Check all files to identify what filetype they are - jpg/zip/gz/tar/etc... if the file type is not known, disallow it. Yes I'm sure someone will invent a zip file format with a JPG header.
Already been done. The JPEG format permits any amount of garbage after the end-of-data marker. The ZIP format permits any amount of garbage at the beginning of the file. Cat a JPEG and a ZIP together, and you've got a file that's both a valid JPEG and a valid ZIP.
There's a brain disorder that causes people to be unable to recognize human faces. I wonder if the uncanny valley effect works on them, because clearly they are missing that survival function that you noted.
I can tell you from personal experience that the Uncanny Valley effect works just fine. It's not so much an "inability to recognize human faces" as an inability to distinguish between faces, especially similar-looking faces. For example, I have no trouble telling that Barack Obama is not the same person as Bill Clinton, but telling Bush, Sr. from Bush, Jr. is nearly impossible.
It's part of why I prefer anime, comics, and other drawn entertainment over live-action: the reduced detail of the medium makes it hard to draw large numbers of distinctive faces, so the artists tend to load up on secondary identification cues such as hairstyle or preferred clothing -- things that are easy for me to identify.
Depeleted uranium is cheaper than tungsten if and only if you've got an active nuclear industry. DU is a waste product of uranium enrichment, where tungsten is an industrially-important metal.
I just used a cable release and a camera in "bulb" mode. Point the camera in the general direction of the storm, hold the shutter open for 15 seconds or until you get a good lightning strike, repeat. For daytime work, add a neutral density filter and reduce the exposure time.
I recently wanted to know when the sun would set in Yellowstone on a certain date. It took me four tries to figure out how to get sunset for a day other than today (hint: "sun set" always refers to today, "sunset" can refer to any day), and three tries to figure out how to get a location other than what my IP address geolocates to. It then took another five tries to find a location near Yellowstone that was in WolframAlpha's database (there are some remarkable inconsistencies in what it includes, and I'm still not convinced that it can handle multi-word town names properly).
..is about a decimal place in which the instuments available to most of us can't even touch (precicion-wise...) But by all means, carry on.
The official prototype kilogram (IPK) has drifted relative to the average of its copies by 40 parts in a million, and relative to one of the copies by over 120 parts per million. The best scale you've got at home is probably good to no more than one part in a hundred, but it's common for laboratory scales to be good for one part in 10,000 (enough to detect the difference between the IPK and K23), and scales good to one part in 100,000 aren't uncommon.
IMHO, all non-CVT vehicles should die off ASAP. You need much less horsepower when you don't get "stuck" in a high gear while trying to accelerate. Not to mention the much more predictable behavior on slick (rain/snow/ice) roads, and less dangerous behavior in cruise control. CVT is so frickin' overdue, it's hard to believe old automatics are still being made.
Continuously-variable transmissions are nice when paired with low-power engines. At higher power and torque levels, they've got durability and slippage issues. There's not a CVT made that can handle a heavy-duty pickup pulling a 25,000 pound trailer up a hill, much less a triple-trailer semi.
Fortunately, CVTs are not the only way to keep the engine operating in its most efficient range. Heavy-duty trucks often have 21-speed or 30-speed transmissions for the same reason.
The secondary of one the 4 bombs were never found.
So what? The secondary of a hydrogen bomb is a stick of lithium deuteride -- expensive, but not radioactive, and it cannot explode without the assistance of a fission bomb.
Any university graduate with a degree in physics can design a gun-type nuclear weapon, and any well-equipped machine shop can build one (if you don't care about the long-term health of the machinists). Your Taliban-in-a-cave type can't build a nuke, but if you live in a Western city, I'm willing to bet that within a mile of you there's someone who can design the bomb, and someone with a machine shop in their garage who can build it.
I've played through VIII twice. The first time was morbid curiousity about the storyline. The second time, I ignored the story entirely and concentrated on seeing how badly I could break the game mechanics (answer: the game mechanics are so unbelievably breakable, I was half-expecting to one-shot the final boss).
Someone wrote a blog post to point out some security issues that need fixing in the pre-Alpha version of Diaspora, and here you are using his words for pointless sensationalism that undermines the work of the Diaspora team and propagates the "Diaspora is shite" gossip that will most certainly haunt the project even after the code has hit Beta. Shameful.
These aren't "security issues that need fixing". These are "My First Web Application"-level mistakes -- things like failure to sanitize input, allowing code injection and SQL injection, and assuming that "user is logged in" or "user provided the super-secret URL" is equivalent to "user is allowed to do this". If these errors are as pervasive as the article says, the best thing that could happen to the code is a ground-up rewrite.
Huh? Liquid fuel is a hell of a lot safer. Seriously, how often do you hear about massive fires and explosions involving gas stations and/or gasoline-fueled vehicles? Answer: you don't.
Explanation: You don't, because it doesn't make the national news. If you look around, you'll find that there are a couple hundred gas tanker or gas station fires every year in the US. These fires generally destroy the station and/or tanker involved, and require evacuating a sizeable area around the fire.
The reason you heard about this fire is because hydrogen fires are less common than gasoline fires (and thus, more newsworthy), and because an airport was in the evacuation zone.
The nice thing about being able to produce the plastic bits is that they are the most expensive part. Threaded steel rod is cheap, wood is cheap, standard electrical parts are cheap, but custom-shaped plastic is only cheap if you can do a run of at least a million parts. A one-off run of the plastic bits at the typical prototyping shop will run you about $250, while a RepRap can make them for around $10.
These systems have high-level I/O options (keyboard, monitor) that embedded systems don't, while avoiding all of the complexity (multi-level caching, speculative execution, out-of-order execution, etc.) of a modern desktop.
With "liquid lenses" that are electronically reshaped on-demand and in real-time, we might see the day where every shot is technically dead-on sharp, almost to the limits of the laws of physics.
We hit the limits of the laws of physics decades ago. High-quality lenses have been diffraction limited since the mid-60s for non-zoom lenses, and since the late 90s for zoom lenses.
As an example, at an aperture of f/8, no lens, no matter how good, can project a point of light to cover less than nine pixels on the sensor described in the article. At f/22 (the standard for high depth-of-field photography), a point of light will cover approximately 65 pixels. At f/32 (needed to get a decent depth of field on a long telephoto lens), it'll cover about 133 pixels.
What you're describing is inter-rater reliability, and a lack of it is not surprising in a subjective evaluation. Lack of repeatability would be if a single wine taster gave one ordering today, and a totally different ordering tomorrow.
I dunno how much energy you could store if, say, everyone had a large water tank on their roof and a small generator/pump to store energy for use later. Just a wild guess at a less 'intrusive' solution than massive water reservoirs.
Not enough. Assuming a two-story house with a buried lower tank (so, a 10-meter drop), you would need 40 cubic meters of water for every kilowatt-hour of electricity you want to store. If you want to store 10 kilowatt-hours (a decent overnight reserve), you'd need a 400-cubic-meter tank -- in short, you'd be adding a third story to the building just to hold the upper tank, and then you'd need to reinforce the structure so it could support 400 metric tons of water.
Didn't you read the summary? "Ultra-high-energy laser fields can actually convert their light into matter" -- this means that sufficiently powerful lasers can create their own frickin' sharks.
It sounds like you're in Europe, in which case you're probably not familiar with American freight trains. Freight trains in the US are typically a mile long, correspondingly heavy, and between cities, will travel at speeds between 50 and 85 miles per hour. This gives them an emergency-stop distance of around two miles
Your suggestion means that the crossing gates of an at-grade crossing will close several minutes before the train arrives (in order to permit the train to stop in time). This will have the paradoxical effect of increasing the death rate, as it encourages people to go around the gates if they can't see an oncoming train -- resulting in accidents, stalls, and other issues increasing the number of cars stuck on the tracks.
Voluntary..!? Have you tried getting a mortgage with no homeowners insurance lately? Or renewing a car registration with no auto insurance?
You can buy a house with no homeowners' insurance. It's only if you're making the purchase with somebody else's money that you need insurance -- if the house burns down, they want to be sure they can still get their money back.
Likewise, the only required auto insurance is liability insurance for registered vehicles: if you are driving a vehicle on public roads, the public requires you to be able to pay for any damage you cause. You can self-insure by setting aside a certain amount of money, but most people either don't have that much cash on hand, or don't want to go to the effort involved. You can avoid the insurance issue entirely by never driving off private property.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you can implement "branch" as a computed "PUT" to the program counter.
Already been done. The JPEG format permits any amount of garbage after the end-of-data marker. The ZIP format permits any amount of garbage at the beginning of the file. Cat a JPEG and a ZIP together, and you've got a file that's both a valid JPEG and a valid ZIP.
I can tell you from personal experience that the Uncanny Valley effect works just fine. It's not so much an "inability to recognize human faces" as an inability to distinguish between faces, especially similar-looking faces. For example, I have no trouble telling that Barack Obama is not the same person as Bill Clinton, but telling Bush, Sr. from Bush, Jr. is nearly impossible.
It's part of why I prefer anime, comics, and other drawn entertainment over live-action: the reduced detail of the medium makes it hard to draw large numbers of distinctive faces, so the artists tend to load up on secondary identification cues such as hairstyle or preferred clothing -- things that are easy for me to identify.
Has something changed recently? My records show that I got Tron from Netflix in May of last year.
Depeleted uranium is cheaper than tungsten if and only if you've got an active nuclear industry. DU is a waste product of uranium enrichment, where tungsten is an industrially-important metal.
I just used a cable release and a camera in "bulb" mode. Point the camera in the general direction of the storm, hold the shutter open for 15 seconds or until you get a good lightning strike, repeat. For daytime work, add a neutral density filter and reduce the exposure time.
It's pretty good, except when it isn't.
I recently wanted to know when the sun would set in Yellowstone on a certain date. It took me four tries to figure out how to get sunset for a day other than today (hint: "sun set" always refers to today, "sunset" can refer to any day), and three tries to figure out how to get a location other than what my IP address geolocates to. It then took another five tries to find a location near Yellowstone that was in WolframAlpha's database (there are some remarkable inconsistencies in what it includes, and I'm still not convinced that it can handle multi-word town names properly).
If you look at the studies those articles are referencing, they all use -- guess what? -- breast development as the measure of maturity.
If you use age of first menstruation as your measure of maturity, the average hasn't budged in the last century.
The official prototype kilogram (IPK) has drifted relative to the average of its copies by 40 parts in a million, and relative to one of the copies by over 120 parts per million. The best scale you've got at home is probably good to no more than one part in a hundred, but it's common for laboratory scales to be good for one part in 10,000 (enough to detect the difference between the IPK and K23), and scales good to one part in 100,000 aren't uncommon.
Continuously-variable transmissions are nice when paired with low-power engines. At higher power and torque levels, they've got durability and slippage issues. There's not a CVT made that can handle a heavy-duty pickup pulling a 25,000 pound trailer up a hill, much less a triple-trailer semi.
Fortunately, CVTs are not the only way to keep the engine operating in its most efficient range. Heavy-duty trucks often have 21-speed or 30-speed transmissions for the same reason.
So what? The secondary of a hydrogen bomb is a stick of lithium deuteride -- expensive, but not radioactive, and it cannot explode without the assistance of a fission bomb.
The fuel is the hard part.
Any university graduate with a degree in physics can design a gun-type nuclear weapon, and any well-equipped machine shop can build one (if you don't care about the long-term health of the machinists). Your Taliban-in-a-cave type can't build a nuke, but if you live in a Western city, I'm willing to bet that within a mile of you there's someone who can design the bomb, and someone with a machine shop in their garage who can build it.
I've played through VIII twice. The first time was morbid curiousity about the storyline. The second time, I ignored the story entirely and concentrated on seeing how badly I could break the game mechanics (answer: the game mechanics are so unbelievably breakable, I was half-expecting to one-shot the final boss).
These aren't "security issues that need fixing". These are "My First Web Application"-level mistakes -- things like failure to sanitize input, allowing code injection and SQL injection, and assuming that "user is logged in" or "user provided the super-secret URL" is equivalent to "user is allowed to do this". If these errors are as pervasive as the article says, the best thing that could happen to the code is a ground-up rewrite.
Explanation: You don't, because it doesn't make the national news. If you look around, you'll find that there are a couple hundred gas tanker or gas station fires every year in the US. These fires generally destroy the station and/or tanker involved, and require evacuating a sizeable area around the fire.
The reason you heard about this fire is because hydrogen fires are less common than gasoline fires (and thus, more newsworthy), and because an airport was in the evacuation zone.
The nice thing about being able to produce the plastic bits is that they are the most expensive part. Threaded steel rod is cheap, wood is cheap, standard electrical parts are cheap, but custom-shaped plastic is only cheap if you can do a run of at least a million parts. A one-off run of the plastic bits at the typical prototyping shop will run you about $250, while a RepRap can make them for around $10.
These systems have high-level I/O options (keyboard, monitor) that embedded systems don't, while avoiding all of the complexity (multi-level caching, speculative execution, out-of-order execution, etc.) of a modern desktop.
Why are you comparing large-format film to 35mm digital? You should be comparing like to like, and looking at large-format scanning backs.
We hit the limits of the laws of physics decades ago. High-quality lenses have been diffraction limited since the mid-60s for non-zoom lenses, and since the late 90s for zoom lenses.
As an example, at an aperture of f/8, no lens, no matter how good, can project a point of light to cover less than nine pixels on the sensor described in the article. At f/22 (the standard for high depth-of-field photography), a point of light will cover approximately 65 pixels. At f/32 (needed to get a decent depth of field on a long telephoto lens), it'll cover about 133 pixels.
What you're describing is inter-rater reliability, and a lack of it is not surprising in a subjective evaluation. Lack of repeatability would be if a single wine taster gave one ordering today, and a totally different ordering tomorrow.
Not enough. Assuming a two-story house with a buried lower tank (so, a 10-meter drop), you would need 40 cubic meters of water for every kilowatt-hour of electricity you want to store. If you want to store 10 kilowatt-hours (a decent overnight reserve), you'd need a 400-cubic-meter tank -- in short, you'd be adding a third story to the building just to hold the upper tank, and then you'd need to reinforce the structure so it could support 400 metric tons of water.
Didn't you read the summary? "Ultra-high-energy laser fields can actually convert their light into matter" -- this means that sufficiently powerful lasers can create their own frickin' sharks.
It sounds like you're in Europe, in which case you're probably not familiar with American freight trains. Freight trains in the US are typically a mile long, correspondingly heavy, and between cities, will travel at speeds between 50 and 85 miles per hour. This gives them an emergency-stop distance of around two miles
Your suggestion means that the crossing gates of an at-grade crossing will close several minutes before the train arrives (in order to permit the train to stop in time). This will have the paradoxical effect of increasing the death rate, as it encourages people to go around the gates if they can't see an oncoming train -- resulting in accidents, stalls, and other issues increasing the number of cars stuck on the tracks.
You can buy a house with no homeowners' insurance. It's only if you're making the purchase with somebody else's money that you need insurance -- if the house burns down, they want to be sure they can still get their money back.
Likewise, the only required auto insurance is liability insurance for registered vehicles: if you are driving a vehicle on public roads, the public requires you to be able to pay for any damage you cause. You can self-insure by setting aside a certain amount of money, but most people either don't have that much cash on hand, or don't want to go to the effort involved. You can avoid the insurance issue entirely by never driving off private property.
You must be new. The tagline for Java is "Write once, test everywhere".