Assuming that god does exist -- by standard definition, a being that has the capacity to create, and subsequently fuck with the entirety of reality. You claim that due to our inability to measure something without changing it implies that god is similarly restricted?
I look at it like this -- the Earth rotates. Thanks to the sun, and other visual indicators, we're able to measure the rate of rotation (real time) with respect to some artificial time -- yet, we have almost zero control over this. Similarly, it would be reasonable to consider that we're hurtling through the time dimension at some rate.
There's been recent discussion as to whether the speed of light really is constant or not -- whether any of our familiar "constants" are truly constant. If our rate of travel through time changes, would the speed of light differ, as well?
Ok. Clearly, this guy has some valid concerns about aliens either being malicious, or unintentionally harmful to us -- like Europeans trading blankets to the american aboriginals.
And clearly, he has zero knowledge of signal processing. The signals we pick up and pass into SETI are collected and chopped up and dumped into packets. These packets have headers. If the packet headers are corrupted, they can cause buffer overruns which can lead to arbitrary code execution. But... we craft the headers.
For the aliens to "infect" us, there would have to be earth-side interference, in the form of a maliciously altered header, a transmission error due to a faulty router or bug in code. The probability of this occuring cotemporaneous to an evil alien supervirus signal is so negligable, I had trouble not falling out of my seat when I read the article.
Hmm. That's my favorite puzzle... but I always give it to people and tell them the minimum number of weighings. If it's open-ended, people would be satisified with a binary search as the "best". The hard part of the puzzle is not in determining the least trials, but actually optimizing it.
I've personally come up with two solutions for that puzzle -- my first solution was discovered essentially through trial and error, whereas the second was engineered.
But here's the real test: given that you can determine one ball in 12 with n trials... using a similar algorithm, what is the largest number of balls can you positively identify one odd out of with n+1 trials? And how? PM me for soln.
Quoth Dr. Wilson, "Since then, I've been asked these same questions about 20 times per day and it is driving me bonkers."
More like, it's driving him stupid! What a shame. The dude wasted his entire life getting a degree, just so he could prove that doing a single study has dropped his IQ score by 10 points. To think that he could've just quit before he ever applied to college, started smoking marijuana... and he'd still be smarter than if he'd done that study.
Finally, it might be possible to design artificial icebergs, specially streamlined for easiest possible transportation to the southern climes. These artificial icebergs would be manufactured in the late winter, along the coast of Greenland, by pouring water into a hollow ship mold. The ship's shell itself, then, could be built of ice. These ship-shaped icebergs could then travel under their own steam to warm water regions off the coast of West Africa.
Man. This guy really IS a crank. He thinks that ice is made of steam! I think it'd be better to put a giant bar of soap on the back of the boat. It works in the bath tub!
They aren't claiming to have learned the language. They've claimed that they can statistically analyze the grammar to the point that they can produce further text which could make sense in some context. There's a huge difference.
At the age of 5 or so, I figured out a GREAT way to power a car. Hook the front wheels to the back via a driveshaft, with some gearing so the front and rear wheels turn at a 1:2 ratio. That way, when you start the car, it accelerates by itself!
Took me a while to figure out why I could never get my self-powered lego car to start.
Now see, my idea makes sense. You get more out than you put in. It'd destroy the gears, or in the case of the legos, just rip the car apart... but I was 5 for cryin' out loud. What are these people's excuses?
5 year-old software runs on 8 year-old hardware! WOW!
Man. That's the stuff that matters, right there. Cripes. Didn't anybody notice that w2k runs on 3 year-old hardware, 5 years ago when it came out? Oh wait. Yeah. That was me.
Lets see. And the newfangled LEENOOKS that I keep hearing about. 2.4 ran on decade-old hardware.
But man... I've still got these old 12-inch DOS floppies sitting around (not authentic MS copies... bring it on BSA!). If the magnetic media hadn't degraded, they'd still run on 15 year-old hardware! WOW!
I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps at the present, C++ is the only compiler that's being used. But think about how many other language interpreters are written in C++. If you've got C++, it practically guarantees that you can build countless other interpreters.
How do we know if computer generated proofs are valid? Easy. Make the programs prove that their algorithms are valid! Just like testing a language for "completeness" by writing an interpreter/compiler for the language in that language.
With google, I've found a number of installations of PHPMyAdmin on people's websites. If you don't know, PHPMyAdmin is a direct interface to a MySQL server through a powerful, easy-to-use interface. In other words, if somebody looked hard enough, they could snag credit cards from online retailers pretty easily.
Alexa is another big danger. At the company I worked at, my boss was fond of browsing the company's admin site with a browser with Alexa installed. On a few pages of the admin site were html links which were used to delete things. Sure enough, when Alexa spidered our admin site, it followed each and every delete link. Goodbye cookie-based authentication, hello IP-based!
I had the same thought -- only, if the entire bottom of the craft could be covered with minijets, we could do away with the shape of the jumbo jet entirely! Flying saucers, here we come!
But really, I just want to know how big my shoes would have to be to fit enough microjets to lift me.:D
You don't know anything about aiming a gun, do you? Automatic gunfire is a helluva lot more difficult to control than shotgun fire. For one thing, you can melt down your barrel if you fire too fast -- harder to do with a shotgun than an uzi. And there's the whole recoil aspect -- one shot is easy to compensate for -- but recoil compensation gets VERY tricky after a couple of shots have been fired in rapid succession.
But it's a GOOD porn site. I subscribed to the site for a while, and downloaded every picture they had (gotta love my porn spider). No men, no dildos, no penetration. The lesbian stuff is all pretty tame, too. This isn't a dark alley porn shop that kidnaps girls and stuffs them full of twenty cocks. There are almost as many female subscibers as male. That alone speaks volumes about the moral content of the site owners.
Slashdot is merely helping provide them with some extra traffic (thus subscriptions) so they'll have a better chance in the upcoming legal battle.
Bah. Don't be so short-sighted. Look how cheap it is for people to travel right now. We've only been airborn for about a hundred years. You and I may get live to see affordable moon trips. What will the next generation live to see?
I used to use PICO all the time, but once I found NANO, I use it exclusively. Emacs, VI, and JEdit blow GOATS!
But that's only console editing. If I'm in a gui, I fire up WINE to run NOTEPAD.EXE -- AWESOME!
This would make a horrible SPAM-sink. Spyware could grab lists of lists of addresses. Once downloaded, addresses could be brute-forced out of the lists. Furthermore, they could use names of friends to send email, and completely bypass any blocking measures.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that god does exist -- by standard definition, a being that has the capacity to create, and subsequently fuck with the entirety of reality. You claim that due to our inability to measure something without changing it implies that god is similarly restricted?
I look at it like this -- the Earth rotates. Thanks to the sun, and other visual indicators, we're able to measure the rate of rotation (real time) with respect to some artificial time -- yet, we have almost zero control over this. Similarly, it would be reasonable to consider that we're hurtling through the time dimension at some rate.
There's been recent discussion as to whether the speed of light really is constant or not -- whether any of our familiar "constants" are truly constant. If our rate of travel through time changes, would the speed of light differ, as well?
Ok. Clearly, this guy has some valid concerns about aliens either being malicious, or unintentionally harmful to us -- like Europeans trading blankets to the american aboriginals.
And clearly, he has zero knowledge of signal processing. The signals we pick up and pass into SETI are collected and chopped up and dumped into packets. These packets have headers. If the packet headers are corrupted, they can cause buffer overruns which can lead to arbitrary code execution. But... we craft the headers.
For the aliens to "infect" us, there would have to be earth-side interference, in the form of a maliciously altered header, a transmission error due to a faulty router or bug in code. The probability of this occuring cotemporaneous to an evil alien supervirus signal is so negligable, I had trouble not falling out of my seat when I read the article.
"One big question remains: When a brilliant idea pops into your mind in the future, what will appear over your head?"
Smoke. That's one thing that I don't see changing any time soon. Not for me, anyway.
Hmm. That's my favorite puzzle... but I always give it to people and tell them the minimum number of weighings. If it's open-ended, people would be satisified with a binary search as the "best". The hard part of the puzzle is not in determining the least trials, but actually optimizing it.
I've personally come up with two solutions for that puzzle -- my first solution was discovered essentially through trial and error, whereas the second was engineered.
But here's the real test: given that you can determine one ball in 12 with n trials... using a similar algorithm, what is the largest number of balls can you positively identify one odd out of with n+1 trials? And how? PM me for soln.
Quoth Dr. Wilson, "Since then, I've been asked these same questions about 20 times per day and it is driving me bonkers."
More like, it's driving him stupid! What a shame. The dude wasted his entire life getting a degree, just so he could prove that doing a single study has dropped his IQ score by 10 points. To think that he could've just quit before he ever applied to college, started smoking marijuana... and he'd still be smarter than if he'd done that study.
No. Cotton doesn't create static. Some clouds are wool (the gray ones) and others are nylon (the white ones). Duh. Where'd you go to school?
Finally, it might be possible to design artificial icebergs, specially streamlined for easiest possible transportation to the southern climes. These artificial icebergs would be manufactured in the late winter, along the coast of Greenland, by pouring water into a hollow ship mold. The ship's shell itself, then, could be built of ice. These ship-shaped icebergs could then travel under their own steam to warm water regions off the coast of West Africa.
Man. This guy really IS a crank. He thinks that ice is made of steam! I think it'd be better to put a giant bar of soap on the back of the boat. It works in the bath tub!They aren't claiming to have learned the language. They've claimed that they can statistically analyze the grammar to the point that they can produce further text which could make sense in some context. There's a huge difference.
At the age of 5 or so, I figured out a GREAT way to power a car. Hook the front wheels to the back via a driveshaft, with some gearing so the front and rear wheels turn at a 1:2 ratio. That way, when you start the car, it accelerates by itself! Took me a while to figure out why I could never get my self-powered lego car to start. Now see, my idea makes sense. You get more out than you put in. It'd destroy the gears, or in the case of the legos, just rip the car apart... but I was 5 for cryin' out loud. What are these people's excuses?
Gmail gives you 2.42 gigs of storage, and growing! Never delete anything!
5 year-old software runs on 8 year-old hardware! WOW!
Man. That's the stuff that matters, right there. Cripes. Didn't anybody notice that w2k runs on 3 year-old hardware, 5 years ago when it came out? Oh wait. Yeah. That was me.
Lets see. And the newfangled LEENOOKS that I keep hearing about. 2.4 ran on decade-old hardware.
But man... I've still got these old 12-inch DOS floppies sitting around (not authentic MS copies... bring it on BSA!). If the magnetic media hadn't degraded, they'd still run on 15 year-old hardware! WOW!
Great news day, guys.
I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps at the present, C++ is the only compiler that's being used. But think about how many other language interpreters are written in C++. If you've got C++, it practically guarantees that you can build countless other interpreters.
How do we know if computer generated proofs are valid? Easy. Make the programs prove that their algorithms are valid! Just like testing a language for "completeness" by writing an interpreter/compiler for the language in that language.
With google, I've found a number of installations of PHPMyAdmin on people's websites. If you don't know, PHPMyAdmin is a direct interface to a MySQL server through a powerful, easy-to-use interface. In other words, if somebody looked hard enough, they could snag credit cards from online retailers pretty easily.
Alexa is another big danger. At the company I worked at, my boss was fond of browsing the company's admin site with a browser with Alexa installed. On a few pages of the admin site were html links which were used to delete things. Sure enough, when Alexa spidered our admin site, it followed each and every delete link. Goodbye cookie-based authentication, hello IP-based!
I had the same thought -- only, if the entire bottom of the craft could be covered with minijets, we could do away with the shape of the jumbo jet entirely! Flying saucers, here we come!
:D
But really, I just want to know how big my shoes would have to be to fit enough microjets to lift me.
Here's the full text:
MySQL roXorZ!!!
It wasn't redundant, 'till ya double-posted...
It wasn't redundant, 'till ya double-posted...
You don't know anything about aiming a gun, do you? Automatic gunfire is a helluva lot more difficult to control than shotgun fire. For one thing, you can melt down your barrel if you fire too fast -- harder to do with a shotgun than an uzi. And there's the whole recoil aspect -- one shot is easy to compensate for -- but recoil compensation gets VERY tricky after a couple of shots have been fired in rapid succession.
But it's a GOOD porn site. I subscribed to the site for a while, and downloaded every picture they had (gotta love my porn spider). No men, no dildos, no penetration. The lesbian stuff is all pretty tame, too. This isn't a dark alley porn shop that kidnaps girls and stuffs them full of twenty cocks. There are almost as many female subscibers as male. That alone speaks volumes about the moral content of the site owners. Slashdot is merely helping provide them with some extra traffic (thus subscriptions) so they'll have a better chance in the upcoming legal battle.
Bah. Don't be so short-sighted. Look how cheap it is for people to travel right now. We've only been airborn for about a hundred years. You and I may get live to see affordable moon trips. What will the next generation live to see?
He invented PHP. I learned PHP in 2 weeks, and haven't been unemployed since. Rasmus is the MAN.
I used to use PICO all the time, but once I found NANO, I use it exclusively. Emacs, VI, and JEdit blow GOATS! But that's only console editing. If I'm in a gui, I fire up WINE to run NOTEPAD.EXE -- AWESOME!
This would make a horrible SPAM-sink. Spyware could grab lists of lists of addresses. Once downloaded, addresses could be brute-forced out of the lists. Furthermore, they could use names of friends to send email, and completely bypass any blocking measures.
Unfortunately, that still leaves 4.2% of Windows crashes. And 4.2% of infinity is still infinity... so no progress has been made.