Hell, in general the US could use a major overhaul of the educational system. It's way too focused on conformity and process than on results.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but conformity
and "proper" socialization are primary goals
of the public schools. They may even be a
higher priority than learning.
I hope I don't sound like the type wears a
tinfoil hat to block and/or magnify my brain
waves, but I really do think that is what the
schools are set up to do. And for what it's
worth, it's not an entirely bad thing to
include some of that in your goals as a school.
Society will work better if kids who beat up
other kids learn they'll be punished, if
people are taught to show up on time and
be respectful to others (not just those in
authority), if they're encouraged to be
organized and dress neatly and all that.
The problem happens when learning goes
out the window in favor of all those other
goals.
Re:Typical ... help the top 3 percent screw the re
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Also what about helpping out the other 97 percent. I think America would be better off with 97 percent average or above children then 3 percent genius and 97 percent retarted.
I don't mean to be mean, but
I think if you think the lower 97 percent can
be average or above, then your math skills might
not be that great.
Hey, as long as we're offering advice, here
are my pointers for women writing profiles
on dating sites. These are based on actual
experience reading women's profiles.
Don't post a photo of you and your
friends if your friends are all way, way
hotter than you. Yes, I know that hotness
is by and large a subjective thing, but when
you do this, one of two things happens. Either
the guy looks at the picture and his eyes are
drawn to the absolute babe standing next to
you and then he's disappointed when he figures
out which one is you, or the guy knows which
one is you and starts thinking, "Hmm, would
it be tacky to write this girl and ask her
if she can hook me up with her hot friend?"
Most, but not all, guys then realize
that it would be tacky.
On a similar note, don't post 12 different
pictures on your profile, all of which have
8 people in them, and yet give no indication
which one of them is you. Yes, I'm sure
you know what you look like and
it's obvious to you which one you are, but
it's just a tad annoying having to look
through all eight and try to find the one
person who is in all of them, especially
if some of your friends appear in several.
See also the hot friend advice in the
previous post: if you have pictures of
a ton of people up there, odds are
excellent that one of them is hotter than
you.
Don't say that you are "equally comfortable
in jeans and high heels", because although
you may not realize it, at least 75% of all
girls say that. In fact, if you want to know if
a profile is written by a girl and not by a guy
posing as a girl, look for that phrase. It's
the best indicator that the profile was actually
written by a woman for one simple reason: guys
don't know what it means or why it's important.
Is it because
it's important to be able to handle both
casual and formal situations? Are the girls
trying to say that they're diverse and
flexible? Are they trying to say they're not
high-maintenance? I don't know, and neither
does any other guy.
Speaking of things guys don't know anything about,
avoid stating your dress size if you're trying
to impress people that you are in shape or,
alternately, trying to prevent them from expecting
you to be thin when you're not. As a guy, I can confidently
say that I don't really know much about dress
sizes (other than that larger numbers mean
larger dresses)
because I, like most guys,
don't often buy dresses.
Sure, I've dated women, and I have a good idea
whether they're small or large, but I don't go
rooting around through their closet looking at
the sizes of the clothes. And on the occasions
when I've removed their clothes, I guess I did
have the opportunity at that time, but
I've generally
been focused on things other than the labels.
Bush also inadvertently coined a great spoonerism about power-stealing vampires when talking about this initiative.
I don't get it -- what's the spoonerism? It's not
"wall wart" is it? It can't be "wall wart"
because that article is from July, 2001, and
the term "wall wart" was around many years
before that. Go search Google Groups -- I
found two uses of the term as far back as 1989.
And for what it's worth, a transformer that is
inline (as opposed to hanging off the wall
socket) is called a "line lump".
Six years!!! For spam!!! Ok, it's very annoying, but I would violently protest anyone getting anything more than a month for just sending spam. Does anyone know how long you actually get/how much you have to pay for sending spam?
I think I have an idea for that. The punishment
should fit the crime. And here's how it should
work.
Just like people are sentenced to community
service for lots of things, spammers should be
sentenced to community service as well. But
in their case, it should be a specific type of
community service: they have to be manual
spam filters.
Everybody knows that for certain messages,
humans are better at figuring out whether
the message is spam or not. If there were
no cost to determining if a message is spam,
then spam would really not be a big problem.
(Yes, it would bog down mail servers, but
that would be the limit of the damage.)
So, if a spammer sends a million spam messages,
the punishment should be that he has to go
through a million mail messages and correctly
mark them as spam or not spam with an error
rate below a certain percentage, say less than
0.5%. As soon as he manually detects as many
spam messages as he has sent (or maybe twice
as many, in order to make up for the other
costs to society, such as the cost of putting
him on trial), his debt to
society is paid and his punishment is over.
Obviously, you would need a way to ensure that
he is doing the work correctly. But that can
be addressed by having other spammers classify
the same messages (and by having a few non-
criminals also classify some) and seeing if their
decisions correlate. If the spammers (and the
others) are given no knowledge of whose work
theirs is being compared to and whether a given
message is being checked, it will be very hard
for them to defeat the mechanism.
If the spammer's work doesn't meet the quality
standards for a given batch of messages, then
that batch simply doesn't count against his
debt and he makes no progress.
I'm not sure how many seconds it will take
the spammer to do the average e-mail, but if
it takes 1 second per message, and if they
work for 8 hours a day, then they should be
able to get through a million messages in
about 35 work days, so about 7 weeks.
And if 75% of those are spam, then that
means they will have made up for sending
750_000 spam messages.
Naturally, if the spammer wants to use some
software to automate the classification,
they are free to do that. But they must
still maintain the 99.5% rate of correct
classification, or whatever rate is
deemed appropriate.
To me, it seems hard to argue that this
punishment is unfair in any way. It just
requires the spammer to compensate society
for exactly the kind and exactly the quantity
of damage they did by spamming.
"[spammer] defied Judge Nicholas Coleman QC by refusing to reveal where he hid up to £425,000, saying Cambridgeshire Police would 'steal' it."
That'd be an outrage if he really ends up with all that, they should make a condition he never gets released unless he says where he hid the cash if he withdrew it or moves it all back into the UK if he transferred his profits offshore.
Nah, they should just watch him like a hawk
when he's released. If he goes to get the
money, wherever it is, they should then
arrest him a new charge of trafficking in
stolen goods or something along those lines.
Surely it's still a crime to try to get the
money or use it if you didn't earn it
legally in the first place.
Then when they've got their new evidence
of him committing a new crime,
lock him up again. The best part about
this is that he'll look forward to his
release for 6 years, and then very shortly
after he's released, it's right back into
the slammer. It's got to be more of a
buzz kill to get your hopes up and then
have them dashed.
Also, can't the victims either press charges
or bring a civil case against him to have
their money returned plus damages and court
costs? Maybe even a class-action suit if
they have those in.uk?
At first glance you think "6 years for spam...damn that's harsh".
No, I don't think that's harsh at all. Let's say
you send a million messages per batch and you do
100 batches of spam over the course of a year.
(That's two batches each week.)
Now, let's further say the average recipient of
your spam spends 5 seconds of their life
downloading it, realizing it's spam, and deleting
it.
That means you've wasted 1_000_000 * 100 / 3600 * 5
hours, or 138_888 hours of people's time.
Now, let's compare that to what would happen if
you spent your life doing things that are
actually productive. If you work a full time
job from age 18 up to age 68, that's 50 years
of work and 2000 hours a year. So that's
100_000 hours of useful work you can get done.
So what's the point? The point is, the guy
has already stolen more time than he'd spend
working his entire life. He's already pretty
much ensured, unless he does something
spectacular like finding a cure for a disease,
that his net lifetime contribution to society
will be negative. He has, essentially,
already wasted the equivalent of one lifetime
of other people's time.
Can someone please explain to me why TANSTAAFL does not come to bear on this?
Yes, anyone who has read the article and has good
reading comprehension can explain it. Here's a
sentence from the article:
Trucks with the HFI system produce half the amount of particulates -- microscopic, unburned bits of diesel.
Now, let's see... we're talking about a diesel
engine whose efficiency is claimed to have been
increased, so what seems interesting about that
sentence? How about the words "half", "unburned bits", and "diesel"? In a diesel engine, unburned
diesel fuel would seem to be a source of
inefficiency, I would think.
So, the answer here appears to be that this
system causes less of the fuel to be sent out
the exhaust. And by the way, you're right that
TANSTAAFL: it costs $4,000 to $14,000 to modify
the vehicle to increase its efficiency by 10%,
and I'm sure there are increased maintenance
costs on account of the fact that you're adding
new mechanical bits that didn't exist before.
On the other hand, for a vehicle where the monthly
diesel bill is $7000, it might be worth it to
increase efficiency.
One phrase: 8 cores + with 16/8 K cache per core and **one** L2 cache. [... ]
So is this an 8-port L2 ? What is the latency on it when all 8 cores are busy? etc... I think we'll find this core will suffer greatly from this point.
I think you'll find that Sun engineers have thought
of all that. In fact, here
is a paper that specifically addresses all the
points you've mentioned.
Basically, the answer is that it doesn't appear
to be a problem for two main reasons. The first
is that each core has up to four active threads
at once. The cores have zero overhead
for switching between one of the four hardware
threads and another, as compared to continuing
to execute the same thread. In fact, "thread
select" is one of the stages of the pipeline,
and the cores are designed to constantly
switch between threads so that of the
available-to-run threads, the least-recently-used
one is selected on each cycle.
As a result, simply having to switch threads
due to L2 / memory access
will not impose any penalty.
For the core to sit idle and
any time to be lost due to waiting on memory,
all four hardware threads would have to be
unavailable to run.
And there are four threads,
unlike (say) Intel's chips that have Hyperthreading
with only two threads. Increasing the number
of threads increases the chance that at least
one will be available to run. For example,
with 2 threads that have a 50% chance of being
available to run at any given time, the odds
of having none that are runnable are 50%^2,
or 25%. With 4 threads and the same 50% chance,
the odds of having none that are runnable
are 50%^4, or only 6.25%. The results are
four times as good with 4 threads as they
are with 2 threads.
Now, given that you have a limited amount of
real estate on that silicon, the question then
becomes: what is the best way to make use
of it? If you have to choose between 4 threads
per core with limited L1 cache and 2 threads
per core with more L1 cache, which is a better
choice for minimizing memory access problems?
Maybe increasing the number of threads is a
more effective strategy than increasing the
size of a cache. Remember, the goal of
Niagara is
throughput for workloads that naturally have
tons of threads. Blocking a thread to wait
on L2 cache essentially doesn't matter as
long as your core isn't sitting idle because
all its threads are blocked. The
PDF I linked to indicates they evaluated
the projected workloads and found that
increasing the size of the L1 cache didn't
really increase the hit rate much, so it
would seem that increasing threads per core
might really be a better use of the real
estate.
To elaborate on that for a second, the real
serious hit is going to be when the system
goes to memory. That is going to take one
of the threads out of the game for a long,
long
time. Having to wait a while on L2 cache
is not nearly as serious a problem, because
although it does prevent the thread from
being runnable, it only does so for a
relatively short time. As long as the
total bandwidth to the L2 cache isn't too
low, access time for the L2 cache isn't going
to make much difference either way.
The second main reason this isn't likely to
be a problem is that the L2 cache is broken into
4 banks. Each of the 8 cores connects to
the L2 cache banks through a crossbar
interconnect, so each cache bank can be talking
to a different core simultaneously. So, no,
it's not an 8-port L2 cache, but it does support
four accesses at once by interleaving, so
contention for the cache probably isn't a
significant problem.
Also, one other little minor detail to keep in
mind: the SPARC architecture specifies
register windows, and the Niagara implementation
of SPARC has 8 register windows, with 16 registers
per window (because when changing windows, you shift
two 8-register positions). Each thread has its
own set of register
Programmer testing? That means testing programmers, as in certifying them? Apparently not.
From the context, it seemed pretty obvious to me that
"programmer testing" means testing that is performed
by programmers, as opposed to by a separate part of
the development team that specializes in testing.
Having the programmer do some of the testing of
his/her own code makes sense to me for several reasons:
Coverage.
The programmer has a more intimate knowledge of
the code and thus has better insight into ways
it can fail than people who are looking at the
code as a black box, which is basically what
testers do. For example, if the programmer
knows the code uses his own implementation
of a hash, he knows to think about adding a
test where the input data has two strings that
have the same hash value to see if it properly
handles collisions.
Testing efficiency.
Because the programmer knows what the code is
supposed to do, what the contracts are between
classes and their clients, etc., etc., it's
easier for the programmer to construct certain
tests than for another person to learn these
things and then create the tests. (Although
on the other hand, the
second pair of eyes might find things that
the programmer didn't think of.)
Development cycle efficiency.
If a programmer does the tests as he's
developing things, he will discover bugs
much sooner than if someone else is doing
them. Perhaps days sooner. In general,
the sooner bugs are discovered, the better,
for several reasons. One is that code is
easier to fix when it's still fresh in
your mind. Another is that bugs may indicate
a design flaw that will need to be corrected
and may affect interfaces and thus require
changes to client code (which may be written
by other developers), and that creates overhead.
Also, it means development versions of the
software will be more stable and easier to
work with (fewer crash scenarios to avoid
when demoing to the boss, checking out if
it's as usable as you thought, etc.)
Tracking overhead.
If the programmer fixes bugs while still
in the process of developing things, then
he is the only one who has to know about
the bug. Which means it doesn't have to
go into a bug database, nobody has to
spend 5 minutes discussing it in a meeting,
etc.
Finding the source. If the programmer
does the testing, it's much easier to trace
that back to the source of the problem than
if the tester just notices that the software
fails in a certain scenario. It takes work
to go from a scenario to the point where
you know whose code fails (and thus who
should fix it).
I'm sure there are other reasons, but the
point is this: in many cases, increasing
the amount of testing that the programmer
can do is advantageous. (At least up to
a point -- you need a second pair of eyes,
and you need someone who tests how all
the modules interact to see if the system
as a whole works as expected.) But still,
finding ways to make it possible and to
make it easy for programmers to add more
tests and better tests
is usually a good thing.
AOL says that since it will control the network, it can protect users from the sorts of viruses and spyware that infect other peer-to-peer systems.
Sounds like a challenge to me.
Not really that tough of a challenge. AOL has the
huge, huge advantage going for them that they are
the only party that inserts content into the
network, and they are also the party
that provides the software (even if it's just a
specially-configured distribution of software
someone else wrote) that the end-user uses
to retrieve the video. In other words, they control
both endpoints of the communications link.
Therefore, the problem of ensuring that no
viruses or spyware or anything creeps into
the data somewhere along the way is quite
easy to solve: just use public/private
key cryptography and sign all the content.
Distribute the public key (there only needs
to be one, since there is only one party
inserting content into the network)
with the software
so that all users of the software can
verify the content that AOL is distributing.
Presto, you have a network that's essentially
immune to viruses and other malicious stuff
being inserted, unless AOL inserts them.
There really isn't much technical challenge
to that.
The second thing to worry about is if the
code that implements this content distribution
network has remote exploits, such as buffer
overflows or data that's not checked before
it's interpreted by something with privileges.
That's less easy to solve, but people have
written software without remote exploits before,
so it can be done. One possible shortcut would
be to write the code in Java or some other
language that has bounds checking on arrays;
that eliminates buffer overflows right there.
(In fact, Java would be perfect for something
like this: most of the performance hit with
Java is in starting up, and this thing will
have to run continuously at least as long as
you're watching a 30-minute TV program. And
garbage collection isn't even likely to be
necessary very often
since it's just transferring streams
of data over the network, which mostly
involves copying back and forth between
a fixed set of buffers, i.e. very little
allocation.)
The whole reason people buy macs is for the stability of OSX. If apple had to start supporting 3rd party hardware, this level of stability would severely drop.
True if Apple supports OS X on all PC hardware.
But what if they support it only the PC hardware
from certain partners? What if Dell or Gateway or
someone makes a deal with Apple and they test
and verify OS X on certain known configurations of
PC hardware, then Apple's partner or partners
sells OS X only on those configurations of machines?
That's essentially equivalent to what Apple is
doing right now with their own hardware; the
difference would be that they'd be involving
a third party (a licensee) in the process.
Well, they are still using Memory Stick in
cameras, laptops, etc. even though it's clear
that SD Card has won that battle. Sony is
weird like that. The seem to have an attitude
that since they are such a big electronics
manufacturer that they can single-handedly
define industry standards.
(But if that were true, we'd be talking about
copy-protection on Minidisc, not CD...)
Reasonable, yes, but legally workable not really, at least according to Sony. The sony eula says you must destroy any and all fair use copies of the music you possess,
Why would I bother reading or agreeing to any
license agreement just to play a CD?
Yes, I realize it has copy protection that asks
me to do so, but is there any legal requirement
for me to enter into some kind of agreement
when I've already bought the thing? I don't
have to enter into agreement with other CDs I've
bought, so I can't see why I'd be legally required
to pay any attention to the EULA that comes
with some Sony CD even if it has one.
Similarly, if there is a company that offers the
service of making copies that are DRM-free, if
it truly is an End-User License Agreement, then
they can ignore it as well, for two reasons.
The first is the reason described above -- that
there is no legal requirement to pay attention
to it. The second is that the company that
offers this service of copying the media
isn't an end user. They are a service
provider who makes the content easier to use.
And even if all this turns out to be wrong, the
company that performs the service can keep the
original copy but specify in their policy that
you continue to own the original copy-protected
CD even if they store it for you.
What the US scientists are suggesting is that we ignore the earth's rotation in our time-keeping, and just try to keep roughly in synch by arbitrarily adding leap-seconds (as opposed to adding them based on our actual observation of the slowing of the earth's rotation).
Silly question, but if we don't care
whether timekeeping remains in
sync with the Earth's rotation, then
why bother with a leap second at all?
Why not just abolish the thing completely?
For that matter, why bother with leap days
every 4-ish years if we no longer care about
keeping our clocks in sync with astronomical
phenomena?
Just to be perfectly clear, everyone would still go to sleep when it was dark and everyone would still get up for work/school/whatever when it became light out again. It would just VASTLY simplify moving between our current time zones or communicating with people in a different one. If someone works from 12:00 AM to 8:00 AM world time and I work from 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM world time, it's going to be damn easy to know that 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM is the timeslot we have to work with for meetings.
It would simplify that particular calculation,
but it would make others more complex. Let's
suppose you are on vacation in a big city
far enough away that today it's in a different
time zone. And let's suppose you want to go
to go eat dinner and then go for a walk on
the beach at sunset. What time is sunset?
With time zones, you can guess that it will be
within one hour of what sunset is at home,
if you haven't changed to a different lattitude.
If everyone uses the same clock, then you have
to know what time local sunset is according to
absolute time -- this is a value that would
essentially be a constant with time zones
(or only a function of latitude), but
with absolute time it is a function of
both latitude and longitude.
Second example: you're on a trip and
you're not feeling so hot. You need to go see
a doctor. Where you live, doctors' offices
typically close at 3am. But what time do
they close where you are now? 5am? 1am?
Are you east or west of where you live?
Basically, if you adopt universal time with
no time zones, you make things easier in
some situations but the price is that you
make things harder in other situations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't pulling it with gravity use even MORE fuel, since you're basically expending the same amount of fuel to move the target, plus additional fuel to move the 20-ton gravity "tug"?
Yes. But, the weight of the ship is
surely
negligible compared to the weight of the asteroid.
You are going to do this over a period of years,
so the gravitational force between them doesn't
need to be that large, which means the craft
doesn't have to have a very high mass relative
to the spacecraft.
Also, if the asteroid is tumbling through space,
you'll have to
turn off the thrusters when you're facing the
wrong direction. If you do a gravity tug
thing, you can point the thrusters in exactly
the right direction 100% of the time and leave
them running continuously. If you mount the
thrusters on the asteroid, then theoretically
the thrusters are facing the exact
right direction exactly zero time (when you
rotate, you go through an infinite number of
angles, and only one of them is exactly right).
In practice, if they're only 10 degrees off,
the efficiency isn't that bad (cosine of 10
degrees), and so on, but even so you can only
leave them on about 25% of the time, because
they drop to 70% efficiency when you are
45 degrees off the angle you want, and you will
be 45 degrees off or worse for 75% of the time.
I suppose you could build articulated thrusters
in your landing craft to reduce this problem,
but it starts to seem simpler and more efficient
just to use gravity.
Scaling up launch systems to put 20 tons next to an asteroid carries a high degree of risk, too. The complex scaling relationships in rockets mean you can't just double every dimension to make a rocket X times as big.
No, but you can just make X times as many rockets.
Make 20 rockets and send 1 ton of payload with
each, then have them rendevous, snap together
into a single spacecraft, then head for the
asteroid if you want.
Or heck, make 20 rockets with 1 ton spacecrafts
and have all 20 spacecrafts separately head for
the asteroid and work in formation to pull the
asteroid onto a different course, with each
spacecraft doing 1/20th the work.
Hmm, in fact, splitting it up into 20 separate
crafts actually decreases
the risk of mission failure.
Just send 10 extras, and now only 2/3 of them
have to do their job for the mission to succeed.
But if we are talking about parking a spacecraft next to an asteroid, why couldn't you simply mount an ion engine on opposite sides of a space craft, and point one beam at the asteroid, and one beam in the opposite direction.
I thought of this exact idea, but then realized there
is bit of a wrinkle: the ion stream will be pushing
the asteriod away from the craft (and vice versa)
but at the same time, gravity will be pulling them
towards each other. So, you will be working
against gravity.
And then the problem becomes that ion thrusters
don't tend to have a very high amount of thrust.
Their strength is that they can produce thrust
without wasting very much matter because of the
high velocity with which the ions move away from
craft. So, I wonder if the ion drive will even
produce as much force as the gravitational
attraction between the asteroid and the craft.
It might not. Even if it does, you still are
fighting against gravity.
Just send Kristie Alley up there. That should work.
Actually, you may have an idea there.
Kirstie Alley didn't
start off fat: she started off normal and
then gained weight. Since it requires so
much fuel to get a 20-ton spacecraft out of
Earth's gravitational field, maybe the spacecraft
should start off lean and mean and then put on
the pounds as it travels through space on the way
to the asteroid.
How hard is it to design a spacecraft to gain
weight?
I'm not sure specifically how you'd do this.
Maybe put a giant funnel
on the front and collect
space dust in a plastic bag? Or use charged
plates to collect ions?
Sheets of magnetized material
to collect particles with iron in them?
Interstellar space is almost a
perfect vacuum, but there is stuff floating
around within the solar system.
Seems like there could be a way to
collect a few tons of it if your voyage is
going to take 10 years anyway.
Evolution is a fact. ID is nothing more than myth.
I agree that there is some really great scientific
evidence for evolution. I experienced some
very compelling evidence of it last weekend:
I got a flu shot. The reason this is compelling
evidence for evolution is that I've gotten flu
shots before, but I had to get another one this
year because there are new strains of flu that
didn't exist last year. That's evolution.
But, it's still a leap from "evolution occurs"
(for which there is compelling evidence) to
"evolution is solely responsible for the
origin of life on Earth and there were no
supernatural forces guiding the process along".
Although it might not have been 100% clear from
what I posted, it is the latter that I am saying
is not a fact.
Yes, intelligent design is a myth, but not all
myths are necessarily false, and as I said
before, some people take it axiomatic that
some knowledge can only be gained by revelation
from a source outside of the physical universe.
Science class should teach science and that is all it should teach.
I agree with this too. However, my statement
was that the schools should teach that there
are alternate points of view on this subject, not
that this should take place in science classes
specifically.
In fact, it might fit better in a history class,
although you could argue that it is an
interdisciplinary subject, since it involves
philosophy, religion, history, and science.
In fact, you could argue that it might best be
categorized as "history of science", and if
there is no room for a separate history of
science class, then that would have to go in
either history or science class (or both).
At any rate, my point is that the schools
shouldn't engage in advocacy. They should
present the facts and tell the students
when things are disputed and why they're
disputed.
In my humble opinion, schools should teach neither
"intelligent design" nor evolution. Instead, what
they should teach is that:
It's an age-old question where humans
and other living things came from.
Science provides (basically) one answer.
Certain religions provide other answers.
While many people think the religious
and scientific answers are compatible, many
do not.
This is a controversial subject, and many who
take one side look down on those who
take the other side.
That different groups believe very different
things even though they have roughly the
same information available to them illustrates
that they take very different approaches to
determining what is true. Some people take it
as axiomatic that the world operates according
to laws, that we can discover explanations
for what we see, and that nothing beyond the
observable reality exists. Other people take
it as axiomatic that something does exist
beyond objectively observable reality and
that certain information can only be gained
by revelation from outside our observable
reality.
Of course, the schools should also go over
the mechanics of evolution.
My point is that schools should not present
any point of view on a controversial subject
like this as truth. They should present facts,
and it is a fact that some people believe
evolution is the explanation of the origin of
life, so it is fair to teach that and to explain
what evolution is. It's also a fact that a lot
of people don't believe in evolution, so they
should present that fact as well.
In other words, when it comes to the veracity
of evolution and other hotly-disputed topics,
schools should be descriptive rather than
prescriptive. Teaching, for example, that
evolution is a fact and that the fact of
evolution means there is no need to believe
in God would be
improper, because you
are telling the students what to believe.
And so would teaching evolution in a way that
tacitly implies that there is no God. And, so
would teaching evolution in a way that tacitly
implies that it's inferior to intelligent
design.
Schools should be telling students what they
could believe, not what they should
believe.
Now, having said all that, if the Kansas government
really did define science, then they are going
way off course, because they are not teaching
facts to the students. They are lying to the
students about what science is, which is dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I hate to break it to you, but conformity and "proper" socialization are primary goals of the public schools. They may even be a higher priority than learning.
I hope I don't sound like the type wears a tinfoil hat to block and/or magnify my brain waves, but I really do think that is what the schools are set up to do. And for what it's worth, it's not an entirely bad thing to include some of that in your goals as a school. Society will work better if kids who beat up other kids learn they'll be punished, if people are taught to show up on time and be respectful to others (not just those in authority), if they're encouraged to be organized and dress neatly and all that. The problem happens when learning goes out the window in favor of all those other goals.
I don't mean to be mean, but I think if you think the lower 97 percent can be average or above, then your math skills might not be that great.
Hey, as long as we're offering advice, here are my pointers for women writing profiles on dating sites. These are based on actual experience reading women's profiles.
I don't get it -- what's the spoonerism? It's not "wall wart" is it? It can't be "wall wart" because that article is from July, 2001, and the term "wall wart" was around many years before that. Go search Google Groups -- I found two uses of the term as far back as 1989.
And for what it's worth, a transformer that is inline (as opposed to hanging off the wall socket) is called a "line lump".
I think I have an idea for that. The punishment should fit the crime. And here's how it should work.
Just like people are sentenced to community service for lots of things, spammers should be sentenced to community service as well. But in their case, it should be a specific type of community service: they have to be manual spam filters.
Everybody knows that for certain messages, humans are better at figuring out whether the message is spam or not. If there were no cost to determining if a message is spam, then spam would really not be a big problem. (Yes, it would bog down mail servers, but that would be the limit of the damage.)
So, if a spammer sends a million spam messages, the punishment should be that he has to go through a million mail messages and correctly mark them as spam or not spam with an error rate below a certain percentage, say less than 0.5%. As soon as he manually detects as many spam messages as he has sent (or maybe twice as many, in order to make up for the other costs to society, such as the cost of putting him on trial), his debt to society is paid and his punishment is over.
Obviously, you would need a way to ensure that he is doing the work correctly. But that can be addressed by having other spammers classify the same messages (and by having a few non- criminals also classify some) and seeing if their decisions correlate. If the spammers (and the others) are given no knowledge of whose work theirs is being compared to and whether a given message is being checked, it will be very hard for them to defeat the mechanism.
If the spammer's work doesn't meet the quality standards for a given batch of messages, then that batch simply doesn't count against his debt and he makes no progress.
I'm not sure how many seconds it will take the spammer to do the average e-mail, but if it takes 1 second per message, and if they work for 8 hours a day, then they should be able to get through a million messages in about 35 work days, so about 7 weeks. And if 75% of those are spam, then that means they will have made up for sending 750_000 spam messages.
Naturally, if the spammer wants to use some software to automate the classification, they are free to do that. But they must still maintain the 99.5% rate of correct classification, or whatever rate is deemed appropriate.
To me, it seems hard to argue that this punishment is unfair in any way. It just requires the spammer to compensate society for exactly the kind and exactly the quantity of damage they did by spamming.
Nah, they should just watch him like a hawk when he's released. If he goes to get the money, wherever it is, they should then arrest him a new charge of trafficking in stolen goods or something along those lines. Surely it's still a crime to try to get the money or use it if you didn't earn it legally in the first place.
Then when they've got their new evidence of him committing a new crime, lock him up again. The best part about this is that he'll look forward to his release for 6 years, and then very shortly after he's released, it's right back into the slammer. It's got to be more of a buzz kill to get your hopes up and then have them dashed.
Also, can't the victims either press charges or bring a civil case against him to have their money returned plus damages and court costs? Maybe even a class-action suit if they have those in .uk?
No, I don't think that's harsh at all. Let's say you send a million messages per batch and you do 100 batches of spam over the course of a year. (That's two batches each week.) Now, let's further say the average recipient of your spam spends 5 seconds of their life downloading it, realizing it's spam, and deleting it. That means you've wasted 1_000_000 * 100 / 3600 * 5 hours, or 138_888 hours of people's time.
Now, let's compare that to what would happen if you spent your life doing things that are actually productive. If you work a full time job from age 18 up to age 68, that's 50 years of work and 2000 hours a year. So that's 100_000 hours of useful work you can get done.
So what's the point? The point is, the guy has already stolen more time than he'd spend working his entire life. He's already pretty much ensured, unless he does something spectacular like finding a cure for a disease, that his net lifetime contribution to society will be negative. He has, essentially, already wasted the equivalent of one lifetime of other people's time.
Yes, anyone who has read the article and has good reading comprehension can explain it. Here's a sentence from the article:
Now, let's see... we're talking about a diesel engine whose efficiency is claimed to have been increased, so what seems interesting about that sentence? How about the words "half", "unburned bits", and "diesel"? In a diesel engine, unburned diesel fuel would seem to be a source of inefficiency, I would think.
So, the answer here appears to be that this system causes less of the fuel to be sent out the exhaust. And by the way, you're right that TANSTAAFL: it costs $4,000 to $14,000 to modify the vehicle to increase its efficiency by 10%, and I'm sure there are increased maintenance costs on account of the fact that you're adding new mechanical bits that didn't exist before. On the other hand, for a vehicle where the monthly diesel bill is $7000, it might be worth it to increase efficiency.
Geez, was I too subtle? This being Slashdot, I thought at least somebody here would've seen movies by a certain director...
I think you'll find that Sun engineers have thought of all that. In fact, here is a paper that specifically addresses all the points you've mentioned.
Basically, the answer is that it doesn't appear to be a problem for two main reasons. The first is that each core has up to four active threads at once. The cores have zero overhead for switching between one of the four hardware threads and another, as compared to continuing to execute the same thread. In fact, "thread select" is one of the stages of the pipeline, and the cores are designed to constantly switch between threads so that of the available-to-run threads, the least-recently-used one is selected on each cycle.
As a result, simply having to switch threads due to L2 / memory access will not impose any penalty. For the core to sit idle and any time to be lost due to waiting on memory, all four hardware threads would have to be unavailable to run. And there are four threads, unlike (say) Intel's chips that have Hyperthreading with only two threads. Increasing the number of threads increases the chance that at least one will be available to run. For example, with 2 threads that have a 50% chance of being available to run at any given time, the odds of having none that are runnable are 50%^2, or 25%. With 4 threads and the same 50% chance, the odds of having none that are runnable are 50%^4, or only 6.25%. The results are four times as good with 4 threads as they are with 2 threads.
Now, given that you have a limited amount of real estate on that silicon, the question then becomes: what is the best way to make use of it? If you have to choose between 4 threads per core with limited L1 cache and 2 threads per core with more L1 cache, which is a better choice for minimizing memory access problems? Maybe increasing the number of threads is a more effective strategy than increasing the size of a cache. Remember, the goal of Niagara is throughput for workloads that naturally have tons of threads. Blocking a thread to wait on L2 cache essentially doesn't matter as long as your core isn't sitting idle because all its threads are blocked. The PDF I linked to indicates they evaluated the projected workloads and found that increasing the size of the L1 cache didn't really increase the hit rate much, so it would seem that increasing threads per core might really be a better use of the real estate.
To elaborate on that for a second, the real serious hit is going to be when the system goes to memory. That is going to take one of the threads out of the game for a long, long time. Having to wait a while on L2 cache is not nearly as serious a problem, because although it does prevent the thread from being runnable, it only does so for a relatively short time. As long as the total bandwidth to the L2 cache isn't too low, access time for the L2 cache isn't going to make much difference either way.
The second main reason this isn't likely to be a problem is that the L2 cache is broken into 4 banks. Each of the 8 cores connects to the L2 cache banks through a crossbar interconnect, so each cache bank can be talking to a different core simultaneously. So, no, it's not an 8-port L2 cache, but it does support four accesses at once by interleaving, so contention for the cache probably isn't a significant problem.
Also, one other little minor detail to keep in mind: the SPARC architecture specifies register windows, and the Niagara implementation of SPARC has 8 register windows, with 16 registers per window (because when changing windows, you shift two 8-register positions). Each thread has its own set of register
From the context, it seemed pretty obvious to me that "programmer testing" means testing that is performed by programmers, as opposed to by a separate part of the development team that specializes in testing.
Having the programmer do some of the testing of his/her own code makes sense to me for several reasons:
I'm sure there are other reasons, but the point is this: in many cases, increasing the amount of testing that the programmer can do is advantageous. (At least up to a point -- you need a second pair of eyes, and you need someone who tests how all the modules interact to see if the system as a whole works as expected.) But still, finding ways to make it possible and to make it easy for programmers to add more tests and better tests is usually a good thing.
Perhaps THX would be even better. In fact, I think you could say that THX is all about seeing the Sun.
Not really that tough of a challenge. AOL has the huge, huge advantage going for them that they are the only party that inserts content into the network, and they are also the party that provides the software (even if it's just a specially-configured distribution of software someone else wrote) that the end-user uses to retrieve the video. In other words, they control both endpoints of the communications link.
Therefore, the problem of ensuring that no viruses or spyware or anything creeps into the data somewhere along the way is quite easy to solve: just use public/private key cryptography and sign all the content. Distribute the public key (there only needs to be one, since there is only one party inserting content into the network) with the software so that all users of the software can verify the content that AOL is distributing. Presto, you have a network that's essentially immune to viruses and other malicious stuff being inserted, unless AOL inserts them. There really isn't much technical challenge to that.
The second thing to worry about is if the code that implements this content distribution network has remote exploits, such as buffer overflows or data that's not checked before it's interpreted by something with privileges. That's less easy to solve, but people have written software without remote exploits before, so it can be done. One possible shortcut would be to write the code in Java or some other language that has bounds checking on arrays; that eliminates buffer overflows right there. (In fact, Java would be perfect for something like this: most of the performance hit with Java is in starting up, and this thing will have to run continuously at least as long as you're watching a 30-minute TV program. And garbage collection isn't even likely to be necessary very often since it's just transferring streams of data over the network, which mostly involves copying back and forth between a fixed set of buffers, i.e. very little allocation.)
True if Apple supports OS X on all PC hardware. But what if they support it only the PC hardware from certain partners? What if Dell or Gateway or someone makes a deal with Apple and they test and verify OS X on certain known configurations of PC hardware, then Apple's partner or partners sells OS X only on those configurations of machines?
That's essentially equivalent to what Apple is doing right now with their own hardware; the difference would be that they'd be involving a third party (a licensee) in the process.
Well, they are still using Memory Stick in cameras, laptops, etc. even though it's clear that SD Card has won that battle. Sony is weird like that. The seem to have an attitude that since they are such a big electronics manufacturer that they can single-handedly define industry standards.
(But if that were true, we'd be talking about copy-protection on Minidisc, not CD...)
Why would I bother reading or agreeing to any license agreement just to play a CD?
Yes, I realize it has copy protection that asks me to do so, but is there any legal requirement for me to enter into some kind of agreement when I've already bought the thing? I don't have to enter into agreement with other CDs I've bought, so I can't see why I'd be legally required to pay any attention to the EULA that comes with some Sony CD even if it has one.
Similarly, if there is a company that offers the service of making copies that are DRM-free, if it truly is an End-User License Agreement, then they can ignore it as well, for two reasons. The first is the reason described above -- that there is no legal requirement to pay attention to it. The second is that the company that offers this service of copying the media isn't an end user. They are a service provider who makes the content easier to use.
And even if all this turns out to be wrong, the company that performs the service can keep the original copy but specify in their policy that you continue to own the original copy-protected CD even if they store it for you.
Oh my gosh -- they said it in a magazine article!? Well, then it must be true!
Silly question, but if we don't care whether timekeeping remains in sync with the Earth's rotation, then why bother with a leap second at all? Why not just abolish the thing completely? For that matter, why bother with leap days every 4-ish years if we no longer care about keeping our clocks in sync with astronomical phenomena?
It would simplify that particular calculation, but it would make others more complex. Let's suppose you are on vacation in a big city far enough away that today it's in a different time zone. And let's suppose you want to go to go eat dinner and then go for a walk on the beach at sunset. What time is sunset? With time zones, you can guess that it will be within one hour of what sunset is at home, if you haven't changed to a different lattitude. If everyone uses the same clock, then you have to know what time local sunset is according to absolute time -- this is a value that would essentially be a constant with time zones (or only a function of latitude), but with absolute time it is a function of both latitude and longitude.
Second example: you're on a trip and you're not feeling so hot. You need to go see a doctor. Where you live, doctors' offices typically close at 3am. But what time do they close where you are now? 5am? 1am? Are you east or west of where you live?
Basically, if you adopt universal time with no time zones, you make things easier in some situations but the price is that you make things harder in other situations.
Yes. But, the weight of the ship is surely negligible compared to the weight of the asteroid. You are going to do this over a period of years, so the gravitational force between them doesn't need to be that large, which means the craft doesn't have to have a very high mass relative to the spacecraft.
Also, if the asteroid is tumbling through space, you'll have to turn off the thrusters when you're facing the wrong direction. If you do a gravity tug thing, you can point the thrusters in exactly the right direction 100% of the time and leave them running continuously. If you mount the thrusters on the asteroid, then theoretically the thrusters are facing the exact right direction exactly zero time (when you rotate, you go through an infinite number of angles, and only one of them is exactly right). In practice, if they're only 10 degrees off, the efficiency isn't that bad (cosine of 10 degrees), and so on, but even so you can only leave them on about 25% of the time, because they drop to 70% efficiency when you are 45 degrees off the angle you want, and you will be 45 degrees off or worse for 75% of the time.
I suppose you could build articulated thrusters in your landing craft to reduce this problem, but it starts to seem simpler and more efficient just to use gravity.
No, but you can just make X times as many rockets. Make 20 rockets and send 1 ton of payload with each, then have them rendevous, snap together into a single spacecraft, then head for the asteroid if you want.
Or heck, make 20 rockets with 1 ton spacecrafts and have all 20 spacecrafts separately head for the asteroid and work in formation to pull the asteroid onto a different course, with each spacecraft doing 1/20th the work.
Hmm, in fact, splitting it up into 20 separate crafts actually decreases the risk of mission failure. Just send 10 extras, and now only 2/3 of them have to do their job for the mission to succeed.
I thought of this exact idea, but then realized there is bit of a wrinkle: the ion stream will be pushing the asteriod away from the craft (and vice versa) but at the same time, gravity will be pulling them towards each other. So, you will be working against gravity.
And then the problem becomes that ion thrusters don't tend to have a very high amount of thrust. Their strength is that they can produce thrust without wasting very much matter because of the high velocity with which the ions move away from craft. So, I wonder if the ion drive will even produce as much force as the gravitational attraction between the asteroid and the craft. It might not. Even if it does, you still are fighting against gravity.
Actually, you may have an idea there. Kirstie Alley didn't start off fat: she started off normal and then gained weight. Since it requires so much fuel to get a 20-ton spacecraft out of Earth's gravitational field, maybe the spacecraft should start off lean and mean and then put on the pounds as it travels through space on the way to the asteroid.
How hard is it to design a spacecraft to gain weight? I'm not sure specifically how you'd do this. Maybe put a giant funnel on the front and collect space dust in a plastic bag? Or use charged plates to collect ions? Sheets of magnetized material to collect particles with iron in them? Interstellar space is almost a perfect vacuum, but there is stuff floating around within the solar system. Seems like there could be a way to collect a few tons of it if your voyage is going to take 10 years anyway.
I agree that there is some really great scientific evidence for evolution. I experienced some very compelling evidence of it last weekend: I got a flu shot. The reason this is compelling evidence for evolution is that I've gotten flu shots before, but I had to get another one this year because there are new strains of flu that didn't exist last year. That's evolution.
But, it's still a leap from "evolution occurs" (for which there is compelling evidence) to "evolution is solely responsible for the origin of life on Earth and there were no supernatural forces guiding the process along". Although it might not have been 100% clear from what I posted, it is the latter that I am saying is not a fact.
Yes, intelligent design is a myth, but not all myths are necessarily false, and as I said before, some people take it axiomatic that some knowledge can only be gained by revelation from a source outside of the physical universe.
I agree with this too. However, my statement was that the schools should teach that there are alternate points of view on this subject, not that this should take place in science classes specifically. In fact, it might fit better in a history class, although you could argue that it is an interdisciplinary subject, since it involves philosophy, religion, history, and science. In fact, you could argue that it might best be categorized as "history of science", and if there is no room for a separate history of science class, then that would have to go in either history or science class (or both).
At any rate, my point is that the schools shouldn't engage in advocacy. They should present the facts and tell the students when things are disputed and why they're disputed.
In my humble opinion, schools should teach neither "intelligent design" nor evolution. Instead, what they should teach is that:
Of course, the schools should also go over the mechanics of evolution.
My point is that schools should not present any point of view on a controversial subject like this as truth. They should present facts, and it is a fact that some people believe evolution is the explanation of the origin of life, so it is fair to teach that and to explain what evolution is. It's also a fact that a lot of people don't believe in evolution, so they should present that fact as well.
In other words, when it comes to the veracity of evolution and other hotly-disputed topics, schools should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Teaching, for example, that evolution is a fact and that the fact of evolution means there is no need to believe in God would be improper, because you are telling the students what to believe. And so would teaching evolution in a way that tacitly implies that there is no God. And, so would teaching evolution in a way that tacitly implies that it's inferior to intelligent design. Schools should be telling students what they could believe, not what they should believe.
Now, having said all that, if the Kansas government really did define science, then they are going way off course, because they are not teaching facts to the students. They are lying to the students about what science is, which is dumb.