Can you explain that a bit more please. How is a neutral charged particle differentiated experimentally from an uncharged particle ? Won't both of them show the same electromagnetic characteristic unless we break down into some "closeness" parameter where the charge density shifting may result in the neutral charged particle to start displaying some net charge in a particular direction(?) If they have already done that, then can you explain how do you confirm if its in fact an uncharged particle or merely a neutral particle which has not been subjected to electromagnetic field of the required strength at the required distance - specially considering that the particle was unknown before the experiment.
Re:I joke a lot on Slashdot, but serious question
on
The Math Behind PageRank
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Thanks for the informative post. I have one question though. How does it help find the relevant information unless that information just happens to be on a popular page too? What I mean to say is that the idea behind grading/filtering systems like PageRank is to provide the most relevant information about the thing you are trying to search on the net. Now suppose Mr. A is looking for some obscure Indian text written in Sanskrit and Mr. B has (recently or not) put up a website with that text as one of the contents but its not a popular blogsite, nor a mainstream ebook source site etc. And there are a gazillion hugely popular sites out there which mention that particular text while talking about a totally different book or text.
So it means the only way that Mr. A will come across Mr. B's website is if he kept on looking for 100s of result pages or if he just chanced upon it via something he read about earlier. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of making the searches more relevant, specially since lots of webmasters actively use PageRanking system to get better ranking on the search index. Where does that leave the people with worthwhile content but not much popular backing?
(I would like to clear that I am not trying to knock this system or anything, I am just curious about the implications for small-but-good-content website owners)
I know exactly what you mean. I used the same technique in my college where they had a policy of forcing the students to use difficult-to-guess passwords and change them every 90 days. My routine back then was shifting the right hand strokes one key left or right, and same for the left hand alternatively. The positive side of it was I could type every new password really fast so it was next to impossible to 'see' the password but, like you said, it was impossible to tell anyone what my password was (I remember one friend getting mad at me because he thought I did not trust him enough to let him use my account for one printout! good times:)
Hell, make it deny everyone. The less legitimate use of windows there is in the world, the more people will get into free alternatives. What are you talking about. Crack the damn thing and put it on a torrent. That is a free alternative.
I am really not clear about the problem with having a spare address on Gmail/yahoo/whatever just for registration. Someone asked the same thing somewhere above and was told it would get out of control very fast. I have been using three dummy addresses (2 yahoo and one lycos) for all the stupid registrations, for 4 years now. Never had a problem with any of them. I can get back to them if I really need to read a mail (e.g if I forget the password to some forum account).
If you do not check the account for a long time (~3 months in yahoo and similar in lots of others) then they just suspend your account till you reactivate it (all your mails are deleted but then they were not important to begin with) Moreover, if you forgot a password to some forum/board, you can just get it to mail you at that same address after reactivation so the risk factor is zero. Most of the mail provider (except hotmail) use decent spam filters so the inbox is decently readable even when you have to hunt for some particular mail.
Someone said that people can sniff your surfing/purchasing habits if you use a single mail id on all of them. First of all, do you really provide real personal information when creating email addresses? Who cares if someone can gather all that info and tie it to a person who does not exists. Secondly, if you are really paranoid, why would you use a single mail address for surfing and purchasing contact addresses ?
Am I missing something obvious here or people are just excited about disposable addresses because they don't like registering different accounts on webmail providers? I did not even have to create a different dummy Gmail account when Gmail came on to the scene and I totally shifted to it for webmails, because the old three worked so well for me.
Even though I totally hate the idea of spilling anything hot over me, the idea of Natalie Portman pouring hot grits in my pants seemed kind of hot. However, after scalding myself with engine oil once, and seeing a picture of her with one hand inside the jeans and scratching her ass, the fantasy has turned into a nightmare.
If the value premise of the case were true, that meant that if I used Photoshop to put a bowl of hot grits in her hands and blatantly put my back in place of her, then linked to it on slashdot, I would have used the image of Natalie Portman illegally under copyright law and will be subjected to all sorts of governmental discipline.
Does this make any sense? Yes. But is it of any relevance to the case except in some fucking remote weird sense? No. Is Natalie Portman hotter than Britney Spears? Yes.
I mean enjoyed it for whatever time he/she played it, try the Cloud Game. Its also made with the same relaxing theme in mind. Don't worry if you have trouble with the control part in the beginning, you will figure out the "how-to" part after a min or so.
Ah..so you were supposed to go up? I finished the blue level, played the orange level till I got to the bottom and gad damn was it tough to eat that snake thingy at bottom. I defeated him after 15-20 min to tight circling and trying to eat as many key points, then I did not know what to do so gave up. Haven't touched it since. So yeah I agree that the replay value is not much in the format released on the net. Perhaps they will introduce some new 'powers' when you eat a creature bigger than yourself (like those huge triangular bastards who chase you like hell if you eat their eyes hehe). But I will give it a shot when it comes out.
I know some people (specially those of you who are professional musicians etc.) are touchy about the subject of piracy, and I kind of understand a lot of points thrown against the 'pirates'. But there is another Big side to piracy which people try to downplay most of the times -> Future Market
Its may be a bit difficult for people living in the US to understand but in lots of countries, pirated music is the only way people get their first taste of music coming out of US. There is no way I would have been introduced to names like Pearl Jam, Jethro Tull, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Alice in Chains, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Sinatra, Johnny Cash et al if it was not for pirated music during my college days. Now when I have started working, these are the names I look for when I am buying CDs for myself or friends/family. These are the names I recommend to anyone who asks for suggestion regarding the next music purchase. Its free publicity and it gives us a choice to actually know if the artist or his/her album/track is actually good. MTV and VH1 videos don't mean crap specially since they have started putting crap all over their screen now (who came up with the idea that everyone loves every kind of rap/pop/hip-hop just so long as you can show voluptuous models in skimpy clothes in the videos?).
Apple sauce, coca-cola and honey are all types of beer. Why do I think this?
They're liquids.
People enjoy their taste.
You can buy them in stores.
They often come in glass containers.
What a revelation! See how I did that? I just set aside the key features of beer (it's brown, it gets you drunk, etc) and all of a sudden everything is just like beer! Wow! GP made some poor points but you are making a faulty argument yourself. You said you set aside the key features of Beer to prove the fallacy of his argument. Meaning thereby that you can remove all the 4 points from the list and it would still be a Beer. I agree. Now take a look at GP's list:
1. Absolute belief in the leader was required for all subjects (like a theocracy)
2. The punishment for thoughtcrime (heresy) involved torture, imprisonment and death (like the Spanish Inquisition).
3. A promised land of plenty (a workers paradise, lebensraum, or heaven) was just around the corner for the people that did what the leader wanted.
4. Any failure to reach this promised land was the fault of the people, not the leader (just as continued suffering in the world is due to our continuing to sin).
2.removed without a problem 4.removed without a problem 3. Tricky one. Will people really believe in a religion and its doctrines if they were not told that there is some sort of reward at the END for behaving and living in a particular way as described in their holy scriptures ? I have my doubts. (I personally think its almost as important as the next point to the belief in any religion) 1. This seems the most relevant of the points. Can there Be any religion if the followers did not completely believe in their 'God'?
I know its probably too late to get into a discussion here but seriously, what were you smoking when you gave that hot stove example? Is touching the hot stove evil? or a sin ? Its not good for him to touch it because it burns his hand not because it condemns his soul to hell or deceives his parents/creator or any shit like that. Moreover, thousands of kids burn their hands while growing up when placed in a similar situation because its human nature to be curious about things they do not understand (specially true for children). Fire/light attracts by nature. This is what draws children to the red glow. Some of them get scared when they get too near it because of the heat, but then some of them take the final step and touch it, only to burn their hands. I am sure they all sinned against some fruity organization which writes down laws in their secret book saying that touching a hot stove will get them thrown out of the human society.
Now if, instead of Hot Stove example, you talked about Hot Coffee then I would have supported you against all these heathen bastards trolling slashdot. >:)
Seiously, are there people out there who replace their hard drives just because they are not the new shiny model in the market? Always make regular backups of important data and that should be sufficient for most of the mortals - may not be applicable if you are running some sort of datacenter or some other important business where the minor efficiency (seek time etc.) fluctuation factor is very important.
I have much smaller hd config (40*1+120*1+200*2). No RAID or SATA, all old fashioned IDE cabled. 40 gigs one is my system drive and is about 5 years old (yeah I know thats incredibly inefficient for a system drive but it has served me well and I am not rich enough to have extra cash to go for a small smarter drive), all the rest of the drives are also about 2 years old, bought withing 3-4 months of each other. Never had any problems with any of them so far (and I use the 200 gb drives+USB casing as portable storage when I travel!) Just make sure to backup your important data. Blank DVDs are dirt cheap for crying out loud!.
Wow. Seriously I have no idea why it felt so correct at the time. I should probably recheck all the the work I did yesterday. If I can fuck up simple subtraction then there is no telling what else I fucked up that day. And I heard the boss saying they have a financial crisis looming overhead, they don't even need me to screw everything.
I mean yeah some of the tips and tricks may (or may not) work in the short run but eventually the spammers will get your id (not to mention the trouble to your customers if you obfuscate the id too much). Its not always how you displayed you mailid on your website or webpage that ultimately gets it harvested. More often than not, its stupid users with your address in their contact lists who get it out in the open.
Like most of the people, I use multiple mail ids for different uses. Lots of them are fakes just to register to sites and such, and a couple are private ones which are used only to correspond with the closest friends and family members. Recently one of my friends told me that he has used my address to register for a gaming site since his was already being used for one account and apparently creating a new id takes ages and he may die before he gets a new one so why not use mine which is totally personal to me but who gives a damn. He actually has no idea why he should Not be doing it. And he is a CS major from the one of the best colleges in the country! Now think of the regular users you may have corresponded to and how easy it is for them to fuck everything trick you have tried to evade harvester bots.
Slashdot broken: feels like the times when a thunderstorm used to hit my home and everything will stop working(including all electrical appliances). Then everyone will drop whatever they were doing, light a fire in the covered verandah and sit around it sipping tea/coffee and swapping stories !
On a more serious note, I don't think random items/powerups placement is a good idea for MP maps. They may work in a single player campaign in the sense that the game will have more replayable value but MP maps are about strategies as much as the 'twitching reaction' time - specially true in case of FPS games. That is the whole point why there are different strategies for different maps because they have different types of items available at different places. If you randomize the location of key items then you are not making the map interesting, you are playing a different map each time.
For example, I don't know how many people here were into q3a (It was insanely popular in my college and my first experience with fps mp so I may be a bit biased) but, if you are playing with good players, you got to have good strategies for the map you are playing. Someone can be awesome with weapon accuracy but suck at strategies and still lose, while another can be decent with weapons but great in devising strategies according to the situation and will beat the first guy hands down. (anyone remember lexer's match where the other guy kept getting all the major powerups but just kept running blindly around the map trying to corner lexer, eventually to be killed when he was caught off guard)
Not to mention the "Luck" factor it will bring into the MP games. You just killed off the guy, are a bit low on health and were running back to the red armour which is about to respawn but the opponent spawns on the other side of the map near a measly yellow armour and *BOOM* the Red Armour decides to appear right in front of him.
Oh and on-topic: dm17 and pro-q3dm6 in Q3A are examples of good map design. One for its sheer action value, other for more 'gameplay'.
There are so many carbon copy (WOW,MySpace,AIM) comments, which will be repeated by some other clueless bums trying to act smart. So we can safely say that Adults use internet to try to find one amusing statement/quote and repeat it over and over again till everyone is sick of it, then they move on to the next one.
Seriously, whats with the negative remarks. Don't you think just maybe some other purpose behind the study apart from which sites 'young' people like to visit and what they use to kill their bandwidth. If the question was more general "What do people use net for?" then the first comment would have been "Porn" - which although amusing and not entirely incorrect, would have been far from the complete picture.
For example: Most of the people hate seeing ads (targeted or otherwise) but there is a reason why websites have come to realise that putting huge blinking Flash ads on the pages is a bad idea and have started to move away from the stupid idea (Google ads anyone?). Online usage research can be productive if put to good use.
I remember the trailer of the first Ali G movie (never watched the movie itself though). There is a scene where he is arguing with some pimp and there are these three ladies standing near them. So the pimp says something like
{pimp}: "..these hoes belong to me"
{Ali G}: "Belong?! That's a very sexist way to talk about these bitches!"
Slashdot Mirror
Can you explain that a bit more please. How is a neutral charged particle differentiated experimentally from an uncharged particle ? Won't both of them show the same electromagnetic characteristic unless we break down into some "closeness" parameter where the charge density shifting may result in the neutral charged particle to start displaying some net charge in a particular direction(?) If they have already done that, then can you explain how do you confirm if its in fact an uncharged particle or merely a neutral particle which has not been subjected to electromagnetic field of the required strength at the required distance - specially considering that the particle was unknown before the experiment.
Thanks for the laugh. Needed it :)
Thanks for the informative post. I have one question though. How does it help find the relevant information unless that information just happens to be on a popular page too? What I mean to say is that the idea behind grading/filtering systems like PageRank is to provide the most relevant information about the thing you are trying to search on the net. Now suppose Mr. A is looking for some obscure Indian text written in Sanskrit and Mr. B has (recently or not) put up a website with that text as one of the contents but its not a popular blogsite, nor a mainstream ebook source site etc. And there are a gazillion hugely popular sites out there which mention that particular text while talking about a totally different book or text.
So it means the only way that Mr. A will come across Mr. B's website is if he kept on looking for 100s of result pages or if he just chanced upon it via something he read about earlier. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of making the searches more relevant, specially since lots of webmasters actively use PageRanking system to get better ranking on the search index. Where does that leave the people with worthwhile content but not much popular backing?
(I would like to clear that I am not trying to knock this system or anything, I am just curious about the implications for small-but-good-content website owners)
umm... </joke> That should do it :P
I know exactly what you mean. I used the same technique in my college where they had a policy of forcing the students to use difficult-to-guess passwords and change them every 90 days. My routine back then was shifting the right hand strokes one key left or right, and same for the left hand alternatively. The positive side of it was I could type every new password really fast so it was next to impossible to 'see' the password but, like you said, it was impossible to tell anyone what my password was (I remember one friend getting mad at me because he thought I did not trust him enough to let him use my account for one printout! good times :)
I am really not clear about the problem with having a spare address on Gmail/yahoo/whatever just for registration. Someone asked the same thing somewhere above and was told it would get out of control very fast. I have been using three dummy addresses (2 yahoo and one lycos) for all the stupid registrations, for 4 years now. Never had a problem with any of them. I can get back to them if I really need to read a mail (e.g if I forget the password to some forum account).
If you do not check the account for a long time (~3 months in yahoo and similar in lots of others) then they just suspend your account till you reactivate it (all your mails are deleted but then they were not important to begin with) Moreover, if you forgot a password to some forum/board, you can just get it to mail you at that same address after reactivation so the risk factor is zero. Most of the mail provider (except hotmail) use decent spam filters so the inbox is decently readable even when you have to hunt for some particular mail.
Someone said that people can sniff your surfing/purchasing habits if you use a single mail id on all of them. First of all, do you really provide real personal information when creating email addresses? Who cares if someone can gather all that info and tie it to a person who does not exists. Secondly, if you are really paranoid, why would you use a single mail address for surfing and purchasing contact addresses ?
Am I missing something obvious here or people are just excited about disposable addresses because they don't like registering different accounts on webmail providers? I did not even have to create a different dummy Gmail account when Gmail came on to the scene and I totally shifted to it for webmails, because the old three worked so well for me.
Even though I totally hate the idea of spilling anything hot over me, the idea of Natalie Portman pouring hot grits in my pants seemed kind of hot. However, after scalding myself with engine oil once, and seeing a picture of her with one hand inside the jeans and scratching her ass, the fantasy has turned into a nightmare.
If the value premise of the case were true, that meant that if I used Photoshop to put a bowl of hot grits in her hands and blatantly put my back in place of her, then linked to it on slashdot, I would have used the image of Natalie Portman illegally under copyright law and will be subjected to all sorts of governmental discipline.
Does this make any sense? Yes. But is it of any relevance to the case except in some fucking remote weird sense? No. Is Natalie Portman hotter than Britney Spears? Yes.
gg
I mean enjoyed it for whatever time he/she played it, try the Cloud Game. Its also made with the same relaxing theme in mind. Don't worry if you have trouble with the control part in the beginning, you will figure out the "how-to" part after a min or so.
Ah..so you were supposed to go up? I finished the blue level, played the orange level till I got to the bottom and gad damn was it tough to eat that snake thingy at bottom. I defeated him after 15-20 min to tight circling and trying to eat as many key points, then I did not know what to do so gave up. Haven't touched it since. So yeah I agree that the replay value is not much in the format released on the net. Perhaps they will introduce some new 'powers' when you eat a creature bigger than yourself (like those huge triangular bastards who chase you like hell if you eat their eyes hehe). But I will give it a shot when it comes out.
I know some people (specially those of you who are professional musicians etc.) are touchy about the subject of piracy, and I kind of understand a lot of points thrown against the 'pirates'. But there is another Big side to piracy which people try to downplay most of the times -> Future Market
Its may be a bit difficult for people living in the US to understand but in lots of countries, pirated music is the only way people get their first taste of music coming out of US. There is no way I would have been introduced to names like Pearl Jam, Jethro Tull, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Alice in Chains, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Sinatra, Johnny Cash et al if it was not for pirated music during my college days. Now when I have started working, these are the names I look for when I am buying CDs for myself or friends/family. These are the names I recommend to anyone who asks for suggestion regarding the next music purchase. Its free publicity and it gives us a choice to actually know if the artist or his/her album/track is actually good. MTV and VH1 videos don't mean crap specially since they have started putting crap all over their screen now (who came up with the idea that everyone loves every kind of rap/pop/hip-hop just so long as you can show voluptuous models in skimpy clothes in the videos?).
Now verbal argument... whats next ? Thought crime? Somehow that does not seem so ridiculous now.
Apple sauce, coca-cola and honey are all types of beer. Why do I think this?
What a revelation! See how I did that? I just set aside the key features of beer (it's brown, it gets you drunk, etc) and all of a sudden everything is just like beer! Wow!
GP made some poor points but you are making a faulty argument yourself. You said you set aside the key features of Beer to prove the fallacy of his argument. Meaning thereby that you can remove all the 4 points from the list and it would still be a Beer. I agree. Now take a look at GP's list:
2. removed without a problem
4. removed without a problem
3. Tricky one. Will people really believe in a religion and its doctrines if they were not told that there is some sort of reward at the END for behaving and living in a particular way as described in their holy scriptures ? I have my doubts. (I personally think its almost as important as the next point to the belief in any religion)
1. This seems the most relevant of the points. Can there Be any religion if the followers did not completely believe in their 'God'?
I know its probably too late to get into a discussion here but seriously, what were you smoking when you gave that hot stove example? Is touching the hot stove evil? or a sin ? Its not good for him to touch it because it burns his hand not because it condemns his soul to hell or deceives his parents/creator or any shit like that. Moreover, thousands of kids burn their hands while growing up when placed in a similar situation because its human nature to be curious about things they do not understand (specially true for children). Fire/light attracts by nature. This is what draws children to the red glow. Some of them get scared when they get too near it because of the heat, but then some of them take the final step and touch it, only to burn their hands. I am sure they all sinned against some fruity organization which writes down laws in their secret book saying that touching a hot stove will get them thrown out of the human society.
Now if, instead of Hot Stove example, you talked about Hot Coffee then I would have supported you against all these heathen bastards trolling slashdot. >:)
Seiously, are there people out there who replace their hard drives just because they are not the new shiny model in the market? Always make regular backups of important data and that should be sufficient for most of the mortals - may not be applicable if you are running some sort of datacenter or some other important business where the minor efficiency (seek time etc.) fluctuation factor is very important.
I have much smaller hd config (40*1+120*1+200*2). No RAID or SATA, all old fashioned IDE cabled. 40 gigs one is my system drive and is about 5 years old (yeah I know thats incredibly inefficient for a system drive but it has served me well and I am not rich enough to have extra cash to go for a small smarter drive), all the rest of the drives are also about 2 years old, bought withing 3-4 months of each other. Never had any problems with any of them so far (and I use the 200 gb drives+USB casing as portable storage when I travel!) Just make sure to backup your important data. Blank DVDs are dirt cheap for crying out loud!.
Wow. Seriously I have no idea why it felt so correct at the time. I should probably recheck all the the work I did yesterday. If I can fuck up simple subtraction then there is no telling what else I fucked up that day. And I heard the boss saying they have a financial crisis looming overhead, they don't even need me to screw everything.
You know, I just realized something. If you had registered 2 accounts earlier, you would have been teh l33Test l33t that ever l33ted !
Please mod me down to oblivion.
Thanks
I mean yeah some of the tips and tricks may (or may not) work in the short run but eventually the spammers will get your id (not to mention the trouble to your customers if you obfuscate the id too much). Its not always how you displayed you mailid on your website or webpage that ultimately gets it harvested. More often than not, its stupid users with your address in their contact lists who get it out in the open.
Like most of the people, I use multiple mail ids for different uses. Lots of them are fakes just to register to sites and such, and a couple are private ones which are used only to correspond with the closest friends and family members. Recently one of my friends told me that he has used my address to register for a gaming site since his was already being used for one account and apparently creating a new id takes ages and he may die before he gets a new one so why not use mine which is totally personal to me but who gives a damn. He actually has no idea why he should Not be doing it. And he is a CS major from the one of the best colleges in the country! Now think of the regular users you may have corresponded to and how easy it is for them to fuck everything trick you have tried to evade harvester bots.
Slashdot broken: feels like the times when a thunderstorm used to hit my home and everything will stop working(including all electrical appliances). Then everyone will drop whatever they were doing, light a fire in the covered verandah and sit around it sipping tea/coffee and swapping stories !
:)
Damn I miss those days now
LOL someone give this guy mod points.
On a more serious note, I don't think random items/powerups placement is a good idea for MP maps. They may work in a single player campaign in the sense that the game will have more replayable value but MP maps are about strategies as much as the 'twitching reaction' time - specially true in case of FPS games. That is the whole point why there are different strategies for different maps because they have different types of items available at different places. If you randomize the location of key items then you are not making the map interesting, you are playing a different map each time.
For example, I don't know how many people here were into q3a (It was insanely popular in my college and my first experience with fps mp so I may be a bit biased) but, if you are playing with good players, you got to have good strategies for the map you are playing. Someone can be awesome with weapon accuracy but suck at strategies and still lose, while another can be decent with weapons but great in devising strategies according to the situation and will beat the first guy hands down. (anyone remember lexer's match where the other guy kept getting all the major powerups but just kept running blindly around the map trying to corner lexer, eventually to be killed when he was caught off guard)
Not to mention the "Luck" factor it will bring into the MP games. You just killed off the guy, are a bit low on health and were running back to the red armour which is about to respawn but the opponent spawns on the other side of the map near a measly yellow armour and *BOOM* the Red Armour decides to appear right in front of him.
Oh and on-topic: dm17 and pro-q3dm6 in Q3A are examples of good map design. One for its sheer action value, other for more 'gameplay'.
There are so many carbon copy (WOW,MySpace,AIM) comments, which will be repeated by some other clueless bums trying to act smart. So we can safely say that Adults use internet to try to find one amusing statement/quote and repeat it over and over again till everyone is sick of it, then they move on to the next one.
Seriously, whats with the negative remarks. Don't you think just maybe some other purpose behind the study apart from which sites 'young' people like to visit and what they use to kill their bandwidth. If the question was more general "What do people use net for?" then the first comment would have been "Porn" - which although amusing and not entirely incorrect, would have been far from the complete picture.
For example: Most of the people hate seeing ads (targeted or otherwise) but there is a reason why websites have come to realise that putting huge blinking Flash ads on the pages is a bad idea and have started to move away from the stupid idea (Google ads anyone?). Online usage research can be productive if put to good use.
I remember the trailer of the first Ali G movie (never watched the movie itself though). There is a scene where he is arguing with some pimp and there are these three ladies standing near them. So the pimp says something like
..these hoes belong to me"
:)
{pimp}: "
{Ali G}: "Belong?! That's a very sexist way to talk about these bitches!"
Cracked me up
uZing k0rrekT sPelling ??????????????????????
Thanks, and yes I shouldn't have been so lazy. I just thought that the title was AC's own invention :)
Pretty good. Who is the author? Are there more by him ?