Chain rule I can see. Poisson brackets are not exactly common in the IT/CS crowd that tends to be drawn to/.
As far as the fantasy book thing, did you bother to RTFA? This is a physics book, it has about as much to do with fantasy as Blazing Saddles has to do with Sci-Fi.
The problem is, most polarizing interests aren't geographical
I disagree. Ever been to a black neighborhood in a major city? Or maybe to a certain part of midtown Atlanta dubbed the "gayborhood"? Most middle classed people live in the subburbs, not the ghetto. The list goes on and on. I am first to admit the electoral college may not be the best way to handle things, but I do think there are advantages to the geographical approach, basically FORCING campaigns to focus attention on more regions and the various people who inhabit those regions.
The minority viewpoint, in many cases, is in the minority for a reason.
There's a difference between being a minority viewpoint, and being a minority. The things you listed are things that come from personality quirks. Do you honestly think all people in a big farm community would think we should be protected from UFO's (ok, maybe not the best example depending how redneck they are), or that all people in the ghetto would want free chocolate cake for everyone named Bob? The advantage of a geographical approach is indeed the fact that it allows you to capture minority views of import, such as public works improvements, education, poverty, all that good stuff, while still not focusing on such a small group that it gives undue weight to really crazy ideals.
arbitrarily giving extra weight to the minorirty views, whether proven or not, is foolish.
Again, I disagree. A full-on mob mentality is generally going to stomp on the minorities for its own benefit unless it's forced head-on to deal with their concerns. I contend that encouraging a system where special consideration is NOT given to minority rights is foolish.
Large expanses... of land, not people. Why should someone from the farms have more voting power than someone from the city?
Why should people from the city be the only ones who are campaigned to or whose interests matter? People are as a rule selfish and only look out for their own good. People in the city are not going to give two shits about anything that they don't see a direct benefit from. The minority, in a sense, DOES need more power per person, to make that group have a chance of being heard at all. Electoral votes are still based on population, so it's not like a thousand farmers are getting the same votes as a million city dwellers, but at least there's actually a chance they might be able to influence things.
Also, it's not like the interests of the two demographics are mutually opposed. People in the city need to eat, you know.
And you honestly expect Joe Average Voter to look at a campaign ad and say "hey this guy is going to put in place a program to help farmers educate their children, that will definitely help me eat better"? Give me a break. Farmers are people too, they don't just exist to provide a service to you.
One thing people seem to forget when they blast the electoral college is how population is distributed in this country. A little googling showed that as of a few years ago, in "developed nations" on average 76+% of the population resided in "urban" areas. Ask yourself, if our presidential elections were based solely on number of votes, what happens when someone campaigns solely for the needs of the urban population and utterly neglects the rural? My guess is, unless the other candidate does the same, he will be pretty much guaranteed a victory. Think about that for a second. If a massive majority of your population fits a certain demographic, your best bet is to appeal solely to that majority. The electoral college, while IMHO fairly broken, does at least guarantee that the votes of large expanses of farm country might have a chance of making a difference. The electoral college helps ensure majority rule with some consideration for minority rights. I don't know that it's the best solution, but I definitely don't believe a flat out majority is the way to go.
Yeah as soon as I read your reply I remembered that. It's been a couple years since I've taken a nuclear physics course, and a lot fresher in my mind is the way they treated EVERYTHING as hazardous when I was at PPPL. Thanks for clarifying.
But if it were fusion that were doing it, the researchers would be dead from radiation poisoning.
What is with this idiotic groupthink that if its nuclear it must be radioactive? Not everything involving a nucleus is radioactive, and not everything radioactive causes cancer and kills people. For example, at princeton plasma physics labs, they deal a lot with fusion experiments, and there is radiation present... FROM THE TRITIUM AND DEUTERIUM THAT THEY STARTED WITH. The beginning materials in this case are radioactive. It's all this kneejerking nonsense about radiation that makes people pissy every time you try to discuss fusion research with a layman.
And for the record, until I see better results otherwise, I still think cold fusion is horseshit
I've seen that thing before, and it is hardly a PDA. Windows XP and a gigahertz processor? Looks a bit big to be pocketable too. I'd much prefer an OS actually tailored for use on a small screen with a stylus, like palm or ce, or as someone else mentioned, one of the custom mobile linux distros.
The main difference here, though, is the PDA touch screen/stylus input method. You can store a contact list on an ipod, but I'd imagine it's a bitch to enter a new contact, if it's even possible.
Plus "normal PDA stuff" is far from what a CE machine does these days. If all you want is a contact list and calendar, you can buy a 15 dollar royal deal from any office store. A modern PDA, whether palm or ms, supports a lot of advanced software.
Now what I'd LOVE to see happen is... M$ introduces new media player/pocket pc with big hard drive. Apple, seeing ipod sales dwindle, adds a touch screen and more PDA functionality to the ipod. The Newton was way before its time both in terms of market and available technology. I'd love to see the ipod's popularity leveraged to really bring on the golden age of the PDA.
The version of internet explorer bundled with pocket pc supports basically nothing in the way of scripting, so it wouldn't be as easy to get spyware installed. There's no "would you like to install this magic cursor plugin" popup, and all in all a very limited system to exploit. Also, a big reason why there's so much spyware and other garbage out there is the number of people on always-connected broadband without firewalls. Unless wireless internet gets a lot cheaper and a lot more common, there's much less opportunity for a pda to get infected. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's going to be much less common than you make it sound.
I've seen windows CE (later called Pocket PC, later called Windows Mobile) described as a "slimmed down version of windows" on many occasions. Could it be possible that their attempt at an ipod killer will be a "lookie maw it's a music player that also does all this cool PDA stuff too" type of device. As somewhat of a PDA nerd, I can tell you that lots of PDA people have been jonesing for a PDA with a massive built-in hard drive, ala ipod. My ipaq 2210 plays MP3s and even some movie files quite well, and if flash storage wasn't so damn expensive, I would most certainly use it as an ipod replacement, and it's not even designed for it. Make a PDA with controls specifically intended for media playback, a slick looking form factor, and a massive hard drive, and I bet you could take a significant chunk out of the ipod sales.
1.) Make joke about how microsoft won't make any money from this, since Apple makes all its money on the ipod 2.) Get moderated as "redundant" 3.) ??????? 4.) PROFIT!
All you motherfucks are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball lickers. As soon as we get to hollywood and find those miramax fucks who's makin that movie, we're gonna make them eat our shit, then shit out our shit and eat their shit that's made up of our shit that we made them eat. And then all yous fucks are next.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
Odds of someone who places one of these bets....
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Tools exist for a purpose, and people too lazy/prejudiced/"good" to use them should shut up, imho;)
Even if those tools are poorly implemented, broken, full of security holes, or any of ten other negative things that can be said about many microsoft API's? (or indeed many non-MS API's as well - I'm not a complete zealout here) My point is, just because something is there already doesnt mean it's the best way to do it.
Plenty of ways. As others have mentioned, fill a disk or use up all the system resources if you just want to hose the system. Also, I've almost never run into a system that had EVERY possible user-accesible root exploit blocked.
As a simple example, I remember at one college I was attending, the graduate student/administrator was talking about how he thought red hat's default install was secure. I'm far from a script kiddie, and in fact haven't used any of that childish nonsense since I was, in fact, a kid, but I felt it neccesary to illustrate to the administrators and professors who believed their system was secure how foolish they were being. In literally five minutes and three attempts, at a commonly-known security bulletain website, I was not only able to find an exploit for which the system was vulnerable, but to use the example code given on the page to root the system. When the admin saw the boxes the next day, the login screen's graphic had somehow managed to have been changed to "All your Base are belong to us"
Also please note that I sent him an email explaining the exploit, linking the page which described said exploit, and giving a few other links to tools to help him better secure the system. I'm not a complete dick.
My point: Any system that hasn't been updated and secured ACTIVELY and REGULARLY is going to have exploits that allow a non-priveledged user to obtain root.
A very very very long time. Long enough that I waited a month before deciding to install X because I knew my dialup provider was going to crap out while downloading the packages.
Funny, zone alarm doesn't prompt me every single time there's network traffic, but it sure warns me when a program I haven't authorized for network access tries.
I run Gentoo both at work and on my xbox, did my first Debian install via ftp over a 14.4 modem years ago. I know linux solves the spyware issue (for now) but I am not a zealot and run several different OSes and like to find the best way to utilize each.
I'm not talking about programs screwing up windows so much as installers coming with a bunch of extra crap. For example, when kazaa first came out, not many people knew it installed gator. If you had a progrm that pops up a big ugly window saying "foo.exe is trying to write to c:\program files\gator\" you would become suspicious much more quickly. Restricting access to WINDIR wouldn't help because if I'm running an installer, it would need access to program files, and hence could install any other useless crap it wants.
That's not a firewall either - it's a sandbox (and not new, either)
That's why I put the quotes around the word firewall, and I would have never thought to google the term sandbox to find such a product. Do you have any suggestions for good sandboxes, now that I know what it's called?
I submitted this as an ask slashdot and was promptly rejected, so I'm going to put this here as a slightly on-topic post.
What I want to see is a software hard drive "firewall." If you're not sure what I mean, think of what a product like zone alarm does when spyware.exe tries to access the internet on your pc. It pops up a window saying "do you want to allow this program..." Now, why can't we have the same thing for hard drive access? So, I download fungame.exe, and when I go to run it, my "firewall" tells me fungame.exe is trying to write to fifteen different directories to install different spyware products. It could only give a popup on the first time a program tries to write to a given directory, and have an option to not show any new notices for this program, to limit the annoyance factor. I think this would be a great tool to help lessen spyware/trojan problems. If the program interacted with spybot or a similar product, it could even automatically prevent writing of files that are known to be adware. Is there anything like this out there? Anyone who would be willing to help make it?
Yes, and it is easier to move a control surface that isn't under 3 tons of metal. If you were to use a stick with a car, you'd have to rotate the tires working against the weight of the car, friction, etc... With a plane you are really only moving control surfaces in the air (with air resistance at speed, but still...)
EXACTLY! There's a question of leverage involved here. A wheel takes two or three rotations to get a full range of motion out of those tires, that means theres some serious gearing going on. A joystick would require massive amounts of force to make the tires turn, unless you were using a very long joystick which moved quite a bit of distance.
Slashdot Mirror
Chain rule I can see. Poisson brackets are not exactly common in the IT/CS crowd that tends to be drawn to /.
As far as the fantasy book thing, did you bother to RTFA? This is a physics book, it has about as much to do with fantasy as Blazing Saddles has to do with Sci-Fi.
The problem is, most polarizing interests aren't geographical
I disagree. Ever been to a black neighborhood in a major city? Or maybe to a certain part of midtown Atlanta dubbed the "gayborhood"? Most middle classed people live in the subburbs, not the ghetto. The list goes on and on. I am first to admit the electoral college may not be the best way to handle things, but I do think there are advantages to the geographical approach, basically FORCING campaigns to focus attention on more regions and the various people who inhabit those regions.
The minority viewpoint, in many cases, is in the minority for a reason.
There's a difference between being a minority viewpoint, and being a minority. The things you listed are things that come from personality quirks. Do you honestly think all people in a big farm community would think we should be protected from UFO's (ok, maybe not the best example depending how redneck they are), or that all people in the ghetto would want free chocolate cake for everyone named Bob? The advantage of a geographical approach is indeed the fact that it allows you to capture minority views of import, such as public works improvements, education, poverty, all that good stuff, while still not focusing on such a small group that it gives undue weight to really crazy ideals.
arbitrarily giving extra weight to the minorirty views, whether proven or not, is foolish.
Again, I disagree. A full-on mob mentality is generally going to stomp on the minorities for its own benefit unless it's forced head-on to deal with their concerns. I contend that encouraging a system where special consideration is NOT given to minority rights is foolish.
Large expanses... of land, not people. Why should someone from the farms have more voting power than someone from the city?
Why should people from the city be the only ones who are campaigned to or whose interests matter? People are as a rule selfish and only look out for their own good. People in the city are not going to give two shits about anything that they don't see a direct benefit from. The minority, in a sense, DOES need more power per person, to make that group have a chance of being heard at all. Electoral votes are still based on population, so it's not like a thousand farmers are getting the same votes as a million city dwellers, but at least there's actually a chance they might be able to influence things.
Also, it's not like the interests of the two demographics are mutually opposed. People in the city need to eat, you know.
And you honestly expect Joe Average Voter to look at a campaign ad and say "hey this guy is going to put in place a program to help farmers educate their children, that will definitely help me eat better"? Give me a break. Farmers are people too, they don't just exist to provide a service to you.
One thing people seem to forget when they blast the electoral college is how population is distributed in this country. A little googling showed that as of a few years ago, in "developed nations" on average 76+% of the population resided in "urban" areas. Ask yourself, if our presidential elections were based solely on number of votes, what happens when someone campaigns solely for the needs of the urban population and utterly neglects the rural? My guess is, unless the other candidate does the same, he will be pretty much guaranteed a victory. Think about that for a second. If a massive majority of your population fits a certain demographic, your best bet is to appeal solely to that majority. The electoral college, while IMHO fairly broken, does at least guarantee that the votes of large expanses of farm country might have a chance of making a difference. The electoral college helps ensure majority rule with some consideration for minority rights. I don't know that it's the best solution, but I definitely don't believe a flat out majority is the way to go.
Yeah as soon as I read your reply I remembered that. It's been a couple years since I've taken a nuclear physics course, and a lot fresher in my mind is the way they treated EVERYTHING as hazardous when I was at PPPL. Thanks for clarifying.
But if it were fusion that were doing it, the researchers would be dead from radiation poisoning.
What is with this idiotic groupthink that if its nuclear it must be radioactive? Not everything involving a nucleus is radioactive, and not everything radioactive causes cancer and kills people. For example, at princeton plasma physics labs, they deal a lot with fusion experiments, and there is radiation present... FROM THE TRITIUM AND DEUTERIUM THAT THEY STARTED WITH. The beginning materials in this case are radioactive. It's all this kneejerking nonsense about radiation that makes people pissy every time you try to discuss fusion research with a layman.
And for the record, until I see better results otherwise, I still think cold fusion is horseshit
I've seen that thing before, and it is hardly a PDA. Windows XP and a gigahertz processor? Looks a bit big to be pocketable too. I'd much prefer an OS actually tailored for use on a small screen with a stylus, like palm or ce, or as someone else mentioned, one of the custom mobile linux distros.
The main difference here, though, is the PDA touch screen/stylus input method. You can store a contact list on an ipod, but I'd imagine it's a bitch to enter a new contact, if it's even possible.
Plus "normal PDA stuff" is far from what a CE machine does these days. If all you want is a contact list and calendar, you can buy a 15 dollar royal deal from any office store. A modern PDA, whether palm or ms, supports a lot of advanced software.
Now what I'd LOVE to see happen is... M$ introduces new media player/pocket pc with big hard drive. Apple, seeing ipod sales dwindle, adds a touch screen and more PDA functionality to the ipod. The Newton was way before its time both in terms of market and available technology. I'd love to see the ipod's popularity leveraged to really bring on the golden age of the PDA.
The version of internet explorer bundled with pocket pc supports basically nothing in the way of scripting, so it wouldn't be as easy to get spyware installed. There's no "would you like to install this magic cursor plugin" popup, and all in all a very limited system to exploit. Also, a big reason why there's so much spyware and other garbage out there is the number of people on always-connected broadband without firewalls. Unless wireless internet gets a lot cheaper and a lot more common, there's much less opportunity for a pda to get infected. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's going to be much less common than you make it sound.
They've clearly never seen office space
No worries, though, I've got karma to burn =)
COCKgobbler
I've seen windows CE (later called Pocket PC, later called Windows Mobile) described as a "slimmed down version of windows" on many occasions. Could it be possible that their attempt at an ipod killer will be a "lookie maw it's a music player that also does all this cool PDA stuff too" type of device. As somewhat of a PDA nerd, I can tell you that lots of PDA people have been jonesing for a PDA with a massive built-in hard drive, ala ipod. My ipaq 2210 plays MP3s and even some movie files quite well, and if flash storage wasn't so damn expensive, I would most certainly use it as an ipod replacement, and it's not even designed for it. Make a PDA with controls specifically intended for media playback, a slick looking form factor, and a massive hard drive, and I bet you could take a significant chunk out of the ipod sales.
1.) Make joke about how microsoft won't make any money from this, since Apple makes all its money on the ipod
2.) Get moderated as "redundant"
3.) ???????
4.) PROFIT!
All you motherfucks are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball lickers. As soon as we get to hollywood and find those miramax fucks who's makin that movie, we're gonna make them eat our shit, then shit out our shit and eat their shit that's made up of our shit that we made them eat. And then all yous fucks are next.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
getting laid before 2010?
Is there a mathematical term for "when pigs fly?"
Tools exist for a purpose, and people too lazy/prejudiced/"good" to use them should shut up, imho ;)
Even if those tools are poorly implemented, broken, full of security holes, or any of ten other negative things that can be said about many microsoft API's? (or indeed many non-MS API's as well - I'm not a complete zealout here) My point is, just because something is there already doesnt mean it's the best way to do it.
Plenty of ways. As others have mentioned, fill a disk or use up all the system resources if you just want to hose the system. Also, I've almost never run into a system that had EVERY possible user-accesible root exploit blocked.
As a simple example, I remember at one college I was attending, the graduate student/administrator was talking about how he thought red hat's default install was secure. I'm far from a script kiddie, and in fact haven't used any of that childish nonsense since I was, in fact, a kid, but I felt it neccesary to illustrate to the administrators and professors who believed their system was secure how foolish they were being. In literally five minutes and three attempts, at a commonly-known security bulletain website, I was not only able to find an exploit for which the system was vulnerable, but to use the example code given on the page to root the system. When the admin saw the boxes the next day, the login screen's graphic had somehow managed to have been changed to "All your Base are belong to us"
Also please note that I sent him an email explaining the exploit, linking the page which described said exploit, and giving a few other links to tools to help him better secure the system. I'm not a complete dick.
My point: Any system that hasn't been updated and secured ACTIVELY and REGULARLY is going to have exploits that allow a non-priveledged user to obtain root.
How long is a modem year?
A very very very long time. Long enough that I waited a month before deciding to install X because I knew my dialup provider was going to crap out while downloading the packages.
Funny, zone alarm doesn't prompt me every single time there's network traffic, but it sure warns me when a program I haven't authorized for network access tries.
I run Gentoo both at work and on my xbox, did my first Debian install via ftp over a 14.4 modem years ago. I know linux solves the spyware issue (for now) but I am not a zealot and run several different OSes and like to find the best way to utilize each.
I'm not talking about programs screwing up windows so much as installers coming with a bunch of extra crap. For example, when kazaa first came out, not many people knew it installed gator. If you had a progrm that pops up a big ugly window saying "foo.exe is trying to write to c:\program files\gator\" you would become suspicious much more quickly. Restricting access to WINDIR wouldn't help because if I'm running an installer, it would need access to program files, and hence could install any other useless crap it wants.
That's not a firewall either - it's a sandbox (and not new, either)
That's why I put the quotes around the word firewall, and I would have never thought to google the term sandbox to find such a product. Do you have any suggestions for good sandboxes, now that I know what it's called?
I submitted this as an ask slashdot and was promptly rejected, so I'm going to put this here as a slightly on-topic post.
What I want to see is a software hard drive "firewall." If you're not sure what I mean, think of what a product like zone alarm does when spyware.exe tries to access the internet on your pc. It pops up a window saying "do you want to allow this program..." Now, why can't we have the same thing for hard drive access? So, I download fungame.exe, and when I go to run it, my "firewall" tells me fungame.exe is trying to write to fifteen different directories to install different spyware products. It could only give a popup on the first time a program tries to write to a given directory, and have an option to not show any new notices for this program, to limit the annoyance factor. I think this would be a great tool to help lessen spyware/trojan problems. If the program interacted with spybot or a similar product, it could even automatically prevent writing of files that are known to be adware. Is there anything like this out there? Anyone who would be willing to help make it?
Yes, and it is easier to move a control surface that isn't under 3 tons of metal. If you were to use a stick with a car, you'd have to rotate the tires working against the weight of the car, friction, etc... With a plane you are really only moving control surfaces in the air (with air resistance at speed, but still...)
EXACTLY! There's a question of leverage involved here. A wheel takes two or three rotations to get a full range of motion out of those tires, that means theres some serious gearing going on. A joystick would require massive amounts of force to make the tires turn, unless you were using a very long joystick which moved quite a bit of distance.
People for the Eating of Tasty Animals? YUM.
Or maybe you mean those vegetarian hippies. To them, all I can say is... For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three