If I want to further specify search keywords to add bias to my search in Google, I can. Unless Blekko is *really, really* good at this, I'm not sure I see how it will end up better than google with the same keywords without the slash?
I suppose it's an interesting *idea*, but the devil will be in the detail of getting the filtering to be really good, better than bing, yahoo, or google with similar searches.
Well, I for one, am thankful that during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and both World Wars, there were soldiers who decided that the needs of many outweighed their personal needs. Either position can be taken to an extreme - the extreme of 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' is communism, where the state takes ownership of virtually all wealth. The other extreme is such utter unsocial selfishness that society would collapse. Human civilization has always survived and thrived living in the nebulous 'middle' - during periods and places where either extreme becomes too dominant, almost everyone suffers to some extent.
There's also the standpoint that the needs of the many and the few don't really conflict - although people might *perceive* a conflict. Soldiers go to war, knowing they *might* die, but hoping that they won't die, yet they still go to war because they have the possibility they might live in a 'safer' world for themselves and their family - I suspect very few soldiers can endure war based upon nebulous ideals of benefiting society. I would bet most of them have specific people they love that they are trying to protect and provide a better life for. It just so happens that what is good for them and theirs, is also good for the greater society as a whole. It's also often true (like in the case of sewers and roads), that giving the State access to the land to do that benefits everyone - even those deprived of the land, because they get the benefit of the sewer or road, etc - again, I don't dispute that eminent domain *can* be abused).
Most "Billionaires" mostly own stocks worth, nominally, Billions, based upon market price, they don't usually actually have Billions in cash-on-hand. Are you saying we should take away their company ownership from them?
Billionaires and Millionaires don't, as far as I know, mostly 'hoard' their cash - mostly they invest that cash in businesses, which creates hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs. Yes, they expect the money to come back to them. They also often engage in large philanthropy/charity projects, fund the Arts, etc, all of which benefit society as a whole.
When you look at something like eminent domain, while it is sometimes abused (and even very 'conservative' people are very uncomfortable with the abuse of eminent domain - look at all the people who decried a court decision a few years ago where some city in Connecticut [I think it was CT] used eminent domain to bulldoze houses so a Walmart could get built - many conservative people thought that was wrong), the basic concept, at least, is that sometimes there is absolutely no other way to accomplish a public good, such as building roads, sewers, or other vital public infrastructure, without taking someone's property - but it's also enshrined in our constitution that when eminent domain is exercised, the 'victims' are supposed to be fairly compensated for their financial loss.
As for the Rich, they pay a lot more taxes than the rest of society (at least, individually - I think the Middle Class in the USA pays the most taxes, as a group, but that's because the Middle Class is like a million times larger than the ranks of the rich), because they have more money.
To be fair, I think the guy in the article would absolutely agree that people need to be able to do that type of math - figuring discounts, taxes, etc. Someone who can't do that basically can't function in the modern world without depending on others, or on technology, just a *little* too much - they'll be an easy target to get ripped off by someone who is better at math than them, or they'll screw up their taxes and get in trouble with the taxman, etc.
One point I think is important - you should teach people a little bit *past* the level of math that they *need*. Teaching algebra to someone should help them about master basic arithmetic, multiplication, division, but it might not make them very good at algebra. Teaching someone trig will require further mastery of arithmetic, plus algebra, but might not get them to really be very good at trig. Teaching someone physics will force them to further master trig, plus algebra, plus arithmetic.
So, one good argument for teaching people 'too much math', is to make sure they really master the fundamental arithmetic and algebra that can be helpful even in basic life tasks.
Unfortunately, I think this comes down to the individual. Some people will be fine with skipping over the limits and such. Personally, if I don't understand *why* something works, I have a hard time accepting that it *does* work. It's a psychology thing, but I'm not gonna let myself learn something if I don't believe it to be true. I hated the stuff with limits, but it laid the foundation for me to understand why the 'shortcuts' worked (shortcuts like saying the derivative of x^n is nx^(n-1) ), etc. I *love* using the shortcuts, but I'd have never been able to learn them, I think, if I didn't first go through the bit about limits.
With integrals, you could say the same thing about Riemann Sums. Why bother teaching students about Riemann sums, since that is the *hardest possible way* to integrate? But, without at least looking at the idea of things like the rectangles that approximate the area of a curve, and how as the rectangles get narrower, the sum of the rectangles gets closer and closer to the actual area, I'd not really understand *why* the integral can give me that area/volume/etc.
As for trig - I think the reason we teach everyone trig and algebra, is that to some extent, we feel everyone should have a basic understanding of physics, right? I'd sure feel more comfortable sharing the road with other drivers who have a basic, concrete understanding of the physics of bodies in motion. Well, I suppose you can teach people some physics without math, but to really help them get a real solid understanding of physics (particularly *why* what we *observe* in physics is true and MUST be true), most people are going to need an understanding of algebra and trig, at the very least. Calc can help with physics too, but isn't strictly required - there are plenty of physics courses taught only with algebra and trig. Mostly, the only physics courses designed *around* the extensive use of calc are the undergrad physics for Science and Engineering majors, where it really is very appropriate in most cases.
I'm not sure. . . when I first read that, the guy's rather poor choice of words sounded like something right out of a marxist speech (in the literal, historical sense of marxism), but if you finish reading the quote, I don't think he's actually advocating a marxist-style nationalization of Google, but rather starting another project to create an index which isn't owned by Google.
My question, however, is who is going to provide all the servers and storage space? Yeah, Microsoft, Google, a few other companies can build the infrastructure to do something like indexing the Internet, but I don't think it'd work well as an 'open-source' type project (the *code* to run it all might all be open source, but at some point, you need some really big datacenters; I mean, maybe you could do some sort of peer-2-peer approach, but what with NAT everywhere (and soon to be at the ISP level), the peer-to-peer model is somewhat hobbled. I just don't think a peer-to-peer solution would be both reliable enough and fast enough (e.g. parts of the index would go 'missing' temporarily from time to time, or just have very high latency).
The guy's comment about "Public Libraries" would seem to indicate he thinks having a government controlled search engine is the answer. Does anyone *really* think a search engine completely controlled by the government (any government), is a good idea?
I don't think so. One of the goals of the metric system over the past century has been to find ways to define the units in terms of fundamental physical constants, as opposed to something completely arbitrary like creating a block of some material and saying "this block is a kilogram". The definitions, by nature are still going to be somewhat arbitrary, but at least once you make the arbitrary definition based on a physical constant, it's easy to reproduce. We could explain to an alien 1/2 way across the galaxy what a second or a kilogram, or a meter is, by telling them a second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."
As long as they are technologically advanced enough to understand that, and to precisely figure out how long that takes, they'll know what a second is. If they aren't advanced enough to deal with that, we can tell them "It's about the amount of time it takes to say 'one-one-thousand'."
More importantly, throughout history, once we have a reasonable definition based upon a fundamental physical constant, we don't have to worry about the units changing value.
Obviously, to most people, having such a level of precision for what a unit is, is not necessary, but for scientists and engineers, in some cases it is very necessary.
Just because there are a lot of intelligence agencies, doesn't *necessarily* mean that there are 'too many'. It may be the you are correct, that there are too many, but the only way to know if there are *too many* is to do an analysis of what they each do, and see to what extent they are redundant. It's quite probable that each intelligence agency has a specialization, designed to serve the specific part of the government they belong to (which is probably why there are like 8 intelligence 'agencies' within the DoD). Your analysis, while *possibly* correct, seems far too simplistic to be worth anything (oh, look, there's a lot of intelligence agencies, that must mean intelligence in the government has become bloated).
Someone certainly needs to review these things, but I doubt anyone on Slashdot (and probably hardly anyone in Congress, for that matter) actually has the knowledge and experience to give them real understanding whether the intelligence is 'too expensive', or if it is simply 'just expensive' to get good quality intel.
I do know there have been some high-profile cases recently where, because not enough intelligence was *shared* properly between intel agencies, the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing, and that absolutely needs to be addressed, and it's quite possible that things need to be overhauled, but it happens sometimes in life that 'management' comes along with little understanding of how a system works, and decides the system is bloated and overly complicated, then they tear it down, and don't understand why the new system doesn't work the way they thought it should.
You should deeply understand systems before even attempting to proclaim you know what the problem is and how to solve it.
The writers have to 'conserve bodies' - the 'dumb jock' plays too much of an instrumental roll in the crew (he's their main shuttle 'pilot', and one of the security/military). When people are dead on the show, they aren't easily replaced (although, with the addition of the 'Lucian alliance' (I may have spelled the name wrong) people at the end of Season one, I suppose things could work out that some of the alliance people end up being integrated into the earth crew, a la Deep Space voyager and that rebel group which ended up stuck with the federation crew at the other side of the galaxy, so you *could* potentially get some 'replacements' from that group.
But, my point is, you can only kill off so many key crew members, before it begins to seem ridiculous that the remaining people could even *survive* without them.
I want to start by saying I'm not making any commentary here on the validity of Oracle's claims regarding direct copying (I suspect they are making that claim just because class names and methods are the same for some classes, for compatibility purposes).
The thing is, Google doesn't claim Dalvik is "Java". They aren't using a Java license. Yes, you can create a free/open-source implementation of Java, as long as you are licensing from Sun/Oracle under the terms of the Java license.
Google created something very similar to Java, but they are not calling it Java, and do not claim to have licensed Java from Sun/Oracle. I believe they claim copyright over the entire Dalvik VM and API. That makes a world of difference, legally, and so they can't use the defense the parent is suggesting.
"But the ONLY reason it was OK was because there is no other good Sci-Fi on TV except Stargate Universe, and even that isn't great."
I'm hoping that the cancellation of this show opens room for some new good science fiction. Show cancellation isn't always a bad thing. When a bad show is canned, that can free up money, people (production staff - costumes, set designers, special effects and sound effects pros, etc) to go work on something else, which may be better. Caprica was a bad show that deserved to die. End of story. I look forward to what some other writers come up with next.
SGU I'm still sort of unsold. The show has potential but has been going nowhere for most of the first season. However, the first season of the original SG-1 kind of sucked in my opinion (others may disagree), but I thought SG-1 got a lot better over the course of the second and third seasons. SGU has been 'good enough' that the writers and producers could really bring the show into it's own in this second season - I guess time will tell. But the clock is definitely ticking on SGU - I think it hasn't been 'good enough' so far to keep the series going into a third season if they don't really get it to be more interesting going forward.
I tried to stay with Caprica for awhile. I watched the whole first season (although, there were only like, what, 9 episodes in the first season? I'd hardly call that a whole season), but I had one problem with the show - I disliked each and every single one of the characters in the show. I kind of wanted them all to die (which, since we know the ending, at least gives the viewer a tiny little bit of satisfaction, I suppose - "at least all these #*%-holes are gonna die". And I'm usually a very empathetic person. Actually - I like one guy, sorta kinda - The lab assistant kid who was working on the cylon prototype. But even him I didn't really feel much empathy or sympathy for, but at least I didn't actively hate him.
When writing something, I think you need at least *one* or two characters that most of the audience can identify as a reasonable 'protagonist'. When the audience dislikes everyone, why do they care about how events unfold? I mean, from an abstract moral standpoint, you can paint it as a hypothetical study of an advanced, powerful culture bringing about it's own demise - how the corruption and moral decay (the nominal 'good guy' hiring 'the mob' to break into his competitor's lab to steal a prototype; the general moral lattitude of the culture - as presented in the very first scene of the series with all the people in the virtual reality, the reactionary religious fundamentalists who want to correct the moral problems, but who themselves are morally corrupt, etc.)
I think, however, when presenting such a story, for most people, you need to make the abstract more concrete by having at least that one or two people who seem to have at least some redeeming qualities.
The other problem I have with the show is that they consistently asked you to buy into premises that were just plain stupid - like the company which created the AI chip which was stolen NOT having design schematics and be able to just fab another part. I'm sorry, but nobody in engineering has a prototype but no design documents/data/CAD files/etc. Stealing a prototype part from a company would at best get you the ability to try to reverse engineer the part - it wouldn't stop them from building more. That's just one example, off the top of my head. I just remember thinking to myself multiple times throughout the show that the writers were idiots because key plot points seemed to hang on something which made no sense.
I've observed a bit of a spectrum (with some people occupying an 'area' of the spectrum instead of a single point - not being absolutely positive of where they stand).
For example, I've heard the following from several different people:
* there's no possible way we have accurate temperature readings of the global temperature 'state' - you'll find out that someone placed the thermometer too close to the earth (too warm) or in direct sunlight in the Sahara, etc, etc (they don't seem to understand the concept of taking lots of samples from lots of places and averaging the result)
* I heard Rush Limbaugh spend most of a program once going on and on about the eruption of a volcano, and how it was putting out more CO2 than mankind would emit in like 200 years or something like that, and concluding there's nothing mankind could possibly *do* to change the climate.
* I've heard people say there might be warming, but it is related to Solar activity cycles and has nothing to do with human activity.
* I've heard people say "So what? Global warming means winter is less horrible. I'm all for that." - which, I suppose, if you live in Canada or the Northern States of the lower-48 (places like New England, NY, PA, the Midwest, etc), is true - some people, as this article discusses, will likely *benefit* from global warming; unfortunately, that benefit comes at the expense of a lot of other (some of whom are very poor to begin with and their lives will be made even worse) people.
* I've heard people say maybe global warming will/is happening a little bit, but that as it happens, cloud cover will increase, which will reflect solar energy, so it will be self-moderating.
* Then there are the folks who believe that any kind of problem is just the fulfillment of prophecy, and Jesus will come rapture the righteous, while the damned will suffer 'real global warming'.
So basically, among the deniers, there's a range of people from "it's definitely not happening", to "maybe it's happening, but I don't think we need to do anything about it", to "it's happening, but there's nothing we can do about it, so eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die".
I don't think even with the horrendous DMCA it's as clear-cut as you say. The DMCA section in question, I believe, is: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
The thing is, the User Agent String was not desgined nor was it ever claimed by the HTTP standards group, to be a measure to control access to copyrighted works. I'm not a lawyer, so don't take any legal advice from me, but I believe there is at least a possibility that a court would find that to be the case. I realize the DMCA does not set the bar very high for what constitutes a "technological control that effectively controls access", but I really do think that the User Agent String was never, EVER intended for that purpose, and other than the fact that ABC, NBC, et. al might wrongly *attempt* to control access based on the User Agent String, that doesn't actually make that a 'privileged' access control mechanism.
I don't think there's any law that dictates what User Agent String a web browser returns. Web Sites can try to use the User Agent string to block content, but I hardly think the User Agent String constitutes a legal 'access control' for content. However, I suspect that there are other ways to suss out what browser is being used - perhaps something with JavaScript, or similar. Maybe a DirectX plugin or something which won't run on a Linux-based Google TV device.
Yeah, that might work for http where the domain name is embedded in the GET or POST request. How about other services which don't include the domain name in the protocol itself? What about encrypted connections where the payload is completely opaque? I'm sorry but your 'solution' is way too application-specific. Domain names where never meant to be used for routing - they were meant to be used to do a lookup of the IP address which *is* the main mechanism for routing.
As for 'isochronous delivery' - are you saying that there can be no QOS/Traffic Shaping with IPv6? I haven't specifically read up on that topic, but I find it almost impossible to believe that routers can't theoretically do traffic shaping on IPv6 packets?
"If a toaster takes up a square metre (big toaster), you'd have to stack them ten billion high over every single metre of the Earth to use them up."
Man, that's the most ridiculous example I think I've read in a long time. Hey, if we're gonna make toasters the size of a laundry machine, why don't we make them the size of cargo ships? Then it would take *more than every single meter of earth*, if you are only going to stack them 10 billion high.
By the way, I hate to point out that a "square meter" is a measurement of area, not volume. Are your over-sized toasters infinitesimally thin as well, or did you mean 1 cubic meter/metre (man I wish people in the UK would learn the proper ENGLISH spelling for words *grin* [yes, that was a joke])?
Because, since all the hosts behind a NAT share a single routable address, that means to make inbound connections, you need to setup port forwarding. So, say I want to run Skype (which likes to have an inbound port), a game server, and a VoIP application, all of which need to be able to accept inbound connections. Well, to do that, on the NAT Gateway, I need to setup 3 ports to be forwarded to my computer. Only I can use those 3 ports, no one else can. Which means with 64k ports available on the NAT, you can probably only setup port forwarding service for maybe 10k-20k customers. You *might* be able to alleviate this a little bit by using multiple 'public' IPs - say one public IP for every 5000-10000 users on the ISP network.
There's also the issue of 'well known ports' - let's say I want to run a web server - well, almost all browsers expect a web server to respond to connections made to either port 80 or port 443 (for SSL encrypted connections). Likewise SSH, telnet, FTP, rdist, etc all typically use well-known ports. Games using iD Software engines usually accept inbound connections on a particular well-known port (27960). Only one computer per public IP may have port 80 or 443, or whatever, forwarded.
Also, perhaps even more importantly, every outbound connection also uses a port associate with the public IP address being used for NAT. Again, using one public IP for a few thousand users might give you enough ports to mostly work.
Basically, in a world where everyone is behind a NAT, no one can ever accept in-bound traffic from off the 'local' network (I put local in quotes, because in the case of Large Scale NAT, you could probably talk to all the other customers of your ISP directly, but not anyone who uses a different ISP), even when they *WANT* to. Some people like the 'comfort' of thinking that NAT somehow protects them better than a firewall, but I'd personally prefer routable addresses for all my devices, with a firewall that I control on my home router to block in-bound access. That way, I can simply open ports when I *want* inbound traffic, and leave all other closed - but when I do want to run services
Speaking of economic incentives - the GP says there's no economic incentive to switch end-users to IPv6 when you can use multi-level Large Scale NAT, but I have one question:
Won't it take money to implement and convert customers to multi-level NAT? Would it really cost much more to convert them to IPv6+NAT64? That's the real question - not whether there is economic incentive to do something you don't have to, but what are the comparative costs/benefits of two alternatives, one of which you will probably *have* to do?
The other interesting thing to see here: Right now a lot of ISP's of course have IPv4 blocks. They could potentially keep using those for customers, BUT, they might also have an opportunity to sell their allocations off for big bucks to companies that are desperate for IPv4 public addresses to use for their servers. If the going rate for a block of IPv4 addresses, after the point of 'exhaustion', is high enough, many ISP's might find that they can actually *make* money by selling off their existing public IP addresses, and either switching customers to NAT or IPv6. If most of them choose "the right solution", and do IPv6, all of a sudden you have the critical mass of IPv6 users which are necessary to justify setting up new services only on IPv6.
"speed and velocity estimation is tricky, and potential energy at those speeds is so very much more."
That would be kinetic energy - not that you are wrong about the basic idea. Just thought it might be helpful to point out the difference between potential and kinetic energy. When objects are in motion, the energy represented by their momentum is kinetic energy. Potential energy applies when a system of objects has an attractive or repellent force connecting them, which would accelerate the objects either towards or away from each other. So, for example, if you have an object being held off the floor by a rope, or your hand or something, the object isn't moving (in relation to the earth/room/you), but it has gravitational potential energy. Cut the rope or release your grip, and the potential energy gets converted to kinetic energy. The potential isn't converted all at once - as an object falls towards the earth, for example, you can say that a small part of the potential energy is being converted during every small instant of time as it falls - so that at the starting point, when it's not moving towards the earth, 100% of the energy is potential, while 0% is kinetic. After the object falls 10% of the distance to the floor/ground, 10% of the potential energy would be converted to kinetic energy, but it would still have 90% of it's gravitational potential energy.
The term "potential energy" doesn't just apply to gravity - tensioned springs, chemical bonds, electrostatic or magnetic attraction/repulsion, etc all can be called "potential" energy.
The thing about the cars is that, other than an extremely small amount of gravitational attraction between them, there's no attractive/repellent force, so you can't really talk about the cars having potential energy, unless they are going downhill (or are in free-fall). In any case, the kinetic energy is much more of a worry than their potential energy in such a situation.
Well, there is the slight problem of making sure you can stop *in time*. Even if the brakes on the van are stronger than the truck's engine (which, btw, ensuring that the brakes are stronger than the *van* engine doesn't guarantee they are stronger than the Truck's engine, although I'm guessing that would probably still be true, unless it's a very large truck). While I totally understand the principle the guy used to stop the truck, I would have been at least a little worried that the combined momentum of van + truck might've lead to a situation where I could brake gradually, but not before entering the intersection. (I guess it depends on how far down the road the intersection was - if it was far enough away, you maybe wouldn't worry about it). However, since the truck was going about 40mph, I guess his foot couldn't have been 'flooring' the gas pedal - probably was only part way down, so not as much of a problem with it taking a very long time to brake.
Slashdot Mirror
If I want to further specify search keywords to add bias to my search in Google, I can. Unless Blekko is *really, really* good at this, I'm not sure I see how it will end up better than google with the same keywords without the slash?
I suppose it's an interesting *idea*, but the devil will be in the detail of getting the filtering to be really good, better than bing, yahoo, or google with similar searches.
Well, I for one, am thankful that during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and both World Wars, there were soldiers who decided that the needs of many outweighed their personal needs. Either position can be taken to an extreme - the extreme of 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' is communism, where the state takes ownership of virtually all wealth. The other extreme is such utter unsocial selfishness that society would collapse. Human civilization has always survived and thrived living in the nebulous 'middle' - during periods and places where either extreme becomes too dominant, almost everyone suffers to some extent.
There's also the standpoint that the needs of the many and the few don't really conflict - although people might *perceive* a conflict. Soldiers go to war, knowing they *might* die, but hoping that they won't die, yet they still go to war because they have the possibility they might live in a 'safer' world for themselves and their family - I suspect very few soldiers can endure war based upon nebulous ideals of benefiting society. I would bet most of them have specific people they love that they are trying to protect and provide a better life for. It just so happens that what is good for them and theirs, is also good for the greater society as a whole. It's also often true (like in the case of sewers and roads), that giving the State access to the land to do that benefits everyone - even those deprived of the land, because they get the benefit of the sewer or road, etc - again, I don't dispute that eminent domain *can* be abused).
Most "Billionaires" mostly own stocks worth, nominally, Billions, based upon market price, they don't usually actually have Billions in cash-on-hand. Are you saying we should take away their company ownership from them?
Billionaires and Millionaires don't, as far as I know, mostly 'hoard' their cash - mostly they invest that cash in businesses, which creates hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs. Yes, they expect the money to come back to them. They also often engage in large philanthropy/charity projects, fund the Arts, etc, all of which benefit society as a whole.
When you look at something like eminent domain, while it is sometimes abused (and even very 'conservative' people are very uncomfortable with the abuse of eminent domain - look at all the people who decried a court decision a few years ago where some city in Connecticut [I think it was CT] used eminent domain to bulldoze houses so a Walmart could get built - many conservative people thought that was wrong), the basic concept, at least, is that sometimes there is absolutely no other way to accomplish a public good, such as building roads, sewers, or other vital public infrastructure, without taking someone's property - but it's also enshrined in our constitution that when eminent domain is exercised, the 'victims' are supposed to be fairly compensated for their financial loss.
As for the Rich, they pay a lot more taxes than the rest of society (at least, individually - I think the Middle Class in the USA pays the most taxes, as a group, but that's because the Middle Class is like a million times larger than the ranks of the rich), because they have more money.
Until video of you walking into the scanner with a woody gets posted to your facebook page for all your friends and family to see. . .
To be fair, I think the guy in the article would absolutely agree that people need to be able to do that type of math - figuring discounts, taxes, etc. Someone who can't do that basically can't function in the modern world without depending on others, or on technology, just a *little* too much - they'll be an easy target to get ripped off by someone who is better at math than them, or they'll screw up their taxes and get in trouble with the taxman, etc.
One point I think is important - you should teach people a little bit *past* the level of math that they *need*. Teaching algebra to someone should help them about master basic arithmetic, multiplication, division, but it might not make them very good at algebra. Teaching someone trig will require further mastery of arithmetic, plus algebra, but might not get them to really be very good at trig. Teaching someone physics will force them to further master trig, plus algebra, plus arithmetic.
So, one good argument for teaching people 'too much math', is to make sure they really master the fundamental arithmetic and algebra that can be helpful even in basic life tasks.
Unfortunately, I think this comes down to the individual. Some people will be fine with skipping over the limits and such. Personally, if I don't understand *why* something works, I have a hard time accepting that it *does* work. It's a psychology thing, but I'm not gonna let myself learn something if I don't believe it to be true. I hated the stuff with limits, but it laid the foundation for me to understand why the 'shortcuts' worked (shortcuts like saying the derivative of x^n is nx^(n-1) ), etc. I *love* using the shortcuts, but I'd have never been able to learn them, I think, if I didn't first go through the bit about limits.
With integrals, you could say the same thing about Riemann Sums. Why bother teaching students about Riemann sums, since that is the *hardest possible way* to integrate? But, without at least looking at the idea of things like the rectangles that approximate the area of a curve, and how as the rectangles get narrower, the sum of the rectangles gets closer and closer to the actual area, I'd not really understand *why* the integral can give me that area/volume/etc.
As for trig - I think the reason we teach everyone trig and algebra, is that to some extent, we feel everyone should have a basic understanding of physics, right? I'd sure feel more comfortable sharing the road with other drivers who have a basic, concrete understanding of the physics of bodies in motion. Well, I suppose you can teach people some physics without math, but to really help them get a real solid understanding of physics (particularly *why* what we *observe* in physics is true and MUST be true), most people are going to need an understanding of algebra and trig, at the very least. Calc can help with physics too, but isn't strictly required - there are plenty of physics courses taught only with algebra and trig. Mostly, the only physics courses designed *around* the extensive use of calc are the undergrad physics for Science and Engineering majors, where it really is very appropriate in most cases.
I'm not sure. . . when I first read that, the guy's rather poor choice of words sounded like something right out of a marxist speech (in the literal, historical sense of marxism), but if you finish reading the quote, I don't think he's actually advocating a marxist-style nationalization of Google, but rather starting another project to create an index which isn't owned by Google.
My question, however, is who is going to provide all the servers and storage space? Yeah, Microsoft, Google, a few other companies can build the infrastructure to do something like indexing the Internet, but I don't think it'd work well as an 'open-source' type project (the *code* to run it all might all be open source, but at some point, you need some really big datacenters; I mean, maybe you could do some sort of peer-2-peer approach, but what with NAT everywhere (and soon to be at the ISP level), the peer-to-peer model is somewhat hobbled. I just don't think a peer-to-peer solution would be both reliable enough and fast enough (e.g. parts of the index would go 'missing' temporarily from time to time, or just have very high latency).
The guy's comment about "Public Libraries" would seem to indicate he thinks having a government controlled search engine is the answer. Does anyone *really* think a search engine completely controlled by the government (any government), is a good idea?
I don't think so. One of the goals of the metric system over the past century has been to find ways to define the units in terms of fundamental physical constants, as opposed to something completely arbitrary like creating a block of some material and saying "this block is a kilogram". The definitions, by nature are still going to be somewhat arbitrary, but at least once you make the arbitrary definition based on a physical constant, it's easy to reproduce. We could explain to an alien 1/2 way across the galaxy what a second or a kilogram, or a meter is, by telling them a second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."
As long as they are technologically advanced enough to understand that, and to precisely figure out how long that takes, they'll know what a second is. If they aren't advanced enough to deal with that, we can tell them "It's about the amount of time it takes to say 'one-one-thousand'."
More importantly, throughout history, once we have a reasonable definition based upon a fundamental physical constant, we don't have to worry about the units changing value.
Obviously, to most people, having such a level of precision for what a unit is, is not necessary, but for scientists and engineers, in some cases it is very necessary.
Just because there are a lot of intelligence agencies, doesn't *necessarily* mean that there are 'too many'. It may be the you are correct, that there are too many, but the only way to know if there are *too many* is to do an analysis of what they each do, and see to what extent they are redundant. It's quite probable that each intelligence agency has a specialization, designed to serve the specific part of the government they belong to (which is probably why there are like 8 intelligence 'agencies' within the DoD). Your analysis, while *possibly* correct, seems far too simplistic to be worth anything (oh, look, there's a lot of intelligence agencies, that must mean intelligence in the government has become bloated).
Someone certainly needs to review these things, but I doubt anyone on Slashdot (and probably hardly anyone in Congress, for that matter) actually has the knowledge and experience to give them real understanding whether the intelligence is 'too expensive', or if it is simply 'just expensive' to get good quality intel.
I do know there have been some high-profile cases recently where, because not enough intelligence was *shared* properly between intel agencies, the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing, and that absolutely needs to be addressed, and it's quite possible that things need to be overhauled, but it happens sometimes in life that 'management' comes along with little understanding of how a system works, and decides the system is bloated and overly complicated, then they tear it down, and don't understand why the new system doesn't work the way they thought it should.
You should deeply understand systems before even attempting to proclaim you know what the problem is and how to solve it.
Why not just make it so that the 'new' mosquitoes just breed with other mosquitoes, so that eventually all mosquitoes pick up the new gene?
Let's see, what things might have happened in the last decade which demanded a growth in our intelligence spending?
Man, I can't think of *anything*. I guess that means that total spending approaching $10 Billion is completely unreasonable.
The writers have to 'conserve bodies' - the 'dumb jock' plays too much of an instrumental roll in the crew (he's their main shuttle 'pilot', and one of the security/military). When people are dead on the show, they aren't easily replaced (although, with the addition of the 'Lucian alliance' (I may have spelled the name wrong) people at the end of Season one, I suppose things could work out that some of the alliance people end up being integrated into the earth crew, a la Deep Space voyager and that rebel group which ended up stuck with the federation crew at the other side of the galaxy, so you *could* potentially get some 'replacements' from that group.
But, my point is, you can only kill off so many key crew members, before it begins to seem ridiculous that the remaining people could even *survive* without them.
I want to start by saying I'm not making any commentary here on the validity of Oracle's claims regarding direct copying (I suspect they are making that claim just because class names and methods are the same for some classes, for compatibility purposes).
The thing is, Google doesn't claim Dalvik is "Java". They aren't using a Java license. Yes, you can create a free/open-source implementation of Java, as long as you are licensing from Sun/Oracle under the terms of the Java license.
Google created something very similar to Java, but they are not calling it Java, and do not claim to have licensed Java from Sun/Oracle. I believe they claim copyright over the entire Dalvik VM and API. That makes a world of difference, legally, and so they can't use the defense the parent is suggesting.
"But the ONLY reason it was OK was because there is no other good Sci-Fi on TV except Stargate Universe, and even that isn't great."
I'm hoping that the cancellation of this show opens room for some new good science fiction. Show cancellation isn't always a bad thing. When a bad show is canned, that can free up money, people (production staff - costumes, set designers, special effects and sound effects pros, etc) to go work on something else, which may be better. Caprica was a bad show that deserved to die. End of story. I look forward to what some other writers come up with next.
SGU I'm still sort of unsold. The show has potential but has been going nowhere for most of the first season. However, the first season of the original SG-1 kind of sucked in my opinion (others may disagree), but I thought SG-1 got a lot better over the course of the second and third seasons. SGU has been 'good enough' that the writers and producers could really bring the show into it's own in this second season - I guess time will tell. But the clock is definitely ticking on SGU - I think it hasn't been 'good enough' so far to keep the series going into a third season if they don't really get it to be more interesting going forward.
I tried to stay with Caprica for awhile. I watched the whole first season (although, there were only like, what, 9 episodes in the first season? I'd hardly call that a whole season), but I had one problem with the show - I disliked each and every single one of the characters in the show. I kind of wanted them all to die (which, since we know the ending, at least gives the viewer a tiny little bit of satisfaction, I suppose - "at least all these #*%-holes are gonna die". And I'm usually a very empathetic person. Actually - I like one guy, sorta kinda - The lab assistant kid who was working on the cylon prototype. But even him I didn't really feel much empathy or sympathy for, but at least I didn't actively hate him.
When writing something, I think you need at least *one* or two characters that most of the audience can identify as a reasonable 'protagonist'. When the audience dislikes everyone, why do they care about how events unfold? I mean, from an abstract moral standpoint, you can paint it as a hypothetical study of an advanced, powerful culture bringing about it's own demise - how the corruption and moral decay (the nominal 'good guy' hiring 'the mob' to break into his competitor's lab to steal a prototype; the general moral lattitude of the culture - as presented in the very first scene of the series with all the people in the virtual reality, the reactionary religious fundamentalists who want to correct the moral problems, but who themselves are morally corrupt, etc.)
I think, however, when presenting such a story, for most people, you need to make the abstract more concrete by having at least that one or two people who seem to have at least some redeeming qualities.
The other problem I have with the show is that they consistently asked you to buy into premises that were just plain stupid - like the company which created the AI chip which was stolen NOT having design schematics and be able to just fab another part. I'm sorry, but nobody in engineering has a prototype but no design documents/data/CAD files/etc. Stealing a prototype part from a company would at best get you the ability to try to reverse engineer the part - it wouldn't stop them from building more. That's just one example, off the top of my head. I just remember thinking to myself multiple times throughout the show that the writers were idiots because key plot points seemed to hang on something which made no sense.
I've observed a bit of a spectrum (with some people occupying an 'area' of the spectrum instead of a single point - not being absolutely positive of where they stand).
For example, I've heard the following from several different people:
* there's no possible way we have accurate temperature readings of the global temperature 'state' - you'll find out that someone placed the thermometer too close to the earth (too warm) or in direct sunlight in the Sahara, etc, etc (they don't seem to understand the concept of taking lots of samples from lots of places and averaging the result)
* I heard Rush Limbaugh spend most of a program once going on and on about the eruption of a volcano, and how it was putting out more CO2 than mankind would emit in like 200 years or something like that, and concluding there's nothing mankind could possibly *do* to change the climate.
* I've heard people say there might be warming, but it is related to Solar activity cycles and has nothing to do with human activity.
* I've heard people say "So what? Global warming means winter is less horrible. I'm all for that." - which, I suppose, if you live in Canada or the Northern States of the lower-48 (places like New England, NY, PA, the Midwest, etc), is true - some people, as this article discusses, will likely *benefit* from global warming; unfortunately, that benefit comes at the expense of a lot of other (some of whom are very poor to begin with and their lives will be made even worse) people.
* I've heard people say maybe global warming will/is happening a little bit, but that as it happens, cloud cover will increase, which will reflect solar energy, so it will be self-moderating.
* Then there are the folks who believe that any kind of problem is just the fulfillment of prophecy, and Jesus will come rapture the righteous, while the damned will suffer 'real global warming'.
So basically, among the deniers, there's a range of people from "it's definitely not happening", to "maybe it's happening, but I don't think we need to do anything about it", to "it's happening, but there's nothing we can do about it, so eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die".
I don't think even with the horrendous DMCA it's as clear-cut as you say. The DMCA section in question, I believe, is: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
The thing is, the User Agent String was not desgined nor was it ever claimed by the HTTP standards group, to be a measure to control access to copyrighted works. I'm not a lawyer, so don't take any legal advice from me, but I believe there is at least a possibility that a court would find that to be the case. I realize the DMCA does not set the bar very high for what constitutes a "technological control that effectively controls access", but I really do think that the User Agent String was never, EVER intended for that purpose, and other than the fact that ABC, NBC, et. al might wrongly *attempt* to control access based on the User Agent String, that doesn't actually make that a 'privileged' access control mechanism.
I don't think there's any law that dictates what User Agent String a web browser returns. Web Sites can try to use the User Agent string to block content, but I hardly think the User Agent String constitutes a legal 'access control' for content. However, I suspect that there are other ways to suss out what browser is being used - perhaps something with JavaScript, or similar. Maybe a DirectX plugin or something which won't run on a Linux-based Google TV device.
Yeah, that might work for http where the domain name is embedded in the GET or POST request. How about other services which don't include the domain name in the protocol itself? What about encrypted connections where the payload is completely opaque? I'm sorry but your 'solution' is way too application-specific. Domain names where never meant to be used for routing - they were meant to be used to do a lookup of the IP address which *is* the main mechanism for routing.
As for 'isochronous delivery' - are you saying that there can be no QOS/Traffic Shaping with IPv6? I haven't specifically read up on that topic, but I find it almost impossible to believe that routers can't theoretically do traffic shaping on IPv6 packets?
"If a toaster takes up a square metre (big toaster), you'd have to stack them ten billion high over every single metre of the Earth to use them up."
Man, that's the most ridiculous example I think I've read in a long time. Hey, if we're gonna make toasters the size of a laundry machine, why don't we make them the size of cargo ships? Then it would take *more than every single meter of earth*, if you are only going to stack them 10 billion high.
By the way, I hate to point out that a "square meter" is a measurement of area, not volume. Are your over-sized toasters infinitesimally thin as well, or did you mean 1 cubic meter/metre (man I wish people in the UK would learn the proper ENGLISH spelling for words *grin* [yes, that was a joke])?
Oops - accidentally hit submit too soon. The last sentence should finish:
. . .but when I do want to run services, I have the freedom to open the ports and allow the connections.
Because, since all the hosts behind a NAT share a single routable address, that means to make inbound connections, you need to setup port forwarding. So, say I want to run Skype (which likes to have an inbound port), a game server, and a VoIP application, all of which need to be able to accept inbound connections. Well, to do that, on the NAT Gateway, I need to setup 3 ports to be forwarded to my computer. Only I can use those 3 ports, no one else can. Which means with 64k ports available on the NAT, you can probably only setup port forwarding service for maybe 10k-20k customers. You *might* be able to alleviate this a little bit by using multiple 'public' IPs - say one public IP for every 5000-10000 users on the ISP network.
There's also the issue of 'well known ports' - let's say I want to run a web server - well, almost all browsers expect a web server to respond to connections made to either port 80 or port 443 (for SSL encrypted connections). Likewise SSH, telnet, FTP, rdist, etc all typically use well-known ports. Games using iD Software engines usually accept inbound connections on a particular well-known port (27960). Only one computer per public IP may have port 80 or 443, or whatever, forwarded.
Also, perhaps even more importantly, every outbound connection also uses a port associate with the public IP address being used for NAT. Again, using one public IP for a few thousand users might give you enough ports to mostly work.
Basically, in a world where everyone is behind a NAT, no one can ever accept in-bound traffic from off the 'local' network (I put local in quotes, because in the case of Large Scale NAT, you could probably talk to all the other customers of your ISP directly, but not anyone who uses a different ISP), even when they *WANT* to. Some people like the 'comfort' of thinking that NAT somehow protects them better than a firewall, but I'd personally prefer routable addresses for all my devices, with a firewall that I control on my home router to block in-bound access. That way, I can simply open ports when I *want* inbound traffic, and leave all other closed - but when I do want to run services
Speaking of economic incentives - the GP says there's no economic incentive to switch end-users to IPv6 when you can use multi-level Large Scale NAT, but I have one question:
Won't it take money to implement and convert customers to multi-level NAT? Would it really cost much more to convert them to IPv6+NAT64? That's the real question - not whether there is economic incentive to do something you don't have to, but what are the comparative costs/benefits of two alternatives, one of which you will probably *have* to do?
The other interesting thing to see here: Right now a lot of ISP's of course have IPv4 blocks. They could potentially keep using those for customers, BUT, they might also have an opportunity to sell their allocations off for big bucks to companies that are desperate for IPv4 public addresses to use for their servers. If the going rate for a block of IPv4 addresses, after the point of 'exhaustion', is high enough, many ISP's might find that they can actually *make* money by selling off their existing public IP addresses, and either switching customers to NAT or IPv6. If most of them choose "the right solution", and do IPv6, all of a sudden you have the critical mass of IPv6 users which are necessary to justify setting up new services only on IPv6.
"speed and velocity estimation is tricky, and potential energy at those speeds is so very much more."
That would be kinetic energy - not that you are wrong about the basic idea. Just thought it might be helpful to point out the difference between potential and kinetic energy. When objects are in motion, the energy represented by their momentum is kinetic energy. Potential energy applies when a system of objects has an attractive or repellent force connecting them, which would accelerate the objects either towards or away from each other. So, for example, if you have an object being held off the floor by a rope, or your hand or something, the object isn't moving (in relation to the earth/room/you), but it has gravitational potential energy. Cut the rope or release your grip, and the potential energy gets converted to kinetic energy. The potential isn't converted all at once - as an object falls towards the earth, for example, you can say that a small part of the potential energy is being converted during every small instant of time as it falls - so that at the starting point, when it's not moving towards the earth, 100% of the energy is potential, while 0% is kinetic. After the object falls 10% of the distance to the floor/ground, 10% of the potential energy would be converted to kinetic energy, but it would still have 90% of it's gravitational potential energy.
The term "potential energy" doesn't just apply to gravity - tensioned springs, chemical bonds, electrostatic or magnetic attraction/repulsion, etc all can be called "potential" energy.
The thing about the cars is that, other than an extremely small amount of gravitational attraction between them, there's no attractive/repellent force, so you can't really talk about the cars having potential energy, unless they are going downhill (or are in free-fall). In any case, the kinetic energy is much more of a worry than their potential energy in such a situation.
Well, there is the slight problem of making sure you can stop *in time*. Even if the brakes on the van are stronger than the truck's engine (which, btw, ensuring that the brakes are stronger than the *van* engine doesn't guarantee they are stronger than the Truck's engine, although I'm guessing that would probably still be true, unless it's a very large truck). While I totally understand the principle the guy used to stop the truck, I would have been at least a little worried that the combined momentum of van + truck might've lead to a situation where I could brake gradually, but not before entering the intersection. (I guess it depends on how far down the road the intersection was - if it was far enough away, you maybe wouldn't worry about it). However, since the truck was going about 40mph, I guess his foot couldn't have been 'flooring' the gas pedal - probably was only part way down, so not as much of a problem with it taking a very long time to brake.