For future reference: this is part of the purpose of the backports repository. Updates and security are, as I understand it, only supposed to fix serious bugs and security vulnerabilities, respectively, so the idea is that software won't change to a new version if you're just using the default repositories. Backports, however, contains some newer versions of select, popular software (primarily desktop applications) for reasons just like what you're talking about.
The Tibet issue seems to have eclipsed a much more clear-cut one: Darfur. China is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, trading partner of Sudan, and, as I understand it, they've used their position on the U.N. Security council to block any U.N. action to stop the Sudanese government sponsored genocide in the Darfur region. While one can have some argument about countries annexing others and whether the Tibetan people would actually be much better off under indigenous rule (which was historically non-democratic), anyone who has leaned about the atrocities in Darfur cannot feel there is any gray area there. Not only do we have moral standing to say this is wrong, we have the duty, as members of the human race, to do so.
That the Chinese government has been instrumental in allowing the ongoing murder of hundreds of thousands of people, children murdered in front of their mothers who are then subsequently raped and/or mutilated, is appalling, and I don't understand why people aren't spending more time talking about this. I am, frankly, ashamed that I and my government (the U.S. government) haven't done more. People should be trying convince China to stop supporting the ongoing genocide.
Well, it actually is possible to use a cellphone to remote detonate a bomb. Simply wire the 'ringer' speaker to the detonator (you may need a transformer to alter voltage and current characterists) call the phone from the ground and... boom!
1) If the cell phone is used as a detonator in the checked luggage (or stashed by maintenance, or whatever) you could detonate it using a call from a phone on the ground just as easily. I don't see what that has to do with a ban on cell phone use in the cabin (given that phones are apparently able to at least sporadically contact ground networks).
2) It should be a relatively simple matter to make cargo containers block out all RF. In fact, if they're metal (and I think they are) they probably already do. If they don't, that's really foolish, because you definitely could remote detonate a bomb on a plane using other RF technology.
Heh, yeah I always loved the old xxx.lanl.gov URL. I do remember once, years ago, trying to access it from a library and being blocked by filtering software. Since the arXiv has been moved to Cornell, though, I'm not sure if they really want people using the LANL URL anymore.
While this is the first I've heard of lawsuits, the subject of a possible catastrophe due to a new particle accelerator is not a new idea. This has actually been a cycle that's happened a couple of times, IIRC, usually when someone mentions the possibility of black holes (or even AdS-CFT black hole analogues) being created in a new particle accelerator. Scientists have actually thought about this and published a number of papers on the topic. Here are two that came up easily via Google Scholar:
The latter is freely available on the arXiv. From the conclusion:
We have shown that the relatively late formation time
of Earth implies that life on our planet is highly unlikely
to be annihilated by an exogenous catastrophes during
the next 109 years. In the case of the doomsday scenar-
ios studied in the Brookhaven report [2], our bound also
applies to hypothetical anthropogenic disasters caused
by high-energy particle accelerators (risks 1-3). This holds because the occurrence of exogenous catastrophes,
e.g., resulting from cosmic ray collisions, places an upper
bound on the frequency of their anthropogenic counter-
parts.
In short, similar events occur naturally due to highly energetic cosmic rays, so, even if we assume we know almost nothing about the physics of the hypothetical catastrophic event, we can infer from teh fact we're still here that such a catastrophe is very unlikely. Based on this conclusion, and the fairly wide acceptance of that conclusion amongst experts, I think it's safe to say this lawsuit is without merit.
the Supreme Court of New York ruled that the terms of the shrink-wrapped license document were enforceable because the customer's assent was evident by his failure to return the merchandise within the 30 days specified by the document
...a 50-60hz signal suppresses the parts of the immune system that protect against cancer. This is why correlations with cancer are so subtle. The 60hz signal by itself doesn't cause cancer - you need some other heightened risk...
That argument doesn't really make any sense. We are all constantly exposed to cancer causing influences (albeit weak ones); the sun would be one example. If the body's ability to resist cancer is suppressed then the rate of cancer will increase no matter what population you're talking about.
I can only say that I haven't had that happen. I've never even had anybody ask what it is, and this almost certainly includes people who know nothing about public key encryption. People are also probably used to superfluous attachments since, for example, email clients that send HTML emails usually send both an HTML and a plain text version together using MIME.
It's not just hard to use, it's also ugly as hell....just using it for digital signatures makes my email nearly unreadable never mind using actual encryption
I'm not too knowledgeable about this stuff either, but I think what you want to use is PGP/MIME. That way the digital signature is appended to the email the same as an attachment. It probably won't even be noticed by people who aren't looking for it or using a signature-aware email client, and it won't look particularly weirder than an email with a plain old attachment. If you use Thunderbird you can install the Enigmail plugin to use PGP/MIME. I've been messing with it recently and kinda like it.
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
I think we have. Except that in the movies, the humans weren't dumb enough to TEACH the robots to feed of body heat. Oh well. I for one would like to offer our slightly peckish robotic overlords a light brunch.
Right, but unlike in that movie we have the laws of thermodynamics to protect us.
I love The Matrix, but science was not its strong point.
That depends on how they're getting power from the heat - if it's powering a heat engine and runs off heat flux, then yes, they would need a temperature gradient (which isn't that hard to get anyhow - put the cold sink near the epidermis and the hot sink near your heart/brain/etc.). If they're using the heat to run a small chemical reaction, then no, they probably wouldn't need a temperature gradient (e.g.: when using two dissimilar metals to generate a charge, the absolute temperature is directly proportional to the reaction rate). I'm currently studying the thermodynamics of the body for my master's, it's a very interesting subject.
Hopefully, since you're studying thermodynamics, you're aware that there are only two options: 1) It's using up some finite internal resource (e.g., internal energy) or 2) it's working by moving heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder one. If it's doing the first, then it's similar to a (possibly very effective) battery. If it's not doing either 1 or 2, then it's directly violating the second law of thermodynamics. I think the point made by earlier posters is that if it's deep in the interior of the body near the heart, as suggested in the summary, one would expect there won't be much of a temperature gradient. And remember that the efficiency of a heat engine at deriving work decreases as the temperatures of the two heat reservoirs become similar.
It's simple to include a link. It's sort of the point of posting in hypertext. If you had time to post in the first place, then I'm sure you had the 5 extra seconds it would have taken to add a link.
It's certainly true that there's a sort of catch-22 where a politician has to be considered popular in order to get media coverage, but that's the way most people would learn about the candidate in the first place. This leads to changes in popularity having a sort of non-linear effect, and one can imagine a candidate who, if covered, might be popular, but who starts as a nobody and is, thus, never covered. On the other hand, there are also candidates who would not be popular no matter how much media attention they got. For example, the media will undoubtedly ignore the Natural Law Party candidate for president this cycle, but I certainly don't think his platform of solving all problems through transcendental meditation would win many votes even if it were covered. The lack of coverage will, rightly, be a reflection of the irrelevance of the candidate.
In the end, I think Paul basically falls into the latter category, a candidate who would not get that much support no matter how much coverage he got (though certainly more than the aforementioned Natural Law candidate). Even here on/., a place far more libertarian in its sentiments than the general populous, his supporters are vocal but seemingly not an overwhelming majority, suggesting that the ceiling of his support among the general population is not all that high. Supporters of fringe candidates often fall back on believing that their candidate is somehow suppressed, presumably because this is more comfortable than believing that their ideas are just not that popular. If one starts with this conviction, it's not even to difficult to cherry pick examples to back up this idea. But some candidates really just are unpopular because their ideas are unpopular (relatively speaking).
Actually, there is no theory of gravity yet. There is a law of gravity. There are hypotheses about how gravity exists or is propagated. None of these hypotheses have sufficient observations in their favor to promote one to the rank of theory.
I can understand the confusion here, given the really inconsistent use of terminology (conjecture, hypothesis, theory, law) by scientists, but who the hell modded this informative??? Mods, if you don't know anything about a subject then you probably should refrain from doling out the "informative" judgment. There have been at least two successful theories of gravity and many other hypotheses with some support.
The first was due to Newton, and it was, indeed, a theory in the modern sense. Newton postulated that the movement of celestial bodies was due to a mutual force of attraction between them and that this force existed not only between celestial bodies but all bodies and was, therefore, responsible for gravity on Earth as well. So it was an idea of how to relate many observations (of planetary motion and gravity on Earth) together, not just a summary of empirical observations. At the time many people not only didn't believe this idea but found it absurd. However, Newton's theory agreed with the empirical observations of Kepler, and the idea that all bodies have a gravitational force between them was later verified (and quantified) in the Cavendish experiment. It may be confusing that we refer to this as "Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation", but that simply reflects how scientific terminology has changed over the centuries. In today's vocabulary, this would be considered a theory of gravity.
The second theory of gravity was Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. It was again a radical shift in our understanding of gravity. It agreed with then current observations, but it also made predictions: Two early successes were the observation by Eddington of gravitational lensing of light and the calculation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
I wondered the same thing. I've talked to several experts and have been told that, indeed, a quantum computer can break elliptic curve encryption efficiently. This paper, for example, seems to cover adapting Shor's algorithm to breaking elliptic codes.
The absence of software patents is precisely what makes "embrace, extend, extinguish" possible.
Isn't "embrace, extend, extinguish" more relevant to standards (or de facto standards), like HTML or file formats? The examples you're talking about are more focused on algorithms implemented by one piece of software or service, which is different. If it doesn't have to inter-operate with other things then there's no embrace and extend. It's certainly true that one can still rip it off, though, and software patents might potentially help with that. For standards, one needs others to be able to implement them, and while patents may be used to control the standard, it seems like their effects are usually bad and anticompetitive (here I'm thinking DVD and Blue-Ray).
Aside from airports* and some hotels, wireless is free everywhere that has it. (And what are you going to do, use another airport?)
I live in the DC area where there are 3 major international airports within reasonable driving distance, so I can quite conceivably use a different one. So, of course, you'd expect market forces to ensure that all 3 have free wifi. Thankfully for them, the regional airport authority decided to ban free wifi in any of the area airports based on totally preposterous safety arguments, thus ensuring their revenue stream.
Has the bill itself actually passed? I can't find any mention of the bill actually having passed the Senate, only that this amendment (the Dodd-Feingold amendment) was rejected. I'm not that adept at reading THOMAS, so did I miss something?
Stick Ron Paul's brain inside Obama's head and you'd have a super candidate. It's not insulting Obama's intelligence the man is extremely intelligent but I'm not hearing a lot of reform ideas come from him. They blew off Ron Paul as the funny old guy but if you had Obama saying the same things he'd be the young guy with new fresh ideas.
They already have that: It's called Alan Keyes, and he really hasn't been all that successful.
As much as Paul supporters would like to believe otherwise, Paul hasn't been successful largely because not that many people like his ideas. I'm not saying that he hasn't been somewhat marginalized (as is any candidate who is not seen as a leading candidate), but many people also just don't happen to share his views. It's just that those who do share them are very vocal and energized. My own opinion is that Paul represents a form of Republicanism that has been all but killed by neoconservatives (really beginning with Reagan).
It wouldn't work in that form. All a scammer seller would have to do is never leave feedback for his buyers, then they're negative feedbacks on him would forever remain hidden. It might work if there were some predetermined time limit at which both the feedbacks would become visible, even if one side were missing (and after which no feedback could be given).
Even in the current system, I'm pretty sure you have only a limited time to leave feedback. The only thing is that in a "blind" feedback system like the one suggested you might want that time to be a bit shorter.
Slashdot Mirror
For future reference: this is part of the purpose of the backports repository. Updates and security are, as I understand it, only supposed to fix serious bugs and security vulnerabilities, respectively, so the idea is that software won't change to a new version if you're just using the default repositories. Backports, however, contains some newer versions of select, popular software (primarily desktop applications) for reasons just like what you're talking about.
The Tibet issue seems to have eclipsed a much more clear-cut one: Darfur. China is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, trading partner of Sudan, and, as I understand it, they've used their position on the U.N. Security council to block any U.N. action to stop the Sudanese government sponsored genocide in the Darfur region. While one can have some argument about countries annexing others and whether the Tibetan people would actually be much better off under indigenous rule (which was historically non-democratic), anyone who has leaned about the atrocities in Darfur cannot feel there is any gray area there. Not only do we have moral standing to say this is wrong, we have the duty, as members of the human race, to do so.
That the Chinese government has been instrumental in allowing the ongoing murder of hundreds of thousands of people, children murdered in front of their mothers who are then subsequently raped and/or mutilated, is appalling, and I don't understand why people aren't spending more time talking about this. I am, frankly, ashamed that I and my government (the U.S. government) haven't done more. People should be trying convince China to stop supporting the ongoing genocide.
I'm not disagreeing that it's a potential danger, but this doesn't seem to have any relevance to the article.
1) If the cell phone is used as a detonator in the checked luggage (or stashed by maintenance, or whatever) you could detonate it using a call from a phone on the ground just as easily. I don't see what that has to do with a ban on cell phone use in the cabin (given that phones are apparently able to at least sporadically contact ground networks).
2) It should be a relatively simple matter to make cargo containers block out all RF. In fact, if they're metal (and I think they are) they probably already do. If they don't, that's really foolish, because you definitely could remote detonate a bomb on a plane using other RF technology.
Heh, yeah I always loved the old xxx.lanl.gov URL. I do remember once, years ago, trying to access it from a library and being blocked by filtering software. Since the arXiv has been moved to Cornell, though, I'm not sure if they really want people using the LANL URL anymore.
I just looked back and realized there's a typo (from pasting) in the parent. It should read 10^9 (as in 1 billion not 109) years.
The studies I talked about in the parent make almost no assumption about what the catastrophe might be or how it would work. If you want to get into the physics of the specific things people are worried about, then there are even more reasons to think it's not a significant danger. There was a report about the possible disaster scenarios for RHIC that should mostly apply to the LHC, and here's a paper discussing the possibilities for the LHC. Finally, it looks like Wikipedia has a pretty decent discussion with references.
While this is the first I've heard of lawsuits, the subject of a possible catastrophe due to a new particle accelerator is not a new idea. This has actually been a cycle that's happened a couple of times, IIRC, usually when someone mentions the possibility of black holes (or even AdS-CFT black hole analogues) being created in a new particle accelerator. Scientists have actually thought about this and published a number of papers on the topic. Here are two that came up easily via Google Scholar:
The latter is freely available on the arXiv. From the conclusion:
In short, similar events occur naturally due to highly energetic cosmic rays, so, even if we assume we know almost nothing about the physics of the hypothetical catastrophic event, we can infer from teh fact we're still here that such a catastrophe is very unlikely. Based on this conclusion, and the fairly wide acceptance of that conclusion amongst experts, I think it's safe to say this lawsuit is without merit.
It seems like with that logic one could setup a great scam with refund checks issues from the "Arse Tickler's Fagots Fan Club" a la Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. You don't even have to lie to the people, just make the EULA totally insane.
That argument doesn't really make any sense. We are all constantly exposed to cancer causing influences (albeit weak ones); the sun would be one example. If the body's ability to resist cancer is suppressed then the rate of cancer will increase no matter what population you're talking about.
I can only say that I haven't had that happen. I've never even had anybody ask what it is, and this almost certainly includes people who know nothing about public key encryption. People are also probably used to superfluous attachments since, for example, email clients that send HTML emails usually send both an HTML and a plain text version together using MIME.
I'm not too knowledgeable about this stuff either, but I think what you want to use is PGP/MIME. That way the digital signature is appended to the email the same as an attachment. It probably won't even be noticed by people who aren't looking for it or using a signature-aware email client, and it won't look particularly weirder than an email with a plain old attachment. If you use Thunderbird you can install the Enigmail plugin to use PGP/MIME. I've been messing with it recently and kinda like it.
I think you're referring to Matthew 7:3-4:
Right, but unlike in that movie we have the laws of thermodynamics to protect us.
I love The Matrix, but science was not its strong point.
Hopefully, since you're studying thermodynamics, you're aware that there are only two options: 1) It's using up some finite internal resource (e.g., internal energy) or 2) it's working by moving heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder one. If it's doing the first, then it's similar to a (possibly very effective) battery. If it's not doing either 1 or 2, then it's directly violating the second law of thermodynamics. I think the point made by earlier posters is that if it's deep in the interior of the body near the heart, as suggested in the summary, one would expect there won't be much of a temperature gradient. And remember that the efficiency of a heat engine at deriving work decreases as the temperatures of the two heat reservoirs become similar.
It's simple to include a link. It's sort of the point of posting in hypertext. If you had time to post in the first place, then I'm sure you had the 5 extra seconds it would have taken to add a link.
It's certainly true that there's a sort of catch-22 where a politician has to be considered popular in order to get media coverage, but that's the way most people would learn about the candidate in the first place. This leads to changes in popularity having a sort of non-linear effect, and one can imagine a candidate who, if covered, might be popular, but who starts as a nobody and is, thus, never covered. On the other hand, there are also candidates who would not be popular no matter how much media attention they got. For example, the media will undoubtedly ignore the Natural Law Party candidate for president this cycle, but I certainly don't think his platform of solving all problems through transcendental meditation would win many votes even if it were covered. The lack of coverage will, rightly, be a reflection of the irrelevance of the candidate.
In the end, I think Paul basically falls into the latter category, a candidate who would not get that much support no matter how much coverage he got (though certainly more than the aforementioned Natural Law candidate). Even here on /., a place far more libertarian in its sentiments than the general populous, his supporters are vocal but seemingly not an overwhelming majority, suggesting that the ceiling of his support among the general population is not all that high. Supporters of fringe candidates often fall back on believing that their candidate is somehow suppressed, presumably because this is more comfortable than believing that their ideas are just not that popular. If one starts with this conviction, it's not even to difficult to cherry pick examples to back up this idea. But some candidates really just are unpopular because their ideas are unpopular (relatively speaking).
I can understand the confusion here, given the really inconsistent use of terminology (conjecture, hypothesis, theory, law) by scientists, but who the hell modded this informative??? Mods, if you don't know anything about a subject then you probably should refrain from doling out the "informative" judgment. There have been at least two successful theories of gravity and many other hypotheses with some support.
The first was due to Newton, and it was, indeed, a theory in the modern sense. Newton postulated that the movement of celestial bodies was due to a mutual force of attraction between them and that this force existed not only between celestial bodies but all bodies and was, therefore, responsible for gravity on Earth as well. So it was an idea of how to relate many observations (of planetary motion and gravity on Earth) together, not just a summary of empirical observations. At the time many people not only didn't believe this idea but found it absurd. However, Newton's theory agreed with the empirical observations of Kepler, and the idea that all bodies have a gravitational force between them was later verified (and quantified) in the Cavendish experiment. It may be confusing that we refer to this as "Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation", but that simply reflects how scientific terminology has changed over the centuries. In today's vocabulary, this would be considered a theory of gravity.
The second theory of gravity was Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. It was again a radical shift in our understanding of gravity. It agreed with then current observations, but it also made predictions: Two early successes were the observation by Eddington of gravitational lensing of light and the calculation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
They also use the term superhero. Don't they sue people for that too?
I wondered the same thing. I've talked to several experts and have been told that, indeed, a quantum computer can break elliptic curve encryption efficiently. This paper, for example, seems to cover adapting Shor's algorithm to breaking elliptic codes.
Isn't "embrace, extend, extinguish" more relevant to standards (or de facto standards), like HTML or file formats? The examples you're talking about are more focused on algorithms implemented by one piece of software or service, which is different. If it doesn't have to inter-operate with other things then there's no embrace and extend. It's certainly true that one can still rip it off, though, and software patents might potentially help with that. For standards, one needs others to be able to implement them, and while patents may be used to control the standard, it seems like their effects are usually bad and anticompetitive (here I'm thinking DVD and Blue-Ray).
I live in the DC area where there are 3 major international airports within reasonable driving distance, so I can quite conceivably use a different one. So, of course, you'd expect market forces to ensure that all 3 have free wifi. Thankfully for them, the regional airport authority decided to ban free wifi in any of the area airports based on totally preposterous safety arguments, thus ensuring their revenue stream.
Has the bill itself actually passed? I can't find any mention of the bill actually having passed the Senate, only that this amendment (the Dodd-Feingold amendment) was rejected. I'm not that adept at reading THOMAS, so did I miss something?
They already have that: It's called Alan Keyes, and he really hasn't been all that successful.
As much as Paul supporters would like to believe otherwise, Paul hasn't been successful largely because not that many people like his ideas. I'm not saying that he hasn't been somewhat marginalized (as is any candidate who is not seen as a leading candidate), but many people also just don't happen to share his views. It's just that those who do share them are very vocal and energized. My own opinion is that Paul represents a form of Republicanism that has been all but killed by neoconservatives (really beginning with Reagan).
Even in the current system, I'm pretty sure you have only a limited time to leave feedback. The only thing is that in a "blind" feedback system like the one suggested you might want that time to be a bit shorter.