Rather than design new propulsion systems to make space travel more efficient, let's just sue Issac Newton, get the law repealed and go there for free.
I wonder if his couse even considered the possibilty that there are natural laws and manmade laws. I'd love to see this in a courtroom. Sadly, given the state of the educational & legsal systems, I might.
> while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously?
As far as I know the cost of SMS hasn't risen. It jus hasn't fallen.
When SMS started (early 90's - anyone?) the cost was, IIRC, 10p each. Now it's 5p. The starting price was a guess and seems to have more-or-less stuck. Obviously if people weren't willing to use the service the price would've been reduced. Since people are willing to pay 5p per message, there's no reason (how do you spell CARTEL, by the way?) for any of the carriers to reduce it.
What they have done instead is to bundle "free" texts in with your monthly contracts - which is nice for the pay-monthly grown-ups, who don't use them, but no use at all for the PAYG kiddies who are the main text users.
> What is the oldest piece of code that is still in use today
Not quite a cheat, but I'd say that the original instructions used to calculate log tables might be close.
It's code (well, instructions - same thing?)
While it has been retyped many time, I'm sure the original paper-based instructions are still in a library somwwhere, and would work on a suitably old calcuator (hand-cranked, of course)
Yes, I know the referenced material quotes the weight in kilograms.
However, when writing an article, is it too hard to call it 71,000 tons (or tonnes, or "metric" tons - they're all essentially the same unit - with a percent or two)
That's all very well, if you can use the CCTV evidence to prosecute an individual and then remove them from society. However, in practice that rarely happens.
The CCTV footage is of a low quality, even with tilt/pan/zoom cameras in well-lit areas. That makes it difficult to put before a judge, given the current street fashions for "hoodies" etc.. Secondly, the sort of punishment that is meted out for petty vandalism, theft, assault etc. is usually non-custodial, so the perpetrator is still free to offend again.
If you do put them in jail (tricky, since the UK's jails are to all intents and purposes full), the sentence will be light - a few weeks at most. The effect of short sentences is that the offender will usually lose their job, get evicted from where they live and once they come out of prison they'll be a welfare case - with even less incentive to act legally.
The only thing that would work is prevention, which a camrea on top of a pole simply cannot do - you need uniformed officers in the area to act as an immediate sign that the offender will be caught.
One of the reasons the system doesn't work, according to the chief who made the original statement is that "the officers don't like looking at CCTV footage because it's too hard".
Now pardon me, but sitting in chair, watching TV - and it's too hard?
That could go along way towards explaining why the crime clear-up rate is so low that most people don't even bother reporting crimes, since they know no-one will turn up.
Of course, not having people reporting crimes helps the govt. statistics: "look the crime rate is going down", so in that way it's all having the desired effect.
... and when one of your neighbours comes banging on your front door because their child has used your mesh network to circumvent their parental controls to download smut. What's your answer then?
that the police trace back to your ISP connection.
They won't care that you had an open WiFi, all they'll know is that some pr0n, bomb-making literature, racist/hate traffic appeared on the internet and it was your IP address that was the source. You thought the RIAA was bad, wait until DHS gets on your case.
Bleat all you like about "helping the community" or philanthropy or whatever you like. This is a naive attitude - similar to leaving your garage door open and then claiming "it's not mine" when stolen goods are found inside.
Anyway, if these devices are so cheap that you can afford to leave them out in the open (until they die, suddenly the firt time it rains), then your neighbours can afford to by one themselves.
engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether
Presumably if he made the same discovery today (regarding the weakness of a secure communication) and told anyone about it, he'd be arrested, rather than have his work recognised as beneficial.
You're absolutely right, basics are timeless - but try telling that to a recruitment "consultant". They're so scared of being accused of wasting their clients' time by putting forward unsuitable candidates that they're hyper-sensitive to buzzwords. Even people who are only 1 year out of date (not having experience of the latest, or next-to latest versions) have a tough time. So in practice if you weren't cutting-edge before going into management for a year, then they won't touch you when you want to get back in.
Oh yes, you can't argue, or reason with these guys - they simply don't have any technical background. All they do is look for skills keywords. Don't match? no interview for you!
You can't even tell then that version Y is just a bug-fixed release of version X. All they hear is whinge, whinge, whinge.
They're high risk and not very satisfying. Once you go into a management job, your tech skills will start to atrophy. If you ever want to go back into a productive job, you'll find that things have moved on. You'll also find you're being judged on the basis of how others produce results, which may not be under your control. Also, management jobs are intangible - no-one can really say what value you add. As a consequence they're very easy to cut, without affecting the overall performance of the organisation. So the risk of losing your job is quite high.
You can move into management, but it's very hard to get back out.
I'd really love a pen containing ink that either degraded to invisibility or sublimated. It would be useful for signing things that need temporary authorisations - where you don't necessarily want your mark to be retained forever. Or where you want people to reauthorise something after a period of time.
Maybe have it available in "1 day" "week" "month" and "year" varieties for different contract lengths.
We didn't make it, we don't know what it does. It must be a threat.
The wonderful thing about this (apart from the certainty that it will involve giving the security organisations more money) is that you don't have to prove anything. Just say "it's possible" (not even probable), or that they're "concerned" or that there "might be a threat" and suddenly everyone is running around as if the sky is falling.
Time to stop watching the James Bond movies guys. Go back to worrying about monsters under the bed.
Whether to adoopt FOSS is a choice that organisations have - no-one forces them to use it, or to purchase non-free tools.
The main point is that it provides an alternative. So far as industry goes, the lifetime cost has nothing to do with the purchase price, it's embedded in the need for support, the cost of making changes, training (whether explicit, or implicit) and the platforms needed to run it over the software's life.
For these reasons the choice to go with software they can download for free, as opposed to a package that may cost 4 or 5 figures is usually never made on up-front price considerations.
Once the non-FOSS industry realises that it's quality, the ability to do the job and the availability of people who can use it effectively, rather than what the sticker on the front says - then they'll wake up to how they can really make successful software.
It probably doesn't matter if the beam is visible, just that it's collimated and that the wavelength would affect the eye. Manual targeting is impossible anyway. The only way you could dazzle a pilot is pure flook.
What you're being asked to do is aim at a target (OK, there are 4 targets: 2 pilots) about 5mm across using a hand-held device. While you're doing this, the target is moving towards you (airspeed doesn't matter - you have to be in front of the plane). The plane will either be coming in to land, or taking off. If it's in level flight a ground based user will have no sight of the cockpit.
Further, the plane will be some distance away - I'd say it would be at leasta mile. Apart from vertical ascent/descent, which in reality contains vibrations from the plane and turbulence - even though it feels smooth, you still get instantaneous movement of *way* more than a pupil's diameter. You also have lateral movement from any wind in the vicinity of the plane.
Test: get a normal red laser. Draw a 5mm diameter dot on a piece of paper and tack it to a fence or something about 25metres (or yards) away. Now try to aim the laser onto the stationary target, even that close. Now think about multiplying the distance by at least 70. This could only be done in a James Bond movie.
but the laser inside a DVD writer is just as powerful (pop balloons, light matches) although less accessible.
If people were genuinely trying to disable pilots (a feat of aiming that's so close to impossible as to make downing an aircraft by throwing stones at it look credible) they could easily extract these and use them in the same way.
Police officer: person who is difficult to recruit, needs training to be responsible for special powers (arrest, driving too fast etc.) expensive to run due to equipment needs.
Administrator: very common, easy to recruit, no special training needed, cheap to employ.
It makes no economic sense to use police officers to do menial administration tasks. An efficient organisation would have people using their specialisations and leaving the unqualified work to cheaper, lower grade staff.
There's no great secret here, it's called comparative advantage and has been the mainstay of all successful commercial enterprises for over 100 years. The thing is that since the police have neither any competition, nor incentive to improve efficiency they can afford to waste people's talents by having the wrong people doing the easy tasks while very few to the actual policing.
Ahhh, right. So now all the Manchester police can claim to be following up leads when they're caught playing around in facebook at work. No wonder the general public is so hacked off - when police stats. show that they spend less than 13% of their time actually out of the police station, catching criminals.
I wonder what the quality of the "leads" they get will be. I would expect it's more likely to be from disaffected children using facebook who are annoyed with something their friends have done and report them out of spite.
Personally I think this looks like one of those great ideas that was dreamed up to make them look trendy and "in touch". I'd give it 6 months before it's quietly dropped under an initial tide of spam, false leads and time wasters, followed by complete and utter apathy.
Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags
That's OK, it's just a genreational change.
Each generation is arrogant enough to ignore the collected wisdom of what's gone before, so it makes the same old mistakes. Hence Dilbert is just as popular with the new "breed" of readers as it was with the last lot. The reason is they get just as frustrated with the same bosses making the same mistakes as their forebears. No doubt in 100 years time, people will still be grousing about the incompetence of their superiors and Scott Adams, or his grandchildren, will still be making money out of it.
While it sounds like a nice, if rather naive idea I seriously doubt if it will amount to anything more than another platform to promote "the message".
Don't think for a minute that any of the candidates will actually ever sign-on and write content themselves - unless of course it's in the context of an on-line chat "ooooh, how trendy!". Even then they will have a full complement of spin-doctors examining every keystroke for nuance, mis-comprehension and sub-text.
The basic problem all over the world is that people under 30 don't really care about politics. I'm not talking about individuals - I mean en masse, as a demographic. This sounds like a means of engaging them - let's see if it will work
> Glossy screens have much higher contrast and brightness
Get your digital camera and put it on auto-exposure. Position it so the image from your screen completely fills the camera's view (kinda difficult on a 16:9 screen, but do your best). Display what you reckon to be a "normally" bright image on the screen.
Now measure the exposure time from your camera's light-meter.
Turn the screen off, place the camera in the same position as before and check the readings from the camera's auto-exposure display.
When I did this, the difference between my normally bright, ambient light image from the display and the light reflected off the display when it was turned off gave me a contrast ratio of 80 to 1
This value doesn't even give you the full dynamic range from an 8-bit display (255 to 1), let alone the 1000+++ to 1 that LCD TV manufacturers claim. On my glossy screen I could see distinct reflections through the viewfinder and these are what gave the laughably bad contrast ratio. I'll never beleive manufacturers specifications again, and I'll never, never buy another glossy screen.
> Furthermore, black looks better on glossy screens
I've heard this before (and not just on this topic). However I just can't bring myself to beleive it. For example, given that most people use their screens in normal ambient light (OK some gamers/video enthusiasts may turn the lights out, but most people don't - it's ones like ME I interested in). That means you always have reflections bouncing around. When you have a totally black screen, all you see are the reflections, not the "blackness".
I did an experiment a while back and used the exposure meter on my DSLR to measure the difference in contrast between a normal picture and a "black" on a glossy screen. I got a contrast ratio of 80:1
To put this on context, I was looking at LCD TVs claiming contrast ratios of well over 1000:1 - absolutely no way, in a normally lit room. Even 80:1 means that you don't get the full dynamic range of an 8-bit display and I blame a large part of this crappy contrast ratio on the reflections from the glossy screen.
Most people who look up wikipedia information don't act on it. Those who do will not invest much of their time or money based purely on what wikipedia tells them - if they do, they won;t do it a second time.
Most of the information discovered is trivial: how many pints in a gallon, or some such. Users don't use wikipedia to decide what investments to make - at least the rich ones don't.
Therefore asking if people "trust" the answers is the wrong question. A better one would be "how much of your own money would you stake on the answer being correct?" Ask that and you'll get a much lower response.
Personally I'd like to see educators "seed" wikipedia with answers that cover the course work they set. The information they place in the relevant topics would be correct, but use catch-phrases so they can detect who is lazy and merely plagiarises someone elses work.
Given the headline that says the items were stolen, how come later it says they were "likely" stolen and also that "the investigators couldn't determinewhere the sellers had obtained..."
It mentions a couple of "components" from F14's - what? Nut and bolts or complete avionics - there's a huge difference. I would expect that if it had been anything significant, they wouldn't named them - so my money is on a few small pieces of easily machined metal.
The article then makes the subtle leap from talking about buying these F14 spares to say "The warplanes, now retired by the military, could easily be purchased and transferred to the Iranian military, which is seeking its".
Pardon me, but nowhere are they claiming to have actually *bought* the planes. They just seem to be sowing FUD in the readers mind.
It's a pity these guys couldn't find any journalistic integrity for sale on eBay - or maybe that's where theirs went.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than design new propulsion systems to make space travel more efficient, let's just sue Issac Newton, get the law repealed and go there for free.
I wonder if his couse even considered the possibilty that there are natural laws and manmade laws. I'd love to see this in a courtroom. Sadly, given the state of the educational & legsal systems, I might.
As far as I know the cost of SMS hasn't risen. It jus hasn't fallen.
When SMS started (early 90's - anyone?) the cost was, IIRC, 10p each. Now it's 5p. The starting price was a guess and seems to have more-or-less stuck. Obviously if people weren't willing to use the service the price would've been reduced. Since people are willing to pay 5p per message, there's no reason (how do you spell CARTEL, by the way?) for any of the carriers to reduce it.
What they have done instead is to bundle "free" texts in with your monthly contracts - which is nice for the pay-monthly grown-ups, who don't use them, but no use at all for the PAYG kiddies who are the main text users.
Now that's marketing!
Not quite a cheat, but I'd say that the original instructions used to calculate log tables might be close.
It's code (well, instructions - same thing?)
While it has been retyped many time, I'm sure the original paper-based instructions are still in a library somwwhere, and would work on a suitably old calcuator (hand-cranked, of course)
It's definitely a complete algorithm
However, when writing an article, is it too hard to call it 71,000 tons (or tonnes, or "metric" tons - they're all essentially the same unit - with a percent or two)
The CCTV footage is of a low quality, even with tilt/pan/zoom cameras in well-lit areas. That makes it difficult to put before a judge, given the current street fashions for "hoodies" etc.. Secondly, the sort of punishment that is meted out for petty vandalism, theft, assault etc. is usually non-custodial, so the perpetrator is still free to offend again.
If you do put them in jail (tricky, since the UK's jails are to all intents and purposes full), the sentence will be light - a few weeks at most. The effect of short sentences is that the offender will usually lose their job, get evicted from where they live and once they come out of prison they'll be a welfare case - with even less incentive to act legally.
The only thing that would work is prevention, which a camrea on top of a pole simply cannot do - you need uniformed officers in the area to act as an immediate sign that the offender will be caught.
Now pardon me, but sitting in chair, watching TV - and it's too hard?
That could go along way towards explaining why the crime clear-up rate is so low that most people don't even bother reporting crimes, since they know no-one will turn up.
Of course, not having people reporting crimes helps the govt. statistics: "look the crime rate is going down", so in that way it's all having the desired effect.
... and when one of your neighbours comes banging on your front door because their child has used your mesh network to circumvent their parental controls to download smut. What's your answer then?
Bleat all you like about "helping the community" or philanthropy or whatever you like. This is a naive attitude - similar to leaving your garage door open and then claiming "it's not mine" when stolen goods are found inside.
Anyway, if these devices are so cheap that you can afford to leave them out in the open (until they die, suddenly the firt time it rains), then your neighbours can afford to by one themselves.
Presumably if he made the same discovery today (regarding the weakness of a secure communication) and told anyone about it, he'd be arrested, rather than have his work recognised as beneficial.
I guess that's progress for you
Oh yes, you can't argue, or reason with these guys - they simply don't have any technical background. All they do is look for skills keywords. Don't match? no interview for you!
You can't even tell then that version Y is just a bug-fixed release of version X. All they hear is whinge, whinge, whinge.
They're high risk and not very satisfying. Once you go into a management job, your tech skills will start to atrophy. If you ever want to go back into a productive job, you'll find that things have moved on. You'll also find you're being judged on the basis of how others produce results, which may not be under your control. Also, management jobs are intangible - no-one can really say what value you add. As a consequence they're very easy to cut, without affecting the overall performance of the organisation. So the risk of losing your job is quite high. You can move into management, but it's very hard to get back out.
I'd really love a pen containing ink that either degraded to invisibility or sublimated. It would be useful for signing things that need temporary authorisations - where you don't necessarily want your mark to be retained forever. Or where you want people to reauthorise something after a period of time. Maybe have it available in "1 day" "week" "month" and "year" varieties for different contract lengths.
so just because you suffer a reaction if you eat something, no-one else in the world is allowed to mention it? Who made you king of the internet
We didn't make it, we don't know what it does. It must be a threat.
The wonderful thing about this (apart from the certainty that it will involve giving the security organisations more money) is that you don't have to prove anything. Just say "it's possible" (not even probable), or that they're "concerned" or that there "might be a threat" and suddenly everyone is running around as if the sky is falling.
Time to stop watching the James Bond movies guys. Go back to worrying about monsters under the bed.
The main point is that it provides an alternative. So far as industry goes, the lifetime cost has nothing to do with the purchase price, it's embedded in the need for support, the cost of making changes, training (whether explicit, or implicit) and the platforms needed to run it over the software's life.
For these reasons the choice to go with software they can download for free, as opposed to a package that may cost 4 or 5 figures is usually never made on up-front price considerations.
Once the non-FOSS industry realises that it's quality, the ability to do the job and the availability of people who can use it effectively, rather than what the sticker on the front says - then they'll wake up to how they can really make successful software.
What you're being asked to do is aim at a target (OK, there are 4 targets: 2 pilots) about 5mm across using a hand-held device. While you're doing this, the target is moving towards you (airspeed doesn't matter - you have to be in front of the plane). The plane will either be coming in to land, or taking off. If it's in level flight a ground based user will have no sight of the cockpit.
Further, the plane will be some distance away - I'd say it would be at leasta mile. Apart from vertical ascent/descent, which in reality contains vibrations from the plane and turbulence - even though it feels smooth, you still get instantaneous movement of *way* more than a pupil's diameter. You also have lateral movement from any wind in the vicinity of the plane.
Test: get a normal red laser. Draw a 5mm diameter dot on a piece of paper and tack it to a fence or something about 25metres (or yards) away. Now try to aim the laser onto the stationary target, even that close. Now think about multiplying the distance by at least 70. This could only be done in a James Bond movie.
but the laser inside a DVD writer is just as powerful (pop balloons, light matches) although less accessible.
If people were genuinely trying to disable pilots (a feat of aiming that's so close to impossible as to make downing an aircraft by throwing stones at it look credible) they could easily extract these and use them in the same way.
Consider this:
Police officer: person who is difficult to recruit, needs training to be responsible for special powers (arrest, driving too fast etc.) expensive to run due to equipment needs.
Administrator: very common, easy to recruit, no special training needed, cheap to employ.
It makes no economic sense to use police officers to do menial administration tasks. An efficient organisation would have people using their specialisations and leaving the unqualified work to cheaper, lower grade staff.
There's no great secret here, it's called comparative advantage and has been the mainstay of all successful commercial enterprises for over 100 years. The thing is that since the police have neither any competition, nor incentive to improve efficiency they can afford to waste people's talents by having the wrong people doing the easy tasks while very few to the actual policing.
I wonder what the quality of the "leads" they get will be. I would expect it's more likely to be from disaffected children using facebook who are annoyed with something their friends have done and report them out of spite.
Personally I think this looks like one of those great ideas that was dreamed up to make them look trendy and "in touch". I'd give it 6 months before it's quietly dropped under an initial tide of spam, false leads and time wasters, followed by complete and utter apathy.
That's OK, it's just a genreational change.
Each generation is arrogant enough to ignore the collected wisdom of what's gone before, so it makes the same old mistakes. Hence Dilbert is just as popular with the new "breed" of readers as it was with the last lot. The reason is they get just as frustrated with the same bosses making the same mistakes as their forebears. No doubt in 100 years time, people will still be grousing about the incompetence of their superiors and Scott Adams, or his grandchildren, will still be making money out of it.
Don't think for a minute that any of the candidates will actually ever sign-on and write content themselves - unless of course it's in the context of an on-line chat "ooooh, how trendy!". Even then they will have a full complement of spin-doctors examining every keystroke for nuance, mis-comprehension and sub-text.
The basic problem all over the world is that people under 30 don't really care about politics. I'm not talking about individuals - I mean en masse, as a demographic. This sounds like a means of engaging them - let's see if it will work
Get your digital camera and put it on auto-exposure. Position it so the image from your screen completely fills the camera's view (kinda difficult on a 16:9 screen, but do your best). Display what you reckon to be a "normally" bright image on the screen.
Now measure the exposure time from your camera's light-meter.
Turn the screen off, place the camera in the same position as before and check the readings from the camera's auto-exposure display.
When I did this, the difference between my normally bright, ambient light image from the display and the light reflected off the display when it was turned off gave me a contrast ratio of 80 to 1
This value doesn't even give you the full dynamic range from an 8-bit display (255 to 1), let alone the 1000+++ to 1 that LCD TV manufacturers claim. On my glossy screen I could see distinct reflections through the viewfinder and these are what gave the laughably bad contrast ratio. I'll never beleive manufacturers specifications again, and I'll never, never buy another glossy screen.
Try this yourself, and see what results you get!
I did an experiment a while back and used the exposure meter on my DSLR to measure the difference in contrast between a normal picture and a "black" on a glossy screen. I got a contrast ratio of 80:1
To put this on context, I was looking at LCD TVs claiming contrast ratios of well over 1000:1 - absolutely no way, in a normally lit room. Even 80:1 means that you don't get the full dynamic range of an 8-bit display and I blame a large part of this crappy contrast ratio on the reflections from the glossy screen.
Most people who look up wikipedia information don't act on it. Those who do will not invest much of their time or money based purely on what wikipedia tells them - if they do, they won;t do it a second time.
Most of the information discovered is trivial: how many pints in a gallon, or some such. Users don't use wikipedia to decide what investments to make - at least the rich ones don't.
Therefore asking if people "trust" the answers is the wrong question. A better one would be "how much of your own money would you stake on the answer being correct?" Ask that and you'll get a much lower response.
Personally I'd like to see educators "seed" wikipedia with answers that cover the course work they set. The information they place in the relevant topics would be correct, but use catch-phrases so they can detect who is lazy and merely plagiarises someone elses work.
It mentions a couple of "components" from F14's - what? Nut and bolts or complete avionics - there's a huge difference. I would expect that if it had been anything significant, they wouldn't named them - so my money is on a few small pieces of easily machined metal.
The article then makes the subtle leap from talking about buying these F14 spares to say "The warplanes, now retired by the military, could easily be purchased and transferred to the Iranian military, which is seeking its".
Pardon me, but nowhere are they claiming to have actually *bought* the planes. They just seem to be sowing FUD in the readers mind.
It's a pity these guys couldn't find any journalistic integrity for sale on eBay - or maybe that's where theirs went.