Actually neither the sun nor the moon are magnified when they are at the horizon, it's a really impressive optical illusion whereby our brains interpret the apparent size of the sun/moon relative to features on the landscape. When it's overhead there are no nearby features to compare with and for some reason it then looks smaller.
Get yourself some appropriate household items and measure it. It's another reminder of how tentatively subjective our knowledge of truth is.
how much could you over clock a processor in the coldness of space?
Not much, cooling devices for CPUs rely on conductive and convective methods of transferring heat away from the CPU. In the vacuum, which I imagine is what you meant by the 'coldness of space' the only available method of heat transfer is radiative. And for a running CPU this isn't much.
Go to the HackSDMI Website. Click on the link to www.hacksdmi.org, and continue recursively. The person who can get the most cascaded frames before their browser crashes wins.
Before one learns to fly, one must first learn to walk. Before one learns to develop a secure framework for digital music, one must first learn to use the target attribute.
It was explicitly mentioned in Judge Kaplan's decision that one of the concerns the MPAA raised over DeCSS was that it would enable people access to the content of the DVDs and thus it would be possible to compress the entire movie to a size which would fit onto a CD. He then went on to say that since blank CDs were about $1 a pop that the risk of piracy was very much increased.
However one of the MPAA's arguments to distinguish copying of DVDs from copying of video cassettes was that there would be no degradation of quality since everything was "digital". This degradation was important in allowing fair use copies and the like.
So is a CD copy of a DVD fair use? It's certainly a degraded quality and is conceptually almost identical to taping a music CD to use in the car.
A bit-for-bit copy of a CSS-scrambled DVD is useless, as it is impossible to copy the session key tracks without specialised equipment.
That doesn't make the copy useless. According to the decision: I can lawfully obtain access to the keys by purchasing a DVD player or drive, which can't distinguish between a copy and an official disk. CSS seems to require that I purchase an 'official' drive, which for me is an unreasonable requirement.
Incidently, there's very little in that decision that I'd consider technical.
Good point, I agree. The proliferation of devices and software that can play mp3s sometimes makes me forget that the format is actually proprietary. I prefer Ogg Vorbis too, but would support anything over an attempt to control playback of the file a la CSS and what some of these executives were proposing. At least anyone who has an mp3 can play it on whatever they like.
I recently attended a conference and the Australian Online Musics industry. There was one panel on 'Digital Downloads' that demonstrated just this sort of mentality on the part of high-moment-of-inertia-type music executives, most of them were talking about how MP3 wasn't the appropriate format and then proceeded to plug their own ideas on the subject. One proposal even involved encoding the music with "unbreakable" encryption and requiring a user to log on to a central server for the key.
Finally one of the panel stood up and said. I'm sorry, MP3s are here you're too late. There is hardware available, consumers like it and it has already been adopted as the defacto standard. You have no place to decide whether it gets adopted or not.
in 1993 the British Minister for Science challenged particle physicists to explain in one page or less what the Higgs Boson was and why they were so eager to find it.
Or "Oceania is at war with Europa, Oceania has always been at war with Europa etc." Better yet, if the word "pirate" doesn't exist then there will be no more piracy...
To: MPAA
Subject: RE: Illegal Provision of DeCSS/Circumvention Device
Date: Thu, 31 Aud 2000 03:02:55 +1000
I am not a citizen of the United States and am therefore not subject to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2),(3). Nor am I subject to Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 101 et seq, and furthermore any precedent set by a federal district court has no bearing on the common law of my country.
As a result, some astronomers now think that the total output of X-rays from accreting matter may therefore be more a product of how massive the black hole is, rather than of the luminosity of the region surrounding the black hole, as it once was thought.
What the hell does this mean? That previously a bright x-ray source near a black hole made astronomers think it was surrounded by lots of tungsten filaments, and a not so bright source surrounded by not much damp earth?
Seriously, is this suggesting that the intensity of a black hole x-ray source is independent of the surrounding region? What would be emitting the x-rays in that case?
(this sentence here to provide one not ending in a question mark)
Doesn't the mass that gathers around these holes "dilute" the gravitation as you get closer to the black hole, and are surrounded by mass in all directions? Assuming this has been accounted for, how much more inefficient are these holes than expected?
It's a first year Newtonian Gravity problem (yes, this is a case where the Newtonian approximation applies) to show that the gravitational potential inside a spherical shell of matter (or inside a ring of matter in the same plane) is zero. The gravity from the surrounding matter cancels itself out.
The amount of matter would be negligible for gravitational effects anyway.
Could the supermassive black holes be decaying, thus weakening the rate at which new mass gathers, while still being surrounded with the mass and radiation to be expected from their large initial mass? Isn't decay a prediction of Hawking's?
The predicated rate of decay is so slow that it couldn't possibly have an effect on the mass intake.
Read Miguel de Icaza's article on Let's make Unix not suck. He talks about why Gnome is more than a desktop and discusses the idea of building applications from components rather than wasting time and effort to build huge mononoliths which all take up memory to implement their own versions of the same thing. So Galeon can just reuse Gnome components for the UI etc and Gecko for the rendering..
Sure its possible to release code that includes all its own libraries its own UI, it's own widgets, its own version of printf and it will compile anywhere, but aren't you getting sick of them?
Re:If you can clone an extinct animal...
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
I believe the accepted critical size for long term survival of mammal population is at about 500 individuals. (from Tim Flannery's "The Future Eaters - excellent book)
With long term survival guaranteed the population would find the equilibrium suppported by the surrounding ecosystem. Tasmania's wilderness is still reasonably untouched so this is hopefully > 0.
Re:Is this the right thing to do?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
Because as much as we might like to, you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
<rant>
God this irritates me. The second law of thermodynamics is, wait for it, a law of thermodynamics. It applies to heat transfer, not ethical considerations. You'd make more sense appealing to the DMCA with which Warner Bros have probably copyrighted Tasmanian Devils.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually neither the sun nor the moon are magnified when they are at the horizon, it's a really impressive optical illusion whereby our brains interpret the apparent size of the sun/moon relative to features on the landscape. When it's overhead there are no nearby features to compare with and for some reason it then looks smaller.
Get yourself some appropriate household items and measure it. It's another reminder of how tentatively subjective our knowledge of truth is.
how much could you over clock a processor in the coldness of space?
Not much, cooling devices for CPUs rely on conductive and convective methods of transferring heat away from the CPU. In the vacuum, which I imagine is what you meant by the 'coldness of space' the only available method of heat transfer is radiative. And for a running CPU this isn't much.
Ta. Or tar.
"Now we want to find out how long information can be stored," he said.
Probably about 10 nanoseconds. Which is about as long as it takes for anything I put on a floppy to be lost.
Go to the HackSDMI Website. Click on the link to www.hacksdmi.org, and continue recursively. The person who can get the most cascaded frames before their browser crashes wins.
Before one learns to fly, one must first learn to walk. Before one learns to develop a secure framework for digital music, one must first learn to use the target attribute.
It was explicitly mentioned in Judge Kaplan's decision that one of the concerns the MPAA raised over DeCSS was that it would enable people access to the content of the DVDs and thus it would be possible to compress the entire movie to a size which would fit onto a CD. He then went on to say that since blank CDs were about $1 a pop that the risk of piracy was very much increased.
However one of the MPAA's arguments to distinguish copying of DVDs from copying of video cassettes was that there would be no degradation of quality since everything was "digital". This degradation was important in allowing fair use copies and the like.
So is a CD copy of a DVD fair use? It's certainly a degraded quality and is conceptually almost identical to taping a music CD to use in the car.
My 2 cents is all I have.
Erm, the session key tracks are represented by bits. You can make bitwise copies of the session tracks.
A bit-for-bit copy of a CSS-scrambled DVD is useless, as it is impossible to copy the session key tracks without specialised equipment.
That doesn't make the copy useless. According to the decision: I can lawfully obtain access to the keys by purchasing a DVD player or drive, which can't distinguish between a copy and an official disk. CSS seems to require that I purchase an 'official' drive, which for me is an unreasonable requirement.
Incidently, there's very little in that decision that I'd consider technical.
Good point, I agree. The proliferation of devices and software that can play mp3s sometimes makes me forget that the format is actually proprietary. I prefer Ogg Vorbis too, but would support anything over an attempt to control playback of the file a la CSS and what some of these executives were proposing. At least anyone who has an mp3 can play it on whatever they like.
I recently attended a conference and the Australian Online Musics industry. There was one panel on 'Digital Downloads' that demonstrated just this sort of mentality on the part of high-moment-of-inertia-type music executives, most of them were talking about how MP3 wasn't the appropriate format and then proceeded to plug their own ideas on the subject. One proposal even involved encoding the music with "unbreakable" encryption and requiring a user to log on to a central server for the key.
Finally one of the panel stood up and said. I'm sorry, MP3s are here you're too late. There is hardware available, consumers like it and it has already been adopted as the defacto standard. You have no place to decide whether it gets adopted or not.
I stood up and clapped.
in 1993 the British Minister for Science challenged particle physicists to explain in one page or less what the Higgs Boson was and why they were so eager to find it.
http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/epp/higgs.html
Q. How do particle physicists figure out how PCs work?
... )
A. They smash two of them together at very high speeds and study the bits that fly out.
(some of you have probably heard this
Can't anybody do anything without violating either a) The DMCA
b) The GPL
c) IP Laws
Sheesh. I'm going back to law school.
Of course it's also the name of an impressively boring James Joyce novel.
Or "Oceania is at war with Europa, Oceania has always been at war with Europa etc." Better yet, if the word "pirate" doesn't exist then there will be no more piracy ...
Who's got 8mb worth of addresses and phone numbers to store?
I think you mean 1984 :)
To: MPAA
Subject: RE: Illegal Provision of DeCSS/Circumvention Device
Date: Thu, 31 Aud 2000 03:02:55 +1000
I am not a citizen of the United States and am therefore not subject to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2),(3). Nor am I subject to Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 101 et seq, and furthermore any precedent set by a federal district court has no bearing on the common law of my country.
Thankyou for your letter.
As a result, some astronomers now think that the total output of X-rays from accreting matter may therefore be more a product of how massive the black hole is, rather than of the luminosity of the region surrounding the black hole, as it once was thought.
What the hell does this mean? That previously a bright x-ray source near a black hole made astronomers think it was surrounded by lots of tungsten filaments, and a not so bright source surrounded by not much damp earth?
Seriously, is this suggesting that the intensity of a black hole x-ray source is independent of the surrounding region? What would be emitting the x-rays in that case?
(this sentence here to provide one not ending in a question mark)
Doesn't the mass that gathers around these holes "dilute" the gravitation as you get closer to the black hole, and are surrounded by mass in all directions? Assuming this has been accounted for, how much more inefficient are these holes than expected?
It's a first year Newtonian Gravity problem (yes, this is a case where the Newtonian approximation applies) to show that the gravitational potential inside a spherical shell of matter (or inside a ring of matter in the same plane) is zero. The gravity from the surrounding matter cancels itself out.
The amount of matter would be negligible for gravitational effects anyway.
Could the supermassive black holes be decaying, thus weakening the rate at which new mass gathers, while still being surrounded with the mass and radiation to be expected from their large initial mass? Isn't decay a prediction of Hawking's?
The predicated rate of decay is so slow that it couldn't possibly have an effect on the mass intake.
Read Miguel de Icaza's article on Let's make Unix not suck. He talks about why Gnome is more than a desktop and discusses the idea of building applications from components rather than wasting time and effort to build huge mononoliths which all take up memory to implement their own versions of the same thing. So Galeon can just reuse Gnome components for the UI etc and Gecko for the rendering..
Sure its possible to release code that includes all its own libraries its own UI, it's own widgets, its own version of printf and it will compile anywhere, but aren't you getting sick of them?
Is that DeCSS mirror illegal in Australia?
We need another themes.org
I believe the accepted critical size for long term survival of mammal population is at about 500 individuals. (from Tim Flannery's "The Future Eaters - excellent book)
With long term survival guaranteed the population would find the equilibrium suppported by the surrounding ecosystem. Tasmania's wilderness is still reasonably untouched so this is hopefully > 0.
Because as much as we might like to, you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
<rant>
God this irritates me. The second law of thermodynamics is, wait for it, a law of thermodynamics. It applies to heat transfer, not ethical considerations. You'd make more sense appealing to the DMCA with which Warner Bros have probably copyrighted Tasmanian Devils.
</rant>