They could find that monopolistic or predatory practices of the corporation void its EULAs and copyrights. In most of those sovreignities, outlaws have very limited property rights.
This would not be a banning of MS products. It might mean that within the EU, MS products would become "free as in beer", depriving MS of the european market while creating a cottage industry in copying original MS CDs and allowing EU software houses to raid MS binaries with impunity. Essentially putting the code in the public domain.
I can't imagine things going that far, but then a year ago I couldn't imagine that the USA would deliberately attempt to provoke a full scale war in the Mid East (or anywhere else). I admit to having less imagination than this new world order seems to require.
Could someone explain what the EU has power to do?
Seems to me like they couldn't do much...
European courts could find that Microsoft was engaging in illegal practices and void part, or all, of the EULAs involved. That could create a gray market of epic proportions. It would also allow european software houses to embrace and extend the microsoft products in ways that would be illegal elsewhere.
I'm not saying that this is a likely outcome, but it is one of the things that a band of sovereign nations could do.
As I recall thirty years ago voting machines in Chicago, around Boston, and probably elsewhere in the USA had one lever you could flip to vote the entire Republican slate, and another to vote the Democratic slate. I believe those were found to be unconstitutional in the early 1970's... I think the ruling was that a citizen had a right to vote for candidates but there was no basis for voting for a party.
I know there was a lot of abuse of slate voting in the political machines of USA politics in the late 1800s through around 1960 (to 1970 in Chicago). I hope that Australia isn't facing anything like that.
Perhaps someone with better knowledge of USA political history will jump in here. Mine is both meager and dim.
Choosing to just enter the "1" and not vote the rest of your options would be valid, wouldn't it? Sort of like the "bullet voting" when three school board positions are open among eight candidates, but you really want Mr. Smith to get on so you vote only for him (and toss away your other two votes rather than give any help to one of his opponents).
Of those who have experience with the instant runoff-- is it always a requirement that you state all your preferences? Can you "bullet vote" by stating only one or two, or would your ballot then be tossed out?
Well, it is more complicated than what I tried to express in my earlier comment. What I presented then is one of the common "centrifugal forces" of american politics: a useful fiction for making some things easier to understand in a few words.
In reality much of what we have going on today is an outgrowth of the civil rights movement of the 1960s-- between 1964 and 1976, several huge voting blocks coalesced into group identities. But this happened in such a way that neither of the two dominant parties could embrace these groups without self-destructing. I'm talking about black, hispanic and other minority voting blocks, of course, but also about other life-style voting blocks that can be traced back to that time. The Green movement, the rise of Libertarians, etc. The creation of these new voting blocks did put an end to the last of the political machines and that is good, but it also left the country fragmented in a strange way and that is not so good.
People tend to identify with these blocks whenever they can, on questionaires and in rallies and through financial contributions and so on. So nominally the Republicans and Democrats have been losing ground. But when it comes to spending their precious single vote, people tend to vote against whichever of the two most-likely-to-win candidates they feel is most in opposition to their own way of life, by voting for the other one. Few are willing to throw away their vote on a third party candidate who is doomed to lose-- that would be working against your own self interest.
This american pattern of aversive voting has the same appearance that you see in a flock of sheep when some are listening to the howls of the wolves on the left while others are reacting to the yipping of the coyotes on the right. The behavior is still sheep behavior. That it is motivated by fear rather than desire just makes it worse: it is more unstable, and more likely to result in the sheep in the middle getting trampled upon.
<rant off> Whew. Sorry about that. Don't know how to say it without it seeming a rant.
In any event, the "instant runoff" or some other multiple vote scheme might make US politics more sane.
I'm an american. The "how to vote" cards would be a vast improvement over our system. Since a big block of voters do have a sheep mentality and would follow their party line, the backroom wheeling and dealing between candidates over the "directed preferences" strikes me as a very practical way of developing the compromises and coalitions between different parties and different political viewpoints that are needed in a strong democracy.
So I don't see this as a problem. I see it as a desirable feature that would require the two most popular parties to accommodate to some degree the viewpoints of any sizeable third parties.
I think if the US adopted the "instant runoff" approach, it would reduce the number of people who feel alienated or disenfranchised, and it would move the country closer toward becoming a working democracy. (In the last 30 years or more, US national politics can be likened to a set of rules for swapping tyrannies without too much bloodshed rather than a working democracy where all major viewpoints have some influence on policy.)
Some of the other voting systems also look interesting. At this point I am very much against the "one person, one vote" that was upheld in my childhood (circa 1960) as the democratic ideal.
Doomsday? Hey guys, it's the internet! Who's gonna die if the internet shuts down?
Now that's a really good question! It begs for a graphic solution, showing the body count if the internet was shut down for three days, or for one week, or two, or a month, or permanently. (Oh, but you are talking about how many, not who.) Yep. Let's see if there are any deaths first. Hang on a bit.
That there would be deaths from a permanent shut down is evident. In the last 25 years the increase in population and its dispersal patterns into more marginal areas introduces risks that didn't exist before the internet. Couple that with a new dependence on JIT deliveries for food, medicine, even potable water systems rather than old fashioned warehousing and water towers, and its clear that the risks associated with loss of rapid communications are now grave. The amount of information passed around on the internet now far exceeds the bandwidth of telephonic systems or any other backup systems. If the internet goes down forever then there will be deaths.
(But who? That was the question!)
Idunno. Probably the disadvantaged in places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Chad would be early losers. Then what? Water riots in Mexico City, Los Angeles and San Diego? Pandemic plague? (We've got tetracycline now.) We'd have no way of coordinating its delivery in time to control the initial outbreak.
Fortunately the US DOD designed the internet to be resilient to catastrophe so a total loss forever is unlikely. But it does seem reasonable at this point to ask whether if the internet were crippled by say a worm that cut the effective bandwidth to a fraction for a few months, what critical services would be interrupted and who and how many would die as a result?
About nuclear testing: They probably do more than just determine the size of the hole we can make. They can also simulate things like the effects of fallout from a device detonated by that person you are less worried about.
Good point.
Another thing that I hope they are checking is whether casings and electronics and such might have get dangerously out of spec as the warheads go stale. I'd hate to find out the hard way that decades of exposure to hard radiation had messed up the capacitance of some critical circuit in some older warhead in some dusty mothball warehouse.
I don't know about macros as such-- Warby may have made an unfortunate choice of words. But in his position I think I'd be concerned about easter eggs and about the continuation of the kind of coding that made the book Undocumented DOS so important to professional programmers about ten years ago.
The corporate culture in Redmond has definitely given positive support to its employees regarding the inclusion of some undocumented features in its products. Features that can be accessed by those in the know but are intended to be hidden from the licensed users of the systems. Does Microsoft police its own workforce and can they assure that there is no combination of usage of undocumented features that would compromise user security? That would be a tall order. I would want to see exactly how they do this; I wouldn't feel comfortable just taking some suit's word for it.
At what point does an undocumented feature become a security threat? When you are talking about high risk situations like banking and medical records, one reasonable answer is "if any undocumented feature exists at all."
It seems to me that Microsoft's insistence on being able to download whatever it wants to for the good of the user aggravates this problem to no end.
No. There is no "expanding rim of photons"; they are everywhere in the universe, uniformly. They do not get "pulled back inward" (whatever that means, since there is no location in space corresponding to "the location of the Big Bang"; it too happened everywhere in space).
This sounds like what I read along time ago about the original inflationary theory of the universe, which in its classic form was a serious alternative for the big bang theory until about twenty years ago. It is the one about dots on a balloon, that has as an underlying principle that there is something that causes new space to mysteriously come into being between old locations. Which I don't personally have a problem in believing, even though it does sort of beg the question of what the spatial generating mechanism is. I mean, you sort of end up having to ask what the turtle is standing on if you go with that line of reasoning.
The discovery of the microwave residuals of the big bang looks pretty convincing. Someone figured out that if the big bang had happened, then a lot of the ultraviolet that was released in the event should be coming back at us red-shifted into the microwave spectrum at a particular frequency. And guess what they found when they looked for it? Further, this has been easy to confirm: subsequent observations have fit the predictions. The article at the head of this thread is all about the latest confirmation. Of course maybe its all a conspiracy and I need to be watching out for black heliocopters rather than reporting decades old news on slashdot.
It does get confusing though, because fairly recently a variant of the original inflationary theory has been proposed to explain some puzzles of the big bang theory. Apparently the math is such that a straightforward big bang doesn't quite work. One of the ways to fudge things so the physics we think we know could get from a big bang to what we see today is to posit an inflationary force that either worked very strongly for a short period of time when the universe was just a baby (as I recall, before even hydrogen and helium were around), or is very weak but is still shoving things apart. This all gets tied in with the dark matter stuff... I don't pretend to understand it. My impression is that a lot of astrophysicists also don't pretend to understand it. Science ain't for people who Just Have To Know; it's for people with a great deal of tolerance for ambiguities.
As to the first photons being everywhere in the universe uniformly, the Big Bang theory suggests that's exactly the case. Not only that, but no matter which way you choose to look outward, if you look out far enough you are looking at the center of everything.
Light is bent by gravity. The original light of the big bang forms an ever expanding rim of the universe as the individual photons loop out and are pulled back inward by the gravity of the whole thing. At least, that's one story:-)
The background radiation can be thought of as that portion of the original light that has gone out the edge and has now looped back to where we can see it.
As my Daddy once told me, if an astronomer builds a powerful enough telescope, he'll be able to look at the back of his own head.
Well, this is all kind of simplified, but then I'm just a science buff. IANAS
Unless something acts on it near apogee to circularize its orbit, that orbit will return to the point it began (which lies inside the atmosphere)
No. The model of orbital mechanics that you are using does not contain enough objects. Here is a more realistic way of visualizing the process:
Instead of looking at one chunk of rock in a billiard-like model, think in terms of the spray of material that would be generated by a glancing strike (which is also the most likely kind). Most of the particles in this spray will not have orbital velocity and will rain back down, with the larger and faster ones making a string of secondary impact craters. A much smaller portion will reach escape velocity and become interplanetary objects.
But what is significant is the group of particles whose velocities exceed orbital velocity but do not reach escape velocity. That is a pretty wide range of speeds. At first these objects will also have a wide range of apogees and perigees, but they will mostly be in the same plane. Their own gravitational interactions and collisions will redistribute the kinetic energy of the group as a whole into a ring. In essence, the circularizing agent that you are looking for is the aggregate effect of the group on each individual member, a sort of gravitational peer pressure. Ring formation is probably a positive feedback process, where the proto ring's growth increases its influence on the remaining wild particles.
There are three ring shepherds that will cause any debris ring (any satellite for that matter) to seek an equatorial orbit over time: the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth's equatorial bulge. I imagine the Moon's presence would also assure that any Earth ring would be relatively short lived.
I would also think that any Earth ring formed in this way would be quite bright, at least for a while. I would think the ejecta stream would suck along a lot of air and water vapor through entrainment, and that many of the ring particles would be frosted as they cooled.
I'm not saying I'm convinced that this happened. But it is an intriguing scenario and might go far to explain ice ages and such. One of the more intriguing things about it is that it appears to be testable in several different ways.
Ah, I see. I have made the error of not pointing out the blindingly obvious.
Of course a flywheel makes no sense in powering a laptop. It's absurd to think about that. Wrong scale entirely.
As to your comparison with 30-06 energy expenditures-- I trust your numbers are right. But the rifle is a very elegant way of directing a relatively small amount of energy in a very efficient manner, and the 30-06 remains one of the most efficient single piston machines of its type ever developed. I'm having a little bit of trouble with your comparison of this kind of tightly controlled use of energy to the uncontrolled energy release of failing flywheel. A hand grenade would have been a better example. But a hand grenade fashioned with the slow burning powders used in 30-06 ordinance would be a bit of a dud.
Even if the gimbal mounting and safety containment trebled the volume and weight of the flywheel, we're still talking about a storage system that is an order of magnitude smaller and lighter than today's chemical batteries.
the only use of flywheel tech ive seen that made it beyond the research stage was a UPS system. It used a massive weight spinning at extraordinary speeds to store the energy in case of a power loss. For safety it was spec'd to be buried outside below grade since it weighed around 90kg and spun at an angular velocity of a few hundred kph.
A 12 inch diameter flywheel weighing only 23 lb will store 3 kilowatt hours of energy at 100,000 rpm. This is the kind of flywheel UPS that is being installed as mechanical batteries for UPS systems. Typically they use concrete containment vessels (an uncontrolled release of 3 kwh in a few hundred milliseconds is catastrophic) but a lighter weight containment vessel is feasible. It's just hard to beat digging a hole and burying it for low cost safety.
My understanding is that Feynman recognized his diagrams could be interpreted as showing particles moving backwards in time. That there was nothing about the theories he was working with that prevented us from regarding a positron as being an electron that was moving backward in time. (However to us who are moving forward in time, it is still and always will be a positron also moving forward in time.)
As I understand it, this aspect of the F.D.s showed one possible way of looking at one part of the theoretical structure, but that neither Feynman nor anyone else has been able to determine whether this is a valid perspective, or possibly an illusion arising from the tools being used (the Feynman diagrams themselves, and the equations that they represent), or if something else entirely is going on. I believe that is one of the fascinations of the Feynman diagrams-- they not only allow physicists to present complicated particle smashing in a way that students and lay people can grasp, but that their time-reversible quality is of itself a kind of koan of physics. If that koan could just be understood, then whole new realms of physics would open up...
All this brings to mind the marxian theory of the arrow of time, but I'll put that in a separate post.
If there's any virtue at all to a discussion about time travel, it's that you can't determine whether mathematics or linguistics is taking the worst beating.
That's X-L-N-tay!
Thanks, epine. If I had mod points to award, and could award them to just a portion of a post, I'd rate that sentence a "5".
I've got no technical knowledge of internet security. I have tried to keep up with general news about defensive strategies and tactics.
It looks to me like IWT's tactics are reasonable extensions of well-accepted defensive moves. Blocking an ISP that will not police its own members has been a routine defensive ploy for some time, I believe. The difference here seems only to be that IWT is able to act proactively (since RIAA has blatantly stated that they are going to violate the generally accepted code of good behavior). Is my thinking wrong about this somehow?
Similarly, their use of the honeypot tactic to identify and counter specific threats seems like accepted behavior, too. Again, is there something here that I'm not seeing?
It seems like the only real new thing that IWT is doing here is being public about their activities. This stuff is usually handled in the back rooms-- but then it usually involves finding some script kiddy's Mommy and making sure that she disciplines her child appropriately. To my knowledge RIAA is the first institution that has ever publically declared that it will violate the unwritten codes of behavior that keep the internet working. Making a public hue and cry about this seems like the moral equivalent of telling the brat's Mommy that she needs to teach her kid some lessons.
Other than being public about it, is there some way in which IWT's tactics differ from what you should expect your ISP to do to guard your interests?
At this point my livelihood is damaged badly when my computer system is messed with. I lose money for every hour of down time. But my livelihood is also damaged when any of my clients or my potential clients go down. Can RIAA guarrantee that neither I nor my clients will be recipients of "collateral damage"? I don't think so...
It is in the best interests of all of us who now depend on the internet in our jobs to oppose this threat from RIAA.
Numerology only works in languages where letters can also represent numbers, like Hebrew and such -- not English, certainly, nor Chinese, etc.
Unless of course numerology is a phenomenon of ordered sets of symbols. Or if that is too broad for comprehension, then at the very least please acknowledge that to the extent which the roman alphabet can be mapped to the hebraic alphabet, whatever numerological values exist in the latter must also be inherent in the former.
Please note that I am not offering an opinion on whether numerology provides anything of value.
This equation shows that the gravitational attraction can never go to zero.
That said, does anyone have any idea how this guy got two objects with mass to not have any gravitational attraction? It seems impossible.
Something of great interest to us is that a leading edge of your species is nearing the point where a fundamental revelation of part of the Mystery is beginning to occur. We think this may have reached the stage where we can begin to talk to you about it.
Recall that your theorist Einstein suggested that gravity is a property of space as well as (or in some frameworks, in place of) a property of matter. And recognize that the visionary Gene Roddenberry metaphorically described the process of, err, "bringing" distant points in space "closer" together as warp technology. (We will ignore for now the delightful absurdity of fractional "warp" states as described by his playwrights).
Now it should be evident that the antigravity you seek is in fact merely the reverse of Roddenberry's warp principle. A directional reverse warp field applied downward from a generating disk you were standing upon would decrease the gravitational effect to the same degree that it would increase the effective distance between the bottom of the disk and the center of gravity of the earth. "Centrifugal force" (another very useful fiction-- I love what your species is doing with physics) would cause you and the disk to rise. Of course the entire column of air above you would also be rising and the vortex effect can be quite a bit of fun to play with, so long as you've constructed your disk with good airfoil properties around its edges-- the effect of being "sucked up into the sky" is actually much more useful in the atmosphere than the "centrigual force" effect.
Uh-oh, Mommy's coming. I can't say anything more right now.
Love your internet by the way. This anonymity is great fun!
It was an interesting article, and I can see how this technique will work when the surveyors have the goodwill of the respondents, so that any respondent's primary concern is only that of keeping his individual privacy.
But is privacy the core issue in market research, or is it simply a label of convenience that a lot people use for something else that we don't have easy words for? I will lie on many surveys even when I am fully confident of my personal anonymity-- though I prefer to avoid those surveys entirely when I can. OTOH, when a survey is done by a group that I have aligned myself with, I might well enthusiastically bare my soul without any regard to the privacy issue. And I know that I am not at all uncommon in these respects.
I suspect that my reactions stem from the same source as nationalism, patriotism, ethnic pride, and that whole mess of things where I'm not behaving as an individual protecting my privacy, but as a member of a group who feels called upon to defend my group.
Mostly I see marketing as an attempt by outsiders to mess with my group, to get us to buy stuff through conning us rather than letting us apply our own standards of value to the goods offered. I think I lie on surveys to protect my group from these subtle attacks; to misdirect and confound my group's enemy.
So I really don't think privacy has much to do with it. I think all this lying is a natural group reaction to consumerism, and its belief that it is perfectly okay to sell product by conning your customers into thinking that what you are pushing today is something they want.
Not in my group, buster. We don't need no steenkeeng pushers in our neighborhood.
Slashdot Mirror
They could find that monopolistic or predatory practices of the corporation void its EULAs and copyrights. In most of those sovreignities, outlaws have very limited property rights.
This would not be a banning of MS products. It might mean that within the EU, MS products would become "free as in beer", depriving MS of the european market while creating a cottage industry in copying original MS CDs and allowing EU software houses to raid MS binaries with impunity. Essentially putting the code in the public domain.
I can't imagine things going that far, but then a year ago I couldn't imagine that the USA would deliberately attempt to provoke a full scale war in the Mid East (or anywhere else). I admit to having less imagination than this new world order seems to require.
Bay of Fundy tides are usually quoted as 38 or 39 feet.
Could someone explain what the EU has power to do?
Seems to me like they couldn't do much...
European courts could find that Microsoft was engaging in illegal practices and void part, or all, of the EULAs involved. That could create a gray market of epic proportions. It would also allow european software houses to embrace and extend the microsoft products in ways that would be illegal elsewhere.
I'm not saying that this is a likely outcome, but it is one of the things that a band of sovereign nations could do.
Thanks for the info.
As I recall thirty years ago voting machines in Chicago, around Boston, and probably elsewhere in the USA had one lever you could flip to vote the entire Republican slate, and another to vote the Democratic slate. I believe those were found to be unconstitutional in the early 1970's... I think the ruling was that a citizen had a right to vote for candidates but there was no basis for voting for a party.
I know there was a lot of abuse of slate voting in the political machines of USA politics in the late 1800s through around 1960 (to 1970 in Chicago). I hope that Australia isn't facing anything like that.
Perhaps someone with better knowledge of USA political history will jump in here. Mine is both meager and dim.
Choosing to just enter the "1" and not vote the rest of your options would be valid, wouldn't it? Sort of like the "bullet voting" when three school board positions are open among eight candidates, but you really want Mr. Smith to get on so you vote only for him (and toss away your other two votes rather than give any help to one of his opponents).
Of those who have experience with the instant runoff-- is it always a requirement that you state all your preferences? Can you "bullet vote" by stating only one or two, or would your ballot then be tossed out?
Well, it is more complicated than what I tried to express in my earlier comment. What I presented then is one of the common "centrifugal forces" of american politics: a useful fiction for making some things easier to understand in a few words.
In reality much of what we have going on today is an outgrowth of the civil rights movement of the 1960s-- between 1964 and 1976, several huge voting blocks coalesced into group identities. But this happened in such a way that neither of the two dominant parties could embrace these groups without self-destructing. I'm talking about black, hispanic and other minority voting blocks, of course, but also about other life-style voting blocks that can be traced back to that time. The Green movement, the rise of Libertarians, etc. The creation of these new voting blocks did put an end to the last of the political machines and that is good, but it also left the country fragmented in a strange way and that is not so good.
People tend to identify with these blocks whenever they can, on questionaires and in rallies and through financial contributions and so on. So nominally the Republicans and Democrats have been losing ground. But when it comes to spending their precious single vote, people tend to vote against whichever of the two most-likely-to-win candidates they feel is most in opposition to their own way of life, by voting for the other one. Few are willing to throw away their vote on a third party candidate who is doomed to lose-- that would be working against your own self interest.
This american pattern of aversive voting has the same appearance that you see in a flock of sheep when some are listening to the howls of the wolves on the left while others are reacting to the yipping of the coyotes on the right. The behavior is still sheep behavior. That it is motivated by fear rather than desire just makes it worse: it is more unstable, and more likely to result in the sheep in the middle getting trampled upon.
<rant off> Whew. Sorry about that. Don't know how to say it without it seeming a rant.
In any event, the "instant runoff" or some other multiple vote scheme might make US politics more sane.
I'm an american. The "how to vote" cards would be a vast improvement over our system. Since a big block of voters do have a sheep mentality and would follow their party line, the backroom wheeling and dealing between candidates over the "directed preferences" strikes me as a very practical way of developing the compromises and coalitions between different parties and different political viewpoints that are needed in a strong democracy.
So I don't see this as a problem. I see it as a desirable feature that would require the two most popular parties to accommodate to some degree the viewpoints of any sizeable third parties.
I think if the US adopted the "instant runoff" approach, it would reduce the number of people who feel alienated or disenfranchised, and it would move the country closer toward becoming a working democracy. (In the last 30 years or more, US national politics can be likened to a set of rules for swapping tyrannies without too much bloodshed rather than a working democracy where all major viewpoints have some influence on policy.)
Some of the other voting systems also look interesting. At this point I am very much against the "one person, one vote" that was upheld in my childhood (circa 1960) as the democratic ideal.
Doomsday? Hey guys, it's the internet! Who's gonna die if the internet shuts down?
Now that's a really good question! It begs for a graphic solution, showing the body count if the internet was shut down for three days, or for one week, or two, or a month, or permanently. (Oh, but you are talking about how many, not who.) Yep. Let's see if there are any deaths first. Hang on a bit.
That there would be deaths from a permanent shut down is evident. In the last 25 years the increase in population and its dispersal patterns into more marginal areas introduces risks that didn't exist before the internet. Couple that with a new dependence on JIT deliveries for food, medicine, even potable water systems rather than old fashioned warehousing and water towers, and its clear that the risks associated with loss of rapid communications are now grave. The amount of information passed around on the internet now far exceeds the bandwidth of telephonic systems or any other backup systems. If the internet goes down forever then there will be deaths.
(But who? That was the question!)
Idunno. Probably the disadvantaged in places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Chad would be early losers. Then what? Water riots in Mexico City, Los Angeles and San Diego? Pandemic plague? (We've got tetracycline now.) We'd have no way of coordinating its delivery in time to control the initial outbreak.
Fortunately the US DOD designed the internet to be resilient to catastrophe so a total loss forever is unlikely. But it does seem reasonable at this point to ask whether if the internet were crippled by say a worm that cut the effective bandwidth to a fraction for a few months, what critical services would be interrupted and who and how many would die as a result?
About nuclear testing: They probably do more than just determine the size of the hole we can make. They can also simulate things like the effects of fallout from a device detonated by that person you are less worried about.
Good point.
Another thing that I hope they are checking is whether casings and electronics and such might have get dangerously out of spec as the warheads go stale. I'd hate to find out the hard way that decades of exposure to hard radiation had messed up the capacitance of some critical circuit in some older warhead in some dusty mothball warehouse.
has anyone got any examples of this anywhere?
I don't know about macros as such-- Warby may have made an unfortunate choice of words. But in his position I think I'd be concerned about easter eggs and about the continuation of the kind of coding that made the book Undocumented DOS so important to professional programmers about ten years ago.
The corporate culture in Redmond has definitely given positive support to its employees regarding the inclusion of some undocumented features in its products. Features that can be accessed by those in the know but are intended to be hidden from the licensed users of the systems. Does Microsoft police its own workforce and can they assure that there is no combination of usage of undocumented features that would compromise user security? That would be a tall order. I would want to see exactly how they do this; I wouldn't feel comfortable just taking some suit's word for it.
At what point does an undocumented feature become a security threat? When you are talking about high risk situations like banking and medical records, one reasonable answer is "if any undocumented feature exists at all."
It seems to me that Microsoft's insistence on being able to download whatever it wants to for the good of the user aggravates this problem to no end.
No. There is no "expanding rim of photons"; they are everywhere in the universe, uniformly. They do not get "pulled back inward" (whatever that means, since there is no location in space corresponding to "the location of the Big Bang"; it too happened everywhere in space).
This sounds like what I read along time ago about the original inflationary theory of the universe, which in its classic form was a serious alternative for the big bang theory until about twenty years ago. It is the one about dots on a balloon, that has as an underlying principle that there is something that causes new space to mysteriously come into being between old locations. Which I don't personally have a problem in believing, even though it does sort of beg the question of what the spatial generating mechanism is. I mean, you sort of end up having to ask what the turtle is standing on if you go with that line of reasoning.
The discovery of the microwave residuals of the big bang looks pretty convincing. Someone figured out that if the big bang had happened, then a lot of the ultraviolet that was released in the event should be coming back at us red-shifted into the microwave spectrum at a particular frequency. And guess what they found when they looked for it? Further, this has been easy to confirm: subsequent observations have fit the predictions. The article at the head of this thread is all about the latest confirmation. Of course maybe its all a conspiracy and I need to be watching out for black heliocopters rather than reporting decades old news on slashdot.
It does get confusing though, because fairly recently a variant of the original inflationary theory has been proposed to explain some puzzles of the big bang theory. Apparently the math is such that a straightforward big bang doesn't quite work. One of the ways to fudge things so the physics we think we know could get from a big bang to what we see today is to posit an inflationary force that either worked very strongly for a short period of time when the universe was just a baby (as I recall, before even hydrogen and helium were around), or is very weak but is still shoving things apart. This all gets tied in with the dark matter stuff... I don't pretend to understand it. My impression is that a lot of astrophysicists also don't pretend to understand it. Science ain't for people who Just Have To Know; it's for people with a great deal of tolerance for ambiguities.
As to the first photons being everywhere in the universe uniformly, the Big Bang theory suggests that's exactly the case. Not only that, but no matter which way you choose to look outward, if you look out far enough you are looking at the center of everything.
Ain't science wunnerful?
Light is bent by gravity. The original light of the big bang forms an ever expanding rim of the universe as the individual photons loop out and are pulled back inward by the gravity of the whole thing. At least, that's one story :-)
The background radiation can be thought of as that portion of the original light that has gone out the edge and has now looped back to where we can see it.
As my Daddy once told me, if an astronomer builds a powerful enough telescope, he'll be able to look at the back of his own head.
Well, this is all kind of simplified, but then I'm just a science buff. IANAS
Unless something acts on it near apogee to circularize its orbit, that orbit will return to the point it began (which lies inside the atmosphere)
No. The model of orbital mechanics that you are using does not contain enough objects. Here is a more realistic way of visualizing the process:
Instead of looking at one chunk of rock in a billiard-like model, think in terms of the spray of material that would be generated by a glancing strike (which is also the most likely kind). Most of the particles in this spray will not have orbital velocity and will rain back down, with the larger and faster ones making a string of secondary impact craters. A much smaller portion will reach escape velocity and become interplanetary objects.
But what is significant is the group of particles whose velocities exceed orbital velocity but do not reach escape velocity. That is a pretty wide range of speeds. At first these objects will also have a wide range of apogees and perigees, but they will mostly be in the same plane. Their own gravitational interactions and collisions will redistribute the kinetic energy of the group as a whole into a ring. In essence, the circularizing agent that you are looking for is the aggregate effect of the group on each individual member, a sort of gravitational peer pressure. Ring formation is probably a positive feedback process, where the proto ring's growth increases its influence on the remaining wild particles.
There are three ring shepherds that will cause any debris ring (any satellite for that matter) to seek an equatorial orbit over time: the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth's equatorial bulge. I imagine the Moon's presence would also assure that any Earth ring would be relatively short lived.
I would also think that any Earth ring formed in this way would be quite bright, at least for a while. I would think the ejecta stream would suck along a lot of air and water vapor through entrainment, and that many of the ring particles would be frosted as they cooled.
I'm not saying I'm convinced that this happened. But it is an intriguing scenario and might go far to explain ice ages and such. One of the more intriguing things about it is that it appears to be testable in several different ways.
Ah, I see. I have made the error of not pointing out the blindingly obvious.
Of course a flywheel makes no sense in powering a laptop. It's absurd to think about that. Wrong scale entirely.
As to your comparison with 30-06 energy expenditures-- I trust your numbers are right. But the rifle is a very elegant way of directing a relatively small amount of energy in a very efficient manner, and the 30-06 remains one of the most efficient single piston machines of its type ever developed. I'm having a little bit of trouble with your comparison of this kind of tightly controlled use of energy to the uncontrolled energy release of failing flywheel. A hand grenade would have been a better example. But a hand grenade fashioned with the slow burning powders used in 30-06 ordinance would be a bit of a dud.
It has been an interesting conversation.
Huh? I don't see that at all.
Even if the gimbal mounting and safety containment trebled the volume and weight of the flywheel, we're still talking about a storage system that is an order of magnitude smaller and lighter than today's chemical batteries.
That seems pretty compact to me.
Here's a bit more info on this: Flywheel Basics
A 12 inch diameter flywheel weighing only 23 lb will store 3 kilowatt hours of energy at 100,000 rpm. This is the kind of flywheel UPS that is being installed as mechanical batteries for UPS systems. Typically they use concrete containment vessels (an uncontrolled release of 3 kwh in a few hundred milliseconds is catastrophic) but a lighter weight containment vessel is feasible. It's just hard to beat digging a hole and burying it for low cost safety.
Gimbals
Time flies like an arrow...
fruit flies like a banana
--Groucho Marx
My understanding is that Feynman recognized his diagrams could be interpreted as showing particles moving backwards in time. That there was nothing about the theories he was working with that prevented us from regarding a positron as being an electron that was moving backward in time. (However to us who are moving forward in time, it is still and always will be a positron also moving forward in time.)
As I understand it, this aspect of the F.D.s showed one possible way of looking at one part of the theoretical structure, but that neither Feynman nor anyone else has been able to determine whether this is a valid perspective, or possibly an illusion arising from the tools being used (the Feynman diagrams themselves, and the equations that they represent), or if something else entirely is going on. I believe that is one of the fascinations of the Feynman diagrams-- they not only allow physicists to present complicated particle smashing in a way that students and lay people can grasp, but that their time-reversible quality is of itself a kind of koan of physics. If that koan could just be understood, then whole new realms of physics would open up...
All this brings to mind the marxian theory of the arrow of time, but I'll put that in a separate post.
That's X-L-N-tay!
Thanks, epine. If I had mod points to award, and could award them to just a portion of a post, I'd rate that sentence a "5".
But I don't and I can't.
I've got no technical knowledge of internet security. I have tried to keep up with general news about defensive strategies and tactics.
It looks to me like IWT's tactics are reasonable extensions of well-accepted defensive moves. Blocking an ISP that will not police its own members has been a routine defensive ploy for some time, I believe. The difference here seems only to be that IWT is able to act proactively (since RIAA has blatantly stated that they are going to violate the generally accepted code of good behavior). Is my thinking wrong about this somehow?
Similarly, their use of the honeypot tactic to identify and counter specific threats seems like accepted behavior, too. Again, is there something here that I'm not seeing?
It seems like the only real new thing that IWT is doing here is being public about their activities. This stuff is usually handled in the back rooms-- but then it usually involves finding some script kiddy's Mommy and making sure that she disciplines her child appropriately. To my knowledge RIAA is the first institution that has ever publically declared that it will violate the unwritten codes of behavior that keep the internet working. Making a public hue and cry about this seems like the moral equivalent of telling the brat's Mommy that she needs to teach her kid some lessons.
Other than being public about it, is there some way in which IWT's tactics differ from what you should expect your ISP to do to guard your interests?
At this point my livelihood is damaged badly when my computer system is messed with. I lose money for every hour of down time. But my livelihood is also damaged when any of my clients or my potential clients go down. Can RIAA guarrantee that neither I nor my clients will be recipients of "collateral damage"? I don't think so...
It is in the best interests of all of us who now depend on the internet in our jobs to oppose this threat from RIAA.
Neat idea, thanks! Since I've now got trackballs on most of my machines, I've got a pile of mousepads in a storage box somewhere.
How do these hold up? Do I need to worry about my Dell mousepad melting all over my Chevie's dash when I have to park in the sun?
Numerology only works in languages where letters can also represent numbers, like Hebrew and such -- not English, certainly, nor Chinese, etc.
Unless of course numerology is a phenomenon of ordered sets of symbols. Or if that is too broad for comprehension, then at the very least please acknowledge that to the extent which the roman alphabet can be mapped to the hebraic alphabet, whatever numerological values exist in the latter must also be inherent in the former.
Please note that I am not offering an opinion on whether numerology provides anything of value.
This equation shows that the gravitational attraction can never go to zero.
That said, does anyone have any idea how this guy got two objects with mass to not have any gravitational attraction? It seems impossible.
Something of great interest to us is that a leading edge of your species is nearing the point where a fundamental revelation of part of the Mystery is beginning to occur. We think this may have reached the stage where we can begin to talk to you about it.
Recall that your theorist Einstein suggested that gravity is a property of space as well as (or in some frameworks, in place of) a property of matter. And recognize that the visionary Gene Roddenberry metaphorically described the process of, err, "bringing" distant points in space "closer" together as warp technology. (We will ignore for now the delightful absurdity of fractional "warp" states as described by his playwrights).
Now it should be evident that the antigravity you seek is in fact merely the reverse of Roddenberry's warp principle. A directional reverse warp field applied downward from a generating disk you were standing upon would decrease the gravitational effect to the same degree that it would increase the effective distance between the bottom of the disk and the center of gravity of the earth. "Centrifugal force" (another very useful fiction-- I love what your species is doing with physics) would cause you and the disk to rise. Of course the entire column of air above you would also be rising and the vortex effect can be quite a bit of fun to play with, so long as you've constructed your disk with good airfoil properties around its edges-- the effect of being "sucked up into the sky" is actually much more useful in the atmosphere than the "centrigual force" effect.
Uh-oh, Mommy's coming. I can't say anything more right now.
Love your internet by the way. This anonymity is great fun!
It was an interesting article, and I can see how this technique will work when the surveyors have the goodwill of the respondents, so that any respondent's primary concern is only that of keeping his individual privacy.
But is privacy the core issue in market research, or is it simply a label of convenience that a lot people use for something else that we don't have easy words for? I will lie on many surveys even when I am fully confident of my personal anonymity-- though I prefer to avoid those surveys entirely when I can. OTOH, when a survey is done by a group that I have aligned myself with, I might well enthusiastically bare my soul without any regard to the privacy issue. And I know that I am not at all uncommon in these respects.
I suspect that my reactions stem from the same source as nationalism, patriotism, ethnic pride, and that whole mess of things where I'm not behaving as an individual protecting my privacy, but as a member of a group who feels called upon to defend my group.
Mostly I see marketing as an attempt by outsiders to mess with my group, to get us to buy stuff through conning us rather than letting us apply our own standards of value to the goods offered. I think I lie on surveys to protect my group from these subtle attacks; to misdirect and confound my group's enemy.
So I really don't think privacy has much to do with it. I think all this lying is a natural group reaction to consumerism, and its belief that it is perfectly okay to sell product by conning your customers into thinking that what you are pushing today is something they want.
Not in my group, buster. We don't need no steenkeeng pushers in our neighborhood.