Re:The proof that physic isn't full of fraud...
on
Ununoctium Wrapup
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· Score: 2
Is that sooner or later as prooved there somebody will want to check your result.
Precisely. There is no problem with fraud in physics, it is simply that fraud has absolutely no place in physics. It is always discovered and then the fraudulent claims are discarded. You could say that by its very method, the field of physics will always lead toward truth, and any pitiful attempts at fraud get discarded along the way.
This inherent dependence and insistence on testability, repeatability, and integrety of reputation, make physics one of the purest fields you can find.
If you happen to live near the bank, go there in person and demand to see managers of managers until you get as high as you can go, and be adamant. It's a lot harder for an institution to press an issue which is clearly unreasonable when an irate person is there in their face.
Sufficient persistence applied this way could save you the legal fees it would take to correct the situation the hard way.
Why does the media keep beating this dead horse for.. what has it been? three years ?
Because Napster is like a martyr. You can destroy Napster easily, but you can't destroy the idea it represents. Once the idea is out in the open, someone will always find ways to implement it.
Many members of the media probably think the demise of Napster is symbolic for demise of its format for distributing music, but you just can't destroy that high of a demand by pulling the plug on a server.
But if someone could come up with a way of ensuring the same ends (artist compensation for giving their work to the public)
Personally I would rather not pay an N-Sync tax.
There are plenty of other social structures which would work wonderfully for production of popular music. Currently academia is the best example we have of information being produced which is generally used for the public benefit of all, and where people are also able to feed their families.
Uuuhm, I've met a lot of left-handed chess-playing musicians in my life who couldn't program their way out of a DOS prompt. Your metric doesn't strike me as having a very high predictability value.
Re:Dude, you gatta get a Dell.
on
CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 2
MOst people buying CD players and CDs have no clue what copy protection or digital rights management is.
Probably because you're calling them "copy protection" and "digital rights management"! Seriously, you can't speak to people with no experience in these matters on those terms. You have to speak to them on terms they can understand. When I explain what's bad about dvd's, I don't say, "They have regional encoding that restricts your access," I tell them that if they buy a dvd in Europe or buy an imported dvd, it won't play in their drive. I might also throw in that people are going out of their way to screw over and imprison people who are trying to let people play dvds on more computers, and I might even throw in an explicit mention that this is a crazy thing to do. Speak in simple, human, and understandable terms to people who are not experts, and they will understand you clearly.
Why is this kind of CD bad? Because it screws with you and won't let you play it where you want to. That's enough to make people want to buy it. People don't want to be restricted, they just don't understand when it's happening to them because things are given marketing labels like "copy protection", which sounds like a good thing, and not "restricted use," which is clearly a bad thing. All you have to do is translate for people.
Re:Even the analog degradation can be beaten
on
CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 2
Actually, the controlled-NOT operation does precisely that, it copies the value of a qubit. The misconception that it is impossible to copy a qubit comes from a misunderstanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The no-cloning theorem in simple terms says that you can't make a copy of a quantum system because you can't know its state, because to know its state completely would be to change it. The way around this is to use a gate such as C-NOT which lets you make copies of a qubit without actually observing or measuring its state. These qubits are then entangled such that if you ever measure one, they all collapse to the same value. (This is the behavior you would expect from a true quantum copy.)
Software can be written by anyone with even a very lowly computer.
So can hardware if you use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). True, you won't generate a 20 THz processor with FPGA, but most hardware doesn't need power. If FPGA's became more common, you could download and share devices, rather than just downloading and sharing device drivers.
You would still need to buy the physical end, such as a virgin controllerless harddrive, or a simple plug to put an ethernet cord into. But if you could download the rest of the hardware, and if you could then plug it into a device like an FPGA, you could bypass almost any complaints people would have with hardware manufacturers.
More importantly, when you can download a set of instructions for programming hardware, you can then share these instructions. Then you gain all the known benefits of open source software.
Terrorists, child molesters, identity thieves and countless others use our PUBLIC computers to commit their crimes. Make the bastards have to buy their own computers.
By this same logic we could stop murder by putting a tax on knives and guns. Criminals use whatever means are available to do what they want to do. If you want to battle terror, your best bet is to start addressing where the motivation for it comes from (which is actually a complicated issue and could take you a lot of research). You won't get anywhere by changing library policy.
With an intelligent, educated populace, the politics will never follow the money
I agree completely. I think the federal government should mandate at least one year of Rhetoric classes for every high school student. If we can develop an entire generation of adults who understand how they are being swayed and have been taught the skills for critical analysis of media and information, then politicians will have to focus on issues. Money can't buy issues like it can buy the swaying of people's emotions.
For example, if what you discovered was time travel, simply send the damn machine, or better yet, millions of the machine into the future 2 years from now.
Funny you shouild mention that. That's exactly what you're going to do in 5 years when you do invent time travel. Except then I will wait two years, take one of the machines back, steal your prototype, and bring it back to me last week, at which point I will announce that I have just invented it...
The generational and technological gap between those of us who understand what is happening and those in power has grown too large.
Remember those thoughts when you are the generation in power. And remember at that time you might also have to look elsewhere for understanding of what is really happening. The advantage of being young is that you innevitably grow older.
I've fought the good fight for too long and don't know if I have the willpower to even bother fighting anymore.
The problem with "good fights", is that usually people either don't know they exist, or don't have the time to understand them. If you want things to change, you have to simplify the fight and put it in easily digestable, easy to understand terms.
In essence, your propaganda must be user-friendly.
How about the ACLU, GNU, NRA, etc... Are these independent organizations allowed to produce their own publications or advertisements that describe which issues and candidates they like? How then do you differentiate that from political parties, where do you draw the line? You can limit the amount of money a candidate gets, but are you going to set legislative limits on how much money the ACLU spends to inform people of its political views? And if you do that, are you going to set limits on ACLU1, ACLU2, ACLU3, all of which support similar causes?
Financial reform as you described it is not a workable solution, and it ignores the root of the problem. As long as it is in any way POSSIBLE for money to influence an election, a way will be created for it to occur.
Anyone else up for buying a island somewhere and declaring it a independant state?
And we could use Slashdot polls to determine our dictator!
Seriously though, there's no where to run, and no reason to run. Even if you moved somewhere else, what good would it do? Until you invent a superior system of government that is more immune to corruption and ensures equality for the poor and non-majority opinions, you're going to have the same things happen over and over, anywhere there are people.
It's not the country that's to blame, it's our ideologies which are insufficient to protect us from ourselves.
Re:New possible high-capacity storage format, huh?
on
Atomic Scale Memory
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· Score: 2
I wonder how long it'll be before the *AA asks for a tax on atoms
prime number = natural number that have exactly two divisors : 1 and itself.
The key phrase here is "exactly two." Exactly two does not mean one or two divisors. You cannot count a single divisor multiple times, this makes no more sense than counting your money multiple times when trying to figure out how much you have.
1 is not prime, by the mathematically accepted definition of prime.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that sooner or later as prooved there somebody will want to check your result.
Precisely. There is no problem with fraud in physics, it is simply that fraud has absolutely no place in physics. It is always discovered and then the fraudulent claims are discarded. You could say that by its very method, the field of physics will always lead toward truth, and any pitiful attempts at fraud get discarded along the way.
This inherent dependence and insistence on testability, repeatability, and integrety of reputation, make physics one of the purest fields you can find.
If you happen to live near the bank, go there in person and demand to see managers of managers until you get as high as you can go, and be adamant. It's a lot harder for an institution to press an issue which is clearly unreasonable when an irate person is there in their face.
Sufficient persistence applied this way could save you the legal fees it would take to correct the situation the hard way.
Good luck.
Brent "Spiner" Hackman as Lex Luther
Wow, I actually think that guy would make an excellent Lex Luther.
Although I did get plastic cuttlery on one airline, even they could do a fair amount of damage
Have you ever actually tried to injur someone with a plastic spoon? Short of firing it out of a cannon, it's quite difficult.
Why does the media keep beating this dead horse for.. what has it been? three years ?
Because Napster is like a martyr. You can destroy Napster easily, but you can't destroy the idea it represents. Once the idea is out in the open, someone will always find ways to implement it.
Many members of the media probably think the demise of Napster is symbolic for demise of its format for distributing music, but you just can't destroy that high of a demand by pulling the plug on a server.
But if someone could come up with a way of ensuring the same ends (artist compensation for giving their work to the public)
Personally I would rather not pay an N-Sync tax.
There are plenty of other social structures which would work wonderfully for production of popular music. Currently academia is the best example we have of information being produced which is generally used for the public benefit of all, and where people are also able to feed their families.
I was interviewed at Adobe Systems a long time ago, and one of the people asked me if I liked my mother.
You could always respond that you liked his better...
Interviewer: Hmm. What do you look for in a woman?
Is that a windowmaker app?
Uuuhm, I've met a lot of left-handed chess-playing musicians in my life who couldn't program their way out of a DOS prompt. Your metric doesn't strike me as having a very high predictability value.
MOst people buying CD players and CDs have no clue what copy protection or digital rights management is.
Probably because you're calling them "copy protection" and "digital rights management"! Seriously, you can't speak to people with no experience in these matters on those terms. You have to speak to them on terms they can understand. When I explain what's bad about dvd's, I don't say, "They have regional encoding that restricts your access," I tell them that if they buy a dvd in Europe or buy an imported dvd, it won't play in their drive. I might also throw in that people are going out of their way to screw over and imprison people who are trying to let people play dvds on more computers, and I might even throw in an explicit mention that this is a crazy thing to do. Speak in simple, human, and understandable terms to people who are not experts, and they will understand you clearly.
Why is this kind of CD bad? Because it screws with you and won't let you play it where you want to. That's enough to make people want to buy it. People don't want to be restricted, they just don't understand when it's happening to them because things are given marketing labels like "copy protection", which sounds like a good thing, and not "restricted use," which is clearly a bad thing. All you have to do is translate for people.
apt-get install cdparanoia
They say that "a domain name isn't tangible property."
Verisign doesn't want domain names to be tangible property because this limits their control over them.
If you can program a new instruction that does what you would do in a normal CPU in a thousand-instruction algorithm
:) I can just picture the atomic MS Office instruction...
You propose Pandora's box.
For instance, it is impossible to copy a qubit
Actually, the controlled-NOT operation does precisely that, it copies the value of a qubit. The misconception that it is impossible to copy a qubit comes from a misunderstanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The no-cloning theorem in simple terms says that you can't make a copy of a quantum system because you can't know its state, because to know its state completely would be to change it. The way around this is to use a gate such as C-NOT which lets you make copies of a qubit without actually observing or measuring its state. These qubits are then entangled such that if you ever measure one, they all collapse to the same value. (This is the behavior you would expect from a true quantum copy.)
Software can be written by anyone with even a very lowly computer.
So can hardware if you use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). True, you won't generate a 20 THz processor with FPGA, but most hardware doesn't need power. If FPGA's became more common, you could download and share devices, rather than just downloading and sharing device drivers.
You would still need to buy the physical end, such as a virgin controllerless harddrive, or a simple plug to put an ethernet cord into. But if you could download the rest of the hardware, and if you could then plug it into a device like an FPGA, you could bypass almost any complaints people would have with hardware manufacturers.
More importantly, when you can download a set of instructions for programming hardware, you can then share these instructions. Then you gain all the known benefits of open source software.
Terrorists, child molesters, identity thieves and countless others use our PUBLIC computers to commit their crimes. Make the bastards have to buy their own computers.
By this same logic we could stop murder by putting a tax on knives and guns. Criminals use whatever means are available to do what they want to do. If you want to battle terror, your best bet is to start addressing where the motivation for it comes from (which is actually a complicated issue and could take you a lot of research). You won't get anywhere by changing library policy.
With an intelligent, educated populace, the politics will never follow the money
I agree completely. I think the federal government should mandate at least one year of Rhetoric classes for every high school student. If we can develop an entire generation of adults who understand how they are being swayed and have been taught the skills for critical analysis of media and information, then politicians will have to focus on issues. Money can't buy issues like it can buy the swaying of people's emotions.
For example, if what you discovered was time travel, simply send the damn machine, or better yet, millions of the machine into the future 2 years from now.
Funny you shouild mention that. That's exactly what you're going to do in 5 years when you do invent time travel. Except then I will wait two years, take one of the machines back, steal your prototype, and bring it back to me last week, at which point I will announce that I have just invented it...
The generational and technological gap between those of us who understand what is happening and those in power has grown too large.
Remember those thoughts when you are the generation in power. And remember at that time you might also have to look elsewhere for understanding of what is really happening. The advantage of being young is that you innevitably grow older.
I've fought the good fight for too long and don't know if I have the willpower to even bother fighting anymore.
The problem with "good fights", is that usually people either don't know they exist, or don't have the time to understand them. If you want things to change, you have to simplify the fight and put it in easily digestable, easy to understand terms.
In essence, your propaganda must be user-friendly.
How about the ACLU, GNU, NRA, etc... Are these independent organizations allowed to produce their own publications or advertisements that describe which issues and candidates they like? How then do you differentiate that from political parties, where do you draw the line? You can limit the amount of money a candidate gets, but are you going to set legislative limits on how much money the ACLU spends to inform people of its political views? And if you do that, are you going to set limits on ACLU1, ACLU2, ACLU3, all of which support similar causes?
Financial reform as you described it is not a workable solution, and it ignores the root of the problem. As long as it is in any way POSSIBLE for money to influence an election, a way will be created for it to occur.
Anyone else up for buying a island somewhere and declaring it a independant state?
And we could use Slashdot polls to determine our dictator!
Seriously though, there's no where to run, and no reason to run. Even if you moved somewhere else, what good would it do? Until you invent a superior system of government that is more immune to corruption and ensures equality for the poor and non-majority opinions, you're going to have the same things happen over and over, anywhere there are people.
It's not the country that's to blame, it's our ideologies which are insufficient to protect us from ourselves.
I wonder how long it'll be before the *AA asks for a tax on atoms
It'll be due at 6:02pm, every October 23rd.
I bet it was Redhat...
Ha. I won't be impressed until they can do it with a paper airplane
Can I use a motorboat and a bit of string?
prime number = natural number that have exactly
two divisors : 1 and itself.
The key phrase here is "exactly two." Exactly two does not mean one or two divisors. You cannot count a single divisor multiple times, this makes no more sense than counting your money multiple times when trying to figure out how much you have.
1 is not prime, by the mathematically accepted definition of prime.