Does it bother anyone else that Microsoft sells their own anti-virus software, and now they are actually trying to write their own worms? Nah, we've seen what their software quality looks like, the stuff coming out of Russia is always going to be a lot scarier than anything MS comes up with. Besides, this sounds more like MS is backing some research into "alternative patching mechanisms" or some such, and it just so happens this lab got the brilliant idea (note sarcasm here) to use worms to distribute patches. As others have commented plenty of studies have shown that this is a really bad and rather inefficient means of distributing patches, and often the "white-hat" worms end up doing as much, or more damage then the ones they're trying to patch against. This whole thing should never have been news, and someone should head out to the lab doing this research and smacking the researchers around a little to remind them to do their homework before they start blabbing about this awesome idea they had.
Someone needs to take these people outback and beat some sense into them. How much of a moron do you need to be to take a look at the smoking crater that's left of SCO and decide that it looks like a good investment of $100M. Shit, take that money and put it into a random startup, your at least as likely to get your money back, if not more so, and they'd be more deserving of it.
mmmm, yes, I'm well aware of relativistic weapons. Of course you can get a similar effect without having to put quite as much effort into it buy simply dropping a bundle of depleted uranium spikes from orbit. I'm voting orbital railguns for the win. Launch them all in such a way that their trajectories intersect at about 1m below ground level, and if you chuck them hard enough you can probably get them to come in at mach 8 or 9 without too much trouble. I'm thinking you setup the satellite with the railguns such that their facing away from each other (think very very shallow inverted V) then all you need to do is impart enough force in firing them that they eventually impact at the opposite side of the planet from where you launched them. Would need a thruster on the back of the satellite though as firing them would tend to kick it out into a higher orbit.
Well, in essence you already have this, just with the components re-arranged slightly. You have torrent tracking websites that act as "well-know want-list tracker"s that you can go to to find torrents which act as a "wrapper" when combined with the torrent app to download and upload itself to other people interested in the file (those connected to the same tracker, and therefore interested in the file). If resources were unlimited of course self replicating files would be great, but since storage space and bandwidth are not only limited, but also vary depending over time it's always going to be a bad idea to let the data decide where it should go. I for instance usually disable my torrents when I'm using the network for other things, and re-enable them when I'm done (usually before I go to bed), where as if the system were automated and the torrents decided if I wanted them or not a download could be kicked off at any time whether I wanted that bandwidth and storage for something more important at that time or not. So far this isn't even mentioning the security and legal issues this brings up. Anyone that's ever run an FTP that allows anonymous upload knows the kinds of things you'll run into.
Well, it's not really a worm if you have to grant it permission. If it asks for permissions it's really a P2P update application which is probably a smart idea anyway. The updaters should probably be using something like bittorrent to spread the load as is. I know one of my favorite bittorrent clients, Azureus distributes patches and updates (and plugins) to itself as torrents. Blizzard is also using bittorrent to distribute its patches.
Actually, according to Wikipedia the first worm was created in Xerox PARC in 1978 to travel around the computer lab and reassign idle processors. "Reaper" and "Creeper" are classified as a virus on wikipedia, although without actually looking at how it spread I'm not sure if that's the correct term, or if it really was the first worm.
To be big enough to suck the earth in from the inside, they'd need a pretty powerful gravitational field - anything lab produced would just disapate as it starves to death (earthly material is not dense enough to grow it substantially). Hmmmm... so does that mean black holes have a "critical mass" they need to achieve in order to keep from evaporating? Also, wouldn't this "critical mass" tend to vary depending on the density of the medium in which the black hole was embedded (as hinted at in your statement)? It's a rather interesting concept, although lets hope if they every try a Manhattan project style bomb around this principle that they do so out in space someplace we wouldn't mind losing.
The evil genius part of my brain is already trying to figure out what kind of math you would need to do in order to design a "planet killer" version of an artificial black hole. I guess the math for the minimum mass would work out to be the point at which the gravity field pulls in more matter at the planets average density than what's lost by evaporation off the surface of the black hole. Of course, since we don't even know if it really does evaporate for sure we can't get an accurate value for how fast it evaporates. Alternately since it's dependent on density of the medium would it increase the odds of eating the planet of you fired it into the core of the planet versus letting it hang out in the atmosphere?
Wow, who let the crackpot in. Why don't you go enlighten one of those flat-earth guys. Better run, I think I hear some black helicopters headed this way.
Knee braces and such, though, break that model, because you have to do more physical work to generate the power. Another article talks more about the knee-brace. It actually helps you walk because it's got a clutch that only engages when your knee is flexing to absorb shock. It adds zero (more or less) resistance when lifting and adds resistance when bracing, so you end up recapturing a lot of the energy wasted on the down step. It's really the same principle as the active-braking systems in electric cars that allow them to recapture a lot of the energy used in accelerating the car when it's braking.
Wouldn't harnessing this energy make the material harder to move in? Actually, in the case of the knee-brace generator it makes it easier to move. The knee-brace has a clutch mechanism that only engages on the absorption portion of the step (when your knee is flexing to absorb the impact and transfer your weight) so the resistance of the brace actually helps your legs absorb the impact of stepping. The only problem with the current model is that it's rather bulky and heavy so until it's made lighter it makes it harder to move just from the weight of it. There are lots of ways this could be used to actually improve efficiency (much like active-braking generators in cars) rather than decrease it. Remember, all friction heat and to a lesser extent gravity (falling down a gravity well) is wasted energy, recapturing as much as possible helps cut down on entropy.
Someone may have already asked this, but what about the heat generated as the wave approaches C? These waves wouldn't approach C. C is the speed of light in a vacuum, not in a fiber optic cable. In fact this experiment wouldn't work in a vacuum because it relies on the second wave traveling faster than the first wave.
A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved. Now THAT is some useful information. Should change the title of this article to 'Laser Light Re-Creates "Rindler Horizon" in the Lab'.
That would be all well and good, but then the article goes on to speculate about using this artificial event horizon to try to generate hawking radiation. It's that second point (as well as the terribly misleading title) that everyone is scratching their heads over.
you sir, are correct. well done. refreshing to see someone who pays attention and (holy shit!) looks up the occasional factoid Looking up the occasional factoid? Hah, we don't need to do that, that's why we have the inter... uh... nevermind.
It sounds to me like a case of one subfield (photonics) sexing up their lingo by adopting the lingo of another subfield (general relativity) to get press. IAAP, but not a cosmologists/GR expert, so I'm willing to stand corrected. IANAP, but even I came to the same conclusion. When your press release is having holes poked in it by laymen there's something a bit fishy going on.
Yeah, I'm no physicist either, but I don't quite follow this. They haven't simulated a black hole at all, just the optics of its event horizon.
Artificial event horizon != Artificial black hole.
Somehow I highly doubt that even if they can get the fiberoptics to 1000 degrees centigrade and perform this experiment that they'll get any hawking radiation out of it.
That sounds safe, to reproduce the effects of the point at which all matter collapses into a virtual singularity. Where were they testing this again? Somewhere on Earth? Alrighty then... Taxi! They aren't simulating a black hole, the title is misleading. They're simulating the optical properties of a black holes event horizon. Subtle but very important difference.
No, and Yes. Pretty much all the members of "Geek Squad" are supposed to be computer techs, it's their job to repair the systems customers bring to them. From what I've seen on the couple occasions I've seen them working (once when buying a new laptop, for some reason they insist on powering it on in the store and running it through a check list, and a couple other times working on other peoples systems while I was waiting at customer service) they have a set of standard diagnostic tools that are more or less automated and spit out a message of what it thinks the problems with the system are. How accurate the tools are I can't say, although I'd bet they aren't going to catch anything your average slashdot reader would miss. I suspect it's these tools that make BestBuy think they can get away with hiring untrained people to work as techs, going on the assumption that all they need to do is click the buttons to run the software and it'll do the tech work ignoring the fact that even after that they still need to do any actual hardware repairs if needed. Of course, for all I know anything more complicated than installing new RAM gets sent off to some central workshop where they keep the real techs.
I know a girl that got a job with the "Geek Squad". She's a computer illiterate, who thinks that AOL is the pinnacle of modern communications. I wouldn't trust most of the "Geek Squad" to replace a fuse, no way in hell are they getting their hands inside the guts of any of my systems.
And if she had sued them for $10k would it have been posted on slashdot? Somehow I doubt it. The reason she put such a big sum up was specifically so the media would pay attention to the case and not let BestBuy slink away. Even if she settles out of court at this point she's accomplished her goal.
Solid State SSL Lighting, from the Department of redundancy department. Bah, beat me to it. In related news, be sure to check out the DRD Departments other fine products, including PIN Numbers, and TCP Protocol.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to take these people outback and beat some sense into them. How much of a moron do you need to be to take a look at the smoking crater that's left of SCO and decide that it looks like a good investment of $100M. Shit, take that money and put it into a random startup, your at least as likely to get your money back, if not more so, and they'd be more deserving of it.
mmmm, yes, I'm well aware of relativistic weapons. Of course you can get a similar effect without having to put quite as much effort into it buy simply dropping a bundle of depleted uranium spikes from orbit. I'm voting orbital railguns for the win. Launch them all in such a way that their trajectories intersect at about 1m below ground level, and if you chuck them hard enough you can probably get them to come in at mach 8 or 9 without too much trouble. I'm thinking you setup the satellite with the railguns such that their facing away from each other (think very very shallow inverted V) then all you need to do is impart enough force in firing them that they eventually impact at the opposite side of the planet from where you launched them. Would need a thruster on the back of the satellite though as firing them would tend to kick it out into a higher orbit.
Well, in essence you already have this, just with the components re-arranged slightly. You have torrent tracking websites that act as "well-know want-list tracker"s that you can go to to find torrents which act as a "wrapper" when combined with the torrent app to download and upload itself to other people interested in the file (those connected to the same tracker, and therefore interested in the file). If resources were unlimited of course self replicating files would be great, but since storage space and bandwidth are not only limited, but also vary depending over time it's always going to be a bad idea to let the data decide where it should go. I for instance usually disable my torrents when I'm using the network for other things, and re-enable them when I'm done (usually before I go to bed), where as if the system were automated and the torrents decided if I wanted them or not a download could be kicked off at any time whether I wanted that bandwidth and storage for something more important at that time or not. So far this isn't even mentioning the security and legal issues this brings up. Anyone that's ever run an FTP that allows anonymous upload knows the kinds of things you'll run into.
Well, it's not really a worm if you have to grant it permission. If it asks for permissions it's really a P2P update application which is probably a smart idea anyway. The updaters should probably be using something like bittorrent to spread the load as is. I know one of my favorite bittorrent clients, Azureus distributes patches and updates (and plugins) to itself as torrents. Blizzard is also using bittorrent to distribute its patches.
Actually, according to Wikipedia the first worm was created in Xerox PARC in 1978 to travel around the computer lab and reassign idle processors. "Reaper" and "Creeper" are classified as a virus on wikipedia, although without actually looking at how it spread I'm not sure if that's the correct term, or if it really was the first worm.
This is a very old idea. One of the earliest worm/viruses was actually of the "white-hat" variety. Nothing to see here, move along.
The evil genius part of my brain is already trying to figure out what kind of math you would need to do in order to design a "planet killer" version of an artificial black hole. I guess the math for the minimum mass would work out to be the point at which the gravity field pulls in more matter at the planets average density than what's lost by evaporation off the surface of the black hole. Of course, since we don't even know if it really does evaporate for sure we can't get an accurate value for how fast it evaporates. Alternately since it's dependent on density of the medium would it increase the odds of eating the planet of you fired it into the core of the planet versus letting it hang out in the atmosphere?
I think he meant that it's currently impossible, but once the LHC is finished and operational it might be possible.
Wow, who let the crackpot in. Why don't you go enlighten one of those flat-earth guys. Better run, I think I hear some black helicopters headed this way.
Only constant in a vacuum. Inside of a medium it varies by the wavelength of the light.
A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved. Now THAT is some useful information. Should change the title of this article to 'Laser Light Re-Creates "Rindler Horizon" in the Lab'.
That would be all well and good, but then the article goes on to speculate about using this artificial event horizon to try to generate hawking radiation. It's that second point (as well as the terribly misleading title) that everyone is scratching their heads over.
Please look up cause and effect.
Yeah, I'm no physicist either, but I don't quite follow this. They haven't simulated a black hole at all, just the optics of its event horizon.
Artificial event horizon != Artificial black hole.
Somehow I highly doubt that even if they can get the fiberoptics to 1000 degrees centigrade and perform this experiment that they'll get any hawking radiation out of it.
No, and Yes. Pretty much all the members of "Geek Squad" are supposed to be computer techs, it's their job to repair the systems customers bring to them. From what I've seen on the couple occasions I've seen them working (once when buying a new laptop, for some reason they insist on powering it on in the store and running it through a check list, and a couple other times working on other peoples systems while I was waiting at customer service) they have a set of standard diagnostic tools that are more or less automated and spit out a message of what it thinks the problems with the system are. How accurate the tools are I can't say, although I'd bet they aren't going to catch anything your average slashdot reader would miss. I suspect it's these tools that make BestBuy think they can get away with hiring untrained people to work as techs, going on the assumption that all they need to do is click the buttons to run the software and it'll do the tech work ignoring the fact that even after that they still need to do any actual hardware repairs if needed. Of course, for all I know anything more complicated than installing new RAM gets sent off to some central workshop where they keep the real techs.
I know a girl that got a job with the "Geek Squad". She's a computer illiterate, who thinks that AOL is the pinnacle of modern communications. I wouldn't trust most of the "Geek Squad" to replace a fuse, no way in hell are they getting their hands inside the guts of any of my systems.
And if she had sued them for $10k would it have been posted on slashdot? Somehow I doubt it. The reason she put such a big sum up was specifically so the media would pay attention to the case and not let BestBuy slink away. Even if she settles out of court at this point she's accomplished her goal.