That is how it is supposed to work, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Courts often are asked to rule on things where there is no current law - so they have to find the closest law and try to apply it to the situation.
It happens a lot. People tend to not like it because they agree with your statement on what a courts job it - but what is the court supposed to do, wait for parliment?
I agree that people could do far more than most currently do, but a "secure system" is a myth. My servers run full custom Java code, all data access is handled by wrappers that isolate the data to make various insertion attacks impossible, but it is not unhackable.
For instance, if a flaw is found in the DNS library for linux such that if you look up a specific hostname you can take over the machine - you could pass that parameter as your email address. When the email address is checked for validity, bam - there goes the server.
Computers, specifically OS interactions, have gotten so complex that security can only be increased, not achieved.
Well, six sigma is about one in a million, so five sigma is less than that. I wonder if there are people going around with a negative IQ? That would be awful! (But I bet people like that wouldn't get tested...)
Ha HA! But this is also wrong! As a persons IQ is not allowed to be negative (presumably to avoid hurt feelings), the distribution cannot be guassian! It must be somewhere between guassian and poisson!
Er, I'll just be quiet and nip off and kill something, OK?
The easy answer never seems to work. In this case, simply adding a small random value to the time merely lowers the signal to moise ratio (the random value is essentially noise). The signal to noise ratio starts out so low, that in order to make any real difference you would have to add so much randomness that you might as well not send the time anymore.
As an example, let's say you add +- 30 seconds to your time. Now, in order to figure out the time to the millisecond, I need about 30,000 samples. But I needed way more samples before anyway, so an additional 30K is no problem.
BTW, the math works out this way: Your signal will simply add, so the signal strength of n samples is n times a single sample. The noise strength will add RMS because it is uncorrelated, so the noise in n samples will be sqrt(n) times the noise in one sample.
Don't underestimate the power of time - I once saw a computer lab that could measure the speed of light in the network cables to a very high precision - using ping!
Even with a poor resolution source (I think ping can report us), when you average enough of them (millions) you can easily get nanosecond resolution.
What is even weirder is that putting in the astericks really does make a difference - I personally don't swear much, but the "niceness" of swear words in a public forum is really increased by using astericks in my opinion.
In fact, I am not at all put out by your statement as you wrote it. But if you had put the actual vowels in, I would have considered you an annoying kid.
Um, I think someone took you for a ride - the steam coming from the sewers is related to how hot the sewers are compared to the outside air, it has nothing to do with heat distribution. (Think about it, they aren't trying to heat the outside, are they? Why would they let the steam escape?)
Some buildings use steam, so by extension I suppose a small downtown area could use a shared system - but you would have horrific losses if you spread such a thing out to cover downtown Chicago.
Hmmm - I live in downtown Chicago, and conditions are apparently very different here. We do use A/C in the summer, but the peak electric bill is during the winter. As far as I know, there is no gas/oil heating of skyscrapers - piping explosives around large buildings would be pretty dangerous. Maybe some of them use central heating, I don't know (at least ours does not!).
What is missing in this analysis is this usage of energy - in the south energy is used to cool homes during the summer. This is great for solar - as temperatures rise, more energy is available. In the north, energy is used for heating in the winter, because the summers are already cool. During the winter, the north get 0-2 hours of 1000 watt insolation equivalent (or about 120 Watt-hours) per day. That would not heat your home above freezing...
Slightly more seriously, though - if you did want to use this technique to move a star around, it would be more complex. If you just did the procedure described you would smash your sphere into the star - so you would need to reflect the energy back into the star in all directions except one.
Anyway, here are the design calculations so you can visit your girl - a sun-like star puts out 386,000,000,000,000,000,000 MW, dividing by the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s) yields the force of about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kgm/s^2. Since a sun-like star has a mass of 2x10^30 kg, your acceleration is 5x10^-12 m/s2.
I thought about that, but really, where would I go? The neighbors aren't that bad, really. I suppose that if I wanted to escape the end of the universe (you know, the big crunch), I could do that - but I'm not sure I really want to survive past that anyway...
This may or may not be true - for example, for my personal Dyson sphere I was displeased by the loss of energy caused by alowing the radiatated energy from the sun to spread over the large volume of my sphere (The effective temperature goes down as you get farther away from the sun), so I made my Dyson's sphere reflective on the inside - focusing the light towards two points on the top and bottom of the sphere. That lead my sphere to emit strongly from the top and bottom, but not at all from the sides.
It increased thermal conversion effeciency by 50%, making me the envy of all the other Spheriods.
The energy requirements are very similar to going from Chicago to Australia via jet. Currently, more than 2,500,000 people do that every year. Your example would be at least a $5B market, similar to the aforementioned route. I don't see that you have a point.
Interesting ideas, but I don't think forming a company with everyone on earth getting one share would prevent many problems - that is sort of a definition of government. The problem is that when power is dispersed to widely, the actual power then becomes the ones that control the communication medium that feeds back success / failure fro the company.
For example, say the CEO is old and wants to retire. Say also that he wants to pass the cushy job to his son. If he controls what people hear about the qualified candidates (and he is CEO, after all), he can pretty much force the issue.
Absolutely correct in spirit - but there is no "crossover point". That is the wierd thing about exponential growth - now matter how far you zoom in or out, the curve looks the same.
In other words, if you plot the curve of technology from 0 - 100 AD, it will look the same at the curve from 0 - 1000 AD, and 0 - 2005 AD, etc. (This assumes that the zero technology point is chosen to be at year zero, of course).
There was the hyper-G work done on chickens, for example, by
Arthur Hamilton ("Milt") Smith in the 1970s. Milt Smith was a gravity
specialist at the University of California at Davis who wanted to find
out what would happen to humans if they lived in greater-than-normal
G-forces. Naturally, he experimented on animals, and he decided that
the animal that most closely resembled man for this specific purpose
was the chicken. Chickens, after all, had a posture similar to man's:
they walked upright on two legs, they had two non-load-bearing limbs
(the wings), and so on. Anyway, Milt Smith and his assistants took a
flock of chickens -- hundreds of them, in fact -- and put them into
the two eighteen-foot-long centrifuges in the university's Chronic
Acceleration Research Laboratory, as the place was called.
They spun those chickens up to two-and-a-half Gs and let them
stay there for a good while. In fact, they left them spinning like
that day and night, for three to six months or more at a time. The
hens went around and around, they clucked and they cackled and they
laid their eggs, and as far as those chickens were concerned that was
what ordinary life was like: a steady pull of two-and-a-half Gs. Some
of those chickens spent the larger portion of their lifetimes in that
goddamn accelerator.
Well, it was easy to predict what would happen. Their bones
would get stronger and their muscles would get bigger--because they
had all that extra gravity to work against. A total of twenty-three
generations of hens was spun around like this and the same thing
happened every time. When the accelerator was turned off, out walked
. ..GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN!
To keep this in perspective, after a long time (once all the research is amortized, essentially) a trip to space should cost no more than a trip to Australia from Chicago. The energies are about the same - just the technology required is different. The technology to do this exists, but is currently too expensive. In twenty years, all the current patents expire - so the prices will come down through simple competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes. But who decides if a law applies? The court, of course.
Thus they can extend any law they like, in effect making law.
OK, I have to expand on this with a little joke:
One day two Russians were sitting at a park bench.
Dimitri, you are my best friend! If you had two coats, would you not share one with me?
Yah, Yah, I would share.
Dimitri, you are such a good person. If you had two houses, would you not share one with me?
Yah, Yah, I would share.
Dimitri, you are a saint! If you had two chickens, would you not share one with me?
Nyet! I would not!
But Dimitri, I do not understand! Why would you not?
Because I HAVE two chickens!
(I don't know why they are Russian, though - seems to work with pretty much any human...)
That is how it is supposed to work, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Courts often are asked to rule on things where there is no current law - so they have to find the closest law and try to apply it to the situation.
It happens a lot. People tend to not like it because they agree with your statement on what a courts job it - but what is the court supposed to do, wait for parliment?
I agree that people could do far more than most currently do, but a "secure system" is a myth. My servers run full custom Java code, all data access is handled by wrappers that isolate the data to make various insertion attacks impossible, but it is not unhackable.
For instance, if a flaw is found in the DNS library for linux such that if you look up a specific hostname you can take over the machine - you could pass that parameter as your email address. When the email address is checked for validity, bam - there goes the server.
Computers, specifically OS interactions, have gotten so complex that security can only be increased, not achieved.
This is true of pretty much everybody. Conservative when it comes to me and my cash, liberal when it come to you and your cash.
Well, six sigma is about one in a million, so five sigma is less than that. I wonder if there are people going around with a negative IQ? That would be awful! (But I bet people like that wouldn't get tested...)
Ha HA! But this is also wrong! As a persons IQ is not allowed to be negative (presumably to avoid hurt feelings), the distribution cannot be guassian! It must be somewhere between guassian and poisson!
Er, I'll just be quiet and nip off and kill something, OK?
The easy answer never seems to work. In this case, simply adding a small random value to the time merely lowers the signal to moise ratio (the random value is essentially noise). The signal to noise ratio starts out so low, that in order to make any real difference you would have to add so much randomness that you might as well not send the time anymore.
As an example, let's say you add +- 30 seconds to your time. Now, in order to figure out the time to the millisecond, I need about 30,000 samples. But I needed way more samples before anyway, so an additional 30K is no problem.
BTW, the math works out this way: Your signal will simply add, so the signal strength of n samples is n times a single sample. The noise strength will add RMS because it is uncorrelated, so the noise in n samples will be sqrt(n) times the noise in one sample.
Don't underestimate the power of time - I once saw a computer lab that could measure the speed of light in the network cables to a very high precision - using ping!
Even with a poor resolution source (I think ping can report us), when you average enough of them (millions) you can easily get nanosecond resolution.
What is even weirder is that putting in the astericks really does make a difference - I personally don't swear much, but the "niceness" of swear words in a public forum is really increased by using astericks in my opinion.
In fact, I am not at all put out by your statement as you wrote it. But if you had put the actual vowels in, I would have considered you an annoying kid.
That is really weird!
Um, I think someone took you for a ride - the steam coming from the sewers is related to how hot the sewers are compared to the outside air, it has nothing to do with heat distribution. (Think about it, they aren't trying to heat the outside, are they? Why would they let the steam escape?)
Some buildings use steam, so by extension I suppose a small downtown area could use a shared system - but you would have horrific losses if you spread such a thing out to cover downtown Chicago.
Hmmm - I live in downtown Chicago, and conditions are apparently very different here. We do use A/C in the summer, but the peak electric bill is during the winter. As far as I know, there is no gas/oil heating of skyscrapers - piping explosives around large buildings would be pretty dangerous. Maybe some of them use central heating, I don't know (at least ours does not!).
What is missing in this analysis is this usage of energy - in the south energy is used to cool homes during the summer. This is great for solar - as temperatures rise, more energy is available. In the north, energy is used for heating in the winter, because the summers are already cool. During the winter, the north get 0-2 hours of 1000 watt insolation equivalent (or about 120 Watt-hours) per day. That would not heat your home above freezing...
Your right - no girlfriend, I'm married. But that probably explains why I'm not too interested in visting my neighbor's sphere.
NO! Don't you see! The reason we the black hole appears larger than the galaxy is because it is rushing straight towards us!
We are all gonna die!
(Commence running around screaming, etc.)
Slightly more seriously, though - if you did want to use this technique to move a star around, it would be more complex. If you just did the procedure described you would smash your sphere into the star - so you would need to reflect the energy back into the star in all directions except one.
Anyway, here are the design calculations so you can visit your girl - a sun-like star puts out 386,000,000,000,000,000,000 MW, dividing by the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s) yields the force of about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kgm/s^2. Since a sun-like star has a mass of 2x10^30 kg, your acceleration is 5x10^-12 m/s2.
So it may take a while...
I thought about that, but really, where would I go? The neighbors aren't that bad, really. I suppose that if I wanted to escape the end of the universe (you know, the big crunch), I could do that - but I'm not sure I really want to survive past that anyway...
This may or may not be true - for example, for my personal Dyson sphere I was displeased by the loss of energy caused by alowing the radiatated energy from the sun to spread over the large volume of my sphere (The effective temperature goes down as you get farther away from the sun), so I made my Dyson's sphere reflective on the inside - focusing the light towards two points on the top and bottom of the sphere. That lead my sphere to emit strongly from the top and bottom, but not at all from the sides.
It increased thermal conversion effeciency by 50%, making me the envy of all the other Spheriods.
Wait a minute - are those "facts" you are using? Hand them over right now, young man! We will have no facts here!
The energy requirements are very similar to going from Chicago to Australia via jet. Currently, more than 2,500,000 people do that every year. Your example would be at least a $5B market, similar to the aforementioned route. I don't see that you have a point.
Interesting ideas, but I don't think forming a company with everyone on earth getting one share would prevent many problems - that is sort of a definition of government. The problem is that when power is dispersed to widely, the actual power then becomes the ones that control the communication medium that feeds back success / failure fro the company.
For example, say the CEO is old and wants to retire. Say also that he wants to pass the cushy job to his son. If he controls what people hear about the qualified candidates (and he is CEO, after all), he can pretty much force the issue.
Absolutely correct in spirit - but there is no "crossover point". That is the wierd thing about exponential growth - now matter how far you zoom in or out, the curve looks the same.
In other words, if you plot the curve of technology from 0 - 100 AD, it will look the same at the curve from 0 - 1000 AD, and 0 - 2005 AD, etc. (This assumes that the zero technology point is chosen to be at year zero, of course).
Yes - that is funny. But you know what is hilarious? It has been studied! (Well, sort of...)
l
.GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN!
http://yarchive.net/space/science/g_tolerance.htm
The precious quote:
There was the hyper-G work done on chickens, for example, by Arthur Hamilton ("Milt") Smith in the 1970s. Milt Smith was a gravity specialist at the University of California at Davis who wanted to find out what would happen to humans if they lived in greater-than-normal G-forces. Naturally, he experimented on animals, and he decided that the animal that most closely resembled man for this specific purpose was the chicken. Chickens, after all, had a posture similar to man's: they walked upright on two legs, they had two non-load-bearing limbs (the wings), and so on. Anyway, Milt Smith and his assistants took a flock of chickens -- hundreds of them, in fact -- and put them into the two eighteen-foot-long centrifuges in the university's Chronic Acceleration Research Laboratory, as the place was called.
They spun those chickens up to two-and-a-half Gs and let them stay there for a good while. In fact, they left them spinning like that day and night, for three to six months or more at a time. The hens went around and around, they clucked and they cackled and they laid their eggs, and as far as those chickens were concerned that was what ordinary life was like: a steady pull of two-and-a-half Gs. Some of those chickens spent the larger portion of their lifetimes in that goddamn accelerator.
Well, it was easy to predict what would happen. Their bones would get stronger and their muscles would get bigger--because they had all that extra gravity to work against. A total of twenty-three generations of hens was spun around like this and the same thing happened every time. When the accelerator was turned off, out walked . .
To keep this in perspective, after a long time (once all the research is amortized, essentially) a trip to space should cost no more than a trip to Australia from Chicago. The energies are about the same - just the technology required is different. The technology to do this exists, but is currently too expensive. In twenty years, all the current patents expire - so the prices will come down through simple competition.