Addendum: A broadcast network could do an online pilot followed by online trial run for presumably much lower cost (and not sacrificing a prime time slot for an experiment), and then move to broadcast if it proved popular. I suspect that's an approach they're more likely to follow.
The summary makes a good point that the sample audience could have very different tastes than the target audience. I think it's probably a good idea for shows that are intended to be released online, in the same format as the pilot is previewed.
Conversely, if you’re a network executive, you usually don’t need millions of people to tell you a show sucks.
Apparently, you do, based on how many TV shows utterly fail due to poor ratings. But here's the problem: TV (especially sitcoms and reality TV) aren't about making quality entertainment, they're about ratings. Some network exec thought Animal Practice would make money, not necessarily be a quality show. TV is primarily a business, not a medium for artistic expression. Internet TV is not that different, but Amazon's approach could give shows a chance that otherwise would have been nixed by an exec that guessed wrong.
This research is pushed by someone who has long advocated for a crunch/bang cycle, and in this paper is trying to question the statistical likelihood that the non-cyclical big bang theory (start of everything) would follow the leading models of inflation. So it's about the mechanics.
Another commenter here said the Anthropic Principle applies if you accept the possibility of multiple universes, which would bring into question such questions about "likelihood".
No, his comment (mostly) makes sense. His complaint is that current non-cyclical Big Bang theory can't explain ultimate origin, because there is not and can't be a scientific explanation for how something can come from nothing. Quantum fluctuations and energy fields are not nothing. He further points out that cyclical crunch/bang theories are not ultimate origin theories, but continuations of existence. They just kick the Question of the Origin of Everything down the cosmological road.
The traditional Christian view of God is that of a being with no origin. There's no attempt to explain one because the belief is that there isn't one. He's eternal. I don't know what he means by BBT and God following the same origin story, unless he means unknowable or incomprehensible through reason alone.
Well, yes and no. You can't resimulate the universe, but you can make inferences from observations. Everything's moving apart, what does that mean? Possibly everything expanded from the same point. What would conditions be like if that were the case? The Big Bang is a model that attempts to explain observed phenomena - and we can do experiments to test how some of our theories about nature hold up to conditions suggested by that model.
If cosmological observations don't match quantum theory, then either QT or the observations are flawed. The solution to this dilemma isn't "don't try to come up with theories and test them." There may be cosmologists who take fundamentalist approach to their pet theories, but the science as a whole is not bogus.
Spent all my mod points, but excellent questions. There are, sadly, limits to what we can discover with physical sciences. This has bugged me since I was a kid. I want to know, dammit! The universe is so vast that we will never know or be able to know even a small fraction of what's there. Some questions, as why there is anything at all, will forever be in the realm of philosophy, unanswerable by empirical sciences alone.
But we keep asking, keep looking, both farther and closer, because we have to know. It's in our nature.
I like some was partially hoping they'd fail to find the Higgs, and the experiments would point the way to some more fundamental theory, but it seems our current model is actually pretty good as far as it goes. Although I barely understand particle physics, I'm fascinated by all the research on it, and share the desire to understand the nature of our universe at the deepest level.
But look at me still talking, when there's science to do! (well not by me personally, I have to get back to coding).
I think thesandbender was referring to the lack of market for ubiquitous encryption, not dash cameras.
With the growing number of cases of seizure of cameras and recording devices by police, I think the need for something like this exists, even if people don't realize it. I would add one feature: authorized write-access. It would be nice if someone couldn't maliciously delete the contents.
Well, I don't much of substance to add to this conversation, so I'll be pedantic instead. The possessive "dropout's" is actually correct in this case, since he's talking about comments belonging to a hypothetical dropout. And the subject "you" is correct because he's requesting others take a specified action, the reason for which is to improve his own experience while reading the comments.
Personally, I think Slashdot's mod system is about as good as you're going to get on an anonymous internet forum. Good posts tend to get modded up, bad posts tend to get modded down. We need the -1 for posts that are actually worse than simply mediocre (or just haven't attracted interest). I browse at -1 to see everything, and can filter out the stupidity myself when I feel like it.
I like that Slashdot's readership has a much higher-than-average technical knowledge (expected due to the nature of the site), but I don't find the civility to be better than the rest of the internet when corrected for what I assume is a higher age and hopefully maturity.
Regarding the meaning of "nanoscale", I'm not aware of an accepted IEEE defition, or anything similar. Various opinions of its definition range from: Google: "Of a size measurable in nanometers or microns." American Heritage Science Dictionary: "Relating to or occurring on a scale of nanometers." PC Magazine: "At nanometer size. Any device only a few nanometers in size is nanoscale. Nanotechnology is said to comprise elements less than 100 nanometers in size (100 nm)." Wikipedia gets a little more specific, but claims 1-100 nanometers as one criterion.
The resolution of this printer, at 30nm, seems to satisfy the letter of these definitions, so I'd say it's correct enough to say it's a "nanoscale printer." It's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
I prefer to use 355/113 for a fractional approximation (~3.14159292). 355/113 - pi = 0.000000266764...
I once wrote a TI-85 program to calculate fractional approximations of pi to arbitrary # of digits. You have to go quite a ways to get better than 355/113.
I read once that 10 digits of pi was enough to approximate the diameter of the universe to within 1 atom. Not sure that's true, and I'm too lazy to do the math.
As far as digits from memory, I once set out to memorize pi 5 digits at a time but only got as far as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... and then I could never for the life of me remember the next five... 51973? something like that? Like my dad always said, "close enough for government work."
Also fun: I once downloaded a text file with the first 10 million digits of pi (exactly 10 MB, how about that!), opened it with Word, shrunk the whole thing down to 1pt font, and printed page one on a high-end company printer. It took about 5 minutes to spool the job, and the result was what appeared to be a gray rectangle, but was actually the first 400,000 or so digits of pi, which were actually legible with a magnifying glass.
This is an excellent question. Are we saying that all celebrities ought to keep their mouths shut about controversial issues? I actually think the comparisons to anti-communist blacklists are apt.
If you disagree with someone's position, rebut his statements. If you don't want to contribute to his personal wealth, don't buy his products.
Pro-gay rights people should be especially aware of the fact that hate has no place in public discourse. Often times I am disappointed when I find out that someone I like doesn't think like me, because I think I'm right and I want everyone to be right. But if he expresses positions consistent with his personal philosophy, what am I to say? "How dare you hold a different view of the nature of the human person and a transcendent moral reality than I?"
I believe that the USA is only just now fully coming to grasp with the implications of Freedom of/from Religion, which properly understood means we have to allow, under the law, ways for the people to adhere to their differing philosophical beliefs. The Government HAS to take a position on some issues, declaring certain moral absolutes ("life, liberty, pursuit of happiness") in order to justify even having government at all, but this generation has to grapple with the issue in a way that I don't think previous ones in this country have had to, but I suppose was inevitable.
Short answer: the ISS weighs 495 tons. That's a LOT of mass, and would take a lot of fuel, which itself would take even MORE fuel to get into orbit. A better compromise would probably be something like a small capsule with a habitat module, sort of like the Spacelab module for the shuttle.
Furthermore, the mission profile for a single launch to orbit ejection is much simpler than multiple launches, docking, building a spacecraft in orbit, and then orbit ejection.
I can accelerate into a corner, put the clutch in, slow and gear down as I turn and use heel to toe whilst releasing the clutch as I come out of the turn for better acceleration. Admittedly, I do this at roundabouts more often than I should.
First "heel & toe" refers to the technique of pressing the gas pedal with the same foot as the brake pedal (usually toe on brake, roll heel onto gas), while the clutch is depressed while braking. This is done to match the driveshaft and axle speeds so that the sudden drag of the engine on the tires due to lower RPM doesn't cause them to break traction. This is done entirely in the braking zone, and you should be on the gas before you apex. If the clutch is still in while coming out of the corner (after apex), or worse you're on the brake, you're doing it wrong. I'm not quite sure what you're describing.
An Automatic gearbox has to wait until I start to accelerate to drop back down a gear. Automatic gearboxes are always reactionary, a good manual driver is proactive. There is no way, any current production auto can pre-empt what a driver is going to do.
No, but a driver can preempt what a driver is going to do. As far as traditional automatics are concerned, they shift based on gas pedal position (not entirely true but close enough), so if you're on the gas before the apex, you CAN force it to downshift before you need full power. This requires very good knowledge of the behavior of the particular transmission to do well, but it is definitely possible to shift an automatic with your foot, and have it in the right gear before you need it (in situations where power needs are known beforehand, like a track).
I've done 3 track days in automatics, and could shift with the gas pedal predictably enough every time. One of the automatics had a manual shift mode. In that car (my current DD), I was actually faster in automatic mode, because manual mode lowered the torque converter stall speed (effectively giving you taller gears), and by chance most corner exit speeds were better aligned with the shorter overall gear ratios.
I've also done 6 actual races in manuals, and it's a lot more fun, but more difficult too. Neither of the cars I've raced had pedals arranged properly for heel & toe, so I can't claim that on my driving resume yet.
Because the whole article was about whether the vote could be hacked, not whether the voters could be influenced. Of course the vote can be affected, as has happened many times in history, but that's not what's being talked about here. This is about physical hacking of the process. From the very first line of TFA:
As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like me wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote?
"...have the Librarian of Congress revisit that decision" != "Make Cell Phone Unlocking Legal"
That is all.
The summary is poor. The petition itself actually states "We ask that the White House ask the Librarian of Congress to rescind this decision, and failing that, champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal."
... "We demand that the White House demand the Librarian of Congress to..." would, IMO, be far more effective;....
It would not be more effective, since the White House has only ever pledged to respond to petitions that reach the threshold, not to take any action whatsoever. The petitions are not binding in any way. The WH raised the threshold for comment only because once the site became popular, it was trivially easy to reach that number for stupid things, and the WH didn't want to have to comment on stupid things.
I was arguing against the GP's assertions that citizenship should not be a defense against summary assassination. I think it's generally accepted that the US Constitution outlines the boundaries of the US Government's relationship to US citizens, although if you're arguing that since those boundaries are based on inalienable human rights they ought to be extended to all humanity, I'd have a hard time making an argument to the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
Addendum: A broadcast network could do an online pilot followed by online trial run for presumably much lower cost (and not sacrificing a prime time slot for an experiment), and then move to broadcast if it proved popular. I suspect that's an approach they're more likely to follow.
The summary makes a good point that the sample audience could have very different tastes than the target audience. I think it's probably a good idea for shows that are intended to be released online, in the same format as the pilot is previewed.
Conversely, if you’re a network executive, you usually don’t need millions of people to tell you a show sucks.
Apparently, you do, based on how many TV shows utterly fail due to poor ratings. But here's the problem: TV (especially sitcoms and reality TV) aren't about making quality entertainment, they're about ratings. Some network exec thought Animal Practice would make money, not necessarily be a quality show. TV is primarily a business, not a medium for artistic expression. Internet TV is not that different, but Amazon's approach could give shows a chance that otherwise would have been nixed by an exec that guessed wrong.
Jerry Seinfeld should deliver all the TED talks.
Google/Motorola Mobility might actually have to manufacture and sell a product to justify their capital expenditure! The horrors!
Also, I agree with posters above, I thought the patent portfolio aspect of the deal was a defensive one.
I almost wonder if it was deliberately done to make a quick buck off a short sell. Sell high, make everyone panic, buy low.
"Pressure cooker? I 'ardly know 'er!"
Sorry, had to do it.
As a matter of fact, I was. How'd you guess?
This research is pushed by someone who has long advocated for a crunch/bang cycle, and in this paper is trying to question the statistical likelihood that the non-cyclical big bang theory (start of everything) would follow the leading models of inflation. So it's about the mechanics.
Another commenter here said the Anthropic Principle applies if you accept the possibility of multiple universes, which would bring into question such questions about "likelihood".
No, his comment (mostly) makes sense. His complaint is that current non-cyclical Big Bang theory can't explain ultimate origin, because there is not and can't be a scientific explanation for how something can come from nothing. Quantum fluctuations and energy fields are not nothing. He further points out that cyclical crunch/bang theories are not ultimate origin theories, but continuations of existence. They just kick the Question of the Origin of Everything down the cosmological road.
The traditional Christian view of God is that of a being with no origin. There's no attempt to explain one because the belief is that there isn't one. He's eternal. I don't know what he means by BBT and God following the same origin story, unless he means unknowable or incomprehensible through reason alone.
<spock>Fascinating</spock>
In other words, it's a "physics crisitunity!"
Well, yes and no. You can't resimulate the universe, but you can make inferences from observations. Everything's moving apart, what does that mean? Possibly everything expanded from the same point. What would conditions be like if that were the case? The Big Bang is a model that attempts to explain observed phenomena - and we can do experiments to test how some of our theories about nature hold up to conditions suggested by that model.
If cosmological observations don't match quantum theory, then either QT or the observations are flawed. The solution to this dilemma isn't "don't try to come up with theories and test them." There may be cosmologists who take fundamentalist approach to their pet theories, but the science as a whole is not bogus.
Spent all my mod points, but excellent questions. There are, sadly, limits to what we can discover with physical sciences. This has bugged me since I was a kid. I want to know, dammit! The universe is so vast that we will never know or be able to know even a small fraction of what's there. Some questions, as why there is anything at all, will forever be in the realm of philosophy, unanswerable by empirical sciences alone.
But we keep asking, keep looking, both farther and closer, because we have to know. It's in our nature.
I like some was partially hoping they'd fail to find the Higgs, and the experiments would point the way to some more fundamental theory, but it seems our current model is actually pretty good as far as it goes. Although I barely understand particle physics, I'm fascinated by all the research on it, and share the desire to understand the nature of our universe at the deepest level.
But look at me still talking, when there's science to do! (well not by me personally, I have to get back to coding).
"There are lies, damn lies, and Belgium." -Mark Twain
I think thesandbender was referring to the lack of market for ubiquitous encryption, not dash cameras.
With the growing number of cases of seizure of cameras and recording devices by police, I think the need for something like this exists, even if people don't realize it. I would add one feature: authorized write-access. It would be nice if someone couldn't maliciously delete the contents.
As usual, I didn't read far enough down before posting. Thanks for your concise explanation; it's exactly right. I'd mod you up if I had points.
Well, I don't much of substance to add to this conversation, so I'll be pedantic instead. The possessive "dropout's" is actually correct in this case, since he's talking about comments belonging to a hypothetical dropout. And the subject "you" is correct because he's requesting others take a specified action, the reason for which is to improve his own experience while reading the comments.
Personally, I think Slashdot's mod system is about as good as you're going to get on an anonymous internet forum. Good posts tend to get modded up, bad posts tend to get modded down. We need the -1 for posts that are actually worse than simply mediocre (or just haven't attracted interest). I browse at -1 to see everything, and can filter out the stupidity myself when I feel like it.
I like that Slashdot's readership has a much higher-than-average technical knowledge (expected due to the nature of the site), but I don't find the civility to be better than the rest of the internet when corrected for what I assume is a higher age and hopefully maturity.
Regarding the meaning of "nanoscale", I'm not aware of an accepted IEEE defition, or anything similar. Various opinions of its definition range from:
Google: "Of a size measurable in nanometers or microns."
American Heritage Science Dictionary: "Relating to or occurring on a scale of nanometers."
PC Magazine: "At nanometer size. Any device only a few nanometers in size is nanoscale. Nanotechnology is said to comprise elements less than 100 nanometers in size (100 nm)."
Wikipedia gets a little more specific, but claims 1-100 nanometers as one criterion.
The resolution of this printer, at 30nm, seems to satisfy the letter of these definitions, so I'd say it's correct enough to say it's a "nanoscale printer." It's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
pi - 3.14 = .00159265... .001264489...
22/7 - pi =
I prefer to use 355/113 for a fractional approximation (~3.14159292).
355/113 - pi = 0.000000266764...
I once wrote a TI-85 program to calculate fractional approximations of pi to arbitrary # of digits. You have to go quite a ways to get better than 355/113.
I read once that 10 digits of pi was enough to approximate the diameter of the universe to within 1 atom. Not sure that's true, and I'm too lazy to do the math.
As far as digits from memory, I once set out to memorize pi 5 digits at a time but only got as far as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... and then I could never for the life of me remember the next five... 51973? something like that? Like my dad always said, "close enough for government work."
Also fun: I once downloaded a text file with the first 10 million digits of pi (exactly 10 MB, how about that!), opened it with Word, shrunk the whole thing down to 1pt font, and printed page one on a high-end company printer. It took about 5 minutes to spool the job, and the result was what appeared to be a gray rectangle, but was actually the first 400,000 or so digits of pi, which were actually legible with a magnifying glass.
This is an excellent question. Are we saying that all celebrities ought to keep their mouths shut about controversial issues? I actually think the comparisons to anti-communist blacklists are apt.
If you disagree with someone's position, rebut his statements.
If you don't want to contribute to his personal wealth, don't buy his products.
Pro-gay rights people should be especially aware of the fact that hate has no place in public discourse. Often times I am disappointed when I find out that someone I like doesn't think like me, because I think I'm right and I want everyone to be right. But if he expresses positions consistent with his personal philosophy, what am I to say? "How dare you hold a different view of the nature of the human person and a transcendent moral reality than I?"
I believe that the USA is only just now fully coming to grasp with the implications of Freedom of/from Religion, which properly understood means we have to allow, under the law, ways for the people to adhere to their differing philosophical beliefs. The Government HAS to take a position on some issues, declaring certain moral absolutes ("life, liberty, pursuit of happiness") in order to justify even having government at all, but this generation has to grapple with the issue in a way that I don't think previous ones in this country have had to, but I suppose was inevitable.
Short answer: the ISS weighs 495 tons. That's a LOT of mass, and would take a lot of fuel, which itself would take even MORE fuel to get into orbit. A better compromise would probably be something like a small capsule with a habitat module, sort of like the Spacelab module for the shuttle.
Furthermore, the mission profile for a single launch to orbit ejection is much simpler than multiple launches, docking, building a spacecraft in orbit, and then orbit ejection.
Partly true and partly not.
I can accelerate into a corner, put the clutch in, slow and gear down as I turn and use heel to toe whilst releasing the clutch as I come out of the turn for better acceleration. Admittedly, I do this at roundabouts more often than I should.
First "heel & toe" refers to the technique of pressing the gas pedal with the same foot as the brake pedal (usually toe on brake, roll heel onto gas), while the clutch is depressed while braking. This is done to match the driveshaft and axle speeds so that the sudden drag of the engine on the tires due to lower RPM doesn't cause them to break traction. This is done entirely in the braking zone, and you should be on the gas before you apex. If the clutch is still in while coming out of the corner (after apex), or worse you're on the brake, you're doing it wrong. I'm not quite sure what you're describing.
An Automatic gearbox has to wait until I start to accelerate to drop back down a gear. Automatic gearboxes are always reactionary, a good manual driver is proactive. There is no way, any current production auto can pre-empt what a driver is going to do.
No, but a driver can preempt what a driver is going to do. As far as traditional automatics are concerned, they shift based on gas pedal position (not entirely true but close enough), so if you're on the gas before the apex, you CAN force it to downshift before you need full power. This requires very good knowledge of the behavior of the particular transmission to do well, but it is definitely possible to shift an automatic with your foot, and have it in the right gear before you need it (in situations where power needs are known beforehand, like a track).
I've done 3 track days in automatics, and could shift with the gas pedal predictably enough every time. One of the automatics had a manual shift mode. In that car (my current DD), I was actually faster in automatic mode, because manual mode lowered the torque converter stall speed (effectively giving you taller gears), and by chance most corner exit speeds were better aligned with the shorter overall gear ratios.
I've also done 6 actual races in manuals, and it's a lot more fun, but more difficult too. Neither of the cars I've raced had pedals arranged properly for heel & toe, so I can't claim that on my driving resume yet.
Please, please start raising the bar again, huh?
I've got a couple of reams of paper that you can put under it if you like...
If that doesn't work, you can have my copy of James Cameron's autobiography. You only need one, since it self-inflates to fill the available space.
Because the whole article was about whether the vote could be hacked, not whether the voters could be influenced. Of course the vote can be affected, as has happened many times in history, but that's not what's being talked about here. This is about physical hacking of the process. From the very first line of TFA:
As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like me wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote?
"...have the Librarian of Congress revisit that decision" != "Make Cell Phone Unlocking Legal"
That is all.
The summary is poor. The petition itself actually states "We ask that the White House ask the Librarian of Congress to rescind this decision, and failing that, champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal."
... "We demand that the White House demand the Librarian of Congress to..." would, IMO, be far more effective; ....
It would not be more effective, since the White House has only ever pledged to respond to petitions that reach the threshold, not to take any action whatsoever. The petitions are not binding in any way. The WH raised the threshold for comment only because once the site became popular, it was trivially easy to reach that number for stupid things, and the WH didn't want to have to comment on stupid things.
The "?" means match zero or one times, not any single character. In this context, it means the 1 is optional.
I was arguing against the GP's assertions that citizenship should not be a defense against summary assassination. I think it's generally accepted that the US Constitution outlines the boundaries of the US Government's relationship to US citizens, although if you're arguing that since those boundaries are based on inalienable human rights they ought to be extended to all humanity, I'd have a hard time making an argument to the contrary.