Well, it's very dangerous to read that much detail into an author's background; but hey, I'm not really a book critic, I just play one on slashdot. It was tempting to do so in this case because that is exactly the kind of book I wanted very much to be able to write four or five years ago.
First of all, this is clearly an immature effort. A decent effort, but immature. Second, the writer lets some of his biases come out in an all-too-obvious way--the tattoos, Death Jockey's, the shocking violence and drawn out sex--all of these reveal that the author is (in my oppinion) an adolescent or recently adolescent-male, who is into the punk scene and has played a lot of video games. Please don't misunderstand me; that could be me we're talking about here.
Next, I want to say what is good. The overall idea is pretty original, and very audacious; this is no mere Matrix rip-off. Second, the non-chronological ordering works, and very well. The second half of the book becomes chronological, but the first half adds some surprises and suspense through its arrangement. Third, for all that some people complain about the violence, sex, rape, incest, etc., most of the scenes did have some sort of point that was only really driven home because of the way the author presented it. Fourth, the ideas were challenging, and philosophically compelling.
The book showed much more promise in the beginning that it delivered in the end. While it was enjoyable, (though short), it left you feeling dissatisfied. I do have some specific complaints.
First, the three laws of robotics are quaint, but have no real place in a modern book. Asimov really used them (see "I, Robot") to show that a straightforward, simplistic moral system is not really so straightforward and simple. His stories focused on why the Three Laws had all kinds of interesting edge conditions that his robot's designers had never considered.
I also agree with many here that the violence, sex, overall depravity was excessive. It was simply distracting, and I had to quickly begin to skip over those parts. The author has too much narration; parts read like a textbook. Novels with characters should give those characters a chance to talk.
I earlier said that the book was too immature; a couple of other immature parts are the military and corporate exploitation angle. Of course these three men are inherently evil, and are really only cardboard. Fred, for all the attention he is given isn't really developed either. A really big failing is that AnneMarie isn't developed; that would have made a riveting book.
The climax of the book was also very lacking. Caroline's confrontation with Lawrence should have been something grand and terrible; instead, it was a Star Trek, "Quick Fix" ending. Afterwards, the characters don't seem to be affected by the "Fall", except to sometimes ruminate that they "sure could use some of those PI powers to light a fire." (Not a real quote.) Up until Chapter 8, there is no particular religious overtones (an interesting topic, to be sure), then we are suddenly in the Book of Genesis. I am reminded of the Twilight Zone episode, "OVER AND OUT." In fact, I think all of Chapter 8 could be an afterword, if not a sequel.
Overall, the author didn't do an outstanding job, but it's a very compelling idea, and its nothing a real editor could help him fix. Less narration, more developed (and more numerous) characters, some fat trimmed off, and some more time developing the world.
It's a good sign when the reader muses that the book is to short, and this was too short. The world of "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect," is really what we paid to see, and we'd like to see more of it.
Forcing a company who has been found to have illegally leveraged Windows (the same OS that MS has been found to have an illegal monopoly on) to destroy a product to help that product.
is exactly the same as
Forcing a free, minor OS to help the company trying to illegally leverage Windows to destroy the free, minor OS.
don't know why... I mean, can't you just define a point that is in the center of a given manifold then make a sphere that is the average distance from all points on the surface and define a new surface that is half-way between the two surfaces, and repeat forever to show that you really get a sphere
By God Man! You've just proven the most important conjecture in topology! You get the Clay Institute Prize!
Consider a mercury thermometer. Say we put a Celcius scale up the left side and a Farenheit scale on the right. Now, say the temperature goes up; obviously, the mercury goes up too. Now, here's why you get to say the two scales are equally as fine-grained: the mercury goes up the same amount on the left as on the right. So the decimal digits will differ, but we just use more signifigant digits anyway (we have an unlimited number of them, get it?).
(To this post's grandparent) BTW, have you ever watched a weather report? They give temperatures in ranges (ie High 60's). With Celcius, the ranges will be tighter (ie 16C-17C), so I still don't understand your point.
Look at it this way: adding stealth capabilities to an aircraft increases its cost by X dollars. The payoff for this is that the aircraft will be Y percent less likely to be shot down. Let Z be the probability that it will be shot down, and let C be the cost, of the aircraft without stealth technology. If
ZC > (C + X)(Z - Y), then you are saving money. Why should the military care about saving money? Because for the military, Money = Force (which explains in part why the US military is so great).
Just because there's a high potential energy stored in a battery does not mean that there is a very catastrophic failure mode. Consider a lead-acid battery. These explode when they are shorted. Now consider a tokamak (to use your lame example.) This needs to continuously feed back into itself to keep the hydrogen fusing. If it fails somehow, then you have about a millionth of a gram of hot hydrogen, which will promptly expand with the force of a popping soap bubble.
Just remember, a hydrogen-bomb does not get its destructive power from fusion. It uses fission to set off a fusion reaction, which sets off a very large fission reaction, which contributes the lions share of the destructive energy in the explosion.
Why is it that on slashdot, as soon as some technology company files a patent claim (no matter how reasonable the patent's claim is) we get call for "The end of the patent system" because it will "ruin America/The World/Linux/GNU, etc." We moan about how much the patent system invites abuse, gets abused, and abuses us (the martyrs of the technology world.) Well, this is the same story, different industry.
However, now that it's not a technology company, but Grandma and Grandpa, and little cousin Joey--not to mention people like yourself and myself--who suffer, we're not supposed to bitch about patents? I think a lot of people on slashdot are intentionally misinterpreting the argument in this article. He is not defending the drug companies, or the few wealthy researchers--in fact, he takes a very anti-Drug company stance--but we act like he is some schill for the drug companies. It's pretty ironic that someone who is basically spouting the slashdot party line is getting crap like this said about him.
Lets try to not construct a straw man to wail against--instead, lets think about the real problem: it's getting to be impossible for a small university or small company to do any biological research.
Was there a point to posting this on Slashdot
If you prick a geek, would they not bleed? I'm human, you're human, therefore, methinks medical technology would be of some sort of importance to us.
That aside, a lot of geeks are doing research or study in these areas, (obviously not yourself), so I think this is News For Nerds.
Maybe you just have something against "The New Republic."
Lets say Congress passes some law (like the PATRIOT act, although there are plenty of other examples), which is in clear contradiction to the Constitution or its amendments. Does that mean that everyone gets to ignore the new law? No, people still should obey the new law. If someone is prosecuted, they should certainly appeal their way to the Supreme Court, and if nobody is ever prosecuted, then it doesn't really matter that the law is unconstitutional, as a matter of fact. But people should obey the law.
I'm not saying I trust the government to pass fair laws, or that the PATRIOT act is a good thing. I'm just saying I don't trust most people (eg. Rednecks) to be adequite judges of the constitutionality of the laws passed by the Congress.
So, the reason I'm replying to you is: go ahead and question the law that does exist, but don't be too upset if people ignore your conclusion and go on obeying the law. Most Universities do not like to go to the Courts.
however, how much can we mine before it begins to have a noticable effect on its mass? change the moon, and you change the earth.
How about this: You and four of your friends (I'm assuming you have friends; see how nice I am?) all jump up at the same time. The Earth will move a tiny distance away from you while you are away. This distance is controlled by the conservation of energy. Think about that distance for a second: it's small.
That's how much the Earth will be affected by the next 100 years of mining the moon, to within an order of magnitude or so.
It's an interesting problem. I believe that, while the Church itself may be coming around (not really on the issue of the origin of humanity,) the Bishops, Priests, and Teachers in the Church have their own ideas. So, really, the whole Catholic opposition to Evolution is a "Grass-roots" kind of thing.
First of all, you're a troll. Please consider explaining why you have any idea what you are talking about. You don't have to list the degrees you have, just how deeply you've studied this subject.
Seriously, how many biology--and more importantly--anthropology classes have you taken? Because if you just allow yourself to be a self-directed reader, you will (inevitably) get a skewed view of reality. You need the rigorous, objective treatment of a good old-fashioned <jed clampet>U-nee-verse-it-ee</jed clampet> to get an understanding of the state of the science.
By the way, not to nitpick, but do you have any idea how complicated a proof of 1+1=2 is? Depending on the axiomatic system that the proof is given in, (IIRC) the proof ranges from several dozen to several hundred steps. The most commonly accepted axiomatic system (based on Peano's postulates) falls in the latter category. My point: nothing in Science or Mathematics is either simple or intuitive. If you try to understand either intuitively (unless you're a Ramanujan, which I doubt) you're doomed to fail.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
Why don't you take some of your own advice?
Consider: we have to make the elevator extend past geosyncronous orbit (otherwise, what would be holding it up?) and connect it to a counterweight at the end. The smaller the counterweight, the farther it must extend. Now, if you are positioned at the counterweight, you are moving at supra-orbital velocity (your angular velocity is the same as it the angular velocity of something in geosynchronous orbit, but you are farther out. Also, tangential orbital velocity goes down as you go out.)
Therefore, if you let go of the space elevator
at the counterweight, you will continue on tangentially to the orbit of the counterweight, but you will be in a very eccentric Earth orbit. The space elevator's utility would be much reduced it the tangential speed at the counterweight was not escape velocity for the Earth, so we could (reasonably) assume that it would be greater.
Now, if you release from the counterweight at just the right time, you will be heading in the opposite direction that the Earth is moving in, relative to the Sun. This means that you will be put in an eccentric orbit around the Sun, with your new perihelion much closer to the Sun than the Earth's.
If the elevator is long enough, then no further action need be taken, otherwise, a retrograde (I think that's the word) burn immediatly after release from the elevator can bring the orbit into one that intersects the Sun. There are more or less energy efficient ways to do the burn, but the point is that you already have a good kick from the elevator.
So, no you are not at all incorrect about the amount of energy requred--it takes a lot of energy to impact the Sun--but the elevator helps tremendously.
The tactics vs. strategy distiction is important and enlightening. Tactical actions are those intended to kill or defend a small number of established groups, while strategic actions are intended to increase the territory controlled (my definition, so feel free to disagree with it).
Winning a tactical battle is something computers are okay at now. MPP is a useful optimization for analyzing a tactical situation. However, winning a particular battle may lead to you losing the game (and frequently it does), so the key problem is chosing the battles to fight. If there are three fights on the board, how do you choose among them? Right now we cannot answer that question, so we don't know if MPP will help or not. I was honestly just conjecturing on the topic.
I think that massively parallel processing would be fairly maladapted as a platform for a Go AI. The basic problem in Go for deciding what move to make right now is this: given the enourmous number of possible moves that can be made right now, limit the list to a small number of moves, and pick the best one.
While generating the "short list" can be made parallelized to some extent, the much harder problem is deciding among those. Because you can't apply traditional game theory methods (where you would decide directly what move would lead to a better end game), you have to analyze each of these alternatives by comparing the goal they are trying to achieve, and the likelyhood of doing so. This, at least, is how I feel humans accomplish choosing a move. Deciding the most worthy goals seems to me to be a serialized task, largely inappropriate to MPP.
In my personal experience playing Go, I almost always see the best potential moves right away (at least, the best ones I will ever see). Then, it takes me quite a while to decide among those moves. There are a few situations (Joseki) where I attempt to construct a mental tree of moves, but computers are already okay at those anyway.
Still, there's nothing you can do on a single processor machine that cannot be done on a MPP, and vice versa. Since we can't figure out how to do the "goal juggling" I mentioned at all, it doesn't matter what architecture we use, not even if we use Blue Gene.
What if you used an IR CCD and some optics, like lenses and filters. Since this laser would be so bright, you'd have a pretty high cutoff. Then, you could run this through some computer algorithms to get the brightest point source, giving you a vector to the fighter.
Since the fighter would be firing the laser for a few seconds (sometimes), you'd also get a decent velocity vector. The path of the light source would be distorted by perspective effects; it is possible to do the inverse, and unproject the vector, to get an honest-to-goodness 3d vector.
Set up a few stations like this, get some high-speed communication (so that different detectors can triangulate for better accuracy), and you can use your own ground based or arial lasers to shoot the fighter. It's all very passive , but it won't work in overcast conditions. Whatever; neither will the fighter. If you had a good GPS system, you could even make the detectors arial themselves.
Actually, IR detectors are really cheap. A laser like this would stand out like a nuclear blast in the dead of night. Ever looked at a laser pointer that's NOT pointed at you?
Am I the only person in the world who thinks Taco's cabinet looks like ass. I mean, the Jubei Chan motif--while odd--is excusable; but the plans are almost inexcusably unauthentic. Seriously, while the "Arcade in a Box" isn't authentic, neither is Taco's.
A couple of guys I know tore out the guts of a Mortal Combat cabinet, bolted in a PC and soldered the microswitches from the Cabinet's controls onto a keyboard's innards. That's authenticity.
At the company I currently work for, we use exclusively macs. There are about 100 people here, all with computers. How many support personnel do we need?
One, non-overworked person.
At my old job, we ran WindowsNT. There were about a dozen people using computers. How many support personnel did we need?
Two, somewhat overworked people.
This is just an anecdote, so don't interpret this post as an argument for/against the Gartner group's findings. This story is simply in line with my experiences, so I'm disinclined to reject their findings. I'm really not saying you need sixteen times more support personnel to employ Windows; I'm just saying we needed more.
Remember, most computer users are not computer literate. These are people who struggle to use Internet Explorer.
But I guess this is what happens when you let a computer science guy (or other digitally minded individual) have enough free time to think up crap like this.
Here we go kiddies, on a romp through introductory quantum physics; when we get to the other side of the ride, please exit in an orderly fashion.
Lession 1: Particles do not have an exact position. This is just a lame restatement Heisenberg's Uncertainty Priciple.
Lession 2: The state of a particle is represented as a probability function over all of space. The probability is the likelyhood that we will observe that particle at the location. For every point in space, there is a nonzero value for this function. This means that you could observe a particle anywhere--not just where we expect to see it. We don't ofter see particles jump around because the probability curve is a fairly sharp spike (for particles like electrons), which quickly tapers off to near zero.
Lesson 3: The state of a single particle therefore has an infinite amount of information. Still, most single particle systems can be summed up with less than an infinite amount of information.
Lession 4: A multiple particle system cannot be represented by anything less than the combined probability function for the two particles. Presentely, we have no idea how to represent the state of a two particle system with anything less than an infinite amount of information. We can approximate many two particle systems to any degree we desire, but the inherent inaccuracies will always add up.
My point is that the Universe cannot be represented by less than an infinite amount of information. Even worse, every particle in the Universe requires aleph one (real number) size infinities. So, any attempt to express the amount of information in the Universe as a finite value is fundamentally, inherently, loosingly and bogusly pointless.
How exactly will you break a 100 mi thick ribon of nanotubes????
Simple: space elevator means easy access to space, means lots of small spacecraft flying around. Any one of these spacecraft can be pointed at the space elevator. I expect that this will happen from time to time until we get a military/police force monitoring the areas around the space elevator.
BTW, the ribbon would only have to be ~40cm across, not 100mi. And an impact would be a shearing stress, not a tensile stress, and I don't think we know the shearing capabilities of carbon nanotubes
Great news for quantum computing
on
Stopping Light
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've noticed a couple of people wondering why this discovery important. Some other people know that it is useful for quantum computing, but they don't know how it would be useful. I'll see if I can help.
The most common way qubits are stored in quantum computers is as spin, which can be thought of as angular momentum, quantum-style. The particle usually used for this task is the electron. So, now we've got the qubit stored as spin, but how do we get the different particle's spin states to interact? If we can't get them to interact, we can't do any computation, so this is a very important question.
The most successful quantum computers (those with 7 qubits) so far use Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to make the qubits interact. This has it's problems, and would not be appropriate for a real quantum computer. So, to make a real (ie. Desktop) QC, we need something better.
This story talks about a method of turning information stored in light (as amplitude, IIRC) into spin. This sort of translation is exactly what is needed to make quantum computers work.
An example QC could use a bunch of atom's as the memory system, with all of the qubits encoded as spin on the electrons orbiting the atoms. The CPU would be a bunch of optical components (beam splitters, polarizers, mirrors, etc.) that operate kind of like transistors. And the wires would just be fiber optics. Now, this is a little simplified, because it assumes we can make atomic scale optical components, but I am confident that it will happen soon.
Hope this helps some people understand why this is Stuff that matters.
You're talking about string theory, and it doesn't really deserve to be called a theory. First, it offers no hypothesies; last I heard, no one had been able to solve any of the equations and produce predictions which can be verified. Second, it's not really based on any observations; string theory is basically an attempt to make quantum electrodynamics work, along with gravity.
I personally think that gravity is not a fundamental force, but an emergent, probabalistic "Force." I'm stying to make this result come out of the math, but it's tricky. This makes sense, given gravity's ridiculously small magnitude, and would offer at least a testable hypothesis. This hypothesis doesn't mean that things sometimes go up when they should go down--- look at the second law of thermodynamics, and show me a time an egg put itself back together.
My point is, at least promote theories which can be tested.
(BTW, I also understand that QCD has the same problem of unsolveable equations.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's very dangerous to read that much detail into an author's background; but hey, I'm not really a book critic, I just play one on slashdot. It was tempting to do so in this case because that is exactly the kind of book I wanted very much to be able to write four or five years ago.
I'm glad you put it out there also, localroger.
First of all, this is clearly an immature effort. A decent effort, but immature. Second, the writer lets some of his biases come out in an all-too-obvious way--the tattoos, Death Jockey's, the shocking violence and drawn out sex--all of these reveal that the author is (in my oppinion) an adolescent or recently adolescent-male, who is into the punk scene and has played a lot of video games. Please don't misunderstand me; that could be me we're talking about here.
Next, I want to say what is good. The overall idea is pretty original, and very audacious; this is no mere Matrix rip-off. Second, the non-chronological ordering works, and very well. The second half of the book becomes chronological, but the first half adds some surprises and suspense through its arrangement. Third, for all that some people complain about the violence, sex, rape, incest, etc., most of the scenes did have some sort of point that was only really driven home because of the way the author presented it. Fourth, the ideas were challenging, and philosophically compelling.
The book showed much more promise in the beginning that it delivered in the end. While it was enjoyable, (though short), it left you feeling dissatisfied. I do have some specific complaints.
First, the three laws of robotics are quaint, but have no real place in a modern book. Asimov really used them (see "I, Robot") to show that a straightforward, simplistic moral system is not really so straightforward and simple. His stories focused on why the Three Laws had all kinds of interesting edge conditions that his robot's designers had never considered.
I also agree with many here that the violence, sex, overall depravity was excessive. It was simply distracting, and I had to quickly begin to skip over those parts. The author has too much narration; parts read like a textbook. Novels with characters should give those characters a chance to talk.
I earlier said that the book was too immature; a couple of other immature parts are the military and corporate exploitation angle. Of course these three men are inherently evil, and are really only cardboard. Fred, for all the attention he is given isn't really developed either. A really big failing is that AnneMarie isn't developed; that would have made a riveting book.
The climax of the book was also very lacking. Caroline's confrontation with Lawrence should have been something grand and terrible; instead, it was a Star Trek, "Quick Fix" ending. Afterwards, the characters don't seem to be affected by the "Fall", except to sometimes ruminate that they "sure could use some of those PI powers to light a fire." (Not a real quote.) Up until Chapter 8, there is no particular religious overtones (an interesting topic, to be sure), then we are suddenly in the Book of Genesis. I am reminded of the Twilight Zone episode, "OVER AND OUT." In fact, I think all of Chapter 8 could be an afterword, if not a sequel.
Overall, the author didn't do an outstanding job, but it's a very compelling idea, and its nothing a real editor could help him fix. Less narration, more developed (and more numerous) characters, some fat trimmed off, and some more time developing the world.
It's a good sign when the reader muses that the book is to short, and this was too short. The world of "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect," is really what we paid to see, and we'd like to see more of it.
You know what, you're absolutely right.
is exactly the same as Thank you for clearing that up.By God Man! You've just proven the most important conjecture in topology! You get the Clay Institute Prize!
(To this post's grandparent) BTW, have you ever watched a weather report? They give temperatures in ranges (ie High 60's). With Celcius, the ranges will be tighter (ie 16C-17C), so I still don't understand your point.
Not that its that simple.
Just remember, a hydrogen-bomb does not get its destructive power from fusion. It uses fission to set off a fusion reaction, which sets off a very large fission reaction, which contributes the lions share of the destructive energy in the explosion.
However, now that it's not a technology company, but Grandma and Grandpa, and little cousin Joey--not to mention people like yourself and myself--who suffer, we're not supposed to bitch about patents? I think a lot of people on slashdot are intentionally misinterpreting the argument in this article. He is not defending the drug companies, or the few wealthy researchers--in fact, he takes a very anti-Drug company stance--but we act like he is some schill for the drug companies. It's pretty ironic that someone who is basically spouting the slashdot party line is getting crap like this said about him.
Lets try to not construct a straw man to wail against--instead, lets think about the real problem: it's getting to be impossible for a small university or small company to do any biological research.
Was there a point to posting this on Slashdot
If you prick a geek, would they not bleed? I'm human, you're human, therefore, methinks medical technology would be of some sort of importance to us. That aside, a lot of geeks are doing research or study in these areas, (obviously not yourself), so I think this is News For Nerds.
Maybe you just have something against "The New Republic."
Lets say Congress passes some law (like the PATRIOT act, although there are plenty of other examples), which is in clear contradiction to the Constitution or its amendments. Does that mean that everyone gets to ignore the new law? No, people still should obey the new law. If someone is prosecuted, they should certainly appeal their way to the Supreme Court, and if nobody is ever prosecuted, then it doesn't really matter that the law is unconstitutional, as a matter of fact. But people should obey the law.
I'm not saying I trust the government to pass fair laws, or that the PATRIOT act is a good thing. I'm just saying I don't trust most people (eg. Rednecks) to be adequite judges of the constitutionality of the laws passed by the Congress.
So, the reason I'm replying to you is: go ahead and question the law that does exist, but don't be too upset if people ignore your conclusion and go on obeying the law. Most Universities do not like to go to the Courts.
How about this: You and four of your friends (I'm assuming you have friends; see how nice I am?) all jump up at the same time. The Earth will move a tiny distance away from you while you are away. This distance is controlled by the conservation of energy. Think about that distance for a second: it's small.
That's how much the Earth will be affected by the next 100 years of mining the moon, to within an order of magnitude or so.
It's an interesting problem. I believe that, while the Church itself may be coming around (not really on the issue of the origin of humanity,) the Bishops, Priests, and Teachers in the Church have their own ideas. So, really, the whole Catholic opposition to Evolution is a "Grass-roots" kind of thing.
Seriously, how many biology--and more importantly--anthropology classes have you taken? Because if you just allow yourself to be a self-directed reader, you will (inevitably) get a skewed view of reality. You need the rigorous, objective treatment of a good old-fashioned <jed clampet>U-nee-verse-it-ee</jed clampet> to get an understanding of the state of the science.
By the way, not to nitpick, but do you have any idea how complicated a proof of 1+1=2 is? Depending on the axiomatic system that the proof is given in, (IIRC) the proof ranges from several dozen to several hundred steps. The most commonly accepted axiomatic system (based on Peano's postulates) falls in the latter category. My point: nothing in Science or Mathematics is either simple or intuitive. If you try to understand either intuitively (unless you're a Ramanujan, which I doubt) you're doomed to fail.
Consider: we have to make the elevator extend past geosyncronous orbit (otherwise, what would be holding it up?) and connect it to a counterweight at the end. The smaller the counterweight, the farther it must extend. Now, if you are positioned at the counterweight, you are moving at supra-orbital velocity (your angular velocity is the same as it the angular velocity of something in geosynchronous orbit, but you are farther out. Also, tangential orbital velocity goes down as you go out.)
Therefore, if you let go of the space elevator at the counterweight, you will continue on tangentially to the orbit of the counterweight, but you will be in a very eccentric Earth orbit. The space elevator's utility would be much reduced it the tangential speed at the counterweight was not escape velocity for the Earth, so we could (reasonably) assume that it would be greater.
Now, if you release from the counterweight at just the right time, you will be heading in the opposite direction that the Earth is moving in, relative to the Sun. This means that you will be put in an eccentric orbit around the Sun, with your new perihelion much closer to the Sun than the Earth's.
If the elevator is long enough, then no further action need be taken, otherwise, a retrograde (I think that's the word) burn immediatly after release from the elevator can bring the orbit into one that intersects the Sun. There are more or less energy efficient ways to do the burn, but the point is that you already have a good kick from the elevator.
So, no you are not at all incorrect about the amount of energy requred--it takes a lot of energy to impact the Sun--but the elevator helps tremendously.
Winning a tactical battle is something computers are okay at now. MPP is a useful optimization for analyzing a tactical situation. However, winning a particular battle may lead to you losing the game (and frequently it does), so the key problem is chosing the battles to fight. If there are three fights on the board, how do you choose among them? Right now we cannot answer that question, so we don't know if MPP will help or not. I was honestly just conjecturing on the topic.
As opposed to which of the alternatives: the past or the present.
While generating the "short list" can be made parallelized to some extent, the much harder problem is deciding among those. Because you can't apply traditional game theory methods (where you would decide directly what move would lead to a better end game), you have to analyze each of these alternatives by comparing the goal they are trying to achieve, and the likelyhood of doing so. This, at least, is how I feel humans accomplish choosing a move. Deciding the most worthy goals seems to me to be a serialized task, largely inappropriate to MPP.
In my personal experience playing Go, I almost always see the best potential moves right away (at least, the best ones I will ever see). Then, it takes me quite a while to decide among those moves. There are a few situations (Joseki) where I attempt to construct a mental tree of moves, but computers are already okay at those anyway.
Still, there's nothing you can do on a single processor machine that cannot be done on a MPP, and vice versa. Since we can't figure out how to do the "goal juggling" I mentioned at all, it doesn't matter what architecture we use, not even if we use Blue Gene.
Since the fighter would be firing the laser for a few seconds (sometimes), you'd also get a decent velocity vector. The path of the light source would be distorted by perspective effects; it is possible to do the inverse, and unproject the vector, to get an honest-to-goodness 3d vector.
Set up a few stations like this, get some high-speed communication (so that different detectors can triangulate for better accuracy), and you can use your own ground based or arial lasers to shoot the fighter. It's all very passive , but it won't work in overcast conditions. Whatever; neither will the fighter. If you had a good GPS system, you could even make the detectors arial themselves.
Not that I'm an expert.
Actually, IR detectors are really cheap. A laser like this would stand out like a nuclear blast in the dead of night. Ever looked at a laser pointer that's NOT pointed at you?
A couple of guys I know tore out the guts of a Mortal Combat cabinet, bolted in a PC and soldered the microswitches from the Cabinet's controls onto a keyboard's innards. That's authenticity.
At the company I currently work for, we use exclusively macs. There are about 100 people here, all with computers. How many support personnel do we need?
One, non-overworked person.
At my old job, we ran WindowsNT. There were about a dozen people using computers. How many support personnel did we need?
Two, somewhat overworked people.
This is just an anecdote, so don't interpret this post as an argument for/against the Gartner group's findings. This story is simply in line with my experiences, so I'm disinclined to reject their findings. I'm really not saying you need sixteen times more support personnel to employ Windows; I'm just saying we needed more.
Remember, most computer users are not computer literate. These are people who struggle to use Internet Explorer.
Here we go kiddies, on a romp through introductory quantum physics; when we get to the other side of the ride, please exit in an orderly fashion.
Lession 1: Particles do not have an exact position. This is just a lame restatement Heisenberg's Uncertainty Priciple.
Lession 2: The state of a particle is represented as a probability function over all of space. The probability is the likelyhood that we will observe that particle at the location. For every point in space, there is a nonzero value for this function. This means that you could observe a particle anywhere--not just where we expect to see it. We don't ofter see particles jump around because the probability curve is a fairly sharp spike (for particles like electrons), which quickly tapers off to near zero.
Lesson 3: The state of a single particle therefore has an infinite amount of information. Still, most single particle systems can be summed up with less than an infinite amount of information.
Lession 4: A multiple particle system cannot be represented by anything less than the combined probability function for the two particles. Presentely, we have no idea how to represent the state of a two particle system with anything less than an infinite amount of information. We can approximate many two particle systems to any degree we desire, but the inherent inaccuracies will always add up.
My point is that the Universe cannot be represented by less than an infinite amount of information. Even worse, every particle in the Universe requires aleph one (real number) size infinities. So, any attempt to express the amount of information in the Universe as a finite value is fundamentally, inherently, loosingly and bogusly pointless.
If I have a iMac connected to the internet full time, and I also have a iBook, could I use bluetooth to access the internet wirelessly from my iBook?
Thanks.
How exactly will you break a 100 mi thick ribon of nanotubes????
Simple: space elevator means easy access to space, means lots of small spacecraft flying around. Any one of these spacecraft can be pointed at the space elevator. I expect that this will happen from time to time until we get a military/police force monitoring the areas around the space elevator.
BTW, the ribbon would only have to be ~40cm across, not 100mi. And an impact would be a shearing stress, not a tensile stress, and I don't think we know the shearing capabilities of carbon nanotubes
I've noticed a couple of people wondering why this discovery important. Some other people know that it is useful for quantum computing, but they don't know how it would be useful. I'll see if I can help.
The most common way qubits are stored in quantum computers is as spin, which can be thought of as angular momentum, quantum-style. The particle usually used for this task is the electron. So, now we've got the qubit stored as spin, but how do we get the different particle's spin states to interact? If we can't get them to interact, we can't do any computation, so this is a very important question.
The most successful quantum computers (those with 7 qubits) so far use Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to make the qubits interact. This has it's problems, and would not be appropriate for a real quantum computer. So, to make a real (ie. Desktop) QC, we need something better.
This story talks about a method of turning information stored in light (as amplitude, IIRC) into spin. This sort of translation is exactly what is needed to make quantum computers work. An example QC could use a bunch of atom's as the memory system, with all of the qubits encoded as spin on the electrons orbiting the atoms. The CPU would be a bunch of optical components (beam splitters, polarizers, mirrors, etc.) that operate kind of like transistors. And the wires would just be fiber optics. Now, this is a little simplified, because it assumes we can make atomic scale optical components, but I am confident that it will happen soon.
Hope this helps some people understand why this is Stuff that matters.
I personally think that gravity is not a fundamental force, but an emergent, probabalistic "Force." I'm stying to make this result come out of the math, but it's tricky. This makes sense, given gravity's ridiculously small magnitude, and would offer at least a testable hypothesis. This hypothesis doesn't mean that things sometimes go up when they should go down--- look at the second law of thermodynamics, and show me a time an egg put itself back together.
My point is, at least promote theories which can be tested.
(BTW, I also understand that QCD has the same problem of unsolveable equations.)