Man, I just don't understand why so many tech journalists are such lapdogs who trot out this same lame line about how terrible a format war is. The real problem is that there aren't enough competing candidates. As it is both main candidates have similar user hostile lock down technology. Imagine if we simply had to accept whatever is annointed and brought down to the masses from the mountain. When only insiders get to make binding design choices that means your likely to get devices that have less than optimum (from the consumer standpoint) features.
It appears that HD-DVD might have a slight edge that you might have an approved option to transfer some content to your computer. Without competition between formats even these slight concessions would be unlikely. I hope the competition continues at least until they have to compete to see which format provides an affordable (less than $100) disc writer so that contestant can be rewarded.
I understand that early adopters face the prospect that a wrong choice means the need to buy a less expensive device of the competing format and a collection of media dependent on legacy players that can only be obtained at bargain prices on eBay (I've purchased more than one LD player there). I'm much happier with my superior LD collection than the cheesy tapes other people collected. So in this particular case even when you lose, you still win because you could have made your choice for reasons that continue to matter to you.
Think of the big shot at ABC who had no trouble claiming people didn't really care about having fast forward for skipping over obnoxious or tedious commercials (or the mysteriously required musical guest on every talk show). If they could enforce a single PVR design (which cable providers pretty much can) there would be a remote possibility that it would be missing the 30/60 second jump forward capability. It is a remote possibility now because people know of its possibility because of competing designs.
The problem isn't the lack of an industry annointed standard format, it is that we could do even better if there were a larger variety of options to compete for our acceptance.
Thank you for the references, I'll probably read them. I am aware of the context and was present at WWDC 2002 when Tim O'Reilly was first making his observation about how he was using alpha geek behavior to predict favorable results for OS X. I don't think this recent tempest in a teapot is comparable to what Tim was observing and reporting. For example even if one were inclined to identify some of these individuals as ubergeeks their stated reasons seem more ideological rather than technological.
It has always been my observation that Macs suck less than the alternative and despite also having a PC and dabbling with linux that remains my suspicion. Today after visiting the newly opened public library in Minneapolis with my daughter (too much detail?) we stopped at the Dunn Brothers coffee bar in the same impressive building on the Nicolett Mall (if you are close to Minneapolis you really should visit it). I was surprised to see that their free internet stations were running a linux variant. I mention it because I was surprised how sluggish the whole experience was. I don't know what was specifically at fault (low bandwidth internet connection?) but it was not a favorable demonstration of the state of the linux desktop experience.
The closest to a reason that resonates for me against OS X is the tedious DRM in the OS and iTMS. But that could be viewed as a consequece of Apple making the moves necessary to enable the iPod to live up to its potential. In any case I think it will be interesting to see the followup on these conversions. I remember one of Nicholas Negroponte's columns at Wired (circa 1999) indicated his intention to dive into Windows from his comfortable position for years as a Mac user. The next column detailed a series of horror stories (from his viewpoint) that he was enduring. In any case let me know when James Gosling or John McCarthy deem the Mac unworthy and that will be a bigger story.
... a lot of the new digital broadcast is going to be 480p...
Where could you possibly live? If you are talking about stations that just transmit shows that have been syndicated for many years then, yes, the quality of the old programs will not be dramatically improved whether 480p or 1080i is used. But essentially every new network show is produced in HD quality and has been for some time. This is already history, not prediction. Even three of the four main late night shows are in HD. Legal certainty isn't a trivial factor but commercial survival has already made any ideas of using 480p something that only unaffiliated stations will consider.
Just like color TV was a certainty long before black and white TV disappeared in the sixties, HDTV is already inevitable. The quirk is that current generation DVD's look so good on an HDTV set that it isn't at all certain that either of the two competing HD disc standards will be able to dislodge it. My guess is that a successful PS3 might give BluRay a chance but it is easy to imagine a future with HDTV but only DVD as a successful standard for discs.
Who allowed you to operate a keyboard before you shook the cobwebs out of your head? Do you really thing Kip Thorne reads slashdot with his Wheaties in the morning to glean your wisdom from it? One of the dangers of articles that popularize science for the multitudes who can't be bothered to study enough to understand even approximately what is involved, is that some readers get the illusion that they actually know something. Just a hint, from what you've written it seems safe to infer you know approximately nothing which is not a problem. But deciding you should offer sage advice is somewhere between ludicrous and nauseating.
If the thousand dollars was diverted from somewhere else to buy that first Bluray player on the block your view might have some validity. But don't forget that for a rather large number of people that much money is just chump change. It isn't like they'd be stuck eating ramen noodles until the end of the month. Besides these people (early adopters) are an important part of our ecology and we need to encourage them so those nifty devices can start sliding down the price curve.
I was just going to allow this noise to fade away but you really don't have a clue. I just can't leave it that way. You seem to have some quaint idea that physical reality must be essentially the same at every scale. If you can't make sense of an electron as just a very small billiard ball then physical theory is hopeless. Since you indicated you had admiration for Feynman here is a quote from his lectures that doesn't "prove" anything but it does provide his angle on this sort of subject:
"It is therefore not fair to say that from the apparent freedom and indeterminacy of the human mind, we should have realized that classical "deterministic" physics could not ever hope to understand it, and to welcome quantum mechanics as a release from a "completely mechanistic" universe."
Or earlier in the same chapter (38) the possibly more applicable quote:
"Let us consider briefly some philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. As always, there are two aspects of the problem: one is the philosophical implication for physics, and the other is the extrapolation of philosophical matters to other fields. When philosophical ideas associated with science are dragged into another field, they are usually completely distorted."
Again I don't pretend that quoting anyone's opinion can prove anything but it can be instructive depending on the experience of the person being quoted. Concerning your looney idea of human consciousness creates reality the really remarkable result of advances of the last century is that physical theory is much more odd than that. The idea you put forth isn't even wrong. It just doesn't address any of the important experiments and discoveries that have been made in the last fifty years. You seem to be stuck back in the early twentieth century before the invention of quantum electrodynamics extended quantum mechanics to cover electrodynamics and the even more recent extension to cover the weak and strong nuclear forces. The most important thing to take from this is that it still isn't over. For all of the glorious advances quantum theory is still not finished. It isn't time to engage in navel gazing and sloppy anthropomorphic bullshitting.
As long as general relativity and quantum theory are in conflict they are both still broken. It isn't time to shut down the enterprise and start sloppy philosophizing. There is still work to be done. You need to take your goofy ideas (and that isn't really meant as an insult, more like a description and there are much goofier ideas that seem to provide considerable explanatory power such as virtual particles in QED) and do useful work with them like harmonizing Einstein's general relativity with quantum theory. Otherwise your ideas won't have any significance where it matters.
Oh, please, have you ever read anything by von Neumann about quantum mechanics? For instance his "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics". What it makes very clear is that the activity that is required for creating and understanding quantum mechanics is mathematics. Eastern philosophy isn't even mentioned. In this context it is a waste of time and, I'm afraid, so are these pointless ramblings. I mean no disrespect for Eastern philosophies, but the thesis that it provides some sort of royal road to understanding quantum physics is a bunch of hokum. Newton was arguably the greatest scientist but even he had some odd side interests like alchemy and he also lost a bundle in the great tulip craze. Towering intellects have a whole range of interests and results. It is our task to use judgment in selecting those works which are part of a grand tradition. For you the mumbo jumbo of mysticism seems to be the item of interest. Well, to each his own.
I don't doubt that Schroedinger was inspired by aspects of Indian philosophy just as I imagine Murray Gell-Mann found inspiration of a sort in the Buddhist Eight Fold Way as I mentioned before. My point is that you can study that stuff till the cows come home and you get precisely nowhere. What you do need to study and learn is differential equations, Hamiltonian mechanics, group theory and any number of other non-Eastern philosophy subjects or you will get nowhere. Quantum mechanics can never be learned in an ashram or temple but it can be and is learned and extended to new levels at universities and institutes of technology. It is a Western scientific theory and they bang the hell out of it on a daily basis in experiments at labs around the world. And they don't burn incense in any of those labs.
As I mentioned before in reference to Oppenheimer many of these figures are very cosmopolitan and they have an active curiosity about other cultures. But even if you excluded every one of them you will still have physicists and mathematicians like von Neumann who can get all of it done with an advanced understanding of Hilbert spaces. The crucial tool in this context is modern mathematics, not Eastern philosophy. Obviously the stuff you go on about doesn't distract many physicists. What is annoying about it is the insidious attraction it has for people who are not literate about modern physics which is, of course, the vast majority.
Neither Alan Watts, nor the Dali Lama, nor myself, would disagree with you when you say "stick to science". Never have I said you should not, in fact I'm a great proponent of it. As I have shown, it is the other way around, "western" scientists are the ones who do not stick to science. They scoff at their own results, and say things like "God does not play dice".
It's a fool's errand but I guess I can't resist replying to this and your whole shtick.No one who matters in this context cares what Alan Watts or the Dali Lama has to say on the subject. Despite the disengenuous claims to the contrary quantum mechanics was developed entirely in places like Copenhagen, Berlin, Cambridge and other locations noted for their scarcity of ashrams. It was conceived and developed by people with extensive training in and knowledge of advanced classical mechanics (Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanics and so forth, not the high school level stuff that is often bandied about). If we were waiting for Buddhists to reach a useful level of creativity to discover QM we would still be waiting (probably forever). In fact the subject in question has not been a static edifice. It continues to be developed and improved, QM -> QED -> QCD -> quantum gravity (that last arrow is a direction, not a completed step). Notably absent from this progress is a useful contributions from any temples or ashrams.
I know a statement like that comes off as insulting toward those institutions which I really don't intend except in regard to bullshit claims made on their behalf and possibly without their agreement with the claims. I had the opportunity to attend some of the lecures of Feynamn and I was even a classmate of Polchinski. These are people who were responsible for improving our understanding of QM and I didn't detect even a hint of oriental philosphy informing either one of them and yet they have done OK. I imagine Joseph might bring matters to higher levels yet.
My point is that QM is a Western game. There have been plenty of contributers from most areas of the world including, for instance, Tomonaga who contributed to the formulation of QED. My point is that his contribution was in no way Eastern except as an incidental geographical matter. I'm only aware of popularizers like Fritjof Capra who make claims such as yours. Not actual working physicists who have made contributions to the advancement of QM. I'm sure there have been many, because of their voracious intellectual interests, who have been curious about Eastern philosophies as well as being actual contributors. Oppenheimer is an example who studied Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gits. But I don't think anyone claims this was part of the intellectual framework that informed his research thinking. Gelman's Eight-Fold Way illustrated his familiarity with Buddhist philosophy but it has immeasurably more to do with the group SU(3) than any discourse delivered by the Buddha.
Hawking's suggestion has the virtue that we actually have the technology necessary to pursue it. I think there is an even more interesting strategy for human survival that requires a few fundamental breakthroughs (which may not actually be possible) but the result would be more dramatic. It's been known since the sixties that a ramscoop fusion engine has the potential to provide constant 1g accelerated space travel. That is, the acceleration would be the amount needed to provide the equivalent of Earth's gravitational field. Analyzing this motion with the appropriate special relativity framework we get remarkable, almost unbelievable, consequences. You can find the analysis in Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's big blue bible Gravitation in chapter six. Because of time dilation and lorentz contraction such a ship could travel to any point in the visible universe with the shipboard time elapsed being less than the number of years a person could expect to live including the return trip.
The amount of time that would correspondingly elapse on Earth during such a round trip is an example of the twin paradox on steroids. There is a list of cases at this web address. The provocative extreme cases involve billions of years. So even though evolution and geological events would have moved far past the era of man we could send teams to the future which could have the potential to renew our species no matter what events might occur. So you could leave in the 21st century and you (not some distant descendant) could return to Earth hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years in the future. Damn, that theory of relativity implies some unbelievable possibilities due to the geometry of how the universe is put together.
I see someone else has provided a correction but I'll just amplify it. Even in the US market the Philips CD-I console had a catalog of movies and other media titles that used the VideoCD format. Some of them even looked pretty good on a regular NTSC set. It also eventually had an option for web browsing which made it the first triple threat (games, media, web) to lose out to platforms that concentrated their efforts on game play. Of course there was also laserdisc which included a "game machine" model (CLD-A100) which had a handful of game titles produced for it (yes, I have purchased some on eBay and they tend to be awful). I even have an Apple ][e and an interface to laserdisc that will do multimedia of a sort from an even earlier time period. My Voyager Space Disc (laserdisc) from Video Vision has some very cool video from the ecounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Which was a big deal? My inability to point out an increasingly common error without committing a similar error or the way a common word has been kidnapped in the online world and tarted up with a superfluous E that does not belong in it? Neither is a big deal but the former is slightly embarrassing. Of course as an alumnus of U of Arizona I could wonder if you aren't confused about this whole spelling/misspelling issue. But that would just be pointlessly nasty (no, really, I'm joking).
Damn, damn, damn, damn. As soon as I clicked post I realized I had committed the hilarious mistake of making a classic spelling error while correcting the spelling of someone else. Of course the correct spelling is misspell which looks ridiculous but is correct. I only spell check for words that feel unfamiliar since I get so many false positives otherwise. I suppose that might be the case for the original poster. Anyhow I apologize and go fix some coffee to see if that improves my acuity.
p.s. But I'm right that there is some sort of conspiracy to misspell the word ridiculous
Did I miss a meeting where everyone using a computer decided to mispell ridiculous as rediculous? There is no E in the word ridiculous. Everyone please stop doing that. This is not an isolated incident, it is part of some vast conspiracy to mangle simple, common words and test our resolve. Any spell checker will catch this sort of error. Please use one.
No, in your effort to be flippant you've messed it up. The statement is that if the manifold is homotopy equivalent to a 3-sphere then it must also be homeomorphic to a 3-sphere. Note that the announcement was not about a proof for n-spheres but specifically for 3-spheres. The reason is that the corresponding proof for n > 3 has been known for decades. Smale proved it for n >= 5 and Freedman proved the result for n = 4.
With your relatively low slashdot user ID I would have thought you might actually be familiar with some computer industry history. Do you remember what Apple did (this was during the first period when Jobs was the head of Apple) when IBM introduced its PC? They put a full page ad in the New York Times (or Wall Street Journal or both) welcoming IBM to the market. Years later when Scully was chairman Apple brought the infamous look and feel lawsuit against Microsoft. The courts dismissed the suit for a number of reasons and we are all better because of the result.
The Akamai servers have the unencrypted files, and then encrypt them for a particular user when you go to buy/download one.
This sort of thing might change over time but the last time I checked identical unlocked files were being sent to the consumer and the DRM was being applied by iTunes to the file it received. I believe there was even a hack out there to disable this application of DRM. This is separate from the tools from Jon Johansen that remove iTMS DRM after the fact. In a sense the DRM used by iTunes is fairly innocuous. The unfortunate part is that you can only by music that has been compressed using lossy compression from iTMS.
I agree with your analysis that using the bittorrent protocol relies almost crucially on all copies of a file being identical. The original small torrent file that contains all the hash values might be the most important reason why bittorrent is so remarkably robust and it is coupled to the idea that all copies of the target file are identical. On the other hand it is sort of a cool problem to think about.
Start with a central server that seeds the various target files and generates corresponding torrent files (the small files that contain the list of hash values). But don't create just one torrent file for a given target media file. Based on a key that a client and the server agree on the server creates a custom torrent file with hash values of the target file encrypted with that key. When a client connects to another client they use Diffie Hellman to exchange key information so each has a key to encode chunks from his encrypted copy so they can be transmitted to the other in the encryption he needs. Obviously the vendor has to create a proprietary client which could almost certainly be hacked but so what? Those files are flying around the internet already in completely unencrypted form already. As long as DVDs are being sold that will continue to be true.
The nasty part of this proposal is that some server has the need to create a custom torrent file for each client that wants to download a media file. But it just has to do that once and it uses no network bandwidth. Everyone gets his own encrypted version without knowing anyone else's key because the clients only need to generate composite keys that convert from one encryption to another without ever creating a plaintext version. The custom hash values for specific encryptions insure the transfer is robust. Of course all this is all moot because they have probably committed to Microsoft's media DRM.
Actually, more important is that Apple Computer agreed not to get into the music business.
Actually, you are full of it. Legal contracts are much more precisely crafted than your wooly headed thinking seems to be able to comprehend. Because the contract did not specify anything so carelessly worded as Apple Computer agreed not to get into the music business, the plaintiff was unable to prevail. Apple Corps tried to stretch their contract past the breaking point and they failed.
It is cases like this that lead me to wonder why one should pay any attention at all to copyright claims. Customarily one could take the position that copyright is an attempt to reach a balance between society and the temporary holder of a copyright. But increasingly the demands of the copyright industry are getting outrageous. Initially we had a 14 year government enforced monopoly wih the option of one 14 year extension. Now copyright is essentially eternal. It increases in length faster than the passing of time. Now they add this sort of outrage, The descendants of the original artist (who died in 1983, over 20 years ago) look for a litigious opportunity to enrich themselves when no original work is being copied.
Copyright has been bent past the breaking point by many different events and actions. The legitimate case for copyright is hopelessly drowned out by despicable claims like this.
The article is really only about the pervasive threat of radiation that humans face if they leave the Earth and its protections behind. They genuflect about time dilation which is a consequence of relativistic physics but don't even try to explain. What we have known theoretically and have verified experimentally for about a century is that space and time are mixed together in a very algebraically specific way when viewed by different observers who are in relative motion. One consequence of this theory is called time dilation which means that each observer in relative motion sees the others' time as being dilated (slowed down) relative to what he experiences in his own frame of reference. I know this sounds paradoxical but it is nicely explained in Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler and many other sources (maybe check Wikipedia).
What is quite incredible is that if we could build a ship capable of constant 1 g acceleration we could travel just about anywhere in the universe in what appears to be about 40 years to people on the ship (see chapter 6 of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler for the mathematical details). Of course it is worth noting that all our space exploration has been conducted with ballistic missles which are nothing like a spacecraft capable of constant 1 g acceleration. There is significant reason to doubt that it is possible to build such a device. But it is true that humans are quite comfortable with 1 g acceleration (that is equivalent to the force of gravity at the Earth's surface). I think that it is beyond merely remarkable that relativistic physics guarantees that if our range would be so great if only such a spacecraft could be built.
What this article and a much more complete similar article in Scientific American (March 2006 page 40)explain is that radiation puts a severe damper on the ecomonics of space travel. Pioneers of space flight have been flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to radiation shielding. Frankly I suspect it is a second order problem in the cosmic quest. If we could devise a starship capable of constant acceleration then just encase the whole thing in as sufficient water or something similar to duplicate Earth's protective atmosphere. Assemble it in space far up in Earth's gravity well with material mined from asteroids. Of course there is still the issue of inventing those darn dilithium crystals.
Imagine traveling to another galaxy and returning in less than one hundred years as experienced in your reference frame while the Earth has aged about 4 billion years. Who says we can't have time machines? The only problem is that they are all one way, into the far future. Check these musings in Kip Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps
If humans could only react to sound, then Einstien would likely have said that nothing goes faster than sound because we can't percieve it faster than sound.
If you are going to pontificate on a subject you might want to spend a little time actually studying it first. Einstein's idea that the speed of light was independent of observer had a lot to do with the results coming from Maxwell's equations and the null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Only a dilettante could think there was a useful analogy to the speed of sound in this context.
It is also worth noting that time dilation and lorentz contaction are effects of special relativity that are verified on a daily basis in particle accelerators everywhere around the world. It is not a subject on which one holds an opinion except insofar as how you want to explain the overwhelming amount of independently measured results.
This part of physics has now been around for over a century (Einstein's first paper on relativity appeared in 1905) and the math behind it has been around even longer. There aren't too many books on differential geometry for the layman but there are many good sources of information about relativity theory by Kip Thorne, John Wheeler and others.
Kathleen Dupre performed Elgar's cello concerto like nobody else
That would be Jacqueline du Pre with an accent over the last 'e' which I doubt many web browsers will handle (Pré). She was often called Jackie and there is even a fairly recent movie about her and her sister (Hilary and Jackie from 1998). The pretend cello playing can be a little annoying but the only actress I know of who could do that well is Lori Singer (see Short Cuts) and she didn't look much like Jackie.
So rather than legacy markets like TV, music, and movies his pitch for DRM was about some new market that would emerge as some sort of hybrid of what is now called games and movies with a healthy dose of networking thrown in. I am aware of and sympathetic to the arguments that it is unwise for government regulation to intrude on the market in order to save one industry when it could be preventing another one from being created. If there were imminent danger that Congress was about to pass legislation making DRM illegal (I don't count legislation against companies installing rootkits as anti-DRM), I would be opposed to it even thouh I do not support DRM. But the opposite is closer to our situation. The government has passed legislation (DMCA) making the circumvention of DRM a criminal offense.
...about the definition of the term "value" as it was being used. It has nothing to do with how good the show is, how funny it is, how smart is it.
Thanks, I couldn't have put it any better. The way he (and possibly you) use the term value has no useful meaning for the viewer. So from his remembered quote:
Anyway, one of the things he said was (and I am essentially quoting here amazing enough), "either we are going to have DRM or the only content we are going to be able to make is stuff not worth stealing, like what you see on television".
It sounds like it is fine with me (and viewers in general) for there to be absolutely no DRM because the content is just as likely to be of interest (or total crap) in either case since his definition of value "has nothing to do with how good the show is, how funny it is, how smart is it". So if you think that is a good description of why DRM is a good or useful idea then you might want to work on the presentation to broaden the appeal.
Nope, it still isn't corresponding to reality. Examples are not hard to find. Firefly is better SF story telling than any movie I can think of (including Serenity). Arrested Development is smarter and funnier than any movie comedy that comes to mind. There is a seriously flawed Hollywood idea that by spending enough money something of value will be produced. What was more accurate (but becoming less so as technology improves) was that by spending sufficient quantities of money promoting a movie, no matter how pathetically dismal it was, you could guarantee a certain level of return at least for the first week or so.
Hey, I just noticed that both of those examples illustrate how badly Fox handles entertainment programming. Of course there are many, many others (see Peter Griffin's list at the opening of season four)that illustrate that the executives at Fox are morons. I suppose if you strictly think in terms of dollars and cents none of this makes any sense.
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Man, I just don't understand why so many tech journalists are such lapdogs who trot out this same lame line about how terrible a format war is. The real problem is that there aren't enough competing candidates. As it is both main candidates have similar user hostile lock down technology. Imagine if we simply had to accept whatever is annointed and brought down to the masses from the mountain. When only insiders get to make binding design choices that means your likely to get devices that have less than optimum (from the consumer standpoint) features.
It appears that HD-DVD might have a slight edge that you might have an approved option to transfer some content to your computer. Without competition between formats even these slight concessions would be unlikely. I hope the competition continues at least until they have to compete to see which format provides an affordable (less than $100) disc writer so that contestant can be rewarded.
I understand that early adopters face the prospect that a wrong choice means the need to buy a less expensive device of the competing format and a collection of media dependent on legacy players that can only be obtained at bargain prices on eBay (I've purchased more than one LD player there). I'm much happier with my superior LD collection than the cheesy tapes other people collected. So in this particular case even when you lose, you still win because you could have made your choice for reasons that continue to matter to you.
Think of the big shot at ABC who had no trouble claiming people didn't really care about having fast forward for skipping over obnoxious or tedious commercials (or the mysteriously required musical guest on every talk show). If they could enforce a single PVR design (which cable providers pretty much can) there would be a remote possibility that it would be missing the 30/60 second jump forward capability. It is a remote possibility now because people know of its possibility because of competing designs.
The problem isn't the lack of an industry annointed standard format, it is that we could do even better if there were a larger variety of options to compete for our acceptance.
Thank you for the references, I'll probably read them. I am aware of the context and was present at WWDC 2002 when Tim O'Reilly was first making his observation about how he was using alpha geek behavior to predict favorable results for OS X. I don't think this recent tempest in a teapot is comparable to what Tim was observing and reporting. For example even if one were inclined to identify some of these individuals as ubergeeks their stated reasons seem more ideological rather than technological.
It has always been my observation that Macs suck less than the alternative and despite also having a PC and dabbling with linux that remains my suspicion. Today after visiting the newly opened public library in Minneapolis with my daughter (too much detail?) we stopped at the Dunn Brothers coffee bar in the same impressive building on the Nicolett Mall (if you are close to Minneapolis you really should visit it). I was surprised to see that their free internet stations were running a linux variant. I mention it because I was surprised how sluggish the whole experience was. I don't know what was specifically at fault (low bandwidth internet connection?) but it was not a favorable demonstration of the state of the linux desktop experience.
The closest to a reason that resonates for me against OS X is the tedious DRM in the OS and iTMS. But that could be viewed as a consequece of Apple making the moves necessary to enable the iPod to live up to its potential. In any case I think it will be interesting to see the followup on these conversions. I remember one of Nicholas Negroponte's columns at Wired (circa 1999) indicated his intention to dive into Windows from his comfortable position for years as a Mac user. The next column detailed a series of horror stories (from his viewpoint) that he was enduring. In any case let me know when James Gosling or John McCarthy deem the Mac unworthy and that will be a bigger story.
Where could you possibly live? If you are talking about stations that just transmit shows that have been syndicated for many years then, yes, the quality of the old programs will not be dramatically improved whether 480p or 1080i is used. But essentially every new network show is produced in HD quality and has been for some time. This is already history, not prediction. Even three of the four main late night shows are in HD. Legal certainty isn't a trivial factor but commercial survival has already made any ideas of using 480p something that only unaffiliated stations will consider.
Just like color TV was a certainty long before black and white TV disappeared in the sixties, HDTV is already inevitable. The quirk is that current generation DVD's look so good on an HDTV set that it isn't at all certain that either of the two competing HD disc standards will be able to dislodge it. My guess is that a successful PS3 might give BluRay a chance but it is easy to imagine a future with HDTV but only DVD as a successful standard for discs.
Who allowed you to operate a keyboard before you shook the cobwebs out of your head? Do you really thing Kip Thorne reads slashdot with his Wheaties in the morning to glean your wisdom from it? One of the dangers of articles that popularize science for the multitudes who can't be bothered to study enough to understand even approximately what is involved, is that some readers get the illusion that they actually know something. Just a hint, from what you've written it seems safe to infer you know approximately nothing which is not a problem. But deciding you should offer sage advice is somewhere between ludicrous and nauseating.
If the thousand dollars was diverted from somewhere else to buy that first Bluray player on the block your view might have some validity. But don't forget that for a rather large number of people that much money is just chump change. It isn't like they'd be stuck eating ramen noodles until the end of the month. Besides these people (early adopters) are an important part of our ecology and we need to encourage them so those nifty devices can start sliding down the price curve.
I was just going to allow this noise to fade away but you really don't have a clue. I just can't leave it that way. You seem to have some quaint idea that physical reality must be essentially the same at every scale. If you can't make sense of an electron as just a very small billiard ball then physical theory is hopeless. Since you indicated you had admiration for Feynman here is a quote from his lectures that doesn't "prove" anything but it does provide his angle on this sort of subject:
"It is therefore not fair to say that from the apparent freedom and indeterminacy of the human mind, we should have realized that classical "deterministic" physics could not ever hope to understand it, and to welcome quantum mechanics as a release from a "completely mechanistic" universe."
Or earlier in the same chapter (38) the possibly more applicable quote:
"Let us consider briefly some philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. As always, there are two aspects of the problem: one is the philosophical implication for physics, and the other is the extrapolation of philosophical matters to other fields. When philosophical ideas associated with science are dragged into another field, they are usually completely distorted."
Again I don't pretend that quoting anyone's opinion can prove anything but it can be instructive depending on the experience of the person being quoted. Concerning your looney idea of human consciousness creates reality the really remarkable result of advances of the last century is that physical theory is much more odd than that. The idea you put forth isn't even wrong. It just doesn't address any of the important experiments and discoveries that have been made in the last fifty years. You seem to be stuck back in the early twentieth century before the invention of quantum electrodynamics extended quantum mechanics to cover electrodynamics and the even more recent extension to cover the weak and strong nuclear forces. The most important thing to take from this is that it still isn't over. For all of the glorious advances quantum theory is still not finished. It isn't time to engage in navel gazing and sloppy anthropomorphic bullshitting.
As long as general relativity and quantum theory are in conflict they are both still broken. It isn't time to shut down the enterprise and start sloppy philosophizing. There is still work to be done. You need to take your goofy ideas (and that isn't really meant as an insult, more like a description and there are much goofier ideas that seem to provide considerable explanatory power such as virtual particles in QED) and do useful work with them like harmonizing Einstein's general relativity with quantum theory. Otherwise your ideas won't have any significance where it matters.
Oh, please, have you ever read anything by von Neumann about quantum mechanics? For instance his "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics". What it makes very clear is that the activity that is required for creating and understanding quantum mechanics is mathematics. Eastern philosophy isn't even mentioned. In this context it is a waste of time and, I'm afraid, so are these pointless ramblings. I mean no disrespect for Eastern philosophies, but the thesis that it provides some sort of royal road to understanding quantum physics is a bunch of hokum. Newton was arguably the greatest scientist but even he had some odd side interests like alchemy and he also lost a bundle in the great tulip craze. Towering intellects have a whole range of interests and results. It is our task to use judgment in selecting those works which are part of a grand tradition. For you the mumbo jumbo of mysticism seems to be the item of interest. Well, to each his own.
I don't doubt that Schroedinger was inspired by aspects of Indian philosophy just as I imagine Murray Gell-Mann found inspiration of a sort in the Buddhist Eight Fold Way as I mentioned before. My point is that you can study that stuff till the cows come home and you get precisely nowhere. What you do need to study and learn is differential equations, Hamiltonian mechanics, group theory and any number of other non-Eastern philosophy subjects or you will get nowhere. Quantum mechanics can never be learned in an ashram or temple but it can be and is learned and extended to new levels at universities and institutes of technology. It is a Western scientific theory and they bang the hell out of it on a daily basis in experiments at labs around the world. And they don't burn incense in any of those labs.
As I mentioned before in reference to Oppenheimer many of these figures are very cosmopolitan and they have an active curiosity about other cultures. But even if you excluded every one of them you will still have physicists and mathematicians like von Neumann who can get all of it done with an advanced understanding of Hilbert spaces. The crucial tool in this context is modern mathematics, not Eastern philosophy. Obviously the stuff you go on about doesn't distract many physicists. What is annoying about it is the insidious attraction it has for people who are not literate about modern physics which is, of course, the vast majority.
Neither Alan Watts, nor the Dali Lama, nor myself, would disagree with you when you say "stick to science". Never have I said you should not, in fact I'm a great proponent of it. As I have shown, it is the other way around, "western" scientists are the ones who do not stick to science. They scoff at their own results, and say things like "God does not play dice".
It's a fool's errand but I guess I can't resist replying to this and your whole shtick.No one who matters in this context cares what Alan Watts or the Dali Lama has to say on the subject. Despite the disengenuous claims to the contrary quantum mechanics was developed entirely in places like Copenhagen, Berlin, Cambridge and other locations noted for their scarcity of ashrams. It was conceived and developed by people with extensive training in and knowledge of advanced classical mechanics (Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanics and so forth, not the high school level stuff that is often bandied about). If we were waiting for Buddhists to reach a useful level of creativity to discover QM we would still be waiting (probably forever). In fact the subject in question has not been a static edifice. It continues to be developed and improved, QM -> QED -> QCD -> quantum gravity (that last arrow is a direction, not a completed step). Notably absent from this progress is a useful contributions from any temples or ashrams.
I know a statement like that comes off as insulting toward those institutions which I really don't intend except in regard to bullshit claims made on their behalf and possibly without their agreement with the claims. I had the opportunity to attend some of the lecures of Feynamn and I was even a classmate of Polchinski. These are people who were responsible for improving our understanding of QM and I didn't detect even a hint of oriental philosphy informing either one of them and yet they have done OK. I imagine Joseph might bring matters to higher levels yet.
My point is that QM is a Western game. There have been plenty of contributers from most areas of the world including, for instance, Tomonaga who contributed to the formulation of QED. My point is that his contribution was in no way Eastern except as an incidental geographical matter. I'm only aware of popularizers like Fritjof Capra who make claims such as yours. Not actual working physicists who have made contributions to the advancement of QM. I'm sure there have been many, because of their voracious intellectual interests, who have been curious about Eastern philosophies as well as being actual contributors. Oppenheimer is an example who studied Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gits. But I don't think anyone claims this was part of the intellectual framework that informed his research thinking. Gelman's Eight-Fold Way illustrated his familiarity with Buddhist philosophy but it has immeasurably more to do with the group SU(3) than any discourse delivered by the Buddha.
Hawking's suggestion has the virtue that we actually have the technology necessary to pursue it. I think there is an even more interesting strategy for human survival that requires a few fundamental breakthroughs (which may not actually be possible) but the result would be more dramatic. It's been known since the sixties that a ramscoop fusion engine has the potential to provide constant 1g accelerated space travel. That is, the acceleration would be the amount needed to provide the equivalent of Earth's gravitational field. Analyzing this motion with the appropriate special relativity framework we get remarkable, almost unbelievable, consequences. You can find the analysis in Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's big blue bible Gravitation in chapter six. Because of time dilation and lorentz contraction such a ship could travel to any point in the visible universe with the shipboard time elapsed being less than the number of years a person could expect to live including the return trip.
The amount of time that would correspondingly elapse on Earth during such a round trip is an example of the twin paradox on steroids. There is a list of cases at this web address. The provocative extreme cases involve billions of years. So even though evolution and geological events would have moved far past the era of man we could send teams to the future which could have the potential to renew our species no matter what events might occur. So you could leave in the 21st century and you (not some distant descendant) could return to Earth hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years in the future. Damn, that theory of relativity implies some unbelievable possibilities due to the geometry of how the universe is put together.
I see someone else has provided a correction but I'll just amplify it. Even in the US market the Philips CD-I console had a catalog of movies and other media titles that used the VideoCD format. Some of them even looked pretty good on a regular NTSC set. It also eventually had an option for web browsing which made it the first triple threat (games, media, web) to lose out to platforms that concentrated their efforts on game play. Of course there was also laserdisc which included a "game machine" model (CLD-A100) which had a handful of game titles produced for it (yes, I have purchased some on eBay and they tend to be awful). I even have an Apple ][e and an interface to laserdisc that will do multimedia of a sort from an even earlier time period. My Voyager Space Disc (laserdisc) from Video Vision has some very cool video from the ecounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Which was a big deal? My inability to point out an increasingly common error without committing a similar error or the way a common word has been kidnapped in the online world and tarted up with a superfluous E that does not belong in it? Neither is a big deal but the former is slightly embarrassing. Of course as an alumnus of U of Arizona I could wonder if you aren't confused about this whole spelling/misspelling issue. But that would just be pointlessly nasty (no, really, I'm joking).
Damn, damn, damn, damn. As soon as I clicked post I realized I had committed the hilarious mistake of making a classic spelling error while correcting the spelling of someone else. Of course the correct spelling is misspell which looks ridiculous but is correct. I only spell check for words that feel unfamiliar since I get so many false positives otherwise. I suppose that might be the case for the original poster. Anyhow I apologize and go fix some coffee to see if that improves my acuity.
p.s. But I'm right that there is some sort of conspiracy to misspell the word ridiculous
Did I miss a meeting where everyone using a computer decided to mispell ridiculous as rediculous? There is no E in the word ridiculous. Everyone please stop doing that. This is not an isolated incident, it is part of some vast conspiracy to mangle simple, common words and test our resolve. Any spell checker will catch this sort of error. Please use one.
No, in your effort to be flippant you've messed it up. The statement is that if the manifold is homotopy equivalent to a 3-sphere then it must also be homeomorphic to a 3-sphere. Note that the announcement was not about a proof for n-spheres but specifically for 3-spheres. The reason is that the corresponding proof for n > 3 has been known for decades. Smale proved it for n >= 5 and Freedman proved the result for n = 4.
With your relatively low slashdot user ID I would have thought you might actually be familiar with some computer industry history. Do you remember what Apple did (this was during the first period when Jobs was the head of Apple) when IBM introduced its PC? They put a full page ad in the New York Times (or Wall Street Journal or both) welcoming IBM to the market. Years later when Scully was chairman Apple brought the infamous look and feel lawsuit against Microsoft. The courts dismissed the suit for a number of reasons and we are all better because of the result.
The Akamai servers have the unencrypted files, and then encrypt them for a particular user when you go to buy/download one.
This sort of thing might change over time but the last time I checked identical unlocked files were being sent to the consumer and the DRM was being applied by iTunes to the file it received. I believe there was even a hack out there to disable this application of DRM. This is separate from the tools from Jon Johansen that remove iTMS DRM after the fact. In a sense the DRM used by iTunes is fairly innocuous. The unfortunate part is that you can only by music that has been compressed using lossy compression from iTMS.
I agree with your analysis that using the bittorrent protocol relies almost crucially on all copies of a file being identical. The original small torrent file that contains all the hash values might be the most important reason why bittorrent is so remarkably robust and it is coupled to the idea that all copies of the target file are identical. On the other hand it is sort of a cool problem to think about.
Start with a central server that seeds the various target files and generates corresponding torrent files (the small files that contain the list of hash values). But don't create just one torrent file for a given target media file. Based on a key that a client and the server agree on the server creates a custom torrent file with hash values of the target file encrypted with that key. When a client connects to another client they use Diffie Hellman to exchange key information so each has a key to encode chunks from his encrypted copy so they can be transmitted to the other in the encryption he needs. Obviously the vendor has to create a proprietary client which could almost certainly be hacked but so what? Those files are flying around the internet already in completely unencrypted form already. As long as DVDs are being sold that will continue to be true.
The nasty part of this proposal is that some server has the need to create a custom torrent file for each client that wants to download a media file. But it just has to do that once and it uses no network bandwidth. Everyone gets his own encrypted version without knowing anyone else's key because the clients only need to generate composite keys that convert from one encryption to another without ever creating a plaintext version. The custom hash values for specific encryptions insure the transfer is robust. Of course all this is all moot because they have probably committed to Microsoft's media DRM.
Actually, more important is that Apple Computer agreed not to get into the music business.
Actually, you are full of it. Legal contracts are much more precisely crafted than your wooly headed thinking seems to be able to comprehend. Because the contract did not specify anything so carelessly worded as Apple Computer agreed not to get into the music business, the plaintiff was unable to prevail. Apple Corps tried to stretch their contract past the breaking point and they failed.
It is cases like this that lead me to wonder why one should pay any attention at all to copyright claims. Customarily one could take the position that copyright is an attempt to reach a balance between society and the temporary holder of a copyright. But increasingly the demands of the copyright industry are getting outrageous. Initially we had a 14 year government enforced monopoly wih the option of one 14 year extension. Now copyright is essentially eternal. It increases in length faster than the passing of time. Now they add this sort of outrage, The descendants of the original artist (who died in 1983, over 20 years ago) look for a litigious opportunity to enrich themselves when no original work is being copied.
Copyright has been bent past the breaking point by many different events and actions. The legitimate case for copyright is hopelessly drowned out by despicable claims like this.
The article is really only about the pervasive threat of radiation that humans face if they leave the Earth and its protections behind. They genuflect about time dilation which is a consequence of relativistic physics but don't even try to explain. What we have known theoretically and have verified experimentally for about a century is that space and time are mixed together in a very algebraically specific way when viewed by different observers who are in relative motion. One consequence of this theory is called time dilation which means that each observer in relative motion sees the others' time as being dilated (slowed down) relative to what he experiences in his own frame of reference. I know this sounds paradoxical but it is nicely explained in Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler and many other sources (maybe check Wikipedia).
What is quite incredible is that if we could build a ship capable of constant 1 g acceleration we could travel just about anywhere in the universe in what appears to be about 40 years to people on the ship (see chapter 6 of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler for the mathematical details). Of course it is worth noting that all our space exploration has been conducted with ballistic missles which are nothing like a spacecraft capable of constant 1 g acceleration. There is significant reason to doubt that it is possible to build such a device. But it is true that humans are quite comfortable with 1 g acceleration (that is equivalent to the force of gravity at the Earth's surface). I think that it is beyond merely remarkable that relativistic physics guarantees that if our range would be so great if only such a spacecraft could be built.
What this article and a much more complete similar article in Scientific American (March 2006 page 40)explain is that radiation puts a severe damper on the ecomonics of space travel. Pioneers of space flight have been flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to radiation shielding. Frankly I suspect it is a second order problem in the cosmic quest. If we could devise a starship capable of constant acceleration then just encase the whole thing in as sufficient water or something similar to duplicate Earth's protective atmosphere. Assemble it in space far up in Earth's gravity well with material mined from asteroids. Of course there is still the issue of inventing those darn dilithium crystals.
Imagine traveling to another galaxy and returning in less than one hundred years as experienced in your reference frame while the Earth has aged about 4 billion years. Who says we can't have time machines? The only problem is that they are all one way, into the far future. Check these musings in Kip Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps
If humans could only react to sound, then Einstien would likely have said that nothing goes faster than sound because we can't percieve it faster than sound.
If you are going to pontificate on a subject you might want to spend a little time actually studying it first. Einstein's idea that the speed of light was independent of observer had a lot to do with the results coming from Maxwell's equations and the null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Only a dilettante could think there was a useful analogy to the speed of sound in this context.
It is also worth noting that time dilation and lorentz contaction are effects of special relativity that are verified on a daily basis in particle accelerators everywhere around the world. It is not a subject on which one holds an opinion except insofar as how you want to explain the overwhelming amount of independently measured results.
This part of physics has now been around for over a century (Einstein's first paper on relativity appeared in 1905) and the math behind it has been around even longer. There aren't too many books on differential geometry for the layman but there are many good sources of information about relativity theory by Kip Thorne, John Wheeler and others.
Kathleen Dupre performed Elgar's cello concerto like nobody else
That would be Jacqueline du Pre with an accent over the last 'e' which I doubt many web browsers will handle (Pré). She was often called Jackie and there is even a fairly recent movie about her and her sister (Hilary and Jackie from 1998). The pretend cello playing can be a little annoying but the only actress I know of who could do that well is Lori Singer (see Short Cuts) and she didn't look much like Jackie.
So rather than legacy markets like TV, music, and movies his pitch for DRM was about some new market that would emerge as some sort of hybrid of what is now called games and movies with a healthy dose of networking thrown in. I am aware of and sympathetic to the arguments that it is unwise for government regulation to intrude on the market in order to save one industry when it could be preventing another one from being created. If there were imminent danger that Congress was about to pass legislation making DRM illegal (I don't count legislation against companies installing rootkits as anti-DRM), I would be opposed to it even thouh I do not support DRM. But the opposite is closer to our situation. The government has passed legislation (DMCA) making the circumvention of DRM a criminal offense.
...about the definition of the term "value" as it was being used. It has nothing to do with how good the show is, how funny it is, how smart is it.
Thanks, I couldn't have put it any better. The way he (and possibly you) use the term value has no useful meaning for the viewer. So from his remembered quote:
Anyway, one of the things he said was (and I am essentially quoting here amazing enough), "either we are going to have DRM or the only content we are going to be able to make is stuff not worth stealing, like what you see on television".
It sounds like it is fine with me (and viewers in general) for there to be absolutely no DRM because the content is just as likely to be of interest (or total crap) in either case since his definition of value "has nothing to do with how good the show is, how funny it is, how smart is it". So if you think that is a good description of why DRM is a good or useful idea then you might want to work on the presentation to broaden the appeal.
Nope, it still isn't corresponding to reality. Examples are not hard to find. Firefly is better SF story telling than any movie I can think of (including Serenity). Arrested Development is smarter and funnier than any movie comedy that comes to mind. There is a seriously flawed Hollywood idea that by spending enough money something of value will be produced. What was more accurate (but becoming less so as technology improves) was that by spending sufficient quantities of money promoting a movie, no matter how pathetically dismal it was, you could guarantee a certain level of return at least for the first week or so.
Hey, I just noticed that both of those examples illustrate how badly Fox handles entertainment programming. Of course there are many, many others (see Peter Griffin's list at the opening of season four)that illustrate that the executives at Fox are morons. I suppose if you strictly think in terms of dollars and cents none of this makes any sense.