I went to see one of the championship finals a few years ago, and it is excellent fun. There are two built-in moments which are bound to be awesome: (1) when the box round is over, tension is through the roof, and the boxers are sat down around a chess board with classical music on, and (2) when two steps before a chess mate, the about-to-lose guy has three minutes to beat out all the smart from the opponent.
Best spectator sport I can imagine, can only recommend to see one.
I can confirm this sport is excellent from a spectator standpoint. I also went to see some championship (I think) fights in London a few years ago and having never seen it before I was very skeptical. After the event however, I raved about it to anyone willing to listen – still do, evidently!
Unless you write down that password or use it elsewhere, that can be considered secret. Compare that to the difficulty of sampling someone's voice by simply eavesdropping.
From the comments there it seems that it's not about (perceived) risks at all, it's more about peer pressure. If no other parents in your group would let their kids go about on their own, you surely won't want to be the only one.
If price was the only factor that matters, we could be using nickel-metal-hydride batteries. They also last longer.
A more important aspect where Sodium would be better than Lithium for batteries is that it doesn't catch fire that easily. Lithium batteries are prone to thermal runaway, where if you increase their temperature that makes them release more energy and increase their temperature even more until they combust violently.
Yes, but the reason for fire is the liquid electrolyte. Lithium batteries don't have to catch fire. A short clip from PBS Nova: https://youtu.be/m9-cNNYb1Ik
Sodium Carbon batteries have the same issue with flammable liquid organic solvent electrolytes. There is research being done into using a solid electrolyte and a metal anode though.
When it comes to batteries, disposing them is the smaller problem as it’s quite straight forward to recycle. Mining resources is what accounts for the majority of pollution & environment damage.
Spontaneously catching fire five days after a crash seems really good! Somewhere between five seconds and five minutes is when it would be problematic.
Who are the students though? I'd assume that parallel computing is mostly interesting for university-grade "aspiring scientists", which is reinforced by the example software (a parallel 2D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics(SPH) code and a parallel Mandelbrot set race).
Do we assume that 18+ folks are only interested in parallel programming if it's assembled of shiny pipes?
Doesn’t seem like anyone assumes that. I’m interested in this stuff, but having it visual and physical like that would spark my interest even more. Seems like a no brainer that it makes students learn without studying a text book
To remove pirated movies from the interwebs there are two options really: either attack content providers / trackers etc, or, find the users directly.
In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)
"In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents"
How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to trackers I download from or ISP monitored?
"[...] with a heavy fine."
Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")
I'm not familiar with the German legal system but the sum did depend on what they've uploaded. (It was detailed in the letter, if I remember correctly, $600 for half an episode-of-whatever and $3000 for multiple movies.)
As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the ISP side.
No it's not the tracker, it also works for magnet links and people get letters for downloading.
There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it.
These companies are the scum of the scum, tbh, I recall I once got a letter claiming I must pay about 6000€ for illegally downloading "Debian 5 Linux Netboot ISO" and "Ubuntu 12.04 x86 Full ISO" or something along those lines.
They sent some awfully scary letters for what amounts to legally obtaining an ISO file.
I used to run an abandoned warez site when I was young. I received a lot of cease and desist letters from "lawyers". They usually failed to identify the infringing material, failed to show they had the right to act on the copywriters behalf and a staggering amount of them confused trademark infringement with copyright infringement. Also, every last one I received via email. Yeah, right, like that's going to hold up. I ignored all of them and never got even so much as a follow up.
In other words, such things are considered low-hanging fruit by these companies. Just throw it out there and see what sticks.
Luckily the german system is less strict than the DMCA, you can fact-check any letters you get, you only need to act if you know (for certain) it's illegal
Though that only tells you the RIPE member for it.
They might have still leased the IP elsewhere (which is totally informal, if you operate a IP range all you need is a letter saying you can do it with the owner's signature)
At least a few years ago in Sweden, all cases where someone had payed a fine for downloading pirated material due to such letters was because the person admitted guilt. The anti-piracy organizations had no way of forcing someone to pay, because none of the evidence would hold up in court. They tried to submit screenshots of IP addresses, but since it's easy to spoof it wasn't enough to convict someone.
I don't know if this has changed in recent years, as I haven't heard anything about it recently.
Copyright holders have been sending those kinds of settlement demands in Finland as well. They seem to be monitoring the torrent swarm for relevant IP addresses so that they can demand that ISPs hand over account holder's names. ISP are by law required to hand over this information if the users has shared something illegally to "a significant degree".
They settlement demands have been between 500€ and 3000€ and they have usually been lowered in the cases that have gone to court. A few have however ended up footing legal costs in the tens of thousands.
> ISP are by law required to hand over this information if the users has shared something illegally to "a significant degree".
ISP's only hand over data by court order but in the past few years, court orders have granted this right to pretty much every request from the copyright holders. ISP's are now contesting this and there were two recent judgements in the courts to allow ISPs not to hand over the data. See this [0] (in Finnish).
So the situation is now better in Finland, partially because the predatory abuse from copyright holders' law firms sending out tons of "fines".
IIRC there are Tor exit nodes in germany, they also filter some traffic but only on the lowest amount of effort they have to do legally. Ie the usual suspects: illegal porn, illegal torrents (usually also porn) and websites not conforming to strict german industry standards.
How does the node operator know what traffic should be blocked (i.e. that something is illegal porn or illegal torrent) ? Is there an official source that says for example which website should be blocked and that is enough ?
I have a Tor relay (not an exit node) running in Germany.
Once I started reading other people's experience of running an exit node through that ISP (Hetzner), it turned out that the hosting company was the one receiving these reports and forwarding them to you. After it, the consequences can range all the way from warnings to physically shutting down your server until you do something ridiculous (IIRC send them a physical mail).
Since I didn't want to risk my server being shut down for whatever reason (there are some other uses of it non-Tor related, and the rest of the monthly bandwidth goes towards Tor relay), I've decided to just not run the exit node.
I'd say it's still very useful to the Tor network, since it handles something like 400 GB of Tor traffic per day.
I was sort of joking a bit but I do know that german node operators block some traffic.
However, it's on a purely notice-and-takedown basis, which is the DMCA of germany but more broadly applicable; if you are made aware of illegal activity on your network you must stop the activity and take reasonable measures to prevent future abuse. They can also fall under the network operator laws in which case they are not responsible for the traffic at all but I'm not sure if that is applicable to tor nodes or not.
Under german law, yes, notice-and-takedown is basically all you need to adhere to; if you are aware of illegal activities, you must take measures to stop them. (But unlike the DMCA for example, you are allowed to verify any notices thoroughly before taking action, you only have to listen to verified claims)
Feynman’s method to understand complex problems is so simple and elegant! Surely you’re joking, mr Feynman:
”I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these “dumb” questions: “Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?” But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, “Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!” The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?” He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, “Wait! There’s a mistake!”
"I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, ‘False!’"
This is also useful to understand preconditions by reduction. I.e. if you want to understand a theorem, it can sometimes be useful to start by figuring out the reason behind the preconditions. "Why does this apply only to balls that have hair?" Simply go, "What would the theorem imply if I start with a smooth ball instead?"
This practise can also lead to generalisations. Oftentimes starting with a smooth ball will make you go "What? That't can't be possible."
But sometimes, starting with a smooth ball leads you to, "Huh, that's really, really weird. But it's not a contradiction in and of itself. I could use that result in another context!"
I have no idea why you were being down-voted, and I wonder how many of the down-voters are actually mathematicians. If they were responding to your tone they need to know that it's incredibly mild compared with what one could say.
I upvoted you, but clearly didn't undo all the downvotes.
Which are a form of example. You don't store those counter examples in your head - you write them down. If they don't turn out to be counter examples, what are they?
I read that in Feynman's voice in my mind. His tone is unmistakable with each word he utters you can hear him smile with astonishment at the complexity of things.
These counterexamples are sometimes a bit involved, but I find they are often useful for understanding the purpose of the technical assumptions that accompany many theorems.
When you're talking about complex abstract systems, I have 2 or 3 real world models going on in my head and playing out chains of consequences at the same time. When your abstract system falls down I can tell you where and what caused it despite not understanding a word of your explanation as to why it should. All those mathematical equations and models may as well be Greek to me.
What’s interesting is that it correctly finds Namecheap whois-guarded domains too. If I search for the guarded domain directly it shows the correct record as the owner’s address/etc being WhoisGuard, but then if I search for a non-guarded domain and click through from the identified name, it does list the guarded domains as well (!)
