HTF is this an "insight" ? It's one viewpoint, and it's understandable. It might even be morally justified (you have to ask yourself that). What it clearly isn't is "Insightful". What's an "insight" ? It's a new and novel view of something that makes it clearer and opens up a new path through some problem.
This is just the same old "Eye for an Eye" strategy, justifying itself because America has all the guns.
It's no new and smarter approach to solving anything.
Any useful leader would long ago have turned away from terrorism, and toward realistic efforts for peace. Arafat has been the singular roadblock to this.
By local standards, Arafat is a positive dove compared to some. It sounds very much as if you quote his name just because it's the only one you know!
Secondly, what has Israel been doing in the last few weeks ? Regular helicopter and tank attacks on Palestinians, with little thought as to civilian casualties.
America has supported Israel in this. It has not castigated Israel for any over-reaction (when many other non-Arab nations have)nad it has done nothing to distance itself from these actions. Whether you support these actions or not, this evident support will have consequences for the safety of Americans.
You might regard Israel as justified, you might regard America's support for it as reasonable, but you should not be surprised when others don't feel that way and response by an escalated attack.
Cute problem solver (although it's a "play it once and then not again"). If you get stuck you wander round and round for ever, but you can't (almost!) kill the character off. One of the designer's aims was to make a fun non-violent game, and they succeeded pretty well.
Very nice visuals too. No rendering - they just made it all of plasticine and filmed it.
No one wants to have a whole computer in their pocket
I do. The thing I like about the first Palms is that they were computers, not just PDAs. Sure, I bought one because I wanted a PDA, and I bought a Palm PDA because they had better HotSync than any others, but the reason I'm still using them today is because they're also a quite useful pocket computer. I calculate IP netmasks and tide timetables on mine. I can even write my own programs to convert video tape timecodes (and other personal weirdness).
Moore's law for bandwidth is increasing at a slower rate than processing power. I think Palms have a limited lifetime (in their current incarnation) but the future is going to be more like a desktop PC (thicker clients), not like a Blackberry (limited and task-specific).
We'd better all learn to bend over and squeal like a piggy, because there's a real risk that the "Palm of the Future" might be a Windows-spawn gadget, horrible prospect though that is.
So show me one company that is giving out Palms to their employees.
How many do you want ? Even today, I know at least six local companies doing this, and they're suits, not nerds.
The problem with that attitude is that you don't define "like this person".
Sure, bad guys shouldn't have rights. Who gets to pick the bad guys ? J. Edgar Hoover ? The Pinkerton agency ? Was Rodney King a bad guy, deserving of losing his rights ? - LA's finest seemed to think so.
The point about "inalienable rights" is that they're inalienable. Even spies, murderers and Flash coders get to keep them. You might like to be able to withdraw these rights from "appropriate" groups, but on the whole society works better if we leave the bad guys with a few too many, but don't have to worry about stormtroopers and death squads artbitrarily deciding they can remove them from any citizen they choose to.
Logistically, shells should be square-ended. You get more bang into the the chamber that way.
Aerodynamically, shells should be pointed at both ends, or in fact, even more pointed at the tail. The trouble with this is that it loses useful volume - although it's commonly done with small arms. The trick with base-bleed is that by burning a slow propellant in the tail of the shell, a high pressure gas plume is generated that makes the shell appear to be long-tailed, aerodynamically. You get the same compact shell layout (although you lose some space for propellant) and you get a long-range shell.
There are also rocket assist shells, but these are rare - they didn't work too well. They have some uses for heavy calibres with low muzzle velocities, but they lose in accuracy what they gained in range.
But doesn't the speed of sound change with the air-pressure?
Yes, but that's not so relevant. It's easy to make things go faster - just accelerate them. What gets to be really hard is making them travel at a higher Mach (speed relative to the current speed of sound), because most aerodynamic behaviour isn't dependent on speed, it's dependent on Mach. The behaviour and position of shock waves depends on the Mach, and that's the tricky one.
This isn't an exercise in making a fast projectile, it's an exercise in making an engine that can still generate useful thrust when travelling at high Mach (and doing it in free-flight, not a tunnel).
What makes this any different from a base bleed boat tail artillary shell?
It still accelerates after it has left the tube.
Secondly, WTF is a "base bleed boat tail" shell ? I've never seen anything (certainly not South African) that used both base-bleed and any boat-tailing together. Why would you ? If you use base-bleed you need the volume of a blunt-end, but you don't need the shaping.
Maybe it's just some 'Merkin deer-huntin' round...
I can't see why a company may want to deploy sourceforge on site
There's no way I could get my PHB to use an open off-site SourceForge. The corporate mentality just can't cope with it - they really would rather we shared nothing and we lost half our changes.
After all, putting any of our product source into SourceForge means that it instantly becomes contaminated with the Cancer of Open Source (tm), and we would have to offer RMS a seat on the board. It must be true, he read it in Pointy Haired Weekly.
If I have a copy of SourceForge that I can spend proper money on, and I then get to label a box in the machine room as "Our SourceForge machine", then I might get to use it.
Oh, and VA Linux have to get some revenue from somewhere!
Anonymous cowards do too know how to spell, dammit.
Seeing that Slash has decided to mangle our postings (the link describer), why stop there ? Let's discourage AC's from posting anonymously by randomly inserting misspielings, or W0RDZ TH4T L00K K00L and H4XX0R
PS - What does Slash do if you do post a Goatse.cx link ?
Anyone else remember teaching a few years ago ? Cambridge used BCPL as a teaching language (FFS!), the only course I took (mid-80s') was in Fortran. Pascal was seen as the "best" teaching language and Modula-2 as some big improvement. Teaching OO was unusual, and teaching it well was nearly unheard of. A real geek / engineering college taught C, which led to the age-group of Bob-awful C++ programmers a few years on who thought that just using// as a comment delimiter was enough to make them into an OO programmer.
I think teaching Java from day #1 is one of the best things that could ever happen to the teaching of programming. It's not enough to teach some abstract CS concepts, and it's too complex to teach intro programming to kids, but for the cannon-fodder training of the great majority of average coders it's a hell of a lot better than C++.
any good encryption produces an output which is indistinguishable from random noise.
That's one way to spot it. Remember the "NSA secret key in MS products" story of a while back ? The way to spot that was that the key was too random to be normal data.
ASCII characters are 7 bit, but nearly all of them are from a set of only about half of the possible values. Anything vaguely random stands out a mile in a stream of such characters, even though it would still be using valid characters.
In compiled machine code, there's a similar bias that the opcode set only uses a fraction of the possible values. Chunks of "data" stand out from pure instructions, and carefully randomised data (like a good key) stands out from everyday trash data.
It's harder for Jpegs (or Zip files). One way to get compression is to squash the limited entropy of the input data into the minimum space it will fit. Put simply, your "6 useful bits" ASCII will fit into 8-bit octets such that you have an compression of 8 characters into 6 octets. A side-effect of this increased entropy density is that the output data appears far more random (for a quick analysis). The more random it looks, it probably indicates a more efficient re-organisation of this entropy (and a better compression algorithm). Most algorithms have artefacts though. It might have output that looks random, except that (e.g.) the sequence '00 00'never appears. In truly random data, obviously everything ought to appear with equal probability. If it really does look random, then suspect a deliberate randomising process has been at work.
Analogue digitisers, including image scanners, are good randomisers. If low-bit data from an image isn't as random as you'd expect, then suspect something embedded. If it's more random than you'd expect, suspect that it's still got something embedded in it, they just hid it better.
... The secondary image, woven into the primary one, would not be possible to detect by peeling up one corner of the main image (as has been done here merely for illustrative purposes).
Excuse me ? Did I wander into The Onion by mistake ?
There's only ever been one justification for the US space program:
Bombing the crap out of Russia
All of that early rocket research was focussed on big missiles, dropping bigger and bigger bombs. By the time some real biggies (Redstone, Atlas) started flying, some bright spark realised that they could carry an astronaut too. OK, so space exploration is cool, but it was the nukes that got the funding through Congress.
Since the mid-60s and the clearly established capacity to crisp Moscow to a cinder, that would even stick to Trevor's beloved frying pans, the need for NASA has waned somewhat. Exploration is still cool, a few people still think it's worth spending money on - but the defence budget money doesn't flow anything like as easily as it used to.
Secondly, America is the richest country on the planet. You've already got cable, drugs and big cars - what else are you going to spend the surplus on ? I'd much rather spend it on looking out into space than have Bush spend it on trying to nuke "rogue states" that most US citizens can't even find on a map.
Porn detection is easy. Much of it (SoCal organisations anyway) is fed from a very small number of very large server farms. Any admin connected with the industry can recognise these by their IP. Although this only detects a fraction of all possible porn, any access to numbers in these blocks is a very reliable indicator of at least some porn content.
Statistically, a porn consumer is also likely to have hit at least one of the sites connected with these cartels.
I work with web-streamed video. Talking to porn webmasters is essential to my work, because these are the guys who had to solve all my problems a year before I knew I had them, and (respect due) they're almost the only profitable part of the dot.com game.
Slashdot Mirror
You really are a moron, aren't you 8-(
You can't even spell half their names, and I assume you meant Iraq, not Iran (probably you just wanted to go for both).
I wish I wasn't even the same species as you.
HTF is this an "insight" ? It's one viewpoint, and it's understandable. It might even be morally justified (you have to ask yourself that). What it clearly isn't is "Insightful". What's an "insight" ? It's a new and novel view of something that makes it clearer and opens up a new path through some problem.
This is just the same old "Eye for an Eye" strategy, justifying itself because America has all the guns.
It's no new and smarter approach to solving anything.
Any useful leader would long ago have turned away from terrorism, and toward realistic efforts for peace. Arafat has been the singular roadblock to this.
By local standards, Arafat is a positive dove compared to some. It sounds very much as if you quote his name just because it's the only one you know!
Secondly, what has Israel been doing in the last few weeks ? Regular helicopter and tank attacks on Palestinians, with little thought as to civilian casualties.
America has supported Israel in this. It has not castigated Israel for any over-reaction (when many other non-Arab nations have)nad it has done nothing to distance itself from these actions. Whether you support these actions or not, this evident support will have consequences for the safety of Americans.
You might regard Israel as justified, you might regard America's support for it as reasonable, but you should not be surprised when others don't feel that way and response by an escalated attack.
I think I heard that one before.
Did it work then ?
Cute problem solver (although it's a "play it once and then not again"). If you get stuck you wander round and round for ever, but you can't (almost!) kill the character off. One of the designer's aims was to make a fun non-violent game, and they succeeded pretty well.
Very nice visuals too. No rendering - they just made it all of plasticine and filmed it.
Hang on, a blue cat ? Surely that was stolen from the Magic Roundabaout....
No one wants to have a whole computer in their pocket
I do. The thing I like about the first Palms is that they were computers, not just PDAs. Sure, I bought one because I wanted a PDA, and I bought a Palm PDA because they had better HotSync than any others, but the reason I'm still using them today is because they're also a quite useful pocket computer. I calculate IP netmasks and tide timetables on mine. I can even write my own programs to convert video tape timecodes (and other personal weirdness).
Moore's law for bandwidth is increasing at a slower rate than processing power. I think Palms have a limited lifetime (in their current incarnation) but the future is going to be more like a desktop PC (thicker clients), not like a Blackberry (limited and task-specific).
We'd better all learn to bend over and squeal like a piggy, because there's a real risk that the "Palm of the Future" might be a Windows-spawn gadget, horrible prospect though that is.
So show me one company that is giving out Palms to their employees.
How many do you want ? Even today, I know at least six local companies doing this, and they're suits, not nerds.
People like this person should have no rights.
The problem with that attitude is that you don't define "like this person".
Sure, bad guys shouldn't have rights. Who gets to pick the bad guys ? J. Edgar Hoover ? The Pinkerton agency ? Was Rodney King a bad guy, deserving of losing his rights ? - LA's finest seemed to think so.
The point about "inalienable rights" is that they're inalienable. Even spies, murderers and Flash coders get to keep them. You might like to be able to withdraw these rights from "appropriate" groups, but on the whole society works better if we leave the bad guys with a few too many, but don't have to worry about stormtroopers and death squads artbitrarily deciding they can remove them from any citizen they choose to.
While you're at the Lego site, try their mosaic-maker too. Upload a photo, and have a brick mosaic delivered.
That's a whole bunch of my Xmas presents taken care of....
Well, this one carries fuel.
To some extent, so does a base-bleed shell.
Logistically, shells should be square-ended. You get more bang into the the chamber that way.
Aerodynamically, shells should be pointed at both ends, or in fact, even more pointed at the tail. The trouble with this is that it loses useful volume - although it's commonly done with small arms. The trick with base-bleed is that by burning a slow propellant in the tail of the shell, a high pressure gas plume is generated that makes the shell appear to be long-tailed, aerodynamically. You get the same compact shell layout (although you lose some space for propellant) and you get a long-range shell.
There are also rocket assist shells, but these are rare - they didn't work too well. They have some uses for heavy calibres with low muzzle velocities, but they lose in accuracy what they gained in range.
But doesn't the speed of sound change with the air-pressure?
Yes, but that's not so relevant. It's easy to make things go faster - just accelerate them. What gets to be really hard is making them travel at a higher Mach (speed relative to the current speed of sound), because most aerodynamic behaviour isn't dependent on speed, it's dependent on Mach. The behaviour and position of shock waves depends on the Mach, and that's the tricky one.
This isn't an exercise in making a fast projectile, it's an exercise in making an engine that can still generate useful thrust when travelling at high Mach (and doing it in free-flight, not a tunnel).
What makes this any different from a base bleed boat tail artillary shell?
It still accelerates after it has left the tube.
Secondly, WTF is a "base bleed boat tail" shell ? I've never seen anything (certainly not South African) that used both base-bleed and any boat-tailing together. Why would you ? If you use base-bleed you need the volume of a blunt-end, but you don't need the shaping.
Maybe it's just some 'Merkin deer-huntin' round...
Why is everything so all integrated into one device?
The last integrated motherboard I bought cost less than the last separate serial card I bought.
I've still got a Palm III that runs on replaceable batteries. Should I just give it the odd bit of air guitar ?
This is why your boss is the boss and you are not: he knows what he is doing.
he sounds like a good guy who knows his job and is doing it well;
Hey Andy ! When did you get a Slashdot account, and why are you posting anonymously ?
the whiny irresponsible code monkeys he has working for him.
That's Mr. Code Monkey to you
I can't see why a company may want to deploy sourceforge on site
There's no way I could get my PHB to use an open off-site SourceForge. The corporate mentality just can't cope with it - they really would rather we shared nothing and we lost half our changes.
After all, putting any of our product source into SourceForge means that it instantly becomes contaminated with the Cancer of Open Source (tm), and we would have to offer RMS a seat on the board. It must be true, he read it in Pointy Haired Weekly.
If I have a copy of SourceForge that I can spend proper money on, and I then get to label a box in the machine room as "Our SourceForge machine", then I might get to use it.
Oh, and VA Linux have to get some revenue from somewhere!
Describing Fred Hoyle as a "Big Bang Theorist" is a bit like saying that RMS invented that notion of free Unix licenses, like BSD.
Anonymous cowards do too know how to spell, dammit.
Seeing that Slash has decided to mangle our postings (the link describer), why stop there ? Let's discourage AC's from posting anonymously by randomly inserting misspielings, or W0RDZ TH4T L00K K00L and H4XX0R
PS - What does Slash do if you do post a Goatse.cx link ?
Admit it. Who bought The HTML book because:
I think teaching Java from day #1 is one of the best things that could ever happen to the teaching of programming. It's not enough to teach some abstract CS concepts, and it's too complex to teach intro programming to kids, but for the cannon-fodder training of the great majority of average coders it's a hell of a lot better than C++.
any good encryption produces an output which is indistinguishable from random noise.
That's one way to spot it. Remember the "NSA secret key in MS products" story of a while back ? The way to spot that was that the key was too random to be normal data.
ASCII characters are 7 bit, but nearly all of them are from a set of only about half of the possible values. Anything vaguely random stands out a mile in a stream of such characters, even though it would still be using valid characters.
In compiled machine code, there's a similar bias that the opcode set only uses a fraction of the possible values. Chunks of "data" stand out from pure instructions, and carefully randomised data (like a good key) stands out from everyday trash data.
It's harder for Jpegs (or Zip files). One way to get compression is to squash the limited entropy of the input data into the minimum space it will fit. Put simply, your "6 useful bits" ASCII will fit into 8-bit octets such that you have an compression of 8 characters into 6 octets. A side-effect of this increased entropy density is that the output data appears far more random (for a quick analysis). The more random it looks, it probably indicates a more efficient re-organisation of this entropy (and a better compression algorithm). Most algorithms have artefacts though. It might have output that looks random, except that (e.g.) the sequence '00 00' never appears. In truly random data, obviously everything ought to appear with equal probability. If it really does look random, then suspect a deliberate randomising process has been at work.
Analogue digitisers, including image scanners, are good randomisers. If low-bit data from an image isn't as random as you'd expect, then suspect something embedded. If it's more random than you'd expect, suspect that it's still got something embedded in it, they just hid it better.
Excuse me ? Did I wander into The Onion by mistake ?
There's only ever been one justification for the US space program:
Bombing the crap out of Russia
All of that early rocket research was focussed on big missiles, dropping bigger and bigger bombs. By the time some real biggies (Redstone, Atlas) started flying, some bright spark realised that they could carry an astronaut too. OK, so space exploration is cool, but it was the nukes that got the funding through Congress.
Since the mid-60s and the clearly established capacity to crisp Moscow to a cinder, that would even stick to Trevor's beloved frying pans, the need for NASA has waned somewhat. Exploration is still cool, a few people still think it's worth spending money on - but the defence budget money doesn't flow anything like as easily as it used to.
Secondly, America is the richest country on the planet. You've already got cable, drugs and big cars - what else are you going to spend the surplus on ? I'd much rather spend it on looking out into space than have Bush spend it on trying to nuke "rogue states" that most US citizens can't even find on a map.
Porn detection is easy. Much of it (SoCal organisations anyway) is fed from a very small number of very large server farms. Any admin connected with the industry can recognise these by their IP. Although this only detects a fraction of all possible porn, any access to numbers in these blocks is a very reliable indicator of at least some porn content.
Statistically, a porn consumer is also likely to have hit at least one of the sites connected with these cartels.
I work with web-streamed video. Talking to porn webmasters is essential to my work, because these are the guys who had to solve all my problems a year before I knew I had them, and (respect due) they're almost the only profitable part of the dot.com game.
PS - Good to see you on Slashdot, Sheldon.
Well, that's what you get when you flatten a piece of steel, fold it in two, and stretch it back while hammering it 15 times...
Nice idea. Shame that's not how they're forged.
(it's a common myth)