â¦said the person who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter
I love it how these companies and even our own government can't keep people from talking about secrets, like it's so fucking juicy that everyone just has to spill it out to the press.
Yes, I'm not a moron, I know these "not authorized" folks are probably explicitly authorized... It's just the whole security "dance" is so fucking silly.
Except if it's a conspiracy, of course. Everyone knows that the government manages to keep its conspiracies completely secret.
Moreover, pressing the power button for several seconds will forcefully switch the computer off even if it has totally crashed (it's not completely equivalent to a hard switch, because there's still power for things like Wake on LAN).
I also noticed how instructions for adding hardware to the computers changed: Back when power switches were real power switches, they recommended to keep the computer plugged in (but of course switched off) when adding hardware. That's because that way the computer remained grounded. Since those computers physically cut power, it was safe. Later, the documentation said to plug off the computer. That's of course because now the computer isn't really switched off, it's in standby.
"As long as I was only warm-booting the machine (i.e., without turning off the power), the RAM disk would stay intact, and I could boot from RAM, which made everything run lighting fast."
I'm pretty sure I could get the same level of understanding of current computers as I could with past computers, if I had the same amount of time for it time as back then.
My current desktop computer (a dual core, so not something from last century) still has it. My laptop doesn't, however. But then, I don't really need it.
I don't say they should be nothing. I wouldn't oppose a new interface if it had networking transparency built-in from the start (because that's the only way networking can get efficient). Also, if they want to reduce context switching, they should put more work into the server, not less. I think the Berlin/Fresco project was going in the right direction; unfortunately it died because at some point the developers got at odds with each others about certain design decisions.
I think a better analogy would be moving a glass of water to another place. If you do it quickly, the water will slosh a lot. However, if you move it slowly enough, the water will remain calm.
If knowing the Hamiltonian would mean knowing the ground state of that Hamiltonian, things like protein folding would be a non-problem: There we definitively know the Hamiltonian (it's just a bunch of electrically charged particles with spin, after all).
Network transparency is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the local experience.
Compositing window management is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the network experience.
Besides, why do you think Wayland makes network transparency impossible?
Not exactly impossible. But it is based on shared buffers. Adding network transparency would mean that you continuously transfer buffers over the network, causing huge network traffic. Already today, modern X applications are often slow like morasses over "slow" internet connections (i.e. DSL). After reading the Wayland FAQ, I think I now understand why:
From the FAQ: The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. I don't know what XFLDs are, but I don't consider the X server rendering fonts and providing graphics primitives a bad idea. But I guess if modern X programs indeed don't use those, this explains why they perform so badly over the network: They probably indeed render locally and push the pixels over the network.
But the fix is not to remove the functionality, the fix is making programs use it.
Please note that the correct URL is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 That way, it will work with anything parsing correctly formed URLs (like QuietUrl).
Of course it doesn't help that Slashdot must be prevented to recognize that as URL, because otherwise it "helpfully" converts the %28 and %29 back to parentheses, forming an invalid URL and thus breaking everything expecting a valid one (also it doesn't help that Firefox [and probably other browsers] does the same in the URL bar, thus giving the impression that this would indeed be a correct URL - well, at least when doing copy&paste they convert it back to a valid URL [never mind that this way they break the fundamental assumption of copy&paste that what you paste is exactly what you copied]).
in the case of Many Worlds, "and then the entire universe instantaneously splits, and you find yourself in one of the copies". And if both of those sound pretty damn non-local to you, well done.
That's a misunderstanding of Many Worlds. The "splitting" of worlds is not a physical process, but only a perception of observers. In Many Worlds, what objectively happens is that the wave function evolves according to normal unitary evolution, unconditionally. There's nothing special happening at observation. It's just that observation entangles the observer with the observed system (that's a consequence of unitary evolution). The splitting of woulds only happens in the observer's perception. Basically (and extremely simplified) the evolution is from
|unmeasured system, oberver has not observed anything>
to
N(|system is in state 1, observer has observed state 1>+|system is in state 2, observer has observed state 2>+...)
That's a consequence of unitary evolution, and contains no non-locality (the interaction between the observer and the system, which created the entanglement, is completely local). As one can see, all terms contain an "observer has observed state n", but none contains a term "observer has observed a superposition of states m and n" or similar (as I said, it's extremely simplified; actually there's a lot more behind the question why those superpositions are not seen). Now Many Worlds says that this is what really happens, and since there is no collapse, all the terms are equally real, and therefore your observer has "split" into a set of observers each of whom have observed one of the states. However note that, again, this split is not a separate physical process; from an "outside view" nothing special happened except for an interaction which entangled the observer with the system. That's not in any way different from the interactions which entangle systems in the laboratory.
well, sure. But you are again, mixing terms. Cotton is a raw material - product, it's wealth. Gold is money. In some cases cotton can be more useful than gold: socks have cotton in them for example, you won't use gold for socks. But you can buy socks with gold.
Gold is also a raw material. Indeed, it is an element, which is about as raw as you can get for materials.
With fiat you will buy less and less cotton over time, as fiat is printed by politicians, but with gold you'll buy at worst the same amount and hopefully if cotton production is increased, you'll get more for the same amount of gold tomorrow once that happens.
Or, if for some reason the government suddenly decides to sell off the gold reserves all at once, you'll get much less cotton for your gold.
It really sounds as though you dont believe that there is such a thing as morality.
No, it doesn't. It sounds as if he doesn't see any moral issues in porn, and that's what he states. Indeed, he even hints at that he would find it immoral if people are exploited for making porn. Which completely contradicts your claim.
It's Slashdot. It's always been this way. People submit worthless articles, counterproductive articles, pointless articles, slashvertising articles, articles which perceptibly reduce the collective IQ of the universe.... which editors (don't) improve...
... and people complain about this... Don't forget the complaining part!!! It's an integral part of the traditions in Slashdot history... As is complaining about all the complaints when people should know better because this is Slashdot after all...;)
... and people complaining about the complaints about the complaints... ... and people complaining about the complaints about the complaints about the complaints... ... and people complaining about the complaints about the complaints about the complaints about the complaints...
In QM, particle states are related to each other across time and space. Binding of particles is transient; they are, and are then are not. Within the context of inside the brain, are states bound to either other either through the quantum effect or other synaptic-like connection? I don't believe there's a sufficient answer for this question today.
I don't believe it makes much of a difference. If the brain indeed managed to keep entangled states (that's the name for those states "related to each other across time and space"), it would be capable to use some quantum computing (I personally don't think there are inter-neural entangled states in the brain because entanglement is such a fragile resource and the brain is full of possible sources of decoherence, but I could of course be wrong about that). But as I said, that just would mean that it can solve certain problems faster. I cannot see how that should be related to consciousness (except that it might reduce the resources needed to generate it). It certainly cannot solve the question of consciousness, because for every quantum process there's, at least in principle, a classical process which can produce the same result (except that it uses vastly more resources, or needs vastly more time). So at best, quantum mechanics might explain why our brain is sufficient to produce consciousness. But it definitely won't explain consciousness per se.
If the quantum effect, either for memory or state transition influencing is possible inside the brain, then how about across brains, across wide distances. It would explain a lot of phenomena where people seem to know facts instantly about others that are identified as various descriptions of precognition, "psychic" events, even those related to spiritual observations.
No, it wouldn't. It's a central theorem of quantum information that entanglement doesn't allow you to transmit information (no-signalling). What you can use it for is to pack more information into one of the particles before sending it, than you could do without the entanglement (that's called "dense coding", or sometimes "superdense coding").
Unfortunately in popular science texts entanglement is often described incorrectly (even by people who should know better) by phrases like "the second particle follows any change done to the first" or similar. Which is wrong. What you can do is "non-local random information generation" where variables which didn't have a defined value before become correlated values on measurement (and yes, one can prove that the value wasn't defined before, that's what Bell's inequality is about). That's already all of the non-locality in the quantum state. Note that this measurement breaks the entanglement. Also note that non-measurement interactions don't affect the other side at all. So say your particles are entangled in a way that if both parties emasure the same variable, they both get the same value. Now assume that one party, before measuring the value, makes a change which, if the value were defined, would cause that value to be changed, and then measures. Then the other particle does not change; the effect is the same as if he had measured first, and then changed the system (and accordingly adapted his result to reflect the change). Also note that whenever this happens, the signal you get on either side is just noise. It's only after you know the results of the other side as well that you can see any structure (in the form of correlations).
Also note that quantum teleportation doesn't violate the principles written above either. To do quantum teleportation, you need to send classical information obtained by a measurement to the other party, and only with this classical information the other party can reconstruct the teleported quantum state. Therefore even here you cannot transmit information without explicitly sending a physical signal.
So what does it mean for explaining "psychic" events with QM? W
Also from TFA, in the same section: "To minimize the impact on others, show explicitly which parts of the work are under which license."
I'm pretty sure I read the whole length of the SFLC's paper about how to reuse permissive-licensed code under a copyleft license like the GPL, but I can't remember anything in there that showed how to indicate which parts of a file are under one license versus another.
Maybe they're suggesting that people just do it on a file-by-file basis, but that part seems mostly like a no-brainer (no?).
I guess anything which is non-ambiguous should work. But doing it on a per-file basis is probably the simplest and most sane solution.
Bullshit. Five FSF licenses and the Apache license does not count for an overview of all the free software licenses out there. They intentionally glossed over the BSD license because it provides more freedom to developers and doesn't require copyright assignment to the FSF, period.
Nonsense. You don't need a copyright assignment to the FSF to license anything under any of the GNU licenses. You only need a copyright assignment if you want your code to become part of an official GNU project, that is, a project maintained by the FSF. Note that this doesn't even include creating a fork of such a project (e.g. making your own modified version of GCC). Only if you want the FSF to distribute your code as part of GNU, you have to assign. Distribute it yourself (or have someone else distribute it who doesn't want the assignment), and there's no need for copyright assignment.
I think almost nobody says the non-free stuff deserves no protection. For example, if you took the non-free song of someone else and then claimed you wrote it and spread copies under that claim, I'm sure that the vast majority of people here would against you, including those who wouldn't otherwise have any problem with you spreading copies of the song left and right.
Slashdot Mirror
â¦said the person who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter
I love it how these companies and even our own government can't keep people from talking about secrets, like it's so fucking juicy that everyone just has to spill it out to the press.
Yes, I'm not a moron, I know these "not authorized" folks are probably explicitly authorized... It's just the whole security "dance" is so fucking silly.
Except if it's a conspiracy, of course. Everyone knows that the government manages to keep its conspiracies completely secret.
Moreover, pressing the power button for several seconds will forcefully switch the computer off even if it has totally crashed (it's not completely equivalent to a hard switch, because there's still power for things like Wake on LAN).
I also noticed how instructions for adding hardware to the computers changed: Back when power switches were real power switches, they recommended to keep the computer plugged in (but of course switched off) when adding hardware. That's because that way the computer remained grounded. Since those computers physically cut power, it was safe. Later, the documentation said to plug off the computer. That's of course because now the computer isn't really switched off, it's in standby.
You missed the following from the OP:
"As long as I was only warm-booting the machine (i.e., without turning off the power), the RAM disk would stay intact, and I could boot from RAM, which made everything run lighting fast."
I strongly doubt that works with tmpfs or ramfs.
I'm pretty sure I could get the same level of understanding of current computers as I could with past computers, if I had the same amount of time for it time as back then.
The reset switch/button!
My current desktop computer (a dual core, so not something from last century) still has it. My laptop doesn't, however.
But then, I don't really need it.
I don't say they should be nothing. I wouldn't oppose a new interface if it had networking transparency built-in from the start (because that's the only way networking can get efficient). Also, if they want to reduce context switching, they should put more work into the server, not less. I think the Berlin/Fresco project was going in the right direction; unfortunately it died because at some point the developers got at odds with each others about certain design decisions.
I think a better analogy would be moving a glass of water to another place. If you do it quickly, the water will slosh a lot. However, if you move it slowly enough, the water will remain calm.
If knowing the Hamiltonian would mean knowing the ground state of that Hamiltonian, things like protein folding would be a non-problem: There we definitively know the Hamiltonian (it's just a bunch of electrically charged particles with spin, after all).
Compositing window management is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the network experience.
Not exactly impossible. But it is based on shared buffers. Adding network transparency would mean that you continuously transfer buffers over the network, causing huge network traffic. Already today, modern X applications are often slow like morasses over "slow" internet connections (i.e. DSL). After reading the Wayland FAQ, I think I now understand why:
From the FAQ:
The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives.
I don't know what XFLDs are, but I don't consider the X server rendering fonts and providing graphics primitives a bad idea. But I guess if modern X programs indeed don't use those, this explains why they perform so badly over the network: They probably indeed render locally and push the pixels over the network.
But the fix is not to remove the functionality, the fix is making programs use it.
Please note that the correct URL is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 That way, it will work with anything parsing correctly formed URLs (like QuietUrl).
Of course it doesn't help that Slashdot must be prevented to recognize that as URL, because otherwise it "helpfully" converts the %28 and %29 back to parentheses, forming an invalid URL and thus breaking everything expecting a valid one (also it doesn't help that Firefox [and probably other browsers] does the same in the URL bar, thus giving the impression that this would indeed be a correct URL - well, at least when doing copy&paste they convert it back to a valid URL [never mind that this way they break the fundamental assumption of copy&paste that what you paste is exactly what you copied]).
That's a misunderstanding of Many Worlds. The "splitting" of worlds is not a physical process, but only a perception of observers. In Many Worlds, what objectively happens is that the wave function evolves according to normal unitary evolution, unconditionally. There's nothing special happening at observation. It's just that observation entangles the observer with the observed system (that's a consequence of unitary evolution). The splitting of woulds only happens in the observer's perception. Basically (and extremely simplified) the evolution is from
|unmeasured system, oberver has not observed anything>
to
N(|system is in state 1, observer has observed state 1>+|system is in state 2, observer has observed state 2>+...)
That's a consequence of unitary evolution, and contains no non-locality (the interaction between the observer and the system, which created the entanglement, is completely local). As one can see, all terms contain an "observer has observed state n", but none contains a term "observer has observed a superposition of states m and n" or similar (as I said, it's extremely simplified; actually there's a lot more behind the question why those superpositions are not seen). Now Many Worlds says that this is what really happens, and since there is no collapse, all the terms are equally real, and therefore your observer has "split" into a set of observers each of whom have observed one of the states. However note that, again, this split is not a separate physical process; from an "outside view" nothing special happened except for an interaction which entangled the observer with the system. That's not in any way different from the interactions which entangle systems in the laboratory.
...but does it mean that there's no dark matter afterall?
No. It just means that there's as much ordinary matter now as there was after the big bang, and we now know where it is.
well, sure. But you are again, mixing terms. Cotton is a raw material - product, it's wealth. Gold is money. In some cases cotton can be more useful than gold: socks have cotton in them for example, you won't use gold for socks. But you can buy socks with gold.
Gold is also a raw material. Indeed, it is an element, which is about as raw as you can get for materials.
With fiat you will buy less and less cotton over time, as fiat is printed by politicians, but with gold you'll buy at worst the same amount and hopefully if cotton production is increased, you'll get more for the same amount of gold tomorrow once that happens.
Or, if for some reason the government suddenly decides to sell off the gold reserves all at once, you'll get much less cotton for your gold.
No, it doesn't. It sounds as if he doesn't see any moral issues in porn, and that's what he states. Indeed, he even hints at that he would find it immoral if people are exploited for making porn. Which completely contradicts your claim.
Well, I know "ssh" only in lower case.
I don't know about BBSSH, though.
It's Slashdot. It's always been this way. People submit worthless articles, counterproductive articles, pointless articles, slashvertising articles, articles which perceptibly reduce the collective IQ of the universe.... which editors (don't) improve...
... and people complain about this... Don't forget the complaining part!!! It's an integral part of the traditions in Slashdot history... As is complaining about all the complaints when people should know better because this is Slashdot after all... ;)
... and people complaining about the complaints about the complaints ...
... and people complaining about the complaints about the complaints about the complaints ...
... and people complaining about the complaints about the complaints about the complaints about the complaints ...
Did the missing mass form a black hole which then sucked the server in, it is it just the regular Slashdot effect?
Yes: Instead of buying gold, you could as well buy cotton. Which has the additional advantage that it seems less attractive to thieves. ;-)
Without porn, what is the point of the Internet?
Slashdot.
I don't believe it makes much of a difference. If the brain indeed managed to keep entangled states (that's the name for those states "related to each other across time and space"), it would be capable to use some quantum computing (I personally don't think there are inter-neural entangled states in the brain because entanglement is such a fragile resource and the brain is full of possible sources of decoherence, but I could of course be wrong about that). But as I said, that just would mean that it can solve certain problems faster. I cannot see how that should be related to consciousness (except that it might reduce the resources needed to generate it). It certainly cannot solve the question of consciousness, because for every quantum process there's, at least in principle, a classical process which can produce the same result (except that it uses vastly more resources, or needs vastly more time). So at best, quantum mechanics might explain why our brain is sufficient to produce consciousness. But it definitely won't explain consciousness per se.
No, it wouldn't. It's a central theorem of quantum information that entanglement doesn't allow you to transmit information (no-signalling). What you can use it for is to pack more information into one of the particles before sending it, than you could do without the entanglement (that's called "dense coding", or sometimes "superdense coding").
Unfortunately in popular science texts entanglement is often described incorrectly (even by people who should know better) by phrases like "the second particle follows any change done to the first" or similar. Which is wrong. What you can do is "non-local random information generation" where variables which didn't have a defined value before become correlated values on measurement (and yes, one can prove that the value wasn't defined before, that's what Bell's inequality is about). That's already all of the non-locality in the quantum state. Note that this measurement breaks the entanglement. Also note that non-measurement interactions don't affect the other side at all. So say your particles are entangled in a way that if both parties emasure the same variable, they both get the same value. Now assume that one party, before measuring the value, makes a change which, if the value were defined, would cause that value to be changed, and then measures. Then the other particle does not change; the effect is the same as if he had measured first, and then changed the system (and accordingly adapted his result to reflect the change). Also note that whenever this happens, the signal you get on either side is just noise. It's only after you know the results of the other side as well that you can see any structure (in the form of correlations).
Also note that quantum teleportation doesn't violate the principles written above either. To do quantum teleportation, you need to send classical information obtained by a measurement to the other party, and only with this classical information the other party can reconstruct the teleported quantum state. Therefore even here you cannot transmit information without explicitly sending a physical signal.
So what does it mean for explaining "psychic" events with QM? W
Also from TFA, in the same section: "To minimize the impact on others, show explicitly which parts of the work are under which license."
I'm pretty sure I read the whole length of the SFLC's paper about how to reuse permissive-licensed code under a copyleft license like the GPL, but I can't remember anything in there that showed how to indicate which parts of a file are under one license versus another.
Maybe they're suggesting that people just do it on a file-by-file basis, but that part seems mostly like a no-brainer (no?).
I guess anything which is non-ambiguous should work.
But doing it on a per-file basis is probably the simplest and most sane solution.
Bullshit. Five FSF licenses and the Apache license does not count for an overview of all the free software licenses out there. They intentionally glossed over the BSD license because it provides more freedom to developers and doesn't require copyright assignment to the FSF, period.
Nonsense. You don't need a copyright assignment to the FSF to license anything under any of the GNU licenses. You only need a copyright assignment if you want your code to become part of an official GNU project, that is, a project maintained by the FSF. Note that this doesn't even include creating a fork of such a project (e.g. making your own modified version of GCC). Only if you want the FSF to distribute your code as part of GNU, you have to assign. Distribute it yourself (or have someone else distribute it who doesn't want the assignment), and there's no need for copyright assignment.
Where the heel did you find that quote. Certainly not in the linked recommendation.
He probably found it here.
Also from TFA, in the same section: "To minimize the impact on others, show explicitly which parts of the work are under which license."
I think almost nobody says the non-free stuff deserves no protection. For example, if you took the non-free song of someone else and then claimed you wrote it and spread copies under that claim, I'm sure that the vast majority of people here would against you, including those who wouldn't otherwise have any problem with you spreading copies of the song left and right.