Your comparison didn't justify your argument - you compared the (monetary) cost of two different types of compression. You are arguing that compression itself is irrelevant - so you shouldn't be comparing codecs with different licensing costs, but rather how much compression is necessary to deliver video to a given platform.
I'm not so sure that resolution is a red herring. If it were a red herring then would people be buying high-def tvs or would they be too scared of pimples coming into focus? Now you raise a good point that the article was about phones and webpages rather than tv, but the demand for higher resolution is still present for these platforms. After all, why would youtube be moving to high-res formats if the market wasn't demanding it?
Although phones currently have relatively low resolution screens this is not a desirable feature that sells them - it's simply a limitation of the current display technology. OLED screens promise much higher resolutions and there is definitely a demand for them. From your use of "cell phones" I'm going to guess that you're American and so you're used to the American phone market. I don't know what the state of video on your handsets over there is, but in Europe every handset on the market has a builtin video camera, and they are used heavily. Whenever there is a news story about a sudden event we get upscaled phone footage on the news for the simple reason that someone with a video phone was there before a professional camera crew.
So the low resolution of phone cameras and displays will not last - and when it increases the bandwidth necessary to transport those video messages will increase as well. While we're talking about mobile handsets - the bandwidth on a wireless device will never match wired networks. Simple physics. And while wired infrastructure may have developed to the point where it handles video well (not here in the UK - we have serious backbone issues) wireless technology will always be a couple of steps behind.
So in short, resolutions will increase (on the web and phones) and as they do so compression will always just as relevant as it is now. If this doesn't seem intuitive then consider the rate of increase in doing computation locally versus the rate of increase in bandwidth. Essentially computation is always cheaper than communication, and as available bandwidth increases our own expectations of what should be transported over it will always keep pace.
While you're entirely correct that mp4 costs more to (legally) distribute than ogg - that wasn't the comparison that I made. You've switched arguments here. The point that you made that I disagreed with was that compression becomes irrelevant as bandwidth increases. This is not true and you don't seem to have tried to defend what you claimed. Did you think that distracting people with a separate issue was your best argument?
Ogg vs Mp4 (where I assume that you actually mean Theora vs Mp4) is an Apples and Oranges comparison. The correct comparison is either Mp2 vs Mp4 or Theora vs Some improvement of Theora. Even as the bandwidth increases the resolution of video will increase to keep pace and compression will be as important as ever.
It's funny that you responded to an article about video with a rambling about audio. It's however hilarious that it got modded Insightful.
Not as funny as the only person in this thread that actually read the article, which was about Nokia's complaints over Ogg+Theora as a video standard getting modded troll for pointing out that all of the other random drivel about the superior audio format is completely irrelevant...
A lock is something that you use to stop anyone without a key getting access to something.
Encryption is a lock (in the normal sense). DRM is a combination of a "lock" and a key, with the understanding that you probably shouldn't use the key if you've been asked not to. It's a very weak analogy at best, as encryption stores the secret under some technical problem. DRM stores the non-secret under some social problem, with weak technical barriers to uphold the social problem.
Reverse engineering a key is when you construct the key from the lock alone. It's not called reverse engineering if somebody gives you the key and you just copy it. Most of the breaks in DRM systems have been about stepping around the "lock", rather than picking it. IE reading the key from memory with a debugger.
I'd stand by the claim that reading something that someone has freely given to you is a new sort of crime that we didn't have 1000 years ago.
I thought that quote was a bit weird as well. It's not the first time that Bruce has sounded like a tool, from Bruce's own mouth. If the internet is all about commerce now - did they forget to send the memo to the owners off all the non-pay sites? I guess accademics and the open-source crowd are shit out of luck.
The other odd claim was that we haven't invented a new crime in a 1000 years. In a discussion about computer security? Trying to relate hacking to "impersonation" or lockpicking (which he didn't list) is a tenuous link at best. How does DRM circumvention get described using 1000-year old criminal terminolgy. If you're going to try then you have to pretend that DRM is some sort of lock...
I think you massively overestimating the difference between a communist / authoritarian state and a capitalist / authoritatian state. They are still both totalitarian entities. I realise that the gist of your point is that this type of tracking is being done by corporations rather than by the government. But how many AT&T scandals does it take to realise that the government has access to any corporate data that it wants to ask for?
Why even bother with fact to face conversations? You can conspire before the conversation, after the conversation and have a partner do it during the conversation.
I'll answer you here rather than your original as I was going to pick up the same point with you. Although I wasn't going to insult you the same way as the other guy who comes off as some sort of troll.
Although it is a small change from what we have now, it has large social implications (rather than technological ones), which is what Vinge was getting at in Rainbow's End. The ubiquity of mobiles (or cellphones if you're American) means that we have something close to longrange telepathy now. If I want to discuss anything with any of friends who have a phone (99.9999% of them) then I can do so regardless of where we both are. This ubiquitous availability and communication has drastically changed social organisation already.
Making the technology invisible is a small step - it can be done now with off the shelf components, but it is currently rare. Once invisible communication becomes ubiquitous it will cause a large shift in social etiquette and norms. Currently whispering in public is considered rude, for the simple reason that people don't like to be discussed behind their back. With this technology everyone will be able to whisper to anyone they know at any time, without being discovered. That is a huge change for social norms.
Just to go back to your point about conspiring - you miss cases where offline conspiricy is not as bad as online conspiricy. Think about the implications for job interviews, or exams. Would they still function in a society that uses this technology?
I can't remember if I made it to Chapter 4 (probably because it was free extract somewhere) but I seem to remember that Chapter 1 covers the main characters time in school and manages to show how this technology has changed the environment totally. Well worth reading in its own right.
We both agree that your numbers weakened your point as they were clearly wrong.
While I don't practice neurobiology myself, my girlfriend's PhD was in psycho-physics and how to exploit the "compression" in the human visual system. Her research was very much at the practical end of the field.
Where we disagree is on whether or not your point stands. You claimed that despite the lack of bandwidth between the eye and the brain, the brain was *not* responsible for synthesizing the majority of what we think that we see. You are wrong on that aspect, and nothing that I have said backs you up on this at all. If you do believe this then feel free to try and argue your (incorrect) point. If you do not believe this then you have cleared messed up in what you have said, as this was your explicit claim that I quoted.
When you pull figures from your arse, you don't actually add anything to the discussion. All that we've learned is that your arse is rather large, and you are used to removing things from it.
Even if your (incorrect assumptions) were correct, 36" x 20" at 1000dpi would be 36000 pixels x 20000 pixels = 720M pixels. Clue: dpi is a scalar measure rather than area.
Of course, the human eye does not work anything like that. Rather than farting numbers I spent 10 seconds on Google to find this which looks into the question of Visual Acuity. The "high-res" part of the eye is a very small circle with about 120 "dots" across its diameter.
As we do not resolve entire "frames" in a single go, the concept of a frame-rate is completely ludicrous. Your argument earlier in the thread about observing skipping when seeing a high speed stimuli doesn't show evidence of a *periodic* frame rate. It just shows that there is a *minimum* temporal resolution. One does not imply the other, especially when the eye is processing asychronous input (from rods and cones).
Although you don't believe that the brain fills in the missing images with educated guesswork, we've already established that what you believe is shit. Most (if not all) neuroscientists have accepted that the high resolution continuous visual imagery that we see is mostly an illusion produced by the mind. There are many well reported experiments that provide evidence of this. You should look for anything on Visual Illusions - there are far too many decent results in peer reviewed journals for me to spend time looking for you. Change Blindness is a related phenomena.
Finally you've cooked up some stupid figures for the number of cells in a brain. Why do you feel the need to demonstrate how stupid you are? The actual numbers (which you get wrong by 3 fucking orders of magnitude) are in the summary of the article! How hard is it to read the 100 billion neurons at the top of the page.
So next time you feel the need to pontificate needless about something that you don't know anything about. Don't. You, sir, are a thief of oxygen and your pointless ramblings have made everyone reading this article collectively dumber.
PS Feel free to mod me flamebait, as I am clearly annoyed. But when you do so remember that the everything the parent poster wrote was incorrect and that I have pointed out to him where he is wrong.
What you really need to do is come to some sort of understanding, perhaps an agreement amongst gentlemen, or peers even. Then you could somehow work together to download your gigs of porn. It would be like a distributed network of peers, a peer-to-peer network even. If only there was some kind of snappy name for this system. Sorry I have to go, I need to call Mark 'fuckwit' Cuban and describe my latest invention to him. He's gonna love it!
There is no way I going to write a letter involving a financial transaction on one of these things. Plus, I have been around long enough to see these things come and go, and my data along with it.
I know MSFT wants to move Office to a web/subscription model and when they do these types of businesses will be out in the cold
Are you trying to have both sides of the arguement by yourself? Either it's a useful product or its not. If its a not a valid product then micronsoft moving into the market has no affect whatsoever.
It does if the data is accessed during the period that you have admin access. The process using the data has to manipulate the keys at some point, and if you can access their memory space then any security is toast. This is exactly how the drm on the new drm for blueray / hddvd was cracked.
This was the point of palladium, that the keys would be locked up inside a separate box, segregated from the processor. Each process would only manipulate opaque handles to the keys.
One nice aspect of this attack is that if you gain admin access after key generation, but before the entropy pool is refreshed then you can play back the state of the random number generator to recreate the keys after the fact. But this just extends the window slightly, you still need an exploit to get admin first.
Nemertes' research initiatives, including this study, are funded by its client base of Fortune 2000 enterprise organizations, vendors, service providers, and not-for-profit organizations including the Internet Innovation Alliance, which purchased distribution rights to these research findings.
...
The Internet Innovation Alliance (www.internetinnovation.org), a non-profit coalition dedicated to universal broadband, was founded by Larry Irving and Bruce Mehlman in 2004. Irving is president and CEO of Irving Information Group, a consulting firm providing strategic advice and assistance to international telecommunications and technology companies. Mehlman is co-founder of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc., a bipartisan public affairs consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.
...
So you're right, but for the wrong reason. People with a vested interest in netwrok providers increasing their spending have announced... that network providers need to increase their spending. Yawn, is there no news today?
You're massively under-estimating the performance of classical computers on simulating neural networks. To tidy up your figures a bit: if you take the "best-case" then we've managed to pack simulations of networks with 10s to 100s of neurons into a PIC microcontroller. This is a 1Mhz device with about 256 bytes of memory. If you go to a more reasonable embedded processor, such as a 500Mhz X-Scale then the simple simulation can handle about 10^6 neurons. Simulating the 10^7 neurons in this simple way should be doable on a portable device within a couple of years.
The reason that people don't is that these simple discrete models of neurons are quite crap for real tasks, and because the networks generated by these models don't correspond to real biological systems. There is a lot of research in the area of how real biological networks are organized (I know a couple of people doing PhDs in the field just in my department). The tougher question is how to execute a more realistic simulation of the neuron.
There is no perfect simulation, and the problem shows diminishing returns. The level of realism is only limited by how much processing power can be thrown at it. Unlike the simple discrete case (which runs nicely using fixed point integer maths) the more complex simulations requires lots of heavy duty floating point performance. However there is some hope for development here; most of the increases in processing performance in the near future will come from adding fast vector support to processors. SIMD extensions are already available, but in the next 5-10 years we should see large SIMD arrays being added to processor dies as graphics functionality is merged back onto the main processor.
These SIMD arrays are heavily optimised for running this type of numerical simulation, and as a result we should see exponential increases in the performance of these simulations for some time to come. I think that we'll see classical systems capable of doing this task in a much shorter time frame than you predict. Also, it is not clear that a quantum computer would be any good at this task - it doesn't relate directly to either of the known quantum algorithms.
Those of us on the right side of the pond would say it happened when our former colonies broke away and has been getting worse ever since. Depends on how you colour it I guess
Sure, I agree with you that it can be used that way. My point was that it doesn't automatically follow that it will be used that way. The example that springs to mind is the drugs laws in the Netherlands. People forget that most drugs are still illegal over there, but there is precedence in dutch law for selectively ignoring bad laws. In the Anglo-Saxon countries this was the basis of right to trial by jury - so that bad laws can be ignored if your peers (rather than your landlord) agree that they are bad laws.
The period covers any position that the person made redundant would have been qualified to do. As far as shell companies and other dodges go, it would depend on what the magistrate thought. I don't think that industrial tribunals have juries so it would come down to the magistrates opinion of the companies actions.
Was your EU Nation the UK by any chance? Employment laws here have drifted to your revised contract over the years (probably because there is some common EU employment law underneath them). The third clause has also been booted out by the courts here and so is meaningless, and the first two points have also been tested in court. Unless the employer can convince the court that the work is strongly related to the product that the employee worked on then they are shit out of luck.
Answering sideways to your other reply - in the public sector at least redundancy law covers that clause. Unless you are booted from work for screwing up, if they let you go it's a redundancy. And then under EU law they can't fill that post for a certain length of time (1-2 years?). I believe the same law covers private firms as well.
I'm not a fan of the current copyright laws, and unlike a lot of people on here I'm happy to come out and say: not only have I ripped a metric fuckload of media over the years, I've downloaded a shitload of it too. I guess that says which side of the debate on copyright I sit on. However, I have to point out that your arguments are so easy to rebut that somebody has to do it, and given a lack of people willing to argue it properly I'll play devil's advocate.
Why would it be wrong to copy media ie what justification does the current law have? People get too hung up on the final part of ownership. I heard this (digital) media and so I've taken a copy of it. I haven't deprived the original owner of it so no transfer has occurred. The universe appears to agree with me that digital media cannot be copy controlled - yay! I win.
What about the flip side? At some point somebody created that song / film / etc. In a very real sense they are the owner of that media (lets ignore scumsuckers like the RIAA for a moment). Did they do this for the sheer joy of benefiting their fellow man? It would be nice to believe so (and I'm an academic so I can believe that people do that:) but in all likely hood they are trying to make a living. So these creative works are goods - in the sense that they are tradable items.
Now, we may argue that because the natural state of the universe seems to make it impossible to prevent copying digital information that these cannnot be trade goods, and that we should abolish copyright law. But would that action benefit us as a society? Most (if not all) of our laws are things that we have decided improve our society, but which need to be imposed on people because they contradict the natural state of the world. Thou shalt not murder - purely a social convention to improve the world that we live in. Very easy to ignore, just ask OJ.
And therein lies the justification for copyright laws. They allow a class of creative people to trade the goods that they produce in a manner that gives them a living. And as a result we live in a richer, more creative society.
The function of parasites like the RIAA, and their attempts to pervert not just copyright law but most of the technological progress in CS for their benefit is left as an exercise for the reader. Apologies for rambling and logical fallacies, but I'm having the day off work with the flu, and despite mainlining ibuprofin and lemsip I'm a little below par.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comparison didn't justify your argument - you compared the (monetary) cost of two different types of compression. You are arguing that compression itself is irrelevant - so you shouldn't be comparing codecs with different licensing costs, but rather how much compression is necessary to deliver video to a given platform.
I'm not so sure that resolution is a red herring. If it were a red herring then would people be buying high-def tvs or would they be too scared of pimples coming into focus? Now you raise a good point that the article was about phones and webpages rather than tv, but the demand for higher resolution is still present for these platforms. After all, why would youtube be moving to high-res formats if the market wasn't demanding it?
Although phones currently have relatively low resolution screens this is not a desirable feature that sells them - it's simply a limitation of the current display technology. OLED screens promise much higher resolutions and there is definitely a demand for them. From your use of "cell phones" I'm going to guess that you're American and so you're used to the American phone market. I don't know what the state of video on your handsets over there is, but in Europe every handset on the market has a builtin video camera, and they are used heavily. Whenever there is a news story about a sudden event we get upscaled phone footage on the news for the simple reason that someone with a video phone was there before a professional camera crew.
So the low resolution of phone cameras and displays will not last - and when it increases the bandwidth necessary to transport those video messages will increase as well. While we're talking about mobile handsets - the bandwidth on a wireless device will never match wired networks. Simple physics. And while wired infrastructure may have developed to the point where it handles video well (not here in the UK - we have serious backbone issues) wireless technology will always be a couple of steps behind.
So in short, resolutions will increase (on the web and phones) and as they do so compression will always just as relevant as it is now. If this doesn't seem intuitive then consider the rate of increase in doing computation locally versus the rate of increase in bandwidth. Essentially computation is always cheaper than communication, and as available bandwidth increases our own expectations of what should be transported over it will always keep pace.
While you're entirely correct that mp4 costs more to (legally) distribute than ogg - that wasn't the comparison that I made. You've switched arguments here. The point that you made that I disagreed with was that compression becomes irrelevant as bandwidth increases. This is not true and you don't seem to have tried to defend what you claimed. Did you think that distracting people with a separate issue was your best argument?
Ogg vs Mp4 (where I assume that you actually mean Theora vs Mp4) is an Apples and Oranges comparison. The correct comparison is either Mp2 vs Mp4 or Theora vs Some improvement of Theora. Even as the bandwidth increases the resolution of video will increase to keep pace and compression will be as important as ever.
Which 5Gb chunk of data would you prefer to download:
* MPEG2 stream ripped from a DVD of a film in standard def
* H.264 stream ripped from a BlueRay/HD-DVD disk in high def
Compression is always going to be important because the quality goalposts (and hence the raw filesize) will keep moving.
Not as funny as the only person in this thread that actually read the article, which was about Nokia's complaints over Ogg+Theora as a video standard getting modded troll for pointing out that all of the other random drivel about the superior audio format is completely irrelevant...
Erm.... I've never heard of that being a crime before. Have you got a single shred of evidence to back that claim up?
A lock is something that you use to stop anyone without a key getting access to something.
Encryption is a lock (in the normal sense). DRM is a combination of a "lock" and a key, with the understanding that you probably shouldn't use the key if you've been asked not to. It's a very weak analogy at best, as encryption stores the secret under some technical problem. DRM stores the non-secret under some social problem, with weak technical barriers to uphold the social problem.
Reverse engineering a key is when you construct the key from the lock alone. It's not called reverse engineering if somebody gives you the key and you just copy it. Most of the breaks in DRM systems have been about stepping around the "lock", rather than picking it. IE reading the key from memory with a debugger.
I'd stand by the claim that reading something that someone has freely given to you is a new sort of crime that we didn't have 1000 years ago.
I thought that quote was a bit weird as well. It's not the first time that Bruce has sounded like a tool, from Bruce's own mouth. If the internet is all about commerce now - did they forget to send the memo to the owners off all the non-pay sites? I guess accademics and the open-source crowd are shit out of luck.
The other odd claim was that we haven't invented a new crime in a 1000 years. In a discussion about computer security? Trying to relate hacking to "impersonation" or lockpicking (which he didn't list) is a tenuous link at best. How does DRM circumvention get described using 1000-year old criminal terminolgy. If you're going to try then you have to pretend that DRM is some sort of lock...
I think you massively overestimating the difference between a communist / authoritarian state and a capitalist / authoritatian state. They are still both totalitarian entities. I realise that the gist of your point is that this type of tracking is being done by corporations rather than by the government. But how many AT&T scandals does it take to realise that the government has access to any corporate data that it wants to ask for?
I'll answer you here rather than your original as I was going to pick up the same point with you. Although I wasn't going to insult you the same way as the other guy who comes off as some sort of troll.
Although it is a small change from what we have now, it has large social implications (rather than technological ones), which is what Vinge was getting at in Rainbow's End. The ubiquity of mobiles (or cellphones if you're American) means that we have something close to longrange telepathy now. If I want to discuss anything with any of friends who have a phone (99.9999% of them) then I can do so regardless of where we both are. This ubiquitous availability and communication has drastically changed social organisation already.
Making the technology invisible is a small step - it can be done now with off the shelf components, but it is currently rare. Once invisible communication becomes ubiquitous it will cause a large shift in social etiquette and norms. Currently whispering in public is considered rude, for the simple reason that people don't like to be discussed behind their back. With this technology everyone will be able to whisper to anyone they know at any time, without being discovered. That is a huge change for social norms.
Just to go back to your point about conspiring - you miss cases where offline conspiricy is not as bad as online conspiricy. Think about the implications for job interviews, or exams. Would they still function in a society that uses this technology?
I can't remember if I made it to Chapter 4 (probably because it was free extract somewhere) but I seem to remember that Chapter 1 covers the main characters time in school and manages to show how this technology has changed the environment totally. Well worth reading in its own right.
I think that you've missed the obvious point; one man's insight is another man's flamebait...
We both agree that your numbers weakened your point as they were clearly wrong.
While I don't practice neurobiology myself, my girlfriend's PhD was in psycho-physics and how to exploit the "compression" in the human visual system. Her research was very much at the practical end of the field.
Where we disagree is on whether or not your point stands. You claimed that despite the lack of bandwidth between the eye and the brain, the brain was *not* responsible for synthesizing the majority of what we think that we see. You are wrong on that aspect, and nothing that I have said backs you up on this at all. If you do believe this then feel free to try and argue your (incorrect) point. If you do not believe this then you have cleared messed up in what you have said, as this was your explicit claim that I quoted.
When you pull figures from your arse, you don't actually add anything to the discussion. All that we've learned is that your arse is rather large, and you are used to removing things from it.
Even if your (incorrect assumptions) were correct, 36" x 20" at 1000dpi would be 36000 pixels x 20000 pixels = 720M pixels. Clue: dpi is a scalar measure rather than area.
Of course, the human eye does not work anything like that. Rather than farting numbers I spent 10 seconds on Google to find this which looks into the question of Visual Acuity. The "high-res" part of the eye is a very small circle with about 120 "dots" across its diameter.
As we do not resolve entire "frames" in a single go, the concept of a frame-rate is completely ludicrous. Your argument earlier in the thread about observing skipping when seeing a high speed stimuli doesn't show evidence of a *periodic* frame rate. It just shows that there is a *minimum* temporal resolution. One does not imply the other, especially when the eye is processing asychronous input (from rods and cones).
Although you don't believe that the brain fills in the missing images with educated guesswork, we've already established that what you believe is shit. Most (if not all) neuroscientists have accepted that the high resolution continuous visual imagery that we see is mostly an illusion produced by the mind. There are many well reported experiments that provide evidence of this. You should look for anything on Visual Illusions - there are far too many decent results in peer reviewed journals for me to spend time looking for you. Change Blindness is a related phenomena.
Finally you've cooked up some stupid figures for the number of cells in a brain. Why do you feel the need to demonstrate how stupid you are? The actual numbers (which you get wrong by 3 fucking orders of magnitude) are in the summary of the article! How hard is it to read the 100 billion neurons at the top of the page.
So next time you feel the need to pontificate needless about something that you don't know anything about. Don't. You, sir, are a thief of oxygen and your pointless ramblings have made everyone reading this article collectively dumber.
PS Feel free to mod me flamebait, as I am clearly annoyed. But when you do so remember that the everything the parent poster wrote was incorrect and that I have pointed out to him where he is wrong.
What you really need to do is come to some sort of understanding, perhaps an agreement amongst gentlemen, or peers even. Then you could somehow work together to download your gigs of porn. It would be like a distributed network of peers, a peer-to-peer network even. If only there was some kind of snappy name for this system. Sorry I have to go, I need to call Mark 'fuckwit' Cuban and describe my latest invention to him. He's gonna love it!
Are you trying to have both sides of the arguement by yourself? Either it's a useful product or its not. If its a not a valid product then micronsoft moving into the market has no affect whatsoever.
It does if the data is accessed during the period that you have admin access. The process using the data has to manipulate the keys at some point, and if you can access their memory space then any security is toast. This is exactly how the drm on the new drm for blueray / hddvd was cracked.
This was the point of palladium, that the keys would be locked up inside a separate box, segregated from the processor. Each process would only manipulate opaque handles to the keys.
One nice aspect of this attack is that if you gain admin access after key generation, but before the entropy pool is refreshed then you can play back the state of the random number generator to recreate the keys after the fact. But this just extends the window slightly, you still need an exploit to get admin first.
So you're right, but for the wrong reason. People with a vested interest in netwrok providers increasing their spending have announced
You're massively under-estimating the performance of classical computers on simulating neural networks. To tidy up your figures a bit: if you take the "best-case" then we've managed to pack simulations of networks with 10s to 100s of neurons into a PIC microcontroller. This is a 1Mhz device with about 256 bytes of memory. If you go to a more reasonable embedded processor, such as a 500Mhz X-Scale then the simple simulation can handle about 10^6 neurons. Simulating the 10^7 neurons in this simple way should be doable on a portable device within a couple of years.
The reason that people don't is that these simple discrete models of neurons are quite crap for real tasks, and because the networks generated by these models don't correspond to real biological systems. There is a lot of research in the area of how real biological networks are organized (I know a couple of people doing PhDs in the field just in my department). The tougher question is how to execute a more realistic simulation of the neuron.
There is no perfect simulation, and the problem shows diminishing returns. The level of realism is only limited by how much processing power can be thrown at it. Unlike the simple discrete case (which runs nicely using fixed point integer maths) the more complex simulations requires lots of heavy duty floating point performance. However there is some hope for development here; most of the increases in processing performance in the near future will come from adding fast vector support to processors. SIMD extensions are already available, but in the next 5-10 years we should see large SIMD arrays being added to processor dies as graphics functionality is merged back onto the main processor.
These SIMD arrays are heavily optimised for running this type of numerical simulation, and as a result we should see exponential increases in the performance of these simulations for some time to come. I think that we'll see classical systems capable of doing this task in a much shorter time frame than you predict. Also, it is not clear that a quantum computer would be any good at this task - it doesn't relate directly to either of the known quantum algorithms.
You're a merkin?????
Holy fuck, it's a talking merkin!
Those of us on the right side of the pond would say it happened when our former colonies broke away and has been getting worse ever since. Depends on how you colour it I guess
Sure, I agree with you that it can be used that way. My point was that it doesn't automatically follow that it will be used that way. The example that springs to mind is the drugs laws in the Netherlands. People forget that most drugs are still illegal over there, but there is precedence in dutch law for selectively ignoring bad laws. In the Anglo-Saxon countries this was the basis of right to trial by jury - so that bad laws can be ignored if your peers (rather than your landlord) agree that they are bad laws.
The period covers any position that the person made redundant would have been qualified to do. As far as shell companies and other dodges go, it would depend on what the magistrate thought. I don't think that industrial tribunals have juries so it would come down to the magistrates opinion of the companies actions.
Er... Are you in the habit of cutting it off and using a prosthetic?
Was your EU Nation the UK by any chance? Employment laws here have drifted to your revised contract over the years (probably because there is some common EU employment law underneath them). The third clause has also been booted out by the courts here and so is meaningless, and the first two points have also been tested in court. Unless the employer can convince the court that the work is strongly related to the product that the employee worked on then they are shit out of luck.
Answering sideways to your other reply - in the public sector at least redundancy law covers that clause. Unless you are booted from work for screwing up, if they let you go it's a redundancy. And then under EU law they can't fill that post for a certain length of time (1-2 years?). I believe the same law covers private firms as well.
As is the newspaper, the motorcar, the uniform, and your point is...
:)
Depending on your background, you're either mistaking implication for a bi-conditional, or correlation for causation
I'm not a fan of the current copyright laws, and unlike a lot of people on here I'm happy to come out and say: not only have I ripped a metric fuckload of media over the years, I've downloaded a shitload of it too. I guess that says which side of the debate on copyright I sit on. However, I have to point out that your arguments are so easy to rebut that somebody has to do it, and given a lack of people willing to argue it properly I'll play devil's advocate.
:) but in all likely hood they are trying to make a living. So these creative works are goods - in the sense that they are tradable items.
Why would it be wrong to copy media ie what justification does the current law have?
People get too hung up on the final part of ownership. I heard this (digital) media and so I've taken a copy of it. I haven't deprived the original owner of it so no transfer has occurred. The universe appears to agree with me that digital media cannot be copy controlled - yay! I win.
What about the flip side? At some point somebody created that song / film / etc. In a very real sense they are the owner of that media (lets ignore scumsuckers like the RIAA for a moment). Did they do this for the sheer joy of benefiting their fellow man? It would be nice to believe so (and I'm an academic so I can believe that people do that
Now, we may argue that because the natural state of the universe seems to make it impossible to prevent copying digital information that these cannnot be trade goods, and that we should abolish copyright law. But would that action benefit us as a society? Most (if not all) of our laws are things that we have decided improve our society, but which need to be imposed on people because they contradict the natural state of the world. Thou shalt not murder - purely a social convention to improve the world that we live in. Very easy to ignore, just ask OJ.
And therein lies the justification for copyright laws. They allow a class of creative people to trade the goods that they produce in a manner that gives them a living. And as a result we live in a richer, more creative society.
The function of parasites like the RIAA, and their attempts to pervert not just copyright law but most of the technological progress in CS for their benefit is left as an exercise for the reader. Apologies for rambling and logical fallacies, but I'm having the day off work with the flu, and despite mainlining ibuprofin and lemsip I'm a little below par.