True, but the process of a microscopic black hole "disappearing" is really a function of it radiating all of its mass away as energy (via Hawking radiation at the event horizon). This is a tremendously energetic process, and would be observable, if it were happening in our vicinity in the solar system. It's not, and has never been observed, AFAIK. This implies that these random microscopic black holes are either much rarer than that, or just don't exist anywhere near enough for us to observe them radiating massive amounts of energy and exploding to nothingness, or the theory of Hawking radiation is somehow wrong. I don't know which of these possibilities is the most likely. But I do know that Hawking radiation makes sense, and I don't know where the theory that these microscopic black holes should be present everywhere comes from (I accept that there may have been many of them everywhere early in the universe, but those would have LONG ago dissipated).
Yes but you seem to miss the point. To operate these colliders, you have to put a lot of energy in. There is no known way to get antimatter for free. It is entropically unlikely that antimatter would form from matter (what you start out with before colliding), without putting more energy into the collision process than energy equivalent units of antimatter you obtain. You don't get energy for free this way. You just get a very compact, storable fuel that is 100% efficient in conversion to energy.
Your explanation of Hawking radiation wasn't quite right, but I'm not gonna critique it since I don't remember enough of the details. But you don't get antimatter out, you get high energy radiation out (but only when the black hole radius is microscopic in dimension... for macroscopic black holes, Hawking radiation is neglible, and hence they are relatively stable).
Glashow is senile, I took a class from him (for a week) last semester before dropping it. He was brilliant, but he's past his prime.
Nevertheless, his conclusion is pretty commonsensical, and I'm sure it can be proved (as much as anything in astronomy/cosmology can be proved).
The point is, that antimatter can't really be found for free by any method I know of. It is moderately conceivable as a fuel for space travel, but would have to be produced, by using energy generated from other processes, i.e. fusion. Antimatter is just a more space efficient way to store this energy. We can't get the energy for free unless we have stuff sitting around with unusually high energy relative to what we convert it to.
Roads in the US probably do cover on order of 1000 mi^2. That's not really all that much road, if you think about it. Just thinking about the island of Manhattan, it's about 15 miles long, and has about 10 avenues, each of which is probably 50 feet wide (roughly, if you include sidewalks). So that's 1.5 mi^2 right there, on one very small, albeit densely populated island. And if you think about it, I-95 is about 2000 miles + long, and about 50 feet wide, so that's about 20 mi^2 right there, or 2% of your 1000 mi^2 figure. Anyway, I agree with you that the cost and feasibility of such massive scale solar power is not currently economically feasible. If/when energy becomes more expensive and more $$$s go into solar power development, it might become cheap enough for everyone to have solar panels on their roof,etc. Even if it couldn't supply ALL our power, it could put a big dent in power consumption.
Don't know why this is moderated so high. Flame bait or no, the fact that you blindly accept the false claims of this oh-so-unbiased "benchmark" should preclude this from a 3 rating.
It's entirely unamusing, and uses incredibly (and self-describedly) offensive dialogue in its lame attempt at humor. Nevertheless I would think that here on Slashdot, people understand why free speech is provided for in the first amendment. Even the most fouly offensive speech is permitted, unless its attempt is the direct causation of violence or injury through provoked action. There is a clear warning on the site, and nobody forced you to read it. Furthermore, it IS an attempt at parody and is thus protected speech: we should never decide that something doesn't fall under the first amendment simply because we don't personally see its artistic merit - thus the fact that most pornography, although possibly technically "obscene" is protected, because there may be some artistic or other sort of merit there to some people. Likewise, some people might find this to be harmlessly funny (hopefully they don't actually takes pleasure in racism and homophobia).
Giuliani and Pataki really do know how to screw things up don't they? I am from NYC, also currently living in Boston. I liked the tolerant attitude the NYPD used to have to minor infractions (i.e. I could smoke a joint in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park without getting arrested). Not to mention the fact that NYPD has become 10 times more violent since Giuliani was elected. This is based on personal experience of getting harrassed in my own apartment in NYC, and I'm an unassuming white guy. Can't imagine what it's like if you're not.
I have to say amen to that. I'm moderately libertarian in my viewpoint, but I recognize that government can do good for people (and sometimes, rarely these days, it does). I'm not an anarchist. Anyway, I just hope the Democrats continue to support a free and tolerant society. The idea of Tipper supporting censorship or Al supporting crypto-restrictions scares me. If I can't vote Democrat in this election, I'm going to have to go 3rd party.
There are moderates out there (I like to think that I'm one). We are usually ignored by, what in my opinion, amount to a bunch of big government statists and cold, uncaring, selfish bastards on both sides of the political spectrum, at least within the party system, particularly in the House. Unfortunately, moderates don't do very well in the party structure. But there is a need for moderates, especially when it comes to running for national office. Successful presidential candidates are usually moderate. The whole reason the GOP has been foundering has been a failure to get national candidates who are sufficiently moderate out there. I would bet that they have their act together for this election though. Personally, I still think Gore is a better bet than Dole or Bush or whoever the Republicans line him up against. I don't exactly admire his techo-bumbling and idiotic self-promotion, but as long as he just butts out and keeps blowing his own horn, I couldn't give a damn.
Um, yes I can give you lots of examples of products written for Windows not working out of the box or at all with some incarnation of the Windows OS. Usually this is due to hardware conflicts, conflicts with other installed software, etc. as opposed to actual problems with the OS, although there is lots of software that's written for Windows 95 that won't work with Windows NT or 3.1, etc.
A personal example: I purchased Mathematica 2.x a couple of years ago or so, only to find that the idiotic interprocess communication between the GUI and the Mathematica core executable wouldn't work under Win 95. I had to contact Wolfram for a patch. The patch they gave me didn't work. This went back and forth for weeks, and it never did get working properly.
Personally, I have found that much more of the production level (i.e. non-alpha, non-beta) Linux software works on installation than does the Microsoft stuff. I suppose the requirements in terms of library versions are somewhat more complicated sometimes, but I can think of lots of Windoze apps that have the same problems (I think I have 5 or 6 different versions of VB DLLs in my Windows system directory).
GNU may be a more correct way to refer to the tools that make the whole operating SYSTEM. Linux is undoubtedly the KERNEL behind this OS, but isn't very useful all by itself. Nevertheless, most people refer to the OS as Linux. But what is the OS itself? Well, it is something that is obtained in distributions from a variety of companies and/or organizations that make distributions with varying intents, goals and focuses. This was always the point of free software: maximum freedom and flexibility, i.e. choice. Likewise, the creators of each distribution can call it WHATEVER they want. You are welcome to make a distribution based on the Linux kernel and call it Green Hat GNU or Blue Hat GNU/Linux. You might confuse people, it might not be popular, but this is fully within your rights as defined by the GPL under which the kernel and the GNU tools are distributed. Likewise, however, the name Linux referring to the OS as a whole (including lots of userspace tools) has stuck with lots of people. So lots of us will continue to refer to it as Linux, even as we acknowledge and promote Free Software and the goals of the FSF, OSI or whatever ideology we adhere to.
My point here is that you have the freedom to call it whatever you want and so do I. Don't be surprised if you anger people and alienate them by trying to FORCE them to call it by the name of your choice (as RMS tries to do). Linux is not one product but a conglomeration of products, distributed by a number of different organizations who are free to call their distributions whatever they want, as this is permitted by the GPL. People will come to accept or reject, appreciate or hate the FSF, the GPL, the OSI, etc. on their own merits. Trying to force things down their throats is just going to alienate them.
Dude, try this: http://www.netcraft.com/cgi-bin/Survey/whats?hos t=www.cybersites.com I think that probably says it: It's running on Red Hat Linux and that's what his email address said too.
Cool... I guess I should rephrase my problem. Our ethernet is configured so that only one ethernet address may be connected per user, which usually means one ethernet address per ethernet jack. Since I have this configured to use my 3com NIC EA, the ethernet bugs when an unauthorized ethernet address (i.e. Win98 networking under VMWare) tries to connect to anything, and it responds by auto-shutting down my ethernet jack for an hour, which is a mild pain in the ass. I guess I was trying to figure out some way to get networking to work without making another ethernet address. Probably not though. Damned fascist computer services people.
Anyone gotten networking to work with VMWare yet? I know it's supposed to do that whole bridging thing, and assign itself a fake Ethernet address, but I'm a little vague on that whole process. When I tried to run Eudora and Netscape on my win partition, it definitely did something, because it took out my ethernet jack for an hour (i.e. ethernet thought I was using a card with an unauthorized ethernet address). How can I make it properly "bridge" through Linux? And has anyone been able to d/l the modified X Server? The link was broken earlier when I tried it. I can only get standard VGA graphics, and I think maybe this modified X Server would fix that in some way, although I'm not sure. Lemme know if you have solutions to these problems. BTW, VMWare runs slow as ass for me, off of/dev/hda. I gather it will run much faster if I give in and make a virtual partition thingie and install Win98 clean. Maybe I'll try that when I get my Win98 CD back from my friend (he's just using it for "evaluation" purposes).
Well, I plan on playing Q3A in both Windows and Linux. I'll buy the Linux version (since I want the Linux numbers to look good so they keep developing for Linux), but I can't afford to buy the game twice. Guess I guess I'll have to copy Win32 binaries from somebody else. Honestly, it seems a little miserly of them to require such a thing. I'm willing to shell out 50-60 bucks for a good game, but not 100-120 bucks. I guess you could argue I shouldn't boot into Windows at all, but that's not really feasible for me, unfortunately.
Keep your fucking Nazi rhetoric off of Slashdot, you son of a bitch. Wanna say it to my face? Come and get me you racist pig. You'll find a hell of a lot more than you bargained for.
"I try to get my readers to think out of the box once in awhile"... I read that to mean that he knew his article was whacked and incorrect, but he decided to troll with it. Great, what a service to humanity.
Thus the hashing down of passphrases to a 128 bit value. Quite easy to figure out how many characters you need to get 128 bits of cryptographically secure pseudo-randomness from uppercase, lowercase characters and numbers, or whatever you use. The new version of PGP 6.0 for Windoze even gives you a handy little filling bar that tells you when your passphrase is long enough to generate a cryptographically secure 128 bit hashvalue. If you want to, you're welcome to try to bruteforce/dictionary/whatever attack my PGP secret key. Don't think you'd have any luck this runthrough of the universe.:)
Slashdot Mirror
True, but the process of a microscopic black hole "disappearing" is really a function of it radiating all of its mass away as energy (via Hawking radiation at the event horizon). This is a tremendously energetic process, and would be observable, if it were happening in our vicinity in the solar system. It's not, and has never been observed, AFAIK. This implies that these random microscopic black holes are either much rarer than that, or just don't exist anywhere near enough for us to observe them radiating massive amounts of energy and exploding to nothingness, or the theory of Hawking radiation is somehow wrong. I don't know which of these possibilities is the most likely. But I do know that Hawking radiation makes sense, and I don't know where the theory that these microscopic black holes should be present everywhere comes from (I accept that there may have been many of them everywhere early in the universe, but those would have LONG ago dissipated).
Yes but you seem to miss the point. To operate these colliders, you have to put a lot of energy in. There is no known way to get antimatter for free. It is entropically unlikely that antimatter would form from matter (what you start out with before colliding), without putting more energy into the collision process than energy equivalent units of antimatter you obtain. You don't get energy for free this way. You just get a very compact, storable fuel that is 100% efficient in conversion to energy.
Your explanation of Hawking radiation wasn't quite right, but I'm not gonna critique it since I don't remember enough of the details. But you don't get antimatter out, you get high energy radiation out (but only when the black hole radius is microscopic in dimension... for macroscopic black holes, Hawking radiation is neglible, and hence they are relatively stable).
Glashow is senile, I took a class from him (for a week) last semester before dropping it. He was brilliant, but he's past his prime.
Nevertheless, his conclusion is pretty commonsensical, and I'm sure it can be proved (as much as anything in astronomy/cosmology can be proved).
The point is, that antimatter can't really be found for free by any method I know of. It is moderately conceivable as a fuel for space travel, but would have to be produced, by using energy generated from other processes, i.e. fusion. Antimatter is just a more space efficient way to store this energy. We can't get the energy for free unless we have stuff sitting around with unusually high energy relative to what we convert it to.
Roads in the US probably do cover on order of 1000 mi^2. That's not really all that much road, if you think about it. Just thinking about the island of Manhattan, it's about 15 miles long, and has about 10 avenues, each of which is probably 50 feet wide (roughly, if you include sidewalks). So that's 1.5 mi^2 right there, on one very small, albeit densely populated island. And if you think about it, I-95 is about 2000 miles + long, and about 50 feet wide, so that's about 20 mi^2 right there, or 2% of your 1000 mi^2 figure. Anyway, I agree with you that the cost and feasibility of such massive scale solar power is not currently economically feasible. If/when energy becomes more expensive and more $$$s go into solar power development, it might become cheap enough for everyone to have solar panels on their roof,etc. Even if it couldn't supply ALL our power, it could put a big dent in power consumption.
Don't know why this is moderated so high. Flame bait or no, the fact that you blindly accept the false claims of this oh-so-unbiased "benchmark" should preclude this from a 3 rating.
It's entirely unamusing, and uses incredibly (and self-describedly) offensive dialogue in its lame attempt at humor. Nevertheless I would think that here on Slashdot, people understand why free speech is provided for in the first amendment. Even the most fouly offensive speech is permitted, unless its attempt is the direct causation of violence or injury through provoked action. There is a clear warning on the site, and nobody forced you to read it. Furthermore, it IS an attempt at parody and is thus protected speech: we should never decide that something doesn't fall under the first amendment simply because we don't personally see its artistic merit - thus the fact that most pornography, although possibly technically "obscene" is protected, because there may be some artistic or other sort of merit there to some people. Likewise, some people might find this to be harmlessly funny (hopefully they don't actually takes pleasure in racism and homophobia).
Giuliani and Pataki really do know how to screw things up don't they? I am from NYC, also currently living in Boston. I liked the tolerant attitude the NYPD used to have to minor infractions (i.e. I could smoke a joint in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park without getting arrested). Not to mention the fact that NYPD has become 10 times more violent since Giuliani was elected. This is based on personal experience of getting harrassed in my own apartment in NYC, and I'm an unassuming white guy. Can't imagine what it's like if you're not.
I have to say amen to that. I'm moderately libertarian in my viewpoint, but I recognize that government can do good for people (and sometimes, rarely these days, it does). I'm not an anarchist. Anyway, I just hope the Democrats continue to support a free and tolerant society. The idea of Tipper supporting censorship or Al supporting crypto-restrictions scares me. If I can't vote Democrat in this election, I'm going to have to go 3rd party.
There are moderates out there (I like to think that I'm one). We are usually ignored by, what in my opinion, amount to a bunch of big government statists and cold, uncaring, selfish bastards on both sides of the political spectrum, at least within the party system, particularly in the House. Unfortunately, moderates don't do very well in the party structure. But there is a need for moderates, especially when it comes to running for national office. Successful presidential candidates are usually moderate. The whole reason the GOP has been foundering has been a failure to get national candidates who are sufficiently moderate out there. I would bet that they have their act together for this election though. Personally, I still think Gore is a better bet than Dole or Bush or whoever the Republicans line him up against. I don't exactly admire his techo-bumbling and idiotic self-promotion, but as long as he just butts out and keeps blowing his own horn, I couldn't give a damn.
Um, yes I can give you lots of examples of products written for Windows not working out of the box or at all with some incarnation of the Windows OS. Usually this is due to hardware conflicts, conflicts with other installed software, etc. as opposed to actual problems with the OS, although there is lots of software that's written for Windows 95 that won't work with Windows NT or 3.1, etc.
A personal example: I purchased Mathematica 2.x a couple of years ago or so, only to find that the idiotic interprocess communication between the GUI and the Mathematica core executable wouldn't work under Win 95. I had to contact Wolfram for a patch. The patch they gave me didn't work. This went back and forth for weeks, and it never did get working properly.
Personally, I have found that much more of the production level (i.e. non-alpha, non-beta) Linux software works on installation than does the Microsoft stuff. I suppose the requirements in terms of library versions are somewhat more complicated sometimes, but I can think of lots of Windoze apps that have the same problems (I think I have 5 or 6 different versions of VB DLLs in my Windows system directory).
GNU may be a more correct way to refer to the tools that make the whole operating SYSTEM. Linux is undoubtedly the KERNEL behind this OS, but isn't very useful all by itself. Nevertheless, most people refer to the OS as Linux. But what is the OS itself? Well, it is something that is obtained in distributions from a variety of companies and/or organizations that make distributions with varying intents, goals and focuses. This was always the point of free software: maximum freedom and flexibility, i.e. choice. Likewise, the creators of each distribution can call it WHATEVER they want. You are welcome to make a distribution based on the Linux kernel and call it Green Hat GNU or Blue Hat GNU/Linux. You might confuse people, it might not be popular, but this is fully within your rights as defined by the GPL under which the kernel and the GNU tools are distributed. Likewise, however, the name Linux referring to the OS as a whole (including lots of userspace tools) has stuck with lots of people. So lots of us will continue to refer to it as Linux, even as we acknowledge and promote Free Software and the goals of the FSF, OSI or whatever ideology we adhere to.
My point here is that you have the freedom to call it whatever you want and so do I. Don't be surprised if you anger people and alienate them by trying to FORCE them to call it by the name of your choice (as RMS tries to do). Linux is not one product but a conglomeration of products, distributed by a number of different organizations who are free to call their distributions whatever they want, as this is permitted by the GPL. People will come to accept or reject, appreciate or hate the FSF, the GPL, the OSI, etc. on their own merits. Trying to force things down their throats is just going to alienate them.
Dude, try this:s t=www.cybersites.com
http://www.netcraft.com/cgi-bin/Survey/whats?ho
I think that probably says it: It's running on Red Hat Linux and that's what his email address said too.
Cool... I guess I should rephrase my problem. Our ethernet is configured so that only one ethernet address may be connected per user, which usually means one ethernet address per ethernet jack. Since I have this configured to use my 3com NIC EA, the ethernet bugs when an unauthorized ethernet address (i.e. Win98 networking under VMWare) tries to connect to anything, and it responds by auto-shutting down my ethernet jack for an hour, which is a mild pain in the ass. I guess I was trying to figure out some way to get networking to work without making another ethernet address. Probably not though. Damned fascist computer services people.
Anyone gotten networking to work with VMWare yet? I know it's supposed to do that whole bridging thing, and assign itself a fake Ethernet address, but I'm a little vague on that whole process. When I tried to run Eudora and Netscape on my win partition, it definitely did something, because it took out my ethernet jack for an hour (i.e. ethernet thought I was using a card with an unauthorized ethernet address). How can I make it properly "bridge" through Linux? And has anyone been able to d/l the modified X Server? The link was broken earlier when I tried it. I can only get standard VGA graphics, and I think maybe this modified X Server would fix that in some way, although I'm not sure. Lemme know if you have solutions to these problems. BTW, VMWare runs slow as ass for me, off of /dev/hda. I gather it will run much faster if I give in and make a virtual partition thingie and install Win98 clean. Maybe I'll try that when I get my Win98 CD back from my friend (he's just using it for "evaluation" purposes).
Well, I plan on playing Q3A in both Windows and Linux. I'll buy the Linux version (since I want the Linux numbers to look good so they keep developing for Linux), but I can't afford to buy the game twice. Guess I guess I'll have to copy Win32 binaries from somebody else. Honestly, it seems a little miserly of them to require such a thing. I'm willing to shell out 50-60 bucks for a good game, but not 100-120 bucks. I guess you could argue I shouldn't boot into Windows at all, but that's not really feasible for me, unfortunately.
Keep your fucking Nazi rhetoric off of Slashdot, you son of a bitch. Wanna say it to my face? Come and get me you racist pig. You'll find a hell of a lot more than you bargained for.
Fnkmaster
gabriel@fas.harvard.edu
"I try to get my readers to think out of the box once in awhile"... I read that to mean that he knew his article was whacked and incorrect, but he decided to troll with it. Great, what a service to humanity.
Thus the hashing down of passphrases to a 128 bit value. Quite easy to figure out how many characters you need to get 128 bits of cryptographically secure pseudo-randomness from uppercase, lowercase characters and numbers, or whatever you use. The new version of PGP 6.0 for Windoze even gives you a handy little filling bar that tells you when your passphrase is long enough to generate a cryptographically secure 128 bit hashvalue. If you want to, you're welcome to try to bruteforce/dictionary/whatever attack my PGP secret key. Don't think you'd have any luck this runthrough of the universe. :)