Everything you said is precisely correct except for this statement:
> and in this case, the researchers were clearly trying to find the truth.
They were not. These two psychologists failed to apply the scientific method properly. They conducted two studies, and then wrote a comprehensive summary describing results they would have hoped to obtain, and dismissing the results they did obtain. They went into the study believing that video game violence (or VGV as they so cutely call it) caused aggressive behavior, and they discovered no evidence that it does. Then they summarized that it must cause aggressive behavior because "it is obvious" (slight paraphrase), despite the results they obtained.
This is not the scientific method, this is the political method. It is effective for achieving political ends, but not for finding truth.
The article does NOT say that video games increase violent behavior, in fact, it says precisely the opposite. Allow me to show you why it says the opposite, when one understands entry level psychology statistics methods.
> Playing violent video games often may well cause increases in delinquent behaviors, > both aggressive and nonaggressive. However, the correlational nature of Study 1 > means that causal statements are risky at best. It could be that the obtained video > game violence links to aggressive and nonaggressive delinquency are > wholly due to the fact that highly aggressive individuals are especially > attracted to violent video games.
This is the single most significant portion of Study #1, it says that people who play violent video games are the same people who are aggressive individuals. This means one of three things, either people play violent video games and become aggressive because of it, people who are aggressive prefer to play violent video games, or a third factor causes both aggressiveness and a tendency to play violent video games.
In order to resolve which of the three it was, they conducted the second study. In Study #2, the hypothesis was the first of the three things I mentioned, that playing violent video games causes aggression. The results of the pilot study conducted for the hypothesis are reported as follows:
> The game type effect as well as all two- and three-way interactions between > the independent variables were nonsignificant (allps >.05).
The key word here is "nonsignificant". In other words, this means that when they attempted to find an increase in aggression due to playing violent video games, they completely failed. There was no measureable increase in aggression due to playing violent video games.
So in conclusion, no, playing violent video games does NOT increase violent behavior, and studies, such as this one, continue to demostrate such. Only the opposite can be shown, that people who are aggressive are inclined to play violent video games.
> Who is to say that the particle that emerges from the other side of the potential > barrier is the incident particle? It's not like you can mark it with a sharpie.
This could be determined with a sharpie, provided one used the sharpie to solve Shroedinger's equation for the exiting wave. The coefficient in front of the wave component that would be incident from the exiting side is set to 0 because there is no object to reflect the wave, which would be necessary to make it travel in the opposite direction.
The wave on the entering side of the potential barrier must be expressed as a combination of an incident wave and a reflected wave, while there can be no reflected wave for the exiting side, which corresponds perfectly to the laws of optics.
> IIRC the chance of tunneling occuring drops drasticly as the distance it is to > tunnel increases. I think that in theory there is the chance of a given particle > tunneling huge distances but the chance is so incredibly small as to be worthless.
You are correct. The transmission probability T is an exponential decay as shown by:
T = e ^ (-2kL)
where k = sqrt(2m(U-E)) / hbar
U is the potential energy of the barrier, and E is the energy of the particle. The closer they stay to each other, the smaller k is, and thus, the farther L (the length) can be without reducing the transmission probability.
> What do you mean legislation isn't going to work? You can't just say that without > backing it up.
*BEEP* News Flash, this just in... The world does not consist of one country. Not all companies are headquartered in the same country. No industry can be controlled by the laws of any country. I reference copyright laws of the U.S. and piracy in China. I reference crypto laws of the U.S. I reference censorship laws of the U.K. and the movement of British protest sites to other countries. I reference the DeCSS trial and the associated broadcast over Australian T.V.
You cannot legislate a world economy.
I didn't mention that because I assumed that was common knowledge among the Slashdot crowd.
Well, you're wrong. Allow me to dig out my undergrad modern physics book and quote a section from it. This section immediately follows what you just described, that photons bouncing off of a particle cause uncertainty in measurement.
"Arguments like the preceding one, although superficially attractive, must be approached with caution. The argument above implies that the electron can possess a definite position and momentum at any instant and that it is the measurement process that introduces the indeterminancy in delta-x times delta-p. On the contrary, _this_indeterminancy_is_inherent_in_the_nature_of_ a_moving_body. The justification for the many "derivations" of this kind is first, they show that it is impossible to imagine a way around the uncertainty principle; and second, they present a view of the principle that can be appreciated in a more familiar context than that of wave groups."
Basically, the particle description of the uncertainty principle that you present is incorrect. It produces similar, but slightly innacurate, resulting equations, but it is conceptually very wrong, since experiment shows that the uncertainty is an inherent property of the particles.
For more info, read "Concepts of Modern Physics" by Beiser, or consult a book of equivalent scope.
> But just because you boinked your particle with a photon.
Not quite. You can close one slit entirely, and the interference results disappear, yet no particle was boinked with a photon.
Also, if you have the detector on just one slit, half the time you do not detect the particle, so you're only boinking half the particles that go through, yet there is still no interference pattern from the other half of the particles.
This is what has led people to claim that it is not the method of observation that causes them to interfere or not, but whether or not the knowledge of their state is obtained.
> Obviously you don't know what are you talking about. There is not that many websites > that collect email addresses, yet alone the ones that got any significant mailing list. > Hence, it is not possible that all businesses would email to all *people* on the Web > at the same time.
Obviously you didn't read. "If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow..."
"If" is one of those powerful words in the English language that allow one to postulate what would happen if a condition changed. The condition that would change would be that corporations that had been relying on pull based web marketting would turn around and switch completely to email.
> I don't know how old are you, but it is ridiculous to expect that businesses > won't take advantage of a cheap method of directly contacting customer such as > Email marketing is (aka spam).
Welcome to the internet. If you think I sound like a child, then to you I am a child. (Although that wouldn't make you very perceptive.)
And it is perfectly reasonable to expect businesses to not take advantage of annoying methods of customer harrassment. If I do not give them the money they need to pay their bills, then obviously they are going to change their practices. We are in (pardon buzzword) the information age, and as a consequence, reputation of a company is extremely important to its success, because it's very easy to distribute bad press about a company.
> This is one of the advantage of the "New Economy", something that can't be achieved > that easy and cheaply elsewhere, and now you suggesting to completely ban it. Obviously > there should be easy way to opt out from any mailing list
You're thinking like an American. You cannot "ban" spam, and you cannot force companies to comply with opt-out lists. I suggest you examine the extended headers sometime of the spam you get. I live in the U.S., and almost every piece of spam I receive is routed through (or sourced from) at least one foreign country. The U.S. can pass all the laws in the world, but it can't dictate policy to the world.
The only viable solution must be consumer oriented and initiated.
Push media are media such as spam, or telemarketers, or junkmail that shove their information down your throat. Pull media are media such as a website, or a TV show, or a radio program, that you actively access.
Most consumers usually prefer pull media because they prefer then they only access the information they want, while most businesses usually prefer push media, because then they can share their information with people that "might not know they want our product".
The argument for corporations using push media is fatally flawed. Simply consider it as this. If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow, the web would crash to a halt within hours.
Why? Every corporation would email every person on the web one copy of their website. That's somewhere around 100 million or so websites times 100 million some users. In other words, approximately 10 quadrillion email messages of, let's conservatively say 1K each, or approximately 10,000 terrabytes of information sent out in one morning.
This is obviously NOT technologically feasible, nor is it efficient, nor do I want to erase 100 million spam messages from my emailbox in the morning. Clearly pull media must become the default method of communication.
Unfortunately, we cannot fight this with legislation (yes, if you're a U.S. politician reading this, sorry to burst your clueless little bubble). I see only two ways to fight this. One is with technology, as we have been doing with blackhole lists to filter email from senders of spam. Unfortunately, this only works against obscure porn sites and "Do YOU want to make 4 gazillion dollars from the comfort of your own home?" offers.
For legitamite businesses we need a different approach. It is simple though, rely on capitalism to work it's magic. Boycott any company that doesn't follow two simple rules:
1. Use pull media primarily for all customer communications. 2. Use push media only when specifically requested by the customer.
I already do this myself, and I urge you to do the same. As soon as it becomes "socially unacceptable" for companies to use push media, they will not do so, but it will take persistence. If you want to be helpful, bitch about how annoying spam and telemarketers are to your friends. This might sound unproductive, but it's the most beneficial thing you can do. If you complain to enough people about it, it will amplify (or seed) their dislike of it, and eventually everyone will dislike companies that spam.
When that occurs, mission accomplished, the consumers control the communication.
I see a ton of posts from people who know a little bit about physics saying things like, "You can't use quantum means to send information faster than light". Some of them are even bringing relativity into the discussion. Let me clarify a few things.
It is an unjustified extrapolation of relativity to assume that the equations describing the limitations of mass increases and time contraction due to conventional particles that are accelerated to a velocity different than an observer particle carry over to all forms of communication.
First, it is not established that all forms of communications require particle transmission. For a simplified and incorrect analogy that is understandable, let me refer to electrons in a wire. Electrons move very slowly through a wire, it is only the signal which moves at near the speed of light, caused by the forces between the electrons. (Yes I know these forces are propagated by photons, and photons are particles travelling at the speed of light.)
There are some currently unmeasured things fundamental to quantum mechanical theory that travel faster than the speeed of light. By derivation of Shroedinger's equation, it can be shown that the particles we measure are simply envelope waves wrapped around other waves. It is derived that the envelope waves must always travel slower than the speed of light, but interestingly enough, it is also derived that the waves wrapped inside must ALWAYS travel faster than the speed of light. This is handwaved away by saying that we can never measure or interact with these waves.
But that isn't entirely true. While we cannot interact with those waves, we CAN reshape them and make them interact with each other. In a spectacular experiment, researchers were able to fire particles at a thin solid barrier, called a potential barrier. The barrier is composed of such solid material that it is physically impossible for the particle to go through the barrier. Instead, by a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as the particle strikes the wall, it's position becomes uncertain, and there is a real and measureable probability that the particle will show up on the other side of the wall.
The result? When researchers measure the time it takes for the particle to stop existing on one side of the wall and start existing on the other side of the wall, they find that it covers the distance significantly faster than the speed of light. The best recorded time I've heard of was 30c, or 30 times the speed of light.
So far this has only been done over tiny, but definitely measureable, distances. It isn't directly useful for communication, but it does show that it can no longer be argued that communication cannot occur faster than light, because it does.
When I decided to learn Perl, I stumbled across Perl 5 By Example, http://www.codebits.com/p5be/. The online version pays for itself by advertising. I contemplated purchasing a hardcopy of the book, or possibly of a different Perl book. Then I considered my situation.
I am always on the go, I program from a half dozen different terminals in the course of a month. Any reference books I have access to, generally sit on a shelf at home, or a shelf at work, and I don't tend to carry a library on my back. But every computer I access has access to the internet, so the only way to have a book be conveniently accessible is to have it online.
Some people talk about cost of printing, and environmental issues, and cheaper distribution in digital form, but while these are important, they are not my primary concern. Internet based references have recently become more accessible than physical references, especially for highly mobile people such as myself.
> It sounds like they threw this whole mission together rather "seat of pants" style; > with quotes like While crews normally train together for a year or more before > launch, this crew was only finalized in mid-February.
You don't finalize your crew before you let them work together. Intracrew social conflicts are not an option in space.
Yes it does. To raise something to a higher orbit you need to increase it's potential energy. U=mgh, where m is the mass of the object, g is the acceleration of gravity at whatever altitude this object happens to be at (I didn't look), and h is the height the object must be raised, then U becomes the energy that needs to be added to raise the object to the higher orbit. (This equation only applies to small orbital changes, as in this case.) So as you can see, the energy required to raise the object is proportional to its mass.
It's a common misconception that gravity is zero in orbit, but it isn't. It is just that the centripital force due to the circular acceleration around the planet is equal to the gravitational pull, so any object inside of a craft experiences zero net force, or weightlessness. You can think of it as the spacecraft "falling" in a circle around the earth.
If you are so brilliant, why don't you post an idea for a more fair moderation system?
Slashdot has an imperfect moderation system, but it has a damn good one. If you REALLY have a better idea for how it should work, then present that idea. A "revolution" under the same system would accomplish nothing productive, only a superior algorithm will result in positive change.
Consider that a challenge, but a challenge to be undertaken as an intellectual, not as a demagogue.
My TV works just fine. The purpose of my TV is watching the TV shows I like, and it has that feature fully implemented and bug free. Why upgrade to a newer version if the current version works fine?
Yes yes, HDTV is digital, and it's a different (not necessarilly better, but different) screen ratio, but so what? X-Files isn't fuzzy when I watch it anyway.
I suspect the bulk of consumers have similar feelings toward HDTV. No one has given us a reason to buy into the idea, so no one is doing it. Most people don't just rush out to buy new stuff because it's new and "cool". If they want me to buy into HDTV, they're going to have to offer me some radically new features that make it well worth converting.
Trying to use it for data is a noble attempt, but it doesn't really appeal to me. I use my computer for browsing the web, not my TV. It'll take something else to make me switch over anytime in the near future.
200x is a hell of a speed improvement. Java and Perl (when done right) are both JIT compiled languages with similar language complexity. I fail to see precisely how switching similar code from Perl to Java could alter your speed by 200 times. Are you sure you did not alter the order of algorithm complexity? That is the only thing I could see causing such a radical difference in speed.
Evolution doesn't work quite like that. An entire category of animals isn't going to evolve a feature in unison. Evolution can be thought of as series of profitable mistakes, and while it is perfectly likely that some species evolved to be warmblooded, and then different dinosaurs evolved from that species, it is rather unlikely that all (or even that most) of the dinosaur types evolved warmblooded traits in parallel.
What would happen instead is one species eventually becomes warmblooded, and because of being warmblooded dominates the other species, eating their food supply. This then causes the warmblooded species to procreate more than the other species in the area, severely limiting the opportunities for the other species to make similar evolutionary advances.
Leibniz, written in Lisp *spit* uses a complicated recursive pattern matching function to accomplish symbolic calculus through a lengthy ruleset. Since perl natively supports this kind of pattern matching now, it should be elementary to write a symbolic calculus engine in perl, or even to port Leibniz.
I've been coding for about 15 years, but never bothered to learn Perl until a few weeks ago. I can tell you I'm sufficiently impressed with the language. Certainly, it has the power to be cryptic, but it's not as if "features" of other languages don't offer you an equivalent level of too much power (e.g. #define, the champion of obfuscated C/C++ contests).
So why do I like perl? Because it has many of the most useful language constructs integrated into its general semantics in a way that other languages don't. In Java you can declare a stack object, in C++ w/ STL you can easily declare a stack object, but in perl, you just use push and pop and the stack is there. In perl if you want to treat something as a stack, and then as a queue, and then as an array, it's elementary.
Anyone who has ever looked at a unix configuration file can't dismiss the usefulness of perl's split function, and the simplicity it provides by splitting files into lines, lines into subsections, and sticking it all in arrays, stacks, or queues with arbitrary lengths, and all done with no effort, and a tiny section of code, in perl.
I shouldn't even need to mention the potential beauty and simplicity of regular expressions (in the hands of someone who knows how to comment!). In my most recent application I needed to split the unix mail spool file into separate emails, it was elementary using regular expressions in perl, since I could make one regular expression to detect the well-structured From line at the beginning of each email. The corresponding C/C++ code would have been quite large and complicated, and the corresponding Java code would have taken 14 packages, 32 regular methods, and 704 getter/setter methods.
The other great thing about Perl is that because of the way things like split, foreach, etc are so naturally integrated, you can usually avoid the most common programming errors. After 15 years, the things that still trip me up in a program are the stupid things. A null pointer error while traversing a data structure, or an off-by-one error while comparing something or interating something. You can't have an off-by-one with split or with regular expressions, since Perl handles the grunt work for you. You basically just tell it what you want it to do in condensed form, and it figures it out.
My biggest gripe with perl is that there seems to be no mode to require variables to be declared beforehand. I really despise when I'm coding and do something like:
my ($fileName) = "/etc/blah/blah.cfg"; if ( $filename =~ m~^/etc~ ) { print "This is in/etc\n");
In most languages, this would trigger a compile error since filename has never been declared, and you would say, "Oh, whoops, I meant to put fileName there", but since perl lets you declare filename in the middle of the if statement, it just makes a new variable. Fine, if you want to program in basic this is useful, but I want to turn it off because I prefer to maintain my sanity. If anyone knows a way to do this, please post it.
All in all, perl is a promissing language. I don't expect it to take any flying leaps in popularity or make any great paradigm shifts due to the level of detest some people have for it, but I know I'll continue to use it for the things it is well tuned for. It's the best tool for a great number of jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything you said is precisely correct except for this statement:
> and in this case, the researchers were clearly trying to find the truth.
They were not. These two psychologists failed to apply the scientific method properly. They conducted two studies, and then wrote a comprehensive summary describing results they would have hoped to obtain, and dismissing the results they did obtain. They went into the study believing that video game violence (or VGV as they so cutely call it) caused aggressive behavior, and they discovered no evidence that it does. Then they summarized that it must cause aggressive behavior because "it is obvious" (slight paraphrase), despite the results they obtained.
This is not the scientific method, this is the political method. It is effective for achieving political ends, but not for finding truth.
The article does NOT say that video games increase violent behavior, in fact, it says precisely the opposite. Allow me to show you why it says the opposite, when one understands entry level psychology statistics methods.
.05).
> Playing violent video games often may well cause increases in delinquent behaviors,
> both aggressive and nonaggressive. However, the correlational nature of Study 1
> means that causal statements are risky at best. It could be that the obtained video
> game violence links to aggressive and nonaggressive delinquency are
> wholly due to the fact that highly aggressive individuals are especially
> attracted to violent video games.
This is the single most significant portion of Study #1, it says that people who play violent video games are the same people who are aggressive individuals. This means one of three things, either people play violent video games and become aggressive because of it, people who are aggressive prefer to play violent video games, or a third factor causes both aggressiveness and a tendency to play violent video games.
In order to resolve which of the three it was, they conducted the second study. In Study #2, the hypothesis was the first of the three things I mentioned, that playing violent video games causes aggression. The results of the pilot study conducted for the hypothesis are reported as follows:
> The game type effect as well as all two- and three-way interactions between
> the independent variables were nonsignificant (allps >
The key word here is "nonsignificant". In other words, this means that when they attempted to find an increase in aggression due to playing violent video games, they completely failed. There was no measureable increase in aggression due to playing violent video games.
So in conclusion, no, playing violent video games does NOT increase violent behavior, and studies, such as this one, continue to demostrate such. Only the opposite can be shown, that people who are aggressive are inclined to play violent video games.
> Who is to say that the particle that emerges from the other side of the potential
> barrier is the incident particle? It's not like you can mark it with a sharpie.
This could be determined with a sharpie, provided one used the sharpie to solve Shroedinger's equation for the exiting wave. The coefficient in front of the wave component that would be incident from the exiting side is set to 0 because there is no object to reflect the wave, which would be necessary to make it travel in the opposite direction.
The wave on the entering side of the potential barrier must be expressed as a combination of an incident wave and a reflected wave, while there can be no reflected wave for the exiting side, which corresponds perfectly to the laws of optics.
> Is this the phenomenon also known as tunneling?
Yes.
> IIRC the chance of tunneling occuring drops drasticly as the distance it is to
> tunnel increases. I think that in theory there is the chance of a given particle
> tunneling huge distances but the chance is so incredibly small as to be worthless.
You are correct. The transmission probability T is an exponential decay as shown by:
T = e ^ (-2kL)
where k = sqrt(2m(U-E)) / hbar
U is the potential energy of the barrier, and E is the energy of the particle. The closer they stay to each other, the smaller k is, and thus, the farther L (the length) can be without reducing the transmission probability.
> What do you mean legislation isn't going to work? You can't just say that without
> backing it up.
*BEEP* News Flash, this just in... The world does not consist of one country. Not all companies are headquartered in the same country. No industry can be controlled by the laws of any country. I reference copyright laws of the U.S. and piracy in China. I reference crypto laws of the U.S. I reference censorship laws of the U.K. and the movement of British protest sites to other countries. I reference the DeCSS trial and the associated broadcast over Australian T.V.
You cannot legislate a world economy.
I didn't mention that because I assumed that was common knowledge among the Slashdot crowd.
Breathing causes pollution, and pollution lowers intelligence. Help increase the average intelligence of the earth by not breathing.
Rally to the cause!
Well, you're wrong. Allow me to dig out my undergrad modern physics book and quote a section from it. This section immediately follows what you just described, that photons bouncing off of a particle cause uncertainty in measurement.
_ a_moving_body. The justification for the many "derivations" of this kind is first, they show that it is impossible to imagine a way around the uncertainty principle; and second, they present a view of the principle that can be appreciated in a more familiar context than that of wave groups."
"Arguments like the preceding one, although superficially attractive, must be approached with caution. The argument above implies that the electron can possess a definite position and momentum at any instant and that it is the measurement process that introduces the indeterminancy in delta-x times delta-p. On the contrary, _this_indeterminancy_is_inherent_in_the_nature_of
Basically, the particle description of the uncertainty principle that you present is incorrect. It produces similar, but slightly innacurate, resulting equations, but it is conceptually very wrong, since experiment shows that the uncertainty is an inherent property of the particles.
For more info, read "Concepts of Modern Physics" by Beiser, or consult a book of equivalent scope.
> But just because you boinked your particle with a photon.
Not quite. You can close one slit entirely, and the interference results disappear, yet no particle was boinked with a photon.
Also, if you have the detector on just one slit, half the time you do not detect the particle, so you're only boinking half the particles that go through, yet there is still no interference pattern from the other half of the particles.
This is what has led people to claim that it is not the method of observation that causes them to interfere or not, but whether or not the knowledge of their state is obtained.
> Obviously you don't know what are you talking about. There is not that many websites
> that collect email addresses, yet alone the ones that got any significant mailing list.
> Hence, it is not possible that all businesses would email to all *people* on the Web
> at the same time.
Obviously you didn't read. "If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow..."
"If" is one of those powerful words in the English language that allow one to postulate what would happen if a condition changed. The condition that would change would be that corporations that had been relying on pull based web marketting would turn around and switch completely to email.
> I don't know how old are you, but it is ridiculous to expect that businesses
> won't take advantage of a cheap method of directly contacting customer such as
> Email marketing is (aka spam).
Welcome to the internet. If you think I sound like a child, then to you I am a child. (Although that wouldn't make you very perceptive.)
And it is perfectly reasonable to expect businesses to not take advantage of annoying methods of customer harrassment. If I do not give them the money they need to pay their bills, then obviously they are going to change their practices. We are in (pardon buzzword) the information age, and as a consequence, reputation of a company is extremely important to its success, because it's very easy to distribute bad press about a company.
> This is one of the advantage of the "New Economy", something that can't be achieved
> that easy and cheaply elsewhere, and now you suggesting to completely ban it. Obviously
> there should be easy way to opt out from any mailing list
You're thinking like an American. You cannot "ban" spam, and you cannot force companies to comply with opt-out lists. I suggest you examine the extended headers sometime of the spam you get. I live in the U.S., and almost every piece of spam I receive is routed through (or sourced from) at least one foreign country. The U.S. can pass all the laws in the world, but it can't dictate policy to the world.
The only viable solution must be consumer oriented and initiated.
Push media are media such as spam, or telemarketers, or junkmail that shove their information down your throat. Pull media are media such as a website, or a TV show, or a radio program, that you actively access.
Most consumers usually prefer pull media because they prefer then they only access the information they want, while most businesses usually prefer push media, because then they can share their information with people that "might not know they want our product".
The argument for corporations using push media is fatally flawed. Simply consider it as this. If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow, the web would crash to a halt within hours.
Why? Every corporation would email every person on the web one copy of their website. That's somewhere around 100 million or so websites times 100 million some users. In other words, approximately 10 quadrillion email messages of, let's conservatively say 1K each, or approximately 10,000 terrabytes of information sent out in one morning.
This is obviously NOT technologically feasible, nor is it efficient, nor do I want to erase 100 million spam messages from my emailbox in the morning. Clearly pull media must become the default method of communication.
Unfortunately, we cannot fight this with legislation (yes, if you're a U.S. politician reading this, sorry to burst your clueless little bubble). I see only two ways to fight this. One is with technology, as we have been doing with blackhole lists to filter email from senders of spam. Unfortunately, this only works against obscure porn sites and "Do YOU want to make 4 gazillion dollars from the comfort of your own home?" offers.
For legitamite businesses we need a different approach. It is simple though, rely on capitalism to work it's magic. Boycott any company that doesn't follow two simple rules:
1. Use pull media primarily for all customer communications.
2. Use push media only when specifically requested by the customer.
I already do this myself, and I urge you to do the same. As soon as it becomes "socially unacceptable" for companies to use push media, they will not do so, but it will take persistence. If you want to be helpful, bitch about how annoying spam and telemarketers are to your friends. This might sound unproductive, but it's the most beneficial thing you can do. If you complain to enough people about it, it will amplify (or seed) their dislike of it, and eventually everyone will dislike companies that spam.
When that occurs, mission accomplished, the consumers control the communication.
I see a ton of posts from people who know a little bit about physics saying things like, "You can't use quantum means to send information faster than light". Some of them are even bringing relativity into the discussion. Let me clarify a few things.
It is an unjustified extrapolation of relativity to assume that the equations describing the limitations of mass increases and time contraction due to conventional particles that are accelerated to a velocity different than an observer particle carry over to all forms of communication.
First, it is not established that all forms of communications require particle transmission. For a simplified and incorrect analogy that is understandable, let me refer to electrons in a wire. Electrons move very slowly through a wire, it is only the signal which moves at near the speed of light, caused by the forces between the electrons. (Yes I know these forces are propagated by photons, and photons are particles travelling at the speed of light.)
There are some currently unmeasured things fundamental to quantum mechanical theory that travel faster than the speeed of light. By derivation of Shroedinger's equation, it can be shown that the particles we measure are simply envelope waves wrapped around other waves. It is derived that the envelope waves must always travel slower than the speed of light, but interestingly enough, it is also derived that the waves wrapped inside must ALWAYS travel faster than the speed of light. This is handwaved away by saying that we can never measure or interact with these waves.
But that isn't entirely true. While we cannot interact with those waves, we CAN reshape them and make them interact with each other. In a spectacular experiment, researchers were able to fire particles at a thin solid barrier, called a potential barrier. The barrier is composed of such solid material that it is physically impossible for the particle to go through the barrier. Instead, by a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as the particle strikes the wall, it's position becomes uncertain, and there is a real and measureable probability that the particle will show up on the other side of the wall.
The result? When researchers measure the time it takes for the particle to stop existing on one side of the wall and start existing on the other side of the wall, they find that it covers the distance significantly faster than the speed of light. The best recorded time I've heard of was 30c, or 30 times the speed of light.
So far this has only been done over tiny, but definitely measureable, distances. It isn't directly useful for communication, but it does show that it can no longer be argued that communication cannot occur faster than light, because it does.
When I decided to learn Perl, I stumbled across Perl 5 By Example, http://www.codebits.com/p5be/. The online version pays for itself by advertising. I contemplated purchasing a hardcopy of the book, or possibly of a different Perl book. Then I considered my situation.
I am always on the go, I program from a half dozen different terminals in the course of a month. Any reference books I have access to, generally sit on a shelf at home, or a shelf at work, and I don't tend to carry a library on my back. But every computer I access has access to the internet, so the only way to have a book be conveniently accessible is to have it online.
Some people talk about cost of printing, and environmental issues, and cheaper distribution in digital form, but while these are important, they are not my primary concern. Internet based references have recently become more accessible than physical references, especially for highly mobile people such as myself.
Does anybody else think it would be morbidly humorous if he were cremated, and then stuffed into a really tiny urn?
> It sounds like they threw this whole mission together rather "seat of pants" style;
> with quotes like While crews normally train together for a year or more before
> launch, this crew was only finalized in mid-February.
You don't finalize your crew before you let them work together. Intracrew social conflicts are not an option in space.
Yes it does. To raise something to a higher orbit you need to increase it's potential energy. U=mgh, where m is the mass of the object, g is the acceleration of gravity at whatever altitude this object happens to be at (I didn't look), and h is the height the object must be raised, then U becomes the energy that needs to be added to raise the object to the higher orbit. (This equation only applies to small orbital changes, as in this case.) So as you can see, the energy required to raise the object is proportional to its mass.
It's a common misconception that gravity is zero in orbit, but it isn't. It is just that the centripital force due to the circular acceleration around the planet is equal to the gravitational pull, so any object inside of a craft experiences zero net force, or weightlessness. You can think of it as the spacecraft "falling" in a circle around the earth.
If you are so brilliant, why don't you post an idea for a more fair moderation system?
Slashdot has an imperfect moderation system, but it has a damn good one. If you REALLY have a better idea for how it should work, then present that idea. A "revolution" under the same system would accomplish nothing productive, only a superior algorithm will result in positive change.
Consider that a challenge, but a challenge to be undertaken as an intellectual, not as a demagogue.
Slighty offtopic, but does anyone know of an existing distro with good support for setting up servers for diskless workstations?
Can this technology help us finally figure out what species Janet Reno is?
My TV works just fine. The purpose of my TV is watching the TV shows I like, and it has that feature fully implemented and bug free. Why upgrade to a newer version if the current version works fine?
Yes yes, HDTV is digital, and it's a different (not necessarilly better, but different) screen ratio, but so what? X-Files isn't fuzzy when I watch it anyway.
I suspect the bulk of consumers have similar feelings toward HDTV. No one has given us a reason to buy into the idea, so no one is doing it. Most people don't just rush out to buy new stuff because it's new and "cool". If they want me to buy into HDTV, they're going to have to offer me some radically new features that make it well worth converting.
Trying to use it for data is a noble attempt, but it doesn't really appeal to me. I use my computer for browsing the web, not my TV. It'll take something else to make me switch over anytime in the near future.
200x is a hell of a speed improvement. Java and Perl (when done right) are both JIT compiled languages with similar language complexity. I fail to see precisely how switching similar code from Perl to Java could alter your speed by 200 times. Are you sure you did not alter the order of algorithm complexity? That is the only thing I could see causing such a radical difference in speed.
Have a heart... An old one...
Evolution doesn't work quite like that. An entire category of animals isn't going to evolve a feature in unison. Evolution can be thought of as series of profitable mistakes, and while it is perfectly likely that some species evolved to be warmblooded, and then different dinosaurs evolved from that species, it is rather unlikely that all (or even that most) of the dinosaur types evolved warmblooded traits in parallel.
What would happen instead is one species eventually becomes warmblooded, and because of being warmblooded dominates the other species, eating their food supply. This then causes the warmblooded species to procreate more than the other species in the area, severely limiting the opportunities for the other species to make similar evolutionary advances.
Leibniz, written in Lisp *spit* uses a complicated recursive pattern matching function to accomplish symbolic calculus through a lengthy ruleset. Since perl natively supports this kind of pattern matching now, it should be elementary to write a symbolic calculus engine in perl, or even to port Leibniz.
One dot, slightly used.
I've been coding for about 15 years, but never bothered to learn Perl until a few weeks ago. I can tell you I'm sufficiently impressed with the language. Certainly, it has the power to be cryptic, but it's not as if "features" of other languages don't offer you an equivalent level of too much power (e.g. #define, the champion of obfuscated C/C++ contests).
/etc\n");
So why do I like perl? Because it has many of the most useful language constructs integrated into its general semantics in a way that other languages don't. In Java you can declare a stack object, in C++ w/ STL you can easily declare a stack object, but in perl, you just use push and pop and the stack is there. In perl if you want to treat something as a stack, and then as a queue, and then as an array, it's elementary.
Anyone who has ever looked at a unix configuration file can't dismiss the usefulness of perl's split function, and the simplicity it provides by splitting files into lines, lines into subsections, and sticking it all in arrays, stacks, or queues with arbitrary lengths, and all done with no effort, and a tiny section of code, in perl.
I shouldn't even need to mention the potential beauty and simplicity of regular expressions (in the hands of someone who knows how to comment!). In my most recent application I needed to split the unix mail spool file into separate emails, it was elementary using regular expressions in perl, since I could make one regular expression to detect the well-structured From line at the beginning of each email. The corresponding C/C++ code would have been quite large and complicated, and the corresponding Java code would have taken 14 packages, 32 regular methods, and 704 getter/setter methods.
The other great thing about Perl is that because of the way things like split, foreach, etc are so naturally integrated, you can usually avoid the most common programming errors. After 15 years, the things that still trip me up in a program are the stupid things. A null pointer error while traversing a data structure, or an off-by-one error while comparing something or interating something. You can't have an off-by-one with split or with regular expressions, since Perl handles the grunt work for you. You basically just tell it what you want it to do in condensed form, and it figures it out.
My biggest gripe with perl is that there seems to be no mode to require variables to be declared beforehand. I really despise when I'm coding and do something like:
my ($fileName) = "/etc/blah/blah.cfg";
if ( $filename =~ m~^/etc~ ) { print "This is in
In most languages, this would trigger a compile error since filename has never been declared, and you would say, "Oh, whoops, I meant to put fileName there", but since perl lets you declare filename in the middle of the if statement, it just makes a new variable. Fine, if you want to program in basic this is useful, but I want to turn it off because I prefer to maintain my sanity. If anyone knows a way to do this, please post it.
All in all, perl is a promissing language. I don't expect it to take any flying leaps in popularity or make any great paradigm shifts due to the level of detest some people have for it, but I know I'll continue to use it for the things it is well tuned for. It's the best tool for a great number of jobs.