If the FCC allowed the television broadcasters to sell/use that spectrum for something other than analog TV the transition would have already happened. This is a very valuable slice of the spectrum and there is tons of market demand to make it available for other use. People may not care about DTV in and of itself, but they definitely care about what the transition will pave the way for, and it is absolutely in the public interest to do so.
Furthermore, the broadcast flag was shot down in court and each time it went to congress. It is not required for converters to implement the flag and AFAIK none of the current crop DTV converters do. The two that I own certainly do not. The horse is already out of the gate here, and Hollywood is going to have a very hard time implementing the broadcast flag now that everyone owns a non-compliant converter.
Normally that would be true, but not in this case.
Unless the ARM instruction set has changed since I last used it, there is no DIV instruction, and the general case way of implementing it is to subtract in a loop. Therefore, with a dumb compiler, the way the code is currently implemented would be faster than using divisions and modulus, because it combines the multiple loops into a single one.
However, there are many ways to optimize this for special cases, and one of the biggest special cases is division by a constant. In that case you can convert the divide to a shift and multiply, which will be faster than a loop in the vast majority of cases.
Normal Person: Holy crap, we just created a vent for magma to escape! Scientist: Ooh, we haven't studied this before! I love it. Oh, and obligatory XKCD comic.
The only way to win was to brute force your way through the game, or make a lucky guess.
For the most part, I'd disagree with that. There was some trial and error, sure, but there was almost always some logic to the puzzle, and most of the puzzles I ended solving with "aha" moments as opposed to finally trying the right random combination.
I don't know if these were the same, but a lot of the solution manuals that I have read present the fastest or easiest method of finishing the game, which is often counter-intuitive, and not the way one would naturally figure out the puzzle. They usually pipeline activities to reduce backtracking (or exploring), which makes it appear as if you have to know to do certain things that you would have no reason to know at that point in the game.
They also make use of major use of shortcuts, which are often not revealed until latter on in the game to make it easier for you to get around. For example, IIRC, you don't actually have to use XYZZY at all to win those games, it is just a shortcut or easter-egg playing homage to the original Adventure game.
Ugh, this. As much as I hate to say it, I am actually looking forward to the Vista rollout here at work because our Java desktop apps (data-crunching and visualization) will finally be able to use more than 1.3GB of memory.
The lander wasn't made by NASA, JPL, or anyone like that. It was designed and assembled by the University of Arizona, who naturally had to get most of the parts fabbed by other folks.
Carter decided to avoid breeder reactors in part because they can blow up and new fuel is cheep enough that reprocessing is not that big a deal[citation needed]
I've read a lot about the nuclear reprocessing ban, and have never heard that. It wasn't in any of the DOE studies of reprocessing that Ford and Carter had done, and it wasn't in any of the speeches or writings that I've read by Carter himself. The reason given was always non-proliferation. I realize that Carter was a smart man and certainly understood nuclear power, but I also realize that he put attempts at attaining peace above all else, and this is just one of many examples of that.
If you're not up to orbital velocity almost immediately, you're going to crash back into the earth.
No, you won't. You are in an airship. You can have zero velocity and you will stay at roughly the same altitude just because of buoyancy. So you spend the first week just floating at the same altitude, slowly accelerating, until you eventually cross a point where you are going faster than the orbital velocity for that altitude. At that point you are now actually orbiting instead of floating. Then you spend another week slowly accelerating and spiraling out to the desired orbit.
I think it is a really cool idea, but I don't know if it will work either. The maximum altitude that the airship can float to must have some atmosphere (although much less than at sea level), and that atmosphere will cause drag - possibly enough to cancel out the efficiencies gained by using an ion engine vs a chemical one. So that is the big question in my mind - how high do you have to go before the atmosphere is thin enough for this to work, and can we build airships capable of doing so?
That page mostly talks about what virtual memory is and doesn't directly list why it is an improvement.
Some folks have already mentioned the fact that it eliminates memory fragmentation, and that it allows mapping of files and hardware into memory without dedicating (wasting) part of the address space to those uses.
Another reason is that you can have 2^64 bytes of total system memory, even if the individual applications are 32-bit, and can only address 2^32 bytes of memory. Since the 32-bit applications are presented a virtual address space, it doesn't matter if their pages are located above the 32-bit boundary.
It means that per-process memory protection is enforced by the CPU paging table. Without virtual memory you would have to reimplement something like it just for memory protection.
It means that the linker/loader don't have to patch the executable with modified address locations when it is loaded into memory.
The above two reasons have the corollary that libraries can be shared in memory much more easily.
And that's just off the top of my head. Virtual memory is a very, very useful thing.
Society doesn't. A self-serving bureaucracy that can only assert control over a device if it is defined to be a medical device will be happy to do so however.
Do you (or anyone else) have recommendations for schools that do a good job at teaching software engineering? I work with HS students from time-to-time and it would be nice to have some place to recommend.
I went to a science/engineering school and got a good Computer Science education there. I agree that it would have been nice to have a couple more classes on software architecture, testing and planning, and that some of the CS classes like Automata (which I enjoyed) aren't useful for 99% of the students.
However, the problem I've found is that all the good schools teach computer science and the ones that claim to teach software engineering are usually no better trade schools that crank out people who know a few technologies but none of the principles behind them. I wouldn't give up a rigorous hands-on treatment of Data Structures, Algorithms, and Systems Architecture for the world, so I still end up recommending a good CS program over software engineering, even if it means suffering through a few unnecessary classes.
I cannot possibly see how delaying Aries would save any money over the long term. NASA has tons of people whose entire job is to support the maintenance and launch operations of the shuttle system. If we delay the Aries these folks will have nothing to do. If we fire them then they will move on and find other jobs and we will loose decades of experience which we can't expect to hire back if we decide to restart the manned space program again.
We have already wasted a bunch of money by grounding the shuttle longer than needed, and will be wasting more between the time when the shuttle is retired and Aries begins to fly. Furthermore the manned space program we have has has little to no value compared to our unmanned programs, and if our only goal is to continue limping along as we have been then it continue to be nothing but a money sink, regardless of how good of a job the Aries engineers are.
We have delayed advancing our manned space program for too long and we are paying for it. The only cost effective option at this point is to not only continue with the shuttle replacement as soon as possible, but to ramp up our manned space program and start doing something usefull (like precursors to colonization). If we aren't willing to do something meaningful with our manned space program then we should admit its current failure and cancel it altogether.
You know, I'm looking at this in Konquerer and it looks like complete shit there as well. Even when viewing it the way it was "intended" to be seen in Firefox, it is still a horrible design. I've been largely positive about the recent redesigns here at slashdot. I really like the new discussion system, and the new front page has some nice aspects even if the tagging is very rough and the have been regressions on article abbreviations.
But I cannot find a single redeeming property of this new personal page. It defaults to showing the least interesting information (which stories I've voted up or down) and other things take longer to find. The summary boxes on the right serve no useful purpose, and their existence requires me to use a wider browser window to prevent the useful information from being covered up. Why are journals no longer on the personal page? The last comment shown white on green is absolutely hideous not to mention pointless - I know what I wrote I don't need to see that, I'd like to see replies and moderation done to it. I'd rather they spend their time improving the beta index, then destroying the user profile.
Telling them that I don't want expertsexchange included in my searches isn't the part I'm worried about - it's the fact that now all my searches are tied to an account which I don't think they anonymize like they do with IP addresses. The firefox plugin works great for simple things like blacklisting, so unless they have some really usefull keyword clustering and search adjustment that can't be done client side, I don't see myself using this.
For something to be considered prior art it must have been publicly available in some form. For example, a released product is prior art, a prototype or in-house product is not. A paper published in a journal is prior art, a internal whitepaper or lab notebook is not.
While the courts to accept internal schematics, code and documentation as evidence that a released product is implemented in a certain way and thus prior art for a certain patent, they would not consider a product that has never been released as prior art.
That is what the first-to-file rules changed - when multiple people apply for overlapping patents all the other internal documentation that is not considered prior art is now only looked at if it was created within a year before the patent was filed. In the past it was looked at much farther back to determine who invented a product first, but only in the case of multiple filers. Even before the change, it wasn't prior art, and thus couldn't invalidate a patent if the other party never filed for a patent.
that statement implies that all positrons are anti-matter and all anti-matter is positrons.
Okay, I guess I don't understand anti-matter as well as I thought I did, and reading the link didn't help. So, I'll ask - why is the first half of that statement not true?
As far as I know, phones don't transmit call logs. But the reason they transmit it's serial number and phone number and GSM IDs, is because they need to have a unique identifier to hand off call from one cell tower to another, and that ID must be traceable to an account in order to bill it properly. So you can't really opt out of this even if you controlled the hardware, although I suppose you might be able to filter the towers that the phone will talk to.
The rest of the privacy invading features are intended to provided a more accurate triangulation for use with the e911 system. This could be evaded except it's against the law to manufacture/distribute a phone without e911 support.
Re:What do I read first?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It doesn't really jump around, and the published order is a good as any other. There are two story lines - the Ender Series which follow Ender he goes out into space, and the Bean Series that describe what happens meanwhile back on Earth. The stories in each series should definitely be read in order, but the two series really don't depend on each other or feedback into each other in any important way, so which of the two you read first (or in parallel) is up to you.
As far as quality goes, I'd recommend reading Speaker for the Dead first as I think it's the best book of both the series. I'd then read Xenocide next, just because it brings better closure to some important plot item in SftD, and is a decent story itself. Children of the Mind can be read last or skipped altogether without harm:P
Their job is to decide whether a law is constitutional Not quite. It's their job to interpret the entirety of the law, of which the constitution is the highest authority. If the law merely grants departments broad powers, in vague circumstances it does become the job of the Supreme Court to determine whether those circumstances apply. You can blame congress for passing crappy laws for that. I too am having a hard time finding out exactly what laws this case was decided based on (without reading the whole decision). Here is some more info, admittedly in favor of the Navy.
It sounds like the actual laws being questioned changed over the duration of the trial. First they were charging that Navy hadn't filed an environmental impact study (which they hadn't although they have studied the heck out of it), which the law "requires" but the law lists no punishment for not doing so. Furthermore, the Navy already had an exemption (from at least some laws), and got another one after the trial started dealing directly with this law. It sounds like after all was said and done this turned into something like the "EPA is required to regulate CO2" lawsuit, requiring the Court to decide based on the powers and responsibilities of that agency.
It claims to be a standard HID Bluetooth keyboard, so it shouldn't need special drivers for linux - the included ones will work fine. Note that the drivers for windows (post 9x) are also optional, as they support bluetooth out of the box, and OS X also works fine out of the box.
Yes. Click on Help&Preferences on the top tool bar. First go to Index/General and uncheck "Use Beta Index", if it is checked and click save. Then go to Index/Sections and select which sections you would like to see on the index - the far right option is to always display the full summary.
The beta index has some nice features like voting, but currently ignores your settings when deciding which stories to collapse.
Slashdot Mirror
If the FCC allowed the television broadcasters to sell/use that spectrum for something other than analog TV the transition would have already happened. This is a very valuable slice of the spectrum and there is tons of market demand to make it available for other use. People may not care about DTV in and of itself, but they definitely care about what the transition will pave the way for, and it is absolutely in the public interest to do so.
Furthermore, the broadcast flag was shot down in court and each time it went to congress. It is not required for converters to implement the flag and AFAIK none of the current crop DTV converters do. The two that I own certainly do not. The horse is already out of the gate here, and Hollywood is going to have a very hard time implementing the broadcast flag now that everyone owns a non-compliant converter.
Normally that would be true, but not in this case.
Unless the ARM instruction set has changed since I last used it, there is no DIV instruction, and the general case way of implementing it is to subtract in a loop. Therefore, with a dumb compiler, the way the code is currently implemented would be faster than using divisions and modulus, because it combines the multiple loops into a single one.
However, there are many ways to optimize this for special cases, and one of the biggest special cases is division by a constant. In that case you can convert the divide to a shift and multiply, which will be faster than a loop in the vast majority of cases.
Normal Person: Holy crap, we just created a vent for magma to escape!
Scientist: Ooh, we haven't studied this before!
I love it. Oh, and obligatory XKCD comic.
The only way to win was to brute force your way through the game, or make a lucky guess.
For the most part, I'd disagree with that. There was some trial and error, sure, but there was almost always some logic to the puzzle, and most of the puzzles I ended solving with "aha" moments as opposed to finally trying the right random combination.
I don't know if these were the same, but a lot of the solution manuals that I have read present the fastest or easiest method of finishing the game, which is often counter-intuitive, and not the way one would naturally figure out the puzzle. They usually pipeline activities to reduce backtracking (or exploring), which makes it appear as if you have to know to do certain things that you would have no reason to know at that point in the game.
They also make use of major use of shortcuts, which are often not revealed until latter on in the game to make it easier for you to get around. For example, IIRC, you don't actually have to use XYZZY at all to win those games, it is just a shortcut or easter-egg playing homage to the original Adventure game.
Ugh, this. As much as I hate to say it, I am actually looking forward to the Vista rollout here at work because our Java desktop apps (data-crunching and visualization) will finally be able to use more than 1.3GB of memory.
The lander wasn't made by NASA, JPL, or anyone like that. It was designed and assembled by the University of Arizona, who naturally had to get most of the parts fabbed by other folks.
Carter decided to avoid breeder reactors in part because they can blow up and new fuel is cheep enough that reprocessing is not that big a deal[citation needed]
I've read a lot about the nuclear reprocessing ban, and have never heard that. It wasn't in any of the DOE studies of reprocessing that Ford and Carter had done, and it wasn't in any of the speeches or writings that I've read by Carter himself. The reason given was always non-proliferation. I realize that Carter was a smart man and certainly understood nuclear power, but I also realize that he put attempts at attaining peace above all else, and this is just one of many examples of that.
If you're not up to orbital velocity almost immediately, you're going to crash back into the earth.
No, you won't. You are in an airship. You can have zero velocity and you will stay at roughly the same altitude just because of buoyancy. So you spend the first week just floating at the same altitude, slowly accelerating, until you eventually cross a point where you are going faster than the orbital velocity for that altitude. At that point you are now actually orbiting instead of floating. Then you spend another week slowly accelerating and spiraling out to the desired orbit.
I think it is a really cool idea, but I don't know if it will work either. The maximum altitude that the airship can float to must have some atmosphere (although much less than at sea level), and that atmosphere will cause drag - possibly enough to cancel out the efficiencies gained by using an ion engine vs a chemical one. So that is the big question in my mind - how high do you have to go before the atmosphere is thin enough for this to work, and can we build airships capable of doing so?
Because it includes Lotus Notes! Who wouldn't want to use Lotus Notes!
That page mostly talks about what virtual memory is and doesn't directly list why it is an improvement.
Some folks have already mentioned the fact that it eliminates memory fragmentation, and that it allows mapping of files and hardware into memory without dedicating (wasting) part of the address space to those uses.
Another reason is that you can have 2^64 bytes of total system memory, even if the individual applications are 32-bit, and can only address 2^32 bytes of memory. Since the 32-bit applications are presented a virtual address space, it doesn't matter if their pages are located above the 32-bit boundary.
It means that per-process memory protection is enforced by the CPU paging table. Without virtual memory you would have to reimplement something like it just for memory protection.
It means that the linker/loader don't have to patch the executable with modified address locations when it is loaded into memory.
The above two reasons have the corollary that libraries can be shared in memory much more easily.
And that's just off the top of my head. Virtual memory is a very, very useful thing.
Society doesn't. A self-serving bureaucracy that can only assert control over a device if it is defined to be a medical device will be happy to do so however.
Do you (or anyone else) have recommendations for schools that do a good job at teaching software engineering? I work with HS students from time-to-time and it would be nice to have some place to recommend.
I went to a science/engineering school and got a good Computer Science education there. I agree that it would have been nice to have a couple more classes on software architecture, testing and planning, and that some of the CS classes like Automata (which I enjoyed) aren't useful for 99% of the students.
However, the problem I've found is that all the good schools teach computer science and the ones that claim to teach software engineering are usually no better trade schools that crank out people who know a few technologies but none of the principles behind them. I wouldn't give up a rigorous hands-on treatment of Data Structures, Algorithms, and Systems Architecture for the world, so I still end up recommending a good CS program over software engineering, even if it means suffering through a few unnecessary classes.
I cannot possibly see how delaying Aries would save any money over the long term. NASA has tons of people whose entire job is to support the maintenance and launch operations of the shuttle system. If we delay the Aries these folks will have nothing to do. If we fire them then they will move on and find other jobs and we will loose decades of experience which we can't expect to hire back if we decide to restart the manned space program again.
We have already wasted a bunch of money by grounding the shuttle longer than needed, and will be wasting more between the time when the shuttle is retired and Aries begins to fly. Furthermore the manned space program we have has has little to no value compared to our unmanned programs, and if our only goal is to continue limping along as we have been then it continue to be nothing but a money sink, regardless of how good of a job the Aries engineers are.
We have delayed advancing our manned space program for too long and we are paying for it. The only cost effective option at this point is to not only continue with the shuttle replacement as soon as possible, but to ramp up our manned space program and start doing something usefull (like precursors to colonization). If we aren't willing to do something meaningful with our manned space program then we should admit its current failure and cancel it altogether.
You know, I'm looking at this in Konquerer and it looks like complete shit there as well. Even when viewing it the way it was "intended" to be seen in Firefox, it is still a horrible design. I've been largely positive about the recent redesigns here at slashdot. I really like the new discussion system, and the new front page has some nice aspects even if the tagging is very rough and the have been regressions on article abbreviations.
But I cannot find a single redeeming property of this new personal page. It defaults to showing the least interesting information (which stories I've voted up or down) and other things take longer to find. The summary boxes on the right serve no useful purpose, and their existence requires me to use a wider browser window to prevent the useful information from being covered up. Why are journals no longer on the personal page? The last comment shown white on green is absolutely hideous not to mention pointless - I know what I wrote I don't need to see that, I'd like to see replies and moderation done to it. I'd rather they spend their time improving the beta index, then destroying the user profile.
Telling them that I don't want expertsexchange included in my searches isn't the part I'm worried about - it's the fact that now all my searches are tied to an account which I don't think they anonymize like they do with IP addresses. The firefox plugin works great for simple things like blacklisting, so unless they have some really usefull keyword clustering and search adjustment that can't be done client side, I don't see myself using this.
Yes, I would definitely trust your average steel worker to take better care of his tools than your average geek or jet pilot.
For something to be considered prior art it must have been publicly available in some form. For example, a released product is prior art, a prototype or in-house product is not. A paper published in a journal is prior art, a internal whitepaper or lab notebook is not.
While the courts to accept internal schematics, code and documentation as evidence that a released product is implemented in a certain way and thus prior art for a certain patent, they would not consider a product that has never been released as prior art.
That is what the first-to-file rules changed - when multiple people apply for overlapping patents all the other internal documentation that is not considered prior art is now only looked at if it was created within a year before the patent was filed. In the past it was looked at much farther back to determine who invented a product first, but only in the case of multiple filers. Even before the change, it wasn't prior art, and thus couldn't invalidate a patent if the other party never filed for a patent.
that statement implies that all positrons are anti-matter and all anti-matter is positrons.
Okay, I guess I don't understand anti-matter as well as I thought I did, and reading the link didn't help. So, I'll ask - why is the first half of that statement not true?
As far as I know, phones don't transmit call logs. But the reason they transmit it's serial number and phone number and GSM IDs, is because they need to have a unique identifier to hand off call from one cell tower to another, and that ID must be traceable to an account in order to bill it properly. So you can't really opt out of this even if you controlled the hardware, although I suppose you might be able to filter the towers that the phone will talk to.
The rest of the privacy invading features are intended to provided a more accurate triangulation for use with the e911 system. This could be evaded except it's against the law to manufacture/distribute a phone without e911 support.
It doesn't really jump around, and the published order is a good as any other. There are two story lines - the Ender Series which follow Ender he goes out into space, and the Bean Series that describe what happens meanwhile back on Earth. The stories in each series should definitely be read in order, but the two series really don't depend on each other or feedback into each other in any important way, so which of the two you read first (or in parallel) is up to you.
As far as quality goes, I'd recommend reading Speaker for the Dead first as I think it's the best book of both the series. I'd then read Xenocide next, just because it brings better closure to some important plot item in SftD, and is a decent story itself. Children of the Mind can be read last or skipped altogether without harm :P
Their job is to decide whether a law is constitutional
Not quite. It's their job to interpret the entirety of the law, of which the constitution is the highest authority. If the law merely grants departments broad powers, in vague circumstances it does become the job of the Supreme Court to determine whether those circumstances apply. You can blame congress for passing crappy laws for that.
I too am having a hard time finding out exactly what laws this case was decided based on (without reading the whole decision). Here is some more info, admittedly in favor of the Navy.
It sounds like the actual laws being questioned changed over the duration of the trial. First they were charging that Navy hadn't filed an environmental impact study (which they hadn't although they have studied the heck out of it), which the law "requires" but the law lists no punishment for not doing so. Furthermore, the Navy already had an exemption (from at least some laws), and got another one after the trial started dealing directly with this law. It sounds like after all was said and done this turned into something like the "EPA is required to regulate CO2" lawsuit, requiring the Court to decide based on the powers and responsibilities of that agency.
It's a flugle bomb!
It claims to be a standard HID Bluetooth keyboard, so it shouldn't need special drivers for linux - the included ones will work fine. Note that the drivers for windows (post 9x) are also optional, as they support bluetooth out of the box, and OS X also works fine out of the box.
Yes. Click on Help&Preferences on the top tool bar. First go to Index/General and uncheck "Use Beta Index", if it is checked and click save. Then go to Index/Sections and select which sections you would like to see on the index - the far right option is to always display the full summary.
The beta index has some nice features like voting, but currently ignores your settings when deciding which stories to collapse.
Adding : to the front of complex commands you just typed but realise you don't want to execute yet so that they get into your shell history
Thanks, I hadn't thought of that.