My son started enjoying Minisebran at about that age. At first he would enjoyed mashing the buttons and seeing different shapes come up. At the age of about 2 he started being able to press the key corresponding to the letter on the screen. And later still as he got the hang of the mouse he enjoyed colouring and drawing (at which point we introduced him to TuxPaint and Poisson Rouge). We've never bought any special input devices for him though.
Yup, if you spin the universe fast enough around the CD, you will cause it explode. That would be a good party trick, but there are certain practical difficulties involved in getting the entire universe to spin.
Besides which, because the CD spinning and the universe staying still is exactly equivalent to the universe spinning and the CD staying still, everybody would just think you were spinning the CD anyway.
Yes, it does. You'd think it wouldn't - you can tell whether you're spinning or not without any reference to the rest of the universe by the forces on your body (central forces required to keep you from flying apart).
But, if you work through the equations of general relativity for a universe rotating around a fixed body, you'll find that the motions of those distant galaxies generate forces on the body - outward forces exactly balancing the centripetal ones!
So a spinning CD is exactly equivalent to a fixed CD with the universe spinning around it - no experiment can tell them apart.
That's what I thought, too, when I discovered Mr Do. But Windmill claim (I don't know if it's true or not) that they were the first to come up with the concept, and the authors of Dig-dug and Mr Do stole the idea after a trade show.
Check out Windmill Software's Digger (http://www.digger.org). It didn't work on modern PCs, but I reverse-engineered and recompiled it so now it does. Source is available, as are *nix versions.
"They" do. Hard drive capacities double every x months, and every data that was erased from a hard disk that was new at one point can be recovered y months later. There is a linear relationship between x and y. That's Moore's law.
Many of the equations of Physics are best described in the language of geometric algebra. An excellent introduction to this language can be found here:
http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/ptIIIcourse/.
In particular, on page 5 of lecture 11, Maxwell's equations (which describe all of electromagnetism - pretty much the entire basis of modern technology and which were the starting point for Einstein's discovery of relativity) in one simple equation: (triangle)F = J.
There have been several things I have been unable to find, so I wrote a web-page about them, hoping other people searching for the same things might contact me and we could share clues. The page is at http://www.reenigne.org/csycfotw.html.
When we are all using wireless internet, cryptography will become essential to stop passers-by sniffing all the internet traffic. It is important that we work the bugs out of the software before then.
There is a well-defined mathematical procedure for finding out if a correlation like this is statistically significant or not. To do this, assume the things are not related and calculate the probability that these results would be obtained anyway. Say the probability was 0.001, then the result is statistically significant at the 99.9% level.
It's just not possible to do what you are trying to do. One of the fundamental principles of encryption is that you have to trust the person you are communicating with. There is no way for you to trust the people you are selling ebooks to. If I can read the book on my computer, I can decrypt it and do whatever I like with the text (although if I were to send it to someone else I'd probably be breaking copyright laws).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to discourage the use of electronic distribution - I'm just stating a fact. I hope that distributors will get past this paranoia and distribute electronically anyway, without any protection. Protection just gets in the way. People buy books today even though they can read them for free by borrowing them from the library.
I might want to read the text using software other than that which it was designed for. I might want grep it (I might want to grep my entire collection of etexts.) I might want to perform statistical analysis on it or feed to artifical intelligence software which tries to understand it. I might want to read it years later when the encrypted etext reader has stopped working for one reason or another. All these things are more difficult if the text is encrypted.
You don't need to trust your neighbor, no matter what email client you use. If you don't want to trust your neighbor, just always reply in plain text (as opposed to HTML) no matter what format the message was sent in. Generate no HTML mail and you are not at risk from this exploit.
> It'd be very nice if you'd give me a hint on how to get it running under DOSEMU
I can do much better than that. The full source code to Digger is available at http://www.digger.org and has been ported to Unix using the SDL library. I think the "remastered" DOS version has been known to work under DOSEMU, but without sound.
Back when the paper version first came out, CRC complained about the whole content being available on the website. Eric modified it so that only 10 of the 26 letters were available on any given day (at random). You might have to wait a day or two to see a given article, but it was still more useful than it is now. Perhaps Eric could go back to that scheme.
But given that this scheme was dumped and the whole thing put online, I thought the copyright problems had been cleared up. I wonder why they've reneged on that.
I was seriously considering buying the paper version so that I could look things up when there was no internet connection handy. I'm having second thoughts now.
I have discovered lots of non-RIAA music I like since I started using Napster - if I just listened to the radio and bought CDs like the RIAA wanted me to I never would have heard this stuff.
The trouble is there is far too much great music being made than is practical to market - record labels have discovered that they can optimise their profits by having relatively few bands, marketing them heavily and selling a lot of copies of few CDs. There are loads of great bands that never get signed for exactly this reason.
As for RIAA songs being popular - songs that are familar to people are always their favorites. You generally have to hear a song a few times before starting to love it.
Yeah, obviously no musician that hasn't been snapped up by a record label which is a member of the RIAA and conjoled into signing away all their rights could possibly be any good. Hence Napster must be shut down, because nobody would ever bother swapping any non-RIAA material on it.
These numbers can be derived from first principles - worked out to any number of decimal places you like just by summing more terms in a series. The terms in these series have a simple pattern. So they are really no more mysterious than other numbers which crop up often, such as 0 and 1 - they just happen to be irrational (and transcendental). It's not really that surprising when you think about it that some irrational numbers turn out to be useful in physics.
What is much more mysterious are dimensionless constants such as the charge on the electron in units where the speed of light, the quantum of angular momentum and the permittivity of free space are all 1. No theory has been able to predict this number - it has to be measured and put into the theory as a parameter. There are about 20 numbers like this.
But before that there were games which didn't need an operating system at all - they had their own minature "operating system" on the disk. You just put the disk in the drive and turned the machine on.
These games were great - since they had complete control of the machine they could utilise superior graphics and sound techniques without having to worry about what else was in memory. They were fast to load and the manufacturers liked them too because they were difficult to make pirate copies of.
Some examples: games by Windmill Software (especially "Digger"), Datasoft's "Bruce Lee" and "Big Top". Go to http://www.mobygames.com and search for "booters" to find other examples.
Just take out "test insurance" before you take the test. If you test positive for something nasty, this insurance pays out big (maybe big enough to pay the insurance premiums for the other insurance!) Insurance companies will surely offer this if there is a market for it.
Slashdot Mirror
My son started enjoying Minisebran at about that age. At first he would enjoyed mashing the buttons and seeing different shapes come up. At the age of about 2 he started being able to press the key corresponding to the letter on the screen. And later still as he got the hang of the mouse he enjoyed colouring and drawing (at which point we introduced him to TuxPaint and Poisson Rouge). We've never bought any special input devices for him though.
There is a nice applet at http://www.falstad.com/circuit/ - it might not be sufficiently sophisticated but it does at least handle op-amps.
Anyone else reminded of the communist "Cultural Revolution" in China?
Yup, if you spin the universe fast enough around the CD, you will cause it explode. That would be a good party trick, but there are certain practical difficulties involved in getting the entire universe to spin.
Besides which, because the CD spinning and the universe staying still is exactly equivalent to the universe spinning and the CD staying still, everybody would just think you were spinning the CD anyway.
Yes, it does. You'd think it wouldn't - you can tell whether you're spinning or not without any reference to the rest of the universe by the forces on your body (central forces required to keep you from flying apart).
But, if you work through the equations of general relativity for a universe rotating around a fixed body, you'll find that the motions of those distant galaxies generate forces on the body - outward forces exactly balancing the centripetal ones!
So a spinning CD is exactly equivalent to a fixed CD with the universe spinning around it - no experiment can tell them apart.
That's what I thought, too, when I discovered Mr Do. But Windmill claim (I don't know if it's true or not) that they were the first to come up with the concept, and the authors of Dig-dug and Mr Do stole the idea after a trade show.
Check out Windmill Software's Digger (http://www.digger.org). It didn't work on modern PCs, but I reverse-engineered and recompiled it so now it does. Source is available, as are *nix versions.
"They" do. Hard drive capacities double every x months, and every data that was erased from a hard disk that was new at one point can be recovered y months later. There is a linear relationship between x and y. That's Moore's law.
In particular, on page 5 of lecture 11, Maxwell's equations (which describe all of electromagnetism - pretty much the entire basis of modern technology and which were the starting point for Einstein's discovery of relativity) in one simple equation: (triangle)F = J.
I assume the idea is that Yahoo or Hotmail could get the machine you use to write the email to do the calculation, via a Java applet.
There have been several things I have been unable to find, so I wrote a web-page about them, hoping other people searching for the same things might contact me and we could share clues. The page is at http://www.reenigne.org/csycfotw.html.
When we are all using wireless internet, cryptography will become essential to stop passers-by sniffing all the internet traffic. It is important that we work the bugs out of the software before then.
There is a well-defined mathematical procedure for finding out if a correlation like this is statistically significant or not. To do this, assume the things are not related and calculate the probability that these results would be obtained anyway. Say the probability was 0.001, then the result is statistically significant at the 99.9% level.
This is meaningful.
It's just not possible to do what you are trying to do. One of the fundamental principles of encryption is that you have to trust the person you are communicating with. There is no way for you to trust the people you are selling ebooks to. If I can read the book on my computer, I can decrypt it and do whatever I like with the text (although if I were to send it to someone else I'd probably be breaking copyright laws).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to discourage the use of electronic distribution - I'm just stating a fact. I hope that distributors will get past this paranoia and distribute electronically anyway, without any protection. Protection just gets in the way. People buy books today even though they can read them for free by borrowing them from the library.
I might want to read the text using software other than that which it was designed for. I might want grep it (I might want to grep my entire collection of etexts.) I might want to perform statistical analysis on it or feed to artifical intelligence software which tries to understand it. I might want to read it years later when the encrypted etext reader has stopped working for one reason or another. All these things are more difficult if the text is encrypted.
Gracenote have patented mis-spelling? They'll be preparing a big lawsuit against /. users then!
You don't need to trust your neighbor, no matter what email client you use. If you don't want to trust your neighbor, just always reply in plain text (as opposed to HTML) no matter what format the message was sent in. Generate no HTML mail and you are not at risk from this exploit.
> It'd be very nice if you'd give me a hint on how to get it running under DOSEMU
I can do much better than that. The full source code to Digger is available at http://www.digger.org and has been ported to Unix using the SDL library. I think the "remastered" DOS version has been known to work under DOSEMU, but without sound.
You are wrong. The N here is the 2^56, not the 56. (2^56)^(1/2)==2^(56*(1/2))==2^28.
Back when the paper version first came out, CRC complained about the whole content being available on the website. Eric modified it so that only 10 of the 26 letters were available on any given day (at random). You might have to wait a day or two to see a given article, but it was still more useful than it is now. Perhaps Eric could go back to that scheme.
But given that this scheme was dumped and the whole thing put online, I thought the copyright problems had been cleared up. I wonder why they've reneged on that.
I was seriously considering buying the paper version so that I could look things up when there was no internet connection handy. I'm having second thoughts now.
I have discovered lots of non-RIAA music I like since I started using Napster - if I just listened to the radio and bought CDs like the RIAA wanted me to I never would have heard this stuff.
The trouble is there is far too much great music being made than is practical to market - record labels have discovered that they can optimise their profits by having relatively few bands, marketing them heavily and selling a lot of copies of few CDs. There are loads of great bands that never get signed for exactly this reason.
As for RIAA songs being popular - songs that are familar to people are always their favorites. You generally have to hear a song a few times before starting to love it.
Yeah, obviously no musician that hasn't been snapped up by a record label which is a member of the RIAA and conjoled into signing away all their rights could possibly be any good. Hence Napster must be shut down, because nobody would ever bother swapping any non-RIAA material on it.
These numbers can be derived from first principles - worked out to any number of decimal places you like just by summing more terms in a series. The terms in these series have a simple pattern. So they are really no more mysterious than other numbers which crop up often, such as 0 and 1 - they just happen to be irrational (and transcendental). It's not really that surprising when you think about it that some irrational numbers turn out to be useful in physics.
What is much more mysterious are dimensionless constants such as the charge on the electron in units where the speed of light, the quantum of angular momentum and the permittivity of free space are all 1. No theory has been able to predict this number - it has to be measured and put into the theory as a parameter. There are about 20 numbers like this.
But before that there were games which didn't need an operating system at all - they had their own minature "operating system" on the disk. You just put the disk in the drive and turned the machine on.
These games were great - since they had complete control of the machine they could utilise superior graphics and sound techniques without having to worry about what else was in memory. They were fast to load and the manufacturers liked them too because they were difficult to make pirate copies of.
Some examples: games by Windmill Software (especially "Digger"), Datasoft's "Bruce Lee" and "Big Top". Go to http://www.mobygames.com and search for "booters" to find other examples.
>I ordered a Windows programming book over
>Amazon.com to learn what I needed and wrote the
>client software.
Does this mean that the RIAA will now be suing Amazon.com?
Just take out "test insurance" before you take the test. If you test positive for something nasty, this insurance pays out big (maybe big enough to pay the insurance premiums for the other insurance!) Insurance companies will surely offer this if there is a market for it.