Actually, every point in the Universe is at the center of the universe...
Just like every point on the planet is the center of the planet.
That just brought back nightmares of the day my professor started talking about p-adic topology. We managed to seriously break the triangle inequality and then all kinds of nonsense happened, like spheres where every point in the sphere was the center...
Just because I only have 2KB, he thinks he can just ignore 0.00026% of the home market?
I was going to tell you that 0.00026% is probably a rather optimistic estimate of the Sinclair's market share, but it actually might be reasonable. There are roughly 300 million people in the US, and 0.00026% of that is 780. Granted, not all people in the US are computer users, but I'm sure if we include the rest of the world we can find 300 million computer users. So, 780 Sinclairs means about 15 or 16 per state... which still seems a bit high. And, this whole comment is full of invalid assumptions, so you should probably just go ahead and ignore me...
I think it's not so much about attracting teachers from other states to come to yours, it's about attracting more people to become teachers rather than going in to industry. I guess this could cause a temporary shortage of qualified people in industry, but I suspect that if students get a better education in high school, it's more likely they will go in to that particular industry to replace the teachers who left industry.
Assuming that your operating system has been securely installed, either by yourself or a trusted vendor, and that your PC is protected from unauthorized physical access, this is not a major problem. If these things aren't true, you probably have bigger problems than someone getting your admin password.
With standard Vista accounts users have to enter an admin password as well as click the UAC confirmation. This is similar to Ubuntu when standard users want to use admin privileges or even OS-X. I'm not suggesting Microsoft would dare rip-off OS-X though... heh.
What's to stop a malicious app from spoofing the password dialog on Ubuntu/OSX/Windows? You could conceivably have a nasty application that pops up a fake password dialog, gets the user's root password, and sends it off to some nasty people somewhere else. This system has the advantage of letting the user run with least privilege, but the trade off is that it desensitizes to user to typing his admin password, making it easier for a social engineering attack to steal the password.
Windows addresses this with the login dialog by requiring the user to push CTRL+ALT+DEL before entering a password. As long as only Windows can intercept CTRL+ALT+DEL, secures you from spoofing. I haven't seen a similar mechanism anywhere else, whether in Ubuntu, OSX, or the Windows UAC prompts.
Depending on what you mean by "solve," I think you are a little mistaken on what it means for a problem to be NP-Complete. NP-Complete problems are actually relatively easy to solve. For example, take 3SAT, were you have a bunch of boolean variables, x[1] through x[n], and then a bunch of string of clauses ANDed together, as in (x[1] OR x[2] OR NOT x[3]) AND (x[24] OR NOT x[37] OR x[42])... To solve 3SAT you just have to tell me whether there exists some combination of variables such that the expression is true. You can just enumerate all 2^n possible combinations of variable assignments and see if any of them work out to be true. The problem is, it doesn't take very large values of n before it will take you longer than the time civilization has been around to try all the combinations. 3SAT is easy to solve, if you just want an answer. What's still an open question is whether we can come up with an algorithm that can solve it efficiently, where efficiently means in O(n^k) time for some k, rather than O(2^n).
For a problem that actually can't be solved, try the Halting Problem.
Now, the cool thing about NP-Complete problems is that any other problem that's known to be in NP (meaning we can solve them, just some instances will take a ridiculous amount of time to do so) can be efficiently transormed, meaning transformed in polynomial time, into an NP-Complete problem. This means if you can really solve general instances of Sudoku in polynomial time, you can take an instance of the 3SAT problem, efficiently transform it into an instance of Sudoku, then efficiently solve the Sudoku problem and then transform the answer into a solution to the 3SAT problem. If they have really built such a machine, this is a big deal.
The use of "IANAP (I am not a physicist)" increases the redundancy, which is useful for error checking and correction. Suppose there was a glitch in transmission, and you received just "IANAW." You'd have no idea what it was or even that there was an error, so you might assume the poster meant "I am not a wombat." If the poster omitted the acronym and there were a transmission error you might receive "I am not a Shysicist," and you'd have no way of knowing there was a transmission error. However, if you received "IANAP (I an not a shysicist)," there was clearly a transmission error, though there isn't quite enough information to correct the error yet.
Still, the machines are made up of electrical pulses moving across the chip. These electrical pulses can be observed and manipulated. As long as you have physical access to the playback device, which won't go away as long as you can use your media at home, there exists some way to get the hardware or software to reveal the key. It may take a whole lot of creativity, trial and error, but it can be done.
If the constitution is changed the courts can't though the change out as unconstitutional.
I think by definition you can't make an unconstitutional change to the constitution. Sure, you could make an amendment stating that the first amendment is no longer valid, but all you've done is change the constitution. For this reason, the constitution is intentionally very difficult to change. Its purpose is to specify a framework under which the government should operate and specify the basic rights of the citizens the government is tasked with protecting. We don't need a new constitution that takes into account all the amendments, they are already part of our constitution.
Most of the necessary changes to copyright, etc, can probably be made with regular legislation. The constitution simply says congress may make laws establishing the idea of copyright, recognizing that it was a useful thing. The details were left up to congress.
If you really want one vote per person, start pushing for a constitutional amendment to establish that. I personally think despite its problems, our representative government is a pretty good way of doing things. I certainly don't want the responsibility that our senators have. Still, if I'm in a very small minority, there's no reason a constitutional amendment can't dissolve congress. If you wanted, you could dissolve the executive and judicial branches too while you're at it.
An important part of science is repeatability. Someone may have gotten this result before, but it's also noteworthy that someone has managed to independently follow the same procedure and get similar results.
What poor grammar? The statement "'Effect' is a verb. 'Affect' is a noun." is a true statement. You even illustrate your understanding of this with your paragraph where you use each word correctly as both a verb and a noun. The GP did not say that effect is not a noun, or that affect was not a verb, just simply that effect is also a verb and affect is also a noun.
I remember talking about the sea of stability in a chemistry course a few years ago. At that time I think they'd just found an element that lasted a few milliseconds, and my professor was quite excited because before that most of the elements we've synthesized lasted on the order of nanoseconds. Now that we've found something that lasts for a couple of seconds this seems to be a very big deal.
Our professor explained part of why this sea of stability would be useful. Since these atoms are so large, their electrons are pretty far away and they aren't held as tightly as in smaller atoms. This makes it easier to play with the spins and such of the electrons, so it could make things like quantum computing a lot easier.
Next you have places like hospitals that demand that you turn your cell phone off because the signal between it and the cell tower may disrupt hospital equipment, pace makers and the like. There are some examples from the past that illustrate this but they were most probably from the era of analogue cell phones which had stronger signals and *may* have interfered with someone's pace maker or some hospital equipment at some point in some unusual circumstances. On the other side of the argument you have the people who are in love with their mobile devices and are livid that they have to turn them off in hospitals. You hear a lot of them complain about how the doctors happily use WiFi tablets and other microwave devices and yet they forbid cell phones.
The last time I had a fever I had a digital thermometer sitting next to me on my bed, and I happened to have my cell phone sitting next to it. I noticed that just before I received a text message on my phone, the thermometer would basically freak out. It would make weird noises, light up, and the LCD segments would randomly darken and light up. It seems pretty easy to believe there could be some truth to cell phones interfering with medical equipment.
I've also noticed that when I'm in my car and the stereo is off, I hear a buzzing noise in the speakers before I receive a text message.
The Venti Filesystem also does copy on write. I don't know if it's the same mechanism that ZFS uses, but basically Venti uses the SHA-1 hash of each data block as its address, and probably has some hash->sector mapping on the disk somewhere. This way when data is written, if data with the same SHA-1 hash has already been written, there's no reason to write it again.
If I had mod points, I'd give you some. I hadn't thought of that possibility before, which makes the whole thing just slightly more plausible. It's still far-fetched, like if someone who'd only ever worked in MS-DOS managed to write a virus that targets Windows Vista in a matter of hours, but it makes it more plausible that these things even had compatible signals in the first place. Many computers still have serial ports, and we still send zeros and ones around about the same way as always, just maybe a few voltages have changed. It doesn't solve the problem, but it gets closer.
I value my electricty more than contributing to folding and SETI.
I've read this isn't quite as much a waste of electricity as it seems, at least during the winter if you have electric heating. The majority of the energy consumed by your CPU goes into thermal energy, which your heatsink disipates into the air. Thus every watt your CPU burns is one wat your furnace doesn't have to burn to keep your house warm enough. I'm sure it doesn't work out perfectly, but one way you're running a whole bunch of electricity through a big resistor that doesn't do anything but get hot, and the other way you're running a whole bunch of electricity through a big resistor that happens to solve interesting and useful problems while getting hot.
What if they did the reverse of this, and removed the off-switch from normal brain cells. Could this make brains that are constantly growing and always able to learn like a child, sort of like Bean from the Ender's Game series? I guess this would make your brain a gigantic tumor, but it'd be fun while it lasted...
A couple years ago I got an IAudio M3. It supports FLAC. It's a pretty good player, though the firmware is kind of buggy. I haven't used anything else enough to make any meaningful comparisons though. I haven't checked the newer models, but they've probably improved a lot.
Vista has a lot of changes under the hood, many of which aren't visible to the user. Yeah, it's not quite all that was promised years ago, but it's still a significant upgrade. One new feature is the User-Mode Device Framework, which will let a lot of drivers run in user mode, and should hopefully make the system more robust since a faulty driver won't be any worse than a faulty application. UAC is a quite pervasive change, that is enforced even down to the kernel level. The graphics changes were by no means minor, and they are the first thing you see, but the graphics system is only one of several areas to receive massive changes.
As for the unsigned drivers, part of my job involves making changes to some drivers used for debugging. I don't bother to sign these, but I'm still able to install them. I just have to tell it I really want to do this a couple of extra times. All the drivers I work on are user-mode drivers though, so maybe Windows is more strict for kernel-mode drivers.
But Firefox doesn't quite integrate as well with Vista as it could. For one, Firefox doesn't seem to be aware of the way Vista can scale fonts based on your monitor's DPI.
Your comparison to AOL highlights something I was thinking. I remember the last time I installed AOL Instant Messenger, they also kindly installed the AOL Web Browser, which I certainly didn't want. How is having RealPlayer include Firefox any different? If I want RealPlayer I'll download RealPlayer, and if I want Firefox, I'll download Firefox. If I weren't a Firefox user I wouldn't be happy about my media player installing a superfluous web browser. It doesn't matter that you can choose not to install it, you've still increased the download size of already bloated software. I use Firefox, and I like it, and would love to see other people use it, but the way to encourage more use of Firefox is not to have it attach itself to unrelated software.
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Just like every point on the planet is the center of the planet.
That just brought back nightmares of the day my professor started talking about p-adic topology. We managed to seriously break the triangle inequality and then all kinds of nonsense happened, like spheres where every point in the sphere was the center...
I was going to tell you that 0.00026% is probably a rather optimistic estimate of the Sinclair's market share, but it actually might be reasonable. There are roughly 300 million people in the US, and 0.00026% of that is 780. Granted, not all people in the US are computer users, but I'm sure if we include the rest of the world we can find 300 million computer users. So, 780 Sinclairs means about 15 or 16 per state... which still seems a bit high. And, this whole comment is full of invalid assumptions, so you should probably just go ahead and ignore me...
Because if there's one thing governments are good at, it's slowing stuff down.
I think it's not so much about attracting teachers from other states to come to yours, it's about attracting more people to become teachers rather than going in to industry. I guess this could cause a temporary shortage of qualified people in industry, but I suspect that if students get a better education in high school, it's more likely they will go in to that particular industry to replace the teachers who left industry.
Assuming that your operating system has been securely installed, either by yourself or a trusted vendor, and that your PC is protected from unauthorized physical access, this is not a major problem. If these things aren't true, you probably have bigger problems than someone getting your admin password.
What's to stop a malicious app from spoofing the password dialog on Ubuntu/OSX/Windows? You could conceivably have a nasty application that pops up a fake password dialog, gets the user's root password, and sends it off to some nasty people somewhere else. This system has the advantage of letting the user run with least privilege, but the trade off is that it desensitizes to user to typing his admin password, making it easier for a social engineering attack to steal the password.
Windows addresses this with the login dialog by requiring the user to push CTRL+ALT+DEL before entering a password. As long as only Windows can intercept CTRL+ALT+DEL, secures you from spoofing. I haven't seen a similar mechanism anywhere else, whether in Ubuntu, OSX, or the Windows UAC prompts.
Somehow I think making the windows out of transparent Glass rather than the old opaque windows would be a huge improvement for the pilots.
Depending on what you mean by "solve," I think you are a little mistaken on what it means for a problem to be NP-Complete. NP-Complete problems are actually relatively easy to solve. For example, take 3SAT, were you have a bunch of boolean variables, x[1] through x[n], and then a bunch of string of clauses ANDed together, as in (x[1] OR x[2] OR NOT x[3]) AND (x[24] OR NOT x[37] OR x[42]) ... To solve 3SAT you just have to tell me whether there exists some combination of variables such that the expression is true. You can just enumerate all 2^n possible combinations of variable assignments and see if any of them work out to be true. The problem is, it doesn't take very large values of n before it will take you longer than the time civilization has been around to try all the combinations. 3SAT is easy to solve, if you just want an answer. What's still an open question is whether we can come up with an algorithm that can solve it efficiently, where efficiently means in O(n^k) time for some k, rather than O(2^n).
For a problem that actually can't be solved, try the Halting Problem.
Now, the cool thing about NP-Complete problems is that any other problem that's known to be in NP (meaning we can solve them, just some instances will take a ridiculous amount of time to do so) can be efficiently transormed, meaning transformed in polynomial time, into an NP-Complete problem. This means if you can really solve general instances of Sudoku in polynomial time, you can take an instance of the 3SAT problem, efficiently transform it into an instance of Sudoku, then efficiently solve the Sudoku problem and then transform the answer into a solution to the 3SAT problem. If they have really built such a machine, this is a big deal.
The use of "IANAP (I am not a physicist)" increases the redundancy, which is useful for error checking and correction. Suppose there was a glitch in transmission, and you received just "IANAW." You'd have no idea what it was or even that there was an error, so you might assume the poster meant "I am not a wombat." If the poster omitted the acronym and there were a transmission error you might receive "I am not a Shysicist," and you'd have no way of knowing there was a transmission error. However, if you received "IANAP (I an not a shysicist)," there was clearly a transmission error, though there isn't quite enough information to correct the error yet.
Still, the machines are made up of electrical pulses moving across the chip. These electrical pulses can be observed and manipulated. As long as you have physical access to the playback device, which won't go away as long as you can use your media at home, there exists some way to get the hardware or software to reveal the key. It may take a whole lot of creativity, trial and error, but it can be done.
...and thus we can not use this article to bash IE7. At least, not if you want to use facts.You must be new here...
I think by definition you can't make an unconstitutional change to the constitution. Sure, you could make an amendment stating that the first amendment is no longer valid, but all you've done is change the constitution. For this reason, the constitution is intentionally very difficult to change. Its purpose is to specify a framework under which the government should operate and specify the basic rights of the citizens the government is tasked with protecting. We don't need a new constitution that takes into account all the amendments, they are already part of our constitution.
Most of the necessary changes to copyright, etc, can probably be made with regular legislation. The constitution simply says congress may make laws establishing the idea of copyright, recognizing that it was a useful thing. The details were left up to congress.
If you really want one vote per person, start pushing for a constitutional amendment to establish that. I personally think despite its problems, our representative government is a pretty good way of doing things. I certainly don't want the responsibility that our senators have. Still, if I'm in a very small minority, there's no reason a constitutional amendment can't dissolve congress. If you wanted, you could dissolve the executive and judicial branches too while you're at it.
An important part of science is repeatability. Someone may have gotten this result before, but it's also noteworthy that someone has managed to independently follow the same procedure and get similar results.
That must be why Vista is the most secure version of Windows ever. I swear the hard drive LED is lit more often than the power LED.
What poor grammar? The statement "'Effect' is a verb. 'Affect' is a noun." is a true statement. You even illustrate your understanding of this with your paragraph where you use each word correctly as both a verb and a noun. The GP did not say that effect is not a noun, or that affect was not a verb, just simply that effect is also a verb and affect is also a noun.
I remember talking about the sea of stability in a chemistry course a few years ago. At that time I think they'd just found an element that lasted a few milliseconds, and my professor was quite excited because before that most of the elements we've synthesized lasted on the order of nanoseconds. Now that we've found something that lasts for a couple of seconds this seems to be a very big deal.
Our professor explained part of why this sea of stability would be useful. Since these atoms are so large, their electrons are pretty far away and they aren't held as tightly as in smaller atoms. This makes it easier to play with the spins and such of the electrons, so it could make things like quantum computing a lot easier.
The last time I had a fever I had a digital thermometer sitting next to me on my bed, and I happened to have my cell phone sitting next to it. I noticed that just before I received a text message on my phone, the thermometer would basically freak out. It would make weird noises, light up, and the LCD segments would randomly darken and light up. It seems pretty easy to believe there could be some truth to cell phones interfering with medical equipment.
I've also noticed that when I'm in my car and the stereo is off, I hear a buzzing noise in the speakers before I receive a text message.
The Venti Filesystem also does copy on write. I don't know if it's the same mechanism that ZFS uses, but basically Venti uses the SHA-1 hash of each data block as its address, and probably has some hash->sector mapping on the disk somewhere. This way when data is written, if data with the same SHA-1 hash has already been written, there's no reason to write it again.
If I had mod points, I'd give you some. I hadn't thought of that possibility before, which makes the whole thing just slightly more plausible. It's still far-fetched, like if someone who'd only ever worked in MS-DOS managed to write a virus that targets Windows Vista in a matter of hours, but it makes it more plausible that these things even had compatible signals in the first place. Many computers still have serial ports, and we still send zeros and ones around about the same way as always, just maybe a few voltages have changed. It doesn't solve the problem, but it gets closer.
I've read this isn't quite as much a waste of electricity as it seems, at least during the winter if you have electric heating. The majority of the energy consumed by your CPU goes into thermal energy, which your heatsink disipates into the air. Thus every watt your CPU burns is one wat your furnace doesn't have to burn to keep your house warm enough. I'm sure it doesn't work out perfectly, but one way you're running a whole bunch of electricity through a big resistor that doesn't do anything but get hot, and the other way you're running a whole bunch of electricity through a big resistor that happens to solve interesting and useful problems while getting hot.
What if they did the reverse of this, and removed the off-switch from normal brain cells. Could this make brains that are constantly growing and always able to learn like a child, sort of like Bean from the Ender's Game series? I guess this would make your brain a gigantic tumor, but it'd be fun while it lasted...
A couple years ago I got an IAudio M3. It supports FLAC. It's a pretty good player, though the firmware is kind of buggy. I haven't used anything else enough to make any meaningful comparisons though. I haven't checked the newer models, but they've probably improved a lot.
Vista has a lot of changes under the hood, many of which aren't visible to the user. Yeah, it's not quite all that was promised years ago, but it's still a significant upgrade. One new feature is the User-Mode Device Framework, which will let a lot of drivers run in user mode, and should hopefully make the system more robust since a faulty driver won't be any worse than a faulty application. UAC is a quite pervasive change, that is enforced even down to the kernel level. The graphics changes were by no means minor, and they are the first thing you see, but the graphics system is only one of several areas to receive massive changes.
As for the unsigned drivers, part of my job involves making changes to some drivers used for debugging. I don't bother to sign these, but I'm still able to install them. I just have to tell it I really want to do this a couple of extra times. All the drivers I work on are user-mode drivers though, so maybe Windows is more strict for kernel-mode drivers.
But Firefox doesn't quite integrate as well with Vista as it could. For one, Firefox doesn't seem to be aware of the way Vista can scale fonts based on your monitor's DPI.
Your comparison to AOL highlights something I was thinking. I remember the last time I installed AOL Instant Messenger, they also kindly installed the AOL Web Browser, which I certainly didn't want. How is having RealPlayer include Firefox any different? If I want RealPlayer I'll download RealPlayer, and if I want Firefox, I'll download Firefox. If I weren't a Firefox user I wouldn't be happy about my media player installing a superfluous web browser. It doesn't matter that you can choose not to install it, you've still increased the download size of already bloated software. I use Firefox, and I like it, and would love to see other people use it, but the way to encourage more use of Firefox is not to have it attach itself to unrelated software.