Actually I think this involves a seldom recognized legal priniciple known as . . . Politeness.
Yes, Weird Al's creations are well protected as parody, despite the commercial use. Weird Al is just a decent human being who asked first despite the fact that he would almost certainly win.
Then doesn't that mean that, if the chance for a universe with laws allowing communication between universes is non-zero, there is a definite subdivision of universes with which we can interact, and from which we can interact with other universes?
I disagree entirely. The beancounters are okay, because you can reason with a beancounter. When you look at them and say "Hey, sure you can pay us for the extra hours, but what you're getting is extra time debugging code, and less actual production, and here's the studies to prove it . .." all of them will back off and the best ones will actually ask you how they *can* get more bang for their buck.
A good beancounter is (Thank god) *greedy* (Note: not necessarily for money. The best Boss in the world is greedy for efficiency beancounter).(S)He has no ego involved in being right, he just wants to make money (or be efficient, or whatever their particular obsession is).
The problem is some people want to A) Be Right, and B) Be *seen* as being right. They get an idea in their head and you can't talk them out of it because there's ego involved. From there you have four choices -
A) Quit. The companies going down in flames, sooner or later. Grab a parachute and go . ..
B) Manipulate. If you're good at it, you can convince them that the changes that need to be made are their idea. If it's their idea, they'll back it.
C) Manipulate. Get the info to *their* boss. *Their* boss is greedy too, and doesn't like making less money because of some idiot.
D) Do Nothing. Sure, the companies going down in flames, but at least you can bring the Bratwurst and beer . ..
Just make sure that you've made a choice, rather than just being swept along.
The basic problem with *any* system like this is that the *actual* rate of inaccuracy doesn't match the rate of inaccuracy oer capita.
Example - take a face recogniton system that is 99% accurate, over 100,000 tests.
Assuming that 99% of people are innocent (An assumption I'm choosing to make my point- but this is true to a lesser extent of any percentage below fifty percent) that mean that you have 1000 criminals, 990 of which will get caught under the system. You also have 99,000 innocents, 990 of which will get falsely caught under such a system.
Of those caught in such a system, whether it face recognition, drug testing, or anything else, with 99% 'accuracy', you will have a %50 failure rate.
As a 'seive' that's not bad - you follow up on them and double check the system. But all too often these aren't made with any follow-up anticipated. A companies drug testing program isn't set to 'follow-up' and investigate the %50 that are incorrectly accused - they're fired, because the test is '99% accurate'. Neither does law enforcement follow up on these kinds of automation with the fact that %50 percent of those accused may be innocent - after all, the system is '99% accurate'.
That is the basic problem with these systems in my mind.
>Yahoo is offering a service available in France.
If you were shipping widgets to France, you would be obligated to obey the laws of France with respect to your French customers.
No, their not. They'e selling a service *here*, and applying french law to it. Applying this to a retailer, France can now make it illegal for me to sell a gestapo insignia that my Grandfather took off a SS uniform because a French citizen might be able to have access to it and buy it.
If France doesn't wish for it's citizen to have access to 'proscribed' influences, they have the perfectly legitimate option of disconnecting those networks physically within French territory from networks outside French territory. Of course, even the french citizenry wouldn't put up with that, thus they feel it necessary to enforce their worldview over the rest of the world.
Pug
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Not as long as women keep dating Assholes it doesn't.
We will start evolving into a more intelligent and nicer species aproximately one generation after women decide not to put up with stupid assholes just because they're good looking or have money.
Until then the human race is doomed - sigh.
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In the range of things that someone will undoubtably call an urban legend, I *have* known of someone whose vision extended past the violet range.
A friend of mine knew the gentleman from chemistry (For those counting at home - My friend knew the man personally. Not a friend of a friend that heard of a guy . . . With none of the other indulgences of urban legends, I choose to believe him - Grin) he never knew he was different from anyone else until he was assigned to jot the lines for a spectrascopy (If my terminology is correct) graph - his teacher informed him he was cheating because he jotted down two other lines in the near ultraviolet. After a couple more tests of it, the teacher was forced to conclude that either his vision extended quite a bit into the UV range, or he was better at cheating than he was at catching it - .
I only bring this up because (A) I thought this was what this originally referred to before reading the article, and since it's not, (B) does anyone know the term for this mutation?
Pug
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The book is excellent, over 1000 pages long and a great story.
What?!? God, BFE has to be one of the worst books ever written. The movies was at least consistent with the original premise - The book itself was dumb.
Read some Asimov or Doc Smith for crying out loud. Anything but the Foundations series which just drags on and on. Except for his single most famous work, Asimov was a great writer - [G]
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Re:Microsoft Purchases Evil From Satan
on
Microsoft Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I'm looking more for simple sin in an Operating System. I'm not looking for Evil(TM), and with a DSL connection I'm pretty much covered in the Lust department. Greed has been working it's way around since the introduction of Reaganomics without much help ('Trickle down economics' my Ass. In the military we called the same effect 'Shit rolls down-hill'.). Of course, Apple is rapidly cornering the market on Jealousy, and MS already had the Pride vice sewn up, which seems to work in a nice lyrical fashion with the Fall their headed for - Snicker . ..
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Actually, the stock will split with the company. One of the oddities that 'proved' that breaking up Standard Oil were a good Idea was that the stock values of the 'baby' Standard companies was more than Standard original Stock was worth.
That's the weirdest thing about monopolies. They hurt themselves a lot. They just hurt everyone else so much more.
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Isn't it nice of them to inform me that they're licensing it to me, after I've paid for it already?
I'm sure this is not merely IANAL, but sheer naivete here, but once I own it, it's too late to license it. They never told me before they sold it, that they weren't planning on selling it.
Now, if they told me before I bought it, it's a different story.
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I've noticed it with a lot of Games - An Editor to modify or create new stuff for the game with a discalimer 'Anything created using this Editor for this game is copyrighted' to the people that wrote the game. Dungeon Master II and Star Fleet Command both contain similar clauses.
If this is legal (And under UCITA, it might be), what's to stop someone that writes an Application program from including the same type of clause. A Word Processor, a spreadsheet, or even a compiler.
I think this would get overturned, even under UCITA, if it went to court first. But it's much more likely that one of these Games will go to court first, and then there will be a precedent for any program.
Possibly I'm being Paranoid - Pug
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Seems counter-intuitive. If gravity propagates at c, then a black hole would 'capture' it's own gravity inside it's own gravity well. Even taking into consideration that a gravity well may not collapse into a black hole in any finite amount of time, as the well collapses towards the event horizon, the propagation of the gravitational field would slow down as the time frame slows, which would cause an orbiting object to orbit, not where the proto-blackhole was a minute ago, but where it was a century or a millenium ago.
Which wouldn't make any difference for a lone black hole by itself, but a large star in orbit around a black hole would find itmatter being pulled along a gravitational rift along the entire path the black hole was orbiting, rather than simply towards the black hole.
Or so it would seem - I'm no Einstein to try and put a thought experiment against established theories. But it seems unlikely to me.
Pug
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Maybe I can expand this somewhat - I'm not sure if your analogy makes sense either, but . . .
A - The Cesium was previously 'charged' by a beam. This creates a solid 'up' level throughout, similar to (as I understand it) the charging state of a laser.
B - Each cesium atom is close enough to it's immediate neighbor for quantam effects to propogate.
Therefore . . .
1- Upon the entrance of the new, off-wavelength beam, the atom try to emit a photon, and pick up the new photon, but has nowhere to hand it off to.
2- Because the atom is below the spooky threshold, it can hand that energy off due to uncertainty to the next atom.
3a- the next atom, being already in an excited state, attempts to hand off the photon (like a laser), but has no atom to hand it of to. Repeat step two . . .
3b- unti we reach the last atom in the chamber, which is free to hand off the photon, and releases a photon of the same wavelength as that originally entering the chamber, dropping that amount of energy (The backwards wave). At no time has the photon actually exceeded lightspeed, but it has made a billion small heisenberg jumps from atom to atom until it found a spot it could exist.
Repeat for the next photon, with the backward wave coming back to meet the incoming wave front such that the backward wave covers the distance in time to cancel out the incoming wave.
If that's a valid interpretation, then this is a macroscopic quantum effect - the cesium is acting as a single quantum function, similar to helium II or a laser, and the photons are being 'virtually' absorbed at one end and released at the other without covering the intermediate distance in any real way, with the 'borrowed' negative energy riding backwards to cancel the original wave.
If this is the case, then it should be able to transmit information at FTL speeds.
As a layman, I await finer minds to invalidate this interpretation.
Pug
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As a layman, I'm guessing, but I suspect that the shape of the wavefront is 'packaged' due to the difference in the wavelengths of the to beams.
To make an analogy, the information in a hologram is packaged at every portion of the hologram because of the interference pattern between a split laser, one of which encodes the inforamation to be recorded, the other half acts as a baseline.
The NYT's mentioned that, rather than using two beams of the same wavelength (thus amplifying it) they used a carefully calculated wavelength that was not identical. My guess is that these created an interference pattern that caused the wavefront to store the shapes of the waves in a manner similar to a hologram.
Can anyone tell me if this makes any sense at all, or is this a completely nonsensical interpretation of the data?
Pug
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Slashdot Mirror
Actually I think this involves a seldom recognized legal priniciple known as . . . Politeness.
Yes, Weird Al's creations are well protected as parody, despite the commercial use. Weird Al is just a decent human being who asked first despite the fact that he would almost certainly win.
Then doesn't that mean that, if the chance for a universe with laws allowing communication between universes is non-zero, there is a definite subdivision of universes with which we can interact, and from which we can interact with other universes?
Hah - the heck with Linear physics!
I disagree entirely. The beancounters are okay, because you can reason with a beancounter. When you look at them and say "Hey, sure you can pay us for the extra hours, but what you're getting is extra time debugging code, and less actual production, and here's the studies to prove it . . ." all of them will back off and the best ones will actually ask you how they *can* get more bang for their buck.
.
.
A good beancounter is (Thank god) *greedy* (Note: not necessarily for money. The best Boss in the world is greedy for efficiency beancounter).(S)He has no ego involved in being right, he just wants to make money (or be efficient, or whatever their particular obsession is).
The problem is some people want to A) Be Right, and B) Be *seen* as being right. They get an idea in their head and you can't talk them out of it because there's ego involved. From there you have four choices -
A) Quit. The companies going down in flames, sooner or later. Grab a parachute and go . .
B) Manipulate. If you're good at it, you can convince them that the changes that need to be made are their idea. If it's their idea, they'll back it.
C) Manipulate. Get the info to *their* boss. *Their* boss is greedy too, and doesn't like making less money because of some idiot.
D) Do Nothing. Sure, the companies going down in flames, but at least you can bring the Bratwurst and beer . .
Just make sure that you've made a choice, rather than just being swept along.
September 5 1969
C/C++, Javascript, Perl, x86 assembler
Windows NT and XP, Linux, BSD Unix and VMS
Silly me - I thought he was making a Malthus joke.
I hate to point it out to you, but evolution is an elitist, classist tendency of the universe - Ask the Neaderthal, oops, too late.
The basic problem with *any* system like this is that the *actual* rate of inaccuracy doesn't match the rate of inaccuracy oer capita.
Example - take a face recogniton system that is 99% accurate, over 100,000 tests.
Assuming that 99% of people are innocent (An assumption I'm choosing to make my point- but this is true to a lesser extent of any percentage below fifty percent) that mean that you have 1000 criminals, 990 of which will get caught under the system. You also have 99,000 innocents, 990 of which will get falsely caught under such a system.
Of those caught in such a system, whether it face recognition, drug testing, or anything else, with 99% 'accuracy', you will have a %50 failure rate.
As a 'seive' that's not bad - you follow up on them and double check the system. But all too often these aren't made with any follow-up anticipated. A companies drug testing program isn't set to 'follow-up' and investigate the %50 that are incorrectly accused - they're fired, because the test is '99% accurate'. Neither does law enforcement follow up on these kinds of automation with the fact that %50 percent of those accused may be innocent - after all, the system is '99% accurate'.
That is the basic problem with these systems in my mind.
Pug
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Only if your employer pays you for thinking about a coding problem when you're in the shower.
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Hudson Hawk is one of the greatest movies of all time . . . if only for the quotes . . .
"When you've made your first Billion by the age of eighteen, it's hard to set new goals. But I've found one. Total World Domination . . ."
Pug
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What?!? God, BFE has to be one of the worst books ever written. The movies was at least consistent with the original premise - The book itself was dumb.
Read some Asimov or Doc Smith for crying out loud. Anything but the Foundations series which just drags on and on. Except for his single most famous work, Asimov was a great writer - [G]
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That's the weirdest thing about monopolies. They hurt themselves a lot. They just hurt everyone else so much more.
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I'm sure this is not merely IANAL, but sheer naivete here, but once I own it, it's too late to license it. They never told me before they sold it, that they weren't planning on selling it.
Now, if they told me before I bought it, it's a different story.
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If this is legal (And under UCITA, it might be), what's to stop someone that writes an Application program from including the same type of clause. A Word Processor, a spreadsheet, or even a compiler.
I think this would get overturned, even under UCITA, if it went to court first. But it's much more likely that one of these Games will go to court first, and then there will be a precedent for any program.
Possibly I'm being Paranoid - Pug
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Which means that one of the underhanded, sneaky, and censorship ridden movement in recent history must of lost a lot of money folks.
And if that's not a good thing, I don't know what is - grin
Pug
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Which wouldn't make any difference for a lone black hole by itself, but a large star in orbit around a black hole would find itmatter being pulled along a gravitational rift along the entire path the black hole was orbiting, rather than simply towards the black hole.
Or so it would seem - I'm no Einstein to try and put a thought experiment against established theories. But it seems unlikely to me.
Pug
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A - The Cesium was previously 'charged' by a beam. This creates a solid 'up' level throughout, similar to (as I understand it) the charging state of a laser.
B - Each cesium atom is close enough to it's immediate neighbor for quantam effects to propogate.
Therefore . . .
1- Upon the entrance of the new, off-wavelength beam, the atom try to emit a photon, and pick up the new photon, but has nowhere to hand it off to.
2- Because the atom is below the spooky threshold, it can hand that energy off due to uncertainty to the next atom.
3a- the next atom, being already in an excited state, attempts to hand off the photon (like a laser), but has no atom to hand it of to. Repeat step two . . .
3b- unti we reach the last atom in the chamber, which is free to hand off the photon, and releases a photon of the same wavelength as that originally entering the chamber, dropping that amount of energy (The backwards wave). At no time has the photon actually exceeded lightspeed, but it has made a billion small heisenberg jumps from atom to atom until it found a spot it could exist.
Repeat for the next photon, with the backward wave coming back to meet the incoming wave front such that the backward wave covers the distance in time to cancel out the incoming wave.
If that's a valid interpretation, then this is a macroscopic quantum effect - the cesium is acting as a single quantum function, similar to helium II or a laser, and the photons are being 'virtually' absorbed at one end and released at the other without covering the intermediate distance in any real way, with the 'borrowed' negative energy riding backwards to cancel the original wave.
If this is the case, then it should be able to transmit information at FTL speeds.
As a layman, I await finer minds to invalidate this interpretation.
Pug
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To make an analogy, the information in a hologram is packaged at every portion of the hologram because of the interference pattern between a split laser, one of which encodes the inforamation to be recorded, the other half acts as a baseline.
The NYT's mentioned that, rather than using two beams of the same wavelength (thus amplifying it) they used a carefully calculated wavelength that was not identical. My guess is that these created an interference pattern that caused the wavefront to store the shapes of the waves in a manner similar to a hologram.
Can anyone tell me if this makes any sense at all, or is this a completely nonsensical interpretation of the data?
Pug
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TNG scale changed, don't have it with me. ~Warp 4 as I recall though.
Pug
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