I'm pretty sure the microcontroller is ready for mainstream. Not entirely sure about the rest. Well, if Windows 95/98 defined what the mainstream would accept, then I guess just about any hand-turned assembly could be considered mainstream.
Let interesting posts be defined on the set of cardinal numbers such that the number of interesting posts is less than or equal to the total number of posts not allocated to the set of posts defined by trolls, funnies and miscellaneous posts, and where a post is moderated as interesting by that set of users who don't do this to give funny posts karma and who also have an excellent karma and who also have an above-average achievements score and who know something about the subject at have, and where such moderations exceed the total number of any other kind of moderation.
It can't be real, unless you assume that there can be fractions of a post. Actually, no, you'd still be able to use the set of all quotients for that. Since it's starting at 0, you would presumably define it over the set of cardinal numbers. If you'd started at 1, you would use the N+ natural numbers. However, on the basis of this post alone, I would actually advocate defining posts over the set of complex numbers, so as to deal with imaginary components.
You are still assuming that fundamental concepts are either specific to this universe or specific to human observers, but you offer no evidence for this claim. You can dispute the logic all you like, but the essence of the scientific method is that you should start with whatever is both necessary and sufficient. By assuming that there are additional constraints on, say, geometry, you are creating a more complex model without explaining why a generic model is insufficient. Your links also make quantum gravity mathematically impossible (to the best of anyone's ability to tell), but quantum gravity is most certainly necessary. Thus, your claims would appear to be neither necessary nor sufficient to explain what we observe and know to be true.
If you would like to offer an alternative explanation which meets these requirements, I would most certainly welcome it. I'm not tied to any specific solution as "the one true answer", but I am tied to the idea that the scientific method (applied correctly) is the "one true herustic" for reaching a valid answer. (Note the word "herustic". It's important.) Scientists "tweak" the method, sure, but that's an optimization function; the actual process remains the same.
Ideally, yes, you'd get a signal jam rather than a collision. Hell, if it could have a similar impact to that satellite that went rogue, taking out cell phones and pagers through a decent swathe of the market, it would be great!
Well, TV is a joke, I'll agree there, but stating the problem isn't. TV doesn't need to be crap, it is because it panders to the audience that makes itself visible (the alcoholic couch potatoes who believe The Price Is Right is the height of intellectualism). You want to know why Star Trek got revived? It's because the marketplace for fan merchandise started having a turnover comparable to that of Paramount itself. That gets noticed. The bean-counters realized other people were cashing in on THEIR gold-mine and that they themselves could not. The reason they're back to making just movies is that the gold-mine is heavily worked-out.
The reason Doctor Who got revived? Pretty much the same reason. The fans had nothing to do with it, in any direct sense. The BBC discovered they were missing out on a fortune but others were raking it in big-time. They wanted in, and the best way to do that was to produce more. The scale of the gold seam that represents Doctor Who can be seen in the number and diversity of spin-offs (hitting at not only the mainstream, but also the children's market and the slasher market).
But other series are as good (or better) than either of these, and have the potential to be just as profitable for the bean-counters. The reason they are neglected and/or abused by the stations is that they're not visibly profitable. The conventions are low-key, the fan productions aren't serious competition ("Stranger and Miss Brown", originally a Who-alike, was serious competition and sold well enough at the retail level for stores to have it on the shelves), and the merchandise isn't visibly big-numbers stuff. The total turnover may actually be huge, but it's discrete and in consequence what the companies see is nothing that interests them.
Let's look at the other side of the equation. Reality shows are cheap, so you can turn a profit from just about any income at all. Sci-fi is generally expensive, and quality script-writers for any series are both expensive and rare. Which is why you don't usually find either, and why SyFy considers wrestling a far better prospect for return-on-investment. But that's because most TV companies don't comprehend the market and Sci-Fi fans and geeks are way, way too under-the-radar.
I'd be willing to bet that if the real value of sci-fi was known, and (even more importantly), if the real value of quality writing was known, TV would be utterly different. There'd be next-to-no crap, there'd be far more intellectual programming, and there'd be far more effort to work with fans to understand what they want and why they want it.
Geeks are stereotyped as basement-dwellers for a reason. We aren't visible. We're probably amongst the largest consumers (programmers tend to earn a decent amount) and we're probably a significant factor in the economy (you couldn't run a consumer-based business in Silicon Valley if geeks didn't know how to spend), but the TV execs treat us as an insignificant minority with a few dollars pocket-money. That's one hell of a perception error, but Star Trek and Doctor Who demonstrate that the perception error was originally created by us. When we choose to make our presence felt, when we choose to tell the market what it needs to do, we have a voice that no couch potato could ever have.
Kim Possible, Doctor Who and Blake's 7 are infinitely superior and far more intellectual than the crap that usually ends up on TV. My "Save TV for Geeks" journal was an effort to promote the idea that good, quality, intellectual shows (other than documentaries) do exist. They're just very rare and frequently cancelled in favour of cheap trash.
Yes. The universe no longer has its original meaning in physics of "all that exists". It is now defined as a container in which all objects within that container can interact ONLY with other objects in that container OR objects that permeate the container (such as the theorized superstrings). Not all objects permeate this universe or any other possible universe, and no object interior to the universe can ever leave the universe.
For example, in the foam multiverse theory, universes are bubbles within a foam. The foam, however, is never inside a bubble. It is a strict object-container model. It is much the same with classical m-theory, and indeed most other models - the idea of the universe being a subset of all that exists is very much key to a lot of modern physics.
Now, there are other alternatives. It is possible to construct a model in which Black Holes do not evaporate into their present-day space/time but actually radiate into the singularity at the start. This creates an interesting loop in time, which is perfectly legal. However, it has the consequence that there's no such thing as T=0 any more than a circle has a start. In such a model, there is no need to explain a beginning because there's no beginning to explain.
As for geometry, geometry is NOT a rule of the current universe. It would be true in ANY/ALL universes, and therefore is not a product of the universe but a pre-requisite. Besides which, since it would be true in ANY/ALL universes, even if you insist on treating it as a product, it's the SAME product, so becomes independent of the universe. You really need to look this stuff up, rather than religiously arguing about this stabbing in the dark nonsense. Or, if you don't want to look it up, apply reasoning. If A, B and C have D as a common denominator, then D is not a special property of A, B or C, and no amount of arguing will ever cause D to become such a special property.
If this stops satellite TV stations from polluting the skies with gameshows and comedies, I'm all in favour of blowing the satellite up in the way that causes the worst debris field possible.
Membranes aren't inside the universe. The Big Bang only involve the creation of the universe and has no concern for anything outside of it. Thus, I don't need to account for them.
Fundamental laws are not a construct. By definition. If it is a construct, it is constructed OF something, and that something is ultimately more fundamental. A truly fundamental law is atomic. It has no components, it has no dependencies, it exists in and of itself, and there is no such thing as it not existing. To put it in mathematical terms, you should always be able to apply Reducio Ad Absurdium to a law that is supposedly fundamental. You start by assuming that it has no subcomponents and try to use this to prove that it does. If you can, this creates a contradiction, showing the initial assumption to be false. The same principle can be used to show there are no integer values for P and Q such that P/Q = sqrt(2).
Your claim that my argument is an act of faith is therefore false. I can show this to be a falsifiable hypothesis by showing there exists at least one method by which the theory can be falsified.
Next up, your argument that these laws have existed outside the bounds of time+space is a bit misleading. According to current string theory, the universe exists in one set of dimensions, the strings supporting it exist in another set, membranes exist in yet another, but the geometric framework they are encapsulated in exist in still another. But you are conflating time+space of this universe with time+space of the multiverse (as described in String Theory) which is a whole different sort of space/time. You can't do that. Type constraint violation, big-time. You can't typecast the universe onto the multiverse.
In fact, you've made absolutely no effort to distinguish between what is atomic and what is composite, which layer something is on, what the interface is between the layers (which is what carries dependencies), and between the creation/destruction of objects and the system they are contained within. This part has nothing to do with me proving my point or anything like that. It is to do with the fact that you cannot communicate your point if you try to mix-and-match like that. It would be like mixing English, Russian and Mayan together in a single sentence, using a homophones in one language as a substitute for the word you want in another. If you want to make your point, you have to use a correct and consistent nomenclature, you have to define your terms (remember that from school?), you have to state assumptions, and you have to state what model of the universe it is that you are using to draw your conclusions.
(For the record, I'm using an M-Space model that is essentially standard but which complies with the generalization of Hamiltonian geometry. The extra 4 dimensions are, however, folded up and have zero size.)
Next, you assume all of these things are stabbing in the dark. Suggest you read up a bit on geometry. Start with the bit where space/time -must- have an exact power of 2 dimensions or zero. It can have no other value. This is a fundamental constraint. It is simply not possible for any universe, under any condition, to have any number of dimensions that is not a precise integer power of 2, except for the state of singularity which has zero dimensions. It is not a case of we couldn't be here without such a law, the universe itself could not be here. This is not because of some limitation in physical constructs, it is a geometric constraint, a pure mathematical constraint, not a physical one. The maths simply doesn't work for any other type of system and no matter what you do to the system, you cannot ever make the maths work.
You also assume some sort of anthromorphic principle - that 1 + 1 could not have been 2 until such time that an observer created a framework for identifying 1 and 2. Sorry, but if you have a million observers, all with their own frameworks, methods of identifying what 1 and 2 are, mathematical notations and haircuts, there will be a way to map 1 + 1
Again, this depends. If the universe is one of many in a foam, a product of a Big Crunch, or was the product of two membranes colliding, then the rules, protocols and foam (but not time as it exists in this universe) exist external to the universe. I need not therefore account for them in these scenarios. They need not be accounted for -inside- this universe prior to this universe existing, they can be accounted for strictly through imports.
Alternatively, if we go with a singular universe originating in quantum foam, the rules for quantum mechanics apply to singularities (points of zero space and zero time) and therefore the rules governing quantum foam ALSO apply. Any singularity MUST exceed the critical energy density for inflation (so Black Hole evaporation MUST always leave a blister in space/time), and provided the total mass is below the critical point for gravitational collapse, it MUST therefore inflate. This requires that certain laws of quantum mechanics to be truly fundamental, that they are not a product of the universe. They would hold perfectly well if no universe existed. Indeed, no matter what shape the universe turns out to be, those specific laws will also hold true for any point not within the universal set.
This then turns the question to one of where these laws came from. If they're truly fundamental (ie: you can mathematically prove not only that there exists one and only one set of fundamental laws AND that the set of quantum mechanics laws required is a perfect subset of those laws, not only for the standard mathematical system but any non-trivial mathematical system capable of modeling a non-trivial physical space/time, BUT ALSO that any initial state - including a zero state - will produce a valid universe from this set of fundamental laws), then none of this complexity you're assuming must have existed needs to have existed at all. All that's left at this point is the requirement that logic is wholly independent of any reality. Everything else directly follows.
You're right about the optics being the challenging part. It would depend on whether it's cheaper to make errors smaller or lenses/mirrors larger (either will let you reduce the visibility of defects, up to a point), and on how large an angle any defect can be allowed to cover when the image reaches the CCD. To be honest, I haven't the foggiest. And, yes, the very earliest (late 1800s, early 1900s) "colour" photography was done by photographing through three distinct filters and you can therefore do the same today to produce the extra resolution and definition without the enhanced optics. It merely requires you take three photographs (well, six if you want to go all the way and subtract the light with the filter present but shutter closed) and overlay them. Actually, this has the benefit that you can add as many colour planes as you like, so long as the CCD is sensitive to the frequency and you use a monochromatic filter.
(RGB is ok, but the three types of cone don't behave in quite the same way, the visual cortex processes colours by subtracting corresponding pairs, etc. If you capture in more than three colours, perhaps you could tweak the values to eliminate some of the differences between how RGB displays display and how the eye expects things to be.)
They've also ditched a lot of the good content, I check anything I hear in their documentaries against known urban legends (a lot of it turns out to be suspect), and the definition of "history" is a little... odd at times. Repeats are also frustrating. I get the impression that History and HI have maybe a half-dozen DVDs between them per season, and that they assume their audience has such a short attention span they can get away with rotating endlessly between two or three shows a day. There's more documentary footage on YouTube.
Sometimes an old thought can trigger a new line of thinking. For example, it would be difficult to make a 3-CCD camera that's as flat as a modern digital camera, because a decent-sized CCD placed sideways will widen the camera by that amount. The prism would normally be bulky, too. Far as I know, that's the main reason you see this sort of camera on high-end video equipment, not cheap digital cameras. However, I don't see anything there that can't be solved by using a few lenses and mirrors. Since CCDs can do 16bpp, this would not only let you triple the number of pixels but also produce high dynamic range. I've no doubt it's been done, it's too obvious not to have been, but I don't see anything like this in the regular marketplace although I can see no obvious objection. The only place I see anything like it is in the high-end with much larger - and much more expensive - gear.
I dunno - I remember a Director of Architecture who could produce infinite fluff. From this, one can extrapolate that you could build a machine that did an infinite amount of nothing useful. It would need to be a quantum computer that existed in every possible state simultaneously, much like said Director in fact.
When working in or around a reflective medium, it is helpful to change the frequency to one that doesn't create so much noise. (RADAR became much more useful over water and in bad weather when the wavelength was shortened.) If something that made the canopy transparent but interesting objects below clear was an easy problem, it would have been done already, rather than relying heavily on computational analysis. However, nothing wrong with analytical techniques, which would still be very useful if a better tuning were found.
You are correct on the "it's tested and verified" vs "it works". And, yes, if you were to deploy on a major site, you want to be on the "it's tested and verified" list. In the case of the guy I was replying to, he was referring to an old ASUS PC, which means it's not a production site. It's probably not even his primary computer any more.
In the case of generating a profile, pretty well everything in Coreboot is a module and a platform is just a collection of modules. Remember, Coreboot is not a full BIOS (OpenBIOS is), it's just a bootstrap that needs to know only enough to get things going and initialize any hardware that the BIOS would need to initialize rather than the OS. That means that if there's a standard, existing configuration that's similar to what you want except that component X is used instead of component Y, but component X is already a standard component that's supported, then you can add support by tweaking a configuration file. If you look at the patches for adding mobos, that's often exactly what they do. They just list a different set of components for that board.
So it's simpler than having to send the list in, just paste the list in and you're pretty much there.*
*There are exceptions to this - there are non-standard and freakish situations which get mentioned on the changelogs for the patches. However, if you start with something very similar, you're about as safe as whenever you upgrade your BIOS or firmware through any other means.
That is definitely always a big problem. Again, the table can't always be trusted, as patches are submitted infinitely faster than the webpage is updated. On the other hand, I think it was Seagate that shipped the bad firmware that bricked drives, I know one major manufacturer did. And there's been more than a few stories of DRM bricking drives and/or computers. So what the hell - you're at risk by breathing in today's world.
No, there's no assumption because they don't depend on any condition at T=0. Indeed, in Hawking's theory regarding the curvature of time, there isn't any need for T=0 and therefore no moment of creation to allow for. Even if we assume a freak accident in quantum foam, the total mass and energy of quantum foam is always zero. Thus, there is no matter or energy to allow for. There is nothing "predating" the Big Bang because, by definition, time itself did not exist prior to that point, so nothing can be said to predate it. Indeed, without time or space, there isn't even nothing. As for the idea that quantum foam must have existed "before" - again, there is no "before". Time is NOT external to the universe, it is an intrinsic part of it. No universe, no time. Until you comprehend this, you cannot understand anything further.
The claim was the Big Bang didn't fit empirical observation, not that it was illogical. This argument is different. Still easily rejected, but different.
Let us start with something from nothing. The Big Bang says nothing about starting from nothing. Indeed, it says nothing about T=0, let alone before. Whatever "before" means when time isn't present.
Now let us consider what the physicists actually say about the origin of energy (there was no matter prior to Universal Inflation, and indeed not for some time after).
What is stated is that there are a wide range of possibilities, including a foam multiverse, colliding membranes or even a freak quantum foam event. Regardless, you only need a high enough energy density. After that, Inflation and Hawking Radiation is sufficient to account for everything else.
This was mostly old news when I learned about cosmology. That was about 1980, when I was 11. May have been a year earlier. Your education must really suck.
Well, the idea of freezing is that the stuff has loaded, initialized and configured itself. You're doing a memory dump of this state to disk, as per the existing suspend/resume mechanism. (Because it's an existing mechanism, rather than the proposed one you list, it's technically simpler all you need is the ability to generate a permanent suspend file and be able to select between that and an actual user-generated suspend. No fancy reordering, no fancy defrag, no fancy lookups.)
A DLL may be loaded when you first run the program, dynamically on use, or dynamically on a dlopen(). If you want to generate an absolute minimal stub for booting from, you absolutely don't want the DLLs in that stub. You don't need them - even if they've been loaded by the software via a dlopen() call. All you need is a mechanism to identify what needs to be loaded in and (in the case where stuff would have been loaded already) where, relatively, the stuff would go. It can then be loaded in on unfreezing.
The benefits of my method over the one you mention? Well, it exists. That's always a good benefit to start with. It doesn't interfere with filesystem internals - you can't defrag a NILFS filesystem without destroying the very properties that make it useful, for example - and would work perfectly well with any filesystem out there. It doesn't require analysis of the boot sequence, because it restores the machine to a state after the boot would have happened. There is no boot, not in the classical sense.
Then, there's your points about Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a small (ok, actually rather a large) team of engineers and they DO make modifications to standard Debian packages. If Ubuntu wanted more modularity, they'd have more modularity. I've used Ubuntu as a desktop (and server) OS for probably longer than a decent percentage of Slashdot readers have used Linux. (I've used Linux since it first came out, and I still wish that the MCC distribution was maintained.)
If I sound smart, it might be 16 years of professional experience, the use of computers for 32 years, the 4-digit UID (always a good sign of a long-time Slashdot reader), the fact that I actually post bug-reports to Ubuntu, the fact that I do not condemn ANY distribution but there is not a single distribution I regard as above criticism when it does something I regard as folly, the fact that I maintain more records on Freshmeat than most posters have even seen in the way of packages (giving me a good insight into what people are doing, why, when, where and how), or the fact that I am willing to learn from the wisdom of others rather than assume I'm some sort of deity - a flaw you clearly suffer from.
As I've posted before, zingers tend to be much more common after I criticize some holy grail or other. I don't give a F* what religion, political system, operating system or movie actor you worship. That's your decision. But nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world is so perfect that it cannot benefit from recognizing the weaknesses, and nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world is so devoid of merit that it cannot deserve the work of others to improve it.
In this case, it's immaterial if it's the controversial posts that set you off. It's beyond question that Ubuntu has suffered from an increase in criticism in the past few release cycles, and it's also beyond question that a good, friendly desktop Linux distro is desirable. Ubuntu could be that distro. If it chose to be. The packages aren't synchronized well, so certain permutations of Ubuntu packages are actually impossible. The same is true of most package-based distros, because the kind of server farm needed to auto-rebuild the package tree is beyond the budget for most distros. There IS no solution to that, without a heavily-versioned install, a massive number of almost-redundant packages and a very very powerful package manager that can auto-adjust file paths and library paths according to package permutations rather than according to a fixed script.
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I'm pretty sure the microcontroller is ready for mainstream. Not entirely sure about the rest. Well, if Windows 95/98 defined what the mainstream would accept, then I guess just about any hand-turned assembly could be considered mainstream.
Actually, you want something like:
Let interesting posts be defined on the set of cardinal numbers such that the number of interesting posts is less than or equal to the total number of posts not allocated to the set of posts defined by trolls, funnies and miscellaneous posts, and where a post is moderated as interesting by that set of users who don't do this to give funny posts karma and who also have an excellent karma and who also have an above-average achievements score and who know something about the subject at have, and where such moderations exceed the total number of any other kind of moderation.
It can't be real, unless you assume that there can be fractions of a post. Actually, no, you'd still be able to use the set of all quotients for that. Since it's starting at 0, you would presumably define it over the set of cardinal numbers. If you'd started at 1, you would use the N+ natural numbers. However, on the basis of this post alone, I would actually advocate defining posts over the set of complex numbers, so as to deal with imaginary components.
You are still assuming that fundamental concepts are either specific to this universe or specific to human observers, but you offer no evidence for this claim. You can dispute the logic all you like, but the essence of the scientific method is that you should start with whatever is both necessary and sufficient. By assuming that there are additional constraints on, say, geometry, you are creating a more complex model without explaining why a generic model is insufficient. Your links also make quantum gravity mathematically impossible (to the best of anyone's ability to tell), but quantum gravity is most certainly necessary. Thus, your claims would appear to be neither necessary nor sufficient to explain what we observe and know to be true.
If you would like to offer an alternative explanation which meets these requirements, I would most certainly welcome it. I'm not tied to any specific solution as "the one true answer", but I am tied to the idea that the scientific method (applied correctly) is the "one true herustic" for reaching a valid answer. (Note the word "herustic". It's important.) Scientists "tweak" the method, sure, but that's an optimization function; the actual process remains the same.
Ideally, yes, you'd get a signal jam rather than a collision. Hell, if it could have a similar impact to that satellite that went rogue, taking out cell phones and pagers through a decent swathe of the market, it would be great!
Well, TV is a joke, I'll agree there, but stating the problem isn't. TV doesn't need to be crap, it is because it panders to the audience that makes itself visible (the alcoholic couch potatoes who believe The Price Is Right is the height of intellectualism). You want to know why Star Trek got revived? It's because the marketplace for fan merchandise started having a turnover comparable to that of Paramount itself. That gets noticed. The bean-counters realized other people were cashing in on THEIR gold-mine and that they themselves could not. The reason they're back to making just movies is that the gold-mine is heavily worked-out.
The reason Doctor Who got revived? Pretty much the same reason. The fans had nothing to do with it, in any direct sense. The BBC discovered they were missing out on a fortune but others were raking it in big-time. They wanted in, and the best way to do that was to produce more. The scale of the gold seam that represents Doctor Who can be seen in the number and diversity of spin-offs (hitting at not only the mainstream, but also the children's market and the slasher market).
But other series are as good (or better) than either of these, and have the potential to be just as profitable for the bean-counters. The reason they are neglected and/or abused by the stations is that they're not visibly profitable. The conventions are low-key, the fan productions aren't serious competition ("Stranger and Miss Brown", originally a Who-alike, was serious competition and sold well enough at the retail level for stores to have it on the shelves), and the merchandise isn't visibly big-numbers stuff. The total turnover may actually be huge, but it's discrete and in consequence what the companies see is nothing that interests them.
Let's look at the other side of the equation. Reality shows are cheap, so you can turn a profit from just about any income at all. Sci-fi is generally expensive, and quality script-writers for any series are both expensive and rare. Which is why you don't usually find either, and why SyFy considers wrestling a far better prospect for return-on-investment. But that's because most TV companies don't comprehend the market and Sci-Fi fans and geeks are way, way too under-the-radar.
I'd be willing to bet that if the real value of sci-fi was known, and (even more importantly), if the real value of quality writing was known, TV would be utterly different. There'd be next-to-no crap, there'd be far more intellectual programming, and there'd be far more effort to work with fans to understand what they want and why they want it.
Geeks are stereotyped as basement-dwellers for a reason. We aren't visible. We're probably amongst the largest consumers (programmers tend to earn a decent amount) and we're probably a significant factor in the economy (you couldn't run a consumer-based business in Silicon Valley if geeks didn't know how to spend), but the TV execs treat us as an insignificant minority with a few dollars pocket-money. That's one hell of a perception error, but Star Trek and Doctor Who demonstrate that the perception error was originally created by us. When we choose to make our presence felt, when we choose to tell the market what it needs to do, we have a voice that no couch potato could ever have.
The thing is, we choose not to speak.
THAT is why TV is crap.
Kim Possible, Doctor Who and Blake's 7 are infinitely superior and far more intellectual than the crap that usually ends up on TV. My "Save TV for Geeks" journal was an effort to promote the idea that good, quality, intellectual shows (other than documentaries) do exist. They're just very rare and frequently cancelled in favour of cheap trash.
That can may or may not have worms, you cannot know until you open it.
Yet they exist?
Yes. The universe no longer has its original meaning in physics of "all that exists". It is now defined as a container in which all objects within that container can interact ONLY with other objects in that container OR objects that permeate the container (such as the theorized superstrings). Not all objects permeate this universe or any other possible universe, and no object interior to the universe can ever leave the universe.
For example, in the foam multiverse theory, universes are bubbles within a foam. The foam, however, is never inside a bubble. It is a strict object-container model. It is much the same with classical m-theory, and indeed most other models - the idea of the universe being a subset of all that exists is very much key to a lot of modern physics.
Now, there are other alternatives. It is possible to construct a model in which Black Holes do not evaporate into their present-day space/time but actually radiate into the singularity at the start. This creates an interesting loop in time, which is perfectly legal. However, it has the consequence that there's no such thing as T=0 any more than a circle has a start. In such a model, there is no need to explain a beginning because there's no beginning to explain.
As for geometry, geometry is NOT a rule of the current universe. It would be true in ANY/ALL universes, and therefore is not a product of the universe but a pre-requisite. Besides which, since it would be true in ANY/ALL universes, even if you insist on treating it as a product, it's the SAME product, so becomes independent of the universe. You really need to look this stuff up, rather than religiously arguing about this stabbing in the dark nonsense. Or, if you don't want to look it up, apply reasoning. If A, B and C have D as a common denominator, then D is not a special property of A, B or C, and no amount of arguing will ever cause D to become such a special property.
If this stops satellite TV stations from polluting the skies with gameshows and comedies, I'm all in favour of blowing the satellite up in the way that causes the worst debris field possible.
Membranes aren't inside the universe. The Big Bang only involve the creation of the universe and has no concern for anything outside of it. Thus, I don't need to account for them.
Fundamental laws are not a construct. By definition. If it is a construct, it is constructed OF something, and that something is ultimately more fundamental. A truly fundamental law is atomic. It has no components, it has no dependencies, it exists in and of itself, and there is no such thing as it not existing. To put it in mathematical terms, you should always be able to apply Reducio Ad Absurdium to a law that is supposedly fundamental. You start by assuming that it has no subcomponents and try to use this to prove that it does. If you can, this creates a contradiction, showing the initial assumption to be false. The same principle can be used to show there are no integer values for P and Q such that P/Q = sqrt(2).
Your claim that my argument is an act of faith is therefore false. I can show this to be a falsifiable hypothesis by showing there exists at least one method by which the theory can be falsified.
Next up, your argument that these laws have existed outside the bounds of time+space is a bit misleading. According to current string theory, the universe exists in one set of dimensions, the strings supporting it exist in another set, membranes exist in yet another, but the geometric framework they are encapsulated in exist in still another. But you are conflating time+space of this universe with time+space of the multiverse (as described in String Theory) which is a whole different sort of space/time. You can't do that. Type constraint violation, big-time. You can't typecast the universe onto the multiverse.
In fact, you've made absolutely no effort to distinguish between what is atomic and what is composite, which layer something is on, what the interface is between the layers (which is what carries dependencies), and between the creation/destruction of objects and the system they are contained within. This part has nothing to do with me proving my point or anything like that. It is to do with the fact that you cannot communicate your point if you try to mix-and-match like that. It would be like mixing English, Russian and Mayan together in a single sentence, using a homophones in one language as a substitute for the word you want in another. If you want to make your point, you have to use a correct and consistent nomenclature, you have to define your terms (remember that from school?), you have to state assumptions, and you have to state what model of the universe it is that you are using to draw your conclusions.
(For the record, I'm using an M-Space model that is essentially standard but which complies with the generalization of Hamiltonian geometry. The extra 4 dimensions are, however, folded up and have zero size.)
Next, you assume all of these things are stabbing in the dark. Suggest you read up a bit on geometry. Start with the bit where space/time -must- have an exact power of 2 dimensions or zero. It can have no other value. This is a fundamental constraint. It is simply not possible for any universe, under any condition, to have any number of dimensions that is not a precise integer power of 2, except for the state of singularity which has zero dimensions. It is not a case of we couldn't be here without such a law, the universe itself could not be here. This is not because of some limitation in physical constructs, it is a geometric constraint, a pure mathematical constraint, not a physical one. The maths simply doesn't work for any other type of system and no matter what you do to the system, you cannot ever make the maths work.
You also assume some sort of anthromorphic principle - that 1 + 1 could not have been 2 until such time that an observer created a framework for identifying 1 and 2. Sorry, but if you have a million observers, all with their own frameworks, methods of identifying what 1 and 2 are, mathematical notations and haircuts, there will be a way to map 1 + 1
Just use the Delay-Tolerant Protocol and some decent error-correcting codes.
Half of it must be. And if you don't look, the probability wave of which half it is won't collapse, so the two halves are equally on the other side.
Again, this depends. If the universe is one of many in a foam, a product of a Big Crunch, or was the product of two membranes colliding, then the rules, protocols and foam (but not time as it exists in this universe) exist external to the universe. I need not therefore account for them in these scenarios. They need not be accounted for -inside- this universe prior to this universe existing, they can be accounted for strictly through imports.
Alternatively, if we go with a singular universe originating in quantum foam, the rules for quantum mechanics apply to singularities (points of zero space and zero time) and therefore the rules governing quantum foam ALSO apply. Any singularity MUST exceed the critical energy density for inflation (so Black Hole evaporation MUST always leave a blister in space/time), and provided the total mass is below the critical point for gravitational collapse, it MUST therefore inflate. This requires that certain laws of quantum mechanics to be truly fundamental, that they are not a product of the universe. They would hold perfectly well if no universe existed. Indeed, no matter what shape the universe turns out to be, those specific laws will also hold true for any point not within the universal set.
This then turns the question to one of where these laws came from. If they're truly fundamental (ie: you can mathematically prove not only that there exists one and only one set of fundamental laws AND that the set of quantum mechanics laws required is a perfect subset of those laws, not only for the standard mathematical system but any non-trivial mathematical system capable of modeling a non-trivial physical space/time, BUT ALSO that any initial state - including a zero state - will produce a valid universe from this set of fundamental laws), then none of this complexity you're assuming must have existed needs to have existed at all. All that's left at this point is the requirement that logic is wholly independent of any reality. Everything else directly follows.
You're right about the optics being the challenging part. It would depend on whether it's cheaper to make errors smaller or lenses/mirrors larger (either will let you reduce the visibility of defects, up to a point), and on how large an angle any defect can be allowed to cover when the image reaches the CCD. To be honest, I haven't the foggiest. And, yes, the very earliest (late 1800s, early 1900s) "colour" photography was done by photographing through three distinct filters and you can therefore do the same today to produce the extra resolution and definition without the enhanced optics. It merely requires you take three photographs (well, six if you want to go all the way and subtract the light with the filter present but shutter closed) and overlay them. Actually, this has the benefit that you can add as many colour planes as you like, so long as the CCD is sensitive to the frequency and you use a monochromatic filter.
(RGB is ok, but the three types of cone don't behave in quite the same way, the visual cortex processes colours by subtracting corresponding pairs, etc. If you capture in more than three colours, perhaps you could tweak the values to eliminate some of the differences between how RGB displays display and how the eye expects things to be.)
They've also ditched a lot of the good content, I check anything I hear in their documentaries against known urban legends (a lot of it turns out to be suspect), and the definition of "history" is a little... odd at times. Repeats are also frustrating. I get the impression that History and HI have maybe a half-dozen DVDs between them per season, and that they assume their audience has such a short attention span they can get away with rotating endlessly between two or three shows a day. There's more documentary footage on YouTube.
Sometimes an old thought can trigger a new line of thinking. For example, it would be difficult to make a 3-CCD camera that's as flat as a modern digital camera, because a decent-sized CCD placed sideways will widen the camera by that amount. The prism would normally be bulky, too. Far as I know, that's the main reason you see this sort of camera on high-end video equipment, not cheap digital cameras. However, I don't see anything there that can't be solved by using a few lenses and mirrors. Since CCDs can do 16bpp, this would not only let you triple the number of pixels but also produce high dynamic range. I've no doubt it's been done, it's too obvious not to have been, but I don't see anything like this in the regular marketplace although I can see no obvious objection. The only place I see anything like it is in the high-end with much larger - and much more expensive - gear.
I dunno - I remember a Director of Architecture who could produce infinite fluff. From this, one can extrapolate that you could build a machine that did an infinite amount of nothing useful. It would need to be a quantum computer that existed in every possible state simultaneously, much like said Director in fact.
When working in or around a reflective medium, it is helpful to change the frequency to one that doesn't create so much noise. (RADAR became much more useful over water and in bad weather when the wavelength was shortened.) If something that made the canopy transparent but interesting objects below clear was an easy problem, it would have been done already, rather than relying heavily on computational analysis. However, nothing wrong with analytical techniques, which would still be very useful if a better tuning were found.
Why do you think it took so long to decode? The code had no idea what to do.
You are correct on the "it's tested and verified" vs "it works". And, yes, if you were to deploy on a major site, you want to be on the "it's tested and verified" list. In the case of the guy I was replying to, he was referring to an old ASUS PC, which means it's not a production site. It's probably not even his primary computer any more.
In the case of generating a profile, pretty well everything in Coreboot is a module and a platform is just a collection of modules. Remember, Coreboot is not a full BIOS (OpenBIOS is), it's just a bootstrap that needs to know only enough to get things going and initialize any hardware that the BIOS would need to initialize rather than the OS. That means that if there's a standard, existing configuration that's similar to what you want except that component X is used instead of component Y, but component X is already a standard component that's supported, then you can add support by tweaking a configuration file. If you look at the patches for adding mobos, that's often exactly what they do. They just list a different set of components for that board.
So it's simpler than having to send the list in, just paste the list in and you're pretty much there.*
*There are exceptions to this - there are non-standard and freakish situations which get mentioned on the changelogs for the patches. However, if you start with something very similar, you're about as safe as whenever you upgrade your BIOS or firmware through any other means.
That is definitely always a big problem. Again, the table can't always be trusted, as patches are submitted infinitely faster than the webpage is updated. On the other hand, I think it was Seagate that shipped the bad firmware that bricked drives, I know one major manufacturer did. And there's been more than a few stories of DRM bricking drives and/or computers. So what the hell - you're at risk by breathing in today's world.
No, there's no assumption because they don't depend on any condition at T=0. Indeed, in Hawking's theory regarding the curvature of time, there isn't any need for T=0 and therefore no moment of creation to allow for. Even if we assume a freak accident in quantum foam, the total mass and energy of quantum foam is always zero. Thus, there is no matter or energy to allow for. There is nothing "predating" the Big Bang because, by definition, time itself did not exist prior to that point, so nothing can be said to predate it. Indeed, without time or space, there isn't even nothing. As for the idea that quantum foam must have existed "before" - again, there is no "before". Time is NOT external to the universe, it is an intrinsic part of it. No universe, no time. Until you comprehend this, you cannot understand anything further.
The claim was the Big Bang didn't fit empirical observation, not that it was illogical. This argument is different. Still easily rejected, but different.
Let us start with something from nothing. The Big Bang says nothing about starting from nothing. Indeed, it says nothing about T=0, let alone before. Whatever "before" means when time isn't present.
Now let us consider what the physicists actually say about the origin of energy (there was no matter prior to Universal Inflation, and indeed not for some time after).
What is stated is that there are a wide range of possibilities, including a foam multiverse, colliding membranes or even a freak quantum foam event. Regardless, you only need a high enough energy density. After that, Inflation and Hawking Radiation is sufficient to account for everything else.
This was mostly old news when I learned about cosmology. That was about 1980, when I was 11. May have been a year earlier. Your education must really suck.
Well, the idea of freezing is that the stuff has loaded, initialized and configured itself. You're doing a memory dump of this state to disk, as per the existing suspend/resume mechanism. (Because it's an existing mechanism, rather than the proposed one you list, it's technically simpler all you need is the ability to generate a permanent suspend file and be able to select between that and an actual user-generated suspend. No fancy reordering, no fancy defrag, no fancy lookups.)
A DLL may be loaded when you first run the program, dynamically on use, or dynamically on a dlopen(). If you want to generate an absolute minimal stub for booting from, you absolutely don't want the DLLs in that stub. You don't need them - even if they've been loaded by the software via a dlopen() call. All you need is a mechanism to identify what needs to be loaded in and (in the case where stuff would have been loaded already) where, relatively, the stuff would go. It can then be loaded in on unfreezing.
The benefits of my method over the one you mention? Well, it exists. That's always a good benefit to start with. It doesn't interfere with filesystem internals - you can't defrag a NILFS filesystem without destroying the very properties that make it useful, for example - and would work perfectly well with any filesystem out there. It doesn't require analysis of the boot sequence, because it restores the machine to a state after the boot would have happened. There is no boot, not in the classical sense.
Then, there's your points about Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a small (ok, actually rather a large) team of engineers and they DO make modifications to standard Debian packages. If Ubuntu wanted more modularity, they'd have more modularity. I've used Ubuntu as a desktop (and server) OS for probably longer than a decent percentage of Slashdot readers have used Linux. (I've used Linux since it first came out, and I still wish that the MCC distribution was maintained.)
If I sound smart, it might be 16 years of professional experience, the use of computers for 32 years, the 4-digit UID (always a good sign of a long-time Slashdot reader), the fact that I actually post bug-reports to Ubuntu, the fact that I do not condemn ANY distribution but there is not a single distribution I regard as above criticism when it does something I regard as folly, the fact that I maintain more records on Freshmeat than most posters have even seen in the way of packages (giving me a good insight into what people are doing, why, when, where and how), or the fact that I am willing to learn from the wisdom of others rather than assume I'm some sort of deity - a flaw you clearly suffer from.
As I've posted before, zingers tend to be much more common after I criticize some holy grail or other. I don't give a F* what religion, political system, operating system or movie actor you worship. That's your decision. But nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world is so perfect that it cannot benefit from recognizing the weaknesses, and nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world is so devoid of merit that it cannot deserve the work of others to improve it.
In this case, it's immaterial if it's the controversial posts that set you off. It's beyond question that Ubuntu has suffered from an increase in criticism in the past few release cycles, and it's also beyond question that a good, friendly desktop Linux distro is desirable. Ubuntu could be that distro. If it chose to be. The packages aren't synchronized well, so certain permutations of Ubuntu packages are actually impossible. The same is true of most package-based distros, because the kind of server farm needed to auto-rebuild the package tree is beyond the budget for most distros. There IS no solution to that, without a heavily-versioned install, a massive number of almost-redundant packages and a very very powerful package manager that can auto-adjust file paths and library paths according to package permutations rather than according to a fixed script.
I've made complaints in the past about Red Ha