Slashdot is a Michigan web site (or started that way) so why are all you other people reading it? Sure, it's grown up now but apparently they forget that sometimes. SBC is the big phone company around here, but I couldn't tell you what that W--whatever thing is they mentioned.
I have a friend who works there, and she has had to learn how to solder among other things that may need to be done in the field. I wouldn't change anything relating to my service during the strike. Imagine an army of PHBs pulling wire pairs out of equipment and putting them into wall sockets or some such.... All the management had to take crash courses in how to do various things that they'd have to take over in case of a strike. I suspect the longer the strike lasts, the more they will realize how much the company depends on those people.
"But isn't this what we do (much more crudely) when building unit tests? In effect we're putting the system specification into the code, in a clear manner that the tool can use to automatically check against the code."
Unit testing has been shown to find something like 10% of all bugs. Forcing this crap on the programmer is not very effective and will probably lead to more confusion. People I talk to are generally in favor of less exacting languages because they are easier to work with.
From article: "If so, the ratio of hot gas and dark matter should be the same for every cluster. Using this assumption, the distance scale can be adjusted"
These clusters differ in age by 7 billion years. Is it really fair to assume the ratio of hot gas and other things is the same? There are so many assumptions in these things that the conclusions are wishful thinking at best.
Do cosmologists take into account the mass equivalent of all the non-dark energy (light) that is flying around in space? How about the radiation pressure from it? i.e. cassimir (sp?) effect on a galactic scale. Gravity from virtual particle pairs? I'm not saying these things are to blame, but they are all real and sometimes I doubt people even consider them.
Lastly, how does one calculate (as I read Feyman did) the energy density of free space? Link please. I've always wondered what went into that big number.
BZZZZT! Dark matter has never been observed directly. Observations have been made of motions (?) that could be explained by the presense of matter other than what we can see. Dark matter and energy are not the only possible explanations. The motions haven't been observed directly either, but infered from other things (red shift perhaps) and I think there are some other assumptions baked in there too. The first I read of dark matter, it went something like this:
The universe is expanding right near the minimum speed to prevent collapse. That seems like a strange coincidence, there must be some reason it's so close. Oh, it's expanding a little too fast for the amount of matter we believe exists. There must be more matter we can't see, lets call it "dark matter". Now that it's expanding faster than the predictions that include dark matter, we must account for this by compensating with "dark energy".
Another thing to consider is the effect of the modernization efforts going on in China. Bush wanted to help the U.S. steel industry right after he became president. I've heard that steel prices are up significantly now because China is using 30% of the worlds output to build things. All that stuff they are building now will likely require oil to run in the near future. The increases in global demand are probably due to China more than the U.S. at this point even though per capita demand is much lower there. Just a thought.
Re:Another "Beyond the Limits"
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
I could put solar panels on a portion of my roof and produce all the power I use. To charge an electric vehicle would possibly require complete coverage of the roof, but then I have more area out back as well. Battery technology sucks though - power density is low, and the things contain nasty stuff. Availability is low, but when energy starts to cost, production of these things will increase. As long as the end of the oil supply doesn't happen too fast everything will work itself out. There are adequate alternative technologys today.
For women, how about a Cleavage Eye Contact Sensor. It would look like a necklace and snap a picture of everyone who makes eye contact with it. I guess it would basically snap a picture of every man that walked by.
"If you think universe splitting occurs whenever a measurement is made, then I believe that you have a very poor understanding of what measurement is."
I have yet to see any acceptable definition of measurement - physically what happens? I also haven't heard of any physical explanation of the wave function. As a side note, I often think the cat in the box experiment is misunderstood, the cat has made it's own observation. Please replace the cat with another person who makes their own "observation". Now the cat-person is actually in both states to the outsider, but not herself.
Physics must separate itself from math more. If everything happens just because the math says so, then we'd be saying the universe exists because the model says it does. I personally find that angle quite interesting. Does the mandelbrot set "exist" in some sense? Do all mathematically defined objects have some form of existence? This is similar to the mathematically based theory of physics we have today. In such a case, the many worlds idea (in some form) and the anthropic pricipal both apply very nicely. Otherwise, you better have a good physical explanation for those wave functions propagating around and what exactly "collapse" means. I don't claim to know what's right, I'd just like to remind you that no one knows for certain. If you know for sure, your physics has become your religion.
It says you can't disclose to anyone the fact that you've recieved one of these things. Wouldn't that prevent you from even contacting a lawyer to help out?
Also, how can it be illegal to disclose the types of things that may be requested under the law? We can't be subjecting people to laws they are not even allowed to know about now can we? This sounds more like the behavior of a certain former leader the US just ejected from Iraq. Say it ain't so.
"There is no right in the copyright law to make backup copies"
There was also no right to prevent people from making backups.
They want all the advantages of electronic media, but want to outlaw a basic feature of it - easy replication. VHS didn't result in their worst nightmares as predicted, but digital media in an age of high bandwidth has. Just revert to the old model of not selling or renting movies to the public. Keep them in theaters where you can control them.
"so this trend might reverse if air pollution clears up."
Ultimately all of our energy comes from the sun, and solar power (wind included) contributes the least pollution to the atmosphere. It's like the fossil fuels are directly hurting the competition. Cutting the output of solar cells 10% is like setting them back years. Strange.
Yes, it was a "what if the sky is falling" sort of worst case thing. I actually have Word 97 at home and it works fine. What if I want to buy a MAC next time? Sure, I'm contriving very bad worst cases here and any specific scenario in very unlikely to actually happen. The point is that as long as you have total control of your data you will be able to continue no mater what actually happens. Open source goes a long way toward this. Bitkeeper provided something else that achieves the same goal - the ability to export YOUR data to an open source tool.
Claiming you can continue to use an obsolete product to maintain access to your own data isn't really a solution. It lacks common sense.
I'll second that. Flight simulation begs for 3 screens, as do some driving and other games.
On another note, I suspect the only way it will really accelerate single images is in cases where render-to-texture is used. i.e. per-frame generation of shadow or environment maps. The completed maps could then be passed to the card that actually has the active frame buffer to be used in regular rendering. Two cards could at BEST double performance and nothing ever scales optimally.
Not quite. I bet if a highjacker took a bunch of passengers hostage in the BACK of the plane and started demanding to be delivered to a particular destination it wouldn't be shot down. This would not likely be tollerated by the passengers these days, but I think as long as the plane was demonstrably in control by the right people we won't be shooting it down. Ready to fire yes. Passengers just won't tollerate any crap now anyway, so the struggle would result in a crash or the highjackers taken out. The good part in all this is that people are taking an active interest in their own well-being.
When you hire someone to write custom software you're really paying for their development time. You may pay for the job rather than by the hour, but the fixed cost will just be an estimate of the time it takes plus some margin for error. If all "custom" software (whatever that is) is contracted on an hourly basis this will clearly be double taxation. If you've got a specialized product already developed and sell it to others, it'd be off the shelf and I'd expect subject to sales tax. Hmmm....
"The OSS scene suffers from the idea they are members of some religion and by using anything other then Open Source they are committing a crime against the movement."
That would be an extreme view. Most just realize that there is a significant risk in using proprietary infrastructure. Imagine BK had no bridge to CVS. BK starts charging a lot of money to use BK (monthy fee even). Great, so the kernel hackers check out the code and put it in CVS - no big deal. Next SCO comes along and makes claims about the history of the code. Oh wait, the history only goes back to the switch from bitkeeper.... Oh, but the last BK archive is still around - oh but BK went out of business so it's not accessible....
It's OK to use proprietary tools when working on your bread and butter, but they must not be able to prevent you from having full access to said bread and butter.
Are your business documents stored in MS Word format? What will you do when they switch to a subscription model and charge $$$ per month? Save them all as.rtf or.txt and import into OpenOffice.org? What if support for saving those formats is removed before the price goes up? Remember, in this scenario it's YOUR data that is not under your own control. Certain things just shouldn't be proprietary, and most people never thought about that when they allowed it to happen.
They can track merchandise through the store all they want. The fear is that they (and others) will continue to track you after you leave. Suppose they scan RFIDs that come back into the store (in clothes for example) and through the register again. They can connect your two purchases as belonging to the same person - even if you paid cash. They may not know it's you personally until one of your tags buys something with a credit card or in some way personally identifies you. With a shared database (like the government wants) RFID readers can then track your movements in any city around the world. Of course duplicate scans of 1 tag are only probably the same person, but enough data can sort out if the tag is still you or has been loaned or given to someone else.
The marketing and surveilence possibilities are amazing. Use them all you want, just disable them at the register please.
And don't laugh, some retailers have already suggested the possibility of reading tags as they come INTO a store so sales people can bother you with things similar to what you've already bought.
If you're going to outsource a project you will be forced to produce better specs than if you don't. Management doesn't like to see "paperwork" going on, they want code. Yet when you outsource, it becomes someones full time job to make sure there are decent requirements. India is a perfect example. Where the contractors are on the other side of the world (so even the phone is hard to use) things must be written down (even in email) in order to get anything done. Another interesting point would be that India - which has much better specs than the U.S. is mostly doing work for US companies. This suggests exactly what I said above: At home we skip the spec, but when it's sent out we figure it must be needed....
OK, I don't really know how much of Indian work is for US companies;-)
I thought the point was to swap things out when more RAM was needed than available. If big-app is using all the memory and I start something else, big-app goes to disk. Why swap if not needed? That would be like windows programs that load at startup - everything loads at startup so it will be faster when you want to use it, but that causes my startup time to be like 2 minutes...
Don't swap until it's necessary seems the right thing to do. If IO isn't busy, you could send older data to disk, but you'd need a way to mark the RAM AND DISK both as valid until the RAM changes. If you need more RAM then just invalidate the RAM copy. Does the MMU support this? Sounds like a patentable idea to me....except that I just posted it to/.
I did a paper on CF back in the day. One thing that really stood out for me was the physicists claim that there should be large amounts of neutrons if the reaction was nuclear as claimed. They said the resulting Helium-4 would spontaneously emit a neutron to become the more stable Helium-3. I checked the back of my physics book and it turns out that Helium-4 is the most common form of that element in nature by quite a bit. Perhaps at the temperatures in a Tokamak He4 tends to emit neutrons, but that's not what cold fusion is all about.
They also claimed that 2 (formerly respectable) chemists must be failing to account for a chemical reaction in a jar containing about 4 elements with no molecules larger than 3 atoms.... The whole thing smelled of "not invented here" along with "don't cut our funding" to me.
That should be sKeptical. Dammit, of all the blunders that are becomming common usage this one drives me insane. It's because I read it with only one consonant at the beginning - an S sound, so it sounds like something having to do with a tank full of crap.
"the whole point of quantum cryptography is that a man-in-the-middle attack like that is fundamentally impossible."
No, the whole point is that snooping the data is impossible without detection. There is no defense against a man-in-the-middle attack for any system. Suppose you're going to perform a transaction with your bank and I'm in the middle terminating YOUR fiber into my QC machine. I also have whatever conventional authentication key is required to mimic the bank. You complete a transaction and I relay the transaction to the bank by mimicing YOU (I have the conventional keys to do that too). Or perhaps I use 2 machines at the same time to decode/recode all traffic in real time. One poster pointed out that round-trip time might be able to detect this setup, but that has nothing to do with Quantum Cryptography. The security rests on the method used to verify who you're communicating with just as it does with any non-quantum channel. Of course if keys can be derived from snooping the data (like with WEP) then QC would be useful, but a better plan would be to change to a scheme where that's not possible.
"A well trained Army is not a more blood-thirsty army, as a matter of fact, the opposite is porbably true."
Lets hope so. Since both sides are able to train this way. Or will they only allow connections from within the US? That would seem to be a wise idea. We really don't need to train all the worlds armies and terrorists in urban warfare, that would be stupid beyond belief.
I'm still waiting for the base jumpers and the high power rocket builders to get together. Build a rocket to lift someone with the ability to eject cleanly and still recover the rocket too...
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I have a friend who works there, and she has had to learn how to solder among other things that may need to be done in the field. I wouldn't change anything relating to my service during the strike. Imagine an army of PHBs pulling wire pairs out of equipment and putting them into wall sockets or some such.... All the management had to take crash courses in how to do various things that they'd have to take over in case of a strike. I suspect the longer the strike lasts, the more they will realize how much the company depends on those people.
Unit testing has been shown to find something like 10% of all bugs. Forcing this crap on the programmer is not very effective and will probably lead to more confusion. People I talk to are generally in favor of less exacting languages because they are easier to work with.
These clusters differ in age by 7 billion years. Is it really fair to assume the ratio of hot gas and other things is the same? There are so many assumptions in these things that the conclusions are wishful thinking at best.
Do cosmologists take into account the mass equivalent of all the non-dark energy (light) that is flying around in space? How about the radiation pressure from it? i.e. cassimir (sp?) effect on a galactic scale. Gravity from virtual particle pairs? I'm not saying these things are to blame, but they are all real and sometimes I doubt people even consider them.
Lastly, how does one calculate (as I read Feyman did) the energy density of free space? Link please. I've always wondered what went into that big number.
The universe is expanding right near the minimum speed to prevent collapse. That seems like a strange coincidence, there must be some reason it's so close. Oh, it's expanding a little too fast for the amount of matter we believe exists. There must be more matter we can't see, lets call it "dark matter". Now that it's expanding faster than the predictions that include dark matter, we must account for this by compensating with "dark energy".
Another thing to consider is the effect of the modernization efforts going on in China. Bush wanted to help the U.S. steel industry right after he became president. I've heard that steel prices are up significantly now because China is using 30% of the worlds output to build things. All that stuff they are building now will likely require oil to run in the near future. The increases in global demand are probably due to China more than the U.S. at this point even though per capita demand is much lower there. Just a thought.
I could put solar panels on a portion of my roof and produce all the power I use. To charge an electric vehicle would possibly require complete coverage of the roof, but then I have more area out back as well. Battery technology sucks though - power density is low, and the things contain nasty stuff. Availability is low, but when energy starts to cost, production of these things will increase. As long as the end of the oil supply doesn't happen too fast everything will work itself out. There are adequate alternative technologys today.
The release date was the 17th as of the 14th. On the 17th I checked and it was magically changed to the 18th.
For women, how about a Cleavage Eye Contact Sensor. It would look like a necklace and snap a picture of everyone who makes eye contact with it. I guess it would basically snap a picture of every man that walked by.
I have yet to see any acceptable definition of measurement - physically what happens? I also haven't heard of any physical explanation of the wave function. As a side note, I often think the cat in the box experiment is misunderstood, the cat has made it's own observation. Please replace the cat with another person who makes their own "observation". Now the cat-person is actually in both states to the outsider, but not herself.
Physics must separate itself from math more. If everything happens just because the math says so, then we'd be saying the universe exists because the model says it does. I personally find that angle quite interesting. Does the mandelbrot set "exist" in some sense? Do all mathematically defined objects have some form of existence? This is similar to the mathematically based theory of physics we have today. In such a case, the many worlds idea (in some form) and the anthropic pricipal both apply very nicely. Otherwise, you better have a good physical explanation for those wave functions propagating around and what exactly "collapse" means. I don't claim to know what's right, I'd just like to remind you that no one knows for certain. If you know for sure, your physics has become your religion.
Also, how can it be illegal to disclose the types of things that may be requested under the law? We can't be subjecting people to laws they are not even allowed to know about now can we? This sounds more like the behavior of a certain former leader the US just ejected from Iraq. Say it ain't so.
There was also no right to prevent people from making backups.
They want all the advantages of electronic media, but want to outlaw a basic feature of it - easy replication. VHS didn't result in their worst nightmares as predicted, but digital media in an age of high bandwidth has. Just revert to the old model of not selling or renting movies to the public. Keep them in theaters where you can control them.
Ultimately all of our energy comes from the sun, and solar power (wind included) contributes the least pollution to the atmosphere. It's like the fossil fuels are directly hurting the competition. Cutting the output of solar cells 10% is like setting them back years. Strange.
Claiming you can continue to use an obsolete product to maintain access to your own data isn't really a solution. It lacks common sense.
On another note, I suspect the only way it will really accelerate single images is in cases where render-to-texture is used. i.e. per-frame generation of shadow or environment maps. The completed maps could then be passed to the card that actually has the active frame buffer to be used in regular rendering. Two cards could at BEST double performance and nothing ever scales optimally.
Not quite. I bet if a highjacker took a bunch of passengers hostage in the BACK of the plane and started demanding to be delivered to a particular destination it wouldn't be shot down. This would not likely be tollerated by the passengers these days, but I think as long as the plane was demonstrably in control by the right people we won't be shooting it down. Ready to fire yes. Passengers just won't tollerate any crap now anyway, so the struggle would result in a crash or the highjackers taken out. The good part in all this is that people are taking an active interest in their own well-being.
When you hire someone to write custom software you're really paying for their development time. You may pay for the job rather than by the hour, but the fixed cost will just be an estimate of the time it takes plus some margin for error. If all "custom" software (whatever that is) is contracted on an hourly basis this will clearly be double taxation. If you've got a specialized product already developed and sell it to others, it'd be off the shelf and I'd expect subject to sales tax. Hmmm....
That would be an extreme view. Most just realize that there is a significant risk in using proprietary infrastructure. Imagine BK had no bridge to CVS. BK starts charging a lot of money to use BK (monthy fee even). Great, so the kernel hackers check out the code and put it in CVS - no big deal. Next SCO comes along and makes claims about the history of the code. Oh wait, the history only goes back to the switch from bitkeeper.... Oh, but the last BK archive is still around - oh but BK went out of business so it's not accessible....
It's OK to use proprietary tools when working on your bread and butter, but they must not be able to prevent you from having full access to said bread and butter.
Are your business documents stored in MS Word format? What will you do when they switch to a subscription model and charge $$$ per month? Save them all as .rtf or .txt and import into OpenOffice.org? What if support for saving those formats is removed before the price goes up? Remember, in this scenario it's YOUR data that is not under your own control. Certain things just shouldn't be proprietary, and most people never thought about that when they allowed it to happen.
The marketing and surveilence possibilities are amazing. Use them all you want, just disable them at the register please.
And don't laugh, some retailers have already suggested the possibility of reading tags as they come INTO a store so sales people can bother you with things similar to what you've already bought.
OK, I don't really know how much of Indian work is for US companies ;-)
Don't swap until it's necessary seems the right thing to do. If IO isn't busy, you could send older data to disk, but you'd need a way to mark the RAM AND DISK both as valid until the RAM changes. If you need more RAM then just invalidate the RAM copy. Does the MMU support this? Sounds like a patentable idea to me....except that I just posted it to /.
They also claimed that 2 (formerly respectable) chemists must be failing to account for a chemical reaction in a jar containing about 4 elements with no molecules larger than 3 atoms.... The whole thing smelled of "not invented here" along with "don't cut our funding" to me.
That should be sKeptical. Dammit, of all the blunders that are becomming common usage this one drives me insane. It's because I read it with only one consonant at the beginning - an S sound, so it sounds like something having to do with a tank full of crap.
No, the whole point is that snooping the data is impossible without detection. There is no defense against a man-in-the-middle attack for any system. Suppose you're going to perform a transaction with your bank and I'm in the middle terminating YOUR fiber into my QC machine. I also have whatever conventional authentication key is required to mimic the bank. You complete a transaction and I relay the transaction to the bank by mimicing YOU (I have the conventional keys to do that too). Or perhaps I use 2 machines at the same time to decode/recode all traffic in real time. One poster pointed out that round-trip time might be able to detect this setup, but that has nothing to do with Quantum Cryptography. The security rests on the method used to verify who you're communicating with just as it does with any non-quantum channel. Of course if keys can be derived from snooping the data (like with WEP) then QC would be useful, but a better plan would be to change to a scheme where that's not possible.
Lets hope so. Since both sides are able to train this way. Or will they only allow connections from within the US? That would seem to be a wise idea. We really don't need to train all the worlds armies and terrorists in urban warfare, that would be stupid beyond belief.
I'm still waiting for the base jumpers and the high power rocket builders to get together. Build a rocket to lift someone with the ability to eject cleanly and still recover the rocket too...