It's one thing for a spam filter to make a mistake or even be careless and put a message into the spam folder, but quite another for a filter to intentionally cause known good messages to be absent from a users inbox. Why don't they just start reporting all messages as good, or just not give any rating to any message? This might be especially bad in situations where ORDB is only given partial weighting in the spam categorization process so that many messages still get through, thus making it less likely that the errors will be noticed quickly because there will not be a total block on email. To do what they're doing might be considered wreckless. I don't know much about the law in a situation like this but I'd be worried about liability even with a good disclaimer in the user agreement.
The founders didn't think the people were very smart. They set up an indirect democracy that separated the people from decision making, sometimes by several layers of representatives. Under the system they set up, the people don't get to vote on federal laws. The closest we get is that we elect the House of Representatives directly. But Two layers were used to separate us from the Senate which was chosen by the state governments. And contrary to popular misunderstanding we don't elect the president either, the choice of president is separated from us by three layers. We elect the state governments, the state governments chose the electoral college, and the electoral college chooses the president. The judiciary is nominated by the president, thus adding a FOURTH layer of separation from the people. Maybe with four layers between us and the Court, and three layers between us and the president, it wasn't so bad to cut the separation between us and the lawmakers in the Senate to just one layer. After all, even one layer often gets us laws out of sync with the interest of the people.
I'm worried about SpaceX's failure analysis for the unstable second stage. It doesn't seem to me that the stage separation bump had much of anything to do with it because the second stage recovered and stabilized quickly. While I think slosh may have contributed and slosh baffles MAY solve the problem, I doubt if slosh is the source of the instability. If slosh were the primary problem I would expect the oscillations to get out of control much more quickly. It doesn't take very many shoves on a tub of liquid before the oscillations reach a high or maximum amplitude. Instead the oscillations started out very small and SLOWLY and STEADILY increased, seemingly inversely proportional to the mass of fuel and therefore the rotational inertia of the stage. I would also have expected the movements to be more random if slosh was the primary problem.
Instead I would suspect first that the control routine was just not quite acting quick enough to stabilize the vehicle. As the rotational inertia dropped, the slow reaction time of the control routine allowed greater deviations. Yet if the control system was totally too slow to keep control of the vehicle I would have expected it to just totally loose control much more quickly than it did. Instead I expect the slowness may have been the result of a non linear factor in the control routine that commanded less drastic corrections for less drastic deviations, yet increased corrections sufficiently as the deviations increased.
I doubt that slosh baffles will solve this problem and I don't think a smoother stage separation will have any significant benefit. SpaceX says third party experts have verified their conclusion "that LOX slosh was the primary contributor to this instability". If SpaceX believes this is the primary problem and it's not, then there is a great danger that their solution won't be adequate.
It all boils down to the purpose of the universe. If life is meaningless then saving your own life is a goal as worthwhile or as pointless as any other. But if you want your life to amount to more than just a rock bouncing down a hillside, a mass of atoms working their way into a potential energy well, looking lively but signifying nothing, then whether you live or die isn't the important thing. You are just a piece of a living thing that has been alive continuously for a billion years. One of the chunks of DNA in your body could be made up of some of the very same atoms that made up the first living thing on earth, passed down in an unbroken, continuously living, never dying line of reproductive cells.
Think of a variation of Pascal's wager. If the universe is meaningless then you're just a bunch of atoms seeking a pattern arbitrarily selected by chance evolution to represent happiness. Why should you care if your brain achieves what it considers the state of happiness or not? If you're unhappy why not kill yourself to feel better? That would be no worse than stopping and vaporizing a rock that was bouncing down a hillside. You don't want to die? If you can, why not just set aside the goal of staying alive and achieving meaningless happiness and choose a more meaningful goal, because if the universe does have a purpose then not pursuing it could be a mistake you will regret severely. If there is no purpose then you don't really have anything to loose by pursuing that purpose.
So what is the purpose of the universe or the meaning of life or whatever you want to call it? I don't know, but it seems like a smart provisional goal is to find out. If figuring out the purpose of the universe is your life goal then your actions should be calculated to maximize the likelihood of achieving that.
Then the question is, will fighting help achieve the purpose of the universe or help you to figure out the purpose of the universe. To spite the claims of Dictators like Hitler, that they're interested in the progress of humanity, I think that probably all dictators are almost purely motivated by the pursuit of power. And even if they truly have a little interest in philosophy, the corruption and loss of freedom necessary to maintain an undemocratic government is almost surely a hindrance to the progress of humanity. Thus I think it is worth fighting for democracy, even at great risk to myself. If life is meaningless then my death would be meaningless and I wouldn't care. But because I think there is a purpose, I take pride in the struggle, and that gives my brain pleasure.
On the other hand what if you think the universe is meaningless and your main goal is to stay alive? You have to remember that there are nasty people in this world who will group together and kill or enslave you to get what they want. If they know you won't fight, then you will be an easy target for them to enslave. You can't fight them alone. You're going to have to have someone help you fight them. But if you convince too many people that it's not smart to fight, then who will protect you? Without a fighting spirit, your country will become weak and you will be enslaved. Unless perhaps you have a strong and good country to protect you. But you'd better hope that country doesn't need your help or turn bad some day after you've lost your fighting spirit.
Although disabling the RFID tags might help, it might not do much good. If only one percent of the population consistently disables all of the RFID tags they carry then it will be relatively easy to just correlate the sensor detections of people who don't have any readable tags. That probably wouldn't work on the side walks of New York City, but on roads or less heavily used side walks you could probably still be tracked. Also if you're one of the few with no tags then you might get some extra scrutiny. Also tags might be set to remain silent for the first 100 scans or so and then activate only occasionally to defeat your attempts to find and destroy them.
In basic terms, how would an attacker go about adding a new root certificate so he could impersonate a domain like citibank.com? It is my understanding that the whole idea of SSL is to ensure the identity of the server (and to provide privacy) even against a man in the middle attack. The two obvious ways to accomplish such an attack are to trick a trusted certificate authority into signing the attacker's certificate, or to get a compromised certificate authority into the browser's trusted authorities list. Since those are the two obvious attacks at the core of the protocol, certificate authorities and browser distributors presumably make such compromises difficult.
Consider an original author releasing a work under the GPL. Then a small patch from a contributor is accepted into the project. If the original author then adds more to the project, then isn't the original author creating a derivative work? So after that point, the original author can't even relicense code that the original author adds to the project, because that code is a derivative of the GPL work, right? I think this is how it's supposed to work so that people wont waste their time contributing to a project that is going to be taken closed.
Instead of the standard being that you cant patent what's obvious, the standard should be that you can't patent something unless its clever. And the twenty year patent period needs to be shortened in these days of rapid tech progress.
Or better still, users should be educated by their bank to check for the lock symbol and the correct domain name so they know who they're connecting to. The advantage of this is that it addresses this and a whole lot more vulnerabilities. And banks should stop using domain names that have no obvious relation to their trademark. For example I know one bank that uses accountonline.com for its domain name. Even if I get the lock symbol I don't know if maybe the crooks just got themselves a domain name and an ssl certificate for it, unless I examine the certificate. And even if I examine the cert. I'm still not sure. But if they use an obvious domain name like citibank.com then I know no scammer could have gotten a certificate for that domain. I suppose all this certificate stuff is probably too much for a lot of customers though.
The nice thing about educating yourself is that your employer might not complain since you're making yourself a more valuable employee, but if you lose the job and you educated yourself in something general, then all that time spent educating yourself still benefits you. I'd think that educating yourself about anything more than what's important for your job would be a rare luxury though, because it seems like there is almost always more to do for any employer than any amount of employees could ever get done. e.g. New features, code reviews, contingency plans, documentation, future project planning, etc. If it was your money paying the salaries, you'd probably want employees that would do as much as they reasonably could for the benefit of the company (without making the employees miserable), so you can assume that that's what you agreed to do in exchange for your paycheck.
The Wikipedia article on Energy Density lists the energy density of lithium batteries with nanowires at about 6MJ/kg and the energy density of TNT at about 4MJ/kg. And unlike butter or gasoline or some other things, I think the lithium battery has the oxidizer in the package (though maybe not right in the molecule like TNT). I don't think they're going to let you take many of these on the plane with you.
The reason learning to ride a bike is tricky is that there is a counter intuitive aspect to it that nobody realizes they are doing. If people could and would just tell kids how to ride, then it would be easy for them to learn.
The first thing one needs to learn is how to balance. It's not very hard for kids to figure out on their own but it's even easier if someone tells them. The trick is simply to turn the handlebars the direction you start to fall. If your bike starts to lean to the right then turn the handlebars to the right and that will bring you back upright and into balance (you have to be moving forward for it to work and if you're going to slow it makes it harder). It's best to learn this in a giant flat area so that as you're turning the handlebars left and right, learning to balance, you don't have to worry about where you're going and running into anything. The narrowness of the typical residential street makes this challenging.
The second thing you need to know, and the counter intuitive part that is hard for the brain to figure out, is how to make the bike go the direction you want it to go. It's called counter steering. This is so counter intuitive that people rarely even believe me when I explain it to them. It's true though. It's in the California Department of Motor Vehicles Motorcycle Handbook, there's a web page by a Berkley physics professor, I've seen articles about it in a major motorcycle magazine. This is not controversial. Nobody who is an expert in motorcycle or bicycle physics will contradict me. The trick to turning a bicycle or motorcycle is to turn the handlebars the opposite direction you want to go. Seriously, I'm not joking. You don't hold them there. A little jerk the opposite way will suffice.
For example, say you're riding along perfectly straight. You've managed to get yourself so that your bike and your body is perfectly straight up and down and your handlebars are straight ahead. Now say you decide to turn LEFT. The first thing you do is give the handlebars a little nudge to the RIGHT. Your body continues in a roughly straight ahead direction while your bike moves out from underneath you to the right. Now you are leaning to the left just as you want to be and need to be in order to do the left turn you want to make. Now that you are leaned to the left you can proceed to turn the handlebars to the left and carry out your left turn.
Note that this IS how YOU ride a bike even if you don't realize it. There is no other way to do it. Some people think that in order to initiate a turn they just lean. But the only way you can lean your bike is to turn the handlebars the opposite way you want to lean. If you try to just lean your body by doing something like just bending your waist to the side, then your upper body will lean the way you want, but you have nothing to push against so the equal and opposite reaction will cause your lower body and your bike to lean the opposite way and cancel out nearly all of your lean. To prove that you can't just lean, try sitting on your bike with it not moving forward and try to balance it with your feet off the ground. It's extremely difficult. But if you're moving forward, you can turn the handlebars to make your bike go out from underneath you to effect a lean, and it's easy to balance.
One reason people don't realize that they're doing this counter steering thing is that when you're riding a bike you're constantly turning your handlebars back and forth and back and forth (a little tiny bit) in order to stay balanced. When you decide to make a turn your brain subconsciously just turns the handlebars a little bit earlier and a little bit more than it was going to in the course of maintaining balance anyway. It's like you've just willed yourself to lean but really you've done a little counter steering without even realizing it.
I feel sorry for all the kids who break their legs and scrape their knees and crack their heads needlessly just because nobody was there who could tell them how to ride their bike. Their
I had hoped my comment would be modded up quickly but it hasn't so forgive me for asking that someone mod my parent post up so that volunteers won't be scared off for fear of bandwidth overload. I've already got excellent karma so I'm not asking this for me, I'm asking for the sake of the pool.
"Bandwidth is not an issue and you will barely notice the extra load on your machine."
If that is the case, why do they need more servers?
If I understand it right bandwidth isn't an issue because they can tailor how much of the pool load goes to your machine. When someone queries the pool their ntp client does a DNS query to pool.ntp.org. The pool's DNS server semi randomly returns the IP address of one of the volunteer servers in the pool. If you tell the pool operators that you have only a little bandwidth then the pool DNS server will only return your IP address say one tenth as often as it does the IPs for the high traffic servers. This allows you to decide how much load you're willing to bear. Even if the pool is overloaded, your machine doesn't have to be.
In addition to the latency of USB, the nmea output of a GPS unit may not be very accurate. Go for a GPS with pulse per second if you can find one for a reasonable price. A while back I was checking the chipset specs for the cheap GPS receivers to find one with a pulse per second output. I found some but I forgot which ones they were. Of course you would have to open the case and do a little soldering. I'm not sure how you would hook it up to your server once you got the pulse per second out. I think maybe to one of the pins on the serial port that would trigger an interrupt.
Under OpenBSD I've gotten much more stable timekeeping by recompiling the generic kernel with only one simple change. I set the processor type to 586 or 686 as the case may be. Specifically in the/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC file I removed "option I486_CPU" and "option I686_CPU" so that it would be correctly configured for my pentium 166 cpu. I think the pentium has some time keeping functions the 386 and 486 didn't have. Although I haven't found the parts of the kernel code where this change does its magic.
Since brains chilled to inactivity during surgery maintain their memories and function, I'd say this dynamic memory theory is questionable. Maybe the old memories are being overwritten or maybe the pathway to access them is being scrambled. Also human brains may store memory quite differently than rats.
The fact that human brains chilled to inactivity maintain their memory, also hints that frozen brains may very well be recoverable in the future. It's said to be an old myth that freezing brains causes ice crystals to shred the brain cells.
>As for input, I used to write it down on a piece of paper, then toggle it in with binary switches.
You think that's funny? I was looking into the value of an IMSAI8080 that was down in the garage a few months ago. The IMSAI8080 was one of the first personal computers and only has toggle switches and lights on the front panel. http://www.imsai.net/ A good one goes on ebay for as much as $900.
I also had to toggle in the program for a pic16F84 microcontroller bit by bit because I couldn't get the programmers I made from web plans to work. I finally determined that it wasn't the programmers that were messed up it was that the pic wouldn't accept a program if the supply voltage was over 4.5 volts, even though it was supposed to work at 5v.
Re:What's good for the goose...
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bri2000 wrote:
By your definition pretty much every government in the Middle East (save for Israel and, ironically, the Hamas lot elected in the West Bank) is criminal, including staunch US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Correct. Nearly all or maybe all Muslim countries are controlled by criminal governments because their governments don't allow freedom of speech, such as the right to publicly criticize Islam. It doesn't even matter if the majority of the people support laws against blasphemy because the people can't come to an informed decision if there isn't freedom of speech on the subject.
Sometimes the US makes allies with criminal governments because the US is unable and/or unwilling to do what's necessary to liberate the people of those countries, and the US might as well get what cooperation it can.
The sad thing about Iraq is that the US had to stand by and allow Iraq to become a non free country because the US was afraid to fight for true freedom of speech in the new Iraq constitution. Hopefully democracy can still take hold and eventually full freedom can be obtained in Iraq.
bri2000 wrote:
...rights or morality is not relevant, it's just something we in the West like to say to make us feel righteous and justified in defending our interests...Unfortunately, we have started to believe our own rehtoric...
No, rights and morality are not just something we say and they are relevant and real and objective, not relative. Many Americans vote and fight based partly on their interest in bringing justice to oppressed people. It's not just rhetoric. From the way you write, it seems that you don't believe in justice. It's as if you think it's OK to stand by and watch while people are being victimized by criminals. That's sad.
bri2000 wrote:
...this has trapped us in Iraq years after the mission we went there for (to depose Saddam and check for WMDs) has been completed as we (bizarrely) decided to try to turn Iraq into Belgium rather than just install another strong-man and letting him get on with repression of religious extremists and being a counterweight to Iran.
That's disgusting. I suppose you think the US should have just found some dictators to replace Hitler and the emperor of Japan as well, rather than free those people. You don't seem to understand that WMDs were mainly just an excuse to persuade the public to support the war. The main reasons for going into Iraq were to stabilize the region in the long term by bringing democracy and to get positioned to deal with Iran and Syria and others.
an AC wrote:
So it's ok to nuke a nation when you are "saving" them.
No, it's OK for a legitimate government to save itself by nuking a nation run by a criminal government. Although at the time the US still had segregation and was therefore under a criminal government itself.
an AC wrote:
You have the same ideology of the pre-world war Germany and Japanese. "We'll help the world to be better, therefore, we are allowed to kill as many as we want to defend our ideology", and you still talk about freedom.
Attacking a government in order to liberate a people is not imposing anything on the people. It makes no sense to criticize the US for trying to get other countries to be governed by the US ideology, when the US ideology is that countries should be governed however the people want to govern them(as determined by vote), and that they should have freedom of speech so they can make an informed decision.
an AC wrote:
US have enough people convinced that they are the good and so they can demand everyone else not to have guns, when they have a really poor internal gun control policy, and they "free" to have as many as they want. Isn't that ironic?
I don't follow you here. The US doesn't want the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but I
Re:What's good for the goose...
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Explosives Camp
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>This is the same sort of fuzzy logic we see with USA possessing nuclear weapons and yet demanding that Iran be prevented from ever having any.
The difference is that the rulers of Iran are criminals. In Iran people are routinely killed for criticizing the government. As compared to the US, which for example restored freedom to Germany and Japan even after having successfully conquered them. Saying that if it's OK for the US to have nukes then it should be OK for Iran to have nukes is like saying that if it's OK for the US government to have nukes then it should be OK for the mafia to have nukes.
There is a clear, obvious, and indisputable difference between the criminal governments of some countries and the legitimate governments of free countries. Whether a government is criminal or not is not usually just relative to the viewpoint of who is making the judgment. Most criminal governments know that they are criminals and just don't care and they consciously lie when they claim to be legitimate. If a country doesn't have reasonably free speech and reasonably fair elections, then the people of the country are being controlled against their will by some minority, and they are thus under a criminal government. Of course there are some governments which are disputably criminal or borderline criminal, but there are many that are unquestionably criminal. Whether the US has the right to nukes or not, the criminal government of Iran certainly does not.
This ISP add insertion also reminds me of a case between the Utah based CleanFlicks company and Hollywood movie studios. The Mormons in Utah and many other people wanted cleaner movies, so CleanFlicks started taking DVDs from customers and giving the customers back an edited version of the DVD with the sex and violence and other objectionable stuff taken out. The studios won a lawsuit, I think, partly on the grounds that CleanFlicks was violating their copyrights by selling derivative works that didn't maintain the artistic integrity of the originals.
One of the problems CleanFlicks had was that they were actually making unauthorized edited copies of the DVDs, even though they required a genuine copy of the DVD to be turned over to them for destruction. Another company, ClearPlay, was also sued after they took a different strategy to avoid the copying problem. ClearPlay made DVD players that just played regular DVDs, but the DVD player cut out portions of the movie as it played, based on a file downloaded from ClearPlay onto a USB flash drive which was then plugged into the DVD player. However according to Wikipedia, the ClearPlay suit didn't make it to a verdict before Congress passed a law explicitly making it legal. I doubt the law applied to inserting adds in web pages though.
The similarity of these situations is that theoretically the ISP customer is asking (by agreeing to the ISP terms of service) for the adds to be inserted in the web pages, just as ClearPlay customers are asking for the bad parts to be removed.
This is also similar to software that removes the adds from web pages. A web page without the adds is like a derivative work, created by the viewer, with the assistance of the add block software.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing for a spam filter to make a mistake or even be careless and put a message into the spam folder, but quite another for a filter to intentionally cause known good messages to be absent from a users inbox. Why don't they just start reporting all messages as good, or just not give any rating to any message? This might be especially bad in situations where ORDB is only given partial weighting in the spam categorization process so that many messages still get through, thus making it less likely that the errors will be noticed quickly because there will not be a total block on email. To do what they're doing might be considered wreckless. I don't know much about the law in a situation like this but I'd be worried about liability even with a good disclaimer in the user agreement.
Intentionally causing large numbers of emails to be lost is a risky move indeed.
There, fixed it for you.
Now it's consistent with what will happen if you try to enter a federal building while ignoring the security guards demanding RealID.
The founders didn't think the people were very smart. They set up an indirect democracy that separated the people from decision making, sometimes by several layers of representatives. Under the system they set up, the people don't get to vote on federal laws. The closest we get is that we elect the House of Representatives directly. But Two layers were used to separate us from the Senate which was chosen by the state governments. And contrary to popular misunderstanding we don't elect the president either, the choice of president is separated from us by three layers. We elect the state governments, the state governments chose the electoral college, and the electoral college chooses the president. The judiciary is nominated by the president, thus adding a FOURTH layer of separation from the people. Maybe with four layers between us and the Court, and three layers between us and the president, it wasn't so bad to cut the separation between us and the lawmakers in the Senate to just one layer. After all, even one layer often gets us laws out of sync with the interest of the people.
I was born on a Thursday, so I want my family and friends to throw me a birthday party every Thursday. And yes, I expect plenty of presents :)
Why was parent modded down? It is the most informative post I've seen yet in this discussion.
Instead I would suspect first that the control routine was just not quite acting quick enough to stabilize the vehicle. As the rotational inertia dropped, the slow reaction time of the control routine allowed greater deviations. Yet if the control system was totally too slow to keep control of the vehicle I would have expected it to just totally loose control much more quickly than it did. Instead I expect the slowness may have been the result of a non linear factor in the control routine that commanded less drastic corrections for less drastic deviations, yet increased corrections sufficiently as the deviations increased.
I doubt that slosh baffles will solve this problem and I don't think a smoother stage separation will have any significant benefit. SpaceX says third party experts have verified their conclusion "that LOX slosh was the primary contributor to this instability". If SpaceX believes this is the primary problem and it's not, then there is a great danger that their solution won't be adequate.
Think of a variation of Pascal's wager. If the universe is meaningless then you're just a bunch of atoms seeking a pattern arbitrarily selected by chance evolution to represent happiness. Why should you care if your brain achieves what it considers the state of happiness or not? If you're unhappy why not kill yourself to feel better? That would be no worse than stopping and vaporizing a rock that was bouncing down a hillside. You don't want to die? If you can, why not just set aside the goal of staying alive and achieving meaningless happiness and choose a more meaningful goal, because if the universe does have a purpose then not pursuing it could be a mistake you will regret severely. If there is no purpose then you don't really have anything to loose by pursuing that purpose.
So what is the purpose of the universe or the meaning of life or whatever you want to call it? I don't know, but it seems like a smart provisional goal is to find out. If figuring out the purpose of the universe is your life goal then your actions should be calculated to maximize the likelihood of achieving that.
Then the question is, will fighting help achieve the purpose of the universe or help you to figure out the purpose of the universe. To spite the claims of Dictators like Hitler, that they're interested in the progress of humanity, I think that probably all dictators are almost purely motivated by the pursuit of power. And even if they truly have a little interest in philosophy, the corruption and loss of freedom necessary to maintain an undemocratic government is almost surely a hindrance to the progress of humanity. Thus I think it is worth fighting for democracy, even at great risk to myself. If life is meaningless then my death would be meaningless and I wouldn't care. But because I think there is a purpose, I take pride in the struggle, and that gives my brain pleasure.
On the other hand what if you think the universe is meaningless and your main goal is to stay alive? You have to remember that there are nasty people in this world who will group together and kill or enslave you to get what they want. If they know you won't fight, then you will be an easy target for them to enslave. You can't fight them alone. You're going to have to have someone help you fight them. But if you convince too many people that it's not smart to fight, then who will protect you? Without a fighting spirit, your country will become weak and you will be enslaved. Unless perhaps you have a strong and good country to protect you. But you'd better hope that country doesn't need your help or turn bad some day after you've lost your fighting spirit.
Although disabling the RFID tags might help, it might not do much good. If only one percent of the population consistently disables all of the RFID tags they carry then it will be relatively easy to just correlate the sensor detections of people who don't have any readable tags. That probably wouldn't work on the side walks of New York City, but on roads or less heavily used side walks you could probably still be tracked. Also if you're one of the few with no tags then you might get some extra scrutiny. Also tags might be set to remain silent for the first 100 scans or so and then activate only occasionally to defeat your attempts to find and destroy them.
In basic terms, how would an attacker go about adding a new root certificate so he could impersonate a domain like citibank.com? It is my understanding that the whole idea of SSL is to ensure the identity of the server (and to provide privacy) even against a man in the middle attack. The two obvious ways to accomplish such an attack are to trick a trusted certificate authority into signing the attacker's certificate, or to get a compromised certificate authority into the browser's trusted authorities list. Since those are the two obvious attacks at the core of the protocol, certificate authorities and browser distributors presumably make such compromises difficult.
Consider an original author releasing a work under the GPL. Then a small patch from a contributor is accepted into the project. If the original author then adds more to the project, then isn't the original author creating a derivative work? So after that point, the original author can't even relicense code that the original author adds to the project, because that code is a derivative of the GPL work, right? I think this is how it's supposed to work so that people wont waste their time contributing to a project that is going to be taken closed.
Instead of the standard being that you cant patent what's obvious, the standard should be that you can't patent something unless its clever. And the twenty year patent period needs to be shortened in these days of rapid tech progress.
Or better still, users should be educated by their bank to check for the lock symbol and the correct domain name so they know who they're connecting to. The advantage of this is that it addresses this and a whole lot more vulnerabilities. And banks should stop using domain names that have no obvious relation to their trademark. For example I know one bank that uses accountonline.com for its domain name. Even if I get the lock symbol I don't know if maybe the crooks just got themselves a domain name and an ssl certificate for it, unless I examine the certificate. And even if I examine the cert. I'm still not sure. But if they use an obvious domain name like citibank.com then I know no scammer could have gotten a certificate for that domain. I suppose all this certificate stuff is probably too much for a lot of customers though.
The nice thing about educating yourself is that your employer might not complain since you're making yourself a more valuable employee, but if you lose the job and you educated yourself in something general, then all that time spent educating yourself still benefits you. I'd think that educating yourself about anything more than what's important for your job would be a rare luxury though, because it seems like there is almost always more to do for any employer than any amount of employees could ever get done. e.g. New features, code reviews, contingency plans, documentation, future project planning, etc. If it was your money paying the salaries, you'd probably want employees that would do as much as they reasonably could for the benefit of the company (without making the employees miserable), so you can assume that that's what you agreed to do in exchange for your paycheck.
The Wikipedia article on Energy Density lists the energy density of lithium batteries with nanowires at about 6MJ/kg and the energy density of TNT at about 4MJ/kg. And unlike butter or gasoline or some other things, I think the lithium battery has the oxidizer in the package (though maybe not right in the molecule like TNT). I don't think they're going to let you take many of these on the plane with you.
The reason learning to ride a bike is tricky is that there is a counter intuitive aspect to it that nobody realizes they are doing. If people could and would just tell kids how to ride, then it would be easy for them to learn.
The first thing one needs to learn is how to balance. It's not very hard for kids to figure out on their own but it's even easier if someone tells them. The trick is simply to turn the handlebars the direction you start to fall. If your bike starts to lean to the right then turn the handlebars to the right and that will bring you back upright and into balance (you have to be moving forward for it to work and if you're going to slow it makes it harder). It's best to learn this in a giant flat area so that as you're turning the handlebars left and right, learning to balance, you don't have to worry about where you're going and running into anything. The narrowness of the typical residential street makes this challenging.
The second thing you need to know, and the counter intuitive part that is hard for the brain to figure out, is how to make the bike go the direction you want it to go. It's called counter steering. This is so counter intuitive that people rarely even believe me when I explain it to them. It's true though. It's in the California Department of Motor Vehicles Motorcycle Handbook, there's a web page by a Berkley physics professor, I've seen articles about it in a major motorcycle magazine. This is not controversial. Nobody who is an expert in motorcycle or bicycle physics will contradict me. The trick to turning a bicycle or motorcycle is to turn the handlebars the opposite direction you want to go. Seriously, I'm not joking. You don't hold them there. A little jerk the opposite way will suffice.
For example, say you're riding along perfectly straight. You've managed to get yourself so that your bike and your body is perfectly straight up and down and your handlebars are straight ahead. Now say you decide to turn LEFT. The first thing you do is give the handlebars a little nudge to the RIGHT. Your body continues in a roughly straight ahead direction while your bike moves out from underneath you to the right. Now you are leaning to the left just as you want to be and need to be in order to do the left turn you want to make. Now that you are leaned to the left you can proceed to turn the handlebars to the left and carry out your left turn.
Note that this IS how YOU ride a bike even if you don't realize it. There is no other way to do it. Some people think that in order to initiate a turn they just lean. But the only way you can lean your bike is to turn the handlebars the opposite way you want to lean. If you try to just lean your body by doing something like just bending your waist to the side, then your upper body will lean the way you want, but you have nothing to push against so the equal and opposite reaction will cause your lower body and your bike to lean the opposite way and cancel out nearly all of your lean. To prove that you can't just lean, try sitting on your bike with it not moving forward and try to balance it with your feet off the ground. It's extremely difficult. But if you're moving forward, you can turn the handlebars to make your bike go out from underneath you to effect a lean, and it's easy to balance.
One reason people don't realize that they're doing this counter steering thing is that when you're riding a bike you're constantly turning your handlebars back and forth and back and forth (a little tiny bit) in order to stay balanced. When you decide to make a turn your brain subconsciously just turns the handlebars a little bit earlier and a little bit more than it was going to in the course of maintaining balance anyway. It's like you've just willed yourself to lean but really you've done a little counter steering without even realizing it.
I feel sorry for all the kids who break their legs and scrape their knees and crack their heads needlessly just because nobody was there who could tell them how to ride their bike. Their
I had hoped my comment would be modded up quickly but it hasn't so forgive me for asking that someone mod my parent post up so that volunteers won't be scared off for fear of bandwidth overload. I've already got excellent karma so I'm not asking this for me, I'm asking for the sake of the pool.
In addition to the latency of USB, the nmea output of a GPS unit may not be very accurate. Go for a GPS with pulse per second if you can find one for a reasonable price. A while back I was checking the chipset specs for the cheap GPS receivers to find one with a pulse per second output. I found some but I forgot which ones they were. Of course you would have to open the case and do a little soldering. I'm not sure how you would hook it up to your server once you got the pulse per second out. I think maybe to one of the pins on the serial port that would trigger an interrupt.
/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC file I removed "option I486_CPU" and "option I686_CPU" so that it would be correctly configured for my pentium 166 cpu. I think the pentium has some time keeping functions the 386 and 486 didn't have. Although I haven't found the parts of the kernel code where this change does its magic.
Under OpenBSD I've gotten much more stable timekeeping by recompiling the generic kernel with only one simple change. I set the processor type to 586 or 686 as the case may be. Specifically in the
I think the signatures are based on different ratios of chemical isotopes produced by different reactors.
i c
From Princeton wordnet
Isotropic,
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=isotrop
"invariant with respect to direction"
From Wikipedia
Isotopic Signature,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopic_signature
"a ratio of stable or unstable isotopes of particular elements found in an investigated material."
It looks like Isotopic is correct.
The fact that human brains chilled to inactivity maintain their memory, also hints that frozen brains may very well be recoverable in the future. It's said to be an old myth that freezing brains causes ice crystals to shred the brain cells.
You think that's funny? I was looking into the value of an IMSAI8080 that was down in the garage a few months ago. The IMSAI8080 was one of the first personal computers and only has toggle switches and lights on the front panel.
http://www.imsai.net/
A good one goes on ebay for as much as $900.
I also had to toggle in the program for a pic16F84 microcontroller bit by bit because I couldn't get the programmers I made from web plans to work. I finally determined that it wasn't the programmers that were messed up it was that the pic wouldn't accept a program if the supply voltage was over 4.5 volts, even though it was supposed to work at 5v.
Correct. Nearly all or maybe all Muslim countries are controlled by criminal governments because their governments don't allow freedom of speech, such as the right to publicly criticize Islam. It doesn't even matter if the majority of the people support laws against blasphemy because the people can't come to an informed decision if there isn't freedom of speech on the subject.
Sometimes the US makes allies with criminal governments because the US is unable and/or unwilling to do what's necessary to liberate the people of those countries, and the US might as well get what cooperation it can.
The sad thing about Iraq is that the US had to stand by and allow Iraq to become a non free country because the US was afraid to fight for true freedom of speech in the new Iraq constitution. Hopefully democracy can still take hold and eventually full freedom can be obtained in Iraq.
bri2000 wrote:
No, rights and morality are not just something we say and they are relevant and real and objective, not relative. Many Americans vote and fight based partly on their interest in bringing justice to oppressed people. It's not just rhetoric. From the way you write, it seems that you don't believe in justice. It's as if you think it's OK to stand by and watch while people are being victimized by criminals. That's sad.
bri2000 wrote:
That's disgusting. I suppose you think the US should have just found some dictators to replace Hitler and the emperor of Japan as well, rather than free those people. You don't seem to understand that WMDs were mainly just an excuse to persuade the public to support the war. The main reasons for going into Iraq were to stabilize the region in the long term by bringing democracy and to get positioned to deal with Iran and Syria and others.
an AC wrote:
No, it's OK for a legitimate government to save itself by nuking a nation run by a criminal government. Although at the time the US still had segregation and was therefore under a criminal government itself.
an AC wrote:
Attacking a government in order to liberate a people is not imposing anything on the people. It makes no sense to criticize the US for trying to get other countries to be governed by the US ideology, when the US ideology is that countries should be governed however the people want to govern them(as determined by vote), and that they should have freedom of speech so they can make an informed decision.
an AC wrote:
I don't follow you here. The US doesn't want the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but I
The difference is that the rulers of Iran are criminals. In Iran people are routinely killed for criticizing the government. As compared to the US, which for example restored freedom to Germany and Japan even after having successfully conquered them. Saying that if it's OK for the US to have nukes then it should be OK for Iran to have nukes is like saying that if it's OK for the US government to have nukes then it should be OK for the mafia to have nukes.
There is a clear, obvious, and indisputable difference between the criminal governments of some countries and the legitimate governments of free countries. Whether a government is criminal or not is not usually just relative to the viewpoint of who is making the judgment. Most criminal governments know that they are criminals and just don't care and they consciously lie when they claim to be legitimate. If a country doesn't have reasonably free speech and reasonably fair elections, then the people of the country are being controlled against their will by some minority, and they are thus under a criminal government. Of course there are some governments which are disputably criminal or borderline criminal, but there are many that are unquestionably criminal. Whether the US has the right to nukes or not, the criminal government of Iran certainly does not.
One of the problems CleanFlicks had was that they were actually making unauthorized edited copies of the DVDs, even though they required a genuine copy of the DVD to be turned over to them for destruction. Another company, ClearPlay, was also sued after they took a different strategy to avoid the copying problem. ClearPlay made DVD players that just played regular DVDs, but the DVD player cut out portions of the movie as it played, based on a file downloaded from ClearPlay onto a USB flash drive which was then plugged into the DVD player. However according to Wikipedia, the ClearPlay suit didn't make it to a verdict before Congress passed a law explicitly making it legal. I doubt the law applied to inserting adds in web pages though.
The similarity of these situations is that theoretically the ISP customer is asking (by agreeing to the ISP terms of service) for the adds to be inserted in the web pages, just as ClearPlay customers are asking for the bad parts to be removed.
This is also similar to software that removes the adds from web pages. A web page without the adds is like a derivative work, created by the viewer, with the assistance of the add block software.