"Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing."
But this is the definition of an event horizon.
No, it's not. Event horizons are defined by the asymptotic properties of the light cone, not by the local properties of geodesics on the boundary. See:
In this picture, there would still be astrophysical black holes in every meaningful sense of the word, i.e. condensed objects from which light would not escape. Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing.
What these black-hole-like objects would not have is an Event Horizon, which is a global property of the spacetime, and is only defined by the behavior at asymptotic infinity. It's a neat resolution of the whole mess: way more sensible than firewalls.
But it's still just hand-waving -- note that the entire argument relies on AdS/CFT, which assumes the black holes are embedded in de Sitter space, which has a negative cosmological constant and is most definitely not the kind of spacetime we live in. And AdS/CFT is itself an unproven conjecture, although it is supported by many specific example cases. Until somebody comes up with a theory of quantum gravity, this stuff is all guesswork. Caveat emptor.
What happens when Bitcoin goes over $2000? Or what happens when it goes over $50,000? Or what happens when it goes over $200,000? [...] Only time will tell, my friend. Only time will tell.
The comic also disregards bigram, trigram,... and n-gram probabilities. People who quote it should study cryptography or change careers.
No it doesn't. The entropy in a set of N unique randomly chosen words from a P-word dictionary is P*(P-1)*(P-2)...*(P-N), or approximately P^N. Period. N-gram probabilities from natural language have absolutely fuck all to do with anything here.
In short: Artificial Scarcity is economically untenable
Tell that to de Beers.
But I think you're right that infinite supply pushes things to zero price. I also think that writers are going to continue to write, because writers have to write. Poverty is already the norm for writers, and chopping off the very top of the bell curve, i.e. those vanishingly few writers who do manage to pull in mega-bucks, probably won't influence the quality of literature much at all. It might even improve it.
I worry more about journalism. We desperately need to maintain a corps of professional, quality journalists to maintain a functioning democracy. And they have to not only be paid, but have their professional work (foreign correspondents, investigative reporters) properly financed. That's expensive, and advertising support is probably going to be a failing model going forward. Likewise subscriptions. The best television journalism right now is either privately financed (Al Jazeera) or publicly financed (BBC). In the U.S., we're stuck with Anderson Cooper.
One-time Walmart fee: $3
Montly fee: $2
ATM withdrawal: $2 plus ATM fees
International ATM withdrawal: $2 plus ATM fees
ATM balance inquiry: $1
Replacement card: $3
Second card: $3
Foreign purchases: Two percent of total purchase amount in U.S. dollars
On top of all that, if the card is stolen or hacked, I lose whatever is spent off the card. If my credit card number is stolen, I am not responsible for charges.
The reality is far, far worse. Even as a non-root user, if I click on the wireless connection icon on my desktop, select my network under Edit Connections, and click "Show Password", there it is, in pure plaintext!
Oh, NOES! If my desktop lets me have access to my own network password, where will it end? It might even let me access my own files! Then what? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
You mean regulatory authorities don't want random yahoos hauling biological samples across borders and flying unmanned drones all over the place? Shocking!
Shit, they probably don't want people building nuclear reactors in their backyards, either.
Pretty much all studies involving human subjects in the U.S. have to be approved by a review board for compliance with ethical and safety standards. This study is an obvious fail in multiple respects, and I can't imagine a reputable review board approving such a thing. And if it wasn't reviewed, the study participants^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H victims of the study probably have standing to sue.
Here are a couple of good resources for looking up details of publisher policies:
Sherpa List of academic journals by preprint policy
Elsevier's policies are particularly obscure, and vary from journal-to-journal. They are often explained so poorly that it's hard to tell what the policy even is.
It's not a choice between "hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed" and suicide. There's Hospice. Death is natural, and it is possible to have a healthy death.
Suppose I started marketing an HIV test, or a Hepatitis C test, or a tuberculosis test without demonstrating the test was effective? The FDA would be on me like shit on stink, and rightly so. Same here: suppose they incorrectly tell someone they have Huntington's Disease, or carry BRCA?
Now cue all the Slashbertarians ranting about how restricting unproven medical testing is an assault on freedom...
It was Mom-n-Pop video stores that were the shiznit, The king of them all was Kim's Mediapolis in Morningside Heights in NYC, which arranged films by director. Blockbuster was never more than an annoying lowest-common-denominator experience designed by mediocre MBAs. May they rot in hell.
We would never have had PGP or encryption research outside government labs if everyone followed such rules.
The way I see it, no one would be using encryption nowadays if Obama managed to be president in the nineties.
Were you around in the nineties? That was when Clinton used CALEA to force telecoms to build the exact infrastructure that was exploited after 9/11 by Bush, and later Obama. That was when Clinton pushed the ultimately doomed "Clipper Chip", with all other strong encryption to be criminalized. Turns out, something as ham-handed as Clipper turned out to be un-necessary, since the NSA was just able to (apparently) subvert certification authorities and cripple hardware-based random number generators.
If Clinton had allowed a secure digital infrastructure to be built in the first place, none of the current shenanigans would have been possible, or at least would have been way harder.
It is hard to hate someone who provides such a great service.
Yes, yes, yes.
I buy pretty much everything at Amazon these days, except for food and building materials. Brick-and-mortar retail is circling the drain at this point: every once in a great while, I attempt to buy something at a store in a local strip mall, and nine times out of ten, I come back empty-handed and horrified by how bad it's gotten out there. I'm beginning to suspect that Bezos has infiltrated retail stores with irritating morons purely to drive you to Amazon.
Even more important, Amazon mediates the online purchase experience with small retailers. It doesn't take many times having to file a dispute with American Express to drive one away from corrupt indie electronics retailers, but even the worst of them won't fuck with you if the order is mediated through Amazon.
I'll take evil over incompetent almost all the time.
The resolution of the human eye for somebody with astoundingly good vision is about one arc minute. At a distance of 3 meters, that means that the smallest thing you can see is about 0.9mm across. If the width of my screen is 1.5 meters, that means there is NO FUCKING POINT in making the display more than 1667 pixels across. For a smaller screen, say 1 meter wide, the limit is 1111 pixels. Which is why I never bothered to buy more than 720p for my 32" monitor, because only Superman would be able to notice the difference of a higher resolution screen at the distance from my couch to the TV.
It's modded insightful because the vast majority of people on Slashdot react with all the rationality of a mob when somebody even obliquely hints at taking their porn away. It's lonely in the basement.
Slashdot Mirror
"Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing."
But this is the definition of an event horizon.
No, it's not. Event horizons are defined by the asymptotic properties of the light cone, not by the local properties of geodesics on the boundary. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
In this picture, there would still be astrophysical black holes in every meaningful sense of the word, i.e. condensed objects from which light would not escape. Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing.
What these black-hole-like objects would not have is an Event Horizon, which is a global property of the spacetime, and is only defined by the behavior at asymptotic infinity. It's a neat resolution of the whole mess: way more sensible than firewalls.
But it's still just hand-waving -- note that the entire argument relies on AdS/CFT, which assumes the black holes are embedded in de Sitter space, which has a negative cosmological constant and is most definitely not the kind of spacetime we live in. And AdS/CFT is itself an unproven conjecture, although it is supported by many specific example cases. Until somebody comes up with a theory of quantum gravity, this stuff is all guesswork. Caveat emptor.
What happens when Bitcoin goes over $2000? Or what happens when it goes over $50,000? Or what happens when it goes over $200,000? [...] Only time will tell, my friend. Only time will tell.
Good luck with that.
The comic also disregards bigram, trigram, ... and n-gram probabilities. People who quote it should study cryptography or change careers.
No it doesn't. The entropy in a set of N unique randomly chosen words from a P-word dictionary is P*(P-1)*(P-2)...*(P-N), or approximately P^N. Period. N-gram probabilities from natural language have absolutely fuck all to do with anything here.
The problem with this is its a weak system. Many accounts are already hacked via the security questions.
Does anybody seriously answer "security questions" honestly? I always, always, fill them in with a random character string.
I'd love to see a source, because I'm sure you're full of it.
Here's a source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23008968 Parent is full of it.
Hey, dipshit. The mutation of cells replicating in the body has fuck all to do with the reproductive cell mutations that evolution is concerned with.
Please go read "The Selfish Gene" and then get back to us.
This hypothesis (that cancer is inevitable, just masked by other diseases that get you first) is wrong.
There are populations where recorded cancer rates are essentially 0.
So what do they die of instead?
In short: Artificial Scarcity is economically untenable
Tell that to de Beers.
But I think you're right that infinite supply pushes things to zero price. I also think that writers are going to continue to write, because writers have to write. Poverty is already the norm for writers, and chopping off the very top of the bell curve, i.e. those vanishingly few writers who do manage to pull in mega-bucks, probably won't influence the quality of literature much at all. It might even improve it.
I worry more about journalism. We desperately need to maintain a corps of professional, quality journalists to maintain a functioning democracy. And they have to not only be paid, but have their professional work (foreign correspondents, investigative reporters) properly financed. That's expensive, and advertising support is probably going to be a failing model going forward. Likewise subscriptions. The best television journalism right now is either privately financed (Al Jazeera) or publicly financed (BBC). In the U.S., we're stuck with Anderson Cooper.
Fees:
One-time Walmart fee: $3
Montly fee: $2
ATM withdrawal: $2 plus ATM fees
International ATM withdrawal: $2 plus ATM fees
ATM balance inquiry: $1
Replacement card: $3
Second card: $3
Foreign purchases: Two percent of total purchase amount in U.S. dollars
On top of all that, if the card is stolen or hacked, I lose whatever is spent off the card. If my credit card number is stolen, I am not responsible for charges.
Debit cards are for suckers.
The reality is far, far worse. Even as a non-root user, if I click on the wireless connection icon on my desktop, select my network under Edit Connections, and click "Show Password", there it is, in pure plaintext!
Oh, NOES! If my desktop lets me have access to my own network password, where will it end? It might even let me access my own files! Then what? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
You mean regulatory authorities don't want random yahoos hauling biological samples across borders and flying unmanned drones all over the place? Shocking!
Shit, they probably don't want people building nuclear reactors in their backyards, either.
... approved this study?
Pretty much all studies involving human subjects in the U.S. have to be approved by a review board for compliance with ethical and safety standards. This study is an obvious fail in multiple respects, and I can't imagine a reputable review board approving such a thing. And if it wasn't reviewed, the study participants^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H victims of the study probably have standing to sue.
Here are a couple of good resources for looking up details of publisher policies:
Sherpa
List of academic journals by preprint policy Elsevier's policies are particularly obscure, and vary from journal-to-journal. They are often explained so poorly that it's hard to tell what the policy even is.
It's not a choice between "hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed" and suicide. There's Hospice. Death is natural, and it is possible to have a healthy death.
Suppose I started marketing an HIV test, or a Hepatitis C test, or a tuberculosis test without demonstrating the test was effective? The FDA would be on me like shit on stink, and rightly so. Same here: suppose they incorrectly tell someone they have Huntington's Disease, or carry BRCA?
Now cue all the Slashbertarians ranting about how restricting unproven medical testing is an assault on freedom...
Sooner or later, being anti-science and pro-capitalist is bound to catch up with you.
It was Mom-n-Pop video stores that were the shiznit, The king of them all was Kim's Mediapolis in Morningside Heights in NYC, which arranged films by director. Blockbuster was never more than an annoying lowest-common-denominator experience designed by mediocre MBAs. May they rot in hell.
It's better! He Rule 34'd the Godwin of the Streisand effect! (or something like that).
You win the internet.
We would never have had PGP or encryption research outside government labs if everyone followed such rules.
The way I see it, no one would be using encryption nowadays if Obama managed to be president in the nineties.
Were you around in the nineties? That was when Clinton used CALEA to force telecoms to build the exact infrastructure that was exploited after 9/11 by Bush, and later Obama. That was when Clinton pushed the ultimately doomed "Clipper Chip", with all other strong encryption to be criminalized. Turns out, something as ham-handed as Clipper turned out to be un-necessary, since the NSA was just able to (apparently) subvert certification authorities and cripple hardware-based random number generators.
If Clinton had allowed a secure digital infrastructure to be built in the first place, none of the current shenanigans would have been possible, or at least would have been way harder.
It is hard to hate someone who provides such a great service.
Yes, yes, yes.
I buy pretty much everything at Amazon these days, except for food and building materials. Brick-and-mortar retail is circling the drain at this point: every once in a great while, I attempt to buy something at a store in a local strip mall, and nine times out of ten, I come back empty-handed and horrified by how bad it's gotten out there. I'm beginning to suspect that Bezos has infiltrated retail stores with irritating morons purely to drive you to Amazon.
Even more important, Amazon mediates the online purchase experience with small retailers. It doesn't take many times having to file a dispute with American Express to drive one away from corrupt indie electronics retailers, but even the worst of them won't fuck with you if the order is mediated through Amazon.
I'll take evil over incompetent almost all the time.
OK, let's to the numbers here.
The resolution of the human eye for somebody with astoundingly good vision is about one arc minute. At a distance of 3 meters, that means that the smallest thing you can see is about 0.9mm across. If the width of my screen is 1.5 meters, that means there is NO FUCKING POINT in making the display more than 1667 pixels across. For a smaller screen, say 1 meter wide, the limit is 1111 pixels. Which is why I never bothered to buy more than 720p for my 32" monitor, because only Superman would be able to notice the difference of a higher resolution screen at the distance from my couch to the TV.
4K is the video equivalent of Monster Cable.
... become completely insane? This has to be the most bizarre and weirdly disturbing thread I have ever seen.
Why is this rated as 5 Insightful?
It's modded insightful because the vast majority of people on Slashdot react with all the rationality of a mob when somebody even obliquely hints at taking their porn away. It's lonely in the basement.
Well, not that i am into erotica, but I dislike being told what I am being allowed to read by private company.
You're not. A private company is deciding which products it wishes to sell and which it does not.