I've never understood this myself; yet I understand a lot about electronics. How a VA is not a Watt I am unsure; for now I just take it as face value that they are different units. If the GP or someone else would kindly explain better than Wikipedia does, I would appreciate it.
It's probably just some semantic detail I am overlooking. For example, for the longest time I did not understand why wall outlets are polarized. I mean, since alternating current flows in both directions, how can AC be polarized unless it has a DC offset? After a long time, I came to understand on my own it's not about positive/negative charges, but just an indicator of which conductor is hot and which leads to ground to complete the circuit.
You have to admit, there is something satisfying in reading a Slashdot summary, going "What the fuck was that?", then to read the comments and find you are not alone in your reaction.
It can be argued that personal medical information is potentially more important than you life savings. Just a few weeks ago some company in the UK was selling confidential data on worker's to building firms that illegally vetted new hires.
There are probably many unscrupulous companies out there that would vet new hires based on health factors such as mental health history, insurance risks (for companies with private insurance), or simply the fact that the STD you have may indicate you are more likely to sexually harass coworkers.
Someone having your online banking account information can only steal the money you have at that time. Someone having your medial information can steal your ability to make money.
I've written scripts for Adobe Acrobat Professional to interleave PDFs of scans from my single-duplex, automatic document feeder scanner. Can you believe that there are companies out there that charge $100 or so to do the same task with a plugin? Took me 15 min to write it in JavaScript myself.
As far as Reader though, I've seen some web-fill state tax forms that use Javascript for field validation.
Peak IP4 is a myth; there are still plenty of addresses buried in the Canadian tar sands. However, in the short term, the only solution is to lift the ban on coastal drilling for IP4 addresses.
Seriously now, WTF? Why is everyone acting like they've never had a BSOD on windows, a failed harddrive, a driver problem, or a vendor discontinue support? I use AWS, GAE and Google Apps and while there is a certain loss of control, the downtime I have experienced is far less than I would incur trying to roll my own infrastructure.
I've worked in a few companies with large IT budgets and have experienced more downtime in those environments than I have so far "in the cloud." I think the biggest problem with cloud computing, is when there is downtime, IT admins don't have anything else to do which frees up a lot of time for bitching about the downtime their blogs. Seems familiar from when I was an admin, except on the other side, it was my users bitching at me about an couple of hours of downtime a year.
I always thought that the way orbit worked was that you got far enough away that you could equalize the reduced pull of the earths gravity with your forward momentum to achieve a stable relationship.
Achieving orbit is not about how far away you are away, it's all about your angular velocity. You could theoretically achieve orbit at sea level, but atmospheric drag keeps that from happening on earth. As satellite orbits the Earth, it is constantly accelerating, not because its speed is increasing, rather because it is constantly changing direction (speed + direction = velocity, change in velocity = acceleration).
The acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s, so if you can achieve an acceleration of 9.8m/s in the opposite direction, you will be in constant free fall and establish an orbit.
It takes a lot of energy (32MJ/kg) to sustain this acceleration on Earth and maintain an orbit. However, you are correct that it takes less energy to enter into a geo-synchronous orbit than other types of orbits from different latitudes. Sorry I can't find a reference for it at the moment though.
I'll admit, I don't know what the N-Prize is and I did not RTFA; I am assuming the goal is to reach some kind of sub-orbital or LEO flight. I've looked in to this for my own balloon projects. The energy savings from using a balloon are only a small percentage of the overall energy required to achieve orbit.
It takes about 20 times the amount of energy to reach LEO than it does to just reach the same altitude. When you compare this energy requirement to the savings of launching from the ceiling height of a weather balloon (40km) it is not much; especially considering you still have to get to the Karman Line (100km) plus the weight of fuel required, which must then be lifted by even larger balloons. Therefore, it's more economical and efficient to burn the fuel as close to ground as possible.
I'm only an armchair rocket scientist though, so I might have this all wrong. In any case, I certainly wish them good luck - Maybe I'll go read the article now.
Just wanted to say thanks for the links and information. I'll be sure to read the Python documentation more, but it's always helpful to get some advice. Cheers.
Never heard of Django before, now it's everwhere
on
Practical Django Projects
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Only a day ago I would have been asking the same question. I have been a long time Java Developer and decided to trying deploying an application to the Google App Engine. Unfortunately, for me at least, only Python is supported so I have been forced to take a deeper look into Python.
The Google App Engine already has the Django libraries available. It's seems like a pretty useful template system, however I really wish they had chosen to use xml tags instead of parenthesis tags so that native xml tools, even browsers would display and work on the raw template more effectively.
On a side note, I have a question for any Java to Python converts out there. I am using Pydev for Eclipse, but I am missing the compile-time checking of static types, method signatures, etc. I've already experienced a few cycles of correct, save and repeat to find simple typos. I feel like I am back in the days of when I was Perl hacking. I know if I had unit tests for this it would make things a little better, but unit tests can't always cover 100%. Until I get to try the junit equivalent for Python (whatever that is), how do the rest of you deal with finding bugs that would have been compile time errors in other languages?
What I missed from the wiki is why you could not just host the random files locally, or generate them on the fly? If the URLs that are distributed are encoded to reassemble the original file from known random parts, why host those parts on other machines at all?
On aside note, assuming computing power is no problem, wouldn't it be better to distribute multiple MD5 hashes of 128kb chunks of a given file. Then through brute force reassemble the file by solving for what the MD5 represents. Not only are you drastically cutting way down on bandwidth, but arguably you are not committing copyright infringement by transferring hashes.
Perhaps MD5 is not even the best for this, maybe a hash that has a lot of collisions and then you need a primer (like a URL for OFFS) to reassemble the file correctly. Otherwise, you may reassemble the file to represent something else that had a collision with the hashes you have.
You could go on and on, and I've decided one way or another, you are transferring copyrighted works whether it's the information to assemble random pieces encoded in a URL, or MD5 hashes that are considered "derivative works". Fun problem to think about though.
I'm not surprised you may think this way if you never had to deal with actual friends. Unlike virtual friends, actual friends are becoming obsolete and it's becoming more and more difficult to satisfy their physical interface requirements. They don't work unless you have physical presence of the friend and even then, they require their own buffer space.
Virtual friend gaming on a PC is simple because only you interface with the monitor and the computer's input devices. But with actual friends, beware! Because of the physical presence requirement, you will get conflicts when trying to operate multiple actual friends on one set of input controls simultaneously. This can often lead to scuffles, fits, and even an occasional brew-hah-hah.
So that is why this antiquated mode of gaming, the console, exists. On a console, the input controls and output device are standardized and multiplexed. While this is totally unnecessary for virtual friend gaming, it makes actual friend gaming convenient and more importantly possible. However, it is not without its own pitfalls, as actual friend gaming may induce sociability, proper hygiene, and depending on the friend; dating.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I'm on a roll. I just tried recaptcha again and it's easy to change one letter or two and pass. I'm not sure why everyone thinks recaptcha is so great when there is a good chance it will pass if the word is similar (I would say OCR similar) to the word in the captcha.
If you think about it, how could it know what the word really is? They are using the captcha to digitize books, which means they don't know exactly what the word is since they they are not employing dedicated people to enter the word. So the captcha validation is s only going to be as good as a first pass OCR scan.
Because you don't have to crack it. Perhaps it has changed, but within the month or so it was first announced I found it very easy to enter words that were only similar to the captcha and yet passed. (e.g. time -> tine)
However, there are plenty of things that you'd struggle to even know were in use. What if it were some new modulation strategy to make the construction of multi-band cellphones easier; there could easily be millions of them in the market before it ever came to your attention.
The problem is the very nature of closed business IP. What carrier or manufacturer is going to give you detailed specifications on how their devices work? Anyone who has tried to contact a manufacturer of some electronic device because you want to hack/extend it knows all about this.
It's next to impossible to get that information to know if someone is infringing on your patent. If they have a similar/duplicate patent themselves, then its a little easier to do a search and find how theirs work. But you still have to suspect that company is infringing in the first place which may not be obvious without reverse engineering. And thanks to DMCA, that can make things complicated if it touches software.
You should have a set timelimit on using it. Either you exercise your patent right and setup royalty shit with other companies, or you start using the patented technology, otherwise it's fair game.
I guess. But as an independent scientist/inventor, I don't have the time to check up on what everyone else is doing while I am trying to make ends meet in my small business. I will never become a patent troll or use patents in evil ways. However, if I patent something novel, but I am just too small of a fish to do anything with it for the time being, my IP should be protected equally as the big corporations' patents.
Granted, it's wrong to know people are infringing and do nothing about it until there is a multi-billion dollar industry revolving around your patent. But you nor I know that is the case with this professor.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood this myself; yet I understand a lot about electronics. How a VA is not a Watt I am unsure; for now I just take it as face value that they are different units. If the GP or someone else would kindly explain better than Wikipedia does, I would appreciate it.
It's probably just some semantic detail I am overlooking. For example, for the longest time I did not understand why wall outlets are polarized. I mean, since alternating current flows in both directions, how can AC be polarized unless it has a DC offset? After a long time, I came to understand on my own it's not about positive/negative charges, but just an indicator of which conductor is hot and which leads to ground to complete the circuit.
You have to admit, there is something satisfying in reading a Slashdot summary, going "What the fuck was that?", then to read the comments and find you are not alone in your reaction.
It can be argued that personal medical information is potentially more important than you life savings. Just a few weeks ago some company in the UK was selling confidential data on worker's to building firms that illegally vetted new hires.
There are probably many unscrupulous companies out there that would vet new hires based on health factors such as mental health history, insurance risks (for companies with private insurance), or simply the fact that the STD you have may indicate you are more likely to sexually harass coworkers.
Someone having your online banking account information can only steal the money you have at that time. Someone having your medial information can steal your ability to make money.
No, it's a Viagra reference; because it gives malware authors a 4hr hard-on.
I've written scripts for Adobe Acrobat Professional to interleave PDFs of scans from my single-duplex, automatic document feeder scanner. Can you believe that there are companies out there that charge $100 or so to do the same task with a plugin? Took me 15 min to write it in JavaScript myself.
As far as Reader though, I've seen some web-fill state tax forms that use Javascript for field validation.
That and I can't get into any of my accounts easily without passwordmaker integrated to generate my SHA256 based passwords.
Peak IP4 is a myth; there are still plenty of addresses buried in the Canadian tar sands. However, in the short term, the only solution is to lift the ban on coastal drilling for IP4 addresses.
Seriously now, WTF? Why is everyone acting like they've never had a BSOD on windows, a failed harddrive, a driver problem, or a vendor discontinue support? I use AWS, GAE and Google Apps and while there is a certain loss of control, the downtime I have experienced is far less than I would incur trying to roll my own infrastructure.
I've worked in a few companies with large IT budgets and have experienced more downtime in those environments than I have so far "in the cloud." I think the biggest problem with cloud computing, is when there is downtime, IT admins don't have anything else to do which frees up a lot of time for bitching about the downtime their blogs. Seems familiar from when I was an admin, except on the other side, it was my users bitching at me about an couple of hours of downtime a year.
Achieving orbit is not about how far away you are away, it's all about your angular velocity. You could theoretically achieve orbit at sea level, but atmospheric drag keeps that from happening on earth.
As satellite orbits the Earth, it is constantly accelerating, not because its speed is increasing, rather because it is constantly changing direction (speed + direction = velocity, change in velocity = acceleration).
The acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s, so if you can achieve an acceleration of 9.8m/s in the opposite direction, you will be in constant free fall and establish an orbit.
It takes a lot of energy (32MJ/kg) to sustain this acceleration on Earth and maintain an orbit. However, you are correct that it takes less energy to enter into a geo-synchronous orbit than other types of orbits from different latitudes. Sorry I can't find a reference for it at the moment though.
I might have answered your question in another post.
I'll admit, I don't know what the N-Prize is and I did not RTFA; I am assuming the goal is to reach some kind of sub-orbital or LEO flight. I've looked in to this for my own balloon projects. The energy savings from using a balloon are only a small percentage of the overall energy required to achieve orbit.
It takes about 20 times the amount of energy to reach LEO than it does to just reach the same altitude. When you compare this energy requirement to the savings of launching from the ceiling height of a weather balloon (40km) it is not much; especially considering you still have to get to the Karman Line (100km) plus the weight of fuel required, which must then be lifted by even larger balloons. Therefore, it's more economical and efficient to burn the fuel as close to ground as possible.
I'm only an armchair rocket scientist though, so I might have this all wrong. In any case, I certainly wish them good luck - Maybe I'll go read the article now.
Just wanted to say thanks for the links and information. I'll be sure to read the Python documentation more, but it's always helpful to get some advice. Cheers.
Only a day ago I would have been asking the same question. I have been a long time Java Developer and decided to trying deploying an application to the Google App Engine. Unfortunately, for me at least, only Python is supported so I have been forced to take a deeper look into Python.
The Google App Engine already has the Django libraries available. It's seems like a pretty useful template system, however I really wish they had chosen to use xml tags instead of parenthesis tags so that native xml tools, even browsers would display and work on the raw template more effectively.
On a side note, I have a question for any Java to Python converts out there. I am using Pydev for Eclipse, but I am missing the compile-time checking of static types, method signatures, etc. I've already experienced a few cycles of correct, save and repeat to find simple typos. I feel like I am back in the days of when I was Perl hacking. I know if I had unit tests for this it would make things a little better, but unit tests can't always cover 100%. Until I get to try the junit equivalent for Python (whatever that is), how do the rest of you deal with finding bugs that would have been compile time errors in other languages?
What I missed from the wiki is why you could not just host the random files locally, or generate them on the fly? If the URLs that are distributed are encoded to reassemble the original file from known random parts, why host those parts on other machines at all?
On aside note, assuming computing power is no problem, wouldn't it be better to distribute multiple MD5 hashes of 128kb chunks of a given file. Then through brute force reassemble the file by solving for what the MD5 represents. Not only are you drastically cutting way down on bandwidth, but arguably you are not committing copyright infringement by transferring hashes.
Perhaps MD5 is not even the best for this, maybe a hash that has a lot of collisions and then you need a primer (like a URL for OFFS) to reassemble the file correctly. Otherwise, you may reassemble the file to represent something else that had a collision with the hashes you have.
You could go on and on, and I've decided one way or another, you are transferring copyrighted works whether it's the information to assemble random pieces encoded in a URL, or MD5 hashes that are considered "derivative works". Fun problem to think about though.
Thanks, I had no idea. I Googled for a correct spelling but Brew-hah-hah came up in quite a few places.
Virtual friend gaming on a PC is simple because only you interface with the monitor and the computer's input devices. But with actual friends, beware! Because of the physical presence requirement, you will get conflicts when trying to operate multiple actual friends on one set of input controls simultaneously. This can often lead to scuffles, fits, and even an occasional brew-hah-hah.
So that is why this antiquated mode of gaming, the console, exists. On a console, the input controls and output device are standardized and multiplexed. While this is totally unnecessary for virtual friend gaming, it makes actual friend gaming convenient and more importantly possible. However, it is not without its own pitfalls, as actual friend gaming may induce sociability, proper hygiene, and depending on the friend; dating.
Why Skeletor, I had no idea you cared!
- Balance and dexterity of humans is available to the machine.
- Human decision making, feature recognition, senses and empathy are all available to the machine.
- Resilience, if the machine is damaged, the squishy bits can crawl out and still fight for a brief extended time.
Computing and robotics are not yet to the state that any of these can equate to the level of human ability.Yeah, except it doesn't work as a turing test. You can change 1 or 2 letters in both words and usually get a correct. Try it.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I'm on a roll. I just tried recaptcha again and it's easy to change one letter or two and pass. I'm not sure why everyone thinks recaptcha is so great when there is a good chance it will pass if the word is similar (I would say OCR similar) to the word in the captcha.
If you think about it, how could it know what the word really is? They are using the captcha to digitize books, which means they don't know exactly what the word is since they they are not employing dedicated people to enter the word. So the captcha validation is s only going to be as good as a first pass OCR scan.
Because you don't have to crack it. Perhaps it has changed, but within the month or so it was first announced I found it very easy to enter words that were only similar to the captcha and yet passed. (e.g. time -> tine)
It's next to impossible to get that information to know if someone is infringing on your patent. If they have a similar/duplicate patent themselves, then its a little easier to do a search and find how theirs work. But you still have to suspect that company is infringing in the first place which may not be obvious without reverse engineering. And thanks to DMCA, that can make things complicated if it touches software.
Granted, it's wrong to know people are infringing and do nothing about it until there is a multi-billion dollar industry revolving around your patent. But you nor I know that is the case with this professor.