I'm not a big fan of the SAT or other standardized testing, but having worked with college admissions, I can tell you that in general SATs/ACTs (or other standardized tests) are generally used only as a dispersion function. You have this huge multi-dimensional space on which to rank candidates, but it's a crap shoot trying to balance all the criteria with subjective and objective components. So what's to do other than apply some weighting/dispersion function that's at least weakly correlated (e.g., SAT)?
It's my opinion that the results are mostly arbitrary, but at least you don't spend a zillion years arguing about whether a 3.4GPA student that plays the violin and being president of a chess club in a 500 person high-school is better than a 3.2GPU student that play a little-piano and being the secretary of the math club on a 1000 person high-school when you make the final ordered list near the cutoff line between accepts and wait-lists and rejects.
Remember, on the admission committees, they basically haven't met any of these students (except perhaps if they have been interviewed and then only member at best), nor have them usually met any of the people writing letters the reccommendations (other than to remember some teachers/councellors that write multiple recs or have a history with the school). Students other than very coarsly ordered have pretty much arbitrary GPAs having taking classes from teachers with different grading scales and class ranks in schools of different sizes are nearly impossible to compare not to mention most students exaggerate their involvement with extra curriculars (or even make them up at times)... you get the picture...
That's why schools (led by university of california and others) have been demanding better SATs for years that have better correlation factors because they don't have really have much objective criteria to go on to begin with...
So then, in a ray-traced environment, couldn't developers just install virtual stage lights in the environment to re-create TV and movie lighting in the gameplay? Sort of the same way that Nintendo made the Zelda game look like it was animated?
In case that wasn't clear in my response, developers do use virtual stage lights to make shadows look good in ray-traced environments (just like they do it in triangle rendered environments).
The time spent is in tweaking the location of those virtual lights to get shadows to look right, so that's not an "advantage" of ray-tracing. You could use a dumb grid of lights in both ray tracing and triangle rendering or you could spend a month putting the light in to get the shadows to look just right, the time is in the placement and intensity of the lights, not the rendering technique.
True, raytracing by itself will not make gameplay any better, nor animation better. However, it should make some visual effects that are hard today (shadows, reflections) simple. Hopefully, this will free up developers to work on other things instead of 'getting the shadows right'.
I'll have to disagree with that. For many people "right" looking shadows are like the movies and television shows. Shadows and light/dark interplay in these environments are far from natural and even in ray-traced environments, animators laboriously juggle "fake" light sources to make the shadows "right" looking.
Also "single" bounce reflections are essentially "solved" problems with triangle rendering (environment maps), so only real advantages of ray tracing are "multi-bounce" and "self-shadowing" which are somewhat easier to solve in a ray-traced environment instead of a triangle rendered environment. Although sometimes these are interesting effects, they generally fall in the "eye-candy" side of the fence today and developers rarely spend much time on these (or so we hope given the state of game-play and AI in todays games), and they generally just implement canned solutions (e.g., some self-shadowing bump-map pixel shader technique) for certain "effects".
Processors have had multiple layers of interconnect for decades.
Transistors, however, have generally been on one layer since the avent of the planar integrated circuit. Although there have been some advances in putting passive components capacitors and floating gates (for dram and flash, respectively), on top of active transistors, or orienting transitors themselves vertically instead of planar, a general 3d circuit is very much a future technology that's only presently being researched.
As a hack, people have tried "stacking" layers of pre-fabricated planar chips (usually drams or flash memory chips), but there have generally been problems with evacuating the heat from the inner layers from these types of devices which why to date they have been restricted to low-cycle-time devices. Although all parts of a processor are generally doing something all the time, only a small part of a memory devices is active. This allows memory to have few heat issues than a processing type devices and why they are really only working on them first.
Soon people will get 3d circuits going, but they certainly haven't been doing 3d circuits for decades...
if only it were 13 million... It's actually 1.3 million every year for 2 years ($2.6 million total). That probably won't even pay to move a pound of contaminated soil (it doesn't even pay for the EIS).
In any case, if Google would have parked these airplanes (plural) at san jose, it probably would have cost them over $500K a year. I'm thinking if they paid 13Million a year. Then maybe that might make it worthwhile, but at 1.3M, if they accidently leak some fuel in the next 2 years, I think it would be a net loss. I don't have direct experience with jet fuel cleanup, but a friend of mine owned a gas station and cleaning up the soil after a tank rupture can be up to $250K so I think google is getting a steal of a deal at taxpayer expense at the rate they are paying...
Yes, 1.3Million and occasional access to a plane is a small price for google to pay to avoid paying property tax to mountain view for 1 million square feet of class A office space developed inside moffett field...
Three cheers Larry and Sergi for figuring out how to saving all that money for google share holders.
Three sighs for the citizens of mountain view who have to put up with all the extra airport noise and traffic congestion and get nothing.
Three boos for people who can't see through this scheme...
Historically, most orbital return vehicles primarily use some sort of ablative heat shield technology where some outer coating burns off to create a boundary layer which protects the re-entry object from the full effect of the heat from the high-temp gas shock region.
On the other hand, the shuttle tiles are basically form a big thermal soak that absorbs the heat and keep it away from the shuttle frame. Since nothing is "burning-away" in a thermal soak scheme, it was thought that this would help in resuability.
Some more modern re-entry devices use radiatively cooled systems (so called hot-metal) which instead of absorbing all the heat and storing it (e.g., in tiles), actually try to re-radiate the heat into the atmosphere (after the initial heat shock of initial re-entry, generally the average heat load is lower so this usually works). I think the leading edge of the space shuttle wings are radiatively cooled, but the bulk of the body is tiles for weight reasons. I also have heard of proposed modern re-entry vehicles that used various types of shingles as radiatively cooled systems for the bulk (and I seem to recall that this was also proposed for the shuttle).
I'm not sure what you mean about thermal plating (is that not what a tile is?). The reason the tiles are small and have gap-fillers between them is that the tiles expand when they heat up (as most things do). A solid piece of thermal plating that covered the whole underside would likely deform and/or crack if heated irregularly and that would be pretty tough to engineer or reuse.
I assume that metal-ceramic material science has advanced enough to make radiatively cooled systems more practical now (where they weren't very practical cost/weight-wize when they had to be all made of titanium)...
I don't really think any of this is "rocket-science" (just material-science;^). Nearly everyone involved with this stuff are aware of the facts and tradeoffs already (or could have googled for them)...
I think lazy-atime already keeps a dirty cache of atimes.
I think relative-lazy-atime optimizes this further by only scheduling updates for atime if the old atime is older than ctime or mtime. If the old atime is newer than ctime or mtime then it silently forgets if you've accessed the file. If you are updating ctime or mtime, then I think atime is updated anyhow.
This optimization still allows certain programs to tell if files have been read once since they were last modified (probably the only non-security feature of atime that is in common use), but of course ignores when they are read multiple times.
Right now the distance to an "astronomically" far object is really just inferred. Most folks use the red-shift/blue-shift (so called velocity dispersion spreading of the spectral lines) vs the apparent size of a similar object in conjunction with the theory of expansion (aka Hubbel's law) that relates the apparent average red-shift to the assumed distance consistant with expansion. The distance in time is reversed from this theoretical distance using the assumption of the speed of light.
IF some the theories that make up the basis of this chain of reasoning are shown to be not consistant with the observed universe (e.g., some of the theories of astrophysics turned out to be wrong), THEN it would be safe to say that we really didn't "know" how long light took to reach us, we were just mistaken in our estimation.
Of course today, it is safe to say that we are currently just using a chain of reasoning based on current astrophysical theory to infer how long light took to reach us based on how far we think the object is away from us and the speed of light is constant in the universe (but it could all be proven wrong when we know more about astrophysics). But maybe that kind of equivocation doesn't make for a good headline;^)
As an example, we could find that quantum mechanics were somehow time dependent so that the spectral lines we are using to infer distance are somehow different in the past and hubble wasn't quite right about expansion factors and the galaxies are really as far as we thought (or maybe they are further than we thought), or perhaps the speed of light really isn't a universal constant or gravity doesn't really work the way we expect it to. Today, we can hardly explain observation about the heliopause or the pioneer anomaly and these are pretty near to us in astronomical terms...
Sun included a special cryptographic accelerator to help with SSL performance (the primary consumer of floating-point calculations on most web servers).
Interesting, comment about the crypto-processor, except SSL servers usually don't use much floating point (RSA key stuff is large integer mult/modulus stuff, not floating point) so I don't think this factoid is related to the FP performance of T1 (or T2). I always thought that sun had their crypt-accelerators as add-in system boards, hmm, I'll have to take a look at this...
There was an old woman who swallowed a cow, I don't know how she swallowed a cow! She swallowed the cow to catch the goat, She swallowed the goat to catch the dog, She swallowed the dog to catch the cat, She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her, She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, I don't know why she swallowed the fly, Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old woman who swallowed a horse, She's dead--of course!
How about a currency backed by honesty as in not dishonestly basing it on top of federal "debt" that is false in name and false in nature. Take off your tin-foil blinkers. The federal "debt" is too huge for it ever to be repaid. The federal bond buying spree by Asians is not sustainable indefinitely. The longer it goes on, the worse the pain when it comes to the end of the run.
I'll take off my tin-foil blinkers (whatever in the hell that means) when you stop posting AC...
But contrary to popular belief, the value of currency (or exchange token) is based off of "faith", (doesn't have that much to do with honesty). Apparently you don't trust the "full-faith-and-credit" of the US to pay it back, but the "Asians" buying the notes seem to be okay with it. Frankly, the fact that the US issues the exact same treasury notes to everyone regardless of their persuasion and seemly redeems them is being honest (unless you think people that are buying this stuff are all dillusional and think they got paid back when they really didn't). The buyers apparently have "faith" that the US government will pay back the notes (and they aren't getting counterfeit notes that they can't redeem, that would be dishonest).
On the other hand, you can argue that these notes don't have value, but to some folks they do. It's like arguing that a britney spears album has value. To me, I have no faith that the music is listenable and wouldn't buy it so it has no value to me, but I'm pretty sure they are being honest that it is an album with music on it and it's the same one that they are selling to other people (some of whom apparently enjoy it).
If you are arguing "credit", well that's not much different than a boomerang kid who lives off of money from their parents. As long as the parents (the note buyers) have faith that their kid (the governement) is going to make it in the world someday, they still finance them. Some observers may say that faith is misplaced, but that is between the kid and their parents.
No currency is worth anything if there isn't faith and I'm sure most folks have faith that if the US government got into a situation where it couldn't pay, they would just print more money or tax the citizens approprately. That may cause dilution (monetary inflation), or taxed based recession, but and may seem painful to you, but going to a non-fiat currency wouldn't be in reality any different (if the government expenses were such that it needed more money, but couldn't issue bonds, or print more money because it would be tied to or backed by some arbitrary commodity, they would just increase taxes more to compensate, no?).
In my opinon, inflation and taxation are really the only way to keep money moving in the economy (otherwize rich people would just sit on their money). For an example, real estate, they aren't making any more of it meaning the rich stay rich and the poor would have no hope. You might say they can "borrow" the money to improve their lot in life, but remember, the amount of "wealth" is fixed in a "backed" currency reality. In this scenario, it would be interesting to ask what would the economic cost of borrowing be (e.g, would a lender be motivated to lend at a rate that would allow a borrower investing in real-estate to make a reasonable profit?). Remember they are taking a risk that you won't pay back and they would lose that wealth forever. Since the number of people is increasing in the world, their wealth (in relative terms is increasing in a per-capita percentage, if they just do nothing...)
As I see it, those folks that constantly rail against "fiat" currencies and yearn for some sort of "backed" currency, should wonder what to back their currency with? gold? silver? diamonds? uranium? petroleum? or any economic goods/resources?
The problem with any of these physical manifestation is that they are either scarce (the definition of an economic good), or are subject to spontaneous dillution (in the case of gold by digging it out of the ground) meaning the total value is subject to random discoveries.
Although gold was generally considered valuable in-itself and thus tradable (remember even gold money is just a token for exchange), there are many factors to consider. What if "gold" (or whatever backing good was chosen) was suddenly more valuable (either due to a fashion fad, or a genuine economic discovery like say gold semiconductors for quantum computers). The economic value of "gold" would compete with the "backing" value of "gold". Or perhaps "gold" became less valuable (say somehow it could be extracted by killing babies or burning down rain-forests).
If you think these things are unlikely, think about deBeers and diamonds and African wars...
This is not to mention the fact that services (at least in the new economy) seem to have a greater aggregate net value that all the capital goods (meaning there aren't enough capital goods to even back the current amount of "wealth"). It seems very short sighted to base a token for exchange on something that is limited by production of available capital goods (because that would limit growth).
I agree that fiat currency isn't the best situation to be in, but lacking a solid 'value' alternative, it just strikes me as just a lot of whining about "the-man"
Look? John Cramer..., Cosmo Kramer, I don't think so...
But strangely there's some resemblance to the "real"
Kenny Kramer (which the character Cosmo Kramer was based on)...
FYI, if you are willing to forego superhet and are willing to go back in time to the "gennies" used by the hackers of the radio generation, you actually only need 1 transistor (for the oscillator) and a diode for a superregenerative for an earphone FM radio receiver.
Perhaps this article can shed some more light on this subject (for anyone interested)...
This cold and menthol receptor, termed CMR1 or TRPM8, was activated at a temperature threshold of ~28C, with currents increasing in magnitude down to 8C
For what it's worth, many folks are bragging that they think you can spend some time at 8C (~45F) in the air, but if you were "bathed" in that temperature (e.g., tossed into cold water at that temperature), the expected survival time would only be a couple of hours or less.
Although it's a lot of fear-mongering so far, if the moratorium is lifted, it would not be against federal rules to let a state or a municipality start taxing the intra-state email (although I fail to see how it would be possible to collect/enforce fairly).
States and municipalities are pretty darn'd good at dreaming up taxes right now and I wouldn't put it beyond some of them to tax corporation an assessment based on how many employees there are or tax broadband providers based on how many customers they had (although in the latter case, I'm sure they'd let them pass the surcharge to the subscriber). If you look at your telephone bill or cable bill, you'll see what I mean. I doubt there would ever be a per-email tax (for instance, how could you really tell web-mail from e-mail an define it properly w/o a loophole), but you could certainly get socked with a per megabyte of bandwidth consumption tax.
For instance, oregon, faced with the possiblity that better fuel economy would make increasing per-gallon tax on gasoline unfairly regressive to folks that must drive older cars that get worse gas, is looking into a GPS-based road tax...
Most of this urge to tax telecom is coming because of fear. Traditionally, local governments were able to shake down the telephone and cable companies for money by offering monopolies in exchange for access to the public right-of-way (e.g., to dig phone trenches and stretch coaxial cable), and a host of free or discount use of services (e.g., anyone remember public access cable, that's what we used before YouTube). With the telecom revolution bringing in many new players that don't have to bow before the local commissioners, local governments realize that the "monopolies" they were granting aren't really that valuable anymore and going forward it'll be hard to continue to shake-down these big companies and that the price of revenue enforcment will go up (can't just rely on the monopoly cable or telephone company to write them a check every month for the tax collection). As the cost of revenue enforcement goes up, so does the tax rate to compensate. Since they can't go that regressive on the taxes, they need to find new revenue streams (it's easier politically to tax the "rich" than the "middle-class" and the "poor"). That's were we are right now.
Essentially, all so called science (including computer science) is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Do you trust the university? Do you trust the textbook/course notes/literature? (since usually you have not performed the experiments yourself, nor walked through the supporting proofs and/or math) Do you trust the professor/teacher?
And more specific to computer science...
Do you trust the algorithm? Do you trust the compiler? Do you trust the computer hardware?
What about "post-modernism" do you find problematic or dangerous? Basically a post-modern philosophy accepts the concept that truth itself is relative/subjective and non-constant.
To take an arbitrary "post-modernist" view of the GNU/Linux for instance, you could say "Linux is better than Windows" is a truth. Some believe it, some do not, the believers can give you proof. Rational people can believe the proof. yet there is an alternate truth where the situation is reversed. A Modernist would say that there is an objective way to prove or disprove this statement as a fact or a lie. However, a postmodernist will accept that the truth of this statement depends on your point of view and can change over time.
Similarly take a language like C++. In itself C++ is just a representation of a programming language and should be a "knowable" thing, right? However, most understand C++ deconstructively in relation to C, BCPL, SmallTalk, or to Java, Perl, Python. Even despite the fact that there is a written standard that allegedly specifies C++, one might also say that you don't know what C++ is if you don't know object oriented programming, STL, Boost, or Design Patterns or even the fact that a translation unit is a file system in a operating environment or that it runs on a physical manifestation of a turing machine. Even if we ignore the context itself, we know C++ is ephemerial to start with, most people only have interactive experience with GCC or VC++ implementations of it. So what _is_ C++, let alone what about C++ is true? Is there any absolute way to study what _is_ C++ or does knowing anything about it depend on your point of view, your compiler, environment, and will potentially change over time?
Perhaps this is what is really "scary" about post-modernism, there's no "man" in the middle, there's nothing in the middle at all, it's all about the surrounding environment;^)
Soo... why is this news when there hasn't even been animal testing yet?
I'm not so sure this is very different than PolyHeme which is artifical blood made with polymerized human haemoglobin extracted from expired donated blood.
Eventually PolyHeme was tested on humans using an opt-out technique (if you didn't have a special bracelet on your wrist, they could use PolyHeme instead of real blood in trama situations where you couldn't object to being a test subject). As you might imagine, medical testing using an unpublicized opt-out scheme was very controversial at the time.
There seem to be many reference in this thread to "GPS" licenses, however, to my knowledge there has never been any fees associated with any license for the C/A code reception device. The codes and frequencies were made public well before any satellites were actually launched (of course the P/Y encrypted codes were not, but since selective availability was turned off in 2000, that channel is only beneficial for ionosphere distortion correction anyhow).
The only thing I can think of is at one time long ago, all GPS equipment was considered military technology and US manufacturers needed an EXPORT license to send US made GPS equipment oversees. By 1991, the US government quickly eliminated this requirement for devices intended for civilian use as it was soon clear that US manufactuers were at a significant DISAVANTAGE to foriegn manufacturers of GPS equiment in that they had to pay for EXPORT licenses. This was well before the system was declared "fully-operational" in 1995 with a full constellation of satellites, so in some ways, it's always been free to use GPS for commercial/non-military use.
I think you got it backwards when you say the EU paid these licenses, since it is the US that paid these licenses and the EU got it for FREE. In fact I was working for one of the companies that wanted to take advantage of this fact and did their product development in the UK and Canada.
The EU/Galileo system, however, in addition to the free signal (to "compete" with the free GPS signal), was going to provide an additional higher quality "pay" service.
So perhaps despite your rantings, GPS succeeds because it's open/free system that spawned a $10-Billion industry in a capitalistic world.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a big fan of the SAT or other standardized testing, but having worked with college admissions, I can tell you that in general SATs/ACTs (or other standardized tests) are generally used only as a dispersion function. You have this huge multi-dimensional space on which to rank candidates, but it's a crap shoot trying to balance all the criteria with subjective and objective components. So what's to do other than apply some weighting/dispersion function that's at least weakly correlated (e.g., SAT)?
It's my opinion that the results are mostly arbitrary, but at least you don't spend a zillion years arguing about whether a 3.4GPA student that plays the violin and being president of a chess club in a 500 person high-school is better than a 3.2GPU student that play a little-piano and being the secretary of the math club on a 1000 person high-school when you make the final ordered list near the cutoff line between accepts and wait-lists and rejects.
Remember, on the admission committees, they basically haven't met any of these students (except perhaps if they have been interviewed and then only member at best), nor have them usually met any of the people writing letters the reccommendations (other than to remember some teachers/councellors that write multiple recs or have a history with the school). Students other than very coarsly ordered have pretty much arbitrary GPAs having taking classes from teachers with different grading scales and class ranks in schools of different sizes are nearly impossible to compare not to mention most students exaggerate their involvement with extra curriculars (or even make them up at times)... you get the picture...
That's why schools (led by university of california and others) have been demanding better SATs for years that have better correlation factors because they don't have really have much objective criteria to go on to begin with...
In case that wasn't clear in my response, developers do use virtual stage lights to make shadows look good in ray-traced environments (just like they do it in triangle rendered environments).
The time spent is in tweaking the location of those virtual lights to get shadows to look right, so that's not an "advantage" of ray-tracing. You could use a dumb grid of lights in both ray tracing and triangle rendering or you could spend a month putting the light in to get the shadows to look just right, the time is in the placement and intensity of the lights, not the rendering technique.
I'll have to disagree with that. For many people "right" looking shadows are like the movies and television shows. Shadows and light/dark interplay in these environments are far from natural and even in ray-traced environments, animators laboriously juggle "fake" light sources to make the shadows "right" looking.
Also "single" bounce reflections are essentially "solved" problems with triangle rendering (environment maps), so only real advantages of ray tracing are "multi-bounce" and "self-shadowing" which are somewhat easier to solve in a ray-traced environment instead of a triangle rendered environment. Although sometimes these are interesting effects, they generally fall in the "eye-candy" side of the fence today and developers rarely spend much time on these (or so we hope given the state of game-play and AI in todays games), and they generally just implement canned solutions (e.g., some self-shadowing bump-map pixel shader technique) for certain "effects".
Processors have had multiple layers of interconnect for decades.
Transistors, however, have generally been on one layer since the avent of the planar integrated circuit. Although there have been some advances in putting passive components capacitors and floating gates (for dram and flash, respectively), on top of active transistors, or orienting transitors themselves vertically instead of planar, a general 3d circuit is very much a future technology that's only presently being researched.
As a hack, people have tried "stacking" layers of pre-fabricated planar chips (usually drams or flash memory chips), but there have generally been problems with evacuating the heat from the inner layers from these types of devices which why to date they have been restricted to low-cycle-time devices. Although all parts of a processor are generally doing something all the time, only a small part of a memory devices is active. This allows memory to have few heat issues than a processing type devices and why they are really only working on them first.
Soon people will get 3d circuits going, but they certainly haven't been doing 3d circuits for decades...
if only it were 13 million... It's actually 1.3 million every year for 2 years ($2.6 million total). That probably won't even pay to move a pound of contaminated soil (it doesn't even pay for the EIS).
In any case, if Google would have parked these airplanes (plural) at san jose, it probably would have cost them over $500K a year. I'm thinking if they paid 13Million a year. Then maybe that might make it worthwhile, but at 1.3M, if they accidently leak some fuel in the next 2 years, I think it would be a net loss. I don't have direct experience with jet fuel cleanup, but a friend of mine owned a gas station and cleaning up the soil after a tank rupture can be up to $250K so I think google is getting a steal of a deal at taxpayer expense at the rate they are paying...
Yes, 1.3Million and occasional access to a plane is a small price for google to pay to avoid paying property tax to mountain view for 1 million square feet of class A office space developed inside moffett field...
Three cheers Larry and Sergi for figuring out how to saving all that money for google share holders.
Three sighs for the citizens of mountain view who have to put up with all the extra airport noise and traffic congestion and get nothing.
Three boos for people who can't see through this scheme...
Historically, most orbital return vehicles primarily use some sort of ablative heat shield technology where some outer coating burns off to create a boundary layer which protects the re-entry object from the full effect of the heat from the high-temp gas shock region.
;^). Nearly everyone involved with this stuff are aware of the facts and tradeoffs already (or could have googled for them)...
On the other hand, the shuttle tiles are basically form a big thermal soak that absorbs the heat and keep it away from the shuttle frame. Since nothing is "burning-away" in a thermal soak scheme, it was thought that this would help in resuability.
Some more modern re-entry devices use radiatively cooled systems (so called hot-metal) which instead of absorbing all the heat and storing it (e.g., in tiles), actually try to re-radiate the heat into the atmosphere (after the initial heat shock of initial re-entry, generally the average heat load is lower so this usually works). I think the leading edge of the space shuttle wings are radiatively cooled, but the bulk of the body is tiles for weight reasons. I also have heard of proposed modern re-entry vehicles that used various types of shingles as radiatively cooled systems for the bulk (and I seem to recall that this was also proposed for the shuttle).
I'm not sure what you mean about thermal plating (is that not what a tile is?). The reason the tiles are small and have gap-fillers between them is that the tiles expand when they heat up (as most things do). A solid piece of thermal plating that covered the whole underside would likely deform and/or crack if heated irregularly and that would be pretty tough to engineer or reuse.
I assume that metal-ceramic material science has advanced enough to make radiatively cooled systems more practical now (where they weren't very practical cost/weight-wize when they had to be all made of titanium)...
I don't really think any of this is "rocket-science" (just material-science
I think lazy-atime already keeps a dirty cache of atimes.
I think relative-lazy-atime optimizes this further by only scheduling updates for atime if the old atime is older than ctime or mtime. If the old atime is newer than ctime or mtime then it silently forgets if you've accessed the file. If you are updating ctime or mtime, then I think atime is updated anyhow.
This optimization still allows certain programs to tell if files have been read once since they were last modified (probably the only non-security feature of atime that is in common use), but of course ignores when they are read multiple times.
Sorry, but I have to jump in here.
;^)
Right now the distance to an "astronomically" far object is really just inferred. Most folks use the red-shift/blue-shift (so called velocity dispersion spreading of the spectral lines) vs the apparent size of a similar object in conjunction with the theory of expansion (aka Hubbel's law) that relates the apparent average red-shift to the assumed distance consistant with expansion. The distance in time is reversed from this theoretical distance using the assumption of the speed of light.
IF some the theories that make up the basis of this chain of reasoning are shown to be not consistant with the observed universe (e.g., some of the theories of astrophysics turned out to be wrong), THEN it would be safe to say that we really didn't "know" how long light took to reach us, we were just mistaken in our estimation.
Of course today, it is safe to say that we are currently just using a chain of reasoning based on current astrophysical theory to infer how long light took to reach us based on how far we think the object is away from us and the speed of light is constant in the universe (but it could all be proven wrong when we know more about astrophysics). But maybe that kind of equivocation doesn't make for a good headline
As an example, we could find that quantum mechanics were somehow time dependent so that the spectral lines we are using to infer distance are somehow different in the past and hubble wasn't quite right about expansion factors and the galaxies are really as far as we thought (or maybe they are further than we thought), or perhaps the speed of light really isn't a universal constant or gravity doesn't really work the way we expect it to. Today, we can hardly explain observation about the heliopause or the pioneer anomaly and these are pretty near to us in astronomical terms...
Interesting, comment about the crypto-processor, except SSL servers usually don't use much floating point (RSA key stuff is large integer mult/modulus stuff, not floating point) so I don't think this factoid is related to the FP performance of T1 (or T2). I always thought that sun had their crypt-accelerators as add-in system boards, hmm, I'll have to take a look at this...
Apparently, there were many, many unanticipated problems with lunar "dust".
. stme id=51367
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6460089
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980327.html
http://dailybeacon.utk.edu/showarticle.php?articl
As expected, enginerds never seem to want to underestimate a problem especially when they've heard of a similar problem before...
There was an old woman who swallowed a cow,
I don't know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old woman who swallowed a horse,
She's dead--of course!
I'll take off my tin-foil blinkers (whatever in the hell that means) when you stop posting AC...
But contrary to popular belief, the value of currency (or exchange token) is based off of "faith", (doesn't have that much to do with honesty). Apparently you don't trust the "full-faith-and-credit" of the US to pay it back, but the "Asians" buying the notes seem to be okay with it. Frankly, the fact that the US issues the exact same treasury notes to everyone regardless of their persuasion and seemly redeems them is being honest (unless you think people that are buying this stuff are all dillusional and think they got paid back when they really didn't). The buyers apparently have "faith" that the US government will pay back the notes (and they aren't getting counterfeit notes that they can't redeem, that would be dishonest).
On the other hand, you can argue that these notes don't have value, but to some folks they do. It's like arguing that a britney spears album has value. To me, I have no faith that the music is listenable and wouldn't buy it so it has no value to me, but I'm pretty sure they are being honest that it is an album with music on it and it's the same one that they are selling to other people (some of whom apparently enjoy it).
If you are arguing "credit", well that's not much different than a boomerang kid who lives off of money from their parents. As long as the parents (the note buyers) have faith that their kid (the governement) is going to make it in the world someday, they still finance them. Some observers may say that faith is misplaced, but that is between the kid and their parents.
No currency is worth anything if there isn't faith and I'm sure most folks have faith that if the US government got into a situation where it couldn't pay, they would just print more money or tax the citizens approprately. That may cause dilution (monetary inflation), or taxed based recession, but and may seem painful to you, but going to a non-fiat currency wouldn't be in reality any different (if the government expenses were such that it needed more money, but couldn't issue bonds, or print more money because it would be tied to or backed by some arbitrary commodity, they would just increase taxes more to compensate, no?).
In my opinon, inflation and taxation are really the only way to keep money moving in the economy (otherwize rich people would just sit on their money). For an example, real estate, they aren't making any more of it meaning the rich stay rich and the poor would have no hope. You might say they can "borrow" the money to improve their lot in life, but remember, the amount of "wealth" is fixed in a "backed" currency reality. In this scenario, it would be interesting to ask what would the economic cost of borrowing be (e.g, would a lender be motivated to lend at a rate that would allow a borrower investing in real-estate to make a reasonable profit?). Remember they are taking a risk that you won't pay back and they would lose that wealth forever. Since the number of people is increasing in the world, their wealth (in relative terms is increasing in a per-capita percentage, if they just do nothing...)
No. Black holes aren't lopsided
As I see it, those folks that constantly rail against "fiat" currencies and yearn for some sort of "backed" currency, should wonder what to back their currency with? gold? silver? diamonds? uranium? petroleum? or any economic goods/resources?
The problem with any of these physical manifestation is that they are either scarce (the definition of an economic good), or are subject to spontaneous dillution (in the case of gold by digging it out of the ground) meaning the total value is subject to random discoveries.
Although gold was generally considered valuable in-itself and thus tradable (remember even gold money is just a token for exchange), there are many factors to consider. What if "gold" (or whatever backing good was chosen) was suddenly more valuable (either due to a fashion fad, or a genuine economic discovery like say gold semiconductors for quantum computers). The economic value of "gold" would compete with the "backing" value of "gold". Or perhaps "gold" became less valuable (say somehow it could be extracted by killing babies or burning down rain-forests).
If you think these things are unlikely, think about deBeers and diamonds and African wars...
This is not to mention the fact that services (at least in the new economy) seem to have a greater aggregate net value that all the capital goods (meaning there aren't enough capital goods to even back the current amount of "wealth"). It seems very short sighted to base a token for exchange on something that is limited by production of available capital goods (because that would limit growth).
I agree that fiat currency isn't the best situation to be in, but lacking a solid 'value' alternative, it just strikes me as just a lot of whining about "the-man"
Look? John Cramer..., Cosmo Kramer, I don't think so...
But strangely there's some resemblance to the "real" Kenny Kramer (which the character Cosmo Kramer was based on)...
Check out this site for a few examples.
However, if you insist on a superhet design, though, you still can get by with only three...
P.S. I'm not actually old enought to remember this stuff, but hacking topics of any generation are is still pretty fascinating to read about...
I think he's also attributed to the wiki-quote...
For what it's worth, many folks are bragging that they think you can spend some time at 8C (~45F) in the air, but if you were "bathed" in that temperature (e.g., tossed into cold water at that temperature), the expected survival time would only be a couple of hours or less.
Although it's a lot of fear-mongering so far, if the moratorium is lifted, it would not be against federal rules to let a state or a municipality start taxing the intra-state email (although I fail to see how it would be possible to collect/enforce fairly).
States and municipalities are pretty darn'd good at dreaming up taxes right now and I wouldn't put it beyond some of them to tax corporation an assessment based on how many employees there are or tax broadband providers based on how many customers they had (although in the latter case, I'm sure they'd let them pass the surcharge to the subscriber). If you look at your telephone bill or cable bill, you'll see what I mean. I doubt there would ever be a per-email tax (for instance, how could you really tell web-mail from e-mail an define it properly w/o a loophole), but you could certainly get socked with a per megabyte of bandwidth consumption tax.
For instance, oregon, faced with the possiblity that better fuel economy would make increasing per-gallon tax on gasoline unfairly regressive to folks that must drive older cars that get worse gas, is looking into a GPS-based road tax...
Most of this urge to tax telecom is coming because of fear. Traditionally, local governments were able to shake down the telephone and cable companies for money by offering monopolies in exchange for access to the public right-of-way (e.g., to dig phone trenches and stretch coaxial cable), and a host of free or discount use of services (e.g., anyone remember public access cable, that's what we used before YouTube). With the telecom revolution bringing in many new players that don't have to bow before the local commissioners, local governments realize that the "monopolies" they were granting aren't really that valuable anymore and going forward it'll be hard to continue to shake-down these big companies and that the price of revenue enforcment will go up (can't just rely on the monopoly cable or telephone company to write them a check every month for the tax collection). As the cost of revenue enforcement goes up, so does the tax rate to compensate. Since they can't go that regressive on the taxes, they need to find new revenue streams (it's easier politically to tax the "rich" than the "middle-class" and the "poor"). That's were we are right now.
Here's some more info on the subject...
Essentially, all so called science (including computer science) is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks.
;^)
Do you trust the university?
Do you trust the textbook/course notes/literature? (since usually you have not performed the experiments yourself, nor walked through the supporting proofs and/or math)
Do you trust the professor/teacher?
And more specific to computer science...
Do you trust the algorithm?
Do you trust the compiler?
Do you trust the computer hardware?
What about "post-modernism" do you find problematic or dangerous? Basically a post-modern philosophy accepts the concept that truth itself is relative/subjective and non-constant.
To take an arbitrary "post-modernist" view of the GNU/Linux for instance, you could say "Linux is better than Windows" is a truth. Some believe it, some do not, the believers can give you proof. Rational people can believe the proof. yet there is an alternate truth where the situation is reversed. A Modernist would say that there is an objective way to prove or disprove this statement as a fact or a lie. However, a postmodernist will accept that the truth of this statement depends on your point of view and can change over time.
Similarly take a language like C++. In itself C++ is just a representation of a programming language and should be a "knowable" thing, right? However, most understand C++ deconstructively in relation to C, BCPL, SmallTalk, or to Java, Perl, Python. Even despite the fact that there is a written standard that allegedly specifies C++, one might also say that you don't know what C++ is if you don't know object oriented programming, STL, Boost, or Design Patterns or even the fact that a translation unit is a file system in a operating environment or that it runs on a physical manifestation of a turing machine. Even if we ignore the context itself, we know C++ is ephemerial to start with, most people only have interactive experience with GCC or VC++ implementations of it. So what _is_ C++, let alone what about C++ is true? Is there any absolute way to study what _is_ C++ or does knowing anything about it depend on your point of view, your compiler, environment, and will potentially change over time?
Perhaps this is what is really "scary" about post-modernism, there's no "man" in the middle, there's nothing in the middle at all, it's all about the surrounding environment
According to this paper, if you are in hot ice, you'd be zapped or fried (maybe that's the same thing) ;^)
Eventually PolyHeme was tested on humans using an opt-out technique (if you didn't have a special bracelet on your wrist, they could use PolyHeme instead of real blood in trama situations where you couldn't object to being a test subject). As you might imagine, medical testing using an unpublicized opt-out scheme was very controversial at the time.
I'm wondering where the original poster was going with this...
;^)
Not that there's anything wrong with it
There seem to be many reference in this thread to "GPS" licenses, however, to my knowledge there has never been any fees associated with any license for the C/A code reception device. The codes and frequencies were made public well before any satellites were actually launched (of course the P/Y encrypted codes were not, but since selective availability was turned off in 2000, that channel is only beneficial for ionosphere distortion correction anyhow).
The only thing I can think of is at one time long ago, all GPS equipment was considered military technology and US manufacturers needed an EXPORT license to send US made GPS equipment oversees. By 1991, the US government quickly eliminated this requirement for devices intended for civilian use as it was soon clear that US manufactuers were at a significant DISAVANTAGE to foriegn manufacturers of GPS equiment in that they had to pay for EXPORT licenses. This was well before the system was declared "fully-operational" in 1995 with a full constellation of satellites, so in some ways, it's always been free to use GPS for commercial/non-military use.
I think you got it backwards when you say the EU paid these licenses, since it is the US that paid these licenses and the EU got it for FREE. In fact I was working for one of the companies that wanted to take advantage of this fact and did their product development in the UK and Canada.
The EU/Galileo system, however, in addition to the free signal (to "compete" with the free GPS signal), was going to provide an additional higher quality "pay" service.
So perhaps despite your rantings, GPS succeeds because it's open/free system that spawned a $10-Billion industry in a capitalistic world.