For the (more) paranoid, look up "Shamirs Secret Sharing Scheme." (apt-get install ssss)
It allows you to split up a "secret" into a number of "shadows." Then, only when X people get together, they can recover the secret. I've always meant to implement this where you can use ssss to split up a private key, then you can keep an-to-date list of certain passwords and email it out to them periodically. The burden isn't on them everytime you want to change a password, the private key will open the new file.
I'd like to pretty this up as a web app so people can handle this stuff automatically. The super-paranoid version is you can have 1 of the "shadows" only get released on a deadmans switch...
which not only tells us the version but also how old it is
Who cares how old it is?
I care how old it is. If I'm having compatibility problems, and I know I'm running 20060202_5, there's a good chance there have been changes. If I'm running TODAY-1, I'm screwed.
No one is immune to groupthink.. I mean, it took 20 years for them to believe val Leeuwenhoek that he had seen microscopic organisms. And if you try to argue "but they changed their minds after 20 years," remember that it still took 20 years.
Posting a script doesn't have any personal connection. How much more likely are you to believe this than if you just read it as a post on a blog somewhere? He is posting this to the general public, so he knew he would have no initial credibility.
This is clearly evidence of a survival mechanism, just not one that usually has to work at such a scale. This indicates your brain can "heal" by generating new neural pathways.
Think of it this way: Your body repairs itself after any surgery as a survival mechanism. Skins heals, interal organs heal, etc, etc. Historically, the mechanisms that are responsible for this don't work fast enough to keep patients alive after trauma. Medical science is really just keeping your body alive long enough to fix itself.
I really think you are missing the point that I'm hoping most of the people here are trying to bring up. I don't think anyone is doubting affirmative action WORKS. When legislation is added to require the hiring of certain people, there are more of those people in the workplace.
The problem is affirmative action is a stopgap solution. The "real" solution would be to try to combat people's prejudices. Racism in American, while by no means gone, is so much less prevalent then it was 100, and even 30 years ago. IMHO, this is largely due to people realizing that their ridiculous beliefs were totally unfounded. Now we add affirmative action into the mix. Before, if someone sees a minority doing something they didn't think they should, they would think "Wow, I didn't realize people were capable of XXX."
Now, it's not racist to say "blacks are getting hired because of their race, and not their skills." It's a fact. So now we have people angry at the fact that they aren't getting hired because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or whatever. We're having the opposite of the intended affect: We're now reinforcing resentment of minorities. This is only going to make us NEED affirmative action to maintain the same balance of minorities. We're only widening the social gaps. I'm sure affirmative action looks great if your view of the world is limited to a statistical breakdown of minorities in the workplace, but to me it looks like a bad plan.
My understand of GPS and your understanding of GPS don't jive.
As I understand it, the entire reason that the GPS doesn't need it's own atomic clock is because it takes an extra measurement in order to ignore the fact that it doesn't really know what time it is. Thats why GPS needs 4 satellites and not 3. In this case, it isn't important to preserve the ABSOLUTE time a signal is received, only the RELATIVE time a signal was received. So long as I know the difference between clock signals I'm fine.
Now, this doesn't help me if I don't know exactly how long the difference is between the clock skew. Because of the analong to digital conversion, I can basically say "The signals are skewed by 200 samples" and not know an accurate conversion from samples to time. However, I know the precise LENGTH (in time) of the message being sent from the satellite. Using this I can correctly determine the "real" sample rate. While you are correct that clock skew is crazy and quartz isn't accuate enough, they don't have to be accurate, they only have to be consistentl and only for as long as it takes to capture the signal.
You make an interesting point, but I don't think I agree.
You are making the argument that by forcing the economy to shift to a new, more efficient system, it would spurt economic growth. We live in a (mostly) capitalist system, and if it was in a corporations economic best interest, they would have already done it. The one thing history has shown time and time again is companies only do what's in their best financial interest.
There have been designs for more environmentally efficient systems for decades. The reason they haven't been put in use is because of the prohibitive cost, and worse performance. If american corporations instituted more environmentally friendly systems, they would have to raise the costs of products to make ends meet. Higher cost, less demand, and I believe that is what the original comment meant when he referred to "devolve our economy."
I'm very amused because I was on the winning team for the midwest regional. It was held last weekend in Champaign and Southern Illinois University won.
My question to you is this: Was your contest a totally unorganized snafu?
At our competition, none of the machines were configured right, the scoring engine they used was pathetic (and constantly scoring teams incorrectly), and the rules were randomly enforced. Although teams hacking other teams was prohibited, our Red team openly discussed the fact that most teams were actively hacking each other.
What really irked me was when we complained about a machine not being configured correctly, and they told us "It was to simulate you coming into a company and having to deal with misconfigured servers." That would be a perfect explanation, if they hadn't told us problems configuring the systems, thus delayed the start of the competition by several hours.
Technically you are correct. However, what most people mean is nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vaccuum.
Cherekov radiation is just an example of a particle traveling faster than the speed of light in air. While difficult, this is (obviously) not impossible. The speed of light varies depending on the medium it's traveling in, just like sound.
Now, if you accept the quantum mechanics view of the universe, theoretically some things can go faster than the speed of light, eg hawking radiation.
When scientific papers are being written about refuting ID, that bothers me immensely. Should we disscuss the fact that it does refure ID? Of course. But scientific papers should be discussing the research they did, specifically about the flight of bees. The purpose of these papers is exposition about their research. Within journals there are places to discuss the merits of theories and the implications of research.
I don't like the idea that the prime goal of the researchers was to refute ID. I like my scientists to be impartial. Research should be done to figure out how something happens, and let whatever the implications of that research be what they may be. If you can't seperate your feelings from your research, how can we possibly trust your research as being scientific?
I was interested in the fact that we figured out how bees fly, because I think it's interesting, not because I want to refute ID. I'm sure we could find a link to this that ISN'T about fighting intelligent design.
Not to nitpick, but we don't know EMI will give you cancer in short order. There have been numerous studies over the years that linked power lines and childhood lukemia rate, which are probably what you are talking about. The problem is that under peer review, most/all of those studies were found to have issues.
There is usually a substantial selection bias, or they "random sample" of people they use as subjects have important things in common.
Studies from the medical college of wisconsin http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/cop/powerlines- cancer-FAQ/ toc.html#16
and the nation institue of health in associate with the national cancer institiute http://cis.nci.nih.gov/fact/3_46.htm All the studies listed there are inconclusive or in progress.
EMI causes cancer is one of those things everyone thinks they know, but if you do any research on, you find out the link isn't at all proven.
Patrick said (in his original "someone help me" email) that the plaque/toothbrush scenario was one if his theories. Since then, he has not mentioned it in any of his updates (that I could find).
All he mentions is that he wants to thank his doctor, and he's feeling better, etc, etc.
Personally, he always sounded like a bit of a hypochondriac prima donna, and I was anxiously waiting to be proven wrong.
This is insanely poor logic. I don't deny, for a moment, that he has an amount of data that far exceeds anything I can fathom, but the idea that he's somehow alone in this is ludicrous.
What about military programs that move this kind of data? What about research programs that move this kind of data? Air traffic control systems?
Or, more to the point, what about the hundreds of REAL financial institutions that support online wire transfers, etc, etc, that DON'T have these problems.
I don't deny that they have a hard job, but pretending that they are somehow the only ones who to deal with the amount of uptime and data as they do is just factually wrong.
Supreme court says you can be held for up to 48 hours by the police without being charged with a crime. 48 hours. I'm not saying this isn't an abuse of power, but don't complain that people are using the system. Complain about the system.
The question becomes was he being arrested, or was he just being "detained." Again, this becomes a legal issue, and IANAL.
Moore claims that the US Secret Service's Uniformed Division protects only the Saudi Embassy, no others. That's just plain false. Any tourist to Washington, DC, will see plenty of Secret Service Police guarding all of the other foreign embassies which request such protection. Other than guarding the White House and some federal buildings, it's the largest use of personnel by the Secret Service's Uniformed Division.
I'm not a physicist, but from what I can tell, the key phrasing in that article is "equivalent energy."
According to a half dozen other sites, you are correct, we have reached the break even point, with a radically different technique. The problem is that containment of the fusion has not exceeded 1.2 seconds, and required constant energy input to continue the reaction.
Ignition reactors will create a self-sustaining fusion reaction, so that the amount of energy to start it would be a one time thing. I would guess they mean exceed the break even point for a sustained reaction, which would be necessary if we intended to harness it somehow...
It appears that dust covering the solar panels is only one of a number of factors which will end up rendering the mars rover a paperweight. The dust on the solar panels appears to be complicated by the fact that the batteries "lose capactity" and (probably most importantly) the sun moves past the latitude where the rover is located. Just like days get shorter in the winter...
I guess it doesn't matter if your solar panels are clean if they aren't being exposed to the sun for an appreciable length of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Data is old but still interesting
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
Not sure if I suck at math... (And I posted this on the site before I saw slashdot picked up the story)
Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years. If it started COMPLETELY PURE, it would only be 99.8% pure at the end of 70 years.
For the (more) paranoid, look up "Shamirs Secret Sharing Scheme." (apt-get install ssss)
It allows you to split up a "secret" into a number of "shadows." Then, only when X people get together, they can recover the secret. I've always meant to implement this where you can use ssss to split up a private key, then you can keep an-to-date list of certain passwords and email it out to them periodically. The burden isn't on them everytime you want to change a password, the private key will open the new file.
I'd like to pretty this up as a web app so people can handle this stuff automatically. The super-paranoid version is you can have 1 of the "shadows" only get released on a deadmans switch...
which not only tells us the version but also how old it is
Who cares how old it is?
I care how old it is. If I'm having compatibility problems, and I know I'm running 20060202_5, there's a good chance there have been changes. If I'm running TODAY-1, I'm screwed.
No one is immune to groupthink.. I mean, it took 20 years for them to believe val Leeuwenhoek that he had seen microscopic organisms. And if you try to argue "but they changed their minds after 20 years," remember that it still took 20 years.
k
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_van_Leeuwenhoe
Botulism toxin is toxic if ingested. That's was the food poisoning "Botulism" is, eating food contaminated with botulism toxin.
http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC3680.htm
Posting a script doesn't have any personal connection. How much more likely are you to believe this than if you just read it as a post on a blog somewhere? He is posting this to the general public, so he knew he would have no initial credibility.
This is clearly evidence of a survival mechanism, just not one that usually has to work at such a scale. This indicates your brain can "heal" by generating new neural pathways.
Think of it this way: Your body repairs itself after any surgery as a survival mechanism. Skins heals, interal organs heal, etc, etc. Historically, the mechanisms that are responsible for this don't work fast enough to keep patients alive after trauma. Medical science is really just keeping your body alive long enough to fix itself.
I really think you are missing the point that I'm hoping most of the people here are trying to bring up. I don't think anyone is doubting affirmative action WORKS. When legislation is added to require the hiring of certain people, there are more of those people in the workplace.
The problem is affirmative action is a stopgap solution. The "real" solution would be to try to combat people's prejudices. Racism in American, while by no means gone, is so much less prevalent then it was 100, and even 30 years ago. IMHO, this is largely due to people realizing that their ridiculous beliefs were totally unfounded. Now we add affirmative action into the mix. Before, if someone sees a minority doing something they didn't think they should, they would think "Wow, I didn't realize people were capable of XXX."
Now, it's not racist to say "blacks are getting hired because of their race, and not their skills." It's a fact. So now we have people angry at the fact that they aren't getting hired because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or whatever. We're having the opposite of the intended affect: We're now reinforcing resentment of minorities. This is only going to make us NEED affirmative action to maintain the same balance of minorities. We're only widening the social gaps. I'm sure affirmative action looks great if your view of the world is limited to a statistical breakdown of minorities in the workplace, but to me it looks like a bad plan.
My understand of GPS and your understanding of GPS don't jive.
As I understand it, the entire reason that the GPS doesn't need it's own atomic clock is because it takes an extra measurement in order to ignore the fact that it doesn't really know what time it is. Thats why GPS needs 4 satellites and not 3. In this case, it isn't important to preserve the ABSOLUTE time a signal is received, only the RELATIVE time a signal was received. So long as I know the difference between clock signals I'm fine.
Now, this doesn't help me if I don't know exactly how long the difference is between the clock skew. Because of the analong to digital conversion, I can basically say "The signals are skewed by 200 samples" and not know an accurate conversion from samples to time. However, I know the precise LENGTH (in time) of the message being sent from the satellite. Using this I can correctly determine the "real" sample rate. While you are correct that clock skew is crazy and quartz isn't accuate enough, they don't have to be accurate, they only have to be consistentl and only for as long as it takes to capture the signal.
You make an interesting point, but I don't think I agree.
You are making the argument that by forcing the economy to shift to a new, more efficient system, it would spurt economic growth. We live in a (mostly) capitalist system, and if it was in a corporations economic best interest, they would have already done it. The one thing history has shown time and time again is companies only do what's in their best financial interest.
There have been designs for more environmentally efficient systems for decades. The reason they haven't been put in use is because of the prohibitive cost, and worse performance. If american corporations instituted more environmentally friendly systems, they would have to raise the costs of products to make ends meet. Higher cost, less demand, and I believe that is what the original comment meant when he referred to "devolve our economy."
I'm very amused because I was on the winning team for the midwest regional. It was held last weekend in Champaign and Southern Illinois University won.
:-D
My question to you is this: Was your contest a totally unorganized snafu?
At our competition, none of the machines were configured right, the scoring engine they used was pathetic (and constantly scoring teams incorrectly), and the rules were randomly enforced. Although teams hacking other teams was prohibited, our Red team openly discussed the fact that most teams were actively hacking each other.
What really irked me was when we complained about a machine not being configured correctly, and they told us "It was to simulate you coming into a company and having to deal with misconfigured servers." That would be a perfect explanation, if they hadn't told us problems configuring the systems, thus delayed the start of the competition by several hours.
Finally, I'll see you in Texas.
Technically you are correct. However, what most people mean is nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vaccuum. Cherekov radiation is just an example of a particle traveling faster than the speed of light in air. While difficult, this is (obviously) not impossible. The speed of light varies depending on the medium it's traveling in, just like sound.
Now, if you accept the quantum mechanics view of the universe, theoretically some things can go faster than the speed of light, eg hawking radiation.
</Supernitpicking>
When scientific papers are being written about refuting ID, that bothers me immensely. Should we disscuss the fact that it does refure ID? Of course. But scientific papers should be discussing the research they did, specifically about the flight of bees. The purpose of these papers is exposition about their research. Within journals there are places to discuss the merits of theories and the implications of research.
I don't like the idea that the prime goal of the researchers was to refute ID. I like my scientists to be impartial. Research should be done to figure out how something happens, and let whatever the implications of that research be what they may be. If you can't seperate your feelings from your research, how can we possibly trust your research as being scientific?
I was interested in the fact that we figured out how bees fly, because I think it's interesting, not because I want to refute ID. I'm sure we could find a link to this that ISN'T about fighting intelligent design.
Not to nitpick, but we don't know EMI will give you cancer in short order. There have been numerous studies over the years that linked power lines and childhood lukemia rate, which are probably what you are talking about. The problem is that under peer review, most/all of those studies were found to have issues.
- cancer-FAQ/ toc.html#16
There is usually a substantial selection bias, or they "random sample" of people they use as subjects have important things in common.
Studies from the medical college of wisconsin
http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/cop/powerlines
and the nation institue of health in associate with the national cancer institiute
http://cis.nci.nih.gov/fact/3_46.htm
All the studies listed there are inconclusive or in progress.
EMI causes cancer is one of those things everyone thinks they know, but if you do any research on, you find out the link isn't at all proven.
You're wrong.
Patrick said (in his original "someone help me" email) that the plaque/toothbrush scenario was one if his theories. Since then, he has not mentioned it in any of his updates (that I could find).
All he mentions is that he wants to thank his doctor, and he's feeling better, etc, etc.
Personally, he always sounded like a bit of a hypochondriac prima donna, and I was anxiously waiting to be proven wrong.
This is insanely poor logic. I don't deny, for a moment, that he has an amount of data that far exceeds anything I can fathom, but the idea that he's somehow alone in this is ludicrous.
What about military programs that move this kind of data? What about research programs that move this kind of data? Air traffic control systems?
Or, more to the point, what about the hundreds of REAL financial institutions that support online wire transfers, etc, etc, that DON'T have these problems.
I don't deny that they have a hard job, but pretending that they are somehow the only ones who to deal with the amount of uptime and data as they do is just factually wrong.
Supreme court says you can be held for up to 48 hours by the police without being charged with a crime. 48 hours.
l ?n avby=search&court=US&case=/us/500/44.html
I'm not saying this isn't an abuse of power, but don't complain that people are using the system. Complain about the system.
The question becomes was he being arrested, or was he just being "detained." Again, this becomes a legal issue, and IANAL.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.p
Moore claims that the US Secret Service's Uniformed Division protects only the Saudi Embassy, no others. That's just plain false. Any tourist to Washington, DC, will see plenty of Secret Service Police guarding all of the other foreign embassies which request such protection. Other than guarding the White House and some federal buildings, it's the largest use of personnel by the Secret Service's Uniformed Division.
Lets start with that one, eh?
I'm not a physicist, but from what I can tell, the key phrasing in that article is "equivalent energy."
. htm
According to a half dozen other sites, you are correct, we have reached the break even point, with a radically different technique. The problem is that containment of the fusion has not exceeded 1.2 seconds, and required constant energy input to continue the reaction.
Ignition reactors will create a self-sustaining fusion reaction, so that the amount of energy to start it would be a one time thing. I would guess they mean exceed the break even point for a sustained reaction, which would be necessary if we intended to harness it somehow...
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/news/1998/06/980611
It appears that dust covering the solar panels is only one of a number of factors which will end up rendering the mars rover a paperweight.
. html
The dust on the solar panels appears to be complicated by the fact that the batteries "lose capactity" and (probably most importantly) the sun moves past the latitude where the rover is located. Just like days get shorter in the winter...
I guess it doesn't matter if your solar panels are clean if they aren't being exposed to the sun for an appreciable length of time.
All of this was grossly overinterpreted from an article lean on details... http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tl_surface