Heh, the Windows key is the worst invention ever. It's so fun to accidently hit the Windows key and have your window minimize and the start menu pop up, just great when you are in the middle of a twitch game!
And, yes, I know that I can disable the Windows key but it's still a pain when you are on someone else's system.
That is the Print Screen key. Don't ever remove that key from the keyboard!
Printing a screen is a rare enough action that it can be assigned to a key combination rather than one key. Yeah, it's convenient to have "print screen" to be a single key but there's a ton of things that would be convenient if they were a single key, if we made every action map to one key then we'd soon have a couple hundred keys!
Under Mac OS X you use command-shift-3 to capture the entire screen and command-shift-4 to capture a portion of it. It's very simple and pretty easy to remember. A similar key combination can easily be added to Windows.
It's a balance between keyboard real estate and ease-of-use. Keyboard real estate is very dear in a laptop so it makes sense to move a rarely-used function like print screen to a key combination.
In other words, if we suppose that reality is information rather than matter and energy, how do we experiment on information?
No, reality is still matter and energy. Information is an approximation which describes the state of the matter and energy and their interactions.
It's like when I say that there's 10 apples in that bucket. The number 10 isn't the actual reality, the apples in the bucket are the reality. The number of apples is just a measurement for our convenience.
On the other hand stuff like entropy and enthalpy are real. Our measurement of these phenomena shows how systems of matter and energy interact and allow us to come up with predictions and approximations of real-life forces such as gravity.
In fact there is pretty good mathematical proof that we can never have perfect knowledge of a system, it's called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Because of this we can probably never know the exact state of any particle, only an approximation. The result of this is that information can never exactly describe the system it models. Reality will always be more complex than any measurements, theories, or calculations we can make.
But Doc Oc, he's just a dude with creepy robot arms. Even if those robot arms can kick eight kinds of ass, the guy they're attached to is still a flabby middle-aged science guy. Our friendly neighborhood spiderman is super-strong and a punch from him should cause disfiguring if not immediately fatal injuries.
There's definitely some movie science going on here. Some of the reasoning is that since the arms are fast and strong they can act as shock absorbers, pulling Doctor Octopus back from the impact and softening the blow. There's a few nods to this in the movie, where Doc Oc uses a couple of the arms to brace himself before doing something or where the arms stabilize him when he loses his balance.
Then again Spider-Man was also depicted to be a lot stronger in the movies than he was in the comic books. Yes, he has super strength from the mutation but in the movie he approaches Superman strength and durability. In the comic books he can take a beating and lift fairly heavy objects but he lifted far more in the movies than he did in the comics, aside from a few story arcs in which his powers were boosted. They definitely inflated everyone's abilities in the name of selling box office tickets.
My point was that if the car performs well and is cheap to run, what does the weight of any particular component matter?
If you read what I posted you'll see that it's likely that a car like the Tesla will cost more, in energy, to run than a car like the Volt. That's why the weight of the components matters, weight is related to efficiency when you are moving stuff around. Something that is lighter tends to waste less energy starting and stopping.
I guess I needed a "too long, didn't read" version of my post...
Mechanical transmissions can lose up to 20 percent of the power put into them to heat.
Which is why I said:
the transmission of mechanical energy from the engine to the tires in a traditional car also is not 100% efficient
My main point was that you can't simply assume that electric is more efficient than gasoline, you actually have to sit down and do the math or test the vehicles to be sure.
The battery should be cheaper, by far, because its a lot easier to dig coal out of the ground, have one big engine convert it to electricity and ship it over a wire, than it is to build container ships and oil drilling and refining apparatus send you energy that you can convert.
Sure, because you don't need any complicated machinery to dig coal out of the ground, post-process it, and ship it to the power plant. Right? Right?
I'm also sure that there are zero losses in transmitting that electricity from the power plant to wherever you charge your battery.
Why, exactly, does the weight of the battery matter if the specs already take that into account?
Because the weight of the vehicle contributes greatly to the efficiency of the vehicle. Heavier batteries means you need more powerful motors (most likely heavier or more expensive) to accelerate at an acceptable rate. You also need a heavier frame to hold the extra weight of the batteries and the more powerful motors. More weight also means more energy to get up to speed. With modern regenerative braking you are recovering some of that energy but there are always losses. More energy lost equals higher cost of operation.
If you perform most of your trips (shopping, taking the kids to practice, etc.) in short hops between recharging then it makes sense to have lower capacity, lighter batteries. You save a ton on the initial cost of the vehicle and the cost of operation. In the Volt they have a gasoline engine as a backup generator that extends the distance the car can go before running out of charge/fuel. This engine adds some weight to the car but far less than would be needed for batteries for the equivalent amount of distance. This is because the engine is a very stripped-down type that operates at a fixed RPM and uses a slightly different cycle than an ordinary car engine.
Part of optimizing a vehicle is minimizing its weight, initial cost, and cost of operation. Lighter batteries contribute positively to all of these factors and when they are combined with a lightweight charging engine they have very few detriments.
I can't see it being any less fuel efficient than a standard car
Of course it could be less fuel efficient than a standard car. The process of converting mechanical energy to electrical energy and back isn't 100% efficient. You have to take the mechanical energy of the engine, convert it to electrical energy, transmit it to the electric motors, and then the motors convert the electrical energy to mechanical energy. All of those steps waste some of the energy.
Now, are the inefficiencies of mechanical/electrical conversion compensated by the increased efficiency of a gasoline engine operating at optimal RPMs? You also have to take into account that the transmission of mechanical energy from the engine to the tires in a traditional car also is not 100% efficient, which complicates the comparison.
You can see that the situation is not as straightforward as might be imagined. There needs to be some careful design and planning to make sure that we really are getting more efficiency with a new car design, it can't be simply assumed that the new design will automatically be better.
If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound, though perhaps a little exacting compared to real-world use cases.
It's not really that great of a methodology. First of all it depends on something that is very difficult to get right, consistency in pressure and accuracy of a human finger. Changing the pressure, position, or angle of your finger can drastically change which capacitive element is triggered on the screen. It becomes difficult to separate errors in the touchscreen from the inaccuracy of the tester's finger.
Secondly, there could be algorithms that account for the motion of the touch in order to predict the next position. If you move across the screen at a certain velocity then it's likely that the next position will be along that line. A good algorithm will take this into account and adjust the position accordingly, resulting in smoother lines. Since the test uses motion this could introduce another variable and confuse the issue.
A better test would be to get one of the styluses that are made for capacitive touchscreens and use some sort of x-y table to move either the stylus or the device. At certain positions you lower the stylus to touch at one point. Repeat this many times and then look at the results.
This sort of test is a much better way to test the true accuracy and precision of these devices. Still, the article does show that there is some sort of effect going on here and that certain devices are most likely more accurate and precise at predicting the true position of a finger on their screen.
Information, at its base level, is just the variables you need to describe the state of a system.
Lets say we are talking about something simple, like a hydrogen molecule. This molecule looks similar to this: H-H. Lets say the page you are looking at has the x axis right-left, the y axis up-down, and the z axis into and out of the page.
Now how can this molecule move? Obviously it can slide along the x, y, and z axis. That means there are 3 degrees of freedom for translation. The bond can get longer or shorter so that's 1 degree of freedom for vibration. The molecule can also rotate about the center of the bond in two ways, the y and the z axis. Rotating around the x axis doesn't change the orientation of the molecule so it's not counted.
If you add that up then you get 3 translation, 1 vibration, and 2 rotation for a total of 6 degrees of freedom. This is the expected value since theory predicts that molecules have 3N degrees of freedom, where N is the number of atoms involved.
What does all this mean? Well, the degrees of freedom is a measure of the amount of information needed to explain the current state of the molecule. You need 6 pieces of information to describe the current state of a hydrogen molecule. The number of degrees of freedom has implications on how the molecule interacts with other molecules and can be used in the calculation of other factors such as the internal energy of the molecule.
Every bit of matter has a certain amount of information associated with it. This information is related to the entropy of a system, which is the number of ways a system can be randomly ordered. This is related to the energy of a system (entropy is actually how uniformly the energy is distributed or dispersed in a system).
The upshot of all this is that a system tends toward the highest entropy possible as time goes on. This is the second law of thermodynamics in a nutshell. It has implications on the "direction" that time travels and now it's theorized to be part of how gravity works.
As I understand it (I'm a chemist and not a theoretical physicist) the information that is being talked about relates to degrees of freedom of groups of particles. Say you have two particles, the interaction between them results in more information than a single particle alone. Three particles results in even more information, and so on.
The more degrees of freedom, the lower the entropy. This is because more interactions allow each particle to exchange information more freely and reach a steady-state more quickly. Therefore there is a "pressure" for objects to collect together into groups rather than staying spread out. Thus groupings of particles have more interaction with each other than they do with empty space and, according to this paper, this is expressed as an apparent force - gravity.
This is similar to surface tension in a liquid. Since each molecule in a drop of water interacts with each other they have some amount of attraction. At the air-water boundary you have water molecules interacting more with each other than the molecules in the air. This results in a force which tends to cause the surface of the water to contract to its lowest level of entropy, ie: lowest energy state. It's because of this that liquid droplets in a free-fall vacuum tend to become nearly spherical.
The information that is being talked about here can't simply be replaced with other words such as gluon, neutrinos, thetans, and so on because we aren't talking about particles, we are talking about interactions between particles. Information is a property of interaction, not the items interacting themselves.
(This is all my spitballing, of course. I've probably terribly mangled these concepts in an attempt to explain them simply so take all that I've said with a grain of salt.)
Actually, if the black gene is dominant and you have a closed system that kills all black cats then you will end up with a population of only white cats.
Dominant traits means that the dominant form of the gene masks the recessive trait. This means that if black is a dominant trait then a cat that has any amount of the black trait will be black. Thus your machine will kill every cat with that trait and there will be no cats with black traits to pass on to their offspring.
Here's a diagram to show this: BB x WW = 100% BW BB x BB = 100% BB BW X BB = 50% BB, 50% BW BW X BW = 25% BB, 50% BW, 25% WW BW X WW = 50% BW, 50% WW WW x WW = 100% WW
BB is pure black. BW is mixed types. If black is dominant the cat is a black color. If white is dominant the cat is a white color. WW is pure white. Percentages are approximate for a large sample size.
When black is dominant any cat that is BB or BW is killed since both combinations result in a black cat, leaving only the cats that are WW and a white color. The black trait is removed from the population.
If the black trait is recessive you will have the a different situation. The only cats that will be removed are the ones with BB so you'll have a lot of cats that are BW and every generation will still result in a noticeable percentage of BB (black) cats.
Remember, evolution is not about completely removing traits that are selected against. Most times those traits are still around but because of selection pressure they tend to result in a lower level of fitness and therefore organisms exhibiting the trait are less successful and less common. If the selection pressure is removed you'll often see some of the suppressed traits exhibit themselves at higher rates in the population.
Rolling rocks "evolve" to roll better. A fire "evolves" to burn better. Water in a container "evolves" to fill a new container when it is placed in it.
There's nothing new about the ability for systems to undergo changes that make some actions easier for elements of the system. That's the whole point about evolution in organisms, it'd be surprising if it DIDN'T happen. Things that are successful tend to continue, things that are a dead end tend to stop. Any process that continues over a long period will tend to settle into the most efficient method of operation. If conditions change then the process will change to a mode which is efficient under the new conditions or the process will come to a halt.
The process of evolution is just happening at a more complicated level than the simple examples I gave in my first paragraph.
Wouldn't reverse-engineering the keyfob (or even computing an X number of keys and some background on the algorithm used) reveal the original seed and make the whole process useless?
Each authenticator has a unique seed and so you'd need to do this for each account you want to hack. The scope of such an activity makes it so tough to do that it's not economical even if it is possible.
One of the "features" I loathe about it is the fact that typical users including so called "light users" have to charge it daily. Insane...where is the time for such attention?
I often go for several days without charging mine and I use it quite a bit. Granted most of my use is as a music player, scheduler, e-mail, and googling stuff. I use it as a phone for maybe an hour or two a day. I don't know if that makes me a light user but I'm certainly not a heavy user.
I have used it for several hours of talk and it's still lasted me at least a day and change but I've never sat there and seen how quickly I could drain the battery. I suppose if I was that type of user I could always look into a battery extender.
As for what is special about the iPhone there's a lot of things. Tons of great apps, with a lot of nice free ones. Simple user interface that stays out of your way and lets you quickly and easily use the device. Great integration with e-mail and contacts. I could go on, there's a lot of features that are shared by one device or another but the iPhone collects them all into one convenient package.
Actually, 2001-2011 is a decade. 2001-2010 is 9 years. The grandparent was referring to the fact that if you start counting the decade at the first day of 2001 then you have to go to the first day of 2002 for it to be 1 year. Thus, 10 years is from the first day of 2001 to the first day of 2011.
Now as for the reason why we should start counting at 2001 instead of 2000. The problem is that there is no year zero in our calendar. We go straight from 1 BC to 1 AD. This means that the first decade is from 1 AD to 11 AD. Follow that forward and the current decade starts in 2001. It does have relevance to how our decades are chosen.
Can we choose a different way to count the decades? Sure, just say that 1 BC was the start of the first decade and then the end of that decade would be 10 AD. It's a little less obvious of a starting date but it's just as valid as any other. For that matter we could throw out the whole artificial idea that groups of 10 years are any more relevant than groups of 9 or 11. In the end all this is just a contrivance that caters to our decimal counting system.
If the 3-4 out of a couple of dozen is to be believed, it's about half that. 3/24 = 12.5%, 4/24 = 16.7%.
It's probably even lower than that, I really didn't keep an accurate count on my total number of calls. I've been going into NYC weekly for the past year and probably make a call 3/4 of the time, so it's more like 3 or 4 out of 30 or 40. Plus two of those dropped calls were on the same call so maybe that day there was something odd going on (sunspot, unusual network problems, who knows).
I'd say that my experience is around 10% dropped calls in NYC but it's not a large enough data set to really matter. I definitely have a much better rate of dropped calls in my home (suburban) area. There I almost never get a dropped call, probably 2 or 3 over the last few years and lots more calls than a couple hundred.
Anyways, AT&T and the iPhone has been a positive experience for me. Maybe I'm an outlier or maybe it's not as bad as some other people have been saying. One thing is for sure, the service can't be that bad or there would be a lot of people dropping it like a hot potato. AT&T and the iPhone's share is doing pretty well so that doesn't seem to be happening.
Back in 2004, I quit my job and went on a roadtrip on steroids. I drove from Mexico to Alaska, down to Texas, up to the Dakotas, and finally back home to Massachusetts. I was an AT&T wireless customer and I was stunned at the lack of coverage.
A lot has changed in 5 or 6 years. AT&T has done a considerable amount of building up its network. I've taken a couple of roadtrips into some decently sparse areas and haven't had a ton of trouble, a couple of dropouts in hilly areas out in the middle of nowhere but not really that bad. I was a Verizon customer and had taken a similar trip a year before that and Verizon was only marginally better.
I can't speak to all the areas you covered but I'm willing to bet if you took the same trip today and used AT&T you'd probably see a marked difference. There's no doubt that there will always be room for improvement, it's tough to cover the entire United States because of large amount of mountainous and out-of-the way areas.
I dunno, my anecdotal data point is that I've had a couple of dropped calls in NYC but not really that many. I'd say about 3 or 4 dropped calls out of a couple of dozen that I've made across Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The calls tended to drop while I was traveling in my car, my iPhone automatically re-dialed for me and the call continued just fine.
I wouldn't really say it was much of a problem. Yes it is a bit higher of a rate of dropped calls in NYC than in the neighboring, more rural areas but certainly nothing that really affected my ability to use the cell phone. If AT&T really is saying they'd rather not sell the iPhone in the NYC area it might just be a preventative measure to avoid adding more iPhones into an area that is close to capacity. That's just spitballing though, I think it's more likely to be a miscommunication.
Yeah, it's a good thing that he posted to Slashdot. It definitely informs a larger base and increases the chance that someone will fit the criteria. I considered giving it a try too but I'm busy with work, school, and several projects right now.
Honestly though, the implied insult to Mac OS X users didn't go far in convincing me to spend my time trying to get a build done for him. Maybe I read into his statement the wrong way but it certainly seemed like he didn't have a high opinion of Mac OS X users. I think that opinion is misplaced, the lack of interest in compiling a build probably lies less in the quality of Mac OS X users and more in the lack of a dire need for his software in the Mac OS X community.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, the Windows key is the worst invention ever. It's so fun to accidently hit the Windows key and have your window minimize and the start menu pop up, just great when you are in the middle of a twitch game!
And, yes, I know that I can disable the Windows key but it's still a pain when you are on someone else's system.
That is the Print Screen key. Don't ever remove that key from the keyboard!
Printing a screen is a rare enough action that it can be assigned to a key combination rather than one key. Yeah, it's convenient to have "print screen" to be a single key but there's a ton of things that would be convenient if they were a single key, if we made every action map to one key then we'd soon have a couple hundred keys!
Under Mac OS X you use command-shift-3 to capture the entire screen and command-shift-4 to capture a portion of it. It's very simple and pretty easy to remember. A similar key combination can easily be added to Windows.
It's a balance between keyboard real estate and ease-of-use. Keyboard real estate is very dear in a laptop so it makes sense to move a rarely-used function like print screen to a key combination.
it's a PEPKAC situation. Users fail.
PEPKAC eh? Sure you don't mean that it's a PEBKAC problem - Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair?
You fail. ;-)
It is also the first step in the diplomatic process that can lead to condemnations from the UN, sanctions, or even war.
In other words, no serious consequences for China.
In other words, if we suppose that reality is information rather than matter and energy, how do we experiment on information?
No, reality is still matter and energy. Information is an approximation which describes the state of the matter and energy and their interactions.
It's like when I say that there's 10 apples in that bucket. The number 10 isn't the actual reality, the apples in the bucket are the reality. The number of apples is just a measurement for our convenience.
On the other hand stuff like entropy and enthalpy are real. Our measurement of these phenomena shows how systems of matter and energy interact and allow us to come up with predictions and approximations of real-life forces such as gravity.
In fact there is pretty good mathematical proof that we can never have perfect knowledge of a system, it's called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Because of this we can probably never know the exact state of any particle, only an approximation. The result of this is that information can never exactly describe the system it models. Reality will always be more complex than any measurements, theories, or calculations we can make.
But Doc Oc, he's just a dude with creepy robot arms. Even if those robot arms can kick eight kinds of ass, the guy they're attached to is still a flabby middle-aged science guy. Our friendly neighborhood spiderman is super-strong and a punch from him should cause disfiguring if not immediately fatal injuries.
There's definitely some movie science going on here. Some of the reasoning is that since the arms are fast and strong they can act as shock absorbers, pulling Doctor Octopus back from the impact and softening the blow. There's a few nods to this in the movie, where Doc Oc uses a couple of the arms to brace himself before doing something or where the arms stabilize him when he loses his balance.
Then again Spider-Man was also depicted to be a lot stronger in the movies than he was in the comic books. Yes, he has super strength from the mutation but in the movie he approaches Superman strength and durability. In the comic books he can take a beating and lift fairly heavy objects but he lifted far more in the movies than he did in the comics, aside from a few story arcs in which his powers were boosted. They definitely inflated everyone's abilities in the name of selling box office tickets.
My point was that if the car performs well and is cheap to run, what does the weight of any particular component matter?
If you read what I posted you'll see that it's likely that a car like the Tesla will cost more, in energy, to run than a car like the Volt. That's why the weight of the components matters, weight is related to efficiency when you are moving stuff around. Something that is lighter tends to waste less energy starting and stopping.
I guess I needed a "too long, didn't read" version of my post...
Mechanical transmissions can lose up to 20 percent of the power put into them to heat.
Which is why I said:
the transmission of mechanical energy from the engine to the tires in a traditional car also is not 100% efficient
My main point was that you can't simply assume that electric is more efficient than gasoline, you actually have to sit down and do the math or test the vehicles to be sure.
The battery should be cheaper, by far, because its a lot easier to dig coal out of the ground, have one big engine convert it to electricity and ship it over a wire, than it is to build container ships and oil drilling and refining apparatus send you energy that you can convert.
Sure, because you don't need any complicated machinery to dig coal out of the ground, post-process it, and ship it to the power plant. Right? Right?
I'm also sure that there are zero losses in transmitting that electricity from the power plant to wherever you charge your battery.
Now where is that sarcasm tag...
Why, exactly, does the weight of the battery matter if the specs already take that into account?
Because the weight of the vehicle contributes greatly to the efficiency of the vehicle. Heavier batteries means you need more powerful motors (most likely heavier or more expensive) to accelerate at an acceptable rate. You also need a heavier frame to hold the extra weight of the batteries and the more powerful motors. More weight also means more energy to get up to speed. With modern regenerative braking you are recovering some of that energy but there are always losses. More energy lost equals higher cost of operation.
If you perform most of your trips (shopping, taking the kids to practice, etc.) in short hops between recharging then it makes sense to have lower capacity, lighter batteries. You save a ton on the initial cost of the vehicle and the cost of operation. In the Volt they have a gasoline engine as a backup generator that extends the distance the car can go before running out of charge/fuel. This engine adds some weight to the car but far less than would be needed for batteries for the equivalent amount of distance. This is because the engine is a very stripped-down type that operates at a fixed RPM and uses a slightly different cycle than an ordinary car engine.
Part of optimizing a vehicle is minimizing its weight, initial cost, and cost of operation. Lighter batteries contribute positively to all of these factors and when they are combined with a lightweight charging engine they have very few detriments.
I can't see it being any less fuel efficient than a standard car
Of course it could be less fuel efficient than a standard car. The process of converting mechanical energy to electrical energy and back isn't 100% efficient. You have to take the mechanical energy of the engine, convert it to electrical energy, transmit it to the electric motors, and then the motors convert the electrical energy to mechanical energy. All of those steps waste some of the energy.
Now, are the inefficiencies of mechanical/electrical conversion compensated by the increased efficiency of a gasoline engine operating at optimal RPMs? You also have to take into account that the transmission of mechanical energy from the engine to the tires in a traditional car also is not 100% efficient, which complicates the comparison.
You can see that the situation is not as straightforward as might be imagined. There needs to be some careful design and planning to make sure that we really are getting more efficiency with a new car design, it can't be simply assumed that the new design will automatically be better.
If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound, though perhaps a little exacting compared to real-world use cases.
It's not really that great of a methodology. First of all it depends on something that is very difficult to get right, consistency in pressure and accuracy of a human finger. Changing the pressure, position, or angle of your finger can drastically change which capacitive element is triggered on the screen. It becomes difficult to separate errors in the touchscreen from the inaccuracy of the tester's finger.
Secondly, there could be algorithms that account for the motion of the touch in order to predict the next position. If you move across the screen at a certain velocity then it's likely that the next position will be along that line. A good algorithm will take this into account and adjust the position accordingly, resulting in smoother lines. Since the test uses motion this could introduce another variable and confuse the issue.
A better test would be to get one of the styluses that are made for capacitive touchscreens and use some sort of x-y table to move either the stylus or the device. At certain positions you lower the stylus to touch at one point. Repeat this many times and then look at the results.
This sort of test is a much better way to test the true accuracy and precision of these devices. Still, the article does show that there is some sort of effect going on here and that certain devices are most likely more accurate and precise at predicting the true position of a finger on their screen.
Information, at its base level, is just the variables you need to describe the state of a system.
Lets say we are talking about something simple, like a hydrogen molecule. This molecule looks similar to this: H-H. Lets say the page you are looking at has the x axis right-left, the y axis up-down, and the z axis into and out of the page.
Now how can this molecule move? Obviously it can slide along the x, y, and z axis. That means there are 3 degrees of freedom for translation. The bond can get longer or shorter so that's 1 degree of freedom for vibration. The molecule can also rotate about the center of the bond in two ways, the y and the z axis. Rotating around the x axis doesn't change the orientation of the molecule so it's not counted.
If you add that up then you get 3 translation, 1 vibration, and 2 rotation for a total of 6 degrees of freedom. This is the expected value since theory predicts that molecules have 3N degrees of freedom, where N is the number of atoms involved.
What does all this mean? Well, the degrees of freedom is a measure of the amount of information needed to explain the current state of the molecule. You need 6 pieces of information to describe the current state of a hydrogen molecule. The number of degrees of freedom has implications on how the molecule interacts with other molecules and can be used in the calculation of other factors such as the internal energy of the molecule.
Every bit of matter has a certain amount of information associated with it. This information is related to the entropy of a system, which is the number of ways a system can be randomly ordered. This is related to the energy of a system (entropy is actually how uniformly the energy is distributed or dispersed in a system).
The upshot of all this is that a system tends toward the highest entropy possible as time goes on. This is the second law of thermodynamics in a nutshell. It has implications on the "direction" that time travels and now it's theorized to be part of how gravity works.
Not quite.
As I understand it (I'm a chemist and not a theoretical physicist) the information that is being talked about relates to degrees of freedom of groups of particles. Say you have two particles, the interaction between them results in more information than a single particle alone. Three particles results in even more information, and so on.
The more degrees of freedom, the lower the entropy. This is because more interactions allow each particle to exchange information more freely and reach a steady-state more quickly. Therefore there is a "pressure" for objects to collect together into groups rather than staying spread out. Thus groupings of particles have more interaction with each other than they do with empty space and, according to this paper, this is expressed as an apparent force - gravity.
This is similar to surface tension in a liquid. Since each molecule in a drop of water interacts with each other they have some amount of attraction. At the air-water boundary you have water molecules interacting more with each other than the molecules in the air. This results in a force which tends to cause the surface of the water to contract to its lowest level of entropy, ie: lowest energy state. It's because of this that liquid droplets in a free-fall vacuum tend to become nearly spherical.
The information that is being talked about here can't simply be replaced with other words such as gluon, neutrinos, thetans, and so on because we aren't talking about particles, we are talking about interactions between particles. Information is a property of interaction, not the items interacting themselves.
(This is all my spitballing, of course. I've probably terribly mangled these concepts in an attempt to explain them simply so take all that I've said with a grain of salt.)
Actually, if the black gene is dominant and you have a closed system that kills all black cats then you will end up with a population of only white cats.
Dominant traits means that the dominant form of the gene masks the recessive trait. This means that if black is a dominant trait then a cat that has any amount of the black trait will be black. Thus your machine will kill every cat with that trait and there will be no cats with black traits to pass on to their offspring.
Here's a diagram to show this:
BB x WW = 100% BW
BB x BB = 100% BB
BW X BB = 50% BB, 50% BW
BW X BW = 25% BB, 50% BW, 25% WW
BW X WW = 50% BW, 50% WW
WW x WW = 100% WW
BB is pure black.
BW is mixed types. If black is dominant the cat is a black color. If white is dominant the cat is a white color.
WW is pure white.
Percentages are approximate for a large sample size.
When black is dominant any cat that is BB or BW is killed since both combinations result in a black cat, leaving only the cats that are WW and a white color. The black trait is removed from the population.
If the black trait is recessive you will have the a different situation. The only cats that will be removed are the ones with BB so you'll have a lot of cats that are BW and every generation will still result in a noticeable percentage of BB (black) cats.
Remember, evolution is not about completely removing traits that are selected against. Most times those traits are still around but because of selection pressure they tend to result in a lower level of fitness and therefore organisms exhibiting the trait are less successful and less common. If the selection pressure is removed you'll often see some of the suppressed traits exhibit themselves at higher rates in the population.
Rolling rocks "evolve" to roll better. A fire "evolves" to burn better. Water in a container "evolves" to fill a new container when it is placed in it.
There's nothing new about the ability for systems to undergo changes that make some actions easier for elements of the system. That's the whole point about evolution in organisms, it'd be surprising if it DIDN'T happen. Things that are successful tend to continue, things that are a dead end tend to stop. Any process that continues over a long period will tend to settle into the most efficient method of operation. If conditions change then the process will change to a mode which is efficient under the new conditions or the process will come to a halt.
The process of evolution is just happening at a more complicated level than the simple examples I gave in my first paragraph.
Wouldn't reverse-engineering the keyfob (or even computing an X number of keys and some background on the algorithm used) reveal the original seed and make the whole process useless?
Each authenticator has a unique seed and so you'd need to do this for each account you want to hack. The scope of such an activity makes it so tough to do that it's not economical even if it is possible.
One of the "features" I loathe about it is the fact that typical users including so called "light users" have to charge it daily. Insane...where is the time for such attention?
I often go for several days without charging mine and I use it quite a bit. Granted most of my use is as a music player, scheduler, e-mail, and googling stuff. I use it as a phone for maybe an hour or two a day. I don't know if that makes me a light user but I'm certainly not a heavy user.
I have used it for several hours of talk and it's still lasted me at least a day and change but I've never sat there and seen how quickly I could drain the battery. I suppose if I was that type of user I could always look into a battery extender.
As for what is special about the iPhone there's a lot of things. Tons of great apps, with a lot of nice free ones. Simple user interface that stays out of your way and lets you quickly and easily use the device. Great integration with e-mail and contacts. I could go on, there's a lot of features that are shared by one device or another but the iPhone collects them all into one convenient package.
Just another note, part of the confusion is the fencepost problem. If I say 2000-2010 how am I counting the end years?
That's about 11 years.
That's about 10 years.
That's about 10 years.
Thats about 9 years.
Obviously most people use method 2.
Actually, 2001-2011 is a decade. 2001-2010 is 9 years. The grandparent was referring to the fact that if you start counting the decade at the first day of 2001 then you have to go to the first day of 2002 for it to be 1 year. Thus, 10 years is from the first day of 2001 to the first day of 2011.
Now as for the reason why we should start counting at 2001 instead of 2000. The problem is that there is no year zero in our calendar. We go straight from 1 BC to 1 AD. This means that the first decade is from 1 AD to 11 AD. Follow that forward and the current decade starts in 2001. It does have relevance to how our decades are chosen.
Can we choose a different way to count the decades? Sure, just say that 1 BC was the start of the first decade and then the end of that decade would be 10 AD. It's a little less obvious of a starting date but it's just as valid as any other. For that matter we could throw out the whole artificial idea that groups of 10 years are any more relevant than groups of 9 or 11. In the end all this is just a contrivance that caters to our decimal counting system.
If the 3-4 out of a couple of dozen is to be believed, it's about half that. 3/24 = 12.5%, 4/24 = 16.7%.
It's probably even lower than that, I really didn't keep an accurate count on my total number of calls. I've been going into NYC weekly for the past year and probably make a call 3/4 of the time, so it's more like 3 or 4 out of 30 or 40. Plus two of those dropped calls were on the same call so maybe that day there was something odd going on (sunspot, unusual network problems, who knows).
I'd say that my experience is around 10% dropped calls in NYC but it's not a large enough data set to really matter. I definitely have a much better rate of dropped calls in my home (suburban) area. There I almost never get a dropped call, probably 2 or 3 over the last few years and lots more calls than a couple hundred.
Anyways, AT&T and the iPhone has been a positive experience for me. Maybe I'm an outlier or maybe it's not as bad as some other people have been saying. One thing is for sure, the service can't be that bad or there would be a lot of people dropping it like a hot potato. AT&T and the iPhone's share is doing pretty well so that doesn't seem to be happening.
Back in 2004, I quit my job and went on a roadtrip on steroids. I drove from Mexico to Alaska, down to Texas, up to the Dakotas, and finally back home to Massachusetts. I was an AT&T wireless customer and I was stunned at the lack of coverage.
A lot has changed in 5 or 6 years. AT&T has done a considerable amount of building up its network. I've taken a couple of roadtrips into some decently sparse areas and haven't had a ton of trouble, a couple of dropouts in hilly areas out in the middle of nowhere but not really that bad. I was a Verizon customer and had taken a similar trip a year before that and Verizon was only marginally better.
I can't speak to all the areas you covered but I'm willing to bet if you took the same trip today and used AT&T you'd probably see a marked difference. There's no doubt that there will always be room for improvement, it's tough to cover the entire United States because of large amount of mountainous and out-of-the way areas.
There's been a lot of coverage indicating problems with iPhones in New York, including one Gizmodo piece saying a 30% dropped call rate is apparently normal.
I dunno, my anecdotal data point is that I've had a couple of dropped calls in NYC but not really that many. I'd say about 3 or 4 dropped calls out of a couple of dozen that I've made across Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The calls tended to drop while I was traveling in my car, my iPhone automatically re-dialed for me and the call continued just fine.
I wouldn't really say it was much of a problem. Yes it is a bit higher of a rate of dropped calls in NYC than in the neighboring, more rural areas but certainly nothing that really affected my ability to use the cell phone. If AT&T really is saying they'd rather not sell the iPhone in the NYC area it might just be a preventative measure to avoid adding more iPhones into an area that is close to capacity. That's just spitballing though, I think it's more likely to be a miscommunication.
I still want to know how you use 100 times less material. So you have x amount of material, you use 100 times less than that:
x - 100x = -99x
It gives back 99 times the original amount? Hmmmm...
Maybe they meant to say that it uses one hundredth the amount of material? Nah, if they meant that they'd have said it correctly, right?
Yeah, it's a good thing that he posted to Slashdot. It definitely informs a larger base and increases the chance that someone will fit the criteria. I considered giving it a try too but I'm busy with work, school, and several projects right now.
Honestly though, the implied insult to Mac OS X users didn't go far in convincing me to spend my time trying to get a build done for him. Maybe I read into his statement the wrong way but it certainly seemed like he didn't have a high opinion of Mac OS X users. I think that opinion is misplaced, the lack of interest in compiling a build probably lies less in the quality of Mac OS X users and more in the lack of a dire need for his software in the Mac OS X community.