Sure it looks good, but that doesn't mean it's not overkill. Have you tried a double-blind comparison with a same-size screen at a lower resolution? Or testing how close you have to hold it to identify lines at the screen's Nyquist frequency? Personally, I find 320x480 on a 3.2" screen to be just perfect (and I have contacts, saw the optician three months ago). Scaling up to 4", that would be 360x540.
I know it's a joke, but Current gen iOS devices already do this with AppleTV or AirPlay enabled devices.
Obligatory pedantism: he said HDTV, which means neither an AppleTV or an AirPlay enabled device. This is actually another thing that Apple does the proprietary way, no way they could just support DLNA like the rest of the electronics world. You have to buy yet another iDevice in order to stream content to your TV, which probably already has streaming support that you've payed for but can't use with Apple.
No matter how you twist it, if Linux gets graphics drivers on par with Windows, it is much better for games since it wastes much less resources.
Case in point: My Linux installation at work, which is an 8 core, 16 GB RAM computational workstation, uses 231 MB of RAM after I've logged in. Two days after last reboot, with five terminal windows, Firefox with a dozen tabs, Citrix (to run Outlook, restrictive company Exchange policy...), Gimp, Blender, two additional CAD programs, and two instances of a PDF viewer, I'm still only using 1.7 GB RAM.
On the same system, Windows 7 uses 1.5 GB after I've logged in, no programs running. And yes, I'm using both preload and readahead on the Linux system, so don't give me the "Windows uses RAM to store things it will need in the future" because my Linux does as well.
History has always been written by the winners. Stalin was an ally in WWII, and Battleship Potemkin shot to fame in the west before "Commies" truly became the bad guys.
The problem is not the model per se, but the fact that your experiences are all with a real-world trampoline, which is imperfect, and where objects experience (static) friction. For objects in space, or even in air if the velocity is small, there is no friction. If you took a frictionless, perfect, infinite trampoline, and placed two stationary marbles 1 meter apart, they would "attract" each other. This is because if you move an infinitesimal length away from the base of the marble in the direction of the other marble, the trampoline cloth would be ever so slightly lower than at the base of the marble.
To say this another way: in real life, if you zoom in 100 000x on the trampoline at the base of the marble, it is flat, because the trampoline is imperfect. However, for an infinite, perfect trampoline, it would slope down towards the other marble.
o_O Already exists in Europe: It's called the Data Retention Directive. This exists now. Today.
Do you have any references on a contry that has actually succesfully implemented the DRD? I know Germany has declared it unconstitutional, and here in Norway the "launch date" has been pushed back to infinity (it seems), as politicians and ISPs can't agree about who's going to pay the bill (and how large the bill is going to be).
Also, from my understanding of the Norwegian implementation, the DRD only requires logging cellphone and ordinary phone traffic, when you connect/disconnect to 3G or DSL/cable, and emails you send through an email provider in Norway. They're not mandating logging of e.g. Gmail, so no deep traffic inspection etc., it's the email providers themselves that have to log traffic. All in all, that's a long, far way short of logging all tcp and udp traffic, and they still can't agree about who's paying the bill.
Given our present knowledge of the universe, gravity is just an experimental fact, like special relativity. What causes the speed of light to be finite? You can then invoke the (either strong or weak) anthropic principle, and say that if gravity wasn't there, you would not exist and could not ask the question.
On a more speculative note, it is possible that one day some ultimate theory of everything, unifying all physics in one theory, explains what causes gravity. It is not necessary for a theory of everything to explain what causes gravity, though, it just has to be a consistent theory of all the fundamental forces which matches all experimental results. Some have e.g. tried to explain gravity as a direct consequence of entropy, but this is widely disputed. In the end, no theory can be made without some experimental inputs in one end. One would of course like to have as few of these as possible, but it could well be that the fact that gravity exists has to be an experimental input.
However, the current theory we have of gravity is sufficient to explain all phenomena that can be experimentally observed on scales you and I can experiment with. Any experimental setup concerning phenomena on the scale of centimeters to kilometers that contradicts our current theory of gravity is pure hocum.
Casimir never called it the Casimir effect himself, he published papers using titles such as "The Influence of Retardation on the London-van der Waals Forces" and "On the attraction between two perfectly conducting plates".
Regarding the "Aspden Effect", I can't tell for sure if Aspden called it that himself, but my bullshit detector works just fine. This effect is not accepted by mainstream science (even though Aspden has published interesting works on other topics) and has not been reproduced. If anyone (e.g. you) really believe in this effect, it's a simple matter of reproducing the experiment in you back yard, and then you'd get pretty famous. The return-on-investment would be significant as well.
And you still haven't explained _what_ _causes_ gravity.
I don't think you yourself understand what you mean by this question. If I replace gravity with electromagnetism in your question, what is the answer then? Or do you believe we don't know what causes electromagnetism either?
Hate to rain on your parade, but one of the problems with FTL drives (in particular an Alcubierre drive) is that if you take such a spaceship out of FTL anywhere near a planet, you kill everything on that planet. (I think this was on/. a few months ago.) You would have to use conventional space drives to get a good, far distance away (say a year of travel) before either engaging or disengaging FTL. It doesn't completely negate the point of FTL, but it makes it a lot less attractive.
Bullshit. The so-called "Hutchison Effect" is a hoax, pure and utter fakery. Protip: anyone who claims to have discovered something weird, and then names it after themselves, is most likely a hoax.
And we have a very good idea of what causes gravity, or rather, what gravity _is_. Gravity is the tendency of spacetime to curve in the presence of objects with mass (and/or energy). This curving of spacetime causes other objects to travel not in straight (relative to our local Minkowski space) line paths, but in curves, when they are close to the first object (and vice versa). Since you can't see the external dimension that spacetime is embedded in where it curves (google "de Sitter-space" if you are interested), you see gravity as a force between massive objects.
Personally, I'd vote for a small soapdish over Obama...I think he is pretty much the worst leader the US has had in a long time (and I was no Bush II fan)...I'm not a fan of Romney, but given the two choices....I can't possibly see giving my support to Obama. I can't imaging Romney would be worse...
In my view, this is your problem. If there are two bad candidates, one of them is still going to win. It means that if all (both) the major parties fuck up, you don't have an alternative.
Look at Greece, for instance, where the formerly-tiny Syriza party is now the second largest in parliament, in no small part due to other formerly-large political parties fucking up on a grand scale. If Greece only had two parties, and both were pro-bailout, a large fraction of the Greek population would not have voted "No" to the bailout simply because they could not have voted "No".
You've got it half right. The american tax system is hopelessly complicated, and should be simplified. But you should also pay more in taxes, not less. Essentially all other countries in the western world have higher taxes than americans, but don't pay (or pay orders of magnitude less) for health insurance, putting your kids through college, and soforth. In total, we have more money for food, paying rent, having fun etc.
Numbers by the WHO (for 2005) say that US spends 15% of GDP on healthcare when you add private and goverment spending. Doing the same math for other western countries: Germany is in second place behind the US with 10%. Third place is the UK, 8.2 %. Both of these countries have what you call a "socialist" healthcare system, but the average person spends less on healthcare in total than you do.
Or to put it another way: the WHO ranks the US healthcare system as the most expensive in the world (2005 numbers), but only the 37th best in the world (2000 numbers).
Long story short: Americans are really, really stupid if you fall for the GOP calling Obama a socialist. In the rest of the western world, Obama would be a good way out on the right side of politics. The two-party system is killing you guys over there. But then again, when more than half of GOP voters polled still believe Obama was born in Kenya (question 64), I guess you almost deserve what's coming...
Sustainable development is an oxymoron used by politicians to show the $green lobby that they care about $green stuff. It's almost as funny as when they say "sustainable growth", or as when you show them an exponential function. If you find a semi-educated one, try explaining to him/her that the laws of thermodynamics say we can't sustain global growth for more than ~100 years no matter what magic technology we invent. Please youtube the resulting facial expression.
If you find a vulnerable exploit that you can use to access or destroy secure assets, you don't waste it on the civilian sector. You save it and use it to get something really valuable. (Like their nuclear material refinement computers).
This. The exploits used in Stuxnet and Flame are bullets in the US/Israeli "cyber-gun". They have to conserve ammo, but I'll bet you they've got atleast a few mags full of 0days stored just in case.
All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.
On this topic: the girl and her dad inquired the school about the type of chicken and sausages they serve, and apparently they are "safe to keep for up to three years". That says it about the quality of the food for me.
It is well known that the algos read news themselves, without human intervention.
However, the main argument in support of HFT is not "synchronization", but rather an increase in liquidity. Pro-HFT people claim that HFT fulfills a market-making function where it matches up a buyer and a seller very rapidly, while pocketing a small fraction of the bid-ask spread. They don't tell you that they use e.g. quote stuffing to artificially increase this spread, thus earning more money. Have a look at this graph from Nanex (they do a lot of very interesting analysis of HFT algos). Note that the entire width of the graph is 200 milliseconds.
There's a major factor here on top - which is that there are two major versions of libv4l - with incompatible interfaces- for a long time skype didn't support v4l2 but I think they fixed that now
I guess this is exactly what they've done. But then the summary should be more along the lines of "Skype finally managed to stop using webcam library from the previous millenium that has been deprecated for over a year.", instead of the positiv spin they've put on it where it sounds like they actually did some good work.
I don't get this part. Skype should only interface
with libv4l, an the kernel handles the drivers.
We've had support for pretty much every webcam
out there since 2.6.27, so what has Skype
improved?
Better the same way a pistol is better than a baseball bat.
If I have an M60 and you have a pistol, I kill you
given no other tactical advantage to either part.
Also, baseball bat is less complicated than pistol
and has even cheaper ammo. Also even less chance
of being shot by police for carrying one.
I guess my point is that the "heaviest" weapon carried
by criminal is almost completely dictated by the law.
Coming from a country where the sale and ownership of firearms is very restricted, I would argue that guns are pretty much worthless. In my country, it is a 99.99% sure thing that unless you're dealing with Russian mafia, people won't have guns. Even when there are gang/mob related incidents such as killing rival gang leaders, they use baseball bats and iron pipes. Makes sense, as it is much easier to explain why you have a baseball bat than a 9mm.
Now, you could argue that blunt weapons are no better than guns, but I haven't heard of anyone accidentally kill someone with a baseball bat. Or shoot themselves in the foot with one. You could also argue that it would be easy for the first gangmember to start carrying guns, and then everyone will, but this is a slippery slope argument. Why don't criminals in the US all carry M60s, seeing as they're much better than handguns? Oh, that's right, because the sale and ownership of M60s is very restricted.* Go back to beginning of this post.
So yes, in a country where criminals don't carry guns, I would meet you in a dark alley, but I might bring a few friends who are going to play some baseball later in the evening.
*: I know it is technically legal for a civilian in the US to own an M60, but you would have to acquire a "transferrable" example, i.e. one manufactured prior to 1986 which is still in working order and hasn't had the receiver replaced. This will cost you upwards of $50 000. I call this severly restricted, partly by law and partly by free market economics.
I agree with parent. I have the Asus 1215b, which is the same thing updated to AMD Fusion series. Runs ArchLinux without problems, only thing I've found is that the most unimportant of the Fn+F[1-9] buttons don't work (e.g. switching bluetooth on/off).
Pop in an SSD drive like I did (this was actually a bit of a hassle), and you have almost Macbook Air performance, except for (the pretty rare) tasks that are bound by max CPU performance. It also weighs just 100 grams more than the 13" Macbook Air. Why people who only run Firefox/Word/Email pay $1200 for an Air when you can have essentially the same thing for $380 (computer and SSD drive) is something I'll never understand.
If you try doing a google search, you'll find plenty of news outlets (including Cult of Mac) reporting instances of Apple screwing developers. I count at least five different cases in the last three years just by a cursory glance on the first few results.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it looks good, but that doesn't mean it's not overkill. Have you tried a double-blind comparison with a same-size screen at a lower resolution? Or testing how close you have to hold it to identify lines at the screen's Nyquist frequency? Personally, I find 320x480 on a 3.2" screen to be just perfect (and I have contacts, saw the optician three months ago). Scaling up to 4", that would be 360x540.
I know it's a joke, but Current gen iOS devices already do this with AppleTV or AirPlay enabled devices.
Obligatory pedantism: he said HDTV, which means neither an AppleTV or an AirPlay enabled device. This is actually another thing that Apple does the proprietary way, no way they could just support DLNA like the rest of the electronics world. You have to buy yet another iDevice in order to stream content to your TV, which probably already has streaming support that you've payed for but can't use with Apple.
No matter how you twist it, if Linux gets graphics drivers on par with Windows, it is much better for games since it wastes much less resources.
Case in point: My Linux installation at work, which is an 8 core, 16 GB RAM computational workstation, uses 231 MB of RAM after I've logged in. Two days after last reboot, with five terminal windows, Firefox with a dozen tabs, Citrix (to run Outlook, restrictive company Exchange policy...), Gimp, Blender, two additional CAD programs, and two instances of a PDF viewer, I'm still only using 1.7 GB RAM.
On the same system, Windows 7 uses 1.5 GB after I've logged in, no programs running. And yes, I'm using both preload and readahead on the Linux system, so don't give me the "Windows uses RAM to store things it will need in the future" because my Linux does as well.
History has always been written by the winners. Stalin was an ally in WWII, and Battleship Potemkin shot to fame in the west before "Commies" truly became the bad guys.
The problem is not the model per se, but the fact that your experiences are all with a real-world trampoline, which is imperfect, and where objects experience (static) friction. For objects in space, or even in air if the velocity is small, there is no friction. If you took a frictionless, perfect, infinite trampoline, and placed two stationary marbles 1 meter apart, they would "attract" each other. This is because if you move an infinitesimal length away from the base of the marble in the direction of the other marble, the trampoline cloth would be ever so slightly lower than at the base of the marble.
To say this another way: in real life, if you zoom in 100 000x on the trampoline at the base of the marble, it is flat, because the trampoline is imperfect. However, for an infinite, perfect trampoline, it would slope down towards the other marble.
o_O Already exists in Europe: It's called the Data Retention Directive. This exists now. Today.
Do you have any references on a contry that has actually succesfully implemented the DRD? I know Germany has declared it unconstitutional, and here in Norway the "launch date" has been pushed back to infinity (it seems), as politicians and ISPs can't agree about who's going to pay the bill (and how large the bill is going to be).
Also, from my understanding of the Norwegian implementation, the DRD only requires logging cellphone and ordinary phone traffic, when you connect/disconnect to 3G or DSL/cable, and emails you send through an email provider in Norway. They're not mandating logging of e.g. Gmail, so no deep traffic inspection etc., it's the email providers themselves that have to log traffic. All in all, that's a long, far way short of logging all tcp and udp traffic, and they still can't agree about who's paying the bill.
I'm not sure I follow your explanation of a finite c. If c is infinite, there's no problem with particles assuming infinite mass in that limit.
Given our present knowledge of the universe, gravity is just an experimental fact, like special relativity. What causes the speed of light to be finite? You can then invoke the (either strong or weak) anthropic principle, and say that if gravity wasn't there, you would not exist and could not ask the question.
On a more speculative note, it is possible that one day some ultimate theory of everything, unifying all physics in one theory, explains what causes gravity. It is not necessary for a theory of everything to explain what causes gravity, though, it just has to be a consistent theory of all the fundamental forces which matches all experimental results. Some have e.g. tried to explain gravity as a direct consequence of entropy, but this is widely disputed. In the end, no theory can be made without some experimental inputs in one end. One would of course like to have as few of these as possible, but it could well be that the fact that gravity exists has to be an experimental input.
However, the current theory we have of gravity is sufficient to explain all phenomena that can be experimentally observed on scales you and I can experiment with. Any experimental setup concerning phenomena on the scale of centimeters to kilometers that contradicts our current theory of gravity is pure hocum.
Regarding the "Aspden Effect", I can't tell for sure if Aspden called it that himself, but my bullshit detector works just fine. This effect is not accepted by mainstream science (even though Aspden has published interesting works on other topics) and has not been reproduced. If anyone (e.g. you) really believe in this effect, it's a simple matter of reproducing the experiment in you back yard, and then you'd get pretty famous. The return-on-investment would be significant as well.
And you still haven't explained _what_ _causes_ gravity.
I don't think you yourself understand what you mean by this question. If I replace gravity with electromagnetism in your question, what is the answer then? Or do you believe we don't know what causes electromagnetism either?
Hate to rain on your parade, but one of the problems with FTL drives (in particular an Alcubierre drive) is that if you take such a spaceship out of FTL anywhere near a planet, you kill everything on that planet. (I think this was on /. a few months ago.) You would have to use conventional space drives to get a good, far distance away (say a year of travel) before either engaging or disengaging FTL. It doesn't completely negate the point of FTL, but it makes it a lot less attractive.
Bullshit. The so-called "Hutchison Effect" is a hoax, pure and utter fakery. Protip: anyone who claims to have discovered something weird, and then names it after themselves, is most likely a hoax.
And we have a very good idea of what causes gravity, or rather, what gravity _is_. Gravity is the tendency of spacetime to curve in the presence of objects with mass (and/or energy). This curving of spacetime causes other objects to travel not in straight (relative to our local Minkowski space) line paths, but in curves, when they are close to the first object (and vice versa). Since you can't see the external dimension that spacetime is embedded in where it curves (google "de Sitter-space" if you are interested), you see gravity as a force between massive objects.
Thanks for an informative post! I agree that handling stuff at the state level would probably be the best solution, as the US is a pretty big country.
Personally, I'd vote for a small soapdish over Obama...I think he is pretty much the worst leader the US has had in a long time (and I was no Bush II fan)...I'm not a fan of Romney, but given the two choices....I can't possibly see giving my support to Obama. I can't imaging Romney would be worse...
In my view, this is your problem. If there are two bad candidates, one of them is still going to win. It means that if all (both) the major parties fuck up, you don't have an alternative.
Look at Greece, for instance, where the formerly-tiny Syriza party is now the second largest in parliament, in no small part due to other formerly-large political parties fucking up on a grand scale. If Greece only had two parties, and both were pro-bailout, a large fraction of the Greek population would not have voted "No" to the bailout simply because they could not have voted "No".
You've got it half right. The american tax system is hopelessly complicated, and should be simplified. But you should also pay more in taxes, not less. Essentially all other countries in the western world have higher taxes than americans, but don't pay (or pay orders of magnitude less) for health insurance, putting your kids through college, and soforth. In total, we have more money for food, paying rent, having fun etc.
Numbers by the WHO (for 2005) say that US spends 15% of GDP on healthcare when you add private and goverment spending. Doing the same math for other western countries: Germany is in second place behind the US with 10%. Third place is the UK, 8.2 %. Both of these countries have what you call a "socialist" healthcare system, but the average person spends less on healthcare in total than you do.
Or to put it another way: the WHO ranks the US healthcare system as the most expensive in the world (2005 numbers), but only the 37th best in the world (2000 numbers).
Long story short: Americans are really, really stupid if you fall for the GOP calling Obama a socialist. In the rest of the western world, Obama would be a good way out on the right side of politics. The two-party system is killing you guys over there. But then again, when more than half of GOP voters polled still believe Obama was born in Kenya (question 64), I guess you almost deserve what's coming...
Sustainable development is an oxymoron used by politicians to show the $green lobby that they care about $green stuff. It's almost as funny as when they say "sustainable growth", or as when you show them an exponential function. If you find a semi-educated one, try explaining to him/her that the laws of thermodynamics say we can't sustain global growth for more than ~100 years no matter what magic technology we invent. Please youtube the resulting facial expression.
Concerning the future of Nokia, I have one word: Kodak.
If you find a vulnerable exploit that you can use to access or destroy secure assets, you don't waste it on the civilian sector. You save it and use it to get something really valuable. (Like their nuclear material refinement computers).
This. The exploits used in Stuxnet and Flame are bullets in the US/Israeli "cyber-gun". They have to conserve ammo, but I'll bet you they've got atleast a few mags full of 0days stored just in case.
All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.
On this topic: the girl and her dad inquired the school about the type of chicken and sausages they serve, and apparently they are "safe to keep for up to three years". That says it about the quality of the food for me.
It is well known that the algos read news themselves, without human intervention.
However, the main argument in support of HFT is not "synchronization", but rather an increase in liquidity. Pro-HFT people claim that HFT fulfills a market-making function where it matches up a buyer and a seller very rapidly, while pocketing a small fraction of the bid-ask spread. They don't tell you that they use e.g. quote stuffing to artificially increase this spread, thus earning more money. Have a look at this graph from Nanex (they do a lot of very interesting analysis of HFT algos). Note that the entire width of the graph is 200 milliseconds.
There's a major factor here on top - which is that there are two major versions of libv4l - with incompatible interfaces- for a long time skype didn't support v4l2 but I think they fixed that now
I guess this is exactly what they've done. But then the summary should be more along the lines of "Skype finally managed to stop using webcam library from the previous millenium that has been deprecated for over a year.", instead of the positiv spin they've put on it where it sounds like they actually did some good work.
I don't get this part. Skype should only interface with libv4l, an the kernel handles the drivers. We've had support for pretty much every webcam out there since 2.6.27, so what has Skype improved?
Better the same way a pistol is better than a baseball bat. If I have an M60 and you have a pistol, I kill you given no other tactical advantage to either part.
Also, baseball bat is less complicated than pistol and has even cheaper ammo. Also even less chance of being shot by police for carrying one.
I guess my point is that the "heaviest" weapon carried by criminal is almost completely dictated by the law.
Coming from a country where the sale and ownership of firearms is very restricted, I would argue that guns are pretty much worthless. In my country, it is a 99.99% sure thing that unless you're dealing with Russian mafia, people won't have guns. Even when there are gang/mob related incidents such as killing rival gang leaders, they use baseball bats and iron pipes. Makes sense, as it is much easier to explain why you have a baseball bat than a 9mm.
Now, you could argue that blunt weapons are no better than guns, but I haven't heard of anyone accidentally kill someone with a baseball bat. Or shoot themselves in the foot with one. You could also argue that it would be easy for the first gangmember to start carrying guns, and then everyone will, but this is a slippery slope argument. Why don't criminals in the US all carry M60s, seeing as they're much better than handguns? Oh, that's right, because the sale and ownership of M60s is very restricted.* Go back to beginning of this post.
So yes, in a country where criminals don't carry guns, I would meet you in a dark alley, but I might bring a few friends who are going to play some baseball later in the evening.
*: I know it is technically legal for a civilian in the US to own an M60, but you would have to acquire a "transferrable" example, i.e. one manufactured prior to 1986 which is still in working order and hasn't had the receiver replaced. This will cost you upwards of $50 000. I call this severly restricted, partly by law and partly by free market economics.
I agree with parent. I have the Asus 1215b, which is the same thing updated to AMD Fusion series. Runs ArchLinux without problems, only thing I've found is that the most unimportant of the Fn+F[1-9] buttons don't work (e.g. switching bluetooth on/off).
Pop in an SSD drive like I did (this was actually a bit of a hassle), and you have almost Macbook Air performance, except for (the pretty rare) tasks that are bound by max CPU performance. It also weighs just 100 grams more than the 13" Macbook Air. Why people who only run Firefox/Word/Email pay $1200 for an Air when you can have essentially the same thing for $380 (computer and SSD drive) is something I'll never understand.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=apple+screws+developers
If you try doing a google search, you'll find plenty of news outlets (including Cult of Mac) reporting instances of Apple screwing developers. I count at least five different cases in the last three years just by a cursory glance on the first few results.