I think it is interesting that the phantom edit was directly made possible by DeCSS, and the DVD format by itself would have actually prevented its creation because of the copy controls. (in the future when VHS is no longer used, this will become even more relevant.)
Re:He's either a fruit that's a little nutty...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
The idea is that the very act of traveling back in time creates some sort of divergence in the timeline that causes a parallel universe to be created for the time travelers. The way the theory works is that every time anything happens anywhere in the universe - say two subatomic particles interact - a number of parallel universes are created, at least one for each possible outcome of the interaction (due to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, an infinite number of outcomes are actually possible). Or something like that. I've always thought that a neat side effect of this sort of theory was a resolution to time paradoxes. If the time travelers didn't really enter their own past, the paradoxes just go away. Note, however, that I am not endorsing or advocating the theory, I'm just informing people of its existence. I have no reason in particular to believe the theory is correct.
Re:He's either a fruit that's a little nutty...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
C'mon, any 15-year-old who daydreamed in math class knows that we will NEVER be able to send people back in time, for the simple reason that we'd have met them already.
Unless you subscribe to the theory that multiple parallel universes exist, in which case the time travelers wouldn't be traveling back to meet us, they would travel to a parallel universe. That way we wouldn't see them, and they couldn't affect their own past and cause nasty time paradoxes (paradoxen?).
Re:My Quick Review
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As noted here by someone else, it's a little slow to start up. I wonder if that is an artifact of it starting up for the very first time.
Yes, the first startup of KDE 3 will be MUCH slower than every other startup afterwards (and the startup of KDE 2) because during that time all of your old settings from KDE 2 and related programs (KMail, etc, in the ~/.kde directory) are being migrated to their new KDE 3 settings.
I learned about this in discrete math, where we had an extra credit assignment to come up with a program to print the pattern of odd numbers in pascal's triangle (which forms the pattern printed by the program, which resembles the Sirpinski triangle fractal). Pascal's triangle goes like this:
It continues on down. Each number is the sum of the two numbers above it, and the sides are simply made of ones.
To find if the Kth number in row N of pascal's triangle is odd, you use the fact that this number is equal to "N choose K" (N choose K being the number of size K subsets of a size N set). To find out whether N choose K is odd, you can (for complicated reasons I don't remember at the moment) look at the binary representation of N and K (which is very convenient for computers!). Putting the binary representation of N vertically over the binary representation of K like so:
10011010 <- N
01101001 <- K
You can tell if N choose K is going to be odd by checking to see if any zeros in N are above any ones in K. If there are, N choose K will be even, otherwise it will be odd. The C expression (~N&K) therefore will be nonzero (true) if N choose K is even, and zero (false) if N choose K is odd. This gives an easy and fast way to compute the even- or odd-ness of a number in any location in Pascal's triangle. That's how the math works for this little hack.
I actually have an even smaller (106 characters) version of this code in C++, but due to funny sig size limits it won't fit in the slashdot sig box (too many <> signs).
And before you start thinking that I'm a genius or something, I didn't come up with that way of discovering the even- or odd-ness of numbers in Pascal's triangle (I wish I was a math wiz like that:-). It was showed to us in class. I only made the implementation.
Since when is merely talking about sex sexist? I don't see what specifically would offend you, as a woman, in the article. If you're simply offended by the mere mention of sex in a humerous context, then I suggest you grow up.
It is also slower when visiting links, because they use the sucky method of redirecting you to their servers whenever you click on a result before they send you to the site. This is so they can track which links you click on, and it makes the time-to-results that much longer, especially on high latency links like modems.
Perhaps ordinary wasn't the word I was looking for. "Fire consisting of everyday materials (not jet fuel) burning" would have been more accurate. My point was not that the fire was not affected by the fuel at all, my point was that it was not jet fuel burning. Therefore, the burning jet fuel did not heat up the metal causing the towers to collapse. Fires started by the jet fuel caused the towers to collapse later.
Excuse me, where exactly did I say that the fuel didn't matter? You are putting words in my mouth. I was talking about the fact that everyone was assuming the jet fuel was what made the fire hard to put out because water won't put out jet fuel, and the heat from the jet fuel caused the building to collapse. The jet fuel made the fire big, but it was gone after a few minutes. It did not prolong the fire due to its flammability, nor did it cause the building to collapse with its own heat.
What I am trying to say is that the people who are thinking "the sprinklers couldn't have been expected to put out the fire because jet fuel was keeping it burning" and "the building collapsed because the fire was especially hot from the burning jet fuel" are wrong, because the jet fuel was gone long before the building collapsed. The sprinklers had a chance to put out the fire after the fuel was gone, but they didn't. The heat that caused the collapse came not from jet fuel, but from combustion of ordinary items. The argument about directness was only tangential to my real point.
Heh, instead of getting a hardware thingy to do this, you could just run XFree with a virtual display size larger than your resolution, and use big fonts. When your mouse reaches the edge of the real screen, XFree will scroll the virtual screen for you (really fast!). You can see this behavior if you start XFree with a high resolution and then use the Ctrl-Alt-+ or Ctrl-Alt-- key combos to switch to a lower resolution. The only difference with the hardware solution you describe is that there's only one mouse, but I don't think this is a big disadvantage. You can set the virtual screen size in the XF86Config-4 file.
What part of "the jet fuel did not directly cause the collapse of the towers" do you not understand? Is it the "directly" part? Let me clear this up for you: The fire caused the fall of the towers. The fire was started by jet fuel. But the jet fuel ran out just minutes after the crash. After that, the fire that was still burning heated up the structure and caused the collapse. The chain of events was like this: Fuel fire -> ordinary fire -> collapse. Note that the fuel did not directly cause the collapse. The ordinary fire did, which was my point. The fire that caused the collapse of the towers was an ordinary (although large) fire, which did not require abnormal fire-fighting chemicals and was not abnormally hot from the heat of jet-fuel combustion, as everyone seems to think.
After the planes slammed into the towers, the fireballs that burst over Lower Manhattan consumed perhaps a third of the 10,000 gallons of fuel on board each plane, for example, but did little structural damage themselves, the report says. Like a giant well of lighter fluid, though, the remaining fuel burned within minutes, setting ablaze furniture, computers, paper files and the planes' cargo over multiple floors and igniting the catastrophic inferno that brought the towers down.
The jet fuel did NOT directly cause the collapse of the towers. It was gone "within minutes," all burned away. So all you people saying that the jet fuel caused the collapse because it was impossible to put out and burned at a very high temperature are wrong, according to this report. They say it was an ordinary blaze, ignited by the fuel but left to burn on its own.
It wasn't until we weighed it against the cost of redeveloping 120 applications for Linux that we decided to cave. MS knows this.
What about CodeWeavers and WINE? CodeWeavers can modify WINE for you to run your applications at a cost hopefully much less than re-developing them all for Linux.
But MS can and will go after corporations (using the BSA, etc). So basically it means that where this plugin would be most useful - allowing corporations to painlessly migrate to Linux on the desktop - it can't be used.
Your evaluation of Kurt's behavior is kind of misleading. First of all, he has never evangelized AtheOS in any way, shape, or form. He has always viewed it as his pet project for himself, and if anyone else wanted to use it, fine for them. All he has ever done is make a small website and provide a mailing list. Any other AtheOS-related stuff you see on the web (like Slashdot submissions) is not his doing, he does not publicize it actively. He has not abandoned anyone, he has taken vacations from AtheOS before and will do so in the future as well. He has been working on it slowly for something like 6 or more years now, though, and he's not going to give up completely. No one is stopped from developing while he isn't working, since no one else works on the core system. Everyone who is programming applications is free to continue.
You don't have to implement a HTTP server in the program itself, you just have to provide a place where the source code can be downloaded through HTTP. The program might just give the address. If HTTP becomes obsolete, though, this license will look fairly silly:-)
I would argue that the adoption of a standard is a much better indication of its "goodness" than its technical features. yEnc has been adopted by lots of people because it solves problems that they have, therefore it is proven to be good. If someone fixes the flaws that this author talks about and makes a new scheme that works better, then it might get adopted. If it does, it will be because it solves real problems people have with yEnc. If it doesn't, that means that it is too much of a pain for people to switch and that the problems yEnc has are not that much of a problem for real users. I think this is probably the case. So you can't use filenames with double quotes. Big deal! Change them to single quotes or something! So one out of a thousand posts will be corrupted because of mis-recognized magic strings or something. Its not any worse than it was before, and the downloads are smaller! If the problems really are THAT bad, a solution will come and people will use it.
Your theory would explain the lifters pushing themselves off of the ground, but did you see this page? I think it rules out an induced dipole explanation. Could it instead have something to do with ionized air being drawn through the device? I would really like to see this done in a vacuum.
It was an extra credit assignment for my Discrete math class. We were learning about Pascal's triangle and ways to determine if a number in the triangle would be even or odd. The assignment was to make a program that would print out the pattern of even and odd numbers in the triangle using what we had learned.
I have an even shorter version of the program (106 characters) in C++, but due to the funny way Slashdot calculates sig lengths it won't fit in the sig box. (all the < and > signs must be turned into < and > because of HTML, which count as 4 characters each).
Slashdot Mirror
This story should have been from the hari seldon dept.
And the NYT has already deleted it. They're not as dim as you might think...
I much prefer the method of finding alternate links, such as this one. It's easy: Simply go to http://www.asahi.com/english/nyt/index.html and search away!
I think it is interesting that the phantom edit was directly made possible by DeCSS, and the DVD format by itself would have actually prevented its creation because of the copy controls. (in the future when VHS is no longer used, this will become even more relevant.)
The idea is that the very act of traveling back in time creates some sort of divergence in the timeline that causes a parallel universe to be created for the time travelers. The way the theory works is that every time anything happens anywhere in the universe - say two subatomic particles interact - a number of parallel universes are created, at least one for each possible outcome of the interaction (due to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, an infinite number of outcomes are actually possible). Or something like that. I've always thought that a neat side effect of this sort of theory was a resolution to time paradoxes. If the time travelers didn't really enter their own past, the paradoxes just go away. Note, however, that I am not endorsing or advocating the theory, I'm just informing people of its existence. I have no reason in particular to believe the theory is correct.
Unless you subscribe to the theory that multiple parallel universes exist, in which case the time travelers wouldn't be traveling back to meet us, they would travel to a parallel universe. That way we wouldn't see them, and they couldn't affect their own past and cause nasty time paradoxes (paradoxen?).
Yes, the first startup of KDE 3 will be MUCH slower than every other startup afterwards (and the startup of KDE 2) because during that time all of your old settings from KDE 2 and related programs (KMail, etc, in the ~/.kde directory) are being migrated to their new KDE 3 settings.
``````````1```````````
````````1```1`````````
``````1```2```1```````
````1```3```3```1`````
``1```4```6```4```1```
1```5``10``10``5```1``
It continues on down. Each number is the sum of the two numbers above it, and the sides are simply made of ones.
To find if the Kth number in row N of pascal's triangle is odd, you use the fact that this number is equal to "N choose K" (N choose K being the number of size K subsets of a size N set). To find out whether N choose K is odd, you can (for complicated reasons I don't remember at the moment) look at the binary representation of N and K (which is very convenient for computers!). Putting the binary representation of N vertically over the binary representation of K like so:
10011010 <- N
01101001 <- K
You can tell if N choose K is going to be odd by checking to see if any zeros in N are above any ones in K. If there are, N choose K will be even, otherwise it will be odd. The C expression (~N&K) therefore will be nonzero (true) if N choose K is even, and zero (false) if N choose K is odd. This gives an easy and fast way to compute the even- or odd-ness of a number in any location in Pascal's triangle. That's how the math works for this little hack.
I actually have an even smaller (106 characters) version of this code in C++, but due to funny sig size limits it won't fit in the slashdot sig box (too many <> signs).
for(int r=-1,c=0;r<65;c++){if(c>r){r++; cout<<endl;for(c=65;c<r;c--)cout<<' ';c=0;}cout<<(~r&c?" `":" #");}
And before you start thinking that I'm a genius or something, I didn't come up with that way of discovering the even- or odd-ness of numbers in Pascal's triangle (I wish I was a math wiz like that :-). It was showed to us in class. I only made the implementation.
Since when is merely talking about sex sexist? I don't see what specifically would offend you, as a woman, in the article. If you're simply offended by the mere mention of sex in a humerous context, then I suggest you grow up.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; umount; sleep
(note: I didn't make this up, so don't blame me! I think early UNIX geeks had extremely dirty subconscious thoughts...)
It is also slower when visiting links, because they use the sucky method of redirecting you to their servers whenever you click on a result before they send you to the site. This is so they can track which links you click on, and it makes the time-to-results that much longer, especially on high latency links like modems.
Perhaps ordinary wasn't the word I was looking for. "Fire consisting of everyday materials (not jet fuel) burning" would have been more accurate. My point was not that the fire was not affected by the fuel at all, my point was that it was not jet fuel burning. Therefore, the burning jet fuel did not heat up the metal causing the towers to collapse. Fires started by the jet fuel caused the towers to collapse later.
Excuse me, where exactly did I say that the fuel didn't matter? You are putting words in my mouth. I was talking about the fact that everyone was assuming the jet fuel was what made the fire hard to put out because water won't put out jet fuel, and the heat from the jet fuel caused the building to collapse. The jet fuel made the fire big, but it was gone after a few minutes. It did not prolong the fire due to its flammability, nor did it cause the building to collapse with its own heat.
What I am trying to say is that the people who are thinking "the sprinklers couldn't have been expected to put out the fire because jet fuel was keeping it burning" and "the building collapsed because the fire was especially hot from the burning jet fuel" are wrong, because the jet fuel was gone long before the building collapsed. The sprinklers had a chance to put out the fire after the fuel was gone, but they didn't. The heat that caused the collapse came not from jet fuel, but from combustion of ordinary items. The argument about directness was only tangential to my real point.
Heh, instead of getting a hardware thingy to do this, you could just run XFree with a virtual display size larger than your resolution, and use big fonts. When your mouse reaches the edge of the real screen, XFree will scroll the virtual screen for you (really fast!). You can see this behavior if you start XFree with a high resolution and then use the Ctrl-Alt-+ or Ctrl-Alt-- key combos to switch to a lower resolution. The only difference with the hardware solution you describe is that there's only one mouse, but I don't think this is a big disadvantage. You can set the virtual screen size in the XF86Config-4 file.
What part of "the jet fuel did not directly cause the collapse of the towers" do you not understand? Is it the "directly" part? Let me clear this up for you: The fire caused the fall of the towers. The fire was started by jet fuel. But the jet fuel ran out just minutes after the crash. After that, the fire that was still burning heated up the structure and caused the collapse. The chain of events was like this: Fuel fire -> ordinary fire -> collapse. Note that the fuel did not directly cause the collapse. The ordinary fire did, which was my point. The fire that caused the collapse of the towers was an ordinary (although large) fire, which did not require abnormal fire-fighting chemicals and was not abnormally hot from the heat of jet-fuel combustion, as everyone seems to think.
No, but that's not the point. The point is that the fire was not especially hot or especially hard to put out because of the fuel, it was only large.
After the planes slammed into the towers, the fireballs that burst over Lower Manhattan consumed perhaps a third of the 10,000 gallons of fuel on board each plane, for example, but did little structural damage themselves, the report says. Like a giant well of lighter fluid, though, the remaining fuel burned within minutes, setting ablaze furniture, computers, paper files and the planes' cargo over multiple floors and igniting the catastrophic inferno that brought the towers down.
The jet fuel did NOT directly cause the collapse of the towers. It was gone "within minutes," all burned away. So all you people saying that the jet fuel caused the collapse because it was impossible to put out and burned at a very high temperature are wrong, according to this report. They say it was an ordinary blaze, ignited by the fuel but left to burn on its own.
What about CodeWeavers and WINE? CodeWeavers can modify WINE for you to run your applications at a cost hopefully much less than re-developing them all for Linux.
But MS can and will go after corporations (using the BSA, etc). So basically it means that where this plugin would be most useful - allowing corporations to painlessly migrate to Linux on the desktop - it can't be used.
Your evaluation of Kurt's behavior is kind of misleading. First of all, he has never evangelized AtheOS in any way, shape, or form. He has always viewed it as his pet project for himself, and if anyone else wanted to use it, fine for them. All he has ever done is make a small website and provide a mailing list. Any other AtheOS-related stuff you see on the web (like Slashdot submissions) is not his doing, he does not publicize it actively. He has not abandoned anyone, he has taken vacations from AtheOS before and will do so in the future as well. He has been working on it slowly for something like 6 or more years now, though, and he's not going to give up completely. No one is stopped from developing while he isn't working, since no one else works on the core system. Everyone who is programming applications is free to continue.
Your theory would explain the lifters pushing themselves off of the ground, but did you see this page? I think it rules out an induced dipole explanation. Could it instead have something to do with ionized air being drawn through the device? I would really like to see this done in a vacuum.
And I thought reactionless thrusters were impossible... Can some physics guys help us out here?
It was an extra credit assignment for my Discrete math class. We were learning about Pascal's triangle and ways to determine if a number in the triangle would be even or odd. The assignment was to make a program that would print out the pattern of even and odd numbers in the triangle using what we had learned.
I have an even shorter version of the program (106 characters) in C++, but due to the funny way Slashdot calculates sig lengths it won't fit in the sig box. (all the < and > signs must be turned into < and > because of HTML, which count as 4 characters each).