"Word in the smart circles is that all of that shit is made out of string anyway, so that's where the real smart money is."
I can't wait to tell the wife. 30yrs ago she said I was an idiot using the spare room to house my string collection. After the children were born she demanded I get rid of my balls alltogether, said she "never wanted to see those hairy monstrosoties again".
I stood firm, I told her "I would rather leave her with my balls intact, than stay and suffer the pain of eternal seperation". Eventually we compromised, we built a shed so that I could keep my balls out of her face. It worked well, to this day I can still play with them (or simply stand and admire), them whenever I feel like it. Now that they are worth money I bet she will want to display them on the mantlepeice and pretend she always loved them.
I don't know anything about US vouchers, where I come from we have decent public schools in cities, suburbs and the middle of nowhere. Perhaps the only thing comprable in this country would be some of the more depressing aboriginal settlements. Sure we also have expensive private schools for those who want their children (or even themselves) to rub shoulders with other rich kids.
If you read Stephen J Gould you will find darwinian evolution is an imperfect optimizer since it climbs peaks of varying height seperated by valleys in a curved plane, it's unlikely to optimize any social/legal system but it sure to reinvent a few nasty ones as it continues to grow and pull down civilizations.
Darwinian competition is how many systems develop over time, it's results can be viewed as either a good or bad thing depending on the measure of success, a well funded secular eductation for your neighbours children is currently the best protection against darwinian social collapse.
"A programmer not checking for a null pointer return or a buffer overflow is the equivalent of... geez, I don't know... a surgeon forgetting to wash his hands before operating?"
Sorry but that conjures up a picture of Dilbert's PHB: "I'm giving you an under-performer rating on your last project Dilbert. I shouldn't have to hire someone to test your work.".
The biggest overflow culprit is probably strcpy() or a similar library function. Most proprietary and open source application code I have seen over the last couple of decades do not explicitly check buffer lengths before calling strcpy, etc. What most applications do (if anything) is focus on input validation and then blindly throw the validated data at library calls or lower level parts of the application code. What you were asking the students to do is act like every bit of code is paranoid interface or library code but the vast bulk of code out there is not written that way, nor should it be.
Writing and to a lesser extent using library code is always a trade off between saftey, speed, and the number of hours in a day. This is why writing a general purpose library/interface that adds something usefull to the art or science is difficult for vetrans let alone students.
I also taught programming to 1st and 2nd year CS students in the early 90's, in my experience many students found it difficult to fully grasp the concept of pointers even after two years with several different explainations from different presenters using different programming languages. Asking them to write bullet proof (sloth like) code is a waste of time. Sure, make them aware of defensive programing techniques, work it into assignments and award points it. However in an educational setting, well commeted and readable code that makes a decent attempt at the assigned problem and it's constraints is far more important than passing the keyboard bashing test and grades should reflect that.
I understood what it meant the first time I read it, the reference was the first google hit to mention it. You seem hung-up on compression or perhaps I am missing something about the definitions, AFAIK a sustained chain reaction is not essential for fusion or fission ( the merging and splitting of atoms ) to take place, it just needs a hard enough collision. Also I am not saying that it is happenening in the blob, I am saying the blob's speed is largely due to the energy released from the destruction of the disk as it spirals inward.
Anyway, to me it seems clear that the disc spirals down at ever increasing velocity. This in turn produces a plasma AND energy from the destruction of matter, the energy/matter is then either sucked into the hole of shot out of the poles at near light speed. These polar beams travel enourmous distances and make the colder gas they encounter glow across a wide spectrum including x-rays. The beams are also quite likely to be the source of cosmic rays. The mechanisim that converts disc to beam is gravity and rotation, but I doubt that's what gives the beam ALL it's energy.
I once heard an atom smasher described as a machine that smashes two berries together to make a fruit salad - and succeeds! The acceleration involved near a black hole dwarfs those of the LHC so you can expect more than a fruit salad.
Granted the majority of mass that is rotating the hole may be a lot further away and be in the form of plasma.
"The law seems (IANAL) to be written so that ISPs are "common carriers" according to this law."
It normally means the companies who own/run the public part of the network. ISP's generally plug a private network into the public one through a PABX or similar. Phone companies who are also ISP's usually do it via a subsiduary.
Chances this will make absofuckingloutely NO difference to the status quo? - Near certainty.
There are no 'extra' powers other than making it compulsory for telecoms to have wiretapping capabilities for various types of digital and analog comms. AFAIK they have all had that capability for quite some time. We don't have a bill of rights AND we don't have warrantless searches, go figure.
As for the "what's the deal" question in the title the answer is "J. Howard kissing GWB's butt". That all changed late last year, apparently K. Rudd prefers the taste and texture of Chinese butt.
Blobs of matter the size of Jupiter have been observed moving away from a black hole at near light speed (perpendicular to the disc's rotation). I always thought those beams were formed from the accretion disc as it falls toward the hole.
The matter that gets sucked into the disc from the surroundings would not be all arriving from the same direction therefore I can't see how the relative speeds of the particles would be so low as to rule out fusion.
That's right, the 'old boys' club doesn't exist and it never did. Graduates from private schools start at the bottom like everyone else. Just because they are set to inherit the company when grandpa drops of the perch doesn't mean they get special treatment.
Agreed, but he is interested in CS not just it's implementation. The quote is a good argument in favour of the LA campus since languages can be 'picked up' quickly once you get the hang of it.
As for TFA, I would follow what I'm intrested in and let the money sort itself out....
Having said that, if you are not familiar with a variety of low and high level programming techniques, you will get you nowhere. A degree AND experience is what is normally required for an interesting (and well paid) job. As someone who has hired for large projects I can say in my experience the degree is not a great deal more than a tick in the box for HR when hiring programmers (does anyone still do that?).
When hiring architects / senior developers, more attention is paid to theory and experience/qualifications in a similar problem space, formal methodologies, mathematics, standards, design/doc tools, etc, are way more important than programming skills. These jobs are often taken up by people who have a non-IT degree and are largely self taught when it comes to programming. Many of them became permenent (and excellent) developers during the 90's simply because people threw wads of money at them. After the crash the phones went silent, IT pimps vanished and diploma factories closed. People without a degree AND experience found it much harder to hold on to a (well paid and interesting) job.
If you prefer to marginally increase the chance of employment, and one course offers an industry internship/project near the end of the course, take that one.
BTW: Perhaps your the next Alan Turing but don't be too disappointed when you first graduate, nobody in thier right mind puts a recent grad where they can do too much damage, besides you will be leaving the first job after a few years because you need to work in different environments to be considered 'experienced'.
If you call what happens in an atom smasher 'friction' then yes, but this is quite different to rubbing two sticks together. The vast majority of radiation from the disc is due to the conversion of mass into energy by particle collisions at near light speed (ie: fission and fusion). It has little or nothing to do with blackbody radiation which is the radiation emitted by an object until it reaches thermal equilibrium with it's surroundings.
All the more reason to attack them now, if they get their hands on ice making technology we are sunk! Better use nukes to make sure we melt any secret bergs they have hidden in the desert.
No it has the opposite effect of making the target more resoulte. Take Robin Williams advice and drop frogs and lizards if you want to scare the shit out of people
In the past I taught for a couple of years at tertiary level in Australia and agree, teaching people how to research is something that is consitently overlooked in the system until they walk into uni, and even then it's hit and miss. Students are more often than not simply taught how to look something up in primary/secondary school. When I was a kid library class actually taught you how to look things up, but just like looking it up on WP they still left research methods as an excercise for the reader.
OTOH I'd care to wager most of these proffesors who complain loudest about WP have never actually reseached what they are babbling on about. In my experience WP does a fine job of representing knowledge by mirroring it's opposing and contradictory 'facts'. The world is a messy place, there is often more than one good answer. As it stands WP is an excellent resource for proffesors to both teach and practice research. IMHO and without RTFA the I think the 'proffesor' has lost touch with reality and is condeming an excellent tool because a bunch of students in their late teens failed to use it properly.
Touche' The term was used by a certain lage IT firm during the "who stole my cheese" era, it's a euphamisim that basically means pack your bags because the project is going nowhere.
I've never had LSD but I have hallucinated from illness, sleep depravation and certain fungi, I imagine it's similar but I'll wait until my 80's before trying it. There is a theory that cave paintings represent 'visions'. Dots and geometric lines often cover the pictures and it's thought that these represent the spots and lines that are often percieved as overlaying (or segmenting) hallucinations in a dimly lit environment.
I've had the ESP thing with dope and a group of people, I've also watched it while straight - it's an hallucination alright, but a lot less dangerous than the beer hallucination of leading the pack in the Paris to Daka while actualy just driving home from the pub.
In (200km/h) tennis you try to trick the opponent into thinking you will hit the ball in a certain direction using your 'body language', if successfull you will win the point because your opponent is alreay commited to moving the other way BEFORE you hit the ball.
The brain is always a few hundred ms ahead but it does a very good job of making everything appear seamless and in sync. It's very hard to observe this in real life unless you need to change a decision fast. For example when closing the car door you see your keys in the ignition, your brain says STOP but your hand continues to close the door.
In a more serious situation (say a car crash) your brain will work overtime and it may appear that everything is in slow motion, this helps to make decisions fast but it still can't overcome the brain to body action latency.
"If Microsoft wants more H1B candidates to stick around then they need to encourage hookups between their American employees and their foreign H1Bs and graduate student interns."
Been done, look up the term "collage party" on the intertubes.
As an Aussie who watch the transition to UHN in this country 30yrs ago I can tell you that you are wrong, one major point you overlook is that your government already spends 1.5 times ours per head on health and your health outcomes are worse. Also health expenditure would stay in the country rather than forming craters in a faraway desert. Thing is though the democrats proposed UHC is trying to have it both ways and probably will be rediculously expensive and ultimately useless.
As for NASA, I think the man-on-mars thing is PR for Bush that was born a white elephant, get rid of it and you will save heaps. Wether the money goes back to NASA's autonomous projects or somewhere else is academic.
"Recall for a moment that without government, corporations would cease to exist as government protected entities with rights, and would be seen as what they are. Worthless pieces of paper backed by government."
Without government, corporations would revert back to smaller (and more violent) fuedal entities.
"but it wasn't the frequency at which it would have been in resonance."
My main point was and still is, engineers are still in disagrement so I don't know how you or I can come up with a definitive answer.
Your answer is a leading theory but I have found no definite evidence that rules out the influence of other mechanisims. What I am essentially arguing is that there was more than one mechanisim at play and in my mind the waves in the cables (resonant or not) are evidence of one such mechanisim. Interestingly, if you watch the video after the first section falls, the remaining section immediately changes from a twisting motion to a classical wave with a smaller amplitude.
Slashdot Mirror
"Word in the smart circles is that all of that shit is made out of string anyway, so that's where the real smart money is."
I can't wait to tell the wife. 30yrs ago she said I was an idiot using the spare room to house my string collection. After the children were born she demanded I get rid of my balls alltogether, said she "never wanted to see those hairy monstrosoties again".
I stood firm, I told her "I would rather leave her with my balls intact, than stay and suffer the pain of eternal seperation". Eventually we compromised, we built a shed so that I could keep my balls out of her face. It worked well, to this day I can still play with them (or simply stand and admire), them whenever I feel like it. Now that they are worth money I bet she will want to display them on the mantlepeice and pretend she always loved them.
"Infrastructure that they were largely given free of charge."
Can someone give me any insight as to what insight can be found in the GP's insightfull remark. In other words, I call bullshit.
I don't know anything about US vouchers, where I come from we have decent public schools in cities, suburbs and the middle of nowhere. Perhaps the only thing comprable in this country would be some of the more depressing aboriginal settlements. Sure we also have expensive private schools for those who want their children (or even themselves) to rub shoulders with other rich kids.
If you read Stephen J Gould you will find darwinian evolution is an imperfect optimizer since it climbs peaks of varying height seperated by valleys in a curved plane, it's unlikely to optimize any social/legal system but it sure to reinvent a few nasty ones as it continues to grow and pull down civilizations.
Darwinian competition is how many systems develop over time, it's results can be viewed as either a good or bad thing depending on the measure of success, a well funded secular eductation for your neighbours children is currently the best protection against darwinian social collapse.
"A programmer not checking for a null pointer return or a buffer overflow is the equivalent of... geez, I don't know... a surgeon forgetting to wash his hands before operating?"
Sorry but that conjures up a picture of Dilbert's PHB: "I'm giving you an under-performer rating on your last project Dilbert. I shouldn't have to hire someone to test your work.".
The biggest overflow culprit is probably strcpy() or a similar library function. Most proprietary and open source application code I have seen over the last couple of decades do not explicitly check buffer lengths before calling strcpy, etc. What most applications do (if anything) is focus on input validation and then blindly throw the validated data at library calls or lower level parts of the application code. What you were asking the students to do is act like every bit of code is paranoid interface or library code but the vast bulk of code out there is not written that way, nor should it be.
Writing and to a lesser extent using library code is always a trade off between saftey, speed, and the number of hours in a day. This is why writing a general purpose library/interface that adds something usefull to the art or science is difficult for vetrans let alone students.
I also taught programming to 1st and 2nd year CS students in the early 90's, in my experience many students found it difficult to fully grasp the concept of pointers even after two years with several different explainations from different presenters using different programming languages. Asking them to write bullet proof (sloth like) code is a waste of time. Sure, make them aware of defensive programing techniques, work it into assignments and award points it. However in an educational setting, well commeted and readable code that makes a decent attempt at the assigned problem and it's constraints is far more important than passing the keyboard bashing test and grades should reflect that.
I understood what it meant the first time I read it, the reference was the first google hit to mention it. You seem hung-up on compression or perhaps I am missing something about the definitions, AFAIK a sustained chain reaction is not essential for fusion or fission ( the merging and splitting of atoms ) to take place, it just needs a hard enough collision. Also I am not saying that it is happenening in the blob, I am saying the blob's speed is largely due to the energy released from the destruction of the disk as it spirals inward.
Anyway, to me it seems clear that the disc spirals down at ever increasing velocity. This in turn produces a plasma AND energy from the destruction of matter, the energy/matter is then either sucked into the hole of shot out of the poles at near light speed. These polar beams travel enourmous distances and make the colder gas they encounter glow across a wide spectrum including x-rays. The beams are also quite likely to be the source of cosmic rays. The mechanisim that converts disc to beam is gravity and rotation, but I doubt that's what gives the beam ALL it's energy.
I once heard an atom smasher described as a machine that smashes two berries together to make a fruit salad - and succeeds! The acceleration involved near a black hole dwarfs those of the LHC so you can expect more than a fruit salad.
Granted the majority of mass that is rotating the hole may be a lot further away and be in the form of plasma.
"The law seems (IANAL) to be written so that ISPs are "common carriers" according to this law."
It normally means the companies who own/run the public part of the network. ISP's generally plug a private network into the public one through a PABX or similar. Phone companies who are also ISP's usually do it via a subsiduary.
I think it's also the reason why here in Oz the phone companies offer ISP services through a subsiduary company.
Unicorn - Where's BadAnalogyGuy when we need him?
"Chances some of this power will be abused? 100%"
Chances this will make absofuckingloutely NO difference to the status quo? - Near certainty.
There are no 'extra' powers other than making it compulsory for telecoms to have wiretapping capabilities for various types of digital and analog comms. AFAIK they have all had that capability for quite some time. We don't have a bill of rights AND we don't have warrantless searches, go figure.
As for the "what's the deal" question in the title the answer is "J. Howard kissing GWB's butt". That all changed late last year, apparently K. Rudd prefers the taste and texture of Chinese butt.
Hear,hear! And if the NRA loggyists turn up again they will get the same reception.
Ref
Blobs of matter the size of Jupiter have been observed moving away from a black hole at near light speed (perpendicular to the disc's rotation). I always thought those beams were formed from the accretion disc as it falls toward the hole.
The matter that gets sucked into the disc from the surroundings would not be all arriving from the same direction therefore I can't see how the relative speeds of the particles would be so low as to rule out fusion.
That's right, the 'old boys' club doesn't exist and it never did. Graduates from private schools start at the bottom like everyone else. Just because they are set to inherit the company when grandpa drops of the perch doesn't mean they get special treatment.
"Good programmers are largely self-taught."
Agreed, but he is interested in CS not just it's implementation. The quote is a good argument in favour of the LA campus since languages can be 'picked up' quickly once you get the hang of it.
As for TFA, I would follow what I'm intrested in and let the money sort itself out....
Having said that, if you are not familiar with a variety of low and high level programming techniques, you will get you nowhere. A degree AND experience is what is normally required for an interesting (and well paid) job. As someone who has hired for large projects I can say in my experience the degree is not a great deal more than a tick in the box for HR when hiring programmers (does anyone still do that?).
When hiring architects / senior developers, more attention is paid to theory and experience/qualifications in a similar problem space, formal methodologies, mathematics, standards, design/doc tools, etc, are way more important than programming skills. These jobs are often taken up by people who have a non-IT degree and are largely self taught when it comes to programming. Many of them became permenent (and excellent) developers during the 90's simply because people threw wads of money at them. After the crash the phones went silent, IT pimps vanished and diploma factories closed. People without a degree AND experience found it much harder to hold on to a (well paid and interesting) job.
If you prefer to marginally increase the chance of employment, and one course offers an industry internship/project near the end of the course, take that one.
BTW: Perhaps your the next Alan Turing but don't be too disappointed when you first graduate, nobody in thier right mind puts a recent grad where they can do too much damage, besides you will be leaving the first job after a few years because you need to work in different environments to be considered 'experienced'.
If you call what happens in an atom smasher 'friction' then yes, but this is quite different to rubbing two sticks together. The vast majority of radiation from the disc is due to the conversion of mass into energy by particle collisions at near light speed (ie: fission and fusion). It has little or nothing to do with blackbody radiation which is the radiation emitted by an object until it reaches thermal equilibrium with it's surroundings.
"Silly boy. Iran doesn't have ice!"
All the more reason to attack them now, if they get their hands on ice making technology we are sunk! Better use nukes to make sure we melt any secret bergs they have hidden in the desert.
No it has the opposite effect of making the target more resoulte. Take Robin Williams advice and drop frogs and lizards if you want to scare the shit out of people
In the past I taught for a couple of years at tertiary level in Australia and agree, teaching people how to research is something that is consitently overlooked in the system until they walk into uni, and even then it's hit and miss. Students are more often than not simply taught how to look something up in primary/secondary school. When I was a kid library class actually taught you how to look things up, but just like looking it up on WP they still left research methods as an excercise for the reader.
OTOH I'd care to wager most of these proffesors who complain loudest about WP have never actually reseached what they are babbling on about. In my experience WP does a fine job of representing knowledge by mirroring it's opposing and contradictory 'facts'. The world is a messy place, there is often more than one good answer. As it stands WP is an excellent resource for proffesors to both teach and practice research. IMHO and without RTFA the I think the 'proffesor' has lost touch with reality and is condeming an excellent tool because a bunch of students in their late teens failed to use it properly.
Touche' The term was used by a certain lage IT firm during the "who stole my cheese" era, it's a euphamisim that basically means pack your bags because the project is going nowhere.
I've never had LSD but I have hallucinated from illness, sleep depravation and certain fungi, I imagine it's similar but I'll wait until my 80's before trying it. There is a theory that cave paintings represent 'visions'. Dots and geometric lines often cover the pictures and it's thought that these represent the spots and lines that are often percieved as overlaying (or segmenting) hallucinations in a dimly lit environment.
I've had the ESP thing with dope and a group of people, I've also watched it while straight - it's an hallucination alright, but a lot less dangerous than the beer hallucination of leading the pack in the Paris to Daka while actualy just driving home from the pub.
"last updated 2004"
So your saying the term "functionally stable" is a bad thing?
In (200km/h) tennis you try to trick the opponent into thinking you will hit the ball in a certain direction using your 'body language', if successfull you will win the point because your opponent is alreay commited to moving the other way BEFORE you hit the ball.
The brain is always a few hundred ms ahead but it does a very good job of making everything appear seamless and in sync. It's very hard to observe this in real life unless you need to change a decision fast. For example when closing the car door you see your keys in the ignition, your brain says STOP but your hand continues to close the door.
In a more serious situation (say a car crash) your brain will work overtime and it may appear that everything is in slow motion, this helps to make decisions fast but it still can't overcome the brain to body action latency.
"If Microsoft wants more H1B candidates to stick around then they need to encourage hookups between their American employees and their foreign H1Bs and graduate student interns."
Been done, look up the term "collage party" on the intertubes.
As an Aussie who watch the transition to UHN in this country 30yrs ago I can tell you that you are wrong, one major point you overlook is that your government already spends 1.5 times ours per head on health and your health outcomes are worse. Also health expenditure would stay in the country rather than forming craters in a faraway desert. Thing is though the democrats proposed UHC is trying to have it both ways and probably will be rediculously expensive and ultimately useless.
As for NASA, I think the man-on-mars thing is PR for Bush that was born a white elephant, get rid of it and you will save heaps. Wether the money goes back to NASA's autonomous projects or somewhere else is academic.
"Recall for a moment that without government, corporations would cease to exist as government protected entities with rights, and would be seen as what they are. Worthless pieces of paper backed by government."
Without government, corporations would revert back to smaller (and more violent) fuedal entities.
"but it wasn't the frequency at which it would have been in resonance."
My main point was and still is, engineers are still in disagrement so I don't know how you or I can come up with a definitive answer.
Your answer is a leading theory but I have found no definite evidence that rules out the influence of other mechanisims. What I am essentially arguing is that there was more than one mechanisim at play and in my mind the waves in the cables (resonant or not) are evidence of one such mechanisim. Interestingly, if you watch the video after the first section falls, the remaining section immediately changes from a twisting motion to a classical wave with a smaller amplitude.