Talk about an effective way to teach people to differentiate the two...
I think nine years is too long; it creates a tax burden. The bastard cost all of us money by spamming, and in jail he'd continue to cost us money.
I think America should institute public flogging instead of jail time. While I for one don't give a shit if this guy rots in jail or gets off with a fine, I would definitely tune in and watch him take a lash for every million spam messages sent. That's some reality television I could go for. And I bet you he'd never forget the lesson, and anyone else thinking about committing a crime would hopefully think twice.
Forget about "cruel and unusual punishment". Punishment should be cruel, otherwise it isn't punishment. And flogging is only unusual in the context of modern times; it wasn't too long ago that gallows and whipping posts were commonplace in this country. Just beat the man senseless, bandage his wounds, and let him be on his way.
Jail is just a place for criminals to network and get educated in how to commit other crimes.
As a fellow fencer, you are an *idiot*. To start with, fencing is getting unpopular enough as it is, you want to start shocking people?
As a spectator, I've never been interested in fencing. However, if the competitors started getting zapped, I'd tune in and watch.:) But I'd be even less likely to ever give participating in it a shot.
Are you just being silly? Think about a TiVo, which records video real-time continuously while powered on. DirecTiVo systems can and do record two video streams at times, while playing back a third. All using regular old IDE hard drives.
Compiling some software for a few hours is a drop in the bucket.
So, my phone is just about as basic as it could get, and most of the bare minimum features it came with, I'm just not using. I store about two dozen phone numbers on it, I call people, I accept incoming calls, and I use my voicemail. I've never used text messaging, or played a game on my cell phone. I don't want my phone to be a substandard camera; if I want to take pictures I want a multi-megapixel digital jobbie with real optics in it. I think pop music ringtones are just stupid; I keep my phone in my pocket on vibrate most of the time just so I don't come off as a giant anus every time someone rings me up when I'm in a public place.
But, instead of just ranting about how I think all this extra whizz-bang is wasteful, stupid, and whatnot, I spent a couple minutes thinking about what I *would* like to have in my cellphone. What extra feature would I pay to have? I've got a good idea. A genius one:
Television and Radio. Once, many years ago, I owned a handheld backlit LCD television. It was a thing of beauty; a few ounces of mass, a two-inch screen, and a telescoping antenna. It was great to have in lots of places. It had a 1/8" mono jack for plugging in headphones or an earpiece. Its integrated speaker was adequate as well.
Now, this was about ten years ago. I know the technology for LCDs has come a long way. I know that device would easily fit into a cellphone today. So, do it. And add AM/FM radio. Then, give me TiVo functionality for the TV and radio (I'm sure the television video scaled down for the phone display would compress pretty damn well!). If my phone had all that, I could justify paying for a hard drive in it.
Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers
So do I. SuSE 9.2, KDE. As an aside, the SuSE 9.2 Professional retail box was one hell of a purchase.
but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly
Neither could I, at first, because the drivers SuSE 9.2 has are inadequate. You have to download and install a better driver from the NVidia Web site and install 'em. You won't get the driver through SuSE updates, either, presumably because the driver comes with the "kernel taint" of its closed-source nature. However, the NVidia video driver install for Linux has always been very good and the latest x64 Linux driver is no exception.
KDE is very pretty these days. Once I got the driver issue solved, it's also as snappy as can be.
It's much more difficult for your typical criminal to steal your fingerprint, esp. if it requires having a decent educational background just to understand how the biometric device works.
Yeah, just like it requires programming skill and detailed knowledge of TCP/IP for a script kiddie to launch a DOS attack or infect a Windows machine with a trojan?
The analogy fits very well. Just like it's only the idiot Windows users who are vulnerable to the idiot script kiddies, so will the complacent and ignorant biometrics users be the victims of thugs who learn to copy a trick created by someone with the skills to create the exploit.
"Won't make $12 billion because the services are overpriced."
Meanwhile, truckers are starting to buy and use laptops on the road, and WiFi access can now be had at almost any pit stop along their routes at prices that are somewhere between dialup and broadband. Here is a WiFi provider that clearly understands its market. Put the hammer down and watch out for Smokey, yo!
... I think Enterprise is finally hitting its groove
I think Enterprise got stuck back in its groove of crappy writing. Take the last episode, for example. Here it is in a nutshell: "humans are special, they are different than ALL OTHER RACES, they are more compassionate and willing to take risks, so they should eventually be First Contacted by some superadvanced aliens."
Excuse me while I go vomit. It's thinly disguised xenophobia and megalomania. That, and these fucking aliens apparently can't have a private conversation without borrowing a couple ephemerals' bodies. Nonsensical crap like that is a big turnoff to me, even though I'm sure the vast majority of the show's audience either didn't catch it or doesn't care.
Now, Galactica paints people as the imperfect beings we really are, and pits us up against one motherfucker of an enemy. Technically, and artistically, the show is great. Very high quality. Unfortunately, I'm not too fond if it because it's just so dark.
I do like my entertainment to be positive, happy-endings and all that. With Trek and Galactica, however, the choice is between saccharine and vinegar. Bah, they both leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Re:And in other news computer beats world chess ch
on
Machine Learns Games
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It recognised 3 actions, and deduced that it had to pick one of the 3 at random
No. It deduced that rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper and paper beats rock. It learned how to determine who won. This has nothing to do with the machine learning strategy.
RTFA. The computer infers the rules by watching people play.
I do think that according to Game Theory, the perfect strategy is perfect randomness. The game is interesting when people play it because people have a huge amount of trouble actually being random.
I said "distros", plural. I got the x86 ver 10.1 DVD image, the x64 ver 10.1, and the "Power Pack" 10.1 which includes some premium software and nice little extras like the nVidia drivers. Sure, I'm not going to use it all. But I am going to run both installs -- one of them on three different machines -- and use things out of the power pack on multple machines as well. It's nice to be able to just burn three DVDs and have it all conveniently there.
Mandrakelinux. I paid for and got access to their premium content, and just got through downloading nearly 12 GB of Linux distributions and premium software from them through BitTorrent. Unfortunately, it took about five days (and I have broadband). I expect a huge chunk of my downloads came directly from their seed(s) and there weren't enough, considering my download:upload ratio for the entire transfer was about 3:1.
Maybe if they had more seeds, scattered around the globe, it would have worked better. As it is, I feel cheated; if I'm going to subscribe to their service for a monthly fee, it would be nice if they would use some of that fee to give me some good bandwidth to download their product. Hell, I'd seed (limited to 1/2 my upstream bandwidth) for them if they gave me a discount or a free upgrade in subscription level.
So, once he learns all there is to know...
on
The Know-It-All
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· Score: 1
Is he going to destroy the entire universe? Does anybody have a quantum bomb handy to send this guy into an alternate universe before he can carry out his evil giant brain plan?
The interference pattern is created even if you release one electron at a time thus suggesting that the electron has taken ALL possible routes
through the screen.
Or that the electron occupies a large amount of space, and oozes through the screen. Imagine a raindrop hitting a fine screen situated horizontally. The drop would be able to flow through the screen. Water's surface tension would hold the drop together as it re-formed on the other side while gravity pulled it through the screen.
Suppose you couldn't see the whole drop and instead had to detect it using a very small probe. You poke the probe into the screen and occasionally it gives you a positive reading saying there is a drop of water coming through the hole you poked. However, the probe isn't very accurate. It won't give you false positives but it will give you a very high number of false negatives. Would that probe allow you to construct an accurage picture of the path of a raindrop?
This is the whole trouble with QM, and why the double-slit experiment is so fascinating.
Incidentally, the double-slit experiment has also been shown to work with cold rubidium atoms. That's right; a stream of atoms through a double-slit also produce an interference pattern. Particle/wave duality applies to atoms as well. Fun, eh?
String theory indicates that black holes are not singularities, and their event horizons are fuzzy. They are not holes, but balls of strings compressed to the maximum possible density the universe will allow. In other words, every quantum state inside a black hole is filled. Black holes aren't composed of anything resembling matter or energy we recognize. However, information about what the matter was before becoming part of the black hole remains encoded in the (extradimensional) vibrations of the strings. Slowly, over time, the black hole gives up its strings (and the information they contained) from the fuzzy event horizon, until it evaporates.
So, one way to look at it is, if you jump into a black hole you'll be transformed into the tiny vibrating strings that make up subatomic particles according to String Theory, then those strings will be flung off in randomly over time in the form of Hawking radiation.
That would be a cool thing to do with your corpse, much like having your body cremated and your ashes scattered.
I can see flicker on a monitor set for a 72 Hz refresh, and 75 Hz gives me headaches. I have to run my monitors at 80 Hz refresh or higher, or I get eyestrain. My sensitivity to flicker has steadily increased over the years. Once upon a time 60 Hz wouldn't bother me unless it was interlaced. Strangely, television screens don't cause me problems. But I'm usually at least six feet away, as opposed to at arm's length, from them.
I've been putting off switching to LCDs because of the slow response time, low resolution, dead pixels, and lower contrast. And the cost. These things have been steadily getting better as well. Maybe soon I can take the plunge.
The author expresses two interesting personal viewpoints in the article, both of which I feel I must comment on.
First, he says that people have the instinct to reproduce. I disagree. Instincts do not directly relate to survival of the species. Rather, instincts are very selfish things. They are all about the individual. If enough individuals survive, then the species does. If the species is in a state where only the strong survive, the species improves.
It is therefore more correct to say we have an instinct to fuck. That is an act that provides a great deal of personal satisfaction to the individuals involved, to the extent that they too often disregard the long and even short term consequences. Reproduction comes as a result of that, and it's easy to believe in maternal instincts.
Unquestionably, the sex drive contributes to survival of the species. But so does the instinct to retreat from the edge of a cliff. The relationship in both cases is indirect.
Second, the author of the article believes that society at large would find moral objection to longevity, that there would be a big moral outcry against it.
I find it laughable; I simply can't imagine that the vast majority of people would reject the option to live for hundreds or thousands of years. I think people get used to the idea that they're going to die, but I also think most people would jump at the chance to live for a long, long time.
There would be a moral outcry against longevity. It would come from an exceedingly vocal minority. Then I think the majority would collectively tell the fringe to stuff it.
As for complexity, any metaphysics philosopher or string theorist (is there a difference? [ducks]) could tell you that the nature of matter (or this new strange substance, in case there's no collision) is anything but simple.
No joke. I just read yesterday where the old laster-through-the-double-slit experiment was done using cold rubidium atoms instead of photons. They produced the expected interference pattern, showing that wave-particle duality applies to matter in the form of atoms.
The strange (as in weird quantum physics strange) part is, when weak radio waves are used to detect which slit each atom goes through, the interference pattern disappears. Theoretically, the radio waves would have such a negligible impact on the paths of the atoms that the "which-way" measurement can be performed without disrupting the atoms' trajectory to a significant degree. That should have eliminated a great deal of uncertainty generated by the measurement, allowing the interference pattern to form while gaining more knowledge about the paths of the individual particles.
Other than spreading water around the country and the slightly increased heat generation, there's no environmental impact.
The article points out that in The Hydrogen Economy, water vapor released by hydrogen fuel cells might act as a greenhouse gas and trap more solar heat. Or, it might increase cloud cover, reflecting away more solar energy and cooling the planet.
Or, it could have no effect at all.
The point is, it's not 100% certain that there is no environmental impact.
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I think America should institute public flogging instead of jail time. While I for one don't give a shit if this guy rots in jail or gets off with a fine, I would definitely tune in and watch him take a lash for every million spam messages sent. That's some reality television I could go for. And I bet you he'd never forget the lesson, and anyone else thinking about committing a crime would hopefully think twice.
Forget about "cruel and unusual punishment". Punishment should be cruel, otherwise it isn't punishment. And flogging is only unusual in the context of modern times; it wasn't too long ago that gallows and whipping posts were commonplace in this country. Just beat the man senseless, bandage his wounds, and let him be on his way.
Jail is just a place for criminals to network and get educated in how to commit other crimes.
Not dupe. Trupe. No, TRIPE! :)
Are you just being silly? Think about a TiVo, which records video real-time continuously while powered on. DirecTiVo systems can and do record two video streams at times, while playing back a third. All using regular old IDE hard drives.
Compiling some software for a few hours is a drop in the bucket.
So, my phone is just about as basic as it could get, and most of the bare minimum features it came with, I'm just not using. I store about two dozen phone numbers on it, I call people, I accept incoming calls, and I use my voicemail. I've never used text messaging, or played a game on my cell phone. I don't want my phone to be a substandard camera; if I want to take pictures I want a multi-megapixel digital jobbie with real optics in it. I think pop music ringtones are just stupid; I keep my phone in my pocket on vibrate most of the time just so I don't come off as a giant anus every time someone rings me up when I'm in a public place.
But, instead of just ranting about how I think all this extra whizz-bang is wasteful, stupid, and whatnot, I spent a couple minutes thinking about what I *would* like to have in my cellphone. What extra feature would I pay to have? I've got a good idea. A genius one:
Television and Radio. Once, many years ago, I owned a handheld backlit LCD television. It was a thing of beauty; a few ounces of mass, a two-inch screen, and a telescoping antenna. It was great to have in lots of places. It had a 1/8" mono jack for plugging in headphones or an earpiece. Its integrated speaker was adequate as well.
Now, this was about ten years ago. I know the technology for LCDs has come a long way. I know that device would easily fit into a cellphone today. So, do it. And add AM/FM radio. Then, give me TiVo functionality for the TV and radio (I'm sure the television video scaled down for the phone display would compress pretty damn well!). If my phone had all that, I could justify paying for a hard drive in it.
Neither could I, at first, because the drivers SuSE 9.2 has are inadequate. You have to download and install a better driver from the NVidia Web site and install 'em. You won't get the driver through SuSE updates, either, presumably because the driver comes with the "kernel taint" of its closed-source nature. However, the NVidia video driver install for Linux has always been very good and the latest x64 Linux driver is no exception.
KDE is very pretty these days. Once I got the driver issue solved, it's also as snappy as can be.
Well, the minimum round-trip ping to Luna is a bit over 2000 ms. Set your TTL accordingly. :)
The analogy fits very well. Just like it's only the idiot Windows users who are vulnerable to the idiot script kiddies, so will the complacent and ignorant biometrics users be the victims of thugs who learn to copy a trick created by someone with the skills to create the exploit.
Excuse me while I go vomit. It's thinly disguised xenophobia and megalomania. That, and these fucking aliens apparently can't have a private conversation without borrowing a couple ephemerals' bodies. Nonsensical crap like that is a big turnoff to me, even though I'm sure the vast majority of the show's audience either didn't catch it or doesn't care.
Now, Galactica paints people as the imperfect beings we really are, and pits us up against one motherfucker of an enemy. Technically, and artistically, the show is great. Very high quality. Unfortunately, I'm not too fond if it because it's just so dark.
I do like my entertainment to be positive, happy-endings and all that. With Trek and Galactica, however, the choice is between saccharine and vinegar. Bah, they both leave a bad taste in my mouth.
RTFA. The computer infers the rules by watching people play.
I do think that according to Game Theory, the perfect strategy is perfect randomness. The game is interesting when people play it because people have a huge amount of trouble actually being random.
I said "distros", plural. I got the x86 ver 10.1 DVD image, the x64 ver 10.1, and the "Power Pack" 10.1 which includes some premium software and nice little extras like the nVidia drivers. Sure, I'm not going to use it all. But I am going to run both installs -- one of them on three different machines -- and use things out of the power pack on multple machines as well. It's nice to be able to just burn three DVDs and have it all conveniently there.
Mandrakelinux. I paid for and got access to their premium content, and just got through downloading nearly 12 GB of Linux distributions and premium software from them through BitTorrent. Unfortunately, it took about five days (and I have broadband). I expect a huge chunk of my downloads came directly from their seed(s) and there weren't enough, considering my download:upload ratio for the entire transfer was about 3:1.
Maybe if they had more seeds, scattered around the globe, it would have worked better. As it is, I feel cheated; if I'm going to subscribe to their service for a monthly fee, it would be nice if they would use some of that fee to give me some good bandwidth to download their product. Hell, I'd seed (limited to 1/2 my upstream bandwidth) for them if they gave me a discount or a free upgrade in subscription level.
Is he going to destroy the entire universe? Does anybody have a quantum bomb handy to send this guy into an alternate universe before he can carry out his evil giant brain plan?
Suppose you couldn't see the whole drop and instead had to detect it using a very small probe. You poke the probe into the screen and occasionally it gives you a positive reading saying there is a drop of water coming through the hole you poked. However, the probe isn't very accurate. It won't give you false positives but it will give you a very high number of false negatives. Would that probe allow you to construct an accurage picture of the path of a raindrop?
This is the whole trouble with QM, and why the double-slit experiment is so fascinating.
Incidentally, the double-slit experiment has also been shown to work with cold rubidium atoms. That's right; a stream of atoms through a double-slit also produce an interference pattern. Particle/wave duality applies to atoms as well. Fun, eh?
String theory indicates that black holes are not singularities, and their event horizons are fuzzy. They are not holes, but balls of strings compressed to the maximum possible density the universe will allow. In other words, every quantum state inside a black hole is filled. Black holes aren't composed of anything resembling matter or energy we recognize. However, information about what the matter was before becoming part of the black hole remains encoded in the (extradimensional) vibrations of the strings. Slowly, over time, the black hole gives up its strings (and the information they contained) from the fuzzy event horizon, until it evaporates.
So, one way to look at it is, if you jump into a black hole you'll be transformed into the tiny vibrating strings that make up subatomic particles according to String Theory, then those strings will be flung off in randomly over time in the form of Hawking radiation.
That would be a cool thing to do with your corpse, much like having your body cremated and your ashes scattered.
I can see flicker on a monitor set for a 72 Hz refresh, and 75 Hz gives me headaches. I have to run my monitors at 80 Hz refresh or higher, or I get eyestrain. My sensitivity to flicker has steadily increased over the years. Once upon a time 60 Hz wouldn't bother me unless it was interlaced. Strangely, television screens don't cause me problems. But I'm usually at least six feet away, as opposed to at arm's length, from them.
I've been putting off switching to LCDs because of the slow response time, low resolution, dead pixels, and lower contrast. And the cost. These things have been steadily getting better as well. Maybe soon I can take the plunge.
The author expresses two interesting personal viewpoints in the article, both of which I feel I must comment on.
First, he says that people have the instinct to reproduce. I disagree. Instincts do not directly relate to survival of the species. Rather, instincts are very selfish things. They are all about the individual. If enough individuals survive, then the species does. If the species is in a state where only the strong survive, the species improves.
It is therefore more correct to say we have an instinct to fuck. That is an act that provides a great deal of personal satisfaction to the individuals involved, to the extent that they too often disregard the long and even short term consequences. Reproduction comes as a result of that, and it's easy to believe in maternal instincts.
Unquestionably, the sex drive contributes to survival of the species. But so does the instinct to retreat from the edge of a cliff. The relationship in both cases is indirect.
Second, the author of the article believes that society at large would find moral objection to longevity, that there would be a big moral outcry against it.
I find it laughable; I simply can't imagine that the vast majority of people would reject the option to live for hundreds or thousands of years. I think people get used to the idea that they're going to die, but I also think most people would jump at the chance to live for a long, long time.
There would be a moral outcry against longevity. It would come from an exceedingly vocal minority. Then I think the majority would collectively tell the fringe to stuff it.
Yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Here is a link..
The strange (as in weird quantum physics strange) part is, when weak radio waves are used to detect which slit each atom goes through, the interference pattern disappears. Theoretically, the radio waves would have such a negligible impact on the paths of the atoms that the "which-way" measurement can be performed without disrupting the atoms' trajectory to a significant degree. That should have eliminated a great deal of uncertainty generated by the measurement, allowing the interference pattern to form while gaining more knowledge about the paths of the individual particles.
Or, it could have no effect at all.
The point is, it's not 100% certain that there is no environmental impact.