You can hide the field with CSS/noscript tag or just mark it: "This field should be left intentionally blank" or something of that nature to make it more human friendly.
What you and a bunch of others don't seem to realize is that it is very hard for a computer program to decipher a captcha produced by a random algorithm. Captcha-defeating software has to target a specific captcha implementation, and the idea is that defeating the captcha is a lot harder than generating it. If your captcha implementation is the only one of its kind, a relatively simple captcha program would do the job since defeating it would take an experienced programmer at least a couple of hours, and your website is not likely to be worth the effort.
However, if your website has multiple millions of visitors (Gmail, Hotmail, Ebay, Youtube) that can be targetted by spam, or if your captcha implementation is included in a major CMS (Wordpress, MediaWiki, phpBB, etc.), a couple of hours to crack it would be well worth it. The same holds for your proposed type of human/computer test, except that a couple of lines of Perl script would do the job rather than tedious image processing and neural-network training.
life expectancy at birth has gone from about 50 years [...] You think that 25 used to literally be "mid life". Half your life was likely over by 25.
Life expectancy at birth includes child diseases that killed about 20% of the children before the age of 5. See page 6, fig 3 of the US life tables. Once you survived the first few years of your life, your life expectancy would increase considerably. See page 30 of the report: at the age of 25, your life expectancy was 65. Your midlife would be around the age of 34. Nowadays, the life expectancy only increases from 77.5 to 78.5 years between the age of 0 and 25 years.
If it is a 6 bit panel, then you can use dithering with four pixels to achieve 253 different values in each color component (that is 253, not 256)
I have heard this many times, but last time I bought an LCD screen, about half a year ago, I brought a couple of home-brewn test images to the computer store and basically all of them (price range up to EUR 350) seem to do time-domain dithering, which is especially visible in the darker areas.
Also, the better screens in this price range (I ended up picking a Samsung 203B, 1400x1050) can display all shades from 0 to 255 without chopping off the lower or higher three.
Physically, this makes sense. The luminosity is supposed to be a nonlinear function of the pixel value (L = n^2.2), and the luminosity of a pixel is some other nonlinear function of the applied voltage, so in order to come anywhere close to the desired gamma of 2.2, the hardware in the monitor has to do more complex dithering than in 4-pixel blocks.
So can anybody provide a reliable reference for this 253-shade claim? I mean, from somebody who actually knows how the hardware is wired?
True, big vehicles are dangerous to *others*, but we're talking your own safety.
Look at How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety. About halfway the page there is a table with fatal-accident statistics for various car models, specified for both driver deaths and other deaths. SUVs and pick-ups score pretty bad on both counts, by about a factor two compared to smaller cars. The cause is in how bad they perform in emergency manoeuvers that sometimes are necessary to avoid a crash.
I'd like to know in which country. Rates for standard grade (Euro 95) vary from 1.05 EUR/L to 1.41 EUR/L (including sales tax), which is about 5 to 7 USD/gallon. See European fuel prices.
They typically wire the detonator in place of the vibrator motor in the phone.
Typically? Where did you get the stats?:)
My phone provider sends me an SMS every now and then, and I get about one call a month by somebody who mistyped someone else's phone number. I wouldn't want to risk that while assembling or placing a bomb. The couple of cheap phones that I've owned don't have an option to switch the vibrator off for everything except calls from certain known phone numbers.
LaTeX (including version 3) is a macro package that runs on top of the TeX engine. It provides a more consistent interface that hides the internals, but it still has to deal with, for example, the archaic way fonts are organized.
You may not realize this, but TeX (like PostScript) is a Turing complete language, complete with branches and loops
Unfortunately, TeX's Turing-completeness is implemented as a macro-expansion language. I use LaTeX for everything that's more than one page, and it is nice that I can still handle 15-year-old documents (except for the images which were tied to the emTeX printer drivers...), but it really sucks to change the layout because it is all in an almost-unstructured mess of macro expansions. Variable scoping rules are weird, you're restricted to max 255 counter variables, it can't do true floating-point arithmetic, and so on. In practice, you're dependent on packages written by TeX gurus, that often don't cooperate with each other.
It's time for a successor to (La)TeX. It's great what TeX can do given that it was originally designed to run on 1982-era hardware, but now we could use something that has less obscure internals so that mere mortals can extend its functionality. And the successor could have things like native unicode support, elegant interfacing with type-1 and truetype fonts, left-to-right and up-down scripts, and so on.
I had to tape over the blue power LED on a Shuttle 51G system, as it was so bright I could see the reflections from it in another room.
This is especially a problem with blue light, since that is the wavelength that a dark-adapted human eye is most sensitive to. I don't understand why these blue leds are everywhere the last few years. It used to be simple: red means problems, green means OK, and yellow something else (such as sleep mode for a monitor). But nowadays, every other power light is blue which appears extremely bright in a dark environment. Many cell phones use blue color schemes which tend to blind you when you use it at night.
And although it appears bright, the resolution of the human eye is pretty bad for blue light. Try blue letters on a black background and you will know what I mean.
Kepler's laws... highly mathematical, and includes a ton of irrelevant mathematics (e.g., analytic geometry equations that belong in the conic sections article); the math is way too heavy, and starts way too soon
photon... completely unintelligible to the general reader, and makes the mathematics even less intelligible by defining lots of unnecessary notation, and presenting various equations in more than one notation
Well, at least I fixed the intro sections for you of these two.:)
So what distinguishes a cell phone from having a conversation with a passenger?
The fact that the passenger tends to shut up if s/he sees that the traffic requires full attention. I agree that some of your other examples are pretty dangerous, since they require that the driver takes his eyes off the road for a couple of seconds. But
Or listening attentively to their GPS navigation system
this doesn't even close. While listening to the navigation system, you have to focus all your attention to the road to realize what left turn it is talking about. Theoretically it is possible that you overlook a pedestrian that way, but it's far less likely than when you have to imagine a situation that you are discussing with someone over the phone, let alone watching the screen of your cellphone.
Can anyone come up with a scenario where it would be ESSENTIAL for store operations to be able to send SSNs and drivers license #s over a wireless connection?
If you had read the article, you would have noted this passage:
After they used that data to crack the [WEP] encryption code the hackers digitally eavesdropped on employees logging into TJX's central database in Framingham and stole one or more user names and passwords, [...] collected transaction data including credit-card numbers [...] They were able to go into the TJX system remotely from any computer on the Internet, probers say.
Whether the cash registers transmitted this sensitive data over wifi is less relevant. The problem would have been much less severe if connections to the central database had been over https or ssh.
Of course, if you don't want to run audio cables throughout your home, you could also consider sending the audio signal over the unused wire pairs that are in the ethernet cable. Unless you use gigabit ethernet, only two out of the four wire pairs in the UTP-cable are used. It's twisted pair, so it's reasonably immune to interference.
while black pipes absorb the most heat, they also radiate the most. So they have some material which absorbs more than it radiates. Not entirely sure of the science behind it.
You need a material that absorbs well in the range 1500-400 nm where the sun radiates most, but that is very reflective at longer wavelengths (3-10 microns) where it would radiate thermally at a temperature of 100 C. Most organic compounds (such as paint) are basically black in the mid-IR range, while metals reflect in both ranges, so this is not so easy. It might work with absorbtive material under glass, since glass is transparent to visible light, but blocks the heat radiation from the inside, as in a greenhouse.
It most certainly is [relevant]. When in doubt you should always follow the money.
Hydrogenation converts liquid fats (i.e., oil) into solid fats, which is more convenient for putting on top of your bread and for things that have to be sold in a dry and crunchy state. Moreover, it allows you to say it's "vegetable fat" on the food label, which seems to sound better than "animal fat". Also, saturated fats are much less prone to oxidation than unsaturated ones, which indeed increases the shelf life. But that does not have to do with the hydrogenation per se.
the same [no consensus] was said for many years in the tobacco wars.
That's no reason to see conspiracy theories everywhere. (Just like the fact that <insert famous scientist here> was not believed in his time doesn't imply that any crackpot has a brilliant theory). Any controversial topic on Wikipedia will attract editors that will defend both sides of the argument endlessly until a way of stating the facts is found that more or less satisfies both sides. This is in contrary to authors that write books titled "What not to eat" or "Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill" that can basically rant on with any one-sided view, cherry-picking studies that support their view and ignoring studies that don't.
Anyway, nobody is denying that trans fats are unhealthy because of their effect on cardiovascular diseases. But you should not state as a proven fact that it causes cancer, diabetes and whatnot when that is still subject of controversy.
It doesn't go off because it is not bio-degradeable. If it is not biodegradable [...] most natural oils such as peanut, olive and coconut/palm oil are not produced in the US [...] fuse hydrogen molecules to the receptors that would normally fuse with the oxygen.
The first statement is blatantly incorrect, the second is not relevant, and the third is clearly written by someone with no clue about chemistry. Hydrogenation has the purpose of transforming liquid oils containing unsaturated bonds, such as the peanut oil, into fats that are solid at room temperature (i.e. saturated fats). Saturated fats, which are completely natural, don't have any unsaturated bonds that can be oxidized either. A side effect of hydrogenation is that some unsaturated trans bonds are formed. How about reading a source with less bias and more scientific references? Trans fats on wikipedia:
Increased risk for coronary heart diseases: yes.
Cancer: no scientific consensus.
Diabetes: no scientific consensus.
Overweight (compared to other fats): no scientific consensus.
No scientific consensus tends to mean that there are one or two studies that show a very small effect and other studies that don't show any effect at all. Even if such na effect exists, it is likely not significant compared to other health risks many people are taking (lack of exercise, smoking, breathing polluted air, to name a few).
Suppose the test kits are 99% accurate. In 1000 tests, there will be 10 false positives.
I understand what you're trying to say here, but I don't think it is meaningful to talk of a false-positive rate for this type of test. It would make sense for a test that specifically tests for the presence of a compound in blood or some other well-defined substance. But how would you define it for a test that is supposed to be used on any material? If the police only uses it for testing soap, the FP rate would be 50%. For testing on bottled water the FP rate would probably be 0.00%.
... they are censoring political speech critical of the regime.
I don't think that Freedom of Speech in the US was supposed to be interpreted as "The government is obliged to use taxpayer's money to carry your speech and bring it out to the people". It basically means that you cannot be arrested for having and expressing an opinion. How you reach the people isn't the government's problem.
central system administration only allows Dell pc's running Windows XP and logging on onto an NT domain, and we are not allowed to purchase computers ourselves with our own budgets.
Let me guess: UvA (University of Amsterdam)? I heard from people who work there in physics research that they had to beg the IT support for permission to install data acquisition boards with accompanying software (non-approved hardware, non-approved software)...
If the 5 volts that is being supplied to the DAC is "dirty"...
Exactly. But my point is that a good AC power supply is not intrinsically harder to make than a stabilized DC-DC convertor on the PCI board. But the circuitry might add $5 to the production costs, which is a considerable amount on a device that sells in retail for $30.
Audio should not be done inside a PC. Well, not the analog portion, anyway.
Do you realize that a modern DAC is a digital signal processor that modulates its analog output between 0 and 5 volts at tens of MHz? If there is any big source of RF noise it's the DAC itself, and cleaning up that signal is a solved problem. Good internal audio cards actually do exist. The main problem is that you need a clean power supply voltage, but if you use your oscilloscope to observe the AC line voltage (hint: it's not a 50/60 Hz sine wave), you will realize that it's not that much easier with an external power supply. But yes, the typical consumer audio card is not suitable for high-quality audio recording and playback.
So if my Karma is capped at 50, metamoderating would only run the risk of lowering my status, from what you have said.
I think maximum something like 12 karma points can be affected by metamod. But the point is: there is a different (hidden) karma bookkeeping for moderation eligibility. You can have karma 50 but never get mod points because in the past you were metamodded as unfair too often, or because your own metamods were considered bad quality. Why do you care? Writing a post can also only affect your karma negatively.
Anyway, this is six years ago. IIRC there were remarks in the code that the metamod evaluation system needed to be rewritten, so it could be different today.
I've modded ~30 comments so far, and none of those have been metamodded.
It means that you are doing a good job. You only get feedback for being metamoderated as "Unfair". The system will then tell you that 87.5% of your recent moderations were fair.
I wonder if anyone has actually looked in the slashcode to see how moderation works and how mod points are given out?
I did, a long time (several years) ago. It mostly worked the way it was advertised: you need karma; doing good metamoderation gives you a bit of additional karma; being metamoderated will affect your moderation eligibility.
Except... they don't tell you one thing: you are penalized if your metamoderations are considered bad. Bad includes consistently disagreeing with other metamods, metamoderating "Unfair" too often, or metamoderating everything "Fair".
Slashdot Mirror
What you and a bunch of others don't seem to realize is that it is very hard for a computer program to decipher a captcha produced by a random algorithm. Captcha-defeating software has to target a specific captcha implementation, and the idea is that defeating the captcha is a lot harder than generating it. If your captcha implementation is the only one of its kind, a relatively simple captcha program would do the job since defeating it would take an experienced programmer at least a couple of hours, and your website is not likely to be worth the effort.
However, if your website has multiple millions of visitors (Gmail, Hotmail, Ebay, Youtube) that can be targetted by spam, or if your captcha implementation is included in a major CMS (Wordpress, MediaWiki, phpBB, etc.), a couple of hours to crack it would be well worth it. The same holds for your proposed type of human/computer test, except that a couple of lines of Perl script would do the job rather than tedious image processing and neural-network training.
Life expectancy at birth includes child diseases that killed about 20% of the children before the age of 5. See page 6, fig 3 of the US life tables. Once you survived the first few years of your life, your life expectancy would increase considerably. See page 30 of the report: at the age of 25, your life expectancy was 65. Your midlife would be around the age of 34. Nowadays, the life expectancy only increases from 77.5 to 78.5 years between the age of 0 and 25 years.
I have heard this many times, but last time I bought an LCD screen, about half a year ago, I brought a couple of home-brewn test images to the computer store and basically all of them (price range up to EUR 350) seem to do time-domain dithering, which is especially visible in the darker areas. Also, the better screens in this price range (I ended up picking a Samsung 203B, 1400x1050) can display all shades from 0 to 255 without chopping off the lower or higher three.
Physically, this makes sense. The luminosity is supposed to be a nonlinear function of the pixel value (L = n^2.2), and the luminosity of a pixel is some other nonlinear function of the applied voltage, so in order to come anywhere close to the desired gamma of 2.2, the hardware in the monitor has to do more complex dithering than in 4-pixel blocks.
So can anybody provide a reliable reference for this 253-shade claim? I mean, from somebody who actually knows how the hardware is wired?
Look at How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety. About halfway the page there is a table with fatal-accident statistics for various car models, specified for both driver deaths and other deaths. SUVs and pick-ups score pretty bad on both counts, by about a factor two compared to smaller cars. The cause is in how bad they perform in emergency manoeuvers that sometimes are necessary to avoid a crash.
I'd like to know in which country. Rates for standard grade (Euro 95) vary from 1.05 EUR/L to 1.41 EUR/L (including sales tax), which is about 5 to 7 USD/gallon. See European fuel prices.
Typically? Where did you get the stats? :)
My phone provider sends me an SMS every now and then, and I get about one call a month by somebody who mistyped someone else's phone number. I wouldn't want to risk that while assembling or placing a bomb. The couple of cheap phones that I've owned don't have an option to switch the vibrator off for everything except calls from certain known phone numbers.
LaTeX (including version 3) is a macro package that runs on top of the TeX engine. It provides a more consistent interface that hides the internals, but it still has to deal with, for example, the archaic way fonts are organized.
Unfortunately, TeX's Turing-completeness is implemented as a macro-expansion language. I use LaTeX for everything that's more than one page, and it is nice that I can still handle 15-year-old documents (except for the images which were tied to the emTeX printer drivers...), but it really sucks to change the layout because it is all in an almost-unstructured mess of macro expansions. Variable scoping rules are weird, you're restricted to max 255 counter variables, it can't do true floating-point arithmetic, and so on. In practice, you're dependent on packages written by TeX gurus, that often don't cooperate with each other.
It's time for a successor to (La)TeX. It's great what TeX can do given that it was originally designed to run on 1982-era hardware, but now we could use something that has less obscure internals so that mere mortals can extend its functionality. And the successor could have things like native unicode support, elegant interfacing with type-1 and truetype fonts, left-to-right and up-down scripts, and so on.
This is especially a problem with blue light, since that is the wavelength that a dark-adapted human eye is most sensitive to. I don't understand why these blue leds are everywhere the last few years. It used to be simple: red means problems, green means OK, and yellow something else (such as sleep mode for a monitor). But nowadays, every other power light is blue which appears extremely bright in a dark environment. Many cell phones use blue color schemes which tend to blind you when you use it at night.
And although it appears bright, the resolution of the human eye is pretty bad for blue light. Try blue letters on a black background and you will know what I mean.
If you had read the article, you would have noted this passage:
Whether the cash registers transmitted this sensitive data over wifi is less relevant. The problem would have been much less severe if connections to the central database had been over https or ssh.Of course, if you don't want to run audio cables throughout your home, you could also consider sending the audio signal over the unused wire pairs that are in the ethernet cable. Unless you use gigabit ethernet, only two out of the four wire pairs in the UTP-cable are used. It's twisted pair, so it's reasonably immune to interference.
You need a material that absorbs well in the range 1500-400 nm where the sun radiates most, but that is very reflective at longer wavelengths (3-10 microns) where it would radiate thermally at a temperature of 100 C. Most organic compounds (such as paint) are basically black in the mid-IR range, while metals reflect in both ranges, so this is not so easy. It might work with absorbtive material under glass, since glass is transparent to visible light, but blocks the heat radiation from the inside, as in a greenhouse.
you've had plenty of other responses.
Hydrogenation converts liquid fats (i.e., oil) into solid fats, which is more convenient for putting on top of your bread and for things that have to be sold in a dry and crunchy state. Moreover, it allows you to say it's "vegetable fat" on the food label, which seems to sound better than "animal fat". Also, saturated fats are much less prone to oxidation than unsaturated ones, which indeed increases the shelf life. But that does not have to do with the hydrogenation per se.
That's no reason to see conspiracy theories everywhere. (Just like the fact that <insert famous scientist here> was not believed in his time doesn't imply that any crackpot has a brilliant theory). Any controversial topic on Wikipedia will attract editors that will defend both sides of the argument endlessly until a way of stating the facts is found that more or less satisfies both sides. This is in contrary to authors that write books titled "What not to eat" or "Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill" that can basically rant on with any one-sided view, cherry-picking studies that support their view and ignoring studies that don't.
Anyway, nobody is denying that trans fats are unhealthy because of their effect on cardiovascular diseases. But you should not state as a proven fact that it causes cancer, diabetes and whatnot when that is still subject of controversy.
The first statement is blatantly incorrect, the second is not relevant, and the third is clearly written by someone with no clue about chemistry. Hydrogenation has the purpose of transforming liquid oils containing unsaturated bonds, such as the peanut oil, into fats that are solid at room temperature (i.e. saturated fats). Saturated fats, which are completely natural, don't have any unsaturated bonds that can be oxidized either. A side effect of hydrogenation is that some unsaturated trans bonds are formed. How about reading a source with less bias and more scientific references? Trans fats on wikipedia:
- Increased risk for coronary heart diseases: yes.
- Cancer: no scientific consensus.
- Diabetes: no scientific consensus.
- Overweight (compared to other fats): no scientific consensus.
No scientific consensus tends to mean that there are one or two studies that show a very small effect and other studies that don't show any effect at all. Even if such na effect exists, it is likely not significant compared to other health risks many people are taking (lack of exercise, smoking, breathing polluted air, to name a few).I understand what you're trying to say here, but I don't think it is meaningful to talk of a false-positive rate for this type of test. It would make sense for a test that specifically tests for the presence of a compound in blood or some other well-defined substance. But how would you define it for a test that is supposed to be used on any material? If the police only uses it for testing soap, the FP rate would be 50%. For testing on bottled water the FP rate would probably be 0.00%.
AdSense program policies: no pornography, adult, or mature content. But of course there are plenty of other advertising companies.
I don't think that Freedom of Speech in the US was supposed to be interpreted as "The government is obliged to use taxpayer's money to carry your speech and bring it out to the people". It basically means that you cannot be arrested for having and expressing an opinion. How you reach the people isn't the government's problem.
Let me guess: UvA (University of Amsterdam)? I heard from people who work there in physics research that they had to beg the IT support for permission to install data acquisition boards with accompanying software (non-approved hardware, non-approved software)...
Exactly. But my point is that a good AC power supply is not intrinsically harder to make than a stabilized DC-DC convertor on the PCI board. But the circuitry might add $5 to the production costs, which is a considerable amount on a device that sells in retail for $30.
Do you realize that a modern DAC is a digital signal processor that modulates its analog output between 0 and 5 volts at tens of MHz? If there is any big source of RF noise it's the DAC itself, and cleaning up that signal is a solved problem. Good internal audio cards actually do exist. The main problem is that you need a clean power supply voltage, but if you use your oscilloscope to observe the AC line voltage (hint: it's not a 50/60 Hz sine wave), you will realize that it's not that much easier with an external power supply. But yes, the typical consumer audio card is not suitable for high-quality audio recording and playback.
I think maximum something like 12 karma points can be affected by metamod. But the point is: there is a different (hidden) karma bookkeeping for moderation eligibility. You can have karma 50 but never get mod points because in the past you were metamodded as unfair too often, or because your own metamods were considered bad quality. Why do you care? Writing a post can also only affect your karma negatively.
Anyway, this is six years ago. IIRC there were remarks in the code that the metamod evaluation system needed to be rewritten, so it could be different today.
It means that you are doing a good job. You only get feedback for being metamoderated as "Unfair". The system will then tell you that 87.5% of your recent moderations were fair.
I did, a long time (several years) ago. It mostly worked the way it was advertised: you need karma; doing good metamoderation gives you a bit of additional karma; being metamoderated will affect your moderation eligibility.
Except... they don't tell you one thing: you are penalized if your metamoderations are considered bad. Bad includes consistently disagreeing with other metamods, metamoderating "Unfair" too often, or metamoderating everything "Fair".