The argument that you link to, Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, is faulty. A key step is along the lines of:
1) We could write simulations of our own history 2) Our simulations don't have to include everything; we can leave out details that don't affect the outcome 3) The people inside our simulations can do 1 and 2, ad infinitum
Step 2 is a big jump. How do you know what details you can leave out unless you do the simulation with the details included and compare?
But even if step 2 were okay and we could skimp on details, step 3 says the people inside can skimp too. In effect we'd run a calculation that computes itself plus something extra and do it recursively, ultimately getting infinite computation for infinitesimal effort. Just like no compression algorithm can guarantee lossless reduction in size, no computation could guarantee greater than 100% efficiency.
But a compression algorithm will do well with raw data, and a computation could do well with raw physics if step 2 is right. So if we ever discover that we can skimp on simulating our own reality then that proves that we are not living in an (already simplified) simulation.
There was a MythBusters episode about this. They were testing the myth that a construction worker falling off a bridge into water could soften the impact by throwing a hammer to break the surface tension. Their conclusion was that the change in force of impact was neglible.
I don't think it's the surface tension that gets you, it's the inertia. Still, the mobility of water means that you're decellerating from 200 MPH to zero in 0.2 seconds instead of 0.1, so it's a big reduction of force.
Sometimes I think that Wikipedia and now Knol are just reinventing the World Wide Web. They're hosting pages that anybody can post and edit. Each page has some information and links to other pages. But they are providing at least one useful service, limiting which pages and changes are visible.
Wikipedia controls changes at the word level. Any nontrivial article is a compilation from many writers, some of which may be feuding over the content. This is like an open source software project where anybody can edit the source and you must rely on some benevolent wizards to keep the whole cohesive.
Knol controls changes at the article level and seems to be more like typical open source projects. Anybody can send changes to the maintainer who decides which make it into the mainstream release. Of course somebody could fork the project, but unless the fork is a real improvement over the original it won't attract attention.
Overall Wikipedia's model is probably faster and Knol's is more stable if Google can keep it organized. Knol would also have the big advantage of actually being citable.
I have subscribed to Consumer Reports' web site a couple times in the past five years and then cancelled after a month. One time was when I was shopping for an HDTV. I found that they were just too out of date to be useful. With the rate at which high tech gear advances, they have too many gaps and old information in their reviews. Other web sites with faster updates and user reviews are much more useful.
I've also seen them make major errors in their explanation of high tech appliances. About a CD burner they said something along the lines of "It can copy an audio CD but the sound quality will be reduced and the copy cannot be further duplicated."
Historically they have been good for items like cars or dishwashers that have slow product cycles and can be judged on mechanical performance. But I wouldn't trust them for anything involving computers or new technology. (Actually, now that cars and household appliances are being filled with computers, I'm not sure I would trust them for those things either.)
Yeah, I used to think that Tower Records had a great selection of alternative music, dozens of listening stations so I could sample the music (in the days before iTunes and Amazon made that easy online), and a not-too-corporate-and-homogeneous atmosphere.
But then I went to Argentina for a weekend and the Tower Records there was a total mess. I'd never heard of half the bands in their inventory and the clerks couldn't even speak English! I was so disappointed that I never went to another Tower back in the USA.
Seriously, the Internet killed record stores, whether through piracy, ease of use, or changes in listening habits. Music retail seems to consist only of bland, mass-market selections in book stores and electronic stores nowadays. Tower was my favorite of the non-independent stores, but I'm not surprised that the market changes killed them.
Wow, that article page has a really annoying ad on it. I moved my mouse up toward the back button and... where the hell did the cursor go? Oh, the security guy in the Intel Centrino ad grabbed it and stomped on it. Clever.
Shame on Intel, The Register, and Camino for developing, printing, and rendering such malware.
I have a 15" MacBook Pro purchased November 2006. After reading that thread I was afraid to upgrade to 10.4.11, then I checked and saw that I already did. No problems, and my Boot Camp still works fine.
I do feel better about signing up for an online backup service now. Mozy offers unlimited storage for $5 per month. Now if only I can get my files transferred before I travel next week. 30 GB over cable at 48 kB/s upload is painful.
One might be able to come up with a "TOE" in physics, But it should be recognized that this is highly limited. It does not for example explain why aging occurs, something which also effects each of us.
Aging is a problem of biology. Biology is a specialization of chemistry. Chemistry is a specialization of physics. You might go further and say that mathematics is the foundation of physics, but that question gets philosophical.
If you have a usable theory of everything then you can eventually solve problems in all of the layers closer to everyday life. But it won't be quick. It'll be like discovering the machine code for a computer and then building up tools and operating systems and applications and networks that are based on the machine code but whose behavior is not apparent by looking at the machine code alone.
Xtravar:
Aging occurs because getting old is not evolutionarily beneficial (on the genetic level) in the original environment.
Getting old might not be beneficial for an individual human but I suspect it's beneficial for human genes. Old people are resistant to change, both in the inability to change their genes and in the reduced flexibility of their minds past their formative years. That can be a problem for the genes if their host organisms are failing to adapt to changes in the environment.
Growing an organism with a mechanism to die and make room for offspring with rescrambled genes and fresh, absorbent brains could be a tremendous evolutionary advantage for the genes involved. And the environment includes not just geological and solar variations but other organisms in the ecosystem and the behavior of the organism's own peers, so change can happen very fast and the genes that produce rapid adaptation win.
In American English, "holiday" doesn't always mean a happy, festive day. Well, checking my Mac OS X dictionary it means "a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done" but I don't think that quite matches modern usage. Columbus Day is a holiday, but most workplaces remain open and I've never heard of a Columbus Day party.
It is a somber day, primarily. Here in Washington, DC there have been people reading the names from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial aloud all weekend. It's a time for reflection on war and the sacrifices made by our veterans.
Your question is similar to "What's the use of a telescope? All it does is make things look bigger! It doesn't have any effect on real life."
Galileo used one of the first telescopes to see that Jupiter is a planet with it's own orbiting moons. Again, that was just a bit of trivia to the common man in his day. But a few centuries later we're using that knowledge to send spacecraft around the solar system.
A new scientific measurement technique is first used to explore fundamental physics and acquire basic knowledge. It could take decades at least before you can point to some everyday object and say "that specific instrument made this possible".
Sometimes the instruments themselves get adapted into everyday tools, like telescope technology being adapted for cameras or Earth-sensing satellites. As somebody else mentioned, maybe high speed ATM could be used as an ultra-high density information storage device. But it's very hard to predict what the everyday impact will be from a bit of fundamental science.
This news is more interesting to those of us who are scientists but didn't know that STM could be done so much faster. Besides saving time to get static scans, high enough speeds would make dynamic scans possible. We could learn a lot about physics, chemistry, and biology if we could watch atoms moving, bonding, and rearranging in real time.
If done right, there's no need for a radiator or other cooling system!
Well, there is still a cooling system: boiling water. I was curious how much water you'd have to carry along for generating steam.
Gasoline has a heat of combustion of 47 MJ/kg. Water has a heat of vaporization of 40 kJ/mol or about 2 MJ/kg.
So if you turned all of the energy from the gasoline into steam then you'd need 24 kg of water for every 1 kg of fuel. But around 25% of the energy goes directly into mechanical motion. And you won't capture all of the remaining heat.
The inventor estimates an efficiency boost of 40%. That's 7 MJ per kg of fuel, or 3.5 kg of water per kg of fuel.
The pilot has announced that the plane is going to crash land into the sea in fifteen minutes. The commanding officer on board orders me to fill out a form to release the military from liability.
Situation #1 - I sign the form. I die in the crash. I could've told the commander to fuck off, but I don't care now because I'm dead.
Situation #2 - I refuse to sign the form. I die in the crash. The last fifteen minutes of my life were spent with the commander yelling at me.
Situation #3 - I sign the form. I survive the crash. Everybody's happy.
Situation #4 - I refuse to sign the form. I survive the crash, and so does the commander. I get dishonorably discharged for failure to follow orders.
It would be hard to think logically, but a sliver of hope and a moment of thought would lead me to sign the form.
Let's say there are 50 ping pong balls in the lottery bin. If somebody chooses number 1 anywhere on their lotto card then the conspirators need to inject radon into balls 2 through 50. If anybody chooses number 2 then the conspirators have to limit the radon to balls 3 through 50.
The only way to prevent somebody from winning, even if the radon were 100% effective, would be for one of the 50 numbers to be unchosen by all of the thousands of lotto players. Otherwise, the guaranteed appearance or nonappearance of any single ball could beat every number combination played. It's not the individual numbers that determine a winner, it's the combination.
The person who wrote that theory must be incredibly dumb or... joking. Ah, the other headlines at www.uncoverer.com include:
Britney Spears Has Cooties: They Made Her Hair Fall Out
Geraldo Rivera To Open Saddam Hussein's Vault
Elmo Busted for Smuggling Meth
If only all the other stupid things I've heard today could be explained by humor. Never ascribe to humor that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
It's not a dupe. The previous article said that 64 Gb chips could be combined into a 128 GB device. Now they can combine 64 Gb chips into a 512 GB device. A huge advance!
Lots of scientists have been working on the theory for 30 years, as you say. It might be useful to explain to the scientifically inclined nonexperts just what all those eggheads are doing. The duck video gives a clear and intriguing introduction to the theory. It might be the trigger to get some young student to realize how much there is still to be discovered about physics, and maybe encourage him/her to become a scientist.
I don't agree with the nomenclature used in the Wikipedia article. I believe Tiger is properly written "OS X 10.4" not "OS X v10.4".
It's true that the "X" and the "10" are redundant, so in conversation I would say "Oh ess ten point four" or "Tiger". It's just one of those cases where how you spell something and how you pronounce it are a little different.
I don't expect Apple to release OS 11.0 anytime soon. That would imply a huge change from the 10.x series, at least as big as X from 9. If they do maybe they'll do a play on Roman numerals and Greek letters and call it OS , OS or OS Xi. (Damn that's hard to make work in HTML.)
A few months ago I had a lip scan to test a new method of screening for colon cancer. I developed colon cancer at an unusually young age, 31, and I'm going through genetic testing to see if my family members are at risk. One hereditary defect is polyposis, but I don't seem to have that. Another is called hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC).
We're doing blood and tissue screening at the cost of thousands of dollars. But some researchers believe that they can detect HNPCC simply by examining a patient's inner lip. It would make sense since it's the same kind of tissue as at the other end of the digestive track.
So they had me sit in a contraption to hold my head steady and then pull my lip down over a plastic ridge. They shined different wavelengths of light on my lip and recorded the reflections. Later they'll compare the results to my other tests to see if they are correlated.
I was under the impression that they were looking at the structure of blood vessels or the composition of the tissue. I wasn't injected with any labeling agent, so I don't think it's related to the Purdue research.
Maybe somebody invented a molecular disruption device and it turned out to dissipate a bit slower than expected. Maybe it's still growing, dissolving molecules as it goes. I wonder what's the resolution of the measurements and whether we could detect growth of this hole in our lifetimes.
I think you are both confused about binary notation. If 1111111111111111 is your highest level then half that value would be 0111111111111111, not 0000000011111111. You wouldn't be reduced to 8 bits of effective resolution unless the soft passsage were only 1/256th as high as the loud passage.
You won't save anything by having a "volume" channel and a "signal" channel. If you put 8 bits of volume next to 16 bits of signal then you've got exactly the same thing as a 24-bit signal.
To decide whether it makes sense to spend resources on manned space travel, you should look at why mankind has explored and colonized new lands in the past.
Natural resources - Early man followed the food. There were edible plants and animals outside of Africa, so if you were hungry where you were born it made sense to go elsewhere for food. Civilized man sought spices, minerals, and lumber. It was lucrative to send out a ship and bring those back. Do the same economics apply to manned space travel?
Religious freedom - America was settled in part by people seeking freedom from religious or economic oppression in the Old World. Do you expect space colonies to escape from the burdens of Earthbound society?
Reduction of overpopulation - Colonization of America didn't do much to decrease the population of Europe. The number of emigrants was small compared to the existing population. For space travel, the number would be miniscule. You'd need to launch a thousand spaceships a day with a thousand passengers each to actually decrease the population of Earth. If overpopulation exists and a fertile underpopulated land is available then it's a good deal for those who make the journey. But it won't help those who stay behind, and we have found no hospitable planets outside our own.
Exploration - Curiosity and pursuit of knowledge are worthwhile reasons for exploration. Men went to the North Pole and the Moon because that was the only way to learn about them. With modern technology we could send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system for the cost of one manned trip to Mars.
Adventure - People still climb mountains just for the sense of adventure. You can build a rocket or buy a ticket on Spaceship One if that's worthwhile to you. But you shouldn't expect the government to fund your trip to the Moon any more than it would pay for your trip to Kilimanjaro.
Preservation of the species - If you're worried about a natural disaster, you could send a few dozen people to live in a deep mine or on the bottom of the ocean. They'll be just as safe as on the Moon or Mars. Plus they'll have protection from extreme temperatures and solar radiation. The journey would be a lot cheaper and less hazardous.
To maintain the spark of life - Life is interesting. It's a pity when some branch of Earth's diversity of life perishes. The universe would be a boring place without life (although there'd be nobody left to miss it). If we're the only life then that's good justification to spread it. But are we alone? Does other life exist? Is it common? Is it like us? Those are questions worth answering. Those are missions I'd be happy working for. Are those missions that would be helped or hindered by focusing on manned space travel?
I'm not colorblind, but I agree that a rainbow spectrum is a bad idea. In a color circle, violet is closer to red than green is. Having violet equal bad and red equal good is confusing. Anything spanning more than 180 degrees of a color circle will be. And certain colors, like yellow, stand out more psychologically, giving a strange emphasis to stories with scores around 60%.
The best solution might be monochromatic: black to white, or white to red. Or have black be neutral, red be positive, and blue be negative with monochromatic gradients in between. That'd be like a good elevation map: green to brown for increasing altitude of land, light blue to dark blue for increasing depth of water.
When I was choosing a license for my open source software projects, I looked into releasing into the public domain. I didn't care if it got put into closed source projects, commercial or otherwise. I just wanted to release it to the world for all to use.
As far as I could research, you can't actually declare a copyrightable work to be in public domain. It becomes public domain when the copyright term expires (in a century or so at the earliest) or if it's exempt from copyright as a product of the federal government. I thought about making up my own license: "This is free to use and copy for any purpose whatsoever." But I couldn't find a precedent and I am not a lawyer. So I went with the closest thing I could find, BSD.
So I don't know if it's legally possible for Microsoft to relinquish their patent.
My bank doesn't have billions of customers. At first, each bank's ATMs would probably only work for their own customers, so the database is cut down to a few million at most. Or the system could be used for granting building access at a school or business, limiting the population to a few thousand.
Anyway, I think facial recognition would have to be used in tandem with a magnetic card or smart card; this is to replace the PIN, not the card. So the ATM already knows who I claim to be and has to check just one set of data points for verification.
Even if you wanted to search for a match among billions of possibilities, is that really so far fetched? You could quickly narrow the possibilities by filtering by a few gross characteristics: head size, aspect ratio, eye spacing. nose length. You'd never actually compare the 3-D data from the user with all of the 3-D data from everybody in the database.
I think it would be pretty damn hard for a camera to do facial recognition unless it truly is a 3D camera -- otherwise you can just stick a picture of the owner's face in front of the lens and you're in business.
The article:
University researchers developed the URxD face recognition software that uses a three-dimensional snapshot of a person's face to create a unique biometric identifier.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument that you link to, Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, is faulty. A key step is along the lines of:
1) We could write simulations of our own history
2) Our simulations don't have to include everything; we can leave out details that don't affect the outcome
3) The people inside our simulations can do 1 and 2, ad infinitum
Step 2 is a big jump. How do you know what details you can leave out unless you do the simulation with the details included and compare?
But even if step 2 were okay and we could skimp on details, step 3 says the people inside can skimp too. In effect we'd run a calculation that computes itself plus something extra and do it recursively, ultimately getting infinite computation for infinitesimal effort. Just like no compression algorithm can guarantee lossless reduction in size, no computation could guarantee greater than 100% efficiency.
But a compression algorithm will do well with raw data, and a computation could do well with raw physics if step 2 is right. So if we ever discover that we can skimp on simulating our own reality then that proves that we are not living in an (already simplified) simulation.
There was a MythBusters episode about this. They were testing the myth that a construction worker falling off a bridge into water could soften the impact by throwing a hammer to break the surface tension. Their conclusion was that the change in force of impact was neglible.
I don't think it's the surface tension that gets you, it's the inertia. Still, the mobility of water means that you're decellerating from 200 MPH to zero in 0.2 seconds instead of 0.1, so it's a big reduction of force.
Sometimes I think that Wikipedia and now Knol are just reinventing the World Wide Web. They're hosting pages that anybody can post and edit. Each page has some information and links to other pages. But they are providing at least one useful service, limiting which pages and changes are visible.
Wikipedia controls changes at the word level. Any nontrivial article is a compilation from many writers, some of which may be feuding over the content. This is like an open source software project where anybody can edit the source and you must rely on some benevolent wizards to keep the whole cohesive.
Knol controls changes at the article level and seems to be more like typical open source projects. Anybody can send changes to the maintainer who decides which make it into the mainstream release. Of course somebody could fork the project, but unless the fork is a real improvement over the original it won't attract attention.
Overall Wikipedia's model is probably faster and Knol's is more stable if Google can keep it organized. Knol would also have the big advantage of actually being citable.
I have subscribed to Consumer Reports' web site a couple times in the past five years and then cancelled after a month. One time was when I was shopping for an HDTV. I found that they were just too out of date to be useful. With the rate at which high tech gear advances, they have too many gaps and old information in their reviews. Other web sites with faster updates and user reviews are much more useful.
I've also seen them make major errors in their explanation of high tech appliances. About a CD burner they said something along the lines of "It can copy an audio CD but the sound quality will be reduced and the copy cannot be further duplicated."
Historically they have been good for items like cars or dishwashers that have slow product cycles and can be judged on mechanical performance. But I wouldn't trust them for anything involving computers or new technology. (Actually, now that cars and household appliances are being filled with computers, I'm not sure I would trust them for those things either.)
Yeah, I used to think that Tower Records had a great selection of alternative music, dozens of listening stations so I could sample the music (in the days before iTunes and Amazon made that easy online), and a not-too-corporate-and-homogeneous atmosphere.
But then I went to Argentina for a weekend and the Tower Records there was a total mess. I'd never heard of half the bands in their inventory and the clerks couldn't even speak English! I was so disappointed that I never went to another Tower back in the USA.
Seriously, the Internet killed record stores, whether through piracy, ease of use, or changes in listening habits. Music retail seems to consist only of bland, mass-market selections in book stores and electronic stores nowadays. Tower was my favorite of the non-independent stores, but I'm not surprised that the market changes killed them.
Wow, that article page has a really annoying ad on it. I moved my mouse up toward the back button and... where the hell did the cursor go? Oh, the security guy in the Intel Centrino ad grabbed it and stomped on it. Clever.
Shame on Intel, The Register, and Camino for developing, printing, and rendering such malware.
I have a 15" MacBook Pro purchased November 2006. After reading that thread I was afraid to upgrade to 10.4.11, then I checked and saw that I already did. No problems, and my Boot Camp still works fine.
I do feel better about signing up for an online backup service now. Mozy offers unlimited storage for $5 per month. Now if only I can get my files transferred before I travel next week. 30 GB over cable at 48 kB/s upload is painful.
bradbury:
Aging is a problem of biology. Biology is a specialization of chemistry. Chemistry is a specialization of physics. You might go further and say that mathematics is the foundation of physics, but that question gets philosophical.
If you have a usable theory of everything then you can eventually solve problems in all of the layers closer to everyday life. But it won't be quick. It'll be like discovering the machine code for a computer and then building up tools and operating systems and applications and networks that are based on the machine code but whose behavior is not apparent by looking at the machine code alone.
Xtravar:
Getting old might not be beneficial for an individual human but I suspect it's beneficial for human genes. Old people are resistant to change, both in the inability to change their genes and in the reduced flexibility of their minds past their formative years. That can be a problem for the genes if their host organisms are failing to adapt to changes in the environment.
Growing an organism with a mechanism to die and make room for offspring with rescrambled genes and fresh, absorbent brains could be a tremendous evolutionary advantage for the genes involved. And the environment includes not just geological and solar variations but other organisms in the ecosystem and the behavior of the organism's own peers, so change can happen very fast and the genes that produce rapid adaptation win.
In American English, "holiday" doesn't always mean a happy, festive day. Well, checking my Mac OS X dictionary it means "a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done" but I don't think that quite matches modern usage. Columbus Day is a holiday, but most workplaces remain open and I've never heard of a Columbus Day party.
It is a somber day, primarily. Here in Washington, DC there have been people reading the names from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial aloud all weekend. It's a time for reflection on war and the sacrifices made by our veterans.
Your question is similar to "What's the use of a telescope? All it does is make things look bigger! It doesn't have any effect on real life."
Galileo used one of the first telescopes to see that Jupiter is a planet with it's own orbiting moons. Again, that was just a bit of trivia to the common man in his day. But a few centuries later we're using that knowledge to send spacecraft around the solar system.
A new scientific measurement technique is first used to explore fundamental physics and acquire basic knowledge. It could take decades at least before you can point to some everyday object and say "that specific instrument made this possible".
Sometimes the instruments themselves get adapted into everyday tools, like telescope technology being adapted for cameras or Earth-sensing satellites. As somebody else mentioned, maybe high speed ATM could be used as an ultra-high density information storage device. But it's very hard to predict what the everyday impact will be from a bit of fundamental science.
This news is more interesting to those of us who are scientists but didn't know that STM could be done so much faster. Besides saving time to get static scans, high enough speeds would make dynamic scans possible. We could learn a lot about physics, chemistry, and biology if we could watch atoms moving, bonding, and rearranging in real time.
Well, there is still a cooling system: boiling water. I was curious how much water you'd have to carry along for generating steam.
Gasoline has a heat of combustion of 47 MJ/kg. Water has a heat of vaporization of 40 kJ/mol or about 2 MJ/kg.
So if you turned all of the energy from the gasoline into steam then you'd need 24 kg of water for every 1 kg of fuel. But around 25% of the energy goes directly into mechanical motion. And you won't capture all of the remaining heat.
The inventor estimates an efficiency boost of 40%. That's 7 MJ per kg of fuel, or 3.5 kg of water per kg of fuel.
The pilot has announced that the plane is going to crash land into the sea in fifteen minutes. The commanding officer on board orders me to fill out a form to release the military from liability.
Situation #1 - I sign the form. I die in the crash. I could've told the commander to fuck off, but I don't care now because I'm dead.
Situation #2 - I refuse to sign the form. I die in the crash. The last fifteen minutes of my life were spent with the commander yelling at me.
Situation #3 - I sign the form. I survive the crash. Everybody's happy.
Situation #4 - I refuse to sign the form. I survive the crash, and so does the commander. I get dishonorably discharged for failure to follow orders.
It would be hard to think logically, but a sliver of hope and a moment of thought would lead me to sign the form.
Let's say there are 50 ping pong balls in the lottery bin. If somebody chooses number 1 anywhere on their lotto card then the conspirators need to inject radon into balls 2 through 50. If anybody chooses number 2 then the conspirators have to limit the radon to balls 3 through 50.
The only way to prevent somebody from winning, even if the radon were 100% effective, would be for one of the 50 numbers to be unchosen by all of the thousands of lotto players. Otherwise, the guaranteed appearance or nonappearance of any single ball could beat every number combination played. It's not the individual numbers that determine a winner, it's the combination.
The person who wrote that theory must be incredibly dumb or... joking. Ah, the other headlines at www.uncoverer.com include:
If only all the other stupid things I've heard today could be explained by humor. Never ascribe to humor that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
It's not a dupe. The previous article said that 64 Gb chips could be combined into a 128 GB device. Now they can combine 64 Gb chips into a 512 GB device. A huge advance!
Lots of scientists have been working on the theory for 30 years, as you say. It might be useful to explain to the scientifically inclined nonexperts just what all those eggheads are doing. The duck video gives a clear and intriguing introduction to the theory. It might be the trigger to get some young student to realize how much there is still to be discovered about physics, and maybe encourage him/her to become a scientist.
No, AOL users say "Me too!". Slashdotters say "You're wrong. You forgot to consider (logic) and (example).", whatever the post.
I don't agree with the nomenclature used in the Wikipedia article. I believe Tiger is properly written "OS X 10.4" not "OS X v10.4".
It's true that the "X" and the "10" are redundant, so in conversation I would say "Oh ess ten point four" or "Tiger". It's just one of those cases where how you spell something and how you pronounce it are a little different.
I don't expect Apple to release OS 11.0 anytime soon. That would imply a huge change from the 10.x series, at least as big as X from 9. If they do maybe they'll do a play on Roman numerals and Greek letters and call it OS , OS or OS Xi. (Damn that's hard to make work in HTML.)
A few months ago I had a lip scan to test a new method of screening for colon cancer. I developed colon cancer at an unusually young age, 31, and I'm going through genetic testing to see if my family members are at risk. One hereditary defect is polyposis, but I don't seem to have that. Another is called hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC).
We're doing blood and tissue screening at the cost of thousands of dollars. But some researchers believe that they can detect HNPCC simply by examining a patient's inner lip. It would make sense since it's the same kind of tissue as at the other end of the digestive track.
So they had me sit in a contraption to hold my head steady and then pull my lip down over a plastic ridge. They shined different wavelengths of light on my lip and recorded the reflections. Later they'll compare the results to my other tests to see if they are correlated.
I was under the impression that they were looking at the structure of blood vessels or the composition of the tissue. I wasn't injected with any labeling agent, so I don't think it's related to the Purdue research.
Maybe somebody invented a molecular disruption device and it turned out to dissipate a bit slower than expected. Maybe it's still growing, dissolving molecules as it goes. I wonder what's the resolution of the measurements and whether we could detect growth of this hole in our lifetimes.
I think you are both confused about binary notation. If 1111111111111111 is your highest level then half that value would be 0111111111111111, not 0000000011111111. You wouldn't be reduced to 8 bits of effective resolution unless the soft passsage were only 1/256th as high as the loud passage.
You won't save anything by having a "volume" channel and a "signal" channel. If you put 8 bits of volume next to 16 bits of signal then you've got exactly the same thing as a 24-bit signal.
To decide whether it makes sense to spend resources on manned space travel, you should look at why mankind has explored and colonized new lands in the past.
Natural resources - Early man followed the food. There were edible plants and animals outside of Africa, so if you were hungry where you were born it made sense to go elsewhere for food. Civilized man sought spices, minerals, and lumber. It was lucrative to send out a ship and bring those back. Do the same economics apply to manned space travel?
Religious freedom - America was settled in part by people seeking freedom from religious or economic oppression in the Old World. Do you expect space colonies to escape from the burdens of Earthbound society?
Reduction of overpopulation - Colonization of America didn't do much to decrease the population of Europe. The number of emigrants was small compared to the existing population. For space travel, the number would be miniscule. You'd need to launch a thousand spaceships a day with a thousand passengers each to actually decrease the population of Earth. If overpopulation exists and a fertile underpopulated land is available then it's a good deal for those who make the journey. But it won't help those who stay behind, and we have found no hospitable planets outside our own.
Exploration - Curiosity and pursuit of knowledge are worthwhile reasons for exploration. Men went to the North Pole and the Moon because that was the only way to learn about them. With modern technology we could send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system for the cost of one manned trip to Mars.
Adventure - People still climb mountains just for the sense of adventure. You can build a rocket or buy a ticket on Spaceship One if that's worthwhile to you. But you shouldn't expect the government to fund your trip to the Moon any more than it would pay for your trip to Kilimanjaro.
Preservation of the species - If you're worried about a natural disaster, you could send a few dozen people to live in a deep mine or on the bottom of the ocean. They'll be just as safe as on the Moon or Mars. Plus they'll have protection from extreme temperatures and solar radiation. The journey would be a lot cheaper and less hazardous.
To maintain the spark of life - Life is interesting. It's a pity when some branch of Earth's diversity of life perishes. The universe would be a boring place without life (although there'd be nobody left to miss it). If we're the only life then that's good justification to spread it. But are we alone? Does other life exist? Is it common? Is it like us? Those are questions worth answering. Those are missions I'd be happy working for. Are those missions that would be helped or hindered by focusing on manned space travel?
AlpineR
I'm not colorblind, but I agree that a rainbow spectrum is a bad idea. In a color circle, violet is closer to red than green is. Having violet equal bad and red equal good is confusing. Anything spanning more than 180 degrees of a color circle will be. And certain colors, like yellow, stand out more psychologically, giving a strange emphasis to stories with scores around 60%.
The best solution might be monochromatic: black to white, or white to red. Or have black be neutral, red be positive, and blue be negative with monochromatic gradients in between. That'd be like a good elevation map: green to brown for increasing altitude of land, light blue to dark blue for increasing depth of water.
AlpineR
When I was choosing a license for my open source software projects, I looked into releasing into the public domain. I didn't care if it got put into closed source projects, commercial or otherwise. I just wanted to release it to the world for all to use.
As far as I could research, you can't actually declare a copyrightable work to be in public domain. It becomes public domain when the copyright term expires (in a century or so at the earliest) or if it's exempt from copyright as a product of the federal government. I thought about making up my own license: "This is free to use and copy for any purpose whatsoever." But I couldn't find a precedent and I am not a lawyer. So I went with the closest thing I could find, BSD.
So I don't know if it's legally possible for Microsoft to relinquish their patent.
My bank doesn't have billions of customers. At first, each bank's ATMs would probably only work for their own customers, so the database is cut down to a few million at most. Or the system could be used for granting building access at a school or business, limiting the population to a few thousand.
Anyway, I think facial recognition would have to be used in tandem with a magnetic card or smart card; this is to replace the PIN, not the card. So the ATM already knows who I claim to be and has to check just one set of data points for verification.
Even if you wanted to search for a match among billions of possibilities, is that really so far fetched? You could quickly narrow the possibilities by filtering by a few gross characteristics: head size, aspect ratio, eye spacing. nose length. You'd never actually compare the 3-D data from the user with all of the 3-D data from everybody in the database.
Somebody who didn't read:
The article: