Quantum computers seemingly employ multiple universes to be in all states at once so the correct answer can be read off from the appropriate universe. For example, a quantum computer with N bits (qubits) can factorize an N bit number instantly.
Based on that, the number of atoms in this universe is not a limiting factor, and maybe all that's needed is a 64 qubit quantum computer, and chess will be as solved as noughts and crosses is.
Whether the windows would work or not, they're quite useless.
Visibility underwater is such that you'd need to be very close to something to see it at all. Coral reefs with fish and stuff, and you'd want to be within 20 feet, more likely 10. There's simply no way you can manoever a 200 ft vessel to within an irregularly shaped reef. Not a surface ship, and certainly not a submarine.
For deeper stuff, you're going to need some seriously powerful white lights. Water filters out the higher frequency light first, so all your reds start disappearing after about 60 feet. For wrecks and stuff, you'll need a huge bank of lateral spotlights (not shown on artists impression because artist didn't take physics), and still be unable to get close enough to see anything.
With sufficient lighting, you may be able to go to depth and see some really nice mud.
Of all the information stored in computers, 80% of it is unstructured, and arguably it's the most valuable 80%, too.
Think of the informal knowledge embodied in the emails sent and received, attachments, spreadsheets, favorite websites, your colleagues documents, as well as SQL databases and the like. There simply is no suitably shaped container that you can put amorphous knowledge into. It defies structure, and XML is no answer.
Useful knowledge is of a pervasive nature. It infuses through everything, and often the really useful bits are where you least expect it, so therefore attempting to design a structure, a priori, to hold it is always doomed to failure.
The key here is polymorphic searching of both structured and unstructured data without distinction. That's where products such as ISYS earn their salt. The hard part is in convincing the blissfully unaware that knowledge is being wasted in the first place.
The other key concept is value. Large result lists are less useful than small, high-quality result lists. Everybody knows this from using Google and getting back 198,000 hits. In the old CB radio days, it was called a squelch knob. Search engines that just give you large amounts of static do you a dis-service. Useful results are small and targeted.
Spying on a foreign registry vessel in international waters which had been directed not to enter Australian territory, but which then did enter in some sort of Norwegian Invasion. If comm intercept ability does not exist for occasions such as this, then why does it exist at all?
Oh, BTW, of course this happens everywhere, but moreso. Especially in the US where people are "told" they are "free" and don't have the education system to question the fact. Try making a few phone calls or sending a few emails about how you're gonna sh**t the pr*s*dent, and see who comes knocking at your door. And that's without the external threat of a Norwegian ship invading your sovereign territory under duress from a bunch of Iraqi queue-jumpers with designer luggage stuffed full of cash (no exageration).
Re:Can someone answer this for me?
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 1
It is nitrogen which becomes narcotic under pressure. The effect is somewhat like being drunk which is what makes deepish diving a bit risky. It has the interesting characteristic that, upon ascent, the effect is removed like curtains unvieling your mind. It's a wierd sensation to suddenly feel your brain click back onto a normal clock speed.
Nitrogen also has the dual effect of being absorbed into the tissue structure. Because Nitrogen is more soluble under pressure, as you ascend it comes out of solution and forms tiny bubbles which tend to accumulate in your joints with great pain, causing you to "bend" over. The effect is quite distinct from narcosis, and may not show up for many hours until you're home with a beer in your hand watching Lost In Space.
The effect of O2 is quite different. Simply, under two atmospheres of pressure it becomes toxic. Breath pure oxygen while 33 ft under the water and you will go into convulsions and almost certainly die. Because Air(TM) is only one fifth Oxygen, you need to go five times deeper before you run the risk of dying from air.
For this reason, deep divers phase out both O2 and N2, and substitute the volume with Helium, which has no nasty effects other than making you sound like Donald Duck(TM).
In space, US astronauts going outside in space suits still use a low pressure pure oxygen environment, otherwise their suits are too inflexible. This not only means No Smoking, but also brings the risk of the bends because they're coming from a nitrogen-rich air environment, so the astronauts have to sit around breathing pure O2 through a face mask for a couple of hours before they suit up and go outside. Thus an emergency spacewalk from the shuttle would incapacitate the participant, demand an immediate re-entry, and a few days in a decompression chamber.
Pi is an infinite length number that never repeats, right?
Therefore all possible data sequences appear somewhere within the digits of Pi, right ?
Therefore any file of any size can be represented by just two numbers - the position of the starting digit within the digits of Pi, and the length of the sequence. Presto. QED.
Best of all, if you want to encrypt as well as compress, just use "e" instead of "Pi".
(note: one of the two numbers resulting from the compression may be rather lengthy in nature, however, do not let this prevent you from IPOing your company)
From your description, it sounds like the problem is with your precocious immaturity, but it's very hard to say that to someone you know, which is probably why everyone at work is just behaving like they wished you worked somewhere else.
You've got to be very, very good to get away with being precocious and immature. Usually that means you're so bright that you also modify your behaviour accordingly. It becomes more of a problem at the fringe, for those people who are easily impressed by themselves.
On the plus side, a smaller version of this thing was built in spain, and worked.
On the minus side, I don't believe it's at all clear how this thing scales.
On the really minus side, Australia is no longer a country that has the sort of boldness it took to build the Snowy Mountain Irrigation Scheme in the 1950s, where rivers were reversed; nor the audaciousness to build the Sydney Opera House in the 1960s. It's unlikely this construction will ever happen, more's the pity. I think we've lost our nerve for risk, an affliction in which we are probably not alone.
It needs the height because there is a 1 C temperature differential for every 100m of altitude, so 1000m = 10 C, which is what creates the 'draw' and makes the whole thing go.
It's like saying "why have hydro-electric generators at the bottom of a long fall of water.
Yeah, it's not much different to playing tight loops from your old 8080 or 6502 based board to your AM radio.
But the 21st century version of this is to take your multi-gigahert Pentium class processor, and phreak your way into your multi-gigahert mobile phone. Not only play row-row-row-your-boat, but also phone your own cellphone and leave it as a voicemail. Now that'd be cool!.
Asked to turn around at a press briefing, Asimo responded in a neutral, if somewhat monotone, voice: ``What do you want?'' while raising a hand and moving some fingers
Remember the old Eliza program which pretended to carry on a conversation? Same algorithm - if you've got absolutely no frappin' idea, just say something non-commital. Fools most of the people most of the time.
It's surprising so many people here are hung up about the checksum angle to this. Using checksums is about the equivalent of your first "hello world" program in Basic. Crude, ineffective, and of little relevance to this particular real world situation.
There are much better techniques around, and they are not all that hard. The trick is to use linguistic techniques to construct a fingerprint of the linguistic content of the message. This is tolerant of names or other pertubations in the content, without running undue risk of false positives.
Because you know the content is written in a human language, and because we know an awful lot about the nature of language, we can leverage this information to do intelligent processing on the content other than just doing a dumb-ass CRC on the byte values.
For example, tokenize the message into words, drop noise words, stem the rest, assign each an unvarying numeric value from a dictionary, histogram them, drop each extremity of relative abundance, and then checksum that. Hardly rocket science -- in fact pretty crude by text processing standards and just related as an example of the sort of things you can do to exploit linguistic characteristics. Other techniques like ngrams have a lot to offer here.
There's a world of linguistic processing techniques around, and people in this business use them every day of the week. Checksums are stone axes.
... as long as you're using a 'base pi' numbering system.
I propose we all switch now. Using whole numbers for our bases is childish, and makes dealing with the natural universe so much more awkward than it needs it be.
If pushed, I'd consider 'base e' instead. Can't wait to argue about the next bill in a restaurant. Bistromathics here we come.
This sort of undiscriminated searching leads to a quite unacceptable signal to noise ratio.
In CB Radio terms, it's like not having a squelch knob, and whatever knowledge is there to be heard is drowned out by static and background chatter. It's all about signal to noise.
Privacy issues aside, such an approach just is not very useful.. A better solution is to add value through accessability to things that people think are worthy of sharing (http://www.isysdev.com), and use technology to power that sharing. It's not necesarily just about personal privacy or freedom -- sometimes the best business results can be congruent with other ideals, and give a better result all round.
The unstated conundrum here is at what speed do the two vehicles separate?
If at 'regular airliner' speeds, then all you've done is buy yourself 8000m and (say) 600 kts, which is pretty insignificant. For traditional vertical launchers, this is not a huge part of where their delta-v goes.
If the two craft stay attached and generating oxygen until they reach orbital speeds before the orbiter 'zips into orbit', then how does the launch craft prevent itself burning up? If it has thermal tiles and all that stuff, and it's right there at orbital speed (or close to it), then why not just have a single craft.
There is no valid argument that the cost saving comes in the self-production of fuel oxidizer, as LOX is incredibly cheap.
The only saving seems to come by having smaller landing gear on the orbital vehicle than would be required if it carried the oxygen generator itself - a saving that is probably outweighed by the additional complexity of the whole arrangement. If they separate at airliner speeds, then the orbital vehicle needs to carry a huge amount of oxidizer anyway.
Where is the end of this maglev tunnel, and what is it filled with? If the tunnel is built horizontally and is filled with air, then you have a real problem with heating, drag, and getting the air out of the way.
If filled with vacuum, then you have a real problem when the spacecraft hits the heavy metal plug sealing the end of the tunnel.
If it's sealed with an amazing plug that disappears just at the right time, then you have a problem finding all the pieces when the craft explodes having hit the equivalent of an air brick wall at mach 25.
If the tunnel is constructed vertically so the other end is in an area of very low air pressure, then it needs to be much more than two miles long, and it would be very, very difficult to build. Where 'difficult' tends asymptotically towards 'impossible' for current values of 'today' tending towards 'tomorrow'.
This is the hazard of reading these sorts articles in discarded copies of "modern biker".:)
In fact, in terms of principles of flight, it operates the same as the Wright Flyer. Different propulsion, and some differences in the detail, but they fly for exactly the same reason.
It's because, on the current technology platforms (electricity, combustion propulsion, materials science, medicine), all the easy stuff was done earlier, and the low-hanging fruit benefits already reaped.
What we're left with since the 50's is incremental improvements (like from vacuum tubes to transistors to VLSI ICs). We're making stuff better, smaller, cheaper and more accessible, but nothing fundamentally new.
You could say a similar thing about Edison's time. Sure, he was a clever cookie, but I don't think he'd be filing as many patents now as he did back in his fertile time.
For a new "golden age", we need major new breakthroughs that start the innovation cycle afresh. Things that people first look at and say "now what use would that be to me?"
Examples:
Reactionless space drive
Understanding how (really how) the brain works
Practical Quantum computing (this one hardly qualifies)
Direct machine interface to the human brain
The discovery of a new aspect to the physical universe that promotes a new way of thinking (like atomic structure did)
Understanding time
Understanding why the transcendental constants have the values they do
Finding telekenesis happens
IOW, things that start a fresh subject and put us at the "101" level.
Unless your objection is that he holds his breath rather than breathing all the way out before blowing the hatch, then you don't have too much to complain about.
People can survive around 30 seconds in pure vacuum as long as they open their airways to let the pressure equalize down to zero (otherwise they get an expansion injuries similar to, but muxh worse than, a scuba diver who holds her breath while ascending).
In a vacuum, your lungs no longer have air to absorb oxygen from, but the O2 in your blood stream keeps you conscious for around 30 seconds before you conk out. Certainly long enough to sneak up behind a psychotic paranoid computer.
People exploding from the eyeballs - now that is science fiction.
True that Tonga has a good 'ol traditional monarchy, where being king means you're the damn king and don't argue about it, but that doesn't mean Tonga is some quaint place to be pityed.
For all its fuedalism, Tonga has a terrific education system, great public health, and a general morality that most of us should envy.
Oh, and the Tongan dollar is worth more than the greenback, and has been for a long time. Not that that has anything to do with anything, granted. And did I mention your kids can go to school without being shot at, and you can drive your pig down the trail without a drive-by shooting. And they're about the only country on earth that's never been conquored. By anyone. Including the English or the Americans. Until now.
Sure, Joe Badnick is exploiting these great people. Let's just understand a bit about the place of which we speak. It ain't no Alabama.
I saw a similar thing a number of years ago (at Comdex, as it happens) - absolutely uncanny 3d objects. The mechanism for the projection was optics, and this sounds very much the same.
IOW, yes, it is just a more sophisticated version of the coin trick. It looks fabulous, but it has little significance for arbitrary synthetically generated animations.
Still no defence against the stoopid
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Whether it is electronic or not has no affect on the ability of people to follow simple instructions, and that is what seems to be of issue in the current debacle.
Spoiled votes is self-imposed quality control against those who do not deserve to have an opinion -- there you go -- cruel, but fair.
This would, of course, create a self-referential belief system for geeks, wherein few new notions would enter the collective conciousness, and the group view of the world would be skewed by, er, the group view of the world.
It's like being able to choose what things you want to appear in your own daily newspaper - it's inherently flawed because the most interesting things one encounters are often those one didn't expect to be interesting.
Similarly the very best things to find with a search engine are those things which are not common knowledge. The job of a decent search engine is to flush out gems, not popular opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify, the FBI is a department within the US government. Australia is a country.
Quantum computers seemingly employ multiple universes to be in all states at once so the correct answer can be read off from the appropriate universe. For example, a quantum computer with N bits (qubits) can factorize an N bit number instantly.
Based on that, the number of atoms in this universe is not a limiting factor, and maybe all that's needed is a 64 qubit quantum computer, and chess will be as solved as noughts and crosses is.
Visibility underwater is such that you'd need to be very close to something to see it at all. Coral reefs with fish and stuff, and you'd want to be within 20 feet, more likely 10. There's simply no way you can manoever a 200 ft vessel to within an irregularly shaped reef. Not a surface ship, and certainly not a submarine.
For deeper stuff, you're going to need some seriously powerful white lights. Water filters out the higher frequency light first, so all your reds start disappearing after about 60 feet. For wrecks and stuff, you'll need a huge bank of lateral spotlights (not shown on artists impression because artist didn't take physics), and still be unable to get close enough to see anything.
With sufficient lighting, you may be able to go to depth and see some really nice mud.
Me - I'd buy 7 trips to orbit instead.
Think of the informal knowledge embodied in the emails sent and received, attachments, spreadsheets, favorite websites, your colleagues documents, as well as SQL databases and the like. There simply is no suitably shaped container that you can put amorphous knowledge into. It defies structure, and XML is no answer.
Useful knowledge is of a pervasive nature. It infuses through everything, and often the really useful bits are where you least expect it, so therefore attempting to design a structure, a priori, to hold it is always doomed to failure.
The key here is polymorphic searching of both structured and unstructured data without distinction. That's where products such as ISYS earn their salt. The hard part is in convincing the blissfully unaware that knowledge is being wasted in the first place.
The other key concept is value. Large result lists are less useful than small, high-quality result lists. Everybody knows this from using Google and getting back 198,000 hits. In the old CB radio days, it was called a squelch knob. Search engines that just give you large amounts of static do you a dis-service. Useful results are small and targeted.
Puhleease !!
Spying on a foreign registry vessel in international waters which had been directed not to enter Australian territory, but which then did enter in some sort of Norwegian Invasion. If comm intercept ability does not exist for occasions such as this, then why does it exist at all?
Oh, BTW, of course this happens everywhere, but moreso. Especially in the US where people are "told" they are "free" and don't have the education system to question the fact. Try making a few phone calls or sending a few emails about how you're gonna sh**t the pr*s*dent, and see who comes knocking at your door. And that's without the external threat of a Norwegian ship invading your sovereign territory under duress from a bunch of Iraqi queue-jumpers with designer luggage stuffed full of cash (no exageration).
Nitrogen also has the dual effect of being absorbed into the tissue structure. Because Nitrogen is more soluble under pressure, as you ascend it comes out of solution and forms tiny bubbles which tend to accumulate in your joints with great pain, causing you to "bend" over. The effect is quite distinct from narcosis, and may not show up for many hours until you're home with a beer in your hand watching Lost In Space.
The effect of O2 is quite different. Simply, under two atmospheres of pressure it becomes toxic. Breath pure oxygen while 33 ft under the water and you will go into convulsions and almost certainly die. Because Air(TM) is only one fifth Oxygen, you need to go five times deeper before you run the risk of dying from air.
For this reason, deep divers phase out both O2 and N2, and substitute the volume with Helium, which has no nasty effects other than making you sound like Donald Duck(TM).
In space, US astronauts going outside in space suits still use a low pressure pure oxygen environment, otherwise their suits are too inflexible. This not only means No Smoking, but also brings the risk of the bends because they're coming from a nitrogen-rich air environment, so the astronauts have to sit around breathing pure O2 through a face mask for a couple of hours before they suit up and go outside. Thus an emergency spacewalk from the shuttle would incapacitate the participant, demand an immediate re-entry, and a few days in a decompression chamber.
Therefore all possible data sequences appear somewhere within the digits of Pi, right ?
Therefore any file of any size can be represented by just two numbers - the position of the starting digit within the digits of Pi, and the length of the sequence. Presto. QED.
Best of all, if you want to encrypt as well as compress, just use "e" instead of "Pi".
(note: one of the two numbers resulting from the compression may be rather lengthy in nature, however, do not let this prevent you from IPOing your company)
DOLT
You've got to be very, very good to get away with being precocious and immature. Usually that means you're so bright that you also modify your behaviour accordingly. It becomes more of a problem at the fringe, for those people who are easily impressed by themselves.
I think we've lost our nerve for risk, an affliction in which we are probably not alone.
It's like saying "why have hydro-electric generators at the bottom of a long fall of water.
But the 21st century version of this is to take your multi-gigahert Pentium class processor, and phreak your way into your multi-gigahert mobile phone. Not only play row-row-row-your-boat, but also phone your own cellphone and leave it as a voicemail. Now that'd be cool!.
Remember the old Eliza program which pretended to carry on a conversation? Same algorithm - if you've got absolutely no frappin' idea, just say something non-commital. Fools most of the people most of the time.
Because you know the content is written in a human language, and because we know an awful lot about the nature of language, we can leverage this information to do intelligent processing on the content other than just doing a dumb-ass CRC on the byte values.
For example, tokenize the message into words, drop noise words, stem the rest, assign each an unvarying numeric value from a dictionary, histogram them, drop each extremity of relative abundance, and then checksum that. Hardly rocket science -- in fact pretty crude by text processing standards and just related as an example of the sort of things you can do to exploit linguistic characteristics. Other techniques like ngrams have a lot to offer here.
There's a world of linguistic processing techniques around, and people in this business use them every day of the week. Checksums are stone axes.
I propose we all switch now. Using whole numbers for our bases is childish, and makes dealing with the natural universe so much more awkward than it needs it be.
If pushed, I'd consider 'base e' instead. Can't wait to argue about the next bill in a restaurant. Bistromathics here we come.
In CB Radio terms, it's like not having a squelch knob, and whatever knowledge is there to be heard is drowned out by static and background chatter. It's all about signal to noise.
Privacy issues aside, such an approach just is not very useful.. A better solution is to add value through accessability to things that people think are worthy of sharing (http://www.isysdev.com), and use technology to power that sharing. It's not necesarily just about personal privacy or freedom -- sometimes the best business results can be congruent with other ideals, and give a better result all round.
If at 'regular airliner' speeds, then all you've done is buy yourself 8000m and (say) 600 kts, which is pretty insignificant. For traditional vertical launchers, this is not a huge part of where their delta-v goes.
If the two craft stay attached and generating oxygen until they reach orbital speeds before the orbiter 'zips into orbit', then how does the launch craft prevent itself burning up? If it has thermal tiles and all that stuff, and it's right there at orbital speed (or close to it), then why not just have a single craft.
There is no valid argument that the cost saving comes in the self-production of fuel oxidizer, as LOX is incredibly cheap.
The only saving seems to come by having smaller landing gear on the orbital vehicle than would be required if it carried the oxygen generator itself - a saving that is probably outweighed by the additional complexity of the whole arrangement. If they separate at airliner speeds, then the orbital vehicle needs to carry a huge amount of oxidizer anyway.
If filled with vacuum, then you have a real problem when the spacecraft hits the heavy metal plug sealing the end of the tunnel.
If it's sealed with an amazing plug that disappears just at the right time, then you have a problem finding all the pieces when the craft explodes having hit the equivalent of an air brick wall at mach 25.
If the tunnel is constructed vertically so the other end is in an area of very low air pressure, then it needs to be much more than two miles long, and it would be very, very difficult to build. Where 'difficult' tends asymptotically towards 'impossible' for current values of 'today' tending towards 'tomorrow'. This is the hazard of reading these sorts articles in discarded copies of "modern biker". :)
In fact, in terms of principles of flight, it operates the same as the Wright Flyer. Different propulsion, and some differences in the detail, but they fly for exactly the same reason.
What we're left with since the 50's is incremental improvements (like from vacuum tubes to transistors to VLSI ICs). We're making stuff better, smaller, cheaper and more accessible, but nothing fundamentally new.
You could say a similar thing about Edison's time. Sure, he was a clever cookie, but I don't think he'd be filing as many patents now as he did back in his fertile time.
For a new "golden age", we need major new breakthroughs that start the innovation cycle afresh. Things that people first look at and say "now what use would that be to me?"
Examples:
IOW, things that start a fresh subject and put us at the "101" level.
What others can you think of?
People can survive around 30 seconds in pure vacuum as long as they open their airways to let the pressure equalize down to zero (otherwise they get an expansion injuries similar to, but muxh worse than, a scuba diver who holds her breath while ascending).
In a vacuum, your lungs no longer have air to absorb oxygen from, but the O2 in your blood stream keeps you conscious for around 30 seconds before you conk out. Certainly long enough to sneak up behind a psychotic paranoid computer.
People exploding from the eyeballs - now that is science fiction.
For all its fuedalism, Tonga has a terrific education system, great public health, and a general morality that most of us should envy.
Oh, and the Tongan dollar is worth more than the greenback, and has been for a long time. Not that that has anything to do with anything, granted. And did I mention your kids can go to school without being shot at, and you can drive your pig down the trail without a drive-by shooting. And they're about the only country on earth that's never been conquored. By anyone. Including the English or the Americans. Until now.
Sure, Joe Badnick is exploiting these great people. Let's just understand a bit about the place of which we speak. It ain't no Alabama.
IOW, yes, it is just a more sophisticated version of the coin trick. It looks fabulous, but it has little significance for arbitrary synthetically generated animations.
Spoiled votes is self-imposed quality control against those who do not deserve to have an opinion -- there you go -- cruel, but fair.
It's like being able to choose what things you want to appear in your own daily newspaper - it's inherently flawed because the most interesting things one encounters are often those one didn't expect to be interesting.
Similarly the very best things to find with a search engine are those things which are not common knowledge. The job of a decent search engine is to flush out gems, not popular opinion.