It is a lot quicker to type '1wtb0t1wtw0t!' though, especially if you are used to it. I usually add a number somewhere which I can increment though to workaround the stupid password expiry policies some places have.
The TSA scanners aren't comparable in any useful sense to cell phones or sonograms.
That depends on the technology used. There are two types of scanners: back scatter X-Ray and THz imaging. THz imaging is, in someway, comparable to a mobile's transmissions: its non-ionizing and close on the frequency spectrum. If this is the technology that was in use then she is arguably correct with the cell phone comparison, although still very, very wrong with the sonogram.
Given the choice I'll take: THz > groping > X-ray. Groping may injure my pride but X-rays have a tiny, but non-zero chance of giving you cancer and while injured pride is easy to recover from, cancer is a little harder so why increase the risk of you don't have to. Besides as a foreigner I've already been fingerprinted and had my mug shot taken so it's only natural that a physical search come next followed by being required to wear an orange jump suit...or do they not do that last step yet?
If your goal is to build a community to develop software, doing things which drive people from the community tend to be counterproductive.
True but, thanks to OS licenses, there is a perfect solution which the community can take without having to resort to censorship: fork and rename the project. Then, when presumably the community all downloads and uses the more appropriately named project it will send a very strong message to the jerk who wrote the original package that the community as a whole does not tolerate such behaviour.
All this modern push for more and more rules and regulations is not always needed. If the community really believes that this sort of behaviour is not acceptable then let them act to show it. That is a FAR more powerful message than having a rule against it since the offender knows that the entire community thinks he is behaving inappropriately. If a rule is passed then s/he can just dismiss it as "those in power not liking them" - far harder to do that if just about everyone out there feels the same.
So do I. The very first post should have been "America has added GB to Kindoms I am Fighting With" since before that there was no America. If he means the continent then he should have said North America and, in any case, his later posts are clearly written to take America as US.
I don't know but why is the actual number of times they are failed to be convinced useful information? It should depend on how much evidence the US government has when it asks so, without knowing this, how can you tell whether the correct decision has been made? Having a 90% reject rate where 10% are let through on flimsy evidence because it was felt that you could not deny all US requests would be far worse than having a 0% rejection rate because the US government presented strong evidence each time.
Er, presumably if there were such a National Security Letter, housing it yourself wouldnt give you much choice in the matter either
Actually it would since my house is in Canada and I'd politely inform them that they'd need to talk to the Canadian government and, if they agree, have them make the request. Similarly in the EU US government demands are worthless. Canada and the EU (or at least the UK) have intelligence sharing treaties with the US so they can get access to the data but only if they ask and convince the local government first and it is in compliance with local law.
This is exactly as it should be. MS could end up in real legal trouble if the US government forces them to disclose data on their EU servers in contravention of EU privacy laws.
Well, some people are mean to their pets. And, because of these few people, pets must no longer be sold to anyone!
Clearly this is the wrong way to go about it though. It is not the pets that are the problem but the mean people who buy them. So surely the correct response is to ban mean people from San Francisco? Of course since it is hard to tell who is mean and who is not the safest thing to do would be to just ban all people from the city. Afterall that would solve not just the animal abuse crime rate but the total crime rate as well not to mention the benefits to the city's carbon footprint, pollution etc.
Come on San Francisco - if you really think the solution to problems is to ban things then don't be shy: ban the root cause of a lot of our problems, ourselves. Clearly using education, innovation and deterrents to solve problems like everyone else is the wrong way to go: stick to your guns (since you are a US city I'm guessing that you cannot ban those) and think of the small, furry creatures.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One of the worst things you can do to a student that truly understands the material is to drag them down and force them to do what they consider menial tasks.
Exactly. What the teacher should have done is give them a question that they cannot do in their heads. If they can do 67pi then how about 67e or 123*sqrt(3) etc. That does not drag them down but does teach them that, smart as they are, there are always more difficult problems out there so they should not get too cocky.
I had a similar, but different, experience trying to correct an article on the ATLAS experiment at CERN which claimed that it was impossible to study single quarks. Unfortunately this is not true because part of the physics program is studying top quarks which decay so fast they decay as single quarks, which is one of the reasons that they are very interesting. Within hours of me making the correction it was reverted with a comment to the effect that I did not know what I was talking about. After putting it back in it was bumped up to some editor resulting in an exchange of increasing ignorance until they decided the safest thing to do was to deny my edit while they looked into it which, as far as I know, they never did.
The article itself has changed considerably since the relevant text no longer appears in it and what they have looks correct. However this experience was enough to put me off Wikipedia. In general the conclusion I have come to is that it is ok to looking up information which is generally taught to many people at an undergraduate or lower level. However when looking up information about any nuances in a field, particularly if those nuances go against the general case taught to undergrads, it is clearly a very hit and miss experience because there are plenty of people out there who don't know what they are writing about but are unaware that they don't know what they are writing about.
Others have already made the case for knowledge outside one's area of specialisation, so I won't repeat it.
I'm not arguing against that - I'm arguing against REQUIRING that at a University level. By all means forcibly expose students to the different topics at school but, at University leave it optional. Some of us had a very clear idea of what we wanted to do and what we found interesting because we had been exposed to many different subjects at school.
Sometimes having a broader knowledge of subjects outside your discipline can be very useful, but sometimes having a deeper, or broader, knowledge of you main subject can also be just as useful. You may disagree, as I do with your position but the real point is that at University students are supposed to take more resposibility for their education. That means that you have to give students the freedom to make the choice themselves and not dictate that they have to take unrelated subjects just because you think that you know what is best for them: you might be wrong...and even if you are right it is their mistake to make and perhaps learn an even more valuable lesson than any course can teach from it.
Clearly both of you can't even conceive why studying, for example, literature and philosophy might be useful to the practice of top-level computer science or software engineering. Therefore you clearly need to come out of your tunnel and be exposed to the world.
While I agree with the sentiment University is not the place to force people to be exposed to subjects they may have no interest in. This should be done at school and then at University the option to have a broader education should be available but NOT required. As I said above, at University you have to take more responsibility for your learning and be more self-motivated this means not having courses forced on you unless they are subject related and giving students the choice (which is the flipside of responsibility). So if you want to take archaelology or philosphy then the opportunity should be there but not the obligation.
Your example about philsophy illustrates the point. Clearly you wanted to do it and enjoyed it. However it is hardly a requirement for CS: otherwise it would be part of the CS course program like calculus. The same goes for courses like english. All scientists need to be able to write clearly and concisely but this is something which should be taught at school, not university, in the same way that those doing english degrees learn basic maths skills at school.
It's a very odd concept to me. It sounds like your university is just a continuation of high school.
The first year of Canadian University is very like 6th form in the UK (last two years of seconary school) in terms of material and focus. The physics that I teach first year students in lectures is exactly the same physics that I did for A level although the maths is at a slightly lower level. However the UK's standards have dropped considerably since I did my A levels and are probably below the Canadian level now.
The difference is that we teach as a univeristy and not a school so students are far more responsible for making sure that they learn the material themselves using the resources provided, rather than the classroom based approach where you are spoon fed. However since Canadian universities are now either comparable or cheaper than UK universities, even with the foreign differential fees and devalued pound, perhaps more Brits will be experiencing the Canadian system. Canada is a very welcoming country!
There's not a lot of polymers that behave that way until they get a lot colder
True, but there are also a lot which don't - and no mention in the article about whether they tested for Canadian temperatures which the Australians may have failed to do given that their climate gets nowhere near as cold as a Canadian winter.
There is a reason that less than 1/5 of one percent of the US population are pilots. It's not easy...
But that is because of the nature of fixed wing aircraft: they have to be moving forward at considerable speed to maintain their lift hence landing is hard because you cannot take it nice and slow. This is what makes poor visibility very difficult to cope with too: you would not drive a car at 100 km/h if you can only see 20m ahead of you but with an aircraft you have no choice because if you slow down you fall out of the sky.
This technology will not make all of the problems magically disappear but it will make it far, far easier to be a pilot since you can always slow down.
Apologies, it seems it''s not the actual notes being supplied by an Australian company but the polypropylene substrate
Let's hope they have tested the Australia substrate for the Canadian climate. It will not go down well if I open my wallet in the winter when it hits -40C and the plastic notes all turn brittle and shatter. I'm also somewhat mystified about how DNA (pictured on the note) is a Canadian contribution to science. Crick was British and Watson American...so they somehow average to be Canadian? In fact I was unable to find any Canadian scientists mentioned in the Wikipedia article describing history of DNA.
I would guess that it is a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor which is a commercially produced device to produce free neutrons. In terms of application I'd be a little concerned what this device is used to probe. Neutrons are readily absorbed by many nuclei and can produce radioactive isotopes. So scanning an object will result in making it radioactive. While I would hope the number of neutrons required would be small, and so the activation minimal, this is still probably a concern for foodstuffs since radioactive material is a lot more dangerous inside the body than outside. Same applies for clothing too probably.
The other issue is that since a nuclear device is a sub-critical mass of fissile material bombarding it with enough neutrons may actually make it supercritical while it is in the beam if the beam balances the neutrons lost. This would let you "detect" the bomb put perhaps not in a very constructive way...although again I would guess that the number of neutrons used for scanning would probably be too small to do this.
Sorry but your post is not informative it is just plain wrong: I think you are confusing the US-based MINOS and MiniBooNE experiments with the Japanese-based T2K experiment which the article is talking about.
It's a particular oscillation that they've observed for the first time.
No it is not. SuperK first observed this type back in 1998 but the results were not conclusive (they saw muon neutrino "disappearing" but not what they converted into). Since then MINOS and MiniBooNE have observed this exact type of neutrino oscillation (around 2003 IIRC - but they have multiple papers published now) and the OPERA experiment has even got some evidence of muon to tau oscillation. (Look them all up in Wikipedia or Google).
Assuming this result is correct then this result implies that there is a CP symmetry violation
No it does not. For T2K (the experiment they are talking about) to see a matter/antimatter asymmetry (CP violation) one of the mixing angles, theta_13 must be large and they need a LOT more data.
The Coriolis effect is far too small to have any significant impact on flywheels this small...
While that is certainly true the coriolis force only applies to objects moving between different latitudes and is caused by the different tangential velocities of the surface at different latitutdes. Hence there is no coriolis force for the flywheel in question since the centre of mass is stationary and remains at a fixed latitude.
Nah, make them work for local farms for 8 weeks. They'll perhaps learn the meaning of hard work and humility.
We are talking GM crops here. Surely a more elegant solution would be to make the crop protester resistant? Once we have Triffid(TM) Potatoes they'll be no more problems with annoying protesters.
I had someone seriously tell me I should take my phone out of my posket when I can so to avoid cancer risk from 8 hour a day exposure of the same body area.
Exactly - if you have a transmitter then the intensity of radiation you are exposed to is considerably higher than just receiving since it falls off as 1/(distance squared). However this should mean that any cancers are far more likely close to transmitters so presumably it should be easy to see: cancers would be near your pocket or near your ear.
However basic common sense can tell you that this report is ridiculous. If cell phones are wireless devices are really, or even probably, causing cancer then why are we only banning these devices from schools? We should be banning them everywhere. Asbestos was not just banned from schools but from everywhere else as well. The fact that they are going for an emotional target, "think of the children", shows that they are making an irrational, emotional argument not a rational, evidence based one.
Slashdot Mirror
...but any short password i vulnerable to a bruteforce attack.
Only if they can get the encrypted hash and with increasing CPU (or rather GPU) power longer passwords are becoming brute-forceable too.
It is a lot quicker to type '1wtb0t1wtw0t!' though, especially if you are used to it. I usually add a number somewhere which I can increment though to workaround the stupid password expiry policies some places have.
Name one legitimate reason to want to jailbreak your phone now days.
Ok: I want to use a bluetooth GPS with my iPod touch (technically not a phone but the same OS).
The TSA scanners aren't comparable in any useful sense to cell phones or sonograms.
That depends on the technology used. There are two types of scanners: back scatter X-Ray and THz imaging. THz imaging is, in someway, comparable to a mobile's transmissions: its non-ionizing and close on the frequency spectrum. If this is the technology that was in use then she is arguably correct with the cell phone comparison, although still very, very wrong with the sonogram.
Given the choice I'll take: THz > groping > X-ray. Groping may injure my pride but X-rays have a tiny, but non-zero chance of giving you cancer and while injured pride is easy to recover from, cancer is a little harder so why increase the risk of you don't have to. Besides as a foreigner I've already been fingerprinted and had my mug shot taken so it's only natural that a physical search come next followed by being required to wear an orange jump suit...or do they not do that last step yet?
Not as ironic as Standard & Poor's.
That's not ironic its descriptive for a credit rating agency. Either you make their arbitrary standard you'll be poor...just ask the Greek Government.
If your goal is to build a community to develop software, doing things which drive people from the community tend to be counterproductive.
True but, thanks to OS licenses, there is a perfect solution which the community can take without having to resort to censorship: fork and rename the project. Then, when presumably the community all downloads and uses the more appropriately named project it will send a very strong message to the jerk who wrote the original package that the community as a whole does not tolerate such behaviour.
All this modern push for more and more rules and regulations is not always needed. If the community really believes that this sort of behaviour is not acceptable then let them act to show it. That is a FAR more powerful message than having a rule against it since the offender knows that the entire community thinks he is behaving inappropriately. If a rule is passed then s/he can just dismiss it as "those in power not liking them" - far harder to do that if just about everyone out there feels the same.
You are maintaining an empire.
So technically they haven't stopped nation building...they just stopped building other nations and concentrated on building their own bigger.
I wish they'd get it right for once.
So do I. The very first post should have been "America has added GB to Kindoms I am Fighting With" since before that there was no America. If he means the continent then he should have said North America and, in any case, his later posts are clearly written to take America as US.
I don't know but why is the actual number of times they are failed to be convinced useful information? It should depend on how much evidence the US government has when it asks so, without knowing this, how can you tell whether the correct decision has been made? Having a 90% reject rate where 10% are let through on flimsy evidence because it was felt that you could not deny all US requests would be far worse than having a 0% rejection rate because the US government presented strong evidence each time.
Er, presumably if there were such a National Security Letter, housing it yourself wouldnt give you much choice in the matter either
Actually it would since my house is in Canada and I'd politely inform them that they'd need to talk to the Canadian government and, if they agree, have them make the request. Similarly in the EU US government demands are worthless. Canada and the EU (or at least the UK) have intelligence sharing treaties with the US so they can get access to the data but only if they ask and convince the local government first and it is in compliance with local law.
This is exactly as it should be. MS could end up in real legal trouble if the US government forces them to disclose data on their EU servers in contravention of EU privacy laws.
Well, some people are mean to their pets. And, because of these few people, pets must no longer be sold to anyone!
Clearly this is the wrong way to go about it though. It is not the pets that are the problem but the mean people who buy them. So surely the correct response is to ban mean people from San Francisco? Of course since it is hard to tell who is mean and who is not the safest thing to do would be to just ban all people from the city. Afterall that would solve not just the animal abuse crime rate but the total crime rate as well not to mention the benefits to the city's carbon footprint, pollution etc.
Come on San Francisco - if you really think the solution to problems is to ban things then don't be shy: ban the root cause of a lot of our problems, ourselves. Clearly using education, innovation and deterrents to solve problems like everyone else is the wrong way to go: stick to your guns (since you are a US city I'm guessing that you cannot ban those) and think of the small, furry creatures.
One of the worst things you can do to a student that truly understands the material is to drag them down and force them to do what they consider menial tasks.
Exactly. What the teacher should have done is give them a question that they cannot do in their heads. If they can do 67pi then how about 67e or 123*sqrt(3) etc. That does not drag them down but does teach them that, smart as they are, there are always more difficult problems out there so they should not get too cocky.
I had a similar, but different, experience trying to correct an article on the ATLAS experiment at CERN which claimed that it was impossible to study single quarks. Unfortunately this is not true because part of the physics program is studying top quarks which decay so fast they decay as single quarks, which is one of the reasons that they are very interesting. Within hours of me making the correction it was reverted with a comment to the effect that I did not know what I was talking about. After putting it back in it was bumped up to some editor resulting in an exchange of increasing ignorance until they decided the safest thing to do was to deny my edit while they looked into it which, as far as I know, they never did.
The article itself has changed considerably since the relevant text no longer appears in it and what they have looks correct. However this experience was enough to put me off Wikipedia. In general the conclusion I have come to is that it is ok to looking up information which is generally taught to many people at an undergraduate or lower level. However when looking up information about any nuances in a field, particularly if those nuances go against the general case taught to undergrads, it is clearly a very hit and miss experience because there are plenty of people out there who don't know what they are writing about but are unaware that they don't know what they are writing about.
Others have already made the case for knowledge outside one's area of specialisation, so I won't repeat it.
I'm not arguing against that - I'm arguing against REQUIRING that at a University level. By all means forcibly expose students to the different topics at school but, at University leave it optional. Some of us had a very clear idea of what we wanted to do and what we found interesting because we had been exposed to many different subjects at school.
Sometimes having a broader knowledge of subjects outside your discipline can be very useful, but sometimes having a deeper, or broader, knowledge of you main subject can also be just as useful. You may disagree, as I do with your position but the real point is that at University students are supposed to take more resposibility for their education. That means that you have to give students the freedom to make the choice themselves and not dictate that they have to take unrelated subjects just because you think that you know what is best for them: you might be wrong...and even if you are right it is their mistake to make and perhaps learn an even more valuable lesson than any course can teach from it.
Clearly both of you can't even conceive why studying, for example, literature and philosophy might be useful to the practice of top-level computer science or software engineering. Therefore you clearly need to come out of your tunnel and be exposed to the world.
While I agree with the sentiment University is not the place to force people to be exposed to subjects they may have no interest in. This should be done at school and then at University the option to have a broader education should be available but NOT required. As I said above, at University you have to take more responsibility for your learning and be more self-motivated this means not having courses forced on you unless they are subject related and giving students the choice (which is the flipside of responsibility). So if you want to take archaelology or philosphy then the opportunity should be there but not the obligation.
Your example about philsophy illustrates the point. Clearly you wanted to do it and enjoyed it. However it is hardly a requirement for CS: otherwise it would be part of the CS course program like calculus. The same goes for courses like english. All scientists need to be able to write clearly and concisely but this is something which should be taught at school, not university, in the same way that those doing english degrees learn basic maths skills at school.
It's a very odd concept to me. It sounds like your university is just a continuation of high school.
The first year of Canadian University is very like 6th form in the UK (last two years of seconary school) in terms of material and focus. The physics that I teach first year students in lectures is exactly the same physics that I did for A level although the maths is at a slightly lower level. However the UK's standards have dropped considerably since I did my A levels and are probably below the Canadian level now.
The difference is that we teach as a univeristy and not a school so students are far more responsible for making sure that they learn the material themselves using the resources provided, rather than the classroom based approach where you are spoon fed. However since Canadian universities are now either comparable or cheaper than UK universities, even with the foreign differential fees and devalued pound, perhaps more Brits will be experiencing the Canadian system. Canada is a very welcoming country!
Who has a couple feet of snow?
Ever heard of Canada? ...although we'd call it 60cm. We even managed a respectable 1.4 cm snow this June.
There's not a lot of polymers that behave that way until they get a lot colder
True, but there are also a lot which don't - and no mention in the article about whether they tested for Canadian temperatures which the Australians may have failed to do given that their climate gets nowhere near as cold as a Canadian winter.
There is a reason that less than 1/5 of one percent of the US population are pilots. It's not easy...
But that is because of the nature of fixed wing aircraft: they have to be moving forward at considerable speed to maintain their lift hence landing is hard because you cannot take it nice and slow. This is what makes poor visibility very difficult to cope with too: you would not drive a car at 100 km/h if you can only see 20m ahead of you but with an aircraft you have no choice because if you slow down you fall out of the sky.
This technology will not make all of the problems magically disappear but it will make it far, far easier to be a pilot since you can always slow down.
Apologies, it seems it''s not the actual notes being supplied by an Australian company but the polypropylene substrate
Let's hope they have tested the Australia substrate for the Canadian climate. It will not go down well if I open my wallet in the winter when it hits -40C and the plastic notes all turn brittle and shatter. I'm also somewhat mystified about how DNA (pictured on the note) is a Canadian contribution to science. Crick was British and Watson American...so they somehow average to be Canadian? In fact I was unable to find any Canadian scientists mentioned in the Wikipedia article describing history of DNA.
I would guess that it is a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor which is a commercially produced device to produce free neutrons. In terms of application I'd be a little concerned what this device is used to probe. Neutrons are readily absorbed by many nuclei and can produce radioactive isotopes. So scanning an object will result in making it radioactive. While I would hope the number of neutrons required would be small, and so the activation minimal, this is still probably a concern for foodstuffs since radioactive material is a lot more dangerous inside the body than outside. Same applies for clothing too probably.
The other issue is that since a nuclear device is a sub-critical mass of fissile material bombarding it with enough neutrons may actually make it supercritical while it is in the beam if the beam balances the neutrons lost. This would let you "detect" the bomb put perhaps not in a very constructive way...although again I would guess that the number of neutrons used for scanning would probably be too small to do this.
It's a particular oscillation that they've observed for the first time.
No it is not. SuperK first observed this type back in 1998 but the results were not conclusive (they saw muon neutrino "disappearing" but not what they converted into). Since then MINOS and MiniBooNE have observed this exact type of neutrino oscillation (around 2003 IIRC - but they have multiple papers published now) and the OPERA experiment has even got some evidence of muon to tau oscillation. (Look them all up in Wikipedia or Google).
Assuming this result is correct then this result implies that there is a CP symmetry violation
No it does not. For T2K (the experiment they are talking about) to see a matter/antimatter asymmetry (CP violation) one of the mixing angles, theta_13 must be large and they need a LOT more data.
The Coriolis effect is far too small to have any significant impact on flywheels this small...
While that is certainly true the coriolis force only applies to objects moving between different latitudes and is caused by the different tangential velocities of the surface at different latitutdes. Hence there is no coriolis force for the flywheel in question since the centre of mass is stationary and remains at a fixed latitude.
Nah, make them work for local farms for 8 weeks. They'll perhaps learn the meaning of hard work and humility.
We are talking GM crops here. Surely a more elegant solution would be to make the crop protester resistant? Once we have Triffid(TM) Potatoes they'll be no more problems with annoying protesters.
I had someone seriously tell me I should take my phone out of my posket when I can so to avoid cancer risk from 8 hour a day exposure of the same body area.
Exactly - if you have a transmitter then the intensity of radiation you are exposed to is considerably higher than just receiving since it falls off as 1/(distance squared). However this should mean that any cancers are far more likely close to transmitters so presumably it should be easy to see: cancers would be near your pocket or near your ear.
However basic common sense can tell you that this report is ridiculous. If cell phones are wireless devices are really, or even probably, causing cancer then why are we only banning these devices from schools? We should be banning them everywhere. Asbestos was not just banned from schools but from everywhere else as well. The fact that they are going for an emotional target, "think of the children", shows that they are making an irrational, emotional argument not a rational, evidence based one.