> Doesn't it seem that these scientists are going out of their way to discredit creationists?
Since creationists (I'm not counting just the belief that humans have a divine something as creationism) are going out of their way to discredit science, is that too unreasonable? The difference is that the scientists do it using the results of solid research, and the creationists do it by bullshit and lies. So it isn't really stooping to the same level.
This isn't really "more evidence for evolution" and more than gravity wave detectors are supposed to give us "more evidence for gravity" to refute flat-earthers. This is evidence about more detail of how evolution happens.
> they mock the dreams and aspirations of young male teenagers (like myself) who wanted to drive fast cars, have laser watches and get all the hot chics....
I used to have the the same cheap watch as Bond in Octopussy(I had the watch before I saw the film). I never had a Faberge egg with a tracer in to see if mine did the homing thing though.
(I thought it was a Casio, but
http://www.thejbw.com/gadgets/op/opgag.htm#homer wa tch shows it was a Seiko. Unless Casio ripped off Seiko's design and I didn't really have exactly the same watch).
And now I'm married with children, which limits my interest in "hot chics" (sic).
> > We can checkout various software titles at our public library here in my town.
> Copyright law makes copious exceptions for non-profit libraries and archives. Blockbuster Video is not a non-profit.
I can rent various software titles (well, games) from my local Blockbuster here in the UK.
But the movie DVDs are in the "movie" section, not the "computer games" section.
> Nice try, but unlike United Kingdom copyright law, United States copyright law would consider this a fair use of the copyrighted work.
[...]
> This paragraph was passed specifically to reject copyright owners' "Copying the program into RAM is infringing; therefore, EULAs are binding" argument.
It's a bit of a bummer for those of us in the UK though. Any chance you could get the US government to get ours to agree to that too while trying to foist the DCMA on us?
http://uk.eurorights.org/
> (1) fifty percent of the class coluded with each other,
> (1) is unlikely,
I've known it happen (though at school, not college, and not computing). The teacher made a mess of explaining something, so most people didn't do the homework, and the few people who did made the same errors. Everybody else copied those few next morning (five people to a desk, then those five were used for second generation copies).
(I copied it, thought "no, this still doesn't make sense", worked out what the error was, and handed in a late but correct answer).
The teacher commented on almost everyone having the same error, but I think he realized it was his own poor explanation that was the real problem.
There's also (4) although the teacher hadn't given it as an example in class, it has been a past exam question and everyone has access to the past papers with sample answers.
> I'm expecting Terry Pratchett to write a book about this any day now, it's right up his alley.
Douglas Adams already did it. (At least he put a couple of paragraphs about it in one of the Hitchhiker books (to do with windows that won't open because the air-conditioning does a better job and can't possibly fail)).
NTLworld worked ok for me when I had an NTL phone. I was thinking of getting a cable modem, but now I'm outside the area they cover. A coworkers father is planning a wireless provider in a village not very far away though....
> If a 17 year old geek could implement strong encryption on a laptop in his bedroom, I am fairly certain a ring of terrorists could do the same.
They _could_. But in this case they _didn't_.
The question isn't "does banning export of strong crypto make it impossible for terrorists to get it", it's "is the hassle and loss of potential crypto sales to non-US companies worth the chance some terrorists/drug smugglers/child pornographers/other bogeymen won't bother using strong crypto if it isn't built in to many common systems".
That's the reason most traffic isn't encrypted at all now. The risk of interception is small, and we don't care if most of our mail is being read (most of the time we aren't negotiating sensitive contracts, or cheating on our wives, or whatever) and it's a hassle.
So only geeks, enthusiasts, paranoids and knowledgeable criminals routinely sign/encrypt stuff, and even they don't always bother to patch stuff for stronger encryption.
> > Probably because you could make a car that can go 500 mph in the shape of a Civic, but honestly no one would need the extra speed (mainly because of traffic laws, but you know...)
> I think the fact that you don't loose your computing licence for 5 years when someone catches running your pc at 100MHz is a more probable reason.
If you crash a Civic at 500mph, your next of kin aren't going to care about your driving licence. If you are running medical of safety-critical equipment off a massively overclocked PC you deserve prosecution, otherwise you aren't likely to kill anyone.
Re:a resounding yes--people r stupid & inconsi
on
Quoting in Emails?
·
· Score: 2
> The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top
No, worse than that is when you get a digest of a mailing list, which includes full quoting *seven* levels deep (and six, and five, and four (the three, two and one level mails being in the previous digest)), every one of them incuding the signature automatically added by the list manager say "please remember to trim quoted text".
And worse than that is over 300 lines of Word generated style sheet in a mangled HTMLized mail to say "Me too" (plus full quote). And when you complain someone else says "I don't see that here, the problem must be your mail client reading it".
> There are many problems with a human reviewed system though. The main one being that you could never have enough staff to keep up with the growth of the internet and still have a profitable business.
But that growth is supposedly slowing down. While covering _everything_ is probably out, it's possible that Yahoo will be able to catch up with every significant online retailer (as well as lots of other useful stuff of course, I'm not suggesting that online retailers are the only thing it's useful to find in a directory).
Think of the Yellow Pages/Yellow Book (http://www.yellgroup.com/, http://www.yell.co.uk, http://www.yell.com) where every entry has as much detail as Yahoo had back in the good old days when they could keep up.
> I-Ching is performed by throwing coins or something.
Yarrow stalks, traditionally. That's why Bruce Schneier's strong pseudorandom number generator is called Yarrow.
http://www.counterpane.com/yarrow.html
But anything that gives random bits will do - coin flips, dice, thermal noise on a diode, radioactive decay, lava lamps (http://www.sciencenews.org/20010512/mathtrek.asp) , whatever.
> But I think Scholastic (publishers) felt most people don't know about this and would be confused by the title (poor dears) and that would affect sales
cf. The Madness of King George, originally The Madness of King George III, but changed because of worries Americans would think they hadn't seen the first two movies, and Licence to Kill, originally Licence Revoked, changed because of worries that most Americans wouldn't know what "revoked" means.
> IE does not crash every ten minutes.
Nor does Netscape. Usually. But this time it did.
> Install an OS that does not use 1996 web browser technology.
I'm running Windows NT (with emacs, cygwin, PuTTY and an X server). That's no excuse to run IE (though I do resort to it sometimes).
I have got Mozilla 0.9.7 here too.
It's getting better, but I'm still not using it as my mail client, so it tends to be easier to use Communicator as my web browser too.
I can't see anyone buying just a remote for more than half the price of a PDA with AV remote functionality built in. Mind you I couldn't see anyone paying that much for a remote in the first place and people did.
Re:industry standard boilerplate
on
Borland Backs Down
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Twice I've written longer replies and Netscape's crashed on me.
Anyway :
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?boilerplat e
The original meaning was a large block of ready typeset text, back when typesetting involved little pieces of lead.
Real boiler plate is steel plate for making boilers (e.g. for steam turbines on ships).
See also
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?cliche
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?stereotype
> Although I've never tried to, I don't think its beyond the realm of probability to be able to recreate a formula for a generated list of data, if that data was created by a formula in the first place.
We have a name for a particular class of functions that produce apparently random data from a complex yet predictable formula. They're called stream ciphers, and an important part of that complex formula is the key. In principle you can compress the data by finding the key, then compressing the (presumably not so random) plaintext. If this method really works, it could have cryptographic importance.
There's another possibility - that this is an extremely lossy method, and they just haven't mentioned that. Compressing a random stream of data to enough information to generate a completely different random stream with many of the same statistical properties is much easier. It's also completely useless if you wanted the actual original data.
> I'm either 5'11" (say, roughly 6') tall or 180.34cm. Now, which of those gives you a better mental picture of how tall I am?
The one you are more used to of course. That doesn't make it better in any objective sense.
I'm about 190cm (say, a handswidth under 2m), or 0.009 furlongs, or 0.3 rods, or 0.09 chains. Which of those gives a better mental picture?
Incidentally are you really 5'11" to within 1/200th of an inch? If not, the apparent accuracy of the ".34" you quote is completely bogus.
> Does metric even have "dry volume" measurements?
Yes of course. Cubic metres. Same as wet volume, since a volume doesn't actually change depending whether its contents are wet or dry. The dimensions of volume are length^3, so the SI unit for volume is (unit for length)^3.
Maybe he has some sort of neck harness that wields the blade.
If you look on the expanded universe tab of
that page, it says he has four arms hidden under his robes. It also says he prefers to rely on mind tricks to befuddle and mislead targets, "though like all Jedi, he carried a lightsaber". Not the same as it being his weapon of choice.
> I don't seem to have much trouble spending 5 minutes with a jar of hand cleaner to save several hundred dollars in "professional" labor.
I've fixed a £500 car that had an estimate of "at least £1500, and that's before we even think about the welding" with £60 worth of parts, but it was several days work (mostly on the welding). For some people that's worth it, for others it isn't.
> Starters, water pumps, alternators, and most commonly brakes, are bloody simple to replace.
Not on my Alfa the brakes weren't. You had to take the whole transaxle off to get at the rear brakes (inboard disks on De Dion suspension). In theory you could get at them through a panel under the rear seat, but that only worked if the pins came out without a hammer and drift.
Changing an engine after I had a valve head go through a piston (in a different car) wasn't much harder.
Some things are getting harder with newer cars. My old Renault 6 you could look under the hood and tell what every single wire and tube did. The only vacuum line went from the manifold to the distributer, and if you sucked on it you could see the baseplate rotate (or not, but it did once it was cleaned up).
When I first got the Subaru that was my car before last, it was running really roughly. I found the problem was a disconnected vacuum (I think) hose, just because I happened to notice the hose end in mid-air fairly close to a T piece with only two hoses on. It connected two plastic lumps with some hose and wires to a block on the side of the inlet manifold with some more hoses and wires. Given the full workshop manual for the exact model, I could probably find out exactly what it was, but the mechanic at the generic MOT/tyre/exhaust place I was using didn't have any idea, he just knew the emissions were barely within spec. The mechanic at the Subaru dealer I used later didn't know either, and since it was fixed by then it wasn't worth him spending time to research it.
Another car I solved a "doesn't start sometimes, cuts out sometimes in heavy rain" problem by replacing points, plugs, leads, condensor, rotor arm and distributer cap - it wasn't worth tracing exactly where the problem was, and all the parts were cheap. When my parents not-very-much-newer Cavalier had a problem the AA guy thought was in the ignition, we were testing it by swapping components with mine (luckily at the time I had a similar age Cavalier (car before the Subaru)) because it was an encapsulated sensor talking to a "module". (The problem turned out to be more fundamental - the camshaft had sheared, so the belt end was turning, but the distributor wasn't).
Re:There is plenty of cost justification.
on
The Eyes Have It
·
· Score: 2
> There were 63 airline accidents resulting in fatalities in the years 1982 through 2000.
> Compare that against the five bombings/suicides, and one thing is immediately obvious: reducing accidents by a mere 10% will have greater effect than eliminating terrorism.
No. Eliminating 10% of the accidents would give you a bit over 6 fewer fatal accidents, which is more than the 5 suicide attacks. But how many of the fatal accidents destroyed large buildings full of people? How many of them killed hundreds of police officers and firefighters?
Auto accidents are another matter. Just think, if thousands of Americans got their fat butts out of their SUVs and on a bike occasionally, they'd be less likely to kill anyone, less likely to die of a heart attack, use less gas, and be fitter if they ever did have to help tackle a terrorist on an airplane.
The short story "The Sentinel" was written first, the book and filmscript for "2001" were then done at overlapping times. Like the previous poster says, there is a preface in the book explaining this.
> Then, Clarke wrote the second book, instead using Jupiter (I imagine because Europa seemed like a good spot to introduce new life).
> He retroactively changed the plot of 2001 to a Jupiter mission when he collaborated with Kubrick on the movie script.
No, the second book (2010) used Jupiter because the movie had. (Also because if you want to create a new mini-sun, Jupiter is a better choice than Saturn).
This is from memory, but a quick Google shows e.g.
http://scifidimensions.fanhosts.com/Dec00/2001bo ok s.htm supports it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Doesn't it seem that these scientists are going out of their way to discredit creationists?
Since creationists (I'm not counting just the belief that humans have a divine something as creationism) are going out of their way to discredit science, is that too unreasonable? The difference is that the scientists do it using the results of solid research, and the creationists do it by bullshit and lies. So it isn't really stooping to the same level.
This isn't really "more evidence for evolution" and more than gravity wave detectors are supposed to give us "more evidence for gravity" to refute flat-earthers. This is evidence about more detail of how evolution happens.
> they mock the dreams and aspirations of young male teenagers (like myself) who wanted to drive fast cars, have laser watches and get all the hot chics....
r wa tch shows it was a Seiko. Unless Casio ripped off Seiko's design and I didn't really have exactly the same watch).
I used to have the the same cheap watch as Bond in Octopussy(I had the watch before I saw the film). I never had a Faberge egg with a tracer in to see if mine did the homing thing though.
(I thought it was a Casio, but
http://www.thejbw.com/gadgets/op/opgag.htm#home
And now I'm married with children, which limits my interest in "hot chics" (sic).
I still fancy some of his cars though.
> If cars go silent on me, I'll be roadkill in no time!
"Think of it as evolution in action."
In the meantime, I hope if you step in front of a cyclist without looking you don't hurt the cyclist.
> > We can checkout various software titles at our public library here in my town.
> Copyright law makes copious exceptions for non-profit libraries and archives. Blockbuster Video is not a non-profit.
I can rent various software titles (well, games) from my local Blockbuster here in the UK.
But the movie DVDs are in the "movie" section, not the "computer games" section.
> Nice try, but unlike United Kingdom copyright law, United States copyright law would consider this a fair use of the copyrighted work.
[...]
> This paragraph was passed specifically to reject copyright owners' "Copying the program into RAM is infringing; therefore, EULAs are binding" argument.
It's a bit of a bummer for those of us in the UK though. Any chance you could get the US government to get ours to agree to that too while trying to foist the DCMA on us?
http://uk.eurorights.org/
> (1) fifty percent of the class coluded with each other,
> (1) is unlikely,
I've known it happen (though at school, not college, and not computing). The teacher made a mess of explaining something, so most people didn't do the homework, and the few people who did made the same errors. Everybody else copied those few next morning (five people to a desk, then those five were used for second generation copies).
(I copied it, thought "no, this still doesn't make sense", worked out what the error was, and handed in a late but correct answer).
The teacher commented on almost everyone having the same error, but I think he realized it was his own poor explanation that was the real problem.
There's also (4) although the teacher hadn't given it as an example in class, it has been a past exam question and everyone has access to the past papers with sample answers.
> I'm expecting Terry Pratchett to write a book about this any day now, it's right up his alley.
Douglas Adams already did it. (At least he put a couple of paragraphs about it in one of the Hitchhiker books (to do with windows that won't open because the air-conditioning does a better job and can't possibly fail)).
NTLworld worked ok for me when I had an NTL phone. I was thinking of getting a cable modem, but now I'm outside the area they cover. A coworkers father is planning a wireless provider in a village not very far away though....
> If a 17 year old geek could implement strong encryption on a laptop in his bedroom, I am fairly certain a ring of terrorists could do the same.
They _could_. But in this case they _didn't_.
The question isn't "does banning export of strong crypto make it impossible for terrorists to get it", it's "is the hassle and loss of potential crypto sales to non-US companies worth the chance some terrorists/drug smugglers/child pornographers/other bogeymen won't bother using strong crypto if it isn't built in to many common systems".
That's the reason most traffic isn't encrypted at all now. The risk of interception is small, and we don't care if most of our mail is being read (most of the time we aren't negotiating sensitive contracts, or cheating on our wives, or whatever) and it's a hassle.
So only geeks, enthusiasts, paranoids and knowledgeable criminals routinely sign/encrypt stuff, and even they don't always bother to patch stuff for stronger encryption.
> > Probably because you could make a car that can go 500 mph in the shape of a Civic, but honestly no one would need the extra speed (mainly because of traffic laws, but you know...)
> I think the fact that you don't loose your computing licence for 5 years when someone catches running your pc at 100MHz is a more probable reason.
If you crash a Civic at 500mph, your next of kin aren't going to care about your driving licence. If you are running medical of safety-critical equipment off a massively overclocked PC you deserve prosecution, otherwise you aren't likely to kill anyone.
> The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top
No, worse than that is when you get a digest of a mailing list, which includes full quoting *seven* levels deep (and six, and five, and four (the three, two and one level mails being in the previous digest)), every one of them incuding the signature automatically added by the list manager say "please remember to trim quoted text".
And worse than that is over 300 lines of Word generated style sheet in a mangled HTMLized mail to say "Me too" (plus full quote). And when you complain someone else says "I don't see that here, the problem must be your mail client reading it".
> There are many problems with a human reviewed system though. The main one being that you could never have enough staff to keep up with the growth of the internet and still have a profitable business.
But that growth is supposedly slowing down. While covering _everything_ is probably out, it's possible that Yahoo will be able to catch up with every significant online retailer (as well as lots of other useful stuff of course, I'm not suggesting that online retailers are the only thing it's useful to find in a directory).
Think of the Yellow Pages/Yellow Book (http://www.yellgroup.com/, http://www.yell.co.uk, http://www.yell.com) where every entry has as much detail as Yahoo had back in the good old days when they could keep up.
> I-Ching is performed by throwing coins or something.
) , whatever.
Yarrow stalks, traditionally. That's why Bruce Schneier's strong pseudorandom number generator is called Yarrow.
http://www.counterpane.com/yarrow.html
But anything that gives random bits will do - coin flips, dice, thermal noise on a diode, radioactive decay, lava lamps (http://www.sciencenews.org/20010512/mathtrek.asp
> But I think Scholastic (publishers) felt most people don't know about this and would be confused by the title (poor dears) and that would affect sales
cf. The Madness of King George, originally The Madness of King George III, but changed because of worries Americans would think they hadn't seen the first two movies, and Licence to Kill, originally Licence Revoked, changed because of worries that most Americans wouldn't know what "revoked" means.
> IE does not crash every ten minutes.
Nor does Netscape. Usually. But this time it did.
> Install an OS that does not use 1996 web browser technology.
I'm running Windows NT (with emacs, cygwin, PuTTY and an X server). That's no excuse to run IE (though I do resort to it sometimes).
I have got Mozilla 0.9.7 here too.
It's getting better, but I'm still not using it as my mail client, so it tends to be easier to use Communicator as my web browser too.
I can't see anyone buying just a remote for more than half the price of a PDA with AV remote functionality built in. Mind you I couldn't see anyone paying that much for a remote in the first place and people did.
Twice I've written longer replies and Netscape's crashed on me.t e
e
Anyway :
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?boilerpla
The original meaning was a large block of ready typeset text, back when typesetting involved little pieces of lead.
Real boiler plate is steel plate for making boilers (e.g. for steam turbines on ships).
See also
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?cliche
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?stereotyp
> My chief admin tools for Apache are ssh and vi. No such option on Windows.
Both ssh and vi seem to be working fine on my NT machine with Cygwin here. (They probably wouldn't be much use for admining IIS though).
> Although I've never tried to, I don't think its beyond the realm of probability to be able to recreate a formula for a generated list of data, if that data was created by a formula in the first place.
We have a name for a particular class of functions that produce apparently random data from a complex yet predictable formula. They're called stream ciphers, and an important part of that complex formula is the key. In principle you can compress the data by finding the key, then compressing the (presumably not so random) plaintext. If this method really works, it could have cryptographic importance.
There's another possibility - that this is an extremely lossy method, and they just haven't mentioned that. Compressing a random stream of data to enough information to generate a completely different random stream with many of the same statistical properties is much easier. It's also completely useless if you wanted the actual original data.
Light of Other Days -c s_ archive/shaw/shaw1.html
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classi
> I'm either 5'11" (say, roughly 6') tall or 180.34cm. Now, which of those gives you a better mental picture of how tall I am?
The one you are more used to of course. That doesn't make it better in any objective sense.
I'm about 190cm (say, a handswidth under 2m), or 0.009 furlongs, or 0.3 rods, or 0.09 chains. Which of those gives a better mental picture?
Incidentally are you really 5'11" to within 1/200th of an inch? If not, the apparent accuracy of the ".34" you quote is completely bogus.
> Does metric even have "dry volume" measurements?
Yes of course. Cubic metres. Same as wet volume, since a volume doesn't actually change depending whether its contents are wet or dry. The dimensions of volume are length^3, so the SI unit for volume is (unit for length)^3.
If you look on the expanded universe tab of that page, it says he has four arms hidden under his robes. It also says he prefers to rely on mind tricks to befuddle and mislead targets, "though like all Jedi, he carried a lightsaber". Not the same as it being his weapon of choice.
> I don't seem to have much trouble spending 5 minutes with a jar of hand cleaner to save several hundred dollars in "professional" labor.
I've fixed a £500 car that had an estimate of "at least £1500, and that's before we even think about the welding" with £60 worth of parts, but it was several days work (mostly on the welding). For some people that's worth it, for others it isn't.
> Starters, water pumps, alternators, and most commonly brakes, are bloody simple to replace.
Not on my Alfa the brakes weren't. You had to take the whole transaxle off to get at the rear brakes (inboard disks on De Dion suspension). In theory you could get at them through a panel under the rear seat, but that only worked if the pins came out without a hammer and drift.
Changing an engine after I had a valve head go through a piston (in a different car) wasn't much harder.
Some things are getting harder with newer cars. My old Renault 6 you could look under the hood and tell what every single wire and tube did. The only vacuum line went from the manifold to the distributer, and if you sucked on it you could see the baseplate rotate (or not, but it did once it was cleaned up).
When I first got the Subaru that was my car before last, it was running really roughly. I found the problem was a disconnected vacuum (I think) hose, just because I happened to notice the hose end in mid-air fairly close to a T piece with only two hoses on. It connected two plastic lumps with some hose and wires to a block on the side of the inlet manifold with some more hoses and wires. Given the full workshop manual for the exact model, I could probably find out exactly what it was, but the mechanic at the generic MOT/tyre/exhaust place I was using didn't have any idea, he just knew the emissions were barely within spec. The mechanic at the Subaru dealer I used later didn't know either, and since it was fixed by then it wasn't worth him spending time to research it.
Another car I solved a "doesn't start sometimes, cuts out sometimes in heavy rain" problem by replacing points, plugs, leads, condensor, rotor arm and distributer cap - it wasn't worth tracing exactly where the problem was, and all the parts were cheap. When my parents not-very-much-newer Cavalier had a problem the AA guy thought was in the ignition, we were testing it by swapping components with mine (luckily at the time I had a similar age Cavalier (car before the Subaru)) because it was an encapsulated sensor talking to a "module". (The problem turned out to be more fundamental - the camshaft had sheared, so the belt end was turning, but the distributor wasn't).
> There were 63 airline accidents resulting in fatalities in the years 1982 through 2000.
> Compare that against the five bombings/suicides, and one thing is immediately obvious: reducing accidents by a mere 10% will have greater effect than eliminating terrorism.
No. Eliminating 10% of the accidents would give you a bit over 6 fewer fatal accidents, which is more than the 5 suicide attacks. But how many of the fatal accidents destroyed large buildings full of people? How many of them killed hundreds of police officers and firefighters?
Auto accidents are another matter. Just think, if thousands of Americans got their fat butts out of their SUVs and on a bike occasionally, they'd be less likely to kill anyone, less likely to die of a heart attack, use less gas, and be fitter if they ever did have to help tackle a terrorist on an airplane.
> The book was written first, by Clarke alone.
o ok s.htm supports it.
The short story "The Sentinel" was written first, the book and filmscript for "2001" were then done at overlapping times. Like the previous poster says, there is a preface in the book explaining this.
> Then, Clarke wrote the second book, instead using Jupiter (I imagine because Europa seemed like a good spot to introduce new life).
> He retroactively changed the plot of 2001 to a Jupiter mission when he collaborated with Kubrick on the movie script.
No, the second book (2010) used Jupiter because the movie had. (Also because if you want to create a new mini-sun, Jupiter is a better choice than Saturn).
This is from memory, but a quick Google shows e.g.
http://scifidimensions.fanhosts.com/Dec00/2001b