The "cell-phone used to monitor traffic flow" - the last 2 dupes have only 1 story between them
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168794&cid =14070720 or http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168794&cid =14070568> and follow-up posts mention.
A lot of us immediately went "Dupe!, then ,:"Hey, this was also on yesterday - Tripe!" then, as people checked, sure enough its been run to death.
Its the same as multiple desktops - once you get used to it, you wouldn't want it any other way.
Its nice to be able to see your edits on one screen, and your results simultaneously on another. Ditto with man pages, graphics editing, css file changes, etc.
I'd rather have a slower machine and dual monitors than a faster machine and a single monitor any day.
Simple solution: get rid of the articles, and just let people browse the highest-rated journals (yeah, talk about a way to get yourself subnet-banned in 10 minutes when 500 people mod your journal as a troll because you posted something good about the FSM:-).Actually, if you could never be banned from posting in your own journal, it would work.
It would all tie in with the whole "blogging is the new paradigm" thing.
Bonus points: This way Roland Piqsqueak could never happen.
Oops... actually, there's a very strong correleation between the number of articles and the quantity of articles. However, there's no correlation between the quality of articles and the quantity of articles.
Actually you were right both times. Posting the same article 6 times (as was done a few days ago) shows there is no correlation betwen the number of articles posted and the quantity. It was 1 article (number) posted 6 times (quantity). It's slash-math. Don't try to understand it - it'll give you a brain aneurism:-)
Well, for starters, Celine Dion is on YOUR side of the border now, and the Canadian Border Patrol has been ordered to "poutine" her to death if she tries to get back into Kanuckistan.
we don't know what most of the universe is made of... (funny if it turned out that we were in a little bubble of matter and the rest of the universe was left-handed:-).. I know, current theories don't show it, and haven't for 2 decades.. Oh, well, on to the second point...
going back in time does not an antiparticle make. Think of spin as an example. An wheel going back in time would also be revolving in the opposite direction than when it was going forward, so to the everyday observer, it would still seem to be rotating in the same direction as the one that's traveling forward in time (I know, that sounds SO fucked up, you get these pictures of wheels doing the moon walk... but it works, and its one reason why the single-particle theory can't be discarded out of hand).
The idea of the single particle bouncing all over the place is that there is now no need whatsoever for it to retain any state information. It's already been there, and done that (not for every possible solution, just for those that have/will happen). The intermediate info is not retained, and not needed. Solves a lot of problems (sure it makes some new ones. wouldn't be too useful if it didn't:-)
If you allow the backward flow of information along world lines it seems to me that you loose the ability to compute intervals, and your whole space-time metric falls apart.
How do you know your time measurements are continuous? Or that 2 intervals that you consider equal are in fact equal? For example, if time is "spongy", squizhed up in some parts, stretched out in others, you, having no external frame of reference, would have no way of knowing. Besides, you can't compute intervals exactly - that would lead to a violation of the unertainty principle, because you are now able to state with certainty 2 exact points in time and 2 positions. Remember - the more exact the timing, the less certainty of the position, and vice versa. If you take even 1 "snapshot" that you are dead certain of the time, then the position basically becomes the whole universe. Would make a pretty neat warp drive, though.
Think again to the basic assumption that we've all made - that any object even has the ability to interact with another object. If it can interact with one, it has to interact with all - simultaneously. We accept that as a daily fact of life, but the consequences just don't compute. We're doing something wrong, in that we aren't looking at it right, but that may be an artifact of our existence and form, and something we can't fix. We may not be "built right" to understand what's relly going on, any more than a cat that is raised in an environment with no horizontal surfaces can jump on a table.
Who knows, maybe we'll solve the problem by gengineering our descendants so they can see things differently, from a mental perspective.
I've changed the topic heading b/c this is not a discussion about right or wrng - its damn interesting.:-)
the temperature of my instruments can affect the temperature of the star, That doesn't sound like QM to me, it sounds like voodoo.
According to some theories, that actually happens. We can already see that here on earth, where the number of receivers can affect the load of a proximate transmitter, due to coupling. Think of the 2 coils of a transformer. Now separate the coils by a foot... now a yard... now a kilometer. There is still some minute affect on the current-carrying coil due to the mere existence of the other coil, and if the other coil is connected to a load, the transmitter will be affected very minutely. The NSA is into that sort of shit - trying to exploit it to determine where a receiver is based on the loads on transmitters, etc.
Now on to your spectral detector. It would seem that C means your receiver can't possible affect the output of the star millions of years in the past... except that some particle theories require a symmetry along the time axis - either a 1-to-1 correspondence (1 particle going back for every particle going forward) or the same particle reversing direction at one end of the time scale. The beauty of these models is that they actually explain how particles can interact, something we take for granted ("well, sure, particles can interact"), but we don't really understand the mechanics of it.
Here's an example. Your body is composed of particles that are affected by every other particle in the cone of light (the distance light has travelled since the big bang) around you. How is that possible? Just the amount of information that represents is greater than the total of all the particles in the universe. And its constantly being updated.
Simple answer is, according to information theory, that its impossible.
So, if, rather than reject the theory, which seems to have worked for everything else, why not question the assumption that "of course particles can interact" and ask why they even should in the first place.
One proposal is that its all just the same single proton, electron, and neutron shuttling back and forth between the beginning and end of time. Now, since they are in all possible places at all times, they can certainly have "experienced" everything there is to experience, forming the background, the "matrix" (that fucking movie ruined the term!!!) against which the universe seems to be unfolding.
In other words, its not that they can interact - they already have, in every scenario that will ever be experienced. So, no information is needed to be preserved, because its already complete, just as you can throw out the intermediate calculations when you've got the solution to a complex problem.
Its a lot cleaner as a theory than the supposition of states ever could be. Its elegant. Its simple. Its ridiculous - which is why its so damn intriguing. Because, as ridiculous as it appears at first glance, it sticks with you because it succeeds in explaining a lot of things that other theories fail miserably at. It also gives a bit of insight into why time is different on our scale than the other dimensions, when there is no reason for it to be.
My question is how the fuck you can make a web site conform to IE, when IE can't even conform to itself?
IE is like Word - different versions, different patch levels, don't work the same. Stuff that works in XP sp2 doesn't work a few months later.
I gave up. Fuck Microsoft. They can't be bothered to fix their crap, I'm not going to be bothered working with it. I code to firefox, and when people tell me something doesn't work, I just tell them "Gee, your browser must have a virus", and to go to getfirefox.com. Tehy ALL buy it. After all, b0rked, virus-laden software is synonymous with Microsoft.
I spent a couple of hours last night checking because someone was saying that a cretai feature wasn't working properly on my site - IE was giving them an "error in line 597" which is a laugh, because there IS NO LINE 597! Once they see that, they become much more receptive to switching browsers.
It took a couple of weeks for someone to complain. Why? Because everyone else has a copy of firefox already on their computer, and is either using it as their main browser, or, when something doesn't work in IE, fires up firefox.
This was unheard of a couple of years ago, but its fast becoming the norm.
Don't think Microsoft doesn't know they've lost the browser market. They know. What they want to do is replace the browser as the future platform with.NET, which is another piece of bloatware designed to keep another generation of MCSEs under thrall.
And before you mod this as troll or flamebait - think about it... why did Microsoft publicly declare that there would be no IE7? Because they don't want the browser to be the next platform, because they don't have a good-enough product, and can't compete, and they know it. That they're now going to produce an IE7 means nothing - the browser is no longer a major part of their long-term survival strategy. They can't lock you in with it, its gone, baby!
Just switch to firefox and get over it, already!
And while you're at it, if you have a domain, throw some firefox banner ads on it. They get more clicks than anything else you can put up there (except banners for free pr0n, of course).
you would in effect be claiming that all measurement was impossible
an accurate measurement of anything IS impossible. WE already know that.
because the speed of light will prevent any influence from the thermometer on the sample.
actually, you're making an assumption that strict causality exists. It has never been proven, and is an unworkable assumption because it then requires artificial constructs such as superpositions of states.
BTW, you misquote me when you say:
You said that of Schroedinger's cat (which asserts that macroscopic objects enter into a superposition of states) "Sounds weird, but its already been proven to be the case"; to now claim that this is "a bit of a brainfuck" while still maintaining that it is a proven, real effect doesn't wash.
What I said - cut-n-pasted from my original quote:
Every measurement, even in the macro universe, affects the thing measured. That this would NOT be the case at the quantum level, while counterintuitive at first, would upon reflection be surprising.
... has nothing to do with Schrodinger's pussy, as I made clear that I don't buy into the "superposition of states" construct. You assumed that my statement implied it. You assumed wrong. Remove strict causality, and there is no need for any "superposition of states" bullshit. The whole copenhagen position sounds good at first, but after a few decades of consideration, it stinks. Better to have non-strict causality, which also explains strange actions at a distance, as well as fully resolving any ambiguities in the 2-slit experiments.
It also doesn't require (unlike the superposition of states crap) that matter or energy be created from nothing, then disappear back to nothing when the wave function collapses. So, unlike schrodingers' cat, non-strict causality doesn't violate known thermodynamic laws.
Not true. You can get localized pockets of superheated water in a nuker with a turntable with a coffee cup. I've done it a few times by accident. Try this:
Put 6 oz of water in a coffee cup
Put the cup on the rotating tray in the nuker
Nuke it for a minute or so
Remove it from the nuker - it looks okay
Drop a tablespoon of hot chocolate mix in it and watch it literally boil over and spray all over the place
I did an experiment one time to get the wrinkles out of a shirt - I sprayed it with water from a mister, then nuked it for 30 seconds.
It did come out dyr and wrinkle-free. The only problem was, when I put it on, it split right down the back. The microwaves had destroyed the cotton.
Turns out one of my nephews tried to dry out a pair of Air Nikes the same way. Turned the inside into goo.
Microwaves suck at a lot of things. They're not even all that efficient at cooking food, if you have a large quantity to cook - you'd be better off and save money using conventional methods.
This is an over-reaction. Who drinks the water from the hot-water tap, anyway? Blech!
As for breathing in mist when taking a shower, don't forget that unless you're leaving your hot water tank stagnant for long periods of time, you're continuously flushing it with chlorinated water from the mains, which kills the suckers.
The whole thing is marketing bullshit. Just like "anti-bacterial soap" - all soap is anti-bacterial.
Be nice if the reporters at the Globe and Mail got a bit of a basic science education (ditto for the editors here for reposting it)
Um, no. You're wrong. The 2-slit experiments I'm referring to neither require nor use a mirror. You're referring to something else.
As for the temperature, there is no way that a thermometer of any size can't affect the sample its measuring unless it already is at the same temperature as the sample.
Every measurement, even in the macro universe, affects the thing measured. That this would NOT be the case at the quantum level, while counterintuitive at first, would upon reflection be surprising.
Also, there is no need to resort to a superposition of states (which has always been a bit of a brainfuck imho) when there are better models. Superposition is only required if the time scale is unidirectional and can't be "rotated out" of the question and replaced by another vector, which has never been shown to be the case. The copenhagen gang lacked sufficient imagination to see the obvious.
But that's just my opinion, and this is slashdot, and its not Tuesday:-)
I always had a problem with that experiment - it implies that human intellegence has some link with the state of the universe.
Sounds weird, but its already been proven to be the case - look for two-slit diffraction experiments if yo really want to warp your brain. And no, it doesn't mean that humans are special - its just one case where takeing a measurement alters the state of an object.
Think on a macro scale. You take a cold thermometer and put it in a big bucket - the bucket's temperature doesn't change much, the thermometer does, and registers the change.
Now, substitute a drop of water for the bucket. Doesn't matter how hot that water is, sticking it on the cold thermometer is going to change its temperature by a significant amount.
Now go to the sub-atomic level. There is no way that ANY measurement can't help but affect the thing being measured. Its like the drop of water - you tried to measure its temperature, and in doing so, changed its temperature.
Objects affect each other when they interact - or, as the saying goes, "shit happens"
Yep, those old machines with almost no ram really were good at teaching us how to get the most "bang for the buck". And assembler is just sooo sweeeet once you get the hang of thinking in those terms.
This isn't that hard to avoid. Yeah, they post to the in-queue along with a time for the story to be uploaded. But what would be so hard for each of them to take 1 day a week to be the guy who has to handle the queue and give the final ok for the upload to actually get posted?
They keep on like this, they'll have to switch to PostNuke or something...
Slashdot Mirror
The "cell-phone used to monitor traffic flow" - the last 2 dupes have only 1 story between them http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168794&cid =14070720 or http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168794&cid =14070568> and follow-up posts mention.
A lot of us immediately went "Dupe!, then , :"Hey, this was also on yesterday - Tripe!" then, as people checked, sure enough its been run to death.
you can always test it by logging in as root and typing "rm -r /usr/local/bin/games/../../../../../"
It'll at least cut down on time wasted browsing slashdot.
There are a lot of real uses for dual monitors.
Its the same as multiple desktops - once you get used to it, you wouldn't want it any other way.
Its nice to be able to see your edits on one screen, and your results simultaneously on another. Ditto with man pages, graphics editing, css file changes, etc.
I'd rather have a slower machine and dual monitors than a faster machine and a single monitor any day.
Simple solution: get rid of the articles, and just let people browse the highest-rated journals (yeah, talk about a way to get yourself subnet-banned in 10 minutes when 500 people mod your journal as a troll because you posted something good about the FSM :-).Actually, if you could never be banned from posting in your own journal, it would work.
It would all tie in with the whole "blogging is the new paradigm" thing.
Bonus points: This way Roland Piqsqueak could never happen.
Actually you were right both times. Posting the same article 6 times (as was done a few days ago) shows there is no correlation betwen the number of articles posted and the quantity. It was 1 article (number) posted 6 times (quantity). It's slash-math. Don't try to understand it - it'll give you a brain aneurism :-)
apt-get install pr0n;
Well, for starters, Celine Dion is on YOUR side of the border now, and the Canadian Border Patrol has been ordered to "poutine" her to death if she tries to get back into Kanuckistan.
Plus, we've got better beer.
You just want to get back at us for sending you Celine Dion ... guess we owe you for that one :-)
... bit if they're determined to screw honest people over this badly, send him to Canada. We like the cut of his jib.
Its all bullshit, and I hope Quinn sues his bosses. He's in an excellent position to win.
- we don't know what most of the universe is made of
... (funny if it turned out that we were in a little bubble of matter and the rest of the universe was left-handed :-) .. I know, current theories don't show it, and haven't for 2 decades.. Oh, well, on to the second point ...
- going back in time does not an antiparticle make. Think of spin as an example. An wheel going back in time would also be revolving in the opposite direction than when it was going forward, so to the everyday observer, it would still seem to be rotating in the same direction as the one that's traveling forward in time (I know, that sounds SO fucked up, you get these pictures of wheels doing the moon walk
... but it works, and its one reason why the single-particle theory can't be discarded out of hand).
The idea of the single particle bouncing all over the place is that there is now no need whatsoever for it to retain any state information. It's already been there, and done that (not for every possible solution, just for those that have/will happen). The intermediate info is not retained, and not needed. Solves a lot of problems (sure it makes some new ones. wouldn't be too useful if it didn'tThink again to the basic assumption that we've all made - that any object even has the ability to interact with another object. If it can interact with one, it has to interact with all - simultaneously. We accept that as a daily fact of life, but the consequences just don't compute. We're doing something wrong, in that we aren't looking at it right, but that may be an artifact of our existence and form, and something we can't fix. We may not be "built right" to understand what's relly going on, any more than a cat that is raised in an environment with no horizontal surfaces can jump on a table.
Who knows, maybe we'll solve the problem by gengineering our descendants so they can see things differently, from a mental perspective.
Now on to your spectral detector. It would seem that C means your receiver can't possible affect the output of the star millions of years in the past ... except that some particle theories require a symmetry along the time axis - either a 1-to-1 correspondence (1 particle going back for every particle going forward) or the same particle reversing direction at one end of the time scale. The beauty of these models is that they actually explain how particles can interact, something we take for granted ("well, sure, particles can interact"), but we don't really understand the mechanics of it.
Here's an example. Your body is composed of particles that are affected by every other particle in the cone of light (the distance light has travelled since the big bang) around you. How is that possible? Just the amount of information that represents is greater than the total of all the particles in the universe. And its constantly being updated.
Simple answer is, according to information theory, that its impossible.
So, if, rather than reject the theory, which seems to have worked for everything else, why not question the assumption that "of course particles can interact" and ask why they even should in the first place.
One proposal is that its all just the same single proton, electron, and neutron shuttling back and forth between the beginning and end of time. Now, since they are in all possible places at all times, they can certainly have "experienced" everything there is to experience, forming the background, the "matrix" (that fucking movie ruined the term!!!) against which the universe seems to be unfolding.
In other words, its not that they can interact - they already have, in every scenario that will ever be experienced. So, no information is needed to be preserved, because its already complete, just as you can throw out the intermediate calculations when you've got the solution to a complex problem.
Its a lot cleaner as a theory than the supposition of states ever could be. Its elegant. Its simple. Its ridiculous - which is why its so damn intriguing. Because, as ridiculous as it appears at first glance, it sticks with you because it succeeds in explaining a lot of things that other theories fail miserably at. It also gives a bit of insight into why time is different on our scale than the other dimensions, when there is no reason for it to be.
My question is how the fuck you can make a web site conform to IE, when IE can't even conform to itself?
IE is like Word - different versions, different patch levels, don't work the same. Stuff that works in XP sp2 doesn't work a few months later.
I gave up. Fuck Microsoft. They can't be bothered to fix their crap, I'm not going to be bothered working with it. I code to firefox, and when people tell me something doesn't work, I just tell them "Gee, your browser must have a virus", and to go to getfirefox.com. Tehy ALL buy it. After all, b0rked, virus-laden software is synonymous with Microsoft.
I spent a couple of hours last night checking because someone was saying that a cretai feature wasn't working properly on my site - IE was giving them an "error in line 597" which is a laugh, because there IS NO LINE 597! Once they see that, they become much more receptive to switching browsers.
It took a couple of weeks for someone to complain. Why? Because everyone else has a copy of firefox already on their computer, and is either using it as their main browser, or, when something doesn't work in IE, fires up firefox. This was unheard of a couple of years ago, but its fast becoming the norm.
Don't think Microsoft doesn't know they've lost the browser market. They know. What they want to do is replace the browser as the future platform with .NET, which is another piece of bloatware designed to keep another generation of MCSEs under thrall.
And before you mod this as troll or flamebait - think about it ... why did Microsoft publicly declare that there would be no IE7? Because they don't want the browser to be the next platform, because they don't have a good-enough product, and can't compete, and they know it. That they're now going to produce an IE7 means nothing - the browser is no longer a major part of their long-term survival strategy. They can't lock you in with it, its gone, baby!
Just switch to firefox and get over it, already!
And while you're at it, if you have a domain, throw some firefox banner ads on it. They get more clicks than anything else you can put up there (except banners for free pr0n, of course).
You mean you drink water directly from your hot-water tap? Without, say, boiling it first to make coffee or tea with it?
Warm water tastes so "blech!" yucky.
6 out of 15 million? I'm not worried about something that the odds are less than 1 in a million.
BTW, you misquote me when you say:
What I said - cut-n-pasted from my original quote:... has nothing to do with Schrodinger's pussy, as I made clear that I don't buy into the "superposition of states" construct. You assumed that my statement implied it. You assumed wrong. Remove strict causality, and there is no need for any "superposition of states" bullshit. The whole copenhagen position sounds good at first, but after a few decades of consideration, it stinks. Better to have non-strict causality, which also explains strange actions at a distance, as well as fully resolving any ambiguities in the 2-slit experiments.It also doesn't require (unlike the superposition of states crap) that matter or energy be created from nothing, then disappear back to nothing when the wave function collapses. So, unlike schrodingers' cat, non-strict causality doesn't violate known thermodynamic laws.
Not true. You can get localized pockets of superheated water in a nuker with a turntable with a coffee cup. I've done it a few times by accident. Try this:
It's like using microwaves to dry clothes.
I did an experiment one time to get the wrinkles out of a shirt - I sprayed it with water from a mister, then nuked it for 30 seconds.
It did come out dyr and wrinkle-free. The only problem was, when I put it on, it split right down the back. The microwaves had destroyed the cotton.
Turns out one of my nephews tried to dry out a pair of Air Nikes the same way. Turned the inside into goo.
Microwaves suck at a lot of things. They're not even all that efficient at cooking food, if you have a large quantity to cook - you'd be better off and save money using conventional methods.
Put an empty glass in, and it won't heat up much. Ditto for most plastics.
This is an over-reaction. Who drinks the water from the hot-water tap, anyway? Blech!
As for breathing in mist when taking a shower, don't forget that unless you're leaving your hot water tank stagnant for long periods of time, you're continuously flushing it with chlorinated water from the mains, which kills the suckers.
The whole thing is marketing bullshit. Just like "anti-bacterial soap" - all soap is anti-bacterial.
Be nice if the reporters at the Globe and Mail got a bit of a basic science education (ditto for the editors here for reposting it)
As for the temperature, there is no way that a thermometer of any size can't affect the sample its measuring unless it already is at the same temperature as the sample.
Every measurement, even in the macro universe, affects the thing measured. That this would NOT be the case at the quantum level, while counterintuitive at first, would upon reflection be surprising.
Also, there is no need to resort to a superposition of states (which has always been a bit of a brainfuck imho) when there are better models. Superposition is only required if the time scale is unidirectional and can't be "rotated out" of the question and replaced by another vector, which has never been shown to be the case. The copenhagen gang lacked sufficient imagination to see the obvious.
But that's just my opinion, and this is slashdot, and its not Tuesday :-)
Sounds weird, but its already been proven to be the case - look for two-slit diffraction experiments if yo really want to warp your brain. And no, it doesn't mean that humans are special - its just one case where takeing a measurement alters the state of an object.
Think on a macro scale. You take a cold thermometer and put it in a big bucket - the bucket's temperature doesn't change much, the thermometer does, and registers the change.
Now, substitute a drop of water for the bucket. Doesn't matter how hot that water is, sticking it on the cold thermometer is going to change its temperature by a significant amount.
Now go to the sub-atomic level. There is no way that ANY measurement can't help but affect the thing being measured. Its like the drop of water - you tried to measure its temperature, and in doing so, changed its temperature.
Objects affect each other when they interact - or, as the saying goes, "shit happens"
Yep, those old machines with almost no ram really were good at teaching us how to get the most "bang for the buck". And assembler is just sooo sweeeet once you get the hang of thinking in those terms.
This isn't that hard to avoid. Yeah, they post to the in-queue along with a time for the story to be uploaded. But what would be so hard for each of them to take 1 day a week to be the guy who has to handle the queue and give the final ok for the upload to actually get posted?
They keep on like this, they'll have to switch to PostNuke or something ...