I use DroidWall (iptables frontend) on my Android phone (=non-Windows) to keep apps from sending my private data out. As an added bonus, it blocks most ads.
Yes, you can choose to not install those apps, but most of them want a network connection and access to storage...
Interesting, I didn't know they have such a wide dynamic range. I knew a small rare-earth magnet near my phone would max out the Hall sensor value, but never considered recalibrating it in that state. It's a bit difficult to test too, since it seems to use dead reckoning (accelerometer) as a fallback for rotation.
So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?
Let's try. As a Java developer (among other things), I can say that I don't really care about Java EE (i.e. the enterprise features like JPA, EJB3).
It works for certain types of software, but in my experience, once you hit a certain complexity, you'll run into things that can't be solved with standard Java EE.
Then you'll usually drop down to the vendor implementation (JPA->Hibernate, EJB3->JBoss/Glassfish or whatever), and start using features that are not really standard.
Nowadays I just use Spring+Hibernate/JOOQ or similar frameworks for EE functionality. It requires a bit more setup work, but it allows much more flexibility when you want to do things that don't fit in the Java EE patterns. It's easier to mix and match different technologies with Spring, and you don't have to wait 5 years for an update in the standards, but you can use cutting edge technology instead.
Enterprise Java development also involves a lot of other technologies, like XML based template languages, JSON/XML web services, database queries for specific databases (JPA database transparency breaks down really quickly), JMS message broker configuration, enterprise bus configuration, web technologies (HTML, javascript, templating), etc. The Java coding part is sometimes only a small part of the whole. And you can often replace that with Scala or Groovy if you want.
I'd rather have some new core language features, like real getters/setters and the Elvis operator that was axed, those would make more difference in real life.
Meanwhile, fans dislike copyright because it creates an imbalance between quality vs. convenience (cracked software is ALWAYS better) or availability (a movie or game isn't available in a certain region or is no longer sold).
That's not about copyright, that's about copy protection aka DRM. Copyright doesn't prevent the act of copying, it just provides a legal defense against it.
Ender's Game - A great morality play; and a very exciting read.
I've read it, and liked it, but "exiting" was not the impression it left on me. It read almost like a documentary: everything was detached, without emotion. There was no real pacing; things just happened when they had to happen.
I wonder how much of the occasional health panic that springs up around wifi - and indeed other technologies - can actually be attributed to the high pitched hums that can be emitted by badly manufactured devices.
It may be in your case, but I don't think that's the cause in most cases. I can also hear very high pitched sounds (transformers, bats), and while they can prevent me from sleeping, they don't make me sick otherwise.
I think the more general mechanisms at work are mass hysteria and the nocebo effect (placebo's evil twin), as evidenced by this story.
the surface, even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space
Seems I read too fast and missed some crucial words. So that's more probable. But I think it would look more like an icy explosion of gas, like a comet tail. My guess is that it would be too violent to allow a crust to form. Of course, putting a large volume of water in space at once is a hypothetical scenario.
even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space
That's Hollywood science. It would actually start boiling and freezing at the same time. If it managed to form an icy crust, this would stabilize the pressure and stop the boiling and freezing. If it was massive enough, the gaseous water would form an atmosphere that would also stabilize the pressure. Otherwise it would probably just boil away into space over time. With the pressure stabilized, it would only lose heat through black body radiation, which would take a long long time to freeze it because water holds large amounts of thermal energy.
The interesting thing is that the vast majority of the universe is in the "everything else" zone.... contemplate that one for a while...
Hmm, I don't think this is correct, depending on what you mean exactly.
When we talk about the universe, we usually mean the observable universe. Since we receive light from all parts of the observable universe (it's observable after all), that means we are in the future light cones of those locations (each roughly an expanding sphere in 3D+time). If we can see something, it can effect us.
But, not all of those places are in our future light cone. Because of the metric expansion of space, which causes accelerated growth of the universe, our sun's light will never reach the outer regions of the observable universe, and we will never be able to travel there unless we find some way around the restrictions of general relativity (unlikely).
Geosynchronous, and especially geostationary orbit exists. So while you're correct, there's nothing to stop us from putting an object into decaying orbit where atmospheric impact will not cause significant enough friction to burn it out.
We just choose not to.
The ISS orbits between 330 km (205 mi) and 435 km (270 mi). Geostationary orbits are at 35,786 km above sea level. That's about 35,000 km higher, and about 1/11th of the distance to the moon. We choose not to put stuff there because: a. Its expensive to put stuff in such a high orbit (more powerful rockets, more fuel) b. It's pretty far from earth, so not very convenient to get to/from, especially in emergencies.
Furthermore, an object in a decaying geostationary orbit (going at about 3 km/s) would speed up along the orbit the closer it gets to earth (basic orbital mechanics), so eventually it would still have enough speed to incinerate largely in the atmosphere.
Any stable orbit has an associated speed, which is what Deadstick was saying. You seem to imply that we choose that speed so stuff will burn up on reentry, which is nonsense. It is estimated that 25% of a large satellite will reach the ground. At best they control (speed up) the orbital decay, so that debris will splash down in an ocean.
From the Apache Flex webpage: What happens to my projects if Adobe Discontinues the Flash Player? It is true that current Flex projects are tied to either the Adobe Flash Player or Adobe AIR. We have been making great strides to compile projects to native JavaScript, therefore bypassing the Flash Player in the browser. Adobe has made a commitment to support the Flash Player and our current runtime for at least 5 years from the time they donated the project to Apache. -- See for example the FlexJS project, that intends to run Flash directly on a JavaScript VM instead of the Flash Player VM.
The reason why clocks appear to slow down at high speeds is that the atoms in the clocks used for the experiments are simply decaying less (because they expend less energy at higher altitudes and higher speeds) than ones that didn't get to move so fast. Because the timing of a second is measured in the half-life decay, any changes to that decay rate will also throw off the clock itself. Mechanical clocks have numerous moving parts that get thrown off by the change in speed, and even electrical clocks still have to deal with changes in the oscillator speed and material resonance.
As I explained in a reply to the parent post, GPS clocks are actually faster than ground clocks.
Furthermore, atomic clocks don't use radioactive decay. Instead they include an atomic oscillator inside an electronic circuit so the whole oscillates at a very precisely defined frequency. The oscillation comes from Cesium/Rubidium atoms with electrons that move from ground energy levels to an excitated level and back. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock#Mechanism
The reason why clocks appear to slow down is because time is relative, and depends on the relative speed (special relativity) or the difference in gravitational field strength (general relativity) of the observer and the observed.
Well, consider that relativity tells us that the satellites zooming up above us have slower ticking clocks.
Actually, the GPS satellite clocks run 38 microseconds faster than ground based clocks. This is because they are not moving fast enough (special relativity: faster means slower clock) to counter the general relativistic effects (stronger gravitational field means slower ground clocks). Both clocks seem to be slower for an observer in free space. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
Slashdot Mirror
He was told a Steam box is great for playing games...
I use DroidWall (iptables frontend) on my Android phone (=non-Windows) to keep apps from sending my private data out. As an added bonus, it blocks most ads.
Yes, you can choose to not install those apps, but most of them want a network connection and access to storage...
Interesting, I didn't know they have such a wide dynamic range. I knew a small rare-earth magnet near my phone would max out the Hall sensor value, but never considered recalibrating it in that state.
It's a bit difficult to test too, since it seems to use dead reckoning (accelerometer) as a fallback for rotation.
Location system (Cell Tower Only? A-GPS? GLONASS + GPS + Compass?
Good luck using a compass near all these magnetic locks...
The thing is, macroscopic superpositions do exist, as mentioned here.
So, by their own reasoning, P=NP.
QED
A five digit ID? I'll get off your lawn now.
So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?
Let's try. As a Java developer (among other things), I can say that I don't really care about Java EE (i.e. the enterprise features like JPA, EJB3).
It works for certain types of software, but in my experience, once you hit a certain complexity, you'll run into things that can't be solved with standard Java EE.
Then you'll usually drop down to the vendor implementation (JPA->Hibernate, EJB3->JBoss/Glassfish or whatever), and start using features that are not really standard.
Nowadays I just use Spring+Hibernate/JOOQ or similar frameworks for EE functionality. It requires a bit more setup work, but it allows much more flexibility when you want to do things that don't fit in the Java EE patterns. It's easier to mix and match different technologies with Spring, and you don't have to wait 5 years for an update in the standards, but you can use cutting edge technology instead.
Enterprise Java development also involves a lot of other technologies, like XML based template languages, JSON/XML web services, database queries for specific databases (JPA database transparency breaks down really quickly), JMS message broker configuration, enterprise bus configuration, web technologies (HTML, javascript, templating), etc. The Java coding part is sometimes only a small part of the whole. And you can often replace that with Scala or Groovy if you want.
I'd rather have some new core language features, like real getters/setters and the Elvis operator that was axed, those would make more difference in real life.
Meanwhile, fans dislike copyright because it creates an imbalance between quality vs. convenience (cracked software is ALWAYS better) or availability (a movie or game isn't available in a certain region or is no longer sold).
That's not about copyright, that's about copy protection aka DRM. Copyright doesn't prevent the act of copying, it just provides a legal defense against it.
Ender's Game - A great morality play; and a very exciting read.
I've read it, and liked it, but "exiting" was not the impression it left on me.
It read almost like a documentary: everything was detached, without emotion. There was no real pacing; things just happened when they had to happen.
But really, make sure The Bible is on the list.
Meh. I read it, but didn't like the ending.
I wonder how much of the occasional health panic that springs up around wifi - and indeed other technologies - can actually be attributed to the high pitched hums that can be emitted by badly manufactured devices.
It may be in your case, but I don't think that's the cause in most cases. I can also hear very high pitched sounds (transformers, bats), and while they can prevent me from sleeping, they don't make me sick otherwise.
I think the more general mechanisms at work are mass hysteria and the nocebo effect (placebo's evil twin), as evidenced by this story.
My point was that mathematics is a science. That it is a formal science instead of a natural science is a different matter all together.
Because string theory isn't science!
Sure it is. It's abstract mathematics.
Each trigram is 3 lines, each hexagram 6 lines. The lines are either full line or broken and represent one bit each (1 or 0).
the surface, even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space
Seems I read too fast and missed some crucial words. So that's more probable.
But I think it would look more like an icy explosion of gas, like a comet tail. My guess is that it would be too violent to allow a crust to form.
Of course, putting a large volume of water in space at once is a hypothetical scenario.
even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space
That's Hollywood science. It would actually start boiling and freezing at the same time.
If it managed to form an icy crust, this would stabilize the pressure and stop the boiling and freezing.
If it was massive enough, the gaseous water would form an atmosphere that would also stabilize the pressure. Otherwise it would probably just boil away into space over time.
With the pressure stabilized, it would only lose heat through black body radiation, which would take a long long time to freeze it because water holds large amounts of thermal energy.
The interesting thing is that the vast majority of the universe is in the "everything else" zone.... contemplate that one for a while...
Hmm, I don't think this is correct, depending on what you mean exactly.
When we talk about the universe, we usually mean the observable universe. Since we receive light from all parts of the observable universe (it's observable after all), that means we are in the future light cones of those locations (each roughly an expanding sphere in 3D+time). If we can see something, it can effect us.
But, not all of those places are in our future light cone. Because of the metric expansion of space, which causes accelerated growth of the universe, our sun's light will never reach the outer regions of the observable universe, and we will never be able to travel there unless we find some way around the restrictions of general relativity (unlikely).
The voters are the ones who keep voting for status quo. If they really are desperately unhappy they should vote for something else.
Let's explain this fallacy with an illustration.
Notice how the last digit in the first case remains unchanged, as expected.
It only remains unchanged because it rounds down. ...60798 ...6080
N[Sin[1], 48] will end with
N[Sin[1], 47] will end with
Calculated on Wolfram Alpha.
Oh, that one is easy actually. You start with a spherical car in a vacuum...
Cat pictures make the best meow-monics?
Geosynchronous, and especially geostationary orbit exists. So while you're correct, there's nothing to stop us from putting an object into decaying orbit where atmospheric impact will not cause significant enough friction to burn it out.
We just choose not to.
The ISS orbits between 330 km (205 mi) and 435 km (270 mi).
Geostationary orbits are at 35,786 km above sea level. That's about 35,000 km higher, and about 1/11th of the distance to the moon.
We choose not to put stuff there because:
a. Its expensive to put stuff in such a high orbit (more powerful rockets, more fuel)
b. It's pretty far from earth, so not very convenient to get to/from, especially in emergencies.
Furthermore, an object in a decaying geostationary orbit (going at about 3 km/s) would speed up along the orbit the closer it gets to earth (basic orbital mechanics), so eventually it would still have enough speed to incinerate largely in the atmosphere.
Any stable orbit has an associated speed, which is what Deadstick was saying. You seem to imply that we choose that speed so stuff will burn up on reentry, which is nonsense. It is estimated that 25% of a large satellite will reach the ground. At best they control (speed up) the orbital decay, so that debris will splash down in an ocean.
From the Apache Flex webpage:
What happens to my projects if Adobe Discontinues the Flash Player?
It is true that current Flex projects are tied to either the Adobe Flash Player or Adobe AIR. We have been making great strides to compile projects to native JavaScript, therefore bypassing the Flash Player in the browser. Adobe has made a commitment to support the Flash Player and our current runtime for at least 5 years from the time they donated the project to Apache.
--
See for example the FlexJS project, that intends to run Flash directly on a JavaScript VM instead of the Flash Player VM.
The reason why clocks appear to slow down at high speeds is that the atoms in the clocks used for the experiments are simply decaying less (because they expend less energy at higher altitudes and higher speeds) than ones that didn't get to move so fast. Because the timing of a second is measured in the half-life decay, any changes to that decay rate will also throw off the clock itself. Mechanical clocks have numerous moving parts that get thrown off by the change in speed, and even electrical clocks still have to deal with changes in the oscillator speed and material resonance.
As I explained in a reply to the parent post, GPS clocks are actually faster than ground clocks.
Furthermore, atomic clocks don't use radioactive decay. Instead they include an atomic oscillator inside an electronic circuit so the whole oscillates at a very precisely defined frequency. The oscillation comes from Cesium/Rubidium atoms with electrons that move from ground energy levels to an excitated level and back. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock#Mechanism
The reason why clocks appear to slow down is because time is relative, and depends on the relative speed (special relativity) or the difference in gravitational field strength (general relativity) of the observer and the observed.
Well, consider that relativity tells us that the satellites zooming up above us have slower ticking clocks.
Actually, the GPS satellite clocks run 38 microseconds faster than ground based clocks.
This is because they are not moving fast enough (special relativity: faster means slower clock) to counter the general relativistic effects (stronger gravitational field means slower ground clocks).
Both clocks seem to be slower for an observer in free space.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html