These lifters just ionize air and direct the ions downwards with an electric field, generating upwards thrust. There's no anti-gravity involved at all. It's the same technology used in The Sharper Image's Ionic Breeze air purifiers.
My friend and I did some measurements of this effect, and with 23,000 Volts, 700 microamps, and 36 centimeters of foil and wire, it's possible to generate 2.7 grams of force. With balsa wood, it's certainly possible to build a support weighing less than that, and, voila! You have flight. Nothing magic.
So because there is a cost of production of software, we must restrict the rights of users of software?
This is a gross misuse of the concept of rights. You have no right to software, no more than you have the right to food, shelter, or medical care. Why? Because somebody has to produce that food, shelter, medical care, or software, and you have no right to compel them to produce it.
And Zip disks that suffer from the Click of Death, somehow infect any other Zip drive they come in contact with. Once a Zip drive is infected, the Click of Death spreads to any Zip disk used in that drive.
Iomega writes:
In addition, if you believe that you experienced a "clicking" problem with your Iomega Zip® drive, you MUST complete Section B. Those providing a valid Proof of Manifestation by properly completing Section B will be entitled to a greater rebate, as provided in paragraph 6(a) of the Notice. Based on your answers to Section B, we will determine if you qualify for the greater rebate amount.
OK, so now does anybody in the NJ area have a Zip disk that suffers from the "Click of Death"? I'll pay hard $$$ for it.;-)
I will grant an unconditional pardon to all non-violent convicts upon entering the oval
office.
Hold on. I can't get to the oval office unless I get out of this god-forsaken prison. I can't get out of this god-forsaken prison without a pardon. I can't get a pardon unless I enter the oval office.
Your website says that you would support the government by excise taxes and tariffs, but how are excise taxes and tariffs acceptable, while income taxes are not? Isn't any form of taxation a violation of the fundamental libertarian principle of noninitiation of force? Why should tariffs impede foreign trade?
Granted, a government would be difficult to maintain without taxes, but on what moral grounds would you collect taxes? For what purposes is the government allowed to collect taxes? Why is national defense a valid function of the federal government but not, say, law enforcement?
You would repeal all gun laws, but would you allow people to possess automatic guns? How about bombs? Biological weapons? Thermonuclear devices? Where do you draw the line, and why?
Why not write a cross-platform network worm that spreads via e-mail? Every time it hits a client, it tells a central server what program it finds. It could spread automatically if it finds an Outlook client, and spread on the honor system for anything else. Just ask people to run this EXE file or shell script or visit this web site and see what you get.;-)
@$%*#! dat dumb birdie nezt on ze satellite dish... give me lagz and LPB American SDI quakerz fragged me Russian satellites. There went ze whole Russian economy... no soup for me tomorrow....
If this really happened, the development of life would happen much faster than what we observe in our solar system.. 10^-21 second is one billion-billionth of the thousandth of a second then the origin of life would require not about 1 billion years (our planet: ~600million years) but about 1/billionth of a year, of 1/13 of a second! It may seem short to us but it might exist on the surface of a neutron star. (too bad we could not interact with them)
Then again, at that rate, once intelligent life develops, figure that it'll take them less than the order of 10^-5 seconds to destroy themselves in a nuclear holocaust (assuming an extremely liberal 1,000,000 years on Earth between intelligent life and annihilation).
The Rise and Fall of the Cyclic Neutronic Empires
In the beginning, at
t = 0.1 s, a fantastic civilization evolved, shining a beacon of gamma rays all through the universe in search of life. In less than a thousandth that time, it destroyed itself and everything on the star. In a new beginning, at t = 0.2 s, a fantastic civilization evolved, shining a slightly different beacon of gamma rays all through the universe in search of life. In less than ten-thousandths of a second, it destroyed itself and everything on the star. In yet another beginning, in a tenth of a second, a fantastic civilization evolved, shining yet another beacon of gamma rays all through the universe in search of life. In less than ten-thousandths of a second, it destroyed itself and everything on the star. In yet another beginning, in a tenth of a second, a fantastic civilization evolved, shining yet another beacon of gamma rays all through the universe in search of life. In less than ten-thousandths of a second, it destroyed itself and everything on the star. In yet another beginning, in a tenth of a second, a fantastic civilization evolved, shining yet another beacon of gamma rays all through the universe in search of life. In less than ten-thousandths of a second, it destroyed itself and everything on the star. In yet another beginning, in a tenth of a second, a fantastic civilization evolved, shining yet another beacon of gamma rays all through the universe in search of life. In less than ten-thousandths of a second, it destroyed...
So maybe what SETI really should be looking for is a pulsar with a cycle of a tenth of a second with a randomly fluctuating frequency in the gamma-ray range...
What I've never understood is how a site like this supports itself, much less turns a profit. It doesn't have any banner ads, so it can't earn advertising revenue, and it doesn't harvest consumer data, so it can't sell it. Yet it provides a service that costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to set up and maintain. How???!!!
My school's magnet program's computer lab runs Windows 95, and my computer science (and electronics, and calculus, and just about anything else) teacher is assuredly an anti-Microsoft proponent, constantly griping about how "If we had a real operating system..." He uses UNIX or "real operating systems" anywhere he can; when I asked him about spam prevention strategies, he discussed killfiles, access keying, etc., and he mentions UNIX often, always in a good light.
Still, he doesn't bother to install Linux or UNIX on them, for reasons essentially amounting to "Too much work":
We have about 25 Dell computers that were bundled with Windows 95. To configure and install Linux on 25 computers is too much trouble; after all, it works fine for what we're doing (compiling and running C++ programs). He himself doesn't use have to suffer through it, just us, so why should he bother?
To teach a class the fundamentals of UNIX and then have to deal with people forgetting passwords or whatever is more work than he's paid to do.
98% of the students use exclusively Microsoft products at home, and he would rather not deal with different compilers, file systems, etc.
When the "professionals" are well-informed, there is really nothing special about the high school environment over the commercial environment. The basic argument against Linux on the desktop applies again: why bother? It's harder to install (Windows is bundled), harder to train, harder to configure, and harder to administer, and 99.999% uptime is not necessary. Why bother?
Admittedly, there are other areas in the school where Linux would be worth the trouble, e.g., the Windows NT 4.0 card-catalog/Internet access/database workstations that they've spent 6 months on and still can't configure properly...
BTW, anybody know how to bypass a censorware product known as Chaperon, running on MS Proxy Server 2.0?
As one who has struggled with installing and using Linux as a new user with nobody around to help, I agree with him that it is difficult, though not impossible. No ordinary user would go through that kind of experience just to get a functional computer.
I do disagree in one aspect.
As Linux is embraced by more organizations, and used in more ways that are crucial, the demands upon you will increase. New feature ideas and bug reports will no longer go onto a "wish list"; they will go onto a "hot list." You will face pressure to add 50 new items to the next release, when it really ought to have 10. Wealthy organizations, accustomed to getting their way, will demand impossible schedules from you, and then complain if the quality is not perfect.
It is not the responsibility of the developers to implement all of these new feature ideas and bug reports and whatever other demands that wealthy organizations make! The GPL makes the stipulation that no warranty is provided with the software, and the developers are under no obligation to continue work on the software.
Not only are the developers under no obligation to code, but if these wealthy organizations just make demands of the developer, they are missing an enormous benefit of the Open Source development model. That they have the source enables them to improve the program themselves, hiring programmers to add the necessary features, fix the annoying bugs, and satisfy their needs! This is the main advantage of Open Source software; you have the source. (How did the author forget this?)
Admittedly, individual normal users usually don't have the resources to hire programmers on their own to fix bugs, add features, etc., but individual users do not place the same type or amount of pressure on developers as "wealthy organizations" do to satisfy their wants.
Hey... don't I have any rights to the shots your satellite took that you're selling to Playboy of my backyard? I mean, I should get some royalties here.
Maybe you could set up a Jennicam-in-the-Sky service...
Seriously, though, this court case says:
The Santa Clara, Cal., police received an anonymous telephone tip that marijuana was growing in respondent's backyard, which was enclosed by two fences and shielded from view at ground level. Officers who were trained in marijuana identification secured a private airplane, flew over respondent's house at an altitude of 1,000 feet, and readily identified marijuana plants growing in the yard. A search warrant was later obtained on the basis of one of the officer's naked-eye observations; a photograph of the surrounding area taken from the airplane was attached as an exhibit. The warrant was executed, and marijuana plants were seized. After the California trial court denied respondent's motion to suppress the evidence of the search, he pleaded guilty to a charge of cultivation of marijuana. The California Court of Appeal reversed on the ground that the warrantless aerial observation of respondent's yard violated the Fourth Amendment.
Held:
The Fourth Amendment was not violated by the naked-eye aerial observation of respondent's backyard. Pp. 211-215.
(a) The touchstone of Fourth Amendment analysis is whether a person has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy, which involves the two inquiries of whether the individual manifested a subjective expectation of privacy in the object of the challenged search, and whether society is willing to recognize that expectation as reasonable. Katz v. United States,
389 U.S. 347. In pursuing the second inquiry, the test of legitimacy is not whether the individual chooses to conceal assertedly "private activity," but whether the government's intrusion infringes upon the personal and societal values protected by the Fourth Amendment. Pp. 211-212.
(b) On the record here, respondent's expectation of privacy from all observations of his backyard was unreasonable. That the backyard and its crop were within the "curtilage" of respondent's home did not itself bar all police observation. The mere fact that an individual has taken measures to restrict some views of his activities does not preclude an officer's observation from a public vantage point where he has a right to be and which renders the activities clearly visible. The police observations here took place within public navigable airspace, in a physically nonintrusive manner. The police were able to observe the [476 U.S. 207, 208] plants readily discernible to the naked eye as marijuana, and it was irrelevant that the observation from the airplane was directed at identifying the plants and that the officers were trained to recognize marijuana. Any member of the public flying in this airspace who cared to glance down could have seen everything that the officers observed. The Fourth Amendment simply does not require police traveling in the public airways at 1,000 feet to obtain a warrant in order to observe what is visible to the naked eye. Pp. 212-215.
The same argument would apply here, since space is still (last time I checked, at least) a public vantage point. After all, what other alternatives are there? You can't stop people from looking out of satellites or airplanes by accident, and to expect people to cover their backyards for some privacy; it's a lose-lose situation.
Privacy seems to inevitably go down the drain, no matter what we try to do to protect it...
If age increases the chances of a CD-R breaking, then the probability of a CD-R not working after a year will be less than in the prior calculation. Hence, the probability of all 40 of my CD-Rs working after a full year would be even less than in the last calculation. Since all 40 of my CD-Rs do in fact work, the probability that the life expectancy of a CD-R being less than 10 years is even less than in the last calculation...
A website like this makes it all too easy to collect confessed secrets and blackmail the confessors, which would be rather negative feedback for the confessors! I do wonder, however, how is the security at real-world confessions? Would it be difficult to slip a bug or tape recorder (or XCam:-) into the confession chamber? "Accidentally" leave one behind after your confession?
There seem to be so many potentials for abuse with a religion that rests your morality on the confession of sins. I know that the Catholic faith was (a few hundred years ago) greatly abused (see Chaucer's Canterbury Tales); is it prevalent or uncommon or impossible now?
Here's my tale of 15 CDs or so... For most of my life, I didn't listen to music at all; my friends didn't, and my parents only had classical stuff, which was just boring. Then, a few years ago, I found an MP3 site (by accidentally typing ftp:// instead of http://) and figured that I'd download a couple of songs from a few artists that I'd heard about. Of course, there were a few songs that I didn't like, but I did like many of them (They Might Be Giants, R.E.M., The Simpsons:-), et al.) This pretty much started my interest in music. I signed up with a CD club and ended up buying the CDs (~15) with most of the songs. Buying 15 CDs cannot possibly be construed as hurting these artists.
As for the songs I downloaded for which I didn't buy the albums, even without MP3s, I would not have bought their albums. Also, I don't listen to those MP3s (after all, if I liked them, I would have bought the albums). This certainly doesn't hurt the artists.
I'm sure that in the future I will definitely buy more CDs, further helping out the artists, all due to MP3s. Have I hurt these artists through MP3s?
I do know some who never ever buy any CDs but rather just download the MP3s, but I think that they are in the vast minority. CDs are cheap if you join one of those clubs (12 free CDs if you buy just one at BMG), and if you quit after fulfilling the obligation, they typically send you an offer to win you back after a period of time. It's simply easier to buy the CDs that than search for and download the MP3s.
Hmm... good point. This doesn't really have a justification. It isn't strictly exponential. An exponential decay function describes a population whose individuals are equally likely to die at any given age. It is unlikely that old and young CD-Rs are equally likely to break; however, it doesn't matter. It's still rather unlikely that a CD-R's life expectancy is less than 10 years.
It's fairly reasonable to assume that age doesn't make the CD-Rs less likely to break; that would be absurd. (Am I wrong here?) If age does in fact increase the chances of the CD-R breaking, then that merely strengthens my argument that the life span of a CD-R must be greater than 10 years.
Simply: If age increases the chances of a CD-R breaking, then the probability of a CD-R not working after a year will be less than in the prior calculation. Hence, the probability of all 40 CD-Rs working after a full year would be even less than in the last calculation.
Expanded (I was pleasantly surprised that the last argument applied; note the "less" and "greater" qualifiers): If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to ?(infinity), Integral?(2^(-x/h))dx< 10, so h/ln(2) < 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of a CD-R not working after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is less than the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong:-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a CD-R is not less than 10 years. So, even if the CD-R is more likely to break as time goes on, the argument still holds.
In my last post, I established that if old and young CD-Rs are equally likely to break, then the life expectancy is not less than 10 years. The last paragraph established that if old CD-Rs are more likely to break than young CD-Rs, then the same argument still holds. Finally, if you can show me a CD-R that is more likely to break when it is young than when it is old, I'll quit my argument:-).
I should really start studying for my English midterm... Daniel J. Peng
BTW, why does slashdot insist on mangling all my properly-escaped character entities (delta, infinity, integral, quotes, less than signs, greater than signs, etc.)??? I've got stuff that looks like <strong>></strong> in my code.
All the major CD-R manufacturers claim expected CD-R lives of at least 50 years, although (being manufacturers standing to profit from longevity) their results may be dubious.
The Special Interest Group for CD Applications and Technology has performed a study; after artificial aging, 3 (TDK, Avery-labeled TDK, and Taiyo Yuden) out of 8 CD-R manufacturers' discs could not be read. There are some limitations to this study, though. There were not enough discs to subject them to the full "Life Expectancy of Compact Discs (CD-ROM) -- Method for Estimating, Based on Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity" (ANSI/NAPM IT9.21-1996), so there is not estimate of how long these discs are expected to last (which almost makes the aging section of the study useless). The aging conditions were 80C, 85% relative humidity, 750 hour period, ramping rate of half that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations, and equilibration time of twice that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations. There are some other links at http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Longevity.html that you may want to take a look at.
In my own personal experience, though, I have made about 40 (TDK) CD-Rs that receive heavy use that are about a year old, with no reported problems. Taking life expectancy to mean the average life span of a CD-R...
"Proof" by reduction to an absurdity that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to (infinity), Integral(2^(-x/h))dx = 10, so h/ln(2) = 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of decay after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is approximately (within 1.1%) the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong:-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
Now back to studying for my English midterm...:-) Daniel J. Peng
Voting through the Internet cannot yet replace physical voting, for all the reasons that others have noted; however, I don't see any reason why voting through the Internet cannot be introduced as an alternative to an absentee ballot. How is an absentee ballot any worse than an electronic ballot?
The security on an absentee ballot (at least where I live) involves registering as a voter in person and mailing a request for an absentee ballot, in response to which an absentee ballot is mailed to your house and your request is noted. In other words, next to none.
Is this any more secure than using public key cryptosystems to authenticate voters online? You have to initially verify that the person that has the private key is really the person that he claims to be, but once this initial step is carried out (which can be done at voter registration), what prevents secure absentee voting? This would make life much easier for citizens living abroad, in remote areas, etc.
Privacy, security, reliability, and public confidence cannot be provided any better by postal services than by strong encryption. As for anonymity, absentee ballots can't expect anonymity anyway. For those who write, "If people aren't sufficiently interested to physically visit the polls (or send in the form for a mail-in ballot if they cannot do so), they probably aren't sufficiently interested to educate themselves on the issues:" In that case, why not reestablish the poll tax or the literacy test? After all, if people aren't sufficiently interested to pay a poll tax or learn to read, they probably aren't sufficiently interested to educate themselves on the issue. Physical ballots are no more difficult to "lose" than electronic ballots. There are no measures against coerced or bribed voting in absentee ballots; why expect them in electronic ballots? As for those who do not have or do not want computers, I ask, "What about those who live too far from a poll booth and don't have any means of transportation? Should poll booths be eliminated?"
Since absentee ballots suffer from all the problems that electronic ballots suffer, should we eliminate those too?
There are very few legitimate reasons for wanting to send mail through a mail server other than your ISP's
What if your ISP's mail server doesn't support, for instance, DSN? Or, if your ISP's mail server has an extremely long mail queue and you just want to put your mail through quickly? Your ISP's mail server is down? Or, you have two dial-up accounts and want to be able to send mail through either without re-configuring? There are numerous reasons for using a different mail server. (Oh, and on the ISP's side, this takes some load off their mail server.)
On a related note, the RBL list is really getting in the way of my dial-up mail server... it seems to block all of the dynamic IP addresses in the MSN and Worldnet points of presence in my area. I e-mailed them and received no response. Anyone else having this problem? Suggestions?
On 01/18/00 at 14:05:55 PST, seller added the following information:
I need to add a clarification and an update. First, I need to make this clear: I do not plan on signing this check. You can frame it and put it on the wall. I will officially ask Microsoft to give the chosen charity $500, which will essentially cost them nothing since the check will remain uncashed. It would be even better if Microsoft would join me in matching the highest bid amount. Obviously, that's their decision.
I am also raising my matching amount to $2500. Let's see how much money we can raise for a good cause.
Sorry, by "You know, when the first books came out, they had only words in them", I assumed that you meant books that came out of a post-Gutenberg printing press, since books before that sort of just stayed in the monastery; didn't really come out in the sense of being available for mass consumption.
I am certainly not an expert in these matters, but it seems that moving from a hierarchacal software development model radically changes how a project progresses. There are unique challanges that broad "Open Source" development encounters. In particular, when there isn't a widely known "reference design" out there for people to model their coding efforts on, as has been the case with Linux (it doesn't need an architect because people can just look at Unix in general for design guidelines), projects can run into trouble keeping a focus.
As a result, for example, human factors issues are weakly addressed in Linux and it's native GUI projects. The overall conciseness of a design suffers when wandering coders can, well.. just wander through the code extending it.
I'm not sure that it's really the "overall conciseness of a design" that suffers in the Linux GUI. Most GUI tools that are available under Windows are available under Linux. The problem (as I see it) is putting it all together.
Coming from a Windows background, I'd really like to be able to access all my system configuration options from one application, like Control Panel, rather than having to do some stuff with linuxconf, other stuff with the Enlightenment configurator, other stuff with Xconfigurator or XF86Setup. linuxconf is extendable, so perhaps modules for that would work best. Plus, it's always nice if there are a curses or plain dumb-terminal front-ends for these tools also, so that I don't have to start X just to, for instance, alter my printer configuration (which RH's printtool really makes a lot easier than editing/etc/printcap); linuxconf seems to provide a curses front-end too. (This was not meant to turn into a linuxconf rant... but:-)
An API along the lines of OLE would be nice, although that does leaves me wondering what kinds of appliations I would use under Linux that OLE could possibly benefit. Still, regardless of whether OLE is useful or practical, Linux applications definitely need more consistent drag and drop support.
IMO, this lack of integration seems to be what suffers "when there isn't a widely known 'reference design' out there for people to model their coding efforts on." There needs to be some way to put tools together and some way to create standard API's, so that programs work together properly. Well, I guess that's what happens when "wandering coders can, well.. just wander through the code extending it."
If a Shockwave plugin means I get a presentation explaining a something to me in less bits than a similar animated GIF, great. If an animation shows me what the product looks like more clearly, that's great, too.
Yes, if an animated GIF or a shockwave plugin explains a concept better than text or expresses an idea with more clarity than text, then it makes sense to use such a representation to convey the information. The best way to get a message across is the one that should be used.
On the other hand, a Flash animation that just scrolls text in front of my face at some predefined rate is more than just useless; it also makes me sit there and wait for all the text to flash across. Take splash pages for another instance; of all the splash pages that you've seen, how many actually serve any useful purpose? Also, if an HTML layout is essentially one big graphic, then my attention is more likely to be drawn to the "pretty pictures," rather than the message that the page is trying to get across. Pictures, illustrations, animations, etc. are fine, so long as they serve a purpose (preferably mine;-).
But then discovered that you could put images in books as well, too, and even though it cost more and took more time to print, the did it. Why did they do it? Because graphically it was more enticing. Sometimes it does absolutely nothing to enhance the story, but sometimes, they're very beneficial.
In the 15th century, when illustrations were first placed into books, to take an image and put it in a book involved making a woodcut or an engraving -- a nontrivial amount of work, not one that would be undertaken simply to make a book "more enticing." I find it more likely that illustrations would be published with a purpose: maps, art, etc. If it did "nothing to enhance the story," I doubt that that publishers would have gone to so much trouble. Daniel J. Peng
Slashdot Mirror
These lifters just ionize air and direct the ions downwards with an electric field, generating upwards thrust. There's no anti-gravity involved at all. It's the same technology used in The Sharper Image's Ionic Breeze air purifiers.
My friend and I did some measurements of this effect, and with 23,000 Volts, 700 microamps, and 36 centimeters of foil and wire, it's possible to generate 2.7 grams of force. With balsa wood, it's certainly possible to build a support weighing less than that, and, voila! You have flight. Nothing magic.
For more details on our measurements, check out http://peng.dyndns.org/~dan/writings/phy210.pdf .
This is a gross misuse of the concept of rights. You have no right to software, no more than you have the right to food, shelter, or medical care. Why? Because somebody has to produce that food, shelter, medical care, or software, and you have no right to compel them to produce it.
Computer Link magazine writes:
Iomega writes:
OK, so now does anybody in the NJ area have a Zip disk that suffers from the "Click of Death"? I'll pay hard $$$ for it.Hold on. I can't get to the oval office unless I get out of this god-forsaken prison. I can't get out of this god-forsaken prison without a pardon. I can't get a pardon unless I enter the oval office.
Damn it!!!!
Cheap, scheming, lying, bastards!
Your website says that you would support the government by excise taxes and tariffs, but how are excise taxes and tariffs acceptable, while income taxes are not? Isn't any form of taxation a violation of the fundamental libertarian principle of noninitiation of force? Why should tariffs impede foreign trade?
Granted, a government would be difficult to maintain without taxes, but on what moral grounds would you collect taxes? For what purposes is the government allowed to collect taxes? Why is national defense a valid function of the federal government but not, say, law enforcement?
You would repeal all gun laws, but would you allow people to possess automatic guns? How about bombs? Biological weapons? Thermonuclear devices? Where do you draw the line, and why?
Too bad that root@127.0.0.1 will probably bounce... try root@[127.0.0.1]
Why not write a cross-platform network worm that spreads via e-mail? Every time it hits a client, it tells a central server what program it finds. It could spread automatically if it finds an Outlook client, and spread on the honor system for anything else. Just ask people to run this EXE file or shell script or visit this web site and see what you get. ;-)
What's the rationale for that???
@$%*#! dat dumb birdie nezt on ze satellite dish... give me lagz and LPB American SDI quakerz fragged me Russian satellites. There went ze whole Russian economy... no soup for me tomorrow....
Then again, at that rate, once intelligent life develops, figure that it'll take them less than the order of 10^-5 seconds to destroy themselves in a nuclear holocaust (assuming an extremely liberal 1,000,000 years on Earth between intelligent life and annihilation).
The Rise and Fall of the Cyclic Neutronic Empires
So maybe what SETI really should be looking for is a pulsar with a cycle of a tenth of a second with a randomly fluctuating frequency in the gamma-ray range...
What I've never understood is how a site like this supports itself, much less turns a profit. It doesn't have any banner ads, so it can't earn advertising revenue, and it doesn't harvest consumer data, so it can't sell it. Yet it provides a service that costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to set up and maintain. How???!!!
My school's magnet program's computer lab runs Windows 95, and my computer science (and electronics, and calculus, and just about anything else) teacher is assuredly an anti-Microsoft proponent, constantly griping about how "If we had a real operating system..." He uses UNIX or "real operating systems" anywhere he can; when I asked him about spam prevention strategies, he discussed killfiles, access keying, etc., and he mentions UNIX often, always in a good light.
Still, he doesn't bother to install Linux or UNIX on them, for reasons essentially amounting to "Too much work":
When the "professionals" are well-informed, there is really nothing special about the high school environment over the commercial environment. The basic argument against Linux on the desktop applies again: why bother? It's harder to install (Windows is bundled), harder to train, harder to configure, and harder to administer, and 99.999% uptime is not necessary. Why bother?
Admittedly, there are other areas in the school where Linux would be worth the trouble, e.g., the Windows NT 4.0 card-catalog/Internet access/database workstations that they've spent 6 months on and still can't configure properly...
BTW, anybody know how to bypass a censorware product known as Chaperon, running on MS Proxy Server 2.0?
As one who has struggled with installing and using Linux as a new user with nobody around to help, I agree with him that it is difficult, though not impossible. No ordinary user would go through that kind of experience just to get a functional computer.
I do disagree in one aspect.
It is not the responsibility of the developers to implement all of these new feature ideas and bug reports and whatever other demands that wealthy organizations make! The GPL makes the stipulation that no warranty is provided with the software, and the developers are under no obligation to continue work on the software.
Not only are the developers under no obligation to code, but if these wealthy organizations just make demands of the developer, they are missing an enormous benefit of the Open Source development model. That they have the source enables them to improve the program themselves, hiring programmers to add the necessary features, fix the annoying bugs, and satisfy their needs! This is the main advantage of Open Source software; you have the source. (How did the author forget this?)
Admittedly, individual normal users usually don't have the resources to hire programmers on their own to fix bugs, add features, etc., but individual users do not place the same type or amount of pressure on developers as "wealthy organizations" do to satisfy their wants.
Hey... don't I have any rights to the shots your satellite took that you're selling to Playboy of my backyard? I mean, I should get some royalties here.
Maybe you could set up a Jennicam-in-the-Sky service...
Seriously, though, this court case says:
The same argument would apply here, since space is still (last time I checked, at least) a public vantage point. After all, what other alternatives are there? You can't stop people from looking out of satellites or airplanes by accident, and to expect people to cover their backyards for some privacy; it's a lose-lose situation.
Privacy seems to inevitably go down the drain, no matter what we try to do to protect it...
If age increases the chances of a CD-R breaking, then the probability of a CD-R not working after a year will be less than in the prior calculation. Hence, the probability of all 40 of my CD-Rs working after a full year would be even less than in the last calculation. Since all 40 of my CD-Rs do in fact work, the probability that the life expectancy of a CD-R being less than 10 years is even less than in the last calculation...
A website like this makes it all too easy to collect confessed secrets and blackmail the confessors, which would be rather negative feedback for the confessors! I do wonder, however, how is the security at real-world confessions? Would it be difficult to slip a bug or tape recorder (or XCam :-) into the confession chamber? "Accidentally" leave one behind after your confession?
There seem to be so many potentials for abuse with a religion that rests your morality on the confession of sins. I know that the Catholic faith was (a few hundred years ago) greatly abused (see Chaucer's Canterbury Tales); is it prevalent or uncommon or impossible now?
Daniel J. Peng
Here's my tale of 15 CDs or so... For most of my life, I didn't listen to music at all; my friends didn't, and my parents only had classical stuff, which was just boring. Then, a few years ago, I found an MP3 site (by accidentally typing ftp:// instead of http://) and figured that I'd download a couple of songs from a few artists that I'd heard about. Of course, there were a few songs that I didn't like, but I did like many of them (They Might Be Giants, R.E.M., The Simpsons :-), et al.) This pretty much started my interest in music. I signed up with a CD club and ended up buying the CDs (~15) with most of the songs. Buying 15 CDs cannot possibly be construed as hurting these artists.
As for the songs I downloaded for which I didn't buy the albums, even without MP3s, I would not have bought their albums. Also, I don't listen to those MP3s (after all, if I liked them, I would have bought the albums). This certainly doesn't hurt the artists.
I'm sure that in the future I will definitely buy more CDs, further helping out the artists, all due to MP3s. Have I hurt these artists through MP3s?
I do know some who never ever buy any CDs but rather just download the MP3s, but I think that they are in the vast minority. CDs are cheap if you join one of those clubs (12 free CDs if you buy just one at BMG), and if you quit after fulfilling the obligation, they typically send you an offer to win you back after a period of time. It's simply easier to buy the CDs that than search for and download the MP3s.
Daniel J. Peng
Hmm... good point. This doesn't really have a justification. It isn't strictly exponential. An exponential decay function describes a population whose individuals are equally likely to die at any given age. It is unlikely that old and young CD-Rs are equally likely to break; however, it doesn't matter. It's still rather unlikely that a CD-R's life expectancy is less than 10 years.
It's fairly reasonable to assume that age doesn't make the CD-Rs less likely to break; that would be absurd. (Am I wrong here?) If age does in fact increase the chances of the CD-R breaking, then that merely strengthens my argument that the life span of a CD-R must be greater than 10 years.
Simply: If age increases the chances of a CD-R breaking, then the probability of a CD-R not working after a year will be less than in the prior calculation. Hence, the probability of all 40 CD-Rs working after a full year would be even less than in the last calculation.
Expanded (I was pleasantly surprised that the last argument applied; note the "less" and "greater" qualifiers): If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to ?(infinity), Integral?(2^(-x/h))dx < 10, so h/ln(2) < 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of a CD-R not working after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is less than the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong :-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a CD-R is not less than 10 years. So, even if the CD-R is more likely to break as time goes on, the argument still holds.
In my last post, I established that if old and young CD-Rs are equally likely to break, then the life expectancy is not less than 10 years. The last paragraph established that if old CD-Rs are more likely to break than young CD-Rs, then the same argument still holds. Finally, if you can show me a CD-R that is more likely to break when it is young than when it is old, I'll quit my argument :-).
I should really start studying for my English midterm...
Daniel J. Peng
BTW, why does slashdot insist on mangling all my properly-escaped character entities (delta, infinity, integral, quotes, less than signs, greater than signs, etc.)??? I've got stuff that looks like <strong>></strong> in my code.
All the major CD-R manufacturers claim expected CD-R lives of at least 50 years, although (being manufacturers standing to profit from longevity) their results may be dubious.
The Special Interest Group for CD Applications and Technology has performed a study; after artificial aging, 3 (TDK, Avery-labeled TDK, and Taiyo Yuden) out of 8 CD-R manufacturers' discs could not be read. There are some limitations to this study, though. There were not enough discs to subject them to the full "Life Expectancy of Compact Discs (CD-ROM) -- Method for Estimating, Based on Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity" (ANSI/NAPM IT9.21-1996), so there is not estimate of how long these discs are expected to last (which almost makes the aging section of the study useless). The aging conditions were 80C, 85% relative humidity, 750 hour period, ramping rate of half that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations, and equilibration time of twice that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations. There are some other links at http://www.cd-info .com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Longevity.html that you may want to take a look at.
In my own personal experience, though, I have made about 40 (TDK) CD-Rs that receive heavy use that are about a year old, with no reported problems. Taking life expectancy to mean the average life span of a CD-R...
"Proof" by reduction to an absurdity that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to (infinity), Integral(2^(-x/h))dx = 10, so h/ln(2) = 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of decay after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is approximately (within 1.1%) the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong :-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
Now back to studying for my English midterm... :-)
Daniel J. Peng
Voting through the Internet cannot yet replace physical voting, for all the reasons that others have noted; however, I don't see any reason why voting through the Internet cannot be introduced as an alternative to an absentee ballot. How is an absentee ballot any worse than an electronic ballot?
The security on an absentee ballot (at least where I live) involves registering as a voter in person and mailing a request for an absentee ballot, in response to which an absentee ballot is mailed to your house and your request is noted. In other words, next to none.
Is this any more secure than using public key cryptosystems to authenticate voters online? You have to initially verify that the person that has the private key is really the person that he claims to be, but once this initial step is carried out (which can be done at voter registration), what prevents secure absentee voting? This would make life much easier for citizens living abroad, in remote areas, etc.
Privacy, security, reliability, and public confidence cannot be provided any better by postal services than by strong encryption. As for anonymity, absentee ballots can't expect anonymity anyway. For those who write, "If people aren't sufficiently interested to physically visit the polls (or send in the form for a mail-in ballot if they cannot do so), they probably aren't sufficiently interested to educate themselves on the issues:" In that case, why not reestablish the poll tax or the literacy test? After all, if people aren't sufficiently interested to pay a poll tax or learn to read, they probably aren't sufficiently interested to educate themselves on the issue. Physical ballots are no more difficult to "lose" than electronic ballots. There are no measures against coerced or bribed voting in absentee ballots; why expect them in electronic ballots? As for those who do not have or do not want computers, I ask, "What about those who live too far from a poll booth and don't have any means of transportation? Should poll booths be eliminated?"
Since absentee ballots suffer from all the problems that electronic ballots suffer, should we eliminate those too?
Daniel J. Peng
What if your ISP's mail server doesn't support, for instance, DSN? Or, if your ISP's mail server has an extremely long mail queue and you just want to put your mail through quickly? Your ISP's mail server is down? Or, you have two dial-up accounts and want to be able to send mail through either without re-configuring? There are numerous reasons for using a different mail server. (Oh, and on the ISP's side, this takes some load off their mail server.)
On a related note, the RBL list is really getting in the way of my dial-up mail server... it seems to block all of the dynamic IP addresses in the MSN and Worldnet points of presence in my area. I e-mailed them and received no response. Anyone else having this problem? Suggestions?
Daniel J. Peng
It looks like that's what Chaney intends...
Daniel J. Peng
Sorry, by "You know, when the first books came out, they had only words in them", I assumed that you meant books that came out of a post-Gutenberg printing press, since books before that sort of just stayed in the monastery; didn't really come out in the sense of being available for mass consumption.
Daniel J. Peng
I'm not sure that it's really the "overall conciseness of a design" that suffers in the Linux GUI. Most GUI tools that are available under Windows are available under Linux. The problem (as I see it) is putting it all together.
Coming from a Windows background, I'd really like to be able to access all my system configuration options from one application, like Control Panel, rather than having to do some stuff with linuxconf, other stuff with the Enlightenment configurator, other stuff with Xconfigurator or XF86Setup. linuxconf is extendable, so perhaps modules for that would work best. Plus, it's always nice if there are a curses or plain dumb-terminal front-ends for these tools also, so that I don't have to start X just to, for instance, alter my printer configuration (which RH's printtool really makes a lot easier than editing /etc/printcap); linuxconf seems to provide a curses front-end too. (This was not meant to turn into a linuxconf rant... but :-)
An API along the lines of OLE would be nice, although that does leaves me wondering what kinds of appliations I would use under Linux that OLE could possibly benefit. Still, regardless of whether OLE is useful or practical, Linux applications definitely need more consistent drag and drop support.
IMO, this lack of integration seems to be what suffers "when there isn't a widely known 'reference design' out there for people to model their coding efforts on." There needs to be some way to put tools together and some way to create standard API's, so that programs work together properly. Well, I guess that's what happens when "wandering coders can, well.. just wander through the code extending it."
Daniel J. Peng
Oh and BTW, if anybody can point me to solutions to these other somewhat annoying aspects of X, I'd be grateful:
Yes, if an animated GIF or a shockwave plugin explains a concept better than text or expresses an idea with more clarity than text, then it makes sense to use such a representation to convey the information. The best way to get a message across is the one that should be used.
On the other hand, a Flash animation that just scrolls text in front of my face at some predefined rate is more than just useless; it also makes me sit there and wait for all the text to flash across. Take splash pages for another instance; of all the splash pages that you've seen, how many actually serve any useful purpose? Also, if an HTML layout is essentially one big graphic, then my attention is more likely to be drawn to the "pretty pictures," rather than the message that the page is trying to get across. Pictures, illustrations, animations, etc. are fine, so long as they serve a purpose (preferably mine ;-).
In the 15th century, when illustrations were first placed into books, to take an image and put it in a book involved making a woodcut or an engraving -- a nontrivial amount of work, not one that would be undertaken simply to make a book "more enticing." I find it more likely that illustrations would be published with a purpose: maps, art, etc. If it did "nothing to enhance the story," I doubt that that publishers would have gone to so much trouble. Daniel J. Peng