Why don't they just get it over with, and just take your money?
Because sometimes you win. Even if you play without counting, you'll walk out ahead some days. In the long term you lose, but the days that you walk out ahead are fun. People enjoy winning the individual hands, and when they walk out a loser, the delta is their price of having enjoyed the game.
Play the game well, and it's not hard to walk away an hour or so later down merely $20. That's not that much more expensive than a movie. Even if you walk away $100 poorer, it's cheaper than the shows.
Mind you, I don't enjoy the games, and I don't play. But for people who do, the process of play is an important part of it, and not to be underestimated.
Have any of these climatologists considered climate change is a natural cycle of the planet?
Why... no! No they haven't! Thank you for bringing that to their attention.
How astute of you to see what none of the several thousand PhDs working the subject for the last few decades have noticed. I'm sure they'll get to work on your brilliant insight right away.
Nope. But you can generally assume that if something is legal, and profitable, somebody will do it. That's why you have to fix the law. If your only argument is "But it's immoral!", sooner or later you'll find somebody who says, "So what?"
Today, that's Eolas. And yeah, it makes them bad guys. But you can't fix the problem by removing the bad guys; other equally bad guys will pop up. You have to fix the law so that it's no longer profitable to break it.
Having seen the trailer, I've probably seen as much of this project as I really want. But the concept is amusing enough that I'm glad they're doing it.
If we synthesize a living organism in totality, does Common Descent become untrue?
Common descent will have been true, which is the important part. It's a fundamental part of evolutionary history, crucial to understanding what has gone before.
There's no reason that this planet couldn't have had several parallel threads of common descent. It would have made evolutionary history harder to unravel, adding more noise to a signal that turned out to be pretty clear once we found it.
It means that future biologists will find the state of evolution on this planet harder to untangle, but that's their problem, not ours. The idea of common descent has already given rise to much more intricate and useful understandings of evolutionary history (e.g. through molecular biology).
If just 1 percent of the population is criminal, you have to anticipate 1 criminal for every 100 people you hire.
If 1% of the population is criminal, and there are 100 employees, there is a 36.6% chance that none of them are criminal (so a 63.4% chance that at least one is).
Remember that the price also includes free upgrades. OK, most of what they've done to Office since 1997 has been worthless, but there are at least a few nice features since then.
The actual time limits can be debated, but they need to be set in the constitution, not left to a congress that can be bribed with corporate donations.
And what body would you propose should do the setting in the constitution?
There is a picture in TFA, but the photographer (or editor, more likely) decided that "interesting composition" trumped "actually conveying information". It is kind of a pretty picture, as long as you weren't actually interested in the subject of the article.
Of course, this is a "human interest piece", which means the "subject" is a human, and the computer is a prop. If the subject is "technology", that goes in a different section of the paper.
My first thought was VMS, but of course there's an open version of that.
And somebody open-sourced CP/M.
But "exists as an open-source hobby project" is a bit bringing back your dead lover as a zombie. Yeah, it's still around, but it's not really the same. Unless you're really, really kinky.
> Since when does everything science accomplish have to have immediate material benefit to humanity?
To play devil's advocate... it's not so much a matter of "what science accomplishes" as "who pays for it". One is entitled to some sort of opinion when one is paying for it, via tax dollars.
It is, as you point out, shortsighted to assume that all science must have an immediate benefit to be worth it. But it is worth considering whether money spent on basic research might be better spent elsewhere.
(Personally, I'd rather spend a lot more on basic research, but those who want to pay less for it are entitled to an opinion when it's their money.)
It's not completely insane to oppose it on "trade secrets" grounds. They're allowed to keep manufacturing details private to keep competitors from stealing their ideas. If you don't like it, they'd say, go buy yourself a car from somebody else. And if you force us to do this, who's coming after your company to disclose it's trade secrets next?
I don't know how defensible that argument is, but it's the sort of thing that a lobbyist could arm a legislator with, after greasing his palm.
If all else fails, they can whip up a nice flurry of outrage by calling it "socialism". They'll have people furious at companies for "sharing the wealth" of such information as right size of windshield wiper replacements.
The analogy, as with most analogies, is useful for precisely the things it was designed to be useful for, and is misleading when extended.
There is a legitimate fear of Google's tools that you can't apply any other tools to your data. These guys are trying to fix that problem.
There is another legitimate fear that you can't delete your data for certain and ever. That's Somebody Else's Problem, and also not covered by the analogy.
Analogies can be useful to explain things, but they're rarely valid for actually proving things. They're useful for proofs only when the analogy is so precise that it's no easier to understand or manipulate than the original thing.
Glad to help. I wish I could be even clearer, but then, nobody really understands what the implications of all this are. The physicists are forced to say, "The numbers are what they are, and if they don't match your intuition, tough." Which is true and unhelpful, in the sense of jokes like this one:
So we end up with the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the Consistent Histories Interpretation (my favorite), which end up all being exactly equivalent but people argue passionately about them because none of them actually make sense in the way you'd want them to.
I favor Consistent Histories precisely because it makes the least sense, and therefore forces you to give up your preconceptions if you're even going to hope to apply it, but all of these interpretations mean the same thing mathematically. And the math is an enormous amount of effort to apply to something you never actually see.
The kludgy bit is that you go from heat->motion->electricity, with losses at each step. Maybe that's just good reuse, having already debugged both steps pretty thoroughly.
But after a century or so of power plants, it's starting to feel like optimization is no longer premature. The power plant is the very center of a tight loop, and worth optimizing.
Unfortunately, any time you replace a well-understood legacy system with a new one you get bugs, and the whole heat->electricity thing isn't yet anywhere near well library-quality code. It actually turns out to be less efficient, not more. But as a programmer you look at the inefficiencies and figure there's got to be a better way.
When we say that the cat is "alive and dead", we mean that there are two possible quantum states in the box, but it's absolutely impossible for you to know what's inside the box until you look.
What does the cat see? Well, there's two possibilities. The cat may be licking its tail. Or it may be an ex-cat. The cat knows which, it being the cat. But you (outside) can't know which without looking.
The ping-pong balls are large-scale objects, and they have a definite position and momentum. Or at least, the indefiniteness is so small you can't even begin to observe it. If you did the same experiment with electrons or atoms (such as the Stern-Gerlach experiment) you'd observe that the mass is conserved; you don't get duplicate objects. But the mass detector is itself a large-scale object, and the combined system of (atom+mass detector) has a definite position.
In essence... the waveform is different whether you're on the inside or the outside. Nobody quite knows what that "means", and there are different interpretations. Personally, I prefer to leave it uninterpreted; I don't believe that we'll ever make it reconcile with our large-scale notion of reality.
That the reality is different at small scales is well-demonstrated, but that different reality is oddly hidden: every time you look at it, it goes away. Try to scale it up (which is what the Cat experiment is about) and you'd think you could get a good look at it, but the universe seems to conspire against you to make it seem like it doesn't happen.
That you're looking at the ping-pong balls. Even if you're not using your eyes, measuring the mass of them is an observation that causes the wave function to collapse.
Actually, ping-pong balls are large enough that their uncertainty is negligible all by themselves. That's why experiments like this are so hard to set up. It's pretty remarkable that they can isolate something as big as a virus.
> What state does the cat think it is?
You can't know without asking the cat, which makes you part of the cat's superposition. And any object big enough to incorporate you asking the cat is going to have its wave-function collapse.
If it was you in the box (the "quantum suicide" experiment), you're still a big object in the box, collapsing the wave forms. So either you live or die. But from outside, if the box is truly isolated (which it never is), then the answer is undefined until they open it up, at which point it's certainly no longer isolated. The wave collapses, and either an alive or dead form is observed.
Until the box is opened, it's neither alive nor dead as far as the outside of the box is concerned. It's genuinely undefined.
I know this is at odds with what you expect. That's because you live your whole life as a large-scale object. But if you pare the components down, you can do the experiments (Stern-Gerlach, two-slit, etc) yourself. The subatomic particles behave very differently from what you expect.
> Just because YOU don't know which, doesn't mean that it doesn't, or that reality doesn't.
Actually, that's precisely what it means. Quantum mechanics isn't just about what you know or don't know. It says that the both-alive-and-dead state is real, and not just some hidden variable. We accept that fairly easily when it comes to photons or electrons. Schroedinger's thought experiment was to demonstrate that the weirdness can't be confined to just subatomic particles.
But it's harder than it sounds. Actual cats in actual boxes aren't really isolated, so the superposition state "collapses" by interaction with the rest of the world. It has nothing to do with "solipsism". Your brain is just one of the objects the cat system interacts with. Because your brain is large-scale, it tends to cause the superpositions to be forced into one state or the other.
It looks like solipsism because you can't see the object without interacting it with your brain. But it's nothing special with your brain as compared to other objects in the universe, except that the brain happens to be yours and so is intimately involved in your actually detecting anything.
The upshot: the superposition is real, but as long as your brain is involved, you'll never "see" the superposition. That doesn't mean we can't detect that it actually happened that way rather than just being a hidden state you couldn't see. Various subtle and intriguing experiments have been done, described in (among other places)
> they could charge 1 penny a page and still make a killing.... as long as the overhead costs don't eat it up. The micropayments provider has overhead of their own (dealing with credit cards, fraud, maintaining accounts, bills, hosting, etc.) If they want to charge $.005 per transaction, that's half your "killing". If they need $.009 per transaction, what's left isn't worth much.
I think we'll need to see some more directly disastrous results before people really base day-to-day decisions on such considerations.
Arguably, not even then. The argument global warming deniers seem to have settled on is "It's happening, but it's not our fault." Even if disasters happen, they can claim that nothing could have been done.
This is a much more stable position than "it's not happening", which is subject to disproof by data. But the cause and effect are far enough separated that no amount of computer modeling will convince those who have a vested interest in not believing it. Especially since it's always possible to find some expert willing to confirm their beliefs. Even the hardest sciences are subject to healthy dispute that can be unhealthily portrayed as though there are two equal and opposite positions.
(Note: they're still happy to leap on "it's not happening" when they can cherry-pick data to support it. I'll be happy when 2009 is over and they can stop pointing to an outlier that occurred in 1999 and say "the last ten years" as if that were an arbitrarily-chosen period.)
> It is the UK Law that counts, not the directive.
And (as I understand it) in joining the EEC, the UK agreed to abide by council directives, even those introduced after the fact. The relevant law is the European Communities Act of 1972:
The details are a matter for lawyers, but they did adopt a treaty. I haven't dug out chapter-and-verse, so I don't know the details, but I gather that the details do in fact exist.
I imagine it could, at the cost of essentially withdrawing from the EU. Which seems a rather drastic solution for the right to not tell anybody how you label your DVDs.
This is not considered a constitutional crisis, just an administrative oversight. The law was passed in 1984, and the EEC directive in 1983. They probably just hadn't gotten the hang of it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they just get it over with, and just take your money?
Because sometimes you win. Even if you play without counting, you'll walk out ahead some days. In the long term you lose, but the days that you walk out ahead are fun. People enjoy winning the individual hands, and when they walk out a loser, the delta is their price of having enjoyed the game.
Play the game well, and it's not hard to walk away an hour or so later down merely $20. That's not that much more expensive than a movie. Even if you walk away $100 poorer, it's cheaper than the shows.
Mind you, I don't enjoy the games, and I don't play. But for people who do, the process of play is an important part of it, and not to be underestimated.
Have any of these climatologists considered climate change is a natural cycle of the planet?
Why... no! No they haven't! Thank you for bringing that to their attention.
How astute of you to see what none of the several thousand PhDs working the subject for the last few decades have noticed. I'm sure they'll get to work on your brilliant insight right away.
Morality is not defined by law.
Nope. But you can generally assume that if something is legal, and profitable, somebody will do it. That's why you have to fix the law. If your only argument is "But it's immoral!", sooner or later you'll find somebody who says, "So what?"
Today, that's Eolas. And yeah, it makes them bad guys. But you can't fix the problem by removing the bad guys; other equally bad guys will pop up. You have to fix the law so that it's no longer profitable to break it.
Having seen the trailer, I've probably seen as much of this project as I really want. But the concept is amusing enough that I'm glad they're doing it.
Changing your file system solves RAM errors how?
If we synthesize a living organism in totality, does Common Descent become untrue?
Common descent will have been true, which is the important part. It's a fundamental part of evolutionary history, crucial to understanding what has gone before.
There's no reason that this planet couldn't have had several parallel threads of common descent. It would have made evolutionary history harder to unravel, adding more noise to a signal that turned out to be pretty clear once we found it.
It means that future biologists will find the state of evolution on this planet harder to untangle, but that's their problem, not ours. The idea of common descent has already given rise to much more intricate and useful understandings of evolutionary history (e.g. through molecular biology).
If just 1 percent of the population is criminal, you
have to anticipate 1 criminal for every 100 people you
hire.
If 1% of the population is criminal, and there are 100 employees, there is a 36.6% chance that none of them are criminal (so a 63.4% chance that at least one is).
Remember that the price also includes free upgrades. OK, most of what they've done to Office since 1997 has been worthless, but there are at least a few nice features since then.
Yeah, good luck with that. I bet you couldn't get 3/4 of the state legislatures to agree that grass is green.
The actual time limits can be debated, but they need to be set in the constitution, not left to a congress that can be bribed with corporate donations.
And what body would you propose should do the setting in the constitution?
There is a picture in TFA, but the photographer (or editor, more likely) decided that "interesting composition" trumped "actually conveying information". It is kind of a pretty picture, as long as you weren't actually interested in the subject of the article.
Of course, this is a "human interest piece", which means the "subject" is a human, and the computer is a prop. If the subject is "technology", that goes in a different section of the paper.
My first thought was VMS, but of course there's an open version of that.
And somebody open-sourced CP/M.
But "exists as an open-source hobby project" is a bit bringing back your dead lover as a zombie. Yeah, it's still around, but it's not really the same. Unless you're really, really kinky.
> Since when does everything science accomplish have to have immediate material benefit to humanity?
To play devil's advocate... it's not so much a matter of "what science accomplishes" as "who pays for it". One is entitled to some sort of opinion when one is paying for it, via tax dollars.
It is, as you point out, shortsighted to assume that all science must have an immediate benefit to be worth it. But it is worth considering whether money spent on basic research might be better spent elsewhere.
(Personally, I'd rather spend a lot more on basic research, but those who want to pay less for it are entitled to an opinion when it's their money.)
Why would anyone oppose this?
It's not completely insane to oppose it on "trade secrets" grounds. They're allowed to keep manufacturing details private to keep competitors from stealing their ideas. If you don't like it, they'd say, go buy yourself a car from somebody else. And if you force us to do this, who's coming after your company to disclose it's trade secrets next?
I don't know how defensible that argument is, but it's the sort of thing that a lobbyist could arm a legislator with, after greasing his palm.
If all else fails, they can whip up a nice flurry of outrage by calling it "socialism". They'll have people furious at companies for "sharing the wealth" of such information as right size of windshield wiper replacements.
The analogy, as with most analogies, is useful for precisely the things it was designed to be useful for, and is misleading when extended.
There is a legitimate fear of Google's tools that you can't apply any other tools to your data. These guys are trying to fix that problem.
There is another legitimate fear that you can't delete your data for certain and ever. That's Somebody Else's Problem, and also not covered by the analogy.
Analogies can be useful to explain things, but they're rarely valid for actually proving things. They're useful for proofs only when the analogy is so precise that it's no easier to understand or manipulate than the original thing.
Glad to help. I wish I could be even clearer, but then, nobody really understands what the implications of all this are. The physicists are forced to say, "The numbers are what they are, and if they don't match your intuition, tough." Which is true and unhelpful, in the sense of jokes like this one:
http://www.ahajokes.com/bus161.html
So we end up with the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the Consistent Histories Interpretation (my favorite), which end up all being exactly equivalent but people argue passionately about them because none of them actually make sense in the way you'd want them to.
I favor Consistent Histories precisely because it makes the least sense, and therefore forces you to give up your preconceptions if you're even going to hope to apply it, but all of these interpretations mean the same thing mathematically. And the math is an enormous amount of effort to apply to something you never actually see.
The kludgy bit is that you go from heat->motion->electricity, with losses at each step. Maybe that's just good reuse, having already debugged both steps pretty thoroughly.
But after a century or so of power plants, it's starting to feel like optimization is no longer premature. The power plant is the very center of a tight loop, and worth optimizing.
Unfortunately, any time you replace a well-understood legacy system with a new one you get bugs, and the whole heat->electricity thing isn't yet anywhere near well library-quality code. It actually turns out to be less efficient, not more. But as a programmer you look at the inefficiencies and figure there's got to be a better way.
When we say that the cat is "alive and dead", we mean that there are two possible quantum states in the box, but it's absolutely impossible for you to know what's inside the box until you look.
What does the cat see? Well, there's two possibilities. The cat may be licking its tail. Or it may be an ex-cat. The cat knows which, it being the cat. But you (outside) can't know which without looking.
The ping-pong balls are large-scale objects, and they have a definite position and momentum. Or at least, the indefiniteness is so small you can't even begin to observe it. If you did the same experiment with electrons or atoms (such as the Stern-Gerlach experiment) you'd observe that the mass is conserved; you don't get duplicate objects. But the mass detector is itself a large-scale object, and the combined system of (atom+mass detector) has a definite position.
In essence... the waveform is different whether you're on the inside or the outside. Nobody quite knows what that "means", and there are different interpretations. Personally, I prefer to leave it uninterpreted; I don't believe that we'll ever make it reconcile with our large-scale notion of reality.
That the reality is different at small scales is well-demonstrated, but that different reality is oddly hidden: every time you look at it, it goes away. Try to scale it up (which is what the Cat experiment is about) and you'd think you could get a good look at it, but the universe seems to conspire against you to make it seem like it doesn't happen.
> What am i missing?
That you're looking at the ping-pong balls. Even if you're not using your eyes, measuring the mass of them is an observation that causes the wave function to collapse.
Actually, ping-pong balls are large enough that their uncertainty is negligible all by themselves. That's why experiments like this are so hard to set up. It's pretty remarkable that they can isolate something as big as a virus.
> What state does the cat think it is?
You can't know without asking the cat, which makes you part of the cat's superposition. And any object big enough to incorporate you asking the cat is going to have its wave-function collapse.
If it was you in the box (the "quantum suicide" experiment), you're still a big object in the box, collapsing the wave forms. So either you live or die. But from outside, if the box is truly isolated (which it never is), then the answer is undefined until they open it up, at which point it's certainly no longer isolated. The wave collapses, and either an alive or dead form is observed.
Until the box is opened, it's neither alive nor dead as far as the outside of the box is concerned. It's genuinely undefined.
I know this is at odds with what you expect. That's because you live your whole life as a large-scale object. But if you pare the components down, you can do the experiments (Stern-Gerlach, two-slit, etc) yourself. The subatomic particles behave very differently from what you expect.
> Just because YOU don't know which, doesn't mean that it doesn't, or that reality doesn't.
Actually, that's precisely what it means. Quantum mechanics isn't just about what you know or don't know. It says that the both-alive-and-dead state is real, and not just some hidden variable. We accept that fairly easily when it comes to photons or electrons. Schroedinger's thought experiment was to demonstrate that the weirdness can't be confined to just subatomic particles.
But it's harder than it sounds. Actual cats in actual boxes aren't really isolated, so the superposition state "collapses" by interaction with the rest of the world. It has nothing to do with "solipsism". Your brain is just one of the objects the cat system interacts with. Because your brain is large-scale, it tends to cause the superpositions to be forced into one state or the other.
It looks like solipsism because you can't see the object without interacting it with your brain. But it's nothing special with your brain as compared to other objects in the universe, except that the brain happens to be yours and so is intimately involved in your actually detecting anything.
The upshot: the superposition is real, but as long as your brain is involved, you'll never "see" the superposition. That doesn't mean we can't detect that it actually happened that way rather than just being a hidden state you couldn't see. Various subtle and intriguing experiments have been done, described in (among other places)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments
> I wonder if that's because it's run by lawyers, bankers, and insurance companies?
Or conversely: do we have so many lawyers, bankers, and insurance companies because Americans are so risk-averse?
> they could charge 1 penny a page and still make a killing. ... as long as the overhead costs don't eat it up. The micropayments provider has overhead of their own (dealing with credit cards, fraud, maintaining accounts, bills, hosting, etc.) If they want to charge $.005 per transaction, that's half your "killing". If they need $.009 per transaction, what's left isn't worth much.
I think we'll need to see some more directly disastrous results before people really base day-to-day decisions on such considerations.
Arguably, not even then. The argument global warming deniers seem to have settled on is "It's happening, but it's not our fault." Even if disasters happen, they can claim that nothing could have been done.
This is a much more stable position than "it's not happening", which is subject to disproof by data. But the cause and effect are far enough separated that no amount of computer modeling will convince those who have a vested interest in not believing it. Especially since it's always possible to find some expert willing to confirm their beliefs. Even the hardest sciences are subject to healthy dispute that can be unhealthily portrayed as though there are two equal and opposite positions.
(Note: they're still happy to leap on "it's not happening" when they can cherry-pick data to support it. I'll be happy when 2009 is over and they can stop pointing to an outlier that occurred in 1999 and say "the last ten years" as if that were an arbitrarily-chosen period.)
> It is the UK Law that counts, not the directive.
And (as I understand it) in joining the EEC, the UK agreed to abide by council directives, even those introduced after the fact. The relevant law is the European Communities Act of 1972:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts1972/ukpga_19720068_en_1
passed by a vote of 356 to 244.
The details are a matter for lawyers, but they did adopt a treaty. I haven't dug out chapter-and-verse, so I don't know the details, but I gather that the details do in fact exist.
> if it wanted, it could ignore any such rule.
I imagine it could, at the cost of essentially withdrawing from the EU. Which seems a rather drastic solution for the right to not tell anybody how you label your DVDs.
This is not considered a constitutional crisis, just an administrative oversight. The law was passed in 1984, and the EEC directive in 1983. They probably just hadn't gotten the hang of it yet.