Rather than version control as such, when our group writes at the same time (we use latex), we use SubEthaEdit to write actually collaboratively. It's a serious step up from version control. Requires a little more trust, but that's fair enough in co-writers.
The main thing that interests me in 4E is a wholescale removal of the major design problems of 3.5E. These include the basic game-breakers, usually involving power imbalance and rules quagmire. While in multiple dozen splatbooks it must be impossible to avoid the occasional unbalanced item slipping through, I wonder if the core books have been tested hard by optimisers.
There are many well-documented things that need fixing that I assume you have under control (polymorph, antimagic, persistent spell, various high level spells, druids, clerics, etc.)
I think the thing that gets the least attention is the timing system. On many occasions my characters have a spare move action and a handful of swift actions that they want to do. House ruling that shorter actions can fit into larger ones (swiftmovestandard) causes all sorts of balance problems. (e.g. that would allow 3 spells per round) Are there any plans to revamp this?
They can do what they say, but it's a lot more trivial than measuring the entire quantum state of the system, which is, as others have suggested above, impossible.
The Heisenberg Unccertainty principle implies that measuring a quantity must add noise in the conjugate quantity. For example, measuring the momentum of an object spreads out the wavefunction. Another example, measuring the state of a qubit (whether it is a zero or a one) destroys the relative phase between the zero and the one.
So the "non-destructive" measurement they are talking about means that they aren't changing it from a zero to a one or vice-versa. But they are (and must) destroy the information about the phase of the qubit state during the measurement. For a more in-depth discussion, look up "quantum nondemolition measurements".
The point of ads is to make you unhappy
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I block ads whenever it's easy. I use my PVR, Firefox's Adblock, and a "No Advertising Material Please" sticker.
Internet ads are exactly like TV ads, except they cost me money to download. I don't like magazines where the ads are so prevalent, they genuinely get in the way of finding content. Content. Haha.
The REAL question is: why do you watch ads? Why do you download them? It's not like you need to be aware of ads these days to know what to buy when you want to buy something. When I want to buy something I look on the internet retail and review sites just like everybody else. Until that point, the only point of ads is to make me unhappy. Ever seen an ad whose message was "everything is great, you can be content and change nothing?" The answer is no. The point of an advert is to make you dissatisfied with soemthing in your life so that you take some action (each advertiser has a preferred action) to fix it.
These people are professionals, too. There is a serious amount of science put into figuring out ways to make people unhappy. I don't feel like subjecting myself to that needlessly, even though I am a happy little consumer.
That's why America is internationally famous for having such a low rate of muggings.
I have a vision of a nation where everyone is free to carry nuclear-armed surface to air missiles. Such a place would be forever free of terrorism and problems of all kinds.
Me, I don't see who wouldn't want to go with XServe, provided that their application is ported to MacOSX. Maybe companies like Google that have thousands of nodes and calculated that Intel hardware will be cheaper.
And wasn't that calculation done before the G5s came out?
Price/performance was dramatically different when a top of the line Mac was a dual G4 machine. The virginia tech G5 cluster was a lot cheaper than the comparable intel clusters, I believe.
If the NSA doesn't throw a fit and complain if you try to export/import it out/into the US, then it's probably breakable already. Notice how the US government tolerance level floats up pretty consistently a few years ahead of publicised code cracking?
Actually, the constant media harassment was irritating them, so the two parallel (public/private) projects declared the gene to be sequenced BEFORE either project was complete.
The enormous media frenzy that happened as a result took up some extra time, but enabled them to get back to the science in peace - with extra funding in several cases.
So you call a random user, programmer, astronaut, doctor, lawyer, governor, or president "he" or "him"...
Do you do the same for a random nurse, or secretary?
By the way, the "established format" is to have unworthy scum like you (and me) working for the aristocracy. Don't stop turning the clock back just because you're on top of the heap.
I imagine an M16 must be some kind of special, American training equipment to help you get in shape.
Unless you mean the gun, but I don't think that you can take what the interview panel says seriously when you're pointing an automatic weapon at them. Even if they seem very sincere and polite.
Citations are a strange measure of quality. The median paper gets exactly one citation. The next largest citation number is zero. However, the mean citation rate per paper is on the order of ten, so you can imagine the distribution. Most papers "sink without a trace", and a very few are cited by a huge number. A study done over a decade ago examined the reasons for the citation rate of different kinds of papers.
1. There are the papers that do not interest others. These, obviously, have very few citations.
2. There are the seminal papers. These, equally obviously, have a flood of citations - from tens to thousands.
3. The most cited papers are those that are spectacularly, fragrantly wrong. These are the only papers which get cited more than the best work in each field. (Think, say, Cold Fusion, to take a somewhat atypical example.)
Whether or not some company adds "feature X" to a CD player is not a problem, even if we don't want that feature. There will always be a market for the uncrippled players, so the uncrippled formats will survive.
As someone posted, if you can hear the music, you can copy the music anyway, so it's not even as if the distribution format of desirable content can control the market heavily.
The only possible problems here are legislation-enforced freedom from choice, or else the sneaky proliferation of devices with these cripple features. What is essential is enforced labeling of the affected drives so that we know what we're buying.
So the latest shuttle launch was cancelled just before the first Israeli crew member was to go into space on it. Does anyone else wonder if the crack is just the story on the press release?
The hard thing about teleportation is that it is impossible to measure something perfectly due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This means that you destroy half the information about something by measuring it even when you have infinitely good technology.
Teleporters use entanglement to disembody the information about the thing they are teleporting. Ideally, they have half of the information travelling classically (where it can be copied, if desired), but half of it travels as an entangled quantum state.
It is NOT a process of measure-copy-destroy, so all those cloning thoughts are not relevant. In fact, there is a well-known
Quantum No-cloning Theorem
which states that it is impossible to create an identical copy of a quantum state without simultaneously destroying the original. If you could, then you could measure different halves of the state of each, and you'd have cheated Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in a two-step process.
Clarification: Teleportation and FASTER COMPUTERS
on
Laser Beam Teleported
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· Score: 1
Teleportation is a key idea in large scale quantum computing schemes.
Quantum computers work enormously faster than classical computers by performing computations on superpositions of states, effectively gaining huge parallelism. The hard part is that the computer must operate perfectly reversibly without decoherence of the memory states. This gets harder and harder as you scale up.
One scheme for making the computations more robust was proposed a couple of years ago. It involves a logical teleportation of a gate (not a physical gate, but a gate operation) after the most dispersive step. This enables multiple attempts at a calculation step to be performed, and then the teleportation of the gate post facto allows the successful operation to be used without repeating the calculation up to that point.
I know that sounds complicated, but hopefully that claim is a little less mysterious now.
The speed advantage has nothing to do with photons, and everything to do with quantum computation, which has been reviewed on/. extensively.
Re:The most likely suspect for the attack
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
Fair enough. But why assume it was kooks? Apart from the chilling evil of the act it seems overly well executed for an unstable brain.
Why do an attack like this without taking responsibility? What has anyone gained? You'd expect some kind of cause to have been trumpeted if it was for a cause... It can't really have been a worthy target in and of itself - what will have changed in a year?
The only obvious result is going to be some US act of aggression - probably anti-arab. If I wanted to destroy Palestine or the Taliban I couldn't think of a better result. It wouldn't be hard to leave a suggestive trail, either.
That sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory, but if it was motivated by religious fervor I'd expect to see at least some kind of point being made. The whole thing seems a little too cold and professional to be "real".
Here's hoping that the US public and military are patient enough to find whoever or whatever really did this.
The most likely suspect for the attack
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
The mostly likely suspect for these attacks would have to be, or at the very least include, American nationals. The "nuke other countries for revenge" mentality is terrorism of an even higher level than that behind this tragedy.
The perpetrators were extraordinarily well informed, equipped and organized. I wouldn't put it past their abilities to leave a false trail, and it's vital that in our rage to punish those responsible we don't massacre innocents. Do not forget the moral of the Oklahoma bombings.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than version control as such, when our group writes at the same time (we use latex), we use SubEthaEdit to write actually collaboratively. It's a serious step up from version control. Requires a little more trust, but that's fair enough in co-writers.
The main thing that interests me in 4E is a wholescale removal of the major design problems of 3.5E. These include the basic game-breakers, usually involving power imbalance and rules quagmire. While in multiple dozen splatbooks it must be impossible to avoid the occasional unbalanced item slipping through, I wonder if the core books have been tested hard by optimisers.
There are many well-documented things that need fixing that I assume you have under control (polymorph, antimagic, persistent spell, various high level spells, druids, clerics, etc.)
I think the thing that gets the least attention is the timing system. On many occasions my characters have a spare move action and a handful of swift actions that they want to do. House ruling that shorter actions can fit into larger ones (swiftmovestandard) causes all sorts of balance problems. (e.g. that would allow 3 spells per round) Are there any plans to revamp this?
I'm sorry to hear this terrible news.
He have not quite managed to finish the series, but we can take heart that he at least he had time to write a sodding prequel while we were waiting.
Turns out the Wheel of Time really doesn't have an ending after all.
They can do what they say, but it's a lot more trivial than measuring the entire quantum state of the system, which is, as others have suggested above, impossible.
The Heisenberg Unccertainty principle implies that measuring a quantity must add noise in the conjugate quantity. For example, measuring the momentum of an object spreads out the wavefunction. Another example, measuring the state of a qubit (whether it is a zero or a one) destroys the relative phase between the zero and the one.
So the "non-destructive" measurement they are talking about means that they aren't changing it from a zero to a one or vice-versa. But they are (and must) destroy the information about the phase of the qubit state during the measurement. For a more in-depth discussion, look up "quantum nondemolition measurements".
I block ads whenever it's easy. I use my PVR, Firefox's Adblock, and a "No Advertising Material Please" sticker.
Internet ads are exactly like TV ads, except they cost me money to download. I don't like magazines where the ads are so prevalent, they genuinely get in the way of finding content. Content. Haha.
The REAL question is: why do you watch ads? Why do you download them? It's not like you need to be aware of ads these days to know what to buy when you want to buy something. When I want to buy something I look on the internet retail and review sites just like everybody else. Until that point, the only point of ads is to make me unhappy. Ever seen an ad whose message was "everything is great, you can be content and change nothing?" The answer is no. The point of an advert is to make you dissatisfied with soemthing in your life so that you take some action (each advertiser has a preferred action) to fix it.
These people are professionals, too. There is a serious amount of science put into figuring out ways to make people unhappy. I don't feel like subjecting myself to that needlessly, even though I am a happy little consumer.
That's why America is internationally famous for having such a low rate of muggings.
I have a vision of a nation where everyone is free to carry nuclear-armed surface to air missiles. Such a place would be forever free of terrorism and problems of all kinds.
Me, I don't see who wouldn't want to go with XServe, provided that their application is ported to MacOSX. Maybe companies like Google that have thousands of nodes and calculated that Intel hardware will be cheaper.
And wasn't that calculation done before the G5s came out?
Price/performance was dramatically different when a top of the line Mac was a dual G4 machine. The virginia tech G5 cluster was a lot cheaper than the comparable intel clusters, I believe.
(which would be trivial if the envirofreaks didn't effectively ban asbestos)
Yeah. Those damn envirofreaks. Always ruining our fun!
How could they possibly ban such an inert material? Too much time on their hands if you ask me.
Every time. Upon the entry of my password. So it's the best browser I can't use.
If the NSA doesn't throw a fit and complain if you try to export/import it out/into the US, then it's probably breakable already. Notice how the US government tolerance level floats up pretty consistently a few years ahead of publicised code cracking?
Actually, the constant media harassment was irritating them, so the two parallel (public/private) projects declared the gene to be sequenced BEFORE either project was complete.
The enormous media frenzy that happened as a result took up some extra time, but enabled them to get back to the science in peace - with extra funding in several cases.
Hey Coward,
So you call a random user, programmer, astronaut, doctor, lawyer, governor, or president "he" or "him"...
Do you do the same for a random nurse, or secretary?
By the way, the "established format" is to have unworthy scum like you (and me) working for the aristocracy. Don't stop turning the clock back just because you're on top of the heap.
I imagine an M16 must be some kind of special, American training equipment to help you get in shape.
Unless you mean the gun, but I don't think that you can take what the interview panel says seriously when you're pointing an automatic weapon at them. Even if they seem very sincere and polite.
Citations are a strange measure of quality. The median paper gets exactly one citation. The next largest citation number is zero. However, the mean citation rate per paper is on the order of ten, so you can imagine the distribution. Most papers "sink without a trace", and a very few are cited by a huge number. A study done over a decade ago examined the reasons for the citation rate of different kinds of papers.
1. There are the papers that do not interest others. These, obviously, have very few citations.
2. There are the seminal papers. These, equally obviously, have a flood of citations - from tens to thousands.
3. The most cited papers are those that are spectacularly, fragrantly wrong. These are the only papers which get cited more than the best work in each field. (Think, say, Cold Fusion, to take a somewhat atypical example.)
Any publicity isn't good publicity.
Whether or not some company adds "feature X" to a CD player is not a problem, even if we don't want that feature. There will always be a market for the uncrippled players, so the uncrippled formats will survive.
As someone posted, if you can hear the music, you can copy the music anyway, so it's not even as if the distribution format of desirable content can control the market heavily.
The only possible problems here are legislation-enforced freedom from choice, or else the sneaky proliferation of devices with these cripple features. What is essential is enforced labeling of the affected drives so that we know what we're buying.
So the latest shuttle launch was cancelled just before the first Israeli crew member was to go into space on it. Does anyone else wonder if the crack is just the story on the press release?
The hard thing about teleportation is that it is impossible to measure something perfectly due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This means that you destroy half the information about something by measuring it even when you have infinitely good technology.
Teleporters use entanglement to disembody the information about the thing they are teleporting. Ideally, they have half of the information travelling classically (where it can be copied, if desired), but half of it travels as an entangled quantum state.
It is NOT a process of measure-copy-destroy, so all those cloning thoughts are not relevant. In fact, there is a well-known
Quantum No-cloning Theorem
which states that it is impossible to create an identical copy of a quantum state without simultaneously destroying the original. If you could, then you could measure different halves of the state of each, and you'd have cheated Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in a two-step process.
Teleportation is a key idea in large scale quantum computing schemes.
/. extensively.
Quantum computers work enormously faster than classical computers by performing computations on superpositions of states, effectively gaining huge parallelism. The hard part is that the computer must operate perfectly reversibly without decoherence of the memory states. This gets harder and harder as you scale up.
One scheme for making the computations more robust was proposed a couple of years ago. It involves a logical teleportation of a gate (not a physical gate, but a gate operation) after the most dispersive step. This enables multiple attempts at a calculation step to be performed, and then the teleportation of the gate post facto allows the successful operation to be used without repeating the calculation up to that point.
I know that sounds complicated, but hopefully that claim is a little less mysterious now.
The speed advantage has nothing to do with photons, and everything to do with quantum computation, which has been reviewed on
Fair enough. But why assume it was kooks? Apart from the chilling evil of the act it seems overly well executed for an unstable brain.
Why do an attack like this without taking responsibility? What has anyone gained? You'd expect some kind of cause to have been trumpeted if it was for a cause... It can't really have been a worthy target in and of itself - what will have changed in a year?
The only obvious result is going to be some US act of aggression - probably anti-arab. If I wanted to destroy Palestine or the Taliban I couldn't think of a better result. It wouldn't be hard to leave a suggestive trail, either.
That sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory, but if it was motivated by religious fervor I'd expect to see at least some kind of point being made. The whole thing seems a little too cold and professional to be "real".
Here's hoping that the US public and military are patient enough to find whoever or whatever really did this.
The mostly likely suspect for these attacks would have to be, or at the very least include, American nationals. The "nuke other countries for revenge" mentality is terrorism of an even higher level than that behind this tragedy.
The perpetrators were extraordinarily well informed, equipped and organized. I wouldn't put it past their abilities to leave a false trail, and it's vital that in our rage to punish those responsible we don't massacre innocents. Do not forget the moral of the Oklahoma bombings.