I seem to recall a Nova special I watched many moons ago about "strange attractors" and "fractal behavior" that seemed to indicate that for a large class of complex-valued iterative functions there was a weird phenomenon called the "Butterfly Effect". Apparently... according to this show I saw 20 years ago (and I think that Mandelbrot mentioned it in a lecture I attended a few years later), initial variables which are as intertwined as the rational and irrational numbers can have drastically divergent outcomes in these situations.
It seems that the reason that this was called the Butterfly Effect was actually because the disturbance caused by a butterfly could be enough to change the track of a massive storm some days later. ( Reference)
The fact is that the weather forecasters on the local broadcast channel are less accurate than if they always predicted sun in one study:
"The graph above shows that stations get their precipitation predictions correct about 85 percent of the time one day out and decline to about 73 percent seven days out.
"On the surface, that would not seem too bad. But consider that if a meteorologist always predicted that it would never rain, they would be right 86.3 percent of the time. So if a viewer was looking for more certainty than just assuming it will not rain, a successful meteorologist would have to be better than 86.3 percent. Three of the forecasters were about 87 percent at one day out â" a hair over the threshold for success."
It's a wonderful idea that we can model the incredibly complex climate of our huge planet, but I'll believe it once I can trust the weekend forecast before Friday.
Any other ideas about useful purposes to put these huge computers to? Perhaps accounting and auditing for the new Emergency Financial Legislation?
Let's hear it for Slashdot, running a headline which disregards basic TCP/IP networking knowledge.
You cannot "bypass firewalls" by sending traffic to port 80, because although most/all outbound filters/firewalls allow this traffic very few inbound filters/firewalls do. In fact there are NO TCP or UDP ports which are opened by default on residential gateways - that's why they provide such good [decent] network protection for most of the broadband world.
Sadly, the best thing around for this is uPNP - a huge security hole which allows applications to request network devices forward return traffic on different ports, rather than use the standard state table for NAT forwarding. This can be used to pass a conversation off from a Client Server Client situation to a Client Client direct connection.
Yup. You are absolutely right - although the submitter, the poster and the original article don't make it clear 0.01$ is the PREMIUM for green power over traditional fossil fuel power.
This small over-looked fact makes this entire post (and the subsequent/. chatter) rather meaningless. Perhaps a better title for the posting would be "Green/Renewable Power Still More Expensive than Fossil Fuels".
I was wondering about this. Seems to me that all the carbon currently sequestered in fossil fuels was probably part of the atmosphere initially (seems like CO/CO2 are part of the primordial ooze). So, basically it was the rise of photosynthesizers which created the oxygen atmosphere and removed the CO2 from the air. All we're doing is putting it back. No less "natural" than the removal, but possibly very detrimental to our health.
Whenever I hear "with all of the terrorist threats lately, bringing passport documents into the digital world is sure to increase security," I cringe. The idea that something which sounds like increased security will actually amount to increased security without any real analysis is an all too common reaction these days.
Think about the TSA (Thousands Standing Around|Take Scissors Away) - does taking knitting needles make anyone safer? The biggest change in airline safety because of 9/11 was 9/11. Before folks figured that they could just quietly land in Cuba and live on peanuts for a few days before they would be brought home. All that has changed, but it didn't require billions of dollars, air marshals, or any of the other visible crap the government did to create the illusion of security.
While biometric passports might make identification more certain, you need to fully look at who/where/how passports are used, and see if these measures will actually be useful in the real world. Urg.
Will the quality be less than that of a minidisc that someone smuggled into the show inside their jacket and tried to keep the microphone out while dancing and such? Or will the quality be less than a studio-mixed album that is engineered over months by experts? I think the answers to both these questions are clear.
they're not saying that pre-2001 *hype* will return, just the employment levels... i.e. number of jobs. That doesn't sound unreasonable. Companies will continue invest in IT projects, as there is real return on careful and reasoned investment.
Why do you think that employment will return to the Y2K-Elevated pre-2001 levels? Seems like the over-investment in Y2K IT fallout is what we're dealing with here, and I'd be suprised if we don't end up with 1998 employment levels. (with some upward adjustment for the honest to goodness benefits that can come from automation and improved communication).
The "addendum" that this covers only the use of the logo rather than the product seems, to me at least, to make this into an absolute non-issue... probably one which is covered in most trademark use licenses.
Why does the/. community persist in badmouthing something that everyone does simply because MSFT does it as well? There are times and places for that certainly, but generally those should have a 'Bill of Rights' icon, rather than a 'Bill of Borg' icon.
Worst movie I've seen in a long time.
on
15 Minutes
·
· Score: 2
My wife and I were wondering as we laughed at moments that the director hoped would be poignant and grimaced at moments intended to be funny "Can anyone like this mindless drivel?" Apparently people can, and there are a number of them here.
The flaw in this movie are far too numerous to completely count, but let's start with a few of the big ones:
1. Why the heck is a fire marshall, who never even saw the big-shot teevee cop (because he doesn't own a teevee, and without a teevee probably doesn't read People magazine) suddenly the guys best friend after they've been together a total of about four hours over the course of two days?
2. Double Jeapordy doesn't mean that court has to stand idly by while obvious mistrials are left standing. Come on Hollywood! This was much worse in the case of the movie of that name, but to put forth (without refutation, in both instances) that this fatal flaw exists in our legal system is irresponsible.
3. I appreciate that the media is an easy and sometimes valid target, which has created a culture of media-obsession, panic-driving media (I like how Kelsey Grammar said 'If it bleeds, it leads' as thought that was a novel idea)... HOWEVER. This topic has been done to death, starting with Network, and then the violence-creation/violence-reporting link was done much better in Natural Born Killers. What does this movie add to the story and the (far too blatant) morality tale? An arson investigator and an escort service.
4. Were the rose petals on the ground around the dying DiNero necessary? No. They were absurd - like all of the symbols in this movie they were far too blatant. It was as though the movie was being as LCD (not the display) as the media that it was harping on - but without the self-awareness to validate it.
There are a lot of other movies. I give it 2/10, because it is still possible for the movie to be worse, but they'd have to work at it.
You have the power both to amaze and to befuddle, eclipsed only by your ability to entertain obviously false "knowledge"
You want to really reduce pollution? Slap some emissions restraints on recreational engines. One hour on a Jet-Ski puts out more pollution than driving a new car for 100,000 miles.
Don't even get me started about lawn mowers.
Okay. Maybe if you look at a single indicator of pollution, let's say, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) you might be somewhat correct, if the car was perfectly tuned and the catalytic converter worked perfectly. But overall, looking at total pollution (SOX, NOX, O3, CO2, particulates) your statement is ludicrous. A JetSki probably burns around one gallon of gasoline in an hour. That can't produce more than 8 pounds of total pollution without violating the principle of conservation of mass/energy. Period. Driving a car for a year (~12-15KMiles) produces (generally) over a ton of pollution.
As an occasional dabbler in solar technology and someone fairly aware of the state of wind and hydro, it's pretty silly to think that our energy thirst can be slated with anything other than fossil fuels for the forseeable future.
Pretty much all of the available hydro in the US is tapped, and the payback on solar and wind is still an order of magnitude beyond what fossil fuels are - I haven't seen any analysis of the environmental impact of producing and disposing of solar cells, but I can't imagine it's a squeaky-clean process.
It appears to me that the best way to go about things is to sleep when its dark, and bicycle or cross-country ski as much as possible. Take that OPEC!
(despite the fact that a very small minority of Americans are familiar with the acronym GPF...)
I'm suprised that General Motors isn't getting its panties in a bunch over the constant use of their trademark for the "evil" Genetically Modified stuff.
If somehow the widely used term was Modified S@!#, and it was constantly shortened to MS I can imagine that there would be one large and vocally unhappy corporation. Speaking of which, I wonder how the boyz in Redmond feel about sharing their abbreviation with a crippling disease?
If you want real privacy head over to www.zeroknowledge.com and get the Beta of their privacy-securing product: Freedom(TM).
I think that it is reasonable that in this day and age you have to pay a little something for your privacy. How can people willing to pay x thousand dollars for the swankiest new computer, and 20+$/month for Internet access (please don't reply just to tell me how little you get your internet access for) complain about another couple bucks to keep the corporations and the government from finding out who they are?
In the phone directory you have to pay a little bit extra to not be listed. You can use a false name for no charge (as you can on the internet), but the phone company can trace any old call back to you, with an appropriate court order. The internet is the same way - publicity is the default and privacy will cost you.
Perhaps a better way to think about it is: The amount that you pay to use the Internet is the amount that it costs, discounted by the value of your personal information. If you take back that privacy, you forfeit the subsidy you have gotten from your publicity. The end result is the same, except that the default is cheaper, and encourages more people to enter the media. [This analogy is not technically complete, but is functional]
Those who care CAN reclaim their privacy, but it is not done for them by government regulation. Sounds fair to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall a Nova special I watched many moons ago about "strange attractors" and "fractal behavior" that seemed to indicate that for a large class of complex-valued iterative functions there was a weird phenomenon called the "Butterfly Effect". Apparently... according to this show I saw 20 years ago (and I think that Mandelbrot mentioned it in a lecture I attended a few years later), initial variables which are as intertwined as the rational and irrational numbers can have drastically divergent outcomes in these situations.
It seems that the reason that this was called the Butterfly Effect was actually because the disturbance caused by a butterfly could be enough to change the track of a massive storm some days later. ( Reference)
The fact is that the weather forecasters on the local broadcast channel are less accurate than if they always predicted sun in one study:
"The graph above shows that stations get their precipitation predictions correct about 85 percent of the time one day out and decline to about 73 percent seven days out.
"On the surface, that would not seem too bad. But consider that if a meteorologist always predicted that it would never rain, they would be right 86.3 percent of the time. So if a viewer was looking for more certainty than just assuming it will not rain, a successful meteorologist would have to be better than 86.3 percent. Three of the forecasters were about 87 percent at one day out â" a hair over the threshold for success."
(ref: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/how-valid-are-tv-weather-forecasts/)
It's a wonderful idea that we can model the incredibly complex climate of our huge planet, but I'll believe it once I can trust the weekend forecast before Friday.
Any other ideas about useful purposes to put these huge computers to? Perhaps accounting and auditing for the new Emergency Financial Legislation?
There has already been a nobel prize awarded for experimental confirmation of gravitational waves.
Why are we doing this again?
Let's hear it for Slashdot, running a headline which disregards basic TCP/IP networking knowledge.
You cannot "bypass firewalls" by sending traffic to port 80, because although most/all outbound filters/firewalls allow this traffic very few inbound filters/firewalls do. In fact there are NO TCP or UDP ports which are opened by default on residential gateways - that's why they provide such good [decent] network protection for most of the broadband world.
Sadly, the best thing around for this is uPNP - a huge security hole which allows applications to request network devices forward return traffic on different ports, rather than use the standard state table for NAT forwarding. This can be used to pass a conversation off from a Client Server Client situation to a Client Client direct connection.
Is there any way to mod down the original post?
Yup. You are absolutely right - although the submitter, the poster and the original article don't make it clear 0.01$ is the PREMIUM for green power over traditional fossil fuel power.
/. chatter) rather meaningless. Perhaps a better title for the posting would be "Green/Renewable Power Still More Expensive than Fossil Fuels".
This small over-looked fact makes this entire post (and the subsequent
Gak.
I was wondering about this. Seems to me that all the carbon currently sequestered in fossil fuels was probably part of the atmosphere initially (seems like CO/CO2 are part of the primordial ooze). So, basically it was the rise of photosynthesizers which created the oxygen atmosphere and removed the CO2 from the air. All we're doing is putting it back. No less "natural" than the removal, but possibly very detrimental to our health.
Whenever I hear "with all of the terrorist threats lately, bringing passport documents into the digital world is sure to increase security," I cringe. The idea that something which sounds like increased security will actually amount to increased security without any real analysis is an all too common reaction these days.
Think about the TSA (Thousands Standing Around|Take Scissors Away) - does taking knitting needles make anyone safer? The biggest change in airline safety because of 9/11 was 9/11. Before folks figured that they could just quietly land in Cuba and live on peanuts for a few days before they would be brought home. All that has changed, but it didn't require billions of dollars, air marshals, or any of the other visible crap the government did to create the illusion of security.
While biometric passports might make identification more certain, you need to fully look at who/where/how passports are used, and see if these measures will actually be useful in the real world. Urg.
Check out Memepool. Seems that their article of Thursday, June 17th was lifted almost verbatim by some karma-wh*re without proper attribution.
Tsk-tsk. For shame...
Yeah! And I wrote the original post (I just happened to not bother to log in).
Dammit.
Will the quality be less than that of a minidisc that someone smuggled into the show inside their jacket and tried to keep the microphone out while dancing and such? Or will the quality be less than a studio-mixed album that is engineered over months by experts? I think the answers to both these questions are clear.
they're not saying that pre-2001 *hype* will return, just the employment levels... i.e. number of jobs. That doesn't sound unreasonable. Companies will continue invest in IT projects, as there is real return on careful and reasoned investment.
Why do you think that employment will return to the Y2K-Elevated pre-2001 levels? Seems like the over-investment in Y2K IT fallout is what we're dealing with here, and I'd be suprised if we don't end up with 1998 employment levels. (with some upward adjustment for the honest to goodness benefits that can come from automation and improved communication).
Why does the
My wife and I were wondering as we laughed at moments that the director hoped would be poignant and grimaced at moments intended to be funny "Can anyone like this mindless drivel?" Apparently people can, and there are a number of them here.
The flaw in this movie are far too numerous to completely count, but let's start with a few of the big ones:
1. Why the heck is a fire marshall, who never even saw the big-shot teevee cop (because he doesn't own a teevee, and without a teevee probably doesn't read People magazine) suddenly the guys best friend after they've been together a total of about four hours over the course of two days?
2. Double Jeapordy doesn't mean that court has to stand idly by while obvious mistrials are left standing. Come on Hollywood! This was much worse in the case of the movie of that name, but to put forth (without refutation, in both instances) that this fatal flaw exists in our legal system is irresponsible.
3. I appreciate that the media is an easy and sometimes valid target, which has created a culture of media-obsession, panic-driving media (I like how Kelsey Grammar said 'If it bleeds, it leads' as thought that was a novel idea)... HOWEVER. This topic has been done to death, starting with Network, and then the violence-creation/violence-reporting link was done much better in Natural Born Killers. What does this movie add to the story and the (far too blatant) morality tale? An arson investigator and an escort service.
4. Were the rose petals on the ground around the dying DiNero necessary? No. They were absurd - like all of the symbols in this movie they were far too blatant. It was as though the movie was being as LCD (not the display) as the media that it was harping on - but without the self-awareness to validate it.
There are a lot of other movies. I give it 2/10, because it is still possible for the movie to be worse, but they'd have to work at it.
Didn't anyone else hate this movie?
CM
You want to really reduce pollution? Slap some emissions restraints on recreational engines. One hour on a Jet-Ski puts out more pollution than driving a new car for 100,000 miles.
Don't even get me started about lawn mowers.
Okay. Maybe if you look at a single indicator of pollution, let's say, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) you might be somewhat correct, if the car was perfectly tuned and the catalytic converter worked perfectly. But overall, looking at total pollution (SOX, NOX, O3, CO2, particulates) your statement is ludicrous. A JetSki probably burns around one gallon of gasoline in an hour. That can't produce more than 8 pounds of total pollution without violating the principle of conservation of mass/energy. Period. Driving a car for a year (~12-15KMiles) produces (generally) over a ton of pollution.
Things that make you go "GNnnnnaaaaaa"
CM
Pretty much all of the available hydro in the US is tapped, and the payback on solar and wind is still an order of magnitude beyond what fossil fuels are - I haven't seen any analysis of the environmental impact of producing and disposing of solar cells, but I can't imagine it's a squeaky-clean process.
It appears to me that the best way to go about things is to sleep when its dark, and bicycle or cross-country ski as much as possible. Take that OPEC!
CM
(despite the fact that a very small minority of Americans are familiar with the acronym GPF...)
I'm suprised that General Motors isn't getting its panties in a bunch over the constant use of their trademark for the "evil" Genetically Modified stuff.
If somehow the widely used term was Modified S@!#, and it was constantly shortened to MS I can imagine that there would be one large and vocally unhappy corporation. Speaking of which, I wonder how the boyz in Redmond feel about sharing their abbreviation with a crippling disease?
If you want real privacy head over to www.zeroknowledge.com and get the Beta of their privacy-securing product: Freedom(TM).
I think that it is reasonable that in this day and age you have to pay a little something for your privacy. How can people willing to pay x thousand dollars for the swankiest new computer, and 20+$/month for Internet access (please don't reply just to tell me how little you get your internet access for) complain about another couple bucks to keep the corporations and the government from finding out who they are?
In the phone directory you have to pay a little bit extra to not be listed. You can use a false name for no charge (as you can on the internet), but the phone company can trace any old call back to you, with an appropriate court order. The internet is the same way - publicity is the default and privacy will cost you.
Perhaps a better way to think about it is: The amount that you pay to use the Internet is the amount that it costs, discounted by the value of your personal information. If you take back that privacy, you forfeit the subsidy you have gotten from your publicity. The end result is the same, except that the default is cheaper, and encourages more people to enter the media. [This analogy is not technically complete, but is functional]
Those who care CAN reclaim their privacy, but it is not done for them by government regulation. Sounds fair to me.