I took his suggestion as "rather than worry about the leak in the hull, notice the entire front of the boat is missing and learn how to swim." The point is, even if the current warming is man made, Earth has been much warmer before and that warming was undeniably not man-made. It's not unreasonable to believe at some point in the future it will warm up to that point again, regardless of what we do. Thus, lets use this warming period as practice for the bigger ones to come.
Not all virtualization requires hardware extensions. In fact, VMware was doing it long before Intel and AMD added virtualization support to their processors. VMware pulled this off by doing dynamic translation, where the virtual machine monitor would transparently rewrite native x86 into virtualized x86 code. For the most part this was just doing a straight copy, and perhaps rewriting some jump addresses. Privileged code that runs in the OS kernel had to be rewritten as something equivalent that would run fine in an unprivileged process.
This really isn't so different from running.NET or Java code. The code starts out compiled to a virtual instruction set, and the JIT compiler translates this on the fly to something that can run natively on the CPU.
This is also how Rosetta worked in Mac OS X to run PPC apps on an x86 processor. XBox 360 does a similar thing to run old XBox games, since the 360 uses a PPC processor but the old XBox was x86.
Sure, you take a performance hit in doing this, but the apps generally get rewritten to run natively eventually, and the ones that don't end up being old enough that they run faster on modern hardware even with the extra translation layer.
I wonder how the answers would have changed if instead of asking "Is X true" they asked "The current mainstream scientific theory holds that X is true." Asking "Is X true" implies "Do you believe that X is true." I know for me, I think I would score fairly well on my general knowledge of mainstream scientific theory. That doesn't imply I believe everything held by the current theories.
I'm probably very much a minority in my view, but I'm a creationist who actually has a lot of respect for Dawkins. I respect him because he's very straightforward about what he beliefs. He doesn't make any attempt to sugar-coat them to make them more palatable to religious people. For example, comparing him to the lady from (IIRC) the National Science Educators Association in the movie Expelled. The NSEA lady was being very accommodating and explain how there's no conflict between "science" and "religion" and how most Evangelicals in the US secretly believe in evolution anyway. Dawkins, on the other hand, was very blunt about his view that with a purely naturalistic worldview there was absolutely no need to consider any sort of god at all. I found Dawkin's approach much more honest, and even though I disagree with his views on our origins, I respect him for his honesty.
You can use Firefox on Windows. There is a new beta Silverlight-based player that I know for sure works on IE, Firefox for Windows, and Safari on a Mac. It doesn't work in Google Chrome though. Anyway, you have to opt in by going to some web site that wasn't directly mentioned on the Netflix site, but a simple web search should find it pretty quickly.
I think the issue really has more to do with address spaces than reserving memory, although the end result is similar. Windows (and probably most other operating systems) typically maps the lower half of the address space for the current process, while the upper half in all processes is mapped to the kernel. If you think of memory addresses as signed values, positive addresses are for user mode and negative addresses are for the kernel. If you can't address the memory, obviously you can't use it, which is where the 2GB limit comes in.
The advantage of doing things this way is that the kernel is present in every process. This means when someone moves the mouse and triggers an interrupt, you don't have to switch to the mouse handler process to take care of the interrupt, you can do it from the context of whatever process happens to be running. It also lets you make system calls without having to fiddle around with the address space too much also.
It's probably not what they had in mind, but my state just legalized physician-assisted suicide during the last elections. I'm pretty sure the law only allows a doctor to prescribe a lethal injection, but if not I suppose a doctor could prescribe one of these things for the alleviation of a terminal illness.
To be a tad bit pedantic, there is a small chance that RF noise could cause your text message to be garbled. The digital carrier is still modulated over something that's analog, which means you might receive a 1 when you were sent a 0. Checksums and other error coding can help you detect when stuff like this happens, but it will always be possible that enough bits will flip in just the right way that you won't be able to detect the error.
When the times required it amendments have been made to the US constitution, do you really think that (a constitutional amendment) is the only way to include healthcare in the list of things the federal government has the right to promote as part of the general welfare?
Yes.
The Constitution specifies what the US federal government can do, and also sets explicit limits that the federal government must not go beyond without a Constitutional amendment. These limits are only effective if we choose to follow them, and I think we should be uniform in the way we follow them. Suppose for some unimaginable reason we decided we needed to ban a particularly dangerous religion. Should we let a pesky thing like needing to repeal the First Amendment stop us? What about needing to fight a war, is there really time to get a declaration of war from congress like the Constitution requires?
The Constitution is over 200 years old now. Some of the things in the original document, such as the 3/5ths clause for slaves, have no place in today's society. The people who wrote this document knew that it would some day be centuries out of date, and they added an amendment process to provide a legal way to update it with the times.
Following the Constitution has become seriously out of favor in recent years. In the 20s, we banned alcohol, and the nation at that time felt it necessary to do so through a Constitutional amendment. For some reason today we ban all kinds of substances, yet have made no such amendments supporting these things. Declarations of war have gone seriously out of fashion, to the best of my knowledge, the last declared war the US fought was World War II, over 50 years ago. Many of the things regarding Guantanamo Bay and the PATRIOT act strike me as Constitutionally questionable, at best.
I don't really care if the rest of the world is screaming past me. I care that we follow the laws that we the people agreed to be governed by, and that if they need to be extended or otherwise modified, that we do so by those very same laws.
But imagine if all wars were fought by proxy. Instead of sending people, we send machines. Let the machines battle it out. To be really civil we should also limit the power and effectiveness of our killer robots, and the number of machines that can enter the battlefield at once.
If two parties could agree on a set of rules for a war-by-proxy like that, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be fighting in the first place.
I know people like to complain that patents stifle innovation, but this is arguably one case where patents have increased innovation. Rather than just copy Microsoft's scroll wheel design, they were forced to come up with something new and different because of the patent.
Doesn't saying an omnipotent god can do anything that's logically possible mean that said omnipotent god is only as powerful as logic, at best? Instead, an omnipotent god must first create the rules of logic, and then choose to follow them.
It's sort of like a chess board. You might imagine the rooks arguing with each other about whether the chess player could move a rock diagonally. They might claim that's nonsense, since it's inherently impossible for rooks to move diagonally. Clearly we can physically move them diagonally, but we choose to follow the rules of chess when playing because the game wouldn't be much fun otherwise.
But course language? It never was the word that was offensive, it was the meaning...and there are plenty of messages to get the meaning out without using the words.
I disagree. Consider that you can usually substitute another word and suddenly your sentence becomes much less offensive. If you say crap, darn, freaking, butthole, or whatever, you still have pretty much the same meaning, but now a lot less people will be offended by it. Maybe it's not quite the same meaning in that the euphemistic version will not carry the same weight, but if that's the case, there's no point in separating the word from its meaning. They are effectively the same.
Your point about the F word being over used to the point that it has almost no meaning is more evidence that it's the word and not the meaning that's offensive.
In college I was working on a collaborative programming project in one of my classes. It was one that didn't really lend itself well to decomposing into things we could work on independently. We were using Emacs as our editor, which has this cool feature where you can open new frames on completely different displays. Thus, the guy I was working with and I each had our own Emacs window on our own computer and were editing the same file at the same time. I was impressed.
To be honest, I'm not terribly thrilled by the outcome of this election. Not that I was all that enamored by McCain either, but I did like him better than Obama. One thing I am happy about though is that all the elections I've been watching seem to have been pretty clearly decided, even if not in my favor. I'm glad we don't have to go through months of charges of fraud, recounts, court cases, hanging chads, people who can't spell, etc. While it's important to address the wrongs when they happen, they last several elections have damaged my faith in American Democracy. I'm glad that in this case, at the very least, the result was clear.
Out of curiosity, where would you go? Is there really anywhere you'd like the politics of better than the US, even with a Democrat-controlled House, Senate and Presidency?
About 13 years or so ago, we were dissecting pig eyeballs at school. My friend and I decided it'd be cool to keep ours, so we cut it in half and each of us took one half home and stuck it in a freezer. Several years after that, I checked and the half an eye was still in the freezer, so I left it there. My family's moved since then, and presumably we cleaned out the freezer when that happened and the eye is no more, but my friend's family is still in the same place, so there may very well still be half an eye in his freezer.
Until "Neither" appears on the ballots not voing is a perfect valid way to voice your opinion, sadly it hard to tell if people are protesting or being lazy sometimes.
There are plenty of third parties on the ballot that make an acceptable vote for "Neither." You can even write in your own candidate if you don't like any of the third party candidates. Vote for yourself if you want.
That said, it's certainly your right not to vote. It's also your right to complain if you choose not to vote. I'd encourage people to vote and complain instead of not voting and not complaining though.
No, if I don't vote it will make no difference whatsoever. I live in a state that will definitely go Democratic.
I also live in a state that will almost certainly go Democrat. I voted for Bob Barr (absentee, I know election day is actually tomorrow), even though I know he has no chance of winning. I saw one poll today that predicts Obama getting 54% of the popular vote, and McCain getting something like 42% of the popular vote. Notice that there's 12% not accounted for. Let's pretend 6% of these are for the Libertarian party, and that many of the Libertarian voters are disaffected Republicans like myself. If, for example, the Republicans next time around adopt some of the Libertarian party's ideas, they may win back half of these Libertarian votes, getting them another 3%. For races as close as we've seen in recent years, that's hugely important.
In other words, even voting third party isn't throwing your vote away. It's a way of pointing out what's important to people that aren't happy with the two major parties. It can help influence the future directions of the major parties.
Given that there are only 2^128 possible values for md5(a), and effectively infinite possible values for x (since it can be any length), I'd say if you happen to find an x with md5(x) equal to md5(a), it's almost certain that x != a.
I mean, I get the point of Surface itself. I do. What I don't get is what value this other layer has over doing the same thing in software.
If you were to do something like this purely in software, you'd just have a flat image on a flat screen, with no tactile feedback when you touch it. This way, you can interact with the computer by moving and manipulating actual physical objects. Instead of saying "Touch here, then slide your finger across the table" you can say "Pick up this paper and put it where you want it." I think moving the actual paper will be a lot more intuitive to people.
I dunno, the actual technology seems really simple. But on the other hand it is rather innovative and I'ce never seen it before.
A lot of good ideas seem really obvious in retrospect. They're the kind of things that make you go, "Huh, why didn't I think of that?" Being a good inventor is about having the insight to think of those simple things no one else has thought of yet, actually going and and doing them, and then demonstrating how they are useful. Probably if it doesn't seem simple in retrospect, it won't be that useful either.
Do you have any numbers on how much space was used on extra versions for a "typical" distribution of files and usage patterns?
Plan 9 from Bell Labs introduced a file system called Venti. Basically, it was a massive, append-only file system which was meant for archival purposes. You could never delete anything from this, you just add new things or new versions of previous files. You could always go back and view previous versions. If I recall correctly, it didn't do single-instance-store, where it would try to only store identical copies of files in one place, which would have made it more space-efficient.
One of the things they noticed was that the file system grows very slowly over time, such that you would normally get a bigger hard drive anyway by the time you fill up a drive with Venti. It seems surprising at first, but if you think about it, it's not too surprising. Most of your disk space usage probably comes from new data, not updated old data. You may take some more photos, save some more video, get some more e-mail, or write some new documents. Sure, you may go back and edit your expense tracking spreadsheet, but for one, you are probably adding new information and not updating old information, and for two, the spreadsheet is tiny compared to your photos.
I guess this is just a long way of saying that saving history forever generally requires only a little more space than saving all your data in the first place.
I live in Seattle, which is far enough from the equator that we probably see at least a 6 hour variation in the number of daylight areas. My experience is that daylight savings makes it stay light way too late in the summer, and not nearly late enough in the winter. I'm in favor of getting rid of daylight savings time, but at the very least, the system we have now seems to be the exact opposite of what would be even remotely sane.
Slashdot Mirror
I took his suggestion as "rather than worry about the leak in the hull, notice the entire front of the boat is missing and learn how to swim." The point is, even if the current warming is man made, Earth has been much warmer before and that warming was undeniably not man-made. It's not unreasonable to believe at some point in the future it will warm up to that point again, regardless of what we do. Thus, lets use this warming period as practice for the bigger ones to come.
Not all virtualization requires hardware extensions. In fact, VMware was doing it long before Intel and AMD added virtualization support to their processors. VMware pulled this off by doing dynamic translation, where the virtual machine monitor would transparently rewrite native x86 into virtualized x86 code. For the most part this was just doing a straight copy, and perhaps rewriting some jump addresses. Privileged code that runs in the OS kernel had to be rewritten as something equivalent that would run fine in an unprivileged process.
This really isn't so different from running .NET or Java code. The code starts out compiled to a virtual instruction set, and the JIT compiler translates this on the fly to something that can run natively on the CPU.
This is also how Rosetta worked in Mac OS X to run PPC apps on an x86 processor. XBox 360 does a similar thing to run old XBox games, since the 360 uses a PPC processor but the old XBox was x86.
Sure, you take a performance hit in doing this, but the apps generally get rewritten to run natively eventually, and the ones that don't end up being old enough that they run faster on modern hardware even with the extra translation layer.
I wonder how the answers would have changed if instead of asking "Is X true" they asked "The current mainstream scientific theory holds that X is true." Asking "Is X true" implies "Do you believe that X is true." I know for me, I think I would score fairly well on my general knowledge of mainstream scientific theory. That doesn't imply I believe everything held by the current theories.
I'm probably very much a minority in my view, but I'm a creationist who actually has a lot of respect for Dawkins. I respect him because he's very straightforward about what he beliefs. He doesn't make any attempt to sugar-coat them to make them more palatable to religious people. For example, comparing him to the lady from (IIRC) the National Science Educators Association in the movie Expelled. The NSEA lady was being very accommodating and explain how there's no conflict between "science" and "religion" and how most Evangelicals in the US secretly believe in evolution anyway. Dawkins, on the other hand, was very blunt about his view that with a purely naturalistic worldview there was absolutely no need to consider any sort of god at all. I found Dawkin's approach much more honest, and even though I disagree with his views on our origins, I respect him for his honesty.
You know, I'm not sure that's the model number I'd pick for modern CPU, since it's so similar to 80386.
You can use Firefox on Windows. There is a new beta Silverlight-based player that I know for sure works on IE, Firefox for Windows, and Safari on a Mac. It doesn't work in Google Chrome though. Anyway, you have to opt in by going to some web site that wasn't directly mentioned on the Netflix site, but a simple web search should find it pretty quickly.
I think the issue really has more to do with address spaces than reserving memory, although the end result is similar. Windows (and probably most other operating systems) typically maps the lower half of the address space for the current process, while the upper half in all processes is mapped to the kernel. If you think of memory addresses as signed values, positive addresses are for user mode and negative addresses are for the kernel. If you can't address the memory, obviously you can't use it, which is where the 2GB limit comes in.
The advantage of doing things this way is that the kernel is present in every process. This means when someone moves the mouse and triggers an interrupt, you don't have to switch to the mouse handler process to take care of the interrupt, you can do it from the context of whatever process happens to be running. It also lets you make system calls without having to fiddle around with the address space too much also.
It's probably not what they had in mind, but my state just legalized physician-assisted suicide during the last elections. I'm pretty sure the law only allows a doctor to prescribe a lethal injection, but if not I suppose a doctor could prescribe one of these things for the alleviation of a terminal illness.
To be a tad bit pedantic, there is a small chance that RF noise could cause your text message to be garbled. The digital carrier is still modulated over something that's analog, which means you might receive a 1 when you were sent a 0. Checksums and other error coding can help you detect when stuff like this happens, but it will always be possible that enough bits will flip in just the right way that you won't be able to detect the error.
When the times required it amendments have been made to the US constitution, do you really think that (a constitutional amendment) is the only way to include healthcare in the list of things the federal government has the right to promote as part of the general welfare?
Yes.
The Constitution specifies what the US federal government can do, and also sets explicit limits that the federal government must not go beyond without a Constitutional amendment. These limits are only effective if we choose to follow them, and I think we should be uniform in the way we follow them. Suppose for some unimaginable reason we decided we needed to ban a particularly dangerous religion. Should we let a pesky thing like needing to repeal the First Amendment stop us? What about needing to fight a war, is there really time to get a declaration of war from congress like the Constitution requires?
The Constitution is over 200 years old now. Some of the things in the original document, such as the 3/5ths clause for slaves, have no place in today's society. The people who wrote this document knew that it would some day be centuries out of date, and they added an amendment process to provide a legal way to update it with the times.
Following the Constitution has become seriously out of favor in recent years. In the 20s, we banned alcohol, and the nation at that time felt it necessary to do so through a Constitutional amendment. For some reason today we ban all kinds of substances, yet have made no such amendments supporting these things. Declarations of war have gone seriously out of fashion, to the best of my knowledge, the last declared war the US fought was World War II, over 50 years ago. Many of the things regarding Guantanamo Bay and the PATRIOT act strike me as Constitutionally questionable, at best.
I don't really care if the rest of the world is screaming past me. I care that we follow the laws that we the people agreed to be governed by, and that if they need to be extended or otherwise modified, that we do so by those very same laws.
But imagine if all wars were fought by proxy. Instead of sending people, we send machines. Let the machines battle it out. To be really civil we should also limit the power and effectiveness of our killer robots, and the number of machines that can enter the battlefield at once.
If two parties could agree on a set of rules for a war-by-proxy like that, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be fighting in the first place.
I know people like to complain that patents stifle innovation, but this is arguably one case where patents have increased innovation. Rather than just copy Microsoft's scroll wheel design, they were forced to come up with something new and different because of the patent.
Doesn't saying an omnipotent god can do anything that's logically possible mean that said omnipotent god is only as powerful as logic, at best? Instead, an omnipotent god must first create the rules of logic, and then choose to follow them.
It's sort of like a chess board. You might imagine the rooks arguing with each other about whether the chess player could move a rock diagonally. They might claim that's nonsense, since it's inherently impossible for rooks to move diagonally. Clearly we can physically move them diagonally, but we choose to follow the rules of chess when playing because the game wouldn't be much fun otherwise.
But course language? It never was the word that was offensive, it was the meaning...and there are plenty of messages to get the meaning out without using the words.
I disagree. Consider that you can usually substitute another word and suddenly your sentence becomes much less offensive. If you say crap, darn, freaking, butthole, or whatever, you still have pretty much the same meaning, but now a lot less people will be offended by it. Maybe it's not quite the same meaning in that the euphemistic version will not carry the same weight, but if that's the case, there's no point in separating the word from its meaning. They are effectively the same.
Your point about the F word being over used to the point that it has almost no meaning is more evidence that it's the word and not the meaning that's offensive.
In college I was working on a collaborative programming project in one of my classes. It was one that didn't really lend itself well to decomposing into things we could work on independently. We were using Emacs as our editor, which has this cool feature where you can open new frames on completely different displays. Thus, the guy I was working with and I each had our own Emacs window on our own computer and were editing the same file at the same time. I was impressed.
To be honest, I'm not terribly thrilled by the outcome of this election. Not that I was all that enamored by McCain either, but I did like him better than Obama. One thing I am happy about though is that all the elections I've been watching seem to have been pretty clearly decided, even if not in my favor. I'm glad we don't have to go through months of charges of fraud, recounts, court cases, hanging chads, people who can't spell, etc. While it's important to address the wrongs when they happen, they last several elections have damaged my faith in American Democracy. I'm glad that in this case, at the very least, the result was clear.
Out of curiosity, where would you go? Is there really anywhere you'd like the politics of better than the US, even with a Democrat-controlled House, Senate and Presidency?
About 13 years or so ago, we were dissecting pig eyeballs at school. My friend and I decided it'd be cool to keep ours, so we cut it in half and each of us took one half home and stuck it in a freezer. Several years after that, I checked and the half an eye was still in the freezer, so I left it there. My family's moved since then, and presumably we cleaned out the freezer when that happened and the eye is no more, but my friend's family is still in the same place, so there may very well still be half an eye in his freezer.
Maybe we should thaw it out and clone it...
Until "Neither" appears on the ballots not voing is a perfect valid way to voice your opinion, sadly it hard to tell if people are protesting or being lazy sometimes.
There are plenty of third parties on the ballot that make an acceptable vote for "Neither." You can even write in your own candidate if you don't like any of the third party candidates. Vote for yourself if you want.
That said, it's certainly your right not to vote. It's also your right to complain if you choose not to vote. I'd encourage people to vote and complain instead of not voting and not complaining though.
No, if I don't vote it will make no difference whatsoever. I live in a state that will definitely go Democratic.
I also live in a state that will almost certainly go Democrat. I voted for Bob Barr (absentee, I know election day is actually tomorrow), even though I know he has no chance of winning. I saw one poll today that predicts Obama getting 54% of the popular vote, and McCain getting something like 42% of the popular vote. Notice that there's 12% not accounted for. Let's pretend 6% of these are for the Libertarian party, and that many of the Libertarian voters are disaffected Republicans like myself. If, for example, the Republicans next time around adopt some of the Libertarian party's ideas, they may win back half of these Libertarian votes, getting them another 3%. For races as close as we've seen in recent years, that's hugely important.
In other words, even voting third party isn't throwing your vote away. It's a way of pointing out what's important to people that aren't happy with the two major parties. It can help influence the future directions of the major parties.
Given that there are only 2^128 possible values for md5(a), and effectively infinite possible values for x (since it can be any length), I'd say if you happen to find an x with md5(x) equal to md5(a), it's almost certain that x != a.
I mean, I get the point of Surface itself. I do. What I don't get is what value this other layer has over doing the same thing in software.
If you were to do something like this purely in software, you'd just have a flat image on a flat screen, with no tactile feedback when you touch it. This way, you can interact with the computer by moving and manipulating actual physical objects. Instead of saying "Touch here, then slide your finger across the table" you can say "Pick up this paper and put it where you want it." I think moving the actual paper will be a lot more intuitive to people.
I dunno, the actual technology seems really simple. But on the other hand it is rather innovative and I'ce never seen it before.
A lot of good ideas seem really obvious in retrospect. They're the kind of things that make you go, "Huh, why didn't I think of that?" Being a good inventor is about having the insight to think of those simple things no one else has thought of yet, actually going and and doing them, and then demonstrating how they are useful. Probably if it doesn't seem simple in retrospect, it won't be that useful either.
Do you have any numbers on how much space was used on extra versions for a "typical" distribution of files and usage patterns?
Plan 9 from Bell Labs introduced a file system called Venti. Basically, it was a massive, append-only file system which was meant for archival purposes. You could never delete anything from this, you just add new things or new versions of previous files. You could always go back and view previous versions. If I recall correctly, it didn't do single-instance-store, where it would try to only store identical copies of files in one place, which would have made it more space-efficient.
One of the things they noticed was that the file system grows very slowly over time, such that you would normally get a bigger hard drive anyway by the time you fill up a drive with Venti. It seems surprising at first, but if you think about it, it's not too surprising. Most of your disk space usage probably comes from new data, not updated old data. You may take some more photos, save some more video, get some more e-mail, or write some new documents. Sure, you may go back and edit your expense tracking spreadsheet, but for one, you are probably adding new information and not updating old information, and for two, the spreadsheet is tiny compared to your photos.
I guess this is just a long way of saying that saving history forever generally requires only a little more space than saving all your data in the first place.
I live in Seattle, which is far enough from the equator that we probably see at least a 6 hour variation in the number of daylight areas. My experience is that daylight savings makes it stay light way too late in the summer, and not nearly late enough in the winter. I'm in favor of getting rid of daylight savings time, but at the very least, the system we have now seems to be the exact opposite of what would be even remotely sane.