latitudes it appears to be moving east, and the air that reaches the equator is now moving westward there simply because it had less easterly momentum to start with. Note that the Coriolis "force" does no work here since it applies itself in a perpendicular direction to the air's movement so the dot product is zero. Gravity, a real force, is doing no work here either for the same reason- even though it flips the sign of all linear momenta every 12 hours. All the work is being done by the pressure gradient.
The net effect is that the storm has had solar energy injected into it, which enables it to extract angular momentum from the Earth's rotation. When it reaches land and throws your stuff around, the Earth gets all its angular momentum back since the wind and debris is moving sideways with respect to the ground. The energy is dissipated in all the collisions into the form of heat, but the system's total angular momentum never changes.
Tornadoes are a bit more convoluted but essentially work the same way. Just like when I stir my coffee. I borrow angular momentum from the earth, with energy that originally came from the sun via the food I ate. As my coffee slows down, the earth gets its angular momentum back (transferred through the mug, through the table, and into the ground) and the energy I put into the coffee heats it and the mug it's in a tiny little bit. That energy came from the sun, not from the earth's rotation. I can't "draw power from the Earth's rotation" to stir my coffee unless I somehow hook my stirrer up to tides crashing at the beach. Those DO extract potentially useful energy from the angular momentum in the Earth-Moon system, since the Moon is available as an anchor and momentum can be dumped into it until the Earth and Moon eventually become tidally locked- analogous to the situation when a hurricane, tornado, or coffee stir is finally dissipated. At that point the angular momentum will be useless for extracting further energy.
Basically, you can't stick a generator axle into the North Pole and generate electricity by spinning the rotor. You have nothing to anchor the stator against.
To ensure the profitability of existing power generation schemes, the government would pay you more not to generate electricity than the revenue you could extract by operating such a device and selling the electricity on the open market. All perpetual motion machines have this problem.
I had to upgrade from Acrobat Reader 6 to 7 at work, more than a year ago. My memory is hazy and repressed but this is what I seem to remember.
First you downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0. It rebooted the computer. Then 7.0 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.1. Then it rebooted the computer. Then 7.0.1 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.2. Then it rebooted the computer. Then 7.0.2 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.3. Then it rebooted the computer. Then 7.0.3 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.4. Then it rebooted the computer.
My current laptop has 7.0.4. Before I attempt to upgrade to 8.1.2, maybe one of you can let me know if my prediction is right:
First you download the upgrade installer for 8.0. Then it reboots the computer. Then 8.0 starts up, and downloads the upgrade installer for 8.1. Then it reboots the computer. Then 8.1 starts up, and downloads the upgrade installer for 8.1.1. Then it reboots the computer. Then 8.1.1 starts up, and downloads the upgrade installer for 8.1.2. Then it reboots the computer and congratulations, you can safely surf the web without someone turning off your antivirus using a hole in Adobe Acrobat Reader!
At least what little code I've written to process HTML/XML has always entirely ignored the DTD.
Don't be so sure- even if your own code ignores it. Unless you're dealing with it on a raw character level, with most XML libraries and frameworks it can be quite tricky to prevent DTDs from being resolved behind your back.
I wrote some Java code a while back to parse some XML files that were downloaded from NCBI. Typical for NCBI data, this involved wading through terabytes of crap, and anything based on DOM wasn't going to work- so I used the lower level event-based SAX library in JAXP. The files did have DTD declarations in them pointing to NCBI, which I wanted to ignore, since this was a one-time data mining operation. I just examined some sample files, figured out pseudo-XPath expressions for what I wanted to pull out, set up a simple state machine to stumble through the SAX events, and not caring about the DTD, cleared the namespace-aware and validating flags on the SAXParserFactory. So I ended up with this:
File xmlgz = new File("ncbi_diarrhea.xml.gz"); DefaultHandler myHandler = new MyNCBIStateMachineHandler(); GZIPInputStream gzos = new GZIPInputStream(new FileInputStream(xmlgz)); SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance(); spf.setValidating(false); spf.setNamespaceAware(false); SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser(); InputSource input = new InputSource(gzos); sp.parse(input, handler);
This ran fine, until it mysteriously froze up 18 hours into the run. It turned out to be caused by our switch to a different ISP, during which time the building lost its outside network access. The thread picked up the next file and immediately got blocked in the SAX library, trying to resolve the NCBI DTD.
Now I'm sure someone is going to come on here calling me a noob for not knowing to use an XMLReaderFactory (or whatever XML API class isn't obsolete this week) and setting a custom EntityResolver that can provide my local copy of the NCBI DTD when presented with its URI, but why should I even have to bother with that? XML pretends to be simple but it's seriously messed up.
...what could the FBI do to make it's spy ware different from anything else out there in the wild? It would seem to me they would limited to the same techniques anyone can use on a computer, so really wouldn't it be just one more obnoxious program out there?
If you travel, they are not restricted to attacks over networks- they can legally get physical access to your machine, which is not a technique just anyone can use.
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's calls had been erased. A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself. Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had "a security concern" with her. "I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight," she said.
However I am sure there methods of getting it installed are probably a little more sophisticated than most users are used to dealing with...
Or maybe not:
"I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days," said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. With ACTE's help, she pressed for relief. More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation.
If they have sole physical access to your computer for 10 or 15 days, it's trivial for them to install all the spyware they want.
ACTE last year filed a Freedom of Information Act request to press the government for information on what happens to data seized from laptops and other electronic devices. "Is it destroyed right then and there if the person is in fact just a regular business traveler?" Gurley asked. "People are quite concerned. They don't want proprietary business information floating, not knowing where it has landed or where it is going. It increases the anxiety level." Udy has changed all her work passwords and no longer banks online. Her company, Radius, has tightened its data policies so that traveling employees must access company information remotely via an encrypted channel, and their laptops must contain no company information.
And they're building a "social network" of their own:
Kamran Habib, a software engineer with Cisco Systems, has had his laptop and cellphone searched three times in the past year. Once, in San Francisco, an officer "went through every number and text message on my cellphone and took out my SIM card in the back," said Habib, a permanent U.S. resident. "So now, every time I travel, I basically clean out my phone. It's better for me to keep my colleagues and friends safe than to get them on the list as well."
Since they can turn your cellphone into a remote listening device at any time, this guy should take the battery out too.
I met a hot chick at a party recently, and I made out with her in the back seat of my car in the parking lot outside. Since then, my wife has nixed the relationship, but I would like to share the pictures and video online with the greater community. The easy part is cleaning them up in Photoshop and applying a Gaussian blur to my stomach and the pimples on the girl's butt. The hard part is making sure that my wife will not kill me if I post them. I might suggest to her that all her lady friends would be jealous of her if they could see my hot body and my superior lovemaking skills in action, but so far I haven't been able to convince her. Has anyone else been in this boat or can refer me to some legal documentation that may help out?
Slashdot Mirror
"Let's say I have a CAPTCHA farm where I have 500 guys willing to sit all day typing in letters. I want you to come up with a system design for a service architecture using a REST-based interface where the input is an image file and I can charge $1 buck a pop by accepting POST requests from scumbags all over the Internet and routing the images to the 500 crappy web browsers I have set up in tents for these people." Then you throw the whiteboard marker over to them and watch them madly scribble boxes and clouds and stick figures.
If they do well with that question then you come at them with the followup: "OK, now say I want to lay off these 500 workers and have my service farm its work off to a distributed network of your grandmothers' compromised PCs. How would you design the messaging architecture and what sort of learning algorithm would you use?" Then maybe needle at them a bit about how the billing system works.
There, I corrected that for you. Bush, like anyone else still afraid of "terrorists", is a huge pussy.
That's a lie. George Bush has never feared terrorists.
He just encourages the rest of you fear them, so he gets the power he needs to do Good Things for America.
If your insurance company pays for it though, then they have a perfect right to see the results.
Excuse me? You paying for something doesn't mean you get to see it. You see my premium check. End of story. I paid to have people waterboarded, but I didn't get to watch the videotape.
Layering still more legislation on top of medical record privacy law is just going to add complexity to a system which is already drowning under its own administrative overhead.
When you set up a stupid system with a flawed design that's doomed to fail, you have to accept that you're going to be spending most of your time on bug fixes and patches. There's no way to clean up this mess, and just to keep it working will require additional layers of complexity to be added constantly into the foreseeable future. just to keep working.
We channel all health care costs through private insurers who are not only free to collude with providers to get better prices for themselves at the cost of the uninsured, but who can also raise rates, drop coverage, or refuse to provide coverage for any reason since they are competing with each other. If "they have a perfect right to see the results" whenever they pay for a test, then this obviously isn't going to work.
One of my wife's stupid friends is with some guy who is starting to show symptoms of Huntingtdon's disease. They're afraid to get him tested, because of the insurance.
The government thinking it can tell you what you may or may not do with your own body is much more of a problem than mere eavesdropping.
I agree with this but remember that buying and selling weed isn't the same as actually smoking it. Not in California anyway- that's right where they split hairs.
If other western countries all jump off a cliff does that mean the US government should jump off the white house roof?
If all the other Western nations are jumping off a cliff, you'd think that would be a clue, hmmm, maybe there's a reason why they're jumping off that cliff.
But noooo, we have to be different and jump off the White House.
Except that preventing someone from buying weed isn't quite the same as listening in on their phone calls and reading their mail without a warrant.
Now if the Fourth Amendment had only protected the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, rolling papers, and effects... well actually you'd need more than mere Constitutional Amendments to safeguard your right to inhale sticky bud around here. A chapter in Leviticus might do the trick.
Well?
Well what?
You're listening to my phone calls and it's not a secret.
I told you, you're not allowed to sue me unless you know my secret.
But I do!
No you don't.
I DO!
No you don't.
Look, I don't want you spying on me.
Well, that's a secret.
Aha. If it's a secret, I must be a terrorist, so it's not a secret anymore! I got you!
No you haven't.
Yes I have. If it's an official government secret that you're spying on me, I must be a terrorist.
Not necessarily. I could be listening to your phone calls in my spare time.
If you can sue us, we'll let you know, unless we consider that to be a secret.
That's certainly believable if you can take Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey at his word:Apparently man-made objects containing hydrazine propellant frequently rain down from the sky without incident, according to rocket scientists and space security experts who "scoff" at this rationale. And Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright doesn't seem too impressed either. But surely our Deputy National Security Advisor knows something about hydrazine that we don't.
Now who is this man James Jeffrey, you may ask?Source: Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2007, four months before the information in the Iran NIE would be exposed, having been known to the White House since 2006.
This guy sounds totally not full of shit at all!
You're going to see a lot of very tiny coal-fired power plants integrated on a single square chip 5 mm to a side. You scratch a pencil across and it heats up and starts emitting thousands of tiny wisps of sulfur dioxide. I'm going to use them on camping trips as battery chargers.
But Great Britain is allowed to let up to 5 other countries copy its law.
A few years ago I got the idea to write code that fed massive scene files into POV-Ray. There are probably better tools nowadays but POV-Ray had the virtue of a simple scene description language that I was already familiar with. It's easy to create code to generate it.
I made a heart out of the sextic (huhhuhhuhhuh) polynomial
(2xx+2yy+zz-1)^3 - xxzzz/10 - yyzzz = 0
and had POV-Ray create a bunch of scene files by rotating this thing through 180 degrees to create an animated heart GIF. (This was back in the Dark Ages when the web was full of animated GIFs.) There were probably a thousand other animated hearts out there but this one was mine.
I got the idea to do space filling of the unit sphere with thousands and thousands of small boxes or smaller spheres, playing around with the lighting to see if I could create something vaguely moonlike with inside-out craters. I tried doing this with thousands of hearts but got bitten in the ass by a bug in POV-Ray's polynomial rendering code where it trips over a planar singularity in the heart equation, so every little heart ends up with an unromantic slit running across its equator. There were just too many to fix by hand.
The most interesting image from this technique came from a routine that recursively generated spheres, invoking itself six times per sphere to create smaller spheres on the top, bottom, left, right, front, and back, each of which then does the same thing, to a depth of 5 or 6. You end up with a Sierpinski octahedron.
All this stuff has been done to death by others. I wish I were good at drawing comics.
Basically it seems they've discovered that islanders who make boats with holes in the bottom don't show up at surrounding islands to tell everyone how great their boats are.
This has implications for today's modern global culture too. Aliens on other planets won't be greeted by humans arriving in spaceships to tell them about their own dandy ideas.
All right! My original anti-FUSSP form racks up yet another spoof!
Please note first of all that I am not the submitter of this article- I just saw it now. But something like this happened to me a few months ago with an order that I placed on Amazon. I did get an email within a few days alerting me of the cancellation although my attempt to get further information was unsuccessful.
Where's the screenshot of the item being offered for $31? Where's the printout of the placed order?
Since I am not in the habit of taking product page screenshots whenever I order things from Amazon, I can't provide a screenshot of the item being offered at the price I saw when I ordered it. However I can give you screenshots of my email exchanges with Amazon:
The original order confirmation dated November 29.
The cancellation email that arrived two days later. I sent them an email in an attempt to follow up on this, which probably went in the bit bucket.
The order history for my account. Notice that no trace of the canceled order remains in my account history. I bought my mother a sweater in October, and myself an LCD monitor in January, and nothing appears in between. I don't really know whether cancellations are actually retained in one's account history, and I'm not inclined to order something and cancel it just to find out, but it struck me as a little weird.
You are aware that companies don't have to honor prices that are obvious misprints, right? (And that a 75-CD limited edition import CD set being sold for $31 is an obivous misprint, right?)
I don't know for sure whether the article submitter is in the United States or not, or if this was a U.S. based transaction at all, and I am not a lawyer. But I did consult one in a nonofficial capacity who told me that regardless of misprints, in the United States what Amazon did in my case was a violation of federal law. I didn't pursue the matter since the price really was a steal and I'd be too embarrassed to make a fuss about it.
Man, next time I have a beef with some company, remind me to completely make some shit up about them and post it as an article here on Slashdot. I'm usually not one to gripe about the job the editorial staff does here, but you guys really drop the ball in a major way on this one. Whether you like Amazon.com or not, with nothing to back it up, this borders on outright libel.
Say what you want about the correctness of Amazon's cancellation policy, but I see no reason to doubt this story.
If there's only two parties than one party always will be too powerful. If on the other hand there were truly more parties (forget about the marginal parties that exist), then they would be forced to compromise, something that has been lacking for (at least) the last seven years.
I read this on Slashdot all the time. All the time. We need more parties! Yes, they would be nice. However this isn't going to happen. And you can't blame the two parties themselves for this (not both of them, anyway) because of the way the U.S. Constitution is constructed. This is really the Constitution's fault.
The Constitution does not explicitly mandate a two party system, but it sets up an electoral system using proportional representation, in which a district is represented by whoever wins a plurality of votes. A two-party political system will naturally emerge from this as a mathematical certainty. Straight out of game theory.
Let's say we have three parties here, the A Party, the B Party, and the C Party. Your district holds an election with candidates A, B, and C. Candidate A gets 30,000 votes, candidate B gets 20,000, and candidate C gets 20,000. Who goes to Washington to represent you? Candidate A.
Generally in a 3+ party system, one party will be far more distinctive (crazy) than the other two- of all three, it holds positions that are the furthest from those which are desired by the public at large. If this party is B or C, and A won, then we have no problem- candidate A is your representative, and mostly represents the majority opinion (A voters + B voters, or A voters + C voters). If the "distinctive" party is A, we have a disaster. Because the majority of voters in the district split their votes across two parties, they lost the representation that they chose.
Since most people who would vote for B or C will realize this (fearing that A might win), there is no way to balance this seesaw- the three-party situation is inherently unstable. The non-A people will panic and they generally all run to B, or all run to C, whichever one looks like a more likely win. And the result is a political system in which you don't vote for the candidate you prefer- you vote against the one you fear. Hence two parties.
In a parliamentary system, your district might send 7 guys to the capital- three from A, two from B, and two from C. Let's say the B party and the C party are much more politically aligned with each other than they are with A. They can cut deals and make compromises, so that the will of the majority of voters (on the issues where they agree) are generally well represented, even if parties B and C individually failed to win a plurality of votes. They together won a majority, which is what really matters.
The Constitution enjoys an undeservedly good reputation, mostly because of its Amendments that allegedly let us own guns, shoot off our mouths, and be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects. These are the parts we usually think of and speak fondly about. But these could be tacked on to any Constitution, even one that sucks as much as ours. And whatever else you can say about Bush, it's clear that he's done an excellent QA job on this thing and the structural deficiencies within it now lay fully exposed for all to see. If he can leverage plurality support among the public to get majority support in Congress, and can appoint judges of his choosing to lifetime positions, one psychotic man can effectively end the rule of law- giving us a virtual dictatorship that nevertheless operates within the structure of a representative democracy.
I would love to see what happens with slave Reparations if he wins.
If there's one thing that's been keeping me up at night for the past eight years, it's slave reparations.
I know you're all like "bullshit!" by now but this exists in nature. Ever heard of a tornado? It would be kinda like how a tornado gets so much energy. There are opposing forces caused by air pressure that should just about cancel each other out and do nothing. But the energy of Earth turning and air's resistance to turning with Earth because of its gaseous state combined with the fact that the inertia isn't in a straight line causes more rotational energy in the opposite direction than would be exerted if Earth wasn't there. The air draws power from the Earth's rotation by resisting wanting to turn with Earth, just like I mentioned how a generator could work.
None of this makes any sense. You're confusing energy with momentum. Air simply doesn't have "resistance to turning with Earth because of its gaseous state" and has no problem turning with the Earth.
These storms get their energy from the sun. In the more straightforward case of a hurricane, the sun is causing northward/southward movement by heating air at equatorial latitudes (and charging it with water vapor) more than the air closer to the poles (which stays cooler and drier). Due to the increased pressure the equatorial air moves toward the poles, and displaces colder air which moves toward the equator. (The water's heat of fusion helps maintain the pressure gradient by buffering thermal energy- it continues to heat the wet air as it moves poleward, and keeps the dry air cool as it crosses warm water which vaporizes and robs it of its heat.) The "Coriolis force" appears to cause circular motion, but it's a false force that's an artifact of the rotating coordinate system we like to use. In a non-rotating coordinate system, the air is retaining the linear easterly momentum that it had at the equator, so when it reaches higher latitudes it appears to be moving east, and the air that reaches the equator is now moving westward there simply because it had less easterly momentum to start with. Note that the Coriolis "force" does no work here since it applies itself in a perpendicular direction to the air's movement so the dot product is zero. Gravity, a real force, is doing no work here either for the same reason- even though it flips the sign of all linear momenta every 12 hours. All the work is being done by the pressure gradient.
The net effect is that the storm has had solar energy injected into it, which enables it to extract angular momentum from the Earth's rotation. When it reaches land and throws your stuff around, the Earth gets all its angular momentum back since the wind and debris is moving sideways with respect to the ground. The energy is dissipated in all the collisions into the form of heat, but the system's total angular momentum never changes.
Tornadoes are a bit more convoluted but essentially work the same way. Just like when I stir my coffee. I borrow angular momentum from the earth, with energy that originally came from the sun via the food I ate. As my coffee slows down, the earth gets its angular momentum back (transferred through the mug, through the table, and into the ground) and the energy I put into the coffee heats it and the mug it's in a tiny little bit. That energy came from the sun, not from the earth's rotation. I can't "draw power from the Earth's rotation" to stir my coffee unless I somehow hook my stirrer up to tides crashing at the beach. Those DO extract potentially useful energy from the angular momentum in the Earth-Moon system, since the Moon is available as an anchor and momentum can be dumped into it until the Earth and Moon eventually become tidally locked- analogous to the situation when a hurricane, tornado, or coffee stir is finally dissipated. At that point the angular momentum will be useless for extracting further energy.
Basically, you can't stick a generator axle into the North Pole and generate electricity by spinning the rotor. You have nothing to anchor the stator against.
To ensure the profitability of existing power generation schemes, the government would pay you more not to generate electricity than the revenue you could extract by operating such a device and selling the electricity on the open market. All perpetual motion machines have this problem.
Never mind, I just did the upgrade and it seems they must have fired the clowns who wrote the installers for 7.
I had to upgrade from Acrobat Reader 6 to 7 at work, more than a year ago. My memory is hazy and repressed but this is what I seem to remember.
First you downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0. It rebooted the computer. Then 7.0 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.1. Then it rebooted the computer. Then 7.0.1 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.2. Then it rebooted the computer. Then 7.0.2 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.3. Then it rebooted the computer. Then 7.0.3 started up, and downloaded the upgrade installer for 7.0.4. Then it rebooted the computer.
My current laptop has 7.0.4. Before I attempt to upgrade to 8.1.2, maybe one of you can let me know if my prediction is right:
First you download the upgrade installer for 8.0. Then it reboots the computer. Then 8.0 starts up, and downloads the upgrade installer for 8.1. Then it reboots the computer. Then 8.1 starts up, and downloads the upgrade installer for 8.1.1. Then it reboots the computer. Then 8.1.1 starts up, and downloads the upgrade installer for 8.1.2. Then it reboots the computer and congratulations, you can safely surf the web without someone turning off your antivirus using a hole in Adobe Acrobat Reader!
I can barely wait to get started.
At least what little code I've written to process HTML/XML has always entirely ignored the DTD.
Don't be so sure- even if your own code ignores it. Unless you're dealing with it on a raw character level, with most XML libraries and frameworks it can be quite tricky to prevent DTDs from being resolved behind your back.
I wrote some Java code a while back to parse some XML files that were downloaded from NCBI. Typical for NCBI data, this involved wading through terabytes of crap, and anything based on DOM wasn't going to work- so I used the lower level event-based SAX library in JAXP. The files did have DTD declarations in them pointing to NCBI, which I wanted to ignore, since this was a one-time data mining operation. I just examined some sample files, figured out pseudo-XPath expressions for what I wanted to pull out, set up a simple state machine to stumble through the SAX events, and not caring about the DTD, cleared the namespace-aware and validating flags on the SAXParserFactory. So I ended up with this:
File xmlgz = new File("ncbi_diarrhea.xml.gz");
DefaultHandler myHandler = new MyNCBIStateMachineHandler();
GZIPInputStream gzos = new GZIPInputStream(new FileInputStream(xmlgz));
SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
spf.setValidating(false);
spf.setNamespaceAware(false);
SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();
InputSource input = new InputSource(gzos);
sp.parse(input, handler);
This ran fine, until it mysteriously froze up 18 hours into the run. It turned out to be caused by our switch to a different ISP, during which time the building lost its outside network access. The thread picked up the next file and immediately got blocked in the SAX library, trying to resolve the NCBI DTD.
This is how I fixed it:
spf.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/external-general-entities", false);
spf.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/external-parameter-entities", false);
Now I'm sure someone is going to come on here calling me a noob for not knowing to use an XMLReaderFactory (or whatever XML API class isn't obsolete this week) and setting a custom EntityResolver that can provide my local copy of the NCBI DTD when presented with its URI, but why should I even have to bother with that? XML pretends to be simple but it's seriously messed up.
If you travel, they are not restricted to attacks over networks- they can legally get physical access to your machine, which is not a technique just anyone can use. However I am sure there methods of getting it installed are probably a little more sophisticated than most users are used to dealing with...
Or maybe not:If they have sole physical access to your computer for 10 or 15 days, it's trivial for them to install all the spyware they want.And they're building a "social network" of their own:Since they can turn your cellphone into a remote listening device at any time, this guy should take the battery out too.
Google
I met a hot chick at a party recently, and I made out with her in the back seat of my car in the parking lot outside. Since then, my wife has nixed the relationship, but I would like to share the pictures and video online with the greater community. The easy part is cleaning them up in Photoshop and applying a Gaussian blur to my stomach and the pimples on the girl's butt. The hard part is making sure that my wife will not kill me if I post them. I might suggest to her that all her lady friends would be jealous of her if they could see my hot body and my superior lovemaking skills in action, but so far I haven't been able to convince her. Has anyone else been in this boat or can refer me to some legal documentation that may help out?