Sure, dandy idea if I'm running a box with five sites in my basement on the cheap.
If I am trying to maintain major sites with totals of millions of hits per day, it not only takes longer to restart due to all of the sites I'm hosting, but that means that a lot of people will be peeved that it is down.
I just got started with Apache, but the idea that I have to restart the Apache server to add a new Web site is just shocking. Additionally, the documentation (as well as numerous books) aren't particularly clear if people are getting all kinds of 404s during this restarting time. Aside from having to restart when adding ISAPI filters, I never have to restart IIS. I get that "Apache needs to reload and reparse the configuration," but, c'mon. If IIS can do it...
Of course, you'd want a fuzzy logic trigger of some sort - not just a single thing to set it off.
You'd want the files encrypted, so that, with just a handful of bytes per file corrupted, cracking the encryption would be trouble.
I'd like to know what the "chemical mist" is.
We had a slashdot article on this very thing many, many years ago. 1999? 2000? It was pointed out that using explosives could get you a nice criminal charge, and using most serious acids could also allow you to be creatively charged. Someone suggested an acid (and named) an acid that would work nicely on the top layer of the platters but be harmless to human skin.
I'm not rah-rah open source and I'm not a GPL zealot. However, Linux needs some scalps hanging from its belt.
What I mean is - Linux, the GPL, open source, all of that will not be taken as seriously as it should be by the corporate types until a major corporation (like SCO) has tangled with it and lost. Lost in a big, final, CEO-fired, flaming-destruction, closing doors, company selling its Aeron chairs kind of way. This would facilitate the kind of hushed whispers that would ensue whenever someone suggested trying to take over, or incorporate code and then lie about it. "You don't want to do that, Mr. PHB - you know what happened to SCO, right?"
I think this technology will really take off once it can produce shapes using latex, gel, or rubber. And you can go into a booth and have something made anonymously. Once people figure out there are sexual applications to this... well, the "Make-A-Dildo" software will be more popular than TurboTax in March. I'm only half kidding.
So, can we use this to FINALLY get a quasi-reasonable head-mounted displays?
I've always thought that one of the two reasons that wearables haven't really hit the mainstream was that the HMD's seemed to come with some weirdass resolution like 312 x 214 or some such nonsense. Aside from the obvious input issues, wearables are stunted by the number of freaky custom parts. HMD's with 15pin cables, let's go!
Most people have the following mental metaphor associated with quantum entanglement and FTL data transmission: imagine two people, set roughly a light year apart. By some fun coincidence, their planets are moving in the same direction at the same time. Now, imagine a perfectly rigid rod that runs between the two observers - Alice has an UP arrow on one end and Bob has a DOWN arrow on his. Simply by rotating the rod up and down, the perfectly rigid rod transmits the information instantaneously from one planet to another. Up is now down, down is now up. Have a few of them for control channels... whammo! FTL data transmission.
Sadly, this is COMPLETELY WRONG.
Instead, Alice and Bob meet on Earth. Alice pulls out a quarter and drops it into this machine. The machine randomly rotates the quarter and then splits it perfectly in half, with the HEAD face rolling one way and the TAIL face rolling the other way. These roll down a little rail into boxes that neither Alice nor Bob can see into.
Bob leaves, with his box via rocketship to a comfy planet off of Sirius. They've calculated all of the relativistic effects of this journey and have their clocks synchronized to account for this. Bob opens his box and finds... TAILS! Hence, Alice must have the HEAD face.
That is what entanglement looks like, with some fun quantum stuff. Until they opened the box, each box existed in both states, partially, having 1/2 HEAD and 1/2 TAIL probabilities. That's your spooky quantum stuff, right there. Opening the box definitely determines that Alice has the HEAD face when Bob has his TAIL face of the quarter. It has absolutely determined it.
But you can't use that to FTL information about. Whoever opens the box first collapses the wave function. It's over. If Bob has TAILS, he knows Alice has HEADS... but Alice doesn't know that until Bob calls her on his pitiful sublight telephone system. "Hi, Alice, I have the TAIL face, so you must have the head." Sure, the wave function collapsed all the way across the galaxy, but Alice doesn't know that. Bob has to call her... on a sublight channel. If he had a superlight channel, then we wouldn't need this nonsense. Catch-22, as someone else mentioned.
And so, quantum entanglement is not useful for this.
It's the most ridiculous possible argument against nanotech. It's like being afraid that a nuclear reactor will turn the Earth into the Sun. And once everyone dispels the straw man argument, we go happily about our merry way, la la la, it's nothing to worry about.
Let me give you some scary: nanobots that go down to the bottom of the ocean and mess with the clathrates, spilling all of that methane out into the atmosphere - there's enough energy there to get that done. Nanobots burrowing into the Earth's crust along fault lines in a long chain, using the temperature gradient to make a heat engine in order to drive any kind of mucking about with tectonic plates. Nanobots carefully and quietly sabotaging subtle but key parts of the ecology.
It's easier to destroy than to create. And nanobots would be able to replicate, with probably greater (but not much) efficiency, anything you could dream up via genetic engineering, because nanotech is going to look a lot like biology plus some nifty physics. And it will be a biology freed from some of the constraints and old hacks Nature imposed.. They could also use physical properties perhaps not accessible to mere biology - how about something really wacky, like point fusion? Nature did a lot of clever tricks, but there's much optimization that could be done.
Yes, grey goo can't be taken seriously, due to physical constraints. The bad guys don't need to destroy the entire planet - they just need to make it unlivable so that $MESSIAH can come. And it wouldn't be tough to spend a few afternoons dreaming up doomsday applications that are not energy intensive.
This paragraph pretty clearly states why the Slashdot editors should try to seek permission, or at least alert the site owners, before linking. We all think it is cute when a site bursts into flames as we all hit it simultaneously, but a lot of small businesses, hobbyists, and so forth, cannot afford to have some giant T3s attached to the latest and best clustered servers on the off-chance that Slashdot would link to them.
However, when it does happen, it's like a Lottery of Suck: sites go down, fees get hiked, business could be lost. A great deal of Slashdotters work for small businesses who simply could not withstand the hit.
Nor is there a good excuse to NOT warn first, just the eagerness to "get the big scoop" on a site that is only vaguely journalistic. Slashdot could offer a "why don't we cache this page for you?" or ask for permission to reprint a page. It seems like the fair thing to do.
Before you laugh, consider that people have made modules for Apache, last I saw, specifically to deal with sudden slashdotting by throttling based on referrer. Now, if the open source community sees a need for it, it probably is a valid need.
... but my data plan involves marching UP the food chain, skipping every other generation.
I'll be backing my audio CDs (and probably data) up to Blu-Ray drives when they become cheap enough. I figure I may get something on the order of 70 CDs (sans compression) on a Blu-Ray. I'll be doing it with file manifests containing both MD5 and SHA checksums, with three copies of each Blu-Ray. If the checksums don't "check out" on a given disk (and they'll probably be on a by-file basis, by-directory, or some convenient aggregator), I'll switch to one of the other Blu-Rays.
I've skipped DVDs here - you could only get about, what, 7 CDs worth on one (not counting the dual-layer burners coming out). I'll be backing up my DVDs onto whatever comes after Blu-Ray.
By leapfrogging generations, I won't be stuck with inefficiently sized backups. My CD collection would fit on a few dozen Blu-Rays. By moving UP the food chain, I'm guaranteeing that, 20 years from now, I'm not copying thousands of CDs all over again.
Yeah, I'll have to write some software for it. Sure, I'll be using FLAC for the audio (with some OGGs for lossy-but-useful files). Will I be scanning in CD and DVD covers? You betcha. Are those checksums going to take a lot of CPU time? Yeah. But if you're serious about preserving your rare data, why not? How many old LPs didn't make it to CD? How many of your favorite CDs won't make it to a new audio format?
A box with a wall-plug is great if you aren't considering doing this again in a decade. CD duplicators, however, are the wrong solution to an archival problem. In twenty years, when you have to copy all over again, who will be making CD duplicators? Remember, kids, they just stopped making BetaMax VCRs. It'll be mighty hard to copy your BetaMax tapes in the future.
I strongly suggest that anyone who is into this sort of work check out Seth Lloyd's Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation. It's quite interesting. I saw him speak a few years ago. People had told me that we would "always find a way" to increase computation, which seemed like utter silliness to me. I'm glad to see that some folks are a little more sensible about this.
1) It's not "ADD," it's "ADHD." The DSM-IV was very clear about the change. You can look for it under the 314.00 and 314.01 codes.
2) It has a genetic component. It's trackable in the genome. Hey, it even shows up on a PET scan, for those of you non-believers. "It's just something they're making up" does not show up on a PET scan.
3) ADHD can be easily overdiagnosed. I tend not to trust diagnoses made without the use of a CPT (Continuous Performance Test) or a TOVA (Test Of Variables of Attention). These are real performance tests, not answering some questions.
4) I know a guy who did some large project on the way to his Ph.D. in psychology on using biofeedback for ADHD. He had ADHD and the subject was of interest to him. Basically, he found that people with ADHD couldn't maintain the focus to make biofeedback work. Biofeedback can be very useful, but, to use a loose analogy, in this instance it is like having someone try to build up their biceps through weightlifting if they are paralyzed from the neck down.
In fact, you are missing quite a bit. Granted, you actually have to watch Buffy from, oh, about the end of the first season on to "get it," Angel you could pass on until the middle of the second season - they require some time investment.
What are you missing out on? Fun, linguistically "hip" dialogue and multileveled jokes. Nod if you get "She makes Godot look punctual." Whedon, being a fool for the Bard, has a lot of references he uses, particularly in regards to names - Cordelia, in King Lear, was a outspoken, blunt princess - not too far off the mark on Buffy. There's in-jokes if you want them.
You want chilly, scary scenes? Try "Hush," middle of season four. Imagine a town that has all lost their voices. Now imagine someone coming for you in the middle of the night to vivisect you... no screaming that can be heard, just your open, silent mouth while your heart's removed.
Real drama? How about, after battling all of your supernatural disasters, coming home and finding your mother dead of a simple aneurysm, and all of your knowledge and power can't help. Imagine all of your superstrength doing is making your dead mother's ribs snap as you attempt CPR on her chilly corpse.
Moral quandries? How would you cope with a choice between saving the world, killing your sister, or hoping you'd find a way through it? Or find a way to forgive your best friend who cold-bloodedly murdered an evil, possibly deserving person? Theological concerns, actual comedy, real character growth besides puberty, a worthwhile musical sung by the cast, some story arcs which almost reach Babylon 5 lengths, surprises and shocks, etc.
They're ultimately multi-leveled shows. You can get action, cute chicks (Eliza Dushku, mrow!), and some cheap laughs, if that's all you want, with some nifty special effects. You've also got things to think about if you want: moral decisions in a world which is not the clear-cut black and white of most shows. These are shows which actually have something to analyze, check out www.slayage.tv if you don't believe me.
I was captured by Buffy right off - here was a show with more characters to relate to than the meandering X-Files, just as weird as Twin Peaks without having to wonder what the hell Lynch was thinking about when he had the dwarf talking backwards. Its spinoff, Angel, has finally matured into a different, but still good, television series with its own concerns. Watch the first two seasons of Buffy - if you don't get it by then, it's not for you.
But, please... no Charmed comparison. Borrowing the Love Spit Love cover of "How Soon Is Now?" from The Craft was a bad enough start to the series. Earth: Final Conflict was... well, I really tried to hook into that series, but I could never bond with the main characters, who were ultimately interchangeable, and the Taelons bugged me... they made me think of what drag queens would evolve into a few million years hence. I haven't seen Andromeda, so I cannot lay any judgment on it.
While latter-era Buffy and Angel both suffered with Whedon being stretched too thin, the man has a real gift for dialogue, comedy, and story arcs. He's not without flaw, but I'd rather see his worst work than 99% of the shows on the air these days. Any sensible studio executive ("invisible pink unicorn") would say, "Star Trek sucks now... how about making it work for the fans for once?" I have my as-yet-unwatched Firefly DVDs waiting for the holiday break. I bought them sight-unseen, if that tells you anything about what I think his talent is.
I am quite sure I will be moderated into chilly oblivion for this, but, ow. I hate to say it, but this is journalism so yellow that I think Rob needs a liver function test - his jaundice is showing.
Problems using the keyboard? Want to use the mouse instead? Wow - it's as if the keyboard is no longer good enough for cut and paste. Of course, Windows gives you that option of using the mouse. If anything slows me down, it's using the mouse, not the keyboard.
Banging on mIRC, well, who doesn't hate that program? Trying to use a chat interface that is only slightly less painful than telnetting directly to port 6666 and somehow painting Microsoft Windows with it does not seem like a balanced comparison. Hell, there's even CLI versions of ircii ported to Win32 if you want them - I know of two.
The reason the suits push Outlook and Exchange as a package is not Outlook Express and email - it's all of the little featurey things they so adore... task lists, contacts, notes, things that give business people some kind of meaning to their lives, aside from stealing staplers. Hence, your average email client doesn't really fill those needs.
Can't find the clock? Weird - it's right in the corner - when I have trained a seventy year old woman to look for, well, text to actually read and to click on, I'm pretty sure Rob can do that.
Acting like there is somehow a bare handful of users who must use Windows-only programs is, well, naive. A lot of businesses have third party software that is tied to Windows, sad but true.
Don't like Notepad? Not featurey enough? Well, when I want to feel like Mister Fancypants, I find TextPad a pretty nice program.
That little bit of faux sagacious advice about looking for Linux-compatible hardware is cute, but a Mac comparison is silly. Be honest - most generic PC hardware manufacturers make Windows compatibility a number one priority. Oh, then Windows 98. And Windows ME. Linux priority number? How about FreeBSD? Well, that number might take two bytes to store it.
Want to complain about patches? Fine... let's teach Sally the Secretary to recompile the kernel. I can see that happening REAL SOON NOW.
FUD, in either direction, doesn't do anyone any favors nor is it good journalism.
YahElite was also prevented from working, maybe about a month ago, but as of last week, the updates allow YahElite to once again function with the Yahoo network.
Yahoo is alright, it's nice that they have sort of a directory structure to build the rooms off of (I still have a hard time not saying "channel"), and the lack of published IP address prevents people from trying to nuke your box directly, but its standard client is the buggiest, cobbled-together piece of crap. It combines the worst elements of very old-school HTML with C in that you can actually tag things to cause, well, I don't know about buffer overflows, but something that will lock the program up, and pretty easily. Certainly, nobody programming it learned the lessons taught by IRC. Worse yet, it has built-in ad space. FLASH ad space, enormous Flash ads guaranteed to send my pitiful processor to the ceiling. I don't mind paying a little mindshare and eye real estate to pay for the service, but it has to leave my computer at the least functional. Messenger is so wretched in terms of stability that someone has written a now pay-for program to bolt over the IM client so that it does not crumple at the slightest sign of trouble.
There is, of course, a Java IM client written by Yahoo, but its functionality is limited. More importantly, it's annoying and slow.
In short, it's not just the uninteroperability (to coin a bad word) of the default clients that drives people to third-party clients, it's the fact that, even if you were only using one network, most of these clients SUCK. These large companies could wipe out the third party guys if they spent a fraction of what they use to lawyer on, oh, serious programming with an eye towards reliability and user interface issues, rather than alluring gee-gaws that end up being more irritating than useful.
A Deepness In The Sky is something of a prequel to this. I didn't much care for it, as it discarded some of the more exciting concepts of A Fire Upon the Deep. I was always fascinated by The Transcend.
To the author of this article, Vinge does have short stories which specifically relate to the Tines that are pretty decent. It's not the only time you'll see well-designed groupminds, like in Charles Sheffield's (sp?) The Mind Pool (which has more than one title). Still, the Tines are fun.
The Peace War and its sequel, Marooned in Realtime, are good for Singularity-addicts and your posthumanist types, especially the latter book. I can't speak to Vinge's other work, such as True Names.
... exactly what it is for which they should be looking.
If this is fusion, and we look up the basic fusion definition, we should get helium (He-3 or He-4) from the fusion of hydrogen (unless they skip some steps and get something heavier).
The assumption that either neutrons or heat should be produced is based on our only working example of fusion, good ole Sol. Nice and hot, emits neutrons in bits.
Clearly, if cold fusion exists (and that is a big if), it wouldn't be a process remotely like what goes on in the Sun. The only part we can assume is the definition: helium as a product. Heat and neutrons are relatively easy to detect, but that's the wrong thing to hunt.
NPR mentioned, many years ago, someone attempting an experiment using a sealed stainless steel reaction chamber with a single gas sample port, hoping to find concentrations of helium greater than what would be found in the atmosphere, also compared against another control cannister heated with the same contents (minus the heavy water) to the same degree. This seems more reasonable.
Cold fusion (should it exist), may have some very unusual pathways that we might not know about to produce the result. Focus on the product, not the pathways.
It's worth pointing out that Hawking Radiation has never been observed. It's theoretical. We've got some really solid evidence for the existence of black holes. We don't have anything for Hawking Radiation.
Not long ago, I attended a symposium where the presenter made a decent case, using some of the same arguments from QM that Hawking used, plus some other bits (sorry, don't have the notes), that Hawking Radiation would actually be forbidden by other physical laws. While the stuff at Ph.D. level and beyond me, it wasn't for the rest of the audience - and they couldn't poke any holes in it right away. Or by the end of the Q and A session.
Is it fringe? Sure. Be nice to verify, though, in the face of what could be a world-ending event. If black holes exist sans Hawking Radiation, we'd be in quite a bit of trouble upon the production of even the smallest one. Probably wise to check that little problem out. I'm not advising doing anything wacky and superparanoid, like building it on the Moon
Scientific method is great, but when it comes to doing planet-wide experiments, you get a sample size of 1 and no control group. Oh, and no "do-overs." This is Chicken Little, signing off.
I could yammer on and on why I like Farscape, points you've all heard before about, hey, finally we have aliens who don't just look like people with a little makeup on their foreheads, and whatnot, but I'd like to bring up two things:
1) You know the Sci Fi Channel is full of it. Okay, so maybe the show cost a little to produce. Heck, maybe it even cost a lot to produce. But, if there was some kind of funding shortfall, I'm pretty sure that just one of those godawful Sci Fi Original Movies would have paid for it. Take Epoch or Antibody. I'm under the impression that the Sci Fi Channel actually pays people to put out these films. If so, the budget from one of two of these forgettable disasters could easily cover a Farscape shortfall.
2) This is the end of it for me and the Sci Fi Channel. First, the end of MST3K. Well, I'll live. I was kind of peeved about them cutting off The Invisible Man, which had been a much better series than I had intended. Farscape is now the last show they have that I'm interested in. They're replacing it with Tracker... hey, this guy, with superpowers like... sucks light out of the bad guys, at least one an episode. Same guy as Highlander. Same show as Highlander. Oh, and let's not forget Tremors: The Series, which was supposed to be cheap, but is months late because it ran over budget, etc. And this is going to be better than Farscape how?
The Sci Fi Channel has totally lost its mission and has no sense of who its viewers are. How does a remake of Psycho belong on a channel about science fiction? And that Viper show... wow. They couldn't rerun The Flash? Where's Max Headroom in this lineup? It had a short run, but no shorter than the incessantly-played (if still good) Brimstone. The most sci-fi thing they have going for them now, aside from Stargate: SG-1 is, well, their little station bits with the melting sumo wrestlers and big-eared alien tongue-touching pets.
It's as if they have decided to stop running decent science fiction shows in exchange for... vaguely sciency programming that cost them a dollar to buy the rights for. They no longer understand who their audience is. Once the last show I cared to watch is gone, I doubt I'll do more than flicker over the station on my cable box. Goodbye, Sci Fi. Goodbye, Advertising Dollars.
That having been said, I'm going to run out and buy some Farscape DVDs. Here's hoping for a movie or a six-episode wrapup show released straight to DVD.
Inferno is one of my favorites, which I have endlessly analyzed.
I'll take a stab at it. By using the passphrase, "This has been willed where what is willed must be," Benito moved throughout Hell with grace, good, old-fashioned divine grace. That is, if he is doing a correct and just thing, he may move freely. Because he is at least partially redeemed, he has the touch of divine grace upon him. And, rather, you should capitalize it: this has been Willed where what is Willed must be.
Hell is purely a manifestation of God's Will. Benito merely reminds God's fallen angels, who still serve a purpose, that they are getting in the way of that Will.
We see the same divine grace given to Carpentier, who, at the end, can see better than before, and will probably attain Benito's unnatural strength.
If anything, more projects like this need to happen, and not just be available in book form, but also posted on domains with some authority (such as nasa.gov).
There are endless amounts of cranks out there who believe in things like "Creation Science." Their arguments should be collected and brutally refuted, using logic, and, more importantly, using evidence of experiments, with actual citations to real paper documents. By now, a lot of people "get" that any crackpot can put up a webpage, cheaply - what is true? Paper still costs, and is frequently peer-reviewed if it is a science journal, thus making entry for people who aren't willing to think difficult.
Similar efforts need to be made for things like special relativity. SR has a special place in the hearts of crackpots who really want Star Trek and warp drives. Despite the fact that time dilation, Lorentz contraction, etc., have all been seen, time and again, on the beamline, these people use arguments based on highly convoluted logic because many of them are ignorant of the fact that real evidence exists for these phenomena. Often, their arguments are simply too long to dissect - reality is a much better refutation.
Most of your crackpots and Usenet kooks have "logical arguments" which tend to fall into very specific categories. The Creation Science types like to haul out some quotes about 1950's science and show how wrong it is (such as having stars older than the Universe - a common tactic). The standard arguments, if properly cataloged, could be neatly dissected.
I know most of you don't buy into this, but there are a lot of people driving around with little Truth fish on the backs of their cars eating Darwin fish-with-feet. A good chunk of the public doesn't believe in evolution at all, thanks to radically out of date textbooks and, well, Oklahoma's assault on science in general in the late 90's.
The sooner information like this is disseminated to the public, the faster we can get back to sanity and progress.
will old hardware and software combinations (say a PIII running Windows 2000) be able to view/listen to/use the new DRM'd stuff? Or is whatever the DRM bit of media is encrypted in something you need DRM-compliant hardware/software to open?
I may end up buying a LOT of P4s in a big, big hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, dandy idea if I'm running a box with five sites in my basement on the cheap.
If I am trying to maintain major sites with totals of millions of hits per day, it not only takes longer to restart due to all of the sites I'm hosting, but that means that a lot of people will be peeved that it is down.
I just got started with Apache, but the idea that I have to restart the Apache server to add a new Web site is just shocking. Additionally, the documentation (as well as numerous books) aren't particularly clear if people are getting all kinds of 404s during this restarting time. Aside from having to restart when adding ISAPI filters, I never have to restart IIS. I get that "Apache needs to reload and reparse the configuration," but, c'mon. If IIS can do it ...
Of course, you'd want a fuzzy logic trigger of some sort - not just a single thing to set it off.
You'd want the files encrypted, so that, with just a handful of bytes per file corrupted, cracking the encryption would be trouble.
I'd like to know what the "chemical mist" is.
We had a slashdot article on this very thing many, many years ago. 1999? 2000? It was pointed out that using explosives could get you a nice criminal charge, and using most serious acids could also allow you to be creatively charged. Someone suggested an acid (and named) an acid that would work nicely on the top layer of the platters but be harmless to human skin.
Any ideas?
I'm not rah-rah open source and I'm not a GPL zealot. However, Linux needs some scalps hanging from its belt.
What I mean is - Linux, the GPL, open source, all of that will not be taken as seriously as it should be by the corporate types until a major corporation (like SCO) has tangled with it and lost. Lost in a big, final, CEO-fired, flaming-destruction, closing doors, company selling its Aeron chairs kind of way. This would facilitate the kind of hushed whispers that would ensue whenever someone suggested trying to take over, or incorporate code and then lie about it. "You don't want to do that, Mr. PHB - you know what happened to SCO, right?"
I think this technology will really take off once it can produce shapes using latex, gel, or rubber. And you can go into a booth and have something made anonymously. Once people figure out there are sexual applications to this ... well, the "Make-A-Dildo" software will be more popular than TurboTax in March. I'm only half kidding.
So, can we use this to FINALLY get a quasi-reasonable head-mounted displays?
I've always thought that one of the two reasons that wearables haven't really hit the mainstream was that the HMD's seemed to come with some weirdass resolution like 312 x 214 or some such nonsense. Aside from the obvious input issues, wearables are stunted by the number of freaky custom parts. HMD's with 15pin cables, let's go!
Most people have the following mental metaphor associated with quantum entanglement and FTL data transmission: imagine two people, set roughly a light year apart. By some fun coincidence, their planets are moving in the same direction at the same time. Now, imagine a perfectly rigid rod that runs between the two observers - Alice has an UP arrow on one end and Bob has a DOWN arrow on his. Simply by rotating the rod up and down, the perfectly rigid rod transmits the information instantaneously from one planet to another. Up is now down, down is now up. Have a few of them for control channels ... whammo! FTL data transmission.
... TAILS! Hence, Alice must have the HEAD face.
... but Alice doesn't know that until Bob calls her on his pitiful sublight telephone system. "Hi, Alice, I have the TAIL face, so you must have the head." Sure, the wave function collapsed all the way across the galaxy, but Alice doesn't know that. Bob has to call her ... on a sublight channel. If he had a superlight channel, then we wouldn't need this nonsense. Catch-22, as someone else mentioned.
Sadly, this is COMPLETELY WRONG.
Instead, Alice and Bob meet on Earth. Alice pulls out a quarter and drops it into this machine. The machine randomly rotates the quarter and then splits it perfectly in half, with the HEAD face rolling one way and the TAIL face rolling the other way. These roll down a little rail into boxes that neither Alice nor Bob can see into.
Bob leaves, with his box via rocketship to a comfy planet off of Sirius. They've calculated all of the relativistic effects of this journey and have their clocks synchronized to account for this. Bob opens his box and finds
That is what entanglement looks like, with some fun quantum stuff. Until they opened the box, each box existed in both states, partially, having 1/2 HEAD and 1/2 TAIL probabilities. That's your spooky quantum stuff, right there. Opening the box definitely determines that Alice has the HEAD face when Bob has his TAIL face of the quarter. It has absolutely determined it.
But you can't use that to FTL information about. Whoever opens the box first collapses the wave function. It's over. If Bob has TAILS, he knows Alice has HEADS
And so, quantum entanglement is not useful for this.
... is that it is the ultimate straw man.
It's the most ridiculous possible argument against nanotech. It's like being afraid that a nuclear reactor will turn the Earth into the Sun. And once everyone dispels the straw man argument, we go happily about our merry way, la la la, it's nothing to worry about.
Let me give you some scary: nanobots that go down to the bottom of the ocean and mess with the clathrates, spilling all of that methane out into the atmosphere - there's enough energy there to get that done. Nanobots burrowing into the Earth's crust along fault lines in a long chain, using the temperature gradient to make a heat engine in order to drive any kind of mucking about with tectonic plates. Nanobots carefully and quietly sabotaging subtle but key parts of the ecology.
It's easier to destroy than to create. And nanobots would be able to replicate, with probably greater (but not much) efficiency, anything you could dream up via genetic engineering, because nanotech is going to look a lot like biology plus some nifty physics. And it will be a biology freed from some of the constraints and old hacks Nature imposed.. They could also use physical properties perhaps not accessible to mere biology - how about something really wacky, like point fusion? Nature did a lot of clever tricks, but there's much optimization that could be done.
Yes, grey goo can't be taken seriously, due to physical constraints. The bad guys don't need to destroy the entire planet - they just need to make it unlivable so that $MESSIAH can come. And it wouldn't be tough to spend a few afternoons dreaming up doomsday applications that are not energy intensive.
Just remember the code: CPE1704TKS
This paragraph pretty clearly states why the Slashdot editors should try to seek permission, or at least alert the site owners, before linking. We all think it is cute when a site bursts into flames as we all hit it simultaneously, but a lot of small businesses, hobbyists, and so forth, cannot afford to have some giant T3s attached to the latest and best clustered servers on the off-chance that Slashdot would link to them.
However, when it does happen, it's like a Lottery of Suck: sites go down, fees get hiked, business could be lost. A great deal of Slashdotters work for small businesses who simply could not withstand the hit.
Nor is there a good excuse to NOT warn first, just the eagerness to "get the big scoop" on a site that is only vaguely journalistic. Slashdot could offer a "why don't we cache this page for you?" or ask for permission to reprint a page. It seems like the fair thing to do.
Before you laugh, consider that people have made modules for Apache, last I saw, specifically to deal with sudden slashdotting by throttling based on referrer. Now, if the open source community sees a need for it, it probably is a valid need.
... but my data plan involves marching UP the food chain, skipping every other generation.
I'll be backing my audio CDs (and probably data) up to Blu-Ray drives when they become cheap enough. I figure I may get something on the order of 70 CDs (sans compression) on a Blu-Ray. I'll be doing it with file manifests containing both MD5 and SHA checksums, with three copies of each Blu-Ray. If the checksums don't "check out" on a given disk (and they'll probably be on a by-file basis, by-directory, or some convenient aggregator), I'll switch to one of the other Blu-Rays.
I've skipped DVDs here - you could only get about, what, 7 CDs worth on one (not counting the dual-layer burners coming out). I'll be backing up my DVDs onto whatever comes after Blu-Ray.
By leapfrogging generations, I won't be stuck with inefficiently sized backups. My CD collection would fit on a few dozen Blu-Rays. By moving UP the food chain, I'm guaranteeing that, 20 years from now, I'm not copying thousands of CDs all over again.
Yeah, I'll have to write some software for it. Sure, I'll be using FLAC for the audio (with some OGGs for lossy-but-useful files). Will I be scanning in CD and DVD covers? You betcha. Are those checksums going to take a lot of CPU time? Yeah. But if you're serious about preserving your rare data, why not? How many old LPs didn't make it to CD? How many of your favorite CDs won't make it to a new audio format?
A box with a wall-plug is great if you aren't considering doing this again in a decade. CD duplicators, however, are the wrong solution to an archival problem. In twenty years, when you have to copy all over again, who will be making CD duplicators? Remember, kids, they just stopped making BetaMax VCRs. It'll be mighty hard to copy your BetaMax tapes in the future.
I strongly suggest that anyone who is into this sort of work check out Seth Lloyd's Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation. It's quite interesting. I saw him speak a few years ago. People had told me that we would "always find a way" to increase computation, which seemed like utter silliness to me. I'm glad to see that some folks are a little more sensible about this.
2) It has a genetic component. It's trackable in the genome. Hey, it even shows up on a PET scan, for those of you non-believers. "It's just something they're making up" does not show up on a PET scan.
3) ADHD can be easily overdiagnosed. I tend not to trust diagnoses made without the use of a CPT (Continuous Performance Test) or a TOVA (Test Of Variables of Attention). These are real performance tests, not answering some questions.
4) I know a guy who did some large project on the way to his Ph.D. in psychology on using biofeedback for ADHD. He had ADHD and the subject was of interest to him. Basically, he found that people with ADHD couldn't maintain the focus to make biofeedback work. Biofeedback can be very useful, but, to use a loose analogy, in this instance it is like having someone try to build up their biceps through weightlifting if they are paralyzed from the neck down.
In fact, you are missing quite a bit. Granted, you actually have to watch Buffy from, oh, about the end of the first season on to "get it," Angel you could pass on until the middle of the second season - they require some time investment.
What are you missing out on? Fun, linguistically "hip" dialogue and multileveled jokes. Nod if you get "She makes Godot look punctual." Whedon, being a fool for the Bard, has a lot of references he uses, particularly in regards to names - Cordelia, in King Lear, was a outspoken, blunt princess - not too far off the mark on Buffy. There's in-jokes if you want them.
You want chilly, scary scenes? Try "Hush," middle of season four. Imagine a town that has all lost their voices. Now imagine someone coming for you in the middle of the night to vivisect you ... no screaming that can be heard, just your open, silent mouth while your heart's removed.
Real drama? How about, after battling all of your supernatural disasters, coming home and finding your mother dead of a simple aneurysm, and all of your knowledge and power can't help. Imagine all of your superstrength doing is making your dead mother's ribs snap as you attempt CPR on her chilly corpse.
Moral quandries? How would you cope with a choice between saving the world, killing your sister, or hoping you'd find a way through it? Or find a way to forgive your best friend who cold-bloodedly murdered an evil, possibly deserving person? Theological concerns, actual comedy, real character growth besides puberty, a worthwhile musical sung by the cast, some story arcs which almost reach Babylon 5 lengths, surprises and shocks, etc.
They're ultimately multi-leveled shows. You can get action, cute chicks (Eliza Dushku, mrow!), and some cheap laughs, if that's all you want, with some nifty special effects. You've also got things to think about if you want: moral decisions in a world which is not the clear-cut black and white of most shows. These are shows which actually have something to analyze, check out www.slayage.tv if you don't believe me.
I was captured by Buffy right off - here was a show with more characters to relate to than the meandering X-Files, just as weird as Twin Peaks without having to wonder what the hell Lynch was thinking about when he had the dwarf talking backwards. Its spinoff, Angel, has finally matured into a different, but still good, television series with its own concerns. Watch the first two seasons of Buffy - if you don't get it by then, it's not for you.
But, please ... no Charmed comparison. Borrowing the Love Spit Love cover of "How Soon Is Now?" from The Craft was a bad enough start to the series. Earth: Final Conflict was ... well, I really tried to hook into that series, but I could never bond with the main characters, who were ultimately interchangeable, and the Taelons bugged me ... they made me think of what drag queens would evolve into a few million years hence. I haven't seen Andromeda, so I cannot lay any judgment on it.
While latter-era Buffy and Angel both suffered with Whedon being stretched too thin, the man has a real gift for dialogue, comedy, and story arcs. He's not without flaw, but I'd rather see his worst work than 99% of the shows on the air these days. Any sensible studio executive ("invisible pink unicorn") would say, "Star Trek sucks now ... how about making it work for the fans for once?" I have my as-yet-unwatched Firefly DVDs waiting for the holiday break. I bought them sight-unseen, if that tells you anything about what I think his talent is.
I am quite sure I will be moderated into chilly oblivion for this, but, ow. I hate to say it, but this is journalism so yellow that I think Rob needs a liver function test - his jaundice is showing.
Problems using the keyboard? Want to use the mouse instead? Wow - it's as if the keyboard is no longer good enough for cut and paste. Of course, Windows gives you that option of using the mouse. If anything slows me down, it's using the mouse, not the keyboard.
Banging on mIRC, well, who doesn't hate that program? Trying to use a chat interface that is only slightly less painful than telnetting directly to port 6666 and somehow painting Microsoft Windows with it does not seem like a balanced comparison. Hell, there's even CLI versions of ircii ported to Win32 if you want them - I know of two.
The reason the suits push Outlook and Exchange as a package is not Outlook Express and email - it's all of the little featurey things they so adore ... task lists, contacts, notes, things that give business people some kind of meaning to their lives, aside from stealing staplers. Hence, your average email client doesn't really fill those needs.
Can't find the clock? Weird - it's right in the corner - when I have trained a seventy year old woman to look for, well, text to actually read and to click on, I'm pretty sure Rob can do that.
Acting like there is somehow a bare handful of users who must use Windows-only programs is, well, naive. A lot of businesses have third party software that is tied to Windows, sad but true.
Don't like Notepad? Not featurey enough? Well, when I want to feel like Mister Fancypants, I find TextPad a pretty nice program.
That little bit of faux sagacious advice about looking for Linux-compatible hardware is cute, but a Mac comparison is silly. Be honest - most generic PC hardware manufacturers make Windows compatibility a number one priority. Oh, then Windows 98. And Windows ME. Linux priority number? How about FreeBSD? Well, that number might take two bytes to store it.
Want to complain about patches? Fine ... let's teach Sally the Secretary to recompile the kernel. I can see that happening REAL SOON NOW.
FUD, in either direction, doesn't do anyone any favors nor is it good journalism.
YahElite was also prevented from working, maybe about a month ago, but as of last week, the updates allow YahElite to once again function with the Yahoo network.
Yahoo is alright, it's nice that they have sort of a directory structure to build the rooms off of (I still have a hard time not saying "channel"), and the lack of published IP address prevents people from trying to nuke your box directly, but its standard client is the buggiest, cobbled-together piece of crap. It combines the worst elements of very old-school HTML with C in that you can actually tag things to cause, well, I don't know about buffer overflows, but something that will lock the program up, and pretty easily. Certainly, nobody programming it learned the lessons taught by IRC. Worse yet, it has built-in ad space. FLASH ad space, enormous Flash ads guaranteed to send my pitiful processor to the ceiling. I don't mind paying a little mindshare and eye real estate to pay for the service, but it has to leave my computer at the least functional. Messenger is so wretched in terms of stability that someone has written a now pay-for program to bolt over the IM client so that it does not crumple at the slightest sign of trouble.
There is, of course, a Java IM client written by Yahoo, but its functionality is limited. More importantly, it's annoying and slow.
In short, it's not just the uninteroperability (to coin a bad word) of the default clients that drives people to third-party clients, it's the fact that, even if you were only using one network, most of these clients SUCK. These large companies could wipe out the third party guys if they spent a fraction of what they use to lawyer on, oh, serious programming with an eye towards reliability and user interface issues, rather than alluring gee-gaws that end up being more irritating than useful.
A Deepness In The Sky is something of a prequel to this. I didn't much care for it, as it discarded some of the more exciting concepts of A Fire Upon the Deep. I was always fascinated by The Transcend.
To the author of this article, Vinge does have short stories which specifically relate to the Tines that are pretty decent. It's not the only time you'll see well-designed groupminds, like in Charles Sheffield's (sp?) The Mind Pool (which has more than one title). Still, the Tines are fun.
The Peace War and its sequel, Marooned in Realtime, are good for Singularity-addicts and your posthumanist types, especially the latter book. I can't speak to Vinge's other work, such as True Names.
If this is fusion, and we look up the basic fusion definition, we should get helium (He-3 or He-4) from the fusion of hydrogen (unless they skip some steps and get something heavier).
The assumption that either neutrons or heat should be produced is based on our only working example of fusion, good ole Sol. Nice and hot, emits neutrons in bits.
Clearly, if cold fusion exists (and that is a big if), it wouldn't be a process remotely like what goes on in the Sun. The only part we can assume is the definition: helium as a product. Heat and neutrons are relatively easy to detect, but that's the wrong thing to hunt.
NPR mentioned, many years ago, someone attempting an experiment using a sealed stainless steel reaction chamber with a single gas sample port, hoping to find concentrations of helium greater than what would be found in the atmosphere, also compared against another control cannister heated with the same contents (minus the heavy water) to the same degree. This seems more reasonable.
Cold fusion (should it exist), may have some very unusual pathways that we might not know about to produce the result. Focus on the product, not the pathways.
Not long ago, I attended a symposium where the presenter made a decent case, using some of the same arguments from QM that Hawking used, plus some other bits (sorry, don't have the notes), that Hawking Radiation would actually be forbidden by other physical laws. While the stuff at Ph.D. level and beyond me, it wasn't for the rest of the audience - and they couldn't poke any holes in it right away. Or by the end of the Q and A session.
Is it fringe? Sure. Be nice to verify, though, in the face of what could be a world-ending event. If black holes exist sans Hawking Radiation, we'd be in quite a bit of trouble upon the production of even the smallest one. Probably wise to check that little problem out. I'm not advising doing anything wacky and superparanoid, like building it on the Moon
Scientific method is great, but when it comes to doing planet-wide experiments, you get a sample size of 1 and no control group. Oh, and no "do-overs." This is Chicken Little, signing off.
1) You know the Sci Fi Channel is full of it. Okay, so maybe the show cost a little to produce. Heck, maybe it even cost a lot to produce. But, if there was some kind of funding shortfall, I'm pretty sure that just one of those godawful Sci Fi Original Movies would have paid for it. Take Epoch or Antibody. I'm under the impression that the Sci Fi Channel actually pays people to put out these films. If so, the budget from one of two of these forgettable disasters could easily cover a Farscape shortfall.
2) This is the end of it for me and the Sci Fi Channel. First, the end of MST3K. Well, I'll live. I was kind of peeved about them cutting off The Invisible Man, which had been a much better series than I had intended. Farscape is now the last show they have that I'm interested in. They're replacing it with Tracker ... hey, this guy, with superpowers like ... sucks light out of the bad guys, at least one an episode. Same guy as Highlander. Same show as Highlander. Oh, and let's not forget Tremors: The Series, which was supposed to be cheap, but is months late because it ran over budget, etc. And this is going to be better than Farscape how?
The Sci Fi Channel has totally lost its mission and has no sense of who its viewers are. How does a remake of Psycho belong on a channel about science fiction? And that Viper show ... wow. They couldn't rerun The Flash? Where's Max Headroom in this lineup? It had a short run, but no shorter than the incessantly-played (if still good) Brimstone. The most sci-fi thing they have going for them now, aside from Stargate: SG-1 is, well, their little station bits with the melting sumo wrestlers and big-eared alien tongue-touching pets.
It's as if they have decided to stop running decent science fiction shows in exchange for ... vaguely sciency programming that cost them a dollar to buy the rights for. They no longer understand who their audience is. Once the last show I cared to watch is gone, I doubt I'll do more than flicker over the station on my cable box. Goodbye, Sci Fi. Goodbye, Advertising Dollars.
That having been said, I'm going to run out and buy some Farscape DVDs. Here's hoping for a movie or a six-episode wrapup show released straight to DVD.
I'll take a stab at it. By using the passphrase, "This has been willed where what is willed must be," Benito moved throughout Hell with grace, good, old-fashioned divine grace. That is, if he is doing a correct and just thing, he may move freely. Because he is at least partially redeemed, he has the touch of divine grace upon him. And, rather, you should capitalize it: this has been Willed where what is Willed must be.
Hell is purely a manifestation of God's Will. Benito merely reminds God's fallen angels, who still serve a purpose, that they are getting in the way of that Will.
We see the same divine grace given to Carpentier, who, at the end, can see better than before, and will probably attain Benito's unnatural strength.
I'm pretty sure this guy was the lawyer for Bernie Shifman about eighteen months ago.
There are endless amounts of cranks out there who believe in things like "Creation Science." Their arguments should be collected and brutally refuted, using logic, and, more importantly, using evidence of experiments, with actual citations to real paper documents. By now, a lot of people "get" that any crackpot can put up a webpage, cheaply - what is true? Paper still costs, and is frequently peer-reviewed if it is a science journal, thus making entry for people who aren't willing to think difficult.
Similar efforts need to be made for things like special relativity. SR has a special place in the hearts of crackpots who really want Star Trek and warp drives. Despite the fact that time dilation, Lorentz contraction, etc., have all been seen, time and again, on the beamline, these people use arguments based on highly convoluted logic because many of them are ignorant of the fact that real evidence exists for these phenomena. Often, their arguments are simply too long to dissect - reality is a much better refutation.
Most of your crackpots and Usenet kooks have "logical arguments" which tend to fall into very specific categories. The Creation Science types like to haul out some quotes about 1950's science and show how wrong it is (such as having stars older than the Universe - a common tactic). The standard arguments, if properly cataloged, could be neatly dissected.
I know most of you don't buy into this, but there are a lot of people driving around with little Truth fish on the backs of their cars eating Darwin fish-with-feet. A good chunk of the public doesn't believe in evolution at all, thanks to radically out of date textbooks and, well, Oklahoma's assault on science in general in the late 90's.
The sooner information like this is disseminated to the public, the faster we can get back to sanity and progress.
I may end up buying a LOT of P4s in a big, big hurry.