Presumably you can ignore all offensive posts, I can too. Presumably everyone with enough bbs boards/fido/usenet/internet boards experience can along with some few people who has an insight to abuser dynamics without digital discussion platform experience. But not all users belong to these groups, we -if you won't be offended by the pronoun- aren't even the majority. And a few users respond to abuse, others rookies will follow. So your scheme won't work. They WILL get reaction, they WON'T be ignored unless you are running a board for the "elite."
a) An account is activated after 16 hours of application
b) In order to post, one must subscribe
c) All subscribers must supply a valid e-mail address, no other information is collected
d) All subscribers must have a unique e-mail address
e) In case of offensive/inappropriate posts, one might be banned from posting. The ban might be timed or permenant
f) An IP can apply for multiple accounts only if the IP can not be proved to belong to same person
These rules can keep abusers away without deleting or editing posts. Since you do not delete/edit any post in any case, you probably won't be responsible for their content. Obvious drawback of this scheme is a abuser might accumulate a set of accounts, in case one of the accounts is banned. If you can replace rules d & f with better rules that can be more strongly linked to identity, the system would work better. It would not be bulletproof in any case, but I doubt any other mechanism can.
Warp's free trial versions had a time limited kernel related file (I don't remember what it was), which had a non-time limited version in the bootable install medium (floppies or the bootable cd.) You just had to copy it on top of installed one and that could be done a single drag of mouse too.
Yesterday I got a message from an Saudi man, Osama.For obvious reasons I can't reveal the e-mail, or any other information for that matter, so don't bother me, okay? He said under Taliban ruling, he was as unhappy as the next guy. Now he dug his eniac out of the bunker he had hid it, and can freely post to internet to share his opinions with us. He promises that, had he known about how internet advanced, he would have never done what he did. Now he can discuss with us instead of suicidal terrorist attacks.
I don't see why solar power crept into this discussion but if you want to check how much power a solar panel can deliver, you really don't have to look at car races and those stuff. Just check the number, how much solar heat/unit area reaches higher protions of the earth, how much wing area can a passanger plane possibly have, how much of light on these wings can be actually converted to electricity and how much electric energy does a passanger plane require? You'll see more than two orders of magnitude difference. Solar power is not practical for self powered vehicles operating on earth, and no breakthru will change it. Thermodynamics puts an upper limit on conversion effciency, the sun-earth system puts an upper limit to amount of sunlight incidence you can expect; you can't change these with advanced technology. You can sure design a solar powered plane (and someone actually did) but it would have hard time keeping itself flying in the middle of a summer day, without 100s of passangers and their luggage. Most people seem to think that if you use solar energy to charge batteries, or break water, then use that for powering something, it is a solar powered thing. It is not, just like my computer is not a hydroelectric powered computer. So I don't deny the possibility that solar power may be utilized in some way, don't get me wrong.
We do not live in a universe that has infinite number of anything, universe may be unbounded or bounded, but that is irrelevant. Everything in this universe has a finite, although possibly variable, number.
That should not stop us from exploring though. The reasons that we are not going to mars are financial reasons, lack of comittment and the fact that our space technology is so primitive that it is stupidly expensive. An interstellar voyage is perhaps an impossibility unless relativity is proven to be wrong, or people start to think in terms of millions of years as the unit of personal achivement times (I wish I attended english classes more often, I hope you can decrypt the sentence preceeding this one.)
Sodium is higly reactive, so elemental sodium in an atmosphere is out of question unless whole planet is made of sodium, which is impossible too. So they must have found sodium ions.
Clockless chips benefit from better transistor technology just like clocked designs, in the same way and by the same amount. So what makes you think that faster transistors give a comparative advantage to clocked chips?
"I don't either, actually. But it's still a better feeling to be the only kid on the block with a gun. It's nice to not worry. I'd rather see no one have nukes than see everyone have them."
"Nobody has nukes" is an unstable condition, eventually somebody will make one. It is also an impossible condition, as somebody already made a lot of them. "Somebody has nukes" is stable but undesirable condition, as one of those countries might use them against others (USA and Russia already agreed on using tactical nukes with reservations) which is one of the worst crimes that a country can (and one actually did) commit. "Everybody have nukes, and plenty of them" is a much better case, as long as every country in possesion of them is sane enough not to use them. I belive every country, including Iraq, Afghanistan and other "terrorist states", qualifies as sane in this respect. Iraq did not attempt to attack USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia or Turkey by chemical or biological means during gulf crisis remember? That is not because they were incapable to do so, nor because they wouldn't like the immediate results; rather it was because in middle term their country would be totally destroyed. The same goes with nukes too.
I'm also a chemical engineer and now I suspect if we che people are taking our job too seriously; because I agree with every word you said.If I produced sealants the way software people code their apps, my company would soon be out of job. Yet, noone *really* cares about crapware, sure, they whine all the time but it does not deter them from using it (heck, I'm using mozilla right now and what do I care?) How much I wish I could produce 2c sealant that would have a pot life between a minute and a week and get away with that *sigh*
You get 50% error only if you use the usual binary notation for storing that byte, there are many different encodings which wouldn't be that much prone to a single digit change. Consider 0=00,1=01,2=11 and pattern 10 is forbidden, now you can store only 0.866 bits of information in a real bit but a) you catch every 1/3rd of errors without recheching b) every error increments or decrements a number by only one. A similar thing can be done with 8bits, instead of 2 bits, as well; and would be more efficient in terms of bit content. "Digital" does not mean exponantial binary notation, it has to do with strictly two possible states for a unit information store.
There are ways around accuracy limit, but if these can be scaled to a reasonable size, it wouldn't matter that much anyway. In most applications you are not looking to "42" kind of answer, which has to be a single number and has to be the correct one. While modelling something like heat distribution on a tire or pressure distribution on space shuttle nose, 0.2% errors would pose no problem. What if some temperature estimation is off by 0.2%? Our formulas' inaccuracy is probably an order of magnitude larger.
...the errors are not systematic. Do the calculation two times and compare and your unidentified errors drops 0.00004th of the whole (provided comparison procedure is not flawed), do it three times and it drops to 0.0000008 and so on. Once possible errors are identified, redoing them, say, ten more times to make sure is not difficult (as you only would have n*0.002 of them, n being the repetition count.) I'm sure one can devise a better system for error correction, but even this crude one would perform satisfatorily.
No, I don't think the story is real either
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But many of you seem to be missing a point. Taliban did not ban internet or any other tech toys at first, they did this banning thingies after they controlled much of the afganistan and only gradually after that. IIRC internet was one of the last things on the ban list (presumably it was not very accessible anyway)
Organisation of containers are not what organisation of data is. Think of it this way, you can store all objects derived from FooObject if you have a node structure FooObject *Item, yet nodes themselves could be stored in a linked list (compare with a simple db table), or in a graph (cw a relational database with many to many relationships) or in a tree (cw a hierarchical database.) The difference between relational and object oriented databases are basicaly what type of things they can store. OO ones can store whole objects, while relational ones store fields in tables. Those fields are usually simple data types. I can't think of a reason that an OO database can not also a be hierarchical database, yet that does not have to be the case either.
I now wish I had waited for your reply, instead I did what AC said, tar everything, mkfs and untar. For some unclear reason, lilo refused to understand that I was trying to install it on/dev/hda5 (/) instead of/dev/hda1 (backup.) But your suggestion does not seem to be working around this problem either, how could I move boot stuff to ext3 and destroy reiserfs after transition?
On my new machine I installed linux as my primary os, expecting soon get tired of it (again) and reconfigure a dual boot system windows as my primary OS. While installing linux, I didn't think much(since I would soon be destroying the partition anyway) and installed the system on reiserfs. To my surprise that didn't happen and unreliability of reiserfs started to bother me more and more. And with this article I'm convinced that ext3 is what I want. Now, how do I convert from ReiserFS to ext3? I have plent of empty space on a soon to be destroyed ntfs partition and a cd writer, so backing up existing data is no problem, but simply copying back files will not do the trick, right?
My first guess was similar too but if that were the case mars society would sure have illimunated us. Anyway, the "longer travel time=more life support =heavier rocket=more fuel=heavier rocket=more fuel=..." equation is sobering. If we are talking about human missions, mars is bound to be more expensive. Difference in cost of lifting people out of earth together with their stuff would dwarf any future savings. Colonies may be different matter; so much stuff have to be transported to build a colony that supplies for human life support during travel may be a small fraction of the whole.
Mars society says going to mars is cheaper because of aerobraking avaliability. So you were right after all.
My name is already buried in martian soil on half burned cd, I wouldn't mind sharing the same fate because of a failed aerobraking attempt, as long as probabilty of success was higher than...umm..zero.
That is news to me too, but when you look from the sun central perpective it may be possible. You have to escape from earth's gravity in any case, so you can forget about that when comparing. Escaping earth-moon gravity well is almost equal to escaping from earth's gravity (when you depart from earth, you already have sufficient speed escape the system and quite a bit of distance from moon anyway), so you can forget about that too. Then going to moon means slowing down for moon capture while going to mars means speeding up to raise orbit and catch mars. If the speed difference between earth and mars is little enough, this may take less fuel. You can also do some fuel saving by using lagrange points, or use venus slingshot but neither would be feasible for a manned mission because of prolonged misson times. In any case I'm sure somebody did work out the numbers, and I'll dig them in the evening to find out for sure.
you should have asked that to segfault. They did a rather interesting research on the topic of bus accidents and linus (segfault gives 500 right now, so I can't dig it.) I'm sure they have the expertise to extend the research to include that question too.
Moon has nothing of economic value except for He3 and Thorium reserves. Everything else is more readily accessible on earth. Water is easy to recyle and produce in little quantities and if small quantities are not enough it is next to impossible to transport large water supplies from anywhere, including the moon, anyway. Even when you have to transport huge quantities, the best source for water are comets, not moon. Mars has high water ice reserves in one of its polar regions too (I guess the southern one was rich) and mars is suited to human colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance. Don't be so romantic about the moon, mars is a much nicer place. And she looks better too:)
Yeah,there are also huge oxygen reserves under Mars by which you can conveniently burn your fossil fuel. I also heard there are massive clue wells under frozen plains of charon. They are very costly to access and carry but it might be feasible to transport those resources to earth because of high demand.
I now wonder what was wrong with my dx2/66 vesa box, since os/2 2.1 didn't think mine was too fast and installed itself (except the soundcard drivers.) OS/2 Warp was much better and came more than a year earlier than W95, Merlin was very good too, except for its lack of native apps. I never installed pre 2.1 versions and what I installed simply rocked. OS/2 was a huge technical success, and that it didn't turn out to be a financial success still surprises me. Your problem must be one of the very few glitches like my soundcard: it didn't quite work until Merlin. Don't write off OS/2 for a single problem you encountered when it was still in its first protected mode incernation.
It could have been that dos would stay for gaming, ad windows 95 would do the rest. The reason that it did not happen was Directx. It is one of the few things MS did right. GDI sucked really hard, it was impossible to write games with it. Once windows 95 had a dos speed sound and graphics api, and support for it were better thru win drivers instead of custom drivers, windows gaming caught on. Correct, that could not have happened without a large user base, but user base is not the only variable, and it is not the only varible linux is lacking.
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Presumably you can ignore all offensive posts, I can too. Presumably everyone with enough bbs boards/fido/usenet/internet boards experience can along with some few people who has an insight to abuser dynamics without digital discussion platform experience. But not all users belong to these groups, we -if you won't be offended by the pronoun- aren't even the majority. And a few users respond to abuse, others rookies will follow. So your scheme won't work. They WILL get reaction, they WON'T be ignored unless you are running a board for the "elite."
a) An account is activated after 16 hours of application
b) In order to post, one must subscribe
c) All subscribers must supply a valid e-mail address, no other information is collected
d) All subscribers must have a unique e-mail address
e) In case of offensive/inappropriate posts, one might be banned from posting. The ban might be timed or permenant
f) An IP can apply for multiple accounts only if the IP can not be proved to belong to same person
These rules can keep abusers away without deleting or editing posts. Since you do not delete/edit any post in any case, you probably won't be responsible for their content. Obvious drawback of this scheme is a abuser might accumulate a set of accounts, in case one of the accounts is banned. If you can replace rules d & f with better rules that can be more strongly linked to identity, the system would work better. It would not be bulletproof in any case, but I doubt any other mechanism can.
Warp's free trial versions had a time limited kernel related file (I don't remember what it was), which had a non-time limited version in the bootable install medium (floppies or the bootable cd.) You just had to copy it on top of installed one and that could be done a single drag of mouse too.
Yesterday I got a message from an Saudi man, Osama.For obvious reasons I can't reveal the e-mail, or any other information for that matter, so don't bother me, okay? He said under Taliban ruling, he was as unhappy as the next guy. Now he dug his eniac out of the bunker he had hid it, and can freely post to internet to share his opinions with us. He promises that, had he known about how internet advanced, he would have never done what he did. Now he can discuss with us instead of suicidal terrorist attacks.
I don't see why solar power crept into this discussion but if you want to check how much power a solar panel can deliver, you really don't have to look at car races and those stuff. Just check the number, how much solar heat/unit area reaches higher protions of the earth, how much wing area can a passanger plane possibly have, how much of light on these wings can be actually converted to electricity and how much electric energy does a passanger plane require? You'll see more than two orders of magnitude difference. Solar power is not practical for self powered vehicles operating on earth, and no breakthru will change it. Thermodynamics puts an upper limit on conversion effciency, the sun-earth system puts an upper limit to amount of sunlight incidence you can expect; you can't change these with advanced technology. You can sure design a solar powered plane (and someone actually did) but it would have hard time keeping itself flying in the middle of a summer day, without 100s of passangers and their luggage. Most people seem to think that if you use solar energy to charge batteries, or break water, then use that for powering something, it is a solar powered thing. It is not, just like my computer is not a hydroelectric powered computer. So I don't deny the possibility that solar power may be utilized in some way, don't get me wrong.
That should not stop us from exploring though. The reasons that we are not going to mars are financial reasons, lack of comittment and the fact that our space technology is so primitive that it is stupidly expensive. An interstellar voyage is perhaps an impossibility unless relativity is proven to be wrong, or people start to think in terms of millions of years as the unit of personal achivement times (I wish I attended english classes more often, I hope you can decrypt the sentence preceeding this one.)
Sodium is higly reactive, so elemental sodium in an atmosphere is out of question unless whole planet is made of sodium, which is impossible too. So they must have found sodium ions.
Clockless chips benefit from better transistor technology just like clocked designs, in the same way and by the same amount. So what makes you think that faster transistors give a comparative advantage to clocked chips?
"Nobody has nukes" is an unstable condition, eventually somebody will make one. It is also an impossible condition, as somebody already made a lot of them. "Somebody has nukes" is stable but undesirable condition, as one of those countries might use them against others (USA and Russia already agreed on using tactical nukes with reservations) which is one of the worst crimes that a country can (and one actually did) commit. "Everybody have nukes, and plenty of them" is a much better case, as long as every country in possesion of them is sane enough not to use them. I belive every country, including Iraq, Afghanistan and other "terrorist states", qualifies as sane in this respect. Iraq did not attempt to attack USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia or Turkey by chemical or biological means during gulf crisis remember? That is not because they were incapable to do so, nor because they wouldn't like the immediate results; rather it was because in middle term their country would be totally destroyed. The same goes with nukes too.
I'm also a chemical engineer and now I suspect if we che people are taking our job too seriously; because I agree with every word you said.If I produced sealants the way software people code their apps, my company would soon be out of job. Yet, noone *really* cares about crapware, sure, they whine all the time but it does not deter them from using it (heck, I'm using mozilla right now and what do I care?) How much I wish I could produce 2c sealant that would have a pot life between a minute and a week and get away with that *sigh*
You get 50% error only if you use the usual binary notation for storing that byte, there are many different encodings which wouldn't be that much prone to a single digit change. Consider 0=00,1=01,2=11 and pattern 10 is forbidden, now you can store only 0.866 bits of information in a real bit but a) you catch every 1/3rd of errors without recheching b) every error increments or decrements a number by only one. A similar thing can be done with 8bits, instead of 2 bits, as well; and would be more efficient in terms of bit content. "Digital" does not mean exponantial binary notation, it has to do with strictly two possible states for a unit information store.
There are ways around accuracy limit, but if these can be scaled to a reasonable size, it wouldn't matter that much anyway. In most applications you are not looking to "42" kind of answer, which has to be a single number and has to be the correct one. While modelling something like heat distribution on a tire or pressure distribution on space shuttle nose, 0.2% errors would pose no problem. What if some temperature estimation is off by 0.2%? Our formulas' inaccuracy is probably an order of magnitude larger.
...the errors are not systematic. Do the calculation two times and compare and your unidentified errors drops 0.00004th of the whole (provided comparison procedure is not flawed), do it three times and it drops to 0.0000008 and so on. Once possible errors are identified, redoing them, say, ten more times to make sure is not difficult (as you only would have n*0.002 of them, n being the repetition count.) I'm sure one can devise a better system for error correction, but even this crude one would perform satisfatorily.
But many of you seem to be missing a point. Taliban did not ban internet or any other tech toys at first, they did this banning thingies after they controlled much of the afganistan and only gradually after that. IIRC internet was one of the last things on the ban list (presumably it was not very accessible anyway)
Organisation of containers are not what organisation of data is. Think of it this way, you can store all objects derived from FooObject if you have a node structure FooObject *Item, yet nodes themselves could be stored in a linked list (compare with a simple db table), or in a graph (cw a relational database with many to many relationships) or in a tree (cw a hierarchical database.) The difference between relational and object oriented databases are basicaly what type of things they can store. OO ones can store whole objects, while relational ones store fields in tables. Those fields are usually simple data types. I can't think of a reason that an OO database can not also a be hierarchical database, yet that does not have to be the case either.
I now wish I had waited for your reply, instead I did what AC said, tar everything, mkfs and untar. For some unclear reason, lilo refused to understand that I was trying to install it on /dev/hda5 (/) instead of /dev/hda1 (backup.) But your suggestion does not seem to be working around this problem either, how could I move boot stuff to ext3 and destroy reiserfs after transition?
On my new machine I installed linux as my primary os, expecting soon get tired of it (again) and reconfigure a dual boot system windows as my primary OS. While installing linux, I didn't think much(since I would soon be destroying the partition anyway) and installed the system on reiserfs. To my surprise that didn't happen and unreliability of reiserfs started to bother me more and more. And with this article I'm convinced that ext3 is what I want. Now, how do I convert from ReiserFS to ext3? I have plent of empty space on a soon to be destroyed ntfs partition and a cd writer, so backing up existing data is no problem, but simply copying back files will not do the trick, right?
My first guess was similar too but if that were the case mars society would sure have illimunated us. Anyway, the "longer travel time=more life support =heavier rocket=more fuel=heavier rocket=more fuel=..." equation is sobering. If we are talking about human missions, mars is bound to be more expensive. Difference in cost of lifting people out of earth together with their stuff would dwarf any future savings. Colonies may be different matter; so much stuff have to be transported to build a colony that supplies for human life support during travel may be a small fraction of the whole.
My name is already buried in martian soil on half burned cd, I wouldn't mind sharing the same fate because of a failed aerobraking attempt, as long as probabilty of success was higher than...umm..zero.
That is news to me too, but when you look from the sun central perpective it may be possible. You have to escape from earth's gravity in any case, so you can forget about that when comparing. Escaping earth-moon gravity well is almost equal to escaping from earth's gravity (when you depart from earth, you already have sufficient speed escape the system and quite a bit of distance from moon anyway), so you can forget about that too. Then going to moon means slowing down for moon capture while going to mars means speeding up to raise orbit and catch mars. If the speed difference between earth and mars is little enough, this may take less fuel. You can also do some fuel saving by using lagrange points, or use venus slingshot but neither would be feasible for a manned mission because of prolonged misson times. In any case I'm sure somebody did work out the numbers, and I'll dig them in the evening to find out for sure.
you should have asked that to segfault. They did a rather interesting research on the topic of bus accidents and linus (segfault gives 500 right now, so I can't dig it.) I'm sure they have the expertise to extend the research to include that question too.
Moon has nothing of economic value except for He3 and Thorium reserves. Everything else is more readily accessible on earth. Water is easy to recyle and produce in little quantities and if small quantities are not enough it is next to impossible to transport large water supplies from anywhere, including the moon, anyway. Even when you have to transport huge quantities, the best source for water are comets, not moon. Mars has high water ice reserves in one of its polar regions too (I guess the southern one was rich) and mars is suited to human colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance. Don't be so romantic about the moon, mars is a much nicer place. And she looks better too :)
Yeah,there are also huge oxygen reserves under Mars by which you can conveniently burn your fossil fuel. I also heard there are massive clue wells under frozen plains of charon. They are very costly to access and carry but it might be feasible to transport those resources to earth because of high demand.
I now wonder what was wrong with my dx2/66 vesa box, since os/2 2.1 didn't think mine was too fast and installed itself (except the soundcard drivers.) OS/2 Warp was much better and came more than a year earlier than W95, Merlin was very good too, except for its lack of native apps. I never installed pre 2.1 versions and what I installed simply rocked. OS/2 was a huge technical success, and that it didn't turn out to be a financial success still surprises me. Your problem must be one of the very few glitches like my soundcard: it didn't quite work until Merlin. Don't write off OS/2 for a single problem you encountered when it was still in its first protected mode incernation.
It could have been that dos would stay for gaming, ad windows 95 would do the rest. The reason that it did not happen was Directx. It is one of the few things MS did right. GDI sucked really hard, it was impossible to write games with it. Once windows 95 had a dos speed sound and graphics api, and support for it were better thru win drivers instead of custom drivers, windows gaming caught on. Correct, that could not have happened without a large user base, but user base is not the only variable, and it is not the only varible linux is lacking.