Your comment got me interested in the question of how inaccurate the process can be, and how these inaccuracies are validated and quantified. One method, which I find compelling, is to date trees, such as bristlecone pines, which live for thousands of years and which also reliably create one ring per year. If you find such a tree that still alive, you can count the rings and know which year each ring was produced. Also, you can use dead trees by correlating tree ring thicknesses (climate-related growth rate) between live and dead trees that were at one time alive simultaneously.
Anyway, it appears that the standard deviation for radiocarbon dating is +/-50 years for something that is 5000 years old, or in other words, +/- 1%. That's going to get you within the correct century for anything up to 100,000 years old.
I understand that I can't *prove* this, but I find the evidence compelling. I will keep my mind open for stronger evidence to the contrary. At the moment, I don't see any.
1. Buy a bottle of boric acid powder from your local pharmacy (costs about $2 USD). 2. Mix equal parts of the above with sugar, and add a little water to bind them together into a thick paste. Ideally, it should be thick enough to form balls that can be easily cleaned up later if necessary. 3. Place the paste in dark places where you think roaches congregate. Wait 1-2 weeks for all roaches to disappear.
The boric acid is poisonous to both ants and roaches. The beauty of this poison is that the roaches succumb in their hiding places, where other roaches will eat the remains and also subsequently die. It spreads like a virus!
My mom has used this effectively in Western Africa, and it has worked for me in the Deep South.
Boric acid is, from what I've heard, much less toxic to people and pets than the alternative sprays that must be reapplied every few months.
I don't see any mention of a draft here. It looks instead like a quite reasonable exchange of military/public service for college financial aid incentives.
The problem with the "Equal Protection" argument is that it's never been equal, and until every county uses the same voting technology, it never will be.
The U.S. Supreme Court fashioned its 5-4 majority opinion on a very weak argument. The court is now tainted with an image of subjectivity that I hope will cause them to think twice before ruling on a close presidential election again.
Look at all the bad press coming about GeorgeWBush.com.
The supposed reason for them blocking their site? Hacking attempts that they could not deal with.
A few weeks ago, someone on slashdot ran Nessus on Kerry's and Bush's websites. The summary: Bush's website uses Microsoft IIS and had 44 unpatched vulnerabilities. Kerry's used Apache and had 2 vulnerabilities.
Do you think that the TCO for Bush's website is lower, figuring in all the bad press? I don't think so.
In a kernel, all the code needs to be transparent,
That got a chuckle from me. I know what you meant, but after looking at the following (randomly chosen:) block from the device driver grip.c, I wonder just how "transparent" it is:
if ((((u ^ v) & (v ^ w)) >> 1) & ~(u | v | w) & 1) {
if (i == 20) {
crc = buf ^ (buf >> 7) ^ (buf >> 14);
if (!((crc ^ (0x25cb9e70 >> ((crc >> 2) & 0x1c))) & 0xf)) {
data[buf >> 18] = buf >> 4;
status |= 1 > 18);
}
The simple reason for that is that otherwise the kernel would be unpredictable.
Point taken, but I hope you're open to the idea that C++ classes can be written that avoid these problems. In particular, it's relatively easy to define your own memory management scheme. This could be confusing to some (redefinition of new and delete would not be obvious in other parts of the code), but C++ has some nice features that facilitate scalability. I'm sure you'll agree that maintaining such a complicated thing as a cross-platform kernel can use some more sophisticated tools for software development than what C provides.
I've only written one linux driver, so I'm no expert, but I can think of situations where exceptions can be helpful for device drivers.
Take, for example, a game controller or other hardware device that can become unplugged at any moment. It's useful to have an elegant way of handling this uncommon occurrence.
Exceptions are a useful way to separate uncommon sanity checks from the rest of your code, so you're not forced to use ugly nested conditionals.
Mod me down if this has been discussed ad nauseum already; I've been away from/. for a while.
Anyone else find the naked guy in the Novell Linux advertisement that I just saw on this page a jarring experience, at least the first time they saw it?
Whew; it's getting harder to find a peaceful stream of sensory experience if Slashdot starts showing pr0n!:-)
You're talking about the time-space tradeoff that crops up repeatedly in CS. You can make files smaller (not in all cases, but especially if you're stretching an image) if you're willing to include image transformation commands as part of the file. You pay for this by requiring that the transformations be recomputed every time the file is rendered.
It's a bit like the choice between compiled vs. interpreted code. An ASCII file of instructions to be interpreted can be much smaller than the equivalent program compiled into machine code.
... that an operating system called "Windows" would lack something called "Transparency"?
Hey, a chance to stretch the mind and reality via analogy. Sounds fun! Mayhap MS is a cathedral: beautiful but non-transparent windows, thousands of indentured serfs to build it, a few faboulously wealthy and powerful leaders whose attention is spent on extending their own power rather than empowering those who they supposedly serve.
I guess that makes the OSS community something like Martin Luther. Protestants everywhere should be proud.
I have fond memories of biking through that area; I was part of a family-oriented club from Corvallis that would organized 10-day, 450 mile bike-camping trips around various part of OR. I hope it's as beautiful and scenici as I remember it being 20 years ago.
How does the government separate the junk data from what may actually be worth looking at?
In the case of the 2000 Florida elections and the woefully inaccurate convicted felons database, the answer was simple: assume the database is correct, especially if it contains a political demographic that is likely to vote Democrat. The ~50,000 non-felons who were denied their right to vote were too poor to sue, so no big deal. I may remind our gentle readers that the Florida presidential elections were decided by less than 600 votes.
It chills me to think that in this age of terrorism paranoia, this kind of approach will be repeated when searching for "terrorists". Hopefully, some of those who are wrongfully "detained" will have the means to fight.
Second-guessing who's behind it is a waste of valuable time. Unless you believe in fairy tales, it will almost surely never be known who exactly is financing the effort. We can infer that whoever it is, they have a desire to influence public opinion. That is, after all, why people write books.
A better use of time is to think what your Windows-running friends might like: burn copies of OpenOffice for Windows or Freeduc or KnoppiXMAME, all of which will run or boot from Windows machines.
Help someone new fall in love with free software...today!
I know my technical CS, but I don't understand shorting at all. I've heard you need quite a bit of non-shorted stock investments to cover potential losses from shorting. I've had a Schwab account before but haven't done more than invest in a few mutual funds.
I have about $2K to play with and about $20K in a Vanguard 401(K) plan. Is this enough to get started?
If you know of any literature for beginners on the subject, I'm sure I'm not alone on this board when I say that I'd be interested in you posting it.
But hey, Dubya loves it. Why? Well, you can extract hydrogen from natural gas
It's also one of the few alternative fuel models that involves a centralized power generation plant. So if it succeeds, big oil companies will maintain control over power generation.
Solar, wind, water, geothermal, etc. can be done on a smaller scale by smaller companies or individuals. Big oil companies will lose their strangehold on energy generation if these succeed. Hence they have no interest in helping these technologies advance.
"The U.S. was in great shape DUE to Clinton. Bush and his greed bastard henchmen fucked it all up."
The Dot Com era occured under Clinton which led to the recession. The recession technically started at the very end of the Clinton administration.
The second clip is just as bogus as the first. Clinton didn't influence the advent of HTML and the resulting, massive speculation on the stock market. It's ludicrous to blame a president for that.
If anything, the massive corporate deregulation instituted by Reagan, which allowed the formation of mega-conglomerates, made massive speculation possible and highly lucrative. CEOs could no longer resist the temptation to bend the truth; they would lose money and possibly market share.
So blame Reagan and all the easily fooled people who voted for a Hollywood actor with wonderful, soundbite answers to complex issues. Yes, deregulation made some people, especially the dodgy ones, lots of money for a while. Great, right? Yeah, tell that to the ex-Enron employees now.
Some of us have and will always believe that government regulation keeps people honest and thinking about more than next quarter's share price.
I will invest in corporations who have independent audits of their accounting practices, stock analysis from people who have nothing to gain or lose by a certain outcome, and impartial board members. That is to say, I don't invest in the stock market; I don't trust most corporations any more. Anyone who invests in today's deregulated corporate world of liars and spin doctors is a moron.
I'd advise protecting yourself and alias rm to 'rm -i'.
An alias is easy to defeat, so it shouldn't be seen as a good defense. An alias will not prevent the following commands from deleting files automatically:/bin/rm -rf ~ \rm -rf ~
Try running on a junk file after you've created the alias if you want to see for yourself.
In bash, "alias" is not a separate program; it's a reserved work within the shell. That's why you don't see a man page. If you do a "man bash", you will find information on the alias command.
Slashdot Mirror
I just realized I should have written "That's going to get you within the correct millennium for anything up to 100,000 years old."
Your comment got me interested in the question of how inaccurate the process can be, and how these inaccuracies are validated and quantified. One method, which I find compelling, is to date trees, such as bristlecone pines, which live for thousands of years and which also reliably create one ring per year. If you find such a tree that still alive, you can count the rings and know which year each ring was produced. Also, you can use dead trees by correlating tree ring thicknesses (climate-related growth rate) between live and dead trees that were at one time alive simultaneously.
Refer to the following for more info:
http://www.rlaha.ox.ac.uk/orau/calibration.html
Anyway, it appears that the standard deviation for radiocarbon dating is +/-50 years for something that is 5000 years old, or in other words, +/- 1%. That's going to get you within the correct century for anything up to 100,000 years old.
I understand that I can't *prove* this, but I find the evidence compelling. I will keep my mind open for stronger evidence to the contrary. At the moment, I don't see any.
1. Buy a bottle of boric acid powder from your local pharmacy (costs about $2 USD).
2. Mix equal parts of the above with sugar, and add a little water to bind them together into a thick paste. Ideally, it should be thick enough to form balls that can be easily cleaned up later if necessary.
3. Place the paste in dark places where you think roaches congregate. Wait 1-2 weeks for all roaches to disappear.
The boric acid is poisonous to both ants and roaches. The beauty of this poison is that the roaches succumb in their hiding places, where other roaches will eat the remains and also subsequently die. It spreads like a virus!
My mom has used this effectively in Western Africa, and it has worked for me in the Deep South.
Boric acid is, from what I've heard, much less toxic to people and pets than the alternative sprays that must be reapplied every few months.
On the other hand, I don't recall hearing conservatives threatening to leave during Clintons' terms.
Like there's anywhere they could go and not be considered a nutjob.
I kid; it's time to put down the insults and move on.
Fuckers. Whoops, my TS symptoms are acting up again.
The parent's "published plan" link doesn't work for me.
p lan.html
The official link with the plan appears to be:
http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/national_service/
I don't see any mention of a draft here. It looks instead like a quite reasonable exchange of military/public service for college financial aid incentives.
The problem with the "Equal Protection" argument is that it's never been equal, and until every county uses the same voting technology, it never will be.
The U.S. Supreme Court fashioned its 5-4 majority opinion on a very weak argument. The court is now tainted with an image of subjectivity that I hope will cause them to think twice before ruling on a close presidential election again.
Look at all the bad press coming about GeorgeWBush.com.
The supposed reason for them blocking their site? Hacking attempts that they could not deal with.
A few weeks ago, someone on slashdot ran Nessus on Kerry's and Bush's websites. The summary: Bush's website uses Microsoft IIS and had 44 unpatched vulnerabilities. Kerry's used Apache and had 2 vulnerabilities.
Do you think that the TCO for Bush's website is lower, figuring in all the bad press? I don't think so.
In a kernel, all the code needs to be transparent,
:) block from the device driver grip.c, I wonder just how "transparent" it is:
That got a chuckle from me. I know what you meant, but after looking at the following (randomly chosen
if ((((u ^ v) & (v ^ w)) >> 1) & ~(u | v | w) & 1) {
if (i == 20) {
crc = buf ^ (buf >> 7) ^ (buf >> 14);
if (!((crc ^ (0x25cb9e70 >> ((crc >> 2) & 0x1c))) & 0xf)) {
data[buf >> 18] = buf >> 4;
status |= 1 > 18);
}
The simple reason for that is that otherwise the kernel would be unpredictable.
Point taken, but I hope you're open to the idea that C++ classes can be written that avoid these problems. In particular, it's relatively easy to define your own memory management scheme. This could be confusing to some (redefinition of new and delete would not be obvious in other parts of the code), but C++ has some nice features that facilitate scalability. I'm sure you'll agree that maintaining such a complicated thing as a cross-platform kernel can use some more sophisticated tools for software development than what C provides.
I've only written one linux driver, so I'm no expert, but I can think of situations where exceptions can be helpful for device drivers.
Take, for example, a game controller or other hardware device that can become unplugged at any moment. It's useful to have an elegant way of handling this uncommon occurrence.
Exceptions are a useful way to separate uncommon sanity checks from the rest of your code, so you're not forced to use ugly nested conditionals.
Mod me down if this has been discussed ad nauseum already; I've been away from /. for a while.
:-)
Anyone else find the naked guy in the Novell Linux advertisement that I just saw on this page a jarring experience, at least the first time they saw it?
Whew; it's getting harder to find a peaceful stream of sensory experience if Slashdot starts showing pr0n!
You're talking about the time-space tradeoff that crops up repeatedly in CS. You can make files smaller (not in all cases, but especially if you're stretching an image) if you're willing to include image transformation commands as part of the file. You pay for this by requiring that the transformations be recomputed every time the file is rendered.
It's a bit like the choice between compiled vs. interpreted code. An ASCII file of instructions to be interpreted can be much smaller than the equivalent program compiled into machine code.
Hey, a chance to stretch the mind and reality via analogy. Sounds fun! Mayhap MS is a cathedral: beautiful but non-transparent windows, thousands of indentured serfs to build it, a few faboulously wealthy and powerful leaders whose attention is spent on extending their own power rather than empowering those who they supposedly serve.
I guess that makes the OSS community something like Martin Luther. Protestants everywhere should be proud.
Nah, Enterprise is where its at.
I have fond memories of biking through that area; I was part of a family-oriented club from Corvallis that would organized 10-day, 450 mile bike-camping trips around various part of OR. I hope it's as beautiful and scenici as I remember it being 20 years ago.
How does the government separate the junk data from what may actually be worth looking at?
In the case of the 2000 Florida elections and the woefully inaccurate convicted felons database, the answer was simple: assume the database is correct, especially if it contains a political demographic that is likely to vote Democrat. The ~50,000 non-felons who were denied their right to vote were too poor to sue, so no big deal. I may remind our gentle readers that the Florida presidential elections were decided by less than 600 votes.
It chills me to think that in this age of terrorism paranoia, this kind of approach will be repeated when searching for "terrorists". Hopefully, some of those who are wrongfully "detained" will have the means to fight.
I'm about to try out CO thanks to coverage here and the ability to scan through top-modded comments.
To Jeremy: geek power all the way!
To be fair, I have no idea what the X-Arcade's shipping costs.
I got one a few months ago; shipping was free.
Second-guessing who's behind it is a waste of valuable time. Unless you believe in fairy tales, it will almost surely never be known who exactly is financing the effort. We can infer that whoever it is, they have a desire to influence public opinion. That is, after all, why people write books.
A better use of time is to think what your Windows-running friends might like: burn copies of OpenOffice for Windows or Freeduc or KnoppiXMAME, all of which will run or boot from Windows machines.
Help someone new fall in love with free software...today!
A great plot with the SCO stock price plotted over Ululu/Ayer's Rock is here.
Original post with this plot is here.
I know my technical CS, but I don't understand shorting at all. I've heard you need quite a bit of non-shorted stock investments to cover potential losses from shorting. I've had a Schwab account before but haven't done more than invest in a few mutual funds.
I have about $2K to play with and about $20K in a Vanguard 401(K) plan. Is this enough to get started?
If you know of any literature for beginners on the subject, I'm sure I'm not alone on this board when I say that I'd be interested in you posting it.
Thanks.
Baystar publicly told SCO to shut Darl up or replace him or pay back all the money. Why is the silence surprising?
Because it's the first time it appears he's listened to anyone.
But hey, Dubya loves it. Why? Well, you can extract hydrogen from natural gas
It's also one of the few alternative fuel models that involves a centralized power generation plant. So if it succeeds, big oil companies will maintain control over power generation.
Solar, wind, water, geothermal, etc. can be done on a smaller scale by smaller companies or individuals. Big oil companies will lose their strangehold on energy generation if these succeed. Hence they have no interest in helping these technologies advance.
"The U.S. was in great shape DUE to Clinton. Bush and his greed bastard henchmen fucked it all up."
The Dot Com era occured under Clinton which led to the recession. The recession technically started at the very end of the Clinton administration.
The second clip is just as bogus as the first. Clinton didn't influence the advent of HTML and the resulting, massive speculation on the stock market. It's ludicrous to blame a president for that.
If anything, the massive corporate deregulation instituted by Reagan, which allowed the formation of mega-conglomerates, made massive speculation possible and highly lucrative. CEOs could no longer resist the temptation to bend the truth; they would lose money and possibly market share.
So blame Reagan and all the easily fooled people who voted for a Hollywood actor with wonderful, soundbite answers to complex issues. Yes, deregulation made some people, especially the dodgy ones, lots of money for a while. Great, right? Yeah, tell that to the ex-Enron employees now.
Some of us have and will always believe that government regulation keeps people honest and thinking about more than next quarter's share price.
I will invest in corporations who have independent audits of their accounting practices, stock analysis from people who have nothing to gain or lose by a certain outcome, and impartial board members. That is to say, I don't invest in the stock market; I don't trust most corporations any more. Anyone who invests in today's deregulated corporate world of liars and spin doctors is a moron.
I'd advise protecting yourself and alias rm to 'rm -i'.
/bin/rm -rf ~
An alias is easy to defeat, so it shouldn't be seen as a good defense. An alias will not prevent the following commands from deleting files automatically:
\rm -rf ~
Try running on a junk file after you've created the alias if you want to see for yourself.
In bash, "alias" is not a separate program; it's a reserved work within the shell. That's why you don't see a man page. If you do a "man bash", you will find information on the alias command.
Example of what to put in ~/.bashrc:
alias rm='rm -i'
GNOME man!
GNO Man!
NOOOO MAN!
I looked for my file
It took a long while
Now 'find' is my only friend!