spambayes does integrate VERY WELL with Outlook....
... but is way too slow too handle that amount of spam. Unless you use a Beowulf cluster... o wait, never mind.:)
Re:I would have thought that the Internet had more
on
Wal-Mart's Data Obsession
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Who says how much data the Internet has available?
Google has 8E9 web pages and documents indexed. If the average document is 20 kB in length, then we have 160 TB of publicly available data on the internet, not including pictures and filesharing. The latter probably has a great deal of duplicate data anyway.
You need to complete a circuit (battery, I hope) which will occur *in* the laptop. Sorry, no dead geeks. Also, the battery can only deliver so much juice.
You only need about 20 mA through the heart to kill someone. The electrodes of the fluorescent tube are separated by about 30 cm, which means that there is a significant danger of exposing the body to that voltage. Hmm, which part of the body is likely to be close to backlight tube when the laptop is dropped in the bathtub? Ouch, at least not the heart.:)
A financial director dropped his laptop in the bath while finishing the company accounts.
Isn't the backlight powered by high voltage (100 volts or so)? Doesn't sound pleasant, although it is probably the best way for a geek to die... BZZZT!
Actually, if you look at only the effects of CO2 you find that the consensus is that direct effects of CO2 are considered near the limit. Adding more CO2 can't cause much more warming.
That is an interesting. I admit, I am not a climatologist myself. But isn't planet Venus so hot mainly because its atmosphere is entirely CO2?
do you know what chaotic means? Thats the climate for you.
The chaotic behavior of the climate applies more to local variations than to long-term global trends. Despite the fact that it is hard to predict the temperature, rainfall, and wind direction a week beforehand, the weather (e.g. in Europe) is colder in the winter than in the summer.
With the greenhouse effect, you can do a simple back-of-the-envelope estimation of the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Without CO2, it would be very cold on the earth surface. An increase in CO2 concentration leads, in this BOTE approach, to an increase in temperature. Then, for a realistic climate model, you have to account for a zillion processes, some of them enhancing the greenhouse effect and others working opposite. That's what the climatologists work on. Everytime you incorporate a few more processes into the model, the outcomes change slightly: a bit more rainfall here, a bit colder there, a bit warmer here. However, no matter how many effects are taken into account, the result is always that the temperature, averaged over the whole earth, increases.
I did once attend a symposium on climate. The chaos effect is taken into account by today's fast computers. They run the simulations 100 times with slightly different start conditions, in order to separate outliers due to the chaos effect from the general trends.
[Citing the scientists:] remains quite uncertain and discrepancies exist... [...] relatively poor representation of some stratospheric processes...
You have to understand that a good scientist always realizes that he does not understand everything and that there always remain things that need to be studied in more detail. If a scientist says: "we don't really understand this or that", it may sound as if it he doesn't know what he is doing. However, most often it means that he knows roughly what is going on, but for some reason, the model does behave strangely in special cases, or systematically predicts 4% too high values, which translates into "if we substract 4% from the model outcome, it matches the experimental data under almost all circumstances, but we don't know which effect accounts for those 4%".
The climatologic models are certainly not perfect and they will never be. However, it could very well be that the greenhouse effect of additional CO2 is actually stronger than predicted thus far. For some reasons, skeptics tend to believe that all errors in the models add up to overestimating the effect of CO2 on climate.
Someone else already pointed out that it is slow natural decay of radioactive elements, not the artifically accelerated nuclear reactions in a nuclear reactor or bomb. Because the volume of the earth is so big compared to its surface, you don't need much radioactivity to keep it warm. The radioactivity in the middle of the sun is not that intense either: it's producing only 0.005 watts per cubic meter averaged over the whole sun.
half the surface being a black body radiator to a night sky tempurature of 2.3 degrees absolute
Thanks to the greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, remember?) the Earth surface is not black-body radiator. The air at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 above to absorb its heat radiation, is much colder.
I've been modded into oblivion each time, [...] I wish I was able to access my previous posts (even from only a few months ago) just to say 'nya nya nya nya'...
It is interesting that you were modded down on a couple of posts. It is hard to avoid being affected by your own opinion on a controversial subject when moderating, but I would personally never moderate down to a score below 2 just because I disagree. Heck, I sometimes mod up an AC even though I disagree. (Of course, trolls, offtopics, and flamebaits are a different thing)
This planet, [...] still has a molten iron core from its original formation days. [...] a certain amount of heat coming up from below as this iron core continues its several billion year cooldown.
The earth core would actually cool down within a couple of million years. It stays hot because of natural radioactivity.
Recovering overwritten data from a magnetic medium is theoretically possible, but there is no
evidence that anyone actually succeeded in doing that in a practical situation.
The Travelling Salesman Problem remains NP-complete,
... and has nothing to with planning a route from A to B, for which the optimal solution can be constructed with little effort. The TSP, the route has to pass through (many) more than two points without a requirement on the order. That is what makes it NP-complete.
Think of nearsightedness. Would that help you do close in work? But you couldn't hunt very well, could you? Maybe your tribe-mate is far-sighted. He'd be a better hunter, but not too good at close-in work like sewing.
Nearsightedness is common nowadays because of two things:
with glasses/contact lenses it is no longer an evolutionary disadvantage;
The growth of the eye during childhood years is finely regulated by growth hormones which are released or inhibited depending on the sharpness of the image on the retina. If you spend your whole childhood reading, your eye doesn't receive the right growth stimuli that are necessary to enable focusing on far-away objects. Children reading much is more common now than it was 1000 years ago.
OK, we agree, if nothing else is specified, that "96% accurate" means:
If the person is honest, there is a.96 chance the machine will return H(onest) and.04 it will return S(py). If the person is a spy, there is a.96 chance it will return S(py) and.04 chance it will return H(onest).
Now you calculate, for a population of 49H, the chance of detecting 47H + 2S(correct) + 1S(false):
.96^47 *.04^3 or 9.9 per million.
Talk about "know your statistics". It should of course be:.96^48 *.04^2 * 49!/(47!*2!) = 0.25. Then there is the chance of detecting 48H + 1S(correct) + 1S(false), 49H + 1H(false) + 1S(false), and so on, and the outcome is that you can expect about 2 false positives and 1 correct positive.
The easiest way to avoid this is to administer the test twice.
That is assuming that the chance of a false positive is something in the machine instead of something in the person being examined.
On the other hand, suppose I know that 50% of the people working in an office are stealing supplies, but I don't know which. If I test 100 people, I'll get 4 false positives and 48 true positives.
And is the employer prepared to fire 52% of his employees, including the ones who didn't do anything wrong? I'd say you typically use a polygraph to identify a small fraction of your population. An exception may be a screening of job applicants.
Anyway, I agree with antipolygraph.org that it is all a bunch of pseudoscience. I just wanted to point out that it is of dubious value even if you take the proponent's view for granted.
1) Why is there a relationship between conductivity and index of refraction?
Reflection of radio waves has to do with electrons in the material that move because of the electrical field of the radio waves. Conductivity obviously has to do with how well electrons can move. You can regard light to some extent as an high-frequency version of radio waves, if you ignore the quantum effects that become important at those frequencies.
2) Index of refraction is the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum to the speed of light in the material. [...] What does a negative I-of-R mean physically?
I think the parent poster was incorrect. The index of refraction is complex, i.e., has an imaginary component. That is a mathematical trick; if you describe a wave as
E(z) = exp(2 pi i n z/c),
then the imaginary component in n will cause the wave to dampen out while propagating.
A refractive index can actually be smaller than 1, which means that light propagates faster than the speed of light (can happen with X rays). This does not violate Einstein's laws, since what counts is how fast you can transmit information and you can't transmit information with a constant wave.
It's called VIRUSES not virii
on
A Truly Alive Virus
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· Score: 4, Informative
This virus has a lot of DNA (the poxvirii do as well)
That geeks write "virii" in l33tspeak when they talk about computer viruses is one thing, but it's worse when this spelling pops up in scientific discussions. The plural is VIRUSES!
In case you didn't notice: the first line of the page tells you that it's a JOKE and that it won't work.
Too bad. I guess that the metal of the car will shield the electronics. Apart from that, even with the dish antenna the power density won't be that high at some distance, though probably a bit higher than what the mobile phone lying next to the target will do.
Florida is one of only 7 states that permanently deny all ex-offenders access to the voting booth. The consequences there are stark: some 600,000 Floridians are unable to vote, including more than 17 percent of the state's black male adults.
I recently started reading "Stupid white men" (IANAA, I'm not an American) where Michael Moore claims it's more like 30% of the black people, including many that never committed a crime, due to "fuzzy matching" of databases. I'm not sure what to believe. I assume that Moore presents the facts in a biased way to support his case, but I find it hard to believe that he made up this issue about fuzzy matching.
Slashdot Mirror
... but is way too slow too handle that amount of spam. Unless you use a Beowulf cluster... o wait, never mind. :)
Google has 8E9 web pages and documents indexed. If the average document is 20 kB in length, then we have 160 TB of publicly available data on the internet, not including pictures and filesharing. The latter probably has a great deal of duplicate data anyway.
You only need about 20 mA through the heart to kill someone. The electrodes of the fluorescent tube are separated by about 30 cm, which means that there is a significant danger of exposing the body to that voltage. Hmm, which part of the body is likely to be close to backlight tube when the laptop is dropped in the bathtub? Ouch, at least not the heart. :)
All this is theory. I don't feel like trying it.
Isn't the backlight powered by high voltage (100 volts or so)? Doesn't sound pleasant, although it is probably the best way for a geek to die... BZZZT!
That is an interesting. I admit, I am not a climatologist myself. But isn't planet Venus so hot mainly because its atmosphere is entirely CO2?
The chaotic behavior of the climate applies more to local variations than to long-term global trends. Despite the fact that it is hard to predict the temperature, rainfall, and wind direction a week beforehand, the weather (e.g. in Europe) is colder in the winter than in the summer.
With the greenhouse effect, you can do a simple back-of-the-envelope estimation of the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Without CO2, it would be very cold on the earth surface. An increase in CO2 concentration leads, in this BOTE approach, to an increase in temperature. Then, for a realistic climate model, you have to account for a zillion processes, some of them enhancing the greenhouse effect and others working opposite. That's what the climatologists work on. Everytime you incorporate a few more processes into the model, the outcomes change slightly: a bit more rainfall here, a bit colder there, a bit warmer here. However, no matter how many effects are taken into account, the result is always that the temperature, averaged over the whole earth, increases.
I did once attend a symposium on climate. The chaos effect is taken into account by today's fast computers. They run the simulations 100 times with slightly different start conditions, in order to separate outliers due to the chaos effect from the general trends.
You have to understand that a good scientist always realizes that he does not understand everything and that there always remain things that need to be studied in more detail. If a scientist says: "we don't really understand this or that", it may sound as if it he doesn't know what he is doing. However, most often it means that he knows roughly what is going on, but for some reason, the model does behave strangely in special cases, or systematically predicts 4% too high values, which translates into "if we substract 4% from the model outcome, it matches the experimental data under almost all circumstances, but we don't know which effect accounts for those 4%".
The climatologic models are certainly not perfect and they will never be. However, it could very well be that the greenhouse effect of additional CO2 is actually stronger than predicted thus far. For some reasons, skeptics tend to believe that all errors in the models add up to overestimating the effect of CO2 on climate.
half the surface being a black body radiator to a night sky tempurature of 2.3 degrees absolute
Thanks to the greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, remember?) the Earth surface is not black-body radiator. The air at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 above to absorb its heat radiation, is much colder.
Subscribers can access those. You are referring to this thread: Re:Wind power efficiency.
It is interesting that you were modded down on a couple of posts. It is hard to avoid being affected by your own opinion on a controversial subject when moderating, but I would personally never moderate down to a score below 2 just because I disagree. Heck, I sometimes mod up an AC even though I disagree. (Of course, trolls, offtopics, and flamebaits are a different thing)
The earth core would actually cool down within a couple of million years. It stays hot because of natural radioactivity.
Recovering overwritten data from a magnetic medium is theoretically possible, but there is no evidence that anyone actually succeeded in doing that in a practical situation.
>See that? Thought not.
Oops.
Well, who reads the blurb anyway. :)
... and has nothing to with planning a route from A to B, for which the optimal solution can be constructed with little effort. The TSP, the route has to pass through (many) more than two points without a requirement on the order. That is what makes it NP-complete.
Check your facts. Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes. That was the first hit on Google for "volcanoes co2 human".
Nearsightedness is common nowadays because of two things:
OK, we agree, if nothing else is specified, that "96% accurate" means: If the person is honest, there is a .96 chance the machine will return H(onest) and .04 it will return S(py). If the person is a spy, there is a .96 chance it will return S(py) and .04 chance it will return H(onest).
Now you calculate, for a population of 49H, the chance of detecting 47H + 2S(correct) + 1S(false):
Talk about "know your statistics". It should of course be: .96^48 * .04^2 * 49!/(47!*2!) = 0.25. Then there is the chance of detecting 48H + 1S(correct) + 1S(false), 49H + 1H(false) + 1S(false), and so on, and the outcome is that you can expect about 2 false positives and 1 correct positive.
The easiest way to avoid this is to administer the test twice.
That is assuming that the chance of a false positive is something in the machine instead of something in the person being examined.
That's what the "parent" button is for. Duh.
Your 10 seconds of doing a copy/paste against 10,000 readers' 2 seconds plus their figuring out which part of the parent you were responding to...
And is the employer prepared to fire 52% of his employees, including the ones who didn't do anything wrong? I'd say you typically use a polygraph to identify a small fraction of your population. An exception may be a screening of job applicants.
Anyway, I agree with antipolygraph.org that it is all a bunch of pseudoscience. I just wanted to point out that it is of dubious value even if you take the proponent's view for granted.
"Overall," says Dr. Rovner, "we are confident that polygraph tests have a 96% accuracy rate when done properly."
If that is true, then if you have 1 spy and 49 honest people, this polygraph will likely falsely accuse two honest people as being spies.
Reflection of radio waves has to do with electrons in the material that move because of the electrical field of the radio waves. Conductivity obviously has to do with how well electrons can move. You can regard light to some extent as an high-frequency version of radio waves, if you ignore the quantum effects that become important at those frequencies.
2) Index of refraction is the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum to the speed of light in the material. [...] What does a negative I-of-R mean physically?
I think the parent poster was incorrect. The index of refraction is complex, i.e., has an imaginary component. That is a mathematical trick; if you describe a wave as
then the imaginary component in n will cause the wave to dampen out while propagating.A refractive index can actually be smaller than 1, which means that light propagates faster than the speed of light (can happen with X rays). This does not violate Einstein's laws, since what counts is how fast you can transmit information and you can't transmit information with a constant wave.
You are trolling: Inflection of substantives. Besides, there is no letter V in Greek.
That geeks write "virii" in l33tspeak when they talk about computer viruses is one thing, but it's worse when this spelling pops up in scientific discussions. The plural is VIRUSES!
If you follow latin rules for constructing the plural form, it would still be viri with a single i at the end.
Too bad. I guess that the metal of the car will shield the electronics. Apart from that, even with the dish antenna the power density won't be that high at some distance, though probably a bit higher than what the mobile phone lying next to the target will do.
I recently started reading "Stupid white men" (IANAA, I'm not an American) where Michael Moore claims it's more like 30% of the black people, including many that never committed a crime, due to "fuzzy matching" of databases. I'm not sure what to believe. I assume that Moore presents the facts in a biased way to support his case, but I find it hard to believe that he made up this issue about fuzzy matching.