The books depict a war, and warfare will always be sexist, for the simple reason that a single man can impregnate one woman per day, but a single woman can only carry one child per nine months, and then needs to take care of them for at least a year (the man can't lactate). In other words, letting women into the battlefield en masse will severely damage your ability to recover from the losses of a war. Add the nature of the warfare in Middle-Earth - a series of wars, forming one long war of attrition - and having women fight would be completely suicidal.
"You will never know what love is, and I feel sorry for you."
Incorrectly quoted, I'm sure, but I wish more grown ups would learn how to realize the answer to powerful violent sociopaths in real life.
You know, I'm not powerful, violent nor (as far as I can tell) a sociopath, but I'm not getting any either, mainly due to the psychological damage caused by extended forced contact with powerful, violent sociopaths. Meanwhile, said sociopaths are succesful, in their personal as well as professional lifes. Based on this, I'd say that the quote is noble-sounding rubbish; in real life being a sociopath is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
Firstly, that wasn't a list of sci-fi novels. It was a short list of some critically acclaimed dystopian novels. "Cynical drivel"? Well, you're entitled to your thoughts (by the way, good luck getting kids to read either The Iliad or Odyssey; I know adults educated to doctorate level who struggle with those) but not many would agree with you there.
As it happens, Iliad and Odyssey are every bit as cynical as the rest of the books in the list, if not more so; only the cynicism is aimed at the Greek gods, rather than mortal politics. Don't forget that in Iliad, the whole war began because of a beauty contest amongst the Olympians; if that isn't cynical, I don't know what is.
That schematic, as described, is pretty much useless. 50 million transistors with no annotation to mark which ones belong to which part? (Is this cache? Is it part of the ALU).
Of course it's pretty useless; it doesn't tell the transistor type either, for example. However, it is useful in estimating, in rough terms, the required storage space for the schematic.
Schematics are nice, but there is a small problem though - I doubt that your house is big enough for the schematics of the north bridge, never mind the processor...
Assume a processor contains 50 million transistors. Number them each with a 32-bit integer, which takes 4 bytes to store. Then number the inputs and outputs of each transistor with another 32-bit integer (better safe than sorry:). Then you can give the transistor-transistor connections as pairs of four integers (the source transistor, the source pin, the destination transistor, the destination pin), taking a total of 16 bytes to store. If every transistor connects to every other transistor, this means 5*10^14 connections, which take a total of 8*10^15 bytes, or 8 petabytes; if we assume a more reasonable 4 connections per transistor, we get 200 million connections, which take a 3 200 000 000 bytes - 3.2 gigabytes to store (but of course this contains many duplicates). I think it would fit in my hard drive just fine...
That's where the rotational momentum goes, but where does the spinning go?
Angular momentum is a scientific term for spinning. From Wikipedia:
In physics and chemistry, spin is the angular momentum intrinsic to a body, as opposed to orbital angular momentum, which is the motion of its center of mass about an external point.
Your attempt to make a difference between the two is like trying to make a different between speed and velocity; in fact it's even sillier, since velocity is a vector while speed usually only refers to the length of said vector, but there is no such difference between spinning and angular momentum.
What I'm saying is: what protects us from being anihilated by such systems, except the fact that at the moment only some [non-critical] parts of the infrastructure are computerized, and that we can disable a system by powering it off?
The Governator and Bruce Willis. That or a brownout caused by lack of regulation in the power grid.
But seriously, I'll start worrying when the strategy game AIs stop needing to cheat.
You need a solid foundation in calculus before you can even begin to truly understand the most basic physics, so I'm sure Einstein had his math skills up to par to be doing the type of stuff he was doing.
Incorrect. You need a solid foundation in calculus before you can understand the mathemathical formulas we often use to describe physics. That is the same as understanding the physics themselves, that is, having a clear idea what, exactly speaking, do the formulas mean. In fact I once heard a saying that if you can't describe a law of physics without mathemathics, you haven't really understood it.
Einsteins genius was in making the conceptual leap away from the idea of fixed space and time. He may or may not have been good at math, I don't know; but that is quite irrelevant.
Pretty sure this will also keep Linux from starting!
Actually, no. Linux IDE driver includes a special infinite loop to create gyroscopic forces which counter magnetic wobbling. Such infinite loops are used in many parts of the kernel, and are the secret behind its stability. The OpenBSD has an even more effective spiral-like stabilizer, the so-called "Death Spiral" subsystem (see Netcraft for details).
Cue the old saw about the best way to cook a frog.
Twist its head off and throw the corpse into boiling water ?
Or just boil the water, throw the frog in and put the lid in place.
It's not like you need to go with the slow boil with the current US/UK population, or any other Western population for that matter - these legs don't have strength to jump anywhere anymore, not with the beer bellies hanging over them.
Here is how Harry Potter dies. He slits his fucking wrists because he realized he is like the shitdot sheeple, a lowly fucktard who should be eliminated from the gene pool.
Nah, the truth is that Harry is actually both Dumbledore and Voldemort. After Voldemort kills all his friends he uses Hermione's watch to go to the past and stop him, but fails again and again because, after all, time paradoxes are not allowed. He finally realizes that his only chance is to replace young Voldemort before he is first met by the wizarding world, and so he kills Tom Riddle a day before Dumbledore arrives for him. This murder splits Harry's soul, forming a horcrux and causing him to go slightly insane.
Since he is in reality 17 and an accomplished wizard, Harry is separated from his new classmates and can confide in no one; even Dumbledore is seemingly hostile. In the following decades, he gets increasingly unstable, and when he finds out that his mother is having an affair with Severus Snape he attacks in rage, accidentally killing the man he thought was his father and his mother. It is not, however, until Harry/Voldemort stands over the broken corpse of Ginny that he realizes just what he has done: there was no Voldemort, just Harry.
He uses Hermione's time machine once more, but it has suffered damage in combat and malfunctions, throwing him to the year 1820 and then breaking. Harry decides to look for Dumbledore for help; even if the great wizard is still a kid, surely his family must be great too. But he can't find any such family, and besides, while his horcruxes still keep him immortal, they can no longer prevent him from aging due to the time difference between him and them. As his skin wrinkles Harry comes to a realization: he must fill Dumbledore's role.
Having already spent two lifetimes as a wizard Harry is without peer. "Dumbledore" becomes a living legend, and finally takes over as headmaster of Hogwarts. Then comes the fateful day where Harry picks up his earlier self, Voldemort; knowing what a monster he would become, he can barely contain his hostility.
Unfortunately for Harry, he speaks in his dreams. This is how Severus Snape finds that it was in fact he who killed his illegitimate lover, Lily Potter. In rage he attacks the weakened Dumbledore, Avada Kedavraving the old bastard out of existence - or so Snape thought; but once more the horcruxes save Harry's life, allowing him to survive as a disembodied spirit and watch while his younger self kills all he cared about while his youngest self is powerless to stop it. Finally, with all the horcruxes destroyed, Harry/Voldemort/Dumpledore departs into whatever awaits him...
...which turns out to be Moaning Myrtle. And boy does she live (?) up to her name >;).
You gotta admit, it would explain why Voldemort and Dumbledore are so much more powerfull than other wizards, why Harry and Voldemort both have wands made from stuff taken from Dumbledore's phoenix, and why Dumbledore didn't just plain apprehend Voldemort when they fought in the Ministry of Magic despite easily overpowering him (he couldn't; the outcome was already history for him).
Anyway, reading anything that's professionally edited, no matter what it's about, improves your spelling and grammar instincts.
Which makes you a better writer. Which is only important if reading is important (since the only thing writing can do is produce something to be read). We seem to have a circular argument here:).
Anyway, reading is important since it gives you access to the collective experience of human race, from stone age to this day. It allows you to learn from other people's mitakes, saving you a lot of pain. It is also a very cheap form of entertainment, and most books don't have unskippable ads and "do not pirate" warnings:).
I've even heard theories that Cortez beat Montezuma because Aztechs didn't have writing, so Montezuma simply didn't have access to the endless store of dirty tricks Cortez did. Or was it Incas ?...
Given an infinite amount of time, the Windows 95 source code could be spewed out perfectly in sequence from a true random number generator.
Since Win95 source code likely consists of more than one file, one would hope that it comes as a gzipped tar archive or something similar. And, in fact, since a compressed archive is likely to be much shorter than the plain text version, the chances of the source coming out as an archive in a given amount of time are greater than it coming out as-is. In other words, random number generators support automatic transparent compression of all files where it saves space, and only for them:).
Speaking of code generation, the Press Esc page linked from the summary has a Google ad for a J2EE code generator. Should I take this as a statement about the quality of the code it generates ?-)
I'm not entirely sure if exponentiating two random numbers is random, as the resulting distribution doesn't pass a "4am in the morning gut check".
Well, if we go with the "0 or 1" random number generator, produce two numbers and exponentiate them, the possible results are:
0*0=0
0*1=0
1*0=0
1*1=1
Doesn't seem like equal distribution to me. Increasing the range yields:
0*0=0
0*1=0
0*2=0
1*0=0
1*1=1
1*2=2
2*0=0
2*1=2
2*2=4
In other words, 5/9 chance to be 0, 1/9 to be 1, 2/9 to be 2, 0/9 to be 3, and 1/9 to be 4. Nope, doesn't yield uniform distribution. Seems that your gut is mathemathically inclined:).
And all this time I thought every human being had at least some shred of a sense of humor...thank you for pointing out the fallacy in my assumption. I forgot this was slashdot.
Since this is Slashdot, aren't you being a bit hasty in deciding which one of your assumptions was false ?-)
I've been a fan of ancient public domain music for a while now. I hope they are kind enough to post these on a website for our listening pleasure.
Public domain ? These recordings are barely a century old, they are hardly in public domain yet. In fact I expect the people who invented this device to be sued for bypassing an effective copy prevention device; after all, these things are not that dissimilar to the limited-time degrading DVDs, now are they ?
There is also the fact that when you take a dead person and remove the thing that was making them dead, say it was that they had no blood in their system or a blocked pipe, when you put them back together and press the power switch they don't start up again. Machines that run on deterministic principles like car engines will happily spring back into life once that blocked pipe has been cleaned.
A car engine which has stopped due to insufficient oil supply and resulting lubricant failure won't spring back into life once more oil has been added. That's because the initial failure of lubricant system caused secondary damage; it caused the pistons to overheat and get stuck, which in turn may have caused tertiary damage to the crankshaft or whatever. In fact, a diesel engine which has stopped due to insufficient fuel likely won't start again after fuel has been added before additional measures has been taken.
Human body is subject to physical laws (which may or may not be deterministic); the reason it doesn't start up again after you've cleaned the airpipe or added blood is that there's been a cascade of failures since the original problem.
"you" is just something your brain does. Asking where you go when your brain turns off is like asking where the spinning goes when the motor turns off.
Since the conservation of angular momentum is one of the fundamental laws of nature, it's a pretty good question, actually:).
And the answer is that the spinning is transferred, usually through friction, to the engine frame and surrounding air (or water or whatever), and from there it keeps on spreading to the rest of the universe. If nothing happens to be nearby, the spinning is transferred through gravitational waves, but this is a too slow process to be observed with current technology.
In any case, the spinning eventually gets dispersed throughout the universe, joining with the cosmic angular momentum.
In this case, it can well work FOR privacy that they are primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the national corporations.
Nah. What'll happen is that the big companies get the enterprise version of the OS, and the small companies and real human beings get the consumer version. The consumer version will have purposeful security holes in it, while the enterprise version, meant to those shining pillars of ethical perfection known as multinational corporations, won't.
This has the added benefit of allowing the BSA to claim in court that the pirates are aiding terrorists if they pirate the enterprise version since that might let potential terrorists - the common people - to keep the lidless eye from their computers. This, in turn, allows the BSA to abuse the anti-terrorism laws for their own ends.
Hmm... Maybe I should become a politician, I seem to have a knack for coming up with evil plans for world domination >:). Then again, I guess I couldn't live with myself if I did.
Luxury! I used to record over commercially-produced tapes that my parents didn't want anymore. Bye-bye shitty Mr. Mister album, hello groovy mid-80s mix tape!
Bah ! In my days we didn't have "tapes", we had spools of steel wire we recorded to with handheld horseshoe magnets while walking on a snowstorm uphill both ways ! And my grandfather had to engrave his recordings to stone tablets with a chisel and a hammer ! And his grandfather didn't have a chisel !
And when he was done, the record company would sell his work, keep the profit and make him pay for the expenses, and he thanked them for it !
Even if they had a SAM that could shoot down something the size of a predator at 60,000 feet it would make them an instant target and chances are good they'll get killed doing it, to accomplish nothing more than destroying a disposable asset.
Actually, dropping a single drone is likely going to inflict a lot more harm to the US than killing a single soldier. United States has no shortage of manpower, but it does have a serious budget shortage. It can keep on replacing soldiers ad infinitum - the birth rate far exceeds the death rate in Iraq - but it can't do so for expensive high-technology items.
The soldiers are disposable, the drones are not. Cold but true.
Having done a ventricular fibrillation for a couple minutes and being "clinically dead", then reanimated - I completely agree with you. All that tunnel stuff is just sensationalist bullshit, like aliens, and all the other crap the media likes to feed to gullible women.
Or it could be that you weren't reanimated, and are now experiencing your afterlife: an eternity of arguing on Slashdot for the nonexistence of afterlife under the delusion that you aren't there yet >:).
Slashdot Mirror
The books depict a war, and warfare will always be sexist, for the simple reason that a single man can impregnate one woman per day, but a single woman can only carry one child per nine months, and then needs to take care of them for at least a year (the man can't lactate). In other words, letting women into the battlefield en masse will severely damage your ability to recover from the losses of a war. Add the nature of the warfare in Middle-Earth - a series of wars, forming one long war of attrition - and having women fight would be completely suicidal.
Yes, but Glorfindel is an elf, so it's close enough ;).
You know, I'm not powerful, violent nor (as far as I can tell) a sociopath, but I'm not getting any either, mainly due to the psychological damage caused by extended forced contact with powerful, violent sociopaths. Meanwhile, said sociopaths are succesful, in their personal as well as professional lifes. Based on this, I'd say that the quote is noble-sounding rubbish; in real life being a sociopath is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
As it happens, Iliad and Odyssey are every bit as cynical as the rest of the books in the list, if not more so; only the cynicism is aimed at the Greek gods, rather than mortal politics. Don't forget that in Iliad, the whole war began because of a beauty contest amongst the Olympians; if that isn't cynical, I don't know what is.
Of course it's pretty useless; it doesn't tell the transistor type either, for example. However, it is useful in estimating, in rough terms, the required storage space for the schematic.
Assume a processor contains 50 million transistors. Number them each with a 32-bit integer, which takes 4 bytes to store. Then number the inputs and outputs of each transistor with another 32-bit integer (better safe than sorry :). Then you can give the transistor-transistor connections as pairs of four integers (the source transistor, the source pin, the destination transistor, the destination pin), taking a total of 16 bytes to store. If every transistor connects to every other transistor, this means 5*10^14 connections, which take a total of 8*10^15 bytes, or 8 petabytes; if we assume a more reasonable 4 connections per transistor, we get 200 million connections, which take a 3 200 000 000 bytes - 3.2 gigabytes to store (but of course this contains many duplicates). I think it would fit in my hard drive just fine...
Angular momentum is a scientific term for spinning. From Wikipedia:
Your attempt to make a difference between the two is like trying to make a different between speed and velocity; in fact it's even sillier, since velocity is a vector while speed usually only refers to the length of said vector, but there is no such difference between spinning and angular momentum.
The Governator and Bruce Willis. That or a brownout caused by lack of regulation in the power grid.
But seriously, I'll start worrying when the strategy game AIs stop needing to cheat.
Incorrect. You need a solid foundation in calculus before you can understand the mathemathical formulas we often use to describe physics. That is the same as understanding the physics themselves, that is, having a clear idea what, exactly speaking, do the formulas mean. In fact I once heard a saying that if you can't describe a law of physics without mathemathics, you haven't really understood it.
Einsteins genius was in making the conceptual leap away from the idea of fixed space and time. He may or may not have been good at math, I don't know; but that is quite irrelevant.
Actually, no. Linux IDE driver includes a special infinite loop to create gyroscopic forces which counter magnetic wobbling. Such infinite loops are used in many parts of the kernel, and are the secret behind its stability. The OpenBSD has an even more effective spiral-like stabilizer, the so-called "Death Spiral" subsystem (see Netcraft for details).
Twist its head off and throw the corpse into boiling water ?
Or just boil the water, throw the frog in and put the lid in place.
It's not like you need to go with the slow boil with the current US/UK population, or any other Western population for that matter - these legs don't have strength to jump anywhere anymore, not with the beer bellies hanging over them.
Nah, the truth is that Harry is actually both Dumbledore and Voldemort. After Voldemort kills all his friends he uses Hermione's watch to go to the past and stop him, but fails again and again because, after all, time paradoxes are not allowed. He finally realizes that his only chance is to replace young Voldemort before he is first met by the wizarding world, and so he kills Tom Riddle a day before Dumbledore arrives for him. This murder splits Harry's soul, forming a horcrux and causing him to go slightly insane.
Since he is in reality 17 and an accomplished wizard, Harry is separated from his new classmates and can confide in no one; even Dumbledore is seemingly hostile. In the following decades, he gets increasingly unstable, and when he finds out that his mother is having an affair with Severus Snape he attacks in rage, accidentally killing the man he thought was his father and his mother. It is not, however, until Harry/Voldemort stands over the broken corpse of Ginny that he realizes just what he has done: there was no Voldemort, just Harry.
He uses Hermione's time machine once more, but it has suffered damage in combat and malfunctions, throwing him to the year 1820 and then breaking. Harry decides to look for Dumbledore for help; even if the great wizard is still a kid, surely his family must be great too. But he can't find any such family, and besides, while his horcruxes still keep him immortal, they can no longer prevent him from aging due to the time difference between him and them. As his skin wrinkles Harry comes to a realization: he must fill Dumbledore's role.
Having already spent two lifetimes as a wizard Harry is without peer. "Dumbledore" becomes a living legend, and finally takes over as headmaster of Hogwarts. Then comes the fateful day where Harry picks up his earlier self, Voldemort; knowing what a monster he would become, he can barely contain his hostility.
Unfortunately for Harry, he speaks in his dreams. This is how Severus Snape finds that it was in fact he who killed his illegitimate lover, Lily Potter. In rage he attacks the weakened Dumbledore, Avada Kedavraving the old bastard out of existence - or so Snape thought; but once more the horcruxes save Harry's life, allowing him to survive as a disembodied spirit and watch while his younger self kills all he cared about while his youngest self is powerless to stop it. Finally, with all the horcruxes destroyed, Harry/Voldemort/Dumpledore departs into whatever awaits him...
...which turns out to be Moaning Myrtle. And boy does she live (?) up to her name >;).
You gotta admit, it would explain why Voldemort and Dumbledore are so much more powerfull than other wizards, why Harry and Voldemort both have wands made from stuff taken from Dumbledore's phoenix, and why Dumbledore didn't just plain apprehend Voldemort when they fought in the Ministry of Magic despite easily overpowering him (he couldn't; the outcome was already history for him).
Which makes you a better writer. Which is only important if reading is important (since the only thing writing can do is produce something to be read). We seem to have a circular argument here :).
Anyway, reading is important since it gives you access to the collective experience of human race, from stone age to this day. It allows you to learn from other people's mitakes, saving you a lot of pain. It is also a very cheap form of entertainment, and most books don't have unskippable ads and "do not pirate" warnings :).
I've even heard theories that Cortez beat Montezuma because Aztechs didn't have writing, so Montezuma simply didn't have access to the endless store of dirty tricks Cortez did. Or was it Incas ?...
Either you'll be hit by lighting, or you won't, but that doesn't mean that the chances of it happening are 50/50.
Since Win95 source code likely consists of more than one file, one would hope that it comes as a gzipped tar archive or something similar. And, in fact, since a compressed archive is likely to be much shorter than the plain text version, the chances of the source coming out as an archive in a given amount of time are greater than it coming out as-is. In other words, random number generators support automatic transparent compression of all files where it saves space, and only for them :).
Speaking of code generation, the Press Esc page linked from the summary has a Google ad for a J2EE code generator. Should I take this as a statement about the quality of the code it generates ?-)
Well, if we go with the "0 or 1" random number generator, produce two numbers and exponentiate them, the possible results are:
Doesn't seem like equal distribution to me. Increasing the range yields:
In other words, 5/9 chance to be 0, 1/9 to be 1, 2/9 to be 2, 0/9 to be 3, and 1/9 to be 4. Nope, doesn't yield uniform distribution. Seems that your gut is mathemathically inclined :).
Since this is Slashdot, aren't you being a bit hasty in deciding which one of your assumptions was false ?-)
Public domain ? These recordings are barely a century old, they are hardly in public domain yet. In fact I expect the people who invented this device to be sued for bypassing an effective copy prevention device; after all, these things are not that dissimilar to the limited-time degrading DVDs, now are they ?
A car engine which has stopped due to insufficient oil supply and resulting lubricant failure won't spring back into life once more oil has been added. That's because the initial failure of lubricant system caused secondary damage; it caused the pistons to overheat and get stuck, which in turn may have caused tertiary damage to the crankshaft or whatever. In fact, a diesel engine which has stopped due to insufficient fuel likely won't start again after fuel has been added before additional measures has been taken.
Human body is subject to physical laws (which may or may not be deterministic); the reason it doesn't start up again after you've cleaned the airpipe or added blood is that there's been a cascade of failures since the original problem.
Since the conservation of angular momentum is one of the fundamental laws of nature, it's a pretty good question, actually :).
And the answer is that the spinning is transferred, usually through friction, to the engine frame and surrounding air (or water or whatever), and from there it keeps on spreading to the rest of the universe. If nothing happens to be nearby, the spinning is transferred through gravitational waves, but this is a too slow process to be observed with current technology.
In any case, the spinning eventually gets dispersed throughout the universe, joining with the cosmic angular momentum.
Nah. What'll happen is that the big companies get the enterprise version of the OS, and the small companies and real human beings get the consumer version. The consumer version will have purposeful security holes in it, while the enterprise version, meant to those shining pillars of ethical perfection known as multinational corporations, won't.
This has the added benefit of allowing the BSA to claim in court that the pirates are aiding terrorists if they pirate the enterprise version since that might let potential terrorists - the common people - to keep the lidless eye from their computers. This, in turn, allows the BSA to abuse the anti-terrorism laws for their own ends.
Hmm... Maybe I should become a politician, I seem to have a knack for coming up with evil plans for world domination >:). Then again, I guess I couldn't live with myself if I did.
Bah ! In my days we didn't have "tapes", we had spools of steel wire we recorded to with handheld horseshoe magnets while walking on a snowstorm uphill both ways ! And my grandfather had to engrave his recordings to stone tablets with a chisel and a hammer ! And his grandfather didn't have a chisel !
And when he was done, the record company would sell his work, keep the profit and make him pay for the expenses, and he thanked them for it !
Why ?
Actually, dropping a single drone is likely going to inflict a lot more harm to the US than killing a single soldier. United States has no shortage of manpower, but it does have a serious budget shortage. It can keep on replacing soldiers ad infinitum - the birth rate far exceeds the death rate in Iraq - but it can't do so for expensive high-technology items.
The soldiers are disposable, the drones are not. Cold but true.
Or it could be that you weren't reanimated, and are now experiencing your afterlife: an eternity of arguing on Slashdot for the nonexistence of afterlife under the delusion that you aren't there yet >:).