A full single-user licence for Maple in the UK costs well over a thousand pounds - getting on for two grand, IIRC. They've done the age-old "sneaky bastards" trick of swapping the £ with $, so it's cheaper in the US. Mathematica is similarly priced.
Heck, the Student Version alone costs £130. These things, however, aren't just programs, they're ways of life. Being able to use the likes of Maple and Mathematica to investingate how mathematics works is truly awe-inspiring. Fuck it, Maple's going to get me my degree. Worth every single penny.
Think about it: while 99.999...n...9% of spam mails are either deleted before they're read or shunted into a "Spam" folder, there will be enough Internet newbies / technology imbeciles / other non-slashdotters;=) who think that unsolicited emails can be a cure to their debt problems / small penis / whatever.
So long as enough people are suckered by the adverts, the spammers get enough to pay their bandwith bills, and they can continue to spam us.
What's needed is education for the naive: just ignore unsolicited adverts. TOTALLY. I mean, when was the last time you opened a credit card mailshot? Or one of those "Espescially for you" things in real life?
Exactly. Trial by error is not a good learning solution for spam. It should be mandatory that all ISP sign-up procedures inform new customers that any unsolicited emails can safely be ignored, hopefully that way the spam industry will start to wither and die.
"Copyright law is only tolerated because it is not applied to the majority of minor offenders"
I can't for the life of me remember where this quote came from, but it's true. If they start going after every kid with some mp3s of his favourite band instead of concentrating on those with 50GB music, film, pr0n;-) caches you will start getting sob stories appearing of how Junior was thrown in the cells and fined several grand merely because he couldn't wait to listen to the new -->insert band here<-- album.
It's a shame that it will take things like that to initiate the public backlash, but rest assured, it will happen.
We can only hope that it starts before it's too late.
Re:This year's once-in-a-lifetime event
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It really IS this time. It's gonna be a big one, as the trail of comet debris (left kindly by Tempel-Tuttle, IIRC) that forms this shower is really, really close this year, and it won't be remotely as good for another thirty years or so after the debris trails start getting further away from the Earth's orbit. Not exactly once-in-a-lifetime, but still. I like meteors.
Speaking of which, it's 10:30PM here. I'm off to the beach to watch things and drink flasks of tea.
As a student in Scotland, if you believe the guff our dear leaders come out with higher education (uni, college, whatever you call it) is free for all.
Bollocks.
For starters, instead of charging tuition fees like they do south of the border (this is so the LibDems, a minority party with the balance of power up here, can claim that they honoured their pledge to scrap them) they merely charge you two grand when you graduate.
And then there's the student loans. Instead of actually giving you a grant so you can live (as they did back in the day), they give you a paltry amount (based on how much your parents could give you if they didn't do anything but give you all their spare cash) then start charging you interest on it at the rate of inflation.
Of course, the unis can charge what they like for the 10by10 foot box they make you live in. And there's all sorts of hidden costs, like printer accounts, matric cards, lab fees, key deposits, beer at the union;)... It all adds uo.
We're getting screwed over. And do you know what? They start on us once we're old enough to get credit. It's things like this that make me want to pay cash for everything.
I watched it on Friday, and (having never read the books) was surprised at how dark and spooky the film was. I'll have to investigate the books, but if the film is representative I would not let young children have much to do with Harry Potter.
Come on, I'd hardly call writing on the walls with blood, petrification, giant man-eating spiders, plants which kill with their screams, trees which try to whack people to death who come too close and the prejudice of some characters towards those not of "pure" blood Seasame Street material.
Of course, the fundamentalists are a bit over the top in their reaction to the Harry Potter phenonemon but they do have a point.
According to the article, the channel centres are seperated by 5MHz, yet the channels themselves span 27MHz.
Now, I'm probably missing something really, really obvious, but why don't they just limit the spread to, say, 2.4MHz from the centre? Surely that way all the channels (11 or 13, depending on where you are) could be used and you would still have a small buffer zone between channels?
Is is just that they can't make the frequency generators precise enough, or something?
Yes. If all I had to pay for was the games and EXTRA accessories (I'm not paying for the first two controllers, power supplies etc) I'd be first in line for a freebie.
Instead, I'd rather spend the US$ xyz they're currently charging on a GeForce4.
"Theoretically, if I reduce the number of employees and simultaneously increase the productivity, we'll have the smallest payroll around and still be a market-leader!
...
...
I wonder how they get the floppy bits inside the floppy disk?"
Probably not, as spy satellites don't use mirrors, they use high quality lenses, and you cant put things on the back of the lens to deform it and have light pass through it at the same time.
Although it is a possibility that a lens could be developed where it's precise curvature could be controlled by a superfine mesh of electrodes on their surfaces, which wouldn't interfere noticeably with the image (diffraction caused But as the lenses are composed of many, many different bits of glass, the processing power required to perform the calculations for every surface is beyond wince-inducing, and NASA don't like using new things either (they've got 486s or plain vanilla Pentiums, IIRC, controlling Hubble) so it couldn't happen for a long time.
Still, come back in a decade or three. Big Brother is not only watching you, he's mocking the size of your "equipment" when you go for a leak as well!
Parents wish to censor what their children look at, at least at a young age. Therefore, so long as the Senate is logical in what it censors (no goatse.kids.us, then) parents will love it. You'll probably get Windows XP Kid Edition, where IE is crippled to only accept kids.us addresses.
The sad thing is, people would buy that in large quantities. That's exploitation of children.
The BBC will throw sackloads of cash at it as it is a guaranteed ratings hit in the UK. (Damn us and our good taste!. Er, except for Marmite;) Which is a shame, as the baddies made from egg cartons and poster paints were genius.
""Try to get away from city lights," he suggests. "The darker the sky, the more meteors you'll see."
Of course, if you live anywhere near a city your view will be obscured by that pleasant glow of street lamps. You'll HAVE to make a trip into the countryside to see anything but the brightest of meteors. I don't mind the Moon, as it's something to look at with binoculars during quiet bits of the storm.
This image, showing the entire world's wasted light, is also intriguing. Think of all the money wasted because idiot government officials allow such wastage.
"affirming the right of scientific research into technology protection measures"
This reminds me of all the people who use shadow, md5 passwords yet use something realy obvious as their root login. Does guessing their pets' name count as research?
It's not unusual at all in the Unix world. Pete's sake, K. Ritchie (he who invented Unix and C, or at least part of the team) put trojans into early versions of cc and login so that he could get accsess to _any_ unix system.
It worked with the trojaned compiler making bent versions of the login program. You couldn't detect it as if you compiled another version of cc or login from clean source the bent cc would infect that one and the cycle of infection continued. Very cleverly done.
Actually, for all you know maybe every version of gcc ever allows RMS and Torvalds into your box...
That's why I use Prime 95. It's designed to find hideously large prime numbers, so while not as useful to the human race as the biochem ones my spare cycles aren't going to be making anyone else rich. And I'm a mathematics geek, so it's pleasing in that sense as well.
Anyone who doesn't use a cycle-sucker is scum. Think about it - how much power is wasted through PC idle time? How much money does that wasted time cost you, through your power bills? How many people will die today for the want of a few pence to buy some food or water?
He's right you know. What's more worrying is that the warming of the earth will eventually bring the next ice age upon us, and all we're doing is quickening it's arrival.
We're overdue an ice age anyways - they're meant to come at 15,000 year (? I forget) intervals and its been about 20,000 years since the last one. It's coming, and soon. If we don't act now the human race is if not doomed then in several feet of the brown stuff.
So is Quantum Theory, and that doesn't get taught at universities because it's just a theory, does it?
Now that many people have FreeNet...
on
Freenet 0.5 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Please remember NOT to set yourself as anything other than a transient node, unless you have a great big fat unfirewalled Internet pipe and never turn your PC off.
Really. There is nothing more annoying than broken links on Freenet which takes ages to resolve.
Pushback will ensure that when the/. effect happens, the server isn't overloaded by dropping connections enroute to the server rather than at the server itself.
I wonder what impact the pushback overhead will have when a server gets slashdotted, though. What if the pushback message gets dropped due to swamped routers?
Think about it - even the most mathematically simple bits of music (r'n'b background music, three-chord punk, etc) rely on the utterly random variations in the human voice to make them interesting. While you could concievably generate some interesting musical backdrops using computers, unless you're that type of person who spends a thousand notes on headphones you're not going to notice.
I am currently playing music very loud, as is everyone else on my corridor. As we can all hear each others music, which could be concieved as sharing it, are we all going to have to pay massive fines for daring to have stereos?
Or would even the RIAA concede that as fair use?
Whoops, I forgot... the RIAA can't reach us here in Britain.
Jupiter is so heavy that it's inner reigions are incredibly hot - some think it's actually a star that just wasn't big enough to have it's own mass crush it's innards to the point where nuclear fusion occurs and the star is born. It's big enough, though, that the innards are squished to to superheat. It's this heat from the inside that makes Jupiter warm up.
The moon's heating is accounted for by tidal forces - Jupiter is just so flippin' MASSIVE that it's gravity stretches and squeezes the moon, and these tidal forces make it heat up.
The surface of Amalthea (sp.?) will be interesting to look at. I think it will have pronounced cracks on the surface where aeons of tidal forces have had their way.
Slashdot Mirror
A full single-user licence for Maple in the UK costs well over a thousand pounds - getting on for two grand, IIRC. They've done the age-old "sneaky bastards" trick of swapping the £ with $, so it's cheaper in the US. Mathematica is similarly priced.
Heck, the Student Version alone costs £130. These things, however, aren't just programs, they're ways of life. Being able to use the likes of Maple and Mathematica to investingate how mathematics works is truly awe-inspiring. Fuck it, Maple's going to get me my degree. Worth every single penny.
Think about it: while 99.999...n...9% of spam mails are either deleted before they're read or shunted into a "Spam" folder, there will be enough Internet newbies / technology imbeciles / other non-slashdotters ;=) who think that unsolicited emails can be a cure to their debt problems / small penis / whatever.
So long as enough people are suckered by the adverts, the spammers get enough to pay their bandwith bills, and they can continue to spam us.
What's needed is education for the naive: just ignore unsolicited adverts. TOTALLY. I mean, when was the last time you opened a credit card mailshot? Or one of those "Espescially for you" things in real life?
Exactly. Trial by error is not a good learning solution for spam. It should be mandatory that all ISP sign-up procedures inform new customers that any unsolicited emails can safely be ignored, hopefully that way the spam industry will start to wither and die.
-Mark
I propose a new rating:
(-2) Idiot
"Copyright law is only tolerated because it is not applied to the majority of minor offenders"
;-) caches you will start getting sob stories appearing of how Junior was thrown in the cells and fined several grand merely because he couldn't wait to listen to the new -->insert band here<-- album.
I can't for the life of me remember where this quote came from, but it's true. If they start going after every kid with some mp3s of his favourite band instead of concentrating on those with 50GB music, film, pr0n
It's a shame that it will take things like that to initiate the public backlash, but rest assured, it will happen.
We can only hope that it starts before it's too late.
It really IS this time. It's gonna be a big one, as the trail of comet debris (left kindly by Tempel-Tuttle, IIRC) that forms this shower is really, really close this year, and it won't be remotely as good for another thirty years or so after the debris trails start getting further away from the Earth's orbit. Not exactly once-in-a-lifetime, but still. I like meteors.
Speaking of which, it's 10:30PM here. I'm off to the beach to watch things and drink flasks of tea.
As a student in Scotland, if you believe the guff our dear leaders come out with higher education (uni, college, whatever you call it) is free for all.
;)... It all adds uo.
Bollocks.
For starters, instead of charging tuition fees like they do south of the border (this is so the LibDems, a minority party with the balance of power up here, can claim that they honoured their pledge to scrap them) they merely charge you two grand when you graduate.
And then there's the student loans. Instead of actually giving you a grant so you can live (as they did back in the day), they give you a paltry amount (based on how much your parents could give you if they didn't do anything but give you all their spare cash) then start charging you interest on it at the rate of inflation.
Of course, the unis can charge what they like for the 10by10 foot box they make you live in. And there's all sorts of hidden costs, like printer accounts, matric cards, lab fees, key deposits, beer at the union
We're getting screwed over. And do you know what? They start on us once we're old enough to get credit. It's things like this that make me want to pay cash for everything.
... don't like Harry Potter.
I watched it on Friday, and (having never read the books) was surprised at how dark and spooky the film was. I'll have to investigate the books, but if the film is representative I would not let young children have much to do with Harry Potter.
Come on, I'd hardly call writing on the walls with blood, petrification, giant man-eating spiders, plants which kill with their screams, trees which try to whack people to death who come too close and the prejudice of some characters towards those not of "pure" blood Seasame Street material.
Of course, the fundamentalists are a bit over the top in their reaction to the Harry Potter phenonemon but they do have a point.
According to the article, the channel centres are seperated by 5MHz, yet the channels themselves span 27MHz.
Now, I'm probably missing something really, really obvious, but why don't they just limit the spread to, say, 2.4MHz from the centre? Surely that way all the channels (11 or 13, depending on where you are) could be used and you would still have a small buffer zone between channels?
Is is just that they can't make the frequency generators precise enough, or something?
"make those things appear everywhere"
Yes. If all I had to pay for was the games and EXTRA accessories (I'm not paying for the first two controllers, power supplies etc) I'd be first in line for a freebie.
Instead, I'd rather spend the US$ xyz they're currently charging on a GeForce4.
(With apologies to Scott Adams) dilbert.com
...
...
"Theoretically, if I reduce the number of employees and simultaneously increase the productivity, we'll have the smallest payroll around and still be a market-leader!
I wonder how they get the floppy bits inside the floppy disk?"
Probably not, as spy satellites don't use mirrors, they use high quality lenses, and you cant put things on the back of the lens to deform it and have light pass through it at the same time.
Although it is a possibility that a lens could be developed where it's precise curvature could be controlled by a superfine mesh of electrodes on their surfaces, which wouldn't interfere noticeably with the image (diffraction caused
But as the lenses are composed of many, many different bits of glass, the processing power required to perform the calculations for every surface is beyond wince-inducing, and NASA don't like using new things either (they've got 486s or plain vanilla Pentiums, IIRC, controlling Hubble) so it couldn't happen for a long time.
Still, come back in a decade or three. Big Brother is not only watching you, he's mocking the size of your "equipment" when you go for a leak as well!
Parents wish to censor what their children look at, at least at a young age. Therefore, so long as the Senate is logical in what it censors (no goatse.kids.us, then) parents will love it. You'll probably get Windows XP Kid Edition, where IE is crippled to only accept kids.us addresses.
The sad thing is, people would buy that in large quantities. That's exploitation of children.
Quote:
;) Which is a shame, as the baddies made from egg cartons and poster paints were genius.
"Please, BBC, don't let us down!"
The BBC will throw sackloads of cash at it as it is a guaranteed ratings hit in the UK. (Damn us and our good taste!. Er, except for Marmite
Wonder if it will still make me scared...
Quote:
""Try to get away from city lights," he suggests. "The darker the sky, the more meteors you'll see."
Of course, if you live anywhere near a city your view will be obscured by that pleasant glow of street lamps. You'll HAVE to make a trip into the countryside to see anything but the brightest of meteors. I don't mind the Moon, as it's something to look at with binoculars during quiet bits of the storm.
If you're in the UK, The Campaign For Dark Skies is an interesting site about this problem.
This image, showing the entire world's wasted light, is also intriguing. Think of all the money wasted because idiot government officials allow such wastage.
Quote:
"affirming the right of scientific research into technology protection measures"
This reminds me of all the people who use shadow, md5 passwords yet use something realy obvious as their root login. Does guessing their pets' name count as research?
It's not unusual at all in the Unix world. Pete's sake, K. Ritchie (he who invented Unix and C, or at least part of the team) put trojans into early versions of cc and login so that he could get accsess to _any_ unix system.
It worked with the trojaned compiler making bent versions of the login program. You couldn't detect it as if you compiled another version of cc or login from clean source the bent cc would infect that one and the cycle of infection continued. Very cleverly done.
Actually, for all you know maybe every version of gcc ever allows RMS and Torvalds into your box...
That's why I use Prime 95. It's designed to find hideously large prime numbers, so while not as useful to the human race as the biochem ones my spare cycles aren't going to be making anyone else rich. And I'm a mathematics geek, so it's pleasing in that sense as well.
Anyone who doesn't use a cycle-sucker is scum. Think about it - how much power is wasted through PC idle time? How much money does that wasted time cost you, through your power bills? How many people will die today for the want of a few pence to buy some food or water?
Distributed computing helps me sleep at night.
Yes, it's all there. Of course, if the Micro-Soft had posted such misleading information it would be flamed into high heaven for it's misdemeanours.
"The Truth Shall Set Ye Free, So Long As Free Means GPL"
He's right you know. What's more worrying is that the warming of the earth will eventually bring the next ice age upon us, and all we're doing is quickening it's arrival.
We're overdue an ice age anyways - they're meant to come at 15,000 year (? I forget) intervals and its been about 20,000 years since the last one. It's coming, and soon. If we don't act now the human race is if not doomed then in several feet of the brown stuff.
So is Quantum Theory, and that doesn't get taught at universities because it's just a theory, does it?
Please remember NOT to set yourself as anything other than a transient node, unless you have a great big fat unfirewalled Internet pipe and never turn your PC off.
Really. There is nothing more annoying than broken links on Freenet which takes ages to resolve.
Pushback will ensure that when the /. effect happens, the server isn't overloaded by dropping connections enroute to the server rather than at the server itself.
I wonder what impact the pushback overhead will have when a server gets slashdotted, though. What if the pushback message gets dropped due to swamped routers?
Think about it - even the most mathematically simple bits of music (r'n'b background music, three-chord punk, etc) rely on the utterly random variations in the human voice to make them interesting. While you could concievably generate some interesting musical backdrops using computers, unless you're that type of person who spends a thousand notes on headphones you're not going to notice.
Still, it beats The Ketchup Song.
Example:
I am currently playing music very loud, as is everyone else on my corridor. As we can all hear each others music, which could be concieved as sharing it, are we all going to have to pay massive fines for daring to have stereos?
Or would even the RIAA concede that as fair use?
Whoops, I forgot... the RIAA can't reach us here in Britain.
Or... can they?
Jupiter is so heavy that it's inner reigions are incredibly hot - some think it's actually a star that just wasn't big enough to have it's own mass crush it's innards to the point where nuclear fusion occurs and the star is born. It's big enough, though, that the innards are squished to to superheat. It's this heat from the inside that makes Jupiter warm up.
The moon's heating is accounted for by tidal forces - Jupiter is just so flippin' MASSIVE that it's gravity stretches and squeezes the moon, and these tidal forces make it heat up.
The surface of Amalthea (sp.?) will be interesting to look at. I think it will have pronounced cracks on the surface where aeons of tidal forces have had their way.