As for the need of massive amounts of random numbers, PRNGs will always repeat the sequence after a time. But there are ways to combine two different PRNGs in a way that this period is extended and can easily be of the order of several exa-bytes (10^18). Depending on how many random bytes you want to extract this might be sufficient.
I just cannot agree that blocking ads is socially responsible - feel free to not click them if they don't interest you but just outright blocking them means you are depriving the site owner from their only source of income, in most cases. You are, in fact, being a free loader.
At first you cannot generalize the matter like you just did. Most advertisements can be found on large news sites, and they are the ones that are most annoying (sometimes 3 or more large ads per site). I mainly use adblock to catch these. And you can't tell me they have to rely on ads for their income...
When it comes to Joe Average who put up a private site (let's say a forum or so) or a Free Software project who choses to display a banner to get some money back I have no problem with those ads and do not block them.
This anti-social behaviour bothers me even more in sites like slashdot or gamespy where one of the incentives of subscribing is, indeed, taking off ads.
Fine for you if you can afford subscriptions to several sites just to get rid of the ads. I cannot.
Visiting a web site is completely different from watching TV, I'm sure you can see the differences yourself without my pointing them out.
Not really, no. When watching TV they offer me a program and put ads in it. I can choose to watch them or not. When I surf a website the site offers me some information with ads put in here and there and I can also choose to block them or not. I don't see a fundamental difference.
I don't think so. I can turn off the TV if I don't want to watch the commercials, why should I not have the possibility when surfing websites?
And for its capabilities, it detects advertisement by URL matching. Luckily most sites have advertisements from a dedicated ad server, making it very easy to block them. I have not seen any advertisements on Slashdot for a long while now.
I mean, Mortal Kombat was fun when you could rip the loser's spine from his body, and it was obviously fake blood and gore. But what will happen when it actually looks like footage of a real man, actually ripping out another man's real spine? Of course, it will still just be a simulation, but is society ready for a generation of kids who literally can't tell reality from fantasy?
Where is the difference to horror/splatter movies? They also show a lot of blood/gore, decapitations, bodies getting torn apart and such things in a photo-realistic way (obviously). Parents will have to make sure, as they already have to do now, that their kids don't play these realistic games. The same rules as for horror movies apply here, no big difference IMHO.
Duh... there are some security concepts that require the reading machine to have visible access to your passport. Before any personal data is exchanged the reader has to authenticate itself by sending the RFID chip a secret key that is imprinted inside the passport. So without making an image of the passport or reading a barcode etc. the reader is unable to retrieve any data.
From the technical point of view you are right, storing just a unique ID would be the simplest way. But this does not fit well into the scheme of privacy. With your solution you will have no control about who uses the data belonging to your ID. If you store the data directly in the passport chip you have the full control to either allow or deny someone to read it.
I guess you mean the right thing, but your description is not quite right. With a regular pendulum the force is not constant but a linear function (in a first approximation) of the amplitude. The further you move the pendulum from the point of rest the stronger is the force which pulls it back. This linear dependence causes it to swing with a single constant frequency.
Now for the singing magnets the force must show some non-linear dependance on the amplitude, which allows (or better: forces) it to oscillate at several frequencies. Might be interesting to actually calculate it...
No? If this experimental results can indeed be confirmed this can very well be the next clean energy source. This experiment can basically be done with a table-top setup, so plenty of research facilities will hop on the train and try to extend the technology. Standing ultrasonic waves are nothing extraordinary.
Other possible fusion reactors like ITER are huge plants which cost billions of euros and require an extensive amount of collaboration of many nations to build. Same goes for lasers, high-energy lasers which can provide the neccessary energy fill huge halls (like NIF). Another problem with such huge installations like ITER are politics, like is right now beeing demonstrated. Even a simple task like finding a site to build it causes extensive discussions over years.
So, this new approach is very promising IMHO. I hope it turns out to be true.
Uhm, this thing consumes a lot of energy but does not produce any. NIF is build for basic research and is not a prototype of a fusion reactor. And if you shoot with this laser on a target you will get quite a lot of radiation, fast neutrons, etc.
Last time I checked these numbers they were only twice as big and not several orders of magnitude. And they surely do not include the radioactive waste produced in fission plants, only what goes directly to the atmosphere or surrounding environment.
What I object to, though, is the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements. These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements. You can't turn uranium into gold, for example, even though it ought to be a straightforward process of splitting off the required number of protons from each atom (if the "we're splitting atoms" camp claims are correct).
We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Ever head of a decay chain? Radioactive decay can very well turn one element into another, and fission is one of the processes that exactly does this. What do you think comes out if you tear a nucleus apart?
Anyway, you are right that the fuel is radioactive itself and splits itself. But you could hardly use this to get a reasonable amount of energy from it, what you need a chain reaction. When a U-235 nucleus decays by chance it emits several fast neutrons. The reactor makes sure these are slowed down (moderated) so it's more likely they induce the fission of another nucleus.
So we do actively influence the "splitting" of the fuel, and this means indeed smashing atoms into smaller bits.
I don't know what's wrong with dnsmasq+exim (and I'm too lazy to search google), but dnsmasq is under very active development and has fixed a lot of bugs, some esotheric, some really nasty. Details are in the changelog. Perhaps the trouble with exim has already been solved.
I didn't follow dnsmasq development, but quite possibly the issue has been fixed (hm, maybe I should have filed a bug report...). Tried it about a year ago and now I'm too lazy to reconfigure my box.
It's indeed a very helpful tool but it can cause some troubles. I tried it a while ago and got errors with Exim 4, it didn't like the DNS responses that dnsmasq sent out for my local machines and thus started to reject mails. Host queries and pings worked fine though. As I switched back to Bind the problems were gone. Dunno what went wrong, I didn't bother to dig deeper into this.
Just for clarification you should add that the linking issue only exists when a proprietary application / library is to be linked against GPLed code. Anyway, these are good points and exactly the same that have always been somewhat unclear to me (I see it the same way you do though). If the next version covers all this stuff it will be very helpful.
Those bombed-to-stone-age cities you speak of I've never seen (in Germany). Many were heavily bombarded and largely destroyed, yes, but they were not completely wiped out. And people tend to rebuild the cities, not start new ones from scratch. For the age, there are lot of cities which already existed when the American continent has not even been discovered. I myself grew up in a one that can be dated back to the 8th century and it's just a regular (and small) city.
I wonder if anyone tried to implement bayesian filters to detect trolls. Works pretty well for spam... Of couse there must be some moderators to initially feed the database and correct false positives/negatives, but afterwards it should work mostly autonomous.
Yes, all countries should arm themselves as much as they can to ensure they never get attacked. Welcome to Cold War II!
Hope you weren't serious about it...
The FEL is already working (at least the first stage) and it has a seperate electron source. IIRC it is far more important for the electrons to have a very sharp velocity/energy distribution than to have high energy.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the need of massive amounts of random numbers, PRNGs will always repeat the sequence after a time. But there are ways to combine two different PRNGs in a way that this period is extended and can easily be of the order of several exa-bytes (10^18). Depending on how many random bytes you want to extract this might be sufficient.
If it was developed by Microsoft it would probably not suck. ;)
I just cannot agree that blocking ads is socially responsible - feel free to not click them if they don't interest you but just outright blocking them means you are depriving the site owner from their only source of income, in most cases. You are, in fact, being a free loader.
At first you cannot generalize the matter like you just did. Most advertisements can be found on large news sites, and they are the ones that are most annoying (sometimes 3 or more large ads per site). I mainly use adblock to catch these. And you can't tell me they have to rely on ads for their income...
When it comes to Joe Average who put up a private site (let's say a forum or so) or a Free Software project who choses to display a banner to get some money back I have no problem with those ads and do not block them.
This anti-social behaviour bothers me even more in sites like slashdot or gamespy where one of the incentives of subscribing is, indeed, taking off ads.
Fine for you if you can afford subscriptions to several sites just to get rid of the ads. I cannot.
Visiting a web site is completely different from watching TV, I'm sure you can see the differences yourself without my pointing them out.
Not really, no. When watching TV they offer me a program and put ads in it. I can choose to watch them or not. When I surf a website the site offers me some information with ads put in here and there and I can also choose to block them or not. I don't see a fundamental difference.
I don't think so. I can turn off the TV if I don't want to watch the commercials, why should I not have the possibility when surfing websites?
And for its capabilities, it detects advertisement by URL matching. Luckily most sites have advertisements from a dedicated ad server, making it very easy to block them. I have not seen any advertisements on Slashdot for a long while now.
Hm, there are still people who do not use Adblock?
I mean, Mortal Kombat was fun when you could rip the loser's spine from his body, and it was obviously fake blood and gore. But what will happen when it actually looks like footage of a real man, actually ripping out another man's real spine? Of course, it will still just be a simulation, but is society ready for a generation of kids who literally can't tell reality from fantasy?
Where is the difference to horror/splatter movies? They also show a lot of blood/gore, decapitations, bodies getting torn apart and such things in a photo-realistic way (obviously). Parents will have to make sure, as they already have to do now, that their kids don't play these realistic games. The same rules as for horror movies apply here, no big difference IMHO.
Uh, that video has audio commentary? Glad I didn't turn my speakers on...
Next, someone will figure out a way to tattoo that image onto the inside of my eyelids.
Unless you put an extremely bright lamp right to your eyelids this shouldn't bother you very much...
Duh... there are some security concepts that require the reading machine to have visible access to your passport. Before any personal data is exchanged the reader has to authenticate itself by sending the RFID chip a secret key that is imprinted inside the passport. So without making an image of the passport or reading a barcode etc. the reader is unable to retrieve any data.
From the technical point of view you are right, storing just a unique ID would be the simplest way. But this does not fit well into the scheme of privacy. With your solution you will have no control about who uses the data belonging to your ID. If you store the data directly in the passport chip you have the full control to either allow or deny someone to read it.
I guess you mean the right thing, but your description is not quite right. With a regular pendulum the force is not constant but a linear function (in a first approximation) of the amplitude. The further you move the pendulum from the point of rest the stronger is the force which pulls it back. This linear dependence causes it to swing with a single constant frequency.
Now for the singing magnets the force must show some non-linear dependance on the amplitude, which allows (or better: forces) it to oscillate at several frequencies. Might be interesting to actually calculate it...
No? If this experimental results can indeed be confirmed this can very well be the next clean energy source. This experiment can basically be done with a table-top setup, so plenty of research facilities will hop on the train and try to extend the technology. Standing ultrasonic waves are nothing extraordinary.
Other possible fusion reactors like ITER are huge plants which cost billions of euros and require an extensive amount of collaboration of many nations to build. Same goes for lasers, high-energy lasers which can provide the neccessary energy fill huge halls (like NIF). Another problem with such huge installations like ITER are politics, like is right now beeing demonstrated. Even a simple task like finding a site to build it causes extensive discussions over years.
So, this new approach is very promising IMHO. I hope it turns out to be true.
Uhm, this thing consumes a lot of energy but does not produce any. NIF is build for basic research and is not a prototype of a fusion reactor. And if you shoot with this laser on a target you will get quite a lot of radiation, fast neutrons, etc.
It's nucular!
Last time I checked these numbers they were only twice as big and not several orders of magnitude. And they surely do not include the radioactive waste produced in fission plants, only what goes directly to the atmosphere or surrounding environment.
What I object to, though, is the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements. These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements. You can't turn uranium into gold, for example, even though it ought to be a straightforward process of splitting off the required number of protons from each atom (if the "we're splitting atoms" camp claims are correct).
We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Ever head of a decay chain? Radioactive decay can very well turn one element into another, and fission is one of the processes that exactly does this. What do you think comes out if you tear a nucleus apart?
Anyway, you are right that the fuel is radioactive itself and splits itself. But you could hardly use this to get a reasonable amount of energy from it, what you need a chain reaction. When a U-235 nucleus decays by chance it emits several fast neutrons. The reactor makes sure these are slowed down (moderated) so it's more likely they induce the fission of another nucleus.
So we do actively influence the "splitting" of the fuel, and this means indeed smashing atoms into smaller bits.
I don't know what's wrong with dnsmasq+exim (and I'm too lazy to search google), but dnsmasq is under very active development and has fixed a lot of bugs, some esotheric, some really nasty. Details are in the changelog. Perhaps the trouble with exim has already been solved.
;-)
;)
I didn't follow dnsmasq development, but quite possibly the issue has been fixed (hm, maybe I should have filed a bug report...). Tried it about a year ago and now I'm too lazy to reconfigure my box.
You may want to give dnsmasq a second chance.
The Force has no effect on me.
It's indeed a very helpful tool but it can cause some troubles. I tried it a while ago and got errors with Exim 4, it didn't like the DNS responses that dnsmasq sent out for my local machines and thus started to reject mails. Host queries and pings worked fine though. As I switched back to Bind the problems were gone. Dunno what went wrong, I didn't bother to dig deeper into this.
Just for clarification you should add that the linking issue only exists when a proprietary application / library is to be linked against GPLed code. Anyway, these are good points and exactly the same that have always been somewhat unclear to me (I see it the same way you do though). If the next version covers all this stuff it will be very helpful.
Those bombed-to-stone-age cities you speak of I've never seen (in Germany). Many were heavily bombarded and largely destroyed, yes, but they were not completely wiped out. And people tend to rebuild the cities, not start new ones from scratch. For the age, there are lot of cities which already existed when the American continent has not even been discovered. I myself grew up in a one that can be dated back to the 8th century and it's just a regular (and small) city.
How the hell did they get weapons though?
Now that's easy, they started with nothing but a knife (or crowbar) and aquired the guns on their way through the lev.. eh.. town.
If you MUST be different, try AAC, its lossless unlike ogg and gives better than cd quality by eliminating jitter.
Ah, nice, so I can finally get rid of that crappy quality of my CDs. Thanks man, gotta try that out!
I wonder if anyone tried to implement bayesian filters to detect trolls. Works pretty well for spam... Of couse there must be some moderators to initially feed the database and correct false positives/negatives, but afterwards it should work mostly autonomous.
Yes, all countries should arm themselves as much as they can to ensure they never get attacked. Welcome to Cold War II!
Hope you weren't serious about it...
The FEL is already working (at least the first stage) and it has a seperate electron source. IIRC it is far more important for the electrons to have a very sharp velocity/energy distribution than to have high energy.