He used the analogy that they were like bubbles in the water. Ok, where did the water come from?
Air bubbles are not made out of water. The water doesn't have to exist for air bubbles to exist, in fact a "bubble" of air can exist in pure vacuum, it's just an ever expanding bubble because there's no pressure to keep it in one place. So just replace "water" with "nothing" or "The Void" to get the idea. All it means is that the forces keeping the universe the shape it is are internal instead of external, as in the case of an air bubble in water.
This is the same sort of blind faith that most atheists pompously deride the religious for. In fact, based on this summary, it would be called something to the effect of a "load of religious bullshit" if it came from a preacher. Oooh, theoretical physicist says it, so we'll hear him out!
The biggest problem with calling theoretical physicists mere preachers is that you are currently using a computer that was made possible by theoretical physics (semiconductors are a direct result of the quantum nature of the universe. Understanding quantum mechanics is necessary to create modern computers). No amount of praying or conjuring has ever caused a computational device to descend from the heavens.
While I have the means to buy a digital TV, I am not about to say that it is fair we cut people who don't have the means off. I would call it a problem, and big or small this should be solved.
Yes, heaven forbid we should cut off the information feed into their heads. They might form their own opinions and vote third party candidates into office or something!
From an external point of view, a government that wont pay for subsidised heating in a country where people can freeze to death but will pay for subsidised digital TV tuners is seriously fucked up, absolutely mind boggling. Yeah sure, the MPAA and the RIAA aren't running your country.
I think it's more insidious. If half the population suddenly decides not to watch TV, especially with the 2008 presidential elections right around the corner, the current political parties are royally screwed. The only reason the current parties are in power is because of television and to a lesser extent radio. Without television, there's no way for rich people to fill everyone else's heads with their idea of who should be elected, and no one in power wants their power to revert to the common people.
are the new Jews? Really? Doesn't it make some difference that the Islamists are actually engaged in varieties of evil such as the Nazis falsely accused the Jews of?
So far, a few thousand people claiming to be Muslim have committed terrorist acts. There are more citizens of almost every nation on earth who have raped, killed, and tortured their fellow citizens than there are Muslim terrorists. Terrorism is not the problem, authoritarian governments oppressing foreign nations and supporting nations that do the same is the root problem and terrorism is just the symptom. Sure, religious fundamentalism is dangerous, but ultimately it can't be eradicated without massive bloodshed. It just needs to be contained, that's all. Bombing the hell out of countries just acts like natural selection for the worst and strongest terrorists who can survive it, and the collateral damage makes finding new recruits at the orphanage quite easy.
Note how he uses words like "might" and "perhaps". The politicians have no clue how it could possibly be implemented.
Note that verifying ages is not going to stop 14 year old girls from talking to 18 year old guys, either. What are they supposed to do, prevent children from viewing the myspace profiles of adults and vice versa? Maybe the government should just build a Children's Earth and send all the children there, and ship them back when they turn 18. Maybe they should also build a Stupid Idiot planet and go there themselves.
If I do trust it's legit, do I trust the people running it to not make critical mistakes that could compromise my data?
If the answer is "no" or "I don't know" then I may be looking for alternatives.
If you think "legitimate" ISPs protect your data, you probably haven't heard of things like Carnivore or Eschelon, right? Well, keep being a good little citizen then. Move along, nothing to see here.
Really though, how could *any* ISP make critical mistakes with your data? Route it to the wrong address or drop the packets? That's what TCP is for. An Internet connection is just an endpoint to stuff packets into and hopefully get packets from, that's all. Anything you put in those packets is entirely your problem to protect with encryption and authentication.
So, the reason some people would choose to believe in a god is that they'd prefer to live in a world with a moral absolute. Otherwise their decisions and actions are fairly meaningless beyond their own gratification.
This is as good an explanation as any for why a European might accept Christianity, but does nothing to explain how a Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Muslim, or Jew is supposed to find it a good idea. After all, if you've already got a pretty good idea of how the supernatural or natural world works, what's one more contradictory explanation worth? Picking moral absolutes is a function of human society, and if they have to invent monsters to torture the nonbelievers until science discovers personality disorders and effective behavior adjustment so be it. Notice that we haven't solved our social behavior problems, so until we do religion will still find some use in keeping some of the people too scared to misbehave.
It's obvious that Citibank, BofA, Visa, etc. aren't ever going to do anything to stop identity theft, maybe it's time the government starts doing something about it. If ReadID helps, it would be a big step forward on that front. I don't care if it has to be sold to the public using terrorism, because it's still an improvement over what we have today.
I rarely have to show my ID when I'm using a credit card physically, and absolutely never has a website required a copy or scan of my ID. It's silly, it doesn't prevent fraud, and it *costs taxpayers money*! It's just a scheme to fund $Business that creates ID cards that's related to some congresscritter.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 1
I have used Vista, I do not like it, it's intrusive and annoying to me (yes I do want to run that exe), I personally don't care about eye candy, I am into performance which vista does not have unless you are running a state of the art proc, 4 gig's of RAM and a high end graphics card (which none have decent drivers as of yet)
I'm not going to get into the DRM portion of Vista.
For all the time Microsoft wasted on Vista, I can't believe all they did was throw more dialog boxes in front of applications. Where's the privilege separation? Where's the capability based access to personal files? What the hell were they doing for 5 years, anyway? The proper way to handle "untrusted" applications is to run them as a dummy user with no filesystem or network rights, essentially sandboxing them. Use the common file dialogs or something similar to grant rights to files that the user picks for them. It really wasn't beyond Microsoft to implement a proper capability system like this, but they seemed more interested in matching Apple's UI.
The DMCA didn't make it illegal to "back up" DVDs. That has always been true of audiovisual works; the reproduction right (17 USC 106) is exclusively reserved to the copyright holder, there's no AHRA-like carveout for movies / TV shows / other A/V works, and the "backup" provisions of 17 USC 117 apply only to computer software -- MPEG2-encoded A/V content is still A/V content, not computer software. The DMCA might have made it (theoretically) harder to reproduce DVDs, what with the anti-circumvention provisions, but no 'right' or legal ability to make a backup copy of an A/V work existed before the DMCA.
I won't believe that nonsense until the RIAA has some way of ripping the memory of a song out of my head, and the MPAA can rip the memories of a movie I've seen out as well. Until then, there's no point in making arbitrary distinctions between wetware and software backups of copyrighted works. Fuck copyright. It's dead. The *AA are just worms gorging on the corpse, and when it's gone the worms die too.
Let me preface this by saying that I am a conservative Christian. Now, I have done some research and found out that most electronic devices that emit photons and audio waves have a switch which allows me to turn them off. The effort required to do that is even less than it is for me to get incensed and make a complaint. Why don't other people get this? Don't want to see it? Turn it off. Don't want the kids to see it? Turn it off.
My guess is it's the people who leave their kids with the TV all night and always leave their keys in the car (possibly in the ignition) who are the most irate. "What if junior craws into the garage and starts the car because of what he done seen on teevee?" Turning a free babysitter off or remembering where they put their keys are things that are fundamentally beyond the intelligence of the type of people who are complaining.
While I don't mind seeing stupid people die, their children shouldn't be doomed to the same fate. Statistically, only 50% of stupid people's children are themselves stupid, so we should at least protect the 25% of smart children with stupid parents, hmm?
Since the article has nothing, I wanted to ask: has anyone implemented merge sort where you merge from both the front and back using two simultaneous threads ? I haven't seen this anywhere, but it's an obvious improvement for multicore machines. Does anyone know how to further parallelize merging (or for that matter, heaps) ?
There are entire classes of sorting algorithms for multiprocessor machines, including algorithms optimized for shared versus non-uniform memory architectures, message passing, sorting networks, and much much more. In general for m processors, sorting becomes an O(n log n / m) problem just as you'd expect (or hope).
I would be stunned if Linux doesn't "infringe" on some patent that Microsoft holds.
An excellent project for anyone who cares about software patents would be to do the search themselves. Look for some of the garbage patents Microsoft owns on stuff that might cover things in open source software, and challenge them on obviousness and prior art grounds. Since the Supreme Court ruled that patents can now be challenged directly without first requiring an infringement suit to be filed by the owner, instead of whining about how Microsoft is spreading FUD, the open source community could find and crush a Microsoft patent, claim victory, and repeat. Every patent invalidated is one less patent Linux "might" infringe on. Pretty soon Microsoft will just shut up and maybe even apologize instead of having their patents slowly whittled away.
Does anyone else remember "way back when" in the mid-90s the internet would start to drag around lunch time and again around dinner time? Somehow, I don't think we'll swing back to that point, but the whining in the article sure seems fearful.
Clearly the entire Internet, the world wide communications network, was sensitive to your local time zones. Did it happen to respect Daylight Savings Time changes in its daily slowdown as well? You don't suppose that might have been localized or anything?
You appear to be blaming the Internet for the results of having 60 people on a ~3Mb pipe, when in reality the problem is that you have less than 1/20th the bandwidth per person than they do at home. Of course it's going to be slow. As usual, the problem in the U.S. is incredibly expensive client connections. If the Internet was the problem, you wouldn't be able to send your email or even get to youtube because everyone else would be clogging all the bandwidth. Throttling your tiny bandwidth probably won't help if most of the users need to use the web to do their job. Modern sites just don't work well at modem speeds, which is what your bandwidth averages out to.
Networks are distributed by nature, so it just means you can't pipe all the data thru centralized routers. You are going to have to setup an infrastrute that can do very basic routing in a spider web. You can route packets very quickly if you just look at the first octect...and forward along to another router. All 1.xxx.xxx.xxx thru 5.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can be piped to a router that knows about those routes, and even breaks it down further. If you think about it they don't even need to do that they can just take the packet and load balance to many other devices. I think it'll be a while before we can't route faster...it is not like faster switching rates is completely dead.
Once again, the problem is client connections. You are the one in a star network with a single provider serving lots of other customers in the same way. Fix it. Set up BGP another couple service providers and then you'll not only have redundant hosting but a more distributed routing model as well.
Sidenote: That damned GoogleBot sometimes hits my sites 5000 times a day -- maybe Google is doing a little more to aggravate the problem than they want to admit? Thankfully I use server-side compression and caching, so things aren't hammered too bad by the bot, but there have been times when things on my end were running slow and I had 100 "Guests" all registered at Google's IPs.
Configure robots.txt or move your servers off port 80 if you don't actually want visitors to your site. If Google is thrashing on dynamic pages, fix your pages or stick them in the robots file. If you just serve up thousands of bloated "content" pages, then I guess it serves you right. After all, you put them on a public network.
I walked out secure in the knowledge that short of melting the platters down the data can *always* be recovered.
Encrypt. I guarantee that even if the NSA can break AES, they won't do it for anything short of top secret cases that will never see the light of day. Breaking random drives encrypted with AES or any other modern cipher would disclose their ability to break that cipher and no one would use it anymore, removing their advantage.
Not a patent, breach of copyright. The penrose tiling cannot be patented as it is a mathematical discovery. The patterns in Penrose's books are copyrighted.
I'd like to see the book that can hold the entire penrose tiling. Why didn't the stupid tissue company just pick a different part of the plane to print on their tissue?
"Without the maths", he said, "You can't argue that they understood the maths" and, he continued, "if they never expressed their finding in mathematical terms (i.e. in formulas with proofs) - then it isn't maths anyway - its just architecture"
Here's a question for your math/philosopher teacher then: Do planets need formulas to obey their orbits properly? If not, what is doing the mathematics? Therefore, formulas are not necessary to perform mathematics, anything that actually *does* mathematics is sufficient. Formulas are just rules that our brains use to perform mathematics with the collection of electrons and chemicals in our brains. Somewhere in there, matter is changing state according to the rules written down as a formula, either modeling the formula itself or the objects it represents. If the same changes occur without looking at the formula, who can claim that mathematics is not taking place?
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He used the analogy that they were like bubbles in the water. Ok, where did the water come from?
Air bubbles are not made out of water. The water doesn't have to exist for air bubbles to exist, in fact a "bubble" of air can exist in pure vacuum, it's just an ever expanding bubble because there's no pressure to keep it in one place. So just replace "water" with "nothing" or "The Void" to get the idea. All it means is that the forces keeping the universe the shape it is are internal instead of external, as in the case of an air bubble in water.
This is the same sort of blind faith that most atheists pompously deride the religious for. In fact, based on this summary, it would be called something to the effect of a "load of religious bullshit" if it came from a preacher. Oooh, theoretical physicist says it, so we'll hear him out!
The biggest problem with calling theoretical physicists mere preachers is that you are currently using a computer that was made possible by theoretical physics (semiconductors are a direct result of the quantum nature of the universe. Understanding quantum mechanics is necessary to create modern computers). No amount of praying or conjuring has ever caused a computational device to descend from the heavens.
So did the music by any chance start out with a big percussion note?
While I have the means to buy a digital TV, I am not about to say that it is fair we cut people who don't have the means off. I would call it a problem, and big or small this should be solved.
Yes, heaven forbid we should cut off the information feed into their heads. They might form their own opinions and vote third party candidates into office or something!
From an external point of view, a government that wont pay for subsidised heating in a country where people can freeze to death but will pay for subsidised digital TV tuners is seriously fucked up, absolutely mind boggling. Yeah sure, the MPAA and the RIAA aren't running your country.
I think it's more insidious. If half the population suddenly decides not to watch TV, especially with the 2008 presidential elections right around the corner, the current political parties are royally screwed. The only reason the current parties are in power is because of television and to a lesser extent radio. Without television, there's no way for rich people to fill everyone else's heads with their idea of who should be elected, and no one in power wants their power to revert to the common people.
The latter would be a lot cheaper since there's no need to get anyone back again. For a further economy just rename Venus and send them there...
I'd go for slapping the Stupid sticker on Earth and just leaving, too. As soon as desktop fabrication is good enough, I'm building a spaceship.
are the new Jews? Really? Doesn't it make some difference that the Islamists are actually engaged in varieties of evil such as the Nazis falsely accused the Jews of?
So far, a few thousand people claiming to be Muslim have committed terrorist acts. There are more citizens of almost every nation on earth who have raped, killed, and tortured their fellow citizens than there are Muslim terrorists. Terrorism is not the problem, authoritarian governments oppressing foreign nations and supporting nations that do the same is the root problem and terrorism is just the symptom. Sure, religious fundamentalism is dangerous, but ultimately it can't be eradicated without massive bloodshed. It just needs to be contained, that's all. Bombing the hell out of countries just acts like natural selection for the worst and strongest terrorists who can survive it, and the collateral damage makes finding new recruits at the orphanage quite easy.
Note how he uses words like "might" and "perhaps". The politicians have no clue how it could possibly be implemented.
Note that verifying ages is not going to stop 14 year old girls from talking to 18 year old guys, either. What are they supposed to do, prevent children from viewing the myspace profiles of adults and vice versa? Maybe the government should just build a Children's Earth and send all the children there, and ship them back when they turn 18. Maybe they should also build a Stupid Idiot planet and go there themselves.
Better question: Would you let somebody with obvious mental instability babysit your $1.3 billion kid?
Good question. The GDP of the United States is $12.98 trillion according to The CIA, but we still have Bush.
If I do trust it's legit, do I trust the people running it to not make critical mistakes that could compromise my data?
If the answer is "no" or "I don't know" then I may be looking for alternatives.
If you think "legitimate" ISPs protect your data, you probably haven't heard of things like Carnivore or Eschelon, right? Well, keep being a good little citizen then. Move along, nothing to see here.
Really though, how could *any* ISP make critical mistakes with your data? Route it to the wrong address or drop the packets? That's what TCP is for. An Internet connection is just an endpoint to stuff packets into and hopefully get packets from, that's all. Anything you put in those packets is entirely your problem to protect with encryption and authentication.
So, the reason some people would choose to believe in a god is that they'd prefer to live in a world with a moral absolute. Otherwise their decisions and actions are fairly meaningless beyond their own gratification.
This is as good an explanation as any for why a European might accept Christianity, but does nothing to explain how a Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Muslim, or Jew is supposed to find it a good idea. After all, if you've already got a pretty good idea of how the supernatural or natural world works, what's one more contradictory explanation worth? Picking moral absolutes is a function of human society, and if they have to invent monsters to torture the nonbelievers until science discovers personality disorders and effective behavior adjustment so be it. Notice that we haven't solved our social behavior problems, so until we do religion will still find some use in keeping some of the people too scared to misbehave.
It's obvious that Citibank, BofA, Visa, etc. aren't ever going to do anything to stop identity theft, maybe it's time the government starts doing something about it. If ReadID helps, it would be a big step forward on that front. I don't care if it has to be sold to the public using terrorism, because it's still an improvement over what we have today.
I rarely have to show my ID when I'm using a credit card physically, and absolutely never has a website required a copy or scan of my ID. It's silly, it doesn't prevent fraud, and it *costs taxpayers money*! It's just a scheme to fund $Business that creates ID cards that's related to some congresscritter.
I have used Vista, I do not like it, it's intrusive and annoying to me (yes I do want to run that exe), I personally don't care about eye candy, I am into performance which vista does not have unless you are running a state of the art proc, 4 gig's of RAM and a high end graphics card (which none have decent drivers as of yet) I'm not going to get into the DRM portion of Vista.
For all the time Microsoft wasted on Vista, I can't believe all they did was throw more dialog boxes in front of applications. Where's the privilege separation? Where's the capability based access to personal files? What the hell were they doing for 5 years, anyway? The proper way to handle "untrusted" applications is to run them as a dummy user with no filesystem or network rights, essentially sandboxing them. Use the common file dialogs or something similar to grant rights to files that the user picks for them. It really wasn't beyond Microsoft to implement a proper capability system like this, but they seemed more interested in matching Apple's UI.
Leave the CDs to be found by office secretaries & receptionists. They talk to everyone and love gossip.
They're also security experts, every last one of them. They'll know *exactly* what that zero day exploit with example code is.
The DMCA didn't make it illegal to "back up" DVDs. That has always been true of audiovisual works; the reproduction right (17 USC 106) is exclusively reserved to the copyright holder, there's no AHRA-like carveout for movies / TV shows / other A/V works, and the "backup" provisions of 17 USC 117 apply only to computer software -- MPEG2-encoded A/V content is still A/V content, not computer software. The DMCA might have made it (theoretically) harder to reproduce DVDs, what with the anti-circumvention provisions, but no 'right' or legal ability to make a backup copy of an A/V work existed before the DMCA.
I won't believe that nonsense until the RIAA has some way of ripping the memory of a song out of my head, and the MPAA can rip the memories of a movie I've seen out as well. Until then, there's no point in making arbitrary distinctions between wetware and software backups of copyrighted works. Fuck copyright. It's dead. The *AA are just worms gorging on the corpse, and when it's gone the worms die too.
Where does that leave the competition?
How about AHEAD, looking back and chuckling as Microsoft struggles to catch up?
Let me preface this by saying that I am a conservative Christian. Now, I have done some research and found out that most electronic devices that emit photons and audio waves have a switch which allows me to turn them off. The effort required to do that is even less than it is for me to get incensed and make a complaint. Why don't other people get this? Don't want to see it? Turn it off. Don't want the kids to see it? Turn it off.
My guess is it's the people who leave their kids with the TV all night and always leave their keys in the car (possibly in the ignition) who are the most irate. "What if junior craws into the garage and starts the car because of what he done seen on teevee?" Turning a free babysitter off or remembering where they put their keys are things that are fundamentally beyond the intelligence of the type of people who are complaining.
While I don't mind seeing stupid people die, their children shouldn't be doomed to the same fate. Statistically, only 50% of stupid people's children are themselves stupid, so we should at least protect the 25% of smart children with stupid parents, hmm?
Since the article has nothing, I wanted to ask: has anyone implemented merge sort where you merge from both the front and back using two simultaneous threads ? I haven't seen this anywhere, but it's an obvious improvement for multicore machines. Does anyone know how to further parallelize merging (or for that matter, heaps) ?
There are entire classes of sorting algorithms for multiprocessor machines, including algorithms optimized for shared versus non-uniform memory architectures, message passing, sorting networks, and much much more. In general for m processors, sorting becomes an O(n log n / m) problem just as you'd expect (or hope).
I would be stunned if Linux doesn't "infringe" on some patent that Microsoft holds.
An excellent project for anyone who cares about software patents would be to do the search themselves. Look for some of the garbage patents Microsoft owns on stuff that might cover things in open source software, and challenge them on obviousness and prior art grounds. Since the Supreme Court ruled that patents can now be challenged directly without first requiring an infringement suit to be filed by the owner, instead of whining about how Microsoft is spreading FUD, the open source community could find and crush a Microsoft patent, claim victory, and repeat. Every patent invalidated is one less patent Linux "might" infringe on. Pretty soon Microsoft will just shut up and maybe even apologize instead of having their patents slowly whittled away.
I'm only 3!
Does anyone else remember "way back when" in the mid-90s the internet would start to drag around lunch time and again around dinner time? Somehow, I don't think we'll swing back to that point, but the whining in the article sure seems fearful.
Clearly the entire Internet, the world wide communications network, was sensitive to your local time zones. Did it happen to respect Daylight Savings Time changes in its daily slowdown as well? You don't suppose that might have been localized or anything?
You appear to be blaming the Internet for the results of having 60 people on a ~3Mb pipe, when in reality the problem is that you have less than 1/20th the bandwidth per person than they do at home. Of course it's going to be slow. As usual, the problem in the U.S. is incredibly expensive client connections. If the Internet was the problem, you wouldn't be able to send your email or even get to youtube because everyone else would be clogging all the bandwidth. Throttling your tiny bandwidth probably won't help if most of the users need to use the web to do their job. Modern sites just don't work well at modem speeds, which is what your bandwidth averages out to.
Networks are distributed by nature, so it just means you can't pipe all the data thru centralized routers. You are going to have to setup an infrastrute that can do very basic routing in a spider web. You can route packets very quickly if you just look at the first octect...and forward along to another router. All 1.xxx.xxx.xxx thru 5.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can be piped to a router that knows about those routes, and even breaks it down further. If you think about it they don't even need to do that they can just take the packet and load balance to many other devices. I think it'll be a while before we can't route faster...it is not like faster switching rates is completely dead.
Once again, the problem is client connections. You are the one in a star network with a single provider serving lots of other customers in the same way. Fix it. Set up BGP another couple service providers and then you'll not only have redundant hosting but a more distributed routing model as well.
Sidenote: That damned GoogleBot sometimes hits my sites 5000 times a day -- maybe Google is doing a little more to aggravate the problem than they want to admit? Thankfully I use server-side compression and caching, so things aren't hammered too bad by the bot, but there have been times when things on my end were running slow and I had 100 "Guests" all registered at Google's IPs.
Configure robots.txt or move your servers off port 80 if you don't actually want visitors to your site. If Google is thrashing on dynamic pages, fix your pages or stick them in the robots file. If you just serve up thousands of bloated "content" pages, then I guess it serves you right. After all, you put them on a public network.
I walked out secure in the knowledge that short of melting the platters down the data can *always* be recovered.
Encrypt. I guarantee that even if the NSA can break AES, they won't do it for anything short of top secret cases that will never see the light of day. Breaking random drives encrypted with AES or any other modern cipher would disclose their ability to break that cipher and no one would use it anymore, removing their advantage.
Not a patent, breach of copyright. The penrose tiling cannot be patented as it is a mathematical discovery. The patterns in Penrose's books are copyrighted.
I'd like to see the book that can hold the entire penrose tiling. Why didn't the stupid tissue company just pick a different part of the plane to print on their tissue?
"Without the maths", he said, "You can't argue that they understood the maths" and, he continued, "if they never expressed their finding in mathematical terms (i.e. in formulas with proofs) - then it isn't maths anyway - its just architecture"
Here's a question for your math/philosopher teacher then: Do planets need formulas to obey their orbits properly? If not, what is doing the mathematics? Therefore, formulas are not necessary to perform mathematics, anything that actually *does* mathematics is sufficient. Formulas are just rules that our brains use to perform mathematics with the collection of electrons and chemicals in our brains. Somewhere in there, matter is changing state according to the rules written down as a formula, either modeling the formula itself or the objects it represents. If the same changes occur without looking at the formula, who can claim that mathematics is not taking place?