That's quantum mechanics - the universe was in a superposition of containing organization x and not containing it, and by turning to page 137 or 25 you collapsed the wavefunction.
Either that, or it was a neat way of making sure you could re-play the game without knowledge of what was going to happen if you took a different turn early on...
I hear ya. I know full well that GoDaddy isn't a fault, but if someone is scamming out of their searches, it only hurts the scammers to test:) I'd like to see the squatters die out, but I guess any ruling has got to be balanced with people who have legitimately registered a domain that someone else wants...
Here comes the clue by four...
Right, so I test a site on GoDaddy, and next minute it's taken... Someone takes it, so we test a bunch of useless sites, hey presto, they're taken by the same people. So whoever takes them gets a load of useless sites, a lot of "noise" for their "signal" of wanted sites. Eventually their model becomes unfeasable...
"If you are gonna bash someone or thing at least get it right"
Oh, the irony.
Time to start the GoDaddy project? They just got SLIPLIPS.COM, HOTSHOTMOTNOT.COM, NODADDYTOGO.COM BLOBLOTTOTSOT.COM - anyone want to keep going on this one?
Actually, to post on Arxiv, you have to have someone refer you. Not anyone can post to it, they need a respected author to approve (not agree with you, just agree that you should be allowed to post). See http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement for the endorsement details.
To an extent, it depends on which aspect science you are talking about. Experiments (and in particular fact checking/verification of data) can be laborious and a bore at times, but again sometimes during this process you detect something new. As a theorist there is a lot of banging ones head against a brick wall, or following tracks that lead nowhere, but also there are sometimes insights that set your mind ablaze and excite you so that you work on them until you realize it's 6am and you told your wife you'd be home at 5 the evening before...
A lot of science, yes, is repetetive due to the nature of statistics - you need a large sample if you're going to reliably claim anything. That said though, there are again exciting, nerve-wracking moments when the data comes in and you find out whether or not you've discovered something.
As for science being "just for the brainy" this a ridiculous statement. Science is done by people who have incredible insights into the world and people who slowly and methodically puzzle things out. What non-scientists don't seem to understand is that 99% of the time the scientist is just as confused as everyone else is, they just spend the time and effort to try to come to terms with things. I'm not saying that scientists aren't smart, but a lot of hyperbole scares the normal person away from spending a while as confused as the scientist was when he first thought about things and trying to piece together the way that it works.
I know it's kinda random, but my school actually uses them for the physical plant guys to get around - see
http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2004_11_11_segway/i ndex.html
It's always kinda funny to see them going around on those things, looking embarassed as hell. But then again, it's faster than walking. The size of some of them makes you think a bike would have been better though...
Absolutely - If I had mod points you'd be sitting higher by now! How fast would a newspaper come down on someone nicking their stuff and posting it online without their ads and revenue source? All you really need to do is hit a couple of newspapers hard enough, or scare them enough, that editors google a random phrase from each article to see if it's plagiarised. Anyone remember how fast the universities caved in to the mp3 sharing demands a few years ago? They now do the policing for the music industry, watching students' uploads and making them sign crazily restrictive network agreements.
It's not a long task for an editor to do a quick check (especially if you pick a mid length sentence and put quotes around it in your search) and would catch a bunch of lazy journos. If you really think the blog says it best, quote the blog and give it the credit it deserves. Plus it would give the editors a chance to see exactly which of their journalists were the useless ones who were being overpaid to do a job that requires no skill other than a google search and a copy and paste in MS word. You could even hire someone to do this, contact the author for the rights and credit them for much less that the journo gets.
Hell, what would happen if one newspaper copied another directly?
Please don't just cut and paste the first paragraph of the article - you're supposed to put a little more effort in to things than that. Cue millions of posts about lazy editors...
Well, they're not entirely disjointed - the "flatness" problem with the universe has a lot to do with the links between the two. However, the two can be thought about separately.
No problem on the reply - this is my area of research, hopefully I can explain it well enough that people will understand it!
It is possible to have the universe expand and contract in different directions at the same time. However, this isn't what we observe. Two of the basic ideas about the universe we assume to be broadly true (yes, not exactly but to a good approximation) are
1) It is homogeneous. This is math speak for it's the same at every point 2) It is isotropic. Math speak for looks the same in every direction.
Now, this clearly isn't exactly true - if it were there would be no difference between the earth and an empty vacuum of the same size. However, on a very very large scale (where galaxies appear like point particles because they are so small) this appears to be true. We get this from the Cosmic Microwave Background - a set of rays that fly towards us from all around the universe in a fairly uniform manner. Also when you look at the "Redshift" of galaxies (like the doppler shift of sound makes a siren sound higher when an ambulance approaches and lower when it moves away) it looks like all galaxies are moving apart from one another in equivalent directions. So we guess that the universe is largely isotropic and homogeneous, make a broad model and then do corrections (perturbations about the solutions to the equations) for the bits that aren't.
So given the idea that it's isotropic and homogeneous we get that it must expand at the same rate in all directions etc. However, there's nothing in the everyday physics to say that it necessarily is - just the observations of some cosmic phenomena.
The asteroids thing is kind of a side point - that's more to do with the topology of the universe. Asteroids is like a torus (or donut with a hole) shape - you go one way for a while you end up back where you started. Some models of the universe have the universe be a 3-torus (an extension of the donut in another dimension, cue Homer drool). However, the universe is broadly thought to be either flat (just like regular space looks) a 3-sphere (like a ball but with another dimension again) or a hyperboloid (hard to explain, but like the inverse of the sphere). This all depends on the matter in the universe and the cosmological constant in a fairly complex way.
Although if you mean that the universe could cycle, that again is possible - it could expand, contract, expand again indefinitely. If you look at the works of Bojowald, for example, on Loop Quantum Gravity he seems to think that the big bang could be just part of a cycle of expansion and contraction.
But I think we all know what he means is that the number of botnets shows that there is a lot of broadband takeup in the UK which is a good thing. It's like saying that a lot of BMWs have been keyed means that there are a lot of BMWs around. As per usual, someone at the DTL appears to be incapable of getting their meaning across but at least interpret it as you think it was meant.
PS: I don't entirely agree that a lot of botnets means a lot of broadband in a 1:1 ratio, but I think this is what TFA was supposed to imply.
On TFA ther is a banner that contains a quote from someone at their organisation, calling it Open Source Media... Methinks a publicity stunt has been pulled here: Change name to something controversial, get Slashdot etc riled up about it, get a lot of page hits etc, change name back.
I see a lot of people questioning the reasoning here, saying that it's ridiculous to pay $2.49 or whatever for a song. The premise, however, is that people are ALREADY PAYING JUST THAT for a small section of the song as a ringtone so they will probably take the whole song for the same price. Hell, if they offer the song and ringtone snippet combined for the same price, they're probably onto a winner. I know that neither you (informed Slashdot reader) nor I (cheapskate student) would pay this much, but if people are already laying out the cash for this stuff why not sell it this convenient way?
Please re-read my comment, I merely said that there needs to be more analysis than raw numbers. As a matter of interest, I did investigate hundreds of universities (literally) throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas (yes, both N and S) before finally selecting the ones to which I applied. I investigated based on the works of people there, my own fields of interest, probability of finding an academic position afterwards, funding, etc etc. It took a long time, and I did see some good places outside the US to go to. But for me the best places were in the US.
However, I think this is a mis-reading of my comment. I just said that there needs to be more investigation than just straight numbers. I specifically stated that I was not saying that Asian universities are all bad (some are very good in fact) just that we can't just say X>Y so help us god we're going under.
Yes, the US graduates fewer PhDs in math and physics. I'm trying to be one of them. But the quality of the US PhD programs are what brought me here (I'm not USian). You can graduate a million PhDs from a degree farm somewhere but if they haven't had the same level of education they aren't going to be as influential. I'm not saying that asian universities are bad, just that there needs to be a deeper insight into this than just raw numbers.
Same for me - I'm a grad student. I'd do what I do for free, but I have a family to keep fed and housed. People don't seem to realize that vocations aren't done for free - we need to be kept alive!
Yep, and by making a better lock I just encourage the lock-pickers to improve their skills, right? And building higher fences just teaches animals to jump even higher to get over them? Steel cages just mean I have to get stronger to bend the bars back?
Come back when you've got an argument worth stating.
Right, I seem to remember someone exploiting with a malformed.doc file - something about the data being longer than was specified opening another copy of the same document ad infinitum.
Wow, IANAL but I'm surprised that you can be sacked for something that tame. Still, the old adage applies - never write something on an email that you wouldn't put on a postcard.
This is probably an old idea but: How about have your client set up so it is required to send a set copyright piece of information (copyright held by some third party) in order to request a file / file list? That way, the only way to get a list of files someone has would be to do something illegal, and hence the **AA can be sued everytime they go after someone as they must have infringed a copyright law to do it.
Eg: Bjorntorrent can be downloaded, and includes an encoded file, Bjorn, copyright me, that only I have the right to distribute. Written into Bjorntorrent is the constraint that in order to get my file list someone must send me a copy of that encoded Bjorn. Thereby anyone requesting and getting a file list from Susan, say, has broken my copyright by sending Susan a copy of Bjorn against my wishes, and hence I can sue them. Obviously I won't go after anyone unless they try to sue Susan for sharing files. It's a bit clumsy, but some neater variation might work.
Slashdot Mirror
That's quantum mechanics - the universe was in a superposition of containing organization x and not containing it, and by turning to page 137 or 25 you collapsed the wavefunction. Either that, or it was a neat way of making sure you could re-play the game without knowledge of what was going to happen if you took a different turn early on...
I hear ya. I know full well that GoDaddy isn't a fault, but if someone is scamming out of their searches, it only hurts the scammers to test :) I'd like to see the squatters die out, but I guess any ruling has got to be balanced with people who have legitimately registered a domain that someone else wants...
Here comes the clue by four... Right, so I test a site on GoDaddy, and next minute it's taken... Someone takes it, so we test a bunch of useless sites, hey presto, they're taken by the same people. So whoever takes them gets a load of useless sites, a lot of "noise" for their "signal" of wanted sites. Eventually their model becomes unfeasable... "If you are gonna bash someone or thing at least get it right" Oh, the irony.
Time to start the GoDaddy project? They just got SLIPLIPS.COM, HOTSHOTMOTNOT.COM, NODADDYTOGO.COM BLOBLOTTOTSOT.COM - anyone want to keep going on this one?
Actually, to post on Arxiv, you have to have someone refer you. Not anyone can post to it, they need a respected author to approve (not agree with you, just agree that you should be allowed to post). See http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement for the endorsement details.
To an extent, it depends on which aspect science you are talking about. Experiments (and in particular fact checking/verification of data) can be laborious and a bore at times, but again sometimes during this process you detect something new. As a theorist there is a lot of banging ones head against a brick wall, or following tracks that lead nowhere, but also there are sometimes insights that set your mind ablaze and excite you so that you work on them until you realize it's 6am and you told your wife you'd be home at 5 the evening before...
A lot of science, yes, is repetetive due to the nature of statistics - you need a large sample if you're going to reliably claim anything. That said though, there are again exciting, nerve-wracking moments when the data comes in and you find out whether or not you've discovered something.
As for science being "just for the brainy" this a ridiculous statement. Science is done by people who have incredible insights into the world and people who slowly and methodically puzzle things out. What non-scientists don't seem to understand is that 99% of the time the scientist is just as confused as everyone else is, they just spend the time and effort to try to come to terms with things. I'm not saying that scientists aren't smart, but a lot of hyperbole scares the normal person away from spending a while as confused as the scientist was when he first thought about things and trying to piece together the way that it works.
I know it's kinda random, but my school actually uses them for the physical plant guys to get around - see http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2004_11_11_segway/i ndex.html
It's always kinda funny to see them going around on those things, looking embarassed as hell. But then again, it's faster than walking. The size of some of them makes you think a bike would have been better though...
Absolutely - If I had mod points you'd be sitting higher by now! How fast would a newspaper come down on someone nicking their stuff and posting it online without their ads and revenue source? All you really need to do is hit a couple of newspapers hard enough, or scare them enough, that editors google a random phrase from each article to see if it's plagiarised. Anyone remember how fast the universities caved in to the mp3 sharing demands a few years ago? They now do the policing for the music industry, watching students' uploads and making them sign crazily restrictive network agreements.
It's not a long task for an editor to do a quick check (especially if you pick a mid length sentence and put quotes around it in your search) and would catch a bunch of lazy journos. If you really think the blog says it best, quote the blog and give it the credit it deserves. Plus it would give the editors a chance to see exactly which of their journalists were the useless ones who were being overpaid to do a job that requires no skill other than a google search and a copy and paste in MS word. You could even hire someone to do this, contact the author for the rights and credit them for much less that the journo gets.
Hell, what would happen if one newspaper copied another directly?
Please don't just cut and paste the first paragraph of the article - you're supposed to put a little more effort in to things than that. Cue millions of posts about lazy editors...
Well, they're not entirely disjointed - the "flatness" problem with the universe has a lot to do with the links between the two. However, the two can be thought about separately.
No problem on the reply - this is my area of research, hopefully I can explain it well enough that people will understand it!
Not a stupid question at all.
It is possible to have the universe expand and contract in different directions at the same time. However, this isn't what we observe. Two of the basic ideas about the universe we assume to be broadly true (yes, not exactly but to a good approximation) are
1) It is homogeneous. This is math speak for it's the same at every point
2) It is isotropic. Math speak for looks the same in every direction.
Now, this clearly isn't exactly true - if it were there would be no difference between the earth and an empty vacuum of the same size. However, on a very very large scale (where galaxies appear like point particles because they are so small) this appears to be true. We get this from the Cosmic Microwave Background - a set of rays that fly towards us from all around the universe in a fairly uniform manner. Also when you look at the "Redshift" of galaxies (like the doppler shift of sound makes a siren sound higher when an ambulance approaches and lower when it moves away) it looks like all galaxies are moving apart from one another in equivalent directions. So we guess that the universe is largely isotropic and homogeneous, make a broad model and then do corrections (perturbations about the solutions to the equations) for the bits that aren't.
So given the idea that it's isotropic and homogeneous we get that it must expand at the same rate in all directions etc. However, there's nothing in the everyday physics to say that it necessarily is - just the observations of some cosmic phenomena.
The asteroids thing is kind of a side point - that's more to do with the topology of the universe. Asteroids is like a torus (or donut with a hole) shape - you go one way for a while you end up back where you started. Some models of the universe have the universe be a 3-torus (an extension of the donut in another dimension, cue Homer drool). However, the universe is broadly thought to be either flat (just like regular space looks) a 3-sphere (like a ball but with another dimension again) or a hyperboloid (hard to explain, but like the inverse of the sphere). This all depends on the matter in the universe and the cosmological constant in a fairly complex way.
Although if you mean that the universe could cycle, that again is possible - it could expand, contract, expand again indefinitely. If you look at the works of Bojowald, for example, on Loop Quantum Gravity he seems to think that the big bang could be just part of a cycle of expansion and contraction.
But I think we all know what he means is that the number of botnets shows that there is a lot of broadband takeup in the UK which is a good thing. It's like saying that a lot of BMWs have been keyed means that there are a lot of BMWs around. As per usual, someone at the DTL appears to be incapable of getting their meaning across but at least interpret it as you think it was meant. PS: I don't entirely agree that a lot of botnets means a lot of broadband in a 1:1 ratio, but I think this is what TFA was supposed to imply.
On TFA ther is a banner that contains a quote from someone at their organisation, calling it Open Source Media... Methinks a publicity stunt has been pulled here: Change name to something controversial, get Slashdot etc riled up about it, get a lot of page hits etc, change name back.
I see a lot of people questioning the reasoning here, saying that it's ridiculous to pay $2.49 or whatever for a song. The premise, however, is that people are ALREADY PAYING JUST THAT for a small section of the song as a ringtone so they will probably take the whole song for the same price. Hell, if they offer the song and ringtone snippet combined for the same price, they're probably onto a winner. I know that neither you (informed Slashdot reader) nor I (cheapskate student) would pay this much, but if people are already laying out the cash for this stuff why not sell it this convenient way?
Please re-read my comment, I merely said that there needs to be more analysis than raw numbers. As a matter of interest, I did investigate hundreds of universities (literally) throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas (yes, both N and S) before finally selecting the ones to which I applied. I investigated based on the works of people there, my own fields of interest, probability of finding an academic position afterwards, funding, etc etc. It took a long time, and I did see some good places outside the US to go to. But for me the best places were in the US. However, I think this is a mis-reading of my comment. I just said that there needs to be more investigation than just straight numbers. I specifically stated that I was not saying that Asian universities are all bad (some are very good in fact) just that we can't just say X>Y so help us god we're going under.
Yes, the US graduates fewer PhDs in math and physics. I'm trying to be one of them. But the quality of the US PhD programs are what brought me here (I'm not USian). You can graduate a million PhDs from a degree farm somewhere but if they haven't had the same level of education they aren't going to be as influential. I'm not saying that asian universities are bad, just that there needs to be a deeper insight into this than just raw numbers.
Same for me - I'm a grad student. I'd do what I do for free, but I have a family to keep fed and housed. People don't seem to realize that vocations aren't done for free - we need to be kept alive!
Yep, and by making a better lock I just encourage the lock-pickers to improve their skills, right? And building higher fences just teaches animals to jump even higher to get over them? Steel cages just mean I have to get stronger to bend the bars back?
Come back when you've got an argument worth stating.
Right, I seem to remember someone exploiting with a malformed .doc file - something about the data being longer than was specified opening another copy of the same document ad infinitum.
Microsoft Word XP was rejected because the code had to seem innocent...
Wow, IANAL but I'm surprised that you can be sacked for something that tame. Still, the old adage applies - never write something on an email that you wouldn't put on a postcard.
Hmm, (searches for explanation): Yesterday was Cinqo de Mayo...Nope, I got nothing
Eg: Bjorntorrent can be downloaded, and includes an encoded file, Bjorn, copyright me, that only I have the right to distribute. Written into Bjorntorrent is the constraint that in order to get my file list someone must send me a copy of that encoded Bjorn. Thereby anyone requesting and getting a file list from Susan, say, has broken my copyright by sending Susan a copy of Bjorn against my wishes, and hence I can sue them. Obviously I won't go after anyone unless they try to sue Susan for sharing files. It's a bit clumsy, but some neater variation might work.