In Robotics class some classmates and I made a robot that used an optical mouse to sense how far it had driven across the floor. We found that the accuracy of our optical mouse left a lot to be desired. The actual distance sensed by the mouse changed depending on the speed it moved across a surface (and didn't seem very accurate even after taking this into account). For normal use this doesn't matter a bit, because you get feedback from the movement of the mouse pointer on the screen, not from the absolute position of your hand on the mouse pad. However, for our robot, this meant that it quickly went off track. It couldn't even drive in a reasonable square on the floor. So it's fine to use optical mice to measure the presence of and probably also the direction of small-scale motion, but using them to measure absolute speed or distance on medium to large scales is not adviasble.
I'm talking about P2P and file transfer applications here mostly. There seems to be a trend these days toward implementing new protocols over UDP to squeeze more bandwidth out of congested links (probably at the expense of TCP users). Experimentation is fine and good is for small, controlled groups of researchers. But a protocol implemented a P2P application intended for general use better be past the experimentation phase. For streaming there are fine standard protocols such as RTSP. Real-time game protocols in general really don't use enough bandwidth for there to be congestion problems on the Internet at large, so UDP works fine for that.
TCP errs on the side of caution. The failure mode of TCP on congested links is to stop. These new UDP transfer protocols have a "damn the network, just send my bits!" attitude that could be bad for the health of the Internet as a whole. The failure mode of a NACK protocol is to flood the pipe with data that never reaches its destination, while the NACK packets never reach back to the source. Widespread use of unproven UDP transfer protocols with bad congestion control could flood the entire Internet with uncontrolled traffic, making it impossible to establish a TCP connection because of high packet loss, and reducing throughput for all. All in the name of getting a few percent more speed on long links. These people should be working together through the IETF to publish RFCs on a real replacement for TCP, not writing their own vigilante protocols on top of UDP.
Haha, so much for their "please avoid submitting it to any high-traffic web sites, it is not yet ready for primetime" policy. Good work, anonymous submitter.
No; yes but that's irrelevant; and "not for the purposes of copyright law". The amount of a work that can be considered "fair use" is explicitly not defined in the copyright law itself, but I believe precedent indicates it is smaller than a whole song in the vast majority of cases. Your argument is stupid; is an album simply a "favorite passage" of a complete works collection? Is a complete works collection just a "favorite passage" of a music genre? You have to draw the line somewhere, and the courts have drawn it *before* a whole song.
If your sole purpose in file sharing was criticism of the works you shared, *and* everyone who downloaded the files had only that purpose as well, it would probably be legal. But don't try and tell me that's true, because it's obviously not. If your purpose is to add it to the collection on your iPod, it's not just criticism.
As for making copies when you play, copyright is not intended to apply to incendental ephemeral copies made as a matter of course during the performance of a work and then discarded (such as a copy in RAM of a computer program or digital file). There's a lot of language in the copyright code to that effect, read it yourself.
"My interpretation" may be recent (if you consider over 100 years ago "recent"), however, it is clearly the letter of the law. US Code Title 19 Section 106: Exclusive rights in copyrighted works clearly states that the owner of a copyrighted work has the exclusive right to "reproduce the work in copies" (in addition to other exclusive rights such as public performance), meaning that nobody else can make copies without permission. I'd like to see you cite any actual law that "encourages" wholesale copying of copyrighted works for your friends and family. You may wish there was one, but there is not. You may think there should be one (and please understand that I am not arguing otherwise), but that does not make one appear.
You once again miss the point when you talk about libraries. Libraries are a completely different issue since they do not make copies of works. They buy copies just like everyone else and merely lend their legal copies to borrowers.
Copying single favorite passages is allowed under fair use (unless there is DRM protecting the work, in which case the DMCA now makes it illegal to circumvent the DRM making fair use illegal).
Wholesale copying of copyrighted works without authorization is and has always been illegal since copyright was made law. What the framers intended is irrelevant to the enforcement of current law insofar as current law does not violate the constitution. (Though the framers' opinions are certainly relevant when considering the merits of current law, but that is a different issue).
You are wrong. Sharing files with your friends is not at all like sharing books, because the file is copied. Copyright says nothing about book sharing because it doesn't involve copying, but file "sharing" is actually file copying and as such is governed by copyright. Whether or not it SHOULD be is of course a different matter, but saying it "may not be" is just wishful thinking.
Google makes these kinds of operators almost entirely redundant. I can't remember the last time using search operators gave me better Google results; even quotes are unneccessary 99% of the time. Google already prioritizes the pages which contain your search words in the order you specify, and pages which contain your search words in close proximity, and I believe it even does this in a phrase-sensitive way (so if you search for two common two-word phrases, Google recognizes this and prioritizes results accordingly, instead of prioritizing results based on one four-word phrase). This works much better than a NEAR operator because it is automatic based on the phrases actually used in the pages you're searching for. Notice if you search for "ahi fish recipie" on Google you get results about the same as your example MSN search; no operators necessary.
We already have yellow lights for the end of greens, and you know what happens with those. Stoplight timers would make waiting at stoplights into a game. Even if you tried to randomize the timers, people would try to "beat" the system by guessing, and occasionally they would guess wrong. Plus, they would be staring at the timer instead of the road. "Oh, that light's almost done, maybe I can make it through without hitting the brake!" Splat. "Oops."
You don't have to lug a database around, you set it up somewhere and access it using a web interface or something like that. A terabyte really is not that much information anymore; you can buy a firewire terabyte drive that you can hold in your hand (though it's kinda heavy) for $800. A hundred terabytes for the database with all special characters is probably out of reach for most people for now, but for a business it's no problem. And one terabyte for all letters and numbers is quite doable for any cracker who feels like it.
The guys at Best Buy are worse. They'll just spout off nonsense about anything if you ask them, trying to steer you toward the "premium" crap. Last time they tried to sell me the gold-plated USB cables, because "they give you better quality printouts from your printer." I wonder, do they get fed all that BS from the managers or do they make it up themselves?
No, you're confused and still thinking of NP-complete problems. NP problems and NP-complete problems are quite different.
NP: problems whose solutions can be VERIFIED to be correct in polynomial time (as opposed to exponential time or some even faster-growing function of time). NP includes all trivial problems which can be solved in constant or linear time, since constants and linear functions are low-order polynomials. No non-deterministic turing machine is required to solve those.
P: problems whose solutions can be FOUND in polynomial time. P is a subset of NP, and also includes all trivial constant- and linear-time problems.
NP-complete: problems in NP which are reducible in polynomial time to any other problem in NP. This means that if you find a polynomial time solution to one NP-complete problem, you can solve any other problem in NP by the following process: translate the hard problem to the solvable one (in polynomial time), solve it (in polynomial time), and translate the answer back to the hard problem (in polynomial time), resulting in 3*polynomial time to solve the hard problem, which is still polynomial time. All those trivial problems in P and NP aren't included in NP-complete, since you can't reduce every hard problem in NP to those trivial problems (or at least, nobody has proven that you can; nobody's proven that you can't either, which is the whole problem).
Not true, many model rockets are brightly colored themselves and have a non-reflective streamer but no parachute. The streamer flaps around and reduces the terminal velocity of the rocket significantly (probably due to effects discussed in this article), so it doesn't break into a million pieces when it hits the ground. It doesn't slow the rocket as much as a parachute, which can be an advantage on windy days where a rocket hanging from a parachute could drift for miles. But it does slow the descent; if you launch without one you're almost certain to end up with a broken rocket.
You can still use World Wind if you select TerraServer as your imagery source instead of NASA. It truly is an awesome program and everyone even remotely interested in this should check it out.
World Wind is here. Just be sure to deselect "Landsat 7" from the toolbar (this uses NASA servers that are out of commission) and select "USGS-1m" instead for 1m resolution for the US. For some urban areas you can get much higher resolution and color by going into the "Layer Manager" under Images->High Resolution Terrain Mapped Imagery and selecting "USGS Urban Aera Ortho-Imagery". The topo maps are cool too.
I think that usually the antibiotics aren't strong enough to kill every last bacteria in your body, but they kill/weaken/slow enough of them for your immune system to get the upper hand. Of course your immune system doesn't finish off the good ones, so they survive. It may also be that some of them are resistant to many antibiotics, or their position in the body is such that they don't see high antibiotic concentrations. Unfortunately most of the information on the Internet about this issue seems to be anecdotal, from unscientific crackpots or people trying to sell you something (or both). I wouldn't trust any of it.
There is a third option which is often overlooked, even though it is nearly always applicable: Reduce the complexity of your system! It can be a lot harder to design a simple system to solve a complex problem, but it's the only way to truly defeat Murphy's Law. It may be that some problems simply can't be solved by a simple system, but I'll wager that the set of those problems is a lot smaller than most people realize.
Econ 101 will also teach you that competition steps in to drive down prices to the production price point. You don't see that happening though, and not for lack of competition either (there are plenty of independents out there). Your Econ 101 lesson is a little simplistic. The real reason prices don't fall is that copyright produces artificial monopolies, disrupting normal capitalist economic processes. One company controls the market for Britney Spears music, and they alone set the price for Britney Spears. Combine that with effective marketing to essentially create a market for Britney Spears music, and you have a monopolized market where you can charge nearly whatever you want. Of course this is also a simplistic explanation, since copycat artists can substitute to some degree. But this is how the music companies work: they use marketing to create a market for the work of a single artist (the more specific to the artist, the better) which they hold a monopoly on thanks to copyright.
The MPAA tried to do that with DVDs, it's called the region system. You may have heard of it. Most Slashdotters aren't too fond of it. Since CDs don't have regions, if albums cost $2 each in Russia, they'd probably have a much harder time selling them for $15 in Europe or the US.
Well, I don't use Gnome and I haven't had problems with Emacs, so I can't help you there. It's worked fine for me, though I haven't used it super-extensively.
... which is why I said AFTER X gets that capability, which is being worked on at freedesktop.org, then along with NX it will make VNC on X redundant. In my original post.
Not necessarily, if you're using NX compression. NX performs smart caching and could easily choose to ignore a few frames of that gif. Furthermore it is much more efficient when drawing text and mouse pointer movement, and many other optimizations are made possible by its integration lower in the window system than VNC. Try it.
Is this for VNC serving another running X server? Does that use polling?
Yes and yes. Being able to remotely connect to a running X session is the main reason to use VNC on X anyway; if you want a new X session you might as well just run an X server locally (excellent free X servers are now available for windows, including a java applet one and a port of XFree86 that is integrated with Windows).
IMHO X should support moving/duplicating sessions and single apps, and I believe work to that effect is progressing (slowly) on freedesktop.org. When it is complete (and combined with NX compression for slow links) it will make VNC for X mostly redundant.
This means you can "draw" your character once in a 3D program and then produce a million drawings by simply posing its skeleton in different positions or moving the camera to arbitrary angles. Especially interesting is the ability to produce unlimited in-between frames with simple 3D interpolation of object positions instead of expensive, laborious hand drawing.
Slashdot Mirror
In Robotics class some classmates and I made a robot that used an optical mouse to sense how far it had driven across the floor. We found that the accuracy of our optical mouse left a lot to be desired. The actual distance sensed by the mouse changed depending on the speed it moved across a surface (and didn't seem very accurate even after taking this into account). For normal use this doesn't matter a bit, because you get feedback from the movement of the mouse pointer on the screen, not from the absolute position of your hand on the mouse pad. However, for our robot, this meant that it quickly went off track. It couldn't even drive in a reasonable square on the floor. So it's fine to use optical mice to measure the presence of and probably also the direction of small-scale motion, but using them to measure absolute speed or distance on medium to large scales is not adviasble.
I'm talking about P2P and file transfer applications here mostly. There seems to be a trend these days toward implementing new protocols over UDP to squeeze more bandwidth out of congested links (probably at the expense of TCP users). Experimentation is fine and good is for small, controlled groups of researchers. But a protocol implemented a P2P application intended for general use better be past the experimentation phase. For streaming there are fine standard protocols such as RTSP. Real-time game protocols in general really don't use enough bandwidth for there to be congestion problems on the Internet at large, so UDP works fine for that.
TCP errs on the side of caution. The failure mode of TCP on congested links is to stop. These new UDP transfer protocols have a "damn the network, just send my bits!" attitude that could be bad for the health of the Internet as a whole. The failure mode of a NACK protocol is to flood the pipe with data that never reaches its destination, while the NACK packets never reach back to the source. Widespread use of unproven UDP transfer protocols with bad congestion control could flood the entire Internet with uncontrolled traffic, making it impossible to establish a TCP connection because of high packet loss, and reducing throughput for all. All in the name of getting a few percent more speed on long links. These people should be working together through the IETF to publish RFCs on a real replacement for TCP, not writing their own vigilante protocols on top of UDP.
Haha, so much for their "please avoid submitting it to any high-traffic web sites, it is not yet ready for primetime" policy. Good work, anonymous submitter.
If your sole purpose in file sharing was criticism of the works you shared, *and* everyone who downloaded the files had only that purpose as well, it would probably be legal. But don't try and tell me that's true, because it's obviously not. If your purpose is to add it to the collection on your iPod, it's not just criticism.
As for making copies when you play, copyright is not intended to apply to incendental ephemeral copies made as a matter of course during the performance of a work and then discarded (such as a copy in RAM of a computer program or digital file). There's a lot of language in the copyright code to that effect, read it yourself.
You once again miss the point when you talk about libraries. Libraries are a completely different issue since they do not make copies of works. They buy copies just like everyone else and merely lend their legal copies to borrowers.
Copying single favorite passages is allowed under fair use (unless there is DRM protecting the work, in which case the DMCA now makes it illegal to circumvent the DRM making fair use illegal).
Wholesale copying of copyrighted works without authorization is and has always been illegal since copyright was made law. What the framers intended is irrelevant to the enforcement of current law insofar as current law does not violate the constitution. (Though the framers' opinions are certainly relevant when considering the merits of current law, but that is a different issue).
You are wrong. Sharing files with your friends is not at all like sharing books, because the file is copied. Copyright says nothing about book sharing because it doesn't involve copying, but file "sharing" is actually file copying and as such is governed by copyright. Whether or not it SHOULD be is of course a different matter, but saying it "may not be" is just wishful thinking.
Google makes these kinds of operators almost entirely redundant. I can't remember the last time using search operators gave me better Google results; even quotes are unneccessary 99% of the time. Google already prioritizes the pages which contain your search words in the order you specify, and pages which contain your search words in close proximity, and I believe it even does this in a phrase-sensitive way (so if you search for two common two-word phrases, Google recognizes this and prioritizes results accordingly, instead of prioritizing results based on one four-word phrase). This works much better than a NEAR operator because it is automatic based on the phrases actually used in the pages you're searching for. Notice if you search for "ahi fish recipie" on Google you get results about the same as your example MSN search; no operators necessary.
We already have yellow lights for the end of greens, and you know what happens with those. Stoplight timers would make waiting at stoplights into a game. Even if you tried to randomize the timers, people would try to "beat" the system by guessing, and occasionally they would guess wrong. Plus, they would be staring at the timer instead of the road. "Oh, that light's almost done, maybe I can make it through without hitting the brake!" Splat. "Oops."
You're right; I realized that's what he meant just after I pressed "submit." Guess I didn't hit back soon enough to prevent the post, though.
Doesn't matter how long the password is, LM hashing splits it up into nice bite-sized 7-character segments to ease cracking.
You don't have to lug a database around, you set it up somewhere and access it using a web interface or something like that. A terabyte really is not that much information anymore; you can buy a firewire terabyte drive that you can hold in your hand (though it's kinda heavy) for $800. A hundred terabytes for the database with all special characters is probably out of reach for most people for now, but for a business it's no problem. And one terabyte for all letters and numbers is quite doable for any cracker who feels like it.
The guys at Best Buy are worse. They'll just spout off nonsense about anything if you ask them, trying to steer you toward the "premium" crap. Last time they tried to sell me the gold-plated USB cables, because "they give you better quality printouts from your printer." I wonder, do they get fed all that BS from the managers or do they make it up themselves?
NP: problems whose solutions can be VERIFIED to be correct in polynomial time (as opposed to exponential time or some even faster-growing function of time). NP includes all trivial problems which can be solved in constant or linear time, since constants and linear functions are low-order polynomials. No non-deterministic turing machine is required to solve those.
P: problems whose solutions can be FOUND in polynomial time. P is a subset of NP, and also includes all trivial constant- and linear-time problems.
NP-complete: problems in NP which are reducible in polynomial time to any other problem in NP. This means that if you find a polynomial time solution to one NP-complete problem, you can solve any other problem in NP by the following process: translate the hard problem to the solvable one (in polynomial time), solve it (in polynomial time), and translate the answer back to the hard problem (in polynomial time), resulting in 3*polynomial time to solve the hard problem, which is still polynomial time. All those trivial problems in P and NP aren't included in NP-complete, since you can't reduce every hard problem in NP to those trivial problems (or at least, nobody has proven that you can; nobody's proven that you can't either, which is the whole problem).
Not true, many model rockets are brightly colored themselves and have a non-reflective streamer but no parachute. The streamer flaps around and reduces the terminal velocity of the rocket significantly (probably due to effects discussed in this article), so it doesn't break into a million pieces when it hits the ground. It doesn't slow the rocket as much as a parachute, which can be an advantage on windy days where a rocket hanging from a parachute could drift for miles. But it does slow the descent; if you launch without one you're almost certain to end up with a broken rocket.
World Wind is here. Just be sure to deselect "Landsat 7" from the toolbar (this uses NASA servers that are out of commission) and select "USGS-1m" instead for 1m resolution for the US. For some urban areas you can get much higher resolution and color by going into the "Layer Manager" under Images->High Resolution Terrain Mapped Imagery and selecting "USGS Urban Aera Ortho-Imagery". The topo maps are cool too.
I think that usually the antibiotics aren't strong enough to kill every last bacteria in your body, but they kill/weaken/slow enough of them for your immune system to get the upper hand. Of course your immune system doesn't finish off the good ones, so they survive. It may also be that some of them are resistant to many antibiotics, or their position in the body is such that they don't see high antibiotic concentrations. Unfortunately most of the information on the Internet about this issue seems to be anecdotal, from unscientific crackpots or people trying to sell you something (or both). I wouldn't trust any of it.
There is a third option which is often overlooked, even though it is nearly always applicable: Reduce the complexity of your system! It can be a lot harder to design a simple system to solve a complex problem, but it's the only way to truly defeat Murphy's Law. It may be that some problems simply can't be solved by a simple system, but I'll wager that the set of those problems is a lot smaller than most people realize.
Econ 101 will also teach you that competition steps in to drive down prices to the production price point. You don't see that happening though, and not for lack of competition either (there are plenty of independents out there). Your Econ 101 lesson is a little simplistic. The real reason prices don't fall is that copyright produces artificial monopolies, disrupting normal capitalist economic processes. One company controls the market for Britney Spears music, and they alone set the price for Britney Spears. Combine that with effective marketing to essentially create a market for Britney Spears music, and you have a monopolized market where you can charge nearly whatever you want. Of course this is also a simplistic explanation, since copycat artists can substitute to some degree. But this is how the music companies work: they use marketing to create a market for the work of a single artist (the more specific to the artist, the better) which they hold a monopoly on thanks to copyright.
The MPAA tried to do that with DVDs, it's called the region system. You may have heard of it. Most Slashdotters aren't too fond of it. Since CDs don't have regions, if albums cost $2 each in Russia, they'd probably have a much harder time selling them for $15 in Europe or the US.
Well, I don't use Gnome and I haven't had problems with Emacs, so I can't help you there. It's worked fine for me, though I haven't used it super-extensively.
... which is why I said AFTER X gets that capability, which is being worked on at freedesktop.org, then along with NX it will make VNC on X redundant. In my original post.
Not necessarily, if you're using NX compression. NX performs smart caching and could easily choose to ignore a few frames of that gif. Furthermore it is much more efficient when drawing text and mouse pointer movement, and many other optimizations are made possible by its integration lower in the window system than VNC. Try it.
Yes and yes. Being able to remotely connect to a running X session is the main reason to use VNC on X anyway; if you want a new X session you might as well just run an X server locally (excellent free X servers are now available for windows, including a java applet one and a port of XFree86 that is integrated with Windows).
IMHO X should support moving/duplicating sessions and single apps, and I believe work to that effect is progressing (slowly) on freedesktop.org. When it is complete (and combined with NX compression for slow links) it will make VNC for X mostly redundant.
This means you can "draw" your character once in a 3D program and then produce a million drawings by simply posing its skeleton in different positions or moving the camera to arbitrary angles. Especially interesting is the ability to produce unlimited in-between frames with simple 3D interpolation of object positions instead of expensive, laborious hand drawing.