Clearly they mean bytes, not bits. 5 hours of full bandwidth usage would be about 1890 Gbit, or roughly 235 GB of usage, so there is a mistake in the summary and the story itself.
So yeah, it's annoying, but not as bad as they made it sound.
I agree, this is fucking ridiculous. The rule with browsers has always been "wait for the point release or the 0.5 release for stability". Now Mozilla has done away with those niceties - so FF4 is a steaming pile of instability still and they are going to call the bugfix release FF5. This is retarded. It's Firefox 4.1. I fear this new naming convention is going to drive everybody away. The only way I can be won back right now is a stabilized version of FF4. I still love Firefox 3.6, and am still running it on my desktop at home, but I can't stick with that forever.
Yeah... except, if you actually went to Harvard, you'd see fairly quickly that the George W. Bush's are in the very significant (I wouldn't quite say vast, but nearly so) minority there. Probably 5%-10% of the student body that are there to schmooze and network rather than to work their asses off.
Everything is highly competitive. That applies both to classes and extracurricular activities. Definitely true even significantly more so of the math/science/comp sci/engineering majors. A "hard", top-rated high school in the US will barely prepare you for the workload of freshman year physics and math, and you'll be competing against some of the smartest students in your age cohort, not just from this country, but from many others too.
But yeah, if you are from a famous family, and you already have a job lined up for you or simply know what you'll be doing with your post-college life and it doesn't involve grad school or a competitive career, sure, you can coast by as a non-honors government major (actually, government isn't even as easy as you'd expect, but as I recall there were a few legendarily easy humanities concentrations).
Oddly enough, you'll occasionally find Wil Wheaton posting on Slashdot. Or at least he used to (Slashdot username: CleverNickName). I think he still does some acting gigs here and there though I haven't seen him in anything in a while now.
Oh, and I'm only using Flashblock, Adblock Plus, and NoScript extensions on my Macbook. So I'm not one of these people with 20 installed extensions, and I think the 3 extensions I use are practically required to safely and comfortably browse the web and are among the most used extensions out there.
I think the issue is that my Macbook only has 2 gigs of RAM. Which is ridiculous. I see people in this thread saying they have 8 gigs of RAM and have trouble with Firefox 4 eating too much memory. This is absurd - you shouldn't need an 8 gig monster machine to browse the web.
I have always agreed with you. Until now. FF3.6 really didn't have any issues. In fact, the whole FF3 series was great, and so was the 2 series. FF4 in the betas was very rough around the edges, and the big problem is the intermittent seizing-up or pausing (for perhaps half a second at a time). It happens every 30 seconds or so after FF4 has been running for a few hours on my Macbook. Same issue on my lightweight Windows desktop at work.
If I restart Firefox, it's fine at first. This only starts happening after it's been running for 20-30 minutes, depending on how heavily I'm using it. I believe it's swapping-related because it allocates too much memory. At least that's what I'm assuming.
My Windows box at home runs FF3.6 still and I have zero issues with it. I also never had this issue on my Macbook or my work desktop before I installed the FF4 betas. The FF4 final release, which I expected to resolve this issue, did not seem to.
I really hope they figure out why this happens. I know I'm not the only person experiencing it, since I've heard others report similar problems.
I am sick of the idiots saying "seal it". What the fuck do you think that means? The core material has most likely melted through the inner steel vessels and probably in places through the concrete containment (at least that seems likely) - as a result, highly radioactive water is leeching out into the drainage tunnels and out to the Pacific Ocean.
How exactly can you "seal" that? Furthermore, even if you could, what makes you think that sealing it before you've cooled down the corium material is a good idea? I mean, if it's been hot and radioactive enough to melt through concrete, how exactly do you "seal" it?
The whole point is it needs to be cooled down enough and stabilized so that it's not melting through anything on an ongoing basis, and only then do the existing leaks need to be sealed up as best as possible, or at least mitigated so that whatever has escaped stays relatively localized.
As for "shut it down", it was shut down within seconds of the original earthquake. It's just that it needs ongoing cooling even after shutdown for quite some time - and once the fuel rods have melted down, it needs even more cooling.
Hawking isn't even a top physicist. I mean, he's a serious, good physicist, and an inspiring guy, just not one of the 5-10 best physicists alive today. Kaku on the other hand is just a popularizer. Which is fine. Except that the guy seems to be a hack and huge self promoter.
You are joking, right? Estimated cost of the war in Iraq is $2.4 trillion, in total, by the time we are exited fully from the country. Spending a few hundred million on ammo to wipe out Qadaffi's air capabilities is less than a hundredth of a percent of what we will have spent on the War in Iraq. I mean, in Iraq the *rounding errors* are measured in billions, so this doesn't even qualify for rounding error.
That Wikipedia page is terribly confusing. It first says a banana equivalent dose is the dose of radiation from eating a single banana. Then it says a banana equivalent dose is the radiation exposure from eating a banana every day for a year. Vastly different things.
So when you say 30 bananas, you mean the equivalent dose of eating 30 bananas every day for a year, right? 30 bananas != 30 banana equivalent doses.
Since the average American eats 75 bananas a year, I don't think we have much concept of what eating over 10,000 bananas in a year would mean. It probably wouldn't be good for you on several levels.
You hear the name John Locke and you think of some TV show? Seriously?? Not the philosopher considered the founder of Liberalism, nor his theories of continuous consciousness or tabula rasa?
I guess the question is why, with all the liability issues, and potential for use against you in any variety of ways, do people still overshare on sites like Facebook? I have a Facebook account, which I keep locked down. Nobody can post on my wall, nobody can see my photos unless I explicitly share them with them (whether they are my "Friends" or not), nobody can see anything more than the briefest of information about me.
The first thing I'm going to tell me kids (my wife and I are expecting our first presently) when they are old enough for online access is that you never, ever post anything online anywhere that you wouldn't want your own children, your boss, your teachers, and your friends to all know about you.
I'd go with yes. But it is not a general purpose desktop nor server distribution, and doesn't come with the full user-space stack that you'd expect from those. Rather, it's a mobile Linux distribution with a Java-based user interface and application environment.
I've never heard of this "Phantom Menace" thing before. I'm sure if George Lucas was behind it, it must be humorous, entertaining and dramatic, with characters we can identify with for generations to come, just like the Star Wars trilogy we all loved as kids!
I'm so glad that somebody with the integrity of George Lucas is responsible for shepherding this loveable trilogy through the years. That way I can introduce these movies to my own children without having to worry about somebody coming along and pooping all over the memories of my childhood. You know, the temptation to edit or re-issue movies to capitalize on their enduring success might be quite extreme, but George is one of those guys who knows when to say "it was good enough 30 years ago, let's not mess with a good thing".
A lesser man might have, for example, decided to edit away some of the age-inappropriate roguishness of Han Solo in an effort to merchandize schlocky toys to kids. But not George, no.
I'm not really sure what this whole 3d thing is about though. I'm sure it's a sincere effort to make a genuine artistic statement that just happens to be set in that Star Wars universe we all know and love.
More specifically, the paper proves that there is no closed form expression for the *binomial* options pricing model on a European put or call.
There's a closed form for European options pricing, under certain assumptions, which is of course the Black Scholes formula. The paper notes this obvious fact in footnote 7.
The binomial model is generally more flexible, and allows the tweaking of assumptions (dividend payments, etc.). As a result, it's used in practice to value certain types of options (exotics, stuff with crunky payout schedules, barrier options, etc.).
I believe the same applies to American options, though I have no clue off the top of my head if it's been proven or not - i.e. there's no known closed form expression for the arbitrary binomial sum in the binomial pricing model. Though I do recall some of what I recall as approximation formulas from my Advanced Derivatives class. But that was quite a few years back so my memory could be fuzzy.
I'd say this is a cool proof, but it's not like people were sitting around wondering "gee, is there a closed form expression for this?" because they are either using simple approximations or programs that run a full binomial simulation to the desired degree of accuracy in such exquisitely fast periods of time that it's probably irrelevant.
And the existance or lack thereof of a closed form expression doesn't really have any deeper theoretical impact that I can think of. But still a cool result.
In summary (with some of my own thoughts): Digital sales are replacing CD sales, but people tend to buy individual songs now, not whole albums, and the industry spent so long fighting digital distribution instead of properly planning for it and figuring out ways to make it more useful for customers (and profitable for them), that they by and large killed their own market.
Well, it is probably the case that these numbers vastly under-represent the number of attempted crimes, and unreported crimes. There definitely is a lot of attempted fraud on Craigslist.
There are certain categories, like vacation rentals, where in some areas there are almost as many fraudulent postings as there are real postings. There was an article about this in the New York Times a few weeks ago and how the author was defrauded of several thousand dollars for a fake vacation rental that seemed "too good a price to be true" and involved wiring money to the UK.
I do however agree that the odds of violent crime from a Craigslist posting seem pretty darned low. I'm guessing the odds of getting robbed, assaulted or killed by somebody you meet on Craigslist isn't much different than the odds of the same happening with somebody you meet at a bar.
The vast majority were console titles. Only a few of the classic PC games represented, and most of those in the form of shitty console ports.
Re:What the fuck are you talking about?
on
Python 3.2 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
I extensively use Numpy at work, and that was the primary reason Python 3 was useless to me. However, I should mention that as of Numpy 1.5 release some months ago, Python 3 is now supported. The FAQ page on the Numpy website just hasn't been updated properly.
And Scipy 0.9.0 *does* support Python 3.1. It's currently at release candidate 5, i.e. within a few weeks of an official release. See the release notes from yesterday.
PyLab, I'm not certain about. Matplotlib has an initial port but I think it's not really working yet.
I think now that Numpy and Scipy are running on Python 3.x you'll see a lot more interest in people running it who do real stuff with Python.
And like he said "nuclear ventilation with either xenon or aerosols"... in other words, there are other compounds, such as hyperpolarized xenon-129, that can achieve very similar results to helium-3. So yes, helium-3 is very useful in this area, but there are good substitutes available.
I remember GeoHot from back in the early days of iPhone jailbreaking. Back when we were using TurboSIMs and stuff, we're talking mid-2007 era. George Hotz came out with the first hardware unlock of the original iPhone. I actually purchased my iPhone (moving from a Treo 650, as I recall) after I saw that he'd broken it wide open.
So yeah, he's earned it. Thanks George Hotz, keep up the good work.
To be clear - I don't have a problem with him taking his chicken to the park, nor with him being a bit strange. However, when you engage in behavior that's somewhat outside the norm in a public venue, it can certainly be misinterpreted and you shouldn't be shocked if that happens. Obviously, I don't think the guy deserves to go to jail or be harassed by police just because he has a chicken for a pet or is a bit strange.
I believe the issue with those projects relates to deep bedrock fracturing rather than energy extraction itself. Small mini-eathquakes have also been known to occur near fracturing efforts in the name of natural gas extraction, though those are mostly shallow enough that I don't think they caused effects like the geothermal project in Basel.
By committing fraud against the US government, with the hopes that it wouldn't catch up to him? Yeah, that's brilliant. The guy in the story here is luckily the CIA didn't take care of business properly to cover up this little fuckup. Why would you want to aspire to that? I know it may be hard for you to wrap your brain around, but it's not so hard to make the kind of money you are describing without committing massive fraud, and you actually get to enjoy the fruits of your labor without ending up in jail, disgraced or dead.
It would certainly help if there were some profitable enterprise that could come out of space exploration. If there were, it would be much easier to get it all funded. It's also hard to justify manned exploration when unmanned exploration is massively cheaper and easier to accomplish, unless there is something of economic value up there that needs factories, mines, or processing facilities with some human oversight.
Colonization for the sake of colonization is not going to happen anytime soon unless our species faces an existential threat so obvious and imminent that it kicks our ass into action.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly they mean bytes, not bits. 5 hours of full bandwidth usage would be about 1890 Gbit, or roughly 235 GB of usage, so there is a mistake in the summary and the story itself.
So yeah, it's annoying, but not as bad as they made it sound.
I agree, this is fucking ridiculous. The rule with browsers has always been "wait for the point release or the 0.5 release for stability". Now Mozilla has done away with those niceties - so FF4 is a steaming pile of instability still and they are going to call the bugfix release FF5. This is retarded. It's Firefox 4.1. I fear this new naming convention is going to drive everybody away. The only way I can be won back right now is a stabilized version of FF4. I still love Firefox 3.6, and am still running it on my desktop at home, but I can't stick with that forever.
Yeah... except, if you actually went to Harvard, you'd see fairly quickly that the George W. Bush's are in the very significant (I wouldn't quite say vast, but nearly so) minority there. Probably 5%-10% of the student body that are there to schmooze and network rather than to work their asses off.
Everything is highly competitive. That applies both to classes and extracurricular activities. Definitely true even significantly more so of the math/science/comp sci/engineering majors. A "hard", top-rated high school in the US will barely prepare you for the workload of freshman year physics and math, and you'll be competing against some of the smartest students in your age cohort, not just from this country, but from many others too.
But yeah, if you are from a famous family, and you already have a job lined up for you or simply know what you'll be doing with your post-college life and it doesn't involve grad school or a competitive career, sure, you can coast by as a non-honors government major (actually, government isn't even as easy as you'd expect, but as I recall there were a few legendarily easy humanities concentrations).
Wonder what ever happened to him.
Oddly enough, you'll occasionally find Wil Wheaton posting on Slashdot. Or at least he used to (Slashdot username: CleverNickName). I think he still does some acting gigs here and there though I haven't seen him in anything in a while now.
Oh, and I'm only using Flashblock, Adblock Plus, and NoScript extensions on my Macbook. So I'm not one of these people with 20 installed extensions, and I think the 3 extensions I use are practically required to safely and comfortably browse the web and are among the most used extensions out there.
I think the issue is that my Macbook only has 2 gigs of RAM. Which is ridiculous. I see people in this thread saying they have 8 gigs of RAM and have trouble with Firefox 4 eating too much memory. This is absurd - you shouldn't need an 8 gig monster machine to browse the web.
I have always agreed with you. Until now. FF3.6 really didn't have any issues. In fact, the whole FF3 series was great, and so was the 2 series. FF4 in the betas was very rough around the edges, and the big problem is the intermittent seizing-up or pausing (for perhaps half a second at a time). It happens every 30 seconds or so after FF4 has been running for a few hours on my Macbook. Same issue on my lightweight Windows desktop at work.
If I restart Firefox, it's fine at first. This only starts happening after it's been running for 20-30 minutes, depending on how heavily I'm using it. I believe it's swapping-related because it allocates too much memory. At least that's what I'm assuming.
My Windows box at home runs FF3.6 still and I have zero issues with it. I also never had this issue on my Macbook or my work desktop before I installed the FF4 betas. The FF4 final release, which I expected to resolve this issue, did not seem to.
I really hope they figure out why this happens. I know I'm not the only person experiencing it, since I've heard others report similar problems.
I am sick of the idiots saying "seal it". What the fuck do you think that means? The core material has most likely melted through the inner steel vessels and probably in places through the concrete containment (at least that seems likely) - as a result, highly radioactive water is leeching out into the drainage tunnels and out to the Pacific Ocean.
How exactly can you "seal" that? Furthermore, even if you could, what makes you think that sealing it before you've cooled down the corium material is a good idea? I mean, if it's been hot and radioactive enough to melt through concrete, how exactly do you "seal" it?
The whole point is it needs to be cooled down enough and stabilized so that it's not melting through anything on an ongoing basis, and only then do the existing leaks need to be sealed up as best as possible, or at least mitigated so that whatever has escaped stays relatively localized.
As for "shut it down", it was shut down within seconds of the original earthquake. It's just that it needs ongoing cooling even after shutdown for quite some time - and once the fuel rods have melted down, it needs even more cooling.
Hawking isn't even a top physicist. I mean, he's a serious, good physicist, and an inspiring guy, just not one of the 5-10 best physicists alive today. Kaku on the other hand is just a popularizer. Which is fine. Except that the guy seems to be a hack and huge self promoter.
You are joking, right? Estimated cost of the war in Iraq is $2.4 trillion, in total, by the time we are exited fully from the country. Spending a few hundred million on ammo to wipe out Qadaffi's air capabilities is less than a hundredth of a percent of what we will have spent on the War in Iraq. I mean, in Iraq the *rounding errors* are measured in billions, so this doesn't even qualify for rounding error.
That Wikipedia page is terribly confusing. It first says a banana equivalent dose is the dose of radiation from eating a single banana. Then it says a banana equivalent dose is the radiation exposure from eating a banana every day for a year. Vastly different things.
So when you say 30 bananas, you mean the equivalent dose of eating 30 bananas every day for a year, right? 30 bananas != 30 banana equivalent doses.
Since the average American eats 75 bananas a year, I don't think we have much concept of what eating over 10,000 bananas in a year would mean. It probably wouldn't be good for you on several levels.
You hear the name John Locke and you think of some TV show? Seriously?? Not the philosopher considered the founder of Liberalism, nor his theories of continuous consciousness or tabula rasa?
Our educational system has truly failed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke
I guess the question is why, with all the liability issues, and potential for use against you in any variety of ways, do people still overshare on sites like Facebook? I have a Facebook account, which I keep locked down. Nobody can post on my wall, nobody can see my photos unless I explicitly share them with them (whether they are my "Friends" or not), nobody can see anything more than the briefest of information about me.
The first thing I'm going to tell me kids (my wife and I are expecting our first presently) when they are old enough for online access is that you never, ever post anything online anywhere that you wouldn't want your own children, your boss, your teachers, and your friends to all know about you.
I'd go with yes. But it is not a general purpose desktop nor server distribution, and doesn't come with the full user-space stack that you'd expect from those. Rather, it's a mobile Linux distribution with a Java-based user interface and application environment.
I've never heard of this "Phantom Menace" thing before. I'm sure if George Lucas was behind it, it must be humorous, entertaining and dramatic, with characters we can identify with for generations to come, just like the Star Wars trilogy we all loved as kids!
I'm so glad that somebody with the integrity of George Lucas is responsible for shepherding this loveable trilogy through the years. That way I can introduce these movies to my own children without having to worry about somebody coming along and pooping all over the memories of my childhood. You know, the temptation to edit or re-issue movies to capitalize on their enduring success might be quite extreme, but George is one of those guys who knows when to say "it was good enough 30 years ago, let's not mess with a good thing".
A lesser man might have, for example, decided to edit away some of the age-inappropriate roguishness of Han Solo in an effort to merchandize schlocky toys to kids. But not George, no.
I'm not really sure what this whole 3d thing is about though. I'm sure it's a sincere effort to make a genuine artistic statement that just happens to be set in that Star Wars universe we all know and love.
Thank god for George Lucas.
More specifically, the paper proves that there is no closed form expression for the *binomial* options pricing model on a European put or call.
There's a closed form for European options pricing, under certain assumptions, which is of course the Black Scholes formula. The paper notes this obvious fact in footnote 7.
The binomial model is generally more flexible, and allows the tweaking of assumptions (dividend payments, etc.). As a result, it's used in practice to value certain types of options (exotics, stuff with crunky payout schedules, barrier options, etc.).
I believe the same applies to American options, though I have no clue off the top of my head if it's been proven or not - i.e. there's no known closed form expression for the arbitrary binomial sum in the binomial pricing model. Though I do recall some of what I recall as approximation formulas from my Advanced Derivatives class. But that was quite a few years back so my memory could be fuzzy.
I'd say this is a cool proof, but it's not like people were sitting around wondering "gee, is there a closed form expression for this?" because they are either using simple approximations or programs that run a full binomial simulation to the desired degree of accuracy in such exquisitely fast periods of time that it's probably irrelevant.
And the existance or lack thereof of a closed form expression doesn't really have any deeper theoretical impact that I can think of. But still a cool result.
I thought this was a rather good explanation of what's happening in the music (i.e. recording) industry:
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
In summary (with some of my own thoughts): Digital sales are replacing CD sales, but people tend to buy individual songs now, not whole albums, and the industry spent so long fighting digital distribution instead of properly planning for it and figuring out ways to make it more useful for customers (and profitable for them), that they by and large killed their own market.
Well, it is probably the case that these numbers vastly under-represent the number of attempted crimes, and unreported crimes. There definitely is a lot of attempted fraud on Craigslist.
There are certain categories, like vacation rentals, where in some areas there are almost as many fraudulent postings as there are real postings. There was an article about this in the New York Times a few weeks ago and how the author was defrauded of several thousand dollars for a fake vacation rental that seemed "too good a price to be true" and involved wiring money to the UK.
I do however agree that the odds of violent crime from a Craigslist posting seem pretty darned low. I'm guessing the odds of getting robbed, assaulted or killed by somebody you meet on Craigslist isn't much different than the odds of the same happening with somebody you meet at a bar.
The vast majority were console titles. Only a few of the classic PC games represented, and most of those in the form of shitty console ports.
I extensively use Numpy at work, and that was the primary reason Python 3 was useless to me. However, I should mention that as of Numpy 1.5 release some months ago, Python 3 is now supported. The FAQ page on the Numpy website just hasn't been updated properly.
And Scipy 0.9.0 *does* support Python 3.1. It's currently at release candidate 5, i.e. within a few weeks of an official release. See the release notes from yesterday.
PyLab, I'm not certain about. Matplotlib has an initial port but I think it's not really working yet.
I think now that Numpy and Scipy are running on Python 3.x you'll see a lot more interest in people running it who do real stuff with Python.
And like he said "nuclear ventilation with either xenon or aerosols"... in other words, there are other compounds, such as hyperpolarized xenon-129, that can achieve very similar results to helium-3. So yes, helium-3 is very useful in this area, but there are good substitutes available.
One Benjamin from me.
I remember GeoHot from back in the early days of iPhone jailbreaking. Back when we were using TurboSIMs and stuff, we're talking mid-2007 era. George Hotz came out with the first hardware unlock of the original iPhone. I actually purchased my iPhone (moving from a Treo 650, as I recall) after I saw that he'd broken it wide open.
So yeah, he's earned it. Thanks George Hotz, keep up the good work.
To be clear - I don't have a problem with him taking his chicken to the park, nor with him being a bit strange. However, when you engage in behavior that's somewhat outside the norm in a public venue, it can certainly be misinterpreted and you shouldn't be shocked if that happens. Obviously, I don't think the guy deserves to go to jail or be harassed by police just because he has a chicken for a pet or is a bit strange.
I believe the issue with those projects relates to deep bedrock fracturing rather than energy extraction itself. Small mini-eathquakes have also been known to occur near fracturing efforts in the name of natural gas extraction, though those are mostly shallow enough that I don't think they caused effects like the geothermal project in Basel.
By committing fraud against the US government, with the hopes that it wouldn't catch up to him? Yeah, that's brilliant. The guy in the story here is luckily the CIA didn't take care of business properly to cover up this little fuckup. Why would you want to aspire to that? I know it may be hard for you to wrap your brain around, but it's not so hard to make the kind of money you are describing without committing massive fraud, and you actually get to enjoy the fruits of your labor without ending up in jail, disgraced or dead.
It would certainly help if there were some profitable enterprise that could come out of space exploration. If there were, it would be much easier to get it all funded. It's also hard to justify manned exploration when unmanned exploration is massively cheaper and easier to accomplish, unless there is something of economic value up there that needs factories, mines, or processing facilities with some human oversight.
Colonization for the sake of colonization is not going to happen anytime soon unless our species faces an existential threat so obvious and imminent that it kicks our ass into action.