You can't falsely shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre.
Actually, the reason you can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre has nothing to do we free speech and everything to do with contract law. When you buy a ticket you are essentially entering into a contract of sorts with the movie theatre - in exchange for your money you are allowed to watch the movie. If you shout "fire" and everyone leaves, essentially you have caused a breach of that contract by infringing on everyone else's viewing of the movie and the theatre's showing of the movie.
As for live stage theatre, the same principle applies.
Well the above comment may seem funny, but it is true. If you've ever driven and watched your GPS location on the map, it sometimes looks like you are driving off the road!
Now if we can just get rid of all those digital watermarks, where map makers insert deliberate errors into the map to make it easier to catch unauthorized *cough* *cough* copies....
I know it's hard to realize they're not significantly different. If you read only the mainstream press, listen to mainstream radio talk shows, and watch mainstream TV, you'll hear the minute differences between them emphasized again and again and again, until you start to believe those differences are huge.
When I was growing up my parents would tell me about countries less off than the United States in terms of governments. One thing I remember was how in countries such as the U.S.S.R. (as it was at the time) how voting consisted of one candidate which you basically had to vote for.
Now we are in a similar situation - there was even a sketch on Saturday Night Live about how alike Bush and Gore are. So what's the difference between having two nearly identical candidates to vote for and one? How many people are going to vote independant when no independant candidate has gained an electoral vote since early in this (20th) century?
I've got an expedition model of this series that I purchased a few months ago. A bit pricey (around $400+ i think) and I haven't quite got it to go quite to the full rated spec of around 20 Watts, but the cell is supposed to be more efficient at higher ambient temperatures.
With passive resistive loads I've seen as high as 16-17W (but on cold days as low as 10-13W!), but keep in mind if you run it through an inverter you are going to get some loss probably 2-3W. To bypass this problem I bought a 50 Watt zener diode at the rated voltage of the DC input (around 16V for my laptop). (Cost around $12 versus $75-$100 for an invertor). In my research I came across this site from which I learned that solar cells act like current sources, which is ideal for a zener diode. The diode essentially syphons off all the extra current your laptop uses, and since it is placed in parallel with your laptop it doesn't draw any power that your laptop can use. The zener also regulates the voltage fairly well. The 50W rating is necessary because there is no series limiting resistor and thus the zener should be able to sink twice the rated capacity of the solar panel (to be on the safe side, especially if you don't have a heat sink;)
I also played around with the idea of some kind of mirrors to focus more sunlight on the panel, but then I figured that kind cuts down on the portability of the system. The panel itself is fairly lightweight, around 3 pounds I think, same as my laptop:-)
Not only that, but I found the following line on the page: Within minutes of navigating through this website, you can obtain your very own, fully legal lot on the lighted surface of the moon, for an "Out of this World" price!
On the lighted surface of the moon? Excuse me, but the moon rotates at the same rate that it orbits the earth. A "day" on the moon is equivalent to a lunar month. The above statement implies that those involved in this scam^H^H^H^Hsite are ignorant about the property which the purport to sell.
Hyperlinking is the very essence of the web -- companies putting up web sites should be aware of this. If they're not, and they're so without a clue that they'd sue over it, their sites should be taken down and their domain names relinquished; they have no business here.
How about if we make them refund all the money they took from their customers, close all their online stores, shoot the managers, and declare bankruptcy. Then would you be happy?
My take on this whole subject is that the concept of "God" is backward. Trying to prove the existence or non-existence of God supposes that the definition of God is axomatic. Every religion I have seen defines God somewhat differently (is God infinite? an individual? engendered? offspringless?) the topic because more of a contest to see who can provide the most "authoritative" ancient documents to support their claim.
From what I have seen, many scientists view God in a way similar to Einstein - not so much as a person as the laws of the universe. There is some evidence that many ancient esoteric sects held this point of view.
But such a view seems somewhat ridiculous to me. How can the non-computable origins of the universe be worthy of anything a god could be? Worship, admiration, or whatever traits psychologists would says the human psyche desires in a god. Ancient gods were largely portrayed as people, or individual beings at the least, not omnipotent or omnipresent but having skills that exceeded any human. As such, the contemporary attempt at merging science with God probably won't be any more real than trying to explain psychology using math.
There was actually a case where something along those lines happened. A man stood up, wrote on the chalkboard for about 15 minutes, turned around and got a standing ovation.
If I remember right, he found the factors to a really large number thought to be prime. When they asked him how he did it they expected some complicated answer. Instead, it turned out he had spent the last 20 years or so multiplying out prime numbers - by hand - in his spare time. No real technical math background.
Granted, much easier than this problem. Interestingly enough, plotting the number of matches for each even number seems to increase almost linearly. Proving no dips to zero on the hand is harder =)
Faber has stipulated that the proof must be submitted to a respectable mathematical journal within two years of the book's publication next week, and published within four years. A panel of world-renowned mathematicians will be appointed to decide whether the proof is valid (Faber is refusing to disclose the panel's names, for fear that they will be flooded with letters from amateurs).
I have a serious question here, and I hope that someone might be able to answer it.
From the tone of the article, it sounds like they are expecting somebody in the mathematical community to submit it, if anybody does. How would say, me, your average slashdot reader, go about claiming such a prize? I have no idea how one would go about publishing something in a mathematical journal, and with such a prize at stake how would one prevent one's proof from being stolen by someone else (like a person you find to "help" you get it published)?
I purchased Mathematica 3.0 when I was a student and I agree, the password problem was REALLY annoying. I recently upgraded to version 4.0 with the student upgrade discount (around $350 versus $79 for the student version or over $1000 for the non-discounted version) and I must say it was certainly worth it. I was expecting the password mess so I installed it on a laptop, so I could easily take it wherever I went without having to get new passwords. Guess what! It didn't even ask for a password! I suspect the student version uses a password because Wolfram is afraid of students pirating the software.
All in all I consider Mathematica to be one of those rare pieces of software that actually have enough merit to be worth every penny paid for them. All of the few bugs I found in version 3.0 have been fixed in 4.0 (for example, I can now find the 1 trillionth prime number without a problem). And the fact that Mathematica does run under Linux is nice too.
In the past I have thought it might be useful to someday start a project to develop a free version of Mathematica. IMHO Mathematica is the best technical computing package available, bar none, and a version with source available would be even sweeter. However, consider this -- a good deal of the functionality in Mathematica is actually written in the Mathematica language. There is a lot of Mathematica source available that comes with the package. Most of the low-level underlying stuff you don't really need the source code for anyway.
As for the comment about arcane language, Mathematica's language is about the cleanest that i've seen. It uses a simple underlying list form (Head, Element,... where Head is a function, data type, etc.) and builds on that to support virtually every known mathematical function, notation, programming style, etc. Lest I seem to exuberant keep in mind it's really optimized towards symbolic and numerical computations, so it really doesn't work as well with things that traditional command line tools such as perl can do much better.
But after our report came out, they unblocked it - so now patrons could read about how to have sex with a horse
I assume that you mean "how to have sex with a horse without getting hurt or killed"???
none of it can get around the fundamental problem: computer algorithms aren't up to the task of categorizing human expression
There are two ways around this that I can see. The first is to use human proxies. On a local TV station we get I keep seeing advertisements for an Internet service that supposedly has people "monitoring web 24 hours a day". I can't imagine they are actually using people to proxy the data before returning it, simply due to the sheer volume of web requests. But such a thing could be possible - if each request page first displayed on a human operator's terminal, the operator could reject pages which violated the ISP's TOS. (that is, people could sign up, essentially agreeing that they subscribed to the ISP's standards and wanted things outside that standard filtered out. While I'm definitely not in favor of censorship the above type of agreement wouldn't be violating the reader's rights any more than a news filtering service would.)
The big problem with human proxies is of course the sheer volume of requests. What are you going to do, have 10,000 workers filtering requests (expensive to say the least), or are you going to impose a 1 minute delay on every page your request? This method might work in a small town where one person might (a big maybe here too) be able to monitor pages for a few computers. But a better use of this technology might be in conjunction with existing filtering technology - if a page comes up blocked, forward it to a human proxy who can decide if the page was blocked in error. Of course this doesn't block potentially offensive material that misses the filter, and costs a lot of money.
In the long term, those who insist on filtering Internet content need to get much smarter software, software that doesn't exist today. "Bad" words or offensive language in the page? Replace them with a non-offensive word or simply "bleep" them out. That way you don't throw out pages simply because the contain expletives. As for pornography, how about an AI program that get's trained as to what pornographic pictures look like, which can then assign a probability that an unknown pictures is pornographic. Pictures above a certain threshold would be blocked.
All the above solutions of course would take a lot of work and a lot of money. They aren't easy solutions, and unfortunately there isn't much more political value in them than "knee-jerk" censorship.
Nothing beats education and parental responsibility except the iron first of a dictator.
Managing your finances from your PC is good. Managing your financies with free software is better. Why? If you are like me, do you really trust a closed source program with all your important, confidential information? Sure, maybe a credit card number here and there to buy stuff over the web, but there is a level of protection there. If somebody steals your number your liability is limited. But if somebody manages to get ahold of your private finances, it's less like somebody stole your wallet and more like somebody broke into your house and looked at all your private letters.
It seems to me that there are two benefits to an open source financial program. First, you can be as sure of your security as you are willing to study the source code. This means that you are better protected both against attackers AND against the off chance of backdoors or other security problems that might (but probably wouldn't be) introduced by the programmers of a proprietary program.
The other benefit is one that is not yet realized. Why not integrate real GNUcash into the program GNUcash? A kind of "open source money" similar to Digicash or whatever. Not only would all the security concerns of the technical community be satisfied (untraceable, unforgeable, no key escrows or whatever) but while we're at it we can revolutionize the monetary systems. World domination with Linux? Try world domination by controlling (and freeing) the world's money supply!
There are just too many sites out there that use this stuff. Sure Javascript, Java, Active-X, etc. all have security issues. But every time I go disabling any of them guess what happens? My wife goes to use the computer and tries to bring up Playsite, or Uproar, Sony Play Station (etc etc), and what happens? Nothing works! Then she gets mad and I have to re-enable all that stuff.
The only real solution I see for myself personally is to simply have a separate computer for browsing the net. Computer are cheap these days, and how much resources does a computer need to browse the net? Since nothing important is kept on the net browsing computer these security issues don't really matter much to me. And having to reboot periodically isn't a problem either, since all the real work is being done on a more powerful machine else.
It makes for a lot less stress too. Heck if I did all the things some people advocate whenever a story like this comes up I'd be a paranoid cave-dwelling hermit!;-)
Most hard drives have current ratings right on the label. All the ones I have say something close to this:
5VDC@0.41A 12VDC@0.21A
So that would less than 5W. A faster drive would probably take more juice, but even four times as much (20W) would only cost you $17.52 a year assuming 10 cents per kilowatt hour.
10. Wide range of stories from across the nation insures you're likely to read something you didn't hear anywhere else. 9. Nifty full-page weather graphic on back page keep you in touch with the outdoors when you've been in your cubicle or office coding for days on end. 8. Doesn't cost anything to read the articles a few days late, unlike the web site. 7. News sections divided into categories (News, Financial, Sports, Life) so you can throw out the ones that don't apply to you. 6. Writers are psychic. (Hey, how else do you explain how a paper that arrives in the mail yet still manages to remain timely?) 5. Colorful, unlike the local newspaper which is in black and white. 4. No obituaries. 3. It's Free! Well, if you can convince your office to subscribe to it, that is. 2. Real-estate section of national classified ads is a great place to look for a retirement home to buy when stock options vest. 1. Still waiting for USA Tommorrow to show race track results.
Wow this has been a subject that nobody seems to want to say anything about.
I just wanted to say thanks to Rob for running this one though - I found the significance of a very interesting series which is related to the solution to:
x^2 + (x+1)^2 = z^2 (x,z in natural numbers)
That series is: 1,3,7,17,41,99,239,577,1393,3363,...
Each subsequent number in the series converges on a multiple of the previous one, but according to the site the series is also the numerators in the continued fraction expansion of the square root of two.
Did you really give an interview to IEEE? in which you confessed that C++ was deliberately created as an awful language for writing unmaintainable code to increase programmers' salaries?
Of course not. Read the real IEEE interview.
The real interview is here: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.h tml
Having said that, I just noticed that the first image, which depicts a graphic being edited what appears to be a windows graphic editing program, has buttons, controls, etc. which are more believable for a regular XGA screen.
Having read the previous stories about all the troubles people have with very large resolutions due to buttons and control etc. not resizing, the images seem very suspicious to me.
Once you see a Rainbow display, you will be amazed at the image quality in a large flat panel display. We invite you to see it for yourself! You will then agree that Rainbow has created a display with excellent image quality, and most importantly: NO VISIBLE SEAMS!
If it was really that seamless then why aren't there any pictures on the website. The graphic that depicts the four displays becoming one seamless display doesn't convince me.
Ok, so there are a few screenshots at http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/news/ images.htm, but they really should have some closeups so you can see how seamless it really is. Such a small image of such a large real estate doesn't convey much.
"If this is right, this is clearly one of the great discoveries of the last hundred years," said Dr. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "To discover that most of the matter in the universe is not what we're made of -- that's pretty spectacular."
The implications of this discovery, if proven correct, might extend farther than appears at first glance. When discoveries like this are made things that seemed absurd yesterday suddenly become plausible.
Particles 50 times heavier than a proton which almost always pass through other matter without a trace - not only can we not observe these particles with our eyes, but we up until now haven't been able to observe them with our best scientific instruments. What if these particles don't just occur randomly? What if they have structure, either naturally occuring and evolved, or by deliberate design?
It would be interesting indeed if we were to discover large scale objects such a rocks, planets, or even life forms made of this stuff.
How do you become a multibillion dollar multinational coporation by passing the savings onto your customer.
Successful innovation in business has always been about making more and making them cheaper. If you can make twice as many at half the cost, you can easily cut your prices 25% or more over the competition and still make a killing. Free enterprise at work!
Sure maybe I work more than 40 hours a week. But how many hours of that is reading Slashdot, surfing the Internet (that's doing research thank you very much) on that high bandwidth connection at work, or reading e-mail?
And I agree with the poster who said that often more hours are worked because of inefficiency - something that should take 20 minutes winds up taking several hours. Gotta hate that.
But overall, if your job entails something you enjoy, then the hours you work are irrelevant. If its something you would be doing anyway even if you weren't paid, then any extra hours spent at work without extra pay aren't really a big concern. On the other hand, I doubt many people have a job they like quite that much.
Maybe time is already flowing backwards at the macro level and we just aren't aware of it. The apparent bizareness of quantum physics could be caused by the fact that quantum events and macro events are occuring with different temporal arrows.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't falsely shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre.
Actually, the reason you can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre has nothing to do we free speech and everything to do with contract law. When you buy a ticket you are essentially entering into a contract of sorts with the movie theatre - in exchange for your money you are allowed to watch the movie. If you shout "fire" and everyone leaves, essentially you have caused a breach of that contract by infringing on everyone else's viewing of the movie and the theatre's showing of the movie.
As for live stage theatre, the same principle applies.
Well the above comment may seem funny, but it is true. If you've ever driven and watched your GPS location on the map, it sometimes looks like you are driving off the road!
Now if we can just get rid of all those digital watermarks, where map makers insert deliberate errors into the map to make it easier to catch unauthorized *cough* *cough* copies....
I know it's hard to realize they're not significantly different. If you read only the mainstream press, listen to mainstream radio talk shows, and watch mainstream TV, you'll hear the minute differences between them emphasized again and again and again, until you start to believe those differences are huge.
When I was growing up my parents would tell me about countries less off than the United States in terms of governments. One thing I remember was how in countries such as the U.S.S.R. (as it was at the time) how voting consisted of one candidate which you basically had to vote for.
Now we are in a similar situation - there was even a sketch on Saturday Night Live about how alike Bush and Gore are. So what's the difference between having two nearly identical candidates to vote for and one? How many people are going to vote independant when no independant candidate has gained an electoral vote since early in this (20th) century?
What question do you think is the most important one we could ask you and what's the answer to it?
The most important question we could ask (as judged by moderation) is:
"What question do you think is the most important one we could ask you and what's the answer to it?"
And the answer to this question is:
"What question do you think is the most important one we could ask you and what's the answer to it?"
Be careful what you wish for.
I've got an expedition model of this series that I purchased a few months ago. A bit pricey (around $400+ i think) and I haven't quite got it to go quite to the full rated spec of around 20 Watts, but the cell is supposed to be more efficient at higher ambient temperatures.
;)
:-)
With passive resistive loads I've seen as high as 16-17W (but on cold days as low as 10-13W!), but keep in mind if you run it through an inverter you are going to get some loss probably 2-3W. To bypass this problem I bought a 50 Watt zener diode at the rated voltage of the DC input (around 16V for my laptop). (Cost around $12 versus $75-$100 for an invertor). In my research I came across this site from which I learned that solar cells act like current sources, which is ideal for a zener diode. The diode essentially syphons off all the extra current your laptop uses, and since it is placed in parallel with your laptop it doesn't draw any power that your laptop can use. The zener also regulates the voltage fairly well. The 50W rating is necessary because there is no series limiting resistor and thus the zener should be able to sink twice the rated capacity of the solar panel (to be on the safe side, especially if you don't have a heat sink
I also played around with the idea of some kind of mirrors to focus more sunlight on the panel, but then I figured that kind cuts down on the portability of the system. The panel itself is fairly lightweight, around 3 pounds I think, same as my laptop
Not only that, but I found the following line on the page:
Within minutes of navigating through this website, you can obtain your very own, fully legal lot on the lighted surface of the moon, for an "Out of this World" price!
On the lighted surface of the moon? Excuse me, but the moon rotates at the same rate that it orbits the earth. A "day" on the moon is equivalent to a lunar month. The above statement implies that those involved in this scam^H^H^H^Hsite are ignorant about the property which the purport to sell.
Hyperlinking is the very essence of the web -- companies putting up web sites should be aware of this. If they're not, and they're so without a clue that they'd sue over it, their sites should be taken down and their domain names relinquished; they have no business here.
How about if we make them refund all the money they took from their customers, close all their online stores, shoot the managers, and declare bankruptcy. Then would you be happy?
My take on this whole subject is that the concept of "God" is backward. Trying to prove the existence or non-existence of God supposes that the definition of God is axomatic. Every religion I have seen defines God somewhat differently (is God infinite? an individual? engendered? offspringless?) the topic because more of a contest to see who can provide the most "authoritative" ancient documents to support their claim.
From what I have seen, many scientists view God in a way similar to Einstein - not so much as a person as the laws of the universe. There is some evidence that many ancient esoteric sects held this point of view.
But such a view seems somewhat ridiculous to me. How can the non-computable origins of the universe be worthy of anything a god could be? Worship, admiration, or whatever traits psychologists would says the human psyche desires in a god. Ancient gods were largely portrayed as people, or individual beings at the least, not omnipotent or omnipresent but having skills that exceeded any human. As such, the contemporary attempt at merging science with God probably won't be any more real than trying to explain psychology using math.
There was actually a case where something along those lines happened. A man stood up, wrote on the chalkboard for about 15 minutes, turned around and got a standing ovation.
If I remember right, he found the factors to a really large number thought to be prime. When they asked him how he did it they expected some complicated answer. Instead, it turned out he had spent the last 20 years or so multiplying out prime numbers - by hand - in his spare time. No real technical math background.
Granted, much easier than this problem. Interestingly enough, plotting the number of matches for each even number seems to increase almost linearly. Proving no dips to zero on the hand is harder =)
Faber has stipulated that the proof must be submitted to a respectable mathematical journal within two years of the book's publication next week, and published within four years. A panel of world-renowned mathematicians will be appointed to decide whether the proof is valid (Faber is refusing to disclose the panel's names, for fear that they will be flooded with letters from amateurs).
I have a serious question here, and I hope that someone might be able to answer it.
From the tone of the article, it sounds like they are expecting somebody in the mathematical community to submit it, if anybody does. How would say, me, your average slashdot reader, go about claiming such a prize? I have no idea how one would go about publishing something in a mathematical journal, and with such a prize at stake how would one prevent one's proof from being stolen by someone else (like a person you find to "help" you get it published)?
I purchased Mathematica 3.0 when I was a student and I agree, the password problem was REALLY annoying. I recently upgraded to version 4.0 with the student upgrade discount (around $350 versus $79 for the student version or over $1000 for the non-discounted version) and I must say it was certainly worth it. I was expecting the password mess so I installed it on a laptop, so I could easily take it wherever I went without having to get new passwords. Guess what! It didn't even ask for a password! I suspect the student version uses a password because Wolfram is afraid of students pirating the software.
All in all I consider Mathematica to be one of those rare pieces of software that actually have enough merit to be worth every penny paid for them. All of the few bugs I found in version 3.0 have been fixed in 4.0 (for example, I can now find the 1 trillionth prime number without a problem). And the fact that Mathematica does run under Linux is nice too.
In the past I have thought it might be useful to someday start a project to develop a free version of Mathematica. IMHO Mathematica is the best technical computing package available, bar none, and a version with source available would be even sweeter. However, consider this -- a good deal of the functionality in Mathematica is actually written in the Mathematica language. There is a lot of Mathematica source available that comes with the package. Most of the low-level underlying stuff you don't really need the source code for anyway.
As for the comment about arcane language, Mathematica's language is about the cleanest that i've seen. It uses a simple underlying list form (Head, Element,... where Head is a function, data type, etc.) and builds on that to support virtually every known mathematical function, notation, programming style, etc. Lest I seem to exuberant keep in mind it's really optimized towards symbolic and numerical computations, so it really doesn't work as well with things that traditional command line tools such as perl can do much better.
But after our report came out, they unblocked it - so now patrons could read about how to have sex with a horse
I assume that you mean "how to have sex with a horse without getting hurt or killed"???
none of it can get around the fundamental problem: computer algorithms aren't up to the task of categorizing human expression
There are two ways around this that I can see. The first is to use human proxies. On a local TV station we get I keep seeing advertisements for an Internet service that supposedly has people "monitoring web 24 hours a day". I can't imagine they are actually using people to proxy the data before returning it, simply due to the sheer volume of web requests. But such a thing could be possible - if each request page first displayed on a human operator's terminal, the operator could reject pages which violated the ISP's TOS. (that is, people could sign up, essentially agreeing that they subscribed to the ISP's standards and wanted things outside that standard filtered out. While I'm definitely not in favor of censorship the above type of agreement wouldn't be violating the reader's rights any more than a news filtering service would.)
The big problem with human proxies is of course the sheer volume of requests. What are you going to do, have 10,000 workers filtering requests (expensive to say the least), or are you going to impose a 1 minute delay on every page your request? This method might work in a small town where one person might (a big maybe here too) be able to monitor pages for a few computers. But a better use of this technology might be in conjunction with existing filtering technology - if a page comes up blocked, forward it to a human proxy who can decide if the page was blocked in error. Of course this doesn't block potentially offensive material that misses the filter, and costs a lot of money.
In the long term, those who insist on filtering Internet content need to get much smarter software, software that doesn't exist today. "Bad" words or offensive language in the page? Replace them with a non-offensive word or simply "bleep" them out. That way you don't throw out pages simply because the contain expletives. As for pornography, how about an AI program that get's trained as to what pornographic pictures look like, which can then assign a probability that an unknown pictures is pornographic. Pictures above a certain threshold would be blocked.
All the above solutions of course would take a lot of work and a lot of money. They aren't easy solutions, and unfortunately there isn't much more political value in them than "knee-jerk" censorship.
Nothing beats education and parental responsibility except the iron first of a dictator.
Managing your finances from your PC is good. Managing your financies with free software is better. Why? If you are like me, do you really trust a closed source program with all your important, confidential information? Sure, maybe a credit card number here and there to buy stuff over the web, but there is a level of protection there. If somebody steals your number your liability is limited. But if somebody manages to get ahold of your private finances, it's less like somebody stole your wallet and more like somebody broke into your house and looked at all your private letters.
It seems to me that there are two benefits to an open source financial program. First, you can be as sure of your security as you are willing to study the source code. This means that you are better protected both against attackers AND against the off chance of backdoors or other security problems that might (but probably wouldn't be) introduced by the programmers of a proprietary program.
The other benefit is one that is not yet realized. Why not integrate real GNUcash into the program GNUcash? A kind of "open source money" similar to Digicash or whatever. Not only would all the security concerns of the technical community be satisfied (untraceable, unforgeable, no key escrows or whatever) but while we're at it we can revolutionize the monetary systems. World domination with Linux? Try world domination by controlling (and freeing) the world's money supply!
Hey, it could happen.
There are just too many sites out there that use this stuff. Sure Javascript, Java, Active-X, etc. all have security issues. But every time I go disabling any of them guess what happens? My wife goes to use the computer and tries to bring up Playsite, or Uproar, Sony Play Station (etc etc), and what happens? Nothing works! Then she gets mad and I have to re-enable all that stuff.
;-)
The only real solution I see for myself personally is to simply have a separate computer for browsing the net. Computer are cheap these days, and how much resources does a computer need to browse the net? Since nothing important is kept on the net browsing computer these security issues don't really matter much to me. And having to reboot periodically isn't a problem either, since all the real work is being done on a more powerful machine else.
It makes for a lot less stress too. Heck if I did all the things some people advocate whenever a story like this comes up I'd be a paranoid cave-dwelling hermit!
Most hard drives have current ratings right on the label. All the ones I have say something close to this:
5VDC@0.41A
12VDC@0.21A
So that would less than 5W. A faster drive would probably take more juice, but even four times as much (20W) would only cost you $17.52 a year assuming 10 cents per kilowatt hour.
10. Wide range of stories from across the nation insures you're likely to read something you didn't hear anywhere else.
9. Nifty full-page weather graphic on back page keep you in touch with the outdoors when you've been in your cubicle or office coding for days on end.
8. Doesn't cost anything to read the articles a few days late, unlike the web site.
7. News sections divided into categories (News, Financial, Sports, Life) so you can throw out the ones that don't apply to you.
6. Writers are psychic. (Hey, how else do you explain how a paper that arrives in the mail yet still manages to remain timely?)
5. Colorful, unlike the local newspaper which is in black and white.
4. No obituaries.
3. It's Free! Well, if you can convince your office to subscribe to it, that is.
2. Real-estate section of national classified ads is a great place to look for a retirement home to buy when stock options vest.
1. Still waiting for USA Tommorrow to show race track results.
Wow this has been a subject that nobody seems to want to say anything about.
;-)
I just wanted to say thanks to Rob for running this one though - I found the significance of a very interesting series which is related to the solution to:
x^2 + (x+1)^2 = z^2 (x,z in natural numbers)
That series is: 1,3,7,17,41,99,239,577,1393,3363,...
Each subsequent number in the series converges on a multiple of the previous one, but according to the site the series is also the numerators in the continued fraction expansion of the square root of two.
(Score -1: Boring)
From the FAQ page:
h tml
Did you really give an interview to IEEE?
in which you confessed that C++ was deliberately created as an awful language for writing unmaintainable code to increase programmers' salaries?
Of course not. Read the real IEEE interview.
The real interview is here:
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.
Having said that, I just noticed that the first image, which depicts a graphic being edited what appears to be a windows graphic editing program, has buttons, controls, etc. which are more believable for a regular XGA screen.
Having read the previous stories about all the troubles people have with very large resolutions due to buttons and control etc. not resizing, the images seem very suspicious to me.
Once you see a Rainbow display, you will be amazed at the image quality in a large flat panel display. We invite you to see it for yourself! You will then agree that Rainbow has created a display with excellent image quality, and most importantly: NO VISIBLE SEAMS!
If it was really that seamless then why aren't there any pictures on the website. The graphic that depicts the four displays becoming one seamless display doesn't convince me.
Ok, so there are a few screenshots at http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/news/ images.htm, but they really should have some closeups so you can see how seamless it really is. Such a small image of such a large real estate doesn't convey much.
"If this is right, this is clearly one of the great discoveries of the last hundred years," said Dr. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "To discover that most of the matter in the universe is not what we're made of -- that's pretty spectacular."
The implications of this discovery, if proven correct, might extend farther than appears at first glance. When discoveries like this are made things that seemed absurd yesterday suddenly become plausible.
Particles 50 times heavier than a proton which almost always pass through other matter without a trace - not only can we not observe these particles with our eyes, but we up until now haven't been able to observe them with our best scientific instruments. What if these particles don't just occur randomly? What if they have structure, either naturally occuring and evolved, or by deliberate design?
It would be interesting indeed if we were to discover large scale objects such a rocks, planets, or even life forms made of this stuff.
How do you become a multibillion dollar multinational coporation by passing the savings onto your customer.
Successful innovation in business has always been about making more and making them cheaper. If you can make twice as many at half the cost, you can easily cut your prices 25% or more over the competition and still make a killing. Free enterprise at work!
Sure maybe I work more than 40 hours a week. But how many hours of that is reading Slashdot, surfing the Internet (that's doing research thank you very much) on that high bandwidth connection at work, or reading e-mail?
And I agree with the poster who said that often more hours are worked because of inefficiency - something that should take 20 minutes winds up taking several hours. Gotta hate that.
But overall, if your job entails something you enjoy, then the hours you work are irrelevant. If its something you would be doing anyway even if you weren't paid, then any extra hours spent at work without extra pay aren't really a big concern. On the other hand, I doubt many people have a job they like quite that much.
cypherpunk/cypherpunk
Maybe time is already flowing backwards at the macro level and we just aren't aware of it. The apparent bizareness of quantum physics could be caused by the fact that quantum events and macro events are occuring with different temporal arrows.