The problem with burying a time capsule is that it works for dead items, but does not work well for something which is supposed to work when you resurrect it.
Why not encrypt your message, spread it around on the surface, freely, and just bury the key in your capsule? For more fun, encrypt it with just enough encryption so that the time it takes to crack it is equal to the time capsule length.
I would say Labview is like Freemasonry, or the Tarot more specifically. The use of visual pictures, and arcane rites is something no religion bothers with any more.
It doesn't matter, since the money was controlled by just one small Cabal.
Now there were reports of a massive Y2K problem which would crash most programs in the world, particularly ones written in COBOL, but revisionist history of software professors today think that it was all a hoax, and that it never really happened.
In 1989, a German pilot flew a small plane from Germany to Russia, evaded Soviet defences and landed inside Red Square. This embarassed the SU greatly, and as a result 2,000 Soviet military officers were fired. Included were the head of the air force.
The guy was found guilty of... get this... hooliganism, and breaching the Soviet defence system, in that order! He was also sentenced to 4 years hard labour, released after 1 year.
"Rust's flight had a great impact on the Soviet military and his successful flight through a supposedly impregnable air defence system lead to the firing of many senior officers. The incident enabled Mikhail Gorbachev to speed his reforms and helped bring an end to the Cold War. [1]"
Apparently, the Soviet military had more of a sense of humour about the whole incident than the police and the Canadian bureaucracy (Carleton is in Ottawa, near the Parliament of Canada buildings) does.
The logic of some people on this thread would lead to the conclusion that Rust had "invaded the Soviet Union", and so deserved to be shot down.
Remember, it's a university. He was exploring the boundaries of behaviour. He's also 20 years old.
Someone should have simply explained the rules to him. Methinks the IT department considers him radioactive right now, so they'd rather see him branded with a record than have to deal with him again.
Psychologically, the world-view of admins requires that they be the masters while everyone else is just a bunch of lusers. Rogue hackers who know more than they do about security, is not something they can stomach. Like police officers who don't want to see criminals with better firearms than they have. Independent and armed citizens with shotguns doesn't make sense to some people.
There could be some subtle racism in this case too, given the name of the perpetrator. Pakistanis have a bit of a history with hacking, the worlds first computer virus was written by a Pakistani software pirate in the 1980s (the "Pakistani Brain" or just "Brain" virus) in order to stop other pirates from pirating his pirated versions of WordPerfect, Lotus 123 etc. (names which may not mean a lot to todays youngsters). A friend of a friend wrote an anti-virus scanner for it, and apparently he got a scholarship to MIT. Apparently, the virus was a very well written piece of code, and virus-hunters used to use it in training sessions to teach anti-virus programming methods.
I was once living in the same neighborhood as the guy who wrote the virus, around 1986, having moved from Canada to Pakistan, and thinking I was as far away as possible from the epicenter of the computer revolution as I could be...and that nothing interesting was happening within a 10,000 mile radius. How wrong I was.
Anyways, the guy's punishment should be that he is forced to take a few ethic courses and pass them with high marks. He's obviously a keener. THAT's his crime.
>1. It's obvious - since these are the only components in cells, and they have all been known for years, how is this remotely interesting?
The ancient Greeks and alchemists too, thought the soul was a chemical, and even today the modern pharmaceutical industry seems to think medicine should be about finding chemicals to magically give us health. Biologists are a lower form of life than hackers, they're drip-kiddies.
It's like an analog hardware engineer I knew who didn't appreciate the complexity of software, and would say (half-jokingly) "it's all an analog voltage when you get down to it." The funny thing is, when I helped him with his software problems, the longer he tried to describe the code to me, the less I understood of it. He had a hardware engineer's mind: to him the whole program was something to be analyzed simultaneously, not as a step-by-step sequential modification of the data. I think he would have loved programming in prolog.
If you slice a Klein bottle in half, you get 2 Mobius strips.
So here's your procedure: forge the KB in the fresh lava of an active volcano, fill it up with a liquid symbol of your undying love, then slice it into two, and mold the mobius strips into 2 wedding bands.
You might as well have the groom demand that the girl construct her own lightsaber and give it to him as a wedding gift.
A woman who wants a perfect wedding, needs to stop watching old Disney movies, and grow up. All this fairytale nonsense is simply because of the TV shows and movies we all watched when we were growing up. It has nothing to do with anybody's real life. Pure fantasy. Watch the island to see this idea taken to it's absurd extreme.
Then the customers will realize that the dealer charged them $1,000 for a GPS add-on which they can buy for $200.
It's the Big Blue mentality all over again. Cars are nothing more than Big Iron. They're just a stupid engine on 4 wheels...but the way people talk about them, you'd think the car companies had actually some magical way to make the darn things.
Even average application software in general use is 100s of times more complex than making a car is.
IIRC training material written for non-techies can actually make you more confused than you would have been without it. Training material meant for people with decades of expertise, but no theoretical knowledge, will make no sense to a programmer.
In my frame of reference, Calgary is at the center of my coordinate system. In fact, the finish line for the race is right outside my office window. In fact, I can see it right now, in fact I just saw the first car (Michigan U) come in right now.
Err, the French settled the entire Mississipi river, as is evidenced by the French influence in New Orleans. If it hadn't been for the Louisiana purchase, Quebec would have been (barely) on the route between Texas and Alberta.
Freeman Dyson wrote something similar about the school system in the 19th century. Back they taught all kinds of Greek and Latin, but they never produced any G or L poets. Predictably, most students hated the subjects and studied math and science as a form of rebellion. So the Brits produced many 1st class scientists during that time.
In the latter half of this century, schools started emphasizing math and science in their curriculum. But all most young people seem to want do is play music.
Following that thinking, you could force your kid to do some integrals and computations by hand, then let him obliquely "discover" how much easier a computer makes it. That's how I got into programming, in the early 1990s...through my interest in scientific computation and simulations. The way to do it today would be to get him interested in something like photography or audio/video processing, get him some hackable hardware, teach him about signal processing and filters, and wait until he finds some application which the standard tool won't let him build. Then get him to program it for himself. The rest will come by itself.
My prediction for the school system is, that once they start emphasizing music in their curricula, and the mainstream gets involved with it, all the other kids will rebel by becoming serious bloggers.
correction: most important thing: DO become romantically involved with each other.
Every natural system has a yin and a yang, or a female and a male aspect to it. Software can be developed the same way, with one programmer writing the code, and the second programmer writing the test system. The code should be performance driven and robust, while the test system should be passive and sensitive towards monitoring the behaviour and performance of the program.
Nowadays test code gets about as much respect as housekeeping, but test code is just about the best way to *ensure* good quality software, along with code reviews. It's also a good way to understand the system from the user's perspective, while keeping oneself grounded in the nuts-and-bolts reality of the product.
The two types of software can be written with 2 entirely different methodologies. Production code can be written in procedural languages like C++ to be fast, efficient, and might want to choose performance over flexibility. Test code can be written in logic-based languages, which are flexible but have huge memory requirements and unbounded run-time performance.... The latter should not be a problem while running tests in batch mode.
Test code has to capture the "logical" structure of the program, model the complete set of requirements, can be run in batch mode in non-realtime (so it can be inefficient) and has to be modified often as requirements change. It must allow logical requirements to be expressed in an obvious way, explicitly (rather than implicitly--which is the way things work out when you use C to write test code.) It can also be throwaway code, which never has to ship although it can be maintained in-house, and never needs to see the light of day.
All the logic based languages which CS professors love but rarely ever used in the real-world, could then find a place as metalanguages for test systems.
>Apparently, it reflects well on you if you worked with someone famous, even if all you did was sweep the floors of the lab.
A system like that is ***EVIL***.
Or to use a technical term, that is a horrible way to architect your society. It's a formula for breeding a class of sycophants and parasites.
In social terms, that system is as badly architected like as a piece of software...with like one module with 10,000 lines of code, 6 deep nested if statements, and some monster global data structures being passed around and modified at will.
He could ask for his fairy godmother to turn him into an *actual* hacker, until the clock strikes 12 and the spell wears off... as opposed to merely being mislabelled as one.
Of course, vibration can affect electromagnetic waves severely...if the cable is vibrating at several hundred megahertz. It's have to be pretty tensed to do that all by itself.
The only things affected by vibration are oscillators and semiconductors. I have a cheap wristwatch which used to lose a few seconds a day, but when the strap broke and I left it home, it barely lost a single second over about two weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with burying a time capsule is that it works for dead items, but does not work well for something which is supposed to work when you resurrect it.
Why not encrypt your message, spread it around on the surface, freely, and just bury the key in your capsule? For more fun, encrypt it with just enough encryption so that the time it takes to crack it is equal to the time capsule length.
I would say Labview is like Freemasonry, or the Tarot more specifically. The use of visual pictures, and arcane rites is something no religion bothers with any more.
It doesn't matter, since the money was controlled by just one small Cabal.
Now there were reports of a massive Y2K problem which would crash most programs in the world, particularly ones written in COBOL, but revisionist history of software professors today think that it was all a hoax, and that it never really happened.
No, Yoda is just the name given to a really old and green Yogi.
Microsoft partnered with the much cooler IBM, and that was all it took to have an OS monopoly.
These ads are all about Gates partnering with Seinfeld. The secret is in the partnership. Gates plays dumb while Jerry tolerates his presence.
What better way to spell out Microsoft's strategy for success than that?
Duh, ink is a suspension. Sericol sells more than ink ... it sells "solutions."
They must be in the dye business.
In 1989, a German pilot flew a small plane from Germany to Russia, evaded Soviet defences and landed inside Red Square. This embarassed the SU greatly, and as a result 2,000 Soviet military officers were fired. Included were the head of the air force.
The guy was found guilty of ... get this ... hooliganism, and breaching the Soviet defence system, in that order! He was also sentenced to 4 years hard labour, released after 1 year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
"Rust's flight had a great impact on the Soviet military and his successful flight through a supposedly impregnable air defence system lead to the firing of many senior officers. The incident enabled Mikhail Gorbachev to speed his reforms and helped bring an end to the Cold War. [1]"
Apparently, the Soviet military had more of a sense of humour about the whole incident than the police and the Canadian bureaucracy (Carleton is in Ottawa, near the Parliament of Canada buildings) does.
The logic of some people on this thread would lead to the conclusion that Rust had "invaded the Soviet Union", and so deserved to be shot down.
Go figure.
Remember, it's a university. He was exploring the boundaries of behaviour. He's also 20 years old.
Someone should have simply explained the rules to him. Methinks the IT department considers him radioactive right now, so they'd rather see him branded with a record than have to deal with him again.
Psychologically, the world-view of admins requires that they be the masters while everyone else is just a bunch of lusers. Rogue hackers who know more than they do about security, is not something they can stomach. Like police officers who don't want to see criminals with better firearms than they have. Independent and armed citizens with shotguns doesn't make sense to some people.
There could be some subtle racism in this case too, given the name of the perpetrator. Pakistanis have a bit of a history with hacking, the worlds first computer virus was written by a Pakistani software pirate in the 1980s (the "Pakistani Brain" or just "Brain" virus) in order to stop other pirates from pirating his pirated versions of WordPerfect, Lotus 123 etc. (names which may not mean a lot to todays youngsters). A friend of a friend wrote an anti-virus scanner for it, and apparently he got a scholarship to MIT. Apparently, the virus was a very well written piece of code, and virus-hunters used to use it in training sessions to teach anti-virus programming methods.
I was once living in the same neighborhood as the guy who wrote the virus, around 1986, having moved from Canada to Pakistan, and thinking I was as far away as possible from the epicenter of the computer revolution as I could be...and that nothing interesting was happening within a 10,000 mile radius. How wrong I was.
Anyways, the guy's punishment should be that he is forced to take a few ethic courses and pass them with high marks. He's obviously a keener. THAT's his crime.
>1. It's obvious - since these are the only components in cells, and they have all been known for years, how is this remotely interesting?
The ancient Greeks and alchemists too, thought the soul was a chemical, and even today the modern pharmaceutical industry seems to think medicine should be about finding chemicals to magically give us health. Biologists are a lower form of life than hackers, they're drip-kiddies.
It's like an analog hardware engineer I knew who didn't appreciate the complexity of software, and would say (half-jokingly) "it's all an analog voltage when you get down to it." The funny thing is, when I helped him with his software problems, the longer he tried to describe the code to me, the less I understood of it. He had a hardware engineer's mind: to him the whole program was something to be analyzed simultaneously, not as a step-by-step sequential modification of the data. I think he would have loved programming in prolog.
If you slice a Klein bottle in half, you get 2 Mobius strips.
So here's your procedure:
forge the KB in the fresh lava of an active volcano, fill it up with a liquid symbol of your undying love, then slice it into two,
and mold the mobius strips into 2 wedding bands.
Princesses are the female equivalent of nerds.
You might as well have the groom demand that the girl construct her own lightsaber and give it to him as a wedding gift.
A woman who wants a perfect wedding, needs to stop watching old Disney movies, and grow up. All this fairytale nonsense is simply because of the TV shows and movies we all watched when we were growing up. It has nothing to do with anybody's real life. Pure fantasy. Watch the island to see this idea taken to it's absurd extreme.
600 bucks for a used engine. It's a good deal.
Quasiness is quantized, and two quasicrystals must differ in some parameter by n times a constant.
Quasi-mechanics.
Then the customers will realize that the dealer charged them $1,000 for a GPS add-on which they can buy for $200.
It's the Big Blue mentality all over again. Cars are nothing more than Big Iron. They're just a stupid engine on 4 wheels...but the way people talk about them, you'd think the car companies had actually some magical way to make the darn things.
Even average application software in general use is 100s of times more complex than making a car is.
IIRC training material written for non-techies can actually make you more confused than you would have been without it. Training material meant for people with decades of expertise, but no theoretical knowledge, will make no sense to a programmer.
Imagine what a GPS virus could do.
"Turn right at the next cliff. Proceed downwards vertically for 700 metres...Arriving at your final destination."
Oh God, more bundling.
In my frame of reference, Calgary is at the center of my coordinate system. In fact, the finish line for the race is right outside my office window. In fact, I can see it right now, in fact I just saw the first car (Michigan U) come in right now.
Coordinates are all relative, remember.
Err, the French settled the entire Mississipi river, as is evidenced by the French influence in New Orleans. If it hadn't been for the Louisiana purchase, Quebec would have been (barely) on the route between Texas and Alberta.
Of course, it never happened.
Freeman Dyson wrote something similar about the school system in the 19th century. Back they taught all kinds of Greek and Latin, but they never produced any G or L poets. Predictably, most students hated the subjects and studied math and science as a form of rebellion. So the Brits produced many 1st class scientists during that time.
In the latter half of this century, schools started emphasizing math and science in their curriculum. But all most young people seem to want do is play music.
Following that thinking, you could force your kid to do some integrals and computations by hand, then let him obliquely "discover" how much easier a computer makes it. That's how I got into programming, in the early 1990s...through my interest in scientific computation and simulations. The way to do it today would be to get him interested in something like photography or audio/video processing, get him some hackable hardware, teach him about signal processing and filters, and wait until he finds some application which the standard tool won't let him build. Then get him to program it for himself. The rest will come by itself.
My prediction for the school system is, that once they start emphasizing music in their curricula, and the mainstream gets involved with it, all the other kids will rebel by becoming serious bloggers.
correction: most important thing: DO become romantically involved with each other.
Every natural system has a yin and a yang, or a female and a male aspect to it. Software can be developed the same way, with one programmer writing the code, and the second programmer writing the test system. The code should be performance driven and robust, while the test system should be passive and sensitive towards monitoring the behaviour and performance of the program.
Nowadays test code gets about as much respect as housekeeping, but test code is just about the best way to *ensure* good quality software, along with code reviews. It's also a good way to understand the system from the user's perspective, while keeping oneself grounded in the nuts-and-bolts reality of the product.
The two types of software can be written with 2 entirely different methodologies. Production code can be written in procedural languages like C++ to be fast, efficient, and might want to choose performance over flexibility. Test code can be written in logic-based languages, which are flexible but have huge memory requirements and unbounded run-time performance.... The latter should not be a problem while running tests in batch mode.
Test code has to capture the "logical" structure of the program, model the complete set of requirements, can be run in batch mode in non-realtime (so it can be inefficient) and has to be modified often as requirements change. It must allow logical requirements to be expressed in an obvious way, explicitly (rather than implicitly--which is the way things work out when you use C to write test code.) It can also be throwaway code, which never has to ship although it can be maintained in-house, and never needs to see the light of day.
All the logic based languages which CS professors love but rarely ever used in the real-world, could then find a place as metalanguages for test systems.
>Apparently, it reflects well on you if you worked with someone famous, even if all you did was sweep the floors of the lab.
A system like that is ***EVIL***.
Or to use a technical term, that is a horrible way to architect your society. It's a formula for breeding a class of sycophants and parasites.
In social terms, that system is as badly architected like as a piece of software...with like one module with 10,000 lines of code, 6 deep nested if statements, and some monster global data structures being passed around and modified at will.
He could ask for his fairy godmother to turn him into an *actual* hacker, until the clock strikes 12 and the spell wears off... as opposed to merely being mislabelled as one.
>woven jacketing to reduce vibration
Of course, vibration can affect electromagnetic waves severely...if the cable is vibrating at several hundred megahertz. It's have to be pretty tensed to do that all by itself.
The only things affected by vibration are oscillators and semiconductors. I have a cheap wristwatch which used to lose a few seconds a day, but when the strap broke and I left it home, it barely lost a single second over about two weeks.
They should jacket the PC instead.
>Well, just yesterday you ran a story speculating that technologies like instant messaging make us stupid [slashdot.org].
Duh, New technologies increase the variance of the stupidity/productivity curve.
Now we need a new study determing if new technologies shift the curve's mean.