What about this meteorite is so special as to deserve a rover's attention? The rovers are very expensive pieces of kit with, presumably, limited lifespans. We get plenty of meteorites on Earth, including some practically uncontaminated ones in the Antarctic. Is this an especially unusual space-rock? Does Mars's position mean it gets types of meteorites that earth doesn't?
What do you mean by "client" here? And what about "native"? The summary seems to be talking about a reimplementation running as natively as OpenGL does on a Gallium system.
As for the performance thing, I don't believe it's an architechtural problem with Gallium. More likely, it's because the gallium drivers are pretty new and are a work in progress.
It doesn't specifically call out the iPhone model so it may not apply to the newer ones with hardware encryption unless the book's been updated since 2008.
If the key is stored on the same device as the encrypted data, the encryption is a particularly funny instance of security through obscurity.
The only other options are to have the user memorise a key, which will practically inevitably be far too short, use around some kind of separate authentication device, or having the user memorise a password that is used to retrieve the key from some kind of authentication server (which could make a shorter password safer by limiting attempts). However, my money is on the key being stored on the device.
I suppose, in retrospect, that it was naive to assume that you were talking about this story (the one about Rackspace), as opposed to something else entirely. This is Slashdot, after all...
RTFS. This isn't "government pressure", this is a hosting provided deciding they'd rather not be associated with a bunch of crazy people, and invoking a contractual clause that states they don't have to host certain crazy stuff.
This is also different from bible burning in a couple of ways. Firstly, most Muslims treat not just the text, but actual copies (at least in the original Arabic) of the book with great respect, for example, never placing any book above it on a shelf, and avoiding touching it at all when not clean (Muslims ritually wash before prayer).
Also, the crazy people are intentionally timing the burning to associating Islam in general with terrorism, which is offensive to the great number of Muslims that would consider those who carried out the 9/11 attacks to be heretics.
This is one of the problems with OSS that isn't userspace software or something well-known;
Make that user-facing software - I recall a Slashdot article a while back about how best to ensure that projects like OpenSSL get some of the money that people throw at more visible stuff, like Firefox, that depends upon it.
Anyways I can see this possibly creating a small market for GPS jamming devices.
GSM jammers are already readily available, if questionably legal. Instead of preventing the device from acquiring its location, prevent it from relaying it.
The reality is that the embryo is biologically a distinct human being.
Why? At the stage we're talking about, it's a lot less human than some cancers. It represents the possibility of a human being, but then so does every single combination of every single egg and sperm. I'm sure you'll agree that an egg and a sperm in close proximity are not a human being yet. Which precise stage of fertilisation do you believe changes things? The moment they make contact? The point at which the sperm successfully breaks into the egg? The first division?
In my opinion, it's illogical to treat any stage before gastrulation as any different to an egg - there is no tissue differentiation, and the influence of the new genome on development is very limited, and you can't even tell how many babies will come from it (a very strange property for a "distinct human being"). Also, it appears likely that it is extremely common for a woman trying to conceive to unknowingly experience the formation of several embryos that fail to implant, so the creation and destruction of excess embryos in IVF somewhat parallels natural conception.
First of all, i beleive in the arrow of time. I also dont think you can slow time down. [...] the notion that you can slow time down by increasing an objects speed just makes no sense.
Why? A hunch? A religious belief? Or just the feeling that it doesn't make common sense? If you want physics to correspond perfectly to your everyday experience of the world (from which we get intuitive ideas of what "makes sense"), you'll have to disagree with atoms and gravitation too.
If you think about them the right way, they can make no sense either: solid objects are mostly empty space, and people are walking around upside-down on the underside of the world. Simply put, reality can become quite counter-intuitive at very different scales than those you're used to.
Coming back to relativity, I don't see a problem with "the arrow of time" - the theory of relativity doesn't permit violation of causality. I can see why you might take issue with the relativity of simultaneity (the idea that observers in different frames of reference will not necessarily agree on the order in which two events that occurred in different places happened), but it actually isn't that bad when you think about it. Each of the two events must take place before there has been time for light (and therefore for anything or any way of transmitting information) from one event to reach the other, so nobody sees the universe doing something nonsensical, nobody gets the chance to create a paradox, and observers watching both events can't disagree over whether one event caused the other, since each event occurs before anyone at that location finds out about the other event.
if history is any indication nobody has been right all the way, just more right than the rest for the moment.
Good physical theories don't end up as complete garbage: for example, Newtonian physics is still correct in a sense, as an approximation to relativity for low velocities . (More tangential trivia: Newtonian physics was used for the Apollo project, since it's predictions were easily accurate enough and the maths is much easier). Whatever replaces general relativity will inevitably make very similar predictions, at least in the areas we've already tested, and I'm sorry about this, but time dilation doesn't look like it's going away: there have been a lot of observations to support it, using multiple timekeeping mechanisms.
As someone else mentioned, GPS is corrected for it, and would be wildly inaccurate if we were wrong about it. There have been experiments in which atomic clocks were sent on commercial airliners, and they behaved exactly as relativity predicted. Scientists operating particle accelerators have noted that unstable particles last longer if they are travelling at great speed. Remember, these observations were made after general relativity was proposed - they are successful predictions, and if there is some undiscovered problem with atomic clocks (and, presumably, with other timekeeping devices that have been used), it would be very surprising that it was so closely quantitatively matched to the predictions of relativity.
But as i said, you can regard me as your average late 1300 "the earth is flat" type.
I don't mean to be in any way disdainful; your objections are quite understandable, but in the end, as the flat-earthers show us, "common sense" can only take one so far.
Traditional physics dogma was that nothing affected decay rates.
Who the hell modded this up? It's not dogma, it's just something that has, until recently, always been observed to be true. Do you consider the theory that the sun will rise again tomorrow to be "dogma", even though there is a lot of observational data suggesting that it rises every day?
Firstly, who has tried to prove relativity with atomic clocks in space? I think you're thinking of a thought experiment in which any extremely accurate timepiece could be substituted.
Secondly, atomic clocks do not depend on radioactive decay and in fact use a stable isotope (there seems to be a common misconception that anything with "atomic" or "nuclear" in the name must be radioactive).
Thirdly, general relativity has made plenty of predictions that disagree with classical physics and have actually been tested. For example, it correctly predicts the orbit of Mercury, while Newton gets it slightly, but measurably, wrong.
(Offtopic, but kinda interesting: before general relativity, astronomers attempted to explain the discrepancy in Mercury's orbit using a hypothetical planet, Vulcan, between Mercury and the Sun, and spent significant effort trying to observe it.)
I'm curious: why do you believe that spacetime cannot bend?
I'm not a biochem geek either, but it is my understanding that embryonic stem cells are not harvested from fetuses but from blastocysts - a much earlier stage in the human lifecycle which consists of a sphere of undifferentiated cells, not yet even implanted in the uterus wall. They can't be obtained from abortions or miscarriages, which occur later, but rather are typically surplus IVF embryos. They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Perhaps the intention was never to have him tried and convicted - they could've been hoping he would flee Sweden, and travel to somewhere with a more compliant government that would be prepared to extradite him.
Slashdot Mirror
Protons from an accelerator do move at "about the speed of light", though. Also, protons at the speed of sound are boring: the molecules of hydrogen gas at 20C are going three times as fast.
This was where I stopped reading and just read Anatoli Bugorski's Wikipedia article instead.
What about this meteorite is so special as to deserve a rover's attention? The rovers are very expensive pieces of kit with, presumably, limited lifespans. We get plenty of meteorites on Earth, including some practically uncontaminated ones in the Antarctic. Is this an especially unusual space-rock? Does Mars's position mean it gets types of meteorites that earth doesn't?
What do you mean by "client" here? And what about "native"? The summary seems to be talking about a reimplementation running as natively as OpenGL does on a Gallium system.
As for the performance thing, I don't believe it's an architechtural problem with Gallium. More likely, it's because the gallium drivers are pretty new and are a work in progress.
MPAA.org and aiplex.com both seem to be working at the moment.
Well, unless something is taking over, this is just a big artillery piece: escape velocity is rather higher than mach 10.
You might if it copied a smaller restaurant's signature dish and used a massive advertising campaign to become much better known.
If the key is stored on the same device as the encrypted data, the encryption is a particularly funny instance of security through obscurity.
The only other options are to have the user memorise a key, which will practically inevitably be far too short, use around some kind of separate authentication device, or having the user memorise a password that is used to retrieve the key from some kind of authentication server (which could make a shorter password safer by limiting attempts). However, my money is on the key being stored on the device.
/me googles it
Heh.
(This reminds me of this photo, which I found on Bruce Shneier's blog).
This will anger a lot of American people, but the free market has been known to do things that are bad.
I suppose, in retrospect, that it was naive to assume that you were talking about this story (the one about Rackspace), as opposed to something else entirely. This is Slashdot, after all...
RTFS. This isn't "government pressure", this is a hosting provided deciding they'd rather not be associated with a bunch of crazy people, and invoking a contractual clause that states they don't have to host certain crazy stuff.
This is also different from bible burning in a couple of ways. Firstly, most Muslims treat not just the text, but actual copies (at least in the original Arabic) of the book with great respect, for example, never placing any book above it on a shelf, and avoiding touching it at all when not clean (Muslims ritually wash before prayer).
Also, the crazy people are intentionally timing the burning to associating Islam in general with terrorism, which is offensive to the great number of Muslims that would consider those who carried out the 9/11 attacks to be heretics.
You are already allowed to consume certain drugs as long as you give your government a cut. It's called alcohol and tobacco taxation.
Make that user-facing software - I recall a Slashdot article a while back about how best to ensure that projects like OpenSSL get some of the money that people throw at more visible stuff, like Firefox, that depends upon it.
Skype uses a closed, secret protocol. It may or may not be properly encrypted. There may or may not be intentional backdoors.
GSM jammers are already readily available, if questionably legal. Instead of preventing the device from acquiring its location, prevent it from relaying it.
You'll still be able to smell the trash, you'll just be able to smell the other stuff as well now.
Why? At the stage we're talking about, it's a lot less human than some cancers. It represents the possibility of a human being, but then so does every single combination of every single egg and sperm. I'm sure you'll agree that an egg and a sperm in close proximity are not a human being yet. Which precise stage of fertilisation do you believe changes things? The moment they make contact? The point at which the sperm successfully breaks into the egg? The first division?
In my opinion, it's illogical to treat any stage before gastrulation as any different to an egg - there is no tissue differentiation, and the influence of the new genome on development is very limited, and you can't even tell how many babies will come from it (a very strange property for a "distinct human being"). Also, it appears likely that it is extremely common for a woman trying to conceive to unknowingly experience the formation of several embryos that fail to implant, so the creation and destruction of excess embryos in IVF somewhat parallels natural conception.
Why? A hunch? A religious belief? Or just the feeling that it doesn't make common sense? If you want physics to correspond perfectly to your everyday experience of the world (from which we get intuitive ideas of what "makes sense"), you'll have to disagree with atoms and gravitation too.
If you think about them the right way, they can make no sense either: solid objects are mostly empty space, and people are walking around upside-down on the underside of the world. Simply put, reality can become quite counter-intuitive at very different scales than those you're used to.
Coming back to relativity, I don't see a problem with "the arrow of time" - the theory of relativity doesn't permit violation of causality. I can see why you might take issue with the relativity of simultaneity (the idea that observers in different frames of reference will not necessarily agree on the order in which two events that occurred in different places happened), but it actually isn't that bad when you think about it. Each of the two events must take place before there has been time for light (and therefore for anything or any way of transmitting information) from one event to reach the other, so nobody sees the universe doing something nonsensical, nobody gets the chance to create a paradox, and observers watching both events can't disagree over whether one event caused the other, since each event occurs before anyone at that location finds out about the other event.
Good physical theories don't end up as complete garbage: for example, Newtonian physics is still correct in a sense, as an approximation to relativity for low velocities . (More tangential trivia: Newtonian physics was used for the Apollo project, since it's predictions were easily accurate enough and the maths is much easier). Whatever replaces general relativity will inevitably make very similar predictions, at least in the areas we've already tested, and I'm sorry about this, but time dilation doesn't look like it's going away: there have been a lot of observations to support it, using multiple timekeeping mechanisms.
As someone else mentioned, GPS is corrected for it, and would be wildly inaccurate if we were wrong about it. There have been experiments in which atomic clocks were sent on commercial airliners, and they behaved exactly as relativity predicted. Scientists operating particle accelerators have noted that unstable particles last longer if they are travelling at great speed. Remember, these observations were made after general relativity was proposed - they are successful predictions, and if there is some undiscovered problem with atomic clocks (and, presumably, with other timekeeping devices that have been used), it would be very surprising that it was so closely quantitatively matched to the predictions of relativity.
I don't mean to be in any way disdainful; your objections are quite understandable, but in the end, as the flat-earthers show us, "common sense" can only take one so far.
Who the hell modded this up? It's not dogma, it's just something that has, until recently, always been observed to be true. Do you consider the theory that the sun will rise again tomorrow to be "dogma", even though there is a lot of observational data suggesting that it rises every day?
Firstly, who has tried to prove relativity with atomic clocks in space? I think you're thinking of a thought experiment in which any extremely accurate timepiece could be substituted.
Secondly, atomic clocks do not depend on radioactive decay and in fact use a stable isotope (there seems to be a common misconception that anything with "atomic" or "nuclear" in the name must be radioactive).
Thirdly, general relativity has made plenty of predictions that disagree with classical physics and have actually been tested. For example, it correctly predicts the orbit of Mercury, while Newton gets it slightly, but measurably, wrong.
(Offtopic, but kinda interesting: before general relativity, astronomers attempted to explain the discrepancy in Mercury's orbit using a hypothetical planet, Vulcan, between Mercury and the Sun, and spent significant effort trying to observe it.)
I'm curious: why do you believe that spacetime cannot bend?
I'm not a biochem geek either, but it is my understanding that embryonic stem cells are not harvested from fetuses but from blastocysts - a much earlier stage in the human lifecycle which consists of a sphere of undifferentiated cells, not yet even implanted in the uterus wall. They can't be obtained from abortions or miscarriages, which occur later, but rather are typically surplus IVF embryos. They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Everyone has their price, and some people have very, very deep pockets.
You say "vast Pentagon conspiracy" as if that is somehow a ridiculous concept.
Perhaps the intention was never to have him tried and convicted - they could've been hoping he would flee Sweden, and travel to somewhere with a more compliant government that would be prepared to extradite him.
Do you say "PC can do X" (and sound a bit like a caveman), or "PCs can do X"?