Indicators and rules of thumb are a good start. However these are also very regional. There were cases of Russians who moved to north america and are mushrooms that would be safe back in Russia (based on guides such as A+B implies safe to eat).
As noted, to be safe you really want a definitive identification. In extreme cases this requires a spore print and microscope. On the other side, in many cases you narrow it down to either a good mushroom, or one that gives some people indigestion but that's it, and then you may just take the risk and taste it.
Foraging can be very enjoyable, and is not restricted to mushrooms, nor does it require living through a depression or the cultural revolution or any such crisis. However, it is very culture dependent, and many in north america there is a tendency to treat all unknown food as dangerous. A friend told me she was eating some wild berries in a local park with her son. A family came by, saw them eating and their boy said he wanted some too, to which the parents replied with a "No! these are poisonous."
That depends a whole lot on what kind of hardware you want to use. One way is to implement a universal Turing machine, and give it the code as input. Those can be quite small, and you don't even need access to the algorithm to find the answer.
You're probably looking for a more efficient implementation.
Well, the pigs who developed this were hardly like this picture.
Animals raised in unsanitary, dense conditions, in an industrial manner are a fertile breeding ground for diseases. Once in a while one shows up that can infect humans, and some of those can be transmitted between humans. Patient -1, the pigs, are no longer needed.
Just one more of the environmental costs of industrialized meat production.
You say government to go into "profit based business", but what is a profit based business? What isn't? Any social interaction can be the basis for commercial exploitation. Profit can be made from education, health care, local level police (private security), national security (private militias), utilities, etc. Who is to decide what should be a "profit based business"? If a private organization offered protection (read, retribution) from criminals, and made good profit out of that (and assume said organization obeyed the law), should government shut down the police to avoid competing?
The problem with free markets is that even when they work, they find a solution that is optimal in some ways, but that may be quite far from the best solution for society as a whole.
A privatized water company in south america will set its prices to optimize its profits. If the resulting prices mean 5% of the population cannot afford clean drinking water, so be it. The cost is not high because it must be, but because that is the free market solution. The social costs of high water prices are external.
Similarly, a private communication company in the US will set prices to optimize profits. Society may benefit from wide spread connectivity, but the company does not, so that will not affect prices.
In summary, competition of government with private sector is not the main issue. The issue is which services should be private and which public. In the interface, there may well be some areas where private and public coexist (education?) Publicly run services can be as corrupt as private corporations, and are generally less efficient, (but do not add a profit margin to the overall cost).
Of course, such decisions have far reaching long term effects that are frequently ignored. see e.g. the US jail industries massive lobbying for longer jail sentences, and the resulting incarceration rates.
In essence, what the bill is saying is that a govt provided internet service should be self-sufficient, unsubsidized and be applicable to all costs and taxes that a private organization is. It is not trying to establish a monoply but instead trying to take the unfair advantage away from a govt sponsored organization.
What unfair advantage? private corporations can and do invest money to develop a market. Initially money is lost, but eventually it may become profitable. Why is such behaviour unfair?
Moreover, government services are rarely self sufficient if you account only for payments directly for the service. To draw a better parallel, one must consider the taxes as government income, since this are the payments citizens make for the services. If taxes are included in the balance sheet of such a venture, it is quite easy to make it self sufficient and unsubsidized.
Of course, the intent of the bill is that tax money cannot be spent on communication services, which amounts to the same thing as preventing government from offering such a service.
I'm not familiar with the details of certificate use, but as far as the cryptologic component there seems to be a reasonable fix, that will not require any change from end-users or invalidate existing certificates (apart from changing the hash).
The attack is based on finding a hash collision between certificates A and B, having
the CA signing A, and using the signature for B. If the CA were to make a small change to A before signing it the attack would be foiled, since it requires active participation from the CA.
Suppose the CA started to add a few random bits to each certificate before signing it. The applicant is told what these bits are, so that they can use the signed (modified) certificate to verify themselves to users. With just a few extra bits this would make the attack unfeasible. Does this make sense?
I will add my recommendation to those above. It is a great series, and will give you a decent introduction to large parts of physics. Some of the chapters are truly superb.
Some years ago as an math undergraduate I could not get to classes in a physics course (for reasons that are not important now). Instead, i learned quantum mechanics from the books, and enjoyed several other parts. (I then did some old exams to prepare for the final.)
There is still one thing you overlook, and that is that solar panels tend to be black. This makes sense as they absorb more light, but that also means less light is reflected back into space. If you had a white roof instead then less energy from the sun would stay on earth.
This is related to the fact that with the north polar ice cap gone, less light is reflected from earth which feeds back into raising mean temperatures.
It is a common error to equate an objects cost with its worth. The satelite may have cost that much, but it seems it may be worthless.
Even by the definition that an object is worth what someone will pay for it, no one will pay the amount that it cost to make it in the first place. This definition is badly flawed when there is not a significant market for the item in question, as the inherent subjectivity of worth cannot be suppressed.
It is true that musch of the public debate on the topic centres around the question of how much are global climate trends influenced by human activities.
However, the implications of global warming and climate change in general go far beyond that question.
The important questions are what actions can humans take at the present to stop changes. If changes cannot be stopped, then other measures need to be taken to prepare for the effects. If human activities have neglegible influence we can continue burning aoil as long as we wish (or as long as we have enough left). If there is a significant influence some steps, possibly drastic would be wise to take.
It is important to remember that the global climate is a complex system, with much memory. Even granting that CO_2 levels are related to global temperatures there are many other factors. Reducing greenhouse gasses in the future might not be enough to reverse trends, especially if critical thresholds are passed and the system falls into a different equilibrium. One example is the ocean currents, often thought of as the "flywheel of global climate". There is some evidence of dramitic reduction in the intensity of these currents. If the pattern of currents will change, it will have a huge effect on climate everywhere, and reversing the change would not be easy.
Since at the moment there is insufficient understanding of this complex system to predict its response to various actions, there are two things we must do. First, more research. The budgets for climate research have been reduced in the past few years. Funding is the biggest bottleneck limitting research being made.
Second, we need to be more aware of the possible scenarios, and be prepared for them. For example, A significant portion of oceanographers claim that a small temprature increase could lead to Greenland melting. It's a simple calculation that this would raise ocean levels by about 6 metres.
Maybe this will not happen. However, the implications are so large that unless the odds are truely miniscule it would be reckless to ignore the possiblity.
This aspect is similar to the scenaroi of an asteroid hitting earth. This will not be the result of human actions, but eventually it will happen (probably not soon). Sufficient preparation can make a huge difference, or allow prevention.
Thus the real question is not whether or not humans have influence.
The real question is whether this influence is large enough to be used to prevent catastrophy, and if not what sacrifices (economic, political) should be made now to mitigate the danger.
The Weizmann Institude has a large scale version of this. A large lot is covered by computer controlled mirrors that can be aimes to reflect sunlight into one of three floors of an opposing building.
Each floor has one wall that can be opened up, as a garage door, to let the sun shine in, and supposedly they can reach tempratures of several thousand degrees in a controlled space there.
One of these doors has a large black spot on it, supposedly from not opening it on time.
What were to happen if a candidate ran with one main promise: cut in half (or beter) taxes for anybody who makes _less_ than $250,000 a year, making up the difference by a small increase to people who make more (is a 5% increase enough? 3%? 1%?).
The rates would be calculated so that the government will be able to offer the same or better services to citizens.
Such a scheme would benefit at least 95% of tax payers. Based on the claim that most people vote first of all by personal finance, such a candidate should have an easy job, no?
Not surprisingly, there is also a french version, sung to the same tune.
Surprisingly, the lyrics are completely different.
O Canada!
Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Translated at one place as:
O Canada!
Land of our forefathers
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic of the most brilliant exploits.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.
Since the technique is based on betting after the ball has been let go, but before it stops, all that's required is to stop betting completely before the roulette is set spinning and the ball released.
is that they do not compare the numbers to the total number of internet users in said countries. Saying the U.S. uses more fossil fues than any other country is true, but more interesting when you see this remains so on a per-capita basis.
additionally, they do not try to find out where the spammers are but only where the messages originate from. as they say, 30% of spam comming from compromised machines is attributed to the location of said machines, not to the spammer's location.
Now, if the EFF or someone else had patented this some years ago, with a free license for non-commercial use, things would have been different today. Of course, Microsoft's patent would be hard to defend in court, but avoiding legal battles is even better.
Surely there are other ideas in the open source world that are worth patenting, just to avoid such issues in the future.
could be as simple as breathing into the analyzer through an appropriate filter. surely several folded layers of tissue soaked with some chemical to interact with the alcohol would work. You only need to reduce the level to below the analyzer's threshold. Any chemists here?
would be to require breath analysis for coding. that should improve source quality. And of course a "rolling retest" for every compiler warning.
While this is clearly a ludicrous proposition, increasing penalties may not be the best thing either. Various studies (which I'll have to search for) show that by a large margin the most significant deterrent to crime is the probability of being caught. This is considerably more influential than the expected penalty. Surely there are better ways of finding drunk drivers other than such silly annoying measures (e.g. more patrols looking for people who drive dangerously).
Slashdot Mirror
As noted, to be safe you really want a definitive identification. In extreme cases this requires a spore print and microscope. On the other side, in many cases you narrow it down to either a good mushroom, or one that gives some people indigestion but that's it, and then you may just take the risk and taste it.
Foraging can be very enjoyable, and is not restricted to mushrooms, nor does it require living through a depression or the cultural revolution or any such crisis. However, it is very culture dependent, and many in north america there is a tendency to treat all unknown food as dangerous. A friend told me she was eating some wild berries in a local park with her son. A family came by, saw them eating and their boy said he wanted some too, to which the parents replied with a "No! these are poisonous."
That depends a whole lot on what kind of hardware you want to use. One way is to implement a universal Turing machine, and give it the code as input. Those can be quite small, and you don't even need access to the algorithm to find the answer.
You're probably looking for a more efficient implementation.
Finally something that works better on 64-bit.
"The Caretaker", by Ken Liu, recently featured on escape pod is quite relevant.
is to forbid smiling in public, so that facial recognition software will be able to identify you.
Well, the pigs who developed this were hardly like this picture.
Animals raised in unsanitary, dense conditions, in an industrial manner are a fertile breeding ground for diseases. Once in a while one shows up that can infect humans, and some of those can be transmitted between humans. Patient -1, the pigs, are no longer needed.
Just one more of the environmental costs of industrialized meat production.
You say government to go into "profit based business", but what is a profit based business? What isn't? Any social interaction can be the basis for commercial exploitation. Profit can be made from education, health care, local level police (private security), national security (private militias), utilities, etc. Who is to decide what should be a "profit based business"? If a private organization offered protection (read, retribution) from criminals, and made good profit out of that (and assume said organization obeyed the law), should government shut down the police to avoid competing?
The problem with free markets is that even when they work, they find a solution that is optimal in some ways, but that may be quite far from the best solution for society as a whole.
A privatized water company in south america will set its prices to optimize its profits. If the resulting prices mean 5% of the population cannot afford clean drinking water, so be it. The cost is not high because it must be, but because that is the free market solution. The social costs of high water prices are external.
Similarly, a private communication company in the US will set prices to optimize profits. Society may benefit from wide spread connectivity, but the company does not, so that will not affect prices.
In summary, competition of government with private sector is not the main issue. The issue is which services should be private and which public. In the interface, there may well be some areas where private and public coexist (education?) Publicly run services can be as corrupt as private corporations, and are generally less efficient, (but do not add a profit margin to the overall cost).
Of course, such decisions have far reaching long term effects that are frequently ignored. see e.g. the US jail industries massive lobbying for longer jail sentences, and the resulting incarceration rates.
In essence, what the bill is saying is that a govt provided internet service should be self-sufficient, unsubsidized and be applicable to all costs and taxes that a private organization is. It is not trying to establish a monoply but instead trying to take the unfair advantage away from a govt sponsored organization.
What unfair advantage? private corporations can and do invest money to develop a market. Initially money is lost, but eventually it may become profitable. Why is such behaviour unfair?
Moreover, government services are rarely self sufficient if you account only for payments directly for the service. To draw a better parallel, one must consider the taxes as government income, since this are the payments citizens make for the services. If taxes are included in the balance sheet of such a venture, it is quite easy to make it self sufficient and unsubsidized.
Of course, the intent of the bill is that tax money cannot be spent on communication services, which amounts to the same thing as preventing government from offering such a service.
I'm not familiar with the details of certificate use, but as far as the cryptologic component there seems to be a reasonable fix, that will not require any change from end-users or invalidate existing certificates (apart from changing the hash).
The attack is based on finding a hash collision between certificates A and B, having the CA signing A, and using the signature for B. If the CA were to make a small change to A before signing it the attack would be foiled, since it requires active participation from the CA.
Suppose the CA started to add a few random bits to each certificate before signing it. The applicant is told what these bits are, so that they can use the signed (modified) certificate to verify themselves to users. With just a few extra bits this would make the attack unfeasible. Does this make sense?
Or better yet, put more efforts into enforcement, since the chance of getting caught has a larger effect on crime levels than the penalty.
Some years ago as an math undergraduate I could not get to classes in a physics course (for reasons that are not important now). Instead, i learned quantum mechanics from the books, and enjoyed several other parts. (I then did some old exams to prepare for the final.)
There is still one thing you overlook, and that is that solar panels tend to be black. This makes sense as they absorb more light, but that also means less light is reflected back into space. If you had a white roof instead then less energy from the sun would stay on earth.
This is related to the fact that with the north polar ice cap gone, less light is reflected from earth which feeds back into raising mean temperatures.
It is a common error to equate an objects cost with its worth. The satelite may have cost that much, but it seems it may be worthless.
Even by the definition that an object is worth what someone will pay for it, no one will pay the amount that it cost to make it in the first place. This definition is badly flawed when there is not a significant market for the item in question, as the inherent subjectivity of worth cannot be suppressed.
The important questions are what actions can humans take at the present to stop changes. If changes cannot be stopped, then other measures need to be taken to prepare for the effects. If human activities have neglegible influence we can continue burning aoil as long as we wish (or as long as we have enough left). If there is a significant influence some steps, possibly drastic would be wise to take.
It is important to remember that the global climate is a complex system, with much memory. Even granting that CO_2 levels are related to global temperatures there are many other factors. Reducing greenhouse gasses in the future might not be enough to reverse trends, especially if critical thresholds are passed and the system falls into a different equilibrium. One example is the ocean currents, often thought of as the "flywheel of global climate". There is some evidence of dramitic reduction in the intensity of these currents. If the pattern of currents will change, it will have a huge effect on climate everywhere, and reversing the change would not be easy.
Since at the moment there is insufficient understanding of this complex system to predict its response to various actions, there are two things we must do. First, more research. The budgets for climate research have been reduced in the past few years. Funding is the biggest bottleneck limitting research being made.
Second, we need to be more aware of the possible scenarios, and be prepared for them. For example, A significant portion of oceanographers claim that a small temprature increase could lead to Greenland melting. It's a simple calculation that this would raise ocean levels by about 6 metres. Maybe this will not happen. However, the implications are so large that unless the odds are truely miniscule it would be reckless to ignore the possiblity.
This aspect is similar to the scenaroi of an asteroid hitting earth. This will not be the result of human actions, but eventually it will happen (probably not soon). Sufficient preparation can make a huge difference, or allow prevention.
Thus the real question is not whether or not humans have influence. The real question is whether this influence is large enough to be used to prevent catastrophy, and if not what sacrifices (economic, political) should be made now to mitigate the danger.
You need to write a script to automatically translate emails to/from certain recipients (and some Babel fish for meetings.)
The Weizmann Institude has a large scale version of this. A large lot is covered by computer controlled mirrors that can be aimes to reflect sunlight into one of three floors of an opposing building.
Each floor has one wall that can be opened up, as a garage door, to let the sun shine in, and supposedly they can reach tempratures of several thousand degrees in a controlled space there.
One of these doors has a large black spot on it, supposedly from not opening it on time.
Hypothetical question:
What were to happen if a candidate ran with one main promise: cut in half (or beter) taxes for anybody who makes _less_ than $250,000 a year, making up the difference by a small increase to people who make more (is a 5% increase enough? 3%? 1%?).
The rates would be calculated so that the government will be able to offer the same or better services to citizens.
Such a scheme would benefit at least 95% of tax payers. Based on the claim that most people vote first of all by personal finance, such a candidate should have an easy job, no?
Not surprisingly, there is also a french version, sung to the same tune.
Surprisingly, the lyrics are completely different.
O Canada!
Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Translated at one place as:
O Canada!
Land of our forefathers
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic of the most brilliant exploits.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.
There's even a penalty for using IE in the form of an extra page charged when you pring anything.
Since the technique is based on betting after the ball has been let go, but before it stops, all that's required is to stop betting completely before the roulette is set spinning and the ball released.
additionally, they do not try to find out where the spammers are but only where the messages originate from. as they say, 30% of spam comming from compromised machines is attributed to the location of said machines, not to the spammer's location.
Surely there are other ideas in the open source world that are worth patenting, just to avoid such issues in the future.
yeah... those new mexico snow storms can be hard.
could be as simple as breathing into the analyzer through an appropriate filter. surely several folded layers of tissue soaked with some chemical to interact with the alcohol would work. You only need to reduce the level to below the analyzer's threshold. Any chemists here?
While this is clearly a ludicrous proposition, increasing penalties may not be the best thing either. Various studies (which I'll have to search for) show that by a large margin the most significant deterrent to crime is the probability of being caught. This is considerably more influential than the expected penalty. Surely there are better ways of finding drunk drivers other than such silly annoying measures (e.g. more patrols looking for people who drive dangerously).