Since in relativity momentum and energy are related through the equation E^2 = p^2*c^2 + m^2*c^4, for a massless photon there is a relation between its energy and it's momentum p = E/c, so light falling on the solar sail has a momentum and thus exerts a force on it, pushing it away from the direction the light came from.
I can't remember any more at the moment, it's been a while since I studied thermodynamics at university:)
You'll probably scoff and write it iff as 'mass hallucination', even though psychologists know of no such mass phenomenon.
Errm, yes there is - the phenomenon of "ergotism" caused by the ergot in rye grains. The ergot is closely related to LSD IIRC, and there have long been incidences of whole towns succumbing to mass attacks of ergotism, including all of the same symptoms as taking LSD. And trust me, I've seen wierder things than the sun dancing across the sky when I've taken LSD:)
The being that he describes as "Azathoth", "the mad idiot that dwells at the center of infinity", would be a fair rendering of what many of us regard as the likely attributes of such a being if it existed.
Now that would almost be worth proving existed just to see the looks on the faces of fundamentalists across the globe - "Hey, we've found the supreme being - it's a mad blob with a pipe at the centre of the Universe!".
On an unrelated topic (the theme of this article from what I've seen) why do you always post as AC, assuming you are the same person with that sig?
I was researching some material for a troll, and I came across this paper, "The Current State of Creation Astronomy" at the Institute for Creation Research website. It's a summary of Creationist views on cosmology and the creation of the Universe written by somebody that has at least half a clue about what he's talking about.
Whether or not you believe it, it's worth reading just to see how Creationists can try and incorporate modern cosmological thought into their beliefs.
The "hidden" troll forum is currently up to about post #2100, and all of them are genuine posts rather than bot-generated. So you still come in second with about 800 posts:)
It depends on whether or not MS can prove that/. is respsonsible for what gets posted on this site. Sure it says "Comments are owned by the Poster" at the bottom, but MS are going to have some good lawyers on the case. It's certainly not cut and dried at all.
Errm, konstant works for MS, but he's certainly not a propaganda machine at all. I certainly don't think who he works for has anything to do with reading/.
I suppose that this had to happen sooner or later given some of the things that get posted to/. every time a "trade secret" story comes up here. It's ironic really that it's everybody's favourite company, Microsoft, that's the one to finally do it though:)
Anyway, given that this is exactly the sort of thing the DMCA was created for I very much doubt that Slashdot would win if it ever goes to a court of law./. did have posts which contained copies of the information which were forbidden under the MS Kerberos EULA, and the recent court case victory for shrinkwrap licenses doesn't put/. in a good position.
The one way I can see to fight this is through publicity and public opinion. Microsoft aren't liked, and if enough of a stink is raised they may back down. And/. is great for raising a stink, especially when it comes to Microsoft:) So everyone should be working to publisize this as a violation of free speech and general interference by a corporation intent on making money at the expense of other's work.
And I fully expect that the relevent posts will already be mirrored in a hundred places across the net by the time this gets posted anyway, so, like with DeCSS, it's a battle that's lost in practice but being fought for control:)
-5 viewing threshold hack
on
FreshPorts
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· Score: 2
Go to the Customise Comments page and save it as HTML. Find the FORM tag and change the action to point to http://slashdot.org/users.pl, and then look down for the "SELECT name=uthreshold" tag. Under that, find the "OPTION selected value=-1" tag and change the -1 to a -5.
Save the page, load it in your browser, set your threshold to -1 in the list and submit it. Lo and behold, you can now see comments all the way down to -5. The/. censorhip where bitchslapped accounts are forced to -2 is defeated:)
Re:Quick 'n' easy hacks
on
FreshPorts
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· Score: 2
I think that it should be based on number of lines taken up for all posts. ((A line > 80 characters or BR) = line) rather than number of bytes.
Yeah, because a BR tag is only 4 bytes - you can have loads of those in any given byte limit. And it would have an effect on large irrelevent articles, at least once they'd gone down to -1.
Most of the more irritating spam (good point about spam v. troll in your other post btw) could be detected using a simple algorithm to spot redundancy.
It's never going to go away (unless Rob comes up with an AI post filter:) ) but it can certainly be limited with some checks which should be fairly simple to encode in Perl. Of course any attempt will draw the spammers into more attempts to circumvent it so they'd have to be good.
Hopefully accounts like "flam0r" will get bitchslapped by Rob soon, but then they can always create more accounts. Oh well...
Re:Quick 'n' easy hacks
on
FreshPorts
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· Score: 2
How many trolls were there before moderation?
Two IIRC - Meept and DAVEO.
How many trolls are there now, after the 70-second delay, lameness filter, caps filter, word length filter, and all of Rob's other attempts to get rid of us?
Not that many if you count the difference between a troll and a spammer. I've written trolls here on/. and they add to the conversation - spam doesn't.
But I do agree that Rob's going about it the wrong way. Short of AI there's never going to be a way to filter spam out, and he's just making this site a challenge with his "lameness filter" and other ideas. But since I browse at -5 it's still annoying.
Two relatively easy things that would help IMHO are:
Any post at -1 gets cut off at 15 lines with the "Read the rest of this comment link..." in place. You might not be able to get rid of them, but at least they wouldn't take up so much space.
Any comment with a word longer than 20 (30? 40?) characters long is rejected. This would avoid the pages being made extra wide, which is probably the most annoying thing of all.
I think the vast quantity of spam (they're not clever enough to qualify as trolls) on this story and others is in direct response to Rob's new "lameness filter" which tries to prevent things from being posted in all caps. Since there are plenty more annoying things than all caps (as we can see here) this is both a) a waste of time and b) asking for trouble.
Every time Rob adds a new feature to cut down on noise (e.g. moderation, 70 sec delay etc.) it seems to result in massive increases in spam from the lamers. Oh well, since they've only got a ten minute attention span it'll probably die down in a while.
Now how in the world would this be physically possible with our current understanding of physics?
It's just a big, spinning loop of cosmic string isn't it? Okay the scale of it is enormous, but that's an engineering problem rather than a physics one. And IIRC the Kerr metric for a rotating black hole does allow for a naked singularity given those kinds of extreme conditions.
Whether or not it produces a black hole/white hole kind of interface between universes is an open question, but the rest of it is plausible enough.
Fair enough, but I think we're both guilty of sounding a bit over the top:) I don't think many things in Stephen Baxter's stories are theoretically impossible, even the Ring, but actually working out a way to do them is the challenge, and most of the technology in his books is definitely 500 years+ down the line at least...
Don't get me wrong -- I've get nothing against faster processors. But my computer is already fast enough to play movies and do 99% of anything that I really want it to. If I'm not doing numerical integration, do I really need it to get any faster?
You don't and I don't (I was running a P133 until it broke) but there are a lot of requirements out there for fast computers. Look at this story for an example of a problem domain where superfast computers are required. There are a huge number of simulation tasks out there which can always use more power in order to use better models. And that can lead to any number of new technologies for us.
There'll always be a need for better computers. After all, since the smallest computer required to simulate the Universe is the Universe itself, we can always build a better machine to better simulate things.
Although the advances were encouraging, the challenges remaining are enormous. Creating individual devices is an essential first step. But before we can build complete, useful circuits we must find a way to secure many millions, if not billions, of molecular devices of various types against some kind of immobile surface and to link them in any manner and into whatever patterns our circuit diagrams dictate. The technology is still too young to say for sure whether this monumental challenge will ever be surmounted.
They've shown that it's possible to build molecular-level electronic components like an AND gate and a memory analogue, but it'll be connected them together to form circuits that'll be the real challenge.
Think of how many transistors comprise even the most simplest of processors nowadays, and the technology it takes to fabricate them. And then think of doing the same, but with individual components and connections consisting of only a few molecules. There's going to have to be some real advances made in the ability to manipulate matter on this scale before this sort of thing becomes feasible on a large scale where economies of scale can apply.
But at least the proof of concept is there, and work will advance quickly with the threat of the end of Moore's Law approaching. And yet again, so much for all of the "end of computing" doomsayers:)
Yeah, but he might hastily dismiss a really good idea as unfeasible just because his knowledge of what is feasible isnt really all that complete. Since today most scientists are extremely specialized, thats not that unlikely a scenario.
No, the whole idea of specialisation is that a scientist only has to concentrate on a single narrow area within which he can be up to date on pretty much the whole field. If an idea isn't within his field then he'll get someone else whose field it is to examine the idea. Of course no one scientists is going to be able to judge every single idea presented to them.
I'm only halfway through it now, but one of the threads in the story is about a group called the Anthropocosmoloigsts who hold this belief. They are waiting for scientists to come up with a valid theory of everything in order to complete the Universe and its structure. And it's a good read so far:)
AFAIK none of them came up with the idea of DNA before it was discovered either. The whole idea of genetic engineering was completely missed out upon by the early sci-fi writers.
Slashdot Mirror
Since in relativity momentum and energy are related through the equation E^2 = p^2*c^2 + m^2*c^4, for a massless photon there is a relation between its energy and it's momentum p = E/c, so light falling on the solar sail has a momentum and thus exerts a force on it, pushing it away from the direction the light came from.
I can't remember any more at the moment, it's been a while since I studied thermodynamics at university :)
You'll probably scoff and write it iff as 'mass hallucination', even though psychologists know of no such mass phenomenon.
Errm, yes there is - the phenomenon of "ergotism" caused by the ergot in rye grains. The ergot is closely related to LSD IIRC, and there have long been incidences of whole towns succumbing to mass attacks of ergotism, including all of the same symptoms as taking LSD. And trust me, I've seen wierder things than the sun dancing across the sky when I've taken LSD :)
The being that he describes as "Azathoth", "the mad idiot that dwells at the center of infinity", would be a fair rendering of what many of us regard as the likely attributes of such a being if it existed.
Now that would almost be worth proving existed just to see the looks on the faces of fundamentalists across the globe - "Hey, we've found the supreme being - it's a mad blob with a pipe at the centre of the Universe!".
On an unrelated topic (the theme of this article from what I've seen) why do you always post as AC, assuming you are the same person with that sig?
I was researching some material for a troll, and I came across this paper, "The Current State of Creation Astronomy" at the Institute for Creation Research website. It's a summary of Creationist views on cosmology and the creation of the Universe written by somebody that has at least half a clue about what he's talking about.
Whether or not you believe it, it's worth reading just to see how Creationists can try and incorporate modern cosmological thought into their beliefs.
The "hidden" troll forum is currently up to about post #2100, and all of them are genuine posts rather than bot-generated. So you still come in second with about 800 posts :)
In this article about this story. See, typing in bold does let you be heard!
And I think there was a subtle sneer in there as well. It was certainly very condescending... :)
It depends on whether or not MS can prove that /. is respsonsible for what gets posted on this site. Sure it says "Comments are owned by the Poster" at the bottom, but MS are going to have some good lawyers on the case. It's certainly not cut and dried at all.
Errm, konstant works for MS, but he's certainly not a propaganda machine at all. I certainly don't think who he works for has anything to do with reading /.
LOL! I love their address:
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way, 114/2314
Redmond, WA 98052
Says it all really :)
Taiwan or Malta would be good - they don't have copyright laws there at all, so MS couldn't really do anything about it.
I suppose that this had to happen sooner or later given some of the things that get posted to /. every time a "trade secret" story comes up here. It's ironic really that it's everybody's favourite company, Microsoft, that's the one to finally do it though :)
Anyway, given that this is exactly the sort of thing the DMCA was created for I very much doubt that Slashdot would win if it ever goes to a court of law. /. did have posts which contained copies of the information which were forbidden under the MS Kerberos EULA, and the recent court case victory for shrinkwrap licenses doesn't put /. in a good position.
The one way I can see to fight this is through publicity and public opinion. Microsoft aren't liked, and if enough of a stink is raised they may back down. And /. is great for raising a stink, especially when it comes to Microsoft :) So everyone should be working to publisize this as a violation of free speech and general interference by a corporation intent on making money at the expense of other's work.
And I fully expect that the relevent posts will already be mirrored in a hundred places across the net by the time this gets posted anyway, so, like with DeCSS, it's a battle that's lost in practice but being fought for control :)
Go to the Customise Comments page and save it as HTML. Find the FORM tag and change the action to point to http://slashdot.org/users.pl, and then look down for the "SELECT name=uthreshold" tag. Under that, find the "OPTION selected value=-1" tag and change the -1 to a -5.
Save the page, load it in your browser, set your threshold to -1 in the list and submit it. Lo and behold, you can now see comments all the way down to -5. The /. censorhip where bitchslapped accounts are forced to -2 is defeated :)
I think that it should be based on number of lines taken up for all posts. ((A line > 80 characters or BR) = line) rather than number of bytes.
Yeah, because a BR tag is only 4 bytes - you can have loads of those in any given byte limit. And it would have an effect on large irrelevent articles, at least once they'd gone down to -1.
Most of the more irritating spam (good point about spam v. troll in your other post btw) could be detected using a simple algorithm to spot redundancy.
It's never going to go away (unless Rob comes up with an AI post filter :) ) but it can certainly be limited with some checks which should be fairly simple to encode in Perl. Of course any attempt will draw the spammers into more attempts to circumvent it so they'd have to be good.
Hopefully accounts like "flam0r" will get bitchslapped by Rob soon, but then they can always create more accounts. Oh well...
How many trolls were there before moderation?
Two IIRC - Meept and DAVEO.
How many trolls are there now, after the 70-second delay, lameness filter, caps filter, word length filter, and all of Rob's other attempts to get rid of us?
Not that many if you count the difference between a troll and a spammer. I've written trolls here on /. and they add to the conversation - spam doesn't.
But I do agree that Rob's going about it the wrong way. Short of AI there's never going to be a way to filter spam out, and he's just making this site a challenge with his "lameness filter" and other ideas. But since I browse at -5 it's still annoying.
Two relatively easy things that would help IMHO are:
Just some thoughts :)
I think the vast quantity of spam (they're not clever enough to qualify as trolls) on this story and others is in direct response to Rob's new "lameness filter" which tries to prevent things from being posted in all caps. Since there are plenty more annoying things than all caps (as we can see here) this is both a) a waste of time and b) asking for trouble.
Every time Rob adds a new feature to cut down on noise (e.g. moderation, 70 sec delay etc.) it seems to result in massive increases in spam from the lamers. Oh well, since they've only got a ten minute attention span it'll probably die down in a while.
Now how in the world would this be physically possible with our current understanding of physics?
It's just a big, spinning loop of cosmic string isn't it? Okay the scale of it is enormous, but that's an engineering problem rather than a physics one. And IIRC the Kerr metric for a rotating black hole does allow for a naked singularity given those kinds of extreme conditions.
Whether or not it produces a black hole/white hole kind of interface between universes is an open question, but the rest of it is plausible enough.
P.s. try to avoid sounding like a rabid advocate.
Fair enough, but I think we're both guilty of sounding a bit over the top :) I don't think many things in Stephen Baxter's stories are theoretically impossible, even the Ring, but actually working out a way to do them is the challenge, and most of the technology in his books is definitely 500 years+ down the line at least...
How about:
There'd be more but I've got to go home now :)
Don't get me wrong -- I've get nothing against faster processors. But my computer is already fast enough to play movies and do 99% of anything that I really want it to. If I'm not doing numerical integration, do I really need it to get any faster?
You don't and I don't (I was running a P133 until it broke) but there are a lot of requirements out there for fast computers. Look at this story for an example of a problem domain where superfast computers are required. There are a huge number of simulation tasks out there which can always use more power in order to use better models. And that can lead to any number of new technologies for us.
There'll always be a need for better computers. After all, since the smallest computer required to simulate the Universe is the Universe itself, we can always build a better machine to better simulate things.
Although the advances were encouraging, the challenges remaining are enormous. Creating individual devices is an essential first step. But before we can build complete, useful circuits we must find a way to secure many millions, if not billions, of molecular devices of various types against some kind of immobile surface and to link them in any manner and into whatever patterns our circuit diagrams dictate. The technology is still too young to say for sure whether this monumental challenge will ever be surmounted.
They've shown that it's possible to build molecular-level electronic components like an AND gate and a memory analogue, but it'll be connected them together to form circuits that'll be the real challenge.
Think of how many transistors comprise even the most simplest of processors nowadays, and the technology it takes to fabricate them. And then think of doing the same, but with individual components and connections consisting of only a few molecules. There's going to have to be some real advances made in the ability to manipulate matter on this scale before this sort of thing becomes feasible on a large scale where economies of scale can apply.
But at least the proof of concept is there, and work will advance quickly with the threat of the end of Moore's Law approaching. And yet again, so much for all of the "end of computing" doomsayers :)
Yeah, but he might hastily dismiss a really good idea as unfeasible just because his knowledge of what is feasible isnt really all that complete. Since today most scientists are extremely specialized, thats not that unlikely a scenario.
No, the whole idea of specialisation is that a scientist only has to concentrate on a single narrow area within which he can be up to date on pretty much the whole field. If an idea isn't within his field then he'll get someone else whose field it is to examine the idea. Of course no one scientists is going to be able to judge every single idea presented to them.
I'm only halfway through it now, but one of the threads in the story is about a group called the Anthropocosmoloigsts who hold this belief. They are waiting for scientists to come up with a valid theory of everything in order to complete the Universe and its structure. And it's a good read so far :)
AFAIK none of them came up with the idea of DNA before it was discovered either. The whole idea of genetic engineering was completely missed out upon by the early sci-fi writers.