That's exactly what I do too. As an extra safety measure, I keep a checksums.md5 file containing the MD5 checksums of all of my videos. That way there's never any guessing as to whether or not anything has gone corrupt. Also, if one of the two drives shows even the slightest signs of becoming unreliable, I swap it out for a new one right away.
The Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel "The Songs Of Distant Earth" (1986) used the Case Of The Missing Neutrinos as the opening premise of the story. I quote: "The experiment worked; solar neutrinos were detected. But - there were far too few of them. [...] By the end of the twentieth century, the astrophysicists had been forced to accept a disturbing conclusion - though as yet no one realized its full implications. There was nothing wrong with the theory, or with the equipment. The trouble lay inside the Sun." Humanity then had a few hundred years to develop interstellar-travel technology before the Sun went nova. 'Twas a good story.
I stopped reading when I got to the statement "And then there's the benefit of halting climate change". I have no doubt that this will curb (perhaps significantly) human impact on climate change (and therefore I'm generally all for this type of research), but to say that it will HALT climate change illustrates a complete lack of recognition that human activity is only one contributing factor in the current trend of climate change. Climate change is for the most part a natural, inevitable, and ongoing process. Trying or expecting to "halt" it is akin to trying or expecting to halt the rotation of the earth, and the statement of such claims or goals undermines the objectivity of the article.
Why is it that Ms. Pac Man always makes it into retro games arcades, but hardly ever the original Pac Man? Back in their respective heydays, wasn't Pac Man way more popular than Ms. Pac Man? Is it a licensing issue? What gives?
Research any new product before purchasing it and you'll discover a long list of problems that it has. No product is without issues. If you refuse to buy a product because you're aware that it has a few issues, then you're either going to go your entire life without buying anything, or you're going to have to start buying things without doing any research. At least knowing what the issues are beforehand gives you the ability to judge whether or not the issues are insurmountable for you so that you can avoid the purchase rather than saying "WTF?" after buying it. Are the iPhone 4 issues insurmountable? Are they worse overall than the list of issues you'll find on most other cell phones currently on the market? Well, the answer to that is very subjective, but from where I stand the iPhone 4 looks like a pretty solid product overall.
I think the question is easier to understand if you knock everything down a dimension, because then it can actually be visualized. Take the surface of any three-dimensional object that doesn't contain any holes (e.g., a cup, but NOT a coffee mug with a handle). Can the surface be stretched/distorted to be shaped into a sphere? The answer is fairly obviously yes. But is this also true for four-dimensional objects? Stop trying to visualize it; you can't. You have to rely on the math instead. But that, I believe, is the question.
A $90 bluray player is going to output THE EXACT SAME audio and video bits as a $5000 bluray player.
That's not quite true, though. A lot goes on in a Blu-Ray player between decoding the raw H.264 stream an pumping an HDMI video signal to the TV. There's the matter of handling all of the many nuances of turning an interlaced signal into a progressive signal, for example. Some players do this sort of thing way better than others, and the resulting difference in video quality is definitely noticeable. Then there's the matter of converting between different framerates. It may sound like a trivial task, but a lot of the low-end players do a quick-and-dirty job of it, resulting in lower-quality video.
I'm not sure about audio. I suspect similar differentiating factors are at work there, too.
That being said, paying $5000 for a Blu-Ray player is a bit ridiculous. Avoid the $90 Walmart specials, sure, but the average $400 Blu-Ray player or a PS3 will give you audio and video that you'd be pretty hard-pressed to distinguish from the best.
I suspect that their formulas and/or intuitions (whatever the source of their declarations) are nowhere close to being more precise than what a minute hand can represent.
A fifth of an inch thick? When I initially read "sheets of carbon nanotubes" I was envisioning something on the order of micrometers thick. I'm sure this is still progress, but the story isn't as exciting as I was initially expecting it to be.
One thing I've never understood about this explanation is that it doesn't explain why it's always the anti-particle that falls into the black hole. Wouldn't chance dictate that half the time it will be the particle, causing the black hole to take on the extra mass?
(I'm sure the answer to this question is somehow related to a similar question that I've always had... and that is: why is the universe composed almost entirely out of matter rather than being a mix? and why aren't there any anti-matter black holes?)
[Logitech's] early mice used balls and so needed replacing after a few years.
That's funny. I've purchased exactly one mouse in my lifetime, a three-button Logitech ball mouse in the mid 1990s, and it hasn't given me a single problem at all over the 15 years of extensive use. I take the ball out and wipe off the contacts every few years, and that's enough to keep it going. My keyboard is in a similar situation. Both my mouse and my keyboard have outlived four host computers, and are still going strong. (I need an adaptor to plug the mouse in now, though, because computers don't seem to come with serial ports any more.) I really don't understand how there can be such a large market for mice and keyboards (as evidenced by the shelves of them in places like Best Buy). I guess the gaming market is somewhat of a driving force; people want the latest hot keys (or whatever) to give them that extra edge in their game du jour.
I'll have to dig it all out of my closet before putting it up on e-Bay, which I plan on doing sometime soon. I can give you first dibs if you supply me with your e-mail address though. (I don't want to make any deals or promises yet until I dig it out and VERIFY that it actually still works.)
I've got a working Commodore 64 system that I'm willing to sell you for cheap (complete with oodles of software). That taught me everything I needed to know about computers, and in a way that captivated me. Perhaps that'd be considered an ultra-archaic learning tool in this day and age, but then again maybe it's the perfect level of entry because it's a system that's simple enough to be (mostly) understood as a whole while being powerful enough (BASIC 2.0 gripes aside) to give one a feeling of accomplishment and control.
IIRC, using integer variables actually slowed things down somewhat, because the underlying math was actually performed in floating point anyways. To achieve integer semantics, the BASIC interpreter had to perform integer-to-floating-point-to-integer conversions for every calculation.
Are you saying that "free will" can exist in a universe that contains only "entirely predicable" events and "truly random" events? I don't think most people's conceptual view of free will is compatible at all with that conjecture. Saying that somebody's decision to do something was actually at a fundamental level a (set of) truly random event(s) doesn't sound like free will at all. For true free will, there needs to be something else going on in the universe, something beyond deterministic events and beyond random events. So like what then? It seems quite likely to me that free will is an illusion (although a very effective one, honed over millions of years of evolution). Saying this, however, isn't satisfactory in actually explaining the illusion of free will, or of the greater parent phenomenon of consciousness itself. No, philosophers will be busy for many years yet trying to get a grip on these things.
If a law is made that says every time I eat a cheeseburger, you must pay fifteen dollars, this in no way indicts me as a bad person for eating cheesburgers, nor does my eating cheeseburgers affect you for any reason that you can legitimately lay upon me.
I don't agree with this. If you're aware that a consequence of you eating a cheeseburger is that somebody else suffers (in this case financially) to an extent greater than your gain, and you proceed to eat a cheeseburger despite this knowledge, then in my opinion your action is unethical. It doesn't matter whether the consequence is direct or as a result of the laws of the land; it's a known and predictable consequence that you're consciously ignoring. Yes, the law itself may indeed be the fundamental problem at work in this example, but it by no means removes you from any ethical responsibility.
Heavy drug users are similarly placing a net drain on society as a whole by relying on others to pay for the consequences of their drug habits. I consider this unethical, even if I personally believe that the laws defining the system are flawed.
"My ideal situation would be, for example, to be able to take a video feed from a camera near the front door and have that fed through to the home automation controller, which is a machine running Linux and a whole bunch of these scripts...and if someone rings the doorbell you could pull up a full motion video stream to see who it is and then use the controllers to unlock the door and let them in."
So... his ideal situation (which he hasn't actually manage to achieve yet) is to do something that the security systems in most apartment buildings have been doing for decades.
It'll actually be at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point. But your point still stands; a repair/servicing mission would be very difficult and prohibitively expensive.
That is funny. I had a disk drive, 1541 to be exact with my C=64. I remember putting in disk and going outside to do something else while they loaded.
The unenhanced speed of the 1541 disk drive was a horrible blunder, but because most Commodore 64 owners (including myself) also had an Epyx Fastload cartridge (or equivalent), which improved the 1541 access times five-fold, it was mostly irrelevant. (I saved the things that I REALLY wanted loaded quickly with an application called Vorpal, which improved read speeds 25-fold!)
Actually, some meanings are seen as a pattern and therefore unlikely. Whenever I tell someone I'm playing 1,2,3,4,5,6 they invariably say "That could never happen".
Yeah, but how many times have I heard someone say that they play 1,2,3,4,5,6 because it's a pattern they think nobody else will pick? All you need are two or three "clever" people like this to make it a very unclever choice. As the ancestor poster stated, the best way to increase your chances of not sharing the prize money is to pick numbers that aren't an obvious pattern.
I find it sad that so much helium is used for projects like this. Okay, most readers at this point are probably already thinking I'm some eco nutcase, but hear me out for a bit, because I think what I'm about to say is something that most people haven't really given any thought to.
There are renewable resources (trees, etc.) and non-renewable resources (oil, etc.). But at least the raw elements of these resources stay around on Earth, and can conceivably be used again in the future for something else. In essense, the elemental composition of the earth has remained mostly constant for the past few billion years; it's only the molecules that the elements are bound up in and where that changes over time. Put it this way, if humans die off tomorrow, there'll be plenty of new oil for the insect overlords that evolve in a billion years, because the raw material for the oil is still churning around in the Earth's biological and geological systems.
But helium... well, helium is special. It has two interesting properties. Firstly, it is a very light element. Hydrogen and helium are so light that as individual atoms they freely escape the Earth's gravitational system and leak out into space. That means forever. Secondly, it is completely inert. It does not and cannot bind to any other molecule to weigh it down. This is in contrast to hydrogen, which is almost always bound up in a molecule of some sort. Thus, helium is the ONLY element that, when released into the atmosphere, will eventually leak out into space and be lost to the Earth forever. The only reason we have helium on Earth now is because a bunch of it is trapped in sand particles (that's where we mine it from). But once we mine it and use it, it's gone. And I mean gone gone. Deep space gone. Helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe (and the sun has a lot of it), but unless it's available on Earth, that fact is completely useless to us. We can't make new helium, other than through nuclear fusion of two hydrogen atoms. And that's not a manufacturing process we (or the future insect overlords) are ever going to undertake.
And this is all a great shame, too, since helium, being the lightest inert gas, is incredibly useful. I can't help but think that in a few hundred years (yes, I realize that it's probably that far away) humans will be kicking themselves for having blown helium in such great quantities in complete disregard for the fact that it could never, for the rest of humanity and beyond, be used again.
Think about that the next time you order a dozen helium balloons for your kid's next birthday party!
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what I do too. As an extra safety measure, I keep a checksums.md5 file containing the MD5 checksums of all of my videos. That way there's never any guessing as to whether or not anything has gone corrupt. Also, if one of the two drives shows even the slightest signs of becoming unreliable, I swap it out for a new one right away.
The Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel "The Songs Of Distant Earth" (1986) used the Case Of The Missing Neutrinos as the opening premise of the story. I quote: "The experiment worked; solar neutrinos were detected. But - there were far too few of them. [...] By the end of the twentieth century, the astrophysicists had been forced to accept a disturbing conclusion - though as yet no one realized its full implications. There was nothing wrong with the theory, or with the equipment. The trouble lay inside the Sun." Humanity then had a few hundred years to develop interstellar-travel technology before the Sun went nova. 'Twas a good story.
Yeah, what's with that? Did they run out of paint or something?
I stopped reading when I got to the statement "And then there's the benefit of halting climate change". I have no doubt that this will curb (perhaps significantly) human impact on climate change (and therefore I'm generally all for this type of research), but to say that it will HALT climate change illustrates a complete lack of recognition that human activity is only one contributing factor in the current trend of climate change. Climate change is for the most part a natural, inevitable, and ongoing process. Trying or expecting to "halt" it is akin to trying or expecting to halt the rotation of the earth, and the statement of such claims or goals undermines the objectivity of the article.
Why is it that Ms. Pac Man always makes it into retro games arcades, but hardly ever the original Pac Man? Back in their respective heydays, wasn't Pac Man way more popular than Ms. Pac Man? Is it a licensing issue? What gives?
Research any new product before purchasing it and you'll discover a long list of problems that it has. No product is without issues. If you refuse to buy a product because you're aware that it has a few issues, then you're either going to go your entire life without buying anything, or you're going to have to start buying things without doing any research. At least knowing what the issues are beforehand gives you the ability to judge whether or not the issues are insurmountable for you so that you can avoid the purchase rather than saying "WTF?" after buying it. Are the iPhone 4 issues insurmountable? Are they worse overall than the list of issues you'll find on most other cell phones currently on the market? Well, the answer to that is very subjective, but from where I stand the iPhone 4 looks like a pretty solid product overall.
I think the question is easier to understand if you knock everything down a dimension, because then it can actually be visualized. Take the surface of any three-dimensional object that doesn't contain any holes (e.g., a cup, but NOT a coffee mug with a handle). Can the surface be stretched/distorted to be shaped into a sphere? The answer is fairly obviously yes. But is this also true for four-dimensional objects? Stop trying to visualize it; you can't. You have to rely on the math instead. But that, I believe, is the question.
A $90 bluray player is going to output THE EXACT SAME audio and video bits as a $5000 bluray player.
That's not quite true, though. A lot goes on in a Blu-Ray player between decoding the raw H.264 stream an pumping an HDMI video signal to the TV. There's the matter of handling all of the many nuances of turning an interlaced signal into a progressive signal, for example. Some players do this sort of thing way better than others, and the resulting difference in video quality is definitely noticeable. Then there's the matter of converting between different framerates. It may sound like a trivial task, but a lot of the low-end players do a quick-and-dirty job of it, resulting in lower-quality video. I'm not sure about audio. I suspect similar differentiating factors are at work there, too. That being said, paying $5000 for a Blu-Ray player is a bit ridiculous. Avoid the $90 Walmart specials, sure, but the average $400 Blu-Ray player or a PS3 will give you audio and video that you'd be pretty hard-pressed to distinguish from the best.
I suspect that their formulas and/or intuitions (whatever the source of their declarations) are nowhere close to being more precise than what a minute hand can represent.
A fifth of an inch thick? When I initially read "sheets of carbon nanotubes" I was envisioning something on the order of micrometers thick. I'm sure this is still progress, but the story isn't as exciting as I was initially expecting it to be.
One thing I've never understood about this explanation is that it doesn't explain why it's always the anti-particle that falls into the black hole. Wouldn't chance dictate that half the time it will be the particle, causing the black hole to take on the extra mass?
(I'm sure the answer to this question is somehow related to a similar question that I've always had... and that is: why is the universe composed almost entirely out of matter rather than being a mix? and why aren't there any anti-matter black holes?)
That's funny. I've purchased exactly one mouse in my lifetime, a three-button Logitech ball mouse in the mid 1990s, and it hasn't given me a single problem at all over the 15 years of extensive use. I take the ball out and wipe off the contacts every few years, and that's enough to keep it going. My keyboard is in a similar situation. Both my mouse and my keyboard have outlived four host computers, and are still going strong. (I need an adaptor to plug the mouse in now, though, because computers don't seem to come with serial ports any more.) I really don't understand how there can be such a large market for mice and keyboards (as evidenced by the shelves of them in places like Best Buy). I guess the gaming market is somewhat of a driving force; people want the latest hot keys (or whatever) to give them that extra edge in their game du jour.
I'll have to dig it all out of my closet before putting it up on e-Bay, which I plan on doing sometime soon. I can give you first dibs if you supply me with your e-mail address though. (I don't want to make any deals or promises yet until I dig it out and VERIFY that it actually still works.)
I've got a working Commodore 64 system that I'm willing to sell you for cheap (complete with oodles of software). That taught me everything I needed to know about computers, and in a way that captivated me. Perhaps that'd be considered an ultra-archaic learning tool in this day and age, but then again maybe it's the perfect level of entry because it's a system that's simple enough to be (mostly) understood as a whole while being powerful enough (BASIC 2.0 gripes aside) to give one a feeling of accomplishment and control.
IIRC, using integer variables actually slowed things down somewhat, because the underlying math was actually performed in floating point anyways. To achieve integer semantics, the BASIC interpreter had to perform integer-to-floating-point-to-integer conversions for every calculation.
OMG!!! If you look closely at this photo, you can see alien life!!! How could the NASA folks have missed seeing this!
http://www.supermediastore.com/ sells them. I use Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs for all of my important backups and archives.
I don't agree with this. If you're aware that a consequence of you eating a cheeseburger is that somebody else suffers (in this case financially) to an extent greater than your gain, and you proceed to eat a cheeseburger despite this knowledge, then in my opinion your action is unethical. It doesn't matter whether the consequence is direct or as a result of the laws of the land; it's a known and predictable consequence that you're consciously ignoring. Yes, the law itself may indeed be the fundamental problem at work in this example, but it by no means removes you from any ethical responsibility.
Heavy drug users are similarly placing a net drain on society as a whole by relying on others to pay for the consequences of their drug habits. I consider this unethical, even if I personally believe that the laws defining the system are flawed.
So... his ideal situation (which he hasn't actually manage to achieve yet) is to do something that the security systems in most apartment buildings have been doing for decades.
It'll actually be at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point. But your point still stands; a repair/servicing mission would be very difficult and prohibitively expensive.
The unenhanced speed of the 1541 disk drive was a horrible blunder, but because most Commodore 64 owners (including myself) also had an Epyx Fastload cartridge (or equivalent), which improved the 1541 access times five-fold, it was mostly irrelevant. (I saved the things that I REALLY wanted loaded quickly with an application called Vorpal, which improved read speeds 25-fold!)
There are renewable resources (trees, etc.) and non-renewable resources (oil, etc.). But at least the raw elements of these resources stay around on Earth, and can conceivably be used again in the future for something else. In essense, the elemental composition of the earth has remained mostly constant for the past few billion years; it's only the molecules that the elements are bound up in and where that changes over time. Put it this way, if humans die off tomorrow, there'll be plenty of new oil for the insect overlords that evolve in a billion years, because the raw material for the oil is still churning around in the Earth's biological and geological systems.
But helium... well, helium is special. It has two interesting properties. Firstly, it is a very light element. Hydrogen and helium are so light that as individual atoms they freely escape the Earth's gravitational system and leak out into space. That means forever. Secondly, it is completely inert. It does not and cannot bind to any other molecule to weigh it down. This is in contrast to hydrogen, which is almost always bound up in a molecule of some sort. Thus, helium is the ONLY element that, when released into the atmosphere, will eventually leak out into space and be lost to the Earth forever. The only reason we have helium on Earth now is because a bunch of it is trapped in sand particles (that's where we mine it from). But once we mine it and use it, it's gone. And I mean gone gone. Deep space gone. Helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe (and the sun has a lot of it), but unless it's available on Earth, that fact is completely useless to us. We can't make new helium, other than through nuclear fusion of two hydrogen atoms. And that's not a manufacturing process we (or the future insect overlords) are ever going to undertake.
And this is all a great shame, too, since helium, being the lightest inert gas, is incredibly useful. I can't help but think that in a few hundred years (yes, I realize that it's probably that far away) humans will be kicking themselves for having blown helium in such great quantities in complete disregard for the fact that it could never, for the rest of humanity and beyond, be used again.
Think about that the next time you order a dozen helium balloons for your kid's next birthday party!