Man, do I ever call bullshit on this one. Next time you and your girlfriend go to a party or whatever at someone's house, and if you catch her off in a bedroom, making out or screwing the host's brains out, get back to us and tell us how you didn't complain.
If the girlfriend (or access point) decides to do something, whose fault is it? Certainly not the fault of the person who asked them to do it.
Your argument basically boils down to "Why should I be responsible for owning a crack house if I let anyone who asks come in and use it whenever they want?".
If you're really worried about it, just turn on encryption or mac filtering. Irresponsible people don't deserve special protection merely because of their irresponsibility.
A better analogy is that you buy a home, but the home builder doesn't tell you that there's an invisible man standing on the porch yelling to people to come on in in a voice too high pitched for you to hear, but that everyone else hears just fine. They put that information in the home's user manual, but hey, who reads those things. You just started using the home, and it kept the rain out, let you plug things in and use them, let you cook your dinner and watch your TV, so you assumed that everything was alright.
Buying a wireless access point is like moving into a neighborhood. You get to own your house (the actual access point), but you have no choice of neighbors. Any of them can come knock on your door and try to visit with you. Some of them will be friendly and you wouldn't mind visiting with them, but until you get a restraining order or put up no trespassing signs (change the SSID), you can't stop them from coming over to knock on your door. They're using your sidewalk, perhaps even precluding your theoretical use of the exact spot they're standing on at the moment, but it's a socially acceptable thing to do when coming over to introduce yourself to new neighbors. Someone can also just build a junk yard or race track in your back yard, because the neighborhood has no zoning laws (like the 2.4GHz band). It's because you only own a single piece of property in the neighborhood, just like you only own a piece of hardware in the 2.4GHz 802.11b/g neighborhood, that you have no control over what happens in the overall neighborhood. Pick your neighborhood well, or build a fence (encryption) to keep the neighbors from coming to visit and keep the noise of the racetrack out.
This analogy still has flaws, but it's because the closest human analogy to 802.11b/g is being in a public place with lots of people shouting at each other to communicate. There's no privacy unless encryption is used, anyone can stand in the public place and shout, and no one can pretend that it's illegal to strike up a conversation with them while they're standing there.
It is not saying "come on in". It's saying "here is network X, it is not secured". You can't legally find out if it's running DHCP without being authorised to connect, so that point is moot.
Wrong. The access point broadcasts all DHCP responses (along with all other traffic), and it's up to the discretion of the wireless NIC to accept or discard the RF that it receives. It's fairly obvious to every 802.11b/g device in the area whether or not DHCP is running, at least if it listens long enough.
Your argument falls apart because you imply that the access point somehow "owns" or "controls" its own airspace. That's just stupid. Each access point has to share the spectrum with every other 2.4GHz device, which makes the responsibility to authenticate access to the network behind the access point the responsibility of each access point, and not the other way around. Don't forget that access points are continually broadcasting "unauthorized" beacons to every NIC in range. They started it.
Forget about momentum. To keep the system in equilibrium, the forward force (propulsion) has to equal the backward force (drag). If drag is equivalent between A and B, they require the same force for propulsion, *regardless* of mass.
Momentum means that once vehicle B is moving the same velocity as vehicle A, it will displace more air (transference of momentum) coming to a complete stop than A would.
Rolling friction is why the heavier vehicle requires more force to stay in equilibrium. If vehicle B has three times the bearing friction of vehicle A, vehicle B will require greater propulsion force to maintain equilibrium. Rolling bearings have a coefficient of kinetic friction of roughly.002 (citation),
so vehicle B should require less than 1% more force than vehicle A to maintain its equilibrium.
Frictionless bearings would negate that effect. Levitating trains are probably close, but a "perfect" example would be flying two spacecraft through the interstellar wind. Spacecraft B is twice the mass of spacecraft A, but both have the same drag, so the force required to maintain equilibrium is the same for both.
but it is NOT fair to say that everybody is addicted to something (even if you can't really quit).
Sure it is. Without the proper chemicals in the right balance, the brain goes insane or becomes comatose. It's just that the word addiction has a very strong cultural bias. For instance, being "addicted" to tobacco is a very late-20th-century concept, and in many cultures being "addicted" to mind altering drugs (and I mean things like opium and peyote, not just caffeine) is the norm.
Almost everyone is addicted to physical/emotional affection, a hobby of some sort, and sleep. There are a few very rare cases where individuals don't need to sleep, or sleep very little, with no ill effects. Does that mean everyone else has a horrible addiction to sleep? Yes, but it will be culturally acceptable until we find a way to reproduce sleeplessness in most individuals. Then sleep will be considered lazy and addictive.
Some of the groups labeled as 'terrorist' are vile, evil, and deserve to be wiped off the Earth.
I'm assuming you mean the groups need to be wiped off the face of the earth, since after all it is presumed that the people in the groups still have their human rights and deserve fair trials, right?
So if you mean an entire ideology should die out, then doesn't that require a form of thought police?
I heard a story once about this guy who was so pissed off that his proprietary printer driver didn't work that he went and wrote his own stack of free software so he wouldn't have the problem again.
For a few ideological zealots, closed source drivers are as good as, or worse than, no drivers. For "many users", closed source drivers make the product work and thus are fine.
A few ideological zealots such as the kernel developers who actually improve Linux? There's no point in trying to track down the cause of panics in development kernels when blobs are loaded.
Why should I, as a Windows Admin, have to know precisely how to edit various INI files and the system registry to change settings, when I can just click something in a GUI?
Maybe I'm just clueless, but where's the GUI for enabling AutoAdminLogon, or for adding Run and RunOnce commands? Where's the GUI for creating a regedit file that deletes a key or value? I'll admit Microsoft is slowly making things better, but it generally takes years for significant improvements. Consider msizap, which used to be the only way to remove hosed MSI installed programs. Well, now (as of sometime this or last year, as far as I can tell) there's a passable gui frontend to it. Yay for microsoft. I still think there are plenty of tasks that are better suited to a text editor than to a gui. Search and replace and regular expressions are two good examples of why.
People who know how to actually do things (engineers) are recruited by all organizations to Actually Do Things(TM). If you can't build a machine or train a factory worker to do it, you probably need an engineer.
Example checks might be:
- Fingerprint: measuring temperature, bloodflow through the finger, resistance of finger, etc
- Voice: asking the individual to respond to questions, measuring stress, etc
- Iris: measuring dilation over time, asking the subject to look left or right, etc
- Temperature provided by current through a resistor: Bloodflow simulated with artificial blood, or with a real finger covered with fake fingerprints, resistance of finger provided by $.002 resistor from Radio Shack.
- Voice recorder plus boom mike pointed at the individual to be impersonated while they're being interrogated by the biometric scanner.
- They already make contact lenses that change the color of your iris; how hard would it be to just impersonate another iris? Retinal scanners are apparently harder to fool, but they are ultimately just a camera. Build an inverse array of the lenses in the retinal scanner, and place an LCD or one of the digital projector arrays where the CCD sensor in the biometric device would be, and play back whatever the device wants to see. Depending on how accurate the camera and algorithms are in the biometric device, such a hack could be easy or just expensive.
Various systems have had combinations of these or many other approaches. In addition, some more secure systems use a combination of biometrics (e.g. finger for identification with voice for authentication)
If each element is easily defeated, multiple elements will be easily defeated. There's nothing hard about fooling two systems at the same time if they're easy to fool.
At least until extreme body modification is commonplace, biometrics suck for identification. It's the only modern "security" mechanism that lacks revocation. Without revocation, a security model is eternally broken as soon as one chink is found.
A person only has 20 digits, 2 palms, 2 soles, 2 retinas, and one genome. All of the biometric properties of those can easily be duplicated with noninvasive methods (simply enrolling in a biometric system requires the same access as duplication would). When one of those 27 properties is compromised, how do you revoke its use? I guess start with the fingers and palms and as people get older they have to start using their feet for identification, and at the very last make them get pricked for each identification. When all the biometric identifiers are used up, the now useless (at least in a Secure(TM) society) people can be recycled in the soylent green program or something.
You obviously haven't ever seen a truck with a good lift kit. Or watched any of the boulder climbing competitions. The kind of people who mix ANFO for fun are the kind of people who like lift kits on their trucks and/or climb boulders with them. Security at almost every non-military site (and many military sites) is still absolutely pathetic.
They should be packed into buses, handed the required "request to become citizen" forms, and sent home to follow the *proper* way to enter this country. No man is above the Law of the land, not the U.S. president, not you or me, and certaintly not illegal entrants.
So what do you do with the thousands (or is it millions now?) of legal U.S. citizens whose parents are illegal aliens, many of them very young? You think social services and foster care can handle that many (non-English speaking, mostly) kids? Or should the U.S. be in the business of expelling its own citizens now?
a) Equal to theft if the owner pays extra for bandwidth;
b) Equal to fraud if you perform any action online while using an IP address assigned to someone else's name;
c) Antisocial as it can cause inconvenience and annoyance for another member of your society
a) Ludicrous. For a wireless user to magically push the subscriber over their bandwidth limit and incur charges that the subscriber would not incur on their own would require a situation that is almost impossible to obtain; the owner would have to transfer just a few KB less than their monthly limit, and then prevent their wireless router from going over the limit via DHCP traffic, not to mention any software on their own PCs connected to the network. Essentially, the only case where this is possible is one where the owner would just about have to unplug their wireless router in the first place to prevent IT from going over the bandwidth limit.
b) So flash and javascript are fraudulently performing actions using my IP address? What about Windows, with its constant phone-home crap? Yet another stupid argument. There is no relationship between IP addresses and individuals. At best, there is a temporary relationship between an Internet host and an IP address. Whether the host is a wireless gateway, single host, or a billion subscribers behind NAT is completely invisible to the rest of the Internet.
c) Arresting and prosecuting people for using the PUBLIC 2.4 GHz spectrum is not antisocial? Look at it realistically; should the FCC change the little logo printed on every wireless access point that specifically informs the owner that it MUST accept all harmful interference? Try getting that fixed before passing idiotic laws about wireless access points.
First thing I'll do if any legislation like this passes is to get a cellular Internet card (Sierra Wireless et al) for my laptop and drive by the lawmakers' houses with my wifi connection shared and see how many of them I can send to prison.
Just parallelize the transmission lines. Have billions of tiny superconducting wires in a bundle and gobs of surface area. Transmit at "normal" voltages so transformers wouldn't be required.
I work in an MS-AD-Exchange shop, and until recently I was a programmer for an AS/400 (iSeries (System I)). I also had access to (and had to manage) some Windows boxes and had access to a couple AIX servers. Despite that, Linux ended up being both my favorite platform and ultimately the most useful for gluing things together. Reports, scheduled data transfers, monitoring, maintenence, and off the wall projects and much easier. Not just Linux; Apache, Perl, unixODBC, Samba, and lots of other tools all work together well on one box. It makes querying multiple databases and flat files from one place easy and fun.
Anyone who tries to combine a bunch of heterogeneous systems into a working network should really look at using *nix and OSS/FSF software for glue. I would use Linux on my workstation if corporate policy allowed it.
This post answered several of the questions I was initially going to ask, especially about the representation of the data in the octree. It sounds like level of detail would be accomplished by storing an approximation of the subspaces in each level of the octree. I'm guessing that by keeping transparency information in each subspace of the octree, a stack of volumetric effects could be created for each ray and applied after the ray hits an opaque surface. Transparent surfaces could support refraction as well, although that could limit the ability of the engine to render normal polygons over the raytraced scene.
Would a tree with a higher degree of branching would be more efficient? It would reduce the maximum depth of the tree, but would introduce more empty subspaces, so it would depend on whether it is faster to iterate over many empty child volumes of the same size versus descending down the tree at each step.
Any increase in violence after playing non-violent video games? Perhaps intense concentration and frustration leads to an increase in violent behavior?
Did you look for other correlations such as competitive games versus constructive games? (racing versus sim city for instance)
Its pretty sad what the "scientific" community is coming to. Why are so many "free thinkers" so opposed to allowing critical analysis of evolution in schools? Would you have children preprogrammed to accept evolution without question? Science, without questions, is dead. I am also quite bored of the tired and ridiculous argument that it is impossible to understand or do good science while not believing in evolution:
Truly critical analysis of evolution requires a thorough understanding of biology, physics, chemistry, paleontology, and mathematics at the graduate level or above. There is absolutely no point in saying "some scientists believe organisms evolve over time, and some scientists don't" because it imparts absolutely nothing to a child's education. They have no way to grasp the arguments on both sides, and simply have to trust one side or the other without evidence of which can present the stronger argument. How many children know about the many logical fallacies that are often used in arguments? It would be akin to teaching history by saying "here, read all these personal diaries, anecdotes, pamphlets, and advertisements from a long time ago and try to figure out what was really going on. By the way, we're not going to tell you what the majority of historians think actually happened." or mathematics by saying "Here's a lot of other children's homework that they've completed. It hasn't been graded, but you can make up your own mind about who got the right answers."
That's not to say that questions are wrong, but the questions need to be at the level children can understand and evaluate. Teach physical science and practical biology and physiology before evolution, with an emphasis on performing experiments to determine the correctness of theories. With that background, children will be much better prepared to encounter evolution and creationism. What do you think most children trained like this would think when they experimentally verify speciation for themselves?
Interesting. And what would Newton, a devout Christian and the father of Calculus say about that? He did quite a bit of work on light himself.
Newton did not know how light worked. Until the early 20th century it was quite mysterious. Once quantum mechanics explained the photoelectric effect and wave particle duality, we understood light much better than before. We still do not perfectly understand light, but that's the eternal nature of science to always approach better understanding. Newton freely admitted that his theories could only explain *how* the universe worked, not why. That is also the basic nature of science. Evolution explains *how* life has grown and prospered, but has no philosophical or religious implications beyond what individuals give it. Promoters of creationism want their "why" included in the classroom. They have no scientifically supported "how".
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Man, do I ever call bullshit on this one. Next time you and your girlfriend go to a party or whatever at someone's house, and if you catch her off in a bedroom, making out or screwing the host's brains out, get back to us and tell us how you didn't complain.
If the girlfriend (or access point) decides to do something, whose fault is it? Certainly not the fault of the person who asked them to do it.
Your argument basically boils down to "Why should I be responsible for owning a crack house if I let anyone who asks come in and use it whenever they want?".
If you're really worried about it, just turn on encryption or mac filtering. Irresponsible people don't deserve special protection merely because of their irresponsibility.
A better analogy is that you buy a home, but the home builder doesn't tell you that there's an invisible man standing on the porch yelling to people to come on in in a voice too high pitched for you to hear, but that everyone else hears just fine. They put that information in the home's user manual, but hey, who reads those things. You just started using the home, and it kept the rain out, let you plug things in and use them, let you cook your dinner and watch your TV, so you assumed that everything was alright.
Buying a wireless access point is like moving into a neighborhood. You get to own your house (the actual access point), but you have no choice of neighbors. Any of them can come knock on your door and try to visit with you. Some of them will be friendly and you wouldn't mind visiting with them, but until you get a restraining order or put up no trespassing signs (change the SSID), you can't stop them from coming over to knock on your door. They're using your sidewalk, perhaps even precluding your theoretical use of the exact spot they're standing on at the moment, but it's a socially acceptable thing to do when coming over to introduce yourself to new neighbors. Someone can also just build a junk yard or race track in your back yard, because the neighborhood has no zoning laws (like the 2.4GHz band). It's because you only own a single piece of property in the neighborhood, just like you only own a piece of hardware in the 2.4GHz 802.11b/g neighborhood, that you have no control over what happens in the overall neighborhood. Pick your neighborhood well, or build a fence (encryption) to keep the neighbors from coming to visit and keep the noise of the racetrack out.
This analogy still has flaws, but it's because the closest human analogy to 802.11b/g is being in a public place with lots of people shouting at each other to communicate. There's no privacy unless encryption is used, anyone can stand in the public place and shout, and no one can pretend that it's illegal to strike up a conversation with them while they're standing there.
It is not saying "come on in". It's saying "here is network X, it is not secured". You can't legally find out if it's running DHCP without being authorised to connect, so that point is moot.
Wrong. The access point broadcasts all DHCP responses (along with all other traffic), and it's up to the discretion of the wireless NIC to accept or discard the RF that it receives. It's fairly obvious to every 802.11b/g device in the area whether or not DHCP is running, at least if it listens long enough.
Your argument falls apart because you imply that the access point somehow "owns" or "controls" its own airspace. That's just stupid. Each access point has to share the spectrum with every other 2.4GHz device, which makes the responsibility to authenticate access to the network behind the access point the responsibility of each access point, and not the other way around. Don't forget that access points are continually broadcasting "unauthorized" beacons to every NIC in range. They started it.
Forget about momentum. To keep the system in equilibrium, the forward force (propulsion) has to equal the backward force (drag). If drag is equivalent between A and B, they require the same force for propulsion, *regardless* of mass.
.002 (citation),
so vehicle B should require less than 1% more force than vehicle A to maintain its equilibrium.
Momentum means that once vehicle B is moving the same velocity as vehicle A, it will displace more air (transference of momentum) coming to a complete stop than A would.
Rolling friction is why the heavier vehicle requires more force to stay in equilibrium. If vehicle B has three times the bearing friction of vehicle A, vehicle B will require greater propulsion force to maintain equilibrium. Rolling bearings have a coefficient of kinetic friction of roughly
Frictionless bearings would negate that effect. Levitating trains are probably close, but a "perfect" example would be flying two spacecraft through the interstellar wind. Spacecraft B is twice the mass of spacecraft A, but both have the same drag, so the force required to maintain equilibrium is the same for both.
but it is NOT fair to say that everybody is addicted to something (even if you can't really quit).
Sure it is. Without the proper chemicals in the right balance, the brain goes insane or becomes comatose. It's just that the word addiction has a very strong cultural bias. For instance, being "addicted" to tobacco is a very late-20th-century concept, and in many cultures being "addicted" to mind altering drugs (and I mean things like opium and peyote, not just caffeine) is the norm.
Almost everyone is addicted to physical/emotional affection, a hobby of some sort, and sleep. There are a few very rare cases where individuals don't need to sleep, or sleep very little, with no ill effects. Does that mean everyone else has a horrible addiction to sleep? Yes, but it will be culturally acceptable until we find a way to reproduce sleeplessness in most individuals. Then sleep will be considered lazy and addictive.
Some of the groups labeled as 'terrorist' are vile, evil, and deserve to be wiped off the Earth.
I'm assuming you mean the groups need to be wiped off the face of the earth, since after all it is presumed that the people in the groups still have their human rights and deserve fair trials, right?
So if you mean an entire ideology should die out, then doesn't that require a form of thought police?
Actions should be punished, not beliefs.
I heard a story once about this guy who was so pissed off that his proprietary printer driver didn't work that he went and wrote his own stack of free software so he wouldn't have the problem again.
For a few ideological zealots, closed source drivers are as good as, or worse than, no drivers. For "many users", closed source drivers make the product work and thus are fine.
A few ideological zealots such as the kernel developers who actually improve Linux? There's no point in trying to track down the cause of panics in development kernels when blobs are loaded.
Why should I, as a Windows Admin, have to know precisely how to edit various INI files and the system registry to change settings, when I can just click something in a GUI?
Maybe I'm just clueless, but where's the GUI for enabling AutoAdminLogon, or for adding Run and RunOnce commands? Where's the GUI for creating a regedit file that deletes a key or value? I'll admit Microsoft is slowly making things better, but it generally takes years for significant improvements. Consider msizap, which used to be the only way to remove hosed MSI installed programs. Well, now (as of sometime this or last year, as far as I can tell) there's a passable gui frontend to it. Yay for microsoft. I still think there are plenty of tasks that are better suited to a text editor than to a gui. Search and replace and regular expressions are two good examples of why.
People who know how to actually do things (engineers) are recruited by all organizations to Actually Do Things(TM). If you can't build a machine or train a factory worker to do it, you probably need an engineer.
Example checks might be: - Fingerprint: measuring temperature, bloodflow through the finger, resistance of finger, etc - Voice: asking the individual to respond to questions, measuring stress, etc - Iris: measuring dilation over time, asking the subject to look left or right, etc
- Temperature provided by current through a resistor: Bloodflow simulated with artificial blood, or with a real finger covered with fake fingerprints, resistance of finger provided by $.002 resistor from Radio Shack.
- Voice recorder plus boom mike pointed at the individual to be impersonated while they're being interrogated by the biometric scanner.
- They already make contact lenses that change the color of your iris; how hard would it be to just impersonate another iris? Retinal scanners are apparently harder to fool, but they are ultimately just a camera. Build an inverse array of the lenses in the retinal scanner, and place an LCD or one of the digital projector arrays where the CCD sensor in the biometric device would be, and play back whatever the device wants to see. Depending on how accurate the camera and algorithms are in the biometric device, such a hack could be easy or just expensive.
Various systems have had combinations of these or many other approaches. In addition, some more secure systems use a combination of biometrics (e.g. finger for identification with voice for authentication)
If each element is easily defeated, multiple elements will be easily defeated. There's nothing hard about fooling two systems at the same time if they're easy to fool.
At least until extreme body modification is commonplace, biometrics suck for identification. It's the only modern "security" mechanism that lacks revocation. Without revocation, a security model is eternally broken as soon as one chink is found.
A person only has 20 digits, 2 palms, 2 soles, 2 retinas, and one genome. All of the biometric properties of those can easily be duplicated with noninvasive methods (simply enrolling in a biometric system requires the same access as duplication would). When one of those 27 properties is compromised, how do you revoke its use? I guess start with the fingers and palms and as people get older they have to start using their feet for identification, and at the very last make them get pricked for each identification. When all the biometric identifiers are used up, the now useless (at least in a Secure(TM) society) people can be recycled in the soylent green program or something.
You obviously haven't ever seen a truck with a good lift kit. Or watched any of the boulder climbing competitions. The kind of people who mix ANFO for fun are the kind of people who like lift kits on their trucks and/or climb boulders with them. Security at almost every non-military site (and many military sites) is still absolutely pathetic.
They should be packed into buses, handed the required "request to become citizen" forms, and sent home to follow the *proper* way to enter this country. No man is above the Law of the land, not the U.S. president, not you or me, and certaintly not illegal entrants.
So what do you do with the thousands (or is it millions now?) of legal U.S. citizens whose parents are illegal aliens, many of them very young? You think social services and foster care can handle that many (non-English speaking, mostly) kids? Or should the U.S. be in the business of expelling its own citizens now?
I wonder what the Ars Technica/privacy zealots who oppose RealID protection will say when the next hijacked airliner is crashed into a building.
"Well, at least they won't have to sift through teeth to identify everybody."
RealID prevents hijacking like DNA and fingerprints prevent crime.
Considering that using someone's wireless is:
a) Equal to theft if the owner pays extra for bandwidth;
b) Equal to fraud if you perform any action online while using an IP address assigned to someone else's name;
c) Antisocial as it can cause inconvenience and annoyance for another member of your society
a) Ludicrous. For a wireless user to magically push the subscriber over their bandwidth limit and incur charges that the subscriber would not incur on their own would require a situation that is almost impossible to obtain; the owner would have to transfer just a few KB less than their monthly limit, and then prevent their wireless router from going over the limit via DHCP traffic, not to mention any software on their own PCs connected to the network. Essentially, the only case where this is possible is one where the owner would just about have to unplug their wireless router in the first place to prevent IT from going over the bandwidth limit.
b) So flash and javascript are fraudulently performing actions using my IP address? What about Windows, with its constant phone-home crap? Yet another stupid argument. There is no relationship between IP addresses and individuals. At best, there is a temporary relationship between an Internet host and an IP address. Whether the host is a wireless gateway, single host, or a billion subscribers behind NAT is completely invisible to the rest of the Internet.
c) Arresting and prosecuting people for using the PUBLIC 2.4 GHz spectrum is not antisocial? Look at it realistically; should the FCC change the little logo printed on every wireless access point that specifically informs the owner that it MUST accept all harmful interference? Try getting that fixed before passing idiotic laws about wireless access points.
First thing I'll do if any legislation like this passes is to get a cellular Internet card (Sierra Wireless et al) for my laptop and drive by the lawmakers' houses with my wifi connection shared and see how many of them I can send to prison.
Just parallelize the transmission lines. Have billions of tiny superconducting wires in a bundle and gobs of surface area. Transmit at "normal" voltages so transformers wouldn't be required.
Nothing better than a (patented) genetically homogeneous worldwide host to infect.
I work in an MS-AD-Exchange shop, and until recently I was a programmer for an AS/400 (iSeries (System I)). I also had access to (and had to manage) some Windows boxes and had access to a couple AIX servers. Despite that, Linux ended up being both my favorite platform and ultimately the most useful for gluing things together. Reports, scheduled data transfers, monitoring, maintenence, and off the wall projects and much easier. Not just Linux; Apache, Perl, unixODBC, Samba, and lots of other tools all work together well on one box. It makes querying multiple databases and flat files from one place easy and fun.
Anyone who tries to combine a bunch of heterogeneous systems into a working network should really look at using *nix and OSS/FSF software for glue. I would use Linux on my workstation if corporate policy allowed it.
This post answered several of the questions I was initially going to ask, especially about the representation of the data in the octree. It sounds like level of detail would be accomplished by storing an approximation of the subspaces in each level of the octree. I'm guessing that by keeping transparency information in each subspace of the octree, a stack of volumetric effects could be created for each ray and applied after the ray hits an opaque surface. Transparent surfaces could support refraction as well, although that could limit the ability of the engine to render normal polygons over the raytraced scene.
Would a tree with a higher degree of branching would be more efficient? It would reduce the maximum depth of the tree, but would introduce more empty subspaces, so it would depend on whether it is faster to iterate over many empty child volumes of the same size versus descending down the tree at each step.
Also, it seems that one "Tim Couch" has been posting a lot of requests for gay porn lately.
I mean, really, did this guy think the law through?
Any increase in violence after playing non-violent video games? Perhaps intense concentration and frustration leads to an increase in violent behavior?
Did you look for other correlations such as competitive games versus constructive games? (racing versus sim city for instance)
Its pretty sad what the "scientific" community is coming to. Why are so many "free thinkers" so opposed to allowing critical analysis of evolution in schools? Would you have children preprogrammed to accept evolution without question? Science, without questions, is dead. I am also quite bored of the tired and ridiculous argument that it is impossible to understand or do good science while not believing in evolution:
Truly critical analysis of evolution requires a thorough understanding of biology, physics, chemistry, paleontology, and mathematics at the graduate level or above. There is absolutely no point in saying "some scientists believe organisms evolve over time, and some scientists don't" because it imparts absolutely nothing to a child's education. They have no way to grasp the arguments on both sides, and simply have to trust one side or the other without evidence of which can present the stronger argument. How many children know about the many logical fallacies that are often used in arguments? It would be akin to teaching history by saying "here, read all these personal diaries, anecdotes, pamphlets, and advertisements from a long time ago and try to figure out what was really going on. By the way, we're not going to tell you what the majority of historians think actually happened." or mathematics by saying "Here's a lot of other children's homework that they've completed. It hasn't been graded, but you can make up your own mind about who got the right answers."
That's not to say that questions are wrong, but the questions need to be at the level children can understand and evaluate. Teach physical science and practical biology and physiology before evolution, with an emphasis on performing experiments to determine the correctness of theories. With that background, children will be much better prepared to encounter evolution and creationism. What do you think most children trained like this would think when they experimentally verify speciation for themselves?
Interesting. And what would Newton, a devout Christian and the father of Calculus say about that? He did quite a bit of work on light himself.
Newton did not know how light worked. Until the early 20th century it was quite mysterious. Once quantum mechanics explained the photoelectric effect and wave particle duality, we understood light much better than before. We still do not perfectly understand light, but that's the eternal nature of science to always approach better understanding. Newton freely admitted that his theories could only explain *how* the universe worked, not why. That is also the basic nature of science. Evolution explains *how* life has grown and prospered, but has no philosophical or religious implications beyond what individuals give it. Promoters of creationism want their "why" included in the classroom. They have no scientifically supported "how".