Isn't anyone wondering why we get to see lists like that, but no "shame" lists of various internet sellers of brand knockoffs?
Selling Folex watches or Rolls-Canardly cars isn't illegal, so a website selling those doesn't qualify for the list. The list does include websites that sell copyright-infringing or trademark-infringing goods, as well as physical markets that do so.
Natural selection results in 'good enough' genetics. There isn't any reason why people couldn't have eyesight as good as predatory birds (though some diet changes would be needed), or hearing as good as bats, or olfactory senses as good as canines, etc. but the conditions under which we evolved did not include pressures that selected for senses beyond our current state. Our sense were not maximized, simply good enough for most to survive, and that is natural selection's ultimate standard.
There are tradeoffs involved here. There's only so much surface area in an eyeball to hold photosensors, and only so many nerve paths between the eye and the brain. Human vision is a compromise: we've got strong color vision, moderate low-resolution peripheral vision, moderate high-resolution central vision, and a balance between day (cone) and night (rod) photosensors. Birds of prey tend to devote almost all their vision to high-resolution central vision, at the cost of peripheral vision (it's easier to sneak up on them), color vision (they can't tell a ripe apple from an unripe one), vision during their "off" lighting conditions (a day hunter is almost blind at night, and vice-versa), or all of the above. Similar tradeoffs exist with smell, sound, and any other sensory system: there's no "best" option, just the one that gives a creature the tools it needs to survive.
Assuming an average pay of $50k per employee (no idea if that's accurate but shouldn't be too bad.. some were programmer/analysts, some were managers, some were probably low-run tech support types), they could have used that $26M to pay all of those peoples' salaries for nearly the whole year.
Assuming Shaw offers benefits, an employee who is paid $50,000 per year costs the company around $150,000. You can't simply look at take-home pay and say the employee costs that much -- you also need to factor in benefits, payroll taxes, administrative overhead, and so on. Higher-paid employees tend to have a lower ratio of additional costs, while the costs for lower-paid employees tend to be higher in proportion to their pay, but "an employee costs three times their salary" is a good rule of thumb.
Even clear instructions often aren't good enough. For example, the software I develop had a rare bug (estimated incidence: one user in a hundred) where it would fail to draw the icons on toolbar buttons. Whenever I got a report of this bug, I'd request two pieces of information: a dxdiag report, and a screenshot.
Of the ten people who replied, nine managed to include a dxdiag report. There were three screenshots: a png scaled to 33%, a Word document with embedded image, and a low-quality JPEG. The report with the Word-document screenshot was PEBCAK: the toolbar icons weren't drawing because the user had turned off the toolbar. Since there was no obvious correlation between hardware or driver versions in the other reports (three chipsets, five drivers), I closed the bug as "can't reproduce".
About a year later, I got another report, this time including a full-size PNG screenshot. Looking carefully at the image showed that the icons were drawing, as a faint white tracery. The drawing code isn't stateless: occasionally, bugs pop up where something doesn't draw because of the order in which preceding elements had been drawn, and I'd assumed that this was another such case. However, nothing in the drawing code could cause this sort of incorrect rendering.
I looked back over the other reports, and discovered that if I assumed two of the chipsets were PEBCAK, the remaining six reports covered one chipset and two driver versions, and some quick online research showed that this driver had a bug in the alpha-blending code.
Bad plan. If you don't get the lawyers involved and ask the people involved to sign a waiver, your "gift" will count for nothing: they can say "thanks for the new minivan" and still sue you for the loss of the old one (and in court the act of doing all this so quickly might be taken as a sign of guilt).
You're thinking like a lawyer here. An ordinary person will see the apology and new minivan as a sincere attempt to make things right, and will respond by deciding not to sue.
Exactly, both Gnome and KDE environments have very good PDF readers built in, OSX is exactly the same if not better. The only OS that's behind is Windows. But then if the PDF viewer was programmed by MS it wouldn't change a thing from security perspective...
If you look under the hood, Linux has the same lack of diversity in PDF viewers that Windows does: almost everything is just a frontend for the Poppler library. If a security hole is found in eg. kpdf, it's a good bet that the hole is also present in epdfview or xpdf.
I don't think a backpack nuke is powerful enough. One of the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing was in a bank vault only a few hundred yards from ground zero, and the containment vessel for a nuclear reactor is a good bit stronger than a bank vault.
Immigration and Customs has, as one of its duties, the management of imports into the country. Part of that management is being the first line of defense against counterfeit and other illegal goods, by preventing them from being imported in the first place.
Apparently, somebody has decided that the potential international transmission of digital goods is "import" enough to get Customs involved.
No, the Saturn V blueprints and documentation are still around. The reason why we can't just pull them out and build another Saturn V is that these blueprints don't include the manufacturing drawings for every nut and bolt; rather, they assume the existence of certain standardized components. Some of these components (e.g. vacuum tubes) are no longer made, while others will have changed: for example, the mounting holes for a pump housing may have moved, or a solenoid-actuated valve may no longer be made from the same materials.
Even "low tech" stuff like pipes may no longer be available. I'm aware of three incompatible changes in the "standard" method of making an end connection between two low-pressure metal pipes; there may have been another one since the Saturn V was built.
They've been using green screens for a long time, and not just sci fi. Whenver you see a shot of two people in a car, it's either a green screen or the car's being towed.
I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."
It was discovered in 1933 that if we add up the mass of all the stars in a galaxy and run it through either Einsteinian or Newtonian gravity, there isn't enough of it to explain the paths of those stars. "Dark matter" simply means any form of matter that doesn't emit light (the Earth, for example, is a lump of baryonic dark matter), and originally it was expected that there were enough cold gas clouds, failed stars, stray planets, and the like (collectively known as "baryonic dark matter") to explain things.
The problem with dark matter is that astronomers have since gotten a fairly good idea of how much baryonic dark matter there is, and there's nowhere near enough. Thus, the various suggestions of non-baryonic dark matter and modified gravitational theories.
Speaking of pressure equalization and diaphragms, there's no reason you can't do this with air on the inside, you just have to have a large enough compression space for the air to compress into (i.e. an external air tank/bladder). So if the pressure at depth is 100 atmospheres, you'll need a sea-level compression space ~100 times the volume of space that your working equipment requires.
Rule of thumb is that 10 meters of water equals one atmosphere of pressure, so at the worst-case scenario of 9000 meters depth, your air compartment needs to be 900 times larger at the surface than at depth. Even with the smallest possible air compartment, that's still a pretty huge change in the total volume (and thus, buoyancy) of your ROV with depth.
If you ballast it for neutral buoyancy at the surface, it'll plummet like a rock as it gets deeper, and it'll be roughly as mobile as a rock once it hits bottom -- if it even survives the impact. If the ROV is neutrally-buoyant at depth, even a slight upward motion will cause the air compartment to expand, resulting in reduced density, increased buoyancy, and further upward motion. This creates a feedback cycle, causing the ROV to rocket to (and above) the surface, shedding debris in its wake.
You're in the counterintuitive situation of needing to drop ballast as the ROV descends, and worse, you need to *add* ballast as it ascends (but not too fast -- you don't want to turn an ascent into a descent). All submersible vessels are unstable with respect to depth, but an adjustable air compartment like you're describing makes it much worse.
As for the capabilities, I just tried it out. The results are *extremely* few and very poor. "Dog" gets five hits, for example. You'd almost think it was a joke. Hopefully this was a load problem or a problem due to a lack of scaling in the system thusfar, and not a design flaw.
I tried my standard search engine test (how hard is it to find the web page for the Hilton hotel in Paris?), and it failed miserably: "Paris Hilton" didn't get a single result, and neither did any other variation I tried.
It's one foot of rainfall on 13,500 acres of land, or 30.48 centimeters of rain on 5463.2561 hectares for you metric types.
The acre-foot is a very useful unit of measure for reasoning about environmental water supplies: if you've got something that needs 13,500 acre-feet of water per year and you're setting up somewhere that gets a foot of rain per year (say, semi-desert), you know you need a catchment area of roughly 13,500 acres that nothing else is drawing water from. If you're somewhere that gets more rain (say, Atlanta's four feet per year), you've got a smaller footprint (3400 acres).
News flash to the rest of the world: using (almost) all your RAM is a Good Thing.
Not really. On my system, performance starts to suffer once applications are taking up all but 1 GB or so; if non-app memory drops below 50 MB, the system becomes unusable.
Efficiency should be measured in how small the number of lines of code/bug fixes are needed for implementing/maintaining the desired functionality.
You want me to minimize line count? I can do that. I'll probably follow it up by submitting the code to the IOCCC, but you'll get the small codebase you asked for.
Step-wise refinement as an engineering process has some very basic assumptions, like, you have lots and lots of time to devote to your task. If you are fending off invaders, hunting and killing your dinner, and trying to refine the novel concept of in-door plumbing, it is difficult to imagine seeing working on a clock as a practical expenditure of precious time.
Fortunately for the ancient Greeks, the slave-owning upper class had plenty of time to spare.
(It's also why the ancient Greek steam engine, the ancient Greek railroad, the Antikythera mechanism, etc. didn't lead to an ancient Greek industrial revolution: "have a couple dozen slaves work on it for a year" works for creating one-offs, but it doesn't permit the mass production of standardized interchangeable parts that the Industrial Revolution was built on.)
IIRC, Morrowind didn't have monsters that leveled up with you. It had it's own set of leveling issues, like it became impossible to level up any more or increase stats beyond a certain point, but I was able to play and enjoy Morrowind without focusing too much on gaming the leveling system.
Morrowind had what they called "leveled lists": when adding creatures to a map, the designer often wouldn't add specific creatures, but rather, lists. For example, an ancestral tomb could contain four enemies from the "skeleton" list: if you entered it at level 5, you might face four ordinary skeleton warriors; at level 10, you might face bonelords or greater bonewalkers.
Level progression was created in three main ways: 1) NPCs were always at fixed levels, so the cave that had three level-2 smugglers at level 2 would have those same smugglers if you entered it at level 20. 2) The lists generally did not cover the entire level range, so if, for example, you tried to enter a Sixth House stronghold at level 1, you'd be shredded by creatures from lists that started at level 10. 3) There was enough variation in the lists that at any given level, you had a chance of encountering a level-inappropriate enemy that you would either defeat easily (thus signaling that you'd gotten more powerful since the last time you encountered it) or need to flee from (indicating that you've still got room for growth).
The net result (especially if you install a "healthy animals are peaceful" mod) is that you feel the power of Red Mountain growing as you progress through the main quest and level up: the forest that used to contain ordinary animals might now have an Ogrim Titan doing his best to smash you to a pulp. At the same time, your increasing power lets you survive in places where earlier you couldn't.
What about handwriting, except rather than simply analyzing the sample of the handwriting, you analyze the whole movement of the hand?
There was an article on Slashdot about that a while back. Turns out the best way to recognize someone from their handwriting is to analyze the pressure patterns as they write their signature -- the variations in the pressure between the pen and the writing surface are highly personal, and simply matching the shape of the signature (which a forger can easily do) won't match the pressure patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
Redirect to www.thepiratebay.org, for equally obvious reasons.
Selling Folex watches or Rolls-Canardly cars isn't illegal, so a website selling those doesn't qualify for the list. The list does include websites that sell copyright-infringing or trademark-infringing goods, as well as physical markets that do so.
If you're trying to find pirated movies or software, it's got a nice list of sites you can go to.
4832 bytes, including all images, stylesheets, and javascript.
Steroids don't occur in a hypothetical "normal" diet.
There are tradeoffs involved here. There's only so much surface area in an eyeball to hold photosensors, and only so many nerve paths between the eye and the brain. Human vision is a compromise: we've got strong color vision, moderate low-resolution peripheral vision, moderate high-resolution central vision, and a balance between day (cone) and night (rod) photosensors. Birds of prey tend to devote almost all their vision to high-resolution central vision, at the cost of peripheral vision (it's easier to sneak up on them), color vision (they can't tell a ripe apple from an unripe one), vision during their "off" lighting conditions (a day hunter is almost blind at night, and vice-versa), or all of the above. Similar tradeoffs exist with smell, sound, and any other sensory system: there's no "best" option, just the one that gives a creature the tools it needs to survive.
Assuming Shaw offers benefits, an employee who is paid $50,000 per year costs the company around $150,000. You can't simply look at take-home pay and say the employee costs that much -- you also need to factor in benefits, payroll taxes, administrative overhead, and so on. Higher-paid employees tend to have a lower ratio of additional costs, while the costs for lower-paid employees tend to be higher in proportion to their pay, but "an employee costs three times their salary" is a good rule of thumb.
Even clear instructions often aren't good enough. For example, the software I develop had a rare bug (estimated incidence: one user in a hundred) where it would fail to draw the icons on toolbar buttons. Whenever I got a report of this bug, I'd request two pieces of information: a dxdiag report, and a screenshot.
Of the ten people who replied, nine managed to include a dxdiag report. There were three screenshots: a png scaled to 33%, a Word document with embedded image, and a low-quality JPEG. The report with the Word-document screenshot was PEBCAK: the toolbar icons weren't drawing because the user had turned off the toolbar. Since there was no obvious correlation between hardware or driver versions in the other reports (three chipsets, five drivers), I closed the bug as "can't reproduce".
About a year later, I got another report, this time including a full-size PNG screenshot. Looking carefully at the image showed that the icons were drawing, as a faint white tracery. The drawing code isn't stateless: occasionally, bugs pop up where something doesn't draw because of the order in which preceding elements had been drawn, and I'd assumed that this was another such case. However, nothing in the drawing code could cause this sort of incorrect rendering.
I looked back over the other reports, and discovered that if I assumed two of the chipsets were PEBCAK, the remaining six reports covered one chipset and two driver versions, and some quick online research showed that this driver had a bug in the alpha-blending code.
You're thinking like a lawyer here. An ordinary person will see the apology and new minivan as a sincere attempt to make things right, and will respond by deciding not to sue.
If you look under the hood, Linux has the same lack of diversity in PDF viewers that Windows does: almost everything is just a frontend for the Poppler library. If a security hole is found in eg. kpdf, it's a good bet that the hole is also present in epdfview or xpdf.
I don't think a backpack nuke is powerful enough. One of the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing was in a bank vault only a few hundred yards from ground zero, and the containment vessel for a nuclear reactor is a good bit stronger than a bank vault.
Immigration and Customs has, as one of its duties, the management of imports into the country. Part of that management is being the first line of defense against counterfeit and other illegal goods, by preventing them from being imported in the first place.
Apparently, somebody has decided that the potential international transmission of digital goods is "import" enough to get Customs involved.
No, the Saturn V blueprints and documentation are still around. The reason why we can't just pull them out and build another Saturn V is that these blueprints don't include the manufacturing drawings for every nut and bolt; rather, they assume the existence of certain standardized components. Some of these components (e.g. vacuum tubes) are no longer made, while others will have changed: for example, the mounting holes for a pump housing may have moved, or a solenoid-actuated valve may no longer be made from the same materials.
Even "low tech" stuff like pipes may no longer be available. I'm aware of three incompatible changes in the "standard" method of making an end connection between two low-pressure metal pipes; there may have been another one since the Saturn V was built.
Rear projection would like to disagree with you.
It was discovered in 1933 that if we add up the mass of all the stars in a galaxy and run it through either Einsteinian or Newtonian gravity, there isn't enough of it to explain the paths of those stars. "Dark matter" simply means any form of matter that doesn't emit light (the Earth, for example, is a lump of baryonic dark matter), and originally it was expected that there were enough cold gas clouds, failed stars, stray planets, and the like (collectively known as "baryonic dark matter") to explain things.
The problem with dark matter is that astronomers have since gotten a fairly good idea of how much baryonic dark matter there is, and there's nowhere near enough. Thus, the various suggestions of non-baryonic dark matter and modified gravitational theories.
Scanning a print will defeat most photoshopping checks, but it introduces its own distinct artifacts, which stick out like a sore thumb.
Rule of thumb is that 10 meters of water equals one atmosphere of pressure, so at the worst-case scenario of 9000 meters depth, your air compartment needs to be 900 times larger at the surface than at depth. Even with the smallest possible air compartment, that's still a pretty huge change in the total volume (and thus, buoyancy) of your ROV with depth.
If you ballast it for neutral buoyancy at the surface, it'll plummet like a rock as it gets deeper, and it'll be roughly as mobile as a rock once it hits bottom -- if it even survives the impact. If the ROV is neutrally-buoyant at depth, even a slight upward motion will cause the air compartment to expand, resulting in reduced density, increased buoyancy, and further upward motion. This creates a feedback cycle, causing the ROV to rocket to (and above) the surface, shedding debris in its wake.
You're in the counterintuitive situation of needing to drop ballast as the ROV descends, and worse, you need to *add* ballast as it ascends (but not too fast -- you don't want to turn an ascent into a descent). All submersible vessels are unstable with respect to depth, but an adjustable air compartment like you're describing makes it much worse.
I tried my standard search engine test (how hard is it to find the web page for the Hilton hotel in Paris?), and it failed miserably: "Paris Hilton" didn't get a single result, and neither did any other variation I tried.
It's one foot of rainfall on 13,500 acres of land, or 30.48 centimeters of rain on 5463.2561 hectares for you metric types.
The acre-foot is a very useful unit of measure for reasoning about environmental water supplies: if you've got something that needs 13,500 acre-feet of water per year and you're setting up somewhere that gets a foot of rain per year (say, semi-desert), you know you need a catchment area of roughly 13,500 acres that nothing else is drawing water from. If you're somewhere that gets more rain (say, Atlanta's four feet per year), you've got a smaller footprint (3400 acres).
Not really. On my system, performance starts to suffer once applications are taking up all but 1 GB or so; if non-app memory drops below 50 MB, the system becomes unusable.
Big Brother ungood.
You want me to minimize line count? I can do that. I'll probably follow it up by submitting the code to the IOCCC, but you'll get the small codebase you asked for.
Fortunately for the ancient Greeks, the slave-owning upper class had plenty of time to spare.
(It's also why the ancient Greek steam engine, the ancient Greek railroad, the Antikythera mechanism, etc. didn't lead to an ancient Greek industrial revolution: "have a couple dozen slaves work on it for a year" works for creating one-offs, but it doesn't permit the mass production of standardized interchangeable parts that the Industrial Revolution was built on.)
Morrowind had what they called "leveled lists": when adding creatures to a map, the designer often wouldn't add specific creatures, but rather, lists. For example, an ancestral tomb could contain four enemies from the "skeleton" list: if you entered it at level 5, you might face four ordinary skeleton warriors; at level 10, you might face bonelords or greater bonewalkers.
Level progression was created in three main ways: 1) NPCs were always at fixed levels, so the cave that had three level-2 smugglers at level 2 would have those same smugglers if you entered it at level 20. 2) The lists generally did not cover the entire level range, so if, for example, you tried to enter a Sixth House stronghold at level 1, you'd be shredded by creatures from lists that started at level 10. 3) There was enough variation in the lists that at any given level, you had a chance of encountering a level-inappropriate enemy that you would either defeat easily (thus signaling that you'd gotten more powerful since the last time you encountered it) or need to flee from (indicating that you've still got room for growth).
The net result (especially if you install a "healthy animals are peaceful" mod) is that you feel the power of Red Mountain growing as you progress through the main quest and level up: the forest that used to contain ordinary animals might now have an Ogrim Titan doing his best to smash you to a pulp. At the same time, your increasing power lets you survive in places where earlier you couldn't.
There was an article on Slashdot about that a while back. Turns out the best way to recognize someone from their handwriting is to analyze the pressure patterns as they write their signature -- the variations in the pressure between the pen and the writing surface are highly personal, and simply matching the shape of the signature (which a forger can easily do) won't match the pressure patterns.