... we have got to start getting really serious about getting cold fusion to work...
Cold fusion? Hell, I'll take *any* fusion, hot or cold. Cold fusion just means I can in theory put one in my basement. I'm fine, at the moment, with utilities building hot fusion plants if they can get them supercritical (supercritical=producing more energy than it takes to make them go). Hot fusion has the same net input and output as cold fusion, and it looks a lot closer to reality.
I'm real hopeful for the fuel cell vehicles, but there is one BIG engineering problem to overcome. All these guys running around saying hydrogen fuel is the answer are nuts! Anyone besides me remember the Hindenberg?????
Actually, the BIG problem they have to overcome is not engineering, but public relations. The Hindenberg disaster was not actually a hydrogen disaster. The skin of the airship was specially coated with a powdered aluminum in paint formula which closely resembles high powered modern solid rocket fuel. This skin was ignited by a discharge of static electricity. The hydrogen released burned upward, away from the passengers. Nearly (if not all) of the passengers that died were killed by jumping before the airship hit the ground. The passengers that rode the airship down escaped. The burn injuries were caused by falling debris or components of the airship, not the hydrogen.
Unfortunately, this oft-quoted disaster is a legacy that modern designers of hydrogen systems have to deal with on a regular basis. Therefore, there are many, many things written about it. Any author with an understanding of physics and the events of the day debunks the idea that hydrogen was the source of the problem. In fact, it is highly likely that had the Hindenberg contained helium, the disaster would not have changed much. The skin coated with rocket fuel was the real culprit.
Reading the data gained from the FOIA request displayed by the aclu gives me some more information. The system apparently showed a false positive rate of.4% (false alarms) and a false negative rate of 53% (failed attempts to match people in the database).
That is to say, if the person in front of the camera was in the database, there was a 53% chance they'd be allowed to continue. If the person in front of the camera was not in the database, there was a.4% chance they'd be detained, and a 99.6% chance they'd be allowed to continue.
Interestingly enough, I'd have to say the technology isn't half bad, so to speak, at doing what it tries to do. If we were to assume this system had been in place before 9/11, and if we were to make the wild assumption that all of the terrorists had been in the database, then the hijackings probably would have been prevented since half the hijackers wouldn't have boarded the planes.
On the other hand, that's.4% false positive with 15 individuals/250 photographs in the database. If we were to assume that that ratio of individuals to photographs scales, then when there are, say, 3750 people in the database, will that imply a (.4*3750/15 = ) 100% false positive rate? That is to say, how does the false positive rate scale to more people in the database to have false positives against? This is a question the airport doesn't appear to be addressing, by not changing the number of available matches over the course of the test.
If the recognition software can get close to half right, then the system can notify a human who can take a closer look on the monitor.
The article stated the system matched 47 percent of the time, indicating a false positive rate of 53%. However, the article doesn't indicate what the false negative rate was. I.e., how often did it identify a person not in the database as being in the database. The article indicates more than 1000 false negatives over four weeks of testing, but doesn't indicate the actual number nor the number of match attempts. Therefore, we can see that matching a face in the database to the database was less than 50% likely, which is near the same as a coin toos, and we cannot say that matching a face that really isn't in the database is a known number. Of course, a rate of near 50% indicates randomness, so we can weakly infer that the system at this airport is no better than a coin toss.
I have to add one question to this... How did they get the names and addresses to mail to? Since nearly everyone's whois is protected by a clause like this one (from `whois bulkregister.com`)
The data in Bulkregister.com's WHOIS database is provided to you by
Bulkregister.com for information purposes only, that is, to assist you in
obtaining information about or related to a domain name registration
record. Bulkregister.com makes this information available "as is", and
does not guarantee its accuracy. By submitting a WHOIS query, you
agree that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that,
under no circumstances will you use this data to: (1) allow, enable,
or otherwise support the transmission of mass or bulk unsolicited,
commercial advertising or solicitations via electronic mail, aka (SPAM).
(2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that apply
to Bulkregister.com (or its systems). The compilation, repackaging,
dissemination or other use of this data is expressly prohibited without
the prior written consent of Bulkregister.com. Bulkregister.com reserves
the right to modify these terms at any time. By submitting this query,
you agree to abide by these terms.
Note, "other use of this data is expressly prohibited". Therefore, I would expect bulkregister would not only be awarded quite a bit in punitive damages, I'd expect they should also be given all the money verisign receives from its former customers when the customer used this form to change service, and to get all those same customers back.
When something moves, you get multiple samples per cell, which the optical-neural system could then be intelligently integrating into a higher resolution picture. If that's true though, it wouldn't help you when staring intently at something that isn't moving.
I should note that research has looked at this. If you look at a single point, you can observe a blackout effect. All but the point you're looking at slowly goes dark until only what you're looking at is identifiable. (Or I'm forgetting, and everything goes darker. Its been a few years since that course in college.) The net result is that most of what you see is triggered by changing light levels, not the static images you look at for a few milliseconds at a time.
And to add to that... This would be the first TLD targeted towards individuals. Currently, if an individual wants to get a domain name they're restricted pretty much to.com and.org, neither of which fits an individual... So when do the rabble, like me, get our TLD???
Ooh, now that's one I had completely overlooked... Outstanding idea. 0.5kbps might be a little low, even for this, since you'd get connections dropped and they'd probably mention it. Put it at 5kbps, though, and you should be fine, and it shouldn't impact much, either.
Just make it extremely inconvenient to do, and people won't be as likely to do it...
Unfortunately, as you probably are aware there's not much you're going to be able to do without alienating most of the teachers. Many teachers tend to react towards control of their resources very harshly, since they're used to being in a position of control.
In this case, I'd start with the usual corporate arsenal. Block unnecessary ports out, unless a teacher requests access to a particular port for a school project. Possibly put an http proxy server into place if there are particular sites that need to be blocked (but don't block carte blanche)
Unfortunately, these policies aren't going to make you friends with any of the teachers or students, so tell anyone who wants access to the blocked ports to just get approval from the principal or superintendent, and let them make the decision to unblock a port.
Would it be a crime for me to write a GPL violent game and let anyone out there download it?
That would depend on the wording of the bill... If the bill says "sell or rent", then you're in the clear. If the bill says "distribute", then you're screwed. Of course, if they realise their mistake, the language will get changed without much fanfare.
Now that someone's thought of infecting a virus with another virus, when will a white hat think of infecting Klez with some sort of antivirus. Let Klez think its doing its work, but don't actually delete the files its trying to delete. Then, a few weeks later, have code that just shuts down the Klez virus altogether.
And how is CA doing this, when Oracle says "they must have been talking to themselves because we didn't know about it"?
Umm... they didn't say that, the representative for the state said that.
(from the article>
Maviglio said Monday that the state was unaware of any official offer from Oracle last week.
"They said that, but they must have been talking to themselves because we didn't know about it," Maviglio said Monday.
Which is to say that even thought it was all over the internet and probably the CA newspapers, Oracle must not have actually called them up and made the offer. Either that or Maviglio doesn't read newspapers.
Jeez, read between the lines! 'Directly Emailing', 'Direct marketing by email' what's the difference?
Well, there's the obvious, "marketing"... I.e., Direct marketing by email necessarily involves marketing (and by extension, most if not all spam goes here). Directly Emailing is a superset which includes the previous category, but if I work at a company with a T1 and send an e-mail to my friend, chances are I just Directly Emailed him, since my company's SMTP server connected to my friend's SMTP server. So you're reading way too much between the lines.
I bought an HP Color LaserJet 4500. I print everything
If I had $1,800 to spend on a HP Color LaserJet 4500, I'd be happy to. Hell, if I could spend $900 on the cheapest laser printer I'd be happy to. But laser printers simply aren't cost effective for the average consumer. An average consumer probably won't replace a cartridge more than 3x per year. While your laser printer probably will last 10 years of usable service life, $1800+toner costs probably will still exceed the $2000 or so it would cost the average user to buy a brand new printer 3x per year, and its a very expensive up front cost.
Good, because until Mozilla bug 58554 [mozilla.org] is fixed, I think I'm going to stick with Netscape 4.x!
Which would be a worthy note if that was a real bug. Looks to me like an enhancement. Just because a piece of software can't do something another similar piece can doesn't make it a bug. An enhancement is something that adds useful functionality.
Here now, 600% more efficient than normal bulbs and also getting very cheap. They also switch on more gradually, making them less painful on the eyes.
If this works, then the new incandescents will be 1200% more efficient than normal incandescents. But the article says 60%, you say? It also says that current tungsten filament bulbs work at about 5% efficiency. Thus,.6/.05=12, or 1200%. (Implying, of course, that the efficient flourescent bulbs you refer to are 30% efficient.) I'd like to note, though, that white LED bulbs are also very efficient, and the 144 LED Medium Base Floodlight Bulb listed here, for example, is (assuming 5% efficiency for its incandescent cousing) 62.5% efficient, or twice as good as its flourescent cousin. It takes only 12 Watts to generate the same as a 150 watt tungsten incandescent.
Large downloads usually max out at 60kb/s with uploads being in the 5-10kb/s range.
Question... is that kB or kb? Either its comparable to a 56kbps modem or its 8 times as fast... significant difference there. saying kb implies kilobit.
I'd be hard pressed to name five more channels that I really watch so even at a base rate of $10/mo + $2/channel I would come out ahead.
This is, of course, only if they allow me to pick my channels. I'd love to be able to pick the 5 channels I like and only get them, but the networks would have a cow there, too. Most of them require you to carry a bunch of stupid little channels with programming on par with public access tv just in order to carry the main channel. I believe Disney is one of these. I bet they'd require you to pick all their garbage channels in addition to their worthwhile channel.
As to what Evolution skeptics may or may not use to advance their arguments, I can only say that I thought the hallmark of Science is skepticism. To my mind, with regard to speciation, a Scientist would say "we don't know".
I do recognize that those Evolution skeptics you refer to typically have a Political Agenda that's anti-Scientific, against serious enquiry and against even presenting information which tends to support Evolutionary Hypothesis in educational settings. That does seem to be good enough reason to oppose those skeptics. I'm concerned that we're diluting the term Science in the process, however.
I would like to make one more note here... I'd have to say that calling evolution the Theory of Evolution is completely accurate. A Theory is not the same as a Law of science, which has been proven to the point where it would require a fairly cataclysmic change in the understanding of science and the evidence surrounding its status to correct. A Theory is less than a Law, in that there is sufficient evidence to expect that it holds true in all cases, but it has not been proven beyond all doubt.
To contrast, I'll note those skeptics who are indeed pushing political and/or religious agendas, and compare the status of Evolution to Creationism. To imply that Creationism is as valid as Evolution, scientifically, would be false. With the amount of evidence that Creationism has to support it, it would have to be called the Hypothesis of Creationism, at best. As far as I know, there is no evidence of an organism spontaneously being created, fully formed and designed. This simple fact (unless I'm mistaken) is enough to prevent it from being called anything more than a Hypothesis. A Hypothesis is, of course, no more than the working idea of a scientist while the scientist goes on to prove or disprove it. There is generally some indication that it is so, or the hypothesis wouldn't have been conceived, but I'm granting a little leeway here.
All in all, I'd have to say Science has correctly labelled Evolution as a Scientific Theory. It has evidence to back it up, but the evidence is insufficient to push it beyond Theory.
We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
Unfortunately there's a long standing error in that calculation. The first time I read that fortune I thought it was hilarious, too. Then I reread it, because there was clearly an error in the language skills of the person who did the math. Clearly "the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days" does not mean 7*7=49, it means 7 (you know, like 7 days would be). Its simile, and its misinterpretation throws the calculations all out of whack. I later found someone who agreed with me.
(excerpted from my link) The error we have found lies in the unknown physicist's use of Isaiah 30:26, which says that heaven receives as much radiation from the Moon as Earth does from the Sun, in addition to what it receives directly from the Sun. The error occurred when the physicist took heaven's radiation from the Sun to be 7 x 7 times more intense than on Earth, whereas the Isaiah passage clearly states that the light of the Sun falling on heaven is only 7 times greater, not 49 times.
I don't think he claims that these are not scientific theories. He's looking for an experiment that would disprove evolution (since falsifiability is the hallmark of a scientific theory).
Careful now. He's not looking for an experiment that would disprove evolution, he's looking for an experiment that could disprove it. The difference being, he doesn't want to actually disprove it, he wants to have an experiment that could disprove it run and either pass or fail. Such an experiment might be extremely easy or difficult to create, depending on just what he wants to disprove.
There are plenty of experiments, and plenty of evidence, that shows changes in organisms from repeated outside influences over generational lifespans. Moths in England changed from light colored to black near factories during the industrial revolution, since the black moths could hide against the black soot covering everything, where light colors had been better before. Corn is the product of many generations of artificially selecting maize with the most desireable characteristics.
Unfortunately, evolution skeptics have latched onto this to call these minor changes, and claim that just because minor changes are possible, that doesn't mean major ones are. I.e., one might claim that it is possible for a dark skinned person's children to evolve into light skinned people, but it isn't possible for an amoeba to evolve, no matter how long it takes, into a human. They ignore that every change that happens at the time seems to be a minor change, but over the course of millions of years, those changes add up. The evolutionary result of a creature a thousand generations from now might be unrecognisable.
Slashdot Mirror
Cold fusion? Hell, I'll take *any* fusion, hot or cold. Cold fusion just means I can in theory put one in my basement. I'm fine, at the moment, with utilities building hot fusion plants if they can get them supercritical (supercritical=producing more energy than it takes to make them go). Hot fusion has the same net input and output as cold fusion, and it looks a lot closer to reality.
Actually, the BIG problem they have to overcome is not engineering, but public relations. The Hindenberg disaster was not actually a hydrogen disaster. The skin of the airship was specially coated with a powdered aluminum in paint formula which closely resembles high powered modern solid rocket fuel. This skin was ignited by a discharge of static electricity. The hydrogen released burned upward, away from the passengers. Nearly (if not all) of the passengers that died were killed by jumping before the airship hit the ground. The passengers that rode the airship down escaped. The burn injuries were caused by falling debris or components of the airship, not the hydrogen.
For more, read it on a page such as this one, about the hindenberg diaster.
Unfortunately, this oft-quoted disaster is a legacy that modern designers of hydrogen systems have to deal with on a regular basis. Therefore, there are many, many things written about it. Any author with an understanding of physics and the events of the day debunks the idea that hydrogen was the source of the problem. In fact, it is highly likely that had the Hindenberg contained helium, the disaster would not have changed much. The skin coated with rocket fuel was the real culprit.
That is to say, if the person in front of the camera was in the database, there was a 53% chance they'd be allowed to continue. If the person in front of the camera was not in the database, there was a .4% chance they'd be detained, and a 99.6% chance they'd be allowed to continue.
Interestingly enough, I'd have to say the technology isn't half bad, so to speak, at doing what it tries to do. If we were to assume this system had been in place before 9/11, and if we were to make the wild assumption that all of the terrorists had been in the database, then the hijackings probably would have been prevented since half the hijackers wouldn't have boarded the planes.
On the other hand, that's .4% false positive with 15 individuals/250 photographs in the database. If we were to assume that that ratio of individuals to photographs scales, then when there are, say, 3750 people in the database, will that imply a ( .4*3750/15 = ) 100% false positive rate? That is to say, how does the false positive rate scale to more people in the database to have false positives against? This is a question the airport doesn't appear to be addressing, by not changing the number of available matches over the course of the test.
The article stated the system matched 47 percent of the time, indicating a false positive rate of 53%. However, the article doesn't indicate what the false negative rate was. I.e., how often did it identify a person not in the database as being in the database. The article indicates more than 1000 false negatives over four weeks of testing, but doesn't indicate the actual number nor the number of match attempts. Therefore, we can see that matching a face in the database to the database was less than 50% likely, which is near the same as a coin toos, and we cannot say that matching a face that really isn't in the database is a known number. Of course, a rate of near 50% indicates randomness, so we can weakly infer that the system at this airport is no better than a coin toss.
Note, "other use of this data is expressly prohibited". Therefore, I would expect bulkregister would not only be awarded quite a bit in punitive damages, I'd expect they should also be given all the money verisign receives from its former customers when the customer used this form to change service, and to get all those same customers back.
Such as, say, IE 5.50 on W2K, which renders the top of the window as a bunch of vertical lines?
I should note that research has looked at this. If you look at a single point, you can observe a blackout effect. All but the point you're looking at slowly goes dark until only what you're looking at is identifiable. (Or I'm forgetting, and everything goes darker. Its been a few years since that course in college.) The net result is that most of what you see is triggered by changing light levels, not the static images you look at for a few milliseconds at a time.
Ooh, now that's one I had completely overlooked... Outstanding idea. 0.5kbps might be a little low, even for this, since you'd get connections dropped and they'd probably mention it. Put it at 5kbps, though, and you should be fine, and it shouldn't impact much, either.
Just make it extremely inconvenient to do, and people won't be as likely to do it...
In this case, I'd start with the usual corporate arsenal. Block unnecessary ports out, unless a teacher requests access to a particular port for a school project. Possibly put an http proxy server into place if there are particular sites that need to be blocked (but don't block carte blanche)
Unfortunately, these policies aren't going to make you friends with any of the teachers or students, so tell anyone who wants access to the blocked ports to just get approval from the principal or superintendent, and let them make the decision to unblock a port.
That would depend on the wording of the bill... If the bill says "sell or rent", then you're in the clear. If the bill says "distribute", then you're screwed. Of course, if they realise their mistake, the language will get changed without much fanfare.
Now that someone's thought of infecting a virus with another virus, when will a white hat think of infecting Klez with some sort of antivirus. Let Klez think its doing its work, but don't actually delete the files its trying to delete. Then, a few weeks later, have code that just shuts down the Klez virus altogether.
And just how will they do that, when they made an offer to dissolve the contract if the State wished to do so?
Umm... they didn't say that, the representative for the state said that.
Which is to say that even thought it was all over the internet and probably the CA newspapers, Oracle must not have actually called them up and made the offer. Either that or Maviglio doesn't read newspapers.
Well, there's the obvious, "marketing"... I.e., Direct marketing by email necessarily involves marketing (and by extension, most if not all spam goes here). Directly Emailing is a superset which includes the previous category, but if I work at a company with a T1 and send an e-mail to my friend, chances are I just Directly Emailed him, since my company's SMTP server connected to my friend's SMTP server. So you're reading way too much between the lines.
And that's supposed to compare to the $1800 color laser printer the poster I was responding to was using?
If I had $1,800 to spend on a HP Color LaserJet 4500, I'd be happy to. Hell, if I could spend $900 on the cheapest laser printer I'd be happy to. But laser printers simply aren't cost effective for the average consumer. An average consumer probably won't replace a cartridge more than 3x per year. While your laser printer probably will last 10 years of usable service life, $1800+toner costs probably will still exceed the $2000 or so it would cost the average user to buy a brand new printer 3x per year, and its a very expensive up front cost.
Which would be a worthy note if that was a real bug. Looks to me like an enhancement. Just because a piece of software can't do something another similar piece can doesn't make it a bug. An enhancement is something that adds useful functionality.
If this works, then the new incandescents will be 1200% more efficient than normal incandescents. But the article says 60%, you say? It also says that current tungsten filament bulbs work at about 5% efficiency. Thus, .6/.05=12, or 1200%. (Implying, of course, that the efficient flourescent bulbs you refer to are 30% efficient.) I'd like to note, though, that white LED bulbs are also very efficient, and the 144 LED Medium Base Floodlight Bulb listed here, for example, is (assuming 5% efficiency for its incandescent cousing) 62.5% efficient, or twice as good as its flourescent cousin. It takes only 12 Watts to generate the same as a 150 watt tungsten incandescent.
This is, of course, only if they allow me to pick my channels. I'd love to be able to pick the 5 channels I like and only get them, but the networks would have a cow there, too. Most of them require you to carry a bunch of stupid little channels with programming on par with public access tv just in order to carry the main channel. I believe Disney is one of these. I bet they'd require you to pick all their garbage channels in addition to their worthwhile channel.
I would like to make one more note here... I'd have to say that calling evolution the Theory of Evolution is completely accurate. A Theory is not the same as a Law of science, which has been proven to the point where it would require a fairly cataclysmic change in the understanding of science and the evidence surrounding its status to correct. A Theory is less than a Law, in that there is sufficient evidence to expect that it holds true in all cases, but it has not been proven beyond all doubt.
To contrast, I'll note those skeptics who are indeed pushing political and/or religious agendas, and compare the status of Evolution to Creationism. To imply that Creationism is as valid as Evolution, scientifically, would be false. With the amount of evidence that Creationism has to support it, it would have to be called the Hypothesis of Creationism, at best. As far as I know, there is no evidence of an organism spontaneously being created, fully formed and designed. This simple fact (unless I'm mistaken) is enough to prevent it from being called anything more than a Hypothesis. A Hypothesis is, of course, no more than the working idea of a scientist while the scientist goes on to prove or disprove it. There is generally some indication that it is so, or the hypothesis wouldn't have been conceived, but I'm granting a little leeway here.
All in all, I'd have to say Science has correctly labelled Evolution as a Scientific Theory. It has evidence to back it up, but the evidence is insufficient to push it beyond Theory.
Unfortunately there's a long standing error in that calculation. The first time I read that fortune I thought it was hilarious, too. Then I reread it, because there was clearly an error in the language skills of the person who did the math. Clearly "the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days" does not mean 7*7=49, it means 7 (you know, like 7 days would be). Its simile, and its misinterpretation throws the calculations all out of whack. I later found someone who agreed with me.
Careful now. He's not looking for an experiment that would disprove evolution, he's looking for an experiment that could disprove it. The difference being, he doesn't want to actually disprove it, he wants to have an experiment that could disprove it run and either pass or fail. Such an experiment might be extremely easy or difficult to create, depending on just what he wants to disprove.
There are plenty of experiments, and plenty of evidence, that shows changes in organisms from repeated outside influences over generational lifespans. Moths in England changed from light colored to black near factories during the industrial revolution, since the black moths could hide against the black soot covering everything, where light colors had been better before. Corn is the product of many generations of artificially selecting maize with the most desireable characteristics.
Unfortunately, evolution skeptics have latched onto this to call these minor changes, and claim that just because minor changes are possible, that doesn't mean major ones are. I.e., one might claim that it is possible for a dark skinned person's children to evolve into light skinned people, but it isn't possible for an amoeba to evolve, no matter how long it takes, into a human. They ignore that every change that happens at the time seems to be a minor change, but over the course of millions of years, those changes add up. The evolutionary result of a creature a thousand generations from now might be unrecognisable.