Any computer connected to the net can be compromised given a sufficiently intelligent/lucky hacker and enough time. The question you should be asking is did they take all reasonable and practical precautions to protect the machines?
This begs the question - if an Iranian astronaut dies because they can't bring him down successfully, does he still get his 40 virgins?
No - if he gets stuck in space he might find just one virgin a lot more useful...assuming this isn't how Iran is planning to get him into space in the first place!
It's more convincing than...many flesh-and-blood actors I've seen.
So when they get it perfected maybe this will mean that they can hire good actors instead of good looking actors and then use the computer to pretty them up.
The other advantage will be that the celebrity salaries will probably end up being more reasonable over time since studios can own the digital likeness and use whomever they want to animate it. Of course this will likely mean trouble since now the actors/actresses will actually get paid a reasonable salary based on how well they can act....
Great so if we happen to be lying awake at 4am we can watch stuff live. However the recorded coverage of non-Canadian medal wins is not at all easy to find unless it is a big story (like Phelps or Bolt). That's completely fine and understandable but is EXTREMELY annoying given that what I want to watch is really easy to find on the BBC site.
Having read a little more of the paper I think your last suggestion is correct. To quote the conclusion from the paper though:
In this sense, we conclude that universes with stars are not especially rare...
He then goes on to say that:
In future work, another issue to be considered is coupling the effects of alternative
values of the fundamental constants to the cosmic expansion, big bang nucleosynthesis
and structure formation.
So his conclusion really should read: If you only consider varying three parameters 25% of the time stars would burn. However there is no guarentee that they would ever form nor has any work been done studying the effect of varying the other fundamental parameters. So we cannot conclude in any meaningful sense from this paper whether universes with stars are common or rare. However it is a step along the way.
china DOES foist their morals on others-tibet. england spain, france, germany, russia (czarist and soviet and post soviet), portugal, etc- all did some foisting-colony wise.
China is not trying to make a moral argument in Tibet it is simply a territorial land grab as was colonialism. I have not heard Russia making moral claims recently: they talk in terms of defending Russian citizens not having superior morals.
i was objecting to the poster's gross generalizarion of the said government being a representation of all its peoples.
...and when did I say that? I was not 'negating' the previous comment. I was merely pointing out that if you want to take the moral high ground with the rest of the world you might want to get your own house in order first otherwise nobody will take you seriously.
That's why the internet didn't melt: linux users can't watch.
Funny, but the real reason it didn't melt is because they refuse to stream video across international boundaries so most of the world cannot access it. Living in Canada my wife cannot access the NBC videos and I cannot access the BBC videos. Given the UK's fantastic performance so far this Olympics is it incredibly frustrating to have to read about it or to catch the odd event on CBC - who actually are very good at covering non-Canadian centric events but obviously don't give foreign medal wins top billing so they are hard to catch unless you watch them live.
Given that the Olympic ideal is bringing the world together perhaps they might like to extend that to web video coverage and allow all of us to watch our home countries athletes wherever we are in the world instead of going out of their way to implement technological barriers to obstruct this?
I understood that. I was commenting that I thought it very unlikely to be true based on the evidence presented.
All parameters are not created equal, he may have picked up on something rather interesting.
I doubt it. There are very clear reasons to expect other parameters to greatly affect the formation of stars. As far as I can see he has not commented on this at all. This means that either:
There is some good reason, so obvious to other cosmologists that he need not explain it, which precludes these other parameters from affecting his conclusions
He is deliberately ignoring the effects of other parameters and just considering varying those he states. In which case his conclusion regarding 25% of universes is simply wrong because he has not considered the full phase space.
He doesn't realize/believe that the other parameters are important to star formation and has not considered them.
My guess is that option (2) or (3) is the case and for both of these I would regard his conclusions as either wrong or unproven. If he has considered and ruled out the other parameters as relevant then either option (1) is the case or else he should have explained his arguments as to why they are irrelevant.
The reason I doubt option (1) is that from the particle physics side of the fence we know of the 3 Sakharov conditions on the Big Bang. One of these is something called CP violation which is a difference between matter and anti-matter which is why the universe is matter only (as far as we know). If we alter the SM parameters relating to this ('delta' for the quarks and possibly another for the leptons plus theta_QCD) then this asymmetry could disappear (unless you add new physics) and you'll have very little matter left plus an equally small amount of anti-matter. I would argue that star formation in a universe like this will be impossible. Either there will be too little material or, if there is enough, the moment it starts to collapse gravitationally it will blow itself apart before a star forms.
The Standard Model has 19 free parameters (not including G) and even more if you include the new neutrino mixing results. This guy varies TWO of them plus G and then claims that 25% of possible universes would form stars? I remain completely unconvinced. While the strength of gravity, EM and the strong interactions may be important for stars the other parameters control some other vaguely important things like whether there is any matter in the universe.
In addition these parameters also have major effects directly on the functioning of stars. For example if the electron mass were larger the orbit of the electron in the atom shrinks and fusion becomes a lot easier. One would presume that this would greatly affect star formation. In addition there are other effects caused by varying the parameters: tweaking with these may well change the type of matter in the universe such as less hydrogen and more helium etc. He does at one point mention this and then states that he would not expect it to vary much from our universe without giving a reference. To me this seems completely non-obvious but I'm not a cosmologist so perhaps it is obvious to them?
So as I said I remain totally unconvinced that this paper really shows anything meaningful at all.
As another poster has pointed out these are not the acts of democratically elected governments and so cannot be said to represent the will of the respective country's people.
However there is one other important point to mention. The China, Zimbabwe, Serbia etc. and not attempting to foist their morals on the rest of the world as some sort of shining beacon of enlightenment and integrity. If you are going to do that you had better make damn sure that you really are beyond reproach and the current US government is so far from that it would be laughable if it were not so sad.
The "average behavior(sic) of crowds is deterministic" thing doesn't really work. The sum or average of a set of random variables is also a random variable.
True but the amount of variance in the average becomes increasingly small to the point where it is so small that it is undetectable/irrelevant: trust me Newtonian mechanics works very well indeed for large objects and it is based on exactly the same principle.
Note: I'm not saying that psycho-history ever will be practically possible my point was simply that should it prove possible it does not rule out free will.
...if you add up enough independent, identically-distributed random variables together you get a normal distribution (i.e. bell curve). Lots of people try to apply this to economics (or in Asimov's case, history), but it doesn't work in practice.
Doesn't this just suggest that you do not have a large enough statistical sample? With atoms you need several thousand to start behaving deterministically but there are a very limited number of different states to "decide" between. With a human there are countless billions upon billions of different possible states to decide between. Consequently I would expect the number of humans needed to average to deterministic behaviour will be astronomical, far, far more than the 6 billion on this planet. Asimov had an entire galaxy full so perhaps, if we ever get there, we may find it enough.
I believe in the ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I believe that all people are created equal and should have equal rights and protection under law. I believe...
I believe that you should vote in a government which shares some of these ideals enough to act on them and then perhaps those of us in the rest of the world might take you more seriously when you start to talk about morals.
Yahoo can point the finger back at U.S law and claim that their hands are tied.
No they cannot. You can't excuse breaking the law in one country because you'll break the law in another. It is Yahoo who have to decide which penalty they wish to accept. This is not just true in China but in Canada and Europe where we have far more stringent privacy laws than the US and companies may well find themselves breaking our laws when the US government demands they hand over private data.
No - in Asimov's world humans can have free will in exactly the same manner as quantum mechanical particles can have "free will" and yet Newtonian mechanics (which is deterministic) can accurately describe the physics of things a lot larger than an atom. There is a probability for each human/particle to make different choices and, when statistically sampled on a large enough scale, those probabilities lead to something that appear deterministic.
This is exactly how quantum mechanics work. Each particle has a probability distribution for what it will do so that, at the large scale because of the huge numbers involved we know that roughly 40% will do X, 20% will do Y and 40% will do Z.
While I don't know for certain that Asimov based psycho-history on QM I've often suspected as much. As a PhD chemist he should have had a reasonably good understanding of QM at least.
Patents on video and audio codecs ARE NOT SOFTWARE PATENTS.
....when implemented in association with hardware. I should have said "pure software". I know that you can patent software in association with hardware (which is presumably what got the MP3 players). I have never heard of software being seized because of a patent violation in the EU.
There is no magical patent protection against patent claims in a 3rd country.
Yes there is, it is called an international border. Short of extradition, which only works for criminal offences, there is no way you can touch a company in another country. Regarding the software patents I should have said PURE software patents. You can patent software associated with a physical device.
The person with the gun is the one that pulled the trigger....I repeat, there was *0* and I really mean absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the person they were following was a terrorist.
This is not a Miss Marple murder mystery where they get to do their own investigation to prove their superiors have actually screwed up. The police operate as a team: if they are told there is a terrorist suspect in the area they will act accordingly. Looking at the pictures it is easy to tell them apart. Now put them in slightly dim articifical light, wearing a hood and backpack and give yourself a couple of seconds glance at a distance. Then add to that that if you get it wrong the guy may have a bomb in the backpack that will kill you if he gets a chance to set it off and see what sort of decision you make.
So who's to blame? Personally I'd say is was combination of actions: his superiors screwed up the intelligence, the victim ran from heavily armed police the day after a major terrorist attack, the terrorists created an environment where someone carrying a backpack can be perceived as a deadly threat and finally the shooter himself who got the ID of the victim wrong. With the exception of the actual terrorist attacks, I don't think that any of these actions were motivated by malicious intent. It was a terrible and tragic compound mistake.
So clearly we need better police officers right?...and the way to get that is to increase their pay and be more selective over who is given the job. If you follow the knee jerk reaction and say "this is terrible we should penalize them" and then reduce their pay what will happen is the standard of the officers will drop and things like this will become more frequent, not less.
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
This is the British Broadcasting Corporation so yes they are both completely patent free because there are no software patents allowed in the UK. It may be a problem for those in the US but why should the BBC worry about that?
No it is not clear because the first quote is attributed to "the BBC" instead of Erik Huggers and then uses "I". The only suitable "I" is the poster hence the confusion because it seems that the quote has ended and now the OP is giving an opinion. Fortunately the punctuation is correct otherwise it would be completely impossible to figure out what it meant.
That done, I'll be able to navigate my tens of thousands of photos by asking for things like photos taken of the kids while outside at the cottage when they were 3 years old.
That raises an interesting concept. Could they do a 4D orbit? For example identify pictures of your kids at different ages and then you could watch them grow up in front of your eyes. Or watch how a city street changes over a decade? That would be really interesting...shame it will probably only every be available for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Any computer connected to the net can be compromised given a sufficiently intelligent/lucky hacker and enough time. The question you should be asking is did they take all reasonable and practical precautions to protect the machines?
This begs the question - if an Iranian astronaut dies because they can't bring him down successfully, does he still get his 40 virgins?
No - if he gets stuck in space he might find just one virgin a lot more useful...assuming this isn't how Iran is planning to get him into space in the first place!
...it just makes them feel as if they lived a lot longer.
I would suggest law. Once you pass the bar, you have a meal ticket for life...
Provided that you can live with yourself. The usual goal in life is to be happy and while money may help it is rarely sufficient by itself.
It's more convincing than...many flesh-and-blood actors I've seen.
So when they get it perfected maybe this will mean that they can hire good actors instead of good looking actors and then use the computer to pretty them up.
The other advantage will be that the celebrity salaries will probably end up being more reasonable over time since studios can own the digital likeness and use whomever they want to animate it. Of course this will likely mean trouble since now the actors/actresses will actually get paid a reasonable salary based on how well they can act....
Well they did call the section "Bottom of the barrel book reviews"....and that review was definitely the bottom of the barrel.
Great so if we happen to be lying awake at 4am we can watch stuff live. However the recorded coverage of non-Canadian medal wins is not at all easy to find unless it is a big story (like Phelps or Bolt). That's completely fine and understandable but is EXTREMELY annoying given that what I want to watch is really easy to find on the BBC site.
In this sense, we conclude that universes with stars are not especially rare...
He then goes on to say that:
In future work, another issue to be considered is coupling the effects of alternative values of the fundamental constants to the cosmic expansion, big bang nucleosynthesis and structure formation.
So his conclusion really should read: If you only consider varying three parameters 25% of the time stars would burn. However there is no guarentee that they would ever form nor has any work been done studying the effect of varying the other fundamental parameters. So we cannot conclude in any meaningful sense from this paper whether universes with stars are common or rare. However it is a step along the way.
china DOES foist their morals on others-tibet. england spain, france, germany, russia (czarist and soviet and post soviet), portugal, etc- all did some foisting-colony wise.
China is not trying to make a moral argument in Tibet it is simply a territorial land grab as was colonialism. I have not heard Russia making moral claims recently: they talk in terms of defending Russian citizens not having superior morals.
i was objecting to the poster's gross generalizarion of the said government being a representation of all its peoples.
That's why the internet didn't melt: linux users can't watch.
Funny, but the real reason it didn't melt is because they refuse to stream video across international boundaries so most of the world cannot access it. Living in Canada my wife cannot access the NBC videos and I cannot access the BBC videos. Given the UK's fantastic performance so far this Olympics is it incredibly frustrating to have to read about it or to catch the odd event on CBC - who actually are very good at covering non-Canadian centric events but obviously don't give foreign medal wins top billing so they are hard to catch unless you watch them live.
Given that the Olympic ideal is bringing the world together perhaps they might like to extend that to web video coverage and allow all of us to watch our home countries athletes wherever we are in the world instead of going out of their way to implement technological barriers to obstruct this?
I also qualified my reply with 'if true'.
I understood that. I was commenting that I thought it very unlikely to be true based on the evidence presented.
All parameters are not created equal, he may have picked up on something rather interesting.
I doubt it. There are very clear reasons to expect other parameters to greatly affect the formation of stars. As far as I can see he has not commented on this at all. This means that either:
My guess is that option (2) or (3) is the case and for both of these I would regard his conclusions as either wrong or unproven. If he has considered and ruled out the other parameters as relevant then either option (1) is the case or else he should have explained his arguments as to why they are irrelevant.
The reason I doubt option (1) is that from the particle physics side of the fence we know of the 3 Sakharov conditions on the Big Bang. One of these is something called CP violation which is a difference between matter and anti-matter which is why the universe is matter only (as far as we know). If we alter the SM parameters relating to this ('delta' for the quarks and possibly another for the leptons plus theta_QCD) then this asymmetry could disappear (unless you add new physics) and you'll have very little matter left plus an equally small amount of anti-matter. I would argue that star formation in a universe like this will be impossible. Either there will be too little material or, if there is enough, the moment it starts to collapse gravitationally it will blow itself apart before a star forms.
This hypothesis, if true...
The Standard Model has 19 free parameters (not including G) and even more if you include the new neutrino mixing results. This guy varies TWO of them plus G and then claims that 25% of possible universes would form stars? I remain completely unconvinced. While the strength of gravity, EM and the strong interactions may be important for stars the other parameters control some other vaguely important things like whether there is any matter in the universe.
In addition these parameters also have major effects directly on the functioning of stars. For example if the electron mass were larger the orbit of the electron in the atom shrinks and fusion becomes a lot easier. One would presume that this would greatly affect star formation. In addition there are other effects caused by varying the parameters: tweaking with these may well change the type of matter in the universe such as less hydrogen and more helium etc. He does at one point mention this and then states that he would not expect it to vary much from our universe without giving a reference. To me this seems completely non-obvious but I'm not a cosmologist so perhaps it is obvious to them?
So as I said I remain totally unconvinced that this paper really shows anything meaningful at all.
As another poster has pointed out these are not the acts of democratically elected governments and so cannot be said to represent the will of the respective country's people.
However there is one other important point to mention. The China, Zimbabwe, Serbia etc. and not attempting to foist their morals on the rest of the world as some sort of shining beacon of enlightenment and integrity. If you are going to do that you had better make damn sure that you really are beyond reproach and the current US government is so far from that it would be laughable if it were not so sad.
The "average behavior(sic) of crowds is deterministic" thing doesn't really work. The sum or average of a set of random variables is also a random variable.
True but the amount of variance in the average becomes increasingly small to the point where it is so small that it is undetectable/irrelevant: trust me Newtonian mechanics works very well indeed for large objects and it is based on exactly the same principle.
Note: I'm not saying that psycho-history ever will be practically possible my point was simply that should it prove possible it does not rule out free will.
...if you add up enough independent, identically-distributed random variables together you get a normal distribution (i.e. bell curve). Lots of people try to apply this to economics (or in Asimov's case, history), but it doesn't work in practice.
Doesn't this just suggest that you do not have a large enough statistical sample? With atoms you need several thousand to start behaving deterministically but there are a very limited number of different states to "decide" between. With a human there are countless billions upon billions of different possible states to decide between. Consequently I would expect the number of humans needed to average to deterministic behaviour will be astronomical, far, far more than the 6 billion on this planet. Asimov had an entire galaxy full so perhaps, if we ever get there, we may find it enough.
I believe in the ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I believe that all people are created equal and should have equal rights and protection under law. I believe...
I believe that you should vote in a government which shares some of these ideals enough to act on them and then perhaps those of us in the rest of the world might take you more seriously when you start to talk about morals.
Yahoo can point the finger back at U.S law and claim that their hands are tied.
No they cannot. You can't excuse breaking the law in one country because you'll break the law in another. It is Yahoo who have to decide which penalty they wish to accept. This is not just true in China but in Canada and Europe where we have far more stringent privacy laws than the US and companies may well find themselves breaking our laws when the US government demands they hand over private data.
No - in Asimov's world humans can have free will in exactly the same manner as quantum mechanical particles can have "free will" and yet Newtonian mechanics (which is deterministic) can accurately describe the physics of things a lot larger than an atom. There is a probability for each human/particle to make different choices and, when statistically sampled on a large enough scale, those probabilities lead to something that appear deterministic.
This is exactly how quantum mechanics work. Each particle has a probability distribution for what it will do so that, at the large scale because of the huge numbers involved we know that roughly 40% will do X, 20% will do Y and 40% will do Z.
While I don't know for certain that Asimov based psycho-history on QM I've often suspected as much. As a PhD chemist he should have had a reasonably good understanding of QM at least.
Everyone is faster in the pool.
Yes, they probably didn't level it right and they are all getting a downhill advantage.
Patents on video and audio codecs ARE NOT SOFTWARE PATENTS.
There is no magical patent protection against patent claims in a 3rd country.
Yes there is, it is called an international border. Short of extradition, which only works for criminal offences, there is no way you can touch a company in another country. Regarding the software patents I should have said PURE software patents. You can patent software associated with a physical device.
The person with the gun is the one that pulled the trigger....I repeat, there was *0* and I really mean absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the person they were following was a terrorist.
This is not a Miss Marple murder mystery where they get to do their own investigation to prove their superiors have actually screwed up. The police operate as a team: if they are told there is a terrorist suspect in the area they will act accordingly. Looking at the pictures it is easy to tell them apart. Now put them in slightly dim articifical light, wearing a hood and backpack and give yourself a couple of seconds glance at a distance. Then add to that that if you get it wrong the guy may have a bomb in the backpack that will kill you if he gets a chance to set it off and see what sort of decision you make.
So who's to blame? Personally I'd say is was combination of actions: his superiors screwed up the intelligence, the victim ran from heavily armed police the day after a major terrorist attack, the terrorists created an environment where someone carrying a backpack can be perceived as a deadly threat and finally the shooter himself who got the ID of the victim wrong. With the exception of the actual terrorist attacks, I don't think that any of these actions were motivated by malicious intent. It was a terrible and tragic compound mistake.
So clearly we need better police officers right?...and the way to get that is to increase their pay and be more selective over who is given the job. If you follow the knee jerk reaction and say "this is terrible we should penalize them" and then reduce their pay what will happen is the standard of the officers will drop and things like this will become more frequent, not less.
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
This is the British Broadcasting Corporation so yes they are both completely patent free because there are no software patents allowed in the UK. It may be a problem for those in the US but why should the BBC worry about that?
No it is not clear because the first quote is attributed to "the BBC" instead of Erik Huggers and then uses "I". The only suitable "I" is the poster hence the confusion because it seems that the quote has ended and now the OP is giving an opinion. Fortunately the punctuation is correct otherwise it would be completely impossible to figure out what it meant.
That done, I'll be able to navigate my tens of thousands of photos by asking for things like photos taken of the kids while outside at the cottage when they were 3 years old.
That raises an interesting concept. Could they do a 4D orbit? For example identify pictures of your kids at different ages and then you could watch them grow up in front of your eyes. Or watch how a city street changes over a decade? That would be really interesting...shame it will probably only every be available for Windows.