The problem as far as I can see it is that a gravity/time module written in an entirely different language has been hacked together with a system that uses variable variables for everything. The inflation plugin looks like it was jammed into the header file at the last moment, and the hardware requirements for the singularity class methods is just stupid.
Don't get me started on the fact that 94% of the source is logic-sensitive whitespace.
Different books give the reader different levels of "imagining" - the Harry Potter series, to pick an example that's similar to Pratchett in setting if not writing, doesn't give you a lot of leeway in imagining the settings and characters, it's firmly placed in our world with a few standard fantasy additions.
Pratchett, on the other hand, allows much more free reign for the imagination. I've not found any of the TV mini-series to match the images running through my head, it all seems a lot more cartoon-like and sanitised. I suspect they've used the Kirby/Kidby images as inspiration, because those never really matched my reading of it either. Personally I read Pratchett as much more deadpan and gritty than any interpretation I've seen - it's possibly a result of a strong American influence in recreating what is very British humour at its heart.
Can anyone recommend a company which doesn't engage in this kind of nonsense on a regular basis? I'd like to be able to buy a phone knowing that I'm not funding innovation suppressing lawsuits and inter-company marketing/distribution battles. This is nothing to do with patents, it's to do with companies threatening the competition and trying to make life difficult for them.
This happens all the time, you can quite legitimately create a book purely based on Wikipedia articles and sell it. Sometimes you get a great product where the author has pulled together high quality articles and sub-edited them, added diagrams and examples, test questions etc and produced a genuinely useful book that's worth paying for. Most of the time, however, it's simply a printout of Wikipedia articles and is a complete waste of time and money. It also happens in the print trade, there's a few company selling wikipedia books for £30 a pop to buyers who haven't checked the contents.
The other big issue here is the fact that people are obsessed with getting their content into the walled gardens of Amazon and iTunes, as if there was no other way to distribute a common eBook format or mp3, and then go screaming censorship. It's their playground, if you don't like their decisions then you are free to "workaround" by simply distributing directly. Everyone though Amazon was great because they were cheap and "cut out the middle man". Now they are the middle man, and you can still cut them out. They won't distribute your book? No big worry, if it's any good it'll sell whether or not it's on Amazon.
An interesting point. Measured this way my list should have been "Things that you're scared of" instead of "Things that are likely to kill you", and for some terrorism would come near the top.
However, that was my original point - the disparity between what people should justifiably worry about and what they should leave on the back burner, so to speak. Fear is a lot easier to resolve than death is.
Not at all, my political opinion is that classifying yourself as left, liberal or rightwing is dangerous and pointlessly divisive, I support and abhor policies from all political parties. Personally I'd love to see party politics and internal parliamentary deals outlawed.
I simply listed some obvious causes of death for people living in the US. If it tells you anything, it's about my beliefs of common or well publicised causes of death in the US. The lack of healthcare is in there because people regularly die for want of available medical care. The guns are in there because they kill lots and lots of people (which is one of the things they're designed for), I make no moral judgement on whether this is a good or bad thing, it's just about numbers.
I was talking about buffalo, the cows are a moo(t) point. The cows tend to feed on whatever they can find, you probably wouldn't want to eat one even if you didn't have a cultural issue with it.
We're actually a completely different species. Apes, monkey and H. sap are all primates of the family Hominidae. Yes, we're closer to apes than monkeys, but we're not apes by the scientific definition.
The correct response to terrorism is to carry on as normal. The London Blitz during WWII was aimed at terrorising civilians, they didn't bother targeting military installations (which is generally considered to be a turning point for the British campaign as it took the heat off the RAF.
The official UK government response? "Keep Calm & Carry On."
(Offtopic: yes, I realise us Brits were just as guilty of terror-based bombing campaigns during WWII.)
"Western Civilization" had their own rennaissance about three hundred years ago (much aided by Islamic/arabic texts from the previous few hundred years), and we still seem to have managed to produce a substantial culture which truly believes the Son Of God will return, the True Believers will be bodily raised up to heaven and the rest will experience Armageddon. Many of them believe it is their religious duty to bring the apocalypse about ASAP. Some of them hold high political positions.
Not sure why you used Islam to illustrate your point, Christianity seems to work better to me.
FEMA produced the zombie plan campaign because people weren't taking the real risks (disease, natural disaster etc) seriously.
Terrorism works by making people overestimate the risks to get the desired behaviour.
Much as I admire their sense of humour and proactive stance, FEMA appear to be the terrorists here, according to current government definitions of "terrorist" at least.
They eat plenty of water buffalo, although a lack of big walking steak isn't their main problem. Raising cattle takes a lot of water and land, and any well-irrigated land will produce far more vegetable matter. If a field is big enough to raise one buffalo then it's big enough to feed a family year-round, so you have a choice of daal bhat (rice & lentil soup) for a year or steak for six months and then starving. In addition, if you have a buffalo then you use it as a tractor, it'll produce more food alive than it will by slaughtering it. The question is akin to asking why so few people in the US fly their own plane when there's thousands rusting in the desert.
Most people in India will eat meat maybe once a week, a little chicken with the daily daal bhat. Even if they all decided that cows were fair game, they'd be back to square one in a few months, with less fertilizer.
This is something I've been looking at here in the UK. We've hit the point where the three main parties are all far more concerned with securing donations then they are with doing what's best for the country (hell, doing what's best for humans in general), the driving forces in politics have become companies and a small number of ultra-rich individuals who have the financial backing to be "worth listening to". There's no accountability because the greatest "realistic" punishment the electorate have is voting the other guys in, which ultimately makes very little difference, the donations roll in whether you're in power and promising something or whether you're trying to get into power and promising something if you do.
So I've been seriously considering a campaign for people to vote independent. Doesn't matter whether you're voting left, middle or right, just vote for a candidate who has no party affiliation. Multiple governments all over the world have shown that it's perfectly possible to have a stable, effective parliament without being dominated by two or three main parties. And we, as an electorate, can do that, it's not tricky, it's a simple matter of convincing everybody that it is a realistic option.
So what happens if everybody writes down the name of the same independent candidate? Would that carry any constitutional weight at all? I have no idea how the US ended up vendor-locked into two parties. (Not that UK politics is much better.)
That's pretty much it, with the caveat that while you're not looking at the cards they are both still in a state of flux. In the real world each card is most definitely either/or, but if you did the QM equivalent of the experiment the cards would both be in a state of "both" until measured. My original post was over-simplified, see corrective posts above.
Yes, sorry, I over-simplified. What I should have said is that the two photons have a combined spin of zero, both have an indeterminate state so that indeterminate state A + indeterminate state B = spin zero. When one particle or the other is measured the two wavefunctions collapse (Copenhagen) or we find out which of the possible universes we are in (Everett).
Does this experiment have any bearing on Bell's Inequality? (And on that thread, would Bell's Theorem be satisfied by an infinite number of hidden variables?)
Actually, it's the equivalent of finding socks in the dark. If two photons are produced by an interaction of spin zero then the two photons will have spin up and spin down, although you can't know which is which without measuring one. What you DO know is that they have opposite spin, so by measuring one you instantly receive information about the other, however far away it is. There are several "pairs" of information which each particle/photon can have, such as momentum/location, the more accurately you measure one the less accurately you know the other, what these guys are proposing (as far as I can tell, it's at the limit of my understanding) is that they can use entanglement properties to discover information beyond Heisenberg's original limit.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realise that fuel efficiency in cars is measured in square metres? Unit cancellation is wierd. Oblig/Ref: according to my graph xkcd will produce a cartoon to answer a /. post in advance within six months.
The problem as far as I can see it is that a gravity/time module written in an entirely different language has been hacked together with a system that uses variable variables for everything. The inflation plugin looks like it was jammed into the header file at the last moment, and the hardware requirements for the singularity class methods is just stupid.
Don't get me started on the fact that 94% of the source is logic-sensitive whitespace.
As a physicist by training, yes, that's exactly what I want.
Brambles are blackberries, you'd need a cluster of mobile email devices to use that name. I believe this is the more generic "Thicket".
Different books give the reader different levels of "imagining" - the Harry Potter series, to pick an example that's similar to Pratchett in setting if not writing, doesn't give you a lot of leeway in imagining the settings and characters, it's firmly placed in our world with a few standard fantasy additions.
Pratchett, on the other hand, allows much more free reign for the imagination. I've not found any of the TV mini-series to match the images running through my head, it all seems a lot more cartoon-like and sanitised. I suspect they've used the Kirby/Kidby images as inspiration, because those never really matched my reading of it either. Personally I read Pratchett as much more deadpan and gritty than any interpretation I've seen - it's possibly a result of a strong American influence in recreating what is very British humour at its heart.
You forgot white people, they come from Africa too.
Can anyone recommend a company which doesn't engage in this kind of nonsense on a regular basis? I'd like to be able to buy a phone knowing that I'm not funding innovation suppressing lawsuits and inter-company marketing/distribution battles. This is nothing to do with patents, it's to do with companies threatening the competition and trying to make life difficult for them.
This happens all the time, you can quite legitimately create a book purely based on Wikipedia articles and sell it. Sometimes you get a great product where the author has pulled together high quality articles and sub-edited them, added diagrams and examples, test questions etc and produced a genuinely useful book that's worth paying for. Most of the time, however, it's simply a printout of Wikipedia articles and is a complete waste of time and money. It also happens in the print trade, there's a few company selling wikipedia books for £30 a pop to buyers who haven't checked the contents.
The other big issue here is the fact that people are obsessed with getting their content into the walled gardens of Amazon and iTunes, as if there was no other way to distribute a common eBook format or mp3, and then go screaming censorship. It's their playground, if you don't like their decisions then you are free to "workaround" by simply distributing directly. Everyone though Amazon was great because they were cheap and "cut out the middle man". Now they are the middle man, and you can still cut them out. They won't distribute your book? No big worry, if it's any good it'll sell whether or not it's on Amazon.
An interesting point. Measured this way my list should have been "Things that you're scared of" instead of "Things that are likely to kill you", and for some terrorism would come near the top.
However, that was my original point - the disparity between what people should justifiably worry about and what they should leave on the back burner, so to speak. Fear is a lot easier to resolve than death is.
Not at all, my political opinion is that classifying yourself as left, liberal or rightwing is dangerous and pointlessly divisive, I support and abhor policies from all political parties. Personally I'd love to see party politics and internal parliamentary deals outlawed.
I simply listed some obvious causes of death for people living in the US. If it tells you anything, it's about my beliefs of common or well publicised causes of death in the US. The lack of healthcare is in there because people regularly die for want of available medical care. The guns are in there because they kill lots and lots of people (which is one of the things they're designed for), I make no moral judgement on whether this is a good or bad thing, it's just about numbers.
I was talking about buffalo, the cows are a moo(t) point. The cows tend to feed on whatever they can find, you probably wouldn't want to eat one even if you didn't have a cultural issue with it.
The "substantial culture" I referred to was meant to indicate that I meant a subset of all Christians, apologies if that wasn't clear.
We're actually a completely different species. Apes, monkey and H. sap are all primates of the family Hominidae. Yes, we're closer to apes than monkeys, but we're not apes by the scientific definition.
It's not in any particular order. But yes, dogs are better than cats at everything.
The correct response to terrorism is to carry on as normal. The London Blitz during WWII was aimed at terrorising civilians, they didn't bother targeting military installations (which is generally considered to be a turning point for the British campaign as it took the heat off the RAF.
The official UK government response? "Keep Calm & Carry On."
(Offtopic: yes, I realise us Brits were just as guilty of terror-based bombing campaigns during WWII.)
What's more likely to kill you than a terrorist? Worrying about a terrorist.
"Western Civilization" had their own rennaissance about three hundred years ago (much aided by Islamic/arabic texts from the previous few hundred years), and we still seem to have managed to produce a substantial culture which truly believes the Son Of God will return, the True Believers will be bodily raised up to heaven and the rest will experience Armageddon. Many of them believe it is their religious duty to bring the apocalypse about ASAP. Some of them hold high political positions.
Not sure why you used Islam to illustrate your point, Christianity seems to work better to me.
FEMA produced the zombie plan campaign because people weren't taking the real risks (disease, natural disaster etc) seriously.
Terrorism works by making people overestimate the risks to get the desired behaviour.
Much as I admire their sense of humour and proactive stance, FEMA appear to be the terrorists here, according to current government definitions of "terrorist" at least.
They eat plenty of water buffalo, although a lack of big walking steak isn't their main problem. Raising cattle takes a lot of water and land, and any well-irrigated land will produce far more vegetable matter. If a field is big enough to raise one buffalo then it's big enough to feed a family year-round, so you have a choice of daal bhat (rice & lentil soup) for a year or steak for six months and then starving. In addition, if you have a buffalo then you use it as a tractor, it'll produce more food alive than it will by slaughtering it. The question is akin to asking why so few people in the US fly their own plane when there's thousands rusting in the desert.
Most people in India will eat meat maybe once a week, a little chicken with the daily daal bhat. Even if they all decided that cows were fair game, they'd be back to square one in a few months, with less fertilizer.
This is something I've been looking at here in the UK. We've hit the point where the three main parties are all far more concerned with securing donations then they are with doing what's best for the country (hell, doing what's best for humans in general), the driving forces in politics have become companies and a small number of ultra-rich individuals who have the financial backing to be "worth listening to". There's no accountability because the greatest "realistic" punishment the electorate have is voting the other guys in, which ultimately makes very little difference, the donations roll in whether you're in power and promising something or whether you're trying to get into power and promising something if you do.
So I've been seriously considering a campaign for people to vote independent. Doesn't matter whether you're voting left, middle or right, just vote for a candidate who has no party affiliation. Multiple governments all over the world have shown that it's perfectly possible to have a stable, effective parliament without being dominated by two or three main parties. And we, as an electorate, can do that, it's not tricky, it's a simple matter of convincing everybody that it is a realistic option.
So what happens if everybody writes down the name of the same independent candidate? Would that carry any constitutional weight at all? I have no idea how the US ended up vendor-locked into two parties. (Not that UK politics is much better.)
Just wondering about the Feynman's path integrals, and whether a very high number of hidden variables would still produce Bell's results.
That's pretty much it, with the caveat that while you're not looking at the cards they are both still in a state of flux. In the real world each card is most definitely either/or, but if you did the QM equivalent of the experiment the cards would both be in a state of "both" until measured. My original post was over-simplified, see corrective posts above.
Yes, sorry, I over-simplified. What I should have said is that the two photons have a combined spin of zero, both have an indeterminate state so that indeterminate state A + indeterminate state B = spin zero. When one particle or the other is measured the two wavefunctions collapse (Copenhagen) or we find out which of the possible universes we are in (Everett).
Does this experiment have any bearing on Bell's Inequality? (And on that thread, would Bell's Theorem be satisfied by an infinite number of hidden variables?)
Actually, it's the equivalent of finding socks in the dark. If two photons are produced by an interaction of spin zero then the two photons will have spin up and spin down, although you can't know which is which without measuring one. What you DO know is that they have opposite spin, so by measuring one you instantly receive information about the other, however far away it is. There are several "pairs" of information which each particle/photon can have, such as momentum/location, the more accurately you measure one the less accurately you know the other, what these guys are proposing (as far as I can tell, it's at the limit of my understanding) is that they can use entanglement properties to discover information beyond Heisenberg's original limit.