Actually, the biggest problem with a Star Trek transporter is that it's impossible, per the Uncertainty Principle, to "scan" all the information in a physical system and encode it in another. You'd have to (somehow, probably equally impossibly) entangle the original particles in your body with particles on the receiving end and then do the magic quantum measurement to sync you with those particles. The plus side is, you wouldn't need the vaporizer; you just would suddenly be on the other side, and the matter which had been your body would no longer be in the form of your body. That's why they call it quantum "teleportation" instead of quantum "replication" or some such; nothing is copied, the particle at the receiving end literally becomes the particle that was at the transmitting end, and the latter ceases to be what it was.
The main hole in that idea is that, unless I am mistaken, the entanglement is broken at the time of the second measurement. So the entangled particles don't act like a wormhole that you can just pump energy (and information) through; it's a one-time thing, that allows you to send an arbitrary-sized chunk of information and energy from one place to another instantly by sending a fixed-size chunk of information and energy normally.
I believe so, yes. You could think of it something like data compression with built-in encryption. We establish a link (entangle our pairs of particles), then on my end I arrange my particles to encode a message, then I send you (at light speed or less) instructions telling you what to do to sync your particles with mine (sort of like giving you the encryption key and compression codec), and then BAM you see the message, which could be much larger than the "key" instructions I sent.
But I am not a physicist, so physicists feel free to correct me.
(Incidentally, I wonder if this is related to the phenomena that have been covered here on/. before of signals propagating "fast than light" through some media, because the medium at the front edge of the signal can tell somehow what the rest of the signal is going to be just from the leading edge; another case of sending a big chunk of information "faster than light" via sending a smaller chunk of information at light speed).
I am not a physicist so this is just my educated-layperson's take on it, but I believe what happens is the energy-states of both entangles particles "sync" at the moment of the (second) measurement. So we've got our two entangles particles; I put mine into a higher-energy state, consuming energy from some source on my end and storing it in the particle. Then when my colleagues perform the directed measurement on their end, they measure their particle in a high-energy state, tapping the energy from the particle in the process (as is always the case with quantum measurements), or in other words, collapsing it back into a low-energy state, with the energy going into the system of their measuring apparatus, and then perhaps on to elsewhere. At that moment, as they make their measurement, our two particles exactly mirror each other, so my particle ALSO collapses back into a low-energy state. (And also, if I'm not mistaken, breaking the entanglement; so, this can only be done once per entangled pair).
So I take energy from something in my lab and put it into a particle, then later (if my colleagues do as instructed) my particle just collapses into a lower-energy state without giving me any of that energy back, the energy apparently just disappearing. Meanwhile on the other end, my colleagues follow some instructions from me and suddenly find their particle exhibiting energy it got apparently from nowhere. The net effect, between the two ends of the entanglement, is that I pump energy into a particle on my end and it comes out of a particle on their end without ever traversing the distance in between (although some other energy, carrying the signal encoding my instructions, had to traverse that distance, but it could be much less energy than is transferred through the entanglement).
People both here and on the linked blog article seem to be thinking that this "teleportation" talk is all about sending things from one place to another faster than light. That's not the big deal; it's already well-established that that cannot be done, at least not via quantum entanglement.
The breakthrough the article is talking about is moving energy from one place to another "instantly" by means of performing the right pair of measurements on both end; but the communication between ends about what measurements to make still happens at light speed or less.
For example, say I have a bunch of particles here on Earth and my colleagues on Mars have another bunch of particles entangled with mine. Mars is at the moment ten light-minutes away from each. On my end, I perform a measurement on (i.e. I interact with) my particles in a way which raises their energy from X joules to Y joules; I then send a radio transmission (with said transmission using less than Y-X joules) to my colleagues on Mars giving them instructions for what measurements to make on their end, i.e. I transmit information, in normal ways, at the speed of light or less.
Ten minutes later, my colleagues on Mars get my message, perform the measurement, and BAM, the energy of their particles jumps up to Y joules. The most efficient classical alternative for transmitting that (Y-X) joules of energy would be to beam a signal of said energy between the two points, but that requires a clear line of sight between them, or some set of relays capable of carrying that signal, each of which adds inefficiency to the transmission. An even less efficient, even more classical method would be to take whatever the energy is stored in here on Earth and physically move it to its destination, which is both much slower and much less energy-efficient.
With this method, my colleagues could be buried deep underground in a sealed lab with no way of getting anything in or out except for a limited range of radio signals carried by equipment incapable of carrying high-power signals... and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy straight into their lab just beaming energy into some particles in my lab and then telling them over the radio what to do in their lab to receive it.
The conclusions arrived to in Stevens' opinion REQUIRE that you assume all non-oral types of speech do not apply concerning the part of the 1st amendment that refers to speech. Which means that in order to accept his conclusions, you have to assume that no other types of speech exist. This means that things like flag-burning, as abhorrent and juvenile as I personally find it, could be legislated as to be illegal.
No, it would mean that it wouldn't be protected by the 1st Amendment. Technically speaking, unless they can somehow rationalize prohibition of flag burning as serving one of these few purposes, Congress has no authority to do so. Of course, given the idiocy of legal precedent that's elapsed since that document was written, the courts would probably rule that as flags can be made in one state and sold in another, the regulation of the burning thereof is conductive to the purpose of regulating interstate commerce...
The other problem with your comparison is that libraries have permission to lend books
Yeah, I was up to you until that point. It's the other way around. Nobody "gives" people permission to lend or even copy books. Instead, the government grants authors and "content creators" the ability to restrict this right of copy for a limited time. That's copyright.
The right to use information is among the inalienable right granted by our Creator (whomever this might be), the right of liberty. It is enshrined in the first amendment, the right to free speech, because the written word is a manifestation of speech.
I agree with the substance of your post but I'd like to point out that the person to whom you're replying did not necessarily mean anything contrary to your point by what he said. To say that someone has permission to do something only means that they are not prohibited from doing it; they are under no obligation to refrain from doing it. It doesn't imply anything about whether they would have such permission were it not for some person granting it do them. That such permission may be morally deserved, and the denial thereof morally unjust, does not change the fact that it is a permission, only what kind of permission it is.
(In technical rights-theory terms, what the 1st Amendment grants is, amongst other things, a legal immunity against infringement of our liberty -- that is to say, our permission -- to speak freely. In other words, it grants us a legal claim against the government, imposing a legal obligation upon them to refrain from imposing any legal obligations upon us to refrain from speaking freely, implicitly on the grounds that such liberty -- that is, absence of contrary obligation -- is natural or inherent and thus beyond the rightful power of human legislators to impugn).
Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Broadcast spectrum even more so.
The FCC's original mandate was to govern allocation of broadcast spectrum; the naturally monopolistic tendencies of wired infrastructure (the need for eminent domain to build it, mostly) provides a reasonable justification for extending its purview to that as well.
But search engines are not natural monopolies. Anyone can come along, do it better than the other guys, and run off with their lunch money, so to speak. Just like Google did to all the search engines that they put out of business or pushed to the sidelines when they debuted. Sure, overturning a very popular brand like Google in the minds of users will be difficult, but that's mostly because Google is good enough for most people; if it sucked, people would be happy to try something new, and if a competitor search engine can't even carve out a little niche for itself to compete in, it obviously has nothing of significant benefit to offer.
And unlike the inevitable Microsoft comparison, switching away from Google to another search engine costs the users absolutely nothing, compared to not only the cost of acquiring an alternative operating system, but of learning it and changing over almost all of your apps which depend on it. If switching from Windows to Linux or OSX or BSD or what have you were as cheap and easy as switching from Google to Yahoo or vice versa, I suspect MS wouldn't have nearly the stranglehold it has on the operating system market.
Point being, there's absolutely no need to regulate search engines, because this is about one of the clearest examples of where the free market can handle itself best.
On earth, oxygen is the most common element, making up about 47% of the earth's mass. Silicon is second, making up 28%... Seeing as how most rocks are mostly silica - silicon dioxide - and most of the mass of the earth is rock, this doesn't surprise me. Oxygen's tendency to bind up with everything into heavier compounds (aluminum oxides, iron oxides, etc) nicely explains its dominance on a rocky planet, too.
I wonder now how different a planet not predominantly silica would be. I've always presumed the other rocky planets in our solar system are made up of mostly the same kind of rock, but what difference would it make if a planet was mostly, say, iron oxide instead?
I know this is largely redundant with what others have said throughout this thread, but I think it needs saying together in one succinct form:
When you buy a Nook, you're buying two things bundled together: (1) a physical good which you own and can (or at least should be able to) do any damn thing you want to, and (2) the service of connectivity to Barnes & Noble to buy books. If you're unintentionally being given perpetual connectivity to the general internet for all purposes, then it's up to the service provider to stop giving you that service and start limiting what they give you to what you bought. If they do so, you have no right to complain about the loss of service you never bought; but until they do so, they have no right to complain if you use the service they're giving you.
It would be easy to respond to such a statement in kind. You don't like any kind of religion, so you fail to discern the differences in your attempt at lumping them all together as worthless and meaningless.
Except that he's not, as far as I can tell at least, failing to discern the differences; he's saying the differences are negligible in light of their similarities.
To borrow the theme of another analogy: Say one group of people thinks that all puppies should be brutally tortured to death. Another group used to do that, but now they only advocate that puppies should all just be taken out and shot in the head, quick and (relatively) painless. Clearly there is a difference here, and I'm confident most people would object <em>more</em> to the former group than the latter, but hopefully most people would likewise condemn them both and ask "why would you want to kill puppies to begin with!?"
The people condemning other religions in the same broad brush as they condemn scientology may very well agree that mainstream religions are generally less harmful today than scientology is, and yet see them both as sharing the same intolerable flaws despite their other differences.
I'm willing to bet you haven't [pulled down a single executable from a site and had it "just work"] -- that you've instead downloaded zips, dmgs, or mpkgs, neither of which are executables
For an OSX user running Safari at least, it really is just that easy. Safari will automatically unzip zips, untar tars, mount dmgs and other such things, throwing away the "wrappers" as it does so (with the exception of dmgs), leaving you with just the final contents of the download. So you click a link to download "MyApp.dmg.tar.zip", give it a moment to download, and up will pop a Finder window (the mounted dmg) containing "MyApp", and maybe a read me or some such. Copy it to where you want it or just double-click it to run it straight from the dmg (not a good idea for tidiness' sake, but something I see lots of users do anyway). No tar or zip file anywhere to be found; they were automatically expanded and discarded.
Just to be extra pedantic, the year 2000 was always going to be a leap year in the Gregorian calendar <p>I think his point was that turn-of-the-century years aren't usually leap years. A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4, unless it's divisible by 100, unless it's divisible by 400. So 1700 wasn't a leap year, nor was 1800, or 1900... but 2000 was, as was 1600 before it.</p>
The classic illustration of magnetic field lines is to put a big bar magnet on a table and sprinkle iron filings on and around it; they will end up tracing the magnetic field lines of the bar magnet.
So say they could construct the monopole equivalent of such a bar magnet, just one big lump of North or South. If we put that on a table and sprinkled iron filings on and around it, what (if any) lines would they end up tracing? Just rays away from the monopole?
I suggest that if Obama accepts this award, he be impeached for a serious breach of ethics. There are others in the world who actually did things, and he would be doing something immoral to willingly deprive them of their recognition.
Presidents cannot be impeached for what any random person or group thereof, no matter how prominent or large, deems a "breach of ethics" or "something immoral". They can only be impeached for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
Exactly. I have no love for electronic voting machines, but I'm not convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the 2004 election was rigged like the people the GGGPP were referring to. I wouldn't be surprised if it was... but then I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of voters really did vote for Bush even after four years of his crap. I have no doubts about the extent of human stupidity.
And they're the complementary, inverse set to the group of people who worked so hard and so fervently to prove the George Bush could not possibly have won the 2004 election.
No, in fact there's plenty of sane, normal people who fall into neither of those sets of wackos.
In philosophy of action, a widely-held position is that all actions are caused by a combination of a belief and a desire: a person has a desire for some end, and a belief that some action is a means to that end, and therefore that person performs that action. There's a lot of argument in philosophical circles about whether all actions are desire-motivated or whether some actions run counter to the actor's desires, so lets sidestep that by instead using a term like "intention" instead of "desire": a person intends something to be so (whether they desire it or not, who knows), and believes that some action will bring that state about, so they perform that action.
The scientific method is a method of getting our beliefs straight - that is, of making sure our beliefs are correct. You are right that just because something is scientifically possible doesn't mean it should be done, questions of "should" are separate from questions of "can"; but science is still half of the equation in correctly determining what actions to take. So your dichotomy of scientists secluded away having no impact on policy-making, vs scientists ruling with an iron slide rule doing anything just because they can, is a false one. Science needs to be engaged with public policy, or rather, policy-making procedures need to engage with science. To do otherwise would be like deciding that you would like to be on the other side of a canyon, and then ignoring the fact that you cannot fly unaided and so running off the cliff is not an effective means to that end.
[Semantics] are anything but insignificant, by definition.
"...from the Greek word σημαντικός (semantikos), "significant", from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that from σήμα (sema), "sign, mark, token"..."
Sorry, I was considering Xbox a form of Windows... guess that's not really accurate.
I could swear I remembered being pissed off (as a Mac user) that PC users got Oni first, but Googling now it appears that Oni was simultaneously released on all three platforms. Either way, Take Two (ugh) owned the rights to it by then so release dates for Oni can't really be attributed to Bungie policy.
Bungie wasn't working on a Myth III, by the way. That was created out of thin air by Mumbo Jumbo and is considered non-canon by most Mythers. They were, however, working on a Marathon 3 (not Infinity, which is pretty much just a stand-along expansion pack, but an actual sequel with new engine), before Myth stole the spotlight. A part of me has to wonder, given Halo's roots as a Marathon RTS, how much that Marathon 3 would have looked like how Halo turned out.
They were never exclusively a Mac developer, but many of their games came first to Mac and then later to Windows, and they may have had one that was a Mac exclusive.
Uh... no, everything Bungie made prior to the Myth series was Mac exclusive, with the exception of Marathon 2 which was later ported to Windows but began with every intention of being Mac exclusive like everything that came from Bungie before it.
Granted, most people these days have never heard of and wouldn't care about those prior titles, but they were there for years before Bungie ever published a single Windows title: Gnop!, Operation: Desert Storm, Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, and of course Marathon, Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity.
Further, during the Myth era, Bungie was the most equitable cross-platform developer I've ever seen. Not only were the Myth games simultaneous releases, but the only difference between the Mac version and the Windows version was the label on the box! The discs were dual-formatted. I have here my original Myth CDs, purchased in a box that say for Mac OS, from which I've installed Myth perfectly fine on both Mac and Windows machines over the years.
It wasn't until Oni and Halo that they shifted development to Windows-first and then Windows only.
Just to throw another anecdote out there for people to chew on:
I went through the (California) public school system through fifth grade. In 3rd grade I tested (not sure now what test) in the top 1% of students, and got bumped up into 4th grade early. Through all that time I found school pretty boring and tedious, and putting up with the other students even more so.
Early in 6th grade my parents pulled me out of the normal school system and had me home tutored through a program that the public school district provided for kids at the fringes of the academic bell curve. Basically each day a teacher would come by my house, return my graded assignments from yesterday, answer any questions I had, give me my new assignments and then leave me to work on them. This was some of the best (from my subjective experience) education I ever got; I was actually interested in what I was being taught and liked my teachers.
But that program only extended through the 8th grade, so in 9th grade my folks put me in a small, private, on-campus alternative school (~15 kids to a classroom, desks arranged in circles, first name basis with the teachers, environmental biology class that included mountain hikes, etc). By 10th grade that school had an online distance learning program and I went into that. Around that point I started spending most of my free time (after burning through my assignments) debating with college professors on UseNet, and learned more from them than I did from my official school. For 12th grade, in a different school district, I was in a similar program to my 6th-8th grade home tutoring, except I went to the teacher instead of them coming to me, and only once every two weeks instead of every day. I graduated high school half a year early, and went into the work force as a computer tech at a local shop.
When they went out of business a year or two later, I had to figure my own way into college/university (my parents are bright but neither are college-educated or really academic at all), got in easily with full scholarships, and went on to get two degrees (an AA in Multimedia Arts and Technologies and a BA in Philosophy) with straight As, and a 4.0/3.9 GPA (4.0 for the AA, 3.9 for the BA).
I'm now barely working part-time as an administrative assistant and occasionally tech/web/database guy at the same dead-end job I've been at since before I even had the AA, and have been searching in apparent futility for better work for the past two years since I finished the BA.
Where did I go wrong, and is my unusual education at all responsible for this?
Did you even finish reading my post before snapping like that? Quoth myself:
Though it would also seem necessary for the owner of a machine to be able to transfer ownership of that machine's output to someone else if they liked, e.g. if you were renting a machine, common sense would seem to suggest you own its output, even though you don't own the machine.
Your suggestion that (if I may rephrase) the user of the machine owns the rights to its output does sound like a solution to the other issues I discussed, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the biggest problem with a Star Trek transporter is that it's impossible, per the Uncertainty Principle, to "scan" all the information in a physical system and encode it in another. You'd have to (somehow, probably equally impossibly) entangle the original particles in your body with particles on the receiving end and then do the magic quantum measurement to sync you with those particles. The plus side is, you wouldn't need the vaporizer; you just would suddenly be on the other side, and the matter which had been your body would no longer be in the form of your body. That's why they call it quantum "teleportation" instead of quantum "replication" or some such; nothing is copied, the particle at the receiving end literally becomes the particle that was at the transmitting end, and the latter ceases to be what it was.
The main hole in that idea is that, unless I am mistaken, the entanglement is broken at the time of the second measurement. So the entangled particles don't act like a wormhole that you can just pump energy (and information) through; it's a one-time thing, that allows you to send an arbitrary-sized chunk of information and energy from one place to another instantly by sending a fixed-size chunk of information and energy normally.
I believe so, yes. You could think of it something like data compression with built-in encryption. We establish a link (entangle our pairs of particles), then on my end I arrange my particles to encode a message, then I send you (at light speed or less) instructions telling you what to do to sync your particles with mine (sort of like giving you the encryption key and compression codec), and then BAM you see the message, which could be much larger than the "key" instructions I sent.
/. before of signals propagating "fast than light" through some media, because the medium at the front edge of the signal can tell somehow what the rest of the signal is going to be just from the leading edge; another case of sending a big chunk of information "faster than light" via sending a smaller chunk of information at light speed).
But I am not a physicist, so physicists feel free to correct me.
(Incidentally, I wonder if this is related to the phenomena that have been covered here on
I am not a physicist so this is just my educated-layperson's take on it, but I believe what happens is the energy-states of both entangles particles "sync" at the moment of the (second) measurement. So we've got our two entangles particles; I put mine into a higher-energy state, consuming energy from some source on my end and storing it in the particle. Then when my colleagues perform the directed measurement on their end, they measure their particle in a high-energy state, tapping the energy from the particle in the process (as is always the case with quantum measurements), or in other words, collapsing it back into a low-energy state, with the energy going into the system of their measuring apparatus, and then perhaps on to elsewhere. At that moment, as they make their measurement, our two particles exactly mirror each other, so my particle ALSO collapses back into a low-energy state. (And also, if I'm not mistaken, breaking the entanglement; so, this can only be done once per entangled pair).
So I take energy from something in my lab and put it into a particle, then later (if my colleagues do as instructed) my particle just collapses into a lower-energy state without giving me any of that energy back, the energy apparently just disappearing. Meanwhile on the other end, my colleagues follow some instructions from me and suddenly find their particle exhibiting energy it got apparently from nowhere. The net effect, between the two ends of the entanglement, is that I pump energy into a particle on my end and it comes out of a particle on their end without ever traversing the distance in between (although some other energy, carrying the signal encoding my instructions, had to traverse that distance, but it could be much less energy than is transferred through the entanglement).
People both here and on the linked blog article seem to be thinking that this "teleportation" talk is all about sending things from one place to another faster than light. That's not the big deal; it's already well-established that that cannot be done, at least not via quantum entanglement.
The breakthrough the article is talking about is moving energy from one place to another "instantly" by means of performing the right pair of measurements on both end; but the communication between ends about what measurements to make still happens at light speed or less.
For example, say I have a bunch of particles here on Earth and my colleagues on Mars have another bunch of particles entangled with mine. Mars is at the moment ten light-minutes away from each. On my end, I perform a measurement on (i.e. I interact with) my particles in a way which raises their energy from X joules to Y joules; I then send a radio transmission (with said transmission using less than Y-X joules) to my colleagues on Mars giving them instructions for what measurements to make on their end, i.e. I transmit information, in normal ways, at the speed of light or less.
Ten minutes later, my colleagues on Mars get my message, perform the measurement, and BAM, the energy of their particles jumps up to Y joules. The most efficient classical alternative for transmitting that (Y-X) joules of energy would be to beam a signal of said energy between the two points, but that requires a clear line of sight between them, or some set of relays capable of carrying that signal, each of which adds inefficiency to the transmission. An even less efficient, even more classical method would be to take whatever the energy is stored in here on Earth and physically move it to its destination, which is both much slower and much less energy-efficient.
With this method, my colleagues could be buried deep underground in a sealed lab with no way of getting anything in or out except for a limited range of radio signals carried by equipment incapable of carrying high-power signals... and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy straight into their lab just beaming energy into some particles in my lab and then telling them over the radio what to do in their lab to receive it.
The conclusions arrived to in Stevens' opinion REQUIRE that you assume all non-oral types of speech do not apply concerning the part of the 1st amendment that refers to speech. Which means that in order to accept his conclusions, you have to assume that no other types of speech exist. This means that things like flag-burning, as abhorrent and juvenile as I personally find it, could be legislated as to be illegal.
No, it would mean that it wouldn't be protected by the 1st Amendment. Technically speaking, unless they can somehow rationalize prohibition of flag burning as serving one of these few purposes, Congress has no authority to do so. Of course, given the idiocy of legal precedent that's elapsed since that document was written, the courts would probably rule that as flags can be made in one state and sold in another, the regulation of the burning thereof is conductive to the purpose of regulating interstate commerce...
The other problem with your comparison is that libraries have permission to lend books
Yeah, I was up to you until that point. It's the other way around. Nobody "gives" people permission to lend or even copy books. Instead, the government grants authors and "content creators" the ability to restrict this right of copy for a limited time. That's copyright.
The right to use information is among the inalienable right granted by our Creator (whomever this might be), the right of liberty. It is enshrined in the first amendment, the right to free speech, because the written word is a manifestation of speech.
I agree with the substance of your post but I'd like to point out that the person to whom you're replying did not necessarily mean anything contrary to your point by what he said. To say that someone has permission to do something only means that they are not prohibited from doing it; they are under no obligation to refrain from doing it. It doesn't imply anything about whether they would have such permission were it not for some person granting it do them. That such permission may be morally deserved, and the denial thereof morally unjust, does not change the fact that it is a permission, only what kind of permission it is.
(In technical rights-theory terms, what the 1st Amendment grants is, amongst other things, a legal immunity against infringement of our liberty -- that is to say, our permission -- to speak freely. In other words, it grants us a legal claim against the government, imposing a legal obligation upon them to refrain from imposing any legal obligations upon us to refrain from speaking freely, implicitly on the grounds that such liberty -- that is, absence of contrary obligation -- is natural or inherent and thus beyond the rightful power of human legislators to impugn).
I believe you're thinking of "Fermirotica", #563: "On average, someone within distance r of you is having sex." http://xkcd.com/563/
Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Broadcast spectrum even more so.
The FCC's original mandate was to govern allocation of broadcast spectrum; the naturally monopolistic tendencies of wired infrastructure (the need for eminent domain to build it, mostly) provides a reasonable justification for extending its purview to that as well.
But search engines are not natural monopolies. Anyone can come along, do it better than the other guys, and run off with their lunch money, so to speak. Just like Google did to all the search engines that they put out of business or pushed to the sidelines when they debuted. Sure, overturning a very popular brand like Google in the minds of users will be difficult, but that's mostly because Google is good enough for most people; if it sucked, people would be happy to try something new, and if a competitor search engine can't even carve out a little niche for itself to compete in, it obviously has nothing of significant benefit to offer.
And unlike the inevitable Microsoft comparison, switching away from Google to another search engine costs the users absolutely nothing, compared to not only the cost of acquiring an alternative operating system, but of learning it and changing over almost all of your apps which depend on it. If switching from Windows to Linux or OSX or BSD or what have you were as cheap and easy as switching from Google to Yahoo or vice versa, I suspect MS wouldn't have nearly the stranglehold it has on the operating system market.
Point being, there's absolutely no need to regulate search engines, because this is about one of the clearest examples of where the free market can handle itself best.
On earth, oxygen is the most common element, making up about 47% of the earth's mass. Silicon is second, making up 28%...
Seeing as how most rocks are mostly silica - silicon dioxide - and most of the mass of the earth is rock, this doesn't surprise me. Oxygen's tendency to bind up with everything into heavier compounds (aluminum oxides, iron oxides, etc) nicely explains its dominance on a rocky planet, too.
I wonder now how different a planet not predominantly silica would be. I've always presumed the other rocky planets in our solar system are made up of mostly the same kind of rock, but what difference would it make if a planet was mostly, say, iron oxide instead?
I know this is largely redundant with what others have said throughout this thread, but I think it needs saying together in one succinct form:
When you buy a Nook, you're buying two things bundled together: (1) a physical good which you own and can (or at least should be able to) do any damn thing you want to, and (2) the service of connectivity to Barnes & Noble to buy books. If you're unintentionally being given perpetual connectivity to the general internet for all purposes, then it's up to the service provider to stop giving you that service and start limiting what they give you to what you bought. If they do so, you have no right to complain about the loss of service you never bought; but until they do so, they have no right to complain if you use the service they're giving you.
Along most of the American eastern and southern coasts, the word "nook" is slang for "vagina". That's why sex is sometimes referred to as "nookie".
And in some Commonwealth countries, "root" as a verb means "have sex with" (c.f. "fuck").
So watch out ladies, if you open the ports on your nook you might get rooted.
It would be easy to respond to such a statement in kind. You don't like any kind of religion, so you fail to discern the differences in your attempt at lumping them all together as worthless and meaningless.
Except that he's not, as far as I can tell at least, failing to discern the differences; he's saying the differences are negligible in light of their similarities.
To borrow the theme of another analogy:
Say one group of people thinks that all puppies should be brutally tortured to death. Another group used to do that, but now they only advocate that puppies should all just be taken out and shot in the head, quick and (relatively) painless. Clearly there is a difference here, and I'm confident most people would object <em>more</em> to the former group than the latter, but hopefully most people would likewise condemn them both and ask "why would you want to kill puppies to begin with!?"
The people condemning other religions in the same broad brush as they condemn scientology may very well agree that mainstream religions are generally less harmful today than scientology is, and yet see them both as sharing the same intolerable flaws despite their other differences.
I'm willing to bet you haven't [pulled down a single executable from a site and had it "just work"] -- that you've instead downloaded zips, dmgs, or mpkgs, neither of which are executables
For an OSX user running Safari at least, it really is just that easy. Safari will automatically unzip zips, untar tars, mount dmgs and other such things, throwing away the "wrappers" as it does so (with the exception of dmgs), leaving you with just the final contents of the download. So you click a link to download "MyApp.dmg.tar.zip", give it a moment to download, and up will pop a Finder window (the mounted dmg) containing "MyApp", and maybe a read me or some such. Copy it to where you want it or just double-click it to run it straight from the dmg (not a good idea for tidiness' sake, but something I see lots of users do anyway). No tar or zip file anywhere to be found; they were automatically expanded and discarded.
Just to be extra pedantic, the year 2000 was always going to be a leap year in the Gregorian calendar
<p>I think his point was that turn-of-the-century years aren't usually leap years. A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4, unless it's divisible by 100, unless it's divisible by 400. So 1700 wasn't a leap year, nor was 1800, or 1900... but 2000 was, as was 1600 before it.</p>
The classic illustration of magnetic field lines is to put a big bar magnet on a table and sprinkle iron filings on and around it; they will end up tracing the magnetic field lines of the bar magnet.
So say they could construct the monopole equivalent of such a bar magnet, just one big lump of North or South. If we put that on a table and sprinkled iron filings on and around it, what (if any) lines would they end up tracing? Just rays away from the monopole?
I suggest that if Obama accepts this award, he be impeached for a serious breach of ethics. There are others in the world who actually did things, and he would be doing something immoral to willingly deprive them of their recognition.
Presidents cannot be impeached for what any random person or group thereof, no matter how prominent or large, deems a "breach of ethics" or "something immoral". They can only be impeached for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
Exactly. I have no love for electronic voting machines, but I'm not convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the 2004 election was rigged like the people the GGGPP were referring to. I wouldn't be surprised if it was... but then I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of voters really did vote for Bush even after four years of his crap. I have no doubts about the extent of human stupidity.
And they're the complementary, inverse set to the group of people who worked so hard and so fervently to prove the George Bush could not possibly have won the 2004 election.
No, in fact there's plenty of sane, normal people who fall into neither of those sets of wackos.
In philosophy of action, a widely-held position is that all actions are caused by a combination of a belief and a desire: a person has a desire for some end, and a belief that some action is a means to that end, and therefore that person performs that action. There's a lot of argument in philosophical circles about whether all actions are desire-motivated or whether some actions run counter to the actor's desires, so lets sidestep that by instead using a term like "intention" instead of "desire": a person intends something to be so (whether they desire it or not, who knows), and believes that some action will bring that state about, so they perform that action.
The scientific method is a method of getting our beliefs straight - that is, of making sure our beliefs are correct. You are right that just because something is scientifically possible doesn't mean it should be done, questions of "should" are separate from questions of "can"; but science is still half of the equation in correctly determining what actions to take. So your dichotomy of scientists secluded away having no impact on policy-making, vs scientists ruling with an iron slide rule doing anything just because they can, is a false one. Science needs to be engaged with public policy, or rather, policy-making procedures need to engage with science. To do otherwise would be like deciding that you would like to be on the other side of a canyon, and then ignoring the fact that you cannot fly unaided and so running off the cliff is not an effective means to that end.
[Semantics] are anything but insignificant, by definition.
"...from the Greek word σημαντικός (semantikos), "significant", from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that from σήμα (sema), "sign, mark, token"..."
I see what you did there.
Sorry, I was considering Xbox a form of Windows... guess that's not really accurate.
I could swear I remembered being pissed off (as a Mac user) that PC users got Oni first, but Googling now it appears that Oni was simultaneously released on all three platforms. Either way, Take Two (ugh) owned the rights to it by then so release dates for Oni can't really be attributed to Bungie policy.
Bungie wasn't working on a Myth III, by the way. That was created out of thin air by Mumbo Jumbo and is considered non-canon by most Mythers. They were, however, working on a Marathon 3 (not Infinity, which is pretty much just a stand-along expansion pack, but an actual sequel with new engine), before Myth stole the spotlight. A part of me has to wonder, given Halo's roots as a Marathon RTS, how much that Marathon 3 would have looked like how Halo turned out.
They were never exclusively a Mac developer, but many of their games came first to Mac and then later to Windows, and they may have had one that was a Mac exclusive.
Uh... no, everything Bungie made prior to the Myth series was Mac exclusive, with the exception of Marathon 2 which was later ported to Windows but began with every intention of being Mac exclusive like everything that came from Bungie before it.
Granted, most people these days have never heard of and wouldn't care about those prior titles, but they were there for years before Bungie ever published a single Windows title: Gnop!, Operation: Desert Storm, Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, and of course Marathon, Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity.
Further, during the Myth era, Bungie was the most equitable cross-platform developer I've ever seen. Not only were the Myth games simultaneous releases, but the only difference between the Mac version and the Windows version was the label on the box! The discs were dual-formatted. I have here my original Myth CDs, purchased in a box that say for Mac OS, from which I've installed Myth perfectly fine on both Mac and Windows machines over the years.
It wasn't until Oni and Halo that they shifted development to Windows-first and then Windows only.
I miss the old Bungie...
Just to throw another anecdote out there for people to chew on:
I went through the (California) public school system through fifth grade.
In 3rd grade I tested (not sure now what test) in the top 1% of students, and got bumped up into 4th grade early.
Through all that time I found school pretty boring and tedious, and putting up with the other students even more so.
Early in 6th grade my parents pulled me out of the normal school system and had me home tutored through a program that the public school district provided for kids at the fringes of the academic bell curve. Basically each day a teacher would come by my house, return my graded assignments from yesterday, answer any questions I had, give me my new assignments and then leave me to work on them. This was some of the best (from my subjective experience) education I ever got; I was actually interested in what I was being taught and liked my teachers.
But that program only extended through the 8th grade, so in 9th grade my folks put me in a small, private, on-campus alternative school (~15 kids to a classroom, desks arranged in circles, first name basis with the teachers, environmental biology class that included mountain hikes, etc). By 10th grade that school had an online distance learning program and I went into that. Around that point I started spending most of my free time (after burning through my assignments) debating with college professors on UseNet, and learned more from them than I did from my official school. For 12th grade, in a different school district, I was in a similar program to my 6th-8th grade home tutoring, except I went to the teacher instead of them coming to me, and only once every two weeks instead of every day. I graduated high school half a year early, and went into the work force as a computer tech at a local shop.
When they went out of business a year or two later, I had to figure my own way into college/university (my parents are bright but neither are college-educated or really academic at all), got in easily with full scholarships, and went on to get two degrees (an AA in Multimedia Arts and Technologies and a BA in Philosophy) with straight As, and a 4.0/3.9 GPA (4.0 for the AA, 3.9 for the BA).
I'm now barely working part-time as an administrative assistant and occasionally tech/web/database guy at the same dead-end job I've been at since before I even had the AA, and have been searching in apparent futility for better work for the past two years since I finished the BA.
Where did I go wrong, and is my unusual education at all responsible for this?
Though it would also seem necessary for the owner of a machine to be able to transfer ownership of that machine's output to someone else if they liked, e.g. if you were renting a machine, common sense would seem to suggest you own its output, even though you don't own the machine.
Your suggestion that (if I may rephrase) the user of the machine owns the rights to its output does sound like a solution to the other issues I discussed, though.