But, honestly, of course they are about profits, they operate in AMERICA, a capatalist economy. Hmm, you mean that they want to succeed and crush competition?
The original poster does have a point though, if you interpret his recommendation to boycot WalMart to mean that we (the consumers) should change our habits so that we don't shop there as long as they don't care about us or our privacy. In other words, make it so that respecting customers translates into profits. And that's perfectly valid, actually the preferred, way for consumers to change behaviour of corporations in capitalistic system. (The other way would be making laws that restrict use of RFID tags, which in captilistic society should only be used as a last resort measure since it interferes with competition and free market.)
Plants have been used in all kinds of games throughout the history, such as "hit a ball with a wooden bat and run", "let's hang somebody!" and "hey, try smoking *this*, dude!".
EXTREME measures and controls are normally in place in order to completely eliminate possible bleeding between classified and unclassified networks...
So true. It's not just unplugging the network cables, this can in fact go to the extremes like having no windows in the rooms and having some level of protection against electromagnetic spying, such as entire rooms being faraday cages...
Makes me wonder if forests also act like this as well... forests are very old, in fact the rainforests of Australia have existed since well before the breakup of Gondwana and are probably 100 million years old and trees do signal one another via chemical messages I recall.
Check out Gaia Theory. And no, it's not some metaphysical or spiritual "Earth has a soul" type crap, but rather something like this tree thing in the article, except on global scale, and across species. The basic idea is that life on Earth not only passively affects Earth's biosphere while living in it, but actually regulates it (slowly, over long perioids of time) to create and maintain optimal environment for itself. For example our atmosphere is chemically quite unstable, yet almost unchanging over long long perioids of time. Is it just accident it stays almost stable, not varying from one extreme to other, or is there a more complex global mechanism?
Anyway, I don't see what's interesting about calling this computation. Air transmits sounds by local interactions of gas particles and the speed of transmission is modulated by density. But I don't see what is gained by claiming that the air is solving a computation to transmit sound at the right speed!
Well, there is no right speed of sound, and speed of sound is determined very locally, by the interaction of immediatly neighbouring molecules, and stays about the same regardless of conditions a mere hundred molecules away.
If I understand correctly, the point is that a plant is able to optimize it's gas intake/output without any actual nervous system or central controlling unit, and that for this type of a problem, this might actually be the optimal way of solving the problem.
And problem it is, for plants. Do it wrong and die (either directly or by being suffocated on more successful plant neighbours). So unlike with sound propagation in air, there is an optimal way to do it, perhaps even several almost optimal ways, so a choice is involved. The plant that is able to choose best wins. (Note: I'm not implying concious choice here, any more than a "choice" made by neural network software is concious).
Actually, one of the big obstacles to using hydrogen as a fuel is that it ISN'T very easily transportable. As a gas, you have to employ very high pressures that involve expensive tanks. Compress it all the way to a liquid and you've burned up so much energy that its no longer attractive as a more efficient source. Chemical storage (metal hydrides, etc) is being researched, but AFAIK, it isn't ready to be main-streamed.
I wonder if, when using nuclear power plant to make H_2, it would be possible to get the produced gas compressed efficiently as part of the operation of the nuclear plant, which involves high pressures anyway. Obiviously it would still take power, but if there was a clever way to partially use power that would otherwise go to waste, it would still be almost free.
Just like we have manners at the dinner table, we should have manners when in a business enviroment. Following such standards will help one out immensely come review time.
Yeah, but in this case, the standards are like having to eat with toothpicks in a dinner table... Changing the expected manners to "using knife and fork", ie somewhat normal language, would benefit everybody (except lawyers of course).
Any way about it, it's probably safe to assume that the voting program probably really is a chunk of manure.
You wish! I bet it's carefully crafted to allow insertion of votes only by Pentagon, and is actually quite secure from everybody else. That's far from manure, more apt comparison would be a modern waste processing plant, filtering out the undesired material...
More like stupid *cough*marketing*cough* execs and droids (meaning those who don't even quite grasp what an "operating system" is; if you're in marketing but reading this, the chances are you're not one of 'em;-) not wanting to deal with or learn Internet reality. So they don't hesitate to click on an e-mail attachment any more than they hesitate to open a letter.
I mean, if this isn't newsworthy, then what is? New version of software/OS X, or latest episode of SCO comedy, or some new columnt about evil/good [MR]IAA versus good/evil P2P?
Uhh, they do have a whitelist of senders who've subscribed to their service. They also have a blacklist of IP addresses that've abused the SWE. Of course whitelisting requires that you can correctly figure out which IP connected to your MX (not always trivial).
Yes, but at least last week I got spam mails that got marked as non-spam, and I'm pretty sure they weren't from white-listed addresses, which means that filters (well, at least SpamAssasin) considered their marking to be sign of non-spam even though they were not whitelisted. Which was exactly my point, spam filters will be forced to make to so that white-listing is not optional, it's required, and thus it lessens value of Habeas's service in cases where whitelists might not get updated fast enough etc, getting mail of their legitimate, paying customers to be blocked more easily.
I believe they also employ blacklisting marked mail from servers that have sent such mail without license, and also whitelist of servers that have valid license.
So if a spam coming from whatever DSL Windows Zombie gets reported to them, they add that one IP to their blacklist, which is supposed to be only used to filter mail with their haiku mark so it doesn't even affact legitimate mail from that IP, only mail that has their mark faked.
Re:China's military plan? Human Wave Attacks!
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 1
Where it counts, America still has massive technological superiority in the aerospace field, and will likely maintain it during the next 10-20 years, even if NASA as we know it disappears.
It's massive *potential* superiority, and maybe even not so massive at that. Until there's something concrete, such as actual ability to launch a man on the moon, not just technology to do it in X years with better technology than anybody else in even 2*X years, it doesn't mean much.
Of course with this announcement by GWB might mean that US is once again prepared to start doing something about it instaead of flying 20 year old shuttles that never did what was expected of them... However, if this doesn't happen, potential advantage remains potential, then better technology will be little consolidation if somewhat inferior Chinese (or Indian, or Russian, or whatever) technology actually gets the job, like a moon base(s) at strategic location(s) on the Moon, done first.
It's an interesting idea, I really hope it'll work too.
Unfortunately I think they might need to make it so that they couple it with a white-list, ie *all* mail with their signature that is *not* on their whitelist is assumed to be spam... Otherwise there will just be too much spam specifically intended to make their service useless, actually harmful to their customers... There'll even be fake spam designed to be hard to track, just to force people to filter out any mail with their delivery and thus forcing them out of business:-/
Re:China's military plan? Human Wave Attacks!
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
We don't hear much about China's space program because they're ~20 years behind us.:P
Things in space exploration have been so slow, or at least so unspectacular, during last 20 years, that we're often forgetting that it took only about 10 years from the first American in orbit to the first American on the Moon... And that was with nobody having done it before, with 1960's technology and with much less general data on the moon than today. I'd imagine it'd be quite possibe for China to get a man to the moon in 5 years. Technically possible at least, financially might be a different matter...
That's still a democratically elected government...
Though that 25% turnout sounds awfully low. Are Brits really that lazy? In EU they're not doing a disservice just for their own country, but for every country in EU by not being interested in who's running their country...:-(
I'm pretty sure the EU *comission* can't hand out fines or anything. Everything like that still has to go through the court. Of course if a company breaks whatever laws and gets taken to court by the comission, there's pretty high chance of them being found quilty, I suppose...
Also, it's not that much of a semi-dictatorship, and definitely not totally undemocratic. Individual countries (basically their democratically elected governments) nominate their own commissaries. Though once in the comission, they are supposed to work exclusively for the EU, not for their own country.
Or even easier to send it out of the entire solar system!
You see, the thing with space is that things don't just "fall in", any more than Earth does. If you reduce orbital speed, the orbit just becomes an ellipse. You have to kill almost all of the orbital speed before you would collide with Sun, and IIRC that speed change is actually *more* than what is needed for exiting the solar system entirely.
Like what, exactly? I love science -- I ought to, I'm a scientist at a genomics center. But the whole trend of even Earth-bound science is to do as much as possible by machine, and just have the humans look at the *data*. People don't sequence by hand any more -- there are automated sequencing machines. So the whole idea of manned spaceflight just looks anachronistic to me -- something out of the 19th century age of gentlemen explorers. As far as science is concerned, robots in space are far more useful than people. They just make less exciting TV.
Call me an inpractical romantic, but at least I have this funny notion that I'd like us humans to go to space, not just our legacy in the form of machines whos "ancestors" were made by us...
The more we do with robots only, the farther away we drift from this dream of mine. The modern society could never have done something like settling the Americas either of the two times (by ancestors of American Indians first, and by Europeans more recently), simply because it took too many lives. Extrapolating this, soon sending people to space at all will be unthinkable, because they *gasp* might die. So if we wait until we can send someone to Mars and bring him back relatively safely, it might be we won't have the guts to send anybody out there at all, and human race will be trapped on Earth (at least until a major cultural revolution overthrowing some of our "modern" cultural values).
That being said, I'd still wait at least to the point where we can build some kind of a colony that will potentially last several years without a resupply (basically calling for a small nuclear reactor), and "forever" with resupply from Earth every now and then... So even if it were a one-way mission, it would not automatically be a suicide mission, just one way mission with a very high risk.
where you're worried about the blood's ability to contain its nitrogen, and thus, about the blood boiling.
I think that's only issue when pressure goes lower rapidly. As long as pressure goes low slowly enough, the nitrogen can get out of the blood slowly, and you avoid those potentially lethal nitrogen bubbles in the blood.
It's same thing with diving, professional divers sometimes stay in high pressure for days (either at the bottom of a sea, or resting in a pressure chamber), then when the work is done they're slowly (over many days) returned to normal pressure so the extra nitrogen in their blood goes out with normal breathing, instead of forming bubbles.
This is a common misconception. Earthquakes are not caused by a long term build-up of pressure which is released. They are caused when moving tectonic plates catch on each other and then break loose.
Still, I do believe it takes considerable time for energy to build up before we get big quakes. Considerable time, as in at least weeks.
Though I'm no expert, so I could be wrong... But I find it hard to believe such huge amounts of energy can just build up and then be released as an earthquake in a time any shorter than that. We're talking about bigger quakes here, mind you. Smaller quakes probably are faster, but they're also less desttructive and therefore less important to predict.
But if you have actual knowledge on the matter (which I don't), feel free to educate me on how things really happen:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The original poster does have a point though, if you interpret his recommendation to boycot WalMart to mean that we (the consumers) should change our habits so that we don't shop there as long as they don't care about us or our privacy. In other words, make it so that respecting customers translates into profits. And that's perfectly valid, actually the preferred, way for consumers to change behaviour of corporations in capitalistic system. (The other way would be making laws that restrict use of RFID tags, which in captilistic society should only be used as a last resort measure since it interferes with competition and free market.)
Plants have been used in all kinds of games throughout the history, such as "hit a ball with a wooden bat and run", "let's hang somebody!" and "hey, try smoking *this*, dude!".
So true. It's not just unplugging the network cables, this can in fact go to the extremes like having no windows in the rooms and having some level of protection against electromagnetic spying, such as entire rooms being faraday cages...
Check out Gaia Theory. And no, it's not some metaphysical or spiritual "Earth has a soul" type crap, but rather something like this tree thing in the article, except on global scale, and across species. The basic idea is that life on Earth not only passively affects Earth's biosphere while living in it, but actually regulates it (slowly, over long perioids of time) to create and maintain optimal environment for itself. For example our atmosphere is chemically quite unstable, yet almost unchanging over long long perioids of time. Is it just accident it stays almost stable, not varying from one extreme to other, or is there a more complex global mechanism?
Well, there is no right speed of sound, and speed of sound is determined very locally, by the interaction of immediatly neighbouring molecules, and stays about the same regardless of conditions a mere hundred molecules away.
If I understand correctly, the point is that a plant is able to optimize it's gas intake/output without any actual nervous system or central controlling unit, and that for this type of a problem, this might actually be the optimal way of solving the problem.
And problem it is, for plants. Do it wrong and die (either directly or by being suffocated on more successful plant neighbours). So unlike with sound propagation in air, there is an optimal way to do it, perhaps even several almost optimal ways, so a choice is involved. The plant that is able to choose best wins. (Note: I'm not implying concious choice here, any more than a "choice" made by neural network software is concious).
I wonder if, when using nuclear power plant to make H_2, it would be possible to get the produced gas compressed efficiently as part of the operation of the nuclear plant, which involves high pressures anyway. Obiviously it would still take power, but if there was a clever way to partially use power that would otherwise go to waste, it would still be almost free.
Yeah, but in this case, the standards are like having to eat with toothpicks in a dinner table... Changing the expected manners to "using knife and fork", ie somewhat normal language, would benefit everybody (except lawyers of course).
You wish! I bet it's carefully crafted to allow insertion of votes only by Pentagon, and is actually quite secure from everybody else. That's far from manure, more apt comparison would be a modern waste processing plant, filtering out the undesired material...
More like stupid *cough*marketing*cough* execs and droids (meaning those who don't even quite grasp what an "operating system" is; if you're in marketing but reading this, the chances are you're not one of 'em ;-) not wanting to deal with or learn Internet reality. So they don't hesitate to click on an e-mail attachment any more than they hesitate to open a letter.
Unique? No.
Newsworthy? Definitely.
I mean, if this isn't newsworthy, then what is? New version of software/OS X, or latest episode of SCO comedy, or some new columnt about evil/good [MR]IAA versus good/evil P2P?
Yes, but at least last week I got spam mails that got marked as non-spam, and I'm pretty sure they weren't from white-listed addresses, which means that filters (well, at least SpamAssasin) considered their marking to be sign of non-spam even though they were not whitelisted. Which was exactly my point, spam filters will be forced to make to so that white-listing is not optional, it's required, and thus it lessens value of Habeas's service in cases where whitelists might not get updated fast enough etc, getting mail of their legitimate, paying customers to be blocked more easily.
It's expected that installation program will take care of the gritty details like environment settings... And remove them with uninstall too.
And this is good.
I believe they also employ blacklisting marked mail from servers that have sent such mail without license, and also whitelist of servers that have valid license.
So if a spam coming from whatever DSL Windows Zombie gets reported to them, they add that one IP to their blacklist, which is supposed to be only used to filter mail with their haiku mark so it doesn't even affact legitimate mail from that IP, only mail that has their mark faked.
It's massive *potential* superiority, and maybe even not so massive at that. Until there's something concrete, such as actual ability to launch a man on the moon, not just technology to do it in X years with better technology than anybody else in even 2*X years, it doesn't mean much.
Of course with this announcement by GWB might mean that US is once again prepared to start doing something about it instaead of flying 20 year old shuttles that never did what was expected of them... However, if this doesn't happen, potential advantage remains potential, then better technology will be little consolidation if somewhat inferior Chinese (or Indian, or Russian, or whatever) technology actually gets the job, like a moon base(s) at strategic location(s) on the Moon, done first.
It's an interesting idea, I really hope it'll work too.
:-/
Unfortunately I think they might need to make it so that they couple it with a white-list, ie *all* mail with their signature that is *not* on their whitelist is assumed to be spam... Otherwise there will just be too much spam specifically intended to make their service useless, actually harmful to their customers... There'll even be fake spam designed to be hard to track, just to force people to filter out any mail with their delivery and thus forcing them out of business
Things in space exploration have been so slow, or at least so unspectacular, during last 20 years, that we're often forgetting that it took only about 10 years from the first American in orbit to the first American on the Moon... And that was with nobody having done it before, with 1960's technology and with much less general data on the moon than today. I'd imagine it'd be quite possibe for China to get a man to the moon in 5 years. Technically possible at least, financially might be a different matter...
That's still a democratically elected government...
:-(
Though that 25% turnout sounds awfully low. Are Brits really that lazy? In EU they're not doing a disservice just for their own country, but for every country in EU by not being interested in who's running their country...
I'm pretty sure the EU *comission* can't hand out fines or anything. Everything like that still has to go through the court. Of course if a company breaks whatever laws and gets taken to court by the comission, there's pretty high chance of them being found quilty, I suppose...
Also, it's not that much of a semi-dictatorship, and definitely not totally undemocratic. Individual countries (basically their democratically elected governments) nominate their own commissaries. Though once in the comission, they are supposed to work exclusively for the EU, not for their own country.
Or even easier to send it out of the entire solar system!
You see, the thing with space is that things don't just "fall in", any more than Earth does. If you reduce orbital speed, the orbit just becomes an ellipse. You have to kill almost all of the orbital speed before you would collide with Sun, and IIRC that speed change is actually *more* than what is needed for exiting the solar system entirely.
Call me an inpractical romantic, but at least I have this funny notion that I'd like us humans to go to space, not just our legacy in the form of machines whos "ancestors" were made by us...
The more we do with robots only, the farther away we drift from this dream of mine. The modern society could never have done something like settling the Americas either of the two times (by ancestors of American Indians first, and by Europeans more recently), simply because it took too many lives. Extrapolating this, soon sending people to space at all will be unthinkable, because they *gasp* might die. So if we wait until we can send someone to Mars and bring him back relatively safely, it might be we won't have the guts to send anybody out there at all, and human race will be trapped on Earth (at least until a major cultural revolution overthrowing some of our "modern" cultural values).
That being said, I'd still wait at least to the point where we can build some kind of a colony that will potentially last several years without a resupply (basically calling for a small nuclear reactor), and "forever" with resupply from Earth every now and then... So even if it were a one-way mission, it would not automatically be a suicide mission, just one way mission with a very high risk.
I don't think so. It's "flowers and bees" thing, except substitue "bees" with "carrion flies"...
I think that's only issue when pressure goes lower rapidly. As long as pressure goes low slowly enough, the nitrogen can get out of the blood slowly, and you avoid those potentially lethal nitrogen bubbles in the blood.
It's same thing with diving, professional divers sometimes stay in high pressure for days (either at the bottom of a sea, or resting in a pressure chamber), then when the work is done they're slowly (over many days) returned to normal pressure so the extra nitrogen in their blood goes out with normal breathing, instead of forming bubbles.
Still, I do believe it takes considerable time for energy to build up before we get big quakes. Considerable time, as in at least weeks.
Though I'm no expert, so I could be wrong... But I find it hard to believe such huge amounts of energy can just build up and then be released as an earthquake in a time any shorter than that. We're talking about bigger quakes here, mind you. Smaller quakes probably are faster, but they're also less desttructive and therefore less important to predict.
But if you have actual knowledge on the matter (which I don't), feel free to educate me on how things really happen
Anarchy perhaps, but perhaps more commonly they just want to make a "honest" buck off other people's work...
They could certainly use this kind of techniques to improve their results...
Then again, in a way they already use something like this, except they're only really concerned about links, not actual contents of pages...