Define "really fricking big," please - because I don't see it as being a real problem. Sure, if you're trying to simulate a full g, it would have to be pretty sizable, but that isn't really necessary. Something like this, you could probably get by with.1 g. Possbily even less - all you really need is there to be some kind of "down," (aside from the enemy's gate), such that you don't have to completely retrain your reflexes and relearn your skills for an environment which doesn't have one.
I'd think.98m/s would suffice to provide a suitable frame of reference.
But these people already don't care what ends up on their machine. I seriously doubt that the consequences of Joe Sixpack being made more complacent about computer security (if that's even possible) outweigh the benefits of having Joe Sixpack's complacency used to help clean up the problem.
But maybe he would, if the person he was dating provided the phone at no cost, the plan at no cost, noted that he could talk to other women on it while they were dating, could use it to pick up other women after they broke up, and that some other particularly attractive women wouldn't accept calls without the change, either.
But even then, the analogy is flawed. A better question would be:
Would you divorce your wife if she decided that you had to switch from Sprint to Cingular, it wouldn't cost you anything extra, and while most of your friends are free calls on Sprint, all of them would be free calls on Cingular?
Of course, if you asked that question, you wouldn't get the answer you wanted.
As secondary effects go, though, hampering lines of communication between malware writers by compromising trust isn't so bad.
Even if the development of fixes to exploits isn't accelerated, and the heuristic approach fails, having hordes of zombie boxes that are zombies specifically for the purpose of distributing malware fixes has got to be faster than trusting people to consciously patch their own computers.
The beauty of it is, of course, that the very people least likely to notice, care about, remove, or prevent malware from ending up on their machines are the people that this scheme would use to clean up the problem. People who are diligent about avoiding malicious software would also not be hosting the cleanup software, since it wouldn't have managed to sneak onto their system, either.
This is neat. Kudos to these guys, and I'm glad they're doing what they're doing.
But it isn't a long-term solution; it still depends on human-speed recognition of the exploit and development of a patch.
What we need is the spread of viruses/worms/trojans whose payload is the removal of malware. Internet antibodies, as it were. The ultimate goal ought to be an antibody - or, to coin a term, an ant.iBody (ant.eBody?) - software that heuristically determines what is malware and what is legitimate software, preventing the former while allowing the latter and propagates itself across the network.
Of course, deploying something like that would break all sorts of computer security laws...but it's not like that stops anything else.
Unless you can turn 180 degrees, jump, and fire a rocket at the same time, light guns aren't going to replace a mouse any time soon.
As a long-time (but dormant for a couple years now) FPSer, that statement actually sums up everything that I grew to dislike about FPS gaming.
Just exactly why should you be able to turn 180 degrees, jump, and fire a rocket (accurately!) at the same time? Picture trying to actually do this. Even if you're the stereotypical cybernetically enhanced supermarine capable of singlehandedly eliminating an entire alien race by lugging around 150 pounds of high tech weaponry and a thousand pounds of ammunition while occasionally jumping half your own height straight up yet being unable to climb over a barrier that's 51% your height - the recoil of launching a rocket in midair (while spinning, no less) ought to knock you on your ass.
Yes, yes, suspension of disbelief, no one claims the games are realistic, if you couldn't do cool stuff there'd be no point to playing, so on and so forth. It still bugs me. Just like the endless bunny hopping that's another hallmark of the FPS genre bugs me, 'cause it's lame.
Point taken; perhaps my use of the word "descriptive" is in error. I was using the term in opposition to "predictive," with the intended denotation to be that "descriptive" usage occurs after observation (the thought being that one can only describe what one has observed), while "predictive" usage occurs prior to the observation.
I am open to suggestions as to what pair of words I should have used instead.
Regardless of my possible misuse of terminology, I maintain that math's predictive power implies a reality to it that is ignored by the too-simple statement that it's simply a fiction defined by humans.
Accuracy has to do with the design and placement of the sights and their relationship to the bore.
The placement of the sights and their relationship to the bore will, certainly, affect the accuracy of a rifle as fired by a person. But that doesn't mean that tolerances of manufacture don't affect the inherent accuracy of a rifle.
Try this experiment sometime: affix an AK-47 to a rest on a shooting bench, such that it can't move. Fire thirty rounds through it at a target. Measure the spread of the resulting pattern. Do the same with an M16.
I maintain that the spread from the M16 will be smaller than from the AK-47, resulting from the inherent greater accuracy of the rifle. If the results match my expectations (and they have when I've run the experiment), this cannot be due to the sight picture, which is strictly useful to the person aiming the rifle.
This is certainly true, but don't undersell math, either. The amazing part of math is that, given certain axioms and definitions crafted to describe and fit easily-observed physical phenomena, logical extrapolations of those axioms and definitions can accurately describe physical phenomena we have not yet observed.
That is, mathematics is not purely descriptive as it relates to science. As an example, it is my understanding that the phenomenon of time dilation as velocity increases towards c was first "observed" as a result of mathematical manipulations of exsiting models, long before it was (or could be) experimentally observed.
If math were purely descriptive, this would not be the case - or, if it were, it would be only by sheerest chance; the exception, rather than the rule.
I agree, of course, that math comes out of description; 2+3=5 because those numbers represent specific physical quantities, and when you have real items in those quantities, they behave in that fashion. However, I can't help believing that there is something inherently "real" about math itself, since the logical structure of math agrees so well with physical reality so often - enough so, in fact, that the mathematical understanding of a physical phenomenon can predate observation of that physical phenomenon.
and if you configure it properly, it can be more accurate than the AK
Which means it operates at tighter tolerances, which means it's more susceptible to dirt.
While the "self cleaning" issue was the lion's share of the problems with the M16 that Vietnam made so famous, the fact does remain that the AK-47 is inherently more reliable than the M16, while being inherently less accurate.
Sort of like a Les Baer competition 1911 vs. a Glock 19.
Yes, the critic is adding meaning to the work that the artist doesn't acknowledge is there - but that doesn't make it invalid. In other areas of artistic endeavor, this is accepted as a particular take on analysis. The idea that the narrative has an existence and a meaning beyond and separate from what the author deliberately intended is the core of narrative theory.
If you want to get high-falutin', you can think of it sort of like the old proverb, "no man crosses the same stream twice. The second time, it is not the same stream, and he is not the same man."
The concept is that the work itself has no inherent meaning. There has to be an interaction between a person and the art for it to take on meaning - one of those interactions is with the artist and the art, of course, but just as important is the interaction between the viewer/reader/gamer/etc. and the art. It's both the art itself and what you get from it that define the meaning of the art.
As a banal example, consider the word "home." "Home," though it's got a generally accepted meaning that everyone understands, also means something very different to each person, and at different times within any given person's life. For me, right now, "home" means a specific apartment in a specific building, which is also occupied by my fiancee, our cats, and a metric crapload of stuff.
Presumably, it means something entirely different to you (unless you've been living under our bed with Niles).
Or, to look at it another way - let's assume that, say, Fitzgerald had specific meanings and symbols in mind when he wrote Gatsby. So you could argue that those are the "correct" meanings of the book. But imagine for a moment that Fitzgerald never lived, and The Great Gatsby was output from some program that randomly selected word. Would this mean that the novel had no meaning? What difference does it make that a person set a particular collection of words to paper as opposed to a computer doing it, from the point of view of the reader?
More pertinently, perhaps, can no one get any meaning out of the Odyssey, since no one can ask Homer what he really meant?
Words, paintings, statues, music, video games do not, in themselves, mean anything. They are only given meaning by being experienced; as such, it is perfectly legitimate to attribute meaning to a work that the creator did not explicitly intend.
I'm not a physicist, an opticsologistician, and I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but lack of qualification has never stopped me from posting before.
SO
I believe that as you scale up the size of the lens, the resolution attainable scales up faster than the area of the lens. But this is a dimly-recalled memory of something I saw somewhere once, probably on the internet, so I would be far from shocked to discover I'm completely wrong.
(Of course, those aren't really your intestines, but this holodeck goes for intensity in imagery.)
Since the safety protocols have no doubt broken/been bypassed/been shut off/been overridden by a rogue AI inside the holodeck program itself, those are, in fact, really your intestines.
It's not the precision of the optics that matters*, it's the size. You could support 31 megapixels if you were willing to put a big enough aperture on the front of the camera. Look at the lens of an HD TV camera sometime - it's much wider than the lens on an SD TV. The extra information is captured by widening the light intake, rather than perfecting the light intake for a given width.
*This statement is to be taken strictly in the context of improving on current optics for higher resolutions. Obviously, the precision of the optics is the most important single factor in the technical quality of a photograph from a reasonable camera; but, as you pointed out, the precision of the optics is pretty much plateaued.
I'm serious when I say this, so bear that in mind as you snicker......but: what's the challenge, here? What's the innovation? If you're not worried about how you're going to fit it into an existing transmission medium (that is, they obviously aren't worried about sending OTA on a TV channel), then what's the challenge to designing a higher-resolution spec?
How is this different than me defining a video spec that operates at 1048576 x 589824 pixels x 120 fps, non-interlaced? Is it just that they spent the money to have custom hardware designed to meet their UHD spec?
(As I alluded to at the beginning, I suspect I'm just ignorant of what actually goes into developing this sort of thing - information replies will get a cookie. Never mind that it comes from slashdot.org, I promise that's my cookie you're getting)
Slashdot Mirror
Define "really fricking big," please - because I don't see it as being a real problem. Sure, if you're trying to simulate a full g, it would have to be pretty sizable, but that isn't really necessary. Something like this, you could probably get by with .1 g. Possbily even less - all you really need is there to be some kind of "down," (aside from the enemy's gate), such that you don't have to completely retrain your reflexes and relearn your skills for an environment which doesn't have one.
.98m/s would suffice to provide a suitable frame of reference.
I'd think
I take it you live somewhere with mild winters.
'Round here (Wisconsin), that mow-ped looks a lot less attractive when it's 10 below with a half inch of compressed snow/ice on the road.
Yes, but it can charge almost arbitrarily faster than a battery.
But it's gotta be better than Wart, right?
Perhaps I should have explicitly stated that I wasn't being particularly serious.
Of course it's a ridiculous claim, posted in response to a clearly not-serious post.
Crikey.
But these people already don't care what ends up on their machine. I seriously doubt that the consequences of Joe Sixpack being made more complacent about computer security (if that's even possible) outweigh the benefits of having Joe Sixpack's complacency used to help clean up the problem.
But maybe he would, if the person he was dating provided the phone at no cost, the plan at no cost, noted that he could talk to other women on it while they were dating, could use it to pick up other women after they broke up, and that some other particularly attractive women wouldn't accept calls without the change, either.
But even then, the analogy is flawed. A better question would be:
Would you divorce your wife if she decided that you had to switch from Sprint to Cingular, it wouldn't cost you anything extra, and while most of your friends are free calls on Sprint, all of them would be free calls on Cingular?
Of course, if you asked that question, you wouldn't get the answer you wanted.
As secondary effects go, though, hampering lines of communication between malware writers by compromising trust isn't so bad.
Even if the development of fixes to exploits isn't accelerated, and the heuristic approach fails, having hordes of zombie boxes that are zombies specifically for the purpose of distributing malware fixes has got to be faster than trusting people to consciously patch their own computers.
The beauty of it is, of course, that the very people least likely to notice, care about, remove, or prevent malware from ending up on their machines are the people that this scheme would use to clean up the problem. People who are diligent about avoiding malicious software would also not be hosting the cleanup software, since it wouldn't have managed to sneak onto their system, either.
Lottery tickets aren't gambling once the jackpot, in dollars, exceeds the odds against.
Then it's a perfectly legitimate risk/reward investment proposition.
This is neat. Kudos to these guys, and I'm glad they're doing what they're doing.
But it isn't a long-term solution; it still depends on human-speed recognition of the exploit and development of a patch.
What we need is the spread of viruses/worms/trojans whose payload is the removal of malware. Internet antibodies, as it were. The ultimate goal ought to be an antibody - or, to coin a term, an ant.iBody (ant.eBody?) - software that heuristically determines what is malware and what is legitimate software, preventing the former while allowing the latter and propagates itself across the network.
Of course, deploying something like that would break all sorts of computer security laws...but it's not like that stops anything else.
Unless you can turn 180 degrees, jump, and fire a rocket at the same time, light guns aren't going to replace a mouse any time soon.
As a long-time (but dormant for a couple years now) FPSer, that statement actually sums up everything that I grew to dislike about FPS gaming.
Just exactly why should you be able to turn 180 degrees, jump, and fire a rocket (accurately!) at the same time? Picture trying to actually do this. Even if you're the stereotypical cybernetically enhanced supermarine capable of singlehandedly eliminating an entire alien race by lugging around 150 pounds of high tech weaponry and a thousand pounds of ammunition while occasionally jumping half your own height straight up yet being unable to climb over a barrier that's 51% your height - the recoil of launching a rocket in midair (while spinning, no less) ought to knock you on your ass.
Yes, yes, suspension of disbelief, no one claims the games are realistic, if you couldn't do cool stuff there'd be no point to playing, so on and so forth. It still bugs me. Just like the endless bunny hopping that's another hallmark of the FPS genre bugs me, 'cause it's lame.
Point taken; perhaps my use of the word "descriptive" is in error. I was using the term in opposition to "predictive," with the intended denotation to be that "descriptive" usage occurs after observation (the thought being that one can only describe what one has observed), while "predictive" usage occurs prior to the observation.
I am open to suggestions as to what pair of words I should have used instead.
Regardless of my possible misuse of terminology, I maintain that math's predictive power implies a reality to it that is ignored by the too-simple statement that it's simply a fiction defined by humans.
Accuracy has to do with the design and placement of the sights and their relationship to the bore.
The placement of the sights and their relationship to the bore will, certainly, affect the accuracy of a rifle as fired by a person. But that doesn't mean that tolerances of manufacture don't affect the inherent accuracy of a rifle.
Try this experiment sometime: affix an AK-47 to a rest on a shooting bench, such that it can't move. Fire thirty rounds through it at a target. Measure the spread of the resulting pattern. Do the same with an M16.
I maintain that the spread from the M16 will be smaller than from the AK-47, resulting from the inherent greater accuracy of the rifle. If the results match my expectations (and they have when I've run the experiment), this cannot be due to the sight picture, which is strictly useful to the person aiming the rifle.
Best. Post. Ever.
This is certainly true, but don't undersell math, either. The amazing part of math is that, given certain axioms and definitions crafted to describe and fit easily-observed physical phenomena, logical extrapolations of those axioms and definitions can accurately describe physical phenomena we have not yet observed.
That is, mathematics is not purely descriptive as it relates to science. As an example, it is my understanding that the phenomenon of time dilation as velocity increases towards c was first "observed" as a result of mathematical manipulations of exsiting models, long before it was (or could be) experimentally observed.
If math were purely descriptive, this would not be the case - or, if it were, it would be only by sheerest chance; the exception, rather than the rule.
I agree, of course, that math comes out of description; 2+3=5 because those numbers represent specific physical quantities, and when you have real items in those quantities, they behave in that fashion. However, I can't help believing that there is something inherently "real" about math itself, since the logical structure of math agrees so well with physical reality so often - enough so, in fact, that the mathematical understanding of a physical phenomenon can predate observation of that physical phenomenon.
and if you configure it properly, it can be more accurate than the AK
Which means it operates at tighter tolerances, which means it's more susceptible to dirt.
While the "self cleaning" issue was the lion's share of the problems with the M16 that Vietnam made so famous, the fact does remain that the AK-47 is inherently more reliable than the M16, while being inherently less accurate.
Sort of like a Les Baer competition 1911 vs. a Glock 19.
I can only assume that the IRS and the BATFE are the other two.
Hrm.
You seem to have said the same thing I did, but you did it more clearly and concisely.
It looks like you win our little game of one-upsmanship.
Yes, the critic is adding meaning to the work that the artist doesn't acknowledge is there - but that doesn't make it invalid. In other areas of artistic endeavor, this is accepted as a particular take on analysis. The idea that the narrative has an existence and a meaning beyond and separate from what the author deliberately intended is the core of narrative theory.
If you want to get high-falutin', you can think of it sort of like the old proverb, "no man crosses the same stream twice. The second time, it is not the same stream, and he is not the same man."
The concept is that the work itself has no inherent meaning. There has to be an interaction between a person and the art for it to take on meaning - one of those interactions is with the artist and the art, of course, but just as important is the interaction between the viewer/reader/gamer/etc. and the art. It's both the art itself and what you get from it that define the meaning of the art.
As a banal example, consider the word "home." "Home," though it's got a generally accepted meaning that everyone understands, also means something very different to each person, and at different times within any given person's life. For me, right now, "home" means a specific apartment in a specific building, which is also occupied by my fiancee, our cats, and a metric crapload of stuff.
Presumably, it means something entirely different to you (unless you've been living under our bed with Niles).
Or, to look at it another way - let's assume that, say, Fitzgerald had specific meanings and symbols in mind when he wrote Gatsby. So you could argue that those are the "correct" meanings of the book. But imagine for a moment that Fitzgerald never lived, and The Great Gatsby was output from some program that randomly selected word. Would this mean that the novel had no meaning? What difference does it make that a person set a particular collection of words to paper as opposed to a computer doing it, from the point of view of the reader?
More pertinently, perhaps, can no one get any meaning out of the Odyssey, since no one can ask Homer what he really meant?
Words, paintings, statues, music, video games do not, in themselves, mean anything. They are only given meaning by being experienced; as such, it is perfectly legitimate to attribute meaning to a work that the creator did not explicitly intend.
I'm not a physicist, an opticsologistician, and I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but lack of qualification has never stopped me from posting before.
SO
I believe that as you scale up the size of the lens, the resolution attainable scales up faster than the area of the lens. But this is a dimly-recalled memory of something I saw somewhere once, probably on the internet, so I would be far from shocked to discover I'm completely wrong.
Wish I had seen this before I posted. You, sir, are deserving of a +1 Funny.
(Of course, those aren't really your intestines, but this holodeck goes for intensity in imagery.)
Since the safety protocols have no doubt broken/been bypassed/been shut off/been overridden by a rogue AI inside the holodeck program itself, those are, in fact, really your intestines.
It's not the precision of the optics that matters*, it's the size. You could support 31 megapixels if you were willing to put a big enough aperture on the front of the camera. Look at the lens of an HD TV camera sometime - it's much wider than the lens on an SD TV. The extra information is captured by widening the light intake, rather than perfecting the light intake for a given width.
*This statement is to be taken strictly in the context of improving on current optics for higher resolutions. Obviously, the precision of the optics is the most important single factor in the technical quality of a photograph from a reasonable camera; but, as you pointed out, the precision of the optics is pretty much plateaued.
I'm serious when I say this, so bear that in mind as you snicker... ...but: what's the challenge, here? What's the innovation? If you're not worried about how you're going to fit it into an existing transmission medium (that is, they obviously aren't worried about sending OTA on a TV channel), then what's the challenge to designing a higher-resolution spec?
How is this different than me defining a video spec that operates at 1048576 x 589824 pixels x 120 fps, non-interlaced? Is it just that they spent the money to have custom hardware designed to meet their UHD spec?
(As I alluded to at the beginning, I suspect I'm just ignorant of what actually goes into developing this sort of thing - information replies will get a cookie. Never mind that it comes from slashdot.org, I promise that's my cookie you're getting)
Ah. Flashback humor.