Let's see... even Wikipedia's example of a poor JPEG is 1523 bytes, so (accounting for metadata) at least 2^10000 (10^3000) possible images. Divide by whatever images/second you like (a billion? a billion billion?) and it's still "more universe lifetimes than you can imagine". "Take time" and "impossible" are not, in this case, mutually exclusive.
I don't know about France particularly, but some jurisdictions issue licenses in some such cases because the epilepsy is either controlled by medicine, otherwise irrelevant to driving (e.g., seizures only while asleep), or simply so rare (epilepsy simply means "has had more than one seizure, ever") that it would be overboard to deny a license. Extra restrictions (e.g., reduced term of license) and/or requirements (e.g., medical supervision) are common, as might be expected.
People here keep SAYING that Latour is wrong... but not one of them -- not even one, and not you -- has even attempted to show how he is actually wrong. And until they do, I will continue to accept what appears to be very solid and legitimate math and science.
OK, here goes. Latour starts by complaining that Spencer's example fails to specify whether the cold surround is kept there by constant heat removal or by a thermostat. Of course, he then goes on to state (correctly) that it makes no difference: the heat input (from the electricity) is constant, therefore (in steady state, which is the only thing under consideration) the heat removed is the same constant regardless of any unpowered additions to the chamber. So the heat input to the wall must be equal in the one- and two-plate cases as well; in both cases its temperature is constant, and the heat removed is the same.
That heat is of course exactly the radiation from one or both plates. In the two-plate case, some of the chamber wall can see only the added plate, which I suppose everyone agrees cannot reach the same temperature as the heated plate. That portion of the wall therefore receives less radiation. As the total must be unchanged from the one-plate case, some other part of the wall must be receiving more radiation. We could suppose this to be that part of the wall that can see both plates edge-on. But, either by making the plates thin and close together, or by (as Spencer suggests to exaggerate the effect) making the added plate actually be a (partial) shroud around the heated plate, we can reduce that effect to irrelevance. Therefore the additional radiation received elsewhere on the chamber wall must come from an increased temperature of the heated plate.
I don't see this a "self-incrimination" issue, after all DNA and biological samples can be taken against your will and you cannot refuse to provide it if its called for.
They can collect your DNA, but you're not required to tell them if you're a chimera. There's a difference between being the subject of an investigation against your will (which goes for your person and your effects), and being compelled to assist in it actively.
In exactly the same way, they can read your encrypted hard disk (with a warrant), and they can break your safe (with a warrant). In the latter case, they'll likely ask you to open it for them for the simple reason that you'd rather have a functional safe afterwards and they'd rather do less work (so everybody wins). However, this law differs by saying that if the cops can't break your safe, you have to help.
Of course HTTPS with any certificate whatsoever is >= HTTP. My point was that by the time ISPs are willing to add headers to your HTTP requests, they already have no problem with tampering with your connection and so might not be deterred by encryption-only HTTPS.
I like your DNS idea, as far as protecting those sites that have CA-certs goes, but it seems a bit circular to me; in order to allow my browser to stop bothering me about self-signed certificates, I go find some CA certificates (which DNSSEC must use if my ISP is to be powerless against it) and use them to double-check the self-signed ones (to make sure that the site in question is expected to present one). Why not just go for the CAs in the first place?
Unfortunately, I bet that going to HTTPS would be a benefit. What I mean by that is that the law is (probably) only strong enough in the case of encryption, and doesn't do what it needs to: unequivocally forbid tampering with traffic that isn't yours (via Comcast's RSTs or these HTTP headers or Phorm or whatever).
(Incidentally, I wonder if there's a technical solution to this that one can implement on the assumption that the ISPs are being cheap about implementing it: deliberately fragment your packets (at TCP or IP level) and keep them from identifying (the assumption: from one packet at a time) a reliable place at which to insert their headers.)
so less need to blast people in the face in order to get their attention.
But if blasting people in the face improves returns now (which it must, since advertisers keep doing it), why would it stop improving returns later? The only that that would help is if people paid enough attention even to subtle ads so that the annoyance of the blasting would outweigh the added eyeballs. Are ZIP+4s going to do that?
I can't tell if you're being ironic or not. But if you are serious, then know that an ISP that's willing to stoop to this level would have a field day with this: they just have to intercept your connection, present you a self-signed certificate for whatever domain you tried to contact, and then they can do whatever they want (among which the least-harmful might be adding your ZIP+4 to the headers). It is malfeasance like this that the PKI is designed to prevent! (Separate topic: how trustworthy are the CAs?)
In this case, there's the special Steven King-like horror of being deliberately (if mistakenly) left to die while perfectly aware of what's happening to you and completely incapable of getting help.
1) you are copying and pasting Wired's content and 2) as early as high school I was taught that if I was copying information verbatim, I had better have some sort of reference
What if I see a phrase on Wired's site and decide to search for it on another site?
What if I'm using someone else's machine, and the best I can do to defeat a potential keylogger is grab random letters from random places?
What if I'm bookmarking their page and want some useful text for the description?
What if I'm writing a point-by-point rebuttal and don't need to cite them after every quotation?
What if I'm selecting a URL that isn't a hyperlink so that I can direct my browser there?
What if I'm copying a quotation in their copy, and would prefer to cite the original source?
What if I'm writing an email to a friend recommending the piece, and would like to include my favorite part as a hook?
What if the article isn't written in my native language and I want to use a translator program on certain words?
What if I want to copy a command into my terminal? (This is Wired, after all.)
What if I'm doing statistics on journalistic writing and am feeding their prose into a calculator of the Gunning fog index? (Should I have to include a link to Wikipedia there because it's where I retrieved the name of the index? They don't own it.)
Provide an easy-to-use "cite us" link if you like, to encourage proper citation practice. But it is the height of narrow-mindedness to assume that you know what other people want to do with text you provide them, and of arrogance to assume that you know how to do it better than they do.
Personally, I feel the most reasonable interpretation (from the standpoint of being consistent and, well, logical) would be that linking does *not* create a derivative work (for example, is Firefox a derivative of the Flash plugin, or Flash plugin a derivative of Firefox? Seems to me they are fairly independent works that use the mechanism of dynamic linking to work together.)
No one claims that Firefox is a derivative of Flash, or vice versa. What is claimed is that the resulting memory space with both objects loaded is a derivative work of each, which can only be created with the license-granted consent of the copyright holders of both objects. The trick: how strong is this argument since it applies only to the ephemeral address space created at runtime by the user and not, say, by Mozilla or Adobe?
In the obvious case of MegaCo distributes foo that always links dynamically to libgpled.so, one can argue that MegaCo is effectively creating that combined object because there is no other way that their software could be used. But IANAL, of course, and I think the real lawyers (and judges) haven't fully settled the question.
Why does the second law say no to arbitrarily concentrating energy?
Because it lets me extract useful work simply from a hot environment with no cold reservoir. I just put my box in a room and it gradually gets hotter while the room gets colder. After a while I set up a heat engine between them and extract some work from the difference. Then I can repeat the process: this time, the room can't heat the box as well, but the room is colder too, so the heat engine still works. Eventually I can get (almost -- see the 3rd law) all the heat from the room extracted as useful work, which is not allowed.
(By "arbitrarily" I meant "without reason or effort" rather than merely "without bound". Sorry for any confusion.)
Surely the fact that you are drawing all your energy from outside the system (your box) would allow for a localised loss of entropy, given the gains in entropy outside the system.
Entropy goes the other way: any normal physical system that gets hotter gains entropy, so the box would be gaining it and the room losing it. But hot systems (by definition!) gain less entropy from, say, a joule of heat than cold systems do. This is the reason for the unidirectional flow of heat: if I'm hotter than you, you lose more entropy giving up a joule than I gain from getting it, so we can't send the heat that way.
The white side reflects light, the black side absorbs it...
Once you reach the same temperature as your surroundings, you'll radiate as many photons as you absorb on the black side, and not go anywhere. If there's any anisotropy in the surrounding radiation field, you can use that to move around (but that's just called a solar sail for the common dipole case).
A better idea would be a mirror sail that transmits light on one face, and reflects it on the other.
The 2nd law says no. I could make a box out of your one-way mirror (note that real "one-way" mirrors are something else entirely) material (all reflecting surfaces inward) and concentrate energy arbitrarily.
If you assume that only most of, say, a 1000 light year journey takes place at 0.5c (so the trip will take 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years, assuming some clever sort of acceleration is worked out), the rest frame (the planet you launched from) will only be experiencing time about 15% faster than the ship, so only 2,300, or 3,450, or 4,600 years will have passed by the time you get to the other planet (or so).
That's still too long. The sensible way to measure velocities is in the frame of the source and destination (which might as well be in one frame when we're talking about SR), so you can calculate the travel times in that frame directly by dividing the distance by the velocity. The only weirdness is the amount of time observed by the travelers, which is smaller than that observed by the endpoints, but not because the latter amount is increased beyond what Newton would expect.
Therefore, although we measure distance in light years, it doesn't lead to twice the duration if we traveled at half the speed of light. In fact, as we approached relativistic speeds, the duration within our frame of reference would stay the same, but from an external point of view, our speed has not actually reached such a velocity.
Um, what? If it's 500 ly away, and something goes there at c/2, it takes 1000 years. What else could a speed of "half of lightspeed" possibly mean? Even relativity isn't so weird as to change that.
Therefore, we would perceive the time to travel to a nearby star as shorter than the value arrived at by a simple ratio applied to c. Likewise, the actual time passed on the target planet will have been many times longer by the time we get there such that we cannot assume that millions of years haven't passed since we first set out from our own home planet.
You're right that the passengers on the trip would experience less proper time than the observers on Earth (I believe this is really due to the acceleration involved, although it can be calculated using SR). But the time as measured by clocks on Earth and the destination will still be the one millennium you would expect from Newtonian physics. (What would surprise Newton is the anomalously large energy required to get to that speed, and the bizarre view out the window had by the travellers.)
You work for thieving criminals. There are specific requirement for someone to be salaried exempt. [...] Also, to be salaried exempt, there cannot be any specific expectation on what hours your work. Only details on what you must get done. The moment they care what hours you work, you are hourly.
Fixing a bug by changing the source code and then recompiling it is creating a derivative work. [...] A few years ago, we had access to the Windows (NT/2000) source code but it's still not legal for me to fix their bugs and then install it on my computer.
Fortunately, the utility of doing what you want with (and within) your own computing equipment has been recognized. (This is no more legal advice than your comment was, of course.)
We read Jack London's "To Build a Fire in 2nd Grade". 2nd grade for crying out loud!
I'm sure that most students would totally support learning how "To Build a Fire in 2nd Grade". And if so, it makes sense that they read it while in 2nd (or 1st) grade, so that it's not already too late to apply what they learn.
Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?
Yes. The typical reasons (aside from Luddite tendencies and comfort) include
that our text editors are extensible, so that you don't have to switch to a completely different program (with a different interface) to edit SQL instead of, say, JavaScript (granted: Eclipse does both of these; I don't think any "Studio" program does)
that they (Emacs especially) are extensively customizable, so that things that bother you can be changed
that they are extremely cross-platform (more so even than Eclipse because more so even than Java)
that they were designed with the keyboard in mind, so they're easier on the hands (if you get over the "holy crap I have to type Escape (vi) or Ctrl-Alt (Emacs) all the time!" thing)
that they've been around for a long time, so that most of the bugs are gone and many many add-ons are available (quick, does Eclipse do Icon? Maybe it does, but it's been supported out-of-the-box by Emacs since at least 2001.)
that they integrate well with other tools in ways that sometimes surpass even an IDE's integration: I'm sure you can sort text in any IDE, but can you pass it to sort(1), use all the options and speed thereof, and replace the text you sent with what you got back? It's C-u M-| in Emacs.
that they've always been free (and Free).
Some people have been using such editors for longer than the modern IDEs have existed, and so are so good with them that it would take a very long time to recoup the investment of switching (if we even take as given that there will be a lasting net benefit).
That's an error on the part of the user that made the image; they pressed Super-PrintScreen (Super is often the "Windows key" on modern keyboards) and that wasn't what they needed to do to get their screenshot.
Unfortunately, one of blackmail's strong points is that the victim is often unwilling to complain about it, because you can release the information faster than you can be arrested. (Even with clever cops, a dead-man's switch in the cloud to post whatever incriminating information will be hard to discover and stop in time.)
Why not have a CBA that says that "workers must have policy as a choice but are free to take other offers that management provides"? Does that damage the union in some way? (Do the union bosses think it does damage?)
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see... even Wikipedia's example of a poor JPEG is 1523 bytes, so (accounting for metadata) at least 2^10000 (10^3000) possible images. Divide by whatever images/second you like (a billion? a billion billion?) and it's still "more universe lifetimes than you can imagine". "Take time" and "impossible" are not, in this case, mutually exclusive.
I don't know about France particularly, but some jurisdictions issue licenses in some such cases because the epilepsy is either controlled by medicine, otherwise irrelevant to driving (e.g., seizures only while asleep), or simply so rare (epilepsy simply means "has had more than one seizure, ever") that it would be overboard to deny a license. Extra restrictions (e.g., reduced term of license) and/or requirements (e.g., medical supervision) are common, as might be expected.
People here keep SAYING that Latour is wrong... but not one of them -- not even one, and not you -- has even attempted to show how he is actually wrong. And until they do, I will continue to accept what appears to be very solid and legitimate math and science.
OK, here goes. Latour starts by complaining that Spencer's example fails to specify whether the cold surround is kept there by constant heat removal or by a thermostat. Of course, he then goes on to state (correctly) that it makes no difference: the heat input (from the electricity) is constant, therefore (in steady state, which is the only thing under consideration) the heat removed is the same constant regardless of any unpowered additions to the chamber. So the heat input to the wall must be equal in the one- and two-plate cases as well; in both cases its temperature is constant, and the heat removed is the same.
That heat is of course exactly the radiation from one or both plates. In the two-plate case, some of the chamber wall can see only the added plate, which I suppose everyone agrees cannot reach the same temperature as the heated plate. That portion of the wall therefore receives less radiation. As the total must be unchanged from the one-plate case, some other part of the wall must be receiving more radiation. We could suppose this to be that part of the wall that can see both plates edge-on. But, either by making the plates thin and close together, or by (as Spencer suggests to exaggerate the effect) making the added plate actually be a (partial) shroud around the heated plate, we can reduce that effect to irrelevance. Therefore the additional radiation received elsewhere on the chamber wall must come from an increased temperature of the heated plate.
On average, online gaming now consumes a staggering 407 million hours of U.S. citizens' time per year.
A whole hour and 18 minutes per person per year? That's nearly 0.0015% of the time! I don't see how the US ever gets anything done at that rate.
I don't see this a "self-incrimination" issue, after all DNA and biological samples can be taken against your will and you cannot refuse to provide it if its called for.
They can collect your DNA, but you're not required to tell them if you're a chimera. There's a difference between being the subject of an investigation against your will (which goes for your person and your effects), and being compelled to assist in it actively.
In exactly the same way, they can read your encrypted hard disk (with a warrant), and they can break your safe (with a warrant). In the latter case, they'll likely ask you to open it for them for the simple reason that you'd rather have a functional safe afterwards and they'd rather do less work (so everybody wins). However, this law differs by saying that if the cops can't break your safe, you have to help.
I suspect it's "You[ are wron]g. I[ will d]o wha[t I wa]nt." or something similar. The 'g' might be out of "You've got to be kidding", though.
Of course HTTPS with any certificate whatsoever is >= HTTP. My point was that by the time ISPs are willing to add headers to your HTTP requests, they already have no problem with tampering with your connection and so might not be deterred by encryption-only HTTPS.
I like your DNS idea, as far as protecting those sites that have CA-certs goes, but it seems a bit circular to me; in order to allow my browser to stop bothering me about self-signed certificates, I go find some CA certificates (which DNSSEC must use if my ISP is to be powerless against it) and use them to double-check the self-signed ones (to make sure that the site in question is expected to present one). Why not just go for the CAs in the first place?
Unfortunately, I bet that going to HTTPS would be a benefit. What I mean by that is that the law is (probably) only strong enough in the case of encryption, and doesn't do what it needs to: unequivocally forbid tampering with traffic that isn't yours (via Comcast's RSTs or these HTTP headers or Phorm or whatever).
(Incidentally, I wonder if there's a technical solution to this that one can implement on the assumption that the ISPs are being cheap about implementing it: deliberately fragment your packets (at TCP or IP level) and keep them from identifying (the assumption: from one packet at a time) a reliable place at which to insert their headers.)
so less need to blast people in the face in order to get their attention.
But if blasting people in the face improves returns now (which it must, since advertisers keep doing it), why would it stop improving returns later? The only that that would help is if people paid enough attention even to subtle ads so that the annoyance of the blasting would outweigh the added eyeballs. Are ZIP+4s going to do that?
I can't tell if you're being ironic or not. But if you are serious, then know that an ISP that's willing to stoop to this level would have a field day with this: they just have to intercept your connection, present you a self-signed certificate for whatever domain you tried to contact, and then they can do whatever they want (among which the least-harmful might be adding your ZIP+4 to the headers). It is malfeasance like this that the PKI is designed to prevent! (Separate topic: how trustworthy are the CAs?)
In this case, there's the special Steven King-like horror of being deliberately (if mistakenly) left to die while perfectly aware of what's happening to you and completely incapable of getting help.
1) you are copying and pasting Wired's content and 2) as early as high school I was taught that if I was copying information verbatim, I had better have some sort of reference
Provide an easy-to-use "cite us" link if you like, to encourage proper citation practice. But it is the height of narrow-mindedness to assume that you know what other people want to do with text you provide them, and of arrogance to assume that you know how to do it better than they do.
Personally, I feel the most reasonable interpretation (from the standpoint of being consistent and, well, logical) would be that linking does *not* create a derivative work (for example, is Firefox a derivative of the Flash plugin, or Flash plugin a derivative of Firefox? Seems to me they are fairly independent works that use the mechanism of dynamic linking to work together.)
No one claims that Firefox is a derivative of Flash, or vice versa. What is claimed is that the resulting memory space with both objects loaded is a derivative work of each, which can only be created with the license-granted consent of the copyright holders of both objects. The trick: how strong is this argument since it applies only to the ephemeral address space created at runtime by the user and not, say, by Mozilla or Adobe?
In the obvious case of MegaCo distributes foo that always links dynamically to libgpled.so, one can argue that MegaCo is effectively creating that combined object because there is no other way that their software could be used. But IANAL, of course, and I think the real lawyers (and judges) haven't fully settled the question.
Why does the second law say no to arbitrarily concentrating energy?
Because it lets me extract useful work simply from a hot environment with no cold reservoir. I just put my box in a room and it gradually gets hotter while the room gets colder. After a while I set up a heat engine between them and extract some work from the difference. Then I can repeat the process: this time, the room can't heat the box as well, but the room is colder too, so the heat engine still works. Eventually I can get (almost -- see the 3rd law) all the heat from the room extracted as useful work, which is not allowed.
(By "arbitrarily" I meant "without reason or effort" rather than merely "without bound". Sorry for any confusion.)
Surely the fact that you are drawing all your energy from outside the system (your box) would allow for a localised loss of entropy, given the gains in entropy outside the system.
Entropy goes the other way: any normal physical system that gets hotter gains entropy, so the box would be gaining it and the room losing it. But hot systems (by definition!) gain less entropy from, say, a joule of heat than cold systems do. This is the reason for the unidirectional flow of heat: if I'm hotter than you, you lose more entropy giving up a joule than I gain from getting it, so we can't send the heat that way.
The white side reflects light, the black side absorbs it...
Once you reach the same temperature as your surroundings, you'll radiate as many photons as you absorb on the black side, and not go anywhere. If there's any anisotropy in the surrounding radiation field, you can use that to move around (but that's just called a solar sail for the common dipole case).
A better idea would be a mirror sail that transmits light on one face, and reflects it on the other.
The 2nd law says no. I could make a box out of your one-way mirror (note that real "one-way" mirrors are something else entirely) material (all reflecting surfaces inward) and concentrate energy arbitrarily.
If you assume that only most of, say, a 1000 light year journey takes place at 0.5c (so the trip will take 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years, assuming some clever sort of acceleration is worked out), the rest frame (the planet you launched from) will only be experiencing time about 15% faster than the ship, so only 2,300, or 3,450, or 4,600 years will have passed by the time you get to the other planet (or so).
That's still too long. The sensible way to measure velocities is in the frame of the source and destination (which might as well be in one frame when we're talking about SR), so you can calculate the travel times in that frame directly by dividing the distance by the velocity. The only weirdness is the amount of time observed by the travelers, which is smaller than that observed by the endpoints, but not because the latter amount is increased beyond what Newton would expect.
Therefore, although we measure distance in light years, it doesn't lead to twice the duration if we traveled at half the speed of light. In fact, as we approached relativistic speeds, the duration within our frame of reference would stay the same, but from an external point of view, our speed has not actually reached such a velocity.
Um, what? If it's 500 ly away, and something goes there at c/2, it takes 1000 years. What else could a speed of "half of lightspeed" possibly mean? Even relativity isn't so weird as to change that.
Therefore, we would perceive the time to travel to a nearby star as shorter than the value arrived at by a simple ratio applied to c. Likewise, the actual time passed on the target planet will have been many times longer by the time we get there such that we cannot assume that millions of years haven't passed since we first set out from our own home planet.
You're right that the passengers on the trip would experience less proper time than the observers on Earth (I believe this is really due to the acceleration involved, although it can be calculated using SR). But the time as measured by clocks on Earth and the destination will still be the one millennium you would expect from Newtonian physics. (What would surprise Newton is the anomalously large energy required to get to that speed, and the bizarre view out the window had by the travellers.)
You work for thieving criminals. There are specific requirement for someone to be salaried exempt. [...] Also, to be salaried exempt, there cannot be any specific expectation on what hours your work. Only details on what you must get done. The moment they care what hours you work, you are hourly.
Unfortunately, they can care about hours. I can't find the real Opinion Letter online, but here's a pretty official site that calls it out (look for "1993").
Fixing a bug by changing the source code and then recompiling it is creating a derivative work. [...] A few years ago, we had access to the Windows (NT/2000) source code but it's still not legal for me to fix their bugs and then install it on my computer.
Fortunately, the utility of doing what you want with (and within) your own computing equipment has been recognized. (This is no more legal advice than your comment was, of course.)
We read Jack London's "To Build a Fire in 2nd Grade". 2nd grade for crying out loud!
I'm sure that most students would totally support learning how "To Build a Fire in 2nd Grade". And if so, it makes sense that they read it while in 2nd (or 1st) grade, so that it's not already too late to apply what they learn.
Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?
Yes. The typical reasons (aside from Luddite tendencies and comfort) include
Some people have been using such editors for longer than the modern IDEs have existed, and so are so good with them that it would take a very long time to recoup the investment of switching (if we even take as given that there will be a lasting net benefit).
That's an error on the part of the user that made the image; they pressed Super-PrintScreen (Super is often the "Windows key" on modern keyboards) and that wasn't what they needed to do to get their screenshot.
4) I've had a LAN party in a van driving at 70 MPH. (No, the driver was not playing.) I think the fail here is obvious.
Blackmail is already illegal.
Unfortunately, one of blackmail's strong points is that the victim is often unwilling to complain about it, because you can release the information faster than you can be arrested. (Even with clever cops, a dead-man's switch in the cloud to post whatever incriminating information will be hard to discover and stop in time.)
Why not have a CBA that says that "workers must have policy as a choice but are free to take other offers that management provides"? Does that damage the union in some way? (Do the union bosses think it does damage?)