Does anyone else think sometimes that physicists are just coming up with crazier and crazier ideas just to see what we'll buy?
While I agree it is a bit mind boggling to think about, it seems that several different approaches to Quantum Gravity predict this phenomena of dimensional reduction at small scales (high energy). Thus it's not just a whack idea they've thrown out there.
I couldn't find the thread I had in mind, but this has been discussed several times at the Physics Forums board, see for example this thread:
Those who read in this forum are probably aware of the remarkable coincidence that three actively pursued approaches seem to agree on a contraction of dimensionality at microscopic scale. In all three (Loop, Triangulations, and UV-Safety) the microscopic geometry seems to become fractal-like and the spacetime dimensionality goes from 4D down to around 2D at very small scale.
What's wrong with distributing copies of GNU/Linux for a fee (e.g. Red Hat)? And what's wrong with distributing copies of Blender + video tutorials + clip art + other non-free goodies for a fee?
The problem is that they hide the fact that it's GPL, and they use copyrighted artwork that they do not have permission to use, and do not respond to requests to remove such content.
Because a lot of the KDE applications are great and if one does not like dual booting you can enjoy them on Windows as well?
I really like Kate for writing code and Okular is a nice Adobe Reader alternative. I haven't tried many LaTeX GUIs but I feel really productive in Kile. Now I can enjoy those applications on Windows as well.
BTW if you do install KDE on Windows, make sure you read the fine tuning step in their wiki for a getting a more native look and feel.
1) The same thing that happens when you install DirectX 10 on a DX9 card: the DX9 subset of DX10 is hardware accelerated, the DX10 parts are run in software.
What is guaranteed by DirectX 10 is that IF the card and driver supports DirectX 10 the application is guaranteed a set of functionality. There is no guarantee that the DX10 support will be there for a DX9 card. Usually the feature will not be implemented in software and you won't be able to run DX10 applications.
So the criminal might "accidentally shoot someone", and that's your argument for banning guns?
It's a bit deeper than that. If regular people don't have guns (or knifes and similar), criminals won't need to use guns as any other weapon (knife/axe) will most likely do the job of scaring the victims into submission.
In addition fewer guns in the population will make it harder to obtain a gun illegally, so even if the criminal wanted they may have to "make do" with something else.
Now back to my hypothetical situation, if the criminal has a gun and there's a good chance you have a gun, he will probably be quite a bite more on the edge than if he had a knife and there's a miniscule chance that you have a gun, knife or similar.
I believe the chance for someone to get hurt in the first scenario is far greater than in the second. That is why I wouldn't want the gun (or knife) laws here lifted.
As for "fixing" the situation in the US, I think it's naive to expect that simply banning guns will make everything all right. However I imagine it's part of the solution.
It displays no grasp of logic whatsoever. Criminals will always have guns.
Criminals will always have weapons, but they don't have to be guns. For example, store robberies here in Norway usually do not involve proper guns (some involve toy replicas).
In such a scenario for example I think it is very good that the criminals does not have guns. It is far harder to accidentally attack someone with an axe than to accidentally shoot someone.
Removing the fucking status bar. I don't know which idiot came up with this brilliant concept, but he (or she) is the reason I'm dumping firefox for greener pastures.
The reason that broke the back of the proverbial camel that is.
I was a bit perplexed by this as well. I read that a lot of people want FF to mimic Chrome and get rid of the permanent status bar. By sheer luck I found the option to turn it back on: right click next to a tab so you get the menu for toolbars. The "status bar" has been renamed to "Add-on bar", so select it and voila.
So it seems it's not gone forever, just hidden by default. However these are things that need to be clearly marked on the "what's new page" IMHO.
Dark matter- God of the gaps. Can't explain something? Dark matter! That magical substance that is everywhere it wants to be, any way you need it to be!
So yeah, introducing new particles to explain discrepancies in observations is something totally unheard of and not something a real scientist would do...
Well, just think about it: in a substitution cipher, the "key" is a permutation of the alphabet (i.e, a -> q, b -> w, etc). If you used this device without the "twizzling" step, it would be exactly like a plain old sub cipher. I just don't see how that twizzle step injects enough entropy into the system for this to be significantly more secure than even a Vignere cipher with a sufficiently long keyword, and that you can do with pen, paper and a good memory.
Well, a substitution cipher only has one "scrambled" alphabet. However the two alphabets in the Chaocipher are "twizzled" differently, so I don't think you can treat it as if you only got one "scrambled" alphabet, and must also consider the possible permutations of the two alphabets. I agree that if the alphabets were "twizzled" in the same way it wouldn't be much different from the plain substitution cipher.
So if you have known plaintext anywhere in the message, you can look for it with the usual techniques for monoalphabetic substitution, while considering all of the small number of possible changes to the two alphabets on each cycle.
From what I can gather the "key" in this system is the ordering of the two alphabets, which is not fixed. Doesn't your method assume that you already have the key? If not, how does your method deal with all the possible alphabet permutations?
I'm no crypto guy tho so I might be missing the obvious:)
Re:Knuth didn't get anything wrong
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Squid is his use case to beat? Has he been in any high performance app stack in the past five years?
Squid... really?
Considering Varnish was written due primarily to the lacking performance of Squid, I don't see why this is so bad?
How low are the specs for these missions are set if it's been operating for 25x longer than it was designed to?
IIRC they expected dust to settle on the solar panels rendering them useless fairly quickly. That the wind clears them as effectively as it does came as a surprise at the time.
Wild guess, perhaps it has something to do with reflective and thermal properties of the material?
They're using the mass as a reference for the satellite position, so I assume they measure the distance to the mass using lasers, hence the need for the mass to be reflective.
Also to increase accuracy I'm guessing that they'd want to minimize the change in physical size of the mass due to thermal fluctuations.
Or I could be completely wrong and they do it just cause it sounds cool:D
I had the unpleasant experience of witnessing my grandmother battling for 4 days to finally let her heart stop despite her pacemaker. Before she lost the ability to communicate, she begged the doctors, and I mean begged for them to be able to turn her pacemaker off. Do you know what they said? We're sorry, but turning off your pacemaker would be murder.
I'm sorry to hear. This was something that worried me when my dad's cancer became worse. I was hoping that they wouldn't force him to live for a few more months in pain, however I wasn't sure if they were legally obliged to try to save him or not.
Fortunately, when the time came, it was up to him. After battling pneumonia for a day he indicated that he did not want to receive more oxygen. After the resident doctor was satisfied that he knew the consequences of turning off the oxygen, they did so.
I feel confident that in my case it is the latter. I'll have some periods when I'm really down, and then I usually end up surfing aimlessly for hour upon hour. My gut feeling is that it's to distract my mind, in an effort to avoid thinking about the stuff that gets me down. Not that it helps much...
Yeah, and the point was that those people wouldn't be buying this card.
True, I was thinking more generally about the GPGPU market. However consider that if a HD5870 speeds up a task by 10-15x compared to a regular CPU for a given task, then this card could potentially give a 2-3x speed-up. For many it'll be easier and cheaper to get this card than a CPU which can do 2-3x.
I should add that the arch. viz. sample was for compute shading in general. But even such "puny" cards such as this should give a nice boost to many GPGPU applications.
I don't get it. Yay, DX11. The biggest new features I could see about it were hardware tessellation and compute shaders.
Compute shaders, or more generally GPGPU (via OpenCL as well as DX11) will open up a huge new market for GPUs. One midrange GPU can replace a small cluster of computers at a fraction of the cost. For example, using 2-3 GPUs in one box, people doing architectural visualization can get their results in minutes instead of days.
I'm a pianist, which means my finger muscles were quite strong Indeed, strong hand muscles are precisely why my hands cramped while writing; stronger hands tend to lend themselves to a tighter grip on the pencil, harder pressure on the paper, etc., all of which contribute to muscle fatigue and injury.
Two things which help me a lot. I use 0.7mm instead of the typical 0.5mm pens, and I use a pen which has a sufficiently large grip. The wider line prevents me from ending up drawing minuscule symbols which really strains the fine motor muscles. The larger grip makes it more comfortable to hold over time.
The pen I'm currently using is a Pilot Alphagel, which for some reason seems to be unavailable in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree it is a bit mind boggling to think about, it seems that several different approaches to Quantum Gravity predict this phenomena of dimensional reduction at small scales (high energy). Thus it's not just a whack idea they've thrown out there.
I couldn't find the thread I had in mind, but this has been discussed several times at the Physics Forums board, see for example this thread:
What's wrong with distributing copies of GNU/Linux for a fee (e.g. Red Hat)? And what's wrong with distributing copies of Blender + video tutorials + clip art + other non-free goodies for a fee?
The problem is that they hide the fact that it's GPL, and they use copyrighted artwork that they do not have permission to use, and do not respond to requests to remove such content.
Read more here: http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/press/re-branding-blender/
ehm....why?!
Because a lot of the KDE applications are great and if one does not like dual booting you can enjoy them on Windows as well?
I really like Kate for writing code and Okular is a nice Adobe Reader alternative. I haven't tried many LaTeX GUIs but I feel really productive in Kile. Now I can enjoy those applications on Windows as well.
BTW if you do install KDE on Windows, make sure you read the fine tuning step in their wiki for a getting a more native look and feel.
1) The same thing that happens when you install DirectX 10 on a DX9 card: the DX9 subset of DX10 is hardware accelerated, the DX10 parts are run in software.
What is guaranteed by DirectX 10 is that IF the card and driver supports DirectX 10 the application is guaranteed a set of functionality. There is no guarantee that the DX10 support will be there for a DX9 card. Usually the feature will not be implemented in software and you won't be able to run DX10 applications.
So the criminal might "accidentally shoot someone", and that's your argument for banning guns?
It's a bit deeper than that. If regular people don't have guns (or knifes and similar), criminals won't need to use guns as any other weapon (knife/axe) will most likely do the job of scaring the victims into submission.
In addition fewer guns in the population will make it harder to obtain a gun illegally, so even if the criminal wanted they may have to "make do" with something else.
Now back to my hypothetical situation, if the criminal has a gun and there's a good chance you have a gun, he will probably be quite a bite more on the edge than if he had a knife and there's a miniscule chance that you have a gun, knife or similar.
I believe the chance for someone to get hurt in the first scenario is far greater than in the second. That is why I wouldn't want the gun (or knife) laws here lifted.
As for "fixing" the situation in the US, I think it's naive to expect that simply banning guns will make everything all right. However I imagine it's part of the solution.
It displays no grasp of logic whatsoever. Criminals will always have guns.
Criminals will always have weapons, but they don't have to be guns. For example, store robberies here in Norway usually do not involve proper guns (some involve toy replicas).
In such a scenario for example I think it is very good that the criminals does not have guns. It is far harder to accidentally attack someone with an axe than to accidentally shoot someone.
In all the usages I can think of, 'sans' refers to something that's a proper subset of something else.
Did you forget about sans serif?
Removing the fucking status bar. I don't know which idiot came up with this brilliant concept, but he (or she) is the reason I'm dumping firefox for greener pastures.
The reason that broke the back of the proverbial camel that is.
I was a bit perplexed by this as well. I read that a lot of people want FF to mimic Chrome and get rid of the permanent status bar. By sheer luck I found the option to turn it back on: right click next to a tab so you get the menu for toolbars. The "status bar" has been renamed to "Add-on bar", so select it and voila.
So it seems it's not gone forever, just hidden by default. However these are things that need to be clearly marked on the "what's new page" IMHO.
Dark matter- God of the gaps. Can't explain something? Dark matter! That magical substance that is everywhere it wants to be, any way you need it to be!
Can't explain the missing mass of Beta decay? Introduce new particle! Can't explain how electrons are confined to the nucleus? Introduce new particle! Can't explain the inertial mass of particles? Introduce new particle!
So yeah, introducing new particles to explain discrepancies in observations is something totally unheard of and not something a real scientist would do...
Tried to figure out how this thing worked and I found this video here: http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/Opposed-Piston-Opposed-Cylinder
Some good technical questions and answers, as well as a working illustrative model of the engine.
Well, just think about it: in a substitution cipher, the "key" is a permutation of the alphabet (i.e, a -> q, b -> w, etc). If you used this device without the "twizzling" step, it would be exactly like a plain old sub cipher. I just don't see how that twizzle step injects enough entropy into the system for this to be significantly more secure than even a Vignere cipher with a sufficiently long keyword, and that you can do with pen, paper and a good memory.
Well, a substitution cipher only has one "scrambled" alphabet. However the two alphabets in the Chaocipher are "twizzled" differently, so I don't think you can treat it as if you only got one "scrambled" alphabet, and must also consider the possible permutations of the two alphabets. I agree that if the alphabets were "twizzled" in the same way it wouldn't be much different from the plain substitution cipher.
Again, I might be missing the big picture here :)
So if you have known plaintext anywhere in the message, you can look for it with the usual techniques for monoalphabetic substitution, while considering
all of the small number of possible changes to the two alphabets on each cycle.
From what I can gather the "key" in this system is the ordering of the two alphabets, which is not fixed. Doesn't your method assume that you already have the key? If not, how does your method deal with all the possible alphabet permutations?
I'm no crypto guy tho so I might be missing the obvious :)
Squid is his use case to beat? Has he been in any high performance app stack in the past five years?
Squid... really?
Considering Varnish was written due primarily to the lacking performance of Squid, I don't see why this is so bad?
How low are the specs for these missions are set if it's been operating for 25x longer than it was designed to?
IIRC they expected dust to settle on the solar panels rendering them useless fairly quickly. That the wind clears them as effectively as it does came as a surprise at the time.
Wild guess, perhaps it has something to do with reflective and thermal properties of the material?
They're using the mass as a reference for the satellite position, so I assume they measure the distance to the mass using lasers, hence the need for the mass to be reflective.
Also to increase accuracy I'm guessing that they'd want to minimize the change in physical size of the mass due to thermal fluctuations.
Or I could be completely wrong and they do it just cause it sounds cool :D
I had the unpleasant experience of witnessing my grandmother battling for 4 days to finally let her heart stop despite her pacemaker. Before she lost the ability to communicate, she begged the doctors, and I mean begged for them to be able to turn her pacemaker off. Do you know what they said? We're sorry, but turning off your pacemaker would be murder.
I'm sorry to hear. This was something that worried me when my dad's cancer became worse. I was hoping that they wouldn't force him to live for a few more months in pain, however I wasn't sure if they were legally obliged to try to save him or not.
Fortunately, when the time came, it was up to him. After battling pneumonia for a day he indicated that he did not want to receive more oxygen. After the resident doctor was satisfied that he knew the consequences of turning off the oxygen, they did so.
I'm very glad that they allowed him the choice.
It's not arrogance to say that superconductors will NEVER work at room temperature... at least according to the laws of physics as we understand them.
What's the theoretical upper limit?
I feel confident that in my case it is the latter. I'll have some periods when I'm really down, and then I usually end up surfing aimlessly for hour upon hour. My gut feeling is that it's to distract my mind, in an effort to avoid thinking about the stuff that gets me down. Not that it helps much...
Yeah, and the point was that those people wouldn't be buying this card.
True, I was thinking more generally about the GPGPU market. However consider that if a HD5870 speeds up a task by 10-15x compared to a regular CPU for a given task, then this card could potentially give a 2-3x speed-up. For many it'll be easier and cheaper to get this card than a CPU which can do 2-3x.
I should add that the arch. viz. sample was for compute shading in general. But even such "puny" cards such as this should give a nice boost to many GPGPU applications.
I don't get it. Yay, DX11. The biggest new features I could see about it were hardware tessellation and compute shaders.
Compute shaders, or more generally GPGPU (via OpenCL as well as DX11) will open up a huge new market for GPUs. One midrange GPU can replace a small cluster of computers at a fraction of the cost. For example, using 2-3 GPUs in one box, people doing architectural visualization can get their results in minutes instead of days.
I don't know exactly how find -iname works (and I'm too lazy to read man pages), but based on your description something like this could work:
for /r /d %a in (*change*) do dir "%a"
No one said they let him touch the .NET Framework, just c#.
That could explain why I find C# a nice language but the .NET framework a mess...
Well, CERN has a FAQ of sorts, 66 pages. Might be a good start, depending on how much detail you want.
I'm a pianist, which means my finger muscles were quite strong Indeed, strong hand muscles are precisely why my hands cramped while writing; stronger hands tend to lend themselves to a tighter grip on the pencil, harder pressure on the paper, etc., all of which contribute to muscle fatigue and injury.
Two things which help me a lot. I use 0.7mm instead of the typical 0.5mm pens, and I use a pen which has a sufficiently large grip. The wider line prevents me from ending up drawing minuscule symbols which really strains the fine motor muscles. The larger grip makes it more comfortable to hold over time.
The pen I'm currently using is a Pilot Alphagel, which for some reason seems to be unavailable in the US.