You can find some information on better solutions (particularly approval voting and Condorcet voting) at Electionmethods.org, including and explanation of why Instant Runoff isn't a much improved voting system.
I am all for deep linking in most cases, and feel it should be legal. But I hate the idea that "there's a way to prevent it, so it shouldn't be ruled illegal." To me, that is the same as saying "There are ways to make your house burglar proof, so we shouldn't have to make breaking and entering illegal."
No, it's not quite the same. If you want to make the analogy a little more reasonable, imagine that you installed a little electronic box on your door that, when someone walks up and says, "I want to go inside", unlocks and opens the door for them. This same box could be configured to only let in family members, but you decided that it would just be easier to sue your curious visitors for breaking and entering, then sue anyone who told them your address for aiding the crime.
If you want to make the analogy even closer, imagine that you live in a world where people enter others' houses this way, welcomed, billions of times a day, that they are unable to do anything but look around once inside, and that your only real complaint is that you wanted all your visitors to go to your neighbor's house and watch commercials first!
Finally, no, an HTTP request is not "circumvention" any more than saying "I want to go inside" is. If someone discovered that making the HTTP request 5 kilobytes long broke into the web server, or that shouting "MACKEREL!" at the top of your lungs broke the door opener, that would be clearly circumvention even though in each case you're just sending data or making noises. One set of data constitutes an understandable request (in the HTTP case, conforming to internationally recognized protocols); the other set is an intentional attempt to get in without making that request or having it answered.
The point is that when we remove God from our society we remove the need for morals,
Obviously we don't; else the millions of athiests in this country would be raping and pillaging as we speak. The need for morals derives from the fact that ethical behavior is required for us to survive as a society. God can be an incentive toward promoting such behavior, but is not a requirement for defining it or the only possible motivation for enforcing it.
because a moral code is basically what religion is, and what God represents to many people,
Exactly the problem. To too many people, God is the only definition of morality, which precludes any morality being "above God". If God orders you to kill your son Isaac or to slaughter everything that breathes in a Canaanite city, no morality can stand in the way of the murder or genocide, because all morality comes from God. In such a state, the only way to be sure that Bin Laden is really doing wrong is to have faith that God wouldn't give such orders to him without checking in with us first.
Yours is "mob rule". Perhaps "free speech" isn't a perfect way to run the world, but it sure beats "get a majority population together in the same geographical area, and they can call themselves a 'culture' and start dictating to minorities what to do".
It is not objectively wrong to prevent free speech when the person being "oppressed" can freely leave their oppressors with no consiquence (as exists in Japan, though not in most Islamic states).
Go on, say that again. "There is no consequence for being forced out of your country." Then, assuming you've kept a straight face, let the rest of us know whether you really wouldn't make any exceptions to this rule. Would a law forcing Americans to accept Christianity (in the Bushs' version, of course; sorry Catholics, Liberals, and Mormons) or leave the country be okay, for example? Was Salem's only problem the fact that they didn't give their "witches" the option to leave the county, penniless?
Let others be free to do what they deem to be "best"
And if what they deem to be "best" is restricting the freedoms of other people still? How can you possibly think that fundamentalist Islamic states wanting to restrict the freedoms of their women is okay, but Americans wanting to restrict the "freedoms" of fundamentalist Islamic lawmakers is bad?
Re:The Force violates conservation of momentum
on
Physics in the Movies
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· Score: 2
So, if you were to get flung off the section of the spinning habitat that was simulating Earth gravity, your "escape velocity" would be around 9.8m/s
To escape Babylon5 completely, your kinetic energy would have to be greater than its mass gravity potential energy... so:
1/2mv2 -GMm/r >= 0
You got this partly wrong. Earth gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, but you can't just throw away a s^-1 unit and presume that the velocity of a spinning object with 1g of centripetal force is 9.8 m/s. If something is spinning at radius r to provide artificial gravity g, then the velocity of a body flung off of it would be sqrt(g*r) = 64 m/s.
You got that equation right, but plugging in 64 m/s I get a mass of 1480 trillion kilograms, more than a million times what the space stations is supposed to weigh. Plug in the actual weight of the station (9.1 million tons, according so some other nerd's webpage), and you get an escape velocity in centimeters per second.
The body would indeed come back to the station, but not because of the station's own gravity; because of the planet's. 64 m/s is enough to get out of "B5 orbit", but not to do more than alter your orbit around the planet below. So, once or twice (depending on the direction the corpse went flying in) in every orbit, the body should approach the station again as their orbits intersect.
... then stop using Outlook. No, I'm not kidding. Outlook uses the same HTML rendering code that Internet Explorer does, doesn't it? That makes it vulnerable to many of the frequently discovered, slowly patched security holes that IE has run across over the last few years.
People need to be taught not to run untrusted executable files, true... but what good does that do when they can be vulnerable to a system compromise by just looking at the preview pane of an infected email?
No, but it did make it easy for Microsoft to take an standard and mutate it into something that interferes with software replaceability. You make it sound like companies need to get something for free before they will ever implement anything new when there's really no good reason that companies can't all just work from a well documented specification.
How did Microsoft's adoption of BSD's TCP/IP stack "interfere with software replaceability"? It meant that when Microsoft was taking months to fix the winnuke/teardrop/syndrop/etc. type holes, we couldn't fix them ourselves (short of replacing the Microsoft software entirely, of course), but if they had "just worked from a well documented specification" we would have had the same problem.
In fact, "working from a well documented specification" has had a negative effect on software replaceability in some cases; witness all the websites that were designed to work only with Netscape or only with IE because neither browser's support for even the well documented W3C standards was up to par.
Mutually Assured Destruction was "stable" only as far as retaliatory destruction was really assured. A limited missile defense system makes it impossible for your opponent to be sure that a first strike of theirs will destroy all of your missiles, and so makes MAD more stable, not less.
The first time I went through it, I definitely took a few wrong directions; there were at least two times I found myself going up an elevator only to have a reptile-spider-thing clawing my face off right at the top.
Unreal takes the cake for atmosphere in my opinion: running through most of the first level with no weapons at all, then catching that first glimpse of an adult Skaarg disembowling one of the ship's crew? Finding yourself locked into a narrow corridor, then watching the lights go dead, one by one? Excellent game.
Don't tell me you weren't at least a little creeped out by the zombie soldiers breaking through the walls or rising up from the fog. I admit, I did the "late night, lights off, volume up" thing myself to try and enhance the atmosphere, but for at least one level the RtCW guys did pretty good by themselves.
This is a *huge* worry for some companies, and quite validly so.
This explains a lot, you know.
Why are some newspaper editorials nearly illiterate? The publishers must not be allowing their editors to read books, lest they accidentally insert copyrighted phrases and ideas into their own work!
Why does so much popular music reek? Because the record companies won't let their artists listen to much real music, lest they inadvertently copy chords and lyrics into their own songs!
Why is the movie industry obsessed with remaking old TV shows, old movies, and old comic books? Because if they put out an original film, there's a danger of them accidentally copying somebody else's copyright, so they might as well buy the rights to some existing creative work and copy it on purpose instead!
Seriously, though, if the justice system understood software, there shouldn't be any "potentially explosive litigation", because there shouldn't be that double standard. Writing a hash table that happens to resemble something you saw in glib shouldn't be any less legal than writing a magazine article that happens to use phrases you read in a book.
Would it be possible for a malicious page to load a trusted page in another frame, pause for it to load, then execute a back() in that frame? There are loads of things that javascript isn't allowed to do in a frame from another website, but is back() among them?
Until we can cheaply send a whole bunch of actors into orbit, I can't see the "Smoke Ring" or "Integral Trees" movies being made. You could try to pull of the trees with CGI, and try to do the zero-G a few minutes a time in a thoroughly blue-screened Vomet Comet, but I'll bet the result would suck.
It's only been a couple years since I took geometric topology; I shouldn't have forgotten this much, this fast.
Isn't a sphere with a bubble in it (say, A = {x in R^n: 1/2 < d(x,0) < 3/2}) a 3-manifold? It's an open subset of 3-space.
Isn't that set A simply connected? You can deformation retract it down to S^2, which is simply connected.
And yet, even if the fundamental group pi_1(A) = 0, the higher homotopy groups aren't trivial: pi_2(A) isn't zero, so A can't be homeomorphic to a 3-sphere.
So why isn't this a counterexample to the Poincare conjecture?
Rice U. breaks Munkres' first book up into two classes, calling the second "Geometric Topology". It's a very clear discussion of the subject. I found "Elements of Algebraic Topology" much harder, but that may just be because we only had one semester to deal with that one.
I didn't have any trouble setting up dualhead on a Matrox G450, but I can't get Linux to recognize the second output on the Radeon 7500. It's supposedly doable in Linux (although Xinerama and DRI weren't compatible on this driver due to some sync bug last time I checked); I just haven't been able to figure out how. Do you have a Radeon 7500 working in dualhead? If so, would you post the DVI output's "Driver" section of your XF86Config file?
I've gone through three sets of drivers from the ATI website since I bought my (non-AIW) Radeon 7500. The drivers that came on the CD were so flaky, I had to uninstall them before upgrading to the website's drivers, lest my computer crash during the upgrade. Each revision since has become more stable, but I still can't do anything heavy (VirtualDub reencoding, in particular) in Windows without the computer crashing to a black screen within a few minutes.
If you're just using Linux, you'll need to upgrade to XFree86 4.2 just to get the card working. The Linux drivers are more stable, at least. I've had two crashes and occasional texture corruption (with a few pixels of rainbow colors!?) while playing Wolfenstein, but no problems in 2D or with OpenGL screensavers.
Oh, and of course dual-head doesn't seem to want to work in either OS (Windows makes a valiant effort).
Maybe I just got a bad card out of the box, but the relative stability in Linux makes that seem doubtful. A friend of mine had similar problems with a Radeon 8500 and the CD drivers, but in his case the first update to drivers off ati.com fixed things.
If you want to try it out safely
on
Deep Algorithms?
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· Score: 1
Try limiting the number of processes it can spawn first: "ulimit -u 100" or something like that on bash. Then you start up top in another window to watch the results.
I tried it on my machine (after syncing the disks) and didn't have to hard boot, but it took literally minutes to kill the damn thing off. Linux tries to split CPU time between processes rather than between users, it seems, and so one root login seems a thousandth as important the scheduler as 1000 spinning forkbombs.
I don't suppose there's any kernel patches like the O(1) scheduler, but which implement a "be fair to multiple users" scheduler instead?
CNET made their last question "Has the spam incident helped or harmed your career path?", when I'm sure we were all more interested in the answer to "(sound of gun cocking) Have you made your peace with God, Mr. Canter?"
No, because if you wanted to remove all of Ximian Gnome then you'd have to go reinstall all the Red Hat stuff like gtk+ and glib that Ximian makes versions of.
C'mon, if you're already planning to install the beta, you should have your important files backed up anyway, so just go wild. I didn't uninstall Ximian, I just clicked OK on a "we've detected 3rd party packages that may be broken in the upgrade" dialog box. Red Hat installed newer versions of some Ximian software, left software that Ximian had a newer version of untouched, and everything still seems to work.
Well then build the tarball into a binary and source RPM and keep those.:)
Oh, I wasn't trying to contradict you, just pointing out that if you're given an SRPM and can't find a tar+spec, then there's a better way to build the SRPM.
My point was that execting every developer to maintain tar.gz, rpm and deb versions of every release is unrealistic, especially since a tarball with a spec inside is just as useful, if not more so than a seperate srpm for download on sourceforge.
I agree completely. Can dpkg do anything like the "tar+spec" for source packages? It would be nice if people could distribute a single tarball and keep the RPM, DPKG, and hand-compile fans all happy.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find some information on better solutions (particularly approval voting and Condorcet voting) at Electionmethods.org, including and explanation of why Instant Runoff isn't a much improved voting system.
I am all for deep linking in most cases, and feel it should be legal. But I hate the idea that "there's a way to prevent it, so it shouldn't be ruled illegal." To me, that is the same as saying "There are ways to make your house burglar proof, so we shouldn't have to make breaking and entering illegal."
No, it's not quite the same. If you want to make the analogy a little more reasonable, imagine that you installed a little electronic box on your door that, when someone walks up and says, "I want to go inside", unlocks and opens the door for them. This same box could be configured to only let in family members, but you decided that it would just be easier to sue your curious visitors for breaking and entering, then sue anyone who told them your address for aiding the crime.
If you want to make the analogy even closer, imagine that you live in a world where people enter others' houses this way, welcomed, billions of times a day, that they are unable to do anything but look around once inside, and that your only real complaint is that you wanted all your visitors to go to your neighbor's house and watch commercials first!
Finally, no, an HTTP request is not "circumvention" any more than saying "I want to go inside" is. If someone discovered that making the HTTP request 5 kilobytes long broke into the web server, or that shouting "MACKEREL!" at the top of your lungs broke the door opener, that would be clearly circumvention even though in each case you're just sending data or making noises. One set of data constitutes an understandable request (in the HTTP case, conforming to internationally recognized protocols); the other set is an intentional attempt to get in without making that request or having it answered.
The point is that when we remove God from our society we remove the need for morals,
Obviously we don't; else the millions of athiests in this country would be raping and pillaging as we speak. The need for morals derives from the fact that ethical behavior is required for us to survive as a society. God can be an incentive toward promoting such behavior, but is not a requirement for defining it or the only possible motivation for enforcing it.
because a moral code is basically what religion is, and what God represents to many people,
Exactly the problem. To too many people, God is the only definition of morality, which precludes any morality being "above God". If God orders you to kill your son Isaac or to slaughter everything that breathes in a Canaanite city, no morality can stand in the way of the murder or genocide, because all morality comes from God. In such a state, the only way to be sure that Bin Laden is really doing wrong is to have faith that God wouldn't give such orders to him without checking in with us first.
Yours is "mob rule". Perhaps "free speech" isn't a perfect way to run the world, but it sure beats "get a majority population together in the same geographical area, and they can call themselves a 'culture' and start dictating to minorities what to do".
It is not objectively wrong to prevent free speech when the person being "oppressed" can freely leave their oppressors with no consiquence (as exists in Japan, though not in most Islamic states).
Go on, say that again. "There is no consequence for being forced out of your country." Then, assuming you've kept a straight face, let the rest of us know whether you really wouldn't make any exceptions to this rule. Would a law forcing Americans to accept Christianity (in the Bushs' version, of course; sorry Catholics, Liberals, and Mormons) or leave the country be okay, for example? Was Salem's only problem the fact that they didn't give their "witches" the option to leave the county, penniless?
Let others be free to do what they deem to be "best"
And if what they deem to be "best" is restricting the freedoms of other people still? How can you possibly think that fundamentalist Islamic states wanting to restrict the freedoms of their women is okay, but Americans wanting to restrict the "freedoms" of fundamentalist Islamic lawmakers is bad?
So, if you were to get flung off the section of the spinning habitat that was simulating Earth gravity, your "escape velocity" would be around 9.8m/s
To escape Babylon5 completely, your kinetic energy would have to be greater than its mass gravity potential energy... so:
1/2mv2 -GMm/r >= 0
You got this partly wrong. Earth gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, but you can't just throw away a s^-1 unit and presume that the velocity of a spinning object with 1g of centripetal force is 9.8 m/s. If something is spinning at radius r to provide artificial gravity g, then the velocity of a body flung off of it would be sqrt(g*r) = 64 m/s.
You got that equation right, but plugging in 64 m/s I get a mass of 1480 trillion kilograms, more than a million times what the space stations is supposed to weigh. Plug in the actual weight of the station (9.1 million tons, according so some other nerd's webpage), and you get an escape velocity in centimeters per second.
The body would indeed come back to the station, but not because of the station's own gravity; because of the planet's. 64 m/s is enough to get out of "B5 orbit", but not to do more than alter your orbit around the planet below. So, once or twice (depending on the direction the corpse went flying in) in every orbit, the body should approach the station again as their orbits intersect.
If you are using Windows or Outlook
... then stop using Outlook. No, I'm not kidding. Outlook uses the same HTML rendering code that Internet Explorer does, doesn't it? That makes it vulnerable to many of the frequently discovered, slowly patched security holes that IE has run across over the last few years.
People need to be taught not to run untrusted executable files, true... but what good does that do when they can be vulnerable to a system compromise by just looking at the preview pane of an infected email?
Where's the competition?
Ummm... scanning each other's Sunday paper advertisements, so that if they get undercut they can match their competitor's price by next week?
No, but it did make it easy for Microsoft to take an standard and mutate it into something that interferes with software replaceability. You make it sound like companies need to get something for free before they will ever implement anything new when there's really no good reason that companies can't all just work from a well documented specification.
How did Microsoft's adoption of BSD's TCP/IP stack "interfere with software replaceability"? It meant that when Microsoft was taking months to fix the winnuke/teardrop/syndrop/etc. type holes, we couldn't fix them ourselves (short of replacing the Microsoft software entirely, of course), but if they had "just worked from a well documented specification" we would have had the same problem.
In fact, "working from a well documented specification" has had a negative effect on software replaceability in some cases; witness all the websites that were designed to work only with Netscape or only with IE because neither browser's support for even the well documented W3C standards was up to par.
Mutually Assured Destruction was "stable" only as far as retaliatory destruction was really assured. A limited missile defense system makes it impossible for your opponent to be sure that a first strike of theirs will destroy all of your missiles, and so makes MAD more stable, not less.
The first time I went through it, I definitely took a few wrong directions; there were at least two times I found myself going up an elevator only to have a reptile-spider-thing clawing my face off right at the top.
Unreal takes the cake for atmosphere in my opinion: running through most of the first level with no weapons at all, then catching that first glimpse of an adult Skaarg disembowling one of the ship's crew? Finding yourself locked into a narrow corridor, then watching the lights go dead, one by one? Excellent game.
Don't tell me you weren't at least a little creeped out by the zombie soldiers breaking through the walls or rising up from the fog. I admit, I did the "late night, lights off, volume up" thing myself to try and enhance the atmosphere, but for at least one level the RtCW guys did pretty good by themselves.
This is a *huge* worry for some companies, and quite validly so.
This explains a lot, you know.
Why are some newspaper editorials nearly illiterate? The publishers must not be allowing their editors to read books, lest they accidentally insert copyrighted phrases and ideas into their own work!
Why does so much popular music reek? Because the record companies won't let their artists listen to much real music, lest they inadvertently copy chords and lyrics into their own songs!
Why is the movie industry obsessed with remaking old TV shows, old movies, and old comic books? Because if they put out an original film, there's a danger of them accidentally copying somebody else's copyright, so they might as well buy the rights to some existing creative work and copy it on purpose instead!
Seriously, though, if the justice system understood software, there shouldn't be any "potentially explosive litigation", because there shouldn't be that double standard. Writing a hash table that happens to resemble something you saw in glib shouldn't be any less legal than writing a magazine article that happens to use phrases you read in a book.
What exactly is one sample antialiasing? A blur filter?
Would it be possible for a malicious page to load a trusted page in another frame, pause for it to load, then execute a back() in that frame? There are loads of things that javascript isn't allowed to do in a frame from another website, but is back() among them?
Until we can cheaply send a whole bunch of actors into orbit, I can't see the "Smoke Ring" or "Integral Trees" movies being made. You could try to pull of the trees with CGI, and try to do the zero-G a few minutes a time in a thoroughly blue-screened Vomet Comet, but I'll bet the result would suck.
Basically my problems were:
The manifold needs to be compact for the conjecture to apply.
I was thinking of the "3-sphere" as B^3, not S^3.
Thanks, everyone.
It's only been a couple years since I took geometric topology; I shouldn't have forgotten this much, this fast.
Isn't a sphere with a bubble in it (say, A = {x in R^n: 1/2 < d(x,0) < 3/2}) a 3-manifold? It's an open subset of 3-space.
Isn't that set A simply connected? You can deformation retract it down to S^2, which is simply connected.
And yet, even if the fundamental group pi_1(A) = 0, the higher homotopy groups aren't trivial: pi_2(A) isn't zero, so A can't be homeomorphic to a 3-sphere.
So why isn't this a counterexample to the Poincare conjecture?
Rice U. breaks Munkres' first book up into two classes, calling the second "Geometric Topology". It's a very clear discussion of the subject. I found "Elements of Algebraic Topology" much harder, but that may just be because we only had one semester to deal with that one.
I didn't have any trouble setting up dualhead on a Matrox G450, but I can't get Linux to recognize the second output on the Radeon 7500. It's supposedly doable in Linux (although Xinerama and DRI weren't compatible on this driver due to some sync bug last time I checked); I just haven't been able to figure out how. Do you have a Radeon 7500 working in dualhead? If so, would you post the DVI output's "Driver" section of your XF86Config file?
If you're just using Linux, you'll need to upgrade to XFree86 4.2 just to get the card working. The Linux drivers are more stable, at least. I've had two crashes and occasional texture corruption (with a few pixels of rainbow colors!?) while playing Wolfenstein, but no problems in 2D or with OpenGL screensavers.
Oh, and of course dual-head doesn't seem to want to work in either OS (Windows makes a valiant effort).
Maybe I just got a bad card out of the box, but the relative stability in Linux makes that seem doubtful. A friend of mine had similar problems with a Radeon 8500 and the CD drivers, but in his case the first update to drivers off ati.com fixed things.
Try limiting the number of processes it can spawn first: "ulimit -u 100" or something like that on bash. Then you start up top in another window to watch the results.
I tried it on my machine (after syncing the disks) and didn't have to hard boot, but it took literally minutes to kill the damn thing off. Linux tries to split CPU time between processes rather than between users, it seems, and so one root login seems a thousandth as important the scheduler as 1000 spinning forkbombs.
I don't suppose there's any kernel patches like the O(1) scheduler, but which implement a "be fair to multiple users" scheduler instead?
CNET made their last question "Has the spam incident helped or harmed your career path?", when I'm sure we were all more interested in the answer to "(sound of gun cocking) Have you made your peace with God, Mr. Canter?"
Is there an automated and clean way to do it ?
No, because if you wanted to remove all of Ximian Gnome then you'd have to go reinstall all the Red Hat stuff like gtk+ and glib that Ximian makes versions of.
C'mon, if you're already planning to install the beta, you should have your important files backed up anyway, so just go wild. I didn't uninstall Ximian, I just clicked OK on a "we've detected 3rd party packages that may be broken in the upgrade" dialog box. Red Hat installed newer versions of some Ximian software, left software that Ximian had a newer version of untouched, and everything still seems to work.
Well then build the tarball into a binary and source RPM and keep those. :)
Oh, I wasn't trying to contradict you, just pointing out that if you're given an SRPM and can't find a tar+spec, then there's a better way to build the SRPM.
My point was that execting every developer to maintain tar.gz, rpm and deb versions of every release is unrealistic, especially since a tarball with a spec inside is just as useful, if not more so than a seperate srpm for download on sourceforge.
I agree completely. Can dpkg do anything like the "tar+spec" for source packages? It would be nice if people could distribute a single tarball and keep the RPM, DPKG, and hand-compile fans all happy.