College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
Let's suppose you're not full of shit. Still, the very fact that you believe mentioning your degrees increases the credibility of your post points towards degrees in general having value, and refutes the rest of your post.
Posts here regularly run counter to ivory-tower elite liberal lies like history, thermodynamics, and economics. But it's still relatively rare to find a single post that disagrees with itself.
And there are four twenty-four hour days in a single rota...
Sorry, I confused one crackpot with another. You're a fucking idiot.
True, there's no built-in concept of time in the Turing machine. There's no built-in concept of time in mathematics either, yet we can use Newton's equations to compute how long it would take for a drop of your drool from your mouth to hit your mother's floor. We can use the wonderful faculty of reason to apply mathematical principles to the real world, and part of that process is integrating time. There's nothing here to fix. Go read a book, if you still remember how.
My car's transmission works by shuffling current between two electric motor-generators. What would you have the manufacturer do, put a manual potentiometer in the cabin with 800VDC flowing through it?
I guess "Interesting Thing This Guy Did with Numbers n' Shit" just doesn't have quite the newsworthy ring to it.
Nah, if we adhered to normal journalistic conventions, the headline would read something like "Man Causes Pig to Fly using Homemade Rocket".
Or if this were the New York Times, "In New Development, Swine's Aerial an Inspiration to All" and an editorial the next day, an editorial "Pigs Must Fly Farther, Higher", paired with "Opinionator: Will the Pig Land? Experts Divided. Join the Discussion."
(Then, on Monday, Krugman's "Why we Need Swine Flight Credits" and Ross Douthat's "When will This Liberal Pig Eat Your Children?")
DES algorithm is quite similar to AES and Blowfish.
In that they're both block ciphers, yes. That's where the similarity ends; AES doesn't even use a Feistel network. Your comparison is like saying that a flintlock rifle is just like an M1 tank. In other words, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
One of Slashdot's corporate overlords at VA Research, or Sourceforge, or whatever it's called this week finally heard about Twitter from his nephew, and demanded that Slashdot be made "Web 2.0" relevant. He probably asked about moving Slashdot to the "cloud" too. After being rebuffed with arguments like "that makes no sense" and "we were a blog before blog was a word" and "do you even know what the cloud is", the executive was only dispatched a huff after being told "we're not ready for that yet".
It's the same reason we have the idle section (which if you're sane or over 16, you'll turn off). It's the same reason we have obvious troll stories ("Which editor is better? Visual Studio or a Diseased Chimpanzee? Discuss."). It's why we have pictures in articles, slashvertisments, and and ten times more stories about first person shooters than about functional programming languages.
The Slashdot owners (if not its actual maintainers) see the level of loyalty, tenacity, and clickthrough-friendly stupidity over at Digg and drool all over themselves in MBA-enhanced dollar sign dreams.
Even pure Javascript extensions aren't "secure". They can access all the usual XPCOM interfaces to do nasty things like overwrite all your files, and in later versions, they can use the Javascript foreign function interface to call any code C++ could.
It is essential to look at Javascript extensions as having the same security properties as native code ones.
However, plugins can be safer because their more clearly delineated NPAPI interface allows them to be run out of process, where in principle, they can be sandboxed.
It's certainly possible to create a Firefox extension (Addon) that uses native code. It's even possible to create a "fat xpi" (if you will) that will work across all supported architectures, though the build process is a little hairy.
Plugins also contain native code, but talk to Mozilla using a different API. In theory, this API works across multiple browsers.
Extensions can do everything plugins can, and a whole lot more. The only advantage a plugin has is a stable, cross-browser ABI.
Yes, T-bills are auctioned off in lots. That's how their price is set, actually: the US government actions off a batch of notes to paid off at a particular price after a particular time, (say, $1,000,000 after 30 years). Investors bid against each other, and the one willing to pay the highest price for the note wins.
Of course, the price paid for a treasury ends up being slightly below the face value of the note. That's mathematically equivalent to the government paying interest on the loan when it's repaid. (Of course, individual investors usually don't hold treasuries to term themselves, but instead sell them to others.)
That's where the interest rate on the US debt comes from: the higher the demand for US treasury securities, the higher the price, and the lower the government's effective interest rate.
Since US treasuries are considered the safest securities around, because the US has never defaulted, demand for treasuries is usually high, and especially high in times of economic sluggishness like the present. During the worst of the financial crisis, the prices paid for treasuries exceeded their face value, which meant investors were literally paying the US government to hold onto their money.
All this means that the US government can borrow very cheaply and in massive quantities. If China were to stop participating in treasury auctions, there are plenty of investors who would sake up the slack. The only effect would be that due to a reduction in competition, the bid price would be slightly lower, which would correspond to a slightly higher interest rate.
From a scientific perspective, sure, crewed spaceflight is a white elephant. But it has other benefits: public interest in space exploration, funding for math and science education, and a slew of advancements in applications, if not of pure theory. And through launch infrastructure, communication networks, organizational support, and so on, significant benefits accrue to pure research programs. Would there be a JPL without the earlier NASA manned programs?
As for the BPP stuff: I don't see how it's a "gravy train". It seems rather obscure, and to be honest, I didn't know about it until today. It just seems like a very cheap form of insurance that has the side effect of keeping busy people who would otherwise make grandiose claims and take attention away from real science.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but I don't accept that those timescales are irrelevant.
Technology changes everything. We can record our experiences in a fixed medium and propagate our knowledge over and over again. Certain things --- mathematics, science, philosophy, intrigue --- are universal, and will be useful to any sentient creature. And now that we have digital technology, we can reproduce everything, forever, with perfect fidelity.
Sure, in 100 million years, our descendants will be as incomprehensibly different as a sauropod and a duck. But these creatures will know who Aristotle, Einstein, and Shakespeare were, and they'll be able to watch Casablanca as easily as we read Cicero today.
I see no reason to think that our cultural offspring, no matter what their physical form, won't live on until the heat death of the universe.
If ancient probes were to finally report back, our descendants would surely be able to extract some old computer files and decipher the signals.
Besides: it's not as if these probes would disappear for an aeon, only to suddenly return with their findings. They'd be sending a continual stream of telemetry that we'd continue to study relentlessly.
From what I can tell, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics lab investigates crackpot theories on the off chance that some might have merit. I'm not convinced that this exercise is completely without merit.
The rest of NASA's science work, however, appears to be up the same standards you'd find anywhere else. Look at all the planetary science and material science work: you can't fake that. NASA's results would have been discredited long ago if they weren't engaging in legitimate research.
Whatever Tynt's solution is, it must be something pretty cool.
Not really.
A really good application of the technique would be removing text: e.g., removing footnote references from copy-and-pasted wikipedia section, and removing inline site notifications from Slashdot posts.
A website can monitor practically anything it wants. One idea is to record the user's mouse movements and report the areas he mouses-over the most (presumably for site optimization).
Incidentally, this is one reason Flash is evil: Flash provides 1) hidden cookies, and 2) clipboard access. It's evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's suppose you're not full of shit. Still, the very fact that you believe mentioning your degrees increases the credibility of your post points towards degrees in general having value, and refutes the rest of your post.
Posts here regularly run counter to ivory-tower elite liberal lies like history, thermodynamics, and economics. But it's still relatively rare to find a single post that disagrees with itself.
And there are four twenty-four hour days in a single rota...
Sorry, I confused one crackpot with another. You're a fucking idiot.
True, there's no built-in concept of time in the Turing machine. There's no built-in concept of time in mathematics either, yet we can use Newton's equations to compute how long it would take for a drop of your drool from your mouth to hit your mother's floor. We can use the wonderful faculty of reason to apply mathematical principles to the real world, and part of that process is integrating time. There's nothing here to fix. Go read a book, if you still remember how.
My car's transmission works by shuffling current between two electric motor-generators. What would you have the manufacturer do, put a manual potentiometer in the cabin with 800VDC flowing through it?
You need to think this one through.
They're not the Saturn V, but rockets like the Delta IV Heavy seem pretty capable.
Places with "low taxes" either:
You can't get a modern civilization for pennies on the dollar.
They sure do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmCKJi3CKGE
Straight out of Newton's Rape Manual.
Nah, if we adhered to normal journalistic conventions, the headline would read something like "Man Causes Pig to Fly using Homemade Rocket".
Or if this were the New York Times, "In New Development, Swine's Aerial an Inspiration to All" and an editorial the next day, an editorial "Pigs Must Fly Farther, Higher", paired with "Opinionator: Will the Pig Land? Experts Divided. Join the Discussion."
(Then, on Monday, Krugman's "Why we Need Swine Flight Credits" and Ross Douthat's "When will This Liberal Pig Eat Your Children?")
In that they're both block ciphers, yes. That's where the similarity ends; AES doesn't even use a Feistel network. Your comparison is like saying that a flintlock rifle is just like an M1 tank. In other words, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
One of Slashdot's corporate overlords at VA Research, or Sourceforge, or whatever it's called this week finally heard about Twitter from his nephew, and demanded that Slashdot be made "Web 2.0" relevant. He probably asked about moving Slashdot to the "cloud" too. After being rebuffed with arguments like "that makes no sense" and "we were a blog before blog was a word" and "do you even know what the cloud is", the executive was only dispatched a huff after being told "we're not ready for that yet".
It's the same reason we have the idle section (which if you're sane or over 16, you'll turn off). It's the same reason we have obvious troll stories ("Which editor is better? Visual Studio or a Diseased Chimpanzee? Discuss."). It's why we have pictures in articles, slashvertisments, and and ten times more stories about first person shooters than about functional programming languages.
The Slashdot owners (if not its actual maintainers) see the level of loyalty, tenacity, and clickthrough-friendly stupidity over at Digg and drool all over themselves in MBA-enhanced dollar sign dreams.
The social antipathy on display here at Slashdot disgusts me. Did it occur to you that the OP might not able to find a job in this dismal economy?
Please, on what planet is all unemployment and underemployment a choice? How do the rest of us get there?
But where everyone drives 70mph on the LIE. There is something fundamentally wrong with the law when most people break it day after day.
Even pure Javascript extensions aren't "secure". They can access all the usual XPCOM interfaces to do nasty things like overwrite all your files, and in later versions, they can use the Javascript foreign function interface to call any code C++ could.
It is essential to look at Javascript extensions as having the same security properties as native code ones.
However, plugins can be safer because their more clearly delineated NPAPI interface allows them to be run out of process, where in principle, they can be sandboxed.
It's certainly possible to create a Firefox extension (Addon) that uses native code. It's even possible to create a "fat xpi" (if you will) that will work across all supported architectures, though the build process is a little hairy.
Plugins also contain native code, but talk to Mozilla using a different API. In theory, this API works across multiple browsers.
Extensions can do everything plugins can, and a whole lot more. The only advantage a plugin has is a stable, cross-browser ABI.
Yes, T-bills are auctioned off in lots. That's how their price is set, actually: the US government actions off a batch of notes to paid off at a particular price after a particular time, (say, $1,000,000 after 30 years). Investors bid against each other, and the one willing to pay the highest price for the note wins.
Of course, the price paid for a treasury ends up being slightly below the face value of the note. That's mathematically equivalent to the government paying interest on the loan when it's repaid. (Of course, individual investors usually don't hold treasuries to term themselves, but instead sell them to others.)
That's where the interest rate on the US debt comes from: the higher the demand for US treasury securities, the higher the price, and the lower the government's effective interest rate.
Since US treasuries are considered the safest securities around, because the US has never defaulted, demand for treasuries is usually high, and especially high in times of economic sluggishness like the present. During the worst of the financial crisis, the prices paid for treasuries exceeded their face value, which meant investors were literally paying the US government to hold onto their money.
All this means that the US government can borrow very cheaply and in massive quantities. If China were to stop participating in treasury auctions, there are plenty of investors who would sake up the slack. The only effect would be that due to a reduction in competition, the bid price would be slightly lower, which would correspond to a slightly higher interest rate.
No big deal.
Because we've always been at war with Eurasia?
From a scientific perspective, sure, crewed spaceflight is a white elephant. But it has other benefits: public interest in space exploration, funding for math and science education, and a slew of advancements in applications, if not of pure theory. And through launch infrastructure, communication networks, organizational support, and so on, significant benefits accrue to pure research programs. Would there be a JPL without the earlier NASA manned programs?
As for the BPP stuff: I don't see how it's a "gravy train". It seems rather obscure, and to be honest, I didn't know about it until today. It just seems like a very cheap form of insurance that has the side effect of keeping busy people who would otherwise make grandiose claims and take attention away from real science.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but I don't accept that those timescales are irrelevant.
Technology changes everything. We can record our experiences in a fixed medium and propagate our knowledge over and over again. Certain things --- mathematics, science, philosophy, intrigue --- are universal, and will be useful to any sentient creature. And now that we have digital technology, we can reproduce everything, forever, with perfect fidelity.
Sure, in 100 million years, our descendants will be as incomprehensibly different as a sauropod and a duck. But these creatures will know who Aristotle, Einstein, and Shakespeare were, and they'll be able to watch Casablanca as easily as we read Cicero today.
I see no reason to think that our cultural offspring, no matter what their physical form, won't live on until the heat death of the universe.
If ancient probes were to finally report back, our descendants would surely be able to extract some old computer files and decipher the signals.
Besides: it's not as if these probes would disappear for an aeon, only to suddenly return with their findings. They'd be sending a continual stream of telemetry that we'd continue to study relentlessly.
From what I can tell, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics lab investigates crackpot theories on the off chance that some might have merit. I'm not convinced that this exercise is completely without merit.
The rest of NASA's science work, however, appears to be up the same standards you'd find anywhere else. Look at all the planetary science and material science work: you can't fake that. NASA's results would have been discredited long ago if they weren't engaging in legitimate research.
If they grow, reproduce, and evolve, in what way are they not life?
Through the stanard API.
No, it isn't.
Not really.
A really good application of the technique would be removing text: e.g., removing footnote references from copy-and-pasted wikipedia section, and removing inline site notifications from Slashdot posts.
Don't like it? Metamoderate.
A website can monitor practically anything it wants. One idea is to record the user's mouse movements and report the areas he mouses-over the most (presumably for site optimization).
Incidentally, this is one reason Flash is evil: Flash provides 1) hidden cookies, and 2) clipboard access. It's evil.
People often say "penultimate" when they mean "consummate".