Suppose you want to buy something illegal using one bitcoin, but the transaction where you paid was intercepted by the police. They seize a copy of the bitcoin. They know that bitcoin was used for illegal purposes, but since you are so devious, they don't know where it came from.
Now in some other investigation, they seize your private key. They see your signature as the previous owner of the illegally used bitcoin and have absolute proof that you are the purchaser, no matter how devious you were in transferring it to the seller.
Yes, RStudio is an IDE. An IDE is a GUI for development. If you want a GUI to do statistics without programming, then RStudio is not what you need.
I really don't know what you're talking about in your second paragraph. R doesn't force any pedagogical problems. It's a tool. It doesn't force anything.
There are no new GUIs in the R distribution, but there are several GUIs produced by third parties that probably weren't available when you were doing your thesis. I like RStudio and recommend it to my students, but there are others too.
"Currently, Julia is available only for 32-bit Windows."
Julia is available in 64 bits on other platforms, but posting it as a reply in a thread that was complaining how late R is to the 64 bit game is a bit rich. R has had 64 bit releases for all platforms for 3 years now. What's new in 3.0.0 is the removal of the remaining 32 bit limit on individual objects.
None of you are willing to sacrifice ANYTHING or inflict ANY kind of inconvenience upon yourself
I think it's pretty clear from other responses that this claim is false. A true version might be, "Not enough of you are willing to sacrifice enough to do away with the TSA." Sounds pretty boring that way, doesn't it?
Personally, I avoid US airports when I can. I suspect a lot on non-Americans do that, and it is hurting American airlines, but not enough to make a difference. You guys aren't really big on acting rationally lately.
Lots of cameras have microphones. Those work with the lens cap on. For example, the Canon EOS M has a stereo mic and WiFi. Since it doesn't have a hideaway lens, it would be easy to forget to turn it off when you put it away -- I do that a lot with my DSLR.
If you could fake that, you could indeed create trillions of bitcoins. They would be counterfeit, but indistinguishable from real ones. Coins and transactions are digitally signed... so this is impossible.
I think you have a different definition of "impossible" than I do. Clearly a brute force attack could fake the signatures. That's not currently feasible, but not impossible.
A much more likely attack is to steal the certificates used for signing. That might be hard, but it's definitely not impossible. We hear about certificates being stolen every few months, so presumably it happens even more frequently than that.
It is indeed impossible to create more coins than defined in the mathematical function that describes bitcoins.
That's assuming that no way is found to cheat. There are 21 million bitcoins possible, and currently about half of those are in circulation. However, you have to trust the underlying system to know whether the bitcoin being offered to you hasn't already been sold to someone else. If you could fake that, you could indeed create trillions of bitcoins. They would be counterfeit, but indistinguishable from real ones.
Yeah, you know, I get really sick and tired of hearing all the horseshit Canadian Slashdot users trot out and flaunt in front of us whenever the US is so stupid and evil and screwed up and crap (not that they're wrong).
You do know that Edwin Mellen Press is American, right? American bloggers would be too frightened by the possibility of a lawsuit to publish their true opinion. You've got to go north to find the land of the free these days.
You can't focus a reflection of a light source to a smaller angle than the apparent size of the light source. From near earth, the sun appears to be about half a degree across, so the tightest focus you could achieve is also half a degree across.
Presumably you'd want to use this at fairly large distances, say 150 million km (the distance from the earth to the sun, which is the range the lasers were to be designed for). At that distance your tightest focus would be about 1.4 million km across (the size of the sun, not coincidentally). And unless you could make your mirror a lot bigger than the sun, you wouldn't light up the asteroid more than the sun already did.
Well, no wonder the prices are high. If the manufacturers aren't allowed to rip off the consumers in underhanded ways, they'll just have to do it out in the open.
It's nice that you have so much confidence in the engineers, but I think it's more likely that there's a senior engineer working at the city, who has been there forever, is totally incompetent, and does things the way he does because if he ever changed it would be like admitting he was wrong before.
If he ever accidentally hires a competent junior engineer, the junior engineer will quickly learn how bad it is to work for an idiot, and will get a job somewhere else. The boss will then get to hire again, until he finds someone as incompetent as he is.
There doesn't need to be any political interference in any of this, just standard bureaucratic incompetence.
Contrary to popular belief most civil engineers aren't dumb
I must live in the city that hired the rest of them:
Light cycles are very long here, regardless of the time of day. If you miss that green, you'll be sitting there for 2 or 3 minutes, even if you are the only car on the road. (Unless you just drive through the red.)
There are loops in the road to detect cars from less travelled roads, and they'll trigger a change in the light. There are also buttons to detect pedestrians, but they don't advance the cycle, they just give a walk signal. Eventually. The pedestrian buttons are also the only way to detect a bike, though it's illegal to ride your bike onto the sidewalk to press them.
The Journal of Statistical Software is an electronic journal that publishes software. It tends to publish R packages because that's where the development is mostly happening these days, but it will publish any language. The refereeing process checks that the software works as well as that it is a good contribution. It has a reasonable reputation, far above the junk journals on Beall's list (Google it if you don't know what that is), though not as high as the better mathematical journals in the area. The R Journal has a similar goal, but it's newer, and the reputation isn't there yet.
I review grants, and I give a lot more credit to software published somewhere like JSS or the R Journal than to software available on someone's web site.
No, the Air Berlin flight would have been a Porter airlines or Air Canada flight, if it really existed and was a scheduled passenger flight: they're the only airlines flying there. I'm guessing the database of airline codes contains errors.
The Asiana flight (if it really existed) was likely a cargo flight, and (if its position was listed correctly), it may well have been headed to Anchorage, but was certainly not outbound from Anchorage.
However, I only checked about a dozen flights and saw these two obvious errors in those checks: so I don't trust the site.
That's a neat site, but the flight-specific data seems quite inaccurate. I saw an Air Berlin flight going from Sault Ste Marie to Toronto, and an Asiana flight near Edmonton on its way from Anchorage to Seoul.
I think you are reading stuff written by the gun lobby. If you look up real reports, you'll see that rates of violent crime were gradually rising from 1996 to 2006, but have been falling since. (I think the gun ban was put in force in 1996; I couldn't find earlier statistics).
Definitions of crimes vary, but assault in Australia at a rate of about 8 per thousand corresponds more or less to simple and aggravated assault in the US, which is at a rate of about 22 simple and 5 aggravated per thousand. Homicide in Australia is at a rate of 1.2 per 100 thousand; in the US, it is about 4.8 per 100 thousand.
For their own reasons, the gun advocates have been making up lots of reports about how crime rates in other countries are higher than in the US. They mostly just aren't true.
The GPL doesn't prohibit you from charging for your software. It does require you to give the source to anyone who gets the binary and charge only the cost of distribution, but failing to do so is a license violation against the copyright holder, not against the user who wants the source.
So you need to convince a copyright holder of the original GPL2 version to go after the individual who isn't releasing source.
And you need to pay the $3.99 before you can get the source from the other guy.
There's only one "warning" on that page, the one from last night's earthquake. The others are "information statements" and "information bulletins".
Now, if you want to say that people should not treat every mention of the word "tsunami" as a warning to evacuate, you'd be right. But you said they should ignore the hundreds of "warnings", and there haven't been hundreds of "warnings". There's just been one in the last month. (I think there were others this year, but I can't find a list of all of them.)
Montreal and Ottawa are both south of the 49th. (Even Thunder Bay is.) Most of the population of Ontario, Quebec and all of the eastern provinces do live south of the 49th, and those six provinces represent about 70% of Canada, so it's actually quite accurate that the majority of Canada's population lives south of the 49th.
That's pretty believable. They did that back in the 90s with the "DOS box" terminal window: they changed the default colours that DOS actually used, to make them more saturated and jarring. (I forget if this was Win 3.1 or Win 95.)
Who would want to keep using one of those old DOS apps with the ugly colours, when you could move to Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you want to buy something illegal using one bitcoin, but the transaction where you paid was intercepted by the police. They seize a copy of the bitcoin. They know that bitcoin was used for illegal purposes, but since you are so devious, they don't know where it came from.
Now in some other investigation, they seize your private key. They see your signature as the previous owner of the illegally used bitcoin and have absolute proof that you are the purchaser, no matter how devious you were in transferring it to the seller.
Since a record is made of every transaction, and is kept forever, do you really believe that the anonymity will be preserved?
Yes, RStudio is an IDE. An IDE is a GUI for development. If you want a GUI to do statistics without programming, then RStudio is not what you need.
I really don't know what you're talking about in your second paragraph. R doesn't force any pedagogical problems. It's a tool. It doesn't force anything.
There are no new GUIs in the R distribution, but there are several GUIs produced by third parties that probably weren't available when you were doing your thesis. I like RStudio and recommend it to my students, but there are others too.
From Julia's web page:
"Currently, Julia is available only for 32-bit Windows."
Julia is available in 64 bits on other platforms, but posting it as a reply in a thread that was complaining how late R is to the 64 bit game is a bit rich. R has had 64 bit releases for all platforms for 3 years now. What's new in 3.0.0 is the removal of the remaining 32 bit limit on individual objects.
None of you are willing to sacrifice ANYTHING or inflict ANY kind of inconvenience upon yourself
I think it's pretty clear from other responses that this claim is false. A true version might be, "Not enough of you are willing to sacrifice enough to do away with the TSA." Sounds pretty boring that way, doesn't it?
Personally, I avoid US airports when I can. I suspect a lot on non-Americans do that, and it is hurting American airlines, but not enough to make a difference. You guys aren't really big on acting rationally lately.
No, the company will sue the cancer patients for illegally duplicating their invention.
Lots of cameras have microphones. Those work with the lens cap on. For example, the Canon EOS M has a stereo mic and WiFi. Since it doesn't have a hideaway lens, it would be easy to forget to turn it off when you put it away -- I do that a lot with my DSLR.
IP theft is an attack on the economy ...
What else would it be? It's a violation of a government granted monopoly. If that's not an attack on the economy, what is it?
If you could fake that, you could indeed create trillions of bitcoins. They would be counterfeit, but indistinguishable from real ones. ... so this is impossible.
Coins and transactions are digitally signed
I think you have a different definition of "impossible" than I do. Clearly a brute force attack could fake the signatures. That's not currently feasible, but not impossible.
A much more likely attack is to steal the certificates used for signing. That might be hard, but it's definitely not impossible. We hear about certificates being stolen every few months, so presumably it happens even more frequently than that.
It is indeed impossible to create more coins than defined in the mathematical function that describes bitcoins.
That's assuming that no way is found to cheat. There are 21 million bitcoins possible, and currently about half of those are in circulation. However, you have to trust the underlying system to know whether the bitcoin being offered to you hasn't already been sold to someone else. If you could fake that, you could indeed create trillions of bitcoins. They would be counterfeit, but indistinguishable from real ones.
Yeah, you know, I get really sick and tired of hearing all the horseshit Canadian Slashdot users trot out and flaunt in front of us whenever the US is so stupid and evil and screwed up and crap (not that they're wrong).
You do know that Edwin Mellen Press is American, right? American bloggers would be too frightened by the possibility of a lawsuit to publish their true opinion. You've got to go north to find the land of the free these days.
You can't focus a reflection of a light source to a smaller angle than the apparent size of the light source. From near earth, the sun appears to be about half a degree across, so the tightest focus you could achieve is also half a degree across.
Presumably you'd want to use this at fairly large distances, say 150 million km (the distance from the earth to the sun, which is the range the lasers were to be designed for). At that distance your tightest focus would be about 1.4 million km across (the size of the sun, not coincidentally). And unless you could make your mirror a lot bigger than the sun, you wouldn't light up the asteroid more than the sun already did.
Well, no wonder the prices are high. If the manufacturers aren't allowed to rip off the consumers in underhanded ways, they'll just have to do it out in the open.
The submitter got it by misreading the ZDnet article. It was the author of that article (Zack Whittaker) who made the recommendation, not MS.
It's nice that you have so much confidence in the engineers, but I think it's more likely that there's a senior engineer working at the city, who has been there forever, is totally incompetent, and does things the way he does because if he ever changed it would be like admitting he was wrong before.
If he ever accidentally hires a competent junior engineer, the junior engineer will quickly learn how bad it is to work for an idiot, and will get a job somewhere else. The boss will then get to hire again, until he finds someone as incompetent as he is.
There doesn't need to be any political interference in any of this, just standard bureaucratic incompetence.
Contrary to popular belief most civil engineers aren't dumb
I must live in the city that hired the rest of them:
Light cycles are very long here, regardless of the time of day. If you miss that green, you'll be sitting there for 2 or 3 minutes, even if you are the only car on the road. (Unless you just drive through the red.)
There are loops in the road to detect cars from less travelled roads, and they'll trigger a change in the light. There are also buttons to detect pedestrians, but they don't advance the cycle, they just give a walk signal. Eventually. The pedestrian buttons are also the only way to detect a bike, though it's illegal to ride your bike onto the sidewalk to press them.
The Journal of Statistical Software is an electronic journal that publishes software. It tends to publish R packages because that's where the development is mostly happening these days, but it will publish any language. The refereeing process checks that the software works as well as that it is a good contribution. It has a reasonable reputation, far above the junk journals on Beall's list (Google it if you don't know what that is), though not as high as the better mathematical journals in the area. The R Journal has a similar goal, but it's newer, and the reputation isn't there yet.
I review grants, and I give a lot more credit to software published somewhere like JSS or the R Journal than to software available on someone's web site.
So some academics do get credit for this.
No, the Air Berlin flight would have been a Porter airlines or Air Canada flight, if it really existed and was a scheduled passenger flight: they're the only airlines flying there. I'm guessing the database of airline codes contains errors.
The Asiana flight (if it really existed) was likely a cargo flight, and (if its position was listed correctly), it may well have been headed to Anchorage, but was certainly not outbound from Anchorage.
However, I only checked about a dozen flights and saw these two obvious errors in those checks: so I don't trust the site.
That's a neat site, but the flight-specific data seems quite inaccurate. I saw an Air Berlin flight going from Sault Ste Marie to Toronto, and an Asiana flight near Edmonton on its way from Anchorage to Seoul.
I think you are reading stuff written by the gun lobby. If you look up real reports, you'll see that rates of violent crime were gradually rising from 1996 to 2006, but have been falling since. (I think the gun ban was put in force in 1996; I couldn't find earlier statistics).
Definitions of crimes vary, but assault in Australia at a rate of about 8 per thousand corresponds more or less to simple and aggravated assault in the US, which is at a rate of about 22 simple and 5 aggravated per thousand. Homicide in Australia is at a rate of 1.2 per 100 thousand; in the US, it is about 4.8 per 100 thousand.
For their own reasons, the gun advocates have been making up lots of reports about how crime rates in other countries are higher than in the US. They mostly just aren't true.
The GPL doesn't prohibit you from charging for your software. It does require you to give the source to anyone who gets the binary and charge only the cost of distribution, but failing to do so is a license violation against the copyright holder, not against the user who wants the source.
So you need to convince a copyright holder of the original GPL2 version to go after the individual who isn't releasing source.
And you need to pay the $3.99 before you can get the source from the other guy.
There's only one "warning" on that page, the one from last night's earthquake. The others are "information statements" and "information bulletins".
Now, if you want to say that people should not treat every mention of the word "tsunami" as a warning to evacuate, you'd be right. But you said they should ignore the hundreds of "warnings", and there haven't been hundreds of "warnings". There's just been one in the last month. (I think there were others this year, but I can't find a list of all of them.)
Montreal and Ottawa are both south of the 49th. (Even Thunder Bay is.) Most of the population of Ontario, Quebec and all of the eastern provinces do live south of the 49th, and those six provinces represent about 70% of Canada, so it's actually quite accurate that the majority of Canada's population lives south of the 49th.
They want it to be jarring.
That's pretty believable. They did that back in the 90s with the "DOS box" terminal window: they changed the default colours that DOS actually used, to make them more saturated and jarring. (I forget if this was Win 3.1 or Win 95.)
Who would want to keep using one of those old DOS apps with the ugly colours, when you could move to Windows?