In some ways, this revelation parallels counting in the west.
Consider counting pies. For the longest time, you either had "N" pies (N > 0), or you had "no" pies (a special, non-numeric state). Of course, the idea of having less than no pies was considered nonsense - "You can you have less than no pies?"
Eventually, this was generalized - the idea that you might have less than no pies (you might own the Widow Johnson a pie, for example), the idea that having no pies is just another number, etc. were added, and more forms of calculation were made possible.
So, now we have quantum information. And we have the idea that having "N" bits (N >= 0) makes intuitive sense, but the idea of N being less than zero seems odd. This sounds to me like we are starting to generalize the idea of information just as we did for numbers.
Now, the question I have is, that given the linkages between information and entropy, what does this mean for entropy?
Also, I can't help but wonder, will we generalize this to the idea of imaginary and complex information?
They don't de-orbit it because de-orbiting something is not as simple as throwing it out the window - you have to remove enough oribital velocity from the object to place it into a re-entry orbit. That takes thrust - so you would have to have a means of providing that thrust.
Like, oh, say, a rocket. Sent up from the earth. By another rocket.
"... So we went out there with our shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, and we loaded all that trash into the back of a Boeing orbiter, went back inside the space station, and had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat."
Here's another three words that I think would make a good game mod:
Little Red Wagon.
Think about it - as part of your wanderings, you find a little red wagon, where you pile most of your stuff. As you need it, you need to go to the LRW and get it. Thus, you have to be a bit more picky in what you are carrying, since you can only carry a few items and the rest are on the LRW.
Also, when you go squeeze through the ventilation system, you have to leave your LRW behind - so choose your gear and choose wisely.
You could also do fun things like:
Put the LRW in an (currently non-working) elevator, the wend your way through the ventilation system to the elevator control system, fix it, and summon your gear.
Have a squeaky wheel, and have to find the WD-40 to quiet it down (else attract all the monsters around as you move).
Ride it, toboggan-style, down an incline.
Put an auto-sentry type gun on it, arm the sentry, and push it down an incline into a room full of bad guys.
Capture the LRW. 'Nuff said.
You also get into the situation where you might have to drop different items at different points down the hall, to battle a Big Bad Guy on the other side of a door: "OK, drop some chain gun ammo here, some more a few feet further down, a rocket here, another here. Some plasma ammo here. OK, here at the door, I'll ready a proxy mine, open the door, step back, and start wailing on the bad guy!"
Just think of how much fun it would be to see a Manly-Man hero (Duke, Sam, Gordon, or Sarge) pulling this child's wagon behind him!
Tool creates fake web pages that look like vulnerable Web apps.
Google indexes fake pages.
Bad Guy searches Google for likely victims.
Google returns indexes of pages created by tool.
Bad Guy follows links.
Tool logs Bad Guy's IP and other information.
No Profit for Bad Guy.
Good Guys watch Bad Guy try to |-|@><0r the page, and log everything his does.
Good Guys contact Law Enforcement, present evidence.
Good Guys contact Bad Guy's ISP, present evidence.
(now, there are 2 possible outcomes - the ideal and the real.)
Ideal outcome
Law Enforcement goes after Bad Guy.
Bad Guy's ISP shuts Bad Guy down.
Bad Guy gets caught, convicted, and spends several years playing "Hide The Sausage" with his new friend Benjamin Dover the Serial Sodomist.
Real outcome
Law Enforcement ignores evidence as no money was lost.
Bad Guy's ISP ignores evidence as there is no Law Enforcement involvement, and Good Guys are not ISP's customers.
Bad Guy is distracted for a while and doesn't get to |-|@><0r as many systems.
How about "Encumbrance doesn't matter"
on
Top Ten Game Cliches
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How about the cliche of "encumbrance doesn't matter" a.k.a. "the walking armory".
Listen, in real life just carrying an AR-15, a shotgun, and a single box of 20 5.56 rounds gets to be difficult - you sling the rifle, you sling the shotgun, take a step, and one or both slings will slide off your shoulders. You crouch and either the but of the weapon hits the ground or the barrel is way in the air.
And ammunition is *heavy* in real life.
Yet here you are, carrying a rifle w/ scope, a selective fire carbine, a rocket launcher, a minigun, three pistols, several alien lifeforms, several rockets, several clips, several HUNDRED rounds of ammunition of different types.
When I was in college, I saw a bible thumper escorted off of campus kicking and screaming about "free speech".
Was this thumper called "Brother Jeb"? If so, he ain't just a Southern Phenom - he was at Wichita State back when I was an undergrad - ca. 1985 or so. Showed up for a couple of years. Was roundly made fun of, and was not, to the best of my knowledge, officially removed from campus, but rather I think he finally "figgerd" out that all those "LEEEEEZZZZZZBIANS and MAAAAAA-STURBATORS" were not going to listen to him.
In the previous stories about the new X acceleration layer there was talk about removing the idea of accelerating drawing of lines with hardware from the acceleration framework.
For me, that is very, very bad as what I do needs to draw about 30-50 thousand line segments a second, and not having line draw acceleration would suck.
Now, along comes OpenVL - which sounds like it would be perfect for accelerating oscilloscope-type operations.
I can only hope that real hardware to do this becomes commonplace.
By rejecting the heat into that big cold wet thing all around them - the OCEAN. Y'know, one of the best heat sinks around?
Space is very cold....
No, space is not cold. Nor is it hot. It is a vacuum, and has no real temperature of its own (modulo the very small amount of interplanetary matter out there).
Yes, given enough time an object in space will cool to 3 kelvin if the object is not sunlight - near the Earth's orbital distance around the sun an object in the sun will heat to over a hundred degrees Celsius.
If you put the "heatsink" somewhere outside of the part of the spaceship that is heated, then you would have your heat that can be "conducted away"
You either have not had high school physics, or you flunked it. To lose heat via conduction you have to have something in physical contact to conduct the heat TO. Remember, space is empty - as in "there is NOTHING THERE to conduct heat". Have you ever wondered why a really good Thermos® is a glass bottle in a vacuum? Because that way there is no heat lost to conduction! (modulo the heat lost through the neck of the glass liner).
The only way you get rid of heat in space is not by conduction, not by convection, but by radiation - which is terribly inefficient.
Whenever I see an article like "$FOO performed over high speed Internet link" I always want to ask:
Was this truly a high-speed Internet link, or was this merely a high-speed TCP/IP link? In other words, did the packets truly traverse the publicly accessible Internet (even if in the form of VPN traffic), or were they merely TCP/IP packets on a link that was completely separate from the publicly accessible Internet?
(Note: I would consider packets that traverse Internet2 to NOT be "On the Internet" as Internet2 is not really accessible to the general public.)
After all, if I say that I am controlling the antennas on my tower "over the Internet" when in truth all I am doing is controlling them over my local LAN from my shack to the tower controller, that would not be a correct statement. Now, if I am controlling them over an SSH session carried over the Internet, it would be.
Not all that is TCP/IP is Internet.
So, which is it: were these packets REALLY going over the Internet in any form, or was this a dedicated link?
This comment is not a question, so please don't submit it as such.
Really, I don't see the utility of this interview - it's kind of like interviewing somebody from the Intelligence community - all the really GOOD questions they aren't going to answer, and any question they will answer are fluff.
After all, asking a question like "What is the real business goal of the Linux lab" is not likely to result in a meaningful answer, but will result in a fine example of tap dancing around the real truth. (NOTE: this is NOT a slam against Microsoft - any business is going to be cagey about reveling what they are examining and why).
Questions about "Are you using this to break Samba" are just insulting, as well as being unlikely to elicit any response other than "No" - they are just like ambush journalism questions ("Did you really embezzle the money as you are accused of doing" asked as the man is on his way to the trial, or "Did you kill your wife Mr. Simpson?")
I fear that all this little exercise will do is yield a bunch of lame questions that will be handed over to this man, thus "proving" that Slashdot is not able to ask meaningful questions.
The single most expensive part of any launch is the simple energy cost to boost a kilo of cargo to orbit. Every kilo you are boosting that ISN'T cargo is several hundred kilos of fuel wasted.
Adding kilos to your launch vehicle to allow it to return to Earth is a WASTE if all you are doing is putting cargo into orbit. Putting a crew return vehicle on every cargo launch is terribly wasteful.
Having a small crew vehicle (where you HAVE to have the kilos to make it return to Earth) and a BIG disposable cargo vehicle is the best solution with today's technology.
Now, perhaps one fine day we will be able to spin a beanstalk and then the economics will change, but for now, this idea is the best one, and I am glad NASA finally sees the light on this!
Oh, I agree - no automated "documentation generator" can generate WHY or WHAT - that is a task for the software writer.
And I will also agree with several people that WHY and WHAT probably don't belong in code comments per se but in proper external documentation.
But I, like the GGP, have encountered far too many projects that, when confronted with the astonishing lack of documentation, will point proudly to their Doxygen pages and say "Nu-HUH! We do SO have documentation! So THERE!"
That would require about 64 volts of potential across the target at the stated current, at a resistance of 3.3 micro-ohms of resistance in the target.
Given the "few millionths of a second" duration, the total energy would be about a kilo-joule to ten kilo-joules - about the same as the chemical energy in a single gumdrop (there's a new/unit for you!)
First - submit it to Technocrat - they can use all the stories they can get, so are much more likely to accept your submission.
Second - whenever you submit a story, place a copy into a journal entry. That way, people can see what is being submitted and rejected to Slashdot.
While I understand and agree with the/crew's refusal to make the story queue public (simply - make a thing public, expect it to be trolled), their current refusal to provide any sort of feedback about why a story is rejected just demonstrates their double-standard of "Everybody ELSE must have complete transparency in everything they do, but DON'T YOU DARE ask US to follow that rule!". The argument they have given in the past against providing any sort of feedback was "It would take too much time! We sort too many stories a day!" - BULLSHIT. The time to click a button to say "Dup/Not news for nerds/Already scheduled for later/Too biased, try again" instead of just "rejected" is trivial.
Oh well - IMHO/. reached its zenith in 2000, and has been sliding toward its nadir at ever-growing speed ever since.
Because Bacchus redirects to Dionysus - so while I could have made the link be to Bacchus, it would have simply redirected the user to the page to which I linked, costing the user some time and Wikipedia some bandwidth.
Also, had you bothered to follow the link, you would have seen that in the first paragraph they list Bacchus as an alias.
Of course, that would have presupposed that you were actually interested in furthering the conversation on Slashdot rather than just trolling for what you thought was an error.
YOU LIAR! No self-respecting Windows user takes any form of security precautions! You MUST be one of those Commie-Tree-Hugging-Penguin-Frenching Linux users!
It sounds to me like he simply failed to opt-out of the "Beat your head in" club.
They must have purchased a list with his name on it, and he failed to opt-out, so they had every right to offer their product to him.
After all, we wouldn't want to deny those people who WANT to have their heads beaten in the opportunity, just because some whiny anti-battery types want such lists to be double opt in.
He should have taken more care with his head - kept it in a metal helmet, only showing it to his friends, changing it periodically. Instead, he had his head out in the open where anybody who wanted to could beat it in.
It's all his fault, and the DMA (Dastardly Murder Association) bears no responsibility for this incident.
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways, this revelation parallels counting in the west.
Consider counting pies. For the longest time, you either had "N" pies (N > 0), or you had "no" pies (a special, non-numeric state). Of course, the idea of having less than no pies was considered nonsense - "You can you have less than no pies?"
Eventually, this was generalized - the idea that you might have less than no pies (you might own the Widow Johnson a pie, for example), the idea that having no pies is just another number, etc. were added, and more forms of calculation were made possible.
So, now we have quantum information. And we have the idea that having "N" bits (N >= 0) makes intuitive sense, but the idea of N being less than zero seems odd. This sounds to me like we are starting to generalize the idea of information just as we did for numbers.
Now, the question I have is, that given the linkages between information and entropy, what does this mean for entropy?
Also, I can't help but wonder, will we generalize this to the idea of imaginary and complex information?
And what would that signify?
They don't de-orbit it because de-orbiting something is not as simple as throwing it out the window - you have to remove enough oribital velocity from the object to place it into a re-entry orbit. That takes thrust - so you would have to have a means of providing that thrust.
Like, oh, say, a rocket. Sent up from the earth. By another rocket.
Which pretty much describes the shuttle.
I'm not sure which of us is worse - you for bringing that up, or me for getting it.
/bot won't get it - they think "Quark" is a barkeep, not a trashman.
Alas, the average
"... So we went out there with our shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, and we loaded all that trash into the back of a Boeing orbiter, went back inside the space station, and had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat."
What, like Duke Nukem? Or Serious Sam? Both of those franchises have a fair amount of humor in them.
Little Red Wagon.
Think about it - as part of your wanderings, you find a little red wagon, where you pile most of your stuff. As you need it, you need to go to the LRW and get it. Thus, you have to be a bit more picky in what you are carrying, since you can only carry a few items and the rest are on the LRW.
Also, when you go squeeze through the ventilation system, you have to leave your LRW behind - so choose your gear and choose wisely.
You could also do fun things like:
You also get into the situation where you might have to drop different items at different points down the hall, to battle a Big Bad Guy on the other side of a door: "OK, drop some chain gun ammo here, some more a few feet further down, a rocket here, another here. Some plasma ammo here. OK, here at the door, I'll ready a proxy mine, open the door, step back, and start wailing on the bad guy!"
Just think of how much fun it would be to see a Manly-Man hero (Duke, Sam, Gordon, or Sarge) pulling this child's wagon behind him!
OK, simply:
Tool creates fake web pages that look like vulnerable Web apps.
Google indexes fake pages.
Bad Guy searches Google for likely victims.
Google returns indexes of pages created by tool.
Bad Guy follows links.
Tool logs Bad Guy's IP and other information.
No Profit for Bad Guy.
Good Guys watch Bad Guy try to |-|@><0r the page, and log everything his does.
Good Guys contact Law Enforcement, present evidence.
Good Guys contact Bad Guy's ISP, present evidence.
(now, there are 2 possible outcomes - the ideal and the real.)
Ideal outcome
Law Enforcement goes after Bad Guy.
Bad Guy's ISP shuts Bad Guy down.
Bad Guy gets caught, convicted, and spends several years playing "Hide The Sausage" with his new friend Benjamin Dover the Serial Sodomist.
Real outcome
Law Enforcement ignores evidence as no money was lost.
Bad Guy's ISP ignores evidence as there is no Law Enforcement involvement, and Good Guys are not ISP's customers.
Bad Guy is distracted for a while and doesn't get to |-|@><0r as many systems.
How about the cliche of "encumbrance doesn't matter" a.k.a. "the walking armory".
Listen, in real life just carrying an AR-15, a shotgun, and a single box of 20 5.56 rounds gets to be difficult - you sling the rifle, you sling the shotgun, take a step, and one or both slings will slide off your shoulders. You crouch and either the but of the weapon hits the ground or the barrel is way in the air.
And ammunition is *heavy* in real life.
Yet here you are, carrying a rifle w/ scope, a selective fire carbine, a rocket launcher, a minigun, three pistols, several alien lifeforms, several rockets, several clips, several HUNDRED rounds of ammunition of different types.
Yes. right.
Was this thumper called "Brother Jeb"? If so, he ain't just a Southern Phenom - he was at Wichita State back when I was an undergrad - ca. 1985 or so. Showed up for a couple of years. Was roundly made fun of, and was not, to the best of my knowledge, officially removed from campus, but rather I think he finally "figgerd" out that all those " LEEEEEZZZZZZBIANS and MAAAAAA-STURBATORS " were not going to listen to him.
In the previous stories about the new X acceleration layer there was talk about removing the idea of accelerating drawing of lines with hardware from the acceleration framework.
For me, that is very, very bad as what I do needs to draw about 30-50 thousand line segments a second, and not having line draw acceleration would suck.
Now, along comes OpenVL - which sounds like it would be perfect for accelerating oscilloscope-type operations.
I can only hope that real hardware to do this becomes commonplace.
How do they do it on submarines?
By rejecting the heat into that big cold wet thing all around them - the OCEAN. Y'know, one of the best heat sinks around?
Space is very cold....
No, space is not cold. Nor is it hot. It is a vacuum, and has no real temperature of its own (modulo the very small amount of interplanetary matter out there).
Yes, given enough time an object in space will cool to 3 kelvin if the object is not sunlight - near the Earth's orbital distance around the sun an object in the sun will heat to over a hundred degrees Celsius.
If you put the "heatsink" somewhere outside of the part of the spaceship that is heated, then you would have your heat that can be "conducted away"
You either have not had high school physics, or you flunked it. To lose heat via conduction you have to have something in physical contact to conduct the heat TO. Remember, space is empty - as in "there is NOTHING THERE to conduct heat". Have you ever wondered why a really good Thermos® is a glass bottle in a vacuum? Because that way there is no heat lost to conduction! (modulo the heat lost through the neck of the glass liner).
The only way you get rid of heat in space is not by conduction, not by convection, but by radiation - which is terribly inefficient.
Whenever I see an article like "$FOO performed over high speed Internet link" I always want to ask:
Was this truly a high-speed Internet link, or was this merely a high-speed TCP/IP link? In other words, did the packets truly traverse the publicly accessible Internet (even if in the form of VPN traffic), or were they merely TCP/IP packets on a link that was completely separate from the publicly accessible Internet?
(Note: I would consider packets that traverse Internet2 to NOT be "On the Internet" as Internet2 is not really accessible to the general public.)
After all, if I say that I am controlling the antennas on my tower "over the Internet" when in truth all I am doing is controlling them over my local LAN from my shack to the tower controller, that would not be a correct statement. Now, if I am controlling them over an SSH session carried over the Internet, it would be.
Not all that is TCP/IP is Internet.
So, which is it: were these packets REALLY going over the Internet in any form, or was this a dedicated link?
This comment is not a question, so please don't submit it as such.
Really, I don't see the utility of this interview - it's kind of like interviewing somebody from the Intelligence community - all the really GOOD questions they aren't going to answer, and any question they will answer are fluff.
After all, asking a question like "What is the real business goal of the Linux lab" is not likely to result in a meaningful answer, but will result in a fine example of tap dancing around the real truth. (NOTE: this is NOT a slam against Microsoft - any business is going to be cagey about reveling what they are examining and why).
Questions about "Are you using this to break Samba" are just insulting, as well as being unlikely to elicit any response other than "No" - they are just like ambush journalism questions ("Did you really embezzle the money as you are accused of doing" asked as the man is on his way to the trial, or "Did you kill your wife Mr. Simpson?")
I fear that all this little exercise will do is yield a bunch of lame questions that will be handed over to this man, thus "proving" that Slashdot is not able to ask meaningful questions.
FINAL-FUCKING-LY NASA gets it!!!!
The single most expensive part of any launch is the simple energy cost to boost a kilo of cargo to orbit. Every kilo you are boosting that ISN'T cargo is several hundred kilos of fuel wasted.
Adding kilos to your launch vehicle to allow it to return to Earth is a WASTE if all you are doing is putting cargo into orbit. Putting a crew return vehicle on every cargo launch is terribly wasteful.
Having a small crew vehicle (where you HAVE to have the kilos to make it return to Earth) and a BIG disposable cargo vehicle is the best solution with today's technology.
Now, perhaps one fine day we will be able to spin a beanstalk and then the economics will change, but for now, this idea is the best one, and I am glad NASA finally sees the light on this!
Oh, I agree - no automated "documentation generator" can generate WHY or WHAT - that is a task for the software writer.
And I will also agree with several people that WHY and WHAT probably don't belong in code comments per se but in proper external documentation.
But I, like the GGP, have encountered far too many projects that, when confronted with the astonishing lack of documentation, will point proudly to their Doxygen pages and say "Nu-HUH! We do SO have documentation! So THERE!"
I've said this before, and I shall say it again.
When I examine your code, I need to know:
Doxygen and JavaDoc are good at the HOW, but cannot do the WHAT or WHY.
To extend your example:
public void frobWoggleFfloofMoing(String, String, String)
Frobs the Woggle
(all these are questions I had when I was trying to grok the low-level RPM API, and which were very poorly documented on the RPM WIKI.)
Actually, it goes to 11!
/mods who's understanding of maths requires them to drop their pants to count to 21, look up factorial.)
(now, for the clueless
That would require about 64 volts of potential across the target at the stated current, at a resistance of 3.3 micro-ohms of resistance in the target.
/unit for you!)
Given the "few millionths of a second" duration, the total energy would be about a kilo-joule to ten kilo-joules - about the same as the chemical energy in a single gumdrop (there's a new
Just do as I do:
/crew's refusal to make the story queue public (simply - make a thing public, expect it to be trolled), their current refusal to provide any sort of feedback about why a story is rejected just demonstrates their double-standard of "Everybody ELSE must have complete transparency in everything they do, but DON'T YOU DARE ask US to follow that rule!". The argument they have given in the past against providing any sort of feedback was "It would take too much time! We sort too many stories a day!" - BULLSHIT. The time to click a button to say "Dup/Not news for nerds/Already scheduled for later/Too biased, try again" instead of just "rejected" is trivial.
/. reached its zenith in 2000, and has been sliding toward its nadir at ever-growing speed ever since.
First - submit it to Technocrat - they can use all the stories they can get, so are much more likely to accept your submission.
Second - whenever you submit a story, place a copy into a journal entry. That way, people can see what is being submitted and rejected to Slashdot.
While I understand and agree with the
Oh well - IMHO
Because Bacchus redirects to Dionysus - so while I could have made the link be to Bacchus, it would have simply redirected the user to the page to which I linked, costing the user some time and Wikipedia some bandwidth.
Also, had you bothered to follow the link, you would have seen that in the first paragraph they list Bacchus as an alias.
Of course, that would have presupposed that you were actually interested in furthering the conversation on Slashdot rather than just trolling for what you thought was an error.
OK, since most of the planets were named after Roman gods, here's a name for it:
Bacchus - the party planet! Party all night - and it's ALWAYS night!
Well, this is another So Happy It's Thursday moment for the guys from Redmond.
Sharp as a marble, those security guys.
1) Convice Bill to offer "one BILEEEON dollars" for a landing.
2) Get Russians to provide it - one way.
3) Profit!
YOU LIAR! No self-respecting Windows user takes any form of security precautions! You MUST be one of those Commie-Tree-Hugging-Penguin-Frenching Linux users!
Of COURSE your copy of Windows is counterfit!
It sounds to me like he simply failed to opt-out of the "Beat your head in" club.
They must have purchased a list with his name on it, and he failed to opt-out, so they had every right to offer their product to him.
After all, we wouldn't want to deny those people who WANT to have their heads beaten in the opportunity, just because some whiny anti-battery types want such lists to be double opt in.
He should have taken more care with his head - kept it in a metal helmet, only showing it to his friends, changing it periodically. Instead, he had his head out in the open where anybody who wanted to could beat it in.
It's all his fault, and the DMA (Dastardly Murder Association) bears no responsibility for this incident.