There is also the issue of what if they arrive at the target planet and discover it really isn't habitable? There probably need to be contingency plans to make the trip to the next possible candidate. This is something that they could be actively looking for during the trip itself.
That's why you're better off building fully self contained permanently habitable stationary colonies every couple months along the path. As a bonus, you'll probably end up with something like a trillion times earths surface area as permanently habitable stations. On the down side that is going to take a heck of a lot of material. It'll take a lot longer, but the rewards are greater.
Its a very American perspective to try to get their first, once, and just as a stunt. Much better to settle colonies all along the way.
Did that for a few years, switched to GIT. Much better handling of file renames. Also decentralized means you keep working when disconnected, and every clone is kinda a backup. I like having many backups.
Disadvantage is some of its system concepts mystify some smart programmers, so you can expect absolute chaos from the middle and left edge of the bell curve. Expect to see funny things like people embedding dates into filenames inside a VCS, people asking you to destroy historical commits to cover things up, etc.
The author begins by introducing RM in layman's terms,
That would have been a more interesting topic than the review itself.
Sometimes I think/. reviewers select the most esoteric thing they can find, just to annoy us. VLM is here to review "Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly During the Years 1842–1846" by Joseph Beete Jukes published by Cambridge University Press. That might actually be more interesting, if you like historical scientific travelogs, anyway...
Given an article about RM in general, or an ask/. that coincidentally happened to plug this book, yeah THEN once the desire is kindled, maybe I'd buy.
You gotta market to build the desire, before you market to establish superiority in that field. In this case, superiority in... what exactly? This review implies the book might be the market leader in its market, too bad its in a market no one has heard of or pays attention to.
Boeing designed the 787 without isolation between the network running the in-flight entertainment system (some of which allow PAX to plug in USB storage devices) and the network on which flight systems sit.
Not exactly. They (Boeing and Airbus, the only two major civilian transport aircraft mfgrs left) were spanked by the FAA half a decade ago to very specifically not even think of doing that.
So conceivably a passenger could have hijacked the plane without ever leaving their seat, e.g. with a crafted media file to exploit, say, ID3 parser bugs.
I presume Boeing have been forced to fix this, but I havn't checked...
Well conceivably, a pig could fly given a high enough thrust to weight ratio via a ID3 parser bug.
aka "FAA Docket No. NM364 Special Conditions No. 25-356-SC"
More or less the FAA telling Boeing and Airbus they will absolutely not be allowed to fly a transport plane without guaranteeing they are not completely separate.
This was all fought out and resolved like half a decade ago but the meme that passengers can hack into the FCS just simply will not die. 20 years from now we'll still be hearing about how someone heard someone quote someone else as having heard that its done all the time by the mysterious someone or something.
Now magically proclaiming "it shall be done" does not mean it actually will be done. Also an argument based on "theoretically I could be an axe murder, because I do have two strong arms and own an axe" and claiming there may or may not be a law against specifically being an axe murder vs a regular old murderer murderer, does not say anything really useful about the venn diagram of me and axe murderers.
I'd worry a lot more about someone jamming GPS, or sabotaging the production facilities, or shooting at the planes from the ground. Basically, the traditional attacks work so much better, and are so much cheaper...
My understanding is that LEU (low-enriched uranium) cannot achieve criticality without a moderator to slow down the neutrons?
Can anyone with a nuclear physics/engineering background give any explanation of how you can get a chain reaction without moderator?
I did about one year of nuke eng, after saying F Chem-Eng, then said F nuke eng and went EE. And then I never did any EE other than ham radio at home and have been a programmer / sysadmin since then. Yeah I was indecisive as a kid.
I cannot get a straight answer on how enriched the fuel was in the U plants. I believe the one reactor with MOX Pu was running about 5%.
I cannot get a straight answer on the core mass. As a gut level estimate a plant with that power output to have a sane thermal to mass ratio of about one ton per 10 MWt the core must have had about a hundred tons of U. Now that is U mass not mass of reactor vessel or mass of control rods and stuff, just "about a hundred tons of U". Also that ratio is from 20 year old memory and I don't know the MWt rating of the reactor, guessing about "1 GWt or so" It was a pretty standard GE BWR-3 installation, wasn't it? So whatever the standard BWR-3 core weight at any other site is probably close enough. Its all very confusing because there are/were like 6 reactors on site with 2 more planned and I can't be bothered to line up all the ducks in a row WRT which core we're all talking about. However, they are all well within an order of magnitude in size and other parameters, as far as I know.
Also I can't be bothered at this moment to look up the formula for minimum enrichment of "about a hundred tons" in optimal conditions. I'm guessing they specifically spec'd the enrichment to be low enough that if the whole core were melted into a perfect sphere surrounded by a perfect neutron reflector at the perfect low temperature (neutron doppler broadening) that it would still be non-critical, but like I said I dropped out of nuke-eng. Also I hated BWRs, all those transient calculations to figure out if the wetwell or drywell or whatever would pop like popcorn when you scram. Hated those things. Loved PWRs, so freaking simple and the turbine hall stays nice and clean. Bipolar transistor models or waveguide field equations, yeah that math sucks, its just fluid dynamics of a BWR during an "incident" suck even more.
Isn't it a motherboard, and not a CPU, that needs to support a BIOS?
I ran into a problem a few years ago with an AMD CPU and an Asys (was it Asus?) MB where the MB bios was old enough that it would read the CPU type info, learn the CPU was newer than it was programmed to understand, and give up all hope. Had to install the oldest AMD CPU I could find, flash the BIOS, then install the brand new fast CPU.
I would assume this means they will give all CPU revision data to the coreboot guys so coreboot can support all (all future?) CPUs in a series without choking.
And so on, and so forth, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
"No one," indeed.
Fair enough. I once saw two guys racing riding lawnmowers, also. Lets agree that there's approximately one million NASCAR fans for each pickup truck racing fan, and for me that rounds down to "no one" and for you it is a significant subset of humanity. No problemo.
Dakar is ultra customized dune buggies, not Tahoes and Suburbans, right? Also Dakar is (or at least used to be) completely insane, like automotive gladiatorial combat rather than racing. Almost like survival research labs with a "starting line and finishing line" theme. Real American Racing (probably a TM somewhere) is hillbillies driving in an oval 200 times, the Dakar experience is not even recognizable as "car racing" to the average American...
Ah that's relatively easy. A harder problem is adjusting the radii of all those curves. The hardest part is stretching all the bridges, tunnels, and viaducts 3 inches wider. And X crossings. Even station platforms might have to be moved...
Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan
Both have the same core problems...
First, private monopoly large scale providers result in the inevitable property taxes levied on the routes, after all why not make the "outsiders" pay property taxes until they bleed... The owners can/might survive depreciation and interest costs of improved routes, but they'll never survive the prop taxes on improved routes. Its kind of like adding an extra 5% to the published interest rate in perpetuity, and taxes always and only go up making an unlimited liability for the private owners.
NIMBY is the second problem, for better or worse we operate sorta kinda partially under the rule of law, and we certainly have plenty of hungry lawyers out to stop all progress.
The problem is for a gasoline car you can do 4 tires and fuel in under 20 seconds. Just gassing a car even in a non pit setting takes what, 3-4 minutes max? How long does it take to charge a battery on these cars.
I'm not seeing a problem here. The whole point of organized hyper-promoted racing is to provide a list of weird rules for the racers to follow. Restriction plates in the carburetors (ancient carbs? Well, throttle bodies anyway), total fuel burned limitations per race, strange rules about weight and dimensions, etc.
Simply add a couple more rules.
Furthermore you can dump electricity into lithium cells VERY quickly if you want, its just that you may only get 5 charges out of them, and they may possibly explode while charging. Both scenarios are fully compatible with hyper-promoted mass marketed "entertainment"
Until we have the technology to make a viable electric sports car they should be left to what they do best, econobox grocery getter. Which is nothing to be ashamed of.
It is possible electric racing may never be popular beyond drag racing / sprint cars / exotic stuff. For example, no one wants to race SUVs or pickup trucks, that would be about as fast paced and exciting as watching hippos mating, but that doesn't seem to have impacted their sales...
I personally find it funny when people use Tor and then leave behind the same cookies, the same user-agent, LSO and Flash cookies, same system configuration, same screen size, same fonts, same installation and versions of plugins, same MAC address, don't change DNS servers and countless amount of other things that make it very easy to identify your other activity or what you're doing.
If someone is trying to block web browsing by installing a cruddy blocker or whatever, but are not smart enough to block tor connections (think, hotel, restaurant, etc) then tor is a massively overcomplicated proxying solution.
Some places, mostly traveler oriented, but also some public K-12 schools, try to provide only www service over their wifi. Often via whitelists. Filtering at layer 7.
Also lots of places only allow ipv4 traffic over their fully ethernet capable wifi. Filtering at layer 2.
For a couple years in the 00s (was it the late 90s?) my wifi at home was bridged onto my wired network. Don't even remember why, I think it was for old fashioned lan parties or it was back when IPX was still viable, or something like that. Confused the heck out of some people. (Oh, heres your problem, your wifi and wired have the same subnet address, thats not possible, etc)
You'd be surprised how many non-networking people think wifi is a ip only protocol or even web-traffic only protocol.
Controlling the language is just a wedge to shove more filtering in.
For a web site, you need a domain and hosting. Firesheep has made HTTP obsolete for any site that takes contributions from its users, so now you need an SSL certificate. Internet Explorer on Windows XP doesn't support SNI, without which name-based virtual hosting for SSL sites is impossible, so you need an IPv4 address. Those aren't exactly free, especially now that IPv4 addresses have officially run out.
As for an application, not all kinds of applications run on Android, and there isn't a single market that serves both AT&T phones and Archos tablets.
Developing a website (that practically no one uses, and makes no profit) is basically free. Not sure if you need a SSL cert to not accept money from your users that don't exist. My domain plus XEN/KVM'd "shared dedicated host" for an entire decade is still cheaper than the fee for one single credit at the local university, and is far more educational.
The flaw in your description, is if utter newbie applicant could make a large, successful, profit generating business with no cash investment, why would Mr. Utter Newbie apply for a menial entry level job? Mr. Utter Newbie should be selling his incoming generating platform to you for $1B, not selling 40/hrs/week of code monkey time.
I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.
I have a LOT of relatives on the inside of the C.C. so I have some insight here.
The argument provided is perfectly valid for almost any religion. Only in the backwoods of TX would it be interpreted as exclusively biblical vs reality. If you never travel outside the TX back woods where 99% of the citizen population is evangelical christian, and 99% of the illegal alien population is Catholic, then its easy to warp your mind into binary thinking where the whole world is either christian or anti-christian, so all arguments must be phrased in those terms.
Now the C.C. is basically officially uni cultural, at least with respect to religion (plus or minus liberation theology, etc). Anyway there are Catholic churches pretty much everywhere in the world, and priests travel all around. I was married by a dude from some little country in Europe thats smaller than the average TX county. Easter mass was presided over by a genuine South American priest. Anyway a "cosmopolitan" church is not going to fall for an argument that is a giveaway to a competitor in India or Africa or pretty much anywhere that is not 99% hicksville.
The C.C. may believe is some pretty weird things, but that does not exclude being extremely sophisticated. In a similar way, backwoods hicks can be open minded and educated, but that does not exclude the vast majority from being extremely unsophisticated.
Bacteria generally are less tolerant of UV than we are for a variety of reasons (for one thing, they generally don't have backups of their genes like we do).
thru the magic of cubed-squared, my cardiac muscle tissue doesn't have to bother being UV resistant, and my skin doesn't have to bother doing much beyond being UV resistant (more or less) and keeping the outside out, and the inside in.
FTFA: "And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages."
So, there is some form of enforcement after all. The legality of this, I couldn't say.
I don't think I'm violating a NDA here, because this is a "well known" liability limiting move.
So anyone killed by, say, an overhead crane dropping a pallet on their heads, can be ruled a suicide, and they promise their family only gets legal minimum in damages. I'm only slightly tongue in cheek with the crane example, as the company would rule the victim should have been looking up, only a suicidal person would not run away as the pallet falls on them, etc. Pretty much anything other than blatant 1st deg murder with numerous witnesses would qualify.
How much legal weight something like this holds is mysterious. If it intimidates just one victims family, it certainly pays for the cost of paperwork.
And FCC engineer T.A.M. Craven was absolutely certain back in 1961 that there was 'no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.'"
Given the atmospheric astrophysics reasons requiring the use of GHz microwave bands, and that era's "bear skins and baling wire" solid state microwave RF technology level, he was correct. My grandfathers EE friends would have fallen out of their chairs if they could see the 2010 catalog and pricelist of a place like minicircuits.
A technology that demands the constant attention of the user or it will misbehave and finally die? That's the basis of
Farmville?
That was the first thing I thought of when "tamagotchi" came up. From observation. pretty much the same people who were addicted to the tama are now addicted to farmville. Also the same people addicted to TV and facebook. Its a personality hack more than a technological hack.
Bank close at 3PM, because, in the pre-computer days, there was several hours worth of counting & bookkeeping that had to be done between kicking the last customer out & close for the night.
Why they STILL close at 3PM, is... well... tradition, I guess.
Business banks. Many banks either are, or at least see themselves as banks for business, probably something to do with profit margin. They see their customer base as being the companies they make loans to, not some dude cashing their paycheck. If the state charter didn't mandate they provide "retail" side banking to all citizens in order to be allowed to act as a business bank, they would certainly not offer retail banking.
Shop around, there's probably a credit union or a retail bank out there, that's open till 7pm, unless you're in a one-bank town.
I have (more than once) had a teller look at my account balances and announce to everyone in earshot that it was a lot of money to have in an account like that, and would I be interested in one of their investment options?
You really want awkward, request too much cash in her opinion, and everyone in earshot hears "You sure, that is a lot of cash to carrying around?" Uh, thanks, next time I'll use the (silent) ATM.
Its the basis of the argument that our CS people gave us as to why a natural language recognition system could not be developed. So a couple of flight control (mechanical) engineers sat down and wrote one.
An excellent example of science "vs" engineering.
The scientists say a theoretically perfect system cannot be made. Also true that the abstract concept of a metal cube exactly one inch on a side cannot exist, because of various quantum and thermodynamic reasons there will always exist a variation somewhere deep in the decimal points.
The engineers, however, are perfectly able to make ones that "work well enough".
The hop from theory to engineering that happens with P=NP is almost as funny/interesting to talk about as the second hop on the same topic from engineering to mass media.
The reason to care about P ?= NP in an encryption context is that if P = NP then encryption definitely doesn't work.
Not true at all. Encryption works if, on average, it takes too long to break it using current technology for the data to be useful once its finally broke. Its an engineering balance, not a theoretical process.
P = NP is a scalability problem where it seems a very small amount of work and very small amount of key is very hard to break.
Something like DES scaled down to 8 bit keys (uh, good luck scaling the s-boxes down, but you get the general idea) is a horrible engineering decision regardless of how scalable the theoretical design is. One of 256 keys will give you your plain text english words back.
If P=NP the days of using a simple algorithm with a tiny key to protect huge amounts of data is over, but that doesn't mean crypto is dead. It just means maybe you need billion bit keys for an engineering win instead of thousand bit keys for an engineering win, and you'll have to pay more attention to improvements in processor speed and parallel processing. It hardly means its "magically" dead.
Think of it in chemical terms : proving N=NP is a chemist proving a formula exists. "breaking crypto" is more like a chemical engineer figuring the appropriate limiting reagent and reaction rate kinetics using the previously mentioned formula as a tool. If the chemist figures out a new formula, worst case scenario is the engineer has some late nights of work, not unemployment.
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There is also the issue of what if they arrive at the target planet and discover it really isn't habitable? There probably need to be contingency plans to make the trip to the next possible candidate. This is something that they could be actively looking for during the trip itself.
That's why you're better off building fully self contained permanently habitable stationary colonies every couple months along the path. As a bonus, you'll probably end up with something like a trillion times earths surface area as permanently habitable stations. On the down side that is going to take a heck of a lot of material. It'll take a lot longer, but the rewards are greater.
Its a very American perspective to try to get their first, once, and just as a stunt. Much better to settle colonies all along the way.
How about SVN?
Did that for a few years, switched to GIT. Much better handling of file renames. Also decentralized means you keep working when disconnected, and every clone is kinda a backup. I like having many backups.
Disadvantage is some of its system concepts mystify some smart programmers, so you can expect absolute chaos from the middle and left edge of the bell curve. Expect to see funny things like people embedding dates into filenames inside a VCS, people asking you to destroy historical commits to cover things up, etc.
The author begins by introducing RM in layman's terms,
That would have been a more interesting topic than the review itself.
Sometimes I think /. reviewers select the most esoteric thing they can find, just to annoy us. VLM is here to review "Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly During the Years 1842–1846" by Joseph Beete Jukes published by Cambridge University Press. That might actually be more interesting, if you like historical scientific travelogs, anyway...
Given an article about RM in general, or an ask /. that coincidentally happened to plug this book, yeah THEN once the desire is kindled, maybe I'd buy.
You gotta market to build the desire, before you market to establish superiority in that field. In this case, superiority in ... what exactly? This review implies the book might be the market leader in its market, too bad its in a market no one has heard of or pays attention to.
Boeing designed the 787 without isolation between the network running the in-flight entertainment system (some of which allow PAX to plug in USB storage devices) and the network on which flight systems sit.
Not exactly. They (Boeing and Airbus, the only two major civilian transport aircraft mfgrs left) were spanked by the FAA half a decade ago to very specifically not even think of doing that.
So conceivably a passenger could have hijacked the plane without ever leaving their seat, e.g. with a crafted media file to exploit, say, ID3 parser bugs.
I presume Boeing have been forced to fix this, but I havn't checked...
Well conceivably, a pig could fly given a high enough thrust to weight ratio via a ID3 parser bug.
Check out
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2008_register&docid=fr02ja08-5
aka "FAA Docket No. NM364 Special Conditions No. 25-356-SC"
More or less the FAA telling Boeing and Airbus they will absolutely not be allowed to fly a transport plane without guaranteeing they are not completely separate.
This was all fought out and resolved like half a decade ago but the meme that passengers can hack into the FCS just simply will not die. 20 years from now we'll still be hearing about how someone heard someone quote someone else as having heard that its done all the time by the mysterious someone or something.
Now magically proclaiming "it shall be done" does not mean it actually will be done. Also an argument based on "theoretically I could be an axe murder, because I do have two strong arms and own an axe" and claiming there may or may not be a law against specifically being an axe murder vs a regular old murderer murderer, does not say anything really useful about the venn diagram of me and axe murderers.
I'd worry a lot more about someone jamming GPS, or sabotaging the production facilities, or shooting at the planes from the ground. Basically, the traditional attacks work so much better, and are so much cheaper...
How, without a moderator?
My understanding is that LEU (low-enriched uranium) cannot achieve criticality without a moderator to slow down the neutrons?
Can anyone with a nuclear physics/engineering background give any explanation of how you can get a chain reaction without moderator?
I did about one year of nuke eng, after saying F Chem-Eng, then said F nuke eng and went EE. And then I never did any EE other than ham radio at home and have been a programmer / sysadmin since then. Yeah I was indecisive as a kid.
Anyway read the paragraph under the table at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of_a_bare_sphere
I cannot get a straight answer on how enriched the fuel was in the U plants. I believe the one reactor with MOX Pu was running about 5%.
I cannot get a straight answer on the core mass. As a gut level estimate a plant with that power output to have a sane thermal to mass ratio of about one ton per 10 MWt the core must have had about a hundred tons of U. Now that is U mass not mass of reactor vessel or mass of control rods and stuff, just "about a hundred tons of U". Also that ratio is from 20 year old memory and I don't know the MWt rating of the reactor, guessing about "1 GWt or so" It was a pretty standard GE BWR-3 installation, wasn't it? So whatever the standard BWR-3 core weight at any other site is probably close enough. Its all very confusing because there are/were like 6 reactors on site with 2 more planned and I can't be bothered to line up all the ducks in a row WRT which core we're all talking about. However, they are all well within an order of magnitude in size and other parameters, as far as I know.
Also I can't be bothered at this moment to look up the formula for minimum enrichment of "about a hundred tons" in optimal conditions. I'm guessing they specifically spec'd the enrichment to be low enough that if the whole core were melted into a perfect sphere surrounded by a perfect neutron reflector at the perfect low temperature (neutron doppler broadening) that it would still be non-critical, but like I said I dropped out of nuke-eng. Also I hated BWRs, all those transient calculations to figure out if the wetwell or drywell or whatever would pop like popcorn when you scram. Hated those things. Loved PWRs, so freaking simple and the turbine hall stays nice and clean. Bipolar transistor models or waveguide field equations, yeah that math sucks, its just fluid dynamics of a BWR during an "incident" suck even more.
Isn't it a motherboard, and not a CPU, that needs to support a BIOS?
I ran into a problem a few years ago with an AMD CPU and an Asys (was it Asus?) MB where the MB bios was old enough that it would read the CPU type info, learn the CPU was newer than it was programmed to understand, and give up all hope. Had to install the oldest AMD CPU I could find, flash the BIOS, then install the brand new fast CPU.
I would assume this means they will give all CPU revision data to the coreboot guys so coreboot can support all (all future?) CPUs in a series without choking.
Nascar Camping World Truck Series
Baja 500
Dakar Rally
Mint 400
And so on, and so forth, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
"No one," indeed.
Fair enough. I once saw two guys racing riding lawnmowers, also. Lets agree that there's approximately one million NASCAR fans for each pickup truck racing fan, and for me that rounds down to "no one" and for you it is a significant subset of humanity. No problemo.
Dakar is ultra customized dune buggies, not Tahoes and Suburbans, right? Also Dakar is (or at least used to be) completely insane, like automotive gladiatorial combat rather than racing. Almost like survival research labs with a "starting line and finishing line" theme. Real American Racing (probably a TM somewhere) is hillbillies driving in an oval 200 times, the Dakar experience is not even recognizable as "car racing" to the average American...
Ah that's relatively easy. A harder problem is adjusting the radii of all those curves. The hardest part is stretching all the bridges, tunnels, and viaducts 3 inches wider. And X crossings. Even station platforms might have to be moved...
Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan
Both have the same core problems...
First, private monopoly large scale providers result in the inevitable property taxes levied on the routes, after all why not make the "outsiders" pay property taxes until they bleed... The owners can/might survive depreciation and interest costs of improved routes, but they'll never survive the prop taxes on improved routes. Its kind of like adding an extra 5% to the published interest rate in perpetuity, and taxes always and only go up making an unlimited liability for the private owners.
NIMBY is the second problem, for better or worse we operate sorta kinda partially under the rule of law, and we certainly have plenty of hungry lawyers out to stop all progress.
It needs to be done once again when larger areas want to connect. And then continents.
Europe - Asia no problemo
N.A. - Australia this is getting difficult
S.A. - Antarctica now that's ridiculous.
Arguably with intermodal all that really matters is container size, since you'll be switching transport providers every couple thousand miles anyway.
Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 1886, the railroad network in the southern United States was converted
Isn't that something like 21 years after they lost "The War of Northern Aggression" known by Ken Burns and the yankees as "The Civil War"?
Give me 21 years to pre-plan and pre-position supplies and workers and I can probably pull 11500 miles of CAT-5 in 2 days.
The problem is for a gasoline car you can do 4 tires and fuel in under 20 seconds. Just gassing a car even in a non pit setting takes what, 3-4 minutes max? How long does it take to charge a battery on these cars.
I'm not seeing a problem here. The whole point of organized hyper-promoted racing is to provide a list of weird rules for the racers to follow. Restriction plates in the carburetors (ancient carbs? Well, throttle bodies anyway), total fuel burned limitations per race, strange rules about weight and dimensions, etc.
Simply add a couple more rules.
Furthermore you can dump electricity into lithium cells VERY quickly if you want, its just that you may only get 5 charges out of them, and they may possibly explode while charging. Both scenarios are fully compatible with hyper-promoted mass marketed "entertainment"
Until we have the technology to make a viable electric sports car they should be left to what they do best, econobox grocery getter. Which is nothing to be ashamed of.
It is possible electric racing may never be popular beyond drag racing / sprint cars / exotic stuff. For example, no one wants to race SUVs or pickup trucks, that would be about as fast paced and exciting as watching hippos mating, but that doesn't seem to have impacted their sales...
I personally find it funny when people use Tor and then leave behind the same cookies, the same user-agent, LSO and Flash cookies, same system configuration, same screen size, same fonts, same installation and versions of plugins, same MAC address, don't change DNS servers and countless amount of other things that make it very easy to identify your other activity or what you're doing.
If someone is trying to block web browsing by installing a cruddy blocker or whatever, but are not smart enough to block tor connections (think, hotel, restaurant, etc) then tor is a massively overcomplicated proxying solution.
Wired and Wireless Ethernet are both Ethernet.
Some places, mostly traveler oriented, but also some public K-12 schools, try to provide only www service over their wifi. Often via whitelists. Filtering at layer 7.
Also lots of places only allow ipv4 traffic over their fully ethernet capable wifi. Filtering at layer 2.
For a couple years in the 00s (was it the late 90s?) my wifi at home was bridged onto my wired network. Don't even remember why, I think it was for old fashioned lan parties or it was back when IPX was still viable, or something like that. Confused the heck out of some people. (Oh, heres your problem, your wifi and wired have the same subnet address, thats not possible, etc)
You'd be surprised how many non-networking people think wifi is a ip only protocol or even web-traffic only protocol.
Controlling the language is just a wedge to shove more filtering in.
developing websites and apps is basically free.
For a web site, you need a domain and hosting. Firesheep has made HTTP obsolete for any site that takes contributions from its users, so now you need an SSL certificate. Internet Explorer on Windows XP doesn't support SNI, without which name-based virtual hosting for SSL sites is impossible, so you need an IPv4 address. Those aren't exactly free, especially now that IPv4 addresses have officially run out.
As for an application, not all kinds of applications run on Android, and there isn't a single market that serves both AT&T phones and Archos tablets.
Developing a website (that practically no one uses, and makes no profit) is basically free. Not sure if you need a SSL cert to not accept money from your users that don't exist. My domain plus XEN/KVM'd "shared dedicated host" for an entire decade is still cheaper than the fee for one single credit at the local university, and is far more educational.
The flaw in your description, is if utter newbie applicant could make a large, successful, profit generating business with no cash investment, why would Mr. Utter Newbie apply for a menial entry level job? Mr. Utter Newbie should be selling his incoming generating platform to you for $1B, not selling 40/hrs/week of code monkey time.
I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.
I have a LOT of relatives on the inside of the C.C. so I have some insight here.
The argument provided is perfectly valid for almost any religion. Only in the backwoods of TX would it be interpreted as exclusively biblical vs reality. If you never travel outside the TX back woods where 99% of the citizen population is evangelical christian, and 99% of the illegal alien population is Catholic, then its easy to warp your mind into binary thinking where the whole world is either christian or anti-christian, so all arguments must be phrased in those terms.
Now the C.C. is basically officially uni cultural, at least with respect to religion (plus or minus liberation theology, etc). Anyway there are Catholic churches pretty much everywhere in the world, and priests travel all around. I was married by a dude from some little country in Europe thats smaller than the average TX county. Easter mass was presided over by a genuine South American priest. Anyway a "cosmopolitan" church is not going to fall for an argument that is a giveaway to a competitor in India or Africa or pretty much anywhere that is not 99% hicksville.
The C.C. may believe is some pretty weird things, but that does not exclude being extremely sophisticated. In a similar way, backwoods hicks can be open minded and educated, but that does not exclude the vast majority from being extremely unsophisticated.
Bacteria generally are less tolerant of UV than we are for a variety of reasons (for one thing, they generally don't have backups of their genes like we do).
thru the magic of cubed-squared, my cardiac muscle tissue doesn't have to bother being UV resistant, and my skin doesn't have to bother doing much beyond being UV resistant (more or less) and keeping the outside out, and the inside in.
FTFA: "And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages."
So, there is some form of enforcement after all. The legality of this, I couldn't say.
I don't think I'm violating a NDA here, because this is a "well known" liability limiting move.
So anyone killed by, say, an overhead crane dropping a pallet on their heads, can be ruled a suicide, and they promise their family only gets legal minimum in damages. I'm only slightly tongue in cheek with the crane example, as the company would rule the victim should have been looking up, only a suicidal person would not run away as the pallet falls on them, etc. Pretty much anything other than blatant 1st deg murder with numerous witnesses would qualify.
How much legal weight something like this holds is mysterious. If it intimidates just one victims family, it certainly pays for the cost of paperwork.
From the fine article
Methods to incentivize researchers,
Ummm, I'd try money.
And FCC engineer T.A.M. Craven was absolutely certain back in 1961 that there was 'no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.'"
Given the atmospheric astrophysics reasons requiring the use of GHz microwave bands, and that era's "bear skins and baling wire" solid state microwave RF technology level, he was correct. My grandfathers EE friends would have fallen out of their chairs if they could see the 2010 catalog and pricelist of a place like minicircuits.
A technology that demands the constant attention of the user or it will misbehave and finally die? That's the basis of
Farmville?
That was the first thing I thought of when "tamagotchi" came up. From observation. pretty much the same people who were addicted to the tama are now addicted to farmville. Also the same people addicted to TV and facebook. Its a personality hack more than a technological hack.
Bank close at 3PM, because, in the pre-computer days, there was several hours worth of counting & bookkeeping that had to be done between kicking the last customer out & close for the night.
Why they STILL close at 3PM, is... well... tradition, I guess.
Business banks. Many banks either are, or at least see themselves as banks for business, probably something to do with profit margin. They see their customer base as being the companies they make loans to, not some dude cashing their paycheck. If the state charter didn't mandate they provide "retail" side banking to all citizens in order to be allowed to act as a business bank, they would certainly not offer retail banking.
Shop around, there's probably a credit union or a retail bank out there, that's open till 7pm, unless you're in a one-bank town.
I have (more than once) had a teller look at my account balances and announce to everyone in earshot that it was a lot of money to have in an account like that, and would I be interested in one of their investment options?
You really want awkward, request too much cash in her opinion, and everyone in earshot hears "You sure, that is a lot of cash to carrying around?"
Uh, thanks, next time I'll use the (silent) ATM.
Its the basis of the argument that our CS people gave us as to why a natural language recognition system could not be developed. So a couple of flight control (mechanical) engineers sat down and wrote one.
An excellent example of science "vs" engineering.
The scientists say a theoretically perfect system cannot be made. Also true that the abstract concept of a metal cube exactly one inch on a side cannot exist, because of various quantum and thermodynamic reasons there will always exist a variation somewhere deep in the decimal points.
The engineers, however, are perfectly able to make ones that "work well enough".
The hop from theory to engineering that happens with P=NP is almost as funny/interesting to talk about as the second hop on the same topic from engineering to mass media.
The reason to care about P ?= NP in an encryption context is that if P = NP then encryption definitely doesn't work.
Not true at all. Encryption works if, on average, it takes too long to break it using current technology for the data to be useful once its finally broke. Its an engineering balance, not a theoretical process.
P = NP is a scalability problem where it seems a very small amount of work and very small amount of key is very hard to break.
Something like DES scaled down to 8 bit keys (uh, good luck scaling the s-boxes down, but you get the general idea) is a horrible engineering decision regardless of how scalable the theoretical design is. One of 256 keys will give you your plain text english words back.
If P=NP the days of using a simple algorithm with a tiny key to protect huge amounts of data is over, but that doesn't mean crypto is dead. It just means maybe you need billion bit keys for an engineering win instead of thousand bit keys for an engineering win, and you'll have to pay more attention to improvements in processor speed and parallel processing. It hardly means its "magically" dead.
Think of it in chemical terms : proving N=NP is a chemist proving a formula exists. "breaking crypto" is more like a chemical engineer figuring the appropriate limiting reagent and reaction rate kinetics using the previously mentioned formula as a tool. If the chemist figures out a new formula, worst case scenario is the engineer has some late nights of work, not unemployment.