Okay, thanks for straightening that out, but I think your analysis evades a crucial point: why does the government *care* about conspiracy theorists and what they think?
I seem to recall a conspiracy theorist that mailed bombs to people he disagreed with. He stayed at large for years until his brother figured out that he was the one sending the bombs and called the FBI.
Some years later another one blew up an eight story building and killed a couple hundred people.
Now idiots are inciting the same crowd, telling them to stock up on guns and bombs or they'll end up in FEMA-run concentration camps. It's only a matter of time before one of these loons blows up another building or worse.
Personally, I hope the FBI has been browsing conspiracy chat rooms for some time. The only question is whether they are allowed to call the inhabitants out for the idiots that they are.
Who gets to determine the difference between responsible dissent and irresponsible dissent? A Conservative might claim that comparing George Bush to Hitler is "irresponsible", while a Liberal might say that claiming Obama is not a U.S. Citizen is "irresponsible."
There is a difference. One of those statements is demonstrably false. If the NFL can get fined because too much breast was visible during the halftime show, why can't we fine people for telling lies on the public airwaves?
The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, it does not qualify whether that speech is "responsible", "irresponsible" or any shade in between.
The courts are really confused on many free speech point. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is apparently "irresponsible," and is therefore not covered under free speech. On the other hand, getting paid to lie while simultaneously calling your lies "news" is apparently protected free speech. Attempting to call attention to these lies, on the other hand, is apparently not free speech. Demonstrating outside of a designated "free speech" zone is apparently "irresponsible" and therefore is not protected speech. Handing your congressperson a pile of cash in an attempt to affect the legislative process, on the other hand, is protected free speech.
I'd just be happy if libel and slander laws applied equally to the government and those making accusations against the government.
For example, Mr. Asspimple Oxycontin was on the radio yesterday accusing people in the White House of diverting funds donated to the Haiti relief efforts towards the Obama campaign. That's a pretty serious accusation of a crime. I think Asspimple should be held responsible for making such an accusation of criminal activity, unless he can back it up.
Wake me up when he can actually use it to make a prediction. For example, he could use it to calculate the value of G. Or the mass of a fundamental particle. Apparently the information content of an electron and a neutrino are different, but why? Can he use his technique to calculate the ratio of the mass of the proton and electron?
Till then it's just mental masturbation.
The app in this case, if you RTFWS, was a fake mobile banking app which collected usernames and passwords. Sandboxing doesn't prevent the user from entering their username and password. A wrapper around a real mobile banking app would work just as well.
I'm talking about people who write books, write or make music, movies, etc. If you have a family or want a life or good health you can't spend your time on the road touring nor can you afford to spend all your free time producing content for which you earn little income.
You are ignoring the basic fact that most people who write books and write or make music don't make a living doing it. I know a lot of people who do that. The same is becoming true of movies. We all know examples in music, so I won't relate them. I'm sure we all have co-workers who are part time musicians.
An example from book publishing, I once met an author who was in the process of getting her fourth SF/Fantasy novel published. I had noticed a couple of her previous book while browsing at Barnes and Noble. When I met her she was working as a part time secretary for a professor. None of her novels had resulted in what could be considered a full time salary for any length of time. Yet her publisher was still publishing them, and she was still writing them.
I have a friend who spent a significant part of his net worth making a movie and trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get it shown at major film festivals.
I have a friend who paints, and tries to sell his paintings online, for about $2500 a piece. He maybe sells one a year.
So stop with the "I've gotta make a living at writing/making music/making movies" crap. Most of the people who write/make music/make movies would do it even if there weren't going to be a big paycheck, because most of them don't get a big paycheck anyway. Even with established artists (with rare exceptions) once the publisher has their cut, there's never much left for the artist.
The disdain of publishers for libraries is well known. It's been well known that the recording industry and movie studios have been trying to prevent libraries from lending their works. The book and magazine publishers would love to go to a "pay per read" model. A library only buys a book once and lets as many people read it as want to. That's clearly theft of copyrighted material. The idea that you can go read a 3 year old copy of "People" in your dentists office without paying for it amounts to communism.
65K jobs, in any field, would have nothing to do with the recession, let alone be one of its causes.
I would contend that the recession could have been prevented by firing 65,000 people in the financial services industry about three years ago. The question is just finding the right 65,000 people to fire.
The GPL doesn't require the source to be available online or at point-of-sale either. All you have to do is offer to send the source code to anyone who asks, provided they already have a copy of the binary version (i.e. they bought a Palm Pre.)
Why can't people read the damn license? For commercial distribution the GPL(v2) requires that you either ship source with the binaries, or include an offer to give complete machine readable source to any third party (whether they have a copy of the binary version or not) on a medium customarily used software exchange (which these days you can limit to FTP, HTTP, CD or DVD) for no more cost than your distribution costs (cost of a blank and envelope plus postage).
Linking is not a requirement for the GPL to be forced upon the app. What is required is that the app in question be a derived work of muPDF. If it can't work without muPDF, it's probably a derived work. The claim that linking is required is just a means that companies try to use to circumvent the GPL.
Yes, Investment.calculateRiskInvestment() is overkill and redundant but Investment.risk() is not clear enough. A good compromise is Investment.calculateRisk() or Investment.getRisk(). You know what action it is taking and what it is acting upon.
Dividing up the calculation of the investment risk and returning the investment risk to a caller is poor design of the Investment class to begin with. You are requiring any program using the class to know whether calculateRisk() has been called since this instance or anything that it depends upon was last modified.
The proper design would have a unified method to calculate and return the risk. That method would check whether the Investment instance or anything else that affected the risk calculation had changed since the risk was last calculated. If so it would recalculate the risk, if not it should return the risk value that was previously calculated.
This could involve a private methods called calculateRisk(), a private const method called getRisk(), and a (possibly public) method called hasBeenModified(), but anyone using this class should be calling the public Risk() method using the documented interface. It will be obvious from the code that Risk returns a value.
risk=investment->Risk();
Someone who looks at that code and wonders what Risk() does and whether it modifies an Investment instance or any static variables should be looking at the class documentation and/or the appropriate header file rather than guessing based upon what the calling code does. But a proper class design shouldn't allow someone to obtain the risk value before it's calculated, nor should it allow a caller to calculate the value if they aren't going to use it. Both of those fit into the "bad idea" category.
Some is going to possibility that Risk() has desirable or undesirable side effects. Well, it shouldn't have any that can be detected by a caller using documented interfaces. If it does, then it shouldn't be called Risk(), it should be called ReturnRiskAfterSortingInvestmentsByCEOsMothersMaidenName().
I apparently have a lot more training in optics than you do. (A couple dozen years professional experience in designing X-ray and UV optics. What did you have, a class in grade school). What do you think the primary effect of diffraction is on a laser beam, if not causing divergence? Divergence is divergence whether it results from diffraction or geometric effects. If you had any optical knowledge you would see that I had used a diffraction approximation in my calculation.
Optic focusing is useless unless the target is a fixed distance away, the scenario he was describing would require some system to determine range and focus the beam.
Yes, and an stabilization system that tilts one or more optical elements to hold it on target while counteracting shake due to an unstable platform (i.e. a person). It's funny, but my $1k digital SLR has all of those items, so I think that it might be possible to put them in to a $100k weapons system.
The divergence is due to diffraction, moron. WTF do you think I was calculating? If you send a laser out of a tiny hole it diverges a hell of a lot because of diffraction. To collimate a laser so it will be effective at large distances you need to significantly expand the size of the beam.
Once it leaves the source, a laser is subject to the same inverse square law as any light source. The formula I posted is accurate enough for the purposes to which it is being put.
Next time post about what you know, rather than what you think you know
As for the size of the wound, that depends on how tightly you focus the beam.
There are limits to that. The divergence of the beam depends upon the size of the optics. For a man portable weapon system, I'd guess 10 cm is about the maximum optics diameter that would be useful. Assuming a wavelength of 1 micron, 10 cm gives a divergence of 1e-5 radians, so at 100 meters you could focus to a 2 cm diameter spot for an irradiance of 240 watts per square cm. At 1000 meters you're up to a 20cm spot for a fairly insignificant irradiance of 2.4 watts per square cm. If you want something useful at a kilometer, it's not going to be man portable.
Lets put that into terms every slashdotter will understand. Remember your 5 cm diameter magnifying glass and its 20cm focal length? It projected an image of the sun 1.7 mm in diameter with an irradiance of 122 watts per square centimeter, almost exactly half of our laser gun at 100 meters, and 50 times larger than our gun at 1000 meters.
So now, lets build a magnifying glass to match our laser gun. We want a 2 cm diameter spot, so we'll need a longer focal length, by the ratio of 20/1.7, which turns out to be 235 cm. We'll also need 750 watts of sunlight or 0.53 square meters of collecting area. That means a lens 82 cm in diameter. Feel free to build one and put a steak in the focus for one second. Please post your results to slashdot. I personally doubt that a second in that spot would be fatal to a human, but it would hurt a hell of a lot.
Yes, as an antipersonnel weapon, a 750 watt continuous laser leaves much to be desired, besides as a way for a sniper to blind someone. It would have to be limited to use against stationary targets. For example the control system of a stationary AAA battery would be a suitable target. There it would have significant stealth advantages for the user, assuming it doesn't go "pewpewpew". Anywhere a sniper can put a crosshairs would be fine.... Even then, a stabilization system would be require to keep the beam on a single spot for long enough to do damage.
The fighter mounted one has 200 times the power, and I assume it is steered to target by computer. It could blind IR sensors on a jet fighter at quite a distance. Blinding the opposing pilot is also an option, since current strategy is to keep your eyes on the enemy. Just do a rapid raster scan across the target. I'd have to do a little math to figure out how long it would take to punch a hole through aircraft skin or detonate incoming ordnance.
It would be interesting to know the specs in more detail....
Yeah, and it goes to half the altitude of an 1947 vintage Aerobee and carries one thirtieth of the payload. It only took 15 years to develop compared to less than two years for the Aerobee. (But that sort of time frame seems to be the direction the world is progressing on all projects.)
Maybe there's some impressive stats that I'm missing?
This isn't a bug. It's a feature. The first time a specific search is run on bing, it quickly returns random garbage. Simultaneously, the bing servers run the same search on google and stores the first few pages of results. The second time the search is entered into bing, it returns the google results, slightly reordered.
However, my iPhone, as a consumer device capable of doing most of the consumer-related things I want from such a device, freakin' rocks — jailbroken or not.
Yeah, it's great! As long as I don't need to use it where I work, or where I live, or about half the places in between. You'd have thought Apple would have found a telecom with a decent network. Verizon is as evil as AT&T, if not more so. It would have made a great partner for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, thanks for straightening that out, but I think your analysis evades a crucial point: why does the government *care* about conspiracy theorists and what they think?
I seem to recall a conspiracy theorist that mailed bombs to people he disagreed with. He stayed at large for years until his brother figured out that he was the one sending the bombs and called the FBI.
Some years later another one blew up an eight story building and killed a couple hundred people.
Now idiots are inciting the same crowd, telling them to stock up on guns and bombs or they'll end up in FEMA-run concentration camps. It's only a matter of time before one of these loons blows up another building or worse.
Personally, I hope the FBI has been browsing conspiracy chat rooms for some time. The only question is whether they are allowed to call the inhabitants out for the idiots that they are.
Who gets to determine the difference between responsible dissent and irresponsible dissent? A Conservative might claim that comparing George Bush to Hitler is "irresponsible", while a Liberal might say that claiming Obama is not a U.S. Citizen is "irresponsible."
There is a difference. One of those statements is demonstrably false. If the NFL can get fined because too much breast was visible during the halftime show, why can't we fine people for telling lies on the public airwaves?
The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, it does not qualify whether that speech is "responsible", "irresponsible" or any shade in between.
The courts are really confused on many free speech point. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is apparently "irresponsible," and is therefore not covered under free speech. On the other hand, getting paid to lie while simultaneously calling your lies "news" is apparently protected free speech. Attempting to call attention to these lies, on the other hand, is apparently not free speech. Demonstrating outside of a designated "free speech" zone is apparently "irresponsible" and therefore is not protected speech. Handing your congressperson a pile of cash in an attempt to affect the legislative process, on the other hand, is protected free speech.
I'd just be happy if libel and slander laws applied equally to the government and those making accusations against the government.
For example, Mr. Asspimple Oxycontin was on the radio yesterday accusing people in the White House of diverting funds donated to the Haiti relief efforts towards the Obama campaign. That's a pretty serious accusation of a crime. I think Asspimple should be held responsible for making such an accusation of criminal activity, unless he can back it up.
Wake me up when he can actually use it to make a prediction. For example, he could use it to calculate the value of G. Or the mass of a fundamental particle. Apparently the information content of an electron and a neutrino are different, but why? Can he use his technique to calculate the ratio of the mass of the proton and electron? Till then it's just mental masturbation.
The app in this case, if you RTFWS, was a fake mobile banking app which collected usernames and passwords. Sandboxing doesn't prevent the user from entering their username and password. A wrapper around a real mobile banking app would work just as well.
Even this failed attack is a win, because it puts the republicans back in the news, makes the security seem inept, causes people to panic, etc.
Fixed that for you....
I'm talking about people who write books, write or make music, movies, etc. If you have a family or want a life or good health you can't spend your time on the road touring nor can you afford to spend all your free time producing content for which you earn little income.
You are ignoring the basic fact that most people who write books and write or make music don't make a living doing it. I know a lot of people who do that. The same is becoming true of movies. We all know examples in music, so I won't relate them. I'm sure we all have co-workers who are part time musicians.
An example from book publishing, I once met an author who was in the process of getting her fourth SF/Fantasy novel published. I had noticed a couple of her previous book while browsing at Barnes and Noble. When I met her she was working as a part time secretary for a professor. None of her novels had resulted in what could be considered a full time salary for any length of time. Yet her publisher was still publishing them, and she was still writing them.
I have a friend who spent a significant part of his net worth making a movie and trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get it shown at major film festivals.
I have a friend who paints, and tries to sell his paintings online, for about $2500 a piece. He maybe sells one a year.
So stop with the "I've gotta make a living at writing/making music/making movies" crap. Most of the people who write/make music/make movies would do it even if there weren't going to be a big paycheck, because most of them don't get a big paycheck anyway. Even with established artists (with rare exceptions) once the publisher has their cut, there's never much left for the artist.
This is all old news.
65K jobs, in any field, would have nothing to do with the recession, let alone be one of its causes.
I would contend that the recession could have been prevented by firing 65,000 people in the financial services industry about three years ago. The question is just finding the right 65,000 people to fire.
The GPL doesn't require the source to be available online or at point-of-sale either. All you have to do is offer to send the source code to anyone who asks, provided they already have a copy of the binary version (i.e. they bought a Palm Pre.)
Why can't people read the damn license? For commercial distribution the GPL(v2) requires that you either ship source with the binaries, or include an offer to give complete machine readable source to any third party (whether they have a copy of the binary version or not) on a medium customarily used software exchange (which these days you can limit to FTP, HTTP, CD or DVD) for no more cost than your distribution costs (cost of a blank and envelope plus postage).
Linking is not a requirement for the GPL to be forced upon the app. What is required is that the app in question be a derived work of muPDF. If it can't work without muPDF, it's probably a derived work. The claim that linking is required is just a means that companies try to use to circumvent the GPL.
That might be just an oversight, there is a GPL-license in the directory.
No, there's an LGPL license in the directory. You can't include a GPL library in an LGPL app.
Yes, Investment.calculateRiskInvestment() is overkill and redundant but Investment.risk() is not clear enough. A good compromise is Investment.calculateRisk() or Investment.getRisk(). You know what action it is taking and what it is acting upon.
Dividing up the calculation of the investment risk and returning the investment risk to a caller is poor design of the Investment class to begin with. You are requiring any program using the class to know whether calculateRisk() has been called since this instance or anything that it depends upon was last modified.
The proper design would have a unified method to calculate and return the risk. That method would check whether the Investment instance or anything else that affected the risk calculation had changed since the risk was last calculated. If so it would recalculate the risk, if not it should return the risk value that was previously calculated.
This could involve a private methods called calculateRisk(), a private const method called getRisk(), and a (possibly public) method called hasBeenModified(), but anyone using this class should be calling the public Risk() method using the documented interface. It will be obvious from the code that Risk returns a value.
risk=investment->Risk();
Someone who looks at that code and wonders what Risk() does and whether it modifies an Investment instance or any static variables should be looking at the class documentation and/or the appropriate header file rather than guessing based upon what the calling code does. But a proper class design shouldn't allow someone to obtain the risk value before it's calculated, nor should it allow a caller to calculate the value if they aren't going to use it. Both of those fit into the "bad idea" category.
Some is going to possibility that Risk() has desirable or undesirable side effects. Well, it shouldn't have any that can be detected by a caller using documented interfaces. If it does, then it shouldn't be called Risk(), it should be called ReturnRiskAfterSortingInvestmentsByCEOsMothersMaidenName().
Mod parent up!
I thought her name was 37 of double-D.
With 5000 machines in the district they are probably replacing one or more fans per day even if they don't run SETI@home.
Now, I do agree that GP is applying the wrong principles and the wrong formula
The quote above is the only part of your post that is wrong.
Yes to reduce DIFFRACTION not DIVERGENCE.
I apparently have a lot more training in optics than you do. (A couple dozen years professional experience in designing X-ray and UV optics. What did you have, a class in grade school). What do you think the primary effect of diffraction is on a laser beam, if not causing divergence? Divergence is divergence whether it results from diffraction or geometric effects. If you had any optical knowledge you would see that I had used a diffraction approximation in my calculation.
Optic focusing is useless unless the target is a fixed distance away, the scenario he was describing would require some system to determine range and focus the beam.
Yes, and an stabilization system that tilts one or more optical elements to hold it on target while counteracting shake due to an unstable platform (i.e. a person). It's funny, but my $1k digital SLR has all of those items, so I think that it might be possible to put them in to a $100k weapons system.
The divergence is due to diffraction, moron. WTF do you think I was calculating? If you send a laser out of a tiny hole it diverges a hell of a lot because of diffraction. To collimate a laser so it will be effective at large distances you need to significantly expand the size of the beam.
Once it leaves the source, a laser is subject to the same inverse square law as any light source. The formula I posted is accurate enough for the purposes to which it is being put.
Next time post about what you know, rather than what you think you know
I know of no weapons system based upon the Aerobee, nor do I think Aerojet was give unlimited funding to develop it.
As for the size of the wound, that depends on how tightly you focus the beam.
There are limits to that. The divergence of the beam depends upon the size of the optics. For a man portable weapon system, I'd guess 10 cm is about the maximum optics diameter that would be useful. Assuming a wavelength of 1 micron, 10 cm gives a divergence of 1e-5 radians, so at 100 meters you could focus to a 2 cm diameter spot for an irradiance of 240 watts per square cm. At 1000 meters you're up to a 20cm spot for a fairly insignificant irradiance of 2.4 watts per square cm. If you want something useful at a kilometer, it's not going to be man portable.
Lets put that into terms every slashdotter will understand. Remember your 5 cm diameter magnifying glass and its 20cm focal length? It projected an image of the sun 1.7 mm in diameter with an irradiance of 122 watts per square centimeter, almost exactly half of our laser gun at 100 meters, and 50 times larger than our gun at 1000 meters.
So now, lets build a magnifying glass to match our laser gun. We want a 2 cm diameter spot, so we'll need a longer focal length, by the ratio of 20/1.7, which turns out to be 235 cm. We'll also need 750 watts of sunlight or 0.53 square meters of collecting area. That means a lens 82 cm in diameter. Feel free to build one and put a steak in the focus for one second. Please post your results to slashdot. I personally doubt that a second in that spot would be fatal to a human, but it would hurt a hell of a lot.
The fighter mounted one has 200 times the power, and I assume it is steered to target by computer. It could blind IR sensors on a jet fighter at quite a distance. Blinding the opposing pilot is also an option, since current strategy is to keep your eyes on the enemy. Just do a rapid raster scan across the target. I'd have to do a little math to figure out how long it would take to punch a hole through aircraft skin or detonate incoming ordnance.
It would be interesting to know the specs in more detail....
Maybe there's some impressive stats that I'm missing?
That name was chosen to make it a top destination for a manned mission. I can see the mission decal now.... "To Eris, Human!"
This isn't a bug. It's a feature. The first time a specific search is run on bing, it quickly returns random garbage. Simultaneously, the bing servers run the same search on google and stores the first few pages of results. The second time the search is entered into bing, it returns the google results, slightly reordered.
However, my iPhone, as a consumer device capable of doing most of the consumer-related things I want from such a device, freakin' rocks — jailbroken or not.
Yeah, it's great! As long as I don't need to use it where I work, or where I live, or about half the places in between. You'd have thought Apple would have found a telecom with a decent network. Verizon is as evil as AT&T, if not more so. It would have made a great partner for Apple.