re: "Because its primary functions are gaming and programming, and neither of those would be seriously enhanced with a better sound card."
Gaming is absolutely enhanced with a better (read: real) sound card. Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory, which can lead to sound dropouts with multiple simultaneous voices, and even cause stuttering and FPS loss. Not that these aren't effects I've also seen with Creative "real" soundcard products though especially from the Live family. Creative's quality seems to have taken a nosedive since the SB16 days.
TY - JOUR JO - Molecular Physics PB - Taylor & Francis AU - Tranter, G. E. TI - The parity violating energy differences between the enantiomers of -amino acids SN - 0026-8976 PY - 1985 VL - 56 IS - 4 SP - 825 EP - 838 UR - http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/00268978500102741
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the left-handed chirality bias had already been explained by the non-conservation of parity in the electroweak force. The L enantiomers have a slightly lower binding energy, so in any mole of racemic amino acids you'll have about a million excess on the L side, which is enough to tip the balance.
re: "There does not yet exist an application that people use that really needs multiple cores."
This one does. Well, not need multiple cores, but it will happily use as many cores up to full utilization that you can throw at it. I see plenty of 8-core servers at the top of the projects' stats sorted by machine. This is an application that plenty of people who aren't IT pros are running.
re: "I can only speak for my ISP in Canada (Shaw). They throttle Bit Torrent on the default ports it would appear, but not on any other ports."
I'm with Rogers since they took over @Home's market when it went bust. The throttling is ridiculous but only on the upstream, which now varies between 1-10KBytes/sec. All ports are affected and encryption doesn't help. It did for a short time, but they caught on and started throttling all encrypted traffic which caused work-at-home business users on VPN's to go ballistic.
I am surprised that your list doesn't contain Edwin Howard Armstrong. I suggest the book "Man of High Fidelity" if you can find it. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer, inventing many of the circuits essential to radio (and he invented FM) but others stole the credit and patents from him throughout his life, culminating in his suicide in 1954.
re: "If the site hosts mac malware then it is a pretty good bet they already have established "businesses" in the field of windows malware."
If the site was detecting the user agent or using some other method of determining platform and delivering targeted malware based on it, I doubt they would have also been delivering a fake Mac scan to a Windows browser as they did in the article.
The linked NIST report mentions only the work of Prof. Yang with which no one has yet found a collision, but a team from Graz University of Technology (Austria) has proposed a significantly faster algorithm for producing SHA-1 collisions and is running a BOINC project to find one.
"In its out-of-court settlement, Seagate proposed to pay $1000000 in damages. When the plaintiffs signed off on the agreement, Seagate lawyers indicated that this was a binary figure, paid the plaintiffs sixty-four dollars in cash and departed, apparently in some haste."
Interestingly, "Microsoft Vista" is an anagram of "Cost Favoritism", and "Microsoft Windows Vista" is an anagram of "It Wows Avid Conformists." I believe that these are original.
I think the latter needs an animated GIF, and is a great comeback to the "well everyone else is upgrading so you should too" nonsense.;^)
"How can u upload my music? How can u pirate my song? (Yeah *my* song!) Maybe I'm just 2 demanding, Maybe the clip's only 30 seconds long, Maybe u're just that kid's mother He's never satisfied (Now he likes Nevermind) Why do we takedown each other? This is what it sounds like When suits fly."
It's very important for students to come to an understanding that there is a difference between the incontrovertible fact that 2 + 2 = 4, and the likelihood that birds are one branch of an evolutionary path from a distinct group of dinosaurs. One is intrinsically true, whereas the other has some exceptionally convincing evidence, but too many alternative possibilities to be solidly provable without a time machine and a very dedicated research team.
There are always alternative possibilities, such as Last Thursdayism, the hypothesis that the universe was suddenly created Last Thursday with fully-grown and mid-development life, all of our memories implanted, light and other radiation travelling between stars/galaxies, etc... anything that would give away that it was recent covered up. How? Magic of course. Can't disprove that... hey, it's magic. It is not based on any confirmed evidence, predicts nothing and is unfalisifiable because all of the evidence was magically covered up or is unavailable, so it fails as a scientific theory, as does YEC/ID, Raelianism, panspermia and everything else.
Here's an example of a scientific theory's use in prediction and falsifiability. Humans have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. All great apes including chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes in 24 pairs.
Prediction: A chromosome fusion occurred in the distant past after human ancestors had split off from our common ancestor with chimpanzees, specifically:
1) Two chimpanzee chromosomes would be found that had the same banding fingerprint when laid end-to-end as a human chromosome. 2) The same human chromosome would have two centromeres because it was a fusion of two chromosomes that each had a centromere. 3) The human chromosome would contain a telomere inside it, in addition to the ones on each end. 4) All of these extra bits would be in the same order as they would be if there was a fusion, ie the extra centromere would be closer to the end than the extra telomere.
This is nicely falsifiable. If such a banding-matched chromosome wasn't present, or if didn't contain an extra telomere or centromere inside it, or they were present but in the wrong order, this would have presented a problem for common ancestry. So why were they all found to be as predicted?
Have a Google and read about it. I'm sure you'll find plenty of creationist sites that mention this too with rebuttals that are about as scientific or relevant as "Nuuuuh! Does not!" Not being able to make testable, falsifiable predictions such as this one, they can always throw dung from the sidelines.
re: "I don't see how archaic spelling and fragmented words are a problem"
Context. If the text is difficult to read so that one or more letters are ambiguous, if you know that the word is a modern American English word then you can fill in the blank(s). I failed to mention proper nouns (ie names) and that is more common because there are no standardized spellings of them. They are turning up quite often in the text.
Also some of the scanned text was a number with a fraction, and some had accent marks and the input doesn't take Unicode.:^)
After doing a hundred or so, several problems I can see with this that may cause problems with accuracy even if the text is human-readable:
1) Hyphenated word fragments broken over lines. ie "vances" where you can't see the "ad-" from the previous line. 2) Dialectic spellings of English words, ie British spelling where "s" replaces "z" in verb forms such as "categorise" 3) Numbers with commas/decimals. Is that thirteen-thousand "13,000" or a precise thirteen "13.000" to three places? 4) Archaic spellings and outdated words. Because these are old books being digitized (only books before 1923 are out of copyright) this is quite common.
But it's a brilliant idea and for the majority of the text samples there was no ambiguity.
This isn't a cable/DSL issue. This is a "we don't tell you how much but we cut you off anyhow" issue. In Canada we are generally advised our bandwidth limits.
Rogers has the same bandwidth limits, but like other providers they vastly oversell it. They are silently "packet-shaping" the BitTorrent protocol which limits the upstream to 1-2K/sec. Because the protocol adapts the downstream to the upstream, it is rendered unusable. By using encrypted protocol headers Rogers subscribers were able to get around this (briefly) but not anymore.
When I called Rogers about this, they admitted they are doing this due to some customers going over their bandwidth limit. I asked what they do to those customers. The reply: they send them an e-mail. They either have to start cutting the bandwidth hogs off or billing them (say, $1/GB) for overusage. My account allows 100GB a month, and I can't use BitTorrent for perfectly legal file transfers (stuff I develop, Open-Office) though I rarely exceed 10% of this. I consider this fraudulent as Rogers is selling a quantity of a product (bandwidth) and then restricting it such that no one can possibly use the guaranteed amount of it, something like a utility company promising I can use 100,000 litres of water a month, then not telling me it all has to be collected with an eyedropper.
... Unless the prosecution was for spam alone (ie spam advertising a legal product.) This was just out-and-out fraud. Most spamvertised "products" are illegal anyways (prescription drugs sold without a prescription, phishing, online gambling, etc.) so the CAN-SPAM act isn't needed to prosecute.
"Its backers say one quart of sea water would be able to generate energy equivalent to a quart of oil or two pounds of coal."
One quart of sea water is roughly a litre, or 1000 grams of water. This will contain about 110 grams of hydrogen, of which about 0.1 grams is deuterium. Perfect D-D fusion releases 338 trillion joules per gram, so about 34 trillion joules from this 0.1 gram. A gallon of gasoline produces about 125 million joules when burned completely, so the deuterium in the quart of sea water is energy-equivalent to about 2.7 million gallons of gasoline.
Either this device is going to be super-inefficient, or someone erred drastically on the units.
They appear to have written their own rather than using free RAR code, and I say this because they had a bug in previous incarnations of DEC2RAR.DLL (up to version 3.2.12.11) that I spent much effort trying to get them to fix almost exactly one year ago. It could not understand RAR archives, both standard and self-extracting, created by RAR versions 1.5x. The process and thus the antivirus would crash when trying to unpack them without any error being displayed or logged. This didn't affect Corporate Edition. In Dec. 2004 they released a LiveUpdate which updated DEC2RAR.DLL from 3.2.12.11 to 3.2.12.45
So perhaps this is all my fault.:^) However, the affected version of the DLL is 3.2.14.3, and the one that they updated to was 3.2.12.45, which is still current on my NAV2005.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor has been around since the 1960's, and is so easy to build that it is sometimes seen in high school science fairs. It is commonly available as a neutron source.
What would be "new" would be a net gain in energy, but like the fusor, that doesn't seem to be happening with this new device.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean there will be mandatory drug testing at the Science Olympiad?
:^p
Just what was in Albert Einstein's pipe?
And how did Stephen Hawking really end up in that wheelchair?
My confidence is shattered.
re: "Because its primary functions are gaming and programming, and neither of those would be seriously enhanced with a better sound card."
Gaming is absolutely enhanced with a better (read: real) sound card. Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory, which can lead to sound dropouts with multiple simultaneous voices, and even cause stuttering and FPS loss. Not that these aren't effects I've also seen with Creative "real" soundcard products though especially from the Live family. Creative's quality seems to have taken a nosedive since the SB16 days.
re: "Citation?"
TY - JOUR
JO - Molecular Physics
PB - Taylor & Francis
AU - Tranter, G. E.
TI - The parity violating energy differences between the enantiomers of -amino acids
SN - 0026-8976
PY - 1985
VL - 56
IS - 4
SP - 825
EP - 838
UR - http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/00268978500102741
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the left-handed chirality bias had already been explained by the non-conservation of parity in the electroweak force. The L enantiomers have a slightly lower binding energy, so in any mole of racemic amino acids you'll have about a million excess on the L side, which is enough to tip the balance.
re: "Giving the Chinese the Olympics is the worst awarding mistake since 1980."
Which was the worst awarding mistake since 1936. What is it with up-and-coming tyrannies getting the Olympics anyways?
re: "There does not yet exist an application that people use that really needs multiple cores."
This one does. Well, not need multiple cores, but it will happily use as many cores up to full utilization that you can throw at it. I see plenty of 8-core servers at the top of the projects' stats sorted by machine. This is an application that plenty of people who aren't IT pros are running.
re: "I can only speak for my ISP in Canada (Shaw). They throttle Bit Torrent on the default ports it would appear, but not on any other ports."
I'm with Rogers since they took over @Home's market when it went bust. The throttling is ridiculous but only on the upstream, which now varies between 1-10KBytes/sec. All ports are affected and encryption doesn't help. It did for a short time, but they caught on and started throttling all encrypted traffic which caused work-at-home business users on VPN's to go ballistic.
I am surprised that your list doesn't contain Edwin Howard Armstrong. I suggest the book "Man of High Fidelity" if you can find it. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer, inventing many of the circuits essential to radio (and he invented FM) but others stole the credit and patents from him throughout his life, culminating in his suicide in 1954.
re: "If the site hosts mac malware then it is a pretty good bet they already have established "businesses" in the field of windows malware."
If the site was detecting the user agent or using some other method of determining platform and delivering targeted malware based on it, I doubt they would have also been delivering a fake Mac scan to a Windows browser as they did in the article.
"I hate to say it, but I have to: ONE day of deployment in Iraq would pay for this thing."
I hate to correct your being off by over an order of magnitude... 90 minutes of Iraq war would pay for the whole budget and 20 minutes would pay for how much was just cut from it.
The linked NIST report mentions only the work of Prof. Yang with which no one has yet found a collision, but a team from Graz University of Technology (Austria) has proposed a significantly faster algorithm for producing SHA-1 collisions and is running a BOINC project to find one.
"In its out-of-court settlement, Seagate proposed to pay $1000000 in damages. When the plaintiffs signed off on the agreement, Seagate lawyers indicated that this was a binary figure, paid the plaintiffs sixty-four dollars in cash and departed, apparently in some haste."
Artifical-Market-Segmentation
;^)
Interestingly, "Microsoft Vista" is an anagram of "Cost Favoritism", and "Microsoft Windows Vista" is an anagram of "It Wows Avid Conformists." I believe that these are original.
I think the latter needs an animated GIF, and is a great comeback to the "well everyone else is upgrading so you should too" nonsense.
"How can u upload my music?
How can u pirate my song? (Yeah *my* song!)
Maybe I'm just 2 demanding,
Maybe the clip's only 30 seconds long,
Maybe u're just that kid's mother
He's never satisfied (Now he likes Nevermind)
Why do we takedown each other?
This is what it sounds like
When suits fly."
It's very important for students to come to an understanding that there is a difference between the incontrovertible fact that 2 + 2 = 4, and the likelihood that birds are one branch of an evolutionary path from a distinct group of dinosaurs. One is intrinsically true, whereas the other has some exceptionally convincing evidence, but too many alternative possibilities to be solidly provable without a time machine and a very dedicated research team.
There are always alternative possibilities, such as Last Thursdayism, the hypothesis that the universe was suddenly created Last Thursday with fully-grown and mid-development life, all of our memories implanted, light and other radiation travelling between stars/galaxies, etc... anything that would give away that it was recent covered up. How? Magic of course. Can't disprove that... hey, it's magic. It is not based on any confirmed evidence, predicts nothing and is unfalisifiable because all of the evidence was magically covered up or is unavailable, so it fails as a scientific theory, as does YEC/ID, Raelianism, panspermia and everything else.
Here's an example of a scientific theory's use in prediction and falsifiability. Humans have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. All great apes including chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes in 24 pairs.
Prediction: A chromosome fusion occurred in the distant past after human ancestors had split off from our common ancestor with chimpanzees, specifically:
1) Two chimpanzee chromosomes would be found that had the same banding fingerprint when laid end-to-end as a human chromosome.
2) The same human chromosome would have two centromeres because it was a fusion of two chromosomes that each had a centromere.
3) The human chromosome would contain a telomere inside it, in addition to the ones on each end.
4) All of these extra bits would be in the same order as they would be if there was a fusion, ie the extra centromere would be closer to the end than the extra telomere.
This is nicely falsifiable. If such a banding-matched chromosome wasn't present, or if didn't contain an extra telomere or centromere inside it, or they were present but in the wrong order, this would have presented a problem for common ancestry. So why were they all found to be as predicted?
Have a Google and read about it. I'm sure you'll find plenty of creationist sites that mention this too with rebuttals that are about as scientific or relevant as "Nuuuuh! Does not!" Not being able to make testable, falsifiable predictions such as this one, they can always throw dung from the sidelines.
re: "I don't see how archaic spelling and fragmented words are a problem"
:^)
Context. If the text is difficult to read so that one or more letters are ambiguous, if you know that the word is a modern American English word then you can fill in the blank(s). I failed to mention proper nouns (ie names) and that is more common because there are no standardized spellings of them. They are turning up quite often in the text.
Also some of the scanned text was a number with a fraction, and some had accent marks and the input doesn't take Unicode.
After doing a hundred or so, several problems I can see with this that may cause problems with accuracy even if the text is human-readable:
1) Hyphenated word fragments broken over lines. ie "vances" where you can't see the "ad-" from the previous line.
2) Dialectic spellings of English words, ie British spelling where "s" replaces "z" in verb forms such as "categorise"
3) Numbers with commas/decimals. Is that thirteen-thousand "13,000" or a precise thirteen "13.000" to three places?
4) Archaic spellings and outdated words. Because these are old books being digitized (only books before 1923 are out of copyright) this is quite common.
But it's a brilliant idea and for the majority of the text samples there was no ambiguity.
You can use a live demo on their about page so no sign-up required and you can start digitizing words immediately.
Now you'd think it'd be Virgin banning pro-choice messages...
(Silver Ringtone Thing?)
This isn't a cable/DSL issue. This is a "we don't tell you how much but we cut you off anyhow" issue. In Canada we are generally advised our bandwidth limits.
Rogers has the same bandwidth limits, but like other providers they vastly oversell it. They are silently "packet-shaping" the BitTorrent protocol which limits the upstream to 1-2K/sec. Because the protocol adapts the downstream to the upstream, it is rendered unusable. By using encrypted protocol headers Rogers subscribers were able to get around this (briefly) but not anymore.
When I called Rogers about this, they admitted they are doing this due to some customers going over their bandwidth limit. I asked what they do to those customers. The reply: they send them an e-mail. They either have to start cutting the bandwidth hogs off or billing them (say, $1/GB) for overusage. My account allows 100GB a month, and I can't use BitTorrent for perfectly legal file transfers (stuff I develop, Open-Office) though I rarely exceed 10% of this. I consider this fraudulent as Rogers is selling a quantity of a product (bandwidth) and then restricting it such that no one can possibly use the guaranteed amount of it, something like a utility company promising I can use 100,000 litres of water a month, then not telling me it all has to be collected with an eyedropper.
... Unless the prosecution was for spam alone (ie spam advertising a legal product.) This was just out-and-out fraud. Most spamvertised "products" are illegal anyways (prescription drugs sold without a prescription, phishing, online gambling, etc.) so the CAN-SPAM act isn't needed to prosecute.
Forget to divide by ten... correct that to "only" 270,000 gallons of gasoline. Still vastly more than a quart!
"Its backers say one quart of sea water would be able to generate energy equivalent to a quart of oil or two pounds of coal."
One quart of sea water is roughly a litre, or 1000 grams of water. This will contain about 110 grams of hydrogen, of which about 0.1 grams is deuterium. Perfect D-D fusion releases 338 trillion joules per gram, so about 34 trillion joules from this 0.1 gram. A gallon of gasoline produces about 125 million joules when burned completely, so the deuterium in the quart of sea water is energy-equivalent to about 2.7 million gallons of gasoline.
Either this device is going to be super-inefficient, or someone erred drastically on the units.
They appear to have written their own rather than using free RAR code, and I say this because they had a bug in previous incarnations of DEC2RAR.DLL (up to version 3.2.12.11) that I spent much effort trying to get them to fix almost exactly one year ago. It could not understand RAR archives, both standard and self-extracting, created by RAR versions 1.5x. The process and thus the antivirus would crash when trying to unpack them without any error being displayed or logged. This didn't affect Corporate Edition. In Dec. 2004 they released a LiveUpdate which updated DEC2RAR.DLL from 3.2.12.11 to 3.2.12.45
:^) However, the affected version of the DLL is 3.2.14.3, and the one that they updated to was 3.2.12.45, which is still current on my NAV2005.
So perhaps this is all my fault.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor has been around since the 1960's, and is so easy to build that it is sometimes seen in high school science fairs. It is commonly available as a neutron source.
What would be "new" would be a net gain in energy, but like the fusor, that doesn't seem to be happening with this new device.