Only $74,534,850 needed for launch, PLEDGE NOW!
on
New NASA Budget Woes
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· Score: 1
"With all the cuts in Government Funding, the greatest portion of NASA funding now comes from its fans among the general public. With the upcoming Return-To-Flight launch of the Shuttle Discovery, we need your support now more than ever! Dial 1-PLEDGE-NASA now, we've got several lines open, operators are standing by to take your pledge."
"Pledge now and get this spiffy T-shirt with the NASA logo and the logos of NASA's largest suppliers such as Morton Thiokol and Lookheed-Boing-GenDynamics, 'were Science gets down with Bizness.' Limited quantity available, so hurry, pledge now! That's, 1-PLEDGE-NASA, 1-PLEDGE-NASA, that number once again, 1-PLEDGE-NASA, please call now."
Ben, "Listened too many NPR/public radio pledge drives"
2) All broker/dealer voice conversations must be recorded for similar time periods. Some places record ALL conversations (including the mail room clerks, support staff, everyone) just to be sure. Watch what you say on the phone at work kids.
Does VOIP traffic get saved? Presuming VOIP isn't already used companywide, does anyone use VOIP at the office in an attempt to get around the "All voice conversations recorded" rule?
at many thrift stores, though they're getting rarer, in the mess of cheap lightweight keyboards. But I have what is surely a lifetime supply of M's both brown and blue logo, they'll surely last until voice or some other input device (a chorded keyboards?) becomes popular and the de facto standard. I've found a few of the earlier IBM AT keyboards as well, they appear to go for significant amounts on ebay. They're in a few ways a better standard, partly because of the larger return key.
I put model M's on all my machines, but it's the Internet machine kbd that gets by far the most abused by food and drink. I've had a couple of them actually stop working because of spilt fluids (diet cola and/or coffee), when that happens, or the keys start sticking and aren't conveniently cleanable, I just pull another Ken off the Barbie...
Obligatory: "In Soviet Russia, computer keyboard feeds YOU!
If you have a phone, just dial them up! If you are worried about them tapping your phone then:
Taking off on what else I read, always talk as if you were doing something very ordinary: "I'll send you a picture of my grandbaby [| godchild | whatever relative that you actually have], she's such a sweet child."
Just mail a floppy disk with a picture on it... but a very high-res picture. And at the bottom-right, just a few pixels are changed to read the message.
Encoding/encrypting a signal inside another 'plaintext' signal like this to hide the fact that there's an encrypted signal is called steganography, but your description is a really crude method of doing it. Google it to find out better methods. It was also mentioned in another comment.
it is unbreakable unless the images are viewed directly.
If it's good it will be unbreakable by being viewed directly (and hard to break with much more sophisticated techniques).
Aww, I wasn't first to mention Wolfram, but this reviewer writing of a "massive new book" is certainly reminiscent of that tome "A New Kind of Science" (I read through it, found it somewhat interesting, but thoroughly enjoyed reading the reviews on amazon, the web, and here on Slashdot), and having read "The Emperor's New Mind" back when it came out, I can't help but wonder about comparisons between these two tomes.
I enjoyed "Emperor's New Mind" as a re-reading on the history/emergence quantum physics that I had previously read about in earlier popular science books, but didn't and still don't believe his conclusion that quantum mechanics is an essential part of the operation of the human mind. Whether "Strong AI" is possible is another argument, and I'm agnostic on that.
So how does this compare? Did he really need to write such a large book, especially after having written "Emperor's New Mind"? Does he rehash much from that book, or is it "all new material" from Penrose?
I'll sooner or later read this, but I still don't feel I know enough about it to know whether I should read it 'sooner' or read it 'later'. And while I actually hope it's a really good book, I must admit to looking forward to a book that generates a lot of satiric reviews as did "A New Kind of Science."
^ is kinda a dirty hack notation where you can't superscript
What's so dirty about that use as the power operator is that it comes from the BASIC programming language. For straight ASCII use (no superscripts), one could instead use ** from FORTRAN, but that's less well known.
From my reading of TFA, Wired has retracted stories where sources could not be verified, not where they were shown to be fabricated. No source was shown to be fabricated.
Excellent point, and I wonder if invesgations of other reporters's stories would show the same percentage of quotes that can't be verified.
There's a big difference: the first is readily attributable to sloppy journalism; the second is certainly fraud. Or perhaps we've forgotten about the the legal theories of reasonable doubt and innocent until proven guilty?
We remember and follow those things in a (USA) Court of Law, but in The Court of Public Opinion, anything goes.
The Slashdot editors should be castigated for using such inflammatory headlines as doing so is in itself is evidence of sloppy journalism on their part.
Tomorrow's big 1,000+ comment story: "Wired sues Slashdot!"
I didn't see this aspect discussed here (doesn't mean it wasn't, I haven't read all 979 comments), but thought it pertinent: "Does the Real ID act contain a Constitution-busting Trojan horse?" http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050509-4886.html
I could have sworn I saw that movie, er, book, on television back in the 1970's.
By John Crighton the same author who wrote Jurassic Park.
He's quite a popular author, his latest "State of Fear" (I even have it but haven't read it yet) has stirred up some controversy among the Global Warming proponents, and I'm sure Michael Crichton would be dissapointed to learn that his name isn't better known or spelled.
To get an idea of how much energy 10^53 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 10^33 ergs each second.
OH! That's Ten to the power of 33, not a thousand and thirty three for the Sun's output. And the GRB puts out Ten to the 53rd power ergs, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as much as the Sun, for its few seconds of glory.
Oh well, no big deal, what's twenty orders of magnitude between friends?
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ This is exactly the type of thing they're looking for a gravitational 'signature' from - it should give a 'chirp' or a signal with increasing frequency as the neurton stars orbit around each other closer and closer.
"In Einstein's theory, alterations in the shape of concentrations of mass (or energy) have the effect of warping space-time, thereby causing distortions that propagate through the universe at the speed of light. A new generation of detectors, led by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), is coming into operation and promises sensitivities that will be capable of detecting a variety of catastrophic events, such as the gravitational collapse of stars or the coalescence of compact binary systems."
This is the Information Age more than ever before, and any good (in the sense of being competent) entity (commercial, Government, or private investigator) can find out everything pertinent about you with any ONE identifying piece of info: name, phone number, address, where you work, SSN, car tag, etc. In some cases it may be illegal for a Government entity to do this, but I'm sure we can trust all Government entities to follow the law, can't we? [insert appropriate emoticon here]
A national ID card won't violate anything that's not already being violated, it will just be a public admission of what's already being done. Perhaps it would be a Good Thing to have it, that way everyone would have a clue as to what has happened to their financial and legal identity - that it's owned by themselves, but by the owners of commercial and government databases.
"Papers? We don't need no stinking papers!" "We have The Technology."
I'd post as Anonymous Coward but I'm sure/. saves the IP address of each post anyway.
you think you've had something pending for a while, check out the pending story (it's a poll, and I didn't even save my own copy, but maybe I'll see it again SOMEDAY...) in my 'recent submissions' http://hardware.slashdot.org/~antispam_ben/
OOTC: I recall intentional buffer overflows and similar hacks in FORTRAN from 25 years ago. I suppose it's good Pascal was never used for a system language, the language definition has array bounds checking built-in. OTOH, pointers can point to anything (IIRC it's called coercion in Pascal - amazing what stuff I remember that's totally useless now).
"There's a Light Saber lying on the ground with many twisty little knobs."
Article fails to mention all dangers!
on
How Lightsabers Work
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Also, a decades-old mystery explained (quoting from TFA):
With practice you can also use a lightsaber like a knife. For example, if you need to cut open the belly of a large domestic animal like a horse or a tauntaun, the lightsaber is the perfect tool.
Mystery farm animal mutilations of the 1970's and 1980's explained! Were crop circles done with a sabre also?
Nearly anything you would normally find around the home or office is easy to cut with a lightsaber, including steel pipes, reinforcing beams, mounting struts and so on.
No warnings about exiting a building as you cut through its utilities (gas leaks leading to explosions) and support structure (building falls dowm, most likely in YOUR direction)?
If you happen to find yourself hanging upside down in a cave, a lightsaber is the perfect tool to use to cut the rope.
Even when hanging a 'safe' distance, less than a foot above the ground, it's too easy to lose control of the sabre when you hit the ground, and cut yourself open.
This article plays so slipshod with safety that I'll have to rate it (Score: -1, Danger Will Robinson).
Slashdot Mirror
"With all the cuts in Government Funding, the greatest portion of NASA funding now comes from its fans among the general public. With the upcoming Return-To-Flight launch of the Shuttle Discovery, we need your support now more than ever! Dial 1-PLEDGE-NASA now, we've got several lines open, operators are standing by to take your pledge."
"Pledge now and get this spiffy T-shirt with the NASA logo and the logos of NASA's largest suppliers such as Morton Thiokol and Lookheed-Boing-GenDynamics, 'were Science gets down with Bizness.' Limited quantity available, so hurry, pledge now! That's, 1-PLEDGE-NASA, 1-PLEDGE-NASA, that number once again, 1-PLEDGE-NASA, please call now."
Ben, "Listened too many NPR/public radio pledge drives"
Was there something, perhaps unrelated to the case, that they really, really, really didn't want to come out?
2) All broker/dealer voice conversations must be recorded for similar time periods. Some places record ALL conversations (including the mail room clerks, support staff, everyone) just to be sure. Watch what you say on the phone at work kids.
Does VOIP traffic get saved? Presuming VOIP isn't already used companywide, does anyone use VOIP at the office in an attempt to get around the "All voice conversations recorded" rule?
Microsoft owes me $25 for each violation, or a total of $500,000,000.
at many thrift stores, though they're getting rarer, in the mess of cheap lightweight keyboards. But I have what is surely a lifetime supply of M's both brown and blue logo, they'll surely last until voice or some other input device (a chorded keyboards?) becomes popular and the de facto standard. I've found a few of the earlier IBM AT keyboards as well, they appear to go for significant amounts on ebay. They're in a few ways a better standard, partly because of the larger return key.
I put model M's on all my machines, but it's the Internet machine kbd that gets by far the most abused by food and drink. I've had a couple of them actually stop working because of spilt fluids (diet cola and/or coffee), when that happens, or the keys start sticking and aren't conveniently cleanable, I just pull another Ken off the Barbie...
Obligatory:
"In Soviet Russia, computer keyboard feeds YOU!
If you have a phone, just dial them up! If you are worried about them tapping your phone then:
Taking off on what else I read, always talk as if you were doing something very ordinary: "I'll send you a picture of my grandbaby [| godchild | whatever relative that you actually have], she's such a sweet child."
Just mail a floppy disk with a picture on it... but a very high-res picture. And at the bottom-right, just a few pixels are changed to read the message.
Encoding/encrypting a signal inside another 'plaintext' signal like this to hide the fact that there's an encrypted signal is called steganography, but your description is a really crude method of doing it. Google it to find out better methods. It was also mentioned in another comment.
it is unbreakable unless the images are viewed directly.
If it's good it will be unbreakable by being viewed directly (and hard to break with much more sophisticated techniques).
Firefox?
For the past I dunno, 4 weeks it's been replaced with some sort of game in which players hit a ball will a stick.
See the two-hour premire episode of ST Deep Space 9. It explains this game.
It's like eating your favorite food everyday, eventually you'll get sick of it.
Especially if you find bugs in it.
Aww, I wasn't first to mention Wolfram, but this reviewer writing of a "massive new book" is certainly reminiscent of that tome "A New Kind of Science" (I read through it, found it somewhat interesting, but thoroughly enjoyed reading the reviews on amazon, the web, and here on Slashdot), and having read "The Emperor's New Mind" back when it came out, I can't help but wonder about comparisons between these two tomes.
I enjoyed "Emperor's New Mind" as a re-reading on the history/emergence quantum physics that I had previously read about in earlier popular science books, but didn't and still don't believe his conclusion that quantum mechanics is an essential part of the operation of the human mind. Whether "Strong AI" is possible is another argument, and I'm agnostic on that.
So how does this compare? Did he really need to write such a large book, especially after having written "Emperor's New Mind"? Does he rehash much from that book, or is it "all new material" from Penrose?
I'll sooner or later read this, but I still don't feel I know enough about it to know whether I should read it 'sooner' or read it 'later'. And while I actually hope it's a really good book, I must admit to looking forward to a book that generates a lot of satiric reviews as did "A New Kind of Science."
I absolutely love Dennett and Hofstadter's "The Mind's I", more than any of either author's other books.
OOTC: This book has a lot to do with reality as humans experience and perceive it. I found it to be mind expanding, a major reason why I read books.
^ is kinda a dirty hack notation where you can't superscript
What's so dirty about that use as the power operator is that it comes from the BASIC programming language. For straight ASCII use (no superscripts), one could instead use ** from FORTRAN, but that's less well known.
From my reading of TFA, Wired has retracted stories where sources could not be verified, not where they were shown to be fabricated. No source was shown to be fabricated.
Excellent point, and I wonder if invesgations of other reporters's stories would show the same percentage of quotes that can't be verified.
There's a big difference: the first is readily attributable to sloppy journalism; the second is certainly fraud. Or perhaps we've forgotten about the the legal theories of reasonable doubt and innocent until proven guilty?
We remember and follow those things in a (USA) Court of Law, but in The Court of Public Opinion, anything goes.
The Slashdot editors should be castigated for using such inflammatory headlines as doing so is in itself is evidence of sloppy journalism on their part.
Tomorrow's big 1,000+ comment story: "Wired sues Slashdot!"
I didn't see this aspect discussed here (doesn't mean it wasn't, I haven't read all 979 comments), but thought it pertinent:6 .html
"Does the Real ID act contain a Constitution-busting Trojan horse?"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050509-488
The Andromeda Strain was a book, not a movie.
I could have sworn I saw that movie, er, book, on television back in the 1970's.
By John Crighton the same author who wrote Jurassic Park.
He's quite a popular author, his latest "State of Fear" (I even have it but haven't read it yet) has stirred up some controversy among the Global Warming proponents, and I'm sure Michael Crichton would be dissapointed to learn that his name isn't better known or spelled.
A thousand ergs here or there didn't seem like much, so I googled for a definition, and one erg is almost literally one fleapower:
g ci789813,00.html)
It has been suggested that 1 erg is approximately the amount of energy required for a mosquito to take off. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_
Quoting parent's quote of the linked page:
To get an idea of how much energy 1053 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 1033 ergs each second.
Well that's what, about a two percent increase over the Sun's output? Wait a second, The Sun only puts out a thousand fleapower???
Quoting the actual linked-to webpage http://swift.sonoma.edu/about_swift/grbs.html:
To get an idea of how much energy 10^53 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 10^33 ergs each second.
OH! That's Ten to the power of 33, not a thousand and thirty three for the Sun's output. And the GRB puts out Ten to the 53rd power ergs, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as much as the Sun, for its few seconds of glory.
Oh well, no big deal, what's twenty orders of magnitude between friends?
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/
7 .html
This is exactly the type of thing they're looking for a gravitational 'signature' from - it should give a 'chirp' or a signal with increasing frequency as the neurton stars orbit around each other closer and closer.
Here's a relevant quote:
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR1236
"In Einstein's theory, alterations in the shape of concentrations of mass (or energy) have the effect of warping space-time, thereby causing distortions that propagate through the universe at the speed of light. A new generation of detectors, led by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), is coming into operation and promises sensitivities that will be capable of detecting a variety of catastrophic events, such as the gravitational collapse of stars or the coalescence of compact binary systems."
I read it over, but STILL hit submit too fast...
the English of using 'themselves' doesn't look quite like right, but I think I get my point accross.
This is the Information Age more than ever before, and any good (in the sense of being competent) entity (commercial, Government, or private investigator) can find out everything pertinent about you with any ONE identifying piece of info: name, phone number, address, where you work, SSN, car tag, etc. In some cases it may be illegal for a Government entity to do this, but I'm sure we can trust all Government entities to follow the law, can't we? [insert appropriate emoticon here]
/. saves the IP address of each post anyway.
A national ID card won't violate anything that's not already being violated, it will just be a public admission of what's already being done. Perhaps it would be a Good Thing to have it, that way everyone would have a clue as to what has happened to their financial and legal identity - that it's owned by themselves, but by the owners of commercial and government databases.
"Papers? We don't need no stinking papers!" "We have The Technology."
I'd post as Anonymous Coward but I'm sure
you think you've had something pending for a while, check out the pending story (it's a poll, and I didn't even save my own copy, but maybe I'll see it again SOMEDAY...) in my 'recent submissions' http://hardware.slashdot.org/~antispam_ben/
OOTC: I recall intentional buffer overflows and similar hacks in FORTRAN from 25 years ago. I suppose it's good Pascal was never used for a system language, the language definition has array bounds checking built-in. OTOH, pointers can point to anything (IIRC it's called coercion in Pascal - amazing what stuff I remember that's totally useless now).
Now where's that slashdot mirror site???
P35 is a beer
That must be a pony beer. A real beer is an 807 (in the fancy shaped envelope, I forget what it's called, where's my RCA manual...).
Bill Gates would [open a Corner Lightsaber Mart chain], and we all know he gave in to the Dark Side a long time ago.
Bill Gates gives The Dark Side a bad name.
"There's a Light Saber lying on the ground with many twisty little knobs."
Also, a decades-old mystery explained (quoting from TFA):
With practice you can also use a lightsaber like a knife. For example, if you need to cut open the belly of a large domestic animal like a horse or a tauntaun, the lightsaber is the perfect tool.
Mystery farm animal mutilations of the 1970's and 1980's explained! Were crop circles done with a sabre also?
Nearly anything you would normally find around the home or office is easy to cut with a lightsaber, including steel pipes, reinforcing beams, mounting struts and so on.
No warnings about exiting a building as you cut through its utilities (gas leaks leading to explosions) and support structure (building falls dowm, most likely in YOUR direction)?
If you happen to find yourself hanging upside down in a cave, a lightsaber is the perfect tool to use to cut the rope.
Even when hanging a 'safe' distance, less than a foot above the ground, it's too easy to lose control of the sabre when you hit the ground, and cut yourself open.
This article plays so slipshod with safety that I'll have to rate it (Score: -1, Danger Will Robinson).
Probably not "stuff that matters", though.
No, but it's even better. This is stuff that energizes!