No one has to play that game. Making yourself unhappy to please other people so that you can be happy is a flawed strategy, no matter how popular it seems to be. Think for yourself. Act for the direct and certain good before gambling on the indirect. Your grades and job evaluations may depend on recognizing the unstated wants and purposes of professors and bosses, but your education and satisfaction depend on actual learning and creativity and not wasting time trying to please people who won't say what they really want.
Anybody with at least average intelligence can do calculus and trig. The problem is the unbelievably awful way it is taught. The teachers often have no understanding of what they are doing themselves. Math teachers do not seem to be able to understand that the content of math has absolutly nothing to do with the formalisms used to express it. You have to show what is being described before describing it. The math should be put in terms of specific visual, physical situations which the students already have intuituion THEN generalized. Once the higher-level thought is in place, then one can go back and build it from foundations. But math originally derived from physics, not the other way around. Quantities, points, lines, distances and axioms all came from physical intuitions. Symbol-shuffling is a pointless exercise unless it is grounded in a connection to reality. The way math is taught today is like learning the grammar of a foreign language with the vocabulary unexplained and being told to write without having ever read or heard the language as it is used.
Well, the military and the missionaries may be pretty bad for all I know, but in my experience, it's the cream of the crop that choose to travel on their own. Also, the usual US citizen at home is either a sheep or a predator, so I'd say our reputation in the world is actually a little generous.
I wasn't taking about machine translation which indeed does often need some degree of understanding of meaning in order to work. For grammar checking within a language, idioms can often be parsed as single units or structures of limited, regular variability. Also, adaptive context-sensitive parses sometimes come up with alternate parse trees for the same text, some of which are resolved by futher context as the parse proceeds, but some aren't. Context from a greater training corpus could resolve some of the latter cases, or could at least provide a better estimate of the liklihoods of the alternate parse trees if a Bayesian algorithm were added. The parser already reduces the choices to a very small number, so in cases where the ambiguity can only be resolved by knowing the intended meaning, the user can select which one is correct, just as today spell-checkers offer alternate possibilities. (In fact, if the spell checking were integrated with the grammar checker, the spell checker would offer better choices than it does now, offering words that would fit the grammatical context at the top of the list. I think this has already been done to some degree.)
You are right that the grammar must be context-sensitive, but such power can largely be gotten without having the program know what the words mean. In fact, with a modest core grammar, an adaptive grammar parser can work starting with dictionaries consisting of only a handful of words.
Here is some background:
There are four classes of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy, each a subset of the next: Regular languages - parsed by finite-state automaton Context-free languages - parsed by push-down automaton Context-sensitive languages - parsed by linear bounded automaton (finite-tape Turing machine) Unrestricted languages -parsed by infinite tape Turing machine
Computer science has mostly stuck to the first two types of language and used ad-hoc hacks to make context-free languages imitate true context-sensitive languages when needed, for example in parsers for compilers.The grammars for languages have traditionally been static collections of rules written in Backus-Naur Form. In the late 80's and early 90's, researchers such as Christiansen, Burshteyn, Shutt and Boullier began working on grammars with rules that could be modified on the fly, known as modifiable, adaptive or dynamic grammars. Natural languages have context-sensitive grammars (at least) and cannot be parsed by lower-level grammars without special-purpose code for a totally impracticable number of commonly encountered cases.
Quinn Tyler Jackson, in work from 1993-1998 created a theoretical framework called Meta-S calculus and extended the Backus-Naur notation for adaptive, truly context-sensitive grammars. His first parsing library release applied this to : "an example natural language grammar that, with only a handful of preset words, which included only one noun ("man"), parsed the Gospel According to Mark (King James Version), acquiring nouns during the parse by context." In late 1998 he released a parser generator, PAISLEI, implementing these ideas and in mid-1999 he began publishing papers on the topic.
In 2002, with feedback from Bjarne Stroustrup (the inventor of C++) and Boris Burshteyn (one of the seminal theorists in modifiable grammars) he demonstrated that a clean, elegant adaptive grammar system could parse C++ with similar speed (and linear parse-time increases when fed longer input files) as conventional parsers using ad-hoc code to handle special cases of context-sensitivity.
When doing any parse, whether of natural or computer language, PAISLEI can provide a graphical derivation tree, which in the case of natural languages amounts to a diagram of the sentence. This remarkable software even naturally handles sentences such as "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana", correctly identifying the first instance of "flies" as a verb and the second as a noun.
With a good dictionary and training on a corpus of known-good text, Dr. Jackson's program should be able to do even more astounding things. If I were putting together a grammar checker, OCR or voice-recognition product team, Quinn would be at the top of my must-recruit list.
The cube-square law means that heat loss becomes less of a problem the larger the airship. The guy at the flyingkettle site has done experiments which show that even for fairly small steam baloons there is adequate outer-skin insulation available - aluminized Mylar layers on either side of a thin layer of closed-cell foam, IIRC. I think a serpentine thin-film baffle system with the hot input at the core would help. Film check valves and parallel conduits to replace ballonets seem like a good safety idea anyway for a steam airship. Also you want to lose some heat to condense the steam the engines are constantly making.
To recover encrypted data you need to recover whole blocks perfectly, and the probability of doing so becomes negligible with repeated random overwrites. The original data looks random and so it's impossible to tell it from the overwritten data. The residual risk is from plaintext in swapfile, and if you're taking these sort of precautions you already know to not use swapfiles anyway. (It's really irritating how OSes try to force them on you even when you have gigs of RAM.)
The newer the HDD tech, the closer to the hairy edge the encoding is to the fundamental limits. There are very few magnetic domains in a bit these days. I read Gutman's paper back when it came out, but the concerns are becoming steadily less relevant. The constant danger of security is trying to achieve perfection in some area far beyond what the threat model demands at the opportunity cost of overlooking more likely risks.
You generally wouldn't know if you had. Most of the time giving CMOS a jolt just makes it unreliable and it fails later. In dry air with synthetic clothes, just shifting in your synthetic-upholstered chair will create several hundred volts. Seperating two materials which have become triboelectrically charged results in capacitive voltage multiplication by the square of the seperation.
Salvaging caps is tricky - you have to be sure the donor MB wasn't from the period when the Taiwanese were making the bad electrolyte, and desoldering them may be more trouble than they're worth. Better to get new ESR caps.
Also while HP is great for spectrum analyzers and other frequency-domain kit, Tektronix is the way to go for oscilloscopes. The Tek 465B is the best cost/performance mix unless you want storage, in which case a computer card is actually better for most purposes - analog storage scopes are great, but the tubes are delicate and all but irreplacable and the DSOs aren't available on eBay or from used vendors at a reasonable price. Also anybody getting their first scope should know to get new probes - no fewer than 3 and preferably 4, x1/x10 switchable with a decent set of tip hardware and a case for each. I believe Jameco has a decent budget model. Get the scope callibrated at least once. Also get the oscilloscope manual and a Tek book on oscope test setups from eBay - they're cheap on CD.
Actually there is one reason to do soldering on motherboards - bad capacitors. Damn things flake our all the time. Any really good repair place should stock several of the more common values of low-ESR electrolytic caps in skinny form factors and should have a good ($400+) soldering/desoldering station. Also, a really good multimeter with miniclip probes is always needed. Get two, and spare batteries. Get them with temperature probes, and get an infrared thermometer, too. A dummy load for testing power supplies. A big Enermax ATX test power supply. A shunt for high-current measurements. An anti-static mat and wrist-strap. A drive duplicator and a stock of the more common drive types. Manufacturer's low-level format disks. Monitor calibration software. Norton, esp. Ghost. Knoppix. PC-DOS/ Ghost bootdisks. Other needed OSes with the needed licenses. Forensics software for data recovery. At least two 17" LCDs - one for the problem computer and one for the diagnostic computer. The space gained with LCDs is worth the money over CRTs, and they interfere less. (14" CRT and a KVM switch - how sad. hang on to the KVM switch, though.) 2nd barebones test computer for component testing. A cheap old oscilliscope can be useful for monitoring power supplies' performance under start-up loads, residual ripple and for intermittent electrical noise problems. It also helps with capacitor testing and makes your bench look cool. There are lots of other uses one can find for an oscope. Or get an oscope card for the test computer, which looks less cool but can be useful for recording transients and long-term tests. Four new 1x/10x switchable probes with tip sets. Old Tektronix manual on CD from eBay on how to do various kinds of oscope tests. Various USB devices - at minimum mouse, keyboard, powered hub, thumb drive. USB 2 drive for when other backup methods fail. Thermal grease for heatsinks. Cheap low-thermal resistence heatsinks for common processors. Electric screwdrivers and bit set. HDD and case screws - replace user case screws with knurled hand-removable screws and you'll get more repeat business. Parts trays. Database-inexed copies of every driver you've had to download. Copies of all OEM driver disks that ever cross your bench. Two of every major kind of computer component for tests. Replacement fans. A test CPU for every kind of socket you generally come across. A universal laptop power supply with interchangable tips. A univeral RadioShack power brick with a set of common tips. Some system for logging tests and results by case. A bookshelf - file the most recently used items on the left, and store anything that hasn't been used in a long time in a shelf below the bench. And most importantly- POWER OUTLETS - LOTS OF POWER OUTLETS. At least 18. And the biggest UPS you can afford serving the whole bench.
Magnets just don't work for erasing data. One or two passes with good pseudo-random data are all that is needed, and even the NSA would be reliably stumped with 5 or more on modern disks. Writing constant patterns is somwhat less effective because the encoding to analog on the disc prevents long strings of highs or lows being written and because any residual field from previous writes can potentially be seperated from the constant overwrite pattern.
You don't need to worry about this level of security if your threat model is phishers and the like. The people selling hard drives would like you to be so paranoid you won't let others make use of your old hardware, but there is no real need for that. If someone with the resources to go over your HDD nanometer by nanometer with SQuIDs wants your data, they'll first try a sneakier, more effective way than buying your old disks.
For quick destruction of encrypted data, assuming the encryption-block size is several times the disk-block size, overwriting just one of the disk blocks for each encryption block will effectively make the data unrecoverable. Similarly, if you use an encrypted file of long, secure keys to access your other encrypted data, once that file is destroyed, everything else is effectively gone until the encryption can be brute-forced a few decades down the line.
But for sensitive data that may need to be quickly destroyed, you're better off using CD or DVD media. Five seconds in the microwave followed by a quick couple of rubs with a piece of sandpaper to remove the flakes will do more than just about anything you could do to an HDD in a similar amount of time. This also gives you an excuse to get a really fat UPS and to have your microwave on your desk. Of course you still need to find a way to get the time needed to destroy the data when your door is being broken down or if your machine is tampered with when you are away - left as an exercise for the reader.;|
Your professor's story does not adress the issue at hand, natural disasters. Also, it ignores most of the Bible where God is constantly interfering with everyone's free will, not to mention all the serious contradictions within the Bible. Further, moving beyond the "married bachelor" and "could God create a stone so heavy he couldn't lift it" word-games, in the natural world, essentially nothing can be ruled out entirely when chaos theory and quantum uncertainty are taken into account, so God is firmly on the hook for all natural disasters.
Omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipotence - pick any two. Theodicy hasn't made any progress in at least 2,000 years.
The airship is called the Walrus, and Paul McCartney also called himself "the walrus" in the LSD-period Beatles song.
I Am the Walrus Beatles, 1967
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly. I'm crying.
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come. Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody tuesday. Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.
Mister city policeman sitting Pretty little policemen in a row. See how they fly like lucy in the sky, see how they run. I'm crying, I'm crying. I'm crying, I'm crying.
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye. Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess, Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.
Sitting in an english garden waiting for the sun. If the sun don't come, you get a tan From standing in the english rain. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.
Expert textpert choking smokers, Don't you thing the joker laughs at you? See how they smile like pigs in a sty, See how they snied. I'm crying.
Semolina pilchard, climbing up the eiffel tower. Elementary penguin singing hari krishna. Man, you should have seen them kicking edgar allan poe. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob. Goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob g'goo.
Oops-from a paper referenced in a post farther down the page, the paint wasn't actually the problem.
Nevertheless, you can still build airships without helium. See http://www.flyingkettle.com/outline.htm . Steam airships have some potential advantages such as being able to make more lift gas on their own, and can reduce lift by venting without losing a huge amount of valuable gas. The envelope can also act as the condenser for steam engines, thus making such engines light enough for use in the air.
Rednecks? The blimps are over cities nearly all the time. Sure, the rednecks come to the football games, but they don't usually bring their guns. I'd bet that the gunfire is coming from another, more urban group with a less socially-acceptable epithet than "rednecks".
Hydrogen airships got a bad rap. It was the flammable coating on the Hindenburg's skin that was the main problem. Helium is too rare and useful for other things to waste in commercial airship transport. Helium comes from natural gas wells, not oil wells per se. And it's a fission byproduct, too - that should set the environmentalists off. And airships burn plenty of petrolum, too, though less than jets or perhaps even ships.
Overrated. India was indeed advanced and had cities before Egypt (the primordial source of Minoan, hence Greek, hence Western civilization and culture), but they were stalled by the time the Greek civilization (the first great Western civilization)
Not to get in the way of demolishing the arguments of that nutter XChristX, but I have studied the Minoans when I was on Crete for three months, and I didn't hear anything about their culture coming from Egypt. They traded, of course, but there are also Minoan connections with the Phonecians. The Minoans were even more distinct from the Egyptians than the Egyptians were from the Sumerians, who were developing cities at about the same time or perhaps somewhat before the Egyptians. Greece had a long history of direct connection with and admiration for Egypt, so whatever Greece got from Egypt by way of the Minoans was minor. At any rate Greek culture didn't get as much from the Minoans as they did from trade with contemporaries and from the Dorian invaders, who pretty much wiped out everything that had come before.
You pulled that "1%" out of your ass. Find or do some rigorous research before asserting your personal prejudices. In any event, the issue is not whether "all" X "are" Y, but whether that is a more valid statistical inference than the null hypothesis based upon the available evidence. This may be true even if only 1% of X are Y in the case where only 0.01% of members of the general population are Y. Look up Bayes' Theorem for more precise expression of this.
Another problem with the way you have expressed your idea is the notion that sets are delineated rather than attributes which lie along a spectrum. For example: the more militantly feminist a woman is, the more lesbian she is likely to be; the more lesbian a woman is, the less anti-feminist she is likely to be. If she spells "women" "womyn", she's nearly certain to have a muff-munching streak - and to be a viciously boring ideologue. Another example: the more literally a person believes the Bible, the less likely he is to believe in the theory of evolution. If he refers to non-Xtians as "godless", he's virtually certain to think that a supreme being in a bathrobe and a beard created the universe in seven days. (Everyone here knows that should be "GNU/universe" and it was actually several years.)
The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in 1994, 67% if all arrests were made against whites and 21% were made against blacks. Since 80% of the population was white and 12% black in 1990, that shows that blacks were twice as likely to commit crimes.
No, it shows that they were almost twice as likely to be arrested. This could be evidence that Blacks are more criminal, or that the types of crimes blacks commit are more likly to be investigated, or that Blacks are discriminated against by police when choosing which crimes on which to make arrests, or that Blacks are less effective in choosing and concealing their crimes than Whites, or, most likely, a combination of all of the above. Similar alternative explainations hold for the tremendous incarceration rate of Blacks. The White incarceration rate is half their portion of the arrest rate, while the Black incarceration rate is four times their portion of arrests, so an arrested Black is roughly eight times more likely than an arrested White to be imprisoned. (Leaving aside the complications of sentence lengths and historical arrest and sentencing rates.) That is pretty difficult to explain without massive bias against blacks in the legal system.
Despite the quality of your argument, for other reeasons I agree with your point about stereotypes generally having a kernel of truth which can only be overcome through visible counterexamples.
The September 2005 issue, "Crossroads for Planet Earth" is pretty political.
Re:Make this guy science editor at the Gaurdian.
on
Bad Science in the Press
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· Score: 4, Informative
Scientific American has been frequently lousy for quite a while. The slide started in 1986 when Holtzbrinck Publishing Group bought it. Dennis Flanagan was the man who made the magazine great, editing it from the late '40s, when he and G. Piel bought the largely hobby and shop-oriented magazine. He presented serious science in a way that an educated layman could understand, never compromised accuracy for sales, and maintained the pratical orientation of the magazine with the Amateur Scientist column. The next editor, Jonathan Piel, who was the son of the long-time chairman and former co-owner, Gerard Piel, was not terribly good. John Rennie, the editor for the past 11 years, has really made the magazine into a more political version of Discover, and eliminated the Amateur Scientist and thus the idea that science was something that didn't belong just to the credentialed authorities.
New Scientist is definitely at a higher level than SA now.
Baloon-launch isn't a great idea, admittedly. Still, this isn't giving us any new technology, just a cheaper scaled-up V-2. There are lots of promising ideas for launch technology that could potentially do better. How about a catapult or rocket-sled launch of a pure kerosene-powered ramjet that would carry the rocket stage to about mach 3 to 5 and 60-120 kft ? (some oxidizer needed if the higher altitudes are used of course) We've had the tech to do that since the early '60s. It isn't nearly as complicated as a scramjet or even a supersonic turbojet, the requirements are lax enough to allow truly robust design and aircraft-style turnaround times for the launcher, and it allows a single-stage rocket design with a good payload fraction.
Slashdot Mirror
No one has to play that game. Making yourself unhappy to please other people so that you can be happy is a flawed strategy, no matter how popular it seems to be. Think for yourself. Act for the direct and certain good before gambling on the indirect. Your grades and job evaluations may depend on recognizing the unstated wants and purposes of professors and bosses, but your education and satisfaction depend on actual learning and creativity and not wasting time trying to please people who won't say what they really want.
Anybody with at least average intelligence can do calculus and trig. The problem is the unbelievably awful way it is taught. The teachers often have no understanding of what they are doing themselves. Math teachers do not seem to be able to understand that the content of math has absolutly nothing to do with the formalisms used to express it. You have to show what is being described before describing it. The math should be put in terms of specific visual, physical situations which the students already have intuituion THEN generalized. Once the higher-level thought is in place, then one can go back and build it from foundations. But math originally derived from physics, not the other way around. Quantities, points, lines, distances and axioms all came from physical intuitions. Symbol-shuffling is a pointless exercise unless it is grounded in a connection to reality. The way math is taught today is like learning the grammar of a foreign language with the vocabulary unexplained and being told to write without having ever read or heard the language as it is used.
Well, the military and the missionaries may be pretty bad for all I know, but in my experience, it's the cream of the crop that choose to travel on their own. Also, the usual US citizen at home is either a sheep or a predator, so I'd say our reputation in the world is actually a little generous.
I wasn't taking about machine translation which indeed does often need some degree of understanding of meaning in order to work. For grammar checking within a language, idioms can often be parsed as single units or structures of limited, regular variability. Also, adaptive context-sensitive parses sometimes come up with alternate parse trees for the same text, some of which are resolved by futher context as the parse proceeds, but some aren't. Context from a greater training corpus could resolve some of the latter cases, or could at least provide a better estimate of the liklihoods of the alternate parse trees if a Bayesian algorithm were added. The parser already reduces the choices to a very small number, so in cases where the ambiguity can only be resolved by knowing the intended meaning, the user can select which one is correct, just as today spell-checkers offer alternate possibilities. (In fact, if the spell checking were integrated with the grammar checker, the spell checker would offer better choices than it does now, offering words that would fit the grammatical context at the top of the list. I think this has already been done to some degree.)
You are right that the grammar must be context-sensitive, but such power can largely be gotten without having the program know what the words mean. In fact, with a modest core grammar, an adaptive grammar parser can work starting with dictionaries consisting of only a handful of words.
Here is some background:
There are four classes of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy, each a subset of the next:
Regular languages - parsed by finite-state automaton
Context-free languages - parsed by push-down automaton
Context-sensitive languages - parsed by linear bounded automaton (finite-tape Turing machine)
Unrestricted languages -parsed by infinite tape Turing machine
Computer science has mostly stuck to the first two types of language and used ad-hoc hacks to make context-free languages imitate true context-sensitive languages when needed, for example in parsers for compilers.The grammars for languages have traditionally been static collections of rules written in Backus-Naur Form. In the late 80's and early 90's, researchers such as Christiansen, Burshteyn, Shutt and Boullier began working on grammars with rules that could be modified on the fly, known as modifiable, adaptive or dynamic grammars. Natural languages have context-sensitive grammars (at least) and cannot be parsed by lower-level grammars without special-purpose code for a totally impracticable number of commonly encountered cases.
Quinn Tyler Jackson, in work from 1993-1998 created a theoretical framework called Meta-S calculus and extended the Backus-Naur notation for adaptive, truly context-sensitive grammars. His first parsing library release applied this to : "an example natural language grammar that, with only a handful of preset words, which included only one noun ("man"), parsed the Gospel According to Mark (King James Version), acquiring nouns during the parse by context." In late 1998 he released a parser generator, PAISLEI, implementing these ideas and in mid-1999 he began publishing papers on the topic.
In 2002, with feedback from Bjarne Stroustrup (the inventor of C++) and Boris Burshteyn (one of the seminal theorists in modifiable grammars) he demonstrated that a clean, elegant adaptive grammar system could parse C++ with similar speed (and linear parse-time increases when fed longer input files) as conventional parsers using ad-hoc code to handle special cases of context-sensitivity.
When doing any parse, whether of natural or computer language, PAISLEI can provide a graphical derivation tree, which in the case of natural languages amounts to a diagram of the sentence. This remarkable software even naturally handles sentences such as "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana", correctly identifying the first instance of "flies" as a verb and the second as a noun.
With a good dictionary and training on a corpus of known-good text, Dr. Jackson's program should be able to do even more astounding things. If I were putting together a grammar checker, OCR or voice-recognition product team, Quinn would be at the top of my must-recruit list.
The cube-square law means that heat loss becomes less of a problem the larger the airship. The guy at the flyingkettle site has done experiments which show that even for fairly small steam baloons there is adequate outer-skin insulation available - aluminized Mylar layers on either side of a thin layer of closed-cell foam, IIRC. I think a serpentine thin-film baffle system with the hot input at the core would help. Film check valves and parallel conduits to replace ballonets seem like a good safety idea anyway for a steam airship. Also you want to lose some heat to condense the steam the engines are constantly making.
To recover encrypted data you need to recover whole blocks perfectly, and the probability of doing so becomes negligible with repeated random overwrites. The original data looks random and so it's impossible to tell it from the overwritten data. The residual risk is from plaintext in swapfile, and if you're taking these sort of precautions you already know to not use swapfiles anyway. (It's really irritating how OSes try to force them on you even when you have gigs of RAM.)
The newer the HDD tech, the closer to the hairy edge the encoding is to the fundamental limits. There are very few magnetic domains in a bit these days. I read Gutman's paper back when it came out, but the concerns are becoming steadily less relevant. The constant danger of security is trying to achieve perfection in some area far beyond what the threat model demands at the opportunity cost of overlooking more likely risks.
"I...have never had a problem with static."
You generally wouldn't know if you had. Most of the time giving CMOS a jolt just makes it unreliable and it fails later. In dry air with synthetic clothes, just shifting in your synthetic-upholstered chair will create several hundred volts. Seperating two materials which have become triboelectrically charged results in capacitive voltage multiplication by the square of the seperation.
Salvaging caps is tricky - you have to be sure the donor MB wasn't from the period when the Taiwanese were making the bad electrolyte, and desoldering them may be more trouble than they're worth. Better to get new ESR caps.
Also while HP is great for spectrum analyzers and other frequency-domain kit, Tektronix is the way to go for oscilloscopes. The Tek 465B is the best cost/performance mix unless you want storage, in which case a computer card is actually better for most purposes - analog storage scopes are great, but the tubes are delicate and all but irreplacable and the DSOs aren't available on eBay or from used vendors at a reasonable price. Also anybody getting their first scope should know to get new probes - no fewer than 3 and preferably 4, x1/x10 switchable with a decent set of tip hardware and a case for each. I believe Jameco has a decent budget model. Get the scope callibrated at least once. Also get the oscilloscope manual and a Tek book on oscope test setups from eBay - they're cheap on CD.
Actually there is one reason to do soldering on motherboards - bad capacitors. Damn things flake our all the time. Any really good repair place should stock several of the more common values of low-ESR electrolytic caps in skinny form factors and should have a good ($400+) soldering/desoldering station. Also, a really good multimeter with miniclip probes is always needed. Get two, and spare batteries. Get them with temperature probes, and get an infrared thermometer, too. A dummy load for testing power supplies. A big Enermax ATX test power supply. A shunt for high-current measurements. An anti-static mat and wrist-strap. A drive duplicator and a stock of the more common drive types. Manufacturer's low-level format disks. Monitor calibration software. Norton, esp. Ghost. Knoppix. PC-DOS/ Ghost bootdisks. Other needed OSes with the needed licenses. Forensics software for data recovery. At least two 17" LCDs - one for the problem computer and one for the diagnostic computer. The space gained with LCDs is worth the money over CRTs, and they interfere less. (14" CRT and a KVM switch - how sad. hang on to the KVM switch, though.) 2nd barebones test computer for component testing. A cheap old oscilliscope can be useful for monitoring power supplies' performance under start-up loads, residual ripple and for intermittent electrical noise problems. It also helps with capacitor testing and makes your bench look cool. There are lots of other uses one can find for an oscope. Or get an oscope card for the test computer, which looks less cool but can be useful for recording transients and long-term tests. Four new 1x/10x switchable probes with tip sets. Old Tektronix manual on CD from eBay on how to do various kinds of oscope tests. Various USB devices - at minimum mouse, keyboard, powered hub, thumb drive. USB 2 drive for when other backup methods fail. Thermal grease for heatsinks. Cheap low-thermal resistence heatsinks for common processors. Electric screwdrivers and bit set. HDD and case screws - replace user case screws with knurled hand-removable screws and you'll get more repeat business. Parts trays. Database-inexed copies of every driver you've had to download. Copies of all OEM driver disks that ever cross your bench. Two of every major kind of computer component for tests. Replacement fans. A test CPU for every kind of socket you generally come across. A universal laptop power supply with interchangable tips. A univeral RadioShack power brick with a set of common tips. Some system for logging tests and results by case. A bookshelf - file the most recently used items on the left, and store anything that hasn't been used in a long time in a shelf below the bench. And most importantly- POWER OUTLETS - LOTS OF POWER OUTLETS. At least 18. And the biggest UPS you can afford serving the whole bench.
Magnets just don't work for erasing data. One or two passes with good pseudo-random data are all that is needed, and even the NSA would be reliably stumped with 5 or more on modern disks. Writing constant patterns is somwhat less effective because the encoding to analog on the disc prevents long strings of highs or lows being written and because any residual field from previous writes can potentially be seperated from the constant overwrite pattern.
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You don't need to worry about this level of security if your threat model is phishers and the like. The people selling hard drives would like you to be so paranoid you won't let others make use of your old hardware, but there is no real need for that. If someone with the resources to go over your HDD nanometer by nanometer with SQuIDs wants your data, they'll first try a sneakier, more effective way than buying your old disks.
For quick destruction of encrypted data, assuming the encryption-block size is several times the disk-block size, overwriting just one of the disk blocks for each encryption block will effectively make the data unrecoverable. Similarly, if you use an encrypted file of long, secure keys to access your other encrypted data, once that file is destroyed, everything else is effectively gone until the encryption can be brute-forced a few decades down the line.
But for sensitive data that may need to be quickly destroyed, you're better off using CD or DVD media. Five seconds in the microwave followed by a quick couple of rubs with a piece of sandpaper to remove the flakes will do more than just about anything you could do to an HDD in a similar amount of time. This also gives you an excuse to get a really fat UPS and to have your microwave on your desk. Of course you still need to find a way to get the time needed to destroy the data when your door is being broken down or if your machine is tampered with when you are away - left as an exercise for the reader.
Your professor's story does not adress the issue at hand, natural disasters. Also, it ignores most of the Bible where God is constantly interfering with everyone's free will, not to mention all the serious contradictions within the Bible. Further, moving beyond the "married bachelor" and "could God create a stone so heavy he couldn't lift it" word-games, in the natural world, essentially nothing can be ruled out entirely when chaos theory and quantum uncertainty are taken into account, so God is firmly on the hook for all natural disasters.
Omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipotence - pick any two. Theodicy hasn't made any progress in at least 2,000 years.
Hunting Microsoft? A poor, defensless fluffy monopoly with big, dewy eyes... for shame!
The airship is called the Walrus, and Paul McCartney also called himself "the walrus" in the LSD-period Beatles song.
I Am the Walrus
Beatles, 1967
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I'm crying.
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody tuesday.
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.
Mister city policeman sitting
Pretty little policemen in a row.
See how they fly like lucy in the sky, see how they run.
I'm crying, I'm crying.
I'm crying, I'm crying.
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.
Sitting in an english garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don't come, you get a tan
From standing in the english rain.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.
Expert textpert choking smokers,
Don't you thing the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in a sty,
See how they snied.
I'm crying.
Semolina pilchard, climbing up the eiffel tower.
Elementary penguin singing hari krishna.
Man, you should have seen them kicking edgar allan poe.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.
Goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob g'goo.
***
I guess you kinda had to be there...
Oops-from a paper referenced in a post farther down the page, the paint wasn't actually the problem.
Nevertheless, you can still build airships without helium. See http://www.flyingkettle.com/outline.htm . Steam airships have some potential advantages such as being able to make more lift gas on their own, and can reduce lift by venting without losing a huge amount of valuable gas. The envelope can also act as the condenser for steam engines, thus making such engines light enough for use in the air.
Rednecks? The blimps are over cities nearly all the time. Sure, the rednecks come to the football games, but they don't usually bring their guns. I'd bet that the gunfire is coming from another, more urban group with a less socially-acceptable epithet than "rednecks".
Hydrogen airships got a bad rap. It was the flammable coating on the Hindenburg's skin that was the main problem. Helium is too rare and useful for other things to waste in commercial airship transport. Helium comes from natural gas wells, not oil wells per se. And it's a fission byproduct, too - that should set the environmentalists off. And airships burn plenty of petrolum, too, though less than jets or perhaps even ships.
For that matter, why not carry an F-22? This thing is supposed to lift 500 tons.
Overrated. India was indeed advanced and had cities before Egypt (the primordial source of Minoan, hence Greek, hence Western civilization and culture), but they were stalled by the time the Greek civilization (the first great Western civilization)
Not to get in the way of demolishing the arguments of that nutter XChristX, but I have studied the Minoans when I was on Crete for three months, and I didn't hear anything about their culture coming from Egypt. They traded, of course, but there are also Minoan connections with the Phonecians. The Minoans were even more distinct from the Egyptians than the Egyptians were from the Sumerians, who were developing cities at about the same time or perhaps somewhat before the Egyptians. Greece had a long history of direct connection with and admiration for Egypt, so whatever Greece got from Egypt by way of the Minoans was minor. At any rate Greek culture didn't get as much from the Minoans as they did from trade with contemporaries and from the Dorian invaders, who pretty much wiped out everything that had come before.
You pulled that "1%" out of your ass. Find or do some rigorous research before asserting your personal prejudices. In any event, the issue is not whether "all" X "are" Y, but whether that is a more valid statistical inference than the null hypothesis based upon the available evidence. This may be true even if only 1% of X are Y in the case where only 0.01% of members of the general population are Y. Look up Bayes' Theorem for more precise expression of this.
Another problem with the way you have expressed your idea is the notion that sets are delineated rather than attributes which lie along a spectrum. For example: the more militantly feminist a woman is, the more lesbian she is likely to be; the more lesbian a woman is, the less anti-feminist she is likely to be. If she spells "women" "womyn", she's nearly certain to have a muff-munching streak - and to be a viciously boring ideologue. Another example: the more literally a person believes the Bible, the less likely he is to believe in the theory of evolution. If he refers to non-Xtians as "godless", he's virtually certain to think that a supreme being in a bathrobe and a beard created the universe in seven days. (Everyone here knows that should be "GNU/universe" and it was actually several years.)
The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in 1994, 67% if all arrests were made against whites and 21% were made against blacks. Since 80% of the population was white and 12% black in 1990, that shows that blacks were twice as likely to commit crimes.
No, it shows that they were almost twice as likely to be arrested. This could be evidence that Blacks are more criminal, or that the types of crimes blacks commit are more likly to be investigated, or that Blacks are discriminated against by police when choosing which crimes on which to make arrests, or that Blacks are less effective in choosing and concealing their crimes than Whites, or, most likely, a combination of all of the above. Similar alternative explainations hold for the tremendous incarceration rate of Blacks. The White incarceration rate is half their portion of the arrest rate, while the Black incarceration rate is four times their portion of arrests, so an arrested Black is roughly eight times more likely than an arrested White to be imprisoned. (Leaving aside the complications of sentence lengths and historical arrest and sentencing rates.) That is pretty difficult to explain without massive bias against blacks in the legal system.
Despite the quality of your argument, for other reeasons I agree with your point about stereotypes generally having a kernel of truth which can only be overcome through visible counterexamples.
The September 2005 issue, "Crossroads for Planet Earth" is pretty political.
Scientific American has been frequently lousy for quite a while. The slide started in 1986 when Holtzbrinck Publishing Group bought it. Dennis Flanagan was the man who made the magazine great, editing it from the late '40s, when he and G. Piel bought the largely hobby and shop-oriented magazine. He presented serious science in a way that an educated layman could understand, never compromised accuracy for sales, and maintained the pratical orientation of the magazine with the Amateur Scientist column. The next editor, Jonathan Piel, who was the son of the long-time chairman and former co-owner, Gerard Piel, was not terribly good. John Rennie, the editor for the past 11 years, has really made the magazine into a more political version of Discover, and eliminated the Amateur Scientist and thus the idea that science was something that didn't belong just to the credentialed authorities.
New Scientist is definitely at a higher level than SA now.
BTW I meant "catapult" in the aircraft-carrier sense, not the siege-engine sense.
Baloon-launch isn't a great idea, admittedly. Still, this isn't giving us any new technology, just a cheaper scaled-up V-2. There are lots of promising ideas for launch technology that could potentially do better. How about a catapult or rocket-sled launch of a pure kerosene-powered ramjet that would carry the rocket stage to about mach 3 to 5 and 60-120 kft ? (some oxidizer needed if the higher altitudes are used of course) We've had the tech to do that since the early '60s. It isn't nearly as complicated as a scramjet or even a supersonic turbojet, the requirements are lax enough to allow truly robust design and aircraft-style turnaround times for the launcher, and it allows a single-stage rocket design with a good payload fraction.