The language choices are interesting: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, and Chinese. My guess as to the reasons: English because it's Britain, Spanish because it's spoken by the non-anglophone Americas, Russian because the USSR was the Cold War enemy, French because it was the international language of diplomacy, Arabic because it's the language of the Middle East (the major intelligence interest today), and Chinese because it's the most common language per capita.
Notable omissions are other European languages and Japanese. Arabic is a very notable inclusion.
Are the plus signs really that big? The height of the sign is bigger than even the b. It ought to be the same size as (or even slightly smaller than) the a.
current NTFS/FAT partition and allow you to resize it
What's it resizing it with? ntfsresize? That program decided that I have one bad sector somewhere I've never noticed, and therefore it can't do anything with any of the disk. Not even with -f.
(As far as I know I don't have a bad sector, but ntfsresize may be right. Even so, it should be able to ignore it....)
What's wrong with using "April 13, 2005", "13 Apr 2005", etc.? Very few uses (e.g., sorting) require numerical YYYYMMDD formats. If you're talking about, oh, the terrorist attacks on the US a couple years back, it's stupid to call them the 2001-09-11 attacks. They're the September 11 attacks. If you call them the 11 September 2001 attacks it would probably make sense (although people in the US would be more used to Month Day). But 2001-09-11 imparts a data-ness to it that it doesn't need to have.
According to whom? Your arbitrary set of aesthetics? You still cannot tell apart the data formats from your randomly chosen preference.
Why not? YYYY-MM-DD is the international ISO standard (yes, I am aware of what the I and S stand for). YYYY-MM-DD goes from least specific to most specific, so if you sort a set of dates you get them in the right order. Nobody ever uses YYYY-DD-MM. It's the most intuitive choice.
I think they wrote some kind of organization program to help themselves in their job, and the bosses want them to clean up the code and copy it to every customer support guy's terminal. On a deadline.
This is actually pretty cool, because it allows many "violent" games. Take Halo for example. Except in multiplayer Slayer games, you have some purpose other than killing the victim, and the only reason you kill him is because either you need to stop him from doing something or he's firing at you and getting in the way. Even in Slayer, you're just killing the person. There's no physical or mental degradation going on. There's blood, but it only shows up after the person dies, and there's no need to overkill them.
The only thing this bill will stop is teabaggers. And that's a good thing. (Actually, it'll probably force a little modification of the next games: e.g., when you shoot a dead person in Halo, instead of more blood coming out, nothing happens.)
There's one sticking point, and that's the definition of "depraved", which includes showing "indifference to the suffering of the victim". Most shooters don't have people feeling sorry for the people they killed (except, perhaps, if they made Ender's Game into a videogame). But then they require the depravity to be "evidenced by torture or serious physical abuse", which requires that they "intend the abuse apart from the killing". When I shoot someone in Halo, I really don't care what they think or do, just that they die, and I don't do anything to them, except to ensure that they don't bother me. (If I can force them out of the way, all the better.) There is the aspect of spawnkilling, etc., which may mentally torture the player, but that neither has anything to do with the avatar, nor is it a part of the game - its a human aspect.
So I can really say that I support this even though I just finished from an hour of Halo-playing. There's no need for shooters to have anything that's deliberately gory or torturing or anything like that - and in fact its still hard for me to play a game that involves gore or shooting (pictures of) human bodies. (In Halo, the bodies are covered by armor, so it doesn't much destroy my human instinct not to kill other humans.) Violence should be a means, not an end, and since this is a video game, it's okay for the end to justify the means.
A) All security can be considered security through obscurity. Take SSH for an example. If you use a keypair, the only security you have is relying on the obscurity of your private key. The moment someone gets your private key by any means, they can connect as you. If you don't agree that this is security through obscurity, please provide a clear definition of what you mean by it.
B) This was not security by obscurity - in fact, it wasn't even security in the usual sense. This was security by only giving the dev kits to certain people's homes or offices. It's the same security as your bank's vault. It's the same security as New Orleans's late levees. Do you think they shouldn't've built levees of any strength because there might come a stronger storm? (And don't say "just don't live in New Orleans", because we're assuming there's a need for a city at the mouth of the Mississippi, just as there was a need to distribute the dev kits.)
This means you must first complete the equation for m first, which I do not know off hand.
You use the conversion factor sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) (let's call that k), where v=velocity and c=speed of light. The relativistic mass of an object is 1/k of its rest mass. The relativistic length of an object in the direction that it's moving shrinks to k times is length. Time also dilates by t=rest t/k, which is how Mazer Rackham got to live for hundreds years by traveling at high speeds and thus having a low k.
The easy way to remember this is to remember that y=sqrt(1-x^2) is a (semi)circle. In other words, if you are moving some fraction x of the speed of light, then x and k must be points on the unit circle (or alternatively, x^2+k^2=1).
An interesting side note of this is that a photon, traveling at the speed of light, has k=0. Since it has energy, and energy is proportional to relativistic mass, it must have relativistic mass. But mk=m0, so its rest mass is zero. This is how a photon can have zero (rest) mass yet be influenced by gravity.
(I think that physicists prefer gamma=1/k as the conversion factor, but k is easier to visualize in my opinion, because it avoids the reciprocal.)
Why have the c^2 part at all? Is the energy contained in an object really variable based upon the speed of light in a particular material?
Um, c isn't the speed of a particular beam of light in any sense (which, as you say, changes depending on the medium). c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and is constant.
So the equation is really just E = M.
Yes, it is, when you use Planck units, which simplify this and other equations by setting certain constants to 1. You are just converting between units, because the constant C becomes just 1 (length/time)^2. And you get a definition of units that's based on the universe's physical constants, not just some bar of metal in Paris*.
Or is it just there to show school children that the energy contained is really, really big?
No, the energy is not really big. It's exactly the same as the mass. It just seems big because we're used to large masses, small energies, and slow velocities in everyday life (in terms of Planck units). As the Wikipedia article quotes an article in Physics Today, "We see that the question is not, 'Why is gravity so feeble?' but rather, 'Why is the proton's mass so small?' For in [Planck] Units, the strength of gravity simply is what it is, a primary quantity, while the proton's mass is the tiny number."
*Yes, I know they redefined the meter based on some 12345.67 wavelengths of some random isotope's emission. But they got that number by measuring the bar of metal in Paris. What's more, they got the bar of metal by taking some fraction of the Earth's circumference, and they got the second by taking a fraction of the Earth's day, which is a really non-sequitur way of getting units to measure the speed of light.
If you can show me a true nerd who doesn't know what E=mc^2 represents, or even what ^2 means, then I will weep.
Yes. Everyone knows that E=mc^2 means that you're turning on the second least significant bit in the variable mc and assigning that to E....wait, it's not?
If parents cared then we would not be in this whole entire mess.
Which is precisely the point. Too many parents don't care. Most of them do, but there is a minority that's way too anarchic with their children. I don't have much of a problem with organized anarchy, but it doesn't really work for raising children.
The real solution would be to find the parents that don't..well..parent, turn the kids over to child protecive services and then a loving adoptive family, and castrate the parents. (Hopefully if you catch the parents while the child is young enough, it won't be too traumatic.) And then monitor the child in case the bad parenting is genetic.
The very existence of the need for a government agency of child protection is proof that there are parents who don't parent.
The satellite rode into space on a Rockot vehicle, a converted SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile. The rocket, which in the Cold War would have been armed with nuclear weapons, had been modified for peaceful space duties with the addition of a Breeze-KM upper stage.
Hm. You add a stage to an ICBM, launch it, and wonder why it stops transmitting signals 90 minutes after launch.
It's simpler than even that. The Windows PCs are imaged and produced in bulk. In order for them to build an open PC, they have to take it out of the line, put a blank hard drive, install a non-WinModem, customize it as per the order, etc. If you call a pizza factory that's designed to make only pepperoni pizzas and ask them to make you a cheese pizza, it would probably cost you more than if you bought the pepperoni pizza and manually removed the pepperonis.
On the other hand, supply/demand vs. price is running backwards...
First sale doctrine says you can re-sell anything someone else has sold to you.
That can't apply to "anything", can it? Does it apply to those 12-packs of cereal where the small boxes say "this unit not marked for individual sale" or simply "not for resale"?
I was thinking about this the other day. As far as I know it's only legal to resell, e.g., candy if you buy it from a place like Sam's Club that markets to resellers. But doesn't the right of first sale apply everywhere?
Which is precisely why I said "Alanis Morisette", not "ironic": in case a pedant came along and said "wait, that's not really ironic!", I could say "neither is the song."
Ender is this perfect superman who murders several children and yet remains perfectly innocent and good as far as Card is concerned.
his brother is able to easily conquer the world by the sheer power of his intellect
(spoiler alert)
You sound like you've never read the sequels (either the Speaker arc or the Shadow arc). Ender's Game as a novel may have its faults, but the whole set is well thought out. Ender does not remain good. Even as early as "The Investment Counselor" of First Meetings, which happens just after Ender leaves earth, he's already demonized and thus has to hide his identity, and his duty is to redeem himself by giving the buggers a home. He is not innocent for the xenocide, nor the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo. There is a moral responsibility there. The catch is that he is not responsible, since from his birth he had been abused by the IF so that they get a leader who will win at all costs. Ender never realizes as a child the immorality of what he did. If you want to read it as a child, go ahead. Stick it in the back of your mind and ignore its morality. Then mature a little, read the sequels, and realize that you, the reader, have also been duped by the IF into believing that what they made Ender do was acceptable.
As far as Peter, the only real power he ever had was stopping a couple of potential wars. Peter didn't even have power to stop Achilles in any reasonable manner. The events that led to his demise - the kidnapping of the Bean/Petra embryos, the shot in cold blood - were all mishandled. Achilles could've been led to a proper trial or something if the Hegemon and his forces had been kinda smart. Peter as Hegemon is not the meritocrat he appears to be. By no means does he "conquer the world", as you say.
I guess you're right that Card's kinda weak on making the morality explicit in Ender's Game. But the later novels make it more than clear.
Imagine when all the new maps come out for Halo3 and you're the one that can't play with your friends on Live because you don't have the HD to download the map-pack.
Not only can you save the maps to a memory card instead, they could always just stream you the map before the game if necessary and keep it in RAM. It shouldn't be that slow - it's just one map at a time, and they can start streaming it as soon as you join the party or begin matchmaking or log in or whatever.
The DMCA is not a copyright law. It is a criminal law regarding circumvention of security measures that control copyright.
Sony is asking the users to perform an operation (burning the music onto their own CD and ripping it thence) that circumvents a method (secure WMA) that effectively prevents loading the songs onto an iPod.
Not only is Sony advocating criminal acts, it also is executing its contract with the artists in bad faith; namely, they are supposedly securing the CDs they sell, but they also provide everyone information on how to remove the security.
Moreover, they are inducing copyright infringement, because they are encouraging people to make an extra copy of the CD and to make a third copy onto the iPod, without licenses to do so. And most people would not throw away their first two copies.
And if they are allowing this because they own the copyright, they've just given everyone a license to copy the music and break the copy-protection. Touché!
Slashdot Mirror
The language choices are interesting: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, and Chinese. My guess as to the reasons: English because it's Britain, Spanish because it's spoken by the non-anglophone Americas, Russian because the USSR was the Cold War enemy, French because it was the international language of diplomacy, Arabic because it's the language of the Middle East (the major intelligence interest today), and Chinese because it's the most common language per capita.
Notable omissions are other European languages and Japanese. Arabic is a very notable inclusion.
Are the plus signs really that big? The height of the sign is bigger than even the b. It ought to be the same size as (or even slightly smaller than) the a.
Please be gentle with my karma!
My dogma ran over your karma.
Wait..uh..I think I got that backwards...but you get the point.
current NTFS/FAT partition and allow you to resize it
What's it resizing it with? ntfsresize? That program decided that I have one bad sector somewhere I've never noticed, and therefore it can't do anything with any of the disk. Not even with -f.
(As far as I know I don't have a bad sector, but ntfsresize may be right. Even so, it should be able to ignore it....)
Yeah. Quit VAXing on about processors before the puns get too Crayzy.
Please use 2005-4-13 as it is less confusing.
What's wrong with using "April 13, 2005", "13 Apr 2005", etc.? Very few uses (e.g., sorting) require numerical YYYYMMDD formats. If you're talking about, oh, the terrorist attacks on the US a couple years back, it's stupid to call them the 2001-09-11 attacks. They're the September 11 attacks. If you call them the 11 September 2001 attacks it would probably make sense (although people in the US would be more used to Month Day). But 2001-09-11 imparts a data-ness to it that it doesn't need to have.
According to whom? Your arbitrary set of aesthetics? You still cannot tell apart the data formats from your randomly chosen preference.
Why not? YYYY-MM-DD is the international ISO standard (yes, I am aware of what the I and S stand for). YYYY-MM-DD goes from least specific to most specific, so if you sort a set of dates you get them in the right order. Nobody ever uses YYYY-DD-MM. It's the most intuitive choice.
I think they wrote some kind of organization program to help themselves in their job, and the bosses want them to clean up the code and copy it to every customer support guy's terminal. On a deadline.
This is actually pretty cool, because it allows many "violent" games. Take Halo for example. Except in multiplayer Slayer games, you have some purpose other than killing the victim, and the only reason you kill him is because either you need to stop him from doing something or he's firing at you and getting in the way. Even in Slayer, you're just killing the person. There's no physical or mental degradation going on. There's blood, but it only shows up after the person dies, and there's no need to overkill them.
The only thing this bill will stop is teabaggers. And that's a good thing. (Actually, it'll probably force a little modification of the next games: e.g., when you shoot a dead person in Halo, instead of more blood coming out, nothing happens.)
There's one sticking point, and that's the definition of "depraved", which includes showing "indifference to the suffering of the victim". Most shooters don't have people feeling sorry for the people they killed (except, perhaps, if they made Ender's Game into a videogame). But then they require the depravity to be "evidenced by torture or serious physical abuse", which requires that they "intend the abuse apart from the killing". When I shoot someone in Halo, I really don't care what they think or do, just that they die, and I don't do anything to them, except to ensure that they don't bother me. (If I can force them out of the way, all the better.) There is the aspect of spawnkilling, etc., which may mentally torture the player, but that neither has anything to do with the avatar, nor is it a part of the game - its a human aspect.
So I can really say that I support this even though I just finished from an hour of Halo-playing. There's no need for shooters to have anything that's deliberately gory or torturing or anything like that - and in fact its still hard for me to play a game that involves gore or shooting (pictures of) human bodies. (In Halo, the bodies are covered by armor, so it doesn't much destroy my human instinct not to kill other humans.) Violence should be a means, not an end, and since this is a video game, it's okay for the end to justify the means.
He said pure software.
I don't want to risk shorting something when I solder it.
A) All security can be considered security through obscurity. Take SSH for an example. If you use a keypair, the only security you have is relying on the obscurity of your private key. The moment someone gets your private key by any means, they can connect as you. If you don't agree that this is security through obscurity, please provide a clear definition of what you mean by it.
B) This was not security by obscurity - in fact, it wasn't even security in the usual sense. This was security by only giving the dev kits to certain people's homes or offices. It's the same security as your bank's vault. It's the same security as New Orleans's late levees. Do you think they shouldn't've built levees of any strength because there might come a stronger storm? (And don't say "just don't live in New Orleans", because we're assuming there's a need for a city at the mouth of the Mississippi, just as there was a need to distribute the dev kits.)
This means you must first complete the equation for m first, which I do not know off hand.
You use the conversion factor sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) (let's call that k), where v=velocity and c=speed of light. The relativistic mass of an object is 1/k of its rest mass. The relativistic length of an object in the direction that it's moving shrinks to k times is length. Time also dilates by t=rest t/k, which is how Mazer Rackham got to live for hundreds years by traveling at high speeds and thus having a low k.
The easy way to remember this is to remember that y=sqrt(1-x^2) is a (semi)circle. In other words, if you are moving some fraction x of the speed of light, then x and k must be points on the unit circle (or alternatively, x^2+k^2=1).
An interesting side note of this is that a photon, traveling at the speed of light, has k=0. Since it has energy, and energy is proportional to relativistic mass, it must have relativistic mass. But mk=m0, so its rest mass is zero. This is how a photon can have zero (rest) mass yet be influenced by gravity.
(I think that physicists prefer gamma=1/k as the conversion factor, but k is easier to visualize in my opinion, because it avoids the reciprocal.)
Why have the c^2 part at all? Is the energy contained in an object really variable based upon the speed of light in a particular material?
Um, c isn't the speed of a particular beam of light in any sense (which, as you say, changes depending on the medium). c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and is constant.
So the equation is really just E = M.
Yes, it is, when you use Planck units, which simplify this and other equations by setting certain constants to 1. You are just converting between units, because the constant C becomes just 1 (length/time)^2. And you get a definition of units that's based on the universe's physical constants, not just some bar of metal in Paris*.
Or is it just there to show school children that the energy contained is really, really big?
No, the energy is not really big. It's exactly the same as the mass. It just seems big because we're used to large masses, small energies, and slow velocities in everyday life (in terms of Planck units). As the Wikipedia article quotes an article in Physics Today, "We see that the question is not, 'Why is gravity so feeble?' but rather, 'Why is the proton's mass so small?' For in [Planck] Units, the strength of gravity simply is what it is, a primary quantity, while the proton's mass is the tiny number."
*Yes, I know they redefined the meter based on some 12345.67 wavelengths of some random isotope's emission. But they got that number by measuring the bar of metal in Paris. What's more, they got the bar of metal by taking some fraction of the Earth's circumference, and they got the second by taking a fraction of the Earth's day, which is a really non-sequitur way of getting units to measure the speed of light.
If you can show me a true nerd who doesn't know what E=mc^2 represents, or even what ^2 means, then I will weep.
...wait, it's not?
Yes. Everyone knows that E=mc^2 means that you're turning on the second least significant bit in the variable mc and assigning that to E.
If parents cared then we would not be in this whole entire mess.
Which is precisely the point. Too many parents don't care. Most of them do, but there is a minority that's way too anarchic with their children. I don't have much of a problem with organized anarchy, but it doesn't really work for raising children.
The real solution would be to find the parents that don't..well..parent, turn the kids over to child protecive services and then a loving adoptive family, and castrate the parents. (Hopefully if you catch the parents while the child is young enough, it won't be too traumatic.) And then monitor the child in case the bad parenting is genetic.
The very existence of the need for a government agency of child protection is proof that there are parents who don't parent.
Heh. The Terminator just terminated terminating.
The satellite rode into space on a Rockot vehicle, a converted SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile. The rocket, which in the Cold War would have been armed with nuclear weapons, had been modified for peaceful space duties with the addition of a Breeze-KM upper stage.
Hm. You add a stage to an ICBM, launch it, and wonder why it stops transmitting signals 90 minutes after launch.
It's simpler than even that. The Windows PCs are imaged and produced in bulk. In order for them to build an open PC, they have to take it out of the line, put a blank hard drive, install a non-WinModem, customize it as per the order, etc. If you call a pizza factory that's designed to make only pepperoni pizzas and ask them to make you a cheese pizza, it would probably cost you more than if you bought the pepperoni pizza and manually removed the pepperonis.
On the other hand, supply/demand vs. price is running backwards...
That's definitely a reason - a real fax modem is considerably more expensive than a Winmodem.
First sale doctrine says you can re-sell anything someone else has sold to you.
That can't apply to "anything", can it? Does it apply to those 12-packs of cereal where the small boxes say "this unit not marked for individual sale" or simply "not for resale"?
I was thinking about this the other day. As far as I know it's only legal to resell, e.g., candy if you buy it from a place like Sam's Club that markets to resellers. But doesn't the right of first sale apply everywhere?
Which is precisely why I said "Alanis Morisette", not "ironic": in case a pedant came along and said "wait, that's not really ironic!", I could say "neither is the song."
Ender is this perfect superman who murders several children and yet remains perfectly innocent and good as far as Card is concerned.
his brother is able to easily conquer the world by the sheer power of his intellect
(spoiler alert)
You sound like you've never read the sequels (either the Speaker arc or the Shadow arc). Ender's Game as a novel may have its faults, but the whole set is well thought out. Ender does not remain good. Even as early as "The Investment Counselor" of First Meetings, which happens just after Ender leaves earth, he's already demonized and thus has to hide his identity, and his duty is to redeem himself by giving the buggers a home. He is not innocent for the xenocide, nor the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo. There is a moral responsibility there. The catch is that he is not responsible, since from his birth he had been abused by the IF so that they get a leader who will win at all costs. Ender never realizes as a child the immorality of what he did. If you want to read it as a child, go ahead. Stick it in the back of your mind and ignore its morality. Then mature a little, read the sequels, and realize that you, the reader, have also been duped by the IF into believing that what they made Ender do was acceptable.
As far as Peter, the only real power he ever had was stopping a couple of potential wars. Peter didn't even have power to stop Achilles in any reasonable manner. The events that led to his demise - the kidnapping of the Bean/Petra embryos, the shot in cold blood - were all mishandled. Achilles could've been led to a proper trial or something if the Hegemon and his forces had been kinda smart. Peter as Hegemon is not the meritocrat he appears to be. By no means does he "conquer the world", as you say.
I guess you're right that Card's kinda weak on making the morality explicit in Ender's Game. But the later novels make it more than clear.
Alanis Morisette would've had a field day with a company named Universal providing video in a proprietary and plugin-specific format.
Imagine when all the new maps come out for Halo3 and you're the one that can't play with your friends on Live because you don't have the HD to download the map-pack.
Not only can you save the maps to a memory card instead, they could always just stream you the map before the game if necessary and keep it in RAM. It shouldn't be that slow - it's just one map at a time, and they can start streaming it as soon as you join the party or begin matchmaking or log in or whatever.
The DMCA is not a copyright law. It is a criminal law regarding circumvention of security measures that control copyright.
Sony is asking the users to perform an operation (burning the music onto their own CD and ripping it thence) that circumvents a method (secure WMA) that effectively prevents loading the songs onto an iPod.
Not only is Sony advocating criminal acts, it also is executing its contract with the artists in bad faith; namely, they are supposedly securing the CDs they sell, but they also provide everyone information on how to remove the security.
Moreover, they are inducing copyright infringement, because they are encouraging people to make an extra copy of the CD and to make a third copy onto the iPod, without licenses to do so. And most people would not throw away their first two copies.
And if they are allowing this because they own the copyright, they've just given everyone a license to copy the music and break the copy-protection. Touché!