Ok, so I read the article. Not much clue there. I thought to start with that they were talking about some kind of steganography, but the article claims that the encoded message isn't embedded in the image. It's not a digital image either, (jpeg etc) it's a printed image. As far as I can tell they're using some optical properties of the image as a key to decode some other encrypted data. Hardly an earth shattering technique, but the linked article is just a brief, confusing write-up of an optical physics paper - perhaps there's actually something interesting in the paper that got dropped along the way.
Actually might not be as bizarre as you think. If a large asteroid split up into several smaller lumps, the lumps would orbit around the center of gravity/mass of the original rock, and thus would seem like a flock of smaller asteroids, all following each other. Eventually they'd probably be drawn off in different directions by the influences of other bodies, but if one split up on its way into the solar system, it might still be a big ball of fragments by the time it passed by Earth.
It's certainly not totally implausible.
For sure. I recall this being a concern with "Let's blow up the asteroid!!11" type plans. If an asteroid is going to hit the earth and you blow it up, unless you're stupendously careful you just end up with all the chunks of the asteroid impacting individually, probably not much of a win.
Also, I suppose a really big asteroid might have enough of a gravitational field to attract other objects, or maybe you could even have some semi-stable situation where two asteroids of relatively equal mass orbited around each other, and then their center of mass collectively orbited the Sun (like a binary star system). Again I don't think it would be stable for very long because of all the interfering forces, but it could probably exist for a short while.
Actually, you just described the earth/moon system, among other things. For further reading, try the wikipedia entry for Center of Mass, particularly the Barycenter section with pretty pictures.
Notably:
In the case where one of the two objects is much larger and more massive than the other, the barycenter will be located within the larger object... This is the case for the Moon and Earth... When the two bodies are of similar masses... the barycenter will be located outside of either of them and both bodies will follow an orbit around it. This is the case for Pluto and Charon, Jupiter and the Sun, and many binary asteroids and binary stars.
All over the Earth, right now, as we read slashdot, there are a trillion different forms of "grey goo" trying like hell to take over the earth and eat every last ounce of available energy. They are called plants, animals, fungus and bacteria. All of these things, genetically speaking, would like NOTHING beter than to cover the entire world with copies of itself and devour *everything*.
But, for some reason, that doesn't happen...
While that's true, you should also consider the consequences of introduced species to isolated environments. Introduced species in Australia and New Zealand (and other places, but I'm from New Zealand so I know the situation here better) usually thoroughly kick ass on indigenous species. I understand this to be because the indigenous species did not evolve in competition with the introduced species (or with sufficiently similar local species), and so have no natural defence against them.
Also, species from larger/more diverse ecosystems have usually evolved to survive a wider variety of predators and environmental factors which is why species from big environments (eurasia) win out over species from small, isolated environments (New Zealand) rather than the reverse.
Now to bring this post back on topic, by analogy it seems likely that any interplanetary species we encounter could kick our collective ass because of being 1) unlike anything on earth and 2) shaped by a larger, more hostile environment.
This is terrible news! If Pirates are now fighting Pornographers as well as their age-old enemies the Ninjas global temperatures will be sure to rise even further! My advice: buy land in Alaska.
Furthermore, Pornographers are well known for their ability to quickly subvert any new technology for pornographic ends. This suggests that the Robots will soon be enslaved, forming a fearsome Robot Ninja Pornographer alliance! What hope is there now for the noble Pirates? The monkeys certainly won't be any help. How could a mere monkey hope to oppose a Robot Ninja Pornographer?
Not sure I'd go for the body cavity search route to save waiting in the ID line, though. I guess that depends on if it's a business trip, or a recreational one.
Umm... I'm almost afraid to ask, but does that mean that
a) your company expects you to have body cavity searches to save time
or
b) body cavity searches are part of your normal recreational activities?
Loosely related; can you imagine playing Pong on the Wii? It strikes me as a surreal image, two people sitting on a sofa waving their white rectangular wiimotes up and down to control the white rectangular Pong paddles on the screen. With experience could you play looking at your opponent's wiimote instead of the screen?
World of Warcraft is a remarkably good couples' game. My wife and I play it whenever we get a chance and she's just as addicted to it as I am. I know a bunch of female WoWers -- it seems to appeal to women (even ones that don't like computer games) far more than most games.
I hate to break it to you, but those 'female' WoW players are actually just 16 year old boys messing with you.
What a spoiled little punk. He didn't know stealing was against the law? He was old enough to come up with this scam and steal, and now suddenly he's just an innocent kid?
Not that I condone stealing, but I imagine the part that he's freaked out about is the felony charge for what I'm sure he assumed was a slightly clever way of shoplifting.
I can only hope that however this turns out he's only punished for 'slightly clever shoplifting', plus perhaps having the &#@! scared out of him with felony charges.
In the same way that laws which are selectively enforced are unjust, it would be unjust to put the kid away on a felony for what was, for all practical purposes, shoplifting.
A 25 yr old British man could be the first people in the world to have cured himself of the deadly HIV virus.
Now, curing HIV is all well and good but I think we're overlooking the real achievement here. These man - with no aid from the scientific establishment - have become more than one person!
With the introduction of the inflammatory FSM, ID proponents are forced to show themselves for what they are - that is, supporters of a Christian, not a scientific, agenda. In other words, cards on the table.
It's funny, but this has been cropping up on Slashdot for ages now, and I haven't heard anyone mention surrealist arguments (this may not be the commonly accepted term - it's a while since I took the paper, and wikipedia doesn't know what I'm talking about).
A surrealist argument (iirc) is one that tries to explain some phenomenon by appeal to an undetectable power or state, e.g. the moon is moved in its orbit by invisible angels. The angels are completely undetectable (apart from their effect on the moon, of course), but they're there. Really. I swear. We can never see them, but they're there.
The problem with surrealist arguments is that they're not disprovable (they never make falsifiable predictions, which is something that DOES get mentioned in these discussions) and unfortunately defences against them usually have to be about lack of explanatory power... but that's another big can of worms. It could be that the moon really is moved in its orbit by invisible angels, but that state cannot be distinguished from the accepted scientific state by any experiment.
Now back to the topic at hand... Pretty much any argument that 'God did it' is a surrealist argument. If you don't want to accept the fossil record you can claim that God rigged to look like that, and the earth is really only 6000 years old. That state is is not experimentally distinguishable from the accepted scientific state.
Intelligent Design and the Flying Spaghetti Monster arguments are both surrealist too. The most important thing about the Flying Spaghetti Monster is that the logical arguments for his existence are exactly as compelling as for ID or the Christian God. The Noodly One is inherently ridiculous which helps reveal the flaws in arguments for His existence, but also unfortunately leads to people misinterpreting the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a parody in poor (or possibly tomatoey) taste.
We can't take the code developed by thousands of programmers over 15 years, make it proprietary, and contribute nothing back.
This is actually a point I'd like some clarification on. One of the supposed strengths of open source is that if something is broken or doesn't work the way you want, you can just fix it yourself.
But if the code is GPL'd and you want to fix something, even if it's a minor tweak, you'll be stuck with an obligation to provide the source on request. If I understand this correctly, it seems just as bad as closed source software only more irritating because you can see what to fix but can't actually fix it without being responsible for providing the code on request. Even if you're happy to release the code for the change, any responsible business would have to implement policy and procedure for how the redistribution would take place.
So, for small changes it seems to me that the benefit of making the change would be outweighed by the cost incurred of having a formalised code redistribution system.
If I'm wrong please correct me. I don't like being wrong, and I like staying wrong even less.
One thing I can't abide about Trekkies is their compulsive need to tie up all loose ends and resolve all inconsistencies, no matter how trivial or uninteresting. The purpose of background is to help tell a story, not the other way around.
Have you never seen an episode? With those kinds of stories, inconsitencies and loose ends are all we have left! (cries)
It's a terrible mistake to think that IT is a geeky field, or that there is stigma attached to it.
Don't be fooled into thinking that IT professionals must be introverted socially inept pedants who live in their parents' basements just because that describes everybody currently in the field.
5) Opera uses very little Screen Real Estate now as I use a minimal theme, deactivated the big button bar and the Panel Selector on the left. the only things I have left are the Tab Bar, the Address Bar, the Menu Bar and one bar with my favorite Bookmarks (and the Scroll Bar on the right). Combined with the Ratpoison Window Manager that does not use a Window Bar I can use over 90% of the Screen for the current Webpage.
If you want that extra 10%, mess with your mouse gesture settings. I bound GestureUp to Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen , so you can lose those menu bars or bring them back with a flick of your wrist.
For the logically inclined, that | means OR, and & works for AND. Roll your own mouse gestures.
1. Mouse gestures can be bound to an insane number of browser functions.
2. Middle click to open a link in a new tab in the background - the only way to read slashdot.
3. Fast Forward - follow the link that looks like it goes to the next page (even better when bound to a mouse gesture).
Those are the three big reasons. Not so different from firefox, with its extensions. I couldn't get firefox set up just how I wanted it though so if anyone would like to give me some hints, go ahead!
Oh yeah, and I'm quite attached to the google text ads too. It's interesting to see what google thinks is related to whatever I'm looking at.
You could claim that IM faciliates poor English, but I don't see this as an direct effect. How could a program turn words and structure into that s*** you find in chatrooms?
Actually, IM minus touchtyping leads to poor english. IM conventions are a result of people who don't know the layout of a keyboard thinking "crap! I need to reply! where's the `e' key?", which results from real-time chat, or cruddy interfaces like text messages on mobile phones.
That's one of the reasons IM conventions don't show up much on slashdot; we all know our way around our keyboards intimately. The grammatical bottleneck is somewhere inside the user's head, rather than at the keyboard so a user's natural level of grammar comes out. (Hi Slashdot crew!)
Re:How does one dispute math as a universal concep
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 1
The flaw in that line of thinking, which many on/. are making, is assuming that what we percieve singularly is similarly percieved by another species....
Now another lifeform comes along, one which can percieve the entirety of the book in time/space. They percieve not only a different book than we are capable of, but further, they may percieve each temporal book as a seperate item, just as we percieve spacially translated objects as seperate. So where we see a single book, they see an infinite number of books. We can only assume that their method of counting would differ from ours, or that we would be unable to correlate ours to theirs because we can not percieve the many, only the one.
So close to right that I can't resist replying... The problem is that if lifeform X perceives the book as some kind of collection over time (or something), it still has a concept of `the book'. Even if X can't differentiate between `the book now' and `the book always' (or something), it can still count by noting the existence of `the book' and `the other book' or `the book now' and `the book a little while ago'. It doesn't matter if X and you or me think that `the book' is the same thing; we're still enumerating.
In fact, as long as lifeform X can determine that [something] exists and [something else] exists (or even may exist), maths sneaks back in. If X cannot distinguish objects, the question of how it can interact with the world becomes much more interesting.
And this leads to a problem that's been bugging me for years: What is an object anyway? What I think of as `my desk' is just a local irregularity in the chemical soup on the surface of what I like to think of as a `planet' which is just...
What they can do is use an algorithm to generate a unique key (from a hash or whatever), then generate tens of millions (out of possible hundred-gazallions) of these keys.
The crackers can still crack the hash, as much as they would like; they'll come up with keys that should work... But the trick is this:
The publisher stores in it's database all of the keys that are shipped with products. While any number of keys may actually allow the product to install, when it phones home, your key has to match a key in the database.
OK, technical question. Assuming that the valid-key-generating hash is not shipped as part of the product, why would hackers crack the hundred-gazillions hash of which some work rather than the tens-of-millions hash which the company used to generate actual valid keys?
So tell me, how much input do you get on which articles get posted and which rejected?
We passively consume the articles, occasionally getting our suggestions accepted. But the real active part only comes *after* the article is posted, and we get to discuss it. Even if the vast majority of us agreed that an article was crap, and should never have been posted, we couldn't change it one iota.
But that's not passive consumption. Reading an article/post and deciding that it's crap is active. And responding is participation. It would be passive if we were to read articles and not wonder whether they were crap or not. It's on the internet, it must be true.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so I read the article. Not much clue there. I thought to start with that they were talking about some kind of steganography, but the article claims that the encoded message isn't embedded in the image. It's not a digital image either, (jpeg etc) it's a printed image. As far as I can tell they're using some optical properties of the image as a key to decode some other encrypted data. Hardly an earth shattering technique, but the linked article is just a brief, confusing write-up of an optical physics paper - perhaps there's actually something interesting in the paper that got dropped along the way.
Actually, you just described the earth/moon system, among other things. For further reading, try the wikipedia entry for Center of Mass, particularly the Barycenter section with pretty pictures.
Notably:
While that's true, you should also consider the consequences of introduced species to isolated environments. Introduced species in Australia and New Zealand (and other places, but I'm from New Zealand so I know the situation here better) usually thoroughly kick ass on indigenous species. I understand this to be because the indigenous species did not evolve in competition with the introduced species (or with sufficiently similar local species), and so have no natural defence against them.
Also, species from larger/more diverse ecosystems have usually evolved to survive a wider variety of predators and environmental factors which is why species from big environments (eurasia) win out over species from small, isolated environments (New Zealand) rather than the reverse.
Now to bring this post back on topic, by analogy it seems likely that any interplanetary species we encounter could kick our collective ass because of being 1) unlike anything on earth and 2) shaped by a larger, more hostile environment.
This is terrible news! If Pirates are now fighting Pornographers as well as their age-old enemies the Ninjas global temperatures will be sure to rise even further! My advice: buy land in Alaska.
Furthermore, Pornographers are well known for their ability to quickly subvert any new technology for pornographic ends. This suggests that the Robots will soon be enslaved, forming a fearsome Robot Ninja Pornographer alliance! What hope is there now for the noble Pirates? The monkeys certainly won't be any help. How could a mere monkey hope to oppose a Robot Ninja Pornographer?
Umm... I'm almost afraid to ask, but does that mean that
a) your company expects you to have body cavity searches to save time
or
b) body cavity searches are part of your normal recreational activities?
Yes, I know people who have called up the police on others who have attempted to drive while drunk. Why? To save a lief (or two or twenty).
You're a member of the Society for the Protection of Scandanavian Peoples?
Sorry, slow day.
Loosely related; can you imagine playing Pong on the Wii? It strikes me as a surreal image, two people sitting on a sofa waving their white rectangular wiimotes up and down to control the white rectangular Pong paddles on the screen. With experience could you play looking at your opponent's wiimote instead of the screen?
>>I will refrain from using the word "innovation"
>No you won't, and I quote, "innovation."
Ah but, to make a point that nobody cares about, he wasn't _using_ the word "innovation", he was _mentioning_ it as evidenced by the double-quotes.
I swear these articles are like the Slashdot version of Two Minutes Hate.
Two minutes? You must be new here.
World of Warcraft is a remarkably good couples' game. My wife and I play it whenever we get a chance and she's just as addicted to it as I am. I know a bunch of female WoWers -- it seems to appeal to women (even ones that don't like computer games) far more than most games.
I hate to break it to you, but those 'female' WoW players are actually just 16 year old boys messing with you.
umm... how well do you know your 'wife'?
(jk!)
Not that I condone stealing, but I imagine the part that he's freaked out about is the felony charge for what I'm sure he assumed was a slightly clever way of shoplifting.
I can only hope that however this turns out he's only punished for 'slightly clever shoplifting', plus perhaps having the &#@! scared out of him with felony charges.
In the same way that laws which are selectively enforced are unjust, it would be unjust to put the kid away on a felony for what was, for all practical purposes, shoplifting.
A 25 yr old British man could be the first people in the world to have cured himself of the deadly HIV virus.
Now, curing HIV is all well and good but I think we're overlooking the real achievement here. These man - with no aid from the scientific establishment - have become more than one person!
It's funny, but this has been cropping up on Slashdot for ages now, and I haven't heard anyone mention surrealist arguments (this may not be the commonly accepted term - it's a while since I took the paper, and wikipedia doesn't know what I'm talking about).
A surrealist argument (iirc) is one that tries to explain some phenomenon by appeal to an undetectable power or state, e.g. the moon is moved in its orbit by invisible angels. The angels are completely undetectable (apart from their effect on the moon, of course), but they're there. Really. I swear. We can never see them, but they're there.
The problem with surrealist arguments is that they're not disprovable (they never make falsifiable predictions, which is something that DOES get mentioned in these discussions) and unfortunately defences against them usually have to be about lack of explanatory power... but that's another big can of worms. It could be that the moon really is moved in its orbit by invisible angels, but that state cannot be distinguished from the accepted scientific state by any experiment.
Now back to the topic at hand... Pretty much any argument that 'God did it' is a surrealist argument. If you don't want to accept the fossil record you can claim that God rigged to look like that, and the earth is really only 6000 years old. That state is is not experimentally distinguishable from the accepted scientific state.
Intelligent Design and the Flying Spaghetti Monster arguments are both surrealist too. The most important thing about the Flying Spaghetti Monster is that the logical arguments for his existence are exactly as compelling as for ID or the Christian God. The Noodly One is inherently ridiculous which helps reveal the flaws in arguments for His existence, but also unfortunately leads to people misinterpreting the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a parody in poor (or possibly tomatoey) taste.
This is actually a point I'd like some clarification on. One of the supposed strengths of open source is that if something is broken or doesn't work the way you want, you can just fix it yourself.
But if the code is GPL'd and you want to fix something, even if it's a minor tweak, you'll be stuck with an obligation to provide the source on request. If I understand this correctly, it seems just as bad as closed source software only more irritating because you can see what to fix but can't actually fix it without being responsible for providing the code on request. Even if you're happy to release the code for the change, any responsible business would have to implement policy and procedure for how the redistribution would take place.
So, for small changes it seems to me that the benefit of making the change would be outweighed by the cost incurred of having a formalised code redistribution system.
If I'm wrong please correct me. I don't like being wrong, and I like staying wrong even less.
Firefly you say... I haven't heard of it before. Was it any good?
(It's a joke, numbskull
It's a terrible mistake to think that IT is a geeky field, or that there is stigma attached to it.
Don't be fooled into thinking that IT professionals must be introverted socially inept pedants who live in their parents' basements just because that describes everybody currently in the field.
If you want that extra 10%, mess with your mouse gesture settings. I bound GestureUp to Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen , so you can lose those menu bars or bring them back with a flick of your wrist.
For the logically inclined, that | means OR, and & works for AND. Roll your own mouse gestures.
1.
Mouse gestures can be bound to an insane number of browser functions.
2.
Middle click to open a link in a new tab in the background - the only way to read slashdot.
3.
Fast Forward - follow the link that looks like it goes to the next page (even better when bound to a mouse gesture).
Those are the three big reasons. Not so different from firefox, with its extensions. I couldn't get firefox set up just how I wanted it though so if anyone would like to give me some hints, go ahead!
Oh yeah, and I'm quite attached to the google text ads too. It's interesting to see what google thinks is related to whatever I'm looking at.
Actually, IM minus touchtyping leads to poor english. IM conventions are a result of people who don't know the layout of a keyboard thinking "crap! I need to reply! where's the `e' key?", which results from real-time chat, or cruddy interfaces like text messages on mobile phones.
That's one of the reasons IM conventions don't show up much on slashdot; we all know our way around our keyboards intimately. The grammatical bottleneck is somewhere inside the user's head, rather than at the keyboard so a user's natural level of grammar comes out. (Hi Slashdot crew!)
So close to right that I can't resist replying... The problem is that if lifeform X perceives the book as some kind of collection over time (or something), it still has a concept of `the book'. Even if X can't differentiate between `the book now' and `the book always' (or something), it can still count by noting the existence of `the book' and `the other book' or `the book now' and `the book a little while ago'. It doesn't matter if X and you or me think that `the book' is the same thing; we're still enumerating.
In fact, as long as lifeform X can determine that [something] exists and [something else] exists (or even may exist), maths sneaks back in. If X cannot distinguish objects, the question of how it can interact with the world becomes much more interesting.
And this leads to a problem that's been bugging me for years: What is an object anyway? What I think of as `my desk' is just a local irregularity in the chemical soup on the surface of what I like to think of as a `planet' which is just...
OK, technical question. Assuming that the valid-key-generating hash is not shipped as part of the product, why would hackers crack the hundred-gazillions hash of which some work rather than the tens-of-millions hash which the company used to generate actual valid keys?
But that's not passive consumption. Reading an article/post and deciding that it's crap is active. And responding is participation. It would be passive if we were to read articles and not wonder whether they were crap or not. It's on the internet, it must be true.
" Why can't they make a good quality game about American soldiers hunting down evil terrorists? "
What? You mean that's not what it's about? I thought it was the America's Army mod for "The War Against Horror".
Why am I going to join the army if I don't get to hunt down Weapons of Mass Fraggage?