You can't prove a negative, just like you can't prove the non-existence of something.
You know, I keep hearing this statement, and something always bothered me about it. I think I just realized why: using the same logic, you "can't prove a positive", either. There is always another explanation. I'm pretty sure Thomas Aquinas covered this awhile ago with his whole "demons manipulating our perceptions" thought experiment, but maybe I only believe that because a demon has interfered with my perception of reality to convince me of that, or because I'm actually plugged into The Matrix, et cetera.
I think it's fair to say that when most people use the term "prove" they implicitly mean "beyond a reasonable doubt", and consider anything else as nitpicking. Otherwise, we may as well retire the words "prove" and "proof" from the dictionary. Yes, even for mathematical/symbolic logic purposes. How do you know that a malicious demon isn't interfering with your perceptions of the symbols on the page when you read the so-called "proof"?
Now, on the other hand, it is certainly possible to disprove a theory (which is not the same as "proving a negative"), as long as the theory contains elements which can be put to the test. For example, if the theory is that mercury in vaccines causes autism, and removing the mercury from vaccines (as well as any other environmental sources of mercury that might serve as a substitute and contaminate the results) results in no change in autism rates, then that theory has been factually disproven. Obviously extremely strict controls are required, and the people with the crazy theory are likely to retcon in a new reason, but it is possible.
To go back to the GP's statement, trying to "prove" a ridiculously broad statement like "vaccines aren't dangerous" is a fool's errand. However, it is certainly possible to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt, etc.) statements such as "statistically, vaccination against deadly/crippling diseases is many times safer than the alternative".
And seriously people, pseudoscience? You are claiming that Susskind and Hawking engage in pseudoscience, like Deepak Chopra?
I have to agree with you. Are physicists not allowed to speculate on what might be over the next horizon, especially when quantum physics arguably provides a compelling model where there are multiple universes (even if not everyone buys that particular interpretation)? Isn't speculation how every major theory began, and how most people with an interest in science got into their field?
I also think it's funny/sad that the author of TFA lumped together "many worlds"-type models with the systems like M-theory that include multiple "universes" sitting next to each other in a hyperdimensional structure, as if they were the same thing. I guess from a geometrical point of view, they sort of are (vaguely), but that's about it. And like many other people with a hobby/personal interest in physics, it seems to me like M-theory *could* be disproven, by looking for the signature of gravitational influences that don't match up with the locations of large masses.
Skepticism and critical thought are obviously a vital part of science, but it seems to me that too often, many scientists don't even bother to consider something before dismissing it out of hand, and mercilessly attacking whoever even suggested it might be correct. That this would happen when people as sharp as Greene, Hawking, and David Deutsch are making the suggestion is especially troubling to me, because I suspect it discourages the sort of speculation that does lead to important research.
Imagine your PS3 hard drive dies. Your saves are online, or your PS3 is in for repairs. You can still use a buddies PS3 and login to an account and play from your last save. Even upgrading to a new console (of the sony variety) and still having your saves for backwards compatible games. That sort of service gives incentive to buy future products.
Imagine this instead: Sony only allows online savegame storage, without the possibility of local copies (because that might allow someone to duplicate items in games with artificial scarcity, etc.). Then they suffer a server outage, and lose everything (a la MS and Hotmail recently).
Or how about: Sony releases the PS4, and drops support for the PS3 because there is no short-term market incentive and like most executives these days, they ignore long-term financial views. Your PS3 games become unplayable because they require online savegame storage. But hey, have fun buying the PS4 sequel that's vaguely like the original.
Thanks, but no thanks. I already have the capability to back up my console savegames to whatever location I want. Most of the functionality is built into the console, but in the case of asinine control-freak developers who set the "you can only move the file, not copy it" flag, I have third-party hardware that ignores it.
If console makers require online savegames, they can guarantee they'll lose at least one customer in the form of me. There are enough existing games out there already that I could never buy a new game again and never run out.
"You buy a sticker to put on the inside of your windshield. It costs ~32€ and is good for a year. With that, you can drive anywhere, without any further tolls."
That is great for residents. What about visitors? I've visited cities with extensive toll systems that require a monthly/annual pass, and I decided not to go there again, because several times I literally had to drive for multiple hours in heavy traffic (on more than one occassion) to get around short sections of freeway that required the pass. No, there was not an option to pay cash, or receive a bill in the mail, or buy a one-day/one-week pass.
Can someone explain to me how it's even possible to "cheat" in Microsoft's little walled playground? I thought that was the whole point of a closed console network.
The main method I know of is using savegame files that are either modified or just copied from someone else's Xbox and then re-signed to run on your own. E.g. buy a game, then download a bunch of savegame files that are set up so each one requires a minute or two of gameplay to trigger each of the major achievements.
Hopefully they don't intend it to continue on simply as a history tourist attraction. When I visited last summer, the "rocket garden" left me sad. Everything was terribly rusted and so on.
In all fairness to the staff there, that's what happens to any metal that's left outside for very long in that environment. So their options are:
Recycle it instead of displaying it. Display it outside, and clean it up every once in awhile. Spend a bunch of money building an enclosed space for it, like they did with the Saturn V. Ship it somewhere else, like the Air Force museum in Dayton.
That's why if you take one of the extended tours, a lot of it is just verbal "this is where X used to be" kind of stuff.
All the tourists going there will finally have space-o-rama roller coasters and extraterrestial-terror-haunted-space-shutte train ride?
Houston has already gone that route. I was there last summer and the main attraction was a giant Clone Wars playset. At least they still had the actual historical artifacts available off in a corner.
Copyright doesn't go into the public domain just because the owner doesn't enforce it.
In the past I would have agreed with you, and I still do in principle, but I think you're forgetting the "Google exemption" (as used for their slurping up of thousands of old books). That is, if you are an enormous corporation with plenty of money to throw around, you can effectively treat copyrighted works as public domain in this manner.
Can you say Sten gun? Probably not, but anyone with a basic lathe and hand tools can make them all day.
I agree with your point in general (that anyone with enough motivation can make their own gun), but doesn't a Sten (or any other rifle/carbine/pistol) essentially require a rifled barrel, and therefore either the rifling tool(s) or the ability to make those tools as well as the final product? Obviously a shotgun or other smooth-bored weapon is exempt from this. Maybe the Sten is a smooth-bored design, but a quick search didn't turn up anything indicating as much.
The typical ghost hunting equipment is a Video Camera, Flashlight, Thermal filter for the Camera, and Magnetic field detector.
There's actually no such thing as a thermal filter for a regular camera. There are certainly infrared filters, but they are near infrared bandpass (like conventional night vision), not thermal (far) infrared. Capturing thermal images requires a specialized sensor and optics - regular glass can't be used.
That having been said, if the author of TFQ has the budget, they can certainly buy an actual thermal imager, which includes all of these things for US$3-4K.
ideas that haven't changed with server technology and durability improving.
Servers are less durable now than they were a decade ago. They're made more cheaply, and they have tin whiskers to contend with. Obviously they are better in most ways than their predecessors, but longevity isn't one of those ways. Before I moved on from server engineering, I had retired a couple of NT4-era Pentium II-based systems that were still chugging away after over a decade of essentially 24/7 operation. Meanwhile, anything based on the P3 or later was virtually guaranteed to fail not long after the five-year mark, probably because that's around the time that manufacturers started seriously embracing RoHS.
This tent concept is a terrible idea, but I've come to expect terrible ideas from every part of the modern Microsoft except their games division.
There are plenty of stupid people who lack wisdom, humility, and social skills; and smart people can learn these things at least as well as stupid people can.
They can, but my experience is that they often don't, because they're not compelled to. If someone is genuinely brilliant, other people are often willing to tolerate their less-admirable qualities because high intelligence is so uncommon. To some extent, I think it makes sense - it's very difficult to excel at multiple things (like some technical field *and* social skills) - but there should definitely be personal guidelines about how much of an allowance is given.
The problem in the US... is not to inspire future scientists. It is that every kid with an IQ of 90 or more is told that they can be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist, and allocated resources as if they could, when only the 1st percentile or less can actually fill these positions.
Oh please. I didn't realize Charles Davenport was still alive, let alone had a Slashdot account.
Someone doesn't need to be a member of the Master Race to make a valuable contribution to society, and there are plenty of people with high IQs who waste their gift. And that's even assuming your original statement is accurate. I believe it's not.
I don't remember anyone being actively encouraged/motivated to go into *any* type of career when I was in school. There were a handful of AP classes for math, and one for science, but they were basically the same as skipping a year and going on to whichever one the older kids were taking.
I would love to see more emphasis on encouraging children to develop an interest in science. It makes it more likely that the ones who do have the most aptitude for it *and* a genuine long-term interest make use of their gifts. At the same time, it can potentially increase the overall knowledge of the others, who either decide they don't have enough interest or have skills better suited to some other field.
Yes, the article does have facts and figures supporting the claim.
It has numbers that show that there are a lot of Chinese-speaking internet users, but it doesn't show how spread out across the world they are. Obviously, China has a huge population, so there are going to be a vast number of Chinese-speaking internet users in China. But that hardly means it's going to "dominate [the] internet", without evidence that also shows that there are large numbers of people across the world who speak/read Chinese and prefer their internet content in that language.
Tron has those 4 squares on his chest. Took me 3 days after watching it to figure out that's how he knew. That's how bad the writing was.
Um, no. Sorry. I don't want to post any spoilers here, but that was not the clue. I'll give you a hint, though. The number you are looking for is 2, and the audience is made aware of the connection long before Flynn is. I'm not sure how much more obvious it could have been made without preventing it from being a surprise at all.
Come to think about it Sam seems a bit like the young Steve Jobs. He is orphaned, a bit of a smart arse, rich....
I actually thought *Kevin* Flynn/CLU was the character based on Steve Jobs - the very smart, but iron-fisted control freak on an impossible quest for perfection by any means necessary.
It doesn't matter how old you are, or how you felt about the original movie.
That's a pretty broad, sweeping statement to make, especially considering that you don't appear to have seen it yourself.
I liked the new film, and I had a similar theory to what MoldySpore came up with - I saw the original many times when I was a kid, and so my mind is sort of pre-wired to accept that in the fictional world of Tron, people can be lasered into the computer world, and once there, they can interact with anthropomorphic versions of the software that runs on the computer. If the original had never been made, I probably would have had a hard time getting past that, since it's so obviously not how things work in the real world.
It also plays very much on the nostalgia of people who remember that era. I'm not sure the scene where Sam Flynn walks into his father's dusty old arcade (just to pick one of many examples) would have much of an impact on those who didn't grow up playing Centipede and Defender in places like that.
That having been said, I did think the visuals and music were the film's strongest aspects. The production team really did take everything that was great about the look of the original, and made something that looks as good on the screen as my memories of the original do in my mind (which is much better than a lot of the original *actually* looks on the screen). It's sort of the Geometry Wars to the original's genuine 80s vector-graphics arcade games.
If it operates in the infrared spectrum, the bonus is that most glass blocks it, so it would be harder to get a signal. The downside is, a sufficiently sensitive thermal camera with LoS to the bulb or a reflector in LoS with the bulb would give it to you.
Infrared devices of the kind that you're describing don't operate in the thermal part of the spectrum. They use near-infrared light, which is easily visible through most kinds of glass.
The data was written to CD-ROM in the late 90s, so I expect there's someone right now trying to figure out how to read the data off of the decade-old, decaying archive.
I have plenty of CDs that I burned in the late 90s that still read fine. Of course, I used reasonably decent blanks. One time I cheaped out and bought a spindle of no-name discs and those were unreadable after five years or less.
Seriously, video calling has been possible for years. But (other than webcam chat) no-one does it.
What about Facetime (or whatever it's called) on Apple's devices? I was skeptical, myself - I don't even own an iPhone, and I almost referred to it as "the Dick Tracy watch application" until I realized the person I was talking to was probably too young to get the reference - but apparently the businesspeople I work with are in love with the idea. Maybe (like so much of the other stuff that Apple has done recently) it was just clunky and unintuitive to use in earlier incarnations?
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over.
Maybe you are just getting old and jaded, while the rest of the world continues on. Did you ever think of that?
I have a phone that is more powerful than the supercomputers that were built when I was growing up. I have a desktop PC that runs at a combined clockspeed of something like 20,000 times that of the Apple IIe my parents bought, and is probably more powerful than most of the computers in the US at that time combined. I have a camera that lets me photograph visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. I think that's pretty cool, but feel free to think that everything of value has already been created.
Maybe it will make you feel better to know that pension funds, which keep a great many of our elderly working class and middle class housed and fed, are among the largest owners of those corporations.
Pension funds? Did you post your message via time portal from the 1980s? The corporations you seem to love so much have done away with those (except possibly for executives). Maybe you mean 401Ks, but those are definitely not the same thing.
Oh yeah, and I should add to that.. the world needs to get out of last century. I've never written a check in my life, it's all plastic or cash.
I still use mostly checks to pay bills. I'd like the convenience of electronic payment of some kind, but not in the current implementation where businesses have saddled it with a bunch of baggage that allows them to continue leaching funds directly from customers whether the customers want them to or not. When I was younger, I learned the hard way that it's a lot easier to refuse to send a company a check than it is to get them to refund money they've already yanked out of your bank account.
Can you please show an example of indentation that's not "guido's way" and would not be accepted by Python?
I can't speak for the anonymous grandparent, but the last time I played around with Python, it wouldn't accept anything that wasn't indented in a very specific way. Something like one tab per level of curly braces, and the curly braces also had to be used in a very specific way. I can't remember if it was Visual Studio-style (both opening and closing braces on their own lines) or not. It was more or less the way I indent code anyway, but the fact that whoever wrote the language micromanaged whitespace instead of leaving it up to the developers made me decide not to use it again.
I hate coding in the old-school style where the opening curly brace is on the same line as the statement that triggered the opening of the brace (it makes it hard for me to find the opening brace that matches a particular closing brace), so who's to say the language maintainers wouldn't arbitrarily start requiring me to use that style at some point? On the other hand, there are plenty of people who love using that style. The code is functionally the same, so who cares? They can code their way, and I can code mine. In any reasonable language, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't prove a negative, just like you can't prove the non-existence of something.
You know, I keep hearing this statement, and something always bothered me about it. I think I just realized why: using the same logic, you "can't prove a positive", either. There is always another explanation. I'm pretty sure Thomas Aquinas covered this awhile ago with his whole "demons manipulating our perceptions" thought experiment, but maybe I only believe that because a demon has interfered with my perception of reality to convince me of that, or because I'm actually plugged into The Matrix, et cetera.
I think it's fair to say that when most people use the term "prove" they implicitly mean "beyond a reasonable doubt", and consider anything else as nitpicking. Otherwise, we may as well retire the words "prove" and "proof" from the dictionary. Yes, even for mathematical/symbolic logic purposes. How do you know that a malicious demon isn't interfering with your perceptions of the symbols on the page when you read the so-called "proof"?
Now, on the other hand, it is certainly possible to disprove a theory (which is not the same as "proving a negative"), as long as the theory contains elements which can be put to the test. For example, if the theory is that mercury in vaccines causes autism, and removing the mercury from vaccines (as well as any other environmental sources of mercury that might serve as a substitute and contaminate the results) results in no change in autism rates, then that theory has been factually disproven. Obviously extremely strict controls are required, and the people with the crazy theory are likely to retcon in a new reason, but it is possible.
To go back to the GP's statement, trying to "prove" a ridiculously broad statement like "vaccines aren't dangerous" is a fool's errand. However, it is certainly possible to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt, etc.) statements such as "statistically, vaccination against deadly/crippling diseases is many times safer than the alternative".
And seriously people, pseudoscience? You are claiming that Susskind and Hawking engage in pseudoscience, like Deepak Chopra?
I have to agree with you. Are physicists not allowed to speculate on what might be over the next horizon, especially when quantum physics arguably provides a compelling model where there are multiple universes (even if not everyone buys that particular interpretation)? Isn't speculation how every major theory began, and how most people with an interest in science got into their field?
I also think it's funny/sad that the author of TFA lumped together "many worlds"-type models with the systems like M-theory that include multiple "universes" sitting next to each other in a hyperdimensional structure, as if they were the same thing. I guess from a geometrical point of view, they sort of are (vaguely), but that's about it. And like many other people with a hobby/personal interest in physics, it seems to me like M-theory *could* be disproven, by looking for the signature of gravitational influences that don't match up with the locations of large masses.
Skepticism and critical thought are obviously a vital part of science, but it seems to me that too often, many scientists don't even bother to consider something before dismissing it out of hand, and mercilessly attacking whoever even suggested it might be correct. That this would happen when people as sharp as Greene, Hawking, and David Deutsch are making the suggestion is especially troubling to me, because I suspect it discourages the sort of speculation that does lead to important research.
Imagine your PS3 hard drive dies. Your saves are online, or your PS3 is in for repairs. You can still use a buddies PS3 and login to an account and play from your last save. Even upgrading to a new console (of the sony variety) and still having your saves for backwards compatible games. That sort of service gives incentive to buy future products.
Imagine this instead: Sony only allows online savegame storage, without the possibility of local copies (because that might allow someone to duplicate items in games with artificial scarcity, etc.). Then they suffer a server outage, and lose everything (a la MS and Hotmail recently).
Or how about: Sony releases the PS4, and drops support for the PS3 because there is no short-term market incentive and like most executives these days, they ignore long-term financial views. Your PS3 games become unplayable because they require online savegame storage. But hey, have fun buying the PS4 sequel that's vaguely like the original.
Thanks, but no thanks. I already have the capability to back up my console savegames to whatever location I want. Most of the functionality is built into the console, but in the case of asinine control-freak developers who set the "you can only move the file, not copy it" flag, I have third-party hardware that ignores it.
If console makers require online savegames, they can guarantee they'll lose at least one customer in the form of me. There are enough existing games out there already that I could never buy a new game again and never run out.
Perhaps their demonstration would be more impressive if they focused on actually generating a passable pre-rendered video first.
The MIT Media lab did that about a decade ago. This is the follow-on to that work.
"You buy a sticker to put on the inside of your windshield. It costs ~32€ and is good for a year. With that, you can drive anywhere, without any further tolls."
That is great for residents. What about visitors? I've visited cities with extensive toll systems that require a monthly/annual pass, and I decided not to go there again, because several times I literally had to drive for multiple hours in heavy traffic (on more than one occassion) to get around short sections of freeway that required the pass. No, there was not an option to pay cash, or receive a bill in the mail, or buy a one-day/one-week pass.
Can someone explain to me how it's even possible to "cheat" in Microsoft's little walled playground? I thought that was the whole point of a closed console network.
The main method I know of is using savegame files that are either modified or just copied from someone else's Xbox and then re-signed to run on your own. E.g. buy a game, then download a bunch of savegame files that are set up so each one requires a minute or two of gameplay to trigger each of the major achievements.
Hopefully they don't intend it to continue on simply as a history tourist attraction. When I visited last summer, the "rocket garden" left me sad. Everything was terribly rusted and so on.
In all fairness to the staff there, that's what happens to any metal that's left outside for very long in that environment. So their options are:
Recycle it instead of displaying it.
Display it outside, and clean it up every once in awhile.
Spend a bunch of money building an enclosed space for it, like they did with the Saturn V.
Ship it somewhere else, like the Air Force museum in Dayton.
That's why if you take one of the extended tours, a lot of it is just verbal "this is where X used to be" kind of stuff.
All the tourists going there will finally have space-o-rama roller coasters and extraterrestial-terror-haunted-space-shutte train ride?
Houston has already gone that route. I was there last summer and the main attraction was a giant Clone Wars playset. At least they still had the actual historical artifacts available off in a corner.
Copyright doesn't go into the public domain just because the owner doesn't enforce it.
In the past I would have agreed with you, and I still do in principle, but I think you're forgetting the "Google exemption" (as used for their slurping up of thousands of old books). That is, if you are an enormous corporation with plenty of money to throw around, you can effectively treat copyrighted works as public domain in this manner.
Can you say Sten gun? Probably not, but anyone with a basic lathe and hand tools can make them all day.
I agree with your point in general (that anyone with enough motivation can make their own gun), but doesn't a Sten (or any other rifle/carbine/pistol) essentially require a rifled barrel, and therefore either the rifling tool(s) or the ability to make those tools as well as the final product? Obviously a shotgun or other smooth-bored weapon is exempt from this. Maybe the Sten is a smooth-bored design, but a quick search didn't turn up anything indicating as much.
The typical ghost hunting equipment is a Video Camera, Flashlight, Thermal filter for the Camera, and Magnetic field detector.
There's actually no such thing as a thermal filter for a regular camera. There are certainly infrared filters, but they are near infrared bandpass (like conventional night vision), not thermal (far) infrared. Capturing thermal images requires a specialized sensor and optics - regular glass can't be used.
That having been said, if the author of TFQ has the budget, they can certainly buy an actual thermal imager, which includes all of these things for US$3-4K.
ideas that haven't changed with server technology and durability improving.
Servers are less durable now than they were a decade ago. They're made more cheaply, and they have tin whiskers to contend with. Obviously they are better in most ways than their predecessors, but longevity isn't one of those ways. Before I moved on from server engineering, I had retired a couple of NT4-era Pentium II-based systems that were still chugging away after over a decade of essentially 24/7 operation. Meanwhile, anything based on the P3 or later was virtually guaranteed to fail not long after the five-year mark, probably because that's around the time that manufacturers started seriously embracing RoHS.
This tent concept is a terrible idea, but I've come to expect terrible ideas from every part of the modern Microsoft except their games division.
There are plenty of stupid people who lack wisdom, humility, and social skills; and smart people can learn these things at least as well as stupid people can.
They can, but my experience is that they often don't, because they're not compelled to. If someone is genuinely brilliant, other people are often willing to tolerate their less-admirable qualities because high intelligence is so uncommon. To some extent, I think it makes sense - it's very difficult to excel at multiple things (like some technical field *and* social skills) - but there should definitely be personal guidelines about how much of an allowance is given.
The problem in the US... is not to inspire future scientists. It is that every kid with an IQ of 90 or more is told that they can be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist, and allocated resources as if they could, when only the 1st percentile or less can actually fill these positions.
Oh please. I didn't realize Charles Davenport was still alive, let alone had a Slashdot account.
Someone doesn't need to be a member of the Master Race to make a valuable contribution to society, and there are plenty of people with high IQs who waste their gift. And that's even assuming your original statement is accurate. I believe it's not.
I don't remember anyone being actively encouraged/motivated to go into *any* type of career when I was in school. There were a handful of AP classes for math, and one for science, but they were basically the same as skipping a year and going on to whichever one the older kids were taking.
I would love to see more emphasis on encouraging children to develop an interest in science. It makes it more likely that the ones who do have the most aptitude for it *and* a genuine long-term interest make use of their gifts. At the same time, it can potentially increase the overall knowledge of the others, who either decide they don't have enough interest or have skills better suited to some other field.
Yes, the article does have facts and figures supporting the claim.
It has numbers that show that there are a lot of Chinese-speaking internet users, but it doesn't show how spread out across the world they are. Obviously, China has a huge population, so there are going to be a vast number of Chinese-speaking internet users in China. But that hardly means it's going to "dominate [the] internet", without evidence that also shows that there are large numbers of people across the world who speak/read Chinese and prefer their internet content in that language.
Tron has those 4 squares on his chest. Took me 3 days after watching it to figure out that's how he knew. That's how bad the writing was.
Um, no. Sorry. I don't want to post any spoilers here, but that was not the clue. I'll give you a hint, though. The number you are looking for is 2, and the audience is made aware of the connection long before Flynn is. I'm not sure how much more obvious it could have been made without preventing it from being a surprise at all.
Come to think about it Sam seems a bit like the young Steve Jobs. He is orphaned, a bit of a smart arse, rich....
I actually thought *Kevin* Flynn/CLU was the character based on Steve Jobs - the very smart, but iron-fisted control freak on an impossible quest for perfection by any means necessary.
It doesn't matter how old you are, or how you felt about the original movie.
That's a pretty broad, sweeping statement to make, especially considering that you don't appear to have seen it yourself.
I liked the new film, and I had a similar theory to what MoldySpore came up with - I saw the original many times when I was a kid, and so my mind is sort of pre-wired to accept that in the fictional world of Tron, people can be lasered into the computer world, and once there, they can interact with anthropomorphic versions of the software that runs on the computer. If the original had never been made, I probably would have had a hard time getting past that, since it's so obviously not how things work in the real world.
It also plays very much on the nostalgia of people who remember that era. I'm not sure the scene where Sam Flynn walks into his father's dusty old arcade (just to pick one of many examples) would have much of an impact on those who didn't grow up playing Centipede and Defender in places like that.
That having been said, I did think the visuals and music were the film's strongest aspects. The production team really did take everything that was great about the look of the original, and made something that looks as good on the screen as my memories of the original do in my mind (which is much better than a lot of the original *actually* looks on the screen). It's sort of the Geometry Wars to the original's genuine 80s vector-graphics arcade games.
If it operates in the infrared spectrum, the bonus is that most glass blocks it, so it would be harder to get a signal. The downside is, a sufficiently sensitive thermal camera with LoS to the bulb or a reflector in LoS with the bulb would give it to you.
Infrared devices of the kind that you're describing don't operate in the thermal part of the spectrum. They use near-infrared light, which is easily visible through most kinds of glass.
The data was written to CD-ROM in the late 90s, so I expect there's someone right now trying to figure out how to read the data off of the decade-old, decaying archive.
I have plenty of CDs that I burned in the late 90s that still read fine. Of course, I used reasonably decent blanks. One time I cheaped out and bought a spindle of no-name discs and those were unreadable after five years or less.
Seriously, video calling has been possible for years. But (other than webcam chat) no-one does it.
What about Facetime (or whatever it's called) on Apple's devices? I was skeptical, myself - I don't even own an iPhone, and I almost referred to it as "the Dick Tracy watch application" until I realized the person I was talking to was probably too young to get the reference - but apparently the businesspeople I work with are in love with the idea. Maybe (like so much of the other stuff that Apple has done recently) it was just clunky and unintuitive to use in earlier incarnations?
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over.
Maybe you are just getting old and jaded, while the rest of the world continues on. Did you ever think of that?
I have a phone that is more powerful than the supercomputers that were built when I was growing up. I have a desktop PC that runs at a combined clockspeed of something like 20,000 times that of the Apple IIe my parents bought, and is probably more powerful than most of the computers in the US at that time combined. I have a camera that lets me photograph visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. I think that's pretty cool, but feel free to think that everything of value has already been created.
Maybe it will make you feel better to know that pension funds, which keep a great many of our elderly working class and middle class housed and fed, are among the largest owners of those corporations.
Pension funds? Did you post your message via time portal from the 1980s? The corporations you seem to love so much have done away with those (except possibly for executives). Maybe you mean 401Ks, but those are definitely not the same thing.
Oh yeah, and I should add to that.. the world needs to get out of last century. I've never written a check in my life, it's all plastic or cash.
I still use mostly checks to pay bills. I'd like the convenience of electronic payment of some kind, but not in the current implementation where businesses have saddled it with a bunch of baggage that allows them to continue leaching funds directly from customers whether the customers want them to or not. When I was younger, I learned the hard way that it's a lot easier to refuse to send a company a check than it is to get them to refund money they've already yanked out of your bank account.
Can you please show an example of indentation that's not "guido's way" and would not be accepted by Python?
I can't speak for the anonymous grandparent, but the last time I played around with Python, it wouldn't accept anything that wasn't indented in a very specific way. Something like one tab per level of curly braces, and the curly braces also had to be used in a very specific way. I can't remember if it was Visual Studio-style (both opening and closing braces on their own lines) or not. It was more or less the way I indent code anyway, but the fact that whoever wrote the language micromanaged whitespace instead of leaving it up to the developers made me decide not to use it again.
I hate coding in the old-school style where the opening curly brace is on the same line as the statement that triggered the opening of the brace (it makes it hard for me to find the opening brace that matches a particular closing brace), so who's to say the language maintainers wouldn't arbitrarily start requiring me to use that style at some point? On the other hand, there are plenty of people who love using that style. The code is functionally the same, so who cares? They can code their way, and I can code mine. In any reasonable language, at least.