(I'd imagine 200kW is needed for regular orbital corrections for the full ISS when all modules are in place, but I'm probably wrong. But here's something better:) No--because of NASA cuts, lawmakers have just ruled that physicists must add an additional ISS equation to quantum mechanics, governing the behavior of the ISS in orbit around Earth, so that quantization will inhibit orbital decay. They picked an equation where the only resonant energies were the only interesting orbits. Since the energies are quantized, we can't just nudge the ISS a little bit at a time, now that it has its own wavefunction, duh!
Come to think of it, I bet I could design a super-efficient combustion engine that relies on macro-scale space quantization. I bet I can lobby a group to get my favorite wavefunction on the books for that, as well!;)
We're guaranteed the right to assembly, but not the right to unharrassed assembly *g* Or maybe we're guaranteed the right to assembly, provided we own rebreather gas masks (for pepper spray), bullet vests (for tasers), body armor (for rubber bullets), silvered full body suits with Peltier coolers mounted on heatsinks with large fans (for infrared heat guns), and earplugs rated for 60dB reduction (for sound cannons) at frequencies up to at least 60kHz (for ultrasonic pain generators). Until, of course, that type of body protection is considered a military-grade weapon and heavy penalties are given to a citizen for owning or using these banned items... "What good is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?"
I think a more accurate way of saying it would be:
Your brother technically made the choice that led to his own death. However, there is a good chance he would have not made that choice had the State not grouped marijuana in with meth, pcp, coke, heroin, etc., which are at least tens of thousands of times more dangerous, and mushrooms and acid, which are hundreds of times more dangerous. In truth, cigarettes and alcohol are thousands of times more dangerous. Why doesn't the State provide accurate statistics of addiction potential, long-term health effects, likelihood of overdose (defined as death or organ damage during use, or maybe anything requiring medical treatment excluding shooting people tripping with thorazine, which has been shown to be more likely to cause a bad experience than letting the hallucinogen or entheogen wear off), etc.? There's a lot of conjecture about that, but there is some info from NORML and a lot of academic study of Prohibition and its conjectured, eventual effects on our drug policy. Accurate information could well have saved your brother's life---we don't know---but if we had a study with a sort of "control group" (though it wouldn't be a blind study), comparing two similar countries where pot is treated differently (there's arguably at least one, the Netherlands, maybe two if you include Mexico), and see what happens, we could give some loose statistics about the likelihood that your brother would still be here.
I am sorry for your loss as well. You can probably indirectly blame the State, but we can only surmise what could have happened, sadly.
[Note to future employers scouring the web for dirty secrets: having an opinion on the drug policy doesn't mean I do drugs---perhaps I just care about how the State treats so many people I have read stories about in the paper.]
Living in Delaware, I'm well aware that many tiny buildings with very few employees are the corporate 'headquarters' for companies that do no significant business here.
Maybe it's wrong, maybe it's not. Companies do tend to be careful, though. I'm not sure what to think of the situation, but I've seen a lot of bizarre corporate behavior here, so if that's any indication, this might warrant additional investigation.
Hmm, thanks. I hate to hurt living beings if I can avoid it, so if I can get them out of my food supply while killing as few as possible, that would rock. (For the record, I still eat beef.. but see the work of Temple Grandin for butchering farms.)
Where's the most inexpensive place to find it in a retail store? And online?
As we all learned from the documentary Event Horizon [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119081/], the scientific data recovered has to be destroyed in order to save any remaining personnel, and the emotional and physical effects on crewmembers traveling through "unusual" regions of time or space involves hematemesis, self-disfiguration by manual removal of the eyeballs and subsequent severing of the optic nerve bundles and cauterization and suturing of the eyelids, and mumbling in classical Latin while having a sore throat. Unfortunately, you can find these conditions at hospitals, so there's really no benefit to experiencing the psychoses involved.
I'm an idiot when it comes to soldering, but I know that industrial soldering techniques (dipping a circuit board precisely into a pool of solder) need to go through stress-testing and QA. Any joints that show signs of stress should be manually soldered. Use the right solvents to clean, right flux for flow, tin carefully, solder with the appropriate type of solder, and clean off the remaining flux.
I suck at soldering and know nearly nothing about it, but, you'd think electronics manufacturers would know more than me... I guess not?
I have ants where I live, and I've experimented by killing and collecting dead ants, then crushing them and spreading the juices around.
The ants don't care about their own dead, apparently. I find trails of ants all the time where dead ants are scattered along the trail. It doesn't deter them one bit...
Maybe every time police acquire evidence through means the regular public could not do, they have to mention it to that person within six months. That person has the ability to file a complaint, not with the same police department (since people might worry about complaining to the same group of people that was watching them---quite understandably), but perhaps to an independent office whose actions have to be transparent by law (and are regularly checked up on by a significant and random (reappointed every 3 months, for example; not a long time period like some organizations are re-appointed) portion Congress, not by a commitee). Statistics about the complaints filed would, by law, be available to anyone by phone call, website, or snail-mail, so the public would be able to fully assess whether the random group of Congress members, studying the actions of police departments gathering substantial evidence, would be able to raise their voice if the group was ignoring complaints for some departments, etc.
This is something taxpayer dollars ought to be paying for; we pay for law enforcement, so we should pay for its oversight (not by raising tax dollars, though, since that would be arguably unfair).
If someone knows of a system that does this sort of thing already (besides the courts; it's ridiculous to expect someone to pay $500 for a lawyer's time just to raise a minor complaint), and has vast public oversight, I'd be happy to know...
But at least you don't need to ranlib after you ar!... Thinking about the fact that I walk around making wisecracks like that, wow, now I know why people call me such a computer geek.
Your eyeballs would have to pass a sufficient amount of IR/UV to the back of the eye -- I'm not sure if they do. If only a tiny bit gets through, you could play with UV and IR light sources in an otherwise dark room, but as far as seeing the UV coloration on flower petals, for example, you'd probably be out of luck, as your eyes would be swamped with visible light. (Biologists who study vision, please correct me if I'm wrong)
And, brown versus light pink? Surely you mean they say "light brownish off-white" to refer to the very light reddish tan that appears light pink to people who don't have thousands of mental snapshots of flashy pink outfits to compare them to.;) [Yeah, I know that's a stereotype, and many women hate pink, including my girlfriend, but hey, it's a joke]
I have a weasel. It rocks and does what you would expect. Anything you can do with a keyboard and monitor (unless the BIOS puts the machine into non-text mode on startup with no option for non-graphics all just to print a bullshit logo, which some do...) can be done via serial connection. Just get an old 25mhz sparc sun box or something to connect to the serial port, and you instantly have another network node that lets you screw with the bios.
(The question is, how did PCs become servers without this kind of functionality already???... I'm sure you've seen the datacenters where people walk around with fancy tablets to plug into PC 'servers' just to reboot them.... efficient?!?!?!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation makes it sound, to me, that it's probably do-able in a lab (very difficultly), or perhaps we can just get a way to bioengineer a strain of micro-organism to methylate certain areas and sequences as appropriate. Or, perhaps we can use enzymes in human cells that induce the appropriate methylation and find a way to make the enzymes function in vitro.
Either way, the methylation assay they've developed may be useful for now, but probably don't be for long.
The study of the halting problem taught us that certain categories of algorithms cannot be formally proved to do certain things. Work on incompleteness tells us that we know algorithms must exist that fit that category.
The question, really, is whether the algorithms in and design of operating systems can be done in such a way that we don't run into incompleteness and halting-problem issues within the constraints of what we are trying to achieve -- after all, we aren't trying to achieve the impossible, just trying to make some specific, absolute guarantees.
I'd recommend a solid study of the Mizar Journal of Formalized Mathematics, the implications of the standard axioms of set theory (maybe including reduced forms of the axiom of choice, but that's not necessarily highly relevant), and careful analyses of what Goedel and Turning actually proved. After that, emergent behavior from cellular automata may be a good next investigation.
[IANA professional set-theory mathematician, logician, nor computer scientist, so take my post as a starting point for finding answers, please, not as anything definitive!]
Idle-Timeout: 15 # no bytes sent in 15 sec, close Unfinished-request-timeout: 1800 # any request not finished in 15min, close Unfinished-nonPOST-request-timeout: 60 # any non-POST (so POST uploads are still treated fairly) request not finished in 60sec, close Snail-threshold: 24K/10 # "greedy snail" threshold is 24K uploaded in 10 sec Max-connections: 200 # max # of simult conns Max-snails: 40 # max # of greedy snails Max-snails-from-IP-before-ignore: 2/5/3600 # 2 max simult snails or 5 snails in 1 hr will "ignore" IP Max-snails-from-netblock-before-ignore: 20/100/3600/24 # 20 max simult snails or 100 snails in 1 hr will "ignore" netblock Max-snails-from-IP-before-block: 5/12/1800 # 5 max simult snails or 12 snails in 30 min will block IP Max-snails-from-netblock-before-block: 4K/1800/24 # 4K snails within 30 min from a/24 netblock will be blocked Snail-IP-ignore-time: 300 # "ignore" is a 5min block for a snail IP Snail-netblock-ignore-time: 3600 # "ignore" is a 1hr block for a snail netblock Snail-IP-block-time: 3600 # block a snail IP for an hour Snail-netblock-block-time: 86400 # block a snail netblock for a day
People can still uploads. Even if all your uploaders are POTS modem users, you can still take 40 of them at once, leaving 160 connections open for non-snails. This could be extended to several levels of snails to also handle DDOS snail attacks from high-speed users who stay just above the first-level snail threshold.
This still doesn't account for high-throughput DOS nor DDOS attacks, but that's already something well-studied.
From New Castle County, Delaware, I get (netanalyzr):
"UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) appears to pass through a firewall or proxy. The applet was unable to transmit an arbitrary request on this UDP port, but was able to transmit a legitimate DNS request, suggesting that a proxy, NAT, or firewall intercepted and blocked the deliberately invalid request. The applet was also able to directly request a large DNS response. "
Normal test results of my own: * Querying 128.175.13.92 (which only answers for hosts in.udel.edu) for copland.udel.edu works, but querying it for google.com returns Query refused (as it should). * Sending any DNS queries to a network firewall / server of mine that is port-forwarding 53 to an internal server that is currently down results in timeouts (as they should). * I turned off the port-forwarding and started a simple caching BIND setup on the firewall. Every time I query the firewall from the PC on a comcast connection, the firewall gets a query from my current comcast IP address (according to tcpdump).
Somewhat strange test result (of my own): * Sometimes, though, if I haven't queried the firewall's nameserver in a few minutes, the next request will "time out" (although tcpdump on the firewall shows the reply was sent; it's possible it was dropped, and since it's UDP, would not be re-transmitted at the datagram level) -- and subsequent queries will time out (over and over again!! -- a sudden loss of *that many* specific types of UDP packets when everything else is getting through fine between the two hosts?) until I query a different nameserver, after which point queries to the "timing-out" nameserver (the firewall) will work fine. Since the firewall has two IPs, I even tested querying a "different" nameserver by just sending a query to the other IP, and the behavior was identical: after not querying the primary IP for a while, I sent a query that timed out; I retried the query several times and every try timed out; I sent the query to the secondary IP and it returned a result; I queried the primary IP again and then got a result; all the while, the firewall shows each request coming in and each reply going out. Am I confusing the DNS caching system they seem to be implementing?
* Another normal test result: If there's a problem with invalid queries, it's not affecting TCP. I started a simple netpipes server "faucet $PORT --out echo hi" on the firewall on 9020 (to test) and then on 53 -- telnet'ing to the firewall from the PC on the comcast network on both ports gave "hi" and closed the connection, as expected.
* Completely abnormal: Now, to test udp with netcat, I set up a dumb echo server with "nc -l -u -p $PORT -q5/dev/null" which I can send a message to with "echo hello|nc -u $NS $PORT -q0". I tested this on port 9020 (worked fine), but when I tried the same thing on port 53 (meaning I sent a non-DNS packet to port 53 from the PC on comcast), the server never got it (I verified this with tcpdump). From a machine accessing the Internet not through comcast, "echo hello|nc -u $NS 53 -w0" [note: -w0 vs. -q0 depends on version of netcat] worked as expected, and the server printed "hello".
Comcast may or may not be caching and/or filtering DNS requests now and/or in the near future (who knows?), but they're definitely blocking outbound on UDP/53 for (at least some) invalid DNS packets.
It was for a job where some particular software that we couldn't replace relied on DOS workstations running LANtastic...
Believe me, no computer I administer has booted DOS in the last ~5 years, and rarely even Windows... (and, hey, VAX, DECstation, Sparc, and SGI MIPS boxes can't even boot Windows *g*)
WinXP has issues connecting to Win98 SMB printers via TCP or NetBEUI when connected to a DOS6 network running LANtastic. It would take about 15 minutes to find the printer and about 10 minutes to send a small document. There was no problem browsing the network, though.
LANtastic had some suggested workarounds (changes to how broadcast packets are routed by LANtastic nodes and changes to the TCP and SMB configs in Win98, mostly involving registry hacks), but it turns out the only reliable workaround I found was to install an lpd emulator on Win98 that connected locally to the printer, and then have WinXP connected to lpd. It worked quite reliably and was quicker at connecting than I'd ever seen an SMB printer be. That wasn't an official workaround, though, just something I tried on a hunch.
I remember in the early days of libtool... depending on what version of automake tools were included in a package, what version of the automake tools you had elsewhere on your system, your version of libc, the version of bash you used, the versions of make and gcc you had installed, and the veerssion of text-utils and sh-utils you had, sometimes libtool would generate very long command strings with hundreds of redundant arguments, and then call itself to "simplify" the arguments but actually recurse with an even longer string, until bash segfaulted and your login session crashed.
There was never really a workaround for ttha... just "try different veersison of thinggs, you might needto downgrade automake, or mix and match different veersison of auttoocnf, automake, and libtool." Quite wonderful, I tell you.
gcc2.7.2.3 (the really stable version you had to compile the linux kernel with for quite some time) had some weird bug that didn't really have an official workaround, either. Somehow if you did pointer calculations on the function argument list (like varargs or stdarg) andn the called another function, the last local variable of the called function couldn't be written until it was read. I remember having to do something like printf("", a); before a statement like a=4; would work. Of course, then you'd get a warning about using an uninitialized variable, but... The funny thing was, I seem to recall that only would happen when optimizations were turned *off*. Turning them on made the bug go away, which made it really frustrating to track down. It ended up being something like gcc subtracting the wrong multiple of 4 from the stack pointer (under all the aforementioned conditions) in the block of asm that set up the stack frame. Of course, gcc2.81 and 2.95.2 had their own issues, and egcs wasn't much better... It wasn't until gcc3.2 where I didn't need multiple versions of gcc (one for the kernel, one for the program I was working on, and one that compiled c++ code correctly!!)
I remember MatlabR11 having broken CSV-file-parsing routines. The workaround? Write your own. The Matlab compiler was also moving to a new system (MEX), but there were lots of things that didn't work yet, and the previous compiler system was officially deprecated. Then, the next release of Matlab required 92MiB of DLLs to be installed as a Matlab runtime if you wanted to distribute anything you compiled with the Matlab compiler... and much of that runtime was broken Java libraries. A lot of the official suggestions for working with structured data that involved strings required many layers of nested cell objects, which had their own compilation issues. Again, the workaround was to convert string tables into padded numeric matrices of UInts. Of course, most of the matrix manipulation functions only worked with Real numbers, so you had to convert back and forth, and be careful about what type of rounding/flooring/ceilinging you were doing...
VB6 had a broken val() that returned the wrong values for ASCII characters in the range 160 through 184 (I think),, butthere wasn't realalyy n conssitent pattern. MSDN and the Microsoft KB gavee th official workaround: write your own val().
Consciousness is the ability to think. Thinking is the process of deduction over time.
I assert that God is timeless. Thus, he cannot think, and cannot be conscious.
If God interacts with the natural world, and is not conscious, he must obey the laws of physics. Adhering to the laws of physics excludes any possibility of supernaturality. (W. V. Quine used an alternate line of reasoning to demonstrate that a supernatural God cannot exist as defined by the traditional assertions of the Catholic church, meaning the assertions are inconsistent or that God does not exist.)
The actions of God are therefore indeterminable from the laws of physics themselves.
So, for God to create humans, he must perform an act in the natural world. These acts are indistinguishable from the laws of physics. The laws of physics entail evolution.
God is the laws of physics is the Universe.
If you assert that God is omniscient, he must be timeless in order to be consistent.
I know this is a very loose, weak chain of reasoning in need of serious rigor, but, my point is: if God is all-knowing, then creationism is bollocks.
There is no way to reconcile creationism with omniscience.
People also love to anthropomorphize God. STOP IT, HE HATES IT!;) Anthropomorphizing something and allowing it to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnivolent is a contradiction in terms.
Here's the partial truth behind these claims, as far as I've ever read.
Modern hard drives don't physically map sectors in logical order. The disk is divided into zones, going from innermost to outermost, since outer tracks are wider. Within these zones, some sectors go unused. If a sector read fails, it is re-read multiple times; if the error appears to have been spurious, it is ignored, but the disk remembers that sector by tracking the position internally. If the data returned is different on every single try, the operating system receives a fault. If a sector read fails and that sector has had a read problem before, the drive will silently map that data to an unused sector.
This means that you can overwrite a "sector" and it may actually write the data to another position, leaving the original data intact and *not* overwritten. Of course, multiple writes won't actually go back over a sector that has been marked bad, ever. You would have to somehow erase the maps, which there is nothing in the ATA spec that allows you to do that, because someone will write a driver and decide "I know better than hard drive engineers" or just plain screw up something and accidentally call the "erase map" function when it doesn't mean to. There are special manufacturer-specific tools that can do a hard wipe by making special calls to ask the drive to attempt to overwrite sectors already marked bad, but not actually erase the map, so that the drive can be used again without worrying about data integrity. There are factory tools to wipe the map, which you would only want to do if you were prepared to do a long, slow statistical analysis of physical sectors (again, with a factory tool) so that any manufacturing quirks (within tolerance, or else the drive is going to do an early death) can be mapped-around before the consumer tries to write data and potentially gets a fault.
If someone can elaborate on these, or correct any incorrect information, please do so.
If they market statistics (29% of college students have mild depression), that's fine. The more a society knows about it itself, the more we can plan for the future. If they're selling individual profiles (18yo freshman at Duke, living in North campus, studying Biology with a minor in Philosophy, homosexual, likes carrots and steak, drives a '99 Honda Civic), that's obviously a privacy issue. You can identify people when you can narrow down every category to a small group of people -- just find the one person that matches the profile, once you have enough information. Tada!
Scientist finds bug in soup from the that's-no-tasty-soup-for-you dept.
"The RNH (Random gNat Hypothesis) proposed 40 years ago suggested that somewhere, some scientist is definitely finding a bug in his/her soup. Now a team of scientists bolsters this hypothesis, having assembled soups in the lab from a mixture that resembles what gnats like to eat in the wild. 'Until now,' Science News reports, 'scientists couldn't figure out the necessary ingredients that created the probabilities necessary to support RNH.' The new work started the RNH soup development from a different angle than what earlier luncheons, err, work had tried."
Slashdot Mirror
(I'd imagine 200kW is needed for regular orbital corrections for the full ISS when all modules are in place, but I'm probably wrong. But here's something better:)
No--because of NASA cuts, lawmakers have just ruled that physicists must add an additional ISS equation to quantum mechanics, governing the behavior of the ISS in orbit around Earth, so that quantization will inhibit orbital decay. They picked an equation where the only resonant energies were the only interesting orbits. Since the energies are quantized, we can't just nudge the ISS a little bit at a time, now that it has its own wavefunction, duh!
Come to think of it, I bet I could design a super-efficient combustion engine that relies on macro-scale space quantization. I bet I can lobby a group to get my favorite wavefunction on the books for that, as well! ;)
"[A] strange sad feeling grew on me, remembering when my income was mine. I *think*, not really sure, I was able to buy CDs and food, not only food."
Maybe thepiratebay can use this to gain political favor: "Saving the marriages of savvy Internet users!"
We're guaranteed the right to assembly, but not the right to unharrassed assembly *g*
Or maybe we're guaranteed the right to assembly, provided we own rebreather gas masks (for pepper spray), bullet vests (for tasers), body armor (for rubber bullets), silvered full body suits with Peltier coolers mounted on heatsinks with large fans (for infrared heat guns), and earplugs rated for 60dB reduction (for sound cannons) at frequencies up to at least 60kHz (for ultrasonic pain generators). Until, of course, that type of body protection is considered a military-grade weapon and heavy penalties are given to a citizen for owning or using these banned items...
"What good is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?"
I think a more accurate way of saying it would be:
Your brother technically made the choice that led to his own death. However, there is a good chance he would have not made that choice had the State not grouped marijuana in with meth, pcp, coke, heroin, etc., which are at least tens of thousands of times more dangerous, and mushrooms and acid, which are hundreds of times more dangerous. In truth, cigarettes and alcohol are thousands of times more dangerous. Why doesn't the State provide accurate statistics of addiction potential, long-term health effects, likelihood of overdose (defined as death or organ damage during use, or maybe anything requiring medical treatment excluding shooting people tripping with thorazine, which has been shown to be more likely to cause a bad experience than letting the hallucinogen or entheogen wear off), etc.? There's a lot of conjecture about that, but there is some info from NORML and a lot of academic study of Prohibition and its conjectured, eventual effects on our drug policy.
Accurate information could well have saved your brother's life---we don't know---but if we had a study with a sort of "control group" (though it wouldn't be a blind study), comparing two similar countries where pot is treated differently (there's arguably at least one, the Netherlands, maybe two if you include Mexico), and see what happens, we could give some loose statistics about the likelihood that your brother would still be here.
I am sorry for your loss as well. You can probably indirectly blame the State, but we can only surmise what could have happened, sadly.
[Note to future employers scouring the web for dirty secrets: having an opinion on the drug policy doesn't mean I do drugs---perhaps I just care about how the State treats so many people I have read stories about in the paper.]
Living in Delaware, I'm well aware that many tiny buildings with very few employees are the corporate 'headquarters' for companies that do no significant business here.
Maybe it's wrong, maybe it's not. Companies do tend to be careful, though. I'm not sure what to think of the situation, but I've seen a lot of bizarre corporate behavior here, so if that's any indication, this might warrant additional investigation.
Hmm, thanks. I hate to hurt living beings if I can avoid it, so if I can get them out of my food supply while killing as few as possible, that would rock. (For the record, I still eat beef.. but see the work of Temple Grandin for butchering farms.)
Where's the most inexpensive place to find it in a retail store? And online?
As we all learned from the documentary Event Horizon [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119081/], the scientific data recovered has to be destroyed in order to save any remaining personnel, and the emotional and physical effects on crewmembers traveling through "unusual" regions of time or space involves hematemesis, self-disfiguration by manual removal of the eyeballs and subsequent severing of the optic nerve bundles and cauterization and suturing of the eyelids, and mumbling in classical Latin while having a sore throat. Unfortunately, you can find these conditions at hospitals, so there's really no benefit to experiencing the psychoses involved.
I'm an idiot when it comes to soldering, but I know that industrial soldering techniques (dipping a circuit board precisely into a pool of solder) need to go through stress-testing and QA. Any joints that show signs of stress should be manually soldered. Use the right solvents to clean, right flux for flow, tin carefully, solder with the appropriate type of solder, and clean off the remaining flux.
I suck at soldering and know nearly nothing about it, but, you'd think electronics manufacturers would know more than me... I guess not?
I have ants where I live, and I've experimented by killing and collecting dead ants, then crushing them and spreading the juices around.
The ants don't care about their own dead, apparently. I find trails of ants all the time where dead ants are scattered along the trail. It doesn't deter them one bit...
Maybe every time police acquire evidence through means the regular public could not do, they have to mention it to that person within six months. That person has the ability to file a complaint, not with the same police department (since people might worry about complaining to the same group of people that was watching them---quite understandably), but perhaps to an independent office whose actions have to be transparent by law (and are regularly checked up on by a significant and random (reappointed every 3 months, for example; not a long time period like some organizations are re-appointed) portion Congress, not by a commitee). Statistics about the complaints filed would, by law, be available to anyone by phone call, website, or snail-mail, so the public would be able to fully assess whether the random group of Congress members, studying the actions of police departments gathering substantial evidence, would be able to raise their voice if the group was ignoring complaints for some departments, etc.
This is something taxpayer dollars ought to be paying for; we pay for law enforcement, so we should pay for its oversight (not by raising tax dollars, though, since that would be arguably unfair).
If someone knows of a system that does this sort of thing already (besides the courts; it's ridiculous to expect someone to pay $500 for a lawyer's time just to raise a minor complaint), and has vast public oversight, I'd be happy to know...
But at least you don't need to ranlib after you ar! ... Thinking about the fact that I walk around making wisecracks like that, wow, now I know why people call me such a computer geek.
Your eyeballs would have to pass a sufficient amount of IR/UV to the back of the eye -- I'm not sure if they do. If only a tiny bit gets through, you could play with UV and IR light sources in an otherwise dark room, but as far as seeing the UV coloration on flower petals, for example, you'd probably be out of luck, as your eyes would be swamped with visible light.
(Biologists who study vision, please correct me if I'm wrong)
And, brown versus light pink? Surely you mean they say "light brownish off-white" to refer to the very light reddish tan that appears light pink to people who don't have thousands of mental snapshots of flashy pink outfits to compare them to. ;)
[Yeah, I know that's a stereotype, and many women hate pink, including my girlfriend, but hey, it's a joke]
I have a weasel. It rocks and does what you would expect. Anything you can do with a keyboard and monitor (unless the BIOS puts the machine into non-text mode on startup with no option for non-graphics all just to print a bullshit logo, which some do...) can be done via serial connection. Just get an old 25mhz sparc sun box or something to connect to the serial port, and you instantly have another network node that lets you screw with the bios.
(The question is, how did PCs become servers without this kind of functionality already??? ... I'm sure you've seen the datacenters where people walk around with fancy tablets to plug into PC 'servers' just to reboot them .... efficient?!?!?!)
He didn't say we should repeal laws about driving while intoxicated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation makes it sound, to me, that it's probably do-able in a lab (very difficultly), or perhaps we can just get a way to bioengineer a strain of micro-organism to methylate certain areas and sequences as appropriate. Or, perhaps we can use enzymes in human cells that induce the appropriate methylation and find a way to make the enzymes function in vitro.
Either way, the methylation assay they've developed may be useful for now, but probably don't be for long.
Disclaimer: IANA-{genetic-engineer/biologist/biochemist}.
The study of the halting problem taught us that certain categories of algorithms cannot be formally proved to do certain things. Work on incompleteness tells us that we know algorithms must exist that fit that category.
The question, really, is whether the algorithms in and design of operating systems can be done in such a way that we don't run into incompleteness and halting-problem issues within the constraints of what we are trying to achieve -- after all, we aren't trying to achieve the impossible, just trying to make some specific, absolute guarantees.
I'd recommend a solid study of the Mizar Journal of Formalized Mathematics, the implications of the standard axioms of set theory (maybe including reduced forms of the axiom of choice, but that's not necessarily highly relevant), and careful analyses of what Goedel and Turning actually proved. After that, emergent behavior from cellular automata may be a good next investigation.
[IANA professional set-theory mathematician, logician, nor computer scientist, so take my post as a starting point for finding answers, please, not as anything definitive!]
So you have a new set of settings:
Idle-Timeout: 15 # no bytes sent in 15 sec, close /24 netblock will be blocked
Unfinished-request-timeout: 1800 # any request not finished in 15min, close
Unfinished-nonPOST-request-timeout: 60 # any non-POST (so POST uploads are still treated fairly) request not finished in 60sec, close
Snail-threshold: 24K/10 # "greedy snail" threshold is 24K uploaded in 10 sec
Max-connections: 200 # max # of simult conns
Max-snails: 40 # max # of greedy snails
Max-snails-from-IP-before-ignore: 2/5/3600 # 2 max simult snails or 5 snails in 1 hr will "ignore" IP
Max-snails-from-netblock-before-ignore: 20/100/3600/24 # 20 max simult snails or 100 snails in 1 hr will "ignore" netblock
Max-snails-from-IP-before-block: 5/12/1800 # 5 max simult snails or 12 snails in 30 min will block IP
Max-snails-from-netblock-before-block: 4K/1800/24 # 4K snails within 30 min from a
Snail-IP-ignore-time: 300 # "ignore" is a 5min block for a snail IP
Snail-netblock-ignore-time: 3600 # "ignore" is a 1hr block for a snail netblock
Snail-IP-block-time: 3600 # block a snail IP for an hour
Snail-netblock-block-time: 86400 # block a snail netblock for a day
People can still uploads. Even if all your uploaders are POTS modem users, you can still take 40 of them at once, leaving 160 connections open for non-snails.
This could be extended to several levels of snails to also handle DDOS snail attacks from high-speed users who stay just above the first-level snail threshold.
This still doesn't account for high-throughput DOS nor DDOS attacks, but that's already something well-studied.
From New Castle County, Delaware, I get (netanalyzr):
"UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) appears to pass through a firewall or proxy.
The applet was unable to transmit an arbitrary request on this UDP port, but was able to transmit a legitimate DNS request, suggesting that a proxy, NAT, or firewall intercepted and blocked the deliberately invalid request.
The applet was also able to directly request a large DNS response. "
Normal test results of my own: .udel.edu) for copland.udel.edu works, but querying it for google.com returns Query refused (as it should).
* Querying 128.175.13.92 (which only answers for hosts in
* Sending any DNS queries to a network firewall / server of mine that is port-forwarding 53 to an internal server that is currently down results in timeouts (as they should).
* I turned off the port-forwarding and started a simple caching BIND setup on the firewall. Every time I query the firewall from the PC on a comcast connection, the firewall gets a query from my current comcast IP address (according to tcpdump).
Somewhat strange test result (of my own):
* Sometimes, though, if I haven't queried the firewall's nameserver in a few minutes, the next request will "time out" (although tcpdump on the firewall shows the reply was sent; it's possible it was dropped, and since it's UDP, would not be re-transmitted at the datagram level) -- and subsequent queries will time out (over and over again!! -- a sudden loss of *that many* specific types of UDP packets when everything else is getting through fine between the two hosts?) until I query a different nameserver, after which point queries to the "timing-out" nameserver (the firewall) will work fine. Since the firewall has two IPs, I even tested querying a "different" nameserver by just sending a query to the other IP, and the behavior was identical: after not querying the primary IP for a while, I sent a query that timed out; I retried the query several times and every try timed out; I sent the query to the secondary IP and it returned a result; I queried the primary IP again and then got a result; all the while, the firewall shows each request coming in and each reply going out. Am I confusing the DNS caching system they seem to be implementing?
* Another normal test result:
If there's a problem with invalid queries, it's not affecting TCP. I started a simple netpipes server "faucet $PORT --out echo hi" on the firewall on 9020 (to test) and then on 53 -- telnet'ing to the firewall from the PC on the comcast network on both ports gave "hi" and closed the connection, as expected.
* Completely abnormal: /dev/null" which I can send a message to with "echo hello|nc -u $NS $PORT -q0". I tested this on port 9020 (worked fine), but when I tried the same thing on port 53 (meaning I sent a non-DNS packet to port 53 from the PC on comcast), the server never got it (I verified this with tcpdump). From a machine accessing the Internet not through comcast, "echo hello|nc -u $NS 53 -w0" [note: -w0 vs. -q0 depends on version of netcat] worked as expected, and the server printed "hello".
Now, to test udp with netcat, I set up a dumb echo server with "nc -l -u -p $PORT -q5
Comcast may or may not be caching and/or filtering DNS requests now and/or in the near future (who knows?), but they're definitely blocking outbound on UDP/53 for (at least some) invalid DNS packets.
It shows how many people actually read the fine summary. I don't see one comment with a sophomoric interpretation of 'speed humps'.
So, I guess I'll have to be the first.
Speed humps? Well, it is the Internet, and you can get pr0n faster than ever before in human history...
It was for a job where some particular software that we couldn't replace relied on DOS workstations running LANtastic...
Believe me, no computer I administer has booted DOS in the last ~5 years, and rarely even Windows... (and, hey, VAX, DECstation, Sparc, and SGI MIPS boxes can't even boot Windows *g*)
WinXP has issues connecting to Win98 SMB printers via TCP or NetBEUI when connected to a DOS6 network running LANtastic. It would take about 15 minutes to find the printer and about 10 minutes to send a small document. There was no problem browsing the network, though.
LANtastic had some suggested workarounds (changes to how broadcast packets are routed by LANtastic nodes and changes to the TCP and SMB configs in Win98, mostly involving registry hacks), but it turns out the only reliable workaround I found was to install an lpd emulator on Win98 that connected locally to the printer, and then have WinXP connected to lpd. It worked quite reliably and was quicker at connecting than I'd ever seen an SMB printer be. That wasn't an official workaround, though, just something I tried on a hunch.
I remember in the early days of libtool... depending on what version of automake tools were included in a package, what version of the automake tools you had elsewhere on your system, your version of libc, the version of bash you used, the versions of make and gcc you had installed, and the veerssion of text-utils and sh-utils you had, sometimes libtool would generate very long command strings with hundreds of redundant arguments, and then call itself to "simplify" the arguments but actually recurse with an even longer string, until bash segfaulted and your login session crashed.
There was never really a workaround for ttha... just "try different veersison of thinggs, you might needto downgrade automake, or mix and match different veersison of auttoocnf, automake, and libtool." Quite wonderful, I tell you.
gcc2.7.2.3 (the really stable version you had to compile the linux kernel with for quite some time) had some weird bug that didn't really have an official workaround, either. Somehow if you did pointer calculations on the function argument list (like varargs or stdarg) andn the called another function, the last local variable of the called function couldn't be written until it was read. I remember having to do something like printf("", a); before a statement like a=4; would work. Of course, then you'd get a warning about using an uninitialized variable, but... The funny thing was, I seem to recall that only would happen when optimizations were turned *off*. Turning them on made the bug go away, which made it really frustrating to track down. It ended up being something like gcc subtracting the wrong multiple of 4 from the stack pointer (under all the aforementioned conditions) in the block of asm that set up the stack frame. Of course, gcc2.81 and 2.95.2 had their own issues, and egcs wasn't much better... It wasn't until gcc3.2 where I didn't need multiple versions of gcc (one for the kernel, one for the program I was working on, and one that compiled c++ code correctly!!)
I remember MatlabR11 having broken CSV-file-parsing routines. The workaround? Write your own. The Matlab compiler was also moving to a new system (MEX), but there were lots of things that didn't work yet, and the previous compiler system was officially deprecated. Then, the next release of Matlab required 92MiB of DLLs to be installed as a Matlab runtime if you wanted to distribute anything you compiled with the Matlab compiler... and much of that runtime was broken Java libraries. A lot of the official suggestions for working with structured data that involved strings required many layers of nested cell objects, which had their own compilation issues. Again, the workaround was to convert string tables into padded numeric matrices of UInts. Of course, most of the matrix manipulation functions only worked with Real numbers, so you had to convert back and forth, and be careful about what type of rounding/flooring/ceilinging you were doing...
VB6 had a broken val() that returned the wrong values for ASCII characters in the range 160 through 184 (I think),, butthere wasn't realalyy n conssitent pattern. MSDN and the Microsoft KB gavee th official workaround: write your own val().
Early versions of t
Consciousness is the ability to think. Thinking is the process of deduction over time.
I assert that God is timeless. Thus, he cannot think, and cannot be conscious.
If God interacts with the natural world, and is not conscious, he must obey the laws of physics. Adhering to the laws of physics excludes any possibility of supernaturality. (W. V. Quine used an alternate line of reasoning to demonstrate that a supernatural God cannot exist as defined by the traditional assertions of the Catholic church, meaning the assertions are inconsistent or that God does not exist.)
The actions of God are therefore indeterminable from the laws of physics themselves.
So, for God to create humans, he must perform an act in the natural world. These acts are indistinguishable from the laws of physics. The laws of physics entail evolution.
God is the laws of physics is the Universe.
If you assert that God is omniscient, he must be timeless in order to be consistent.
I know this is a very loose, weak chain of reasoning in need of serious rigor, but, my point is: if God is all-knowing, then creationism is bollocks.
There is no way to reconcile creationism with omniscience.
People also love to anthropomorphize God. STOP IT, HE HATES IT! ;) Anthropomorphizing something and allowing it to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnivolent is a contradiction in terms.
Here's the partial truth behind these claims, as far as I've ever read.
Modern hard drives don't physically map sectors in logical order. The disk is divided into zones, going from innermost to outermost, since outer tracks are wider. Within these zones, some sectors go unused.
If a sector read fails, it is re-read multiple times; if the error appears to have been spurious, it is ignored, but the disk remembers that sector by tracking the position internally. If the data returned is different on every single try, the operating system receives a fault.
If a sector read fails and that sector has had a read problem before, the drive will silently map that data to an unused sector.
This means that you can overwrite a "sector" and it may actually write the data to another position, leaving the original data intact and *not* overwritten.
Of course, multiple writes won't actually go back over a sector that has been marked bad, ever. You would have to somehow erase the maps, which there is nothing in the ATA spec that allows you to do that, because someone will write a driver and decide "I know better than hard drive engineers" or just plain screw up something and accidentally call the "erase map" function when it doesn't mean to.
There are special manufacturer-specific tools that can do a hard wipe by making special calls to ask the drive to attempt to overwrite sectors already marked bad, but not actually erase the map, so that the drive can be used again without worrying about data integrity. There are factory tools to wipe the map, which you would only want to do if you were prepared to do a long, slow statistical analysis of physical sectors (again, with a factory tool) so that any manufacturing quirks (within tolerance, or else the drive is going to do an early death) can be mapped-around before the consumer tries to write data and potentially gets a fault.
If someone can elaborate on these, or correct any incorrect information, please do so.
My opinion--
If they market statistics (29% of college students have mild depression), that's fine. The more a society knows about it itself, the more we can plan for the future. If they're selling individual profiles (18yo freshman at Duke, living in North campus, studying Biology with a minor in Philosophy, homosexual, likes carrots and steak, drives a '99 Honda Civic), that's obviously a privacy issue. You can identify people when you can narrow down every category to a small group of people -- just find the one person that matches the profile, once you have enough information. Tada!
Scientist finds bug in soup
from the that's-no-tasty-soup-for-you dept.
"The RNH (Random gNat Hypothesis) proposed 40 years ago
suggested that somewhere, some scientist is definitely finding a
bug in his/her soup. Now a team of scientists bolsters this
hypothesis, having assembled soups in the lab from a mixture
that resembles what gnats like to eat in the wild. 'Until now,'
Science News reports, 'scientists couldn't figure
out the necessary ingredients that created the probabilities
necessary to support RNH.' The new work started the RNH
soup development from a different angle than what earlier
luncheons, err, work had tried."