Leap seconds are ad hoc seat-of-the-pants alterations to the time. They violate the monotonically steadily increasing property of time encoding, so simply cannot be tolerated in any system that benefits from having monotonically steadily increasing time values.
That word -- monotonically -- you're using it but I don't think you understand what it means. Adding leap seconds doesn't violate a monotonically increasing property of time. As long as the count of the seconds doesn't go down, the time function is still monotonically increasing.
Hell, if the ITU declared that we'd stay at 12:59 for an hour at 23:00 12-31-2010 , time would still be monotonically increasing. As long as the ITU doesn't have the time skip back, time would still be a monotonically increasing function.
This is completely bizarre. Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products. And they decide to dive in with an Android tablet? WTF?
They make quite a lot of ip phones. You plug the phone into an ethernet jack, it connects to and gets its configuration information from a central server and works like a phone connected to a pbx system. Their phones even get power over ethernet so one cable is all you need. There's some other nice features as well.
They were talking about 2 stop advantage, 4x. As current tech is about 60-80% (80% peak QE CCD-sensors are pretty cheap and widely used in astronomy) peak efficient, it seems like this new tech is up to 360% efficient. Most current cameras are getting 30-60% peak QE right now. From pocket cameras to DSLRs.
I call bullshit on the technology. Snake oil or they're being very creative with truth.
They're claiming that they can replace in-chip features with features on the top of the chip. E.g. instead of having your pixels surrounded with supporting electronics that can't collect any light, you can move the pixel to the top of the chip and put the supporting electronics underneath the pixels. Also, your pixels aren't covered by a few microns of material that photons have to go through before hitting the pixel.
Since QE only measures the efficiency converting photons incident on the photodetector and not the efficiency of converting photons incident on the entire surface, a 4x improvement is possible depending on the overhead of the supporting electronics for ccd pixel elements.
You could try to introduce basic computational chemistry through ChemOffice or PCmodel. Have them find the lowest energy conformation for a particular cyclic structure. Have them explain why adding a particular group at a particular location increases the conformational energy. Or just integrate this into their lab reports by having them create these 3d/kekuli structures in ChemOffice and paste them into their reports.
We're talking about high school students. Without quantum mechanics, they're not going to be able to really understand what they'll be calculating or the methods behind the calculations. They'll essentially be plugging a structure and/or numbers into some software and cutting/pasting the results into their reports. That's not going to help anyone. Same with literature searches, most high schools don't have access to scientific journals or aside from the odd journal or two, they'll be limited to abstracts from the articles they find. Looking up chemicals/hazards in the merck or sigma handbook/website is much more useful.
Sit in the middle of the ocean and turn off GPS. Perhaps you'll quickly see the value of "good enough". I'm all for a backup plan, and a backup plan to the backup plan, especially if we can avoid pissing away a $160M investment.
Well if you were in the middle of the ocean, you probably wouldn't get a LORAN-C signal at all so your backup really isn't a backup. Check the LORAN-C coverage maps, anywhere outside the Caribbean, North Atlantic and North Pacific simply can't get any fix from LORAN-C signals (so if you're south of the equator you're probably SOL). Anywhere out of sight of coasts doesn't really get a great signal and has a fairly poor resolution.
In addition to what wayland++ said, there's also the fact that the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot, called Rakudo, is intended to be able to mix programming languages with great ease. For example, one syntax that's been bandied about is this:
use v6;
# Perl 6 goes here
{
use P5;
# Hey, now I'm writing Perl 5 code!
}
# I'm writing Perl 6 again!
You're seriously calling this a good thing? The ability to fairly easily switch to a very similar but different language in the middle of your code? That sounds like an excellent way to create a maintenance and troubleshooting nightmare.
Has anyone actually done this? With even a ''simple'' organism ( yes, those are air-quotes ), like a paramecium? It sounds easy in theory, but I bet when we actually get down to it, there'll be a few speedbumps and unexpected obstacles in the way.
Things are not even close. Look at vcell to see what's close to the state of the art in cell simulation. Right now, it's a matter of trying to get a few reactions and cell compartments working correctly. I don't think anyone has even come close to modeling any type of complete cell.
Pardon me. I did state that incorrectly. I did not mean that they might not be solvable, but it is impossible to determine in advance whether they are solvable in a "reasonable" amount of time. "Polynomial" time encompasses some very big numbers: millions of years for example.
That still doesn't make sense. Any algorithm has a constant factor associated with it in big-O notation. So even if an algorithm is sub-polynomial, logarithmic, or even constant time, it might not be solvable in a "reasonable" amount of time. So, yes knowing something is O(n^2) may not tell you how long a solution will take to use, but it'll tell you how the time to compute the solution grows with input size. Which is really what big O notation and NP/P classifications are about.
And yes, it is possible to determine in advance the approximate amount of time it will require. If you have the algorithm and the size of the input then you can determine the approximate length of time.
This still has the sound of defendant intimidation. While it may be true that the judges are throwing out these cases, in every case where the city government asks for a Frye hearing, the procedure intimidates the defendants into just paying the fine rather than trying to stand up against unproven technology.
What else is the government supposed to do? The admissibility is being challenged by the defendant so the prosecution agrees to a Frye hearing to defend the admissibility of the lidar readings. When the defendents challenge the lidar technology, they're requesting a Frye hearing so the prosecution agreeing to one isn't intimidation.
Not so. There is a reason this class of problems is called "non-deterministic". That is because there is no way to determine, ahead of time, whether a finite solution for this problem exists!
No, that's just wrong. The problems are called non-deterministic polynomial (NP) because they can be solved in polynomial time by a non-deterministic turing machine. A non-deterministic turing machine is a turing machine that can take go into multiple states and accepts an input if any of it's states end up leading to an accept state. Think superposition of states with a wave collapse if you're a physicist.
All of these problems have finite solutions and in fact one of the requirements is that a NP problem has a solution that can be checked in polynomial time by a deterministic turing machine.
NASA spent $10 million developing a pen that would write in space without gravity.
Russia sent pencils up. cost, zip.
fancy new technology is not always the answer.
A - NASA didn't actually spend the money for it, a company did it privately
B - Russia switched to pens as soon as NASA had them ready, turns out the pencils would shed graphite flakes that could get into the electronics and shortcircuit them -- not so good.
Like H.L. Menkin said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
I've been using Wolfram Mathematica to take class notes and exams for years.
By using the keyboard shortcuts you can easily keep up with the class. You can also have instant interactive graphs which will be much easier to understand than anything a professor could draw on a board, although it's not like my professors write on the board as they use Mathematica or Matlab to teach the class as well. This is at a private university in Mexico.
That's not going to work for higher math classes, Mathematica isn't going to be all that fast if you're trying to enter stuff from topology or cohomology algebra or similar things. It definitely won't give you graphics for those.
But what if the photons that arrived first had left last? That might put the difference in travel time as high as 3.1s....
I think the scientists writing the paper and the reviewers already considered that possibility. The paper sets bounds on how big of an effect energy / speed interactions could be for photons so they probably used worst case situations to establish the upper or lower bounds as needed.
BOINC doesn't work so well if the tasks need to download 10-20 GB of data and the actual applications running the job take up another 10GB of space and the jobs run full out on a system for 2-3 days while consuming 2GB of memory.
Don't know if it's illegal or not but it should be. They are misrepresenting the site as presenting all reviews, not just ones that they approve. That's fraud with material financial consequences.
Given that Mechanist.tm wasn't aware of this they probably are misrepresenting the reviews.
If they made clear that the site is not representative of all customer reviews then there should be no legal problem though it's still shady and I for one would be shopping elsewhere.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Do you tell potential employers about every major mistake you've made in previous jobs or about the times you've slacked off or skipped out for one reason or another? If not, then you're not making it clear that your resume, cover letter, and job interviews aren't fully representative of your prior work. And as you said, it's fraud with material consequences. How about stuff that you're trying to sell like a car or a home?
No one gives all the details about something they're trying to sell regardless of whether it's a piece of electronics, a car, or a home. The phrase caveat emptor has been around for at least 2000 years and probably a lot longer than that. As such, I don't think anyone should trust the reviews on a retailer's site entirely.
You've apparently never tried to report a stolen wallet or backpack, or even modest laptop. You fill out forms, answer questions,a nd they do _nothing_. It's just not important enough.
What exactly are they supposed to do? A stolen or lost wallet/backpack/laptop is pretty hard to recover especially if you don't know who did it and more than a few minutes have passed since the theft. Unless whatever is stolen is fairly rare and easily identifiable, the cops can't really do much.
I'm not sure if that's enough to cover your butt or not. See first sentence about this is slashdot, not legaldot. I would consult with a lawyer, preferably one that is not one of your customers.
It's a damn shame the laws can't be written in non-double speak, non-open-to-interpretation, non-legalese, and just plain old English. Imagine not needing lawyers...
It's a shame that programs can't be written using plain old english or some other language. There's some obscurities present but a lot of the reasons laws and legal terms are complicated is because they end up having to deal with complicated situations and odd cases that arise in real life.
Did anyone else notice in the movie, when the robot set the cylinder down, it broke the regulator off? If it'd been charged, that would have created a quite avoidable mess.
I don't think the regulator was really attached correctly to the cylinder. The robot just drops the cyclinder end from about 6 inches and the regulator just pops out. I'm fairly sure the regulator would be more secure if the cylinder were actually charged.
The memory capacity of an isolinear optical chip is 2.15 kiloquads, which is about 2.15 exabytes. I don't know how much they weigh, but they're about the size of a stick of gum... I'd guess they weigh about the same... say... 20g... so that'd be about.002g/petabyte.
Who really cares about a fictional piece of technology with made up capacity and weight? It's much more interesting and relevant to discuss the capacity and weight of the books in the library of congress or microsd cards.
When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site so they must be US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) or 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches.
That's utter bs. If you bother to check wikipedia, you'll find out that diameter of the boosters are 12.17 ft. That's not us standard gauge by any means. Plus, if you think about it, NASA doesn't have any issues shipping the main fuel tank assembly to florida.
But does that take into account people with multiple flights? What if I go from Mexico, to France, to Thailand, to Australia?
How does the twitter information help with this? The tweet grabs the destination and assumes the start is the hometown in the profile. It certainly doesn't catch layovers or even return trips.
Yes, but in said community counterarguments like "Here's the math and it works out, while your doesn't due to this counterexample!" work. Try that with the religious nutjobs.
That doesn't happen as often as you'd think it does though. Depending on the field, a lot of the arguments revolve around details of the data analysis which can be somewhat subjective.
Her last name is "09" and she is a "concentrator?" Who wrote this?
It's from a student newspaper. Hence the 09 which refers to her graduation year. Also the concentrator part means that she's concentrating on physics. Some universities call it concentrating on a subject rather than majoring.
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
Tell that to all of the bloggers that went out and reported on what was happening during the Tsunami, or Katrina, or the Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When you've got literally millions of reporters all out there reporting, and almost that many with decently high-end cameras taking decent photos...it sortof becomes unnecessary to throw Dan Rather on a jet.
Tell that to the reporters that spend months investigating a given issue and then writing 7-8 articles on it. Bloggers are fine for breaking news, not so much for things that require in depth coverage and investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
Leap seconds are ad hoc seat-of-the-pants alterations to the time. They violate the monotonically steadily increasing property of time encoding, so simply cannot be tolerated in any system that benefits from having monotonically steadily increasing time values.
That word -- monotonically -- you're using it but I don't think you understand what it means. Adding leap seconds doesn't violate a monotonically increasing property of time. As long as the count of the seconds doesn't go down, the time function is still monotonically increasing.
Hell, if the ITU declared that we'd stay at 12:59 for an hour at 23:00 12-31-2010 , time would still be monotonically increasing. As long as the ITU doesn't have the time skip back, time would still be a monotonically increasing function.
This is completely bizarre. Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products. And they decide to dive in with an Android tablet? WTF?
They make quite a lot of ip phones. You plug the phone into an ethernet jack, it connects to and gets its configuration information from a central server and works like a phone connected to a pbx system. Their phones even get power over ethernet so one cable is all you need. There's some other nice features as well.
They were talking about 2 stop advantage, 4x. As current tech is about 60-80% (80% peak QE CCD-sensors are pretty cheap and widely used in astronomy) peak efficient, it seems like this new tech is up to 360% efficient. Most current cameras are getting 30-60% peak QE right now. From pocket cameras to DSLRs.
I call bullshit on the technology. Snake oil or they're being very creative with truth.
They're claiming that they can replace in-chip features with features on the top of the chip. E.g. instead of having your pixels surrounded with supporting electronics that can't collect any light, you can move the pixel to the top of the chip and put the supporting electronics underneath the pixels. Also, your pixels aren't covered by a few microns of material that photons have to go through before hitting the pixel.
Since QE only measures the efficiency converting photons incident on the photodetector and not the efficiency of converting photons incident on the entire surface, a 4x improvement is possible depending on the overhead of the supporting electronics for ccd pixel elements.
You could try to introduce basic computational chemistry through ChemOffice or PCmodel. Have them find the lowest energy conformation for a particular cyclic structure. Have them explain why adding a particular group at a particular location increases the conformational energy. Or just integrate this into their lab reports by having them create these 3d/kekuli structures in ChemOffice and paste them into their reports.
We're talking about high school students. Without quantum mechanics, they're not going to be able to really understand what they'll be calculating or the methods behind the calculations. They'll essentially be plugging a structure and/or numbers into some software and cutting/pasting the results into their reports. That's not going to help anyone. Same with literature searches, most high schools don't have access to scientific journals or aside from the odd journal or two, they'll be limited to abstracts from the articles they find. Looking up chemicals/hazards in the merck or sigma handbook/website is much more useful.
Sit in the middle of the ocean and turn off GPS. Perhaps you'll quickly see the value of "good enough". I'm all for a backup plan, and a backup plan to the backup plan, especially if we can avoid pissing away a $160M investment.
Well if you were in the middle of the ocean, you probably wouldn't get a LORAN-C signal at all so your backup really isn't a backup. Check the LORAN-C coverage maps, anywhere outside the Caribbean, North Atlantic and North Pacific simply can't get any fix from LORAN-C signals (so if you're south of the equator you're probably SOL). Anywhere out of sight of coasts doesn't really get a great signal and has a fairly poor resolution.
In addition to what wayland++ said, there's also the fact that the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot, called Rakudo, is intended to be able to mix programming languages with great ease. For example, one syntax that's been bandied about is this: use v6; # Perl 6 goes here { use P5; # Hey, now I'm writing Perl 5 code! } # I'm writing Perl 6 again!
You're seriously calling this a good thing? The ability to fairly easily switch to a very similar but different language in the middle of your code? That sounds like an excellent way to create a maintenance and troubleshooting nightmare.
It's all chemistry, physics and math.
Has anyone actually done this? With even a ''simple'' organism ( yes, those are air-quotes ), like a paramecium? It sounds easy in theory, but I bet when we actually get down to it, there'll be a few speedbumps and unexpected obstacles in the way.
Things are not even close. Look at vcell to see what's close to the state of the art in cell simulation. Right now, it's a matter of trying to get a few reactions and cell compartments working correctly. I don't think anyone has even come close to modeling any type of complete cell.
Pardon me. I did state that incorrectly. I did not mean that they might not be solvable, but it is impossible to determine in advance whether they are solvable in a "reasonable" amount of time. "Polynomial" time encompasses some very big numbers: millions of years for example.
That still doesn't make sense. Any algorithm has a constant factor associated with it in big-O notation. So even if an algorithm is sub-polynomial, logarithmic, or even constant time, it might not be solvable in a "reasonable" amount of time. So, yes knowing something is O(n^2) may not tell you how long a solution will take to use, but it'll tell you how the time to compute the solution grows with input size. Which is really what big O notation and NP/P classifications are about.
And yes, it is possible to determine in advance the approximate amount of time it will require. If you have the algorithm and the size of the input then you can determine the approximate length of time.
This still has the sound of defendant intimidation. While it may be true that the judges are throwing out these cases, in every case where the city government asks for a Frye hearing, the procedure intimidates the defendants into just paying the fine rather than trying to stand up against unproven technology.
What else is the government supposed to do? The admissibility is being challenged by the defendant so the prosecution agrees to a Frye hearing to defend the admissibility of the lidar readings. When the defendents challenge the lidar technology, they're requesting a Frye hearing so the prosecution agreeing to one isn't intimidation.
Not so. There is a reason this class of problems is called "non-deterministic". That is because there is no way to determine, ahead of time, whether a finite solution for this problem exists!
No, that's just wrong. The problems are called non-deterministic polynomial (NP) because they can be solved in polynomial time by a non-deterministic turing machine. A non-deterministic turing machine is a turing machine that can take go into multiple states and accepts an input if any of it's states end up leading to an accept state. Think superposition of states with a wave collapse if you're a physicist.
All of these problems have finite solutions and in fact one of the requirements is that a NP problem has a solution that can be checked in polynomial time by a deterministic turing machine.
NASA spent $10 million developing a pen that would write in space without gravity.
Russia sent pencils up. cost, zip.
fancy new technology is not always the answer.
A - NASA didn't actually spend the money for it, a company did it privately
B - Russia switched to pens as soon as NASA had them ready, turns out the pencils would shed graphite flakes that could get into the electronics and shortcircuit them -- not so good.
Like H.L. Menkin said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
I've been using Wolfram Mathematica to take class notes and exams for years. By using the keyboard shortcuts you can easily keep up with the class. You can also have instant interactive graphs which will be much easier to understand than anything a professor could draw on a board, although it's not like my professors write on the board as they use Mathematica or Matlab to teach the class as well. This is at a private university in Mexico.
That's not going to work for higher math classes, Mathematica isn't going to be all that fast if you're trying to enter stuff from topology or cohomology algebra or similar things. It definitely won't give you graphics for those.
But what if the photons that arrived first had left last? That might put the difference in travel time as high as 3.1s....
I think the scientists writing the paper and the reviewers already considered that possibility. The paper sets bounds on how big of an effect energy / speed interactions could be for photons so they probably used worst case situations to establish the upper or lower bounds as needed.
BOINC doesn't work so well if the tasks need to download 10-20 GB of data and the actual applications running the job take up another 10GB of space and the jobs run full out on a system for 2-3 days while consuming 2GB of memory.
Why is this illegal?
Don't know if it's illegal or not but it should be. They are misrepresenting the site as presenting all reviews, not just ones that they approve. That's fraud with material financial consequences.
Given that Mechanist.tm wasn't aware of this they probably are misrepresenting the reviews.
If they made clear that the site is not representative of all customer reviews then there should be no legal problem though it's still shady and I for one would be shopping elsewhere.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Do you tell potential employers about every major mistake you've made in previous jobs or about the times you've slacked off or skipped out for one reason or another? If not, then you're not making it clear that your resume, cover letter, and job interviews aren't fully representative of your prior work. And as you said, it's fraud with material consequences. How about stuff that you're trying to sell like a car or a home?
No one gives all the details about something they're trying to sell regardless of whether it's a piece of electronics, a car, or a home. The phrase caveat emptor has been around for at least 2000 years and probably a lot longer than that. As such, I don't think anyone should trust the reviews on a retailer's site entirely.
You've apparently never tried to report a stolen wallet or backpack, or even modest laptop. You fill out forms, answer questions,a nd they do _nothing_. It's just not important enough.
What exactly are they supposed to do? A stolen or lost wallet/backpack/laptop is pretty hard to recover especially if you don't know who did it and more than a few minutes have passed since the theft. Unless whatever is stolen is fairly rare and easily identifiable, the cops can't really do much.
I'm not sure if that's enough to cover your butt or not. See first sentence about this is slashdot, not legaldot. I would consult with a lawyer, preferably one that is not one of your customers.
It's a damn shame the laws can't be written in non-double speak, non-open-to-interpretation, non-legalese, and just plain old English. Imagine not needing lawyers...
It's a shame that programs can't be written using plain old english or some other language. There's some obscurities present but a lot of the reasons laws and legal terms are complicated is because they end up having to deal with complicated situations and odd cases that arise in real life.
Did anyone else notice in the movie, when the robot set the cylinder down, it broke the regulator off? If it'd been charged, that would have created a quite avoidable mess.
I don't think the regulator was really attached correctly to the cylinder. The robot just drops the cyclinder end from about 6 inches and the regulator just pops out. I'm fairly sure the regulator would be more secure if the cylinder were actually charged.
The memory capacity of an isolinear optical chip is 2.15 kiloquads, which is about 2.15 exabytes. I don't know how much they weigh, but they're about the size of a stick of gum... I'd guess they weigh about the same... say... 20g... so that'd be about .002g/petabyte.
Who really cares about a fictional piece of technology with made up capacity and weight? It's much more interesting and relevant to discuss the capacity and weight of the books in the library of congress or microsd cards.
When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site so they must be US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) or 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches.
That's utter bs. If you bother to check wikipedia, you'll find out that diameter of the boosters are 12.17 ft. That's not us standard gauge by any means. Plus, if you think about it, NASA doesn't have any issues shipping the main fuel tank assembly to florida.
But does that take into account people with multiple flights? What if I go from Mexico, to France, to Thailand, to Australia?
How does the twitter information help with this? The tweet grabs the destination and assumes the start is the hometown in the profile. It certainly doesn't catch layovers or even return trips.
I think I know what the problem is.... The mouse, is connected to the monitor.
Huh? Quite a few people have usb mice that are connected to their computers using the usb hub on their monitors.
Yes, but in said community counterarguments like "Here's the math and it works out, while your doesn't due to this counterexample!" work. Try that with the religious nutjobs.
That doesn't happen as often as you'd think it does though. Depending on the field, a lot of the arguments revolve around details of the data analysis which can be somewhat subjective.
Her last name is "09" and she is a "concentrator?" Who wrote this?
It's from a student newspaper. Hence the 09 which refers to her graduation year. Also the concentrator part means that she's concentrating on physics. Some universities call it concentrating on a subject rather than majoring.
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
Tell that to all of the bloggers that went out and reported on what was happening during the Tsunami, or Katrina, or the Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When you've got literally millions of reporters all out there reporting, and almost that many with decently high-end cameras taking decent photos...it sortof becomes unnecessary to throw Dan Rather on a jet.
Tell that to the reporters that spend months investigating a given issue and then writing 7-8 articles on it. Bloggers are fine for breaking news, not so much for things that require in depth coverage and investigation.