You take your pet chicken to the park with you. That doesn't make you a pedophile, but it's more than a bit strange if you ask me. I mean, unless I'm missing something and it is normal in Australia to have a chicken as a household pet and to take it for walks to the park?
Admittedly, I live in New York City so my perspective may be a bit skewed, but I suspect if you took a chicken with you into a park here, people might think you had some weird ulterior motive, or that you were just bonkers.
Umm, I don't really care about breasts or a blue schlong, obviously it's silly to think that a bit of nudity will scar a child's mind. But there is a rape scene in Watchmen. So yeah, I don't think I'd really want a 10 year old to see that, certainly not without a parent present to put it in context.
More usefully, one might note that the island of Manhattan is about 58 square kilometers. A lot of people have visited Manhattan, and in so doing, often traverse the edge of the island by boat or, in part, by taxi cab. At the very least, you often go cross-town, and up and down town (though rarely all the way up to the top, as that's not a particularly well-visited area for good reason, unless you happen to be going to the Columbia football stadium).
So a far more useful visualization for most people might be around 2/3rds the size of Manhattan, or about the area of Manhattan south of 116th street (which is all of Manhattan you're likely to want to visit).
Hmmm... Okay, but all the other servers that have to talk to it *are* connected to the internet. I know because I've set servers up before in their primary data center.
So even if you keep all the NASDAQ servers on a private network only, you still have all the entry points from the physical ethernet drops throughout the data center going into all the cages (several thousands of them) of people routing orders onto NASDAQ.
So when Joe Brokerage or John Trading Shop gets compromised, it's only a hop away to the NASDAQ servers anyway.
Also, any functions that NASDAQ runs that do need internet access now need to be run on servers that are segregated out from their private network servers... and again, surely those probably need to communicate with those private network servers at some point.
In fact, I'm guessing that's roughly how their stuff is set up from what I remember about interacting with it. But completely disconnecting everything from the internet makes it kind of hard to interact with all the stuff out there that is on the internet.
Or a tablet with a case/conversion feature that lets you easily use a physical keyboard when you need it, but keep it as a tablet when you want maximum portability.
For $20 you can get a case for the Viewsonic G Tablet with a built in USB keyboard that allows your $350-$400 tablet function as a netbook too. Works well for many of us to get more done with our G Tablets.
Spoken like a man who's never had any relationship with a real woman, and whose knowledge of the female members of our species comes from a random postmodern gender studies paper.
That bears zero resemblance to the attitude of the vast majority of women I've ever known, been friends with, dated, etc. I mean, at least some stereotypes bear some commonality with observable trends ("women aren't good at math" - well, there definitely aren't as many female mathematicians as there are male), but this one is just ridiculous.
It's funny you say this, but I have set up servers in the data center that houses the primary NASDAQ exchange servers in Carteret, New Jersey (there's also a backup facility elsewhere in New Jersey).
They don't publicize this data center's location, but it's not exactly top secret within the finance industry because lots of firms need fast, direct access to route orders and get market data. Heck, Google will tell you exactly where it is if you ask the right questions.
The building is a Verizon data center, and there is definitely physical security there consisting of an access gate, and a guard who has to buzz you in. But if you have the money to get a rack there (figure $2k a month) you can get on the access list for the building. Once on the list, you can get into the rear area where NASDAQ has all their servers - I had their area pointed out to me and I believe there was much stuff of theirs not in large cages, but just regular, locked racks.
Anyway, if an adversary were intent on creating mayhem or extracting profits, physical access wouldn't be quite as hard to obtain as one might think.
Huh, well, the Viewsonic G Tablet is a Tegra 2 tablet that gets in the 6-7 hour range playing video. So this is either an issue with the battery capacity on the Streak (could just be a smaller battery in that smaller form factor tablet) or a software issue with their ROM/video playback software.
Generally true, but the Tegra 2/Android platform is so standardized now that most of the ROMs are easily portable between devices, and there's a very healthy community on XDA Developer forums building, porting and supporting ROMs and useful apps for Tegra 2 tablets. Especially for the G Tablet, because we have kernel source available unlike some of the other devices out there.
I'm running a port of the Advent Vega ROM on my Viewsonic G Tablet, and there's a port of the Notion Ink ROM now too.
CyanogenMod runs well on the G Tablet too.
I'm fairly certain we'll get ports of the Honeycomb ROMs as soon as they come out for other Tegra 2 devices.
The light travel time is obviously a maximum of about 13.7 billion years, so clearly the light travel distance is 13.7 billion light years (well, actually 13.1 billion years is the oldest stuff we've actually seen, but whatever, you get the gist). But that's just the age of the oldest stuff we can possibly see times the speed of light - it doesn't say anything about where those objects presently are relative to us.
In fact, the objects are not currently 13.7 billion light years away in any meaningful sense of the word - they currently are 30 billion light years in terms of comoving or proper distance.
On a merely interstellar or even ordinary intergalactic scale the light travel distance and proper distance are going to be very similar.
Obviously, the light travel distance is essentially a coordinate system in which it's really easy to tell whether something is or is not in our light cone, since by definition, our light cone includes stuff with a light travel distance of 13.7 billion light years or less.
Sorry, but you're wrong. You are thinking of the lightcone based on the current size of the universe. The "observable universe" *is* essentially our lightcone, corrected for expansion of the universe.
One of the misconceptions listed under the Misconceptions heading is that the radius of the observable universe should be 13.7 billion light-years - and it notes that that would only be true in a flat, non-expanding Minkowski spacetime. Hubble expansion proves we're not in such a universe.
And the fact that the farthest objects observed are about 30 billion light years away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDFy-38135539) should hint to you that things can be farther than 13.7 billion light years away from us currently and still be in our lightcone.
Basic special relativity-style intuition fails on a cosmological scale, unfortunately.:)
The problem was that for some time, Chrome focused solely on Javascript speed. And for a while, they were by far the fastest Javascript game in town. But they never had the fastest rendering engine - quite far from it. So on pages where Javascript wasn't the limiting reagent, Chrome often felt sluggish, especially at scrolling pages.
Firefox 4 now has a very nice Javascript engine - not quite as fast as Chrome for some applications, but the gap is now measured in the small percentage points, i.e. 5-25% slower, not 2x, 3x, or 5x slower. And Firefox 4 on Windows has the unequivocally fastest rendering and scrolling I've seen. Which is the base case of browser use for me.
Not to mention all the extension flexibility that Firefox has.
People keep declaring Firefox dead and it seems to be doing quite well.
No, he was right, or at least closer. It's actually about 90 billion light years across (in diameter), 45 billion light years in radius, at least, measured in terms of comoving or proper distance (what you would think of as roughly the "actual" distance today).
14 billion is roughly the age of the universe, so obviously the light at the boundaries of the observable universe had to be emitted about 14 billion years ago. However, the universe was much smaller back then and has expanded a lot since. So the stuff that was a few billion light years away in the early times of the universe is now much farther away. Thus the counter-intuitive result that we are able to see things that are up to about 45 billion light-years away today (well, the oldest *thing*, i.e. galaxy, we've actually seen is around 30 billion light-years away presently, because there are limitations of present technology as well as issues related to the lack of transparency of the early universe).
Hopefully I got all that right.:)
Re:This takes me back...
on
Julia Meets HTML5
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Nothing quite like calculating and rendering fractals in Javascript to make your Core i7 feel like a Pentium 200.
That issue was going on the first day or two after the switchover to the new Slashcode a week or so ago. However, they seemed to have fixed it, as I was able to re-enable D1 again on my account. So... if you have trouble switching to D1, try doing it again later. It should eventually work.
And of course, in the short-term, you may get anti-democratic Muslim extremists winning who rapidly set up Iran-style theocracies and suspend all but puppet elections. In other words, just as much of an iron fist as Mubarak, but without the secularism or more socially progressive aspects.
Turkey is a good example, but they have a constitutionally empowered military to protect against exactly this happening because they don't trust the masses in their own country to elect people who will support the basic institutions of democracy.
No offense, but I don't even have faith in a supposedly-well-educated American populace to elect decent leaders. Too many people are just too dumb.
What you see when you go back to Egypt are likely the relatively well-educated, liberal family members of a guy whose immediate family was smart enough to get to a Western nation to raise their kids. There is some inherent selection bias to that. So I fully believe that your family members and their friends are bright enough to elect good leaders for Egypt.
The problem is that massive numbers of dumb, poor, poorly educated people in the rest of the country. This isn't really a knock against Egypt, these people exist in every country, you just don't necessarily see them when you visit a country and stay in a major urban center and spend time with the bright, well-educated secular populace there. And in majority-Muslim nations like Turkey and Egypt, they get used by the religious parties to win elections.
Turkey has a good system in place to keep this in check - a military constitutionally empowered to defend secularism even if it means throwing out an elected government. I think Egypt would benefit from a similar arrangement - democracy at gunpoint, because sometimes only force can prevent the crazy kooks from trying to create an Iranian-style theocracy.
I think the reason the government is scared right now is that the secular opposition and the religious fundamentalist opposition all seem to be on board with the protests. In other words, they've finally decided they hate the Mubaraks more than they hate each other, and that portends badly for the Mubarak government.
I think he means socially progressive, in the sense that women aren't generally murdered in Egypt for walking around in public unaccompanied or for failing to wear a burqa.
You switch to D1 instead of the stupid D2 discussion system by clicking on Account while on the main page. D1 actually lets you view more-or-less all the comments for most stories.
Then fix up the D1 system by creating/editing userContent.css (assuming you are using Firefox) in your profile/chrome directory:
I've settled on this userContent.css script (the other parts of yours are fine too, I just like making minimal changes - but your li.comment didn't feel quite right - I think mine is close enough to nice that I don't want to peel my eyes out using D1 now):
Try it again.. they seem to have fixed it, since I was able to switch back to D1 later this morning again.
Also, try something like this in your userContent.css if you are running Firefox, this makes it look more palatable - it's almost like they forgot the rest of the CSS for D1:
Shit, I just switched from D1 to D2 temporarily to try it out and it won't let me change back now. Please fix this ASAP and leave us with both options - I need D1 for my tablet/smartphones, D2 is horrible for limited devices and many, many, many of us just don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
You take your pet chicken to the park with you. That doesn't make you a pedophile, but it's more than a bit strange if you ask me. I mean, unless I'm missing something and it is normal in Australia to have a chicken as a household pet and to take it for walks to the park?
Admittedly, I live in New York City so my perspective may be a bit skewed, but I suspect if you took a chicken with you into a park here, people might think you had some weird ulterior motive, or that you were just bonkers.
Umm, I don't really care about breasts or a blue schlong, obviously it's silly to think that a bit of nudity will scar a child's mind. But there is a rape scene in Watchmen. So yeah, I don't think I'd really want a 10 year old to see that, certainly not without a parent present to put it in context.
There are some perfectly good alternative words. Gimped, neutered, hobbled.
I kind of like "Tivo plans to gimp their boxes in the UK".
More usefully, one might note that the island of Manhattan is about 58 square kilometers. A lot of people have visited Manhattan, and in so doing, often traverse the edge of the island by boat or, in part, by taxi cab. At the very least, you often go cross-town, and up and down town (though rarely all the way up to the top, as that's not a particularly well-visited area for good reason, unless you happen to be going to the Columbia football stadium).
So a far more useful visualization for most people might be around 2/3rds the size of Manhattan, or about the area of Manhattan south of 116th street (which is all of Manhattan you're likely to want to visit).
Hmmm... Okay, but all the other servers that have to talk to it *are* connected to the internet. I know because I've set servers up before in their primary data center.
So even if you keep all the NASDAQ servers on a private network only, you still have all the entry points from the physical ethernet drops throughout the data center going into all the cages (several thousands of them) of people routing orders onto NASDAQ.
So when Joe Brokerage or John Trading Shop gets compromised, it's only a hop away to the NASDAQ servers anyway.
Also, any functions that NASDAQ runs that do need internet access now need to be run on servers that are segregated out from their private network servers... and again, surely those probably need to communicate with those private network servers at some point.
In fact, I'm guessing that's roughly how their stuff is set up from what I remember about interacting with it. But completely disconnecting everything from the internet makes it kind of hard to interact with all the stuff out there that is on the internet.
Or a tablet with a case/conversion feature that lets you easily use a physical keyboard when you need it, but keep it as a tablet when you want maximum portability.
For $20 you can get a case for the Viewsonic G Tablet with a built in USB keyboard that allows your $350-$400 tablet function as a netbook too. Works well for many of us to get more done with our G Tablets.
Spoken like a man who's never had any relationship with a real woman, and whose knowledge of the female members of our species comes from a random postmodern gender studies paper.
That bears zero resemblance to the attitude of the vast majority of women I've ever known, been friends with, dated, etc. I mean, at least some stereotypes bear some commonality with observable trends ("women aren't good at math" - well, there definitely aren't as many female mathematicians as there are male), but this one is just ridiculous.
It's funny you say this, but I have set up servers in the data center that houses the primary NASDAQ exchange servers in Carteret, New Jersey (there's also a backup facility elsewhere in New Jersey).
They don't publicize this data center's location, but it's not exactly top secret within the finance industry because lots of firms need fast, direct access to route orders and get market data. Heck, Google will tell you exactly where it is if you ask the right questions.
The building is a Verizon data center, and there is definitely physical security there consisting of an access gate, and a guard who has to buzz you in. But if you have the money to get a rack there (figure $2k a month) you can get on the access list for the building. Once on the list, you can get into the rear area where NASDAQ has all their servers - I had their area pointed out to me and I believe there was much stuff of theirs not in large cages, but just regular, locked racks.
Anyway, if an adversary were intent on creating mayhem or extracting profits, physical access wouldn't be quite as hard to obtain as one might think.
Huh, well, the Viewsonic G Tablet is a Tegra 2 tablet that gets in the 6-7 hour range playing video. So this is either an issue with the battery capacity on the Streak (could just be a smaller battery in that smaller form factor tablet) or a software issue with their ROM/video playback software.
Generally true, but the Tegra 2/Android platform is so standardized now that most of the ROMs are easily portable between devices, and there's a very healthy community on XDA Developer forums building, porting and supporting ROMs and useful apps for Tegra 2 tablets. Especially for the G Tablet, because we have kernel source available unlike some of the other devices out there.
I'm running a port of the Advent Vega ROM on my Viewsonic G Tablet, and there's a port of the Notion Ink ROM now too.
CyanogenMod runs well on the G Tablet too.
I'm fairly certain we'll get ports of the Honeycomb ROMs as soon as they come out for other Tegra 2 devices.
The light travel time is obviously a maximum of about 13.7 billion years, so clearly the light travel distance is 13.7 billion light years (well, actually 13.1 billion years is the oldest stuff we've actually seen, but whatever, you get the gist). But that's just the age of the oldest stuff we can possibly see times the speed of light - it doesn't say anything about where those objects presently are relative to us.
In fact, the objects are not currently 13.7 billion light years away in any meaningful sense of the word - they currently are 30 billion light years in terms of comoving or proper distance.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_measures_(cosmology)
On a merely interstellar or even ordinary intergalactic scale the light travel distance and proper distance are going to be very similar.
Obviously, the light travel distance is essentially a coordinate system in which it's really easy to tell whether something is or is not in our light cone, since by definition, our light cone includes stuff with a light travel distance of 13.7 billion light years or less.
Sorry, but you're wrong. You are thinking of the lightcone based on the current size of the universe. The "observable universe" *is* essentially our lightcone, corrected for expansion of the universe.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
One of the misconceptions listed under the Misconceptions heading is that the radius of the observable universe should be 13.7 billion light-years - and it notes that that would only be true in a flat, non-expanding Minkowski spacetime. Hubble expansion proves we're not in such a universe.
And the fact that the farthest objects observed are about 30 billion light years away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDFy-38135539) should hint to you that things can be farther than 13.7 billion light years away from us currently and still be in our lightcone.
Basic special relativity-style intuition fails on a cosmological scale, unfortunately. :)
The problem was that for some time, Chrome focused solely on Javascript speed. And for a while, they were by far the fastest Javascript game in town. But they never had the fastest rendering engine - quite far from it. So on pages where Javascript wasn't the limiting reagent, Chrome often felt sluggish, especially at scrolling pages.
Firefox 4 now has a very nice Javascript engine - not quite as fast as Chrome for some applications, but the gap is now measured in the small percentage points, i.e. 5-25% slower, not 2x, 3x, or 5x slower. And Firefox 4 on Windows has the unequivocally fastest rendering and scrolling I've seen. Which is the base case of browser use for me.
Not to mention all the extension flexibility that Firefox has.
People keep declaring Firefox dead and it seems to be doing quite well.
No, he was right, or at least closer. It's actually about 90 billion light years across (in diameter), 45 billion light years in radius, at least, measured in terms of comoving or proper distance (what you would think of as roughly the "actual" distance today).
14 billion is roughly the age of the universe, so obviously the light at the boundaries of the observable universe had to be emitted about 14 billion years ago. However, the universe was much smaller back then and has expanded a lot since. So the stuff that was a few billion light years away in the early times of the universe is now much farther away. Thus the counter-intuitive result that we are able to see things that are up to about 45 billion light-years away today (well, the oldest *thing*, i.e. galaxy, we've actually seen is around 30 billion light-years away presently, because there are limitations of present technology as well as issues related to the lack of transparency of the early universe).
Hopefully I got all that right. :)
Nothing quite like calculating and rendering fractals in Javascript to make your Core i7 feel like a Pentium 200.
That issue was going on the first day or two after the switchover to the new Slashcode a week or so ago. However, they seemed to have fixed it, as I was able to re-enable D1 again on my account. So... if you have trouble switching to D1, try doing it again later. It should eventually work.
And of course, in the short-term, you may get anti-democratic Muslim extremists winning who rapidly set up Iran-style theocracies and suspend all but puppet elections. In other words, just as much of an iron fist as Mubarak, but without the secularism or more socially progressive aspects.
Turkey is a good example, but they have a constitutionally empowered military to protect against exactly this happening because they don't trust the masses in their own country to elect people who will support the basic institutions of democracy.
No offense, but I don't even have faith in a supposedly-well-educated American populace to elect decent leaders. Too many people are just too dumb.
What you see when you go back to Egypt are likely the relatively well-educated, liberal family members of a guy whose immediate family was smart enough to get to a Western nation to raise their kids. There is some inherent selection bias to that. So I fully believe that your family members and their friends are bright enough to elect good leaders for Egypt.
The problem is that massive numbers of dumb, poor, poorly educated people in the rest of the country. This isn't really a knock against Egypt, these people exist in every country, you just don't necessarily see them when you visit a country and stay in a major urban center and spend time with the bright, well-educated secular populace there. And in majority-Muslim nations like Turkey and Egypt, they get used by the religious parties to win elections.
Turkey has a good system in place to keep this in check - a military constitutionally empowered to defend secularism even if it means throwing out an elected government. I think Egypt would benefit from a similar arrangement - democracy at gunpoint, because sometimes only force can prevent the crazy kooks from trying to create an Iranian-style theocracy.
I think the reason the government is scared right now is that the secular opposition and the religious fundamentalist opposition all seem to be on board with the protests. In other words, they've finally decided they hate the Mubaraks more than they hate each other, and that portends badly for the Mubarak government.
I think he means socially progressive, in the sense that women aren't generally murdered in Egypt for walking around in public unaccompanied or for failing to wear a burqa.
You switch to D1 instead of the stupid D2 discussion system by clicking on Account while on the main page. D1 actually lets you view more-or-less all the comments for most stories.
Then fix up the D1 system by creating/editing userContent.css (assuming you are using Firefox) in your profile/chrome directory:
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org")
{
div.col_1
{
position: absolute !important;
}
header.h
{
position: absolute !important;
}
li.comment
{
border:solid 1px grey;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:10px !important;
left:20px;
width:95%;
}
}
They don't have a Steve Jobs, so they figured, hey, what the fuck, the Black Eyed Peas know more about "cool" than our engineers do.
Sigh.
I've settled on this userContent.css script (the other parts of yours are fine too, I just like making minimal changes - but your li.comment didn't feel quite right - I think mine is close enough to nice that I don't want to peel my eyes out using D1 now):
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org")
{
div.col_1
{
position: absolute !important;
}
header.h
{
position: absolute !important;
}
li.comment
{
border:solid 1px grey;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:10px !important;
left:20px;
width:95%;
}
}
Try it again.. they seem to have fixed it, since I was able to switch back to D1 later this morning again.
Also, try something like this in your userContent.css if you are running Firefox, this makes it look more palatable - it's almost like they forgot the rest of the CSS for D1:
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org")
{
div.col_1
{
position: absolute !important;
}
header.h
{
position: absolute !important;
}
li.comment
{
border:solid 1px grey;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:10px !important;
left:20px;
width:95%;
}
}
Shit, I just switched from D1 to D2 temporarily to try it out and it won't let me change back now. Please fix this ASAP and leave us with both options - I need D1 for my tablet/smartphones, D2 is horrible for limited devices and many, many, many of us just don't like it.