Humans will naturally develop communication, even without being taught how. For instance there are examples of groups of deaf children developing sign language on their own, etc. I do remember hearing that there is a time frame in which learning how to communicate has to be accomplished in. There were case studies of "feral" children who basically raised themselves from a very young age with no social human contact. After a certain age, they can be trained to become more civilized, but nobody has as of yet found progress in teaching any sort of language communication skills. The word "trained" in the above sentence was intentional, as they can not be "taught" things like most children would be, the process is much more similar to classical pavlovian reinforcement.
No, a submarine patent is one that the filer holds up in the patent office for an unreasonable time by filing amendments to the original in order to gain an advantage to be levered at the time the patent is finally granted.
Since the patent was filed in 2001, this means that either A)the patent was intentionally held up in process by Creative or B)the United States patent system is extremely bogged down and not nimble enough to effectively issue patents in the modern tech. field. (And what field would you issue patents in besides technology?)
They were about to reveal it to the world. You don't want to tell the world that you PLAN on making one, as then the other countries will bomb you back to the stone age to make sure you don't make it.
Where m0 is rest mass and mf is the factor by which mass is multiplied due to velocity.
I'm sure someone has better variables out there... and the m0 should read "m sub zero" where the zero is a subscript. don't know the HTML for that, or if slashcode allows it.
Someone correct me if I am wrong (and I know I take some dangerous assumptions, mostly involving divide by zero error) but I have a potential model of light that may help explain the phenomenon, based around the light as a particle theory.
Basically, light is comprised of photons, which are particles which have zero mass when at rest. If a force is applied to the photon, it will experience infinite acceleration. Infinite acceleration means... infinite velocity if that force is applied for any time at all. But then we enter relativistic speeds, where essentially the fabric of space and time (and indeed matter as well) is torn through.
First, we will imagine the situation from a stationary observer watching an object with a small resting mass being accelerated. As it reaches higher and higher velocity, it's mass increases. If the object were to reach the speed of light, the mass would be multiplied by a factor of infinity. Obviously, as the object nears the speed of light the force required to accelerate it any further becomes greater and greater, and the object will never actually reach the speed of light.
Now, a photon has zero rest mass, so multiplying this by infinity wouldn't make sense, would it? Except we are not actually dealing with infinity for the factor, we are dealing with a number that APPROACHES infinity as the photon accelerates. This brings up limit math, so if we can assume that the resting mass of the photon is not actually zero but is simply so small that it approaches zero, then we are multiplying (the limit as the mass factor due to acceleration approaches infinity) by (the limit of a resting mass approacing zero.) This can be rearrange to (lim m->infinity)/(lim m-> infinity) which, as I recall, can be a real number. So, at some point, from the observer's point of view, the photon eventually goes so fast that it gains a mass. This means that the force accellerating the photon is no longer imparting an infinite accelleration, but a finite one. The math on all this would work out that, to an observer, the photon travels at... c, the speed of light.
Next, we will view the same situation, but instead of an obersver at rest, we will imagine that we are the object being accellerated. If we have a resting mass, our percieved mass does not increase. Instead, time and space contract to an extent that it does not take as long as Newtonian physics would predict to actually reach our final destination, but we also do not percieve that we are travelling as far. This has been experimentally proven with atomic clocks aboard really fast airplanes and whatnot.
The leap in imagination comes in imagining that we are the object being accelerated, except that we have zero resting mass. In such a case we are accellerated such that the time it takes us to get to the destination is zero, but space is compressed so much that we do not percieve having traveled at all, instead the distance between start and end simply compresses into zero. The end result: it takes no time for a photon to reach the final destination, from the photon's point of view. It as is it was simply knocked instantaneously from say, The Sun to The Earth. So, it is meaningless to compare the photons travelling relative to each other, as they indeed do not percieve themselves as travelling.
And the "what about a ship travelling near the speed of light turning on it's headlights" is equally meaningless, as any object with a rest mass can not actually reach the speed of light... either from an observer's fram of reference or from the ship's frame of reference. An observer would experience a time dilation effect, where it appears that the mass of the ship increases. The ship would experience a time constriction effect, where it appears that the distance traveled is compressed such that... the speed of light is always... the speed of light. Because in reality the photon is whizzing by at infinite speed, or not travelling at all.
The cost of media and packaging isn't all that high, but the cost of middlemen is. Picture the costs involved in getting a DVD from the press to the customer in the store: shipping, distributors, warehouses, shipping again, loading/unloading, stocking shelves, paying the lease/taxes on the store property, cashiers, purchasers, managers, janitors, insurance, lights, heating/cooling, sick days, training, the physical shelves the product sits on, security, breakage and shrinkage etc etc etc all add up to a significant amount of money that woulnd't be necessary with a bittorrent style download. There you would cancel out all of those, in addition to the actual publication of the DVD, and only require some bandwith to make up for a lack of seeds, a small handfull of programmers and wrench monkeys to set up and maintain the whole thing, some server storage, an online billing mechanism, electricity to run the whole thing and some fancy network security. I would expect overall cost before the customer recieves the product to be drastically lower with a P2P system than traditional brick and mortar store + physical medium. Even online retailers such as Amazon incur many of the costs that a brick and mortar store will in delivering physical media, although they are generally a lot less... employers on the clock are more likely to be working than simply waiting for customers, cleaning, over/understocking is not as significant of a problem, etc.
If the media player you use is unsecure, the media file could cause a buffer overrun (or even use innate scripting abilities... remember word macro viruses?) to run "arbitrary code." It's even possible to do this simply viewing a picture...
As soon as the technology improves, you have to get surgery to replace it with one that isn't spoofable.
The surgery to remove an RFID chip would be very minimal. Probably an incision less than half an inch long if good technique is used. And that's assuming you actually have to remove the chip, it would be trivial to design the chips to be permanently disablable, or to simply have the next-gen chips use a different frequency so the old chip isn't read. These chips won't hold any private information about you, they will basically hold a unique identifier which can be compared against a database, and at the very most a challenge/response protocol to provide a good level of confidence that the chip was not forged.
There's the possibility of infection or other negative reaction to the device.
The chip is inserted under the skin with a sterile single use syringe. Proper aseptic technique will pretty much reduce the possibility of infection to just about zero. The chip is coated in glass... very non-reactive in the human body.
We have no idea what the long-term impact of these devices inside the human body could be.
But we do know the long-term impact of these devices inside the bodies of many many many other animals, from pets to lab rats to livestock these things are used all over.
And of course, there's the big one: instead of stealing someone's wallet to steal money from them, thieves will now start cutting off someone's hand---sort of a reverse medieval thing.
Unlikely that this would happen in the US, although it is imaginable in certain developing nations, the kinds that have rumors about organ harvesting/etc.
What would happen in the US is someone would sit with a long-range RFID scanner (could probably fit it in a briefcase, golf bag or something) and read the chip, then make dupes. A challenge/response type authentication shouldn't be too difficult if someone figures out the algorithm used by the scanner, they could just run through the likely protocol, then reverse engineer the response. The "dupe" chip doesn't even have to be an imbedded RFID chip, but could be an antenna hooked up to a laptop or modified PDA. A Cell phone would make a seemingly logical platform to hack into a scanner. A wire running up a shirtsleeve could probably be rigged to make it look like the hand is waved over the scanner (assuming the chip is placed in the hand. This seems the most useful place for things like financial transactions.) The big problem with RFID over old school cut metal keys is that it is a lot easier to make a dupe. For some reason people view them as a secure system, and are therefore led into a very false sense of comfort untill someone makes the headlines by pulling off a giant crime using stolen RFID identities.
An authentication system in general could be set up with a human check in many circumstances. Waving your RFID chip at the grocery store, a bank window, the guard station to get into work, etc etc would pop up your associated ID photo for the other person to verify against. Sure, you could break the system if the trusted party was in on it, but then again employees are ntrusted with certain information which could be used to rip off the parent organization much more often than one might think. An employee is a lot easier to trust than random customers, because in theory you know where to find the employee if it is found out they are stealing/cheating/whatever.
You don't get fingerprints by shaking hands with the owner of the fingerprints. You do it by lifting them off of a glass the owner used, or doorknob they turned... your not knowing about them taking the fingerprints surreptiously might just mean that they are good at the surreptious part.
That's pretty much what I'd expect to hear from an organization which "advances the interests of the food, beverage and consumer products industry on key issues that affect the ability of brand manufacturers to market their products profitably" (the organization's mission statement.)
You see, a lot of geeks have a very low self esteem which they need to bolster by telling themselves that they are smarter and more important than anyone else. So they try to convince themselves that anyone that can't do what they do is an idiot. By extension, everything that an idiot does is trivial. So geeks think that economics is as complex as that intro econ class they took in high school.
Oh, and it's not just geeks that do this. Construction workers would say that programmers have it easy: they get to sit in a chair all day. Cooks scoff at people who umm... can't take the heat so never worked in the kitchen. Athletes? Yup. Artists? Well, same thing. Everyone does this to some extent. Management is in a unique position where they have to actually know the dollar value of different employees, not just different positions but down to how individual employees rate in the company to some extent. It makes sense that they would actually have to know enough about the departments they work with to realize that they could not make that final product themselves.
In my experience, the withdrawal symptoms can pretty much be taken care of with LOTS of water, some aspirin, mild to moderate excercise and a good deal of sleep. Unfortunately for most employed people who are caffeine addicted, this would take out a good portion of a week. A week that you would probably have to take vacation to get through. Difficult to actually focus on work, but if you don't mind a few days of being absolutely non-productive, the overall experience can be quite enjoyable.
Now, this is only breaking the caffeine addiction. The habit is still there, so you have to be very conscious of your caffeine levels once you get back to work.
In addition, LACK of exposure to vuruses/bacteria is also the number two or three suspect behind the drastic rise in allergies and asthma that the medical community has seen (number one suspect being smoking parents, I believe.) The purported link has something to do with the immune system not being trained to attack organisms. This means there is not as much of a buildup of the B cells which make up specific resistance to pathogens, so the body assumes there is a failure in the immune system and therefore kicks the C cell resistance, which is far more general than B cell resistance into overdrive. The more general resistance is more likely to cause autoimmune and hyperimmune effects.
Some "recycling" companies ship the old parts out to third world countries, where the boards are essentially burned over an open fire to melt off the more valuable metals. This releases PCBs and other really nasty chemicals which are just allowed to burn right out into the atmosphere. The ash is then just dumped, often into an open landfill where more other toxic chemicals are leached out into the water supply. I have no idea WHICH companies do this or anything but this practice, while not necesarilly common, is not unheard of.
Environmental monitoring is much more strict in the US (and presumably just about any developed country/region) so these things really don't happen. But at least shipping the old computer parts off satisfies the local NIMBYs, giving the "recycling" companies a green image and a decent profit.
If this is done properly (Which is much more likely if the actual recycling is done in the U.S. as Apple claims) this is a lot better than just dumping your old gear in the trash. A fair amount of the heavy metals can be expected to be stripped out for reuse, those parts which are not economically recyclable will be divided into two parts: general waste which is disposed of at any old landfill, and toxic materials which are disposed of at designated facilities that monitor groundwater perfusion, etc. But if the old parts are shipped off to a third world nation, chances are the end result will be less environmentally friendly than just dumping the old gear in the trash for the garbage man to deal with.
Yeah... because Yellow River has connotations for most people besides the Huang He. Especially those in the target demographic: Chinese people. But most people in China won't think of the Huang He when someone says "Yellow Sheep River," they'll think of a small very poor village near the Gobi Desert whose economy is primarilly textile related but people have been trying to make the next technological showcase. Sounds like a really good name to me, as long as you don't have the mind of an 8 year old.
Slashdot Mirror
Humans will naturally develop communication, even without being taught how. For instance there are examples of groups of deaf children developing sign language on their own, etc. I do remember hearing that there is a time frame in which learning how to communicate has to be accomplished in. There were case studies of "feral" children who basically raised themselves from a very young age with no social human contact. After a certain age, they can be trained to become more civilized, but nobody has as of yet found progress in teaching any sort of language communication skills. The word "trained" in the above sentence was intentional, as they can not be "taught" things like most children would be, the process is much more similar to classical pavlovian reinforcement.
No, a submarine patent is one that the filer holds up in the patent office for an unreasonable time by filing amendments to the original in order to gain an advantage to be levered at the time the patent is finally granted.
Since the patent was filed in 2001, this means that either A)the patent was intentionally held up in process by Creative or B)the United States patent system is extremely bogged down and not nimble enough to effectively issue patents in the modern tech. field. (And what field would you issue patents in besides technology?)
I'd say just line up with the other side of the magnet.
They were about to reveal it to the world. You don't want to tell the world that you PLAN on making one, as then the other countries will bomb you back to the stone age to make sure you don't make it.
Peter is indeed a scientist. He even says so.
I'm just surprised that it took this long in the discussion to bring these guys up.
Err... Right, I meant (lim mf -> infinity)/(lim m0 -> infinity)
Where m0 is rest mass and mf is the factor by which mass is multiplied due to velocity.
I'm sure someone has better variables out there... and the m0 should read "m sub zero" where the zero is a subscript. don't know the HTML for that, or if slashcode allows it.
Someone correct me if I am wrong (and I know I take some dangerous assumptions, mostly involving divide by zero error) but I have a potential model of light that may help explain the phenomenon, based around the light as a particle theory.
Basically, light is comprised of photons, which are particles which have zero mass when at rest. If a force is applied to the photon, it will experience infinite acceleration. Infinite acceleration means... infinite velocity if that force is applied for any time at all. But then we enter relativistic speeds, where essentially the fabric of space and time (and indeed matter as well) is torn through.
First, we will imagine the situation from a stationary observer watching an object with a small resting mass being accelerated. As it reaches higher and higher velocity, it's mass increases. If the object were to reach the speed of light, the mass would be multiplied by a factor of infinity. Obviously, as the object nears the speed of light the force required to accelerate it any further becomes greater and greater, and the object will never actually reach the speed of light.
Now, a photon has zero rest mass, so multiplying this by infinity wouldn't make sense, would it? Except we are not actually dealing with infinity for the factor, we are dealing with a number that APPROACHES infinity as the photon accelerates. This brings up limit math, so if we can assume that the resting mass of the photon is not actually zero but is simply so small that it approaches zero, then we are multiplying (the limit as the mass factor due to acceleration approaches infinity) by (the limit of a resting mass approacing zero.) This can be rearrange to (lim m->infinity)/(lim m-> infinity) which, as I recall, can be a real number. So, at some point, from the observer's point of view, the photon eventually goes so fast that it gains a mass. This means that the force accellerating the photon is no longer imparting an infinite accelleration, but a finite one. The math on all this would work out that, to an observer, the photon travels at... c, the speed of light.
Next, we will view the same situation, but instead of an obersver at rest, we will imagine that we are the object being accellerated. If we have a resting mass, our percieved mass does not increase. Instead, time and space contract to an extent that it does not take as long as Newtonian physics would predict to actually reach our final destination, but we also do not percieve that we are travelling as far. This has been experimentally proven with atomic clocks aboard really fast airplanes and whatnot.
The leap in imagination comes in imagining that we are the object being accelerated, except that we have zero resting mass. In such a case we are accellerated such that the time it takes us to get to the destination is zero, but space is compressed so much that we do not percieve having traveled at all, instead the distance between start and end simply compresses into zero. The end result: it takes no time for a photon to reach the final destination, from the photon's point of view. It as is it was simply knocked instantaneously from say, The Sun to The Earth. So, it is meaningless to compare the photons travelling relative to each other, as they indeed do not percieve themselves as travelling.
And the "what about a ship travelling near the speed of light turning on it's headlights" is equally meaningless, as any object with a rest mass can not actually reach the speed of light... either from an observer's fram of reference or from the ship's frame of reference. An observer would experience a time dilation effect, where it appears that the mass of the ship increases. The ship would experience a time constriction effect, where it appears that the distance traveled is compressed such that... the speed of light is always... the speed of light. Because in reality the photon is whizzing by at infinite speed, or not travelling at all.
802.11 assault rifles.
And using this technique to pay the RIAA what they are demanding would somehow decrease their cashflow?
While all were legitimate shipments on the day
Translation: physical piracy really doesn't happen much.
The cost of media and packaging isn't all that high, but the cost of middlemen is. Picture the costs involved in getting a DVD from the press to the customer in the store: shipping, distributors, warehouses, shipping again, loading/unloading, stocking shelves, paying the lease/taxes on the store property, cashiers, purchasers, managers, janitors, insurance, lights, heating/cooling, sick days, training, the physical shelves the product sits on, security, breakage and shrinkage etc etc etc all add up to a significant amount of money that woulnd't be necessary with a bittorrent style download. There you would cancel out all of those, in addition to the actual publication of the DVD, and only require some bandwith to make up for a lack of seeds, a small handfull of programmers and wrench monkeys to set up and maintain the whole thing, some server storage, an online billing mechanism, electricity to run the whole thing and some fancy network security. I would expect overall cost before the customer recieves the product to be drastically lower with a P2P system than traditional brick and mortar store + physical medium. Even online retailers such as Amazon incur many of the costs that a brick and mortar store will in delivering physical media, although they are generally a lot less... employers on the clock are more likely to be working than simply waiting for customers, cleaning, over/understocking is not as significant of a problem, etc.
If the media player you use is unsecure, the media file could cause a buffer overrun (or even use innate scripting abilities... remember word macro viruses?) to run "arbitrary code." It's even possible to do this simply viewing a picture...
As soon as the technology improves, you have to get surgery to replace it with one that isn't spoofable.
The surgery to remove an RFID chip would be very minimal. Probably an incision less than half an inch long if good technique is used. And that's assuming you actually have to remove the chip, it would be trivial to design the chips to be permanently disablable, or to simply have the next-gen chips use a different frequency so the old chip isn't read. These chips won't hold any private information about you, they will basically hold a unique identifier which can be compared against a database, and at the very most a challenge/response protocol to provide a good level of confidence that the chip was not forged.
There's the possibility of infection or other negative reaction to the device.
The chip is inserted under the skin with a sterile single use syringe. Proper aseptic technique will pretty much reduce the possibility of infection to just about zero. The chip is coated in glass... very non-reactive in the human body.
We have no idea what the long-term impact of these devices inside the human body could be.
But we do know the long-term impact of these devices inside the bodies of many many many other animals, from pets to lab rats to livestock these things are used all over.
And of course, there's the big one: instead of stealing someone's wallet to steal money from them, thieves will now start cutting off someone's hand---sort of a reverse medieval thing.
Unlikely that this would happen in the US, although it is imaginable in certain developing nations, the kinds that have rumors about organ harvesting/etc.
What would happen in the US is someone would sit with a long-range RFID scanner (could probably fit it in a briefcase, golf bag or something) and read the chip, then make dupes. A challenge/response type authentication shouldn't be too difficult if someone figures out the algorithm used by the scanner, they could just run through the likely protocol, then reverse engineer the response. The "dupe" chip doesn't even have to be an imbedded RFID chip, but could be an antenna hooked up to a laptop or modified PDA. A Cell phone would make a seemingly logical platform to hack into a scanner. A wire running up a shirtsleeve could probably be rigged to make it look like the hand is waved over the scanner (assuming the chip is placed in the hand. This seems the most useful place for things like financial transactions.) The big problem with RFID over old school cut metal keys is that it is a lot easier to make a dupe. For some reason people view them as a secure system, and are therefore led into a very false sense of comfort untill someone makes the headlines by pulling off a giant crime using stolen RFID identities.
An authentication system in general could be set up with a human check in many circumstances. Waving your RFID chip at the grocery store, a bank window, the guard station to get into work, etc etc would pop up your associated ID photo for the other person to verify against. Sure, you could break the system if the trusted party was in on it, but then again employees are ntrusted with certain information which could be used to rip off the parent organization much more often than one might think. An employee is a lot easier to trust than random customers, because in theory you know where to find the employee if it is found out they are stealing/cheating/whatever.
You don't get fingerprints by shaking hands with the owner of the fingerprints. You do it by lifting them off of a glass the owner used, or doorknob they turned... your not knowing about them taking the fingerprints surreptiously might just mean that they are good at the surreptious part.
That's pretty much what I'd expect to hear from an organization which "advances the interests of the food, beverage and consumer products industry on key issues that affect the ability of brand manufacturers to market their products profitably" (the organization's mission statement.)
Wow. That site has some very odd scents. I mean... funeral home? turpentine? tarnish? earthworm?
How exactly does one eat a Latin dance style?
With flair, of course.
You see, a lot of geeks have a very low self esteem which they need to bolster by telling themselves that they are smarter and more important than anyone else. So they try to convince themselves that anyone that can't do what they do is an idiot. By extension, everything that an idiot does is trivial. So geeks think that economics is as complex as that intro econ class they took in high school.
Oh, and it's not just geeks that do this. Construction workers would say that programmers have it easy: they get to sit in a chair all day. Cooks scoff at people who umm... can't take the heat so never worked in the kitchen. Athletes? Yup. Artists? Well, same thing. Everyone does this to some extent. Management is in a unique position where they have to actually know the dollar value of different employees, not just different positions but down to how individual employees rate in the company to some extent. It makes sense that they would actually have to know enough about the departments they work with to realize that they could not make that final product themselves.
In my experience, the withdrawal symptoms can pretty much be taken care of with LOTS of water, some aspirin, mild to moderate excercise and a good deal of sleep. Unfortunately for most employed people who are caffeine addicted, this would take out a good portion of a week. A week that you would probably have to take vacation to get through. Difficult to actually focus on work, but if you don't mind a few days of being absolutely non-productive, the overall experience can be quite enjoyable.
Now, this is only breaking the caffeine addiction. The habit is still there, so you have to be very conscious of your caffeine levels once you get back to work.
In addition, LACK of exposure to vuruses/bacteria is also the number two or three suspect behind the drastic rise in allergies and asthma that the medical community has seen (number one suspect being smoking parents, I believe.) The purported link has something to do with the immune system not being trained to attack organisms. This means there is not as much of a buildup of the B cells which make up specific resistance to pathogens, so the body assumes there is a failure in the immune system and therefore kicks the C cell resistance, which is far more general than B cell resistance into overdrive. The more general resistance is more likely to cause autoimmune and hyperimmune effects.
Some "recycling" companies ship the old parts out to third world countries, where the boards are essentially burned over an open fire to melt off the more valuable metals. This releases PCBs and other really nasty chemicals which are just allowed to burn right out into the atmosphere. The ash is then just dumped, often into an open landfill where more other toxic chemicals are leached out into the water supply. I have no idea WHICH companies do this or anything but this practice, while not necesarilly common, is not unheard of.
Environmental monitoring is much more strict in the US (and presumably just about any developed country/region) so these things really don't happen. But at least shipping the old computer parts off satisfies the local NIMBYs, giving the "recycling" companies a green image and a decent profit.
If this is done properly (Which is much more likely if the actual recycling is done in the U.S. as Apple claims) this is a lot better than just dumping your old gear in the trash. A fair amount of the heavy metals can be expected to be stripped out for reuse, those parts which are not economically recyclable will be divided into two parts: general waste which is disposed of at any old landfill, and toxic materials which are disposed of at designated facilities that monitor groundwater perfusion, etc. But if the old parts are shipped off to a third world nation, chances are the end result will be less environmentally friendly than just dumping the old gear in the trash for the garbage man to deal with.
Now, if only there was some sort of copper wire between the customer and the electric company which could transmit pricing information. If only...
I doubt it would even be able to calculate minesweeper.
Yeah... because Yellow River has connotations for most people besides the Huang He. Especially those in the target demographic: Chinese people. But most people in China won't think of the Huang He when someone says "Yellow Sheep River," they'll think of a small very poor village near the Gobi Desert whose economy is primarilly textile related but people have been trying to make the next technological showcase. Sounds like a really good name to me, as long as you don't have the mind of an 8 year old.