PHP has an important drawback. It's awful. I've once showed a kid the scripts (beautifully indented, of course) I use for the my site, and he was all "what the bunch of $$$s ?". These arrays filled with "" didn't help either.
It doesn't sound like much, but a clean, nice syntax is a lot less scaring than some uninteligible mess.
HTML is the most boring language I had the displeasure to learn. And I couldn't see a kid being interested in building a webpage. It's not to give them a profession, it's to keep them interested.
If you wanna teach programming, well, teach programming. Perl would be my shot. Or any other scripting language. And if they have the knack, move on to more consistent stuff, like plain old C.
Hummmm no. Using rational radixes would just lead to infinite degrees of binariness between 1 and 1/2, not continuous binariness. To get that, you'd have to use reals.
But as I can't fathom even what base 2/3 would be, base e is just lost to me.
Well, I'm sure many people would agree that ternary is more binary than hex. Heck, you could even create a binariness index, 1/radix + 1/2, to classify the basis.
Although the steps would be discrete steps, so yeah, there's no continuum.
A scientific study showed that the deadliest parts of the road are those immediately after the speed traps [citation needed]. Of course, when they are publicly displayed (as they are required by law to be in Brasil).
Although I can't remember the source, it does make sense, as people generally slow down just before the speed traps, and accelerate after. Thus, you're just creating a zone in the road where everyone is accelerating, thus having less handling and increased likelihood of crashes.
Of course, that would only happen in this case if a significant percentage of the drives uses the service, which I find unlikely.
The only inaccurate thing about my post is the last bit, about antimatter. It's a typo. Substitute antimatter with dark matter and the sentence makes sense. I told that the energy spectrum of the electron beams can lead to insight on how they were produced, i.e. the mass of the dark matter particles. And they haven't observed positrons, they're just predicted by some theories, in this case the Kaluza-Klein model.
Its interacting clusters of galaxies, not colliding galaxies. And its more than the shape. Its the difference in where weak lensing show concentrations of matter and where X-ray observations show where hot intergalactic gas is.
I concede, it would be more accurate to say clusters of galaxies instead of galaxies, with a negligible loss of communicating power.
But no. They are colliding. You can have numerous types of non-destructive interactions between clusters, none of which is shoving a cluster trough another. If you don't want to call that a collision, I think you'd be very lonely in the astrophysics community.
And the x-ray observations are used to determine the distribution of baryonic matter, and thus calculate were the centre of mass should be. The gravitational lensing shows were the actual centre of mass is, and they are not the same. That is, we have a difference between the actual shape and the one we would have expected from the baryonic matter we see. Now, if it is too much a leap for you associating the centre of mass of a cluster with its shape, I'm sorry. I should have been clearer.
Frankly, it's all in the wikipedia I've linked. So that the interested parties could gather information on how the calculations were made. If I had talked straight about the methods as you did, I doubt many would have understood. My point is not to show off knowledge (I'm very secure of that, thank you), is to distribute some.
Slashdot is a great forum to discuss technical matters, but when it comes to actual science, the general level of knowledge is very low.
You are assuming that the universe is finite, and has been expanding at the speed of light from 15 billion years ago.
Actually, the big bang occurred about 13.73 billion years ago, and from that you can calculate the radius of the visible universe, which is about 13.8 billion light years.
The actual radius is unknown, as we don't know if the universe is finite or infinite, but it's at least 46 billion light years.
What I find amusing is that the summary is an accurate resume of the article, which is thoroughly inaccurate.
The "little evidence" we have is the shape of colliding galaxies, of which the most famous is the Bullet Cluster, and gravitational lenses in regions that appear to be free from "normal" matter.
The exciting thing here is that they measured the actual energy spectrum of the beams, which could give insight on what are the particles of antimatter. That, AFAIK, we had no idea until now.
Well, we have history classes here too, and we wish it or not, the US is an important country. Anyway, from here what I heard is that the electoral college was put into place to avoid the more populous agrarian south rule the north colonies, and stop things like the abolition of slavery. Now, the situation is inverted, and the scarcely populated rural area gets a disproportioned amount of power relative to the cities.
And I don't think that it is a bad thing that the cities ruled the country, the idea of democracy is the will of majority, isn't it? And, at least in Brasil, it's where the most educated parcel of the population lives.
What I didn't know is that nowadays there still existed people that supported this system, thought that the electoral college was kept only due to inertia. The concept of the president not being elected by the majority of the population is very alien to me. My bad.
Voter registration really is more about your state knowing where you are so you can vote for the right people. Certainly, if the federal government handled it, it would be automatic, but we just don't have the federal government in charge of elections (which is fine, we are, at least in theory, more about a collection of states rather than citizens of one large federal government).
It's fine, really? I think that it only makes sense that federal elections are handled by the federal government. That way, you can simplify the candidates registration process (somebody remember ron paul and ralph nader not showing up in some ballots?), and have some uniformity in how citizens cast their votes. Believe me, it only boosts transparency. By having everybody following the same public guidelines, it's harder for some state have some shady process that discriminates against some minorities.
At least, it's how it happens here in Brasil. Even the most obscure candidates show up in every ballot, and we don't have to vote J.F. Kerry to stop Bush from winning, as we hold runoffs.
Here in Brasil, we have some sane regulating agencies, and noone advertises unlimited bandwidth. Mine has a monthly cap of 20 GiB (yes, very little, but I paid less for it, and I can buy additional quotas as needed). We even have companies that let you have low speed at business hours (when bandwidth is expensive) and high speeds at night, when I let my BitTorrent running.
It isn't that hard, you know, charging the real cost instead of punishing the users for using your service in an unprofitable way.
What I can't understand is why the ISPs can't charge per GiB, with low prices when the network is idle, and high prices when it's busy. Like the telcoms do, for, 30 years?
That way they could just expand their infrastructure, like the telcoms do, instead of rationating their service.
Classical analog: Perpetual interference on all radio frequencies. Not quite feasible, is it?
The question is, noone has your information. If no exchange took place, you know that that channel is insecure (this is very valuable information). So, you change your channel. Simple, isn't it?
In the end, I doubt anyone would eavesdrop quantum communication, it has essentially no point.
And what references do you have on this information? Your ass, I suppose.
I work with quantum computing. You forgot to say that qubits aren't some magical beings that appear out of the thin air, they have to be physically implemented somehow. And, IMHO, using polarization of light is the most promising technique. And you can transmit quantumly encrypted information via any system that can be used to make qubits.
Quantum computing and quantum crypto have everything in common. In fact, quantum crypto is one tiny consequence of quantum computation and information.
The point is, quantum crypto was never intended to be used as the standard encryption, just a perfectly (yes, perfect. Not even quantum computers can break it.) secure means of transmitting a small amount of critical information. To be used, let's see, to transmit private keys of classical crypto, or attack orders in times of war, that kind of stuff.
And to break RSA isn't that big a deal. It appears that quantum computers can't accelerate considerably the solution of NP-complete problems. So, we could move from the factorization of a large number to finding a hamiltonian cycle of a graph.
I can't believe this was moded insightful and not flamebait.
I live in Brasil, and have many times voted in these machines (and yes, in major elections also) without any problems.
Let me give you some hard facts to counter the flame war:
1 - The votes are publicly counted, and the results displayed in real time identified by individual voting machine (we call them e-urns). Quite hard to hide a tampered e-urn this way.
2 - Only a handful of the e-urns register the votes on paper, which we use as a sample to check the results.
Brasil has a long tradition of tampering with the election results (especially in the Old Republic, in the early 1900's), and some political crisis caused in part by the sluggishness of the counting process (most famously the election of Kubitschek in 1956). After the introduction of the e-urns, we haven't had any of them. Can you say the same about your beloved paper ballots?
The only problem I can say we have with them is caused by stupid people that can't read numbers (yes, they do exist), and mostly always miscast their votes.
This "quantum stuff" you talk about is probably tunnelling, which will make electrons leak the transistors if they are too small.
The exact distance is hard to tell, but in my STM I use around 10 angstroms (fuck ASCII), to get a sizeable current through a potential wall. So, I bet that 20 angstroms would suffice to make it negligible, and so, accounting for other instabilities, I would agree with parent in 5 nm.
FTFA: Computers are constrained by the laws of physics; what you can do with information is no more than the laws of physics, when you operate at classical level. On a quantum computer, information processing is done on devices that obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
So, quantum mechanics is not physics, or it just doesn't obey its laws?
The problem is, this quote is from the company's CTO. Or he used a very unhappy wording, or he has no idea what he's talking about. Scam? Oh no, wouldn't think about it. How can i tag this vaporware?
But seriously though, let your physics department know that you have idle time on such a cluster, they will come begging at you for some cicles. I've tried running a simulation of some quantum systems from first principles, using Monte Carlo methods (my software), and it would never get anywhere on small clusters. On a big one I managed to see something, but after days of processing.
Well, you don't understand a sodding bit about Brasil's taxes. The government charges the greatest taxes in the world in imported technology, that being software, hardware, iPods and such.
What I'm saying is that for microsoft to have the same profit here and in the US, they have to charge higher prices.
Of course microsoft could lower the prices to compensate the taxes, but I don't think that any capitalistic enterprise would do that. So yes, it is the government's fault.
Ok, you can lie with statistics, but still the microsoft prices are too big for the average consumer, let me show with hard numbers:
Price of Windows Vista Home Basic: R$499,00 Minimum wage: R$415,00
And believe me, a lot of families earn the minimum here. That's 83% the cost of the OS. Do you see any chance of them paying that?
Of course, you could argue that these people don't own computers. Not true, since there are programs of distribution of low-cost PCs (how they would be able to run Vista is a mistery), and some do have them.
But that's not the main market. Let's say them a good middle-class salary, of about R$1200,00 Now the OS is 43% of the wage. Would you pay it? Darn, myself used a pirated edition during my whole childhood, until I learned enough so I could install Linux.
I live in Brazil. The anti-american wave has largely passed away: you don't find love for US here, but neither hate.
As for the pricing scheme, it is really outrageous for the average income here, but I don't think that it has much to do with the linux adoption here. It's very rare to see someone that does care about copyright here. Even if Microsoft sold at reasonable prices (yes, it is the government's fault), just the fact we need to register, call for license keys and all that bullshit makes us just pirate the damn thing. And if it's hard to pirate (wga and all), we go away. And there's linux. It's free and it doesn't hassle us. Oh, it's open source and all? Cute. But that's not the main point.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people that care a lot about FOSS philosophy (myself included) but for the masses, the "software that don't get in my way" is more important.
As a scientist, I have to say that this model is utterly beneficial. One of the greatest problems we run when trying to replicate experiments is that the dirty lab details are (intentionally or not) omitted from the fine print articles, making us lose quite a time figuring them out. Obviously it would disappear if such openness became the standard.
Although the idea of making science collaboratively is as old as science itself, it merits having a working model (just don't patent it!) and standing the principle quite out.
Oh and I *hate* this marketing way of naming everything like software versions.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to differ.
PHP has an important drawback. It's awful. I've once showed a kid the scripts (beautifully indented, of course) I use for the my site, and he was all "what the bunch of $$$s ?". These arrays filled with "" didn't help either.
It doesn't sound like much, but a clean, nice syntax is a lot less scaring than some uninteligible mess.
Are you fucking kidding?
HTML is the most boring language I had the displeasure to learn. And I couldn't see a kid being interested in building a webpage. It's not to give them a profession, it's to keep them interested.
If you wanna teach programming, well, teach programming. Perl would be my shot. Or any other scripting language. And if they have the knack, move on to more consistent stuff, like plain old C.
Hummmm no.
Using rational radixes would just lead to infinite degrees of binariness between 1 and 1/2, not continuous binariness. To get that, you'd have to use reals.
But as I can't fathom even what base 2/3 would be, base e is just lost to me.
Well, I'm sure many people would agree that ternary is more binary than hex. Heck, you could even create a binariness index, 1/radix + 1/2, to classify the basis.
Although the steps would be discrete steps, so yeah, there's no continuum.
A scientific study showed that the deadliest parts of the road are those immediately after the speed traps [citation needed]. Of course, when they are publicly displayed (as they are required by law to be in Brasil).
Although I can't remember the source, it does make sense, as people generally slow down just before the speed traps, and accelerate after. Thus, you're just creating a zone in the road where everyone is accelerating, thus having less handling and increased likelihood of crashes.
Of course, that would only happen in this case if a significant percentage of the drives uses the service, which I find unlikely.
The only inaccurate thing about my post is the last bit, about antimatter. It's a typo. Substitute antimatter with dark matter and the sentence makes sense. I told that the energy spectrum of the electron beams can lead to insight on how they were produced, i.e. the mass of the dark matter particles. And they haven't observed positrons, they're just predicted by some theories, in this case the Kaluza-Klein model.
Its interacting clusters of galaxies, not colliding galaxies. And its more than the shape. Its the difference in where weak lensing show concentrations of matter and where X-ray observations show where hot intergalactic gas is.
I concede, it would be more accurate to say clusters of galaxies instead of galaxies, with a negligible loss of communicating power.
But no. They are colliding. You can have numerous types of non-destructive interactions between clusters, none of which is shoving a cluster trough another. If you don't want to call that a collision, I think you'd be very lonely in the astrophysics community.
And the x-ray observations are used to determine the distribution of baryonic matter, and thus calculate were the centre of mass should be. The gravitational lensing shows were the actual centre of mass is, and they are not the same.
That is, we have a difference between the actual shape and the one we would have expected from the baryonic matter we see. Now, if it is too much a leap for you associating the centre of mass of a cluster with its shape, I'm sorry. I should have been clearer.
Frankly, it's all in the wikipedia I've linked. So that the interested parties could gather information on how the calculations were made. If I had talked straight about the methods as you did, I doubt many would have understood. My point is not to show off knowledge (I'm very secure of that, thank you), is to distribute some.
Slashdot is a great forum to discuss technical matters, but when it comes to actual science, the general level of knowledge is very low.
What? Wild leap of faith, my friend.
You are assuming that the universe is finite, and has been expanding at the speed of light from 15 billion years ago.
Actually, the big bang occurred about 13.73 billion years ago, and from that you can calculate the radius of the visible universe, which is about 13.8 billion light years.
The actual radius is unknown, as we don't know if the universe is finite or infinite, but it's at least 46 billion light years.
But yeah, it's pretty close.
This is "news", not information.
What I find amusing is that the summary is an accurate resume of the article, which is thoroughly inaccurate.
The "little evidence" we have is the shape of colliding galaxies, of which the most famous is the Bullet Cluster, and gravitational lenses in regions that appear to be free from "normal" matter.
The exciting thing here is that they measured the actual energy spectrum of the beams, which could give insight on what are the particles of antimatter. That, AFAIK, we had no idea until now.
That's why I chose to work with superconducting magnets. Free liquid helium!
Although its pretty useless, I love having an overclocked desktop in my lab to show off to the simulation folks.
Now I can finally turn on Aero.
Well, we have history classes here too, and we wish it or not, the US is an important country. Anyway, from here what I heard is that the electoral college was put into place to avoid the more populous agrarian south rule the north colonies, and stop things like the abolition of slavery. Now, the situation is inverted, and the scarcely populated rural area gets a disproportioned amount of power relative to the cities.
And I don't think that it is a bad thing that the cities ruled the country, the idea of democracy is the will of majority, isn't it? And, at least in Brasil, it's where the most educated parcel of the population lives.
What I didn't know is that nowadays there still existed people that supported this system, thought that the electoral college was kept only due to inertia. The concept of the president not being elected by the majority of the population is very alien to me. My bad.
Gerrymandering, really? An old Magic player, are you?
Voter registration really is more about your state knowing where you are so you can vote for the right people. Certainly, if the federal government handled it, it would be automatic, but we just don't have the federal government in charge of elections (which is fine, we are, at least in theory, more about a collection of states rather than citizens of one large federal government).
It's fine, really? I think that it only makes sense that federal elections are handled by the federal government. That way, you can simplify the candidates registration process (somebody remember ron paul and ralph nader not showing up in some ballots?), and have some uniformity in how citizens cast their votes. Believe me, it only boosts transparency. By having everybody following the same public guidelines, it's harder for some state have some shady process that discriminates against some minorities.
At least, it's how it happens here in Brasil. Even the most obscure candidates show up in every ballot, and we don't have to vote J.F. Kerry to stop Bush from winning, as we hold runoffs.
Here in Brasil, we have some sane regulating agencies, and noone advertises unlimited bandwidth. Mine has a monthly cap of 20 GiB (yes, very little, but I paid less for it, and I can buy additional quotas as needed). We even have companies that let you have low speed at business hours (when bandwidth is expensive) and high speeds at night, when I let my BitTorrent running.
It isn't that hard, you know, charging the real cost instead of punishing the users for using your service in an unprofitable way.
What I can't understand is why the ISPs can't charge per GiB, with low prices when the network is idle, and high prices when it's busy. Like the telcoms do, for, 30 years?
That way they could just expand their infrastructure, like the telcoms do, instead of rationating their service.
Classical analog: Perpetual interference on all radio frequencies. Not quite feasible, is it?
The question is, noone has your information. If no exchange took place, you know that that channel is insecure (this is very valuable information). So, you change your channel. Simple, isn't it?
In the end, I doubt anyone would eavesdrop quantum communication, it has essentially no point.
And what references do you have on this information? Your ass, I suppose.
I work with quantum computing. You forgot to say that qubits aren't some magical beings that appear out of the thin air, they have to be physically implemented somehow. And, IMHO, using polarization of light is the most promising technique. And you can transmit quantumly encrypted information via any system that can be used to make qubits.
Quantum computing and quantum crypto have everything in common. In fact, quantum crypto is one tiny consequence of quantum computation and information.
The point is, quantum crypto was never intended to be used as the standard encryption, just a perfectly (yes, perfect. Not even quantum computers can break it.) secure means of transmitting a small amount of critical information. To be used, let's see, to transmit private keys of classical crypto, or attack orders in times of war, that kind of stuff.
And to break RSA isn't that big a deal. It appears that quantum computers can't accelerate considerably the solution of NP-complete problems. So, we could move from the factorization of a large number to finding a hamiltonian cycle of a graph.
Well, I do consider flamebait making a polemical point without giving any information to back it.
You were given an example of e-voting functioning perfectly in major, general elections and just replied as if it was bullshit.
But, as I disagree with you, my opinion is inevitably biased.
And 64 6E 74 20 75 20 70 72 65 66 65 72 20 68 78 3F
I can't believe this was moded insightful and not flamebait.
I live in Brasil, and have many times voted in these machines (and yes, in major elections also) without any problems.
Let me give you some hard facts to counter the flame war:
1 - The votes are publicly counted, and the results displayed in real time identified by individual voting machine (we call them e-urns). Quite hard to hide a tampered e-urn this way.
2 - Only a handful of the e-urns register the votes on paper, which we use as a sample to check the results.
Brasil has a long tradition of tampering with the election results (especially in the Old Republic, in the early 1900's), and some political crisis caused in part by the sluggishness of the counting process (most famously the election of Kubitschek in 1956). After the introduction of the e-urns, we haven't had any of them. Can you say the same about your beloved paper ballots?
The only problem I can say we have with them is caused by stupid people that can't read numbers (yes, they do exist), and mostly always miscast their votes.
This "quantum stuff" you talk about is probably tunnelling, which will make electrons leak the transistors if they are too small.
The exact distance is hard to tell, but in my STM I use around 10 angstroms (fuck ASCII), to get a sizeable current through a potential wall. So, I bet that 20 angstroms would suffice to make it negligible, and so, accounting for other instabilities, I would agree with parent in 5 nm.
FTFA: Computers are constrained by the laws of physics; what you can do with information is no more than the laws of physics, when you operate at classical level. On a quantum computer, information processing is done on devices that obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
So, quantum mechanics is not physics, or it just doesn't obey its laws?
The problem is, this quote is from the company's CTO. Or he used a very unhappy wording, or he has no idea what he's talking about. Scam? Oh no, wouldn't think about it. How can i tag this vaporware?
Well, you could always make a virus farm
But seriously though, let your physics department know that you have idle time on such a cluster, they will come begging at you for some cicles. I've tried running a simulation of some quantum systems from first principles, using Monte Carlo methods (my software), and it would never get anywhere on small clusters. On a big one I managed to see something, but after days of processing.
Well, you don't understand a sodding bit about Brasil's taxes. The government charges the greatest taxes in the world in imported technology, that being software, hardware, iPods and such.
What I'm saying is that for microsoft to have the same profit here and in the US, they have to charge higher prices.
Of course microsoft could lower the prices to compensate the taxes, but I don't think that any capitalistic enterprise would do that. So yes, it is the government's fault.
Ok, you can lie with statistics, but still the microsoft prices are too big for the average consumer, let me show with hard numbers:
Price of Windows Vista Home Basic: R$499,00
Minimum wage: R$415,00
And believe me, a lot of families earn the minimum here. That's 83% the cost of the OS. Do you see any chance of them paying that?
Of course, you could argue that these people don't own computers. Not true, since there are programs of distribution of low-cost PCs (how they would be able to run Vista is a mistery), and some do have them.
But that's not the main market. Let's say them a good middle-class salary, of about R$1200,00
Now the OS is 43% of the wage. Would you pay it?
Darn, myself used a pirated edition during my whole childhood, until I learned enough so I could install Linux.
I live in Brazil. The anti-american wave has largely passed away: you don't find love for US here, but neither hate.
As for the pricing scheme, it is really outrageous for the average income here, but I don't think that it has much to do with the linux adoption here. It's very rare to see someone that does care about copyright here. Even if Microsoft sold at reasonable prices (yes, it is the government's fault), just the fact we need to register, call for license keys and all that bullshit makes us just pirate the damn thing. And if it's hard to pirate (wga and all), we go away. And there's linux. It's free and it doesn't hassle us. Oh, it's open source and all? Cute. But that's not the main point.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people that care a lot about FOSS philosophy (myself included) but for the masses, the "software that don't get in my way" is more important.
As a scientist, I have to say that this model is utterly beneficial. One of the greatest problems we run when trying to replicate experiments is that the dirty lab details are (intentionally or not) omitted from the fine print articles, making us lose quite a time figuring them out. Obviously it would disappear if such openness became the standard.
Although the idea of making science collaboratively is as old as science itself, it merits having a working model (just don't patent it!) and standing the principle quite out.
Oh and I *hate* this marketing way of naming everything like software versions.
Post Office complains e-mail has caused losses of $168 billion from 1992 to 2008.