Let me explain. Most reactions are time-reversible. (Sort of) example: oxygen and hydrogen can combine to form water and release energy, but you can put energy back into the system to get hydrogen and oxygen back out again (thermodynamics states you will always lose some energy in this process, however, no matter how efficiently you conduct the H+O->water->H+O process).which indicates time is not perfectly reversible, but doesn't explain why). At the subatomic level, however, some similar (vaguely similar, anyways) reactions cannot be reversed, or don't reverse in the same way. In this case, they studied a meson that spontaneously changes from matter to antimatter and back (don't ask). If time reversibility held true for them, the probability of matter->antimatter would be the same as the probability of antimatter-> matter. It was not, by a very very very very significant margin (14 sigma, or a 1 in 10^43 chance this was seen by accident). Note this may also help to explain why matter is more prevalent than anti-matter in our universe.
Is "being the only remaining suspect living in the area" cause enough? Also, there's plenty of investigating that can be done without probable cause or a search warrant.
No? Who says the suspect still lives there. And sure, they could do some investigation, but given the age of the case, it's unlikely that would turn up very much in the way of solid proof. If they couldn't find him a decade ago, it's doubtful they could prove he did it now, even if they know who it was.
That's why the US has the fifth amendment (and why a right against self-incrimination is a good idea in general).
Please elaborate on how this is a good thing, because I'm really confused about it. To me it sounds like, the police finally found a way to identify a murderer, but then this 5th amendment thingy comes in and it gets thrown out on a technicality. What's good about that?
Because otherwise the police would be doing dragnets like this constantly. Say there was a murder with a handgun: the police could ask everyone to bring in all their guns they owned for examination, and assume anyone who didn't do so was guilty. Or hell, just send out poll question "did you do x?" and anyone who didn't respond is automatically a suspect. The point is that wanting privacy does not automatically make you guilty (otherwise, the police really could just say "well if you have nothing to hide, why don't you just let us in and plant video cameras or examine everything you own?" or whatever they want. The point is to curb the power of the police, because otherwise it becomes essentially arbitrary).
If 96% of people had done it the social pressure might have been insurmountable.
He might have figured if he was the only person in the village who didn't give DNA the police would investigate him and find him anyway, so he might as well give the DNA, hope that there would be a mistake, or hope that he could claim "If it was me, then why did I give them my DNA?"
That's why the US has the fifth amendment (and why a right against self-incrimination is a good idea in general). Not turning in DNA is not probable cause for an investigation, and if that is why they started investigating him, the case would have a high chance of being thrown out (of course, the family DNA might be enough to establish an investigation). I'm not sure what the law is on this in the Netherlands.
Well, then, the Ouya is probably the kind of thing you are looking for. Straight-up gaming platform with standard controller. I'm sure it'll have video streaming apps and everything else as well (given it is OSS Android based), but it is really just a basic gaming system.
Pretty sure you're wrong about that. So are 62,000 other people who spent an average of nearly $70 each to help crowd-fund the game. And thats with all the doubt around whether he will be able to pull it off (I still have my doubts, and nevertheless am thinking of raising my pledge... because even the possibility he could deliver 1/2 of what he promises is worth it to me).
Or make the trip in a series of much smaller jumps, so you don't build up enough energy to do any damage. Still might have to drop out a few hours from your destination, but it is by no means an unsurmountable problem.
Haha, right, because a Faraday cage won't show up like a blinding spotlight on radar or anything. That's like saying a building makes you invisible because you can't see someone inside. Sure, I guess in a sense that's correct, but you can still see the damned building.
I never went into robotic vision because nearly all of the immediate applications are military.
Just like radar, and jet engines and rockets and spaceflight and GPS and encryption and antibiotics, yet all those things turned out to be slightly beneficial (or more than slightly, in the case of... all of them) to humanity as a whole.
Interesting numbers. Statcounter, however, seems to disagree with them considerably, showing Android leading by a significant margin. Not sure what to make of that exactly, but it's pretty clear that "Fact is most Android phones are the low-price, low-margin variety that are used almost exclusively for texting" probably isn't completely true.
I'm not even sure why they let vegetative people live if they've been in that condition for so long. If they're truly unconscious then they're already gone, and if they're not you definitely want to kill them. It makes me sick that we even *potentially* leave people in such a state for so long.
You cannot say that someone else should die, without asking them, simply because **you** imagine you would want to in that situation. That would violate just about every single code of ethics imaginable. The situation changes a bit if they have previously expressed a desire not to be kept alive in such a situation (which is often followed, although mind you even in that case, it's hard to know if they really meant it, since they had no prior experience with which to make an educated judgment), but to presume that another should die because of what you think or want is one of the grossest violations of human rights possible.
Well, it depends. We can detect this because it is large enough to emit quite a lot of heat. A smaller rocky body (like an asteroid or Earth-type planet) would be undetectable until it was much, much closer, close enough for us to see the reflected sunlight from it. That's why there is speculation about a fairly large planet somewhere in the Kepler belt even today. It's impossible to see something that isn't emitting light or heat, and isn't close enough to reflect a significant amount from another body (like the sun). Thankfully, Jupiter tends to act as a clean-up machine, pulling in anything that might get close enough to threaten us, so I wouldn't spend any time at all worrying about it. It's very unlikely that anything would hit us.
Based on a quick scan of the paper, it looks like they did a spectral and photometry analysis based on it's estimated size, compared it to their atmospheric models, and determined a probable age. They did image it, BTW, just not very clearly since it is pretty far away (sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb on infrared, thanks to it's warmth). They also matched that to probable origins based on it's path and determined a likely group to which it belongs, which helps confirm the age slightly. Note that this estimate is rather tentative, since it's hard to say exactly.
Because Google hasn't done something similar? They've removed apps for trademark and copyright claims. But, hey, let's ignore that because we are Google fans.
Ok. And that stops me from installing those apps on Android... how, exactly?
Agriculture and cities tend to mean individuals do not need to be able to fend for themselves as much, but it does mean they need to be able to work together and look towards the future more. Farmers need to plant crops at the right times every year, need to save seeds, plant enough to survive through winter and trade some away for other stuff, city builders need to organize the whole city for future growth, etc. That means evolution will naturally tend to emphasize long-term planning and intelligence rather than the brute strength which was almost required to survive at all before the invention of cities and agriculture. If anything, modern life emphasizes intelligence more than it did millenia and centuries ago, when strength and survival skills would have been required and emphasized. Our intelligence is, in fact, the very reason we aren't as strong or physical capable as our primate ancestors were. In fact, if it weren't for our ability to live in society, our intelligence would be nearly worthless. The whole reason our intelligence gives us an advantage is that we are able to use tools and organization in order to overcome obstacles that would be otherwise physically beyond us.
A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate
Yeah, a Wall Street executive who is homeless and hungry is sure going to attract lots of mates. (/sarcasm) Simply because our decisions now are different from what they were 3000 years ago, does not mean the intelligence required is any less so. Or any more, for that matter.
Just wanted to say thanks to Slashdot for adding the transcript, some of us can't watch the videos, and it's nice to have an alternative.
Now, down to the meat:
They say they want players to interact more with the story, but this move surprises me. Now, if you don’t want to log in and do a specified amount of repetitive content every day, you don’t progress at all.
Why would this surprise you? The entire point of an MMO like WoW is to get you to log in as often as possible, ideally every day, for some period of time. It's not even important to Blizzard what you do, really, just that you log in and do something. That drives up the server count, and ensures you are playing continuously, rather than brief spurts now and again. It's part of the MMO grind system. Blizzard likes WoW to feel full, even if it is just people repeating the same action over and over again. Same reason for this:
Really, it’s part of a larger problem, one endemic to the MMORPG industry in general, which is that developers still require excessive amounts of content repetition if you want to use multiple characters.
That isn't a problem from the developers point of view, thats a feature. Literally anything that gets people to spend more time in the game, and more importantly to spread out their enjoyment over a longer period of time (rather than getting a large enjoyment at once), is a fantastic thing from their point of view. It's basic addiction 101: give people small rewards over a long time with the promise of potential future rewards, rather than giving them a large reward all at once for relatively little effort. Keeps them addicted. You see the exact same methodology employed by Zynga and in tons of F2P and MMO type games. That's why they do that sort of thing, and it won't change so long as they keep charging (and people keep paying) a monthly fee. It's also why (from what I've heard) Guild Wars doesn't do that: because there isn't a monthly fee, they aren't trying to get you to grind as much as possible every day, they can give you the end rewards all at once.
Finally:
They've further refined their “phasing” tech, which allows two different players standing in the same spot to see different things. Quest givers and objectives were phased to a greater degree this time around, and sometimes only visible to each user individually. This effectively reduced wait times.
Nice to see Blizzard implementing only the latest MMO techniques... that were Lord of the Rings Online (only an example, others may have done it earlier) featured 5 years ago.
It won't be animated, obviously, but it probably will be a family-friendly movie... just like the original three were. Lots of the now-older fans forget that, but the movies were very much family-friendly. Not a "kids movie", perhaps, but many of the fans were kids when they first watched it.
Slippery Slope isn't a real argument. It's a position people take when they don't have a real argument, as slipper slope can applied to pretty much anything. Try again please.
Yes and no. Properly used, it is a perfectly usable and completely valid point. Here, for instance, the point is that if they start suppressing one individual's freedom of speech, there is less of a barrier for them to start suppressing others as well. It's perfectly true, as illustrated a thousand times (at least) by history. It's an argument from induction (countless examples of human history) rather than deduction (it actually doesn't follow a priori that one action will lead to another... but in practice it usually does). As such, it does not always hold true... but it often does (and of course some people use it poorly, to argue that one thing will lead to another, unconnected thing).
Perhaps more importantly, it can only be used in combination with some argument that the first step shouldn't be taken at all, because if that step should be taken and further steps should not, then there is no slippery slope. In this case, the argument is that freedom of speech should be protected no matter who it offends, which is a pretty reasonable argument.
Expressions of discontent, whether intellectual or emotional, are a vital component of informative discussion. That's the entire point behind organizing protests. It lets people (both those in power and those in voting booths) know that some segment of the population holds certain views, a segment that might otherwise go unheard or even suppressed, deliberately or accidentally. Of course, some people really do it just for the attention, but that is the downside of freedom: some people will inevitably abuse it (my signature is highly relevant). Freedom is worth that price.
As for centralized servers creating huge security and points of failure... LOL! Keep reaching.
Ahem, you heard of Sony Playstation Network? If you haven't, you are grossly uninformed. If you have, you are an idiot for thinking as you do, and more of one for advertising your idiocy online.
It depends on your sample size and method. BitDefender took the top 385 malware recent, and came up with the 15% figure. I'm betting AV Comparatives took a much different, likely broader, sample. Makes sense that as you take a larger sample of less "popular" (which is more or less by necessity less infectious) and/or older (which is more likely to spread using now-fixed vectors) malware, the success rate will grow higher. I'd say the BitDefender method is more useful, as it selects the malware that you are most likely to be exposed to and most likely to be infected by. It really only takes one bit of malware to sneak by to cause havok. Both are obviously useful for their own measurements (one is, well, a comparative, the other is "how well does it end up working"), but you can't compare one set of results to the other.
More devices run Linux than Windows. How big of a target do you need?
Ah yes. But which Linux? There is, what, 20+ major distributions and dozens or hundreds of minor ones? Even calling all of them a single OS is almost a stretch, given that some of them have almost nothing in common with each other. That's not one target, it's a few dozen. And it's hacked all the time, just rarely using automated malware tools (because, again, those aren't terribly effective against heavily fragmented targets).
Slashdot Mirror
The Palestinians? What, all of them? Even the children?
Yes, even some of the children.
Let me explain. Most reactions are time-reversible. (Sort of) example: oxygen and hydrogen can combine to form water and release energy, but you can put energy back into the system to get hydrogen and oxygen back out again (thermodynamics states you will always lose some energy in this process, however, no matter how efficiently you conduct the H+O->water->H+O process).which indicates time is not perfectly reversible, but doesn't explain why). At the subatomic level, however, some similar (vaguely similar, anyways) reactions cannot be reversed, or don't reverse in the same way. In this case, they studied a meson that spontaneously changes from matter to antimatter and back (don't ask). If time reversibility held true for them, the probability of matter->antimatter would be the same as the probability of antimatter-> matter. It was not, by a very very very very significant margin (14 sigma, or a 1 in 10^43 chance this was seen by accident). Note this may also help to explain why matter is more prevalent than anti-matter in our universe.
I think everyone sees your general gist. Wait...
Is "being the only remaining suspect living in the area" cause enough? Also, there's plenty of investigating that can be done without probable cause or a search warrant.
No? Who says the suspect still lives there. And sure, they could do some investigation, but given the age of the case, it's unlikely that would turn up very much in the way of solid proof. If they couldn't find him a decade ago, it's doubtful they could prove he did it now, even if they know who it was.
Please elaborate on how this is a good thing, because I'm really confused about it. To me it sounds like, the police finally found a way to identify a murderer, but then this 5th amendment thingy comes in and it gets thrown out on a technicality. What's good about that?
Because otherwise the police would be doing dragnets like this constantly. Say there was a murder with a handgun: the police could ask everyone to bring in all their guns they owned for examination, and assume anyone who didn't do so was guilty. Or hell, just send out poll question "did you do x?" and anyone who didn't respond is automatically a suspect. The point is that wanting privacy does not automatically make you guilty (otherwise, the police really could just say "well if you have nothing to hide, why don't you just let us in and plant video cameras or examine everything you own?" or whatever they want. The point is to curb the power of the police, because otherwise it becomes essentially arbitrary).
If 96% of people had done it the social pressure might have been insurmountable. He might have figured if he was the only person in the village who didn't give DNA the police would investigate him and find him anyway, so he might as well give the DNA, hope that there would be a mistake, or hope that he could claim "If it was me, then why did I give them my DNA?"
That's why the US has the fifth amendment (and why a right against self-incrimination is a good idea in general). Not turning in DNA is not probable cause for an investigation, and if that is why they started investigating him, the case would have a high chance of being thrown out (of course, the family DNA might be enough to establish an investigation). I'm not sure what the law is on this in the Netherlands.
Well, then, the Ouya is probably the kind of thing you are looking for. Straight-up gaming platform with standard controller. I'm sure it'll have video streaming apps and everything else as well (given it is OSS Android based), but it is really just a basic gaming system.
Pretty sure you're wrong about that. So are 62,000 other people who spent an average of nearly $70 each to help crowd-fund the game. And thats with all the doubt around whether he will be able to pull it off (I still have my doubts, and nevertheless am thinking of raising my pledge... because even the possibility he could deliver 1/2 of what he promises is worth it to me).
Or make the trip in a series of much smaller jumps, so you don't build up enough energy to do any damage. Still might have to drop out a few hours from your destination, but it is by no means an unsurmountable problem.
You can. It's called a fucking Faraday cage.
Haha, right, because a Faraday cage won't show up like a blinding spotlight on radar or anything. That's like saying a building makes you invisible because you can't see someone inside. Sure, I guess in a sense that's correct, but you can still see the damned building.
I never went into robotic vision because nearly all of the immediate applications are military.
Just like radar, and jet engines and rockets and spaceflight and GPS and encryption and antibiotics, yet all those things turned out to be slightly beneficial (or more than slightly, in the case of... all of them) to humanity as a whole.
Interesting numbers. Statcounter, however, seems to disagree with them considerably, showing Android leading by a significant margin. Not sure what to make of that exactly, but it's pretty clear that "Fact is most Android phones are the low-price, low-margin variety that are used almost exclusively for texting" probably isn't completely true.
I'm not even sure why they let vegetative people live if they've been in that condition for so long. If they're truly unconscious then they're already gone, and if they're not you definitely want to kill them. It makes me sick that we even *potentially* leave people in such a state for so long.
You cannot say that someone else should die, without asking them, simply because **you** imagine you would want to in that situation. That would violate just about every single code of ethics imaginable. The situation changes a bit if they have previously expressed a desire not to be kept alive in such a situation (which is often followed, although mind you even in that case, it's hard to know if they really meant it, since they had no prior experience with which to make an educated judgment), but to presume that another should die because of what you think or want is one of the grossest violations of human rights possible.
Well, it depends. We can detect this because it is large enough to emit quite a lot of heat. A smaller rocky body (like an asteroid or Earth-type planet) would be undetectable until it was much, much closer, close enough for us to see the reflected sunlight from it. That's why there is speculation about a fairly large planet somewhere in the Kepler belt even today. It's impossible to see something that isn't emitting light or heat, and isn't close enough to reflect a significant amount from another body (like the sun). Thankfully, Jupiter tends to act as a clean-up machine, pulling in anything that might get close enough to threaten us, so I wouldn't spend any time at all worrying about it. It's very unlikely that anything would hit us.
Based on a quick scan of the paper, it looks like they did a spectral and photometry analysis based on it's estimated size, compared it to their atmospheric models, and determined a probable age. They did image it, BTW, just not very clearly since it is pretty far away (sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb on infrared, thanks to it's warmth). They also matched that to probable origins based on it's path and determined a likely group to which it belongs, which helps confirm the age slightly. Note that this estimate is rather tentative, since it's hard to say exactly.
Because Google hasn't done something similar? They've removed apps for trademark and copyright claims. But, hey, let's ignore that because we are Google fans.
Ok. And that stops me from installing those apps on Android... how, exactly?
Agriculture and cities tend to mean individuals do not need to be able to fend for themselves as much, but it does mean they need to be able to work together and look towards the future more. Farmers need to plant crops at the right times every year, need to save seeds, plant enough to survive through winter and trade some away for other stuff, city builders need to organize the whole city for future growth, etc. That means evolution will naturally tend to emphasize long-term planning and intelligence rather than the brute strength which was almost required to survive at all before the invention of cities and agriculture. If anything, modern life emphasizes intelligence more than it did millenia and centuries ago, when strength and survival skills would have been required and emphasized. Our intelligence is, in fact, the very reason we aren't as strong or physical capable as our primate ancestors were. In fact, if it weren't for our ability to live in society, our intelligence would be nearly worthless. The whole reason our intelligence gives us an advantage is that we are able to use tools and organization in order to overcome obstacles that would be otherwise physically beyond us.
A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate
Yeah, a Wall Street executive who is homeless and hungry is sure going to attract lots of mates. (/sarcasm) Simply because our decisions now are different from what they were 3000 years ago, does not mean the intelligence required is any less so. Or any more, for that matter.
Just wanted to say thanks to Slashdot for adding the transcript, some of us can't watch the videos, and it's nice to have an alternative.
Now, down to the meat:
They say they want players to interact more with the story, but this move surprises me. Now, if you don’t want to log in and do a specified amount of repetitive content every day, you don’t progress at all.
Why would this surprise you? The entire point of an MMO like WoW is to get you to log in as often as possible, ideally every day, for some period of time. It's not even important to Blizzard what you do, really, just that you log in and do something. That drives up the server count, and ensures you are playing continuously, rather than brief spurts now and again. It's part of the MMO grind system. Blizzard likes WoW to feel full, even if it is just people repeating the same action over and over again. Same reason for this:
Really, it’s part of a larger problem, one endemic to the MMORPG industry in general, which is that developers still require excessive amounts of content repetition if you want to use multiple characters.
That isn't a problem from the developers point of view, thats a feature. Literally anything that gets people to spend more time in the game, and more importantly to spread out their enjoyment over a longer period of time (rather than getting a large enjoyment at once), is a fantastic thing from their point of view. It's basic addiction 101: give people small rewards over a long time with the promise of potential future rewards, rather than giving them a large reward all at once for relatively little effort. Keeps them addicted. You see the exact same methodology employed by Zynga and in tons of F2P and MMO type games. That's why they do that sort of thing, and it won't change so long as they keep charging (and people keep paying) a monthly fee. It's also why (from what I've heard) Guild Wars doesn't do that: because there isn't a monthly fee, they aren't trying to get you to grind as much as possible every day, they can give you the end rewards all at once.
Finally:
They've further refined their “phasing” tech, which allows two different players standing in the same spot to see different things. Quest givers and objectives were phased to a greater degree this time around, and sometimes only visible to each user individually. This effectively reduced wait times.
Nice to see Blizzard implementing only the latest MMO techniques... that were Lord of the Rings Online (only an example, others may have done it earlier) featured 5 years ago.
It's an x86-64 processor based on Sandy Bridge, so I don't see any reason you couldn't. Might even work with Windows, if someone wanted to.
It won't be animated, obviously, but it probably will be a family-friendly movie... just like the original three were. Lots of the now-older fans forget that, but the movies were very much family-friendly. Not a "kids movie", perhaps, but many of the fans were kids when they first watched it.
Slippery Slope isn't a real argument. It's a position people take when they don't have a real argument, as slipper slope can applied to pretty much anything. Try again please.
Yes and no. Properly used, it is a perfectly usable and completely valid point. Here, for instance, the point is that if they start suppressing one individual's freedom of speech, there is less of a barrier for them to start suppressing others as well. It's perfectly true, as illustrated a thousand times (at least) by history. It's an argument from induction (countless examples of human history) rather than deduction (it actually doesn't follow a priori that one action will lead to another... but in practice it usually does). As such, it does not always hold true... but it often does (and of course some people use it poorly, to argue that one thing will lead to another, unconnected thing).
Perhaps more importantly, it can only be used in combination with some argument that the first step shouldn't be taken at all, because if that step should be taken and further steps should not, then there is no slippery slope. In this case, the argument is that freedom of speech should be protected no matter who it offends, which is a pretty reasonable argument.
Expressions of discontent, whether intellectual or emotional, are a vital component of informative discussion. That's the entire point behind organizing protests. It lets people (both those in power and those in voting booths) know that some segment of the population holds certain views, a segment that might otherwise go unheard or even suppressed, deliberately or accidentally. Of course, some people really do it just for the attention, but that is the downside of freedom: some people will inevitably abuse it (my signature is highly relevant). Freedom is worth that price.
As for centralized servers creating huge security and points of failure... LOL! Keep reaching.
Ahem, you heard of Sony Playstation Network? If you haven't, you are grossly uninformed. If you have, you are an idiot for thinking as you do, and more of one for advertising your idiocy online.
It depends on your sample size and method. BitDefender took the top 385 malware recent, and came up with the 15% figure. I'm betting AV Comparatives took a much different, likely broader, sample. Makes sense that as you take a larger sample of less "popular" (which is more or less by necessity less infectious) and/or older (which is more likely to spread using now-fixed vectors) malware, the success rate will grow higher. I'd say the BitDefender method is more useful, as it selects the malware that you are most likely to be exposed to and most likely to be infected by. It really only takes one bit of malware to sneak by to cause havok. Both are obviously useful for their own measurements (one is, well, a comparative, the other is "how well does it end up working"), but you can't compare one set of results to the other.
More devices run Linux than Windows. How big of a target do you need?
Ah yes. But which Linux? There is, what, 20+ major distributions and dozens or hundreds of minor ones? Even calling all of them a single OS is almost a stretch, given that some of them have almost nothing in common with each other. That's not one target, it's a few dozen. And it's hacked all the time, just rarely using automated malware tools (because, again, those aren't terribly effective against heavily fragmented targets).