Thank you for a breath of anti-ignorance, if you don't mind a mixed metaphor.
One minor correction: not proven. (unless you're talking about math instead of science) Things in science might be considered very likely to be true, but experiment can only disprove, and never prove, our hypotheses.
Ok, what we really need, is for all us F/OSS enthusiasts to go out, buy an island, and form our own country, with an entirely FDL'd constitution. w00t! Open Source Government here we come!
It would only fry the focus if you pointed it directly at the sun. Otherwise, the light would focus at some other point. Thermal distortion does make sense however. Pretty sweet though.
Re:Magnification does nothing
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Exactly. In order to get the same power output from a completely magnification based setup, you'd need a magnifier with area about equal to the area of all the mirrors put together. The only really feasible way to do this is to use a fresnel lens, a normal lens would either be much too thick in the middle (because the thickness is proportional to the radius, and we're talking a pretty good sized lens) or else the focal point of the lens would be pretty far away...
I am not really considering switching, although if I find I need a laptop in the near future then it'll probably be a Mac.
However, both of my grandmothers have aging windows 98 boxes, which regularly fill up with spyware etc despite the best efforts of my father and I. The time will soon come to replace the things, and I am definitely going to recommend Mac Minis. Two, three years ago, I wouldn't have. But Apple has come a long way recently.
Basically, as I see it, these companies (unless they're really dumb, which I won't rule out) don't think they are going to prevent copying. However, if you can make content available in a way which is agreeable to the user, but still discourages copying and sharing, then the average user will no longer see a need to download illegally.
Whether or not current schemes make sense for that idea is another question, because if the user discovers that after listening to a song 5 times, its gone, then they won't bother with DRM'd songs, and just go back to illegal downloading.
Actually, this could be very useful in some specialized applications. At my school, I sometimes want to do my homework at the library, but I need TeX. The library machines are all winxp boxes, with no TeX. Enter Knoppix! Only problem, the techs were actually smart about something for once. They disabled the cd and the floppy as boot devices in BIOS, and set a BIOS password. Crap (although, late versions of Knoppix don't have TeX anyway...). So I'm reduced to installing MikTeX temporarily on the HDD, and using windoze anyway. However, with this new deal...
What I'd like to see is a site where you could select up to one cd's worth (or one dvd's worth) of debian packages for inclusion on a custom knoppix cd. Then the server serves up a nice shiny iso image. Of course, I guess I could do this manually, but who has the time for that!:-p And also, I guess this would kinda defeat the whole dl the iso via bittorrent idea... leading to high bandwidth costs, dead servers, etc. crap. well, nevermind on that idea.
Good Lord! I should hope they weigh more than (-298.8) pounds... Although they might be useful for building an antigravity machine in that case.
Re:Favorite quote from the article
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
It's not too much of a stretch to say GCC is as central an enabler to the free and open-source programming movements as a free press is to democracy.
Yes it is. The analogy is not parallel, because saying that GCC is a central enabler to FOSS is like saying that (ie) the Dallas Morning News is a central enabler to democracy. A far better statement would be "It's not too much of a stretch to say that a really deucedly good free compiler (of which GCC is an example) is as central an enabler to the free and open-source programming movements as a free press is to democracy."
I think when you say, "defy the laws of physics," that you actually mean, "use different conditions than what we are used to here on Earth." For example, falling a long way and not going splat doesn't defy the laws of physics, it just indicates that the character's body is held together a lot more strongly than a normal human body. This does not defy any physical laws, it just uses different conditions than "normal human body falling under earth gravity," instead it is "body which superficially resembles a normal human body, but which is much more difficult to break apart falling under possibly somewhat lighter than earth gravity." Or maybe the viscosity of air is much higher than earth's atmosphere, so the terminal velocity is low enough that even a normal human body would survive such a fall.
If conservation of momentum or mass-energy (for example) were broken in such a way that they could not be accounted for in ways that would not affect the gameplay (ie the air is heated slightly), then the laws of physics would be being denied. For example, if you ran into someone, and then suddenly both of you had a high velocity in the same direction, conservation of momentum would be violated.
Out behind my parents' house when I was growing up, there was one of those big green transformers, the ones that are basically just a huge green box on the ground. Well, us kids stayed away from it, not because it had extremely high voltage running through it all the time and our parents were all scared shitless that we'd get zapped, but because it was constantly infested with fireants. Well, one day at breakfast, we hear this BOOM! and the lights go out. Power company truck comes out an hour or two later, opens it up, closes it, drives off. Hour later, comes back with shovels. Open it up, the workers start shoveling dirt and fried fire ants out of it... every available cubic inch in this thing (about 4'x4'x3') is full of ant mound, and they eventually just chewed right through the insulation and shorted the transformer, causing it to explode inside.
Ever hear about the SCSC? The SuperConducting Super Collider, that was going to be built in Waxahacie, TX (about half an hour south of where I grew up in Dallas). Well, among other things, one of the reasons cited for not completing it was fireants. The report said that fireants were attracted to electricity and had already started to move into the tunnels they had built for the collider. So maybe nothing was spilled, and the ants just found the electricity to be to their liking...
and certainly shouldn't come anywhere near what this guy said in the article...
"The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail," Linford warned. "You'll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It's the beginning of the e-mail meltdown."
I agree. Spammers would have to be a lot dumber than I give them credit for (and that's saying something) if they brought down the email infrastructure by their own action. Without email, spammers lose their source of income.
side note - my bad grammer/spelling is OK only because I'm a FUCKING CODER. I don't want to hear from the grammer/spelling Nazis on the text of this post.
Actually, I may be the odd one out in this case, but I generally attribute my tendency to correct spelling mistakes immediately (rather than either correcting them later or just leaving them in) to the fact that I code. I know this may not seem to be an obvious connection, but when coding, if you misspell something (identifier, reserved word, anything) then the compiler generally barfs. So, I find my work to be much much more efficient if I correct as I go. As a consequence, when I'm using AIM or posting on Slashdot or whatever, I tend to have better spelling than most of my friends (including my gf, who is, incidentally, a linguistics major:-p).
There are two key differences. One: OSS is much less used, therefore an exploit of an OSS hole will do much less damage, therefore those exploits are much less common. Two: OSS developers (in general, not all of them) know that one reason a lot of people use their software is that it is supposed to be more secure, therefore they put an emphasis on keeping it secure (in order to keep people using their software), therefore they patch those holes in very short order.
M$ on the other hand... One: Very widely used, therefore an exploit will go far and do a lot, therefore those exploits are written. Two: M$ users as a general rule (once again not all of them) are not as security conscious as OSS users, and therefore 1)they dont bother with the patches, 2)M$ doesnt bother making the patches in a timely manner.
Thus, M$ products attract more exploits, and the holes are (in general) open for much longer after discovery, leaving more time for even lazy hackers to write exploits.
In fact, some BIOSes not only fail to report the true size of a drive if it is above the max, but will completely flip out unless you artificially limit the drive size in some manner (like a capacity limiting jumper).
I had an AOpen AX58Pro, and when I put a 60GB drive in, it wouldn't even get through POST. Until I got the BIOS upgrade, and then it was fine. Or I could have used the capacity limiting jumper, but that just sucks to have to do.
It doesn't make a theory more likely if believing it to be true have side benefits. (E.g. "feels good", "smaller chance of Hell", "meet pretty girls in bible study", etc.)
Pascal's wager never claims that "smaller chance of Hell" means that any theory is more likely. A human wager has no bearing on the truth of the subject of the wager. What Pascal says is that it is a good idea to believe in God. His reasoning is a fairly simple cost/benefit analysis.
If God exists and I do believe in Him, I gain a heck of a lot. If He does not exist and I do believe in Him, then I (maybe; depending on your point of view, some people would say that adhering to a moral code is a good idea whether or not any deity commands it) lose a little. If He does exist and I do not believe in Him, then I lose a heck of a lot. If He does not exist and I do not believe in Him, then I gain a little (again, depends on your point of view and your decision to adhere to a moral code).
So to sum up, believing in God can either gain you a lot or lose you a little. Expectation value: positive. Not believing in God can either lose you a lot or gain you a little. Expectation value: negative.
Thus, Pascal says it is a safe bet to believe in God. He never claims that his reasoning ever touches on the truth of theism, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply wrong.
So what you have said (the bit that I quoted anyway) is strictly true. However, from the context, it would seem that you either believe or are trying to imply that Pascal's wager is somehow related to what you have said (that I quoted). If you believe this, then you are wrong. If you are trying to imply this, then you are not using good logic, you are trying to convince people by slipping fallacies past them unnoticed. Which I personally consider despicable.
Slashdot Mirror
Did he actually *say* all those smiley faces??
...you know like put out the next IE7...
Whoa... M$ puts out? Thats hawt.
Thank you for a breath of anti-ignorance, if you don't mind a mixed metaphor.
One minor correction: not proven. (unless you're talking about math instead of science) Things in science might be considered very likely to be true, but experiment can only disprove, and never prove, our hypotheses.
Ok, what we really need, is for all us F/OSS enthusiasts to go out, buy an island, and form our own country, with an entirely FDL'd constitution. w00t! Open Source Government here we come!
It would only fry the focus if you pointed it directly at the sun. Otherwise, the light would focus at some other point. Thermal distortion does make sense however. Pretty sweet though.
Exactly. In order to get the same power output from a completely magnification based setup, you'd need a magnifier with area about equal to the area of all the mirrors put together. The only really feasible way to do this is to use a fresnel lens, a normal lens would either be much too thick in the middle (because the thickness is proportional to the radius, and we're talking a pretty good sized lens) or else the focal point of the lens would be pretty far away...
I am not really considering switching, although if I find I need a laptop in the near future then it'll probably be a Mac.
However, both of my grandmothers have aging windows 98 boxes, which regularly fill up with spyware etc despite the best efforts of my father and I. The time will soon come to replace the things, and I am definitely going to recommend Mac Minis. Two, three years ago, I wouldn't have. But Apple has come a long way recently.
Well, I care about baseball.... but I also agree that the Senate should not.
Basically, as I see it, these companies (unless they're really dumb, which I won't rule out) don't think they are going to prevent copying. However, if you can make content available in a way which is agreeable to the user, but still discourages copying and sharing, then the average user will no longer see a need to download illegally.
Whether or not current schemes make sense for that idea is another question, because if the user discovers that after listening to a song 5 times, its gone, then they won't bother with DRM'd songs, and just go back to illegal downloading.
the Longhornblogs network,
Whoops, I misread that as the Longhornblows network...
Actually, this could be very useful in some specialized applications. At my school, I sometimes want to do my homework at the library, but I need TeX. The library machines are all winxp boxes, with no TeX. Enter Knoppix! Only problem, the techs were actually smart about something for once. They disabled the cd and the floppy as boot devices in BIOS, and set a BIOS password. Crap (although, late versions of Knoppix don't have TeX anyway...). So I'm reduced to installing MikTeX temporarily on the HDD, and using windoze anyway. However, with this new deal... :-p And also, I guess this would kinda defeat the whole dl the iso via bittorrent idea... leading to high bandwidth costs, dead servers, etc. crap. well, nevermind on that idea.
What I'd like to see is a site where you could select up to one cd's worth (or one dvd's worth) of debian packages for inclusion on a custom knoppix cd. Then the server serves up a nice shiny iso image. Of course, I guess I could do this manually, but who has the time for that!
1.2-300 pounds
Good Lord! I should hope they weigh more than (-298.8) pounds... Although they might be useful for building an antigravity machine in that case.
It's not too much of a stretch to say GCC is as central an enabler to the free and open-source programming movements as a free press is to democracy.
Yes it is. The analogy is not parallel, because saying that GCC is a central enabler to FOSS is like saying that (ie) the Dallas Morning News is a central enabler to democracy. A far better statement would be "It's not too much of a stretch to say that a really deucedly good free compiler (of which GCC is an example) is as central an enabler to the free and open-source programming movements as a free press is to democracy."
I think when you say, "defy the laws of physics," that you actually mean, "use different conditions than what we are used to here on Earth." For example, falling a long way and not going splat doesn't defy the laws of physics, it just indicates that the character's body is held together a lot more strongly than a normal human body. This does not defy any physical laws, it just uses different conditions than "normal human body falling under earth gravity," instead it is "body which superficially resembles a normal human body, but which is much more difficult to break apart falling under possibly somewhat lighter than earth gravity." Or maybe the viscosity of air is much higher than earth's atmosphere, so the terminal velocity is low enough that even a normal human body would survive such a fall.
If conservation of momentum or mass-energy (for example) were broken in such a way that they could not be accounted for in ways that would not affect the gameplay (ie the air is heated slightly), then the laws of physics would be being denied. For example, if you ran into someone, and then suddenly both of you had a high velocity in the same direction, conservation of momentum would be violated.
which is why we new PowerPC cores so closely follow the release of new POWER cores.
I didn't know IBM was making intelligent machines yet?
Out behind my parents' house when I was growing up, there was one of those big green transformers, the ones that are basically just a huge green box on the ground. Well, us kids stayed away from it, not because it had extremely high voltage running through it all the time and our parents were all scared shitless that we'd get zapped, but because it was constantly infested with fireants. Well, one day at breakfast, we hear this BOOM! and the lights go out. Power company truck comes out an hour or two later, opens it up, closes it, drives off. Hour later, comes back with shovels. Open it up, the workers start shoveling dirt and fried fire ants out of it... every available cubic inch in this thing (about 4'x4'x3') is full of ant mound, and they eventually just chewed right through the insulation and shorted the transformer, causing it to explode inside.
Ever hear about the SCSC? The SuperConducting Super Collider, that was going to be built in Waxahacie, TX (about half an hour south of where I grew up in Dallas). Well, among other things, one of the reasons cited for not completing it was fireants. The report said that fireants were attracted to electricity and had already started to move into the tunnels they had built for the collider. So maybe nothing was spilled, and the ants just found the electricity to be to their liking...
Of course, then the spammers could just access this list and tailor their messages to not match the list.
and certainly shouldn't come anywhere near what this guy said in the article...
"The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail," Linford warned. "You'll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It's the beginning of the e-mail meltdown."
I agree. Spammers would have to be a lot dumber than I give them credit for (and that's saying something) if they brought down the email infrastructure by their own action. Without email, spammers lose their source of income.
Maybe the spammers all buy stuff from each other, just to keep the market alive.
side note - my bad grammer/spelling is OK only because I'm a FUCKING CODER. I don't want to hear from the grammer/spelling Nazis on the text of this post.
:-p).
Actually, I may be the odd one out in this case, but I generally attribute my tendency to correct spelling mistakes immediately (rather than either correcting them later or just leaving them in) to the fact that I code. I know this may not seem to be an obvious connection, but when coding, if you misspell something (identifier, reserved word, anything) then the compiler generally barfs. So, I find my work to be much much more efficient if I correct as I go. As a consequence, when I'm using AIM or posting on Slashdot or whatever, I tend to have better spelling than most of my friends (including my gf, who is, incidentally, a linguistics major
There are two key differences. One: OSS is much less used, therefore an exploit of an OSS hole will do much less damage, therefore those exploits are much less common. Two: OSS developers (in general, not all of them) know that one reason a lot of people use their software is that it is supposed to be more secure, therefore they put an emphasis on keeping it secure (in order to keep people using their software), therefore they patch those holes in very short order.
M$ on the other hand... One: Very widely used, therefore an exploit will go far and do a lot, therefore those exploits are written. Two: M$ users as a general rule (once again not all of them) are not as security conscious as OSS users, and therefore 1)they dont bother with the patches, 2)M$ doesnt bother making the patches in a timely manner.
Thus, M$ products attract more exploits, and the holes are (in general) open for much longer after discovery, leaving more time for even lazy hackers to write exploits.
If I put it up for free download or offer copies for sale, then I know I can expect the BSA and/or the FBI to do their best to destroy my life.
The Boy Scouts of America? Geez, they've really changed since I was in the program!
So the FED is in some sense just ~a million tiny single-pixel CRTs? Interesting!
In fact, some BIOSes not only fail to report the true size of a drive if it is above the max, but will completely flip out unless you artificially limit the drive size in some manner (like a capacity limiting jumper).
I had an AOpen AX58Pro, and when I put a 60GB drive in, it wouldn't even get through POST. Until I got the BIOS upgrade, and then it was fine. Or I could have used the capacity limiting jumper, but that just sucks to have to do.
It doesn't make a theory more likely if believing it to be true have side benefits. (E.g. "feels good", "smaller chance of Hell", "meet pretty girls in bible study", etc.)
Pascal's wager never claims that "smaller chance of Hell" means that any theory is more likely. A human wager has no bearing on the truth of the subject of the wager. What Pascal says is that it is a good idea to believe in God. His reasoning is a fairly simple cost/benefit analysis.
If God exists and I do believe in Him, I gain a heck of a lot. If He does not exist and I do believe in Him, then I (maybe; depending on your point of view, some people would say that adhering to a moral code is a good idea whether or not any deity commands it) lose a little. If He does exist and I do not believe in Him, then I lose a heck of a lot. If He does not exist and I do not believe in Him, then I gain a little (again, depends on your point of view and your decision to adhere to a moral code).
So to sum up, believing in God can either gain you a lot or lose you a little. Expectation value: positive. Not believing in God can either lose you a lot or gain you a little. Expectation value: negative.
Thus, Pascal says it is a safe bet to believe in God. He never claims that his reasoning ever touches on the truth of theism, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply wrong.
So what you have said (the bit that I quoted anyway) is strictly true. However, from the context, it would seem that you either believe or are trying to imply that Pascal's wager is somehow related to what you have said (that I quoted). If you believe this, then you are wrong. If you are trying to imply this, then you are not using good logic, you are trying to convince people by slipping fallacies past them unnoticed. Which I personally consider despicable.