Seriously, we've had the technology to detect global climate changes for
what, a hundred years at most?
ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc., etc.
>the earth has gone through a variety of climate changes in its history, and it will continue to go through plenty of climate changes
...which will not necessarily be suitable for human civilisation.
>regardless of whether we eject terawatts of thermal energy into the atmosphere or not.
It is the carbon dioxide, which has increased by 30% due to human sources. The amount of heat we actually generate is about 1/10,000 of what comes in from the sun.
>Putting aside the fact that a forest fire or volcano is a hell of a lot more energy than humans normally put out.
Not relevant, and probably not true either. The annual (fossil-fuel-)CO2 production by humans is in the order of 10^13 kg/year, which would be equivalent to burning a 1.5x1.5x1.5 km^3 solid block of wood. That would be a pretty large forest fire, given that forests are only 20 m high and contain plenty of air.
>The climate will change, and we'll adapt.
Civilisation might adapt to a certain extent, but if it means that half of the world population dies due to famine and the other half has to be relocated over thousands of km, that wouldn't be a very pleasant thing if it caught you by surprise. Regardless of whether climate change is anthropocentric or not, predictions about the future climate are useful. (I can't judge for myself how reasonable the claims in the article are).
...comparison to the thoery that cell phones might give you some kind of brain cancer. It's still highly disputed and nobody can be too certain, there is logic to it...
As the other poster said: there is no scientific logic to it. There is no known mechanism of how the chemical processes in the brain could be influenced by radiation of 1--2 GHz other than through heating and that heating is negligible at normal cellphone powers (1--2 watts) compared to the heating due to for example having an object pressed against your ear for a prolonged time. Above that, there is no statistical link between brain tumors and mobile phone usage.
As for sound exposure, the legal limit (for workers) is 85 dB(A) based on 40 hours per week. Apparently this is regarded as not leading to significant hearing loss over longer periods. (For some reason, the allowed hours are halved for every additional 5 dB rather than 3 dB as one might think) Note that 85 dB(A) is way below the levels where your ears feel uncomfortable. A rough guideline is that you need to raise your voice to make yourself heard at 85 dB(A).
I don't know what PMPO means, Peak Momentary Power Output I've heard but I think SWPOOA would be a better term, Shit We Pulled Out of Our Ass. It seems to have no relation to reality, purely somebody's fantasy.
Indeed. A couple of posters try to explain somewhat reasonable ways to define the number, but the ratings are clearly utter nonsense. To dissipate 50 W peak power (100 W PMPO over 2 speakers) through an ordinary 8 ohm speaker cone, you would need 20 volts and a current of 2.5 amps. Neither the tiny +/-5V power supply nor the small transistors (high internal resistance) would be able to deliver such a power, not even for a microsecond.
The only definition that I ever read that might produce these PMPO numbers in a measurement is that you shortcut the capacitors in the power supply over a resistor with a value equal to the internal resistance of the capacitors (maybe 0.1 ohm). In that case, PMPO = V^2/4R, where V is the power supply voltage and R the internal resistance of the capacitors. Which has no meaningful value to the sound output whatsoever.
My problem was definately about a lack of lactase.
That does in itself not exclude the theory of the good/bad bacteriae. Yoghurt bacteriae transform lactose into lactic acid (see wikipedia.
I doubt though that eating yoghurt will help someone who's lactose intolerant to digest normal milk. Most bacteriae won't make it through the acidity of the stomach (except if you ingest those special yoghurts with acid-tolerant bacteriae) and even then they would need several hours to convert the lactose. (Yoghurt preparation takes 6 hours at 43 C (110 F)).
It's Sütterlin, the old German style of hand-writing.
Interesting theory, but no. The web page explains that it was taught at school between 1915 and 1941, while Einstein probably learnt writing between 1885 and 1890. Moreover the letters in Einstein's manuscript don't look anywhere close to those in the Sütterlin script. The only thing that can be said is that Einstein didn't make clear arcade curves (the ones in n, m) which makes it hard to read if you don't know German.
Interesting thoughts. As I said, I'm not a hard disk engineer and you do actually seem to have a thorough background. The only thing that still keeps me skeptic is that I haven't heard of a company that states clearly that they can recover overwritten bytes of data, which would seem to be a very good selling point: "Other companies can only recover deleted files as long as the space formerly occupied by the file is not yet overwritten. However, we have Whizbang technology that allows us to recover data that is physically overwritten up to two times. Contact us for pricing."
By the way, why do you post anonymously? Many readers won't see your comments due to the low score of anonymous posts.
First, I am not convinced that the thing -even theoretically- works on modern hard disks (but then, I am a physicist, not a hard disk engineer). A bit, zero or one, consists of only a small number of magnetic grains, although I'm not sure how many. That means that the magnetic signal on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0 is quantized, with a step size dependent of how many magnetic grains you happen to have at that location. The reason that harddisks get more and more capacity over the years is partially because the grains are getting smaller such that you can reliably distinguish a one from a zero if you pack more bits on a unit surface. (The other reason is probably the quality of the read/write heads and servoes). It means that the ghosts of earlier data are overwhelmed by the intrinsic noise in the magnetic signal.
Second, if you assume that the theory behind recovery of overwritten data is correct, then it doesn't matter whether you overwrite with random data or not. You know the data that is currently "on top". According to the theory, it is always possible to fully recover the data one layer deep. So whether the two top layers of data are cryptographically random does not matter. And so on. The only thing that matters is that all bits are flipped between one and zero a couple of times, which is not trivial given the fact that 1s and 0s in the data do not correspond directly to the magnetisation (see the documentation of the shred utility).
Third, to recover a file you have to know where it is, so first recover the root directory, then the file allocation table or inodes of the subdirectories and so on until you have found the file. If you can recover a bit with 99% certainty (which I find rather optimistic), then the probability of correctly recovering a 32-bit sector/block number is only 72%. And you have to do that for every subdirectory, and for the blocks over which the file is spread out. I think you see the point I'm trying to make.
Just because they do claim at the first page that they "undelete" your files if you like, it does not mean that they don't do something else if needed
I find that a strange argument. Anyway, see: Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data?. Quote: "It it would take more than a year to scan a single platter with recent MFM technology, and tens of terabytes of image data would have to be processed."
Wrong. See my previous post. You don't need the personnel, neither the equipment. The service is commercially and easily available
You two seem to be talking about different things. The Hungarian company you mention does not claim that it can recover overwritten data. However, it can recover deleted files, similar to Norton's and PC-Tools' undelete tool under DOS in the old days. Moreover, they can recover data from drives that are electronically or mechanically defective.
The grandparent (which is funny rather than troll) was suggesting that the physically overwritten 1s and 0s can be recovered provided you have a few 100.000 dollars of equipment. The latter never been demonstrated possible for a modern hard disk.
What would be even better would be if the archives digitally signed their archives and kept signatures even of those things that had been asked to remove so that the validity of a copy could be established if made for legal purposes
But how can you force the submitter of the removal request to store a copy, let alone an exact copy, from which the checksum can be calculated?
If the submitter keeps the page it is not necessarily the same set of bytes as the removed one (think dynamic pages).
Wait a second... his site gets a piddling 3000 page views a day... WTF?
Read. He says that he has around twenty blogger web sites; he just doesn't tell which one is generating most of the revenue. For example his digital camera site has 20k views per day.
Apart from that, Adsense revenue depends a lot on the type of advertisements. Advertisers only pay $0.05 for clicks on ads for small niche products with little competition. It can be over $10 for a single click on high-competition, high-profit products. See all the bogus web sites that are stuffed with "information" about debt consolidation, loans, online poker, etc.
What I find interesting is that pianists tend to not have RSI or carpal tunnel, even though their repertoire might primarily be Chopin.
My former piano teacher once told me that almost every piano student during experienced major physical problems at some time during their education. This has to do with the transition from less than an hour of piano excercise per day to four hours or more.
Usually, though, they recover and learn how to avoid this problem, so yes, once they make it through their education, pianists usually don't have RSI.
The keys didn't jam because of speed. They jammed because [..]
Of course that is correct, but still the letters "asdfhjkl" on the home row are not exactly the most frequently used ones in the English language. How many words can you write with those letters?
ad add adds ads al ala alas alfalfa alfalfas all alls as ask asks ass dad dada dads daff daffs fad fads all falls flak flask flasks ka kaka kakas la lad lads lass sad salad salads salsa salsas sass skalds
Compare that to aoeuhtns:
an anent annotate anon ant ante ante antenna anus ashen assent attenuate attune aunt auto ensue enthuse ethos hasten haunt henna hosanna hose host hostess house nausea neat ness noose nose nosh onus nuts oat oath onset onus osseous oust sane sans Santa Satan sauna season senate sense sensuous sent sheen shoe shoot shoo shone shot shout shun shunt snot snout so so son sonata sonnet sons soon soot sooth soothe SOS soso sot sotto souse south Stetson stoat stone stout stun stunt sun tan tattoo taunt teens tenant tense tenuous tetanus than that those those toast toss tuna uneaten unseat unseen soot
I've never stuck around long enough to see what happens when the countdown finishes...
Tried it, nothing happened, could still access the site. Since the page is from 1996 or so, it might be sending a ping of death to your IP. Back then you could crash a Windows computer by sending it a nonstandard ping.
did Einstein really "prove" that time is only specific to a local system of reference? Isn't it just that because you're moving very fast, time *seems* to go slower? And again, nothing of this is proved, much like quantum mechanics, no one really knows crap about this.
Of course, "prove" means something different in science than in mathematics. However, Einstein did prove (in the mathematical sense) that a mathematical description of space-time is not internally consistent if time is considered to be an absolute quantity.
Quantum mechanics is only "proven" in the physical sense: it is capable of making quantitative predictions that cannot be made with the same accuracy with any known alternatives.
Anyway, if you want to go nitpicking on whether a proof is a real proof or just circumstantial evindence: even in mathematics you cannot prove anything without using assumptions from outside, as was proven by Gödel.
Couldn't you just ban access to clients comming in with the Casinos referrer?/n00b
You could do that, but what counts whether you can convince Googlebot not to follow redirects. Unfortunately, Googlebot doesn't tell you about the referrer.
for those too lazy to RTFA, it appears google adsense wasn't exactly 'hijacked', but was victim of its own slightly buggy (at the moment) trust algorithms.
That's not what I read there. The TrustRank issue was mentioned, but that's about sites that are linked to from Yahoo's RSS feed and thus suddenly from one day to the next are linked to from many sites that use those RSS feeds. Apparently, obtaining a massive number of links within a day's time triggers some spam filter in Google.
Page hijacking is normally that a big website uses a redirect to a small website. Then Google sees that the big website's redirected page has the same content as the small site's page, and throws out the small site's page from the index due to duplicate content. However, this is not the case here since the small site (hijacker) should not be able to trigger the dupe filter for the big one (Google), so it must have been something else.
That you can get a pagerank 9 on a redirecting URL was already well-known, but that won't help you since the pagerank only counts for the target of the redirection and will not increase the pagerank of other pages on your own website.
I'm 24 and can type 70wpm, I've only ever had practice, never used software.
When I was 23, I had taught myself to type at around 400 cpm (I think that's 80 wpm), indeed, just by practicing. (OK, I confess, at some point I played with a DOS-based typing tutor to practice the independent movement of the fingers). Then I made the step to Slackware Linux with kernel 1.2 and discovered that I could edit my undergrad thesis in LaTeX, do calculations, and create plots, thanks to multitasking.
Three weeks later the thesis was finished and I was suffering from an unpleasant RSI because I had taught myself a few bad habits regarding hand posture. I basically had pain in my hands during any keyboard activity during the next 6 months. (I think I couldn't type at all during the first month). That was when I taught myself about Dvorak keyboards, chairs with armrests, and wrist supports. The RSI (or whatever you call it) still haunts me every now and then when I type too much LaTeX or Perl (why is the damn backslash not in the middle of the keyboard?), but I know how to recognize the signals these days.
LaTex has a little learning curve, but if your authors can't figure that out, I'm not sure I would put much faith in what they have to write.
And I wouldn't have to much faith in someone who can't write LaTeX correctly...;-) Anyway, LaTeX is highly popular among mathematicians and CS people. In physics is it somewhat popular, mainly among those who have to deal with a lot of math. As you move to fields where the emphasis is more and more on experimental issues rather than calculations, such as chemical physics, physical chemistry, chemistry, microbiology, and so on, people make less and less use of LaTeX. Word rules, unfortunately. Apparently, if you spend your day dealing with practical issues rather than deriving abstract generalized formalisms, it is less appealing to apply abstract generalizations to document preparation.
Incidentally, seperating code from view from data is probably the most effective way of cutting bandwidth. A report you look at 20 times a day, with different data, will download the file 20 times. The 'view' layer doesn't need to be downloaded again.. just the data!
Unless you use MSIE, whose handling of the cache is terrible. If you have an URL www.example.com/style.css MSIE will cache it. However, if the URL is something like foo.example.com/style.css, it will not cache it, thus actually increasing the bandwidth. The same happens for.js,.html,.png,.jpg,.pdf and any other file extension.
To prevent this, the webmaster will find out only after quite a lot of web search efforts how to tweak the headers that Apache sends such that MSIE actually caches the data.
Slashdot Mirror
>How can this be moderated to +5 Insightful???
Seriously, we've had the technology to detect global climate changes for what, a hundred years at most?
ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc., etc.
>the earth has gone through a variety of climate changes in its history, and it will continue to go through plenty of climate changes
...which will not necessarily be suitable for human civilisation.
>regardless of whether we eject terawatts of thermal energy into the atmosphere or not.
It is the carbon dioxide, which has increased by 30% due to human sources. The amount of heat we actually generate is about 1/10,000 of what comes in from the sun.
>Putting aside the fact that a forest fire or volcano is a hell of a lot more energy than humans normally put out.
Not relevant, and probably not true either. The annual (fossil-fuel-)CO2 production by humans is in the order of 10^13 kg/year, which would be equivalent to burning a 1.5x1.5x1.5 km^3 solid block of wood. That would be a pretty large forest fire, given that forests are only 20 m high and contain plenty of air.
>The climate will change, and we'll adapt.
Civilisation might adapt to a certain extent, but if it means that half of the world population dies due to famine and the other half has to be relocated over thousands of km, that wouldn't be a very pleasant thing if it caught you by surprise. Regardless of whether climate change is anthropocentric or not, predictions about the future climate are useful. (I can't judge for myself how reasonable the claims in the article are).
As the other poster said: there is no scientific logic to it. There is no known mechanism of how the chemical processes in the brain could be influenced by radiation of 1--2 GHz other than through heating and that heating is negligible at normal cellphone powers (1--2 watts) compared to the heating due to for example having an object pressed against your ear for a prolonged time. Above that, there is no statistical link between brain tumors and mobile phone usage.
As for sound exposure, the legal limit (for workers) is 85 dB(A) based on 40 hours per week. Apparently this is regarded as not leading to significant hearing loss over longer periods. (For some reason, the allowed hours are halved for every additional 5 dB rather than 3 dB as one might think) Note that 85 dB(A) is way below the levels where your ears feel uncomfortable. A rough guideline is that you need to raise your voice to make yourself heard at 85 dB(A).
Indeed. A couple of posters try to explain somewhat reasonable ways to define the number, but the ratings are clearly utter nonsense. To dissipate 50 W peak power (100 W PMPO over 2 speakers) through an ordinary 8 ohm speaker cone, you would need 20 volts and a current of 2.5 amps. Neither the tiny +/-5V power supply nor the small transistors (high internal resistance) would be able to deliver such a power, not even for a microsecond.
The only definition that I ever read that might produce these PMPO numbers in a measurement is that you shortcut the capacitors in the power supply over a resistor with a value equal to the internal resistance of the capacitors (maybe 0.1 ohm). In that case, PMPO = V^2/4R, where V is the power supply voltage and R the internal resistance of the capacitors. Which has no meaningful value to the sound output whatsoever.
That does in itself not exclude the theory of the good/bad bacteriae. Yoghurt bacteriae transform lactose into lactic acid (see wikipedia.
I doubt though that eating yoghurt will help someone who's lactose intolerant to digest normal milk. Most bacteriae won't make it through the acidity of the stomach (except if you ingest those special yoghurts with acid-tolerant bacteriae) and even then they would need several hours to convert the lactose. (Yoghurt preparation takes 6 hours at 43 C (110 F)).
Interesting theory, but no. The web page explains that it was taught at school between 1915 and 1941, while Einstein probably learnt writing between 1885 and 1890. Moreover the letters in Einstein's manuscript don't look anywhere close to those in the Sütterlin script. The only thing that can be said is that Einstein didn't make clear arcade curves (the ones in n, m) which makes it hard to read if you don't know German.
By the way, why do you post anonymously? Many readers won't see your comments due to the low score of anonymous posts.
Second, if you assume that the theory behind recovery of overwritten data is correct, then it doesn't matter whether you overwrite with random data or not. You know the data that is currently "on top". According to the theory, it is always possible to fully recover the data one layer deep. So whether the two top layers of data are cryptographically random does not matter. And so on. The only thing that matters is that all bits are flipped between one and zero a couple of times, which is not trivial given the fact that 1s and 0s in the data do not correspond directly to the magnetisation (see the documentation of the shred utility).
Third, to recover a file you have to know where it is, so first recover the root directory, then the file allocation table or inodes of the subdirectories and so on until you have found the file. If you can recover a bit with 99% certainty (which I find rather optimistic), then the probability of correctly recovering a 32-bit sector/block number is only 72%. And you have to do that for every subdirectory, and for the blocks over which the file is spread out. I think you see the point I'm trying to make.
I find that a strange argument. Anyway, see: Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data?. Quote: "It it would take more than a year to scan a single platter with recent MFM technology, and tens of terabytes of image data would have to be processed."
You two seem to be talking about different things. The Hungarian company you mention does not claim that it can recover overwritten data. However, it can recover deleted files, similar to Norton's and PC-Tools' undelete tool under DOS in the old days. Moreover, they can recover data from drives that are electronically or mechanically defective.
The grandparent (which is funny rather than troll) was suggesting that the physically overwritten 1s and 0s can be recovered provided you have a few 100.000 dollars of equipment. The latter never been demonstrated possible for a modern hard disk.
But how can you force the submitter of the removal request to store a copy, let alone an exact copy, from which the checksum can be calculated?
If the submitter keeps the page it is not necessarily the same set of bytes as the removed one (think dynamic pages).
Read. He says that he has around twenty blogger web sites; he just doesn't tell which one is generating most of the revenue. For example his digital camera site has 20k views per day.
Apart from that, Adsense revenue depends a lot on the type of advertisements. Advertisers only pay $0.05 for clicks on ads for small niche products with little competition. It can be over $10 for a single click on high-competition, high-profit products. See all the bogus web sites that are stuffed with "information" about debt consolidation, loans, online poker, etc.
My former piano teacher once told me that almost every piano student during experienced major physical problems at some time during their education. This has to do with the transition from less than an hour of piano excercise per day to four hours or more.
Usually, though, they recover and learn how to avoid this problem, so yes, once they make it through their education, pianists usually don't have RSI.
The tone of your reply suggests that you are trying to compensate a lack of arguments by shouting. I won't get involved in such a discussion.
Of course that is correct, but still the letters "asdfhjkl" on the home row are not exactly the most frequently used ones in the English language. How many words can you write with those letters?
Compare that to aoeuhtns: (adapted from this).Tried it, nothing happened, could still access the site. Since the page is from 1996 or so, it might be sending a ping of death to your IP. Back then you could crash a Windows computer by sending it a nonstandard ping.
Of course, "prove" means something different in science than in mathematics. However, Einstein did prove (in the mathematical sense) that a mathematical description of space-time is not internally consistent if time is considered to be an absolute quantity.
Quantum mechanics is only "proven" in the physical sense: it is capable of making quantitative predictions that cannot be made with the same accuracy with any known alternatives.
Anyway, if you want to go nitpicking on whether a proof is a real proof or just circumstantial evindence: even in mathematics you cannot prove anything without using assumptions from outside, as was proven by Gödel.
You could do that, but what counts whether you can convince Googlebot not to follow redirects. Unfortunately, Googlebot doesn't tell you about the referrer.
That's not what I read there. The TrustRank issue was mentioned, but that's about sites that are linked to from Yahoo's RSS feed and thus suddenly from one day to the next are linked to from many sites that use those RSS feeds. Apparently, obtaining a massive number of links within a day's time triggers some spam filter in Google.
Page hijacking is normally that a big website uses a redirect to a small website. Then Google sees that the big website's redirected page has the same content as the small site's page, and throws out the small site's page from the index due to duplicate content. However, this is not the case here since the small site (hijacker) should not be able to trigger the dupe filter for the big one (Google), so it must have been something else.
That you can get a pagerank 9 on a redirecting URL was already well-known, but that won't help you since the pagerank only counts for the target of the redirection and will not increase the pagerank of other pages on your own website.
When I was 23, I had taught myself to type at around 400 cpm (I think that's 80 wpm), indeed, just by practicing. (OK, I confess, at some point I played with a DOS-based typing tutor to practice the independent movement of the fingers). Then I made the step to Slackware Linux with kernel 1.2 and discovered that I could edit my undergrad thesis in LaTeX, do calculations, and create plots, thanks to multitasking.
Three weeks later the thesis was finished and I was suffering from an unpleasant RSI because I had taught myself a few bad habits regarding hand posture. I basically had pain in my hands during any keyboard activity during the next 6 months. (I think I couldn't type at all during the first month). That was when I taught myself about Dvorak keyboards, chairs with armrests, and wrist supports. The RSI (or whatever you call it) still haunts me every now and then when I type too much LaTeX or Perl (why is the damn backslash not in the middle of the keyboard?), but I know how to recognize the signals these days.
And I wouldn't have to much faith in someone who can't write LaTeX correctly... ;-) Anyway, LaTeX is highly popular among mathematicians and CS people. In physics is it somewhat popular, mainly among those who have to deal with a lot of math. As you move to fields where the emphasis is more and more on experimental issues rather than calculations, such as chemical physics, physical chemistry, chemistry, microbiology, and so on, people make less and less use of LaTeX. Word rules, unfortunately. Apparently, if you spend your day dealing with practical issues rather than deriving abstract generalized formalisms, it is less appealing to apply abstract generalizations to document preparation.
Hmm, I used Opera 7.5x/Linux. And I get href-clicklogs for the .nl version rather than javascripts.
Even weirder: compare
- query on google.nl - clicklogging redirects
- same query on google.com - no redirects
- same query on google.de - no redirects
This is for me, from the Netherlands. Note that the SERPs are identical otherwise (hl and lr parameters).Doesn't work in slashdot because:
Unless you use MSIE, whose handling of the cache is terrible. If you have an URL www.example.com/style.css MSIE will cache it. However, if the URL is something like foo.example.com/style.css, it will not cache it, thus actually increasing the bandwidth. The same happens for .js, .html, .png, .jpg, .pdf and any other file extension.
To prevent this, the webmaster will find out only after quite a lot of web search efforts how to tweak the headers that Apache sends such that MSIE actually caches the data.
Lead and cadmium, now that is a good alternative to that toxic mercury! ;-)