If you have a Via-based motherboard, you're out of luck. I tried everything imaginable and finally threw in the towel and got a non-via motherboard. Instamagically, my entire collection of video cards started working!
You think AOL is bad, try using a large company that outsources their EMail. I set up my brother's web-based company administration. It sends email alerts from his webserver to the appropriate employees as jobs are entered into the website by customers. One day, it just stopped. Why? His ISP, SWBell was blocking his webserver as a spam sender. I called them and got India. I complained to the Indian woman a while and got transferred to another Indian woman. I asked repeatedly how to get a person in the United States. After three days of calls, I got a guy in Texas who claimed there was no spam filter of any kind on SWBell's email server. Sure, right. I argued with him for a while and got him to admit that SWBell outsources their email server to Yahoo. Yahoo!? Who the hell can I call at Yahoo about this? Another few days of calls and I got a technician at Yahoo who said that the webserver was blocked because it sent many similar emails to users at SWBell. No kidding. That is the job of the webserver. The Yahoo tech said it was impossible to remove the block on the server. So, my brother now uses Comcast for his business ISP.
Although this is an old thread, I thought I'd answer your questions, just in case you notice that I replied...
How does the other side know what bits it is supposed to get?
First, I have to make clear the use of a filter when reading a photon. Photons normally read as spinning up or down, right or left, basically, opposite spins. Think of it as a spinning ball. It spins one way or the other. The catch is that it takes a hell of a lot longer to detect the direction of rotation than it does to detect the angle of rotation. Keep in mind that photons most likely don't rotate and have no angle - these are manmade ideas applied to the photons.
So, think of baseballs. You don't care the direction of spin, you only care the angle of the axis. For instance, the angle could be perpendicular to the ground (90 degrees) or level with the ground (0 degrees). Then, you can call a 0 degree spin a 0 and a 90 degree spin a 1. Great! You turned photons into zeros and ones!
The catch is that the angle is arbitrary. You want angles that are 90 degrees apart, but you could easily choose 45 and 135 degrees, or even 10 and 100 degrees. You filter the photons when you read the angle. If the photon is not spinning at one of the choices, it will quantimagically turn into one of the angles you are measuring! The catch here is that you don't know how it will choose, so it is random. You must use the same filter on the receiving as as the sending end. That, in a sense, is quantum encryption. If you don't know the filter sequence, you can't really read the message.
Finally, we can get to the message. First, a key is sent of a known length - say 120 bits. The sender randomizes not only the bits, but also the filters. The receiver than repies back with the filter choices he used using a known filter sequence (so the original sender is sure to read his message correctly). The sender replies with the filter matches - the ones that they both randomly chose to use that are the same. They end up both knowing the filter sequence. So, they can talk back and forth and anyone who doesn't know the filter sequence cannot read the message.
So, I can answer your question now - it isn't a matter of knowing what you are going to get. It is a matter of knowing the filter settings. There are other ways of transmitting/agreeing on a filter sequence. This is just one example of doing it on the fly.
If sender X can send any message, then how does recipient Y know that the message should have contained some set number of 1s and 0s.
Unlike computers that will read a constant set of zeros or ones at the end of transmission, when a photon stream is ended, there are no more photons. Hopefully, the machinery will be designed to recognize when the end of message occurs.
You could not, as a Spy S, intercept X's message, examine it, then resend it, without Y knowing that the message changed. But could you not still completely block X's message, then, simply send another one with the same "pattern" that Y knows about?
It is possible to have a man-in-the-middle attack. The spy must be there from start to finish to hide himself. This is a complicated way to explain the man-in-the-middle, so I'll use an easier analogy:
You have to islands with guys on them. A man in a boat wants to help them communicate - secretly. He gives each a unique lock and key (the only key to the lock). So, the man in the boat cannot unlock their padlocks. They cannot unlock each other's padlocks. How do they communicate?
Man A puts a message in the box and locks it with Lock A. The boatman takes the box to Man B who puts Lock B on it. The boatman takes the box to Man A who unlocks his lock (leaving Lock B). The boatman takes the box to Man B who takes Lock B off and gets the message.
How does the man-in-the-middle attack work? Man A locks it. Boatman goes off and puts his own lock on it, then returns to Man A. Man A sees the lock, assuming it
1. Make a photon stream connection to the other user.
I'm beginning to feel that those typing tapes I bought on late night television aren't working as well as the busom blonde and the short guy with the toupe promised they would.
Please stop thinking that "quantum cryptography" is a form of cryptography.
That depends completely on how it is used. If I simply send a message in 1s and 0s over the photon stream, it isn't encrypted. I can only be certain that it either got there or it didn't get there.
Cryptography comes in when you encode a message using a photon stream. The mechanics of doing this are old hat by now. It is done in the following steps:
Send a stream of, say, 2,000 random 1s and 0s to the other end.
The other end pics, at random, 500 of the 1s and 0s and sends a plain message back saying only which are chosen - the index, not the value. So, you can both form a 500 bit key (the number of bits is to your choosing)
Encrypt the message using the key you just worked up and send it.
This is commonly said to be 'mostly secure' because it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. However, it is tamper-proof once it begins. If anyone attempts to read any of the photons as they travel down the stream, they alter the photons. So, you get a scrambled message at the other end and the hack is immediately known.
Because it cannot be copied enroute without giving away that it is being copied, it is commonly called unhackable. You cannot make a copy of it and send it along while you try and hack it. I know, you are thinking you can just copy the photons and resend new ones with the same message. Nope - you have to know the spin orientation of the photons BEFORE you can read them for a 1 or a 0. If you read it with the wrong spin orientation, you will force it to the orientation you read it as and get an errant 1 or 0 that you incorrectly send down the line. So, you could say it is doubly-encrypted and doubly-protected from in-line hacking.
If they are all travelling at the same speed - so what? What if one was still and the other was travelling at 400mph? Could they still communicate? I know, they would be too far apart if the moving one went in a straight line. But, what if it went back and forth? The issue is the simple doppler effect. At what point is it unable to handle wireless communications?
I only ask because I feel that we will eventually have wireless transmitters in all cars to monitor traffic and assist in directing traffic away from congested areas. At what speed do cars lose effective communication with stationary antennas? Cell phones seem to work just fine at 100mph+
Uhm, duh? Why would I want to let websites disable or change the behaviour of my backspace key?
I have answered this so many times that I'm ready to just give up on human intelligence...
This is not a case of "why would I want to let websites disable or change the behavious of my backspace key?" This is a case of Opera not letting websites that you create change the behaviour of your own backspace key as you like. Opera is making the decision for you. All other browsers let you make the decision.
Maybe the rest of the world is just so stupid that they've never noticed.
I thought Fermat's Last Theorem was proved not so long ago by someone else, using some sort of complex geometry concepts. Can any expert confirm this or explain why this is relevant?
Like Hollywood - the sequel doesn't have to have anything to do with the original. You just need the name that people know, like Fermat's Last Theorem. I can see it now:
Fermat II: The Serre Conjecture, starring Keanu Reeves as Chandra Khare (he looks Indian enough), a simple mathmetician from Utah. Just when thought it was safe to go into the theoretical waters again... the Serre Conjecture. As the world's nations cry in fear, one man comes up with a two-part solution to... well, this is Hollywood. He blows stuff up and gets the woman in the end.
Now, if they could only support the Opera specs. According to the specs, if you get an event, the javascript "window.event.cancelBubble = true;" will cancel the event from bubbling up to the window handler. Try that with a backspace key event. Nope - doesn't work. Specs, schmecs. Opera developers don't need 'em.
When the law was written, the term "common law marriage" was considered too common place to be a legal term, so "legal union" was used. Any married couple or couple in a legal union is allowed to be a foster parent in Texas. Many years later, gay couples began forming legal unions. So, they fit the letter of the law even though the authors of the law did not intend for legal union to cover same-sex unions. This is a loophole because it is not illegal, but it is not what the authors of the law intended. So, the current stink in Texas is about redefining "legal union" in the foster child laws to specifically be between a man and a woman, as implied when it was written. It is not as though the law initially said "gays can be foster parents too!" and now they want to remove that.
To a greater extent, this is important because it redefines "legal union" in Texas. It is important for gay couples to be allowed to have legal unions for legal reasons. For instance, a gay spouse is not allowed to make decisions on their partners behalf in a hospital. A gay spouse is not entitled to ANY of a partner's estate upon death. A gay spouse cannot sue for any support upon 'divorce'. I'm rather surprised that this hasn't proceeded quickly because along with the good benefits comes the bad: creditors and tax collectors coming after the gay spouse when the partner gets behind on payments. You'd think Visa/Mastercard and the IRS would be shoving gay partnership right through the Supreme Court.
Gay bashing is now a socially acceptable form of discrimination in this country.
How is it bashing to maintain the status quo that has existed for a few hundred years? You attempt to make it sound like gays had equal rights until Bush was elected. The fact is that gays have more rights now than they had when he was first elected. Look at the number of states finding some way to grant legal marriage rights to gay couples. Look at the laws passed to allow gay adoption. As for acceptance, is it legal in Hollywood to make a movie or television show without a gay character? OK, that's a cheap joke. I can't be serious for a whole paragraph.
Keep your eye out for anyone on the extremes. You mention the Texas ban on gay foster parents. Gays are using a loophole in the foster parent laws to become foster parents. Some legislators in Texas want to close the loophole. By definition, a loophole is 'legal' but not 'as intended by the law'. So, the main issue is that the gays in Texas need to stop using a loophole and pass a real law allowing them to be foster parents - or complain that they are being bashed and hope someone else will come fix everything for them.
How to do this? In Opera 8 goto the Tools menu, then preferences. Click "advanced" and then "shortcuts". Click the edit button for the keyboard setup. In the dialog that opens, find the text "backspace" without quotes. Find this line (or the mac platform line if you're on a mac):
I fail to understand how you feel this is a solution. I state the problem: I "the web designer", not I "the Opera user", cannot remove the default functionality of the backspace key when a single form item is focused. Your solution: Have the Opera user alter their keyboard configuration for all web pages.
As for your following note to post the question on the Opera Forums, I did and I have been receiving loads of hate mail every day for the past two weeks. However, they have failed to come up with a solution for cancelling the Backspace KeyEvent.
Re:all-nine-users-cheer dept ??
on
Opera 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Just curious...why would you want to override the backspace key?
I have been unable to explain to Opera developers, so please be patient...
The hospital switched from paper forms to web-based forms a few years ago. It created a database problem because everything was free-form text.
Step 2: To limit entry, they changed a bunch of fields to select-lists. You had to choose from a valid value. The problem was that new values were required on a regular enough basis that the Db administrator made me add a text field for 'new' values and a select list for the proper allowed values.
Step 3: The text field/select list combos made the clerks upset because it was too much to look at. So, I got real creative and made the text field hover above the select list so it looked exactly like a real combo-box. Problem: tabs don't work when you have two fields pretending to be one field and the clerks don't use mice unless they absolutely have to.
Step 4: I removed the text field and used javascript to allow you to edit the first entry in the select list. You get one item to tab across and you can edit it if necessary. Problem: when you hit the backspace key to fix a typo, you go to the previous page.
Step 5: I caught the backspace key event and everyone was happy - until the Opera guys used the forms. You cannot catch/change the backspace event for Opera. So, when they make a typo, they cannot change it. My solution: don't use Opera. This combo-box tested fine in IE, Netscape, Mozilla/Firefox, Konqueror, and Safari.
Re:all-nine-users-cheer dept ??
on
Opera 8 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know that Firefox is all the rage these days, but Opera has a pretty faithful user base....or did I miss a slash-think programming update, the one where we're supposed to badmouth and laugh at Opera?
In the hospital that I work in, Opera users are 'faithful', they are 'fanatical'. I had to experience this first-hand when a request came in to set one of our in-house web forms up so that the user could add to a field, but not delete anything. Guess what, you cannot override the backspace functionality in Opera. You can do it in every other web browser in common use, but no Opera. So, I got the rath of the Opera users. I told them that I would be more than happy to make Opera work properly with the form if they would tell me HOW to make Opera work properly. This went all the way back to the Opera developers since the hospital pays a lot of money for a site license. The developers response was that Opera does not and will never support overriding the backspace key because there is no valid reason an honest person would ever want to do that - even if that person was a programmer for a hospital that specifically asked for a page on their in-house web forms to be set up with the backspace key overridden.
This looks very much like the old (1993) David Beavers' "Magic Stage" - a 3D projection of a real-time computer generated image using laser pointers. Light is light, regardless of the source. In the Beavers' project, he was not limited to a few inches above the projection platform and he integrated it with "Poser" so the 3D images could be manipulated by actors. Last I heard, his project was taken in my David Copperfield and nobody else really uses it. Kind of sad because it looked very interesting when I saw it about 10 years ago.
I hereby propose a new unit for measuring intelligence: the MBOTY (monkey-banging-on-typewriter-years).
I worked on an AI project to generate 'pleasing music'. We had two primary ratings for each sample that it produced: The number of times it went through the generator and the pink balance (or zipfian balance if you like). That project didn't go anywhere, but I applied it to generating groups of colored pixels and found that the number of times it went through the generator was very important. Perhaps that could be construed as a MBOTY rating.
Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence --
Is Microsoft going to trademark 'Gates' now as they did with 'Windows' so you'll have to pay him a license fee every time you talk about your 'moveable portion of a fence'?
I am intentionally not spell checking this post, because if I mispelled something, it will help to proev my point.
I wish I had a copy or cache of the article, but I don't. Anyway, I read an article on a Chinese website a few years ago that argued against computer-based spelling and grammar checkers. It claimed that users become dependent on them and nevery learn. If can't spell, the spell checker will jump in and spell it right for you. If you don't know grammar, the grammer checker will fix it for you. Of course, the rules in Chinese are stricter than in English, so the spelling and grammar checkers do a much better job. However, the same argument could be applied here. I could go through my whole life spelling 'the' and 'teh' and Word will make sure nobody ever knows about it.
Now that I know what you are talking about it is a fun puzzle to solve it turns-out:)
I see you went from p and q to 4pq. I tripped across this little puzzle going from 4pq to p and q. I realized that 4pq is always a sequence of odd numbers, but there isn't an easy way that I know of to determine the start and end of the series without either p or q (only having 4pq). So, I quit that and went on to other things.
Why did you go out of your way and attack me with your reply?
I didn't realize that what I said would be taken as an attack. I never said anything like 'Hey idiot...' I just said that you were using what I would call a 'set' and I was using a 'sequence'.
Does that deserve to be an article on./? Now, you get to the whole point of the post. It was not to announce a great discovery in mathematics. It was to make a joke about having slashdot articles about 'some guy' who solved a math puzzle. The blurb actually referred to him as 'some guy'. I was poking fun at slashdot, not mathematics. I hadn't really intended for anyone to take my simple math puzzle seriously.
I am going to come up with the most ridiculous and obvious idea relating to computers and patent it, just to see if i can get something completely insane throught the USPTO. now, who wants to give me $350
I tried. The response (a good 3 years later) was:
Author did not use a patent lawyer.
Author used the phrase "may be used", which could mean "it possibly not possible".
Author used the phrase "it is possible", which could mean "it may not be possible".
Patent refused.
So, like the rest of government, get a lawyer. There's no room in there for common folk.
You do not get an article because any positive integer can be trivially represented as a sequence of odd primes by using the unary representation:
I said "sequence", not "set". You are using a "set". A "sequence" has a formula to get from one item to the next. Technically, your formula could be x(i) = x(i-1) + 0. However, I was using a sequence of odd numbers, which implies that x(i) is odd and x(i) = x(i-1) + 2. So, I was using a sequence of odd numbers without skipping any odd numbers from the lowest number to the highest number in the sequence.
Well, I realized that if you multiply any number by 4, you can represent the total as a sequence of odd numbers. Actually, there's more than one sequence if the original number is not prime. One is obviously half the sum plus/minus 1. The other is longer. For example, 21*4 = 84 = 9+11+13+15+17+19. So, where's my/. article?
GM would not sell the last available cars to the public due to... potential liability claims.
I wonder if this is a red herring or not. Sure, lawyers have turned the U.S. into a lawsuit-happy country where people are visited in the hospital right after surgery with promises of grand malpractice suits (I work in a hospital, so that's the only example that comes to my mind right away). But, it is possible that GM made some damn good electric cars. Maybe they don't want people using them so they can force-feed a few more SUVs to the nation. Either way, I'm of the opinion that we should drastically increase our fossil fuel usage. The sooner we use it up, the sooner we will stop using it.
Ah, I think we're actually closer in thought than I realised.
I agree. I personally get my news from scanning the CNN headlines in the morning, checking on/. periodically throughout the day, and watching BBC news at night. I also read China Times because I've spent the past few years working on becoming very fluent in Chinese. Seeing things from another perspective makes me feel like I have a better understanding of the news in general. That's just a weird thing. I don't expect anyone to learn Chinese just to read some other country's propoganda.
Padilla is still being held in a naval brig in South Carolina (or possibly Virginia, I forget which).
Naval Weapons Station in North Charleston, SC. The prison is right next to my old office when I worked for Spawar over there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a Via-based motherboard, you're out of luck. I tried everything imaginable and finally threw in the towel and got a non-via motherboard. Instamagically, my entire collection of video cards started working!
You think AOL is bad, try using a large company that outsources their EMail. I set up my brother's web-based company administration. It sends email alerts from his webserver to the appropriate employees as jobs are entered into the website by customers. One day, it just stopped. Why? His ISP, SWBell was blocking his webserver as a spam sender. I called them and got India. I complained to the Indian woman a while and got transferred to another Indian woman. I asked repeatedly how to get a person in the United States. After three days of calls, I got a guy in Texas who claimed there was no spam filter of any kind on SWBell's email server. Sure, right. I argued with him for a while and got him to admit that SWBell outsources their email server to Yahoo. Yahoo!? Who the hell can I call at Yahoo about this? Another few days of calls and I got a technician at Yahoo who said that the webserver was blocked because it sent many similar emails to users at SWBell. No kidding. That is the job of the webserver. The Yahoo tech said it was impossible to remove the block on the server. So, my brother now uses Comcast for his business ISP.
Although this is an old thread, I thought I'd answer your questions, just in case you notice that I replied...
How does the other side know what bits it is supposed to get?
First, I have to make clear the use of a filter when reading a photon. Photons normally read as spinning up or down, right or left, basically, opposite spins. Think of it as a spinning ball. It spins one way or the other. The catch is that it takes a hell of a lot longer to detect the direction of rotation than it does to detect the angle of rotation. Keep in mind that photons most likely don't rotate and have no angle - these are manmade ideas applied to the photons.
So, think of baseballs. You don't care the direction of spin, you only care the angle of the axis. For instance, the angle could be perpendicular to the ground (90 degrees) or level with the ground (0 degrees). Then, you can call a 0 degree spin a 0 and a 90 degree spin a 1. Great! You turned photons into zeros and ones!
The catch is that the angle is arbitrary. You want angles that are 90 degrees apart, but you could easily choose 45 and 135 degrees, or even 10 and 100 degrees. You filter the photons when you read the angle. If the photon is not spinning at one of the choices, it will quantimagically turn into one of the angles you are measuring! The catch here is that you don't know how it will choose, so it is random. You must use the same filter on the receiving as as the sending end. That, in a sense, is quantum encryption. If you don't know the filter sequence, you can't really read the message.
Finally, we can get to the message. First, a key is sent of a known length - say 120 bits. The sender randomizes not only the bits, but also the filters. The receiver than repies back with the filter choices he used using a known filter sequence (so the original sender is sure to read his message correctly). The sender replies with the filter matches - the ones that they both randomly chose to use that are the same. They end up both knowing the filter sequence. So, they can talk back and forth and anyone who doesn't know the filter sequence cannot read the message.
So, I can answer your question now - it isn't a matter of knowing what you are going to get. It is a matter of knowing the filter settings. There are other ways of transmitting/agreeing on a filter sequence. This is just one example of doing it on the fly.
If sender X can send any message, then how does recipient Y know that the message should have contained some set number of 1s and 0s.
Unlike computers that will read a constant set of zeros or ones at the end of transmission, when a photon stream is ended, there are no more photons. Hopefully, the machinery will be designed to recognize when the end of message occurs.
You could not, as a Spy S, intercept X's message, examine it, then resend it, without Y knowing that the message changed. But could you not still completely block X's message, then, simply send another one with the same "pattern" that Y knows about?
It is possible to have a man-in-the-middle attack. The spy must be there from start to finish to hide himself. This is a complicated way to explain the man-in-the-middle, so I'll use an easier analogy:
You have to islands with guys on them. A man in a boat wants to help them communicate - secretly. He gives each a unique lock and key (the only key to the lock). So, the man in the boat cannot unlock their padlocks. They cannot unlock each other's padlocks. How do they communicate?
Man A puts a message in the box and locks it with Lock A. The boatman takes the box to Man B who puts Lock B on it. The boatman takes the box to Man A who unlocks his lock (leaving Lock B). The boatman takes the box to Man B who takes Lock B off and gets the message.
How does the man-in-the-middle attack work? Man A locks it. Boatman goes off and puts his own lock on it, then returns to Man A. Man A sees the lock, assuming it
Sorry, but, uh, what's step 1?
1. Make a photon stream connection to the other user.
I'm beginning to feel that those typing tapes I bought on late night television aren't working as well as the busom blonde and the short guy with the toupe promised they would.
That depends completely on how it is used. If I simply send a message in 1s and 0s over the photon stream, it isn't encrypted. I can only be certain that it either got there or it didn't get there.
Cryptography comes in when you encode a message using a photon stream. The mechanics of doing this are old hat by now. It is done in the following steps:
This is commonly said to be 'mostly secure' because it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. However, it is tamper-proof once it begins. If anyone attempts to read any of the photons as they travel down the stream, they alter the photons. So, you get a scrambled message at the other end and the hack is immediately known.
Because it cannot be copied enroute without giving away that it is being copied, it is commonly called unhackable. You cannot make a copy of it and send it along while you try and hack it. I know, you are thinking you can just copy the photons and resend new ones with the same message. Nope - you have to know the spin orientation of the photons BEFORE you can read them for a 1 or a 0. If you read it with the wrong spin orientation, you will force it to the orientation you read it as and get an errant 1 or 0 that you incorrectly send down the line. So, you could say it is doubly-encrypted and doubly-protected from in-line hacking.
If they are all travelling at the same speed - so what? What if one was still and the other was travelling at 400mph? Could they still communicate? I know, they would be too far apart if the moving one went in a straight line. But, what if it went back and forth? The issue is the simple doppler effect. At what point is it unable to handle wireless communications?
I only ask because I feel that we will eventually have wireless transmitters in all cars to monitor traffic and assist in directing traffic away from congested areas. At what speed do cars lose effective communication with stationary antennas? Cell phones seem to work just fine at 100mph+
Uhm, duh? Why would I want to let websites disable or change the behaviour of my backspace key?
I have answered this so many times that I'm ready to just give up on human intelligence...
This is not a case of "why would I want to let websites disable or change the behavious of my backspace key?" This is a case of Opera not letting websites that you create change the behaviour of your own backspace key as you like. Opera is making the decision for you. All other browsers let you make the decision.
Maybe the rest of the world is just so stupid that they've never noticed.
I thought Fermat's Last Theorem was proved not so long ago by someone else, using some sort of complex geometry concepts. Can any expert confirm this or explain why this is relevant?
Like Hollywood - the sequel doesn't have to have anything to do with the original. You just need the name that people know, like Fermat's Last Theorem. I can see it now:
Fermat II: The Serre Conjecture, starring Keanu Reeves as Chandra Khare (he looks Indian enough), a simple mathmetician from Utah. Just when thought it was safe to go into the theoretical waters again... the Serre Conjecture. As the world's nations cry in fear, one man comes up with a two-part solution to... well, this is Hollywood. He blows stuff up and gets the woman in the end.
I must admited Opera knows how to support linux
Now, if they could only support the Opera specs. According to the specs, if you get an event, the javascript "window.event.cancelBubble = true;" will cancel the event from bubbling up to the window handler. Try that with a backspace key event. Nope - doesn't work. Specs, schmecs. Opera developers don't need 'em.
How are they using a loophole?
When the law was written, the term "common law marriage" was considered too common place to be a legal term, so "legal union" was used. Any married couple or couple in a legal union is allowed to be a foster parent in Texas. Many years later, gay couples began forming legal unions. So, they fit the letter of the law even though the authors of the law did not intend for legal union to cover same-sex unions. This is a loophole because it is not illegal, but it is not what the authors of the law intended. So, the current stink in Texas is about redefining "legal union" in the foster child laws to specifically be between a man and a woman, as implied when it was written. It is not as though the law initially said "gays can be foster parents too!" and now they want to remove that.
To a greater extent, this is important because it redefines "legal union" in Texas. It is important for gay couples to be allowed to have legal unions for legal reasons. For instance, a gay spouse is not allowed to make decisions on their partners behalf in a hospital. A gay spouse is not entitled to ANY of a partner's estate upon death. A gay spouse cannot sue for any support upon 'divorce'. I'm rather surprised that this hasn't proceeded quickly because along with the good benefits comes the bad: creditors and tax collectors coming after the gay spouse when the partner gets behind on payments. You'd think Visa/Mastercard and the IRS would be shoving gay partnership right through the Supreme Court.
Gay bashing is now a socially acceptable form of discrimination in this country.
How is it bashing to maintain the status quo that has existed for a few hundred years? You attempt to make it sound like gays had equal rights until Bush was elected. The fact is that gays have more rights now than they had when he was first elected. Look at the number of states finding some way to grant legal marriage rights to gay couples. Look at the laws passed to allow gay adoption. As for acceptance, is it legal in Hollywood to make a movie or television show without a gay character? OK, that's a cheap joke. I can't be serious for a whole paragraph.
Keep your eye out for anyone on the extremes. You mention the Texas ban on gay foster parents. Gays are using a loophole in the foster parent laws to become foster parents. Some legislators in Texas want to close the loophole. By definition, a loophole is 'legal' but not 'as intended by the law'. So, the main issue is that the gays in Texas need to stop using a loophole and pass a real law allowing them to be foster parents - or complain that they are being bashed and hope someone else will come fix everything for them.
How to do this? In Opera 8 goto the Tools menu, then preferences. Click "advanced" and then "shortcuts". Click the edit button for the keyboard setup. In the dialog that opens, find the text "backspace" without quotes. Find this line (or the mac platform line if you're on a mac):
I fail to understand how you feel this is a solution. I state the problem: I "the web designer", not I "the Opera user", cannot remove the default functionality of the backspace key when a single form item is focused. Your solution: Have the Opera user alter their keyboard configuration for all web pages.
As for your following note to post the question on the Opera Forums, I did and I have been receiving loads of hate mail every day for the past two weeks. However, they have failed to come up with a solution for cancelling the Backspace KeyEvent.
Just curious...why would you want to override the backspace key?
I have been unable to explain to Opera developers, so please be patient...
The hospital switched from paper forms to web-based forms a few years ago. It created a database problem because everything was free-form text.
Step 2: To limit entry, they changed a bunch of fields to select-lists. You had to choose from a valid value. The problem was that new values were required on a regular enough basis that the Db administrator made me add a text field for 'new' values and a select list for the proper allowed values.
Step 3: The text field/select list combos made the clerks upset because it was too much to look at. So, I got real creative and made the text field hover above the select list so it looked exactly like a real combo-box. Problem: tabs don't work when you have two fields pretending to be one field and the clerks don't use mice unless they absolutely have to.
Step 4: I removed the text field and used javascript to allow you to edit the first entry in the select list. You get one item to tab across and you can edit it if necessary. Problem: when you hit the backspace key to fix a typo, you go to the previous page.
Step 5: I caught the backspace key event and everyone was happy - until the Opera guys used the forms. You cannot catch/change the backspace event for Opera. So, when they make a typo, they cannot change it. My solution: don't use Opera. This combo-box tested fine in IE, Netscape, Mozilla/Firefox, Konqueror, and Safari.
I know that Firefox is all the rage these days, but Opera has a pretty faithful user base....or did I miss a slash-think programming update, the one where we're supposed to badmouth and laugh at Opera?
In the hospital that I work in, Opera users are 'faithful', they are 'fanatical'. I had to experience this first-hand when a request came in to set one of our in-house web forms up so that the user could add to a field, but not delete anything. Guess what, you cannot override the backspace functionality in Opera. You can do it in every other web browser in common use, but no Opera. So, I got the rath of the Opera users. I told them that I would be more than happy to make Opera work properly with the form if they would tell me HOW to make Opera work properly. This went all the way back to the Opera developers since the hospital pays a lot of money for a site license. The developers response was that Opera does not and will never support overriding the backspace key because there is no valid reason an honest person would ever want to do that - even if that person was a programmer for a hospital that specifically asked for a page on their in-house web forms to be set up with the backspace key overridden.
This looks very much like the old (1993) David Beavers' "Magic Stage" - a 3D projection of a real-time computer generated image using laser pointers. Light is light, regardless of the source. In the Beavers' project, he was not limited to a few inches above the projection platform and he integrated it with "Poser" so the 3D images could be manipulated by actors. Last I heard, his project was taken in my David Copperfield and nobody else really uses it. Kind of sad because it looked very interesting when I saw it about 10 years ago.
I hereby propose a new unit for measuring intelligence: the MBOTY (monkey-banging-on-typewriter-years).
I worked on an AI project to generate 'pleasing music'. We had two primary ratings for each sample that it produced: The number of times it went through the generator and the pink balance (or zipfian balance if you like). That project didn't go anywhere, but I applied it to generating groups of colored pixels and found that the number of times it went through the generator was very important. Perhaps that could be construed as a MBOTY rating.
Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence --
Is Microsoft going to trademark 'Gates' now as they did with 'Windows' so you'll have to pay him a license fee every time you talk about your 'moveable portion of a fence'?
I am intentionally not spell checking this post, because if I mispelled something, it will help to proev my point.
I wish I had a copy or cache of the article, but I don't. Anyway, I read an article on a Chinese website a few years ago that argued against computer-based spelling and grammar checkers. It claimed that users become dependent on them and nevery learn. If can't spell, the spell checker will jump in and spell it right for you. If you don't know grammar, the grammer checker will fix it for you. Of course, the rules in Chinese are stricter than in English, so the spelling and grammar checkers do a much better job. However, the same argument could be applied here. I could go through my whole life spelling 'the' and 'teh' and Word will make sure nobody ever knows about it.
Now that I know what you are talking about it is a fun puzzle to solve it turns-out :)
./?
I see you went from p and q to 4pq. I tripped across this little puzzle going from 4pq to p and q. I realized that 4pq is always a sequence of odd numbers, but there isn't an easy way that I know of to determine the start and end of the series without either p or q (only having 4pq). So, I quit that and went on to other things.
Why did you go out of your way and attack me with your reply?
I didn't realize that what I said would be taken as an attack. I never said anything like 'Hey idiot...' I just said that you were using what I would call a 'set' and I was using a 'sequence'.
Does that deserve to be an article on
Now, you get to the whole point of the post. It was not to announce a great discovery in mathematics. It was to make a joke about having slashdot articles about 'some guy' who solved a math puzzle. The blurb actually referred to him as 'some guy'. I was poking fun at slashdot, not mathematics. I hadn't really intended for anyone to take my simple math puzzle seriously.
I tried. The response (a good 3 years later) was:
So, like the rest of government, get a lawyer. There's no room in there for common folk.
You do not get an article because any positive integer can be trivially represented as a sequence of odd primes by using the unary representation:
I said "sequence", not "set". You are using a "set". A "sequence" has a formula to get from one item to the next. Technically, your formula could be x(i) = x(i-1) + 0. However, I was using a sequence of odd numbers, which implies that x(i) is odd and x(i) = x(i-1) + 2. So, I was using a sequence of odd numbers without skipping any odd numbers from the lowest number to the highest number in the sequence.
Well, I realized that if you multiply any number by 4, you can represent the total as a sequence of odd numbers. Actually, there's more than one sequence if the original number is not prime. One is obviously half the sum plus/minus 1. The other is longer. For example, 21*4 = 84 = 9+11+13+15+17+19. So, where's my /. article?
GM would not sell the last available cars to the public due to ... potential liability claims.
I wonder if this is a red herring or not. Sure, lawyers have turned the U.S. into a lawsuit-happy country where people are visited in the hospital right after surgery with promises of grand malpractice suits (I work in a hospital, so that's the only example that comes to my mind right away). But, it is possible that GM made some damn good electric cars. Maybe they don't want people using them so they can force-feed a few more SUVs to the nation. Either way, I'm of the opinion that we should drastically increase our fossil fuel usage. The sooner we use it up, the sooner we will stop using it.
Ah, I think we're actually closer in thought than I realised.
/. periodically throughout the day, and watching BBC news at night. I also read China Times because I've spent the past few years working on becoming very fluent in Chinese. Seeing things from another perspective makes me feel like I have a better understanding of the news in general. That's just a weird thing. I don't expect anyone to learn Chinese just to read some other country's propoganda.
I agree. I personally get my news from scanning the CNN headlines in the morning, checking on
Padilla is still being held in a naval brig in South Carolina (or possibly Virginia, I forget which).
Naval Weapons Station in North Charleston, SC. The prison is right next to my old office when I worked for Spawar over there.