1) People calling something "dark" doesn't mean they literally believe that, for instance, "dark energy" exists. What they know is that observations cannot be accounted for without something that acts the way "dark energy" acts, in the equations they currently employ. There is enormous research in this field pursuing a wide range of approaches to reproducing the observations theoretically. The simplest models employ a "dark energy" -- literally, something that does not interact with light, and which has a pressure sufficiently negative as to accelerate the expansion of the universe. No-one -- and I mean NO-ONE -- who works in the field treats these as anything other than toy models. Phenomenology, to use the jargon. More complex models attempt to see what changes to the assumed laws of gravity are necessary to reproduce the effect. No-one who does this pretends that their model is anything other than a toy model. (Indeed, most modifications to gravity can be rephrased as a dark energy of the first kind anyway, albeit a really weird, ugly one. It's the motivation that's different.) More controversial models attempt to reproduce the observations by changing one of the fundamental assumptions that lead to the standard cosmological model: homogeneity. Violate homogeneity and you can influence the paths of photons around us in ways that mimic "dark energy". No-one working on this pretends that it's anything other than a toy model. Yet another approach is to point out that the universe is intrinsically inhomogeneous and anisotropic and attempt to reconstruct the homogeneous universe we employ in cosmology from that. No-one working on this pretends that the models studied so far are anything other than toy models.
It's not "scientists" "making up" "dark" "somethings" that can be "plugged into equations" but "never detected", it's people tagging a puzzling observation with a placeholder ("dark energy" for the anomalous acceleration of the universe; "dark matter" for the apparent necessity across a massive range of scales for large amounts of clustering matter that doesn't interact with light) and then exploring potential explanations.
I don't care if you were trying to joke. This kind of accusation really annoys me because it suggests that either we're terrible at explaining what's going on, or people simply aren't listening to us;, or both and people who argue this way tend to insinuate that those of us in astrophysics are a pack of idiots or charlatans fraudulently inventing arbitrary and unobservable physics in order to screw millions upon millions of euro from the honest taxpayer. And that's frankly offensive.
Sure. (Grade + 5)*365.25*24*60*60 gives you the target age in seconds. There will, unfortunately, be an error of 365.25*24*60*60 on that since children can inconveniently be born at any time of the year, and then there will also be an additional error of x*365.25*24*60*60 on that (where x is an integer function encoding the stupidity of a subset of children) to account for people held back one, two or more grades. There will also be an extra error since the year isn't exactly 365.25 days long, but this should be expected to be extremely subdominant to the other uncertainties.
Jesus, I forgot about this! Yes, this one was one of my earlier programming experiences too, or something very similar to it. Though my first actual experience was using Sinclair Basic to make the Spectrum screen flash in sickening colours that made me begin to worry if I were epileptic. (I wasn't, but I didn't often do that again.)
10 RANDOMIZE 20 A=7*RND 30 B=7*RND 40 BORDER A 50 PAPER B 60 CLS 70 GOTO 20
I've probably got that totally wrong because I've forgotten Sinclair Basic completely but you get the point. This produced truly sickening results, making it ideal for children.
Mod +1. My feelings exactly. eInk screens are too small for papers and don't update anything like fast enough. What's more, a lot of papers come with colour figures, which eInk screens will currently mangle into 16 shades of grey, removing all meaning from the plot. Use a tablet or stick to a screen for now - the time for papers on eBook readers will come in a good few years.
Never heard of Briss, thanks for that. I tried using my Sony Reader for papers a few years ago and it was such an unenjoyable experience that I quit right away.
Unfortunately, most likely with growing library conflicts and unpatched security holes.
To be honest I'd add my voice to people who want to fork it and keep it up-to-date and in repositories for a variety of distros for a lot longer - but like many others saying that, I don't have the ability to do anything of the sort myself. It'll be either KDE or XFCE for me when I next use Linux.
And in 11.10? 12.04? That Classic option isn't going to stick around. Last I heard it probably wasn't going to stick around until 11.10 - and even if they've changed that and it will, it's going to go.
Personally I really like OSX for almost everything, except those stupid menus. They were even OK until I started using a dual-monitor setup. It's not even crazy resolution on the second monitor, but it's an enormous drag to go from the bottom left of one screen all the way across to the menu on the right-hand screen. Or I can have it set up the other way round, which is even worse -- the menu clusters on the left of the screen, so if I put it on the left-hand monitor and the mouse is at the bottom of the right-hand monitor it takes even longer. I'm not sure what Apple's solution should be, given that they're heavily invested in maintaining a Mac look, but they're losing usability from their UI at a rate that should be unacceptable for a company that prizes "intuition" and "usability" above almost anything.
People who are good at programming creating the UIs is also someone overstepping their role, surely? They should be programming the UIs. Someone who knows how to design UIs should be designing the UIs -- and no offense meant, but one of the biggest problems with open-source software is the plethora of shitty UIs obviously designed by the programmers with little thought as to how a user would *want* to interface with the software.
What there should be is decent designers, a lot of UI testing, and then communication between all of them. Designers should know at least some coding, coders should understand some design philosophy, and artists should understand what is and isn't realistic. That way they can actually get each other to understand the limitations in the system and the boundaries that can actually be pushed.
Thanks. I was wondering if it was still like that - it was my understanding that GPL2 allows this kind of thing, though I could've been wrong on that, too....
Someone noted in the comments on the blog article that the "source" that HamsterSoft posted includes a binary blob for their UI. That may or may not be in violation of the GPL3 (I've honestly no idea; does GPL3 require you to publish your complete source code and not just those section based on or copied from GPL3 code?) but it's not quite posting source.
They're perfectly good questions - you just didn't get a reply because no-one knows the answers. Those would require a quantum theory of gravity, and we simply don't have one that's developed enough to answer such questions. For all we know, string theory is dead wrong and at a fundamental level all particles are little black holes that can't evaporate further. That seems unlikely, but until we have a working (and useful) theory of quantum gravity it can't be ruled out. (It's also basically useless as a supposition without being able to build a theory on it... which would still require quantum gravity.)
Damn it! That's my entire career invalidated! If only someone had told me that I shouldn't include photons in the Einstein equations!
You know, it's even worse than that. No-one told me that I shouldn't include their pressure, either! Oh man, I've seriously been getting it wrong. Thank you, Anonymous Coward. I'll never make that mistake again!
They didn't say the black hole would explode, they said that the companion would.
Also, to answer the question you asked (even though it's not relevant here), a black hole won't "explode" but unless something's very wrong with our theories, it will dissipate. Black holes emit Hawking radiation, which you can view more or less as pair-production in the vicinity of an event horizon. Two quanta pop out of the vacuum; one falls into the hole, while the other escapes into the universe at large. The energy for that has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the event horizon. So the hole grows smaller as it emits Hawking radiation until ultimately (we assume) it vanishes.
Good luck but neither are going to come about. I think it's more likely that producers will ultimately give up on DRM than a law is passed allowing us to bypass it for our own personal use.
The answer is you don't format-shift an encrypted DVD if you don't want to break the law. Ultimately it's a very simple answer to a very simple question (whether you agree with it or not.)
Personally I take the view that I'll rip all my DVDs to my PC and put them onto the telly from there. Technically illegal, but I don't think anyone's going to sue my ass off over it so long as I don't immediately torrent the lot as well.
Hell, he doesn't even need to get out of his chair. He can go to various websites (Amazon/Play.com/BladDVD/tons of others) and find an enormous range of CDs which still sell well. He could even go to sales figures and find that to the best of my knowledge CDs still outsell downloads by a significant margin.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus.
1) People calling something "dark" doesn't mean they literally believe that, for instance, "dark energy" exists. What they know is that observations cannot be accounted for without something that acts the way "dark energy" acts, in the equations they currently employ. There is enormous research in this field pursuing a wide range of approaches to reproducing the observations theoretically. The simplest models employ a "dark energy" -- literally, something that does not interact with light, and which has a pressure sufficiently negative as to accelerate the expansion of the universe. No-one -- and I mean NO-ONE -- who works in the field treats these as anything other than toy models. Phenomenology, to use the jargon. More complex models attempt to see what changes to the assumed laws of gravity are necessary to reproduce the effect. No-one who does this pretends that their model is anything other than a toy model. (Indeed, most modifications to gravity can be rephrased as a dark energy of the first kind anyway, albeit a really weird, ugly one. It's the motivation that's different.) More controversial models attempt to reproduce the observations by changing one of the fundamental assumptions that lead to the standard cosmological model: homogeneity. Violate homogeneity and you can influence the paths of photons around us in ways that mimic "dark energy". No-one working on this pretends that it's anything other than a toy model. Yet another approach is to point out that the universe is intrinsically inhomogeneous and anisotropic and attempt to reconstruct the homogeneous universe we employ in cosmology from that. No-one working on this pretends that the models studied so far are anything other than toy models.
It's not "scientists" "making up" "dark" "somethings" that can be "plugged into equations" but "never detected", it's people tagging a puzzling observation with a placeholder ("dark energy" for the anomalous acceleration of the universe; "dark matter" for the apparent necessity across a massive range of scales for large amounts of clustering matter that doesn't interact with light) and then exploring potential explanations.
I don't care if you were trying to joke. This kind of accusation really annoys me because it suggests that either we're terrible at explaining what's going on, or people simply aren't listening to us;, or both and people who argue this way tend to insinuate that those of us in astrophysics are a pack of idiots or charlatans fraudulently inventing arbitrary and unobservable physics in order to screw millions upon millions of euro from the honest taxpayer. And that's frankly offensive.
Sure. (Grade + 5)*365.25*24*60*60 gives you the target age in seconds. There will, unfortunately, be an error of 365.25*24*60*60 on that since children can inconveniently be born at any time of the year, and then there will also be an additional error of x*365.25*24*60*60 on that (where x is an integer function encoding the stupidity of a subset of children) to account for people held back one, two or more grades. There will also be an extra error since the year isn't exactly 365.25 days long, but this should be expected to be extremely subdominant to the other uncertainties.
Jesus, I forgot about this! Yes, this one was one of my earlier programming experiences too, or something very similar to it. Though my first actual experience was using Sinclair Basic to make the Spectrum screen flash in sickening colours that made me begin to worry if I were epileptic. (I wasn't, but I didn't often do that again.)
10 RANDOMIZE
20 A=7*RND
30 B=7*RND
40 BORDER A
50 PAPER B
60 CLS
70 GOTO 20
I've probably got that totally wrong because I've forgotten Sinclair Basic completely but you get the point. This produced truly sickening results, making it ideal for children.
Mod +1. My feelings exactly. eInk screens are too small for papers and don't update anything like fast enough. What's more, a lot of papers come with colour figures, which eInk screens will currently mangle into 16 shades of grey, removing all meaning from the plot. Use a tablet or stick to a screen for now - the time for papers on eBook readers will come in a good few years.
Never heard of Briss, thanks for that. I tried using my Sony Reader for papers a few years ago and it was such an unenjoyable experience that I quit right away.
Unfortunately, most likely with growing library conflicts and unpatched security holes.
To be honest I'd add my voice to people who want to fork it and keep it up-to-date and in repositories for a variety of distros for a lot longer - but like many others saying that, I don't have the ability to do anything of the sort myself. It'll be either KDE or XFCE for me when I next use Linux.
And in 11.10? 12.04? That Classic option isn't going to stick around. Last I heard it probably wasn't going to stick around until 11.10 - and even if they've changed that and it will, it's going to go.
I agree with absolutely all of this, except that I'll be putting Arch with XFCE on my machine instead of Mint - though I've always quite liked Mint.
"oh, please, stop with the fanboyism"
I'm not sure you quite know where you are.
Personally I really like OSX for almost everything, except those stupid menus. They were even OK until I started using a dual-monitor setup. It's not even crazy resolution on the second monitor, but it's an enormous drag to go from the bottom left of one screen all the way across to the menu on the right-hand screen. Or I can have it set up the other way round, which is even worse -- the menu clusters on the left of the screen, so if I put it on the left-hand monitor and the mouse is at the bottom of the right-hand monitor it takes even longer. I'm not sure what Apple's solution should be, given that they're heavily invested in maintaining a Mac look, but they're losing usability from their UI at a rate that should be unacceptable for a company that prizes "intuition" and "usability" above almost anything.
People who are good at programming creating the UIs is also someone overstepping their role, surely? They should be programming the UIs. Someone who knows how to design UIs should be designing the UIs -- and no offense meant, but one of the biggest problems with open-source software is the plethora of shitty UIs obviously designed by the programmers with little thought as to how a user would *want* to interface with the software.
What there should be is decent designers, a lot of UI testing, and then communication between all of them. Designers should know at least some coding, coders should understand some design philosophy, and artists should understand what is and isn't realistic. That way they can actually get each other to understand the limitations in the system and the boundaries that can actually be pushed.
Thanks. I was wondering if it was still like that - it was my understanding that GPL2 allows this kind of thing, though I could've been wrong on that, too....
Someone noted in the comments on the blog article that the "source" that HamsterSoft posted includes a binary blob for their UI. That may or may not be in violation of the GPL3 (I've honestly no idea; does GPL3 require you to publish your complete source code and not just those section based on or copied from GPL3 code?) but it's not quite posting source.
They're perfectly good questions - you just didn't get a reply because no-one knows the answers. Those would require a quantum theory of gravity, and we simply don't have one that's developed enough to answer such questions. For all we know, string theory is dead wrong and at a fundamental level all particles are little black holes that can't evaporate further. That seems unlikely, but until we have a working (and useful) theory of quantum gravity it can't be ruled out. (It's also basically useless as a supposition without being able to build a theory on it... which would still require quantum gravity.)
Mine hurts too. The idea that we might detect gravitons as baryons is particularly painful.
Damn it! That's my entire career invalidated! If only someone had told me that I shouldn't include photons in the Einstein equations!
You know, it's even worse than that. No-one told me that I shouldn't include their pressure, either! Oh man, I've seriously been getting it wrong. Thank you, Anonymous Coward. I'll never make that mistake again!
They didn't say the black hole would explode, they said that the companion would.
Also, to answer the question you asked (even though it's not relevant here), a black hole won't "explode" but unless something's very wrong with our theories, it will dissipate. Black holes emit Hawking radiation, which you can view more or less as pair-production in the vicinity of an event horizon. Two quanta pop out of the vacuum; one falls into the hole, while the other escapes into the universe at large. The energy for that has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the event horizon. So the hole grows smaller as it emits Hawking radiation until ultimately (we assume) it vanishes.
Sorry. My bad.
This post should be modded up.
Good luck but neither are going to come about. I think it's more likely that producers will ultimately give up on DRM than a law is passed allowing us to bypass it for our own personal use.
The answer is you don't format-shift an encrypted DVD if you don't want to break the law. Ultimately it's a very simple answer to a very simple question (whether you agree with it or not.)
Personally I take the view that I'll rip all my DVDs to my PC and put them onto the telly from there. Technically illegal, but I don't think anyone's going to sue my ass off over it so long as I don't immediately torrent the lot as well.
Hell, he doesn't even need to get out of his chair. He can go to various websites (Amazon/Play.com/BladDVD/tons of others) and find an enormous range of CDs which still sell well. He could even go to sales figures and find that to the best of my knowledge CDs still outsell downloads by a significant margin.
CSI could even use some fancy "new" voxel technology to make it even more impressive!
don't worry, i do understand :)
Are you saying we're programmed to see the Millenium Falcon?