What is the best way to construct an eyeball from hydrogen atoms?
We don't know and it depends on the definition of "best", but it's almost certainly never happened before. Human eyes have glaring flaws -- blind spot, limited colour receptivity, unimpressive resolution compared to some known alternatives, relatively high light requirements, easily damaged, degrades over time, inconsistent with many humans having very poor vision even at their peak, easily damaged by the giant space explosion that is continuously running in the sky for ~half of the average day, slow to adjust to dimmer lighting conditions, limited range of motion and extremely limited independent range of motion. Some other animals correct those flaws but have other flaws all of their own. Evolution actually does a very poor job of finding globally optimal solutions, but it does a reasonable job at identifying local maxima / minima of sufficient signifiance, and hanging around in the area of same maxima / minima.
Our super computers and dedicated scientists can't even predict the weather terribly accurately; what makes you think any "expert" has the slightest clue how to predict and control social, technological, and economic development?
Unstated assumption: that the weather is consistently less complicated than these other things.
The laws should emerge from reality, not from a committee of bureaucrats.
I'm not quite sure what that means. No law (as in, legal law) has ever "emerged from reality" in any sense that I can understand the phrase.
I don't know what's so great about being poor in the US. Rich in the US, I'll accept.
I find it a bit telling that he separated "citizen rights and restrictions" from "privacy". They call that gerrymandering.
I guess for patriotism I just don't get why that's a good thing, and I'm not from either place, but I do get that he looks like a patriotic US citizen judging from all that.
You're talking about different things. Revenues are independent of costs, and the GP was talking about costs.
Still, combined with reports that gross margins on hardware range from high 30s to mid 40s, the profit still looks significantly higher than those revenues.
But when you say Ontario you're clearly talking about the greater Toronto area, because again, it's still not true in Ontario. Local operators are the rule of the day in much of the province (I'd say most, but I don't actually know that for sure).
Not sure about phones, but for tablets by all appearances they're so "all in" that it's the opposite: they're going to hold back the PC to chase the tablet.
If you never found somebody who loved their blackberry, you just weren't looking very hard. For instance, frickin' Barack Obama.
They were quite popular and, among a shrinking subset of people, still are (particularly for BBM in social circles where sufficient people have that that you essentially get free texting without fucking with shitty 3rd party IM apps).
Having that patent is irrelevant to the issue at hand. They could do that without the patent, they can decide not to do it with the patent. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between having that patent and likelihood of using it to jailbreak, particularly when you consider that said patent wasn't specific to jailbreaking.
In fact, looking at it, it seems like the most obvious purpose of the patent would be dealing with stolen iPhones, and dealing with stolen iPhones even if they were jailbroken and SIM-swapped. The most *reported* possible purpose, of course, was arbitrarily killing jailbroken phones for no apparent reason while giggling uncontrollably in a windswept castle as lightning flashes and thunder peals.
It seems pretty similar to most other smartphone remote wipe technologies, really -- not sure what the patentable piece is and I'm not going to read the claims in detail. But since jailbreaking is something you do with iPhones, the remote wipe feature on iPhones gets automatically associated with jailbreaking.
What's your point? It's exactly the bit he's talking about. Whether or not he did it at Gran Canaria is basically irrelevant unless you're trying to score nerd points by pointing out flaws in bonch's argument. Though I have little reason to doubt that the Gran Canaria bit was gender neutral, but anyway, I have no reason at all to care.
Quote: "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act.".
I suspect you're not actually familiar with programming, because you're making the mistake of thinking that code is fungible, like you can easily swipe a chunk of Chrome into Opera (to choose two browsers you didn't call out specifically, for the sake of impartiality:)) and suddenly a bunch of CSS properties work.
Even in extremely modular code this won't be true of internal details like this, especially in highly optimised software like web browsers where internal data structures will generally be tuned to favour performance over potential to interact with completely different software packages.
What tangible advantage do you see in going down the renting route? You've described how it can be "enormously lucrative and rewarding in more ways than just money" to rent it. Can you describe ways in which that is clearly better than the other route, both to yourself and to society at large?
I think with c6gunner is getting at is that you're talking about a marginal benefit to yourself that is invisible (100 billion dollars vs. 1 trillion dollars -- if that's personal wealth, then there really is no meaningful difference), while not addressing:
* Increased marginal risk to the world -- what if there's an accident and you die with all the trade secrets? * What makes you think you could bring your products to market in as timely a manner as a series of competitors who all license your technology (regardless of whether you can secure seed money, which we agree you can)? * What makes you think that your product is so perfect that either it cannot be significantly improved upon or, if it can be improved upon, you can do it yourself just as well as a series of licensed competitors trying to improve upon the technology? Because if you don't think that, then we're not talking about releasing innovative products to the market in a timely manner, we're talking about artificially delaying them in order for you to retain control.
The mental health crack the GP did may have been uncalled for but the argument really seems to on the level of James Bond villainy. You're grasping at "power" (my interpretation of "in more ways than money") for its own sake without any analyses of the effects of the alternatives.
The fact that you don't seem to understand the metaphor doesn't help -- in the conspiracy theory, Big Pharma isn't literally hurting people, it actually *is* helping people, but it's intentionally doing it in a self-serving way without regard to the fact that it could help people much more and still get great profits. It's a matter of opportunity cost.
It's really an excellent analogy between the two hypothetical business models. The disease here has the symptom is "limited power supply". You have a cure. You could become insanely rich by releasing your cure. Or you could become possibly even more insanely rich, and have some other nebulous benefits you've mentioned, by treating the symptoms.
Frankly, I thought the movies were far better than the books, which I agree drag on and have serious difficulties with pacing and affected prose.
The one exception being the end of the last movie, which as we all know was far too long and skipped over events from the books, which may or may not have been the right decision but it would have certainly broken up that ending.
Why are you making this argument? It's ridiculous.
We can say something looks like an interstellar spaceship, even though such a thing does not exist. We can say it looks like a cave troll, which doesn't exist -- except, of course, in stories. But then again, miracles definitely exist in stories.
How can you be sure that a "miracle" won't make the universe disappear?
This question makes no sense at all and it's also irrelevant. How can you be sure a cave troll won't make the universe disappear?
If humans can perceive at most 24fps then you need to display at a minimum rate of 48fps (Nyquist rate) in order to reliably convey that information to a human; else you'll jitter.
But humans don't actually take frame-like snapshots. The flicker fusion threshold for black & white is about 60fps with noticeable variation between individuals. Human beings can reliably identify an object flashed in from of them for only 5 milliseconds: effectively 200fps for one frame. Even though they cannot distinguish the same video played at 200fps and 100fps (the latter one skipping alternate frames to keep the same pace).
HDMI was 24 fps because film is traditionally 24fps. Film gets away with 24fps because of motion blur. Somewhere around 60fps is pretty decent for images that aren't blurry.
Is this actually the case in the US? Most people in grade 10 that I knew had part-time jobs through the school year. Those who didn't almost universally had summer jobs, and also odd one-offs like babysitting etc.. It wasn't exactly a poverty-stricken area.
On the flip side, a lot of 9 year olds would have a pittance allowance tied to doing their chores.
That just reduces to the trivial argument that everything uses quantum effects because everything* derives ultimately from QM. It's equivocating compared to what the article is saying.
Fire is a chemical effect that produces light. It's not a quantum effect, in that there's nothing to explain about fire using Quantum Mechanics that cannot be described using chemistry/thermodynamics (maybe a tiny bit of fluid dynamics). You do not need to include quantum mechanics in this mathematical model for the model to be useful -- which isn't to say that there aren't uses for injecting QM understanding into the study of fire, just that it's silly to claim that it's required for the model. When they are talking about quantum effects in photosynthesis they are talking about effects that they cannot easily describe using other well-founded theories.
*modulo some reconciliation problems with relativity, and anything we haven't figured out yet.
I admit I startled a bit when I saw "golden rice bowl" but I figured it was probably a translated idiom. It's like when somebody refers to their average job as their "bread and butter".
Three parts where you lose me, in order of importance:
1. The assertion that the atheistic worldview utterly fails. I haven't seen an argument to this effect that wasn't either absurd, or attacking an atheistic worldview that is not representative of all or most atheistic worldviews (the straw atheistic worldview). 2. If the atheistic worldview fails, that doesn't leave you ruling out religions. Even if I granted that the atheistic worldview cannot work, I can't see how you'd conclude that what remains is even remotely similar to any world religion. There's pretty much an infinite variety of things that nobody has ever thought of before, which could be said to be consistent with what we know of reality. 3. While I'm sure Christianity does beat out some alternative religions, I'm far from convinced that it's "up there" in terms of plausibility compared to other world religions. I'll grant that I'm more familiar with Christianity (many variations thereof) than any other religion and as such I might be missing some completely wacky things in other religions.
I had a quick look at your site but didn't immediately find anything addressing point 1 (clicking "atheist" led me to a couple antagonistic / preaching to the choir articles, but I'll take that in good humour), and it's a holiday so I won't be researching all day:).
The least dense solid is going to also be the lightest solid in any given near-constant gravitational field, such as any given location on the surface of the planet Earth at a scale that humans will typically work with.
Where O is the one time pad, P(N) is the plaintext message N, C(N) is the encrypted ciphertext for message N, and * is the encryption operator. Since it happens to be XOR, it is commutative.
Let's expand out C(2) since we know C(1):
C(2) = P(2) * P(1) * O
What's this? The one-time pad got re-used more than one time!
That's a critical flaw: you don't have a one time pad, you have a two time pad, because you used it to encrypt two different messages. The only way this can be as secure as a OTP is if you have something at least as strong as the one time pad encrypting the one time pad itself. Otherwise you can tease it out.
You simply disguised the fact that you re-used the "one time" pad fact from yourself by encrypting it using plaintext, but plaintext is not a good one time pad.
On a more intuitive level: if that worked, there's no reason you couldn't apply it at the level of a single character and iterate it across all characters in a message of arbitrary length. This is the case where the "plaintext" size = 1, and the number of messages is unbounded. Your key would have to be only a single letter and be totally unguessable. And yet, clearly that's not true.
Calculus was a required high school course to enter any science program in Ontario when I applied. Why is that a moronic requirement? Or are you arguing against Calculus being a general requirement -- which is not the same thing at all.
Maybe it's a terminology, but it surprises me that at least a little Calculus -- derivatives, basic integrals, integration by parts, L'Hopital's rule, etc. -- would not be required courses.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the best way to construct an eyeball from hydrogen atoms?
We don't know and it depends on the definition of "best", but it's almost certainly never happened before. Human eyes have glaring flaws -- blind spot, limited colour receptivity, unimpressive resolution compared to some known alternatives, relatively high light requirements, easily damaged, degrades over time, inconsistent with many humans having very poor vision even at their peak, easily damaged by the giant space explosion that is continuously running in the sky for ~half of the average day, slow to adjust to dimmer lighting conditions, limited range of motion and extremely limited independent range of motion. Some other animals correct those flaws but have other flaws all of their own. Evolution actually does a very poor job of finding globally optimal solutions, but it does a reasonable job at identifying local maxima / minima of sufficient signifiance, and hanging around in the area of same maxima / minima.
Our super computers and dedicated scientists can't even predict the weather terribly accurately; what makes you think any "expert" has the slightest clue how to predict and control social, technological, and economic development?
Unstated assumption: that the weather is consistently less complicated than these other things.
The laws should emerge from reality, not from a committee of bureaucrats.
I'm not quite sure what that means. No law (as in, legal law) has ever "emerged from reality" in any sense that I can understand the phrase.
I don't know what's so great about being poor in the US. Rich in the US, I'll accept.
I find it a bit telling that he separated "citizen rights and restrictions" from "privacy". They call that gerrymandering.
I guess for patriotism I just don't get why that's a good thing, and I'm not from either place, but I do get that he looks like a patriotic US citizen judging from all that.
You're talking about different things. Revenues are independent of costs, and the GP was talking about costs.
Still, combined with reports that gross margins on hardware range from high 30s to mid 40s, the profit still looks significantly higher than those revenues.
But when you say Ontario you're clearly talking about the greater Toronto area, because again, it's still not true in Ontario. Local operators are the rule of the day in much of the province (I'd say most, but I don't actually know that for sure).
Not sure about phones, but for tablets by all appearances they're so "all in" that it's the opposite: they're going to hold back the PC to chase the tablet.
If you never found somebody who loved their blackberry, you just weren't looking very hard. For instance, frickin' Barack Obama.
They were quite popular and, among a shrinking subset of people, still are (particularly for BBM in social circles where sufficient people have that that you essentially get free texting without fucking with shitty 3rd party IM apps).
Having that patent is irrelevant to the issue at hand. They could do that without the patent, they can decide not to do it with the patent. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between having that patent and likelihood of using it to jailbreak, particularly when you consider that said patent wasn't specific to jailbreaking.
In fact, looking at it, it seems like the most obvious purpose of the patent would be dealing with stolen iPhones, and dealing with stolen iPhones even if they were jailbroken and SIM-swapped. The most *reported* possible purpose, of course, was arbitrarily killing jailbroken phones for no apparent reason while giggling uncontrollably in a windswept castle as lightning flashes and thunder peals.
It seems pretty similar to most other smartphone remote wipe technologies, really -- not sure what the patentable piece is and I'm not going to read the claims in detail. But since jailbreaking is something you do with iPhones, the remote wipe feature on iPhones gets automatically associated with jailbreaking.
What's your point? It's exactly the bit he's talking about. Whether or not he did it at Gran Canaria is basically irrelevant unless you're trying to score nerd points by pointing out flaws in bonch's argument. Though I have little reason to doubt that the Gran Canaria bit was gender neutral, but anyway, I have no reason at all to care.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25ejlP0uWeI#t=2m8s
Quote: "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act.".
That's not gender neutral, that's very specific.
I suspect you're not actually familiar with programming, because you're making the mistake of thinking that code is fungible, like you can easily swipe a chunk of Chrome into Opera (to choose two browsers you didn't call out specifically, for the sake of impartiality :)) and suddenly a bunch of CSS properties work.
Even in extremely modular code this won't be true of internal details like this, especially in highly optimised software like web browsers where internal data structures will generally be tuned to favour performance over potential to interact with completely different software packages.
What tangible advantage do you see in going down the renting route? You've described how it can be "enormously lucrative and rewarding in more ways than just money" to rent it. Can you describe ways in which that is clearly better than the other route, both to yourself and to society at large?
I think with c6gunner is getting at is that you're talking about a marginal benefit to yourself that is invisible (100 billion dollars vs. 1 trillion dollars -- if that's personal wealth, then there really is no meaningful difference), while not addressing:
* Increased marginal risk to the world -- what if there's an accident and you die with all the trade secrets?
* What makes you think you could bring your products to market in as timely a manner as a series of competitors who all license your technology (regardless of whether you can secure seed money, which we agree you can)?
* What makes you think that your product is so perfect that either it cannot be significantly improved upon or, if it can be improved upon, you can do it yourself just as well as a series of licensed competitors trying to improve upon the technology? Because if you don't think that, then we're not talking about releasing innovative products to the market in a timely manner, we're talking about artificially delaying them in order for you to retain control.
The mental health crack the GP did may have been uncalled for but the argument really seems to on the level of James Bond villainy. You're grasping at "power" (my interpretation of "in more ways than money") for its own sake without any analyses of the effects of the alternatives.
The fact that you don't seem to understand the metaphor doesn't help -- in the conspiracy theory, Big Pharma isn't literally hurting people, it actually *is* helping people, but it's intentionally doing it in a self-serving way without regard to the fact that it could help people much more and still get great profits. It's a matter of opportunity cost.
It's really an excellent analogy between the two hypothetical business models. The disease here has the symptom is "limited power supply". You have a cure. You could become insanely rich by releasing your cure. Or you could become possibly even more insanely rich, and have some other nebulous benefits you've mentioned, by treating the symptoms.
Where are such sales illegal, and why?
Frankly, I thought the movies were far better than the books, which I agree drag on and have serious difficulties with pacing and affected prose.
The one exception being the end of the last movie, which as we all know was far too long and skipped over events from the books, which may or may not have been the right decision but it would have certainly broken up that ending.
Why are you making this argument? It's ridiculous.
We can say something looks like an interstellar spaceship, even though such a thing does not exist. We can say it looks like a cave troll, which doesn't exist -- except, of course, in stories. But then again, miracles definitely exist in stories.
How can you be sure that a "miracle" won't make the universe disappear?
This question makes no sense at all and it's also irrelevant. How can you be sure a cave troll won't make the universe disappear?
But if they are smoking crack, well then, clearly they are not corrupt.
If humans can perceive at most 24fps then you need to display at a minimum rate of 48fps (Nyquist rate) in order to reliably convey that information to a human; else you'll jitter.
But humans don't actually take frame-like snapshots. The flicker fusion threshold for black & white is about 60fps with noticeable variation between individuals. Human beings can reliably identify an object flashed in from of them for only 5 milliseconds: effectively 200fps for one frame. Even though they cannot distinguish the same video played at 200fps and 100fps (the latter one skipping alternate frames to keep the same pace).
HDMI was 24 fps because film is traditionally 24fps. Film gets away with 24fps because of motion blur. Somewhere around 60fps is pretty decent for images that aren't blurry.
No, but it's a member of the set "open source" and the statement in question is:
"Apple doesn't restrict open source apps from their app store."
If Apple restricts GPL, and GPL is open source, then Apple restricts open source.
Let's draw an analogy:
"Mom doesn't restrict the foods that go in my lunch box"
If Mom says you can't have a chocolate bar in your lunch box, and a chocolate bar is a food, then Mom restricts the foods that go into your lunch box.
Is this actually the case in the US? Most people in grade 10 that I knew had part-time jobs through the school year. Those who didn't almost universally had summer jobs, and also odd one-offs like babysitting etc.. It wasn't exactly a poverty-stricken area.
On the flip side, a lot of 9 year olds would have a pittance allowance tied to doing their chores.
That just reduces to the trivial argument that everything uses quantum effects because everything* derives ultimately from QM. It's equivocating compared to what the article is saying.
Fire is a chemical effect that produces light. It's not a quantum effect, in that there's nothing to explain about fire using Quantum Mechanics that cannot be described using chemistry/thermodynamics (maybe a tiny bit of fluid dynamics). You do not need to include quantum mechanics in this mathematical model for the model to be useful -- which isn't to say that there aren't uses for injecting QM understanding into the study of fire, just that it's silly to claim that it's required for the model. When they are talking about quantum effects in photosynthesis they are talking about effects that they cannot easily describe using other well-founded theories.
*modulo some reconciliation problems with relativity, and anything we haven't figured out yet.
I admit I startled a bit when I saw "golden rice bowl" but I figured it was probably a translated idiom. It's like when somebody refers to their average job as their "bread and butter".
Three parts where you lose me, in order of importance:
1. The assertion that the atheistic worldview utterly fails. I haven't seen an argument to this effect that wasn't either absurd, or attacking an atheistic worldview that is not representative of all or most atheistic worldviews (the straw atheistic worldview).
2. If the atheistic worldview fails, that doesn't leave you ruling out religions. Even if I granted that the atheistic worldview cannot work, I can't see how you'd conclude that what remains is even remotely similar to any world religion. There's pretty much an infinite variety of things that nobody has ever thought of before, which could be said to be consistent with what we know of reality.
3. While I'm sure Christianity does beat out some alternative religions, I'm far from convinced that it's "up there" in terms of plausibility compared to other world religions. I'll grant that I'm more familiar with Christianity (many variations thereof) than any other religion and as such I might be missing some completely wacky things in other religions.
I had a quick look at your site but didn't immediately find anything addressing point 1 (clicking "atheist" led me to a couple antagonistic / preaching to the choir articles, but I'll take that in good humour), and it's a holiday so I won't be researching all day :).
The least dense solid is going to also be the lightest solid in any given near-constant gravitational field, such as any given location on the surface of the planet Earth at a scale that humans will typically work with.
You are proposing:
P(1) * O = C(1) ...
P(2) * C(1) = C(2)
P(3) * C(2) = C(3)
P(N) * C(N - 1) = C(N)
Where O is the one time pad, P(N) is the plaintext message N, C(N) is the encrypted ciphertext for message N, and * is the encryption operator. Since it happens to be XOR, it is commutative.
Let's expand out C(2) since we know C(1):
C(2) = P(2) * P(1) * O
What's this? The one-time pad got re-used more than one time!
That's a critical flaw: you don't have a one time pad, you have a two time pad, because you used it to encrypt two different messages. The only way this can be as secure as a OTP is if you have something at least as strong as the one time pad encrypting the one time pad itself. Otherwise you can tease it out.
You simply disguised the fact that you re-used the "one time" pad fact from yourself by encrypting it using plaintext, but plaintext is not a good one time pad.
On a more intuitive level: if that worked, there's no reason you couldn't apply it at the level of a single character and iterate it across all characters in a message of arbitrary length. This is the case where the "plaintext" size = 1, and the number of messages is unbounded. Your key would have to be only a single letter and be totally unguessable. And yet, clearly that's not true.
The local business paid to ship their stuff too.
(delta a few things that may have been produced on-site but didn't have to be).
Calculus was a required high school course to enter any science program in Ontario when I applied. Why is that a moronic requirement? Or are you arguing against Calculus being a general requirement -- which is not the same thing at all.
Maybe it's a terminology, but it surprises me that at least a little Calculus -- derivatives, basic integrals, integration by parts, L'Hopital's rule, etc. -- would not be required courses.