You walk into a store and buy a computer. It comes with Windows pre-installed.
You get a document sent to you by a cow orker. It's in Word format.
New PC game? Designed for and runs only on Windows.
The vast majority of computer users now believe computers need to be rebooted regularly, that getting a virus is an accident of nature, and that botnets are an unavoidable consequence of the Internet.
They can produce marketing like this, because frankly, they can. They don't care. In fact, they probably revel in it.
In Australia, non-compete clauses are classed as restraint of trade, and thus illegal.
This is, as far as I know, not true. Non-compete clauses are legal, but not universally regarded as valid — they are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Here is an interview
with Peter Townsend, a lawyer specialising in business law, describing the state and enforceability of these clauses in Australia.
I can't compare with the US. But I can compare with living in a major Australian city.
Rent per square meter is much higher in Tokyo; this is undeniable. But:
If you're willing to compromise on raw space, you can find much cheaper accommodation
in inner city Tokyo than you can in central Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Darwin
or Canberra.
In most of Tokyo, the public transportation is so good that you do not need a car. This is
not an exagguration.
That same public transportation is not only orders of magnitude more timely and convenient than
that in the Australian capitals, it's also cheaper.
Electricity and gas costs are lower in Tokyo.
Eating out at the casual cheap end is much cheaper in Tokyo and also, on average,
much higher quality.
Fresh food used to be slightly more expensive in Tokyo, but now is pretty much on par with
that available in Australian supermarkets. Oh, and again is typically of better quality.
(This is moot of course if you happen to live conveniently close to a good farmer's market.)
Books are more expensive in Australia by 30% to 50%. In fact, a major generalist Tokyo bookstore is likely to have a wider
range of technical and specialist English texts than any Australian generalist bookstore.
Living in Tokyo is not cheap -- but it's cheaper than living in Australian cities, if you can live without
a back garden and excessive use of living space.
The Japanese government, when it comes to tobacco control, has a severe conflict of interest. Japan Tobacco, the major (more than 60% of the market) supplier of cigarettes in Japan, is 50% owned by the government -- it used to be two-thirds government owned.
Given the degree of tobacco use in Japan, I'd wager that the profits earned through tobacco sales more than compensate for the consequent heath-care costs in the population. Further, the long incestuous relationship between government, public service bureaucracy and industry is most definitely expressed in the connections between the Ministry of Finance and JT: as far as I know, every president of JT has come from the top end of the Ministry of Finance, in the amakudari tradition.
The mid-level bureaucrat in question I doubt was expressing an honest opinion on the aging demographic, but rather was trying to justify a very cozy but entirely medically irresponsible government relationship.
Non-American, never studied US history: 31/33 (Erred on #4 and #8.) This is just from common sense and exposure to movies. Don't you guys even watch your own movies? Though, that'd explain a few things...
I can corroborate: travelled with Qantas I think six times internationally in the last two years, and every time there were problems with the entertainment systems; on two of the flights, they were not able to get it working at all.
I have to disagree, it really doesn't try very hard to explain the observed properties of diamond in terms of its elegant abstract structure.
There is a single throw away line in the introduction ascribing the refractive properties of diamond to its particular "periodic arrangement of carbon atoms"
(which, essentially is true — other arrangements of carbon atoms certainly do not have the same optical properties.) And then the physical properties
of diamond are never mentioned again! This is definitely not an article about the physical properties of crystals.
Yes, the summary is crap — but this is slashdot, after all.
Pretty is being used here not to describe the visual attraction of diamond, but instead to characterise simple but interesting properties of the structure. Quoting Sunada,
The beauty would be more enhanced
and its emotional appeal would be raised to a
rational one if we would explore the microscopic
structure, say the periodic arrangement of carbon
atoms, which is actually responsible for the
dazzling glaze caused by the effective refraction
and reflection of light.
Similarly, the crystal structure being discussed is a mathematical abstraction that captures key aspects of physical crystalline structures, while not purporting to be a complete or even entirely faithful representation of crystals in the real world: for example, real-world crystals are obviously not infinite in extent.
The term pretty, when used in this sort of mathematical context, is not exclusive. Under a different set of criteria, other crystalline structures could well be regarded as being "the prettiest". The properties that Sunada has identified though, are elegant properties from a mathematical viewpoint: they relate the intrinsic symmetries of the structure as a graph with the extrinsic symmetries of the realisation of that graph in a three-dimensional configuration. That the standard realization of a crystal lattice corresponds to a minimal energy configuration (Theorem 1) also demonstrates links to analysis and is an introduction to methods of ab initio calculations of specific heat (see for example the paper of Shubin and Sunada cited in the article.) From considerations of abstract mathematical structure, the diamond crystal is indeed beautiful, and the K4 crystal similarly so.
That the structure may be chemically impossible to realise with carbon atoms is certainly a valid and useful observation, but to criticise the whole article on the basis of 90 words of chemical speculation really is to misunderstand the article's topic and goals.
See, this is why, faults and all, the USA is loved around the world. It's like watching your goofy cousin make a fool of himself at the wedding reception.
Well... your goofy cousin with a stockpile of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, anyhow.
Music on your keitai is big business: the cell phone providers have their own music download services, and on most phones, you do not have the ability to upload mp3s or the like yourself (there are certainly some exceptions, and I believe Vodaphone phones generally did allow you much more freedom in this regard. Vodaphone were very much the minor player in the market though.)
Services like MYUTA threaten to undermine a very lucrative source of revenue, and the music industry is a very, very powerful lobby: Sony for example were able to have the law rewritten such that importing CDs of Japanese music that Japanese publishers had licensed to overseas companies for distribution would be illegal... as a copyright violation. With progressively higher-level manufacturing moving to China, there is strong support from the government to encourage industry to develop and invest in IP, with correspondingly strong IP laws.
I was wondering what the magnetic field strength of this magnet would be, but the FA is a light on details. But there's a pamphlet!
Peak field strength for the barrel toroid magnet is 3.9 Tesla. And apparently it will take 30 days to cool the thing down with liquid helium to operating temperature.
Sure, if $20 billion gave a real fusion project with no risk of failure, they'd be all over it. Large oil companies are typically conservative when it comes to new technologies. It's not that they do not innovate; rather, they tend to focus their money and energy on refinements of well-proven processes.
Re:Philosophically/Ideologically driven blather
on
Divine Proportions
·
· Score: 1
The argument for ultrafinitism is essentially sound. Why should we grant (mathematical) existence to entities which we can neither construct nor describe? Standard mathematics is interesting, powerful
and highly applicable — but it might not even be consistent.
There really does seem to be
a profound lack of interest in mathematical foundations.
Most mathematicians don't care, and regard
those who do as being at best a little odd. There are logicians working on ways of resolving the
problem of potential inconsistency in mathematics that would allow such inconsistency to be
contained, in that they would not make everything trivially true. The vast majority of
mathematicians really couldn't care less.
From a finitist point of view, the advantage of working with the axiomatic set theory and dealing
with all the inifinities and such is that very general statements can be proved which would
remain true even in the finite domain. For example, any property that can be shown for all natural
numbers in standard mathematics, is probably going to remain true and applicable to all natural
numbers in a ultrafinitist mathematical system. On the other hand, there could well be properties that
hold for numbers in a ultrafinitist system that are very much not held universally by what are
normally regarded as natural numbers. (For example, that there is a natural number which is no less
than every other natural number. Given that the number of possible numbers in a finite scheme is
finite, it seems very possible that there are a very large number of properties that are enjoyed
that do not hold for natural numbers generally.)
There is however a problem in formalising such extreme versions of finitism. As far as I know, no one has created an axiomatic system which well describes this sort of mathematical system. The larger
problem seems to be that very few mathematicians feel that such an enquiry is at all worthwhile.
Of the two books cited at the end of that section of the linked article, I've only read Bakan's book. Which is entertaining and informative, but is regarded by some as being a one-sided criticism of the modern corporation. As one might have guessed, it was a form of state greed that allowed the development of the limited liability deregulated company, and in this form is no older than many 120 years or so.
There did not appear to be much written in the review on the way the PCIe lanes could be configured. The default apparently has that the four physical 16-lane slots are electrically 1-lane, 16-lane, 16-lane and 1-lane respectively.
What excites me about such a board is the possibility of having simultaneously a fast SLI rendering set-up, together with fast I/O with 10Gbit ethernet and SAS. Having everything on PCIe rather than a mix of PCIe for graphics and PCI-X for I/O cards would allow more flexibility (at least, once there is a bit more range available in PCIe non-graphics cards!). Yet, if the configuration of channels only allows 1-lane on all but two of the slots, then it's not going to work out.
The whole cell-switching connection maintaining thing has already been pretty much solved by cell phone networks. As it stands, right now, I can download data from the internet to my phone at about 2 Mbit/sec in most parts of Japan. And for a capped price per month at 4000 yen.
The telecoms certainly don't want to relinquish their huge profit margins -- this is surely why, despite a capped cost on packets to the phone, using this particular network's PC wireless option is charged per packet -- but it seems there is little technically stopping them from offering 24 hour unlimited 2 Mbit/sec internet access for a fixed per monthly charge over a very wide area. Again, technically, it seems crazy to reinvest in another wireless network infrastructure when there already is one (or in fact, two or three) in place using proven technology.
The only reason why we aren't doing wireless VoIP or its equivalent right now, is because there is more money for the telecoms not to, and the cost of setting up a competitor is astronomical (not to mention the cozy deals set up with governments and regulatory bodies to protect the market.)
With other sort of nature versus nuture hypotheses, one can at least look at how identical twins separated at birth fare in different environments, so as to obtain some sort of lower bound on the environmental influence in (say) intelligence.
But one can't exactly do that with male versus female, can one?
It will be interesting to read the argument and results in the paper itself. Especially since to justify the position, they will have to either claim that the difference they observe is at least partly due to educational and environmental differences in the way that boys and girls are raised, or, should they claim to be dealing with some sort of meaure of 'intrinsic' intelligence, demonstrate that their results are not contaminated by these educational differences.
That the environment in which boys and girls are raised differs is unarguable: colours, toys, social roles, expectations, the works. If they are simply state that intelligence is affected by upbringing, then they are saying nothing new and certainly nothing of any surprise. Separating out environmental influences on the other hand is going to be very tricky indeed.
The only objective measure they can call on is brain size. (And even that may well have dependencies on nutrition and childhood environment.) But is there any sort of strong correlation between brain size and intelligence, in the realm of the 5% size difference mentioned?
Oh, and surely the distribution of Nobel Prizes along gender lines surely is much more dependent upon the gender distribution and politics in universities and research institutions that it is on any putative average 5 point IQ differences. It is not as though the Nobel Prize goes to the smartest researcher.
Slashdot Mirror
It just shows that Microsoft know they've won.
You walk into a store and buy a computer. It comes with Windows pre-installed.
You get a document sent to you by a cow orker. It's in Word format.
New PC game? Designed for and runs only on Windows.
The vast majority of computer users now believe computers need to be rebooted regularly, that getting a virus is an accident of nature, and that botnets are an unavoidable consequence of the Internet.
They can produce marketing like this, because frankly, they can. They don't care. In fact, they probably revel in it.
This is, as far as I know, not true. Non-compete clauses are legal, but not universally regarded as valid — they are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Here is an interview with Peter Townsend, a lawyer specialising in business law, describing the state and enforceability of these clauses in Australia.
I can't compare with the US. But I can compare with living in a major Australian city.
Rent per square meter is much higher in Tokyo; this is undeniable. But:
Living in Tokyo is not cheap -- but it's cheaper than living in Australian cities, if you can live without a back garden and excessive use of living space.
The Japanese government, when it comes to tobacco control, has a severe conflict of interest. Japan Tobacco, the major (more than 60% of the market) supplier of cigarettes in Japan, is 50% owned by the government -- it used to be two-thirds government owned.
Given the degree of tobacco use in Japan, I'd wager that the profits earned through tobacco sales more than compensate for the consequent heath-care costs in the population. Further, the long incestuous relationship between government, public service bureaucracy and industry is most definitely expressed in the connections between the Ministry of Finance and JT: as far as I know, every president of JT has come from the top end of the Ministry of Finance, in the amakudari tradition.
The mid-level bureaucrat in question I doubt was expressing an honest opinion on the aging demographic, but rather was trying to justify a very cozy but entirely medically irresponsible government relationship.
Non-American, never studied US history: 31/33 (Erred on #4 and #8.) ...
This is just from common sense and exposure to movies.
Don't you guys even watch your own movies? Though, that'd explain a few things
I can corroborate: travelled with Qantas I think six times internationally in the last two years, and every time there were problems with the entertainment systems; on two of the flights, they were not able to get it working at all.
Programmers beware! You're next! This is only the tip of the iceburg:
I have to disagree, it really doesn't try very hard to explain the observed properties of diamond in terms of its elegant abstract structure.
There is a single throw away line in the introduction ascribing the refractive properties of diamond to its particular "periodic arrangement of carbon atoms" (which, essentially is true — other arrangements of carbon atoms certainly do not have the same optical properties.) And then the physical properties of diamond are never mentioned again! This is definitely not an article about the physical properties of crystals.
Yes, the summary is crap — but this is slashdot, after all.
Pretty is being used here not to describe the visual attraction of diamond, but instead to characterise simple but interesting properties of the structure. Quoting Sunada,
Similarly, the crystal structure being discussed is a mathematical abstraction that captures key aspects of physical crystalline structures, while not purporting to be a complete or even entirely faithful representation of crystals in the real world: for example, real-world crystals are obviously not infinite in extent.The term pretty, when used in this sort of mathematical context, is not exclusive. Under a different set of criteria, other crystalline structures could well be regarded as being "the prettiest". The properties that Sunada has identified though, are elegant properties from a mathematical viewpoint: they relate the intrinsic symmetries of the structure as a graph with the extrinsic symmetries of the realisation of that graph in a three-dimensional configuration. That the standard realization of a crystal lattice corresponds to a minimal energy configuration (Theorem 1) also demonstrates links to analysis and is an introduction to methods of ab initio calculations of specific heat (see for example the paper of Shubin and Sunada cited in the article.) From considerations of abstract mathematical structure, the diamond crystal is indeed beautiful, and the K4 crystal similarly so.
That the structure may be chemically impossible to realise with carbon atoms is certainly a valid and useful observation, but to criticise the whole article on the basis of 90 words of chemical speculation really is to misunderstand the article's topic and goals.
See, this is why, faults and all, the USA is loved around the world. It's like watching your goofy cousin make a fool of himself at the wedding reception.
Well
Those GDP figures do not take into account inflation. In 2003 pounds, the 1975 GDP was 577,489 million pounds and the 1990 GDP was 814,956 million pounds. That's an annual increase of approximately 2.3%. Or 2.2% if you look at per capita GDP growth.
Music on your keitai is big business: the cell phone providers have their own music download services, and on most phones, you do not have the ability to upload mp3s or the like yourself (there are certainly some exceptions, and I believe Vodaphone phones generally did allow you much more freedom in this regard. Vodaphone were very much the minor player in the market though.)
... as a copyright violation. With progressively higher-level manufacturing moving to China, there is strong support from the government to encourage industry to develop and invest in IP, with correspondingly strong IP laws.
Services like MYUTA threaten to undermine a very lucrative source of revenue, and the music industry is a very, very powerful lobby: Sony for example were able to have the law rewritten such that importing CDs of Japanese music that Japanese publishers had licensed to overseas companies for distribution would be illegal
I don't think you understand. They are very large bees.
I was wondering what the magnetic field strength of this magnet would be, but the FA is a light on details. But there's a pamphlet!
Peak field strength for the barrel toroid magnet is 3.9 Tesla. And apparently it will take 30 days to cool the thing down with liquid helium to operating temperature.
Sure, if $20 billion gave a real fusion project with no risk of failure, they'd be all over it. Large oil companies are typically conservative when it comes to new technologies. It's not that they do not innovate; rather, they tend to focus their money and energy on refinements of well-proven processes.
The argument for ultrafinitism is essentially sound. Why should we grant (mathematical) existence to entities which we can neither construct nor describe? Standard mathematics is interesting, powerful and highly applicable — but it might not even be consistent.
There really does seem to be a profound lack of interest in mathematical foundations. Most mathematicians don't care, and regard those who do as being at best a little odd. There are logicians working on ways of resolving the problem of potential inconsistency in mathematics that would allow such inconsistency to be contained, in that they would not make everything trivially true. The vast majority of mathematicians really couldn't care less.
From a finitist point of view, the advantage of working with the axiomatic set theory and dealing with all the inifinities and such is that very general statements can be proved which would remain true even in the finite domain. For example, any property that can be shown for all natural numbers in standard mathematics, is probably going to remain true and applicable to all natural numbers in a ultrafinitist mathematical system. On the other hand, there could well be properties that hold for numbers in a ultrafinitist system that are very much not held universally by what are normally regarded as natural numbers. (For example, that there is a natural number which is no less than every other natural number. Given that the number of possible numbers in a finite scheme is finite, it seems very possible that there are a very large number of properties that are enjoyed that do not hold for natural numbers generally.)
There is however a problem in formalising such extreme versions of finitism. As far as I know, no one has created an axiomatic system which well describes this sort of mathematical system. The larger problem seems to be that very few mathematicians feel that such an enquiry is at all worthwhile.
If you're like me and don't (or won't) have a working flash plug-in, the trailer can be downloaded from http://trailers.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_shadow run_e36_gt.mov.
That in fact used to be the case.
Of the two books cited at the end of that section of the linked article, I've only read Bakan's book. Which is entertaining and informative, but is regarded by some as being a one-sided criticism of the modern corporation. As one might have guessed, it was a form of state greed that allowed the development of the limited liability deregulated company, and in this form is no older than many 120 years or so.
Thanks! That's just the information I wanted :)
There did not appear to be much written in the review on the way the PCIe lanes could be configured. The default apparently has that the four physical 16-lane slots are electrically 1-lane, 16-lane, 16-lane and 1-lane respectively.
What excites me about such a board is the possibility of having simultaneously a fast SLI rendering set-up, together with fast I/O with 10Gbit ethernet and SAS. Having everything on PCIe rather than a mix of PCIe for graphics and PCI-X for I/O cards would allow more flexibility (at least, once there is a bit more range available in PCIe non-graphics cards!). Yet, if the configuration of channels only allows 1-lane on all but two of the slots, then it's not going to work out.
Very funny, but harsh, so harsh. Not that Lucas didn't have it coming.
Well, TinyTIM has been running since 1990, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn of older LPMUDs or the like.
The whole cell-switching connection maintaining thing has already been pretty much solved by cell phone networks. As it stands, right now, I can download data from the internet to my phone at about 2 Mbit/sec in most parts of Japan. And for a capped price per month at 4000 yen.
The telecoms certainly don't want to relinquish their huge profit margins -- this is surely why, despite a capped cost on packets to the phone, using this particular network's PC wireless option is charged per packet -- but it seems there is little technically stopping them from offering 24 hour unlimited 2 Mbit/sec internet access for a fixed per monthly charge over a very wide area. Again, technically, it seems crazy to reinvest in another wireless network infrastructure when there already is one (or in fact, two or three) in place using proven technology.
The only reason why we aren't doing wireless VoIP or its equivalent right now, is because there is more money for the telecoms not to, and the cost of setting up a competitor is astronomical (not to mention the cozy deals set up with governments and regulatory bodies to protect the market.)
With other sort of nature versus nuture hypotheses, one can at least look at how identical twins separated at birth fare in different environments, so as to obtain some sort of lower bound on the environmental influence in (say) intelligence.
But one can't exactly do that with male versus female, can one?
It will be interesting to read the argument and results in the paper itself. Especially since to justify the position, they will have to either claim that the difference they observe is at least partly due to educational and environmental differences in the way that boys and girls are raised, or, should they claim to be dealing with some sort of meaure of 'intrinsic' intelligence, demonstrate that their results are not contaminated by these educational differences.
That the environment in which boys and girls are raised differs is unarguable: colours, toys, social roles, expectations, the works. If they are simply state that intelligence is affected by upbringing, then they are saying nothing new and certainly nothing of any surprise. Separating out environmental influences on the other hand is going to be very tricky indeed.
The only objective measure they can call on is brain size. (And even that may well have dependencies on nutrition and childhood environment.) But is there any sort of strong correlation between brain size and intelligence, in the realm of the 5% size difference mentioned?
Oh, and surely the distribution of Nobel Prizes along gender lines surely is much more dependent upon the gender distribution and politics in universities and research institutions that it is on any putative average 5 point IQ differences. It is not as though the Nobel Prize goes to the smartest researcher.