This is definitely true. Proof: much of the spam my Hotmail account receives was sent by Hotmail itself. Microsoft spams you. At least one email a month. You can't block it. You can't unsubscribe. Junking it doesn't seem to do anything.
For many open problems, a solution is not known to exist.
Semantics. In that situation, the problem is actually "Does a solution exist to this problem?" The Halting Problem wasn't "What Turing Machine will determine whether any another Turing Machine will halt or not?" The Halting Problem was "Does that Turing Machine exist? If so, what is it?" and the answer, the solution to the Halting Problem, is "No".
If someone wants to blow up a bridge, they will blow it up.
This is what gets me. It's well-established that despite all pretense, security (even airflight security) in the USA is poor at best. Given this, if terrorists really wanted to attack America, don't you think they would have, you know, attacked America? At all? In the last five years?
Here's your problem. A bomb does not "look like a bomb". People think a bomb is a bundle of sticks of dynamite with a bright red digital timer, preferably bleeping. But bombs don't look like that.
But on the other hand, no deep and detailed scientific discussion can be had while people who don't know anything and have no place in the discussion challenge you endlessly over the basic, universally accepted axioms. It's like trying to fix a broken spark plug in your car engine, while surrounded by people who claim repeatedly that your car is a bicycle. Though I agree that outright censorship is not the solution.
Any wire carrying a current also has a magnetic field around it. (Right-hand grip rule: grab a wire with your thumb pointing in the direction of current, and your fingers show you which direction the magnetic field curls around it.)
Now imagine getting two long parallel rails and putting a bullet in the middle which connects them together. Pass a current along one rail, through the bullet, and back down the other rail.
Imagine the magnetic field generated by those wires (and bullet). It all curves INWARDS, right? Everywhere inside the long rectangle described by the rails and bullet, there is a magnetic field which points downwards.
Now, we know that if you pass a current through a wire in the presence of a magnetic field, the wire experiences a force. In this case, the force will push the bullet along the rails.
Now make that current you pass an instantaneous 8MJ pulse of electricity and what you have is a railgun.
And while I'm at it, I think the most obvious solution at the moment is to develop a railgun where replacing the rail is really easy. Make up a model where you can eject the "spent" rail out the back and reload it with a new one from a rack of thousands you would obviously have stored on board your aircraft carrier. Strip the replaceable section down to a minimum - just a pair of metal strips, let's say - and make it so a few trained marine technicians can replace it themselves, and you're back to the level of old-fashioned manual reloading cannons. Then, a bit further down the line, automate the whole system... How hard can it be? Think of the rail in a railgun like the jacket for an old-fashioned bullet.
I'm almost positive the main issue is not electricity generation but rail friction. The best rail guns I'd heard of until today needed completely overhauling after each test firing because the rails themselves are damaged so badly as the projectile passes. Coil guns are better in this respect, as the projectile doesn't have to touch the coils...
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap
on
IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Copyright is an arbitrary ARTIFICIAL law-- whose time has come and past [...] it's an archaic hold-over when information was a scarce commodity.
Clearly you have never created anything you hold valuable.
I'm going to have to stand up and give my unpopular opinion here. Copyright does have its place. People SHOULD have the right to retain ownership of things they worked hard to create. They SHOULD be allowed to choose what happens to what they have created. If that means letting a limited number of people seeing it, if that means only allowing it to be seen in certain galleries or theaters or sold in certain stores, if that means charging what they feel is a fair price for each reproduction of that work, if that means not allowing other people to distribute their work freely then they have the right to that - for a finite, and fair, amount of time. I create stuff. I write stories. One day, I hope to publish and make money from what I write, which is why not everything I write is freely available online. I don't want people to randomly copy and paste my stories elsewhere without asking me. I'm lenient, but I draw the line at people who profit themselves from it, or don't give me due credit. Is that so bad? Don't I have the right to draw that line?
The argument is this: the movie studios and recording companies believe that they are losing staggering amounts of money from piracy. They believe - or have convinced themselves - that EVERY downloaded song or movie is a lost physical sale and therefore they SUE indiscriminately, for appallingly disproportionate sums and prison terms (decades in some cases), to make it so that the general public FEARS piracy.
But the fact of the matter is: when you copy me, I may lose sales - or, I may not. But I also gain a wider audience for my work. And through that wider audience I may gain sales - more than I originally lost (whatever that number is). If I am an artist and I created solely so that people could see my work, then I lose NOTHING. If I am a businessman and created solely for profit, I MAY lose something, or I may gain something.
The pro-piracy argument here is surely not that "all information should be free, everything you ever created should be available to everybody for no cost and they shouldn't have to pay you". That's insane. The argument is that choice should be with the creator - something the internet has facilitated, to the **AA's chagrin.
On that topic, amateur geocide watchers and fans of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board will be reassured to learn that unlike the Nuclear Death Clock, the Current Earth-Destruction Status is expected to remain at its current status of "Not Destroyed" for the forseeable future.
Because the imperial system is insane. The units used are more handy for measuring or describing things in everyday life, but when it comes to doing actual calculations, you are lost. The metric system measures things in tens. The imperial system, however, uses twos, threes, fours, fives, eights, tens, twelves, fourteens and sixteens and more. How many cubic centimetres in a litre? 1000. How many cubic inches in a gallon? 231.
Ease of calculations is the key. If you don't do much actual mathematics in your daily life, you won't see the need for the metric system. If you're a scientist, you do, and you will.
It's not that we don't want to see something new, it's that we can't see something new if it's not being produced.
There ARE good new movies being produced, just in smaller numbers and with less pervasive marketing, which is why fewer casual movie-goers realise they exist and so fewer people see them and they make less money so the feedback loop continues. It's not EVERY movie-goer who is at fault here. In having refined movie tastes, and the active desire to seek out inspired movies over insipid ones, you and I and others on Slashdot are not the problem. Unfortunately we are also not in the majority and hence not in the target demographic.
That's interesting. Does that mean Ford gets money when people use artists' renditions of his face for the covers of the EU novels? Because that happens quite a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
And a gigantic iron to stand on.
I am not a number! I am a free man!
Sudoku problems can be formed by a computer and solved by another computer. I see no reason to get a human being involved in the process.
What, you mean Sonic CD? The final straw was the third game in the series?
I'm pretty sure the creator of Captain Copyright is still alive, so, no.
Besides, it's surely just a publicity stunt. Remember that time they killed Superman? He was back within a matter of months.
Sure, but do you really need a law for that? Instead of, e.g., filtering software?
This is definitely true. Proof: much of the spam my Hotmail account receives was sent by Hotmail itself. Microsoft spams you. At least one email a month. You can't block it. You can't unsubscribe. Junking it doesn't seem to do anything.
This is PRECISELY the market that Nintendo have been trying to tap with the Wii. With, I would say, some success...
Super Monkey Ball. The original GameCube game. Level E7.
Some of you will have no idea what I'm talking about. The rest will be nodding sagely.
That and E22. And M3. And M6 to M9.
SMB is among the hardest games in recent history.
Semantics. In that situation, the problem is actually "Does a solution exist to this problem?" The Halting Problem wasn't "What Turing Machine will determine whether any another Turing Machine will halt or not?" The Halting Problem was "Does that Turing Machine exist? If so, what is it?" and the answer, the solution to the Halting Problem, is "No".
This is what gets me. It's well-established that despite all pretense, security (even airflight security) in the USA is poor at best. Given this, if terrorists really wanted to attack America, don't you think they would have, you know, attacked America? At all? In the last five years?
Here's your problem. A bomb does not "look like a bomb". People think a bomb is a bundle of sticks of dynamite with a bright red digital timer, preferably bleeping. But bombs don't look like that.
Why wouldn't the government fund that research? Isn't it the government's job to ensure the welfare of its citizens?
But on the other hand, no deep and detailed scientific discussion can be had while people who don't know anything and have no place in the discussion challenge you endlessly over the basic, universally accepted axioms. It's like trying to fix a broken spark plug in your car engine, while surrounded by people who claim repeatedly that your car is a bicycle. Though I agree that outright censorship is not the solution.
Any wire carrying a current also has a magnetic field around it. (Right-hand grip rule: grab a wire with your thumb pointing in the direction of current, and your fingers show you which direction the magnetic field curls around it.)
Now imagine getting two long parallel rails and putting a bullet in the middle which connects them together. Pass a current along one rail, through the bullet, and back down the other rail.
Imagine the magnetic field generated by those wires (and bullet). It all curves INWARDS, right? Everywhere inside the long rectangle described by the rails and bullet, there is a magnetic field which points downwards.
Now, we know that if you pass a current through a wire in the presence of a magnetic field, the wire experiences a force. In this case, the force will push the bullet along the rails.
Now make that current you pass an instantaneous 8MJ pulse of electricity and what you have is a railgun.
And while I'm at it, I think the most obvious solution at the moment is to develop a railgun where replacing the rail is really easy. Make up a model where you can eject the "spent" rail out the back and reload it with a new one from a rack of thousands you would obviously have stored on board your aircraft carrier. Strip the replaceable section down to a minimum - just a pair of metal strips, let's say - and make it so a few trained marine technicians can replace it themselves, and you're back to the level of old-fashioned manual reloading cannons. Then, a bit further down the line, automate the whole system... How hard can it be? Think of the rail in a railgun like the jacket for an old-fashioned bullet.
I'm almost positive the main issue is not electricity generation but rail friction. The best rail guns I'd heard of until today needed completely overhauling after each test firing because the rails themselves are damaged so badly as the projectile passes. Coil guns are better in this respect, as the projectile doesn't have to touch the coils...
Clearly you have never created anything you hold valuable.
I'm going to have to stand up and give my unpopular opinion here. Copyright does have its place. People SHOULD have the right to retain ownership of things they worked hard to create. They SHOULD be allowed to choose what happens to what they have created. If that means letting a limited number of people seeing it, if that means only allowing it to be seen in certain galleries or theaters or sold in certain stores, if that means charging what they feel is a fair price for each reproduction of that work, if that means not allowing other people to distribute their work freely then they have the right to that - for a finite, and fair, amount of time. I create stuff. I write stories. One day, I hope to publish and make money from what I write, which is why not everything I write is freely available online. I don't want people to randomly copy and paste my stories elsewhere without asking me. I'm lenient, but I draw the line at people who profit themselves from it, or don't give me due credit. Is that so bad? Don't I have the right to draw that line?
The argument is this: the movie studios and recording companies believe that they are losing staggering amounts of money from piracy. They believe - or have convinced themselves - that EVERY downloaded song or movie is a lost physical sale and therefore they SUE indiscriminately, for appallingly disproportionate sums and prison terms (decades in some cases), to make it so that the general public FEARS piracy.
But the fact of the matter is: when you copy me, I may lose sales - or, I may not. But I also gain a wider audience for my work. And through that wider audience I may gain sales - more than I originally lost (whatever that number is). If I am an artist and I created solely so that people could see my work, then I lose NOTHING. If I am a businessman and created solely for profit, I MAY lose something, or I may gain something.
The pro-piracy argument here is surely not that "all information should be free, everything you ever created should be available to everybody for no cost and they shouldn't have to pay you". That's insane. The argument is that choice should be with the creator - something the internet has facilitated, to the **AA's chagrin.
I'm beginning to ramble so I'll stop here.
My studies have led me to conclude that the ultimate Slashdot headline would be "Creationists Oppose Linux".
On that topic, amateur geocide watchers and fans of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board will be reassured to learn that unlike the Nuclear Death Clock, the Current Earth-Destruction Status is expected to remain at its current status of "Not Destroyed" for the forseeable future.
Because the imperial system is insane. The units used are more handy for measuring or describing things in everyday life, but when it comes to doing actual calculations, you are lost. The metric system measures things in tens. The imperial system, however, uses twos, threes, fours, fives, eights, tens, twelves, fourteens and sixteens and more. How many cubic centimetres in a litre? 1000. How many cubic inches in a gallon? 231.
Ease of calculations is the key. If you don't do much actual mathematics in your daily life, you won't see the need for the metric system. If you're a scientist, you do, and you will.
Since nobody else has answered, Two hundred and thirty-one, apparently.
Oh wait, actually, it depends on the gallon!
There ARE good new movies being produced, just in smaller numbers and with less pervasive marketing, which is why fewer casual movie-goers realise they exist and so fewer people see them and they make less money so the feedback loop continues. It's not EVERY movie-goer who is at fault here. In having refined movie tastes, and the active desire to seek out inspired movies over insipid ones, you and I and others on Slashdot are not the problem. Unfortunately we are also not in the majority and hence not in the target demographic.
That's interesting. Does that mean Ford gets money when people use artists' renditions of his face for the covers of the EU novels? Because that happens quite a lot.