Entirely correct. I've observed liquid water at -25C on the high Antarctic plateau, on black metal in the sun without wind. But it is a rare occurence and doesn't last very long. What occurs naturally are black rock which get plenty warm enough in the sun, also on Mars I believe. Or much more interesting and on topic to this discussion: cryptoendolith (or more simply endolith): life forms that hide inside clear rock: they get sunlight through the clear rock, protection from the elements, air by porous diffusion... It's a whole ecosystem in a few mm of thickness. It shows if you break a clear rock as a green line about a cm underneath the surface. I have a picture of an endolith here and Wikipedia has, of course, more information.
Yup, one thing the summary forgets is that those critters thrive and reproduce only when the temperature gets warm enough, which happens for about 2 months a years in Antarctica, while it never happens on Mars. Yes, you can have small springs with running water in Antarctica.
I am not a microbiologist but I've spent 3 years in Antarctica.
I got a Mac OS 10.0 couple years back. My first reaction was: how do I disable all that bouncing dancing colorful crap, which took me a while to figure out since I hadn't used a Mac for the past 5 years. When I figured there was no way to disable the horrible anti-aliased fonts I SWITCHED to an OS that has sharp letters, not something blurry that makes my eyes water.
Case in point: when you put eye candy in your OS, make it easy for people to disable. In WinXP you have to download TweakUI or somesuch to get rid of all the animations. I don't want to have to pursue bouncing icons so I can click them: it's annoying and distracting if I want to be doing something else.
I hate commercials so much I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. This being saud, I thought the main way to detect commercial was a special signal as part of the final and/or initial lines of the frame, those that don't display on the screen and that are used for various purposes (subtitle for the deaf, show start and stop info, etc). I read somewhere that this signal was used by substations to sometimes broadcast localized commercials instead of the default ones. Of course that's all just hearsay.
Another method I may suggest, is to simply look at the volume level. In the country I currently live in, the volume of commercials is heaps louders than the show you are watching, leading for a jump on the remote each time a commercial break comes up. It may be worth adding to the list in case a heuristic is needed.
Thanks Joto. THere were several techniques I had never heard of. I'll be doing do bare metal stuff soon again in my new job, after 6 years doing sysadmin and data analysis stuff.
No-one seems to mind that people copy recipes - they're not covered by copyright even. So now I'm imagining the chefs of the world getting mad that they're not getting a cut of people translating their recipes from books
You mean like this ? My wife is a chef and I find this insane.
I've lived most of my life in foreign countries: Italy, the US, Alaska (is it the same than the US ? I don't think so), France, Antarctica and some others. Between the US and Europe the differences are not that big, cultural mostly. What I personally find truly annoying are the administrative differences. Before the onslaugh of terror bullshit the US had great and quick administration, at the end of my 1st day I would already have most of my paperwork in order (bank account, SSN, driver's licence, bought car, car insurrance). On the other hand it's almost impossible for a foreigner to open a bank account in France or Italy (it takes huge pressure from your company).
And I know why guns are illegal in Italy, it's to make sure you don't shoot the clerks from pure rage after being turned around for the 7th time for a missing comma in the certificate of proper translation to the official translation of the certified copy of your grand mother's birth certificate. Each time after fighting to stay in line for 4 hours. Or somesuch.
Yes, core science/education texts need to be put out freely, and in the wikipedia tradition, make sure they are easily modifiable. This way they'll stay current.
I also wonder if you could push this concept to other forms of litterature. Imagine if you could modify anything in the Lord of the Ring or Shakespear's plays, could anything better come out ? I doubt it but it would sure provide for some interesting social experiment. Of course, make sure the original version is just a click away (or less !).
What if the drive has a hiccup for some reason ? Say a sector or even a single byte gets written wrong for some reason (power loss, OS reboot, falling off the lap...). From what I understand of encrypted discs, you loose the whole thing and you cannot build redundancies which would weaken the encryption. How is this issue addressed ?
Well, you can do that through one-way hashes, but there's no technical way around having someone read "51% go to A" as "51% go to B" on the final machine result. A supreme court for instance.
I have a general question relating to this. How can you compile a program that stays compatible with all those kinds of processor 'options' ? It's been a while since I last did some compiler work (okay, 15 years), but how can you have a program that uses FPU instructions if there's an FPU coprocessor or on-die available and and still work if not, and so on for GPU, DSP, SIMD, etc... Do you have tests and branches each time one of those instructions should be used that uses a library if not available ? In that case it gives a lot of sense to use a distro like Gentoo to compile specifically for your processor (saves a lot of test/branches during program execution and a lot of space in the executable). Or I'm missing something.
It would be a hash, so you cannot return to the voter or who the vote was for from it. The only information you get from it, in association with an external verification (website) is that it's an effectively counted vote.
I would add one thing: issue the voter with a hash of his vote on a little strip of paper. A unique number that he can then verify on a government web site that says: yes, this number has voted, and the vote has been considered. Just make sure you can't go back from the hash to the voter's name or vote. One more way to make sure that the vote doesn't 'disapear' between voting and counting machine.
Re:This is soo sad, its not even funny..
on
School Bans 'Tag'
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· Score: 1
we are are rasing a bunch of whiny little snots who can't even take a little bruse
Well, Tag is a voluntary game, so no problem with the kids wanting to get involved, but when I was a kid the only sport at recess and in gym class was also the national sport: soccer. Being the class geek I hated, HATED, being bullied by my own team because I didn't pass them the ball fast enough in the rare few instances I had it. It disgusted me of sport for 10 years until I learnt that there are other sports which are not quite so stupid and I'm actually quiet good at them, thank you. To this day I'm convinced that playing with a ball is only worthy of a dog and all ball players are absolute morons.
Yup, and there's the related problem of outliers: when you order something out of your ordinary habits. Example, I ordered a bunch of baby books as a gift for some friends on amazon.com. And although I have zilch interest in the little critters, Amazon now keeps recommanding whole ranges of baby stuff.
In a fiction book involving Apollo-area astronauts, one of them later tells his colleague that he wanted to add "study of explosive decompression" to the list of trivial experiments they were doing for schools while on the moon: drop a rock and a feather in the vacuum and such. Just twist open the purge valve and 'poof!'.
And for a few more space quotes:
"Why don't you light that candle?" —Alan Shepard while waiting for the first american rocket to launch.
"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars." —Les Brown.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." —Larry Niven.
I've been interested in parallel languages for a while (think Ada) and I think they'll become more important in the future with all those multicores, without having to resort to dirty hacks like MPI or OpenMP. But one thing about Erlang is that the threads run inside the compiled program, without the OS knowing about them, just like Java green threads. When I was working on a cluster a couple years back, Java was a no-no as the whole mess of processes would run on a single processor and never split or migrate. Has this improved since and how is it addressed in Erlang ?
I'm not sure why you wouldn't want this sort of metadata saved in your pictures
Well, I'm wondering about that right now. I sell images online and I'm in the process of editing two new CD compilations. The difference with before is that I now use digital which records the instant the image was taken. I'm not absolutely sure I want people to know exactly where I was every day of my life (or every day I use a camera). It's one thing to have your images made public, another one to have your whereabouts made public, although I can't really pinpoint a negative example.
Would you like your waiter to try and convince you to change your order because they don't think it's right to eat lamb?
Actually yes, somewhat. When going to a restaurant (meaning something better than a fast food joint), it's always good to listen to the suggestions of the waiter. You get to discover new tastes this way.
I also expected people to be more constructive and add to my post rather than tear me down for leaving out valid details. I must have forgotten this is cynical, flaming slashdot
Sorry, wasn't my intent. I was merely pointing out that there's no magic bullet for bike safety.
Yeah, tell me something I don't know. When I left for a winter in Antarctica, I configured an old headless PC into a gentoo server I left at home with the instruction to my wife: don't touch it! It handled email, ssh and image sales. When I got back, it had an incredible 400 days of uptime, but after I emerged it, I basically had to stop using it: there where thousands of problems, breakages and nasties which were obviously impossible to clean up. It served well, RIP.
I should have added this: at night wear a reflective jacket of the kind they wear in construction, those are highly visible. They can be found in professional clothing stores. Even blinking LEDs are not that visible at night when you are driving in a car, particularly in a city where you have so much parasite light (neon advertisement) and reflections.
just like it will be legal for the Casino to shoot you in the knees... Spot on the subject, every geek should read the Eudaemonic Pie about besting the Las Vegas roulettes.
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Oh man, thanks a lot, now there's beer all over my keyboard and programming notes. And it went through my nose too...
Entirely correct. I've observed liquid water at -25C on the high Antarctic plateau, on black metal in the sun without wind. But it is a rare occurence and doesn't last very long. What occurs naturally are black rock which get plenty warm enough in the sun, also on Mars I believe. Or much more interesting and on topic to this discussion: cryptoendolith (or more simply endolith): life forms that hide inside clear rock: they get sunlight through the clear rock, protection from the elements, air by porous diffusion... It's a whole ecosystem in a few mm of thickness. It shows if you break a clear rock as a green line about a cm underneath the surface. I have a picture of an endolith here and Wikipedia has, of course, more information.
Yup, one thing the summary forgets is that those critters thrive and reproduce only when the temperature gets warm enough, which happens for about 2 months a years in Antarctica, while it never happens on Mars. Yes, you can have small springs with running water in Antarctica. I am not a microbiologist but I've spent 3 years in Antarctica.
I got a Mac OS 10.0 couple years back. My first reaction was: how do I disable all that bouncing dancing colorful crap, which took me a while to figure out since I hadn't used a Mac for the past 5 years. When I figured there was no way to disable the horrible anti-aliased fonts I SWITCHED to an OS that has sharp letters, not something blurry that makes my eyes water. Case in point: when you put eye candy in your OS, make it easy for people to disable. In WinXP you have to download TweakUI or somesuch to get rid of all the animations. I don't want to have to pursue bouncing icons so I can click them: it's annoying and distracting if I want to be doing something else.
I hate commercials so much I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. This being saud, I thought the main way to detect commercial was a special signal as part of the final and/or initial lines of the frame, those that don't display on the screen and that are used for various purposes (subtitle for the deaf, show start and stop info, etc). I read somewhere that this signal was used by substations to sometimes broadcast localized commercials instead of the default ones. Of course that's all just hearsay.
Another method I may suggest, is to simply look at the volume level. In the country I currently live in, the volume of commercials is heaps louders than the show you are watching, leading for a jump on the remote each time a commercial break comes up. It may be worth adding to the list in case a heuristic is needed.
Thanks Joto. THere were several techniques I had never heard of. I'll be doing do bare metal stuff soon again in my new job, after 6 years doing sysadmin and data analysis stuff.
I've lived most of my life in foreign countries: Italy, the US, Alaska (is it the same than the US ? I don't think so), France, Antarctica and some others. Between the US and Europe the differences are not that big, cultural mostly. What I personally find truly annoying are the administrative differences. Before the onslaugh of terror bullshit the US had great and quick administration, at the end of my 1st day I would already have most of my paperwork in order (bank account, SSN, driver's licence, bought car, car insurrance). On the other hand it's almost impossible for a foreigner to open a bank account in France or Italy (it takes huge pressure from your company).
And I know why guns are illegal in Italy, it's to make sure you don't shoot the clerks from pure rage after being turned around for the 7th time for a missing comma in the certificate of proper translation to the official translation of the certified copy of your grand mother's birth certificate. Each time after fighting to stay in line for 4 hours. Or somesuch.
I also wonder if you could push this concept to other forms of litterature. Imagine if you could modify anything in the Lord of the Ring or Shakespear's plays, could anything better come out ? I doubt it but it would sure provide for some interesting social experiment. Of course, make sure the original version is just a click away (or less !).
What if the drive has a hiccup for some reason ? Say a sector or even a single byte gets written wrong for some reason (power loss, OS reboot, falling off the lap...). From what I understand of encrypted discs, you loose the whole thing and you cannot build redundancies which would weaken the encryption. How is this issue addressed ?
Well, you can do that through one-way hashes, but there's no technical way around having someone read "51% go to A" as "51% go to B" on the final machine result. A supreme court for instance.
I have a general question relating to this. How can you compile a program that stays compatible with all those kinds of processor 'options' ? It's been a while since I last did some compiler work (okay, 15 years), but how can you have a program that uses FPU instructions if there's an FPU coprocessor or on-die available and and still work if not, and so on for GPU, DSP, SIMD, etc... Do you have tests and branches each time one of those instructions should be used that uses a library if not available ? In that case it gives a lot of sense to use a distro like Gentoo to compile specifically for your processor (saves a lot of test/branches during program execution and a lot of space in the executable). Or I'm missing something.
It would be a hash, so you cannot return to the voter or who the vote was for from it. The only information you get from it, in association with an external verification (website) is that it's an effectively counted vote.
I would add one thing: issue the voter with a hash of his vote on a little strip of paper. A unique number that he can then verify on a government web site that says: yes, this number has voted, and the vote has been considered. Just make sure you can't go back from the hash to the voter's name or vote. One more way to make sure that the vote doesn't 'disapear' between voting and counting machine.
Yup, and there's the related problem of outliers: when you order something out of your ordinary habits. Example, I ordered a bunch of baby books as a gift for some friends on amazon.com. And although I have zilch interest in the little critters, Amazon now keeps recommanding whole ranges of baby stuff.
I've been interested in parallel languages for a while (think Ada) and I think they'll become more important in the future with all those multicores, without having to resort to dirty hacks like MPI or OpenMP. But one thing about Erlang is that the threads run inside the compiled program, without the OS knowing about them, just like Java green threads. When I was working on a cluster a couple years back, Java was a no-no as the whole mess of processes would run on a single processor and never split or migrate. Has this improved since and how is it addressed in Erlang ?
Yeah, tell me something I don't know. When I left for a winter in Antarctica, I configured an old headless PC into a gentoo server I left at home with the instruction to my wife: don't touch it! It handled email, ssh and image sales. When I got back, it had an incredible 400 days of uptime, but after I emerged it, I basically had to stop using it: there where thousands of problems, breakages and nasties which were obviously impossible to clean up. It served well, RIP.
I should have added this: at night wear a reflective jacket of the kind they wear in construction, those are highly visible. They can be found in professional clothing stores. Even blinking LEDs are not that visible at night when you are driving in a car, particularly in a city where you have so much parasite light (neon advertisement) and reflections.
just like it will be legal for the Casino to shoot you in the knees... Spot on the subject, every geek should read the Eudaemonic Pie about besting the Las Vegas roulettes.