The global economy is worth almost $70 trillion dollars; a sudden influx of 0.27% of that amount would have negligible impact on the value of goods and services.
The realised possibility of mining asteroids might have an impact though. Eventually.
And also, haven't you seen a progress dialog go from "30 seconds remaining" to "2 hours remaining"? Dynamic recalculation sometimes doesn't help and just makes the problem appear worse.
This is a problem with the developers of the progress bar (and their managers). "2 hours remaining" isn't a progress report. "28% complete" is a progress report. It's more accurate, it never goes backwards, and it splits the workload more effectively: the computer can calculate how much it has done, and the human can do some simple extrapolation to guess how long it will take, in a human time scale. That's not "20 minutes" or "2 hours", that's "quick enough to sit and watch the progress bar", or "enough time to take a leak / make some coffee", or "time to check my email / facebook". "2 hours remaining... no wait, 5 seconds remaining... no wait, it'll never finish!" is bullshit coming out of the program, and we all know it. So just cut the bullshit and let the progress bars indicate progress.
But even that's wrong. 28% of what? Total number of files? Total amount of data? If you're copying a large number of files then the effort required to gather this info is significant too. Also, the computer does this so called "simple extrapolation" to determine how much time is remaining and it gets it wildly wrong so why do you think you'd be any better?
In most cases there already is a progress bar anyway, fwiw. There may be no % figure given, but that matters not so much. And many times i've seen the progress bar get almost all the way to the right and just sit there for ages.
At some Microsoft conference I attended the presenter just said 'fake it' (wrt progress bars, not "time remaining"). Take a vague stab at the amount of time the task will take, and make the progress bar fill 50% in half that time. Then do it again for the next 25%. And so on. If the task finishes just move the progress bar to 100%.
The computer is able to measure it's data throughput, read/write times, etc. Whether programmars actually do this measurment I don't know. But if the computer knows how fast it is reading or writing a disk or transferring over the LAN then there is no reason why it shouldn't be able to make those calculations. Even if the environment changes from task swapping or adding overhead or whatever then the measurement, being dynamic, can be recalculated on the fly and the 'finish time' updated accordingly.
Mandatory Car Analogy: I know that if my speedometer indicates 60 miles/hour, that in one minute I will have travelled one mile. That's predicting the future son!
Sometimes the measurement takes a significant chunk of the progress time so its best not to bother.
Windows tries to do this measurement sometimes ("Preparing to copy..." etc) and still manages to screw it up, and for all the bad things people say about Microsoft at the upper levels of management, the programmers there aren't stupid. If it hasn't been done in 25 years then it should be self evident that the problem is hard to solve.
Why it's hard to solve is an interesting discussion to have, but stating that it's not hard to solve flies in the face of many years of evidence to the contrary.
And also, haven't you seen a progress dialog go from "30 seconds remaining" to "2 hours remaining"? Dynamic recalculation sometimes doesn't help and just makes the problem appear worse.
And if you want a car analogy, a better one is your car telling you how many km you can do until your tank is empty.
Add that script to the payload malware usually carries, and spread it around, a few thousands bricks later, the negative publicity is sure to kill this whole UEFI thing, or at least force the hardware makers to include linux in their testing.
I don't understand. How is my botnet supposed to make me money if all the machines don't boot?
From the article: "Seems to violate law of conservation of momentum". - Yup it does. Imagine putting an invisible mass-less box around the entire system. Almost nothing comes out the back (only microwave energy - more on that later). The center of mass of the box accelerates. This is a violation of conservation of momentum - one of the most well understood and best tested laws in physics. If there were some exotic high energy physics effect proposed for this at least it might be worth listening, but this is just electromagnetism - very well understood. The "group velocity / phase velocity" is just jargon that has nothing to do with this since it is the Poynting vector that carries momentum.
You CAN make a reaction drive using photons (microwaves in this case), this idea has been around for many decades. The problem is that photons carry a lot of energy relative to their momentum so it takes an enormous power source to produce any thrust. So far no one has found a practical application where there was a large enough energy (and high enough power ) source to make this practical.
There have been a lot of experiments with microwaves - I've personally worked on a 600MW pulse microwave system. There have even been attempts at microwave driven spacecraft sails. Some early experiments seemed to indicate more thrust than would be expected from momentum conservation. Eventually this was tracked down to gas absorbed on the surface being heated and released by the microwaves - essentially a conventional rocket. With very high microwave powers you can generate forces in all sorts of ways in a closed laboratory environment that would not work in space.
This will not work.
If the microwaves blasted pieces of the resonation cavity out the back at super high speed it would appear to work in space. For a while.
My uncle got pulled over at an airport and detained for a good half hour because he 'looked nervous'. Well, yeah, it was the first time he'd ever flown.
Didn't feel much safer thinking that if there were any terrorists trying to get on his plane they were now quite free to walk through while the security agents dealt with him.
A good security guard would easily be able to tell the difference between someone anxious because of flying, or of large crowds, etc. Unfortunately from what i've heard they don't employ many of those.
http://m.xkcd.org/ is a better version for mobile. The title below the comic has a clickable superscript (alt text) link that will display the alt text underneath.
Awesome. Tanks for the tip. I've now changed my bookmark:)
> I have to admit not ever reading xkcd, having more important things on my Kindle.
It publishes 3 strips a week, plus a what-if from time to time. It's not a book, or anything else which would compete with whatever's on your kindle for your attention, unless you're a very, very slow reader.
The bigger problem is that Friday's comic was number 1168, so if you've only just started reading now you have a lot of catching up to do. Then half way through you'll realise that if you hover the mouse over the picture some additional text pops up so you'll have to go all the way back and start again[1]. Then you need to read the blag to figure out what all the references to cancer are about.
Most of the comics can be fully enjoyed in 30 seconds or less, but some require a bit more effort...
The What-If's come out once a week and also require a bit more attention but there's only a handful of them so far.
[1] I don't know how to get hover text on my Samsung Galaxy S2... maybe kindle's can't get to it either?
Neither one is as good as the original: Sir Mix-a-Lot.
I think you'll find that if glee had tried to cover the original, instead of a cover, it would have sucked more.
Might be a good way to make money - cover a popular song in such a way that it would fit within the capabilities of a bunch of semi-talented highschool kids and then wait for the royalties to roll in. Unless glee steal it instead of buying the rights to it... which they almost certainly will.
NSW in Australia has just survived a heat wave where there was recorded 50 degree Celsius in some of the bush towns. Where I lived, it hit 46 degree which is the highest temperature ever recorded
Whilst listening to the countdown yesterday I was pondering the idea that the warmest 100 is flawed because it only takes into account the votes from people who think the rest of the world cares about their every thought. Turns out I was wrong... I guess I'm a bit older than the Triple J target demographic these days - I wasn't 20 years ago though dammit!
Next year i'm posting my votes on facebook, just to throw it out a little bit:)
Anyone ever heard of it, it's only like all of Europe (and Russia, and much of the middle east)
Never heard of it.
TripleJ Hottest 100 is actually a poll to vote in the top 100 songs of the year. I think the Eurovision is a different thing. If TFS was written by someone with the slightest bit of competence we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Nope. Or at least in Victoria. You give an 8yo alcohol and see what you get charged with when the parents find out. Whether the 8yo paid you money (selling) or you gave it to them for free won't make a significant amount of difference.
There are exceptions allowing a parent to supply alcohol to a minor, or others to supply alcohol to a minor with the parents permission, but that is an exception.
How is this any different than getting anthrax poisoning from cows that fed from overgrazed fields? (anthrax bacteria naturally grows in soil and one of the causes of natural anthrax poisoning in humans is through cows that have ingested this soil)
Anthrax is nasty, but treatable. Mad cows disease is nastier and untreatable (they can prolong the time until death a bit, i think, but that doesn't count).
Dont't get it, meat is meat, and with spices on it'll taste the same. If people get upset by horsemeat, cowmeat , dogmeat or whatever, maybe they shoudln't eat meat at all.
Wrong. You don't want to eat the meat from an animal that also eats meat. Remember what happened when they fed ground up cows to cows? It doesn't end well.
What if they put HS in your burgers instead of BS?
And if you are vegan yourself and not simply offering it up as a suggestion, have you seriously _never_ been served a dish containing meat when you ordering a vegan dish? It's happened to a few vegetarian friends on numerous occasions... I never really saw what the fuss was though... i mean it's got vegetables in it right?;)
I consider myself very scientific, fairly worldly, and pretty open minded.
But to me this is unethical.
Ask yourself just some simple preliminary questions such as: If the resulting semi-human is self aware, what rights will it/he/she have? Will it/he/she be a cage animal? Will it be sterilized or allowed to reproduce? And if so, with which other species or semi-species? Is this fair to it/he/she? Will it/he/she be allowed to vote? To own property? Be allowed or required to work? To choose a field of education? To be free of staring, poking prodding?
I'm guessing a lawyer will find them and start a class action on their behalf. The evidence we have tends to suggest that we wiped them out - that's gotta be worth something. We also displaced them from their ancestral land, so they'll want that back too.
Fascinating creature, the black mamba. In Africa, the saying goes 'in the bush, an elephant can kill you, a leopard can kill you, and a black mamba can kill you. But only with the black mamba--and this has been true in africa since the dawn of time--is death sure.' Hence its handle--'death incarnate. Its neurotoxic venom is one of nature's most effective poisons, acting on the nervous system causing paralysis. The venom of a black mamba can kill a human being in four hours if, say, bitten on the ankle or the thumb. However, a bite to the face or torso can bring death from paralysis within 20 minutes. The amount of venom that can be delivered from a single bite can be gargantuan. If not treated quickly with anti-venom, ten to fifteen milligrams can be fatal to human beings. However, the black mamba can deliver as much as 100 to 400 milligrams of venom from a single bite.
Just be sure to include a return address.
I don't think the he wants them to die, just to hurt a lot. One of these should do the trick. They can kill in some cases, but at least it will hurt the whole time they are dying.
Slashdot Mirror
The global economy is worth almost $70 trillion dollars; a sudden influx of 0.27% of that amount would have negligible impact on the value of goods and services.
The realised possibility of mining asteroids might have an impact though. Eventually.
This is a problem with the developers of the progress bar (and their managers). "2 hours remaining" isn't a progress report. "28% complete" is a progress report. It's more accurate, it never goes backwards, and it splits the workload more effectively: the computer can calculate how much it has done, and the human can do some simple extrapolation to guess how long it will take, in a human time scale. That's not "20 minutes" or "2 hours", that's "quick enough to sit and watch the progress bar", or "enough time to take a leak / make some coffee", or "time to check my email / facebook". "2 hours remaining... no wait, 5 seconds remaining... no wait, it'll never finish!" is bullshit coming out of the program, and we all know it. So just cut the bullshit and let the progress bars indicate progress.
But even that's wrong. 28% of what? Total number of files? Total amount of data? If you're copying a large number of files then the effort required to gather this info is significant too. Also, the computer does this so called "simple extrapolation" to determine how much time is remaining and it gets it wildly wrong so why do you think you'd be any better?
In most cases there already is a progress bar anyway, fwiw. There may be no % figure given, but that matters not so much. And many times i've seen the progress bar get almost all the way to the right and just sit there for ages.
At some Microsoft conference I attended the presenter just said 'fake it' (wrt progress bars, not "time remaining"). Take a vague stab at the amount of time the task will take, and make the progress bar fill 50% in half that time. Then do it again for the next 25%. And so on. If the task finishes just move the progress bar to 100%.
The computer is able to measure it's data throughput, read/write times, etc. Whether programmars actually do this measurment I don't know. But if the computer knows how fast it is reading or writing a disk or transferring over the LAN then there is no reason why it shouldn't be able to make those calculations. Even if the environment changes from task swapping or adding overhead or whatever then the measurement, being dynamic, can be recalculated on the fly and the 'finish time' updated accordingly.
Mandatory Car Analogy: I know that if my speedometer indicates 60 miles/hour, that in one minute I will have travelled one mile. That's predicting the future son!
Sometimes the measurement takes a significant chunk of the progress time so its best not to bother.
Windows tries to do this measurement sometimes ("Preparing to copy..." etc) and still manages to screw it up, and for all the bad things people say about Microsoft at the upper levels of management, the programmers there aren't stupid. If it hasn't been done in 25 years then it should be self evident that the problem is hard to solve.
Why it's hard to solve is an interesting discussion to have, but stating that it's not hard to solve flies in the face of many years of evidence to the contrary.
And also, haven't you seen a progress dialog go from "30 seconds remaining" to "2 hours remaining"? Dynamic recalculation sometimes doesn't help and just makes the problem appear worse.
And if you want a car analogy, a better one is your car telling you how many km you can do until your tank is empty.
Add that script to the payload malware usually carries, and spread it around, a few thousands bricks later, the negative publicity is sure to kill this whole UEFI thing, or at least force the hardware makers to include linux in their testing.
I don't understand. How is my botnet supposed to make me money if all the machines don't boot?
I don't understand the summary, but riddle me this: Is there any good reason not to use end-to-end encryption?
Encryption? Do you have something to hide there, comrade?
That's the reason why.
From the article: "Seems to violate law of conservation of momentum". - Yup it does. Imagine putting an invisible mass-less box around the entire system. Almost nothing comes out the back (only microwave energy - more on that later). The center of mass of the box accelerates. This is a violation of conservation of momentum - one of the most well understood and best tested laws in physics. If there were some exotic high energy physics effect proposed for this at least it might be worth listening, but this is just electromagnetism - very well understood. The "group velocity / phase velocity" is just jargon that has nothing to do with this since it is the Poynting vector that carries momentum.
You CAN make a reaction drive using photons (microwaves in this case), this idea has been around for many decades. The problem is that photons carry a lot of energy relative to their momentum so it takes an enormous power source to produce any thrust. So far no one has found a practical application where there was a large enough energy (and high enough power ) source to make this practical.
There have been a lot of experiments with microwaves - I've personally worked on a 600MW pulse microwave system. There have even been attempts at microwave driven spacecraft sails. Some early experiments seemed to indicate more thrust than would be expected from momentum conservation. Eventually this was tracked down to gas absorbed on the surface being heated and released by the microwaves - essentially a conventional rocket. With very high microwave powers you can generate forces in all sorts of ways in a closed laboratory environment that would not work in space.
This will not work.
If the microwaves blasted pieces of the resonation cavity out the back at super high speed it would appear to work in space. For a while.
My uncle got pulled over at an airport and detained for a good half hour because he 'looked nervous'. Well, yeah, it was the first time he'd ever flown.
Didn't feel much safer thinking that if there were any terrorists trying to get on his plane they were now quite free to walk through while the security agents dealt with him.
A good security guard would easily be able to tell the difference between someone anxious because of flying, or of large crowds, etc. Unfortunately from what i've heard they don't employ many of those.
How hard can it be? Whenever I'm in meetings the clock always seems to run at half speed. That's 500 millihertz right there.
I bet it's not stable though. You watch the clock more closely next time - I bet two ticks are never quite the same.
http://m.xkcd.org/ is a better version for mobile. The title below the comic has a clickable superscript (alt text) link that will display the alt text underneath.
Awesome. Tanks for the tip. I've now changed my bookmark :)
> I have to admit not ever reading xkcd, having more important things on my Kindle.
It publishes 3 strips a week, plus a what-if from time to time. It's not a book, or anything else which would compete with whatever's on your kindle for your attention, unless you're a very, very slow reader.
The bigger problem is that Friday's comic was number 1168, so if you've only just started reading now you have a lot of catching up to do. Then half way through you'll realise that if you hover the mouse over the picture some additional text pops up so you'll have to go all the way back and start again[1]. Then you need to read the blag to figure out what all the references to cancer are about.
Most of the comics can be fully enjoyed in 30 seconds or less, but some require a bit more effort...
The What-If's come out once a week and also require a bit more attention but there's only a handful of them so far.
[1] I don't know how to get hover text on my Samsung Galaxy S2... maybe kindle's can't get to it either?
We've had two username collisions at our company, we avoided them by adding a middle initial.
I have a Ms Alyssa C. Untbridge and a Colin F. Uckerman here with an objection to your naming policy...
Neither one is as good as the original: Sir Mix-a-Lot.
I think you'll find that if glee had tried to cover the original, instead of a cover, it would have sucked more.
Might be a good way to make money - cover a popular song in such a way that it would fit within the capabilities of a bunch of semi-talented highschool kids and then wait for the royalties to roll in. Unless glee steal it instead of buying the rights to it... which they almost certainly will.
NSW in Australia has just survived a heat wave where there was recorded 50 degree Celsius in some of the bush towns. Where I lived, it hit 46 degree which is the highest temperature ever recorded
And just a bit further north it's all tornado's and flooding http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-27/live-wild-weather-queensland-calls-in-army/4486270
Whilst listening to the countdown yesterday I was pondering the idea that the warmest 100 is flawed because it only takes into account the votes from people who think the rest of the world cares about their every thought. Turns out I was wrong... I guess I'm a bit older than the Triple J target demographic these days - I wasn't 20 years ago though dammit!
Next year i'm posting my votes on facebook, just to throw it out a little bit :)
Anyone ever heard of it, it's only like all of Europe (and Russia, and much of the middle east)
Never heard of it.
TripleJ Hottest 100 is actually a poll to vote in the top 100 songs of the year. I think the Eurovision is a different thing. If TFS was written by someone with the slightest bit of competence we wouldn't be having this conversation.
When you say "supplying", do you mean "selling"?
Nope. Or at least in Victoria. You give an 8yo alcohol and see what you get charged with when the parents find out. Whether the 8yo paid you money (selling) or you gave it to them for free won't make a significant amount of difference.
There are exceptions allowing a parent to supply alcohol to a minor, or others to supply alcohol to a minor with the parents permission, but that is an exception.
Start by reading http://www.health.vic.gov.au/aod/alcohol/alcohol-law.htm and http://www.health.vic.gov.au/alcoholunder18/minors.htm
Pigs are omnivorous and they eat all kind of stuff. We still eat them.
Cows will happily eat meat too if you feed it to them in a form that they can digest. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to feed it to them.
How is this any different than getting anthrax poisoning from cows that fed from overgrazed fields? (anthrax bacteria naturally grows in soil and one of the causes of natural anthrax poisoning in humans is through cows that have ingested this soil)
Anthrax is nasty, but treatable. Mad cows disease is nastier and untreatable (they can prolong the time until death a bit, i think, but that doesn't count).
Dont't get it, meat is meat, and with spices on it'll taste the same. If people get upset by horsemeat, cowmeat , dogmeat or whatever, maybe they shoudln't eat meat at all.
Wrong. You don't want to eat the meat from an animal that also eats meat. Remember what happened when they fed ground up cows to cows? It doesn't end well.
yes you just have to worry about malnutrition!
You have to worry more about accidentally ingesting dairy and losing the vegan super powers you gained at vegan academy
And you don't have to worry about any of this BS.
What if they put HS in your burgers instead of BS?
And if you are vegan yourself and not simply offering it up as a suggestion, have you seriously _never_ been served a dish containing meat when you ordering a vegan dish? It's happened to a few vegetarian friends on numerous occasions... I never really saw what the fuss was though... i mean it's got vegetables in it right? ;)
Actually if you put a Neanderthal into a suit(or better tshirt and jeans) he wouldn't stand out too much in a crowd of rugby players
Fixed that for you.
I consider myself very scientific, fairly worldly, and pretty open minded.
But to me this is unethical.
Ask yourself just some simple preliminary questions such as: If the resulting semi-human is self aware, what rights will it/he/she have? Will it/he/she be a cage animal? Will it be sterilized or allowed to reproduce? And if so, with which other species or semi-species? Is this fair to it/he/she? Will it/he/she be allowed to vote? To own property? Be allowed or required to work? To choose a field of education? To be free of staring, poking prodding?
I'm guessing a lawyer will find them and start a class action on their behalf. The evidence we have tends to suggest that we wiped them out - that's gotta be worth something. We also displaced them from their ancestral land, so they'll want that back too.
There is 0 chance someone is going to steal your luggage if its bright pink. It's that simple.
I would. Just to prove you wrong.
Fascinating creature, the black mamba. In Africa, the saying goes 'in the bush, an elephant can kill you, a leopard can kill you, and a black mamba can kill you. But only with the black mamba--and this has been true in africa since the dawn of time--is death sure.' Hence its handle--'death incarnate. Its neurotoxic venom is one of nature's most effective poisons, acting on the nervous system causing paralysis. The venom of a black mamba can kill a human being in four hours if, say, bitten on the ankle or the thumb. However, a bite to the face or torso can bring death from paralysis within 20 minutes. The amount of venom that can be delivered from a single bite can be gargantuan. If not treated quickly with anti-venom, ten to fifteen milligrams can be fatal to human beings. However, the black mamba can deliver as much as 100 to 400 milligrams of venom from a single bite.
Just be sure to include a return address.
I don't think the he wants them to die, just to hurt a lot. One of these should do the trick. They can kill in some cases, but at least it will hurt the whole time they are dying.