A lot of people here seem to want the courts to only convict people of murder when there is absolute certainty of guilt. The trouble is, certainty doesn't exist.
An erroneous murder conviction is a horrible thing, but you have to remember that an erroneous acquittal is really bad too. As a society, we have to come to terms with the fact that we have to weight these two potential evils against each other and make decisions even when we're not sure what's right.
Seconded. We never came anywhere near encryption in my intro to discrete math class (as I recall, that class was mostly basic combinatorics and graph theory).
The textbook for my number theory class was Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective by Richard Crandall and Carl Pomerance. It covers the basics of number theory while covering a wide variety of essential number theoretic algorithms (prime and pseudo-prime tests, factoring and discrete log algorithms, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, RSA, elliptic curve cryptosystems, and a large chapter on algorithms for large-integer arithmetic).
Would it be possible to use a weaker reader and use it like a metal detector?
If you could just tag items based on where they belong then you could sweep through the house looking for items that should be in a particular place. I think the submitter would be satisfied with something that would just speed up searches for items rather than needing absolute positioning of all items in the house.
I believe that the main point of "Brave New World" was that naive utilitarianism (using happiness as the metric of what is and isn't good) could result in a society that we would find repulsive.
I believe that basing a society on any metric that does not include a concept of human dignity leads to the Huxleyian trap.
I think it's wisest to try to avoid any scenarios that entail medical facilities that resemble slaughterhouses. That seems to be the direction some people seem to be steering the conversation. I'm not even sure why people keep bringing up the headless bodies in vats thing when technologies like organ printing may be possible within our lifetimes.
I figured that they were probably talking about a mass of undifferentiated cells, but I don't think that dismisses all questions here.
I have no problem with stem-cells being collected from an embryoblast to create a culture. However, if the cells of a zygote or embryoblast are genetically modified in place without disrupting its structure so that it would develop into an embryo if allowed to proceed along its current course then it falls into a gray area. The article doesn't make it clear exactly what was done.
Exactly how long should something that could conceivably be brought to term, but which we would not want to see brought to term be kept around?
If you reduce all ethical questions to their impact on the conscious experiences of humans, you're going to end up wandering into "Brave New World" territory.
So the exact same file should change sizes depending on if it is read into RAM or not? Pretending not to understand someone else's argument doesn't make it invalid.
I understand that internally many things are aligned along 1024 byte boundaries. I don't see why that should be considered relevant to the end user. The machine exists to serve me and any time it displays information in a format that is inconvenient for me, the machine has failed.
I'll only change my opinion on this if it can be demonstrated that displaying file and storage capacity sizes in binary measurements benefits the user.
People can call 1024 byte units whatever they want when they are working with things that are organized into 1024 byte units, but please just let the rest of us who are working with data in all sorts of odd sizes call a million bytes a MB.
If something says a file is n GB then in a just and reasonable world the actual size of the file would always be a 10+int(log n) digit number that is closer to n*10^9 than it is to (n+1)*10^9 or (n-1)*10^9.
I do not think I am unreasonable for expecting this and by extension, I believe that you are unreasonable for suggesting that this should not be so.
When will we computer geeks get over this obsession with binary memory measurements.
Using the binary units makes referring to RAM capacities easier and makes many other things (storage capacities and file sizes) clumsier to deal with. I suppose that OS internals also use 1024 bytes as a basic organizational unit, but that hardly seems relevant to the issue of whether a file labeled as 8GB should actually be 8 billion bytes or 8.6 billion bytes.
Everyone around here seems to hate tradition for tradition's sake unless it's a computer related tradition. Congratulations, you've become what you hate and you didn't even realize it.
This decision only means that the law currently on the books can't be interpreted in the way the RIAA wants.
However, looking at the history of the RIAA's lobbying efforts, it's extremely likely that we'll soon be seeing a law that criminalizes making copyrighted files available.
I wasn't impressed with that one either. You could do it by setting up two ripple sources so that the wave peaks will be out of phase when they reach a certain point. If both or neither ripple source is turned on, the water will be calm at that point, but if only one is turned on the camera will see ripples at the point.
IANAP but I believe the following is roughly correct:
The black hole emits Hawking radiation at a rate inversely proportional to its mass. At the same time, it can gain mass as stray particles wander into its event horizon. The rate at which stray particles wander into its event horizon is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon which is proportional to the square of its radius which is proportional to the black hole's mass.
If the rate at which particles wander in is greater than the rate of evaporation, it will grow. As it grows, the rate of evaporation will decrease and the rate at which stray particles wander in will increase, so if it starts growing, it's unlikely to stop growing until it consumes all of the matter available to it.
Keep in mind that a black hole on the atomic scale would evaporate almost instantly and would have an almost non-existant chance of encountering a single stray particle within its lifespan.
Here's the basic template for a South Park episode:
A social phenomenon is characterized as an imminent threat to the public. Stan and Kyle become embroiled in the issue. Cartman exacerbates the situation. In the end, it's revealed that the problem can be resolved by a glib solution.
I guess I was ahead of the curve on that trend. I included my name with all of the posts I made to Usenet as a teenager. So now I have to live with the unsettling knowledge that all of my ill-conceived schemes and dumbass philosophical musings will echo across eternity through the Google Usenet archive.
I could ask Google to delete them, but then the replies would still be in the archive, forever mocking me with their accurate assessments of the inadequacy of my ideas.
You need quantum entangled particles so that their states are always related, and no matter how far apart, when you mess with one particle, the other one instantly changes state accordingly.
Unfortunately a lot of quantum computing lecturers explain it in a misleading way to avoid bringing in the math, which can be kept fairly simple if you don't mind dealing with some relatively simple vector spaces (albeit with an oddball notation).
The two entangled particles form a system. This system has a quantum state represented by the state vector. This state vector is expressed as a linear combination of the vectors |00>, |01>, |10>, and |11>. |00> corresponds to both particles being in the 0 state, and you get the idea for the other vectors.
You can prepare a pair of particles so that their joint state vector is (|00>+|11>)/sqrt(2). That means that if you measure the two particles, there's a 50% chance you'll get two 0s and a 50% chance you'll get two 1s. It doesn't matter which order you measure them in because once you measure one, you know what the other one has to be and nature obligingly gives you the answer you expect when you measure the other one.
It's misleading to say that anything you do to one will happen to the other. A better way to think of it is that if you measure one of a pair of entangled particles, then the other one's value is constrained so that it can't contradict the first one.
You could take those two particles in the state (|00>+|11>)/sqrt(2) and perform a NOT operation on one of them. Then the state of the system is (|01>+|10>)/sqrt(2). You haven't changed the other particle, you've just changed their relationship and now they'll have opposite values when you measure them.
The way you use this for quantum teleportation is you perform an interaction between one of the entangled particles and the particle with the state you want to send, measure both of these particles, then send the results to the recipient who performs an operation on the other entangled particle based on the result of the measurements. All of this is set up so that the final state of the recipient's entangled particle is the original state of the particle to be sent.
You'll notice that in order to perform the teleportation, you have to communicate with the recipient by some other means, which means that even if you have an entangled pair of particles on Earth and Pluto, you can't use them to communicate instantly.
Entangled particles are a lot like one time pads in cryptography. With a one time pad, you make a secure delivery of n bits today and that lets you transmit n bits over an insecure channel as if it were secure at some point in the future. In quantum computing, you can split n pairs of qubits with someone today and then you have a mechanism for transmitting n qubits over a classical communication channel (internet, phone, yelling, etc.) at some point in the future.
The article makes it sound like this proves that natural selection isn't a stochastic process, but in a couple of places they contradict this. It wouldn't make sense for natural selection to be deterministic.
My understanding of natural selection is that it's more or less a random walk with drift toward a point determined by the nature of the selection pressures. Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that this new research shows that the drift term of the process is much larger than the error term, not that there is no error term.
The significance of this would be that if the error term were large enough, the process would be unlikely to converge to the point determined by the selective pressure.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people here seem to want the courts to only convict people of murder when there is absolute certainty of guilt. The trouble is, certainty doesn't exist.
An erroneous murder conviction is a horrible thing, but you have to remember that an erroneous acquittal is really bad too. As a society, we have to come to terms with the fact that we have to weight these two potential evils against each other and make decisions even when we're not sure what's right.
You'll never win an argument using logic unless the other person already agrees with you and just doesn't realize it yet.
Seconded. We never came anywhere near encryption in my intro to discrete math class (as I recall, that class was mostly basic combinatorics and graph theory).
The textbook for my number theory class was Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective by Richard Crandall and Carl Pomerance. It covers the basics of number theory while covering a wide variety of essential number theoretic algorithms (prime and pseudo-prime tests, factoring and discrete log algorithms, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, RSA, elliptic curve cryptosystems, and a large chapter on algorithms for large-integer arithmetic).
I really liked the battle system. It's kind of a cross between Paper Mario's timing based mechanics and Final Fantasy's active time battle system.
It shows some symptoms of fetch quest syndrome, but the combat, art style, and shear volume of amusing things to see kept it from dragging.
Overall it's a very enjoyable game and I'm looking forward to the next episode.
Would it be possible to use a weaker reader and use it like a metal detector?
If you could just tag items based on where they belong then you could sweep through the house looking for items that should be in a particular place. I think the submitter would be satisfied with something that would just speed up searches for items rather than needing absolute positioning of all items in the house.
Don't bother trying to communicate with them. They have their blinders on.
I believe that the main point of "Brave New World" was that naive utilitarianism (using happiness as the metric of what is and isn't good) could result in a society that we would find repulsive.
I believe that basing a society on any metric that does not include a concept of human dignity leads to the Huxleyian trap.
I think it's wisest to try to avoid any scenarios that entail medical facilities that resemble slaughterhouses. That seems to be the direction some people seem to be steering the conversation. I'm not even sure why people keep bringing up the headless bodies in vats thing when technologies like organ printing may be possible within our lifetimes.
I figured that they were probably talking about a mass of undifferentiated cells, but I don't think that dismisses all questions here.
I have no problem with stem-cells being collected from an embryoblast to create a culture. However, if the cells of a zygote or embryoblast are genetically modified in place without disrupting its structure so that it would develop into an embryo if allowed to proceed along its current course then it falls into a gray area. The article doesn't make it clear exactly what was done.
Exactly how long should something that could conceivably be brought to term, but which we would not want to see brought to term be kept around?
If you reduce all ethical questions to their impact on the conscious experiences of humans, you're going to end up wandering into "Brave New World" territory.
The usual kind.
I understand that internally many things are aligned along 1024 byte boundaries. I don't see why that should be considered relevant to the end user. The machine exists to serve me and any time it displays information in a format that is inconvenient for me, the machine has failed.
I'll only change my opinion on this if it can be demonstrated that displaying file and storage capacity sizes in binary measurements benefits the user.
People can call 1024 byte units whatever they want when they are working with things that are organized into 1024 byte units, but please just let the rest of us who are working with data in all sorts of odd sizes call a million bytes a MB.
The fact that this thing still lingers in end user software after decades of usability research is two-thirds of what makes this so annoying.
The other one-third is the people who keep on defending it.
If something says a file is n GB then in a just and reasonable world the actual size of the file would always be a 10+int(log n) digit number that is closer to n*10^9 than it is to (n+1)*10^9 or (n-1)*10^9.
I do not think I am unreasonable for expecting this and by extension, I believe that you are unreasonable for suggesting that this should not be so.
When will we computer geeks get over this obsession with binary memory measurements.
Using the binary units makes referring to RAM capacities easier and makes many other things (storage capacities and file sizes) clumsier to deal with. I suppose that OS internals also use 1024 bytes as a basic organizational unit, but that hardly seems relevant to the issue of whether a file labeled as 8GB should actually be 8 billion bytes or 8.6 billion bytes.
Everyone around here seems to hate tradition for tradition's sake unless it's a computer related tradition. Congratulations, you've become what you hate and you didn't even realize it.
It should be handled like emergency rooms. Treat everyone, bill everyone, collect from the ones who can afford to pay, and take a loss on the rest.
This decision only means that the law currently on the books can't be interpreted in the way the RIAA wants.
However, looking at the history of the RIAA's lobbying efforts, it's extremely likely that we'll soon be seeing a law that criminalizes making copyrighted files available.
I wasn't impressed with that one either. You could do it by setting up two ripple sources so that the wave peaks will be out of phase when they reach a certain point. If both or neither ripple source is turned on, the water will be calm at that point, but if only one is turned on the camera will see ripples at the point.
IANAP but I believe the following is roughly correct:
The black hole emits Hawking radiation at a rate inversely proportional to its mass. At the same time, it can gain mass as stray particles wander into its event horizon. The rate at which stray particles wander into its event horizon is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon which is proportional to the square of its radius which is proportional to the black hole's mass.
If the rate at which particles wander in is greater than the rate of evaporation, it will grow. As it grows, the rate of evaporation will decrease and the rate at which stray particles wander in will increase, so if it starts growing, it's unlikely to stop growing until it consumes all of the matter available to it.
Keep in mind that a black hole on the atomic scale would evaporate almost instantly and would have an almost non-existant chance of encountering a single stray particle within its lifespan.
Here's the basic template for a South Park episode:
A social phenomenon is characterized as an imminent threat to the public. Stan and Kyle become embroiled in the issue. Cartman exacerbates the situation. In the end, it's revealed that the problem can be resolved by a glib solution.
I guess I was ahead of the curve on that trend. I included my name with all of the posts I made to Usenet as a teenager. So now I have to live with the unsettling knowledge that all of my ill-conceived schemes and dumbass philosophical musings will echo across eternity through the Google Usenet archive.
I could ask Google to delete them, but then the replies would still be in the archive, forever mocking me with their accurate assessments of the inadequacy of my ideas.
At first I thought he was replying to himself too, but he's replying to the anonymous coward.
"Replying to the anonymous coward" ought to be a euphemism for something obscene but I'm not sure what.
Unfortunately a lot of quantum computing lecturers explain it in a misleading way to avoid bringing in the math, which can be kept fairly simple if you don't mind dealing with some relatively simple vector spaces (albeit with an oddball notation).
The two entangled particles form a system. This system has a quantum state represented by the state vector. This state vector is expressed as a linear combination of the vectors |00>, |01>, |10>, and |11>. |00> corresponds to both particles being in the 0 state, and you get the idea for the other vectors.
You can prepare a pair of particles so that their joint state vector is (|00>+|11>)/sqrt(2). That means that if you measure the two particles, there's a 50% chance you'll get two 0s and a 50% chance you'll get two 1s. It doesn't matter which order you measure them in because once you measure one, you know what the other one has to be and nature obligingly gives you the answer you expect when you measure the other one.
It's misleading to say that anything you do to one will happen to the other. A better way to think of it is that if you measure one of a pair of entangled particles, then the other one's value is constrained so that it can't contradict the first one.
You could take those two particles in the state (|00>+|11>)/sqrt(2) and perform a NOT operation on one of them. Then the state of the system is (|01>+|10>)/sqrt(2). You haven't changed the other particle, you've just changed their relationship and now they'll have opposite values when you measure them.
The way you use this for quantum teleportation is you perform an interaction between one of the entangled particles and the particle with the state you want to send, measure both of these particles, then send the results to the recipient who performs an operation on the other entangled particle based on the result of the measurements. All of this is set up so that the final state of the recipient's entangled particle is the original state of the particle to be sent.
You'll notice that in order to perform the teleportation, you have to communicate with the recipient by some other means, which means that even if you have an entangled pair of particles on Earth and Pluto, you can't use them to communicate instantly.
Entangled particles are a lot like one time pads in cryptography. With a one time pad, you make a secure delivery of n bits today and that lets you transmit n bits over an insecure channel as if it were secure at some point in the future. In quantum computing, you can split n pairs of qubits with someone today and then you have a mechanism for transmitting n qubits over a classical communication channel (internet, phone, yelling, etc.) at some point in the future.
The article makes it sound like this proves that natural selection isn't a stochastic process, but in a couple of places they contradict this. It wouldn't make sense for natural selection to be deterministic.
My understanding of natural selection is that it's more or less a random walk with drift toward a point determined by the nature of the selection pressures. Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that this new research shows that the drift term of the process is much larger than the error term, not that there is no error term.
The significance of this would be that if the error term were large enough, the process would be unlikely to converge to the point determined by the selective pressure.
Half of the threatened satellites are American owned, not half of the debris.