I agree, although for the sake of appearances, it would be cool if the finite state machine portion were hard-coded to implement a universal turing machine, and the only programmability was the starting contents of the tape.
It would be more than cool--it would be actually demonstrate Turing's remarkable core insight. As it is, this a very clever micro-controller implementation of a programmable finite state machine that uses a long tape as an book-keeping device. He says in the description, "In a way the tape is the computer" but this is false. The programmable finite state machine in the micro-controller is a the computer.
The tape in this machine isn't doing any computing at all. It is just helping the finite state machine along. Turing's core insight was that you can get rid of the finite state machine and just have the tape, and a very simple set of universal rules. Implement those on a non-programable finite state machine and you've have, as you point out, a universal Turing machine where all the programability is in the initial number written on the tape. That would be mind-blowingly cool.
This is cool, but falls well short of mind-blowingly so.
Various sources have reported that they were never comfortable operating in China.
This is not entirely surprising even setting morality and politics as far aside as one can manage.
Google is in the business of selling advertising by attracting users. They attract users by providing a simple, seamless and uniform search experience. This is the absolute core of Google's business model, and the reason why they gained search share so rapidly over AltaVista, MetaCrawler, etc, back in the day. Everyone else you had to wade through oodles of crap to get what you wanted, and even then what you found was often garbage.
To put it as simply as possible: censorship breaks PageRank.
And PageRank is what makes Google money.
It's as if McDonald's was given a chance to operate in a market where pre-prepared food service was forbidden. It's what McDonald's does: their most basic business process is "customer orders/customer pays/food is delivered". No where does "food is cooked" appear. McDonald's is a food-delivery service, not a food preparation service (Burger King is a food preparation service.)
Google is an "low-spam, high-quality of information search engine." Censorship is an additional layer to the PageRank algorithm that throws out many of the highest quality results, directly crippling Google's core business.
I can appreciate why Google got into the Chinese market: they thought they could make money, and felt that access to some high-quality information was better than none for Chinese people. Recent events have proven to them empirically that Chinese censorship damages their core offering to the point where it isn't worth their while to continue, and puts them at risk of aiding and abetting the childish little people who run China, who are so terrified of what a few bloggers might say about them that they can't stand to have those results freely accssible.
While Google loses out here--because they have not been permitted to practise their core business in one of the world's largest markets--Chinese people lose out far more, because they have let the lame little children in charge continue to dictate to them what they are permitted to know.
But disappointingly, it's the PATENT that's scary, not the smartphone motion.
Hey, it's a patent story on/. so you should consider yourself fortunate that it has anything to do with phones at all. The usual standard around here is that the headline says "XYZ Patents Breathing!" while the patent is actually for an extremely specialized widget that fits into a particular style of respirator used only by a few high-altitude climbers in yak-roasting emergencies.
How do you work around the Apple multi-touch patents?
Start by being specific about which patents you mean. "The Apple multi-touch patents" means nothing. Apple has a great many patents, 28 of which contain the words "multi-touch" in the text. Here's a likely candidate, #7656394, "User interface gestures".
All five independent claims refer to "proximity images", so the obvious work-around for this patent would be to begin with a system that does not use an image (a regular, contiguous array of pixels in two or more dimensions) as the primary data structure.
There's more to it than that, but the basic process is the same: be specific as to what patent(s) you are concerned with; read the CLAIMS (not the abstract) carefully and then the supporting material to ensure you understand the terms of art being used.
This patent doesn't actually define "image", but it is clear from context, and equally clear from common usage that a data structure that contains only a list of (mostly non-contiguous) points of contact is not an "image".
The government may outlaw child porn and make copyright law increasingly onerous, but it doesn't try to use censorship to protect its own position. In China, on the other hand. . . well, I'll just quote a section of their criminal code:
The difference being that the Chinese system is incredibly fragile. It is unable to withstand the utterly devastating assault of one lone individual saying, "Hey, I think our government is doing something really stupid. This is why..."
The American system, despite being utterly broken in almost every important respect, is more than comfortable with that kind of critique.
Really, it comes down to a measure of how robustly powerful the Anglo-European system of democratic government is compared to every other model, particularly the delicate and flimsy Chinese model, which apparently needs draconian laws to protected it from the dangerous scourge of... bloggers!
It would be dead funny, if those Chinese Communist losers didn't actually kill innocent Chinese people who want nothing but to have their voices heard as one amongst many in the true song of Chinese democracy.
We can even, if we get sufficiently worked up about it, change how our government(s) operate.
Almost certainly false. You can't even muster up a viable third party, something your neighbours to the north have been doing with clockwork regularity every thirty years or so for the past century.
The American system of government is broken. Congress has approval ratings that regularly dip below 20% and sometimes into the single digits, but incumbents are returned over 80%, sometimes over 90%, of the time. That is the reality of your broken governmental system. You can SAY anything you damned well please, so long as (a very few of) you vote for one of two almost identical parties.
The only reason the anti-conservative radicals of the Republican Party and the sometime budget-balancers of the Democratic Party look so completely different to you is that they are the only two tiny bumps on the otherwise atomically smooth surface of mainstream American politics. You have a populace so politically naive that a set of minor tweaks to your broken for-profit health care system is considered "socialism", for heavens sake!
All of which said: obvious the US is in pretty much infinitely better shape, culturally and politically, than China, who are shooting themselves in the foot with this ridiculous policy. The Chinese people need access to information to prosper, and by attempting to restrict it the Chinese government is in epic fail territory.
Yeah, every day this place hits new lows. This is an interesting story on planetary formation and the complex unravelling of the history of the solar system using a mix of precise observation and computer modelling, and the comments are almost exclusively juvenile jokes and complaints that the proposed mechanisms sound stupid.
My question is: is there anywhere that is remotely like/. used to be (say a few months ago, even) when we still got the odd intelligent comment that added something useful to the story?
I can find doctors and parents (and lawyers) who say that certain vaccine preservatives cause autism. I can find doctors and parents (and lawyers) who say pretty much anything.
That someone says it does not make it true.
That they are comparing the rate of birth defects in Fallujah to European cities is an immediate red flag. Iraq had a reasonably sound civil administration before it was invaded, so the records on birth defects prior to the invasion should still exist. How about comparing to those numbers? Or even just normalizing for the age of mothers and fathers, degree of relation between them, etc. Iraq is a tribal society in which kin-groups are much more closely related than in the average European city--that may not be significant, but it is one of many alternative explantations that a serious study would have to look into.
I don't know what the truth is, but I do know that a couple of links to hysterical news stories is pretty much the opposite of convincing.
of course people were quick to say how useless that was: slow and impractical.
Actually some of us said the hype was stupid.
By thought ALONE, eh?
So, like, no cables, computers, software, hardware...? All I have to do is think, and my typing appears somewhere, without any intervening, like, STUFF?
Because that's what "alone" would seem to mean. No one would think it reasonable or honest to say, "Automobile allows people to travel huge distances at high speeds by ARMS ALONE!" even though that's what cruise control does. We'd all recognize that as misleading and stupid.
So why do we keep seeing the same kinds of claim on/. about these arm/hand/finger replacement technologies?
And F = m*v. At least, that's what I'd really like to believe, so I'm going to keep repeating it on the Internet and completely ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
Psychopathy is opportunistic. Everyone has the capacity. Most people take advantage of the opportunity when they have it.
The terrifying conclusion of this research is that when you randomly assign normal people to positions of power, they become psychopaths.
And in other news, when you apply a force to something it accelerates in inverse proportion to its mass...
Seriously, why is it in the sciences we can prove things by experiment and they stay proved, but in the social "sciences" every repeat of a well-known, empirically proven result is considered new and insightful?
Is it the lack of sound biological foundation for the social "sciences", so that there is no notion that some truths--like those revealed decades ago by the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, as well as many, many actual field observations, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib--are in any way fundamental? The strong tendency of people in power to abuse that power is not a truism or "philosophical" observation, but an ordinary empirical fact.
It's as if social "scientists" were continually running experiments in which they didn't give people food for a week and reported with breathless amazement at the end that the subjects were hungry! Isn't that amazing? No, it isn't, unless you haven't been paying any attention to anything for the past thirty or forty years.
The gall of people, smashing two innocent and unrelated words together like that to create a third, wholly unauthorized word.
I think the issue is not the process by which the word "cyberwar" was created (even granted that "cyber" is a word...) but the inherent stupidity of using the already dog tired "war" metaphor in this quite inappropriate context.
The "war" in cyber-war is about as meaningful as the "war" in the "War on Drugs" or the "War on Terrorism." Which is to say, not much. It is a cliche' rhetorical device designed to inspire people who aren't particularly able thinkers.
War is of course a fundamentally irrational activity--economically it is the least efficient and effective way of solving human problems. It fails routinely to bring about any sort of viable solution--see the Basque, the Tamil, the Irish, the Palestinians...--and in the rare cases when it does (WWII, Napoleon, and maybe Bismark's little wars) it almost always involves vastly more cost in money and human life than any of the alternative solutions.
Wars are fought to satisfy our inner monkey needs, in defiance of anything that is good and rational in our nature. People who are unable to control their emotions and who engage in emotion-driven thinking and decision-making are in favour of wars. No one else is, because there is no rational motivation to go to war, except in the face of the most utterly intractable enemy. Even then, alternatives to war are generally available. They just take things that advocates of warfare don't have, like courage, self-control and a rudimentary level of rationality.
Re:dear libertarians and tea baggers:
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teabaggers and libertarians: in SOME avenues of life, not all, the government is good, and works for you. you reject it at the price of your own impoverishment. that's the simple obvious truth
Simple and obvious to anyone who isn't innumerate, but the people you are trying to talk to are by definition innumerate. Otherwise they wouldn't have to lean on the crutch of ideology, which is what innumerate people are wont to do. Otherwise they would have to deal with actual quantitative reality, rather than black-and-white abstractions.
Re:The bill appears to suck but....
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Whether or not there's a moral or legal imperative for the federal government to provide healthcare.
No modern "conservative" is the least bit concerned about any of that. Proof? The War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, neither of which the Federal Government of the United States is empowered by the Constitution to undertake.
Since "conservatives" are all major supporters of those two bits of Federal meddling in the rights of the states, and the people, they have no moral leg to stand on when it comes to opposing a Federally-regulated health-care system.
Nor can I find anything in the Constitution about regulation of abortion being within the Federal government's purview, yet again, "conservatives" are in favour of it.
The mythical "small-government" conservative can still be sighted rarely in the American political wilderness, but the dominant "conservative" movement is in fact populated by wild-eyed radicals who would extend Federal power into any number of areas where there is no Constitutional mandate for it.
Everybody seems to be in an outrage with doctors making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but nobody bats an eye when some sports star signs a multi-million dollar contract.
Since you apparently think this is an argument, I'll point out that it isn't. Neither is your well-known falsehood about tort reform.
You are merely pointing out here that some people are hypocrites, although you falsely claim that "nobody" bats and eye about sports salaries when in fact there is frequent and lively public discussion of the obscene numbers some athletes make.
Even granted that falsehood, you are still not making an argument, because it is equally plausible that everyone should be as upset about sports salaries as they are about doctor's pay. You have provided no reasons for choosing one alternative over the other. When you do, you will have an argument. Until then, do please keep trying.
Once they've placed this object in a quantum state, how do they verify that it's "occupying two states at once?"
Interference phenomena. The article is light on detail, but presumably they excite the system into a superposition of (mechanical) normal modes and then observe the motion, or the position of some part of it, at a later time and find that it is in a classically forbidden region.
For example, suppose they excite it into two modes that interfere to produce a node at some point, so there is no motion there, but there would be if there it was in one mode or the other. Then monitoring the motion at that point would allow you to determine if the system was in a superposition of two quantum states rather than one or the other.
With regard to the many-worlds interpretation: it doesn't answer the really important question. Neither does consistent histories or any of the decoherence-based approaches. The really important question is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" That is, these theories purport to show that we can get along just fine without the wavefunction ever undergoing "collapse", so in some sense all possible quantum outcomes of an experiment are permitted. But they never answer (or even ask), "Why is it only via interference phenomena that we are aware of these effects? Why aren't we aware of the other components of the wavefunction all the time? Why is there a classical world at all? Is it a feature of consciousness or the physics that permits beings like us to exist, that we are selected by a basically anthropic process to be able to experience only the narrowest subset of existence? If so, how?"
Apart from that, the article is badly misleading: it seems to suggest that anyone anywhere thinks there is anything interesting about the physical size or number of particles involved the detectability of quantum phenomena. It has been known for decades that this is not the case: the number of available modes is what matters, and any sufficiently cold object can become arbitarily large without exhibiting classical behaviour. Furthermore, phenomena like the Mossbaure Effect told us something similar half a century or so ago. It's probably time for the popular press to stop talking about the quantum equivalent of the luminiferous aether and get with the 21st century.
I would say they're interested in getting as much output as possible, for as little expenditure as possible.
No, it's definitely "effort", not "output". Most managers don't care two pins about the bottom line. All they want to know is that that their people are working really really hard. It may be completely unproductive work, but that doesn't matter.
As anyone with an engineering degree should be able to tell you, it is a fundamental design mistake to measure inputs and assume outputs from them. But this is exactly what most managers do. Maybe they teach this in business school. But again, as every engineer should know: input measures are terrible surrogates for output measures, and if they are all you have you have a deep broken, dangerous and potentially destructive system (to take one particularly dramatic example, Three Mile Island was caused in part by an input measure--current to a motor--being reported as an output measure--valve state.)
They've had this CD tax for years that legalized music copyright infringement.
It isn't infringement if its legal.
This levy is designed to compensate for private copying, not filesharing, so it covers format shifting but not downloading.
The Conservatives are opposed to it because they are in bed with Big Media, as are the Liberals. This is still going to play well with most Canadians because we'd like to be able to compensate artists, and a (small!) tax on mp3 players and the like is the kind of pragmatic, workable solution that Canadians love. Implementing it will give us more free time to chuckle at the wacky antics of our ideologically addled cousins to the south.
The article claims that there is no increase observed.
The overwhelmingly likely factor in regeneration vs scaring is that the warm-blooded creatures scar, cold-blooded creatures regenerate (more or less). There are pretty obvious reasons why a creature that needs a fairly constant supply of food would be selected for a healing mechanism that works very quickly, as opposed to one that works slowly but restores more complete functionality.
Because evolution is an elaborative process, it is likely that scaring came about by repurposing genes that control regeneration in other species (there's a lab at the University of Ottawa working on this, I believe--can't recall who.) Therefore creatures that scar don't regenerate, but have a latent ability to do so with a little tweaking.
It's incredibly funny to watch all the well-fed deep thinkers here scratch their heads and try to come up with complicated solutions to a trivial problem: cold blooded animals don't have to keep eating on a daily basis to survive. Ergo, they have time to regenerate. They can just find a place to curl up while it happens.
Warm blooded animals need a much more regular food supply. Ergo, there is an advantage to them in a fast and adequate healing.
No mysterious cancer-causing whatevers need be invoked. It is most probably a simple issue of energy budget.
It could be as simple as we didn't have enough nutrition at the time to be able to support it, and would die of malnourishment when we'd otherwise live with the injury...
In nature, cold-blooded beings regenerate, warm-blooded being scar is a pretty good first-order rule.
Warm-blooded beings have energy demands that are far higher than cold-blooded, making the suggestion that we'd starve if we waited for regeneration quite plausible. Scaring is all about fast, adequate healing, so we can go out there and eat more to keep our body temperature up. A cold blooded creature can find somewhere safe to hole up for a week or three while regeneration gets underway.
Evolution is all about trade-offs, and it appears that living with scar tissue and missing limbs (which happen pretty rarely in nature anyway) was better for our ancestors than regenerating.
Nothing lives forever anyway, for obvious and well-known reasons, so we're always dealing with situations where you have to ask what will give an individual the greatest reproductive advantage over the span of remaining years that accidents and co-evolving parasites allow them.
I'm sorry but if you leave the US, travel to a foreign battlefield and willingly enlist in the service of those who are fighting our country you've committed treason.
Treason is a crime. Crimes are dealt with by arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing.
Responding to purported treason by assassination is a cowardly, banana republic approach.
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What I find tickling about this implementation is the clear evidence of an embedded FSM emulating the programmed TM.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is embedded in the programmed Transcendental Meditation?
Proof of Intelligent Design!
I agree, although for the sake of appearances, it would be cool if the finite state machine portion were hard-coded to implement a universal turing machine, and the only programmability was the starting contents of the tape.
It would be more than cool--it would be actually demonstrate Turing's remarkable core insight. As it is, this a very clever micro-controller implementation of a programmable finite state machine that uses a long tape as an book-keeping device. He says in the description, "In a way the tape is the computer" but this is false. The programmable finite state machine in the micro-controller is a the computer.
The tape in this machine isn't doing any computing at all. It is just helping the finite state machine along. Turing's core insight was that you can get rid of the finite state machine and just have the tape, and a very simple set of universal rules. Implement those on a non-programable finite state machine and you've have, as you point out, a universal Turing machine where all the programability is in the initial number written on the tape. That would be mind-blowingly cool.
This is cool, but falls well short of mind-blowingly so.
Various sources have reported that they were never comfortable operating in China.
This is not entirely surprising even setting morality and politics as far aside as one can manage.
Google is in the business of selling advertising by attracting users. They attract users by providing a simple, seamless and uniform search experience. This is the absolute core of Google's business model, and the reason why they gained search share so rapidly over AltaVista, MetaCrawler, etc, back in the day. Everyone else you had to wade through oodles of crap to get what you wanted, and even then what you found was often garbage.
To put it as simply as possible: censorship breaks PageRank.
And PageRank is what makes Google money.
It's as if McDonald's was given a chance to operate in a market where pre-prepared food service was forbidden. It's what McDonald's does: their most basic business process is "customer orders/customer pays/food is delivered". No where does "food is cooked" appear. McDonald's is a food-delivery service, not a food preparation service (Burger King is a food preparation service.)
Google is an "low-spam, high-quality of information search engine." Censorship is an additional layer to the PageRank algorithm that throws out many of the highest quality results, directly crippling Google's core business.
I can appreciate why Google got into the Chinese market: they thought they could make money, and felt that access to some high-quality information was better than none for Chinese people. Recent events have proven to them empirically that Chinese censorship damages their core offering to the point where it isn't worth their while to continue, and puts them at risk of aiding and abetting the childish little people who run China, who are so terrified of what a few bloggers might say about them that they can't stand to have those results freely accssible.
While Google loses out here--because they have not been permitted to practise their core business in one of the world's largest markets--Chinese people lose out far more, because they have let the lame little children in charge continue to dictate to them what they are permitted to know.
But disappointingly, it's the PATENT that's scary, not the smartphone motion.
Hey, it's a patent story on /. so you should consider yourself fortunate that it has anything to do with phones at all. The usual standard around here is that the headline says "XYZ Patents Breathing!" while the patent is actually for an extremely specialized widget that fits into a particular style of respirator used only by a few high-altitude climbers in yak-roasting emergencies.
How do you work around the Apple multi-touch patents?
Start by being specific about which patents you mean. "The Apple multi-touch patents" means nothing. Apple has a great many patents, 28 of which contain the words "multi-touch" in the text. Here's a likely candidate, #7656394, "User interface gestures".
All five independent claims refer to "proximity images", so the obvious work-around for this patent would be to begin with a system that does not use an image (a regular, contiguous array of pixels in two or more dimensions) as the primary data structure.
There's more to it than that, but the basic process is the same: be specific as to what patent(s) you are concerned with; read the CLAIMS (not the abstract) carefully and then the supporting material to ensure you understand the terms of art being used.
This patent doesn't actually define "image", but it is clear from context, and equally clear from common usage that a data structure that contains only a list of (mostly non-contiguous) points of contact is not an "image".
The government may outlaw child porn and make copyright law increasingly onerous, but it doesn't try to use censorship to protect its own position. In China, on the other hand. . . well, I'll just quote a section of their criminal code:
The difference being that the Chinese system is incredibly fragile. It is unable to withstand the utterly devastating assault of one lone individual saying, "Hey, I think our government is doing something really stupid. This is why..."
The American system, despite being utterly broken in almost every important respect, is more than comfortable with that kind of critique.
Really, it comes down to a measure of how robustly powerful the Anglo-European system of democratic government is compared to every other model, particularly the delicate and flimsy Chinese model, which apparently needs draconian laws to protected it from the dangerous scourge of... bloggers!
It would be dead funny, if those Chinese Communist losers didn't actually kill innocent Chinese people who want nothing but to have their voices heard as one amongst many in the true song of Chinese democracy.
We can even, if we get sufficiently worked up about it, change how our government(s) operate.
Almost certainly false. You can't even muster up a viable third party, something your neighbours to the north have been doing with clockwork regularity every thirty years or so for the past century.
The American system of government is broken. Congress has approval ratings that regularly dip below 20% and sometimes into the single digits, but incumbents are returned over 80%, sometimes over 90%, of the time. That is the reality of your broken governmental system. You can SAY anything you damned well please, so long as (a very few of) you vote for one of two almost identical parties.
The only reason the anti-conservative radicals of the Republican Party and the sometime budget-balancers of the Democratic Party look so completely different to you is that they are the only two tiny bumps on the otherwise atomically smooth surface of mainstream American politics. You have a populace so politically naive that a set of minor tweaks to your broken for-profit health care system is considered "socialism", for heavens sake!
All of which said: obvious the US is in pretty much infinitely better shape, culturally and politically, than China, who are shooting themselves in the foot with this ridiculous policy. The Chinese people need access to information to prosper, and by attempting to restrict it the Chinese government is in epic fail territory.
Yeah, every day this place hits new lows. This is an interesting story on planetary formation and the complex unravelling of the history of the solar system using a mix of precise observation and computer modelling, and the comments are almost exclusively juvenile jokes and complaints that the proposed mechanisms sound stupid.
My question is: is there anywhere that is remotely like /. used to be (say a few months ago, even) when we still got the odd intelligent comment that added something useful to the story?
Here is what happened in Fallujah:
I can find doctors and parents (and lawyers) who say that certain vaccine preservatives cause autism. I can find doctors and parents (and lawyers) who say pretty much anything.
That someone says it does not make it true.
That they are comparing the rate of birth defects in Fallujah to European cities is an immediate red flag. Iraq had a reasonably sound civil administration before it was invaded, so the records on birth defects prior to the invasion should still exist. How about comparing to those numbers? Or even just normalizing for the age of mothers and fathers, degree of relation between them, etc. Iraq is a tribal society in which kin-groups are much more closely related than in the average European city--that may not be significant, but it is one of many alternative explantations that a serious study would have to look into.
I don't know what the truth is, but I do know that a couple of links to hysterical news stories is pretty much the opposite of convincing.
of course people were quick to say how useless that was: slow and impractical.
Actually some of us said the hype was stupid.
By thought ALONE, eh?
So, like, no cables, computers, software, hardware...? All I have to do is think, and my typing appears somewhere, without any intervening, like, STUFF?
Because that's what "alone" would seem to mean. No one would think it reasonable or honest to say, "Automobile allows people to travel huge distances at high speeds by ARMS ALONE!" even though that's what cruise control does. We'd all recognize that as misleading and stupid.
So why do we keep seeing the same kinds of claim on /. about these arm/hand/finger replacement technologies?
Or - psychopathy is genetic, not learned.
And F = m*v. At least, that's what I'd really like to believe, so I'm going to keep repeating it on the Internet and completely ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
Psychopathy is opportunistic. Everyone has the capacity. Most people take advantage of the opportunity when they have it.
The terrifying conclusion of this research is that when you randomly assign normal people to positions of power, they become psychopaths.
And in other news, when you apply a force to something it accelerates in inverse proportion to its mass...
Seriously, why is it in the sciences we can prove things by experiment and they stay proved, but in the social "sciences" every repeat of a well-known, empirically proven result is considered new and insightful?
Is it the lack of sound biological foundation for the social "sciences", so that there is no notion that some truths--like those revealed decades ago by the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, as well as many, many actual field observations, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib--are in any way fundamental? The strong tendency of people in power to abuse that power is not a truism or "philosophical" observation, but an ordinary empirical fact.
It's as if social "scientists" were continually running experiments in which they didn't give people food for a week and reported with breathless amazement at the end that the subjects were hungry! Isn't that amazing? No, it isn't, unless you haven't been paying any attention to anything for the past thirty or forty years.
The gall of people, smashing two innocent and unrelated words together like that to create a third, wholly unauthorized word.
I think the issue is not the process by which the word "cyberwar" was created (even granted that "cyber" is a word...) but the inherent stupidity of using the already dog tired "war" metaphor in this quite inappropriate context.
The "war" in cyber-war is about as meaningful as the "war" in the "War on Drugs" or the "War on Terrorism." Which is to say, not much. It is a cliche' rhetorical device designed to inspire people who aren't particularly able thinkers.
War is of course a fundamentally irrational activity--economically it is the least efficient and effective way of solving human problems. It fails routinely to bring about any sort of viable solution--see the Basque, the Tamil, the Irish, the Palestinians...--and in the rare cases when it does (WWII, Napoleon, and maybe Bismark's little wars) it almost always involves vastly more cost in money and human life than any of the alternative solutions.
Wars are fought to satisfy our inner monkey needs, in defiance of anything that is good and rational in our nature. People who are unable to control their emotions and who engage in emotion-driven thinking and decision-making are in favour of wars. No one else is, because there is no rational motivation to go to war, except in the face of the most utterly intractable enemy. Even then, alternatives to war are generally available. They just take things that advocates of warfare don't have, like courage, self-control and a rudimentary level of rationality.
teabaggers and libertarians: in SOME avenues of life, not all, the government is good, and works for you. you reject it at the price of your own impoverishment. that's the simple obvious truth
Simple and obvious to anyone who isn't innumerate, but the people you are trying to talk to are by definition innumerate. Otherwise they wouldn't have to lean on the crutch of ideology, which is what innumerate people are wont to do. Otherwise they would have to deal with actual quantitative reality, rather than black-and-white abstractions.
Whether or not there's a moral or legal imperative for the federal government to provide healthcare.
No modern "conservative" is the least bit concerned about any of that. Proof? The War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, neither of which the Federal Government of the United States is empowered by the Constitution to undertake.
Since "conservatives" are all major supporters of those two bits of Federal meddling in the rights of the states, and the people, they have no moral leg to stand on when it comes to opposing a Federally-regulated health-care system.
Nor can I find anything in the Constitution about regulation of abortion being within the Federal government's purview, yet again, "conservatives" are in favour of it.
The mythical "small-government" conservative can still be sighted rarely in the American political wilderness, but the dominant "conservative" movement is in fact populated by wild-eyed radicals who would extend Federal power into any number of areas where there is no Constitutional mandate for it.
Everybody seems to be in an outrage with doctors making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but nobody bats an eye when some sports star signs a multi-million dollar contract.
Since you apparently think this is an argument, I'll point out that it isn't. Neither is your well-known falsehood about tort reform.
You are merely pointing out here that some people are hypocrites, although you falsely claim that "nobody" bats and eye about sports salaries when in fact there is frequent and lively public discussion of the obscene numbers some athletes make.
Even granted that falsehood, you are still not making an argument, because it is equally plausible that everyone should be as upset about sports salaries as they are about doctor's pay. You have provided no reasons for choosing one alternative over the other. When you do, you will have an argument. Until then, do please keep trying.
Once they've placed this object in a quantum state, how do they verify that it's "occupying two states at once?"
Interference phenomena. The article is light on detail, but presumably they excite the system into a superposition of (mechanical) normal modes and then observe the motion, or the position of some part of it, at a later time and find that it is in a classically forbidden region.
For example, suppose they excite it into two modes that interfere to produce a node at some point, so there is no motion there, but there would be if there it was in one mode or the other. Then monitoring the motion at that point would allow you to determine if the system was in a superposition of two quantum states rather than one or the other.
With regard to the many-worlds interpretation: it doesn't answer the really important question. Neither does consistent histories or any of the decoherence-based approaches. The really important question is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" That is, these theories purport to show that we can get along just fine without the wavefunction ever undergoing "collapse", so in some sense all possible quantum outcomes of an experiment are permitted. But they never answer (or even ask), "Why is it only via interference phenomena that we are aware of these effects? Why aren't we aware of the other components of the wavefunction all the time? Why is there a classical world at all? Is it a feature of consciousness or the physics that permits beings like us to exist, that we are selected by a basically anthropic process to be able to experience only the narrowest subset of existence? If so, how?"
Apart from that, the article is badly misleading: it seems to suggest that anyone anywhere thinks there is anything interesting about the physical size or number of particles involved the detectability of quantum phenomena. It has been known for decades that this is not the case: the number of available modes is what matters, and any sufficiently cold object can become arbitarily large without exhibiting classical behaviour. Furthermore, phenomena like the Mossbaure Effect told us something similar half a century or so ago. It's probably time for the popular press to stop talking about the quantum equivalent of the luminiferous aether and get with the 21st century.
I would say they're interested in getting as much output as possible, for as little expenditure as possible.
No, it's definitely "effort", not "output". Most managers don't care two pins about the bottom line. All they want to know is that that their people are working really really hard. It may be completely unproductive work, but that doesn't matter.
As anyone with an engineering degree should be able to tell you, it is a fundamental design mistake to measure inputs and assume outputs from them. But this is exactly what most managers do. Maybe they teach this in business school. But again, as every engineer should know: input measures are terrible surrogates for output measures, and if they are all you have you have a deep broken, dangerous and potentially destructive system (to take one particularly dramatic example, Three Mile Island was caused in part by an input measure--current to a motor--being reported as an output measure--valve state.)
They've had this CD tax for years that legalized music copyright infringement.
It isn't infringement if its legal.
This levy is designed to compensate for private copying, not filesharing, so it covers format shifting but not downloading.
The Conservatives are opposed to it because they are in bed with Big Media, as are the Liberals. This is still going to play well with most Canadians because we'd like to be able to compensate artists, and a (small!) tax on mp3 players and the like is the kind of pragmatic, workable solution that Canadians love. Implementing it will give us more free time to chuckle at the wacky antics of our ideologically addled cousins to the south.
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers
As of the 10th of June 1903 you hate COBOL developers?
P21 knockout mice show a lot of carcinomas
The article claims that there is no increase observed.
The overwhelmingly likely factor in regeneration vs scaring is that the warm-blooded creatures scar, cold-blooded creatures regenerate (more or less). There are pretty obvious reasons why a creature that needs a fairly constant supply of food would be selected for a healing mechanism that works very quickly, as opposed to one that works slowly but restores more complete functionality.
Because evolution is an elaborative process, it is likely that scaring came about by repurposing genes that control regeneration in other species (there's a lab at the University of Ottawa working on this, I believe--can't recall who.) Therefore creatures that scar don't regenerate, but have a latent ability to do so with a little tweaking.
What medical care do newts have access to?
It's incredibly funny to watch all the well-fed deep thinkers here scratch their heads and try to come up with complicated solutions to a trivial problem: cold blooded animals don't have to keep eating on a daily basis to survive. Ergo, they have time to regenerate. They can just find a place to curl up while it happens.
Warm blooded animals need a much more regular food supply. Ergo, there is an advantage to them in a fast and adequate healing.
No mysterious cancer-causing whatevers need be invoked. It is most probably a simple issue of energy budget.
It could be as simple as we didn't have enough nutrition at the time to be able to support it, and would die of malnourishment when we'd otherwise live with the injury...
In nature, cold-blooded beings regenerate, warm-blooded being scar is a pretty good first-order rule.
Warm-blooded beings have energy demands that are far higher than cold-blooded, making the suggestion that we'd starve if we waited for regeneration quite plausible. Scaring is all about fast, adequate healing, so we can go out there and eat more to keep our body temperature up. A cold blooded creature can find somewhere safe to hole up for a week or three while regeneration gets underway.
Evolution is all about trade-offs, and it appears that living with scar tissue and missing limbs (which happen pretty rarely in nature anyway) was better for our ancestors than regenerating.
Nothing lives forever anyway, for obvious and well-known reasons, so we're always dealing with situations where you have to ask what will give an individual the greatest reproductive advantage over the span of remaining years that accidents and co-evolving parasites allow them.
I'm sorry but if you leave the US, travel to a foreign battlefield and willingly enlist in the service of those who are fighting our country you've committed treason.
Treason is a crime. Crimes are dealt with by arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing.
Responding to purported treason by assassination is a cowardly, banana republic approach.
Firing control will never be a non-human decision.
And we can close up the patent office because everything has already been invented.
And that atomic power stuff? Moonshine, man, pure moonshine.