However, we can progress if we really understand the underlying issues, and fix them by gene therapy, or manual selection of fertilized eggs. I predict this will become a normal procedure in this century.
Humans may not be in a struggle for existence right now (at least in the developed world), but this doesn't mean evolution has stopped. Evolution is going towards genes that favour a large amount of children.
There used to be a large cost of having more children, because you'd need to find enough food to keep them alive. This has changed since society will provide for the children even if the parents themselves can't.
Nearly everbody who dies leaves behind close relatives and friends who would do anything to save them. This is very moving, but not a basis for rational decision making.
In the end, we're all going to die. Nothing we do can prevent that. The only thing we can do is use our limited resources to make our life worth living. Part of this life is taking risks. If you don't want your wife or kids to die, don't have a wife or kids. Yet, in pursuit of their happiness, many people face the risks, and have a wife and kids.
They will let their kids smoke, drink, drive a car, cross a street.
Whenever fuel cells are discussed on slashdot, someone is always quick to point out the dangers, without properly realizing that common household cleaners come in larger quantities, and are just as toxic, or even more so.
Also, nobody thinks twice about handling cans of hairspray or lighter fluid which are thin, pressurized containers with extremely flammable contents. Or for that matter, Lithium batteries which contain very aggressive chemicals.
Of course, taking these things on planes may require some sort of safety standard.
In mod_perl (which is what the parent was talking about), the Perl engine parses the text only once, and keeps the internal representation in memory, as long as the apache child process is running.
I just checked my web server logs from the last couple of weeks. Out of 252 request that came from a google search, only 3 came from the google cache (getting the images for the cached pages), and all three were from the same host. I'll admit that this is in no way representative, but it would appear that the most people don't use the cache feature. Since nearly all of my pages have in-line images, which google doesn't cache, I don't think there is a significant number of google cache requests that I didn't see here.
Since the 802.11b communications link is two-way, increasing the transmit power of only one end (the access point) is not going to buy you a whole lot
Not necessarily true. If most of the traffic is coming from the AP (a typical case since the AP is usually connected to the servers using a wired network), increasing the power on the AP may allow it to use a higher rate (802.11b has rates between 1 and 11 Mbps). The client card could still use a lower rate for the acknowledgements.
This wouldn't necessary increase your range, but it can certainly increase your throughput.
Not only does the FCC care about the output power, they also care about the spectrum. In case of the 802.11b spectrum there is a main lobe, and smaller side lobes. The FCC regulates the ratio between the power on the main and side lobes. Increasing the power output will also increase the distortion levels, and the power output on the side lobes. This is bad because it interferes with adjacent channels. Manufacturers typically tune their equipment so that they are just within the FCC limits, so blindly increasing power output is not a good idea. The advantage may be smaller than expected too, because of the increased distortion in the signal.
I don't see what the big deal is. As other people have already said, this is likely to be used only on the big bills (500 Euro). Cash machines don't issue these bills, and most banks will not give them out to customers unless requested, or when withdrawing very large amounts of money. For many people, even holding a 500 Euro bill will be a rare event. Spending it is not easy too, as most stores are unlikely to accept it for payment of small items, such as donuts.
And even if you're handling these kinds of bills, it's not easy to tie the bill's serial number to a particular person, and it's fairly easy to circumvent by trading it for somebody else's 500 Euro note.
Compare this with credit cards where every single transaction, no matter how small, is already logged in a database, with full details about the owner, product, place, date and time. How come those aren't "unacceptable" ?
I get tired of all those claims that the "government" is going to see what I buy in the store. Honestly, the government has better things to do that watch me buy a loaf of bread, a can of coke, and a magazine, when they don't even have enough detectives to solve a significant part of real crimes.
Good question. Maybe they're afraid smaller parts have separated from the big piece of debris, and that these fragments are too small to detect from earth ?
2% packet loss is not terrible if you consider that most packet loss on WAN is caused by routers dropping frames because of congestions. TCP uses knowledge from these dropped frames to determine this congestion, and basically reduce its throughput to match the link's bottleneck. 200 ms latency isn't great, but it probably assumes crossing the ocean.
Now, assuming the dropped packets are due to congestion at a bottleneck, there's no reason to assume that UDP+FEC can seriously increase bandwith. If people all start to pump UDP packets at T1 speeds into a WAN, serious congestion will occur, and some router is going to drop the majority of the packets.
Of course, if only a single person is doing it, bandwith can be improved, but I bet you can achieve similar results by removing congestion control from TCP, and using big windows.
The real issue here is that the files shouldn't get corrupted, even if your.pst file is 1.5GB. I keep a lot of stuff in my outlook folders too, organized by topic, including any attachments people may have used. This makes it really easy to view the same thread a year later. There is no fundamental reason why putting 1.5G worth of documents straight on the disk should be any better or more efficient than leaving them in your mailboxes. People aren't supposed to know this, anyway. They're supposed to do their work, and not have to worry how big their mail database has gotten.
A plain 802.11 MAC will not allow a 45 mile distance. This has nothing to do with signal quality, but with round trip delay time. After sending a data frame, the MAC expects an ACK frame withing ~300 microseconds.
Since the signal travels at light speed, every mile of round trip equals ~10.7 microseconds. After about 28 miles the round trip delay becomes higher than the ACK timeout value, and the 802.11 protocol stops working, no matter how much you have amplified the signal. This limit is the same for 802.11 and 802.11b, and will be even worse for 802.11a which has shorter ACK timeout values. Of course, if your product allows tuning of the ACK timeout value, you could theoretically stretch the limit.
Another point to remember is that using 1W transmitters on standard 802.11 products probably violates your country's regulations.
Maybe the people behind the anthrax letters are only trying to get people scared (even the authorities are now warning people to be careful with handling mail), and it looks like this is a fairly effective way. Even though the number of letters sent with anthrax is insignificant compared to the total amount of mail, a lot of people are worried that they may be the next target. Also, if a large terrorist group is behind this, they have shown that they can create anthrax, and maybe they'll find better ways to deliver it. The fact that a lethal dose of anthrax is very small, means that it could be anywhere, especially if the goal is only to kill a few people here and there.
The problem is that you need a temperature gradient. Inside the human body there is hardly any gradient, so this wouldn't work without part of the device being outside the body. Even then, I am sure there's no way this method comes close to generating the power needed for an artificial heart.
Instead of relying on your employer to provide 'advertising' for you, why not set up a personal web page for yourself ? It would be a simple matter of describing your past work experience, and the name of your current employer, plus a bit about what exactly you're doing. As long as you don't mention anything that could be construed as leaking confidential information you should be okay (or show it to your employer/lawyer first). Google should take care of the rest.
The wording can be chosen between desperate for a new job and very happy with current job.
The purpose of the paperwork is not to save lives, it's to save the space program. The amount of money spent to avoid losing an astronaut's life is completely out of proportion compared to the money spent on almost any other life in the world. More people freeze to death every winter in New York than the total number of astronauts who have died in the space program. Yet, we don't see any multi million dollar effort to save them. While NASA would be saddened and shocked over the loss of any of their people's lives, they are more worried that another mishap with a shuttle will have the remaining ones grounded for 10 years.
I think their point is that they want to have cheap, high bandwith, internet access. Of course, this has been done before, even with standard 802.11b equipment.
It's a security breach waiting to happen.
Not quite. It's easy enough to run your own security on top of this link, and block all unauthorized traffic.
One of the overlooked things about these recent advances in chess playing is that it is (often) more about advances in brute-force
computational power than "true" AI improvements.
If you want to study AI, chess is the wrong way to do it. There is no reason to think that the human approach to chess is any more successful that brute force. Your average PC has much less total computing power that your brain, but it will still beat you at chess (unless you're a grand master). Given a limited amount of hardware, the computer's way of playing chess may be more optimal than the human way of playing chess. Humans aren't build for chess, they are build to survive in the woods. The fact that some of them can learn to play chess pretty well is a coincidence.
If you want to build a strong chess computer, there is no reason why it should be based on "true" AI.
If you want "true" AI, you need to pick a different problem to solve. Preferably one that's much fuzzier than chess. The game of 'Go' would be much more suitable because brute force doesn't work there.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true.
However, we can progress if we really understand the underlying issues, and fix them by gene therapy, or manual selection of fertilized eggs. I predict this will become a normal procedure in this century.
Humans may not be in a struggle for existence right now (at least in the developed world), but this doesn't mean evolution has stopped. Evolution is going towards genes that favour a large amount of children.
There used to be a large cost of having more children, because you'd need to find enough food to keep them alive. This has changed since society will provide for the children even if the parents themselves can't.
So, are you suggesting that Joe Sixpack is going to record his favourite television show by aiming a camcorder to his television set ?
Ha, you're going to 'confirm' this supposed moon landing by showing doctored photographs ? Try again.
No.
Nearly everbody who dies leaves behind close relatives and friends who would do anything to save them. This is very moving, but not a basis for rational decision making.
In the end, we're all going to die. Nothing we do can prevent that. The only thing we can do is use our limited resources to make our life worth living. Part of this life is taking risks. If you don't want your wife or kids to die, don't have a wife or kids. Yet, in pursuit of their happiness, many people face the risks, and have a wife and kids.
They will let their kids smoke, drink, drive a car, cross a street.
I'll let mine handle mail.
So, what happens when a terrorist kills 5 Americans with a bomb strapped to his body ?
Whenever fuel cells are discussed on slashdot, someone is always quick to point out the dangers, without properly realizing that common household cleaners come in larger quantities, and are just as toxic, or even more so.
Also, nobody thinks twice about handling cans of hairspray or lighter fluid which are thin, pressurized containers with extremely flammable contents. Or for that matter, Lithium batteries which contain very aggressive chemicals.
Of course, taking these things on planes may require some sort of safety standard.
In mod_perl (which is what the parent was talking about), the Perl engine parses the text only once, and keeps the internal representation in memory, as long as the apache child process is running.
I just checked my web server logs from the last couple of weeks. Out of 252 request that came from a google search, only 3 came from the google cache (getting the images for the cached pages), and all three were from the same host. I'll admit that this is in no way representative, but it would appear that the most people don't use the cache feature. Since nearly all of my pages have in-line images, which google doesn't cache, I don't think there is a significant number of google cache requests that I didn't see here.
Since the 802.11b communications link is two-way, increasing the transmit power of only one end (the access point) is not going to buy you a whole lot
Not necessarily true. If most of the traffic is coming from the AP (a typical case since the AP is usually connected to the servers using a wired network), increasing the power on the AP may allow it to use a higher rate (802.11b has rates between 1 and 11 Mbps). The client card could still use a lower rate for the acknowledgements.
This wouldn't necessary increase your range, but it can certainly increase your throughput.
Not only does the FCC care about the output power, they also care about the spectrum. In case of the 802.11b spectrum there is a main lobe, and smaller side lobes. The FCC regulates the ratio between the power on the main and side lobes. Increasing the power output will also increase the distortion levels, and the power output on the side lobes. This is bad because it interferes with adjacent channels. Manufacturers typically tune their equipment so that they are just within the FCC limits, so blindly increasing power output is not a good idea. The advantage may be smaller than expected too, because of the increased distortion in the signal.
I don't see what the big deal is. As other people have already said, this is likely to be used only on the big bills (500 Euro). Cash machines don't issue these bills, and most banks will not give them out to customers unless requested, or when withdrawing very large amounts of money. For many people, even holding a 500 Euro bill will be a rare event. Spending it is not easy too, as most stores are unlikely to accept it for payment of small items, such as donuts.
And even if you're handling these kinds of bills, it's not easy to tie the bill's serial number to a particular person, and it's fairly easy to circumvent by trading it for somebody else's 500 Euro note.
Compare this with credit cards where every single transaction, no matter how small, is already logged in a database, with full details about the owner, product, place, date and time. How come those aren't "unacceptable" ?
I get tired of all those claims that the "government" is going to see what I buy in the store. Honestly, the government has better things to do that watch me buy a loaf of bread, a can of coke, and a magazine, when they don't even have enough detectives to solve a significant part of real crimes.
Good question. Maybe they're afraid smaller parts have separated from the big piece of debris, and that these fragments are too small to detect from earth ?
2% packet loss is not terrible if you consider that most packet loss on WAN is caused by routers dropping frames because of congestions. TCP uses knowledge from these dropped frames to determine this congestion, and basically reduce its throughput to match the link's bottleneck. 200 ms latency isn't great, but it probably assumes crossing the ocean.
Now, assuming the dropped packets are due to congestion at a bottleneck, there's no reason to assume that UDP+FEC can seriously increase bandwith. If people all start to pump UDP packets at T1 speeds into a WAN, serious congestion will occur, and some router is going to drop the majority of the packets.
Of course, if only a single person is doing it, bandwith can be improved, but I bet you can achieve similar results by removing congestion control from TCP, and using big windows.
The real issue here is that the files shouldn't get corrupted, even if your .pst file is 1.5GB. I keep a lot of stuff in my outlook folders too, organized by topic, including any attachments people may have used. This makes it really easy to view the same thread a year later. There is no fundamental reason why putting 1.5G worth of documents straight on the disk should be any better or more efficient than leaving them in your mailboxes. People aren't supposed to know this, anyway. They're supposed to do their work, and not have to worry how big their mail database has gotten.
A plain 802.11 MAC will not allow a 45 mile distance. This has nothing to do with signal quality, but with round trip delay time. After sending a data frame, the MAC expects an ACK frame withing ~300 microseconds.
Since the signal travels at light speed, every mile of round trip equals ~10.7 microseconds. After about 28 miles the round trip delay becomes higher than the ACK timeout value, and the 802.11 protocol stops working, no matter how much you have amplified the signal. This limit is the same for 802.11 and 802.11b, and will be even worse for 802.11a which has shorter ACK timeout values. Of course, if your product allows tuning of the ACK timeout value, you could theoretically stretch the limit.
Another point to remember is that using 1W transmitters on standard 802.11 products probably violates your country's regulations.
Maybe the people behind the anthrax letters are only trying to get people scared (even the authorities are now warning people to be careful with handling mail), and it looks like this is a fairly effective way. Even though the number of letters sent with anthrax is insignificant compared to the total amount of mail, a lot of people are worried that they may be the next target. Also, if a large terrorist group is behind this, they have shown that they can create anthrax, and maybe they'll find better ways to deliver it. The fact that a lethal dose of anthrax is very small, means that it could be anywhere, especially if the goal is only to kill a few people here and there.
The problem is that you need a temperature gradient. Inside the human body there is hardly any gradient, so this wouldn't work without part of the device being outside the body. Even then, I am sure there's no way this method comes close to generating the power needed for an artificial heart.
Instead of relying on your employer to provide 'advertising' for you, why not set up a personal web page for yourself ? It would be a simple matter of describing your past work experience, and the name of your current employer, plus a bit about what exactly you're doing. As long as you don't mention anything that could be construed as leaking confidential information you should be okay (or show it to your employer/lawyer first). Google should take care of the rest.
The wording can be chosen between desperate for a new job and very happy with current job.
Some programs require the user to move the mouse around in order to generate "random" numbers that will be used to create a private key.
The purpose of the paperwork is not to save lives, it's to save the space program. The amount of money spent to avoid losing an astronaut's life is completely out of proportion compared to the money spent on almost any other life in the world. More people freeze to death every winter in New York than the total number of astronauts who have died in the space program. Yet, we don't see any multi million dollar effort to save them. While NASA would be saddened and shocked over the loss of any of their people's lives, they are more worried that another mishap with a shuttle will have the remaining ones grounded for 10 years.
..but what's the point?
I think their point is that they want to have cheap, high bandwith, internet access. Of course, this has been done before, even with standard 802.11b equipment.
It's a security breach waiting to happen.
Not quite. It's easy enough to run your own security on top of this link, and block all unauthorized traffic.
2005, NASA shows Hubble's last blurry picture, in which an alien wearing a red sweatshirt is approaching the telescope.
Only moments later, contact with the Hubble is lost...
One of the overlooked things about these recent advances in chess playing is that it is (often) more about advances in brute-force
computational power than "true" AI improvements.
If you want to study AI, chess is the wrong way to do it. There is no reason to think that the human approach to chess is any more successful that brute force. Your average PC has much less total computing power that your brain, but it will still beat you at chess (unless you're a grand master). Given a limited amount of hardware, the computer's way of playing chess may be more optimal than the human way of playing chess. Humans aren't build for chess, they are build to survive in the woods. The fact that some of them can learn to play chess pretty well is a coincidence.
If you want to build a strong chess computer, there is no reason why it should be based on "true" AI.
If you want "true" AI, you need to pick a different problem to solve. Preferably one that's much fuzzier than chess. The game of 'Go' would be much more suitable because brute force doesn't work there.
Here's an interesting link discussing this type of reactor.