Actually+, I think all sentences should be punctuated so as to indicate tone` We could reform the world^/Everyone knows how beautiful% perl scripts are---why hasn't this spread to the rest of printed# text? It could@ do &wonders for ==human.computer interaction!_ ))Just think: with{everything so clear,$we,could,see+world+`peace]`within&&our$lifetime! \|Misundersta%%ndings %{in*^written)()communi+[cation,"would@become^things&of the past@@
I'm taking a grad-level course in optical properties of condensed matter, and one of the things we study is how EM propagation is slowed by atomic dipole formation in polarization from photonic fields. It would be interesting if it were the case that the vacuum could be demonstrated to have, at the quantum level, some degree of spontaneous polarization in a field, and since there's always a field (even if perhaps self-induced from uncertainty foam), you could somehow make an analogy to the concept of the aether (even though it would not have the properties of the aether). However, as far as I've studied, that's not the case, because you can't ever rid yourself of QHO's unless you have a universe with no net matter/energy (which we don't have, even if you are looking at a gauge symmetry), no uncertainty principle (but matter waves obviously exist, because you can even diffract molecules), or you can demonstrate that QM is based a flawed assumption, viz. that matter waves don't extend to infinity (but experiments with entanglement have demonstrated that assumption to be accurate to a very high degree). Of course, we don't have a solid definition of what exactly constitutes an observer, but as far as formalism is concerned, most of our results don't need one.
And, yep, I *am* talking out my ass;). No, actually, if it weren't early in the morning, and I weren't busy working on other things, I would go back and make the above paragraph (a) cite references, (b) use accurate and proper terminology rather than vague concepts, and (c) convey my thoughts with some rigor instead of a bunch of conjecturous statements.
If it weren't for the fact that Sebastian Dröge's name is no longer mentioned after the second cleanup, I would send in a patch to fix the lack of umlaut* over the 'o'.
* = The most interesting usage of umlaut-like diacritics has *got* to be the diaresis, if for nothing other than the fact than a mispronunciation of the name can induce laughter.
Oh, the other day I read something about the history of Gilbert and Sullivan which leads me to think that applying the term "piracy" to copyright infringement originally was a reference to the international nature of the theft. Has anyone researched this? I know the ship has sailed (excuse the pun) for preserving the identity of piracy as that of violent plundering in international waters, but maybe we can still present a good argument for why making a mix tape of Metallica songs should not be called "piracy" by any stretch. (Another interesting thing---the Wikipedia entry on looting refers to large-scale looting by Germany, then refers to the Allied mass acquisition of German intellectual property also as looting; if that wording was being used at the time, and the two distinct forms of "looting" were seen in a comparative light, that might have further deteriorated linguistic barriers between physical and intellectual property. Any thoughts?)
Something I've never quite understood is why software being loaded into memory is considered "copying" or a type of "format-shifting" that is something manking hasn't experienced before. Why? Compare to a book. I buy a collection of matter (book with pages having ink) laid out in a way (ink formed into appropriate shapes) that represents the abstract, copyrighted content. In order to read the book, I have to bombard each page with photons, creating a temporary copy of the image of the page in mid-air. These photons have to be focused through the lens in my eye, a complex process where photons are absorbed and re-emitted, giving us transient copies of the image in molecules of the lens and additional sets of photons generated. These photons also have to interact with the rhodopsin in my eyes, making more copies of the image (and more-detailed portions of the image on the fovea), and this leads to patterns of electrical potential that represent copies of sections of the image. Within the nervous system, many copies are again generated. In some form, the content is stored semi-permanently in the brain via memory (though perhaps in a form with much, much less detail than the original). Soemone might argue that the new concept is that the CPU only handles a few instructions or data from the copyrighted work at one time, but, the human brain also processes the book linearly, words at a time, as the pages are manually turned by the reader.
We don't distribute licenses that say "You are permitted to shine light on the pages of this book, look at them, and interpret and remember the words and concepts in your brain," but software licenses *do* tell us we're allowed to certain kinds of copies (installation, disk to RAM, etc) for the purposes of using the software.
Another potential argument someone might propose: the computer interacts directly with the software, and the human only indirectly, whereas the human directly interacts with the book. Not so fast, I say. Suppose I am a bad reader, and I can't easily understand words I look at, but I can pronounce them. Then, I have to introduce an intermediate device, where one part of my brain recognizes the words and pronounces them aloud, and the part of my brain which actually attaches meaning to the content is getting the data in a more indirect form.
(I know there are some holes in my arguments, but I don't have the time right now to try to plug them.)
You can talk about whether math is discovered or invented. Laten in the party, when everyone is too drunk to comment rationally, just load up the/. responses and everyone can laugh at the responses from those of us who are majoring in applied fields (and not theoretical ones).
Other fun things: discuss notation through history (particularly interesting is the bracketing notation in Principia Mathematica; if one person is an expert on it already, he can be the answer-key for a drinking game).
Don't do reciting powers of 2 or digits of pi (or even digits of e). Boring. (Plus, that's not very interesting, theoretically.) However, you can have contests to see who can work out an unusual (but known) integral form the fastest using traditional integral table reference books. Or, working out arbitrary Taylor's series...
Open discussion about different applications of curve-fitting and interpolation? (Bonus prize for anyone who knows the details of Everett interpolation off the top of his/her head.) Another interesting topic: functions equal (in some form) to their Fourier series. (Use that topic twice---once for discrete transforms, once more for continuous!)
Maybe just an all-out flamewar between two camps: (1) theoretical math is more imrpotant than applied and (2) applied is more important. Of course, that's probably only good if the two have roughly the same number of supporters.
At one point, AOL disks were distributed in pairs---"give a copy to your friends!" I think they should've had an AOL CD and a blank CDR. They could've included an app that let you write your friends a letter about why they "should" switch to AOL and burn that plus a new installer on the blank. Of course, we all know the subtly-pro-power-user-friendly image the blank CDR would have generated.
Warning: there are lots of run-on sentences, because I'm thinking very quickly and want to write it all down before I lose my train of thought.
The problem with perfectly aligning notes and sounds is that it destroys the individualistic nature of the instruments and just makes a wall of tonal sound. My best guess as to how the brain separates multiple sources of sound is by following sequences of sounds with similar harmonics that all occur at the same time, but not quite the same time as another source of sequences of sounds with its own set of harmonics (which could be pretty similar, or very different; the more different they are, the easier it is to distinguish the two, but I'll talk more about that in a minute). In other words, if a bass and guitar are playing at the same time, they don't align perfectly (naturally, anyway, because musicians aren't robots), so the brain can tell sounds coming from the bass (which have bass-like harmonics) apart from sounds coming from the guitar (which have guitar-like harmonics) very, very well. (I don't mean really bad mis-alignment produced by amateur or intoxicated musicians wherein an instrument sounds like it's being played off-beat, but rather slight mis-alignment on the order of a few milliseconds or so.) If the separate instrumental tracks are digitally edited to line up precisely, the only distinguishment between the bass and guitar is that they have separate harmonics and range; they no longer have *any* separation of when the notes are played. Consequently, it's much harder to tell the two apart unless your "ear" (as musicians say, but it's actually a part of the brain) is very well-trained to know exactly what harmonics and range each instrument has. However, even this is no guarantee, as basses and guitars cam vary quite a bit in just how they sound. Distorted guitars make this even more difficult, because the harmonics all get amplified to be nearly as loud as the fundamental frequency, so you can't hear the quieter harmonics of the bass, just the bass's fundamental frequency; since the human ear isn't very sensitive to sounds that low, you'd really have to crank up that part of the spectrum to tell what the bass is playing, but that also will increase the volume of the bass drum, so it doesn't even work that well, since percussive sounds have so many loud harmonics that they can mask other instruments.
(Note: I'm leaving out other interesting behavior in the time domain, which also helps the brain tell sources of sound apart. For example, when a string on the guitar is plucked, the pitch is initially slightly high, from the plectrum increasing the tension in the string, but then falls back to its resonant frequency. For a piano, this effect is much different, because the hammers don't increase the tension in the strings nearly as much. Also, on a guitar, the volume of the note has a fast rise time, then quickly drops to a somewhat linear decay (it's somewhat linear rather than nearly linear for several reasons: there's always slight differences in behavior from a real-world string because of the geometry of the string, interactions between resonances of different strings, interactions with the resonances of the body of the instrument, and the endpoints of the string, e.g. the bridge and nut on a guitar, which don't quite behave like an ideal physical endpoint). In a piano, each hammer actually strikes three strings, which are tuned to the fundamental frequency and sometimes harmonics*, but not neccessarily with perfect, simple fractional ratios. The interactions between these resonant strings and the body of the piano also causes some interesting modulation (mostly of the volume.))
(* = See this WP article about temperament for a very interesting discussion and history of how instruments are tuned. The methods vary dramatically from strings to woodwinds to brass to static-pitch instruments (piano, xylophone, etc.). If you tune an instrument so that it has perfect 4ths and
Exactly my thoughts. I learned C by adding features to CircleMUD. MUDs cover a good amount of ground: complex data structures, sockets, cross-platform code, managing many separate tasks pseudo-concurrently, buffering and caching data, handling large files and databases, manipulating the filesystem, lots of different types of algorithms that have to be decently efficient, etc.
The only problems are that CircleMUD (in particular) is *very* cross-platform, so sometimes the code gets a bit hard to follow, learning your way around such a complex and diverse codebase can take a while, and there's lots of things it doesn't use at all (graphics, threads, interprocess communication, etc). It also is just a hobby project, not a summer job.
It is pretty fun learning to be able to tweak a sophisticated game to do most anything you can imagine, if you have the patience.
Other good things to study would be: MATLAB programming, Visual C++, systems programming, MySQL, perl, and PHP. They come up in many programming jobs.
Note: I'm hoping to spark some discussion with this post; I'm not trying to present a self-consistent theory.
I'm trying to wrap my head around those individuals labeling themselves as Anonymous or griefers.
Let me state that I'm assuming that there exists some 'Anonymous' that speaks truly when claiming to have been a responsible party.
The idea of some distinct yet nonrecognizable (featureless, nondistinct) group that can be labelled as 'Anonymous' is a literal contradiction in terms, meaning that 'Anonymous' is almost meaningless as far as names go. The best approach so far in metaphysics to the topic of proper names is probably the Kripkean causal-story model. Names for presumably-new-and-unnamed things are chosen and passed down to other individuals, with the possibility of modification (the whisper-down-the-lane phenomonen we all know from grade school games); this is in opposition to the older Russell-Frege descriptive model of evaluating a name based on sets of learned properties. In the descriptive model, naming conflicts are rather hard to handle; Kripke's ideas offer a number of potential solutions. For example, we can have conflicts in naming if there are differences in semantics. Let's try to examine the problem of "Who is Anonymous?" and "Which Anonymous is the referent?"
Proposition: There are sets of individuals (call them A1 and A2) to which we can ascribe the property of they-call-themselves-Anonymous. We'll let A1 be the antiscientologists and A2 be the seizurists. For any further actions by some group calling itself Anonymous, we can postulate additional A3, A4, etc. We have no way of knowing much about the membership or intersection of these sets, although we could make some educated guesses about future actions (the 'goals' of Anonymous) of a union of all such sets with a statistical model. We might also be able to logically suppose that A1, A2, etc. can be constructed as subsets of a larger, whole, collective 'Anonymous' by means of selecting functions. For example, the selector for A1 would be individuals who have acquired* an opposition to the Church of Scientology, and the selector for A2 might be individuals who find epileptic seizures amusing. Note that there may be many different functions that could yield nearly-identical (and possibly exactly identical) subsets.
Now, I'm thinking about two situations. (1) It could be that A1 and A2 have a small or negligible intersection (two effectively distinct 'Anonymi', to use another/.-er's cute term). (2) Or, A1 and A2 could have nearly the same members. As the parent post indicated, the individuals vary in their behaviors.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series talks about a future mathematical model that can predict the behavior of large groups by considering the behavior over time of persons to be a stochastic process. This would be an interesting approach to studying the actions of Anonymous. (Are there any similar sociological theories at present?)
Anonymous seems to be in favor of individualism and against groupthink, but at some level a group has to act coherently to have a net effect, and in a large enough group I would suspect to find an overall groupthink even though there are drastic variations for particular persons' stances on the issue of study. Each person participates in the groupthink even if nobody has thoughts that are synonymous with the groupthink: the thoughts or actions may just add (approximately) as a linear superposition. By this way, if A1 and A2 are similar, we could end up with a set of ethics that would look rather queer: the group at large is opposed to cult-like religions, showing an ethical attitude of promoting-the-individual; and, since medical conditions are intrinsically individualistic in nature, the group at large is showing an ethical attitude of harming-the-individual. (Promotion and harm aren't literal inverses, but they are arguably close inverses.)
There are a lot of things to weigh. (1) Was the crime violent in nature of action? (2) Was there any planning? Was there a motive? Was the motive justifiable to any extent, even using (the criminal's) false sense of reasoning? (3) Is the criminal in an otherwise good standing? (4) Is this an aberrance to the criminal's normal behavior? Has the criminal been subject to undue or extreme stress lately? (5) Was damage caused directly (eg robbery), or only indirectly (eg insurance fraud)? (6) What was the type of victim, and what was the relationship between it/he/she and the criminal? (7) Did the criminal understand the consequences of his actions? Does he/she know? Does he/she generally understand the consequences of his/her actions? (8) Is there indication of remorse? How long did it take for remorse to show up? (If it shows up immediately upon arrest, that might indicate a sociopath who is a good actor and trying to get out of trouble as quickly as possible! But then again, sometimes that's obviously not the case at all!) Is the remorse related to the victim, or just to the crime? What is the nature, intensity, and persistence of the remorse? (9) (I'm sure are more things to consider...)
I think it'd be interesting to have psychologists get tax breaks or something for volunteering or state-employed psychs to interview someone (1) upon arrest, (2) before the trial, (3) near the end of the trial, (4) after the verdict and sentencing, and [if applicable] (5) after they've been in jail for some time. That kind of detail and paying attention to the person would serve at least two purposes: (1) if they have some mental problems related to feeling detached or as if nobody cares about them as a person, you'd be indicating there's more personable to the judge-and-pony-show than throwing people in jail
Minor and non-violent crimes resulting in penalties, social service, classes, and therapy is a good thing.
Short jail sentences (and sentences-with-possibility-of-parole) ought to be for rational adults who would realize, "wow, I made a mistake, I'm not taking something seriously enough" and, upon getting out of jail, will have it ingrained in them, "I need to be more careful with my choices in life, because I don't need nor want to go back there!" (note: that's not the same as, "I need to be more careful so that I don't get caught!...")
Some jail with social service and therapy is good for people with fly off the rails quickly (stop thinking about consequences even though they are capable, really bad anger management, etc).
Long jail sentences, maybe with or without chance of parole, are sometimes appropriate for individuals who may or may not be capable of changing their behavior. An interesting idea (may be flawed!): if someone commited a violent crime-of-passion, put them in a medium-security prison with, say, people who have committed serious insurance fraud---if they're at all capable of rational thought and changing their behavior, they might gradually get the picture that what they did was really serious (ie moreso than their fellow inmates)---you can always move them at the first indication of trouble.
Effectively-until-death (although I don't tend to agree with the death penalty) sentences ought to be for irrational adults that show no sign of being able to accomodate therapy or who have severe or unreducable/uneliminatable sociopathic tendencies.
There are low-security, medium-security, and high-security prisons for whether or not people are likely to try to break out or are too violent or dangerous to risk any chance of break-out. If someone tries to break out, just move them up to the next level of security/surveillance. Putting someone with the capability of changing themselves who hasn't committed something really grotesque into a high-security prison with a long sentence with no chance of parole might make them think, "I have nothing left to live for, I'm seen as the worst type of human through-and-through," an
I just looked up Krone blocks. They do sound useful... effectively a patch bay is to audio as a disconnection block is to twisted-pair communication?
A tip I learned for Cat5: Some cords have rubber pin protectors (little hoods over them, on the ends of the cable), so that if you yank the cable while untangling or pulling it out of a pipe or whatever, the little plastic pin won't get caught on something and snap off. However, the extra cost isn't justfied, because you can just take 4-6 inches of black electrical tape and wrap it around the connector to fully cover the pin (not extremely tight, though, because plastic is unforgiving of repetitive strains if they are intense), giving you a cable with a smooth end that won't get caught on anything. Obviously, you only put tape on the cable when you're doing wiring/untangling; take the tape off to plug it in to something!
A couple notes (I'm getting on a soapbox here; I hate to pointlessly tell people what they probably already know, but I've seen too many so-called "experts" do things wrong):
In general, you shouldn't be yanking on cables anyway. That's a good way to break the soldering on some of the wires inside of the connector (or separate wires from crimped connectors), leading to a bad cable or one that has to be wiggled sometimes. Also, another thing that I see people do often is not winding/unwinding long cables properly; they can go straight on-to or off-of a spool, but if you're looping them by hand, you have to give a bit of a twist after every loop, or you're going to put strain on the wire. (Be careful when doing the twists to coax them all the way out throuugh the other end of the cable periodically (how often depends on the thickness and stiffness); you don't want a bunch of twists to pile up at the other end and make forceful kinks that could break the wires!)
If you have an RJ45 plug and the plastic pin has broken off, you might be able to get it to sit a little snugly inn a socket by wrapping a layer or two of electrical tape around the connector, just behind the pins. Don't use too much; you don't want to be forcing it into the female jack.
[hours and hours later] - whoops, didn't hit submit before turning monitor off, hope someone else hasn't already posted all this info by now somewhere below...:)
A good doctor will admit when he/she needs to consult another doctor, or refer you to someone who understands your particular situation better. I've met a few excellent doctors. Some of the best doctors I've ever met have said things you'd "never want to hear a doctor say," like (1) Wow, that's interesting. I want to show this to some of my buddies, hold on... (2) I'll be damned if I knew why that was happening! (3) I don't really know. What do *you* think is going on?
People expect doctors to be gods. The placebo effect (which accounts for part of the medical establishment's income, and can probably never be completely eliminated) depends largely (in our society, at the current time) on doctors having somewhat inflated egos. In other words, the problem is just as much the patients as it is the doctors.
The doctor-patient relationship works best when there *is* one---when there is an exchange of information, resulting in a solution (or at least progress). I've (unfortunately) met a few doctors who would would just look me over and hand me a prescription, without asking me what was wrong!
Knowledge is most effectively used when its limitations are carefully observed; beyond that, extrapolate carefully, experiment inventively, and document everything extensively.
That's quite correct: the presence of obscured or hidden audio recorders must be disclosed in many States. However, there are a lot of loopholes. You can make records of various types of data (phone numbers dialed, when someone comes and goes,...), and that's usually do-able. In some situations, you can record things if you "make someone aware" that they're being recorded, and you also assume that someone is consenting by participating (talking on the phone rather than hanging it up, shopping in a store rather than leaving, walking on the beach instead of going home,...). "Making someone aware" is sometimes as simple as emitting a beep or series of clicks in a telephone call, or having surveillance equipment be visible. I think there might also be loopholes that let you record video in some situations where it would be illegal to record audio.
Of course, I haven't done any fact-checking for the above, so I encourage someone with field-specific knowledge to correct/extend/rebut/... my statements:)
What RFCs say that, and does it just apply to dynamic addresses, or also to having a static IP but being just a common customer of an ISP? Or, is it based on who handles the reverse lookup or routing for an address? For a lot of broadband, dynamic lease times are a year or longer, and I would argue that, on the Internet (where an ISP's standard mail servers might be replaced with newer machines that occupy different IP addresses once or twice a year), a year is a semi-permanent amount of time...
If I want to run my own mailserver (maybe my ISP's doesn't have features that I want, or maybe I want the experience of running a mailserver myself so that I can put it on my resume), and my machine has a permanent connection and (nearly) permanent address, what's wrong with that?
I've gotten on spam blacklists because a previous owner of an IP (even a designated static IP address) had somehow been implicated in spam three years prior... and some blacklists have a "we'll take you off when we get around to it if we think you've fixed the problem, so don't contact us, because not only will we ignore you, but we'll purposely wait even longer to consider you for removal." Not to mention blacklists that require you to donate money to "charity" to be removed (extortion, anyone?), even when you can demonstrate (for example) that the blacklist was in error to block you to begin with.
Now, graylisting is interesting, but, my maillog fills with errors, mail takes forever to reach its recipient, and my inbox fills with nearly-useless and somewhat-incorrect bounce messages. True, once your mailserver is OK'd, e-mail goes normally for that destination system, but, unless you send e-mail to that destination system fairly often, you'll lose your "OK" status. Plus, unless you only send e-mail to the same people all the time (i.e., you never send e-mail to random, new people: for example, writing them feedback regarding their websites or private replies to usenet posts or mailing list members), you'll constantly have to go through the graylisting process. If almost everybody in the world was on a small handful of huge ISPs (like having an Internet built from a bunch of AOLs, I guess?), graylisting would rarely be noticeable, but, the Internet shouldn't have that kind of constraint on its mailing system... what ever happened to heterogeneous systems and the *inter*-connection of many small networks (hence "inter-net"), not just a few huge ISPs?
Nope. The I/O hardware that the Level/68 system used was an extremely complex independent beast. (Think of SCSI (small computer systems interconnect) on steroids... since, uhh, Multics wasn't a "small computer system," but quite the opposite.) The documentation that survives is widely scattered; the few (insufficient) pieces that have been scanned and can be found on the web are at bitsavers. Much will likely have to be reverse-engineered.
I've been working on an emulator for a number of years. This article very good news, because it will make it easier for other people to get involved. (Note: don't bother trying to play with the emulator, because it is very... non-functional thus far. If you're interested in helping out, please do read everything at multicians.org, start following alt.os.multics, skim through everything on bitsavers, and then drop me a line *grin*).
Folklore, definitely. But, folklore as most people think of it is a pretty simplistic notion. There's a lot more to the culture and beliefs of our ancestors. paganlibrary.com has some interesting things on Halloween and, also to some extent, our modern monsters (primarily: see Witch's Thoughts, All Hallow's Eve, Origins Of Halloween; also useful: Death of Llew, Derivation of the Word "Witch", Wiccan Sabbats, the (mildly humorous) Public Service Announcement, and perhaps/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?=&p=52511 -- they all show up within the first 30 hits.)
(defining) Halloween: A pagan holiday perpetuated by the American Dental Assoc.
{insert obligatory HAIL ERIS ALL HAIL DISCORDIA... obligatory for me, at least!}
I'm not surprised. Gathering food is a useful thing to evolve, knowing how much food to gather also is, and being able to count different types of food (and not just bananas, for example) also is.
Whoever tagged this article 'sixtynine', this wasn't Bonobos, this was Rhesus monkeys;)
As far as I can understand, articles without good references and citations are all candidates for deletion. The web is a rapidly-growing environment. Show me how many well-done, intelligent, popular webcomics have professional (or at least webzines, although those are often not good enough) things written about them...
So are similar things like local music communities. There are plenty of bands in, say, New York City or Philadelphia that produce serious, sophisticated music, have experienced musicians, are not "some stupid kid's garage band," have a decent following, but have not put out albums on a major label nor toured heavily (two of the only criteria for bands that aren't very, very famous to not get speedily-deleted). Also, what about bands *not* in major cities? Where a band has its venues should not be of matter, although I'm sure most people would say to themselves, "Oh, a band from Philly *must* be more worthy of inclusion than a band from Nowhereville, no matter how artistic, serious, mature, or respected they are."
Yeah... seriously:-/ 8th-grade geometry, anyone? Propositional calculus is something you get in college studying metaphysics, but basic logic is usually taught in high school.
For clarification (we're pretending #1 is true, even though we now know it to be false): (1) We have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is universal (2) [Inverse] We do not have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is not universal (This DOES NOT follow from #1) (3) [Converse] The 2,3 machine is universal, so we have a correct proof. (This DOES NOT follow from #1) (4) [Contrapositive] The 2,3 machine is not universal, so we do not have a correct proof. (This DOES follow from #1). And in prop logic, something is possibly false if it isn't necessarily true (X is possible == Not X is Not Necessary; this is the definition) (5) We have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is necessarily universal (6) We don't have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is possibly not universal We can pretend {1,2,3,4} is equivalent to {5,6} here. (David Lewis would shoot me.)
I used to be on comcast a few years back, and I had a lot of trouble getting IPSec connections to work. I also remember trying to transfer files among various school friends, and we found that comcast would sometimes "randomly" start dropping every Nth packet (quite literally and regularly) between hosts on similar subnets. After they fixed this "problem," they started severely rate-limiting transfers between similar subnets, and blocked you from talking to any hosts on the same subnet as you (except for their router). They blocked a number of ports (tcp/137,138,139 for Samba, any ports related to incoming IRC (6667, 9999, and the like), incoming nntp, and others associated with certain filesharing programs) although they *didn't* block the standard services (although I hear that they block them most places), and I ran Apache, FTP, BIND, CircleMUD, and Sendmail. At one point, though, I think they did block SMTP.
The TOS said "no servers, and no VPN." I always likened having an Internet connection but not being allowed to run any services as like having a telephone that can only dial out.
Actually, the next version of Unicode lets you store the bits on the disk in any orientation. You have to have perpendicular-magnetic or holographic storage to implement it, though.
Future versions of unicode may account for the "time singularity" and allow orientation in four space dimensions. You don't have to worry about an implementation, though, since all physical read/write processes require a discrete length of time to complete, and most singularities are fresh out of discrete quantities.
If you like dividing by zero, though, you might be able to find a cute singularity hanging around in an
_ x (read: "x bar"). Also, if it's a black hole singularity, one of the nice things is that she hides her weight well, so you don't have to worry about the "I'm-married-now-so-I'll-let-myself-go" syndrome (;
Slashdot Mirror
Actually+, I think all sentences should be punctuated so as to indicate tone` We could reform the world^ /Everyone knows how beautiful% perl scripts are---why hasn't this spread to the rest of printed# text? It could@ do &wonders for ==human.computer interaction!_ ))Just think: with{everything so clear,$we,could,see+world+`peace]`within&&our$lifetime! \|Misundersta%%ndings %{in*^written)()communi+[cation,"would@become^things&of the past@@
I'm taking a grad-level course in optical properties of condensed matter, and one of the things we study is how EM propagation is slowed by atomic dipole formation in polarization from photonic fields. It would be interesting if it were the case that the vacuum could be demonstrated to have, at the quantum level, some degree of spontaneous polarization in a field, and since there's always a field (even if perhaps self-induced from uncertainty foam), you could somehow make an analogy to the concept of the aether (even though it would not have the properties of the aether). However, as far as I've studied, that's not the case, because you can't ever rid yourself of QHO's unless you have a universe with no net matter/energy (which we don't have, even if you are looking at a gauge symmetry), no uncertainty principle (but matter waves obviously exist, because you can even diffract molecules), or you can demonstrate that QM is based a flawed assumption, viz. that matter waves don't extend to infinity (but experiments with entanglement have demonstrated that assumption to be accurate to a very high degree). Of course, we don't have a solid definition of what exactly constitutes an observer, but as far as formalism is concerned, most of our results don't need one.
;). No, actually, if it weren't early in the morning, and I weren't busy working on other things, I would go back and make the above paragraph (a) cite references, (b) use accurate and proper terminology rather than vague concepts, and (c) convey my thoughts with some rigor instead of a bunch of conjecturous statements.
And, yep, I *am* talking out my ass
If it weren't for the fact that Sebastian Dröge's name is no longer mentioned after the second cleanup, I would send in a patch to fix the lack of umlaut* over the 'o'.
* = The most interesting usage of umlaut-like diacritics has *got* to be the diaresis, if for nothing other than the fact than a mispronunciation of the name can induce laughter.
Oh, the other day I read something about the history of Gilbert and Sullivan which leads me to think that applying the term "piracy" to copyright infringement originally was a reference to the international nature of the theft. Has anyone researched this? I know the ship has sailed (excuse the pun) for preserving the identity of piracy as that of violent plundering in international waters, but maybe we can still present a good argument for why making a mix tape of Metallica songs should not be called "piracy" by any stretch. (Another interesting thing---the Wikipedia entry on looting refers to large-scale looting by Germany, then refers to the Allied mass acquisition of German intellectual property also as looting; if that wording was being used at the time, and the two distinct forms of "looting" were seen in a comparative light, that might have further deteriorated linguistic barriers between physical and intellectual property. Any thoughts?)
Something I've never quite understood is why software being loaded into memory is considered "copying" or a type of "format-shifting" that is something manking hasn't experienced before.
Why? Compare to a book. I buy a collection of matter (book with pages having ink) laid out in a way (ink formed into appropriate shapes) that represents the abstract, copyrighted content. In order to read the book, I have to bombard each page with photons, creating a temporary copy of the image of the page in mid-air. These photons have to be focused through the lens in my eye, a complex process where photons are absorbed and re-emitted, giving us transient copies of the image in molecules of the lens and additional sets of photons generated. These photons also have to interact with the rhodopsin in my eyes, making more copies of the image (and more-detailed portions of the image on the fovea), and this leads to patterns of electrical potential that represent copies of sections of the image. Within the nervous system, many copies are again generated. In some form, the content is stored semi-permanently in the brain via memory (though perhaps in a form with much, much less detail than the original).
Soemone might argue that the new concept is that the CPU only handles a few instructions or data from the copyrighted work at one time, but, the human brain also processes the book linearly, words at a time, as the pages are manually turned by the reader.
We don't distribute licenses that say "You are permitted to shine light on the pages of this book, look at them, and interpret and remember the words and concepts in your brain," but software licenses *do* tell us we're allowed to certain kinds of copies (installation, disk to RAM, etc) for the purposes of using the software.
Another potential argument someone might propose: the computer interacts directly with the software, and the human only indirectly, whereas the human directly interacts with the book. Not so fast, I say. Suppose I am a bad reader, and I can't easily understand words I look at, but I can pronounce them. Then, I have to introduce an intermediate device, where one part of my brain recognizes the words and pronounces them aloud, and the part of my brain which actually attaches meaning to the content is getting the data in a more indirect form.
(I know there are some holes in my arguments, but I don't have the time right now to try to plug them.)
You can talk about whether math is discovered or invented. Laten in the party, when everyone is too drunk to comment rationally, just load up the /. responses and everyone can laugh at the responses from those of us who are majoring in applied fields (and not theoretical ones).
Other fun things: discuss notation through history (particularly interesting is the bracketing notation in Principia Mathematica; if one person is an expert on it already, he can be the answer-key for a drinking game).
Don't do reciting powers of 2 or digits of pi (or even digits of e). Boring. (Plus, that's not very interesting, theoretically.) However, you can have contests to see who can work out an unusual (but known) integral form the fastest using traditional integral table reference books. Or, working out arbitrary Taylor's series...
Open discussion about different applications of curve-fitting and interpolation? (Bonus prize for anyone who knows the details of Everett interpolation off the top of his/her head.) Another interesting topic: functions equal (in some form) to their Fourier series. (Use that topic twice---once for discrete transforms, once more for continuous!)
Maybe just an all-out flamewar between two camps: (1) theoretical math is more imrpotant than applied and (2) applied is more important. Of course, that's probably only good if the two have roughly the same number of supporters.
That's why I pounce and dash around instead of walking at work. Plus, it keeps the boss from asking about the TPS reports.
At one point, AOL disks were distributed in pairs---"give a copy to your friends!" I think they should've had an AOL CD and a blank CDR. They could've included an app that let you write your friends a letter about why they "should" switch to AOL and burn that plus a new installer on the blank. Of course, we all know the subtly-pro-power-user-friendly image the blank CDR would have generated.
Warning: there are lots of run-on sentences, because I'm thinking very quickly and want to write it all down before I lose my train of thought.
The problem with perfectly aligning notes and sounds is that it destroys the individualistic nature of the instruments and just makes a wall of tonal sound. My best guess as to how the brain separates multiple sources of sound is by following sequences of sounds with similar harmonics that all occur at the same time, but not quite the same time as another source of sequences of sounds with its own set of harmonics (which could be pretty similar, or very different; the more different they are, the easier it is to distinguish the two, but I'll talk more about that in a minute). In other words, if a bass and guitar are playing at the same time, they don't align perfectly (naturally, anyway, because musicians aren't robots), so the brain can tell sounds coming from the bass (which have bass-like harmonics) apart from sounds coming from the guitar (which have guitar-like harmonics) very, very well. (I don't mean really bad mis-alignment produced by amateur or intoxicated musicians wherein an instrument sounds like it's being played off-beat, but rather slight mis-alignment on the order of a few milliseconds or so.) If the separate instrumental tracks are digitally edited to line up precisely, the only distinguishment between the bass and guitar is that they have separate harmonics and range; they no longer have *any* separation of when the notes are played. Consequently, it's much harder to tell the two apart unless your "ear" (as musicians say, but it's actually a part of the brain) is very well-trained to know exactly what harmonics and range each instrument has. However, even this is no guarantee, as basses and guitars cam vary quite a bit in just how they sound. Distorted guitars make this even more difficult, because the harmonics all get amplified to be nearly as loud as the fundamental frequency, so you can't hear the quieter harmonics of the bass, just the bass's fundamental frequency; since the human ear isn't very sensitive to sounds that low, you'd really have to crank up that part of the spectrum to tell what the bass is playing, but that also will increase the volume of the bass drum, so it doesn't even work that well, since percussive sounds have so many loud harmonics that they can mask other instruments.
(Note: I'm leaving out other interesting behavior in the time domain, which also helps the brain tell sources of sound apart. For example, when a string on the guitar is plucked, the pitch is initially slightly high, from the plectrum increasing the tension in the string, but then falls back to its resonant frequency. For a piano, this effect is much different, because the hammers don't increase the tension in the strings nearly as much. Also, on a guitar, the volume of the note has a fast rise time, then quickly drops to a somewhat linear decay (it's somewhat linear rather than nearly linear for several reasons: there's always slight differences in behavior from a real-world string because of the geometry of the string, interactions between resonances of different strings, interactions with the resonances of the body of the instrument, and the endpoints of the string, e.g. the bridge and nut on a guitar, which don't quite behave like an ideal physical endpoint). In a piano, each hammer actually strikes three strings, which are tuned to the fundamental frequency and sometimes harmonics*, but not neccessarily with perfect, simple fractional ratios. The interactions between these resonant strings and the body of the piano also causes some interesting modulation (mostly of the volume.))
(* = See this WP article about temperament for a very interesting discussion and history of how instruments are tuned. The methods vary dramatically from strings to woodwinds to brass to static-pitch instruments (piano, xylophone, etc.). If you tune an instrument so that it has perfect 4ths and
Exactly my thoughts. I learned C by adding features to CircleMUD. MUDs cover a good amount of ground: complex data structures, sockets, cross-platform code, managing many separate tasks pseudo-concurrently, buffering and caching data, handling large files and databases, manipulating the filesystem, lots of different types of algorithms that have to be decently efficient, etc.
The only problems are that CircleMUD (in particular) is *very* cross-platform, so sometimes the code gets a bit hard to follow, learning your way around such a complex and diverse codebase can take a while, and there's lots of things it doesn't use at all (graphics, threads, interprocess communication, etc). It also is just a hobby project, not a summer job.
It is pretty fun learning to be able to tweak a sophisticated game to do most anything you can imagine, if you have the patience.
Other good things to study would be: MATLAB programming, Visual C++, systems programming, MySQL, perl, and PHP. They come up in many programming jobs.
Note: I'm hoping to spark some discussion with this post; I'm not trying to present a self-consistent theory.
/.-er's cute term). (2) Or, A1 and A2 could have nearly the same members. As the parent post indicated, the individuals vary in their behaviors.
I'm trying to wrap my head around those individuals labeling themselves as Anonymous or griefers.
Let me state that I'm assuming that there exists some 'Anonymous' that speaks truly when claiming to have been a responsible party.
The idea of some distinct yet nonrecognizable (featureless, nondistinct) group that can be labelled as 'Anonymous' is a literal contradiction in terms, meaning that 'Anonymous' is almost meaningless as far as names go. The best approach so far in metaphysics to the topic of proper names is probably the Kripkean causal-story model. Names for presumably-new-and-unnamed things are chosen and passed down to other individuals, with the possibility of modification (the whisper-down-the-lane phenomonen we all know from grade school games); this is in opposition to the older Russell-Frege descriptive model of evaluating a name based on sets of learned properties. In the descriptive model, naming conflicts are rather hard to handle; Kripke's ideas offer a number of potential solutions. For example, we can have conflicts in naming if there are differences in semantics. Let's try to examine the problem of "Who is Anonymous?" and "Which Anonymous is the referent?"
Proposition: There are sets of individuals (call them A1 and A2) to which we can ascribe the property of they-call-themselves-Anonymous. We'll let A1 be the antiscientologists and A2 be the seizurists. For any further actions by some group calling itself Anonymous, we can postulate additional A3, A4, etc. We have no way of knowing much about the membership or intersection of these sets, although we could make some educated guesses about future actions (the 'goals' of Anonymous) of a union of all such sets with a statistical model. We might also be able to logically suppose that A1, A2, etc. can be constructed as subsets of a larger, whole, collective 'Anonymous' by means of selecting functions. For example, the selector for A1 would be individuals who have acquired* an opposition to the Church of Scientology, and the selector for A2 might be individuals who find epileptic seizures amusing. Note that there may be many different functions that could yield nearly-identical (and possibly exactly identical) subsets.
Now, I'm thinking about two situations. (1) It could be that A1 and A2 have a small or negligible intersection (two effectively distinct 'Anonymi', to use another
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series talks about a future mathematical model that can predict the behavior of large groups by considering the behavior over time of persons to be a stochastic process. This would be an interesting approach to studying the actions of Anonymous. (Are there any similar sociological theories at present?)
Anonymous seems to be in favor of individualism and against groupthink, but at some level a group has to act coherently to have a net effect, and in a large enough group I would suspect to find an overall groupthink even though there are drastic variations for particular persons' stances on the issue of study. Each person participates in the groupthink even if nobody has thoughts that are synonymous with the groupthink: the thoughts or actions may just add (approximately) as a linear superposition. By this way, if A1 and A2 are similar, we could end up with a set of ethics that would look rather queer: the group at large is opposed to cult-like religions, showing an ethical attitude of promoting-the-individual; and, since medical conditions are intrinsically individualistic in nature, the group at large is showing an ethical attitude of harming-the-individual. (Promotion and harm aren't literal inverses, but they are arguably close inverses.)
* =
Kid 1: "Hey, how is channel 99 at your house?"
Kid 2: "Who cares about channel 99? I can get Natalie Portman with Hot Grits on channel 98.5!"
There are a lot of things to weigh.
...")
(1) Was the crime violent in nature of action?
(2) Was there any planning? Was there a motive? Was the motive justifiable to any extent, even using (the criminal's) false sense of reasoning?
(3) Is the criminal in an otherwise good standing?
(4) Is this an aberrance to the criminal's normal behavior? Has the criminal been subject to undue or extreme stress lately?
(5) Was damage caused directly (eg robbery), or only indirectly (eg insurance fraud)?
(6) What was the type of victim, and what was the relationship between it/he/she and the criminal?
(7) Did the criminal understand the consequences of his actions? Does he/she know? Does he/she generally understand the consequences of his/her actions?
(8) Is there indication of remorse? How long did it take for remorse to show up? (If it shows up immediately upon arrest, that might indicate a sociopath who is a good actor and trying to get out of trouble as quickly as possible! But then again, sometimes that's obviously not the case at all!) Is the remorse related to the victim, or just to the crime? What is the nature, intensity, and persistence of the remorse?
(9) (I'm sure are more things to consider...)
I think it'd be interesting to have psychologists get tax breaks or something for volunteering or state-employed psychs to interview someone (1) upon arrest, (2) before the trial, (3) near the end of the trial, (4) after the verdict and sentencing, and [if applicable] (5) after they've been in jail for some time. That kind of detail and paying attention to the person would serve at least two purposes: (1) if they have some mental problems related to feeling detached or as if nobody cares about them as a person, you'd be indicating there's more personable to the judge-and-pony-show than throwing people in jail
Minor and non-violent crimes resulting in penalties, social service, classes, and therapy is a good thing.
Short jail sentences (and sentences-with-possibility-of-parole) ought to be for rational adults who would realize, "wow, I made a mistake, I'm not taking something seriously enough" and, upon getting out of jail, will have it ingrained in them, "I need to be more careful with my choices in life, because I don't need nor want to go back there!" (note: that's not the same as, "I need to be more careful so that I don't get caught!
Some jail with social service and therapy is good for people with fly off the rails quickly (stop thinking about consequences even though they are capable, really bad anger management, etc).
Long jail sentences, maybe with or without chance of parole, are sometimes appropriate for individuals who may or may not be capable of changing their behavior. An interesting idea (may be flawed!): if someone commited a violent crime-of-passion, put them in a medium-security prison with, say, people who have committed serious insurance fraud---if they're at all capable of rational thought and changing their behavior, they might gradually get the picture that what they did was really serious (ie moreso than their fellow inmates)---you can always move them at the first indication of trouble.
Effectively-until-death (although I don't tend to agree with the death penalty) sentences ought to be for irrational adults that show no sign of being able to accomodate therapy or who have severe or unreducable/uneliminatable sociopathic tendencies.
There are low-security, medium-security, and high-security prisons for whether or not people are likely to try to break out or are too violent or dangerous to risk any chance of break-out. If someone tries to break out, just move them up to the next level of security/surveillance. Putting someone with the capability of changing themselves who hasn't committed something really grotesque into a high-security prison with a long sentence with no chance of parole might make them think, "I have nothing left to live for, I'm seen as the worst type of human through-and-through," an
A tip I learned for Cat5: Some cords have rubber pin protectors (little hoods over them, on the ends of the cable), so that if you yank the cable while untangling or pulling it out of a pipe or whatever, the little plastic pin won't get caught on something and snap off. However, the extra cost isn't justfied, because you can just take 4-6 inches of black electrical tape and wrap it around the connector to fully cover the pin (not extremely tight, though, because plastic is unforgiving of repetitive strains if they are intense), giving you a cable with a smooth end that won't get caught on anything. Obviously, you only put tape on the cable when you're doing wiring/untangling; take the tape off to plug it in to something!
A couple notes (I'm getting on a soapbox here; I hate to pointlessly tell people what they probably already know, but I've seen too many so-called "experts" do things wrong):
[hours and hours later] - whoops, didn't hit submit before turning monitor off, hope someone else hasn't already posted all this info by now somewhere below...
A good doctor will admit when he/she needs to consult another doctor, or refer you to someone who understands your particular situation better. I've met a few excellent doctors. Some of the best doctors I've ever met have said things you'd "never want to hear a doctor say," like
(1) Wow, that's interesting. I want to show this to some of my buddies, hold on...
(2) I'll be damned if I knew why that was happening!
(3) I don't really know. What do *you* think is going on?
People expect doctors to be gods. The placebo effect (which accounts for part of the medical establishment's income, and can probably never be completely eliminated) depends largely (in our society, at the current time) on doctors having somewhat inflated egos. In other words, the problem is just as much the patients as it is the doctors.
The doctor-patient relationship works best when there *is* one---when there is an exchange of information, resulting in a solution (or at least progress). I've (unfortunately) met a few doctors who would would just look me over and hand me a prescription, without asking me what was wrong!
Knowledge is most effectively used when its limitations are carefully observed; beyond that, extrapolate carefully, experiment inventively, and document everything extensively.
That's quite correct: the presence of obscured or hidden audio recorders must be disclosed in many States. However, there are a lot of loopholes. You can make records of various types of data (phone numbers dialed, when someone comes and goes, ...), and that's usually do-able. In some situations, you can record things if you "make someone aware" that they're being recorded, and you also assume that someone is consenting by participating (talking on the phone rather than hanging it up, shopping in a store rather than leaving, walking on the beach instead of going home, ...). "Making someone aware" is sometimes as simple as emitting a beep or series of clicks in a telephone call, or having surveillance equipment be visible. I think there might also be loopholes that let you record video in some situations where it would be illegal to record audio.
:)
Of course, I haven't done any fact-checking for the above, so I encourage someone with field-specific knowledge to correct/extend/rebut/... my statements
What RFCs say that, and does it just apply to dynamic addresses, or also to having a static IP but being just a common customer of an ISP? Or, is it based on who handles the reverse lookup or routing for an address?
For a lot of broadband, dynamic lease times are a year or longer, and I would argue that, on the Internet (where an ISP's standard mail servers might be replaced with newer machines that occupy different IP addresses once or twice a year), a year is a semi-permanent amount of time...
If I want to run my own mailserver (maybe my ISP's doesn't have features that I want, or maybe I want the experience of running a mailserver myself so that I can put it on my resume), and my machine has a permanent connection and (nearly) permanent address, what's wrong with that?
I've gotten on spam blacklists because a previous owner of an IP (even a designated static IP address) had somehow been implicated in spam three years prior... and some blacklists have a "we'll take you off when we get around to it if we think you've fixed the problem, so don't contact us, because not only will we ignore you, but we'll purposely wait even longer to consider you for removal." Not to mention blacklists that require you to donate money to "charity" to be removed (extortion, anyone?), even when you can demonstrate (for example) that the blacklist was in error to block you to begin with.
Now, graylisting is interesting, but, my maillog fills with errors, mail takes forever to reach its recipient, and my inbox fills with nearly-useless and somewhat-incorrect bounce messages. True, once your mailserver is OK'd, e-mail goes normally for that destination system, but, unless you send e-mail to that destination system fairly often, you'll lose your "OK" status. Plus, unless you only send e-mail to the same people all the time (i.e., you never send e-mail to random, new people: for example, writing them feedback regarding their websites or private replies to usenet posts or mailing list members), you'll constantly have to go through the graylisting process. If almost everybody in the world was on a small handful of huge ISPs (like having an Internet built from a bunch of AOLs, I guess?), graylisting would rarely be noticeable, but, the Internet shouldn't have that kind of constraint on its mailing system... what ever happened to heterogeneous systems and the *inter*-connection of many small networks (hence "inter-net"), not just a few huge ISPs?
Nope. The I/O hardware that the Level/68 system used was an extremely complex independent beast. (Think of SCSI (small computer systems interconnect) on steroids... since, uhh, Multics wasn't a "small computer system," but quite the opposite.) The documentation that survives is widely scattered; the few (insufficient) pieces that have been scanned and can be found on the web are at bitsavers. Much will likely have to be reverse-engineered.
I've been working on an emulator for a number of years. This article very good news, because it will make it easier for other people to get involved. (Note: don't bother trying to play with the emulator, because it is very... non-functional thus far. If you're interested in helping out, please do read everything at multicians.org, start following alt.os.multics, skim through everything on bitsavers, and then drop me a line *grin*).
Folklore, definitely. But, folklore as most people think of it is a pretty simplistic notion. There's a lot more to the culture and beliefs of our ancestors. paganlibrary.com has some interesting things on Halloween and, also to some extent, our modern monsters (primarily: see Witch's Thoughts, All Hallow's Eve, Origins Of Halloween; also useful: Death of Llew, Derivation of the Word "Witch", Wiccan Sabbats, the (mildly humorous) Public Service Announcement, and perhaps /phpBB2/viewtopic.php?=&p=52511 -- they all show up within the first 30 hits.)
... obligatory for me, at least!}
(defining) Halloween: A pagan holiday perpetuated by the American Dental Assoc.
{insert obligatory HAIL ERIS ALL HAIL DISCORDIA
No, trolls count: 1, 0, -1, whoneedskarmaanyway!
;)
I'm not surprised. Gathering food is a useful thing to evolve, knowing how much food to gather also is, and being able to count different types of food (and not just bananas, for example) also is.
Whoever tagged this article 'sixtynine', this wasn't Bonobos, this was Rhesus monkeys
Also, nice meta-first-post.
As far as I can understand, articles without good references and citations are all candidates for deletion.
The web is a rapidly-growing environment. Show me how many well-done, intelligent, popular webcomics have professional (or at least webzines, although those are often not good enough) things written about them...
So are similar things like local music communities. There are plenty of bands in, say, New York City or Philadelphia that produce serious, sophisticated music, have experienced musicians, are not "some stupid kid's garage band," have a decent following, but have not put out albums on a major label nor toured heavily (two of the only criteria for bands that aren't very, very famous to not get speedily-deleted). Also, what about bands *not* in major cities? Where a band has its venues should not be of matter, although I'm sure most people would say to themselves, "Oh, a band from Philly *must* be more worthy of inclusion than a band from Nowhereville, no matter how artistic, serious, mature, or respected they are."
Oops... {1,4}, I mean. .. and I even used the preview button .....
Yeah... seriously :-/ 8th-grade geometry, anyone? Propositional calculus is something you get in college studying metaphysics, but basic logic is usually taught in high school.
For clarification (we're pretending #1 is true, even though we now know it to be false):
(1) We have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is universal
(2) [Inverse] We do not have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is not universal (This DOES NOT follow from #1)
(3) [Converse] The 2,3 machine is universal, so we have a correct proof. (This DOES NOT follow from #1)
(4) [Contrapositive] The 2,3 machine is not universal, so we do not have a correct proof. (This DOES follow from #1).
And in prop logic, something is possibly false if it isn't necessarily true (X is possible == Not X is Not Necessary; this is the definition)
(5) We have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is necessarily universal
(6) We don't have a correct proof, so the 2,3 machine is possibly not universal
We can pretend {1,2,3,4} is equivalent to {5,6} here. (David Lewis would shoot me.)
I used to be on comcast a few years back, and I had a lot of trouble getting IPSec connections to work. I also remember trying to transfer files among various school friends, and we found that comcast would sometimes "randomly" start dropping every Nth packet (quite literally and regularly) between hosts on similar subnets. After they fixed this "problem," they started severely rate-limiting transfers between similar subnets, and blocked you from talking to any hosts on the same subnet as you (except for their router). They blocked a number of ports (tcp/137,138,139 for Samba, any ports related to incoming IRC (6667, 9999, and the like), incoming nntp, and others associated with certain filesharing programs) although they *didn't* block the standard services (although I hear that they block them most places), and I ran Apache, FTP, BIND, CircleMUD, and Sendmail. At one point, though, I think they did block SMTP.
The TOS said "no servers, and no VPN." I always likened having an Internet connection but not being allowed to run any services as like having a telephone that can only dial out.
Actually, the next version of Unicode lets you store the bits on the disk in any orientation. You have to have perpendicular-magnetic or holographic storage to implement it, though.
Future versions of unicode may account for the "time singularity" and allow orientation in four space dimensions. You don't have to worry about an implementation, though, since all physical read/write processes require a discrete length of time to complete, and most singularities are fresh out of discrete quantities.
If you like dividing by zero, though, you might be able to find a cute singularity hanging around in an
_
x (read: "x bar"). Also, if it's a black hole singularity, one of the nice things is that she hides her weight well, so you don't have to worry about the "I'm-married-now-so-I'll-let-myself-go" syndrome (;
Err, by lack of history, I mean lack of *demonstrable* history.