It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.
Which is why IMHO the next big wave of innovation will start when technology is developed to improve human collaboration by orders of magnitude. No, I do not mean the internet, groupware,.... . They all help but are lacking the "order of magnitude". Something cyberwarish would be more like it.
You should maybe start to wonder, where those 7% are payed from. Due to TANSTAAFL your local credit union must be in some high risk operation for earning that interest.
Yet it shows nicely how markets and some financial institutions are willing to bend the rules for their mutual gain to the detriement of a third party: the common public.
So in the lingo, an unhedged risk is the one where only one bank has egg on its face, and a hedged risk is where every fucking bank has egg on its face, and greater society picks up the tab.
This is the general problem with short-term speculation. It is a (near) zero-sum game (the near due to possible arbitrage gains from providing liquidity for long-term trades). Yet for years banks have posted record gains out of it. That money had to come from somewhere. It came out of the coffers of the financial institutes which had to be saved by governments in the last financial crisis.
And had UBS lost not only 2 but say 20 billions, it would too have to be saved (again) by the Swiss government. Yet the 20 billions would have turned up on several people's bonus/dividend slip.
You're obviously going to get two people who haven't cheated or read each others papers coming up with essentially the same paper every now and then
Not unless the papers are really short. Otherwise even the only finite number of variations will be large enough to spread random matches with other papers to individual sentences. But that is not a problem. I doubt an instructor would believe a student read 60 papers on the same topic just to swipe one or two random sentences from each. But if central ideas including supportive reasoning seem to match not only from the idea but also the sentence perspective, the probability for random occurrence is quite low.
Hmm, seems to be a bit more complicated. At least in the vodafone net itself (DSL from Arcor/Vodafone).
--- snip --- $ nslookup > set type=ns > theregister.co.uk Server: 192.168.0.1 [The nameserver on the DSL router which forwards to vodafones DNS servers] Address: 192.168.0.1#53
I do not deny that the word "mined" appears in the article (after "studied" BTW). But there is a small difference between
"The Chinese" [people or government]
"Want" [seriously intend to do]
"capture....and mine" [sounds like near future and a good deal] to
"Two Chinese"
"propose a scheme in a scientific paper(?)"
"to wait 37 years and then to capture an object 10 meters across (yielding about 500 m^3 or a block of ca. 8m edge length of whatever is in the asteroid).
How did
Two Chinese scientists propose to nudge a ten-meter asteroid nearing earth in 2049 into an earth orbit transform into
"The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it" ?
I think the question is more on why Firefox all of a sudden needs constant API breakage.
Picture yourself working on a software with a multi-million (probably tens of million) user base. Lots of external developers depending on the API (you proudly presented years ago). Your new boss comes in saying: "Hey guys, I heard about this bazar vs. Cathedral thing and the spiral software engineering model. Let's go to a monthly release schedule. All APIs are unfrozen. And get some UI designers. I want a new look in every version until we find the ultimate one." Do you a) Say "Yes boss. Will be done immediatly" b) Propose a fork to do all the explorative work and, once it stabilizes in a year or so, convince people to move over.
It seems Firefox choose a) thinking it saves them the "winning over" after a year but which will actually loose a lot of people in that time or have people stop caring about updates.
BTW, since Firefox didn't branch, a lot of people (including me on all non-security relevant systems) seemingly did it on their own as the still large share of 3.6 Firefox users show.
There see to be some problems with understanding civil disobedience in the above posting
Why stop at keeping me from getting to work and contributing to society?
People have every right to keep you from getting to work.... if they are willing to bear the consequences. In this case that could e.g. be a short detainment by police (carrying people of the station) and a civil penalty [correct word?] for breach of domestic peace [another word looked up in the dictionary] or similar. Expect the police to take a few hours to clear the area and the courts to take weeks to months to get through all the cases. That's the basic idea of civil disobedience: Flood the system beyond its capacity so policy changes might be easier than constantly fighting protestors.
You could push me in the mud, slash my tires, kidnap my dog, leave flaming bags of poo on my doorstep... there are all sorts of ways to inconvenience me.
Except that consequence to the protestors would be more severe and ending up in jail might not be the idea normal citizen have about acceptable consequences.
And I do wholly admit that this is an effective way to draw attention to pet and minority views that otherwise I wouldn't give the time of day to. Nobody would recognize the names 'Anders Breivik' or 'Al Qaeda' if they contented themselves with politely handing out pamphlets.
I find it quite thought-provoking how (I assume) peaceful, violent-free protest is brought in relation to inhuman terrorists. Is this a proposal to detain more American citizens in Guantanamo?
I suppose if you think imposing costs on others i[s] an acceptable means of getting attention for your political agenda
The first thing I had to think of when reading this was "US congress not raising the debt ceiling".
I am in general no fan of blockades because, as you point out, they give over-proportional power to a determined minority. But they are an inconvenience which comes with democracy and the right to protest. After all democracy is _not_ the rule of the majority but the compromise between majority and minority on points important for the latter (especially the compromise part seems to be forgotten in the US). What form of protest would you propose instead? Standing around in a seldom passed corner of town until frustrated enough to radicalize?
> 1) Rotational curves of galaxies. > 2) Gravitational lensing - it's too strong for the amount of baryonic matter present. > 3) Bullet cluster. > 4) Small galaxies - the smaller the galaxy the more dark-matter-dominated it is.
1,2, and 4 all seem to be about gravity working against inertia. So how about a particle/mass/force which on large scale reduces inertia. We can make it non-interacting in other ways just like Dark Matter. Not sure how 3 would fit into that but I don't know what is going on in such collisions.
An external verification controller isn't completely necessary to increase security. Just make the actuator more complicated to control.
If you use e.g. a BLDC motor (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushless_DC_electric_motor) at the door, just sending some power done the control lines is at most going to burn the coils. controls have to be activated and deactivated in correct fashion (and current measured) for the motor to turn. Obviously people skilled enough can reverse engineer this. But connecting all wires to your own microcontroller will take some time.
A normal automatic signaling system on high-speed/high-traffic rails works by dividing the track into segments. As a train enters a segment the signaling lights controlling that segment turn to red (and often the system even counts the number of axles/wagons entering the segment). Only if this trains enters the next segment (then 'protected' by the signal light in front of that) the first signal light turns back to green.
This is not something a lightning strike should be able to break unless there is a serious design flaw, e.g. the first signaling light being reset by the lightning or a power failure and reinitializing in 'green' mode instead of 'red'. Or the 'protecting' signal not being installed far enough ahead of the segment to allow breaking in time at high speed.
I think what Google was after was a) some additional PR (and they got it as we see) b) a nod from the nerd community which sometimes seemed a bit alienated lately (and they got it also as one can see from the above comment)
And they even got it for free (-lawyers' costs) as they didn't win the auction. So much for waisting shareholder's money as someone claimed above.
What he was saying is that you need the temperature and ashes of a "real" fire (and not just a comparably "small" hydrogen explosion) to carry nuclear waste around the world. Chernobyl will not be easily matched without something to burn, preferably something very close to the nuclear fuel.
"On November 11th, 2008, The co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square (Times Square Alliance, Countdown Entertainment) unveiled a new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball at a press conference at Hudson Scenic Studio in Yonkers, New York."
So the new ball already bounced around on two new year's eves. But hey, its about the history anyway.....
I don't exactly know what the previous poster is referring to and critizising but that posting is not informative but contains flawed math..11111 in base 8 is NOT 1/8+1/80+1/800+...
That would be a strange mix of once base 8 and then base 10.11111 in base 8 IS 1/8+1/64+1/512+.... (or 8^-1+8^-2+8^-3+....)
Following this (7*.11111...)base 8 IS equal to 1 as expected.
>And what happens if the pilot has a stroke or heart attack and is unable to direct the plane to land.
The scenario was that the plane can and does fly on its own in 99.999% of the cases. If the pilot has a heart attack, the plane will fly to next airport and land (assuming there is a deadmean switch) or to its assigned airport and land (assuming no switch and the pilot is also not capable anymore of pressing a "Land quickly" button). The assumptions was that pilot is only needed in very seldom circumstances to take over.
The statement I critized was after all: Modern technology can only make both pilots unnecessary or none. And that is untrue as modern technology might still need an human backup for the 0,001% it can handle. But then posssibly only one human.
Co-pilots are there to handle things in case the pilot gets sick or something. If modern technology has made co-pilots unncesessary, it has made pilots unnecessary, period. If it hasn't made pilots redundant, then it has not made co-pilots redundant, either.
This is wrong. Lets assume the task of a pilot is to be a backup of the pilot in case the latter gets sick or otherwise incapacitated.. Now also assume that modern technology has become good enough to fly a plane safely from A to B in e.g. 99.999% of all cases including all known emergencies. The rest is to be handled by the pilot. In this case the probability of the pilot to become unable to fly at the moment (or shortly before) the 0.001% case happens might be negliglble (needs mathematical checking of course). If the pilot becomes ill during a flight, he orders the autopilot to land at the nearest airport, so the 'window of vulnerability' for the 0.001% is short.
In such a scenario, modern technology would have made the *co*pilot unnecessary but not the pilot. Basically the pilot would have become the co-pilot of the autopilot.
Now in reality there may be other reasons for having a co-pilot, e.g. the danger of information overflow in critical situations, so it might be that one will always need 2 pilots unless one can produces a completely fail-safe autopilot (including all, also unknown, emergencies). But I don't think there are many people on slashdot who can judge about that. I, at least, can't.
> This is the country that... voted to censor child porn
Due to lack of a plebiscite in the constitution _the country_ definitely did not vote on censoring child porn. The parliament did and thanks to highly enforced party whip (great expression in English) even that can hardly be called a vote.
The thing which shocked me most about the patent is that it completely lacks the "Previous Arts" section. I had been looking forward on MS winding itself in explaining why what they invented was not covered by previous art like Ubuntu (since 2004). But nothing! If the USPTO granted that without requiring detailed differentiation in the patent from previous art, it should really be closed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.
Which is why IMHO the next big wave of innovation will start when technology is developed to improve human collaboration by orders of magnitude. No, I do not mean the internet, groupware, .... . They all help but are lacking the "order of magnitude". Something cyberwarish would be more like it.
You should maybe start to wonder, where those 7% are payed from. Due to TANSTAAFL your local credit union must be in some high risk operation for earning that interest.
Yet it shows nicely how markets and some financial institutions are willing to bend the rules for their mutual gain to the detriement of a third party: the common public.
So in the lingo, an unhedged risk is the one where only one bank has egg on its face, and a hedged risk is where every fucking bank has egg on its face, and greater society picks up the tab.
This is the general problem with short-term speculation. It is a (near) zero-sum game (the near due to possible arbitrage gains from providing liquidity for long-term trades). Yet for years banks have posted record gains out of it. That money had to come from somewhere. It came out of the coffers of the financial institutes which had to be saved by governments in the last financial crisis.
And had UBS lost not only 2 but say 20 billions, it would too have to be saved (again) by the Swiss government. Yet the 20 billions would have turned up on several people's bonus/dividend slip.
You're obviously going to get two people who haven't cheated or read each others papers coming up with essentially the same paper every now and then
Not unless the papers are really short. Otherwise even the only finite number of variations will be large enough to spread random matches with other papers to individual sentences. But that is not a problem. I doubt an instructor would believe a student read 60 papers on the same topic just to swipe one or two random sentences from each.
But if central ideas including supportive reasoning seem to match not only from the idea but also the sentence perspective, the probability for random occurrence is quite low.
1) Get some SSL keys
2) Redirect the DNS Servers
3) Profit!
Hmm, seems to be a bit more complicated. At least in the vodafone net itself (DSL from Arcor/Vodafone).
--- snip ---
$ nslookup
> set type=ns
> theregister.co.uk
Server: 192.168.0.1 [The nameserver on the DSL router which forwards to vodafones DNS servers]
Address: 192.168.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
theregister.co.uk nameserver = ns3.theregister.co.uk.
theregister.co.uk nameserver = ns4.theregister.co.uk.
theregister.co.uk nameserver = ns2.theregister.co.uk.
theregister.co.uk nameserver = ns5.theregister.co.uk.
theregister.co.uk nameserver = ns1.theregister.co.uk.
theregister.co.uk nameserver = ns6.theregister.co.uk.
> set type=a
> theregister.co.uk
Server: 192.168.0.1
Address: 192.168.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer: ..]
Name: theregister.co.uk
Address: 68.68.20.116 [same address as ups.com,
--- snip ----
So even though I get the correct NS entries there are the wrong A entries.
whois is also correct here.
I do not deny that the word "mined" appears in the article (after "studied" BTW). But there is a small difference between ....and mine" [sounds like near future and a good deal]
"The Chinese" [people or government]
"Want" [seriously intend to do]
"capture
to
"Two Chinese"
"propose a scheme in a scientific paper(?)"
"to wait 37 years and then to capture an object 10 meters across (yielding about 500 m^3 or a block of ca. 8m edge length of whatever is in the asteroid).
How did
Two Chinese scientists propose to nudge a ten-meter asteroid nearing earth in 2049 into an earth orbit
transform into
"The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it" ?
I think the question is more on why Firefox all of a sudden needs constant API breakage.
Picture yourself working on a software with a multi-million (probably tens of million) user base. Lots of external developers depending on the API (you proudly presented years ago). Your new boss comes in saying: "Hey guys, I heard about this bazar vs. Cathedral thing and the spiral software engineering model. Let's go to a monthly release schedule. All APIs are unfrozen. And get some UI designers. I want a new look in every version until we find the ultimate one."
Do you
a) Say "Yes boss. Will be done immediatly"
b) Propose a fork to do all the explorative work and, once it stabilizes in a year or so, convince people to move over.
It seems Firefox choose a) thinking it saves them the "winning over" after a year but which will actually loose a lot of people in that time or have people stop caring about updates.
BTW, since Firefox didn't branch, a lot of people (including me on all non-security relevant systems) seemingly did it on their own as the still large share of 3.6 Firefox users show.
There see to be some problems with understanding civil disobedience in the above posting
Why stop at keeping me from getting to work and contributing to society?
People have every right to keep you from getting to work .... if they are willing to bear the consequences. In this case that could e.g. be a short detainment by police (carrying people of the station) and a civil penalty [correct word?] for breach of domestic peace [another word looked up in the dictionary] or similar. Expect the police to take a few hours to clear the area and the courts to take weeks to months to get through all the cases. That's the basic idea of civil disobedience: Flood the system beyond its capacity so policy changes might be easier than constantly fighting protestors.
You could push me in the mud, slash my tires, kidnap my dog, leave flaming bags of poo on my doorstep... there are all sorts of ways to inconvenience me.
Except that consequence to the protestors would be more severe and ending up in jail might not be the idea normal citizen have about acceptable consequences.
And I do wholly admit that this is an effective way to draw attention to pet and minority views that otherwise I wouldn't give the time of day to. Nobody would recognize the names 'Anders Breivik' or 'Al Qaeda' if they contented themselves with politely handing out pamphlets.
I find it quite thought-provoking how (I assume) peaceful, violent-free protest is brought in relation to inhuman terrorists. Is this a proposal to detain more American citizens in Guantanamo?
I suppose if you think imposing costs on others i[s] an acceptable means of getting attention for your political agenda
The first thing I had to think of when reading this was "US congress not raising the debt ceiling".
I am in general no fan of blockades because, as you point out, they give over-proportional power to a determined minority. But they are an inconvenience which comes with democracy and the right to protest. After all democracy is _not_ the rule of the majority but the compromise between majority and minority on points important for the latter (especially the compromise part seems to be forgotten in the US). What form of protest would you propose instead? Standing around in a seldom passed corner of town until frustrated enough to radicalize?
> 1) Rotational curves of galaxies.
> 2) Gravitational lensing - it's too strong for the amount of baryonic matter present.
> 3) Bullet cluster.
> 4) Small galaxies - the smaller the galaxy the more dark-matter-dominated it is.
1,2, and 4 all seem to be about gravity working against inertia. So how about a particle/mass/force which on large scale reduces inertia. We can make it non-interacting in other ways just like Dark Matter.
Not sure how 3 would fit into that but I don't know what is going on in such collisions.
So, please explain in somewhat layman's terms (school level physics) why it has to be dark matter and not e.g. black holes.
An external verification controller isn't completely necessary to increase security. Just make the actuator more complicated to control.
If you use e.g. a BLDC motor (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushless_DC_electric_motor) at the door, just sending some power done the control lines is at most going to burn the coils. controls have to be activated and deactivated in correct fashion (and current measured) for the motor to turn. Obviously people skilled enough can reverse engineer this. But connecting all wires to your own microcontroller will take some time.
I am a bit surprised how this could happen.
A normal automatic signaling system on high-speed/high-traffic rails works by dividing the track into segments. As a train enters a segment the signaling lights controlling that segment turn to red (and often the system even counts the number of axles/wagons entering the segment). Only if this trains enters the next segment (then 'protected' by the signal light in front of that) the first signal light turns back to green.
This is not something a lightning strike should be able to break unless there is a serious design flaw, e.g. the first signaling light being reset by the lightning or a power failure and reinitializing in 'green' mode instead of 'red'. Or the 'protecting' signal not being installed far enough ahead of the segment to allow breaking in time at high speed.
I think what Google was after was
a) some additional PR (and they got it as we see)
b) a nod from the nerd community which sometimes seemed a bit alienated lately (and they got it also as one can see from the above comment)
And they even got it for free (-lawyers' costs) as they didn't win the auction. So much for waisting shareholder's money as someone claimed above.
What he was saying is that you need the temperature and ashes of a "real" fire (and not just a comparably "small" hydrogen explosion) to carry nuclear waste around the world. Chernobyl will not be easily matched without something to burn, preferably something very close to the nuclear fuel.
From the linked article:
"On November 11th, 2008, The co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square (Times Square Alliance, Countdown Entertainment) unveiled a new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball at a press conference at Hudson Scenic Studio in Yonkers, New York."
So the new ball already bounced around on two new year's eves. But hey, its about the history anyway.....
Well, switch all your cookies and javascript off and it changes.
The second time *I* was told there was only one other browser with same fingerprint.
I guess with cookies/supercookies it simply stores you have been there before in your browser.
I don't exactly know what the previous poster is referring to and critizising but that posting is not informative but contains flawed math. .11111 in base 8 is NOT 1/8+1/80+1/800+...
That would be a strange mix of once base 8 and then base 10 .11111 in base 8 IS 1/8+1/64+1/512+.... (or 8^-1+8^-2+8^-3+....)
Following this (7*.11111...)base 8 IS equal to 1 as expected.
>And what happens if the pilot has a stroke or heart attack and is unable to direct the plane to land.
The scenario was that the plane can and does fly on its own in 99.999% of the cases. If the pilot has a heart attack, the plane will fly to next airport and land (assuming there is a deadmean switch) or to its assigned airport and land (assuming no switch and the pilot is also not capable anymore of pressing a "Land quickly" button). The assumptions was that pilot is only needed in very seldom circumstances to take over.
The statement I critized was after all: Modern technology can only make both pilots unnecessary or none. And that is untrue as modern technology might still need an human backup for the 0,001% it can handle. But then posssibly only one human.
Co-pilots are there to handle things in case the pilot gets sick or something. If modern technology has made co-pilots unncesessary, it has made pilots unnecessary, period. If it hasn't made pilots redundant, then it has not made co-pilots redundant, either.
This is wrong. Lets assume the task of a pilot is to be a backup of the pilot in case the latter gets sick or otherwise incapacitated..
Now also assume that modern technology has become good enough to fly a plane safely from A to B in e.g. 99.999% of all cases including all known emergencies. The rest is to be handled by the pilot.
In this case the probability of the pilot to become unable to fly at the moment (or shortly before) the 0.001% case happens might be negliglble (needs mathematical checking of course).
If the pilot becomes ill during a flight, he orders the autopilot to land at the nearest airport, so the 'window of vulnerability' for the 0.001% is short.
In such a scenario, modern technology would have made the *co*pilot unnecessary but not the pilot. Basically the pilot would have become the co-pilot of the autopilot.
Now in reality there may be other reasons for having a co-pilot, e.g. the danger of information overflow in critical situations, so it might be that one will always need 2 pilots unless one can produces a completely fail-safe autopilot (including all, also unknown, emergencies). But I don't think there are many people on slashdot who can judge about that. I, at least, can't.
And also wrong is:
> This is the country that ... voted to censor child porn
Due to lack of a plebiscite in the constitution _the country_ definitely did not vote on censoring child porn. The parliament did and thanks to highly enforced party whip (great expression in English) even that can hardly be called a vote.
> Executes when the privilege violation occurs without requiring the app to be aware.
Well, that also seems to be patented previously, at least in Europe, http://depatisnet.dpma.de/DepatisNet/depatisnet?action=bibdat&docid=EP000001255394B1 (couldn't find an english version). Admittedly on a grander scale (network instead of computer) but I doubt that step has sufficient patentability.
The thing which shocked me most about the patent is that it completely lacks the "Previous Arts" section. I had been looking forward on MS winding itself in explaining why what they invented was not covered by previous art like Ubuntu (since 2004). But nothing! If the USPTO granted that without requiring detailed differentiation in the patent from previous art, it should really be closed.
Lizards do it with their (continuing to wiggle) tail if they flee an enemy. So what's the excitement with this?