Ok, I'll bite and try my rusty math skills. earth-sun distance = 1 AU min jupiter-sun distance = ~5 AU
e 1|
s---------j
5
So we see:
e /
j /
while what's lit is:
| s j
|
The portion we can't see would be just angle j in the first diagram. Some simple trig gives us:
sin j = 1/sqrt(26)
Assuming all my math is right, j = 12 degrees. So worst case we can't see 12 degrees of Jupiters lit surface. What percentage of the surface that is is left as an excersize to the interested reader;).
Oh I understand there's a HUGE amount of value in understanding how proteins fold, it was just my understanding that folding@home provided a very primitive understanding of protein folding (due to limited computing power even on thousands of machines).
Distributed.net has drug its feet for a LONG time on the OGR project. OGR-24 could have been solved a couple years ago if they had been more aggressive in re-issuing stubs.
I could go on, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of any more productive distributed computing projects? Folding at home always seemed a little dubious in its scientific merit, same with seti@home. I'm not much interested in finding bigger and bigger primes (sorry, but it seems rather pointless), so what's someone who wants to put spare computing power to good use to do?
You've missed the point. As I said, you can obviously come up with some system where you can COUNT something. Counting is easy, but voting isn't just coming up with some system, then counting. It's SUPPOSED to be about finding out if more people want one candidate more than another.
At an academic level, I will concede that one might make a theoretical distinction between the voter's intent and the actual vote cast.
Did you completely forget about what happened in Florida 4 years ago? This isn't just an academic exercize, it's quite real. Hanging chads, pregnant chads, all kinds of nonsense. Sure, you can devise some system to count a vote one way or another and be able to enforce your system with a high degree of accuracy. But the error rate emerges when someone thinks they voted for one candidate, but either weren't counted at all, or were counted for the wrong person.
The idea is sound enough, we all know of course that no one adheres to any standards with regard to software revisions. Some software goes for years at version 0.x, and a 1.0 release is a really exceptional product. Others (like Microsoft) take at least up to version 3 for the thing to be actually useable.
Anyway, you should have (or perhaps you did) play his game and announce that Apache 2.0 has been out for more than 2 years. As far as the ridiculous >= 2.0 policy, I'd go the route that software companies know this trick and will inflate version numbers. That way the VP doesn't look like a total moron and can save some face when the policy goes the way of the dodo
So what? We don't even know what she said to raise the concern of the Secret Service. It's a good bet that since she took down the post it could be taken the wrong way (satyrical style or not). Until I see the post and it just says something along the lines of "Bush is a stupid wanker" I'll defer judgement to the Secret Service. If you post stupid threats against the president on the internet it shouldn't be any surprise that the Secret Service comes to investigate.
From her own descriptions they didn't throw her in jail, interrogate her downtown, or anything of the kind. They simply asked her some questions, were polite, etc. This kind of thing is NOTHING new and happens with any and all presidents.
The Homeland Security story is FAR more troubling. What do these guys have to do with preventing some small toy store from selling toys? This agency is really starting to frighten me if they think this kind of thing is within their bailiwick.
How long am I going to have to put up with emails like this?
If you install amavisd-new and clamav, you won't have to put up with it at all. amavisd-new is a generic mail proxy that calls both spamassassin for spam filtering, and clamav for virus scanning. If you really want you can get it to call dspam as well. It also can use a huge number of other virus scanners if you prefer them. I now get zero viruses using clamav and zero false positives.
I suspect different editors have different biases. DSpam has received a lot of hype for mostly the reasons you describe. I'd never heard of popfile before your post (though there's a ton of popular open source tools I've never heard of) so my guess is some editors are more willing than others to post stories about lesser-known tools. Re-submit the story in another week and hope you get lucky.
They aren't banning accounts for talking about it - they are banning for people who link to info on how to get it, whats in it, spoilers obtained from the leak, etcetera. Basically they're trying to keep the bungie forums a safe place to enjoy discussing the game
Sure, they have a right to control their forums, but the statement Bungie made isn't limited to just their forum. Here's a clip of the rather draconian announcement:
If you come across a link to the leaked game, do not reply to it, do not post about it in other forums, do not in any way spread the problem. Message me, SketchFactor, Frankie, or Achronos immediately upon discovering the leak, and then leave it alone.Even telling your friends can result in the spread of the leak, which does us as a company harm.
It really sounds like Bungie is trying to control the spread of free speech. It's a rather poor statement if all they want to do is provide a leak-talk free forum on the bungie forums. A good way to actually GET people to talk about something is to tell them very loudly to NOT talk about it. Get real Bungie, this is a game not a military secret. Sadly I think this is just a poorly thought out statement from one guy at Bungie, but since it's the only thing that's been said it's taken on large-scale meaning.
Bungie needs to realize that the cat is out of the bag and they can't do anything to put it back in. Anyone that wants to know will know. They should have just been as quite as possible, announce they're looking for the source of the leak, and remove any posts on their forums posting links to the game or spoilers.
Yah, I'd say you're probbably right. I'd also say you're defintaly right about how the HW actually works. I know the basic software part of hardware fairly well (interrupts, caching, pipelining, instruction decoding, etc) but I know almost jack about the electrical engineering parts.
But then that level of techincal detail isn't really within the scope of slashdot. Anandtech does that stuff quite well, where people on slashdot are fanboys of HW.
Because Slashdot isn't a part of the real world. It's a collection of tech fanatics who don't understand business at all.
Right, that's why just about every post in this discussion is wondering what the hell kind of crack the story submitter was smoking. The truth is there's a small, insane, vocal minority that the majority likes to hear from so we can all rip them to shreds every so often.
The only thing that the majority seems particularly weak on is science stories. Slashdot knows computers, but slashdot don't know jack (though more than Joe Average) about science.
I expect that meat prices would increase dramatically, and maybe Americans would end up eating food that is actually good for them
There's nothing unhealthy about meat, there is something unhealthy about eating too much saturated fat or an unbalanced diet. I really wish the vegetarians and vegans would stop lying to us and implicating meat as some sort of unhealthy food. I've known vegans who deep fry everything as if that's "healthy".
If you want to have your fuzzy huggable lovable animal beliefs, fine. Just don't keep spreading bullshit about how meat is somehow inherently unhealthy.
"Organism" is a word, nothing more. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Yes and no. It's important to not get to caught up in word definitions, but I think how you see something can profoundly effect how you understand it, and come up with solutions. Words are the shortcuts we use to understand incredibly complex things. Define a word differently and your entire view of it can change. The thing isn't different of course, but that's not the point.
I think the point in this new definition is more that all the other "stuff" in the body is too often ignored. Yeast infections in women are a result of the wrong kind of bacteria taking over in the vagina. There are perhaps other diseases that are a result of bacterial imbalances. It's also possible different people have very different bacteria balances in them and it effects how well drugs work.
Because it's a good idea? Because we need to start doing something about C02 emmisions as change on that large a scale takes a decade to implement?
Maybe Kyoto was too big a step to take at once (though I have my doubts about that) but the big problem is the Bush administration wants to ignore the problem entirely.
Uhh, no. The license can say whatever it wants, but that doesn't change the nature of the product. Most software licenses contain invalid claims in them which you are in no way bound by. I can claim I own your house if you break the shrinkwrap but that doesn't make it so.
Not to pic nits, but fuels can be used to produce energy because they're not in the lowest energy state, not because of instability. Endothermic reactions can result from instability, but absorb energy.
A better try than the guy above, but with one major fallacy. Commercial software isn't a service. Cable TV, phone, stock tickers, etc are. If you contract with someone to write software for you, sure that's a service. But software sitting on a shelf, downloaded from a website, etc are products.
Nice try, but wrong. Software licensing isn't a service. It's a product and if you copy software without a license you're breaking copyright law. It's really quite as simple as that. It's not a criminal act, but it is something you can be taken to civil court for and sued for damages. Theft of service would be more like contracting with someone to write you a software product, receiving the end product, then stiffing them when it comes time to pay.
Any attempts to define breaking copyright law as theft are just plain wrong as a legal definition. Attempts to define it morally as theft are problematic at best since the immoral act is generally considered to be depriving someone of their property, breaking and entering, etc. Violating copyright law involves none of those.
You can still have your moral qualms about it, just don't try to associate copyright violations with theft.
True, but slashdot is mainly a US, and to a lesser extent Europe centric site. I'd expect most developed nations to have some equivalent emergency service as we have here, and liberal policies for emergency treatment of anyone. For people living in South Africa I suppose it's more of an issue.
I still think the same principle applies though. If you're truly in need of that constant contact, don't put yourself in situations where you don't have it.
I dunno, getting up to and disturbing other people to make a call outside the theatre because the babysitter called to ask where the ice-cream scoop is?
The other point is there's a sickness people seem to be developing about being in constant contact. It works both ways in that some people expect to always be able to reach cell-phone users, and some cell-phone users expect to always be reachable.
I would like it if I'm in a movie and somebody is trying to alert me of, say, my mom having a heart attack (which *I* consider an emergency), and I could get that notification immediately.
When did we get to the point where everyone needs to be alerted of significant events immediately? Your mother having a heart attack is terrible of course, but this need for instant communications has gotten a little out of hand. I'd suggest if you're really that worried about being incommunicado, then don't go places where you are. Unless you're someone wildly important (Dr. on call, bomb-squad guy, etc) the issue only exists in your mind. I'd look inward for a solution rather than feeding this sickness by _constantly_ having to be reachable.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'll bite and try my rusty math skills.
/
/
;).
earth-sun distance = 1 AU
min jupiter-sun distance = ~5 AU
e
1|
s---------j
5
So we see:
e
j
while what's lit is:
|
s j
|
The portion we can't see would be
just angle j in the first diagram.
Some simple trig gives us:
sin j = 1/sqrt(26)
Assuming all my math is right, j = 12 degrees. So worst case we can't see 12 degrees of Jupiters lit surface. What percentage of the surface that is is left as an excersize to the interested reader
Oh I understand there's a HUGE amount of value in understanding how proteins fold, it was just my understanding that folding@home provided a very primitive understanding of protein folding (due to limited computing power even on thousands of machines).
Distributed.net has drug its feet for a LONG time on the OGR project. OGR-24 could have been solved a couple years ago if they had been more aggressive in re-issuing stubs.
I could go on, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of any more productive distributed computing projects? Folding at home always seemed a little dubious in its scientific merit, same with seti@home. I'm not much interested in finding bigger and bigger primes (sorry, but it seems rather pointless), so what's someone who wants to put spare computing power to good use to do?
You've missed the point. As I said, you can obviously come up with some system where you can COUNT something. Counting is easy, but voting isn't just coming up with some system, then counting. It's SUPPOSED to be about finding out if more people want one candidate more than another.
At an academic level, I will concede that one might make a theoretical distinction between the voter's intent and the actual vote cast.
Did you completely forget about what happened in Florida 4 years ago? This isn't just an academic exercize, it's quite real. Hanging chads, pregnant chads, all kinds of nonsense. Sure, you can devise some system to count a vote one way or another and be able to enforce your system with a high degree of accuracy. But the error rate emerges when someone thinks they voted for one candidate, but either weren't counted at all, or were counted for the wrong person.
The idea is sound enough, we all know of course that no one adheres to any standards with regard to software revisions. Some software goes for years at version 0.x, and a 1.0 release is a really exceptional product. Others (like Microsoft) take at least up to version 3 for the thing to be actually useable.
Anyway, you should have (or perhaps you did) play his game and announce that Apache 2.0 has been out for more than 2 years. As far as the ridiculous >= 2.0 policy, I'd go the route that software companies know this trick and will inflate version numbers. That way the VP doesn't look like a total moron and can save some face when the policy goes the way of the dodo
So what? We don't even know what she said to raise the concern of the Secret Service. It's a good bet that since she took down the post it could be taken the wrong way (satyrical style or not). Until I see the post and it just says something along the lines of "Bush is a stupid wanker" I'll defer judgement to the Secret Service. If you post stupid threats against the president on the internet it shouldn't be any surprise that the Secret Service comes to investigate.
From her own descriptions they didn't throw her in jail, interrogate her downtown, or anything of the kind. They simply asked her some questions, were polite, etc. This kind of thing is NOTHING new and happens with any and all presidents.
The Homeland Security story is FAR more troubling. What do these guys have to do with preventing some small toy store from selling toys? This agency is really starting to frighten me if they think this kind of thing is within their bailiwick.
How long am I going to have to put up with emails like this?
If you install amavisd-new and clamav, you won't have to put up with it at all. amavisd-new is a generic mail proxy that calls both spamassassin for spam filtering, and clamav for virus scanning. If you really want you can get it to call dspam as well. It also can use a huge number of other virus scanners if you prefer them. I now get zero viruses using clamav and zero false positives.
I suspect different editors have different biases. DSpam has received a lot of hype for mostly the reasons you describe. I'd never heard of popfile before your post (though there's a ton of popular open source tools I've never heard of) so my guess is some editors are more willing than others to post stories about lesser-known tools. Re-submit the story in another week and hope you get lucky.
They're asking people not to even talk about it. That's a bit more than not spreading links to illegal downloads.
They aren't banning accounts for talking about it - they are banning for people who link to info on how to get it, whats in it, spoilers obtained from the leak, etcetera. Basically they're trying to keep the bungie forums a safe place to enjoy discussing the game
Sure, they have a right to control their forums, but the statement Bungie made isn't limited to just their forum. Here's a clip of the rather draconian announcement:
It really sounds like Bungie is trying to control the spread of free speech. It's a rather poor statement if all they want to do is provide a leak-talk free forum on the bungie forums. A good way to actually GET people to talk about something is to tell them very loudly to NOT talk about it. Get real Bungie, this is a game not a military secret. Sadly I think this is just a poorly thought out statement from one guy at Bungie, but since it's the only thing that's been said it's taken on large-scale meaning.
Bungie needs to realize that the cat is out of the bag and they can't do anything to put it back in. Anyone that wants to know will know. They should have just been as quite as possible, announce they're looking for the source of the leak, and remove any posts on their forums posting links to the game or spoilers.
Yah, I'd say you're probbably right. I'd also say you're defintaly right about how the HW actually works. I know the basic software part of hardware fairly well (interrupts, caching, pipelining, instruction decoding, etc) but I know almost jack about the electrical engineering parts.
But then that level of techincal detail isn't really within the scope of slashdot. Anandtech does that stuff quite well, where people on slashdot are fanboys of HW.
Somehow I don't think North Korea, or Iran is going to enforce any local law against counterfeiting US currency.
Because Slashdot isn't a part of the real world. It's a collection of tech fanatics who don't understand business at all.
Right, that's why just about every post in this discussion is wondering what the hell kind of crack the story submitter was smoking. The truth is there's a small, insane, vocal minority that the majority likes to hear from so we can all rip them to shreds every so often.
The only thing that the majority seems particularly weak on is science stories. Slashdot knows computers, but slashdot don't know jack (though more than Joe Average) about science.
I expect that meat prices would increase dramatically, and maybe Americans would end up eating food that is actually good for them
There's nothing unhealthy about meat, there is something unhealthy about eating too much saturated fat or an unbalanced diet. I really wish the vegetarians and vegans would stop lying to us and implicating meat as some sort of unhealthy food. I've known vegans who deep fry everything as if that's "healthy".
If you want to have your fuzzy huggable lovable animal beliefs, fine. Just don't keep spreading bullshit about how meat is somehow inherently unhealthy.
"Organism" is a word, nothing more. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Yes and no. It's important to not get to caught up in word definitions, but I think how you see something can profoundly effect how you understand it, and come up with solutions. Words are the shortcuts we use to understand incredibly complex things. Define a word differently and your entire view of it can change. The thing isn't different of course, but that's not the point.
I think the point in this new definition is more that all the other "stuff" in the body is too often ignored. Yeast infections in women are a result of the wrong kind of bacteria taking over in the vagina. There are perhaps other diseases that are a result of bacterial imbalances. It's also possible different people have very different bacteria balances in them and it effects how well drugs work.
Because it's a good idea? Because we need to start doing something about C02 emmisions as change on that large a scale takes a decade to implement?
Maybe Kyoto was too big a step to take at once (though I have my doubts about that) but the big problem is the Bush administration wants to ignore the problem entirely.
Uhh, no. The license can say whatever it wants, but that doesn't change the nature of the product. Most software licenses contain invalid claims in them which you are in no way bound by. I can claim I own your house if you break the shrinkwrap but that doesn't make it so.
Not to pic nits, but fuels can be used to produce energy because they're not in the lowest energy state, not because of instability. Endothermic reactions can result from instability, but absorb energy.
A better try than the guy above, but with one major fallacy. Commercial software isn't a service. Cable TV, phone, stock tickers, etc are. If you contract with someone to write software for you, sure that's a service. But software sitting on a shelf, downloaded from a website, etc are products.
It is called "theft of services".
Nice try, but wrong. Software licensing isn't a service. It's a product and if you copy software without a license you're breaking copyright law. It's really quite as simple as that. It's not a criminal act, but it is something you can be taken to civil court for and sued for damages. Theft of service would be more like contracting with someone to write you a software product, receiving the end product, then stiffing them when it comes time to pay.
Any attempts to define breaking copyright law as theft are just plain wrong as a legal definition. Attempts to define it morally as theft are problematic at best since the immoral act is generally considered to be depriving someone of their property, breaking and entering, etc. Violating copyright law involves none of those.
You can still have your moral qualms about it, just don't try to associate copyright violations with theft.
True, but slashdot is mainly a US, and to a lesser extent Europe centric site. I'd expect most developed nations to have some equivalent emergency service as we have here, and liberal policies for emergency treatment of anyone. For people living in South Africa I suppose it's more of an issue.
I still think the same principle applies though. If you're truly in need of that constant contact, don't put yourself in situations where you don't have it.
I dunno, getting up to and disturbing other people to make a call outside the theatre because the babysitter called to ask where the ice-cream scoop is?
The other point is there's a sickness people seem to be developing about being in constant contact. It works both ways in that some people expect to always be able to reach cell-phone users, and some cell-phone users expect to always be reachable.
I would like it if I'm in a movie and somebody is trying to alert me of, say, my mom having a heart attack (which *I* consider an emergency), and I could get that notification immediately.
When did we get to the point where everyone needs to be alerted of significant events immediately? Your mother having a heart attack is terrible of course, but this need for instant communications has gotten a little out of hand. I'd suggest if you're really that worried about being incommunicado, then don't go places where you are. Unless you're someone wildly important (Dr. on call, bomb-squad guy, etc) the issue only exists in your mind. I'd look inward for a solution rather than feeding this sickness by _constantly_ having to be reachable.