I need to know the basic idea of your paper *before* I decide to check your sign errors.
And you trust that the paper has been seen and deemed correct by a referee. I've been a referee for a couple of Physical Review papers and unfortunately it is indeed rather common that there is too little information in the paper to allow "checking for sign errors" as you call it. So you cannot really trust that the reviewer had enough information to vet the correctness of the paper.
In my case I sent the articles back to the editor with the comment that the authors should first properly explain what they are doing before I can judge the scientific conclusions, together with a long list of ambiguities in the discussion. I'm quite sure though that most referees don't bother since I would say the same about most published papers.
OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?
Those OCR algorithms are manually tweaked for a specific CAPTCHA algorithm, in the case of Gmail a tightly spaced letter sequence with spatial distortion. Neural networks have been better than humans in recognizing individual letters for a while (see http://research.microsoft.com/~kumarc/ ); the hardest part is separating the letter glyphs so that the neural network knows where to look, which is the purpose of the clutter in old Hotmail captchas and the tight spacing in both Gmail and recent Hotmail captchas.
With normal 'connected' handwriting, separation is obviously pretty tough. Moreover, the handwriting of many persons cannot be deciphered unambiguously on the basis of letter shapes alone. The reader needs to know the context, which becomes painfully obvious if the handwriting is in a different language. Remember the time when medical prescriptions were handwritten? I would say that reading sloppy handwriting is much harder than deciphering a Captcha. If only a computer could generate sloppy handwriting automatically...
I don't really get why clicking OK on something that vaguely looks like a system error is a problem. If it is a script running inside a web browser, the script cannot do anything that it wouldn't be able to do without the script. If it is already a process running inside the OS, it means that you are already in trouble because it could also erase files or install programs without you clicking OK.
It would be more beneficial to malware if they could make a REAL Windows dialog ("Install new software, Allow?") look like a harmless message ("Print job finished."), but that would be pretty tough to do.
Still waiting for Ludicrously High Frequency.... Seriously..
Well, EHF is up to 0.3 THz (1 mm wavelength). Long-distance fiber links already use 1.5 micron wavelengths (200 THz); it is called infrared and it is already widely used for communication.
You never want to defrag SSD's. It just wears out the disk.
A good SSD has wear-leveling and write-combining techniques that keep the SSD "defragmented" automatically.
I recently did an experiment on the impact of fragmentation on a flash drive, and it does seem that there are significant issues with fragmentation, although I'll be the first to acknowledge that I only tested one device so far and that an older SD card is not a modern SSD.
It looks like writing flash memory is very slow (tens of milliseconds for a write), which is compensated for by parallelizing writes in large (100+ kB) contiguous blocks, with obvious consequences for performance on writing scattered data. It would not surprise me if high-end SSDs parallellize their write operations across the separate physical chips inside so that a single write does not block all other read/write access to the device, but wear and access would still be better if data is stored contiguously as much as possible.
I wasn't aware Moore's law applied to hard drives?
It seems to apply: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law , although the rate of increase has been less predictable over the years than for integrated circuits.
Its not going to be long before units of 2^100 are common.
What are you smoking? We're at 2^40 (1 TiB) now, with Moore's law it would take 60 times 18 months, or 90 years before you're at 2^100. And that is if Moore's law continues to work that long. If you somehow manage to use one electron to store a bit, you need 9 kg of electrons, not to mention about 32 metric tons of accompanying protons and neutrons.
Wall warts pull power out of the wall even when they are not charging your shiny gadget. In fact this Idle current can be from 4 to 20 watts.
It depends on the type, though. The older ones have a heavy iron-core transformer inside that draws current and dissipates it over the resistance of the thin wire of the primary winding; they get hot whether you use them or not. But more and more wall warts are based on switching power supplies, at least over here in Netherlands. They are usually quite light-weight compared to the old-style transformers, and they usually don't get warm at all when not in use, which also means that they don't waste any energy.
By the way, I haven't seen any wall wart that consumes feels hot enough to be consuming 20 watts.
Unfortunately, writing legal documents in English isn't really an option. The law, like math, natural science, or computer programming, has an evolved set of vocabulary, logical rules, stylistic conventions, etc.
Maybe you can explain what the purpose is of the UPPERCASE PARAGRAPHS IN EULAS? Uppercase text is harder to read than lowercase text, so if the purpose is to emphasize the important bits, it doesn't do it very well. And why emphasize paragraphs? Is lowercase text less legally binding than uppercase text?
Here in the laser lab, we often use white paper for temporary blocking laser beams up to 10 W/cm2. There is almost no absorption for visible and near-infrared light so that it just scatters the light to mostly harmless. I don't know what kind of wavelength your brother uses in his lab, but wood has a tendency to turn black after prolongued exposure, which makes it only absorb more light. I find the idea that glue vapor can spread out a laser beam enough to make it harmless rather unlikely.
The military tactical high-energy laser appears to emit radiation at a wavelength around 4 micrometers. That is something that gets absorbed pretty well by typical paint materials (all kinds of organic molecules), but shiny silver or gold will reflect 99% of it and most other clean metal surfaces well above 90% as well. It appears that the laser is in the 10--100 kW range [THEL description], so reducing the impacted energy to less than 1 kW will make a big difference.
What people here don't understand is that you have to read the claims of a patent to know what mechanism really is patented. The claims describe a minimum set of properties that a device should have in order to be covered by the patent. For example:
6,563,415 "Analog sensor(s) with snap-through tactile feedback" - in essence, it is about a button that does 'click' when you press it AND has analog readout. For prior art, you need a combination of these two properties integrated into a single device. The fact that there have been analog joysticks with a clicky button forever is not relevant. In addition there are some technical details on how the click is produced and how the analog reading is done. Make a pressure sensitive button with a capacitive pressure sensor instead of a conductance sensor and it is not covered by this patent.
3D controller with vibration - if you read the claim, this seems to be a very complex device with several buttons attached in a specific way combined with potentiometers. The patent was filed in 2000. An Nintendo engineer who knew about this patent could probably have designed around it if he wanted to.
So I don't think the patents are covered by prior art in this case. There is another requirement for a patent, and that is whether the invention is obvious to someone skilled in the art. That is much more fuzzy. In general, if the patent is a new combination of three or more existing inventions, it is non-obvious. If it is only two existing inventions combined, then it depends. I'm not into game controllers, so I can't judge that here.
Re:Why not apply spam filters on outgoing messages
on
Spammers Choose GMail
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nice idea, but what if you're discussing spam content? Then your email will appear spammy, even though it isn't.
I have mail accounts which are filtered by SpamAssassin, which does a fairly good job, and it looks like the actual text content of the email can only contribute so much to the spam score. I tried sending myself emails from a different account with text like "president nigeria $8,000,000 viagra penis enlargement rolex' and it stayed below the spam threshold: each spammy subject gives one point, so that is only 4 points while the spam cutoff is at 5. Blacklisted IP addresses have much more weight, and in addition there are plenty of technical issues that are are spam indicators, such as dynamic IP addresses, forged header lines, HTML-only mail with inline images, and so on.
I don't know what Gmail exactly uses for spam filtering, but the above message sent to my gmail account made it to the inbox with no problem.
Apart from the cost, an important difference between a dog and a potential hijacker is that the latter can prepare a piece of insulating plastic to slide inbetween the skin and the collar after getting seated and before taking over the plane. No way to prevent that unless they make the collars so tight that it cuts off all the blood flow.
If you think you can speak e.g. German after a 12-week course, try going out on the street and have a non-trivial conversation with a native, or just watch TV programs in German.
I learnt Swedish at the age of 29 and who already did learn several foreign languages before that, I estimate it took me 400 hours of active study to get to the level where I could have a conversation with someone who didn't speak too fast. The grandparent was talking about an immersion-type of course, which means that you're exposed to the language almost every waking hour, i.e. 60 hours per week. That means 720 hours in a 12-week course. The problem with courses is that, due to the one-teacher-many-pupils setup, you get more practice in listening, writing, and reading than in speaking. For that, you really have to be in an environment with native speakers of that language.
By the way, I'm Dutch. In high school, we learn English and get some German and French as well. As for the statement that learning a language is easier when you're young: during 6 years of high school, we had about 900 hours of English (including homework).
It's referred to as a "significant drain" on resources, but quoting one number without the other is pointless.
Well, I'm not sure how efficient Coldfusion is for handling large web forums, and how fast their database back-end is (16 million posts), but if each request takes 0.1 second of CPU time, it means it's enough traffic to keep a whole extra server busy. Approaching it differently: there are typically about 1000 users online, which open maybe one page per minute each. That means about 20 page requests per second during normal usage. Someone else mentioned 50 requests per second, but it's not clear whether that includes static content (images, CSS, javascript), while AVG only requests web pages. Database/script-driven pages take much more server resources than static content.
But why isn't it easier to grow a crystal with a cubic symmetry slowly,
As others have said, atomically sharp ridges on a cube are way too fragile. Also, I don't think silicon will spontaneously crystallize as nice cubes, so polishing is still necessary - and impossible if there are sharp edges. Although it has a cubic symmetry, the cleavage planes are octahedral. The technology for crystallizing large chunks of ultra-pure materials is not as well-developed for other materials than silicon.
To make a perfect sphere all you need is to make sure it has exactly the same curvature everywhere.
This turns out to be extremely difficult to do and to validate.
On the contrary, it is quite simple if you use interferometry. Put the sphere on top of a small flat piece of glass. Illuminate it with monochromatic (laser) light. The light reflects both from the glass and from the sphere; depending on the distance between the glass and a point of the sphere, there will be constructive or destructive interference. It's straightforward to measure the curvature across a square cm with better than 150 nm accuracy (you can do it at home by putting to glass plates on top of each other), and with some tricks even more accurate. See Wikipedia: Newton's rings. There are variations on this principle with better accuracy; they can make telescope mirrors of more than a meter with less than 100 nm deviation from the ideal surface.
I mean I doubt you grab the calculator everytime you download a file, or a webpage is finished loading...
My ISP tells it somewhere on the web interface for my account settings. Moreover, the web interface to your ADSL modem probably also shows it somewhere, at least since the last reboot.
It only takes a couple. He's just about to piss of a few thousand people.
AFAIK, spamcop.net uses a combination of honeypots, user-reported spam, and some heuristics that counts how often the IP address is requested at their RBL. A user-reported spam message will not do anything except generate a spamcop email to the upstream provider. I've done it plenty of times, but I don't think I've ever managed to get a company cut off by their ISP.
I doubt it. If the competitor is able to send mailings without being blacklisted , then there are no honeypot addresses in there. It is not likely that enough recipients will take the effort to report the mail to spamcop.net (are there any other blacklists based on manual reporting? Is the spamcop blacklist widely used anyway?) to get the sender blacklisted. At most, some individual Bayesian filters may become more sensitive to the name of the company and travel-related spam, although I'm not sure how hotmail/gmail/yahoo exactly deal with user-reported spam.
Some recipients are likely to be annoyed and may decide to never do business with your company.
The submitter works for a travel agency. Plenty of competition; the chance that the potential customer comes to them is small anyway.
I'm afraid that, however unethical this spamming would be, the risk of getting in trouble is rather small.
The drag on a standard automobile is just ridiculous. Rear ends today are typically vertically flat! Who are these designers that aren't familiar with the teardrop shape?
The flat back you're talking about is called a Kammback and it has actually a lower air resistance than a teardrop shape.
I am very much opposed to the insane prices to get at research, both as a researcher and a writer.
It depends quite a bit on the publisher. For example, the prestigious Physical Review (A,B,C,...,Letters) cost quite a bit, but mainly because there are so many articles in there. If you convert it, an institutional subscription is only about $0.10 per page. An institutional subscription to Nature is much more expensive at about $0.90 per page. And Elsevier's Chemical Physics Letters (a fairly important journal in its field) is $2 per page! I think the publisher of Physical Review (American Physical Society) is a non-profit organisation, while for Elsevier, the journals are created with the sole purpose of extracting as much money from them as possible. Researchers in the field of chemical physics must have access to CPL, so the publisher can basically charge as much as they want.
Slashdot Mirror
And you trust that the paper has been seen and deemed correct by a referee. I've been a referee for a couple of Physical Review papers and unfortunately it is indeed rather common that there is too little information in the paper to allow "checking for sign errors" as you call it. So you cannot really trust that the reviewer had enough information to vet the correctness of the paper.
In my case I sent the articles back to the editor with the comment that the authors should first properly explain what they are doing before I can judge the scientific conclusions, together with a long list of ambiguities in the discussion. I'm quite sure though that most referees don't bother since I would say the same about most published papers.
In the other news, robot fishes are reported to sing loud protests against roboplants that are invading their territory.
Those OCR algorithms are manually tweaked for a specific CAPTCHA algorithm, in the case of Gmail a tightly spaced letter sequence with spatial distortion. Neural networks have been better than humans in recognizing individual letters for a while (see http://research.microsoft.com/~kumarc/ ); the hardest part is separating the letter glyphs so that the neural network knows where to look, which is the purpose of the clutter in old Hotmail captchas and the tight spacing in both Gmail and recent Hotmail captchas.
With normal 'connected' handwriting, separation is obviously pretty tough. Moreover, the handwriting of many persons cannot be deciphered unambiguously on the basis of letter shapes alone. The reader needs to know the context, which becomes painfully obvious if the handwriting is in a different language. Remember the time when medical prescriptions were handwritten? I would say that reading sloppy handwriting is much harder than deciphering a Captcha. If only a computer could generate sloppy handwriting automatically...
I don't really get why clicking OK on something that vaguely looks like a system error is a problem. If it is a script running inside a web browser, the script cannot do anything that it wouldn't be able to do without the script. If it is already a process running inside the OS, it means that you are already in trouble because it could also erase files or install programs without you clicking OK.
It would be more beneficial to malware if they could make a REAL Windows dialog ("Install new software, Allow?") look like a harmless message ("Print job finished."), but that would be pretty tough to do.
Well, EHF is up to 0.3 THz (1 mm wavelength). Long-distance fiber links already use 1.5 micron wavelengths (200 THz); it is called infrared and it is already widely used for communication.
I recently did an experiment on the impact of fragmentation on a flash drive, and it does seem that there are significant issues with fragmentation, although I'll be the first to acknowledge that I only tested one device so far and that an older SD card is not a modern SSD.
It looks like writing flash memory is very slow (tens of milliseconds for a write), which is compensated for by parallelizing writes in large (100+ kB) contiguous blocks, with obvious consequences for performance on writing scattered data. It would not surprise me if high-end SSDs parallellize their write operations across the separate physical chips inside so that a single write does not block all other read/write access to the device, but wear and access would still be better if data is stored contiguously as much as possible.
It seems to apply: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law , although the rate of increase has been less predictable over the years than for integrated circuits.
What are you smoking? We're at 2^40 (1 TiB) now, with Moore's law it would take 60 times 18 months, or 90 years before you're at 2^100. And that is if Moore's law continues to work that long. If you somehow manage to use one electron to store a bit, you need 9 kg of electrons, not to mention about 32 metric tons of accompanying protons and neutrons.
It depends on the type, though. The older ones have a heavy iron-core transformer inside that draws current and dissipates it over the resistance of the thin wire of the primary winding; they get hot whether you use them or not. But more and more wall warts are based on switching power supplies, at least over here in Netherlands. They are usually quite light-weight compared to the old-style transformers, and they usually don't get warm at all when not in use, which also means that they don't waste any energy.
By the way, I haven't seen any wall wart that consumes feels hot enough to be consuming 20 watts.
Maybe you can explain what the purpose is of the UPPERCASE PARAGRAPHS IN EULAS? Uppercase text is harder to read than lowercase text, so if the purpose is to emphasize the important bits, it doesn't do it very well. And why emphasize paragraphs? Is lowercase text less legally binding than uppercase text?
Here in the laser lab, we often use white paper for temporary blocking laser beams up to 10 W/cm2. There is almost no absorption for visible and near-infrared light so that it just scatters the light to mostly harmless. I don't know what kind of wavelength your brother uses in his lab, but wood has a tendency to turn black after prolongued exposure, which makes it only absorb more light. I find the idea that glue vapor can spread out a laser beam enough to make it harmless rather unlikely.
The military tactical high-energy laser appears to emit radiation at a wavelength around 4 micrometers. That is something that gets absorbed pretty well by typical paint materials (all kinds of organic molecules), but shiny silver or gold will reflect 99% of it and most other clean metal surfaces well above 90% as well. It appears that the laser is in the 10--100 kW range [THEL description], so reducing the impacted energy to less than 1 kW will make a big difference.
What people here don't understand is that you have to read the claims of a patent to know what mechanism really is patented. The claims describe a minimum set of properties that a device should have in order to be covered by the patent. For example:
6,563,415 "Analog sensor(s) with snap-through tactile feedback" - in essence, it is about a button that does 'click' when you press it AND has analog readout. For prior art, you need a combination of these two properties integrated into a single device. The fact that there have been analog joysticks with a clicky button forever is not relevant. In addition there are some technical details on how the click is produced and how the analog reading is done. Make a pressure sensitive button with a capacitive pressure sensor instead of a conductance sensor and it is not covered by this patent.
6,351,205 "Variable-conductance sensor" - this is a variation of the previous one with two click points during pressing the button.
3D controller with vibration - if you read the claim, this seems to be a very complex device with several buttons attached in a specific way combined with potentiometers. The patent was filed in 2000. An Nintendo engineer who knew about this patent could probably have designed around it if he wanted to.
So I don't think the patents are covered by prior art in this case. There is another requirement for a patent, and that is whether the invention is obvious to someone skilled in the art. That is much more fuzzy. In general, if the patent is a new combination of three or more existing inventions, it is non-obvious. If it is only two existing inventions combined, then it depends. I'm not into game controllers, so I can't judge that here.
I have mail accounts which are filtered by SpamAssassin, which does a fairly good job, and it looks like the actual text content of the email can only contribute so much to the spam score. I tried sending myself emails from a different account with text like "president nigeria $8,000,000 viagra penis enlargement rolex' and it stayed below the spam threshold: each spammy subject gives one point, so that is only 4 points while the spam cutoff is at 5. Blacklisted IP addresses have much more weight, and in addition there are plenty of technical issues that are are spam indicators, such as dynamic IP addresses, forged header lines, HTML-only mail with inline images, and so on.
I don't know what Gmail exactly uses for spam filtering, but the above message sent to my gmail account made it to the inbox with no problem.
In that case the pilot just needs to crank up the heating until the hijacker starts sweating. :-)
Apart from the cost, an important difference between a dog and a potential hijacker is that the latter can prepare a piece of insulating plastic to slide inbetween the skin and the collar after getting seated and before taking over the plane. No way to prevent that unless they make the collars so tight that it cuts off all the blood flow.
I learnt Swedish at the age of 29 and who already did learn several foreign languages before that, I estimate it took me 400 hours of active study to get to the level where I could have a conversation with someone who didn't speak too fast. The grandparent was talking about an immersion-type of course, which means that you're exposed to the language almost every waking hour, i.e. 60 hours per week. That means 720 hours in a 12-week course. The problem with courses is that, due to the one-teacher-many-pupils setup, you get more practice in listening, writing, and reading than in speaking. For that, you really have to be in an environment with native speakers of that language.
By the way, I'm Dutch. In high school, we learn English and get some German and French as well. As for the statement that learning a language is easier when you're young: during 6 years of high school, we had about 900 hours of English (including homework).
Well, I'm not sure how efficient Coldfusion is for handling large web forums, and how fast their database back-end is (16 million posts), but if each request takes 0.1 second of CPU time, it means it's enough traffic to keep a whole extra server busy. Approaching it differently: there are typically about 1000 users online, which open maybe one page per minute each. That means about 20 page requests per second during normal usage. Someone else mentioned 50 requests per second, but it's not clear whether that includes static content (images, CSS, javascript), while AVG only requests web pages. Database/script-driven pages take much more server resources than static content.
As others have said, atomically sharp ridges on a cube are way too fragile. Also, I don't think silicon will spontaneously crystallize as nice cubes, so polishing is still necessary - and impossible if there are sharp edges. Although it has a cubic symmetry, the cleavage planes are octahedral. The technology for crystallizing large chunks of ultra-pure materials is not as well-developed for other materials than silicon.
On the contrary, it is quite simple if you use interferometry. Put the sphere on top of a small flat piece of glass. Illuminate it with monochromatic (laser) light. The light reflects both from the glass and from the sphere; depending on the distance between the glass and a point of the sphere, there will be constructive or destructive interference. It's straightforward to measure the curvature across a square cm with better than 150 nm accuracy (you can do it at home by putting to glass plates on top of each other), and with some tricks even more accurate. See Wikipedia: Newton's rings. There are variations on this principle with better accuracy; they can make telescope mirrors of more than a meter with less than 100 nm deviation from the ideal surface.
My ISP tells it somewhere on the web interface for my account settings. Moreover, the web interface to your ADSL modem probably also shows it somewhere, at least since the last reboot.
No, not exponentially, but rather as N^(-3/2).
AFAIK, spamcop.net uses a combination of honeypots, user-reported spam, and some heuristics that counts how often the IP address is requested at their RBL. A user-reported spam message will not do anything except generate a spamcop email to the upstream provider. I've done it plenty of times, but I don't think I've ever managed to get a company cut off by their ISP.
I doubt it. If the competitor is able to send mailings without being blacklisted , then there are no honeypot addresses in there. It is not likely that enough recipients will take the effort to report the mail to spamcop.net (are there any other blacklists based on manual reporting? Is the spamcop blacklist widely used anyway?) to get the sender blacklisted. At most, some individual Bayesian filters may become more sensitive to the name of the company and travel-related spam, although I'm not sure how hotmail/gmail/yahoo exactly deal with user-reported spam.
The submitter works for a travel agency. Plenty of competition; the chance that the potential customer comes to them is small anyway.
I'm afraid that, however unethical this spamming would be, the risk of getting in trouble is rather small.
The flat back you're talking about is called a Kammback and it has actually a lower air resistance than a teardrop shape.
It depends quite a bit on the publisher. For example, the prestigious Physical Review (A,B,C,...,Letters) cost quite a bit, but mainly because there are so many articles in there. If you convert it, an institutional subscription is only about $0.10 per page. An institutional subscription to Nature is much more expensive at about $0.90 per page. And Elsevier's Chemical Physics Letters (a fairly important journal in its field) is $2 per page! I think the publisher of Physical Review (American Physical Society) is a non-profit organisation, while for Elsevier, the journals are created with the sole purpose of extracting as much money from them as possible. Researchers in the field of chemical physics must have access to CPL, so the publisher can basically charge as much as they want.