The issue with n=1s is that they can always be contradicted. For example, I'm almost the opposite of you.
I'm male. I'm 5'9" and weigh 118-120 lbs. I eat mostly bread and vegetables, rice, potatoes, with some meat and fruit. I can't stand most fat (most fatty acids taste like something rotting to me) and so I tend to have a very low fat intake. HCLF, effectively. I tend not to feel hunger much, so I use alarms to remind me when to eat. I'm active, I have stamina, and my biggest problem is keeping away from being dangerously underweight. When I diet I generally increase the meat/eggs/dairy amounts I eat in an attempt to gain some weight because I've gotten too thin. If I ate "as much as I feel like eating" I'd probably be grossly malnourished.
Different things work for different people. While it's true that no one can escape thermodynamics (if you eat less than you use, you'll lose weight) it's also true that if a diet is uncomfortable people won't stay with it. There's also the issue of bioavailability of the energy, the number of calories you actually get from a serving of food can't be more than what is measured by a calorimeter but it can be less.
I just moved, got comcast, hooked up my modem & router (brought my own, but reset to factory defaults before install) and got ipv6 out of the box. No mucking about needed.
I just moved into a new apartment, and Comcast was the only broadband ISP (DSL wouldn't be broadband in this location). I bought my own modem, they wanted $8/month to rent theirs. $96/yr for a $70 device. You'd have to be stupid to be of legal age to subscribe to their service and yet unable to do the math to save the money.
It's a problem for gun laws that they don't deprive everyone equally. I did not intend to imply that I support gun laws without amending the constitution. I agree that they're unconstitutional. I think that handguns (including revolvers) should be restricted, since they're used far more than rifles in violent crime and have fewer legitimate uses. They're more concealable, easier to carry, significantly less useful for hunting or competition target shooting, and nowhere near as good as a shotgun for home defense. Sadly most gun legislation focuses on rifles, which are far less useful for crime.
I don't think that the 2nd amendment is useful for resisting the spread of tyranny. Modern tyrants don't work through martial law, they work through bread and circuses. Keeping the people fat and complacent is far more useful, since there are never enough at any time with nothing to lose. 'Brave New World' was far more prophetic than '1984.' Claims that the 2nd amendment provides an effective check against tyranny are misinformed at best.
Gun laws have a big problem: there are already tons of guns in the US. Guns last a long time, even a poorly maintained gun will generally still fire, just not accurately. This means that a decrease in availability of guns to criminals will lag the decrease to law-abiding citizens by decades.
So just as dangerous as any small particulate matter. It will stick to space suits, get in via airlocks, cover equipment that goes outside, etc. You don't want to be breathing fine rock dust. The levels in the pressurized areas will be low, but it's still something to be concerned with. Even if not breathing, it can get into mechanical components of suits and machinery and cause wear. Of course this is assuming a system with a pressurized base and the outside area having natural Martian atmosphere (tenuous and oxygen-free, but present.)
That said, dust can be dealt with. The US military has been learning how to do so in Iraq, dust gets into everything there. It takes quite a bit of effort to keep things clean and operational in a dusty desert environment.
I read it as suggesting one of many possible difficulties with starting a mars base. Scientists have studied the issue of lunar dust toxicity, but further studies are needed. Mars has a lot of dust, and if it's toxic then extra precautions will need to be taken. A work of fiction has explored this possibility, so it's not a new idea. I don't think he was trying to imply that Red Mars is factual, merely that it is illustrative and partially based on a real potential problem.
"The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice runs thus:
At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.
Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.
Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month. "
Strongly disagree. Scientific Theory: A set of equations with associated explanation in words, stating in mathematics and natural language how something works, able to make predictions supported by observation. Scientific Law: Outdated term for a particularly well-tested Theory. Not used outside of historical naming due to the difficulty in defining "particularly well-tested". Scientific Hypothesis: An idea of how something might work, with a way to make or test predictions. If its predictions are tested and shown to be correct it will become a theory, otherwise it will be revised or abandoned.
This is still incomplete, since there are some "tool" theories of imaginary worlds (such as Super Yang-Mills) that are not able to make predictions of the real world, but which can make certain calculations for the theories that do make predictions of the real world easier. These might better be considered mathematical theories, but they're almost all used only in physics so they tend to get lumped with the scientific theories.
Also note that, even in biology, theories involve mathematics.
Re:Games: Autosave is the devil
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 1
First, because with many games that can reduce the challenge, which is seen as bad. EG save after you win each sub-stage of a boss fight, etc. Personally, I find it rather silly; either let me save wherever I want (manually) or don't let me save at all (a la roguelikes.)
Unicode works, but only a small number of characters, due to the use of a whitelist. People were doing strange things with RTL control characters, hiding posts, rewriting parts of the page above, etc, so instead of blacklisting the RTL characters and languages that use them they whitelisted a tiny tiny subset of Unicode. This is of course another terrible idea. The whitelist is never updated. The preview code doesn't seem to use the same list.
Slashdot uses different code for the preview and the actual post. This is of course a terrible idea, but it's Slashcode. There are lots of terrible ideas.
Because the phrase drone is scary. It invokes imagery of the military's drones, of weddings bombed and people dead. So instead of calling things RC aircraft like they used to people can call them drones, thereby scaring people and getting page views (and thus money) or political influence.
Personally, I think the definition of "drone" should be restricted to aircraft with a remote pilot (or no pilot) capable of some fully autonomous operation. So while a 747 has an autopilot it's not a drone because it has a pilot in the cockpit, and an RC plane isn't a drone because it can't do anything autonomously.
Take Bremermann's Limit. With all the computing power available on Earth right now, assuming it actually doubles every year (instead of simply new computers coming out every 18 months which have double the power) then it will still take more than a few thousand years to do the computation. If someone converts the entire earth into a computer operating at the limit, then simply using a 512-bit key with symmetric algorithms will effectively fix the issue, since the time to brute-force the keyspace (10^72 yrs) is longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.
The Landauer limit is somewhat stronger, but may not be correct. Let's assume we have a good cryptosystem that uses a 256-bit key, with no attack better than brute force. Let us also assume that the Landauer limit is correct (it very probably is) and there is a minimum energy to perform a computation. To break such a cipher with a 256-bit key takes a worst-case time of 2^256 with an average case of 2^255.
Let's assume we're running our cracking computer at the coldest temperature ever produced, 100pK. Then it would take 9.67x10-34 J per operation. Let's pretend we can try a key with only one operation, since in reality it will take a few more but we should be correct to an order of magnitude. It therefore takes 2256*9.57x10-34 J = 1.1081x1044 J to brute force the key space, or about 5.5x1043 J in the average case. The average type 1a supernova puts out about 1.5x1044 J. It's about as much energy as we could get by covering the entire earth (including the oceans) with solar panels and using it all... for 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Even with exponential growth we won't hit the Landauer limit for thousands of years.
So having a better random stream and being more resistant to cryptanalysis is more important than being resistant to increased computing power. It's far easier to use a side-channel attack than to directly attack the crypto, and far easier to attack the crypto than to brute-force the key.
It's being marketed as a medical device, and the FDA also has authority over medical devices. They approve things like MRI machines and EKG machines to ensure they actually work as advertized. Also, this one is apparently capable of using electromyogram electrodes, which may be intramuscular (needles implanted into the muscles) and not just those attached to the skin.
If there are no parameters for a model that allow the model to simulate reality, then the model must be incorrect. If there are parameters for a model that allow the model to simulate reality, then the model may be correct, but may still be incorrect.
This work moves us from the first state to the second, at least when it comes to simulating rather large scale structure.
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
In the USA, and 28.
The issue with n=1s is that they can always be contradicted. For example, I'm almost the opposite of you.
I'm male. I'm 5'9" and weigh 118-120 lbs. I eat mostly bread and vegetables, rice, potatoes, with some meat and fruit. I can't stand most fat (most fatty acids taste like something rotting to me) and so I tend to have a very low fat intake. HCLF, effectively. I tend not to feel hunger much, so I use alarms to remind me when to eat. I'm active, I have stamina, and my biggest problem is keeping away from being dangerously underweight. When I diet I generally increase the meat/eggs/dairy amounts I eat in an attempt to gain some weight because I've gotten too thin. If I ate "as much as I feel like eating" I'd probably be grossly malnourished.
Different things work for different people. While it's true that no one can escape thermodynamics (if you eat less than you use, you'll lose weight) it's also true that if a diet is uncomfortable people won't stay with it. There's also the issue of bioavailability of the energy, the number of calories you actually get from a serving of food can't be more than what is measured by a calorimeter but it can be less.
It was listed as being a parody account several days before the raid.
Milk and cereal can spontaneously combust in this world too, if you enjoy the rich taste of potassium flakes.
I just moved, got comcast, hooked up my modem & router (brought my own, but reset to factory defaults before install) and got ipv6 out of the box. No mucking about needed.
I just moved into a new apartment, and Comcast was the only broadband ISP (DSL wouldn't be broadband in this location). I bought my own modem, they wanted $8/month to rent theirs. $96/yr for a $70 device. You'd have to be stupid to be of legal age to subscribe to their service and yet unable to do the math to save the money.
It's a problem for gun laws that they don't deprive everyone equally. I did not intend to imply that I support gun laws without amending the constitution. I agree that they're unconstitutional. I think that handguns (including revolvers) should be restricted, since they're used far more than rifles in violent crime and have fewer legitimate uses. They're more concealable, easier to carry, significantly less useful for hunting or competition target shooting, and nowhere near as good as a shotgun for home defense. Sadly most gun legislation focuses on rifles, which are far less useful for crime.
I don't think that the 2nd amendment is useful for resisting the spread of tyranny. Modern tyrants don't work through martial law, they work through bread and circuses. Keeping the people fat and complacent is far more useful, since there are never enough at any time with nothing to lose. 'Brave New World' was far more prophetic than '1984.' Claims that the 2nd amendment provides an effective check against tyranny are misinformed at best.
Gun laws have a big problem: there are already tons of guns in the US. Guns last a long time, even a poorly maintained gun will generally still fire, just not accurately. This means that a decrease in availability of guns to criminals will lag the decrease to law-abiding citizens by decades.
So just as dangerous as any small particulate matter. It will stick to space suits, get in via airlocks, cover equipment that goes outside, etc. You don't want to be breathing fine rock dust. The levels in the pressurized areas will be low, but it's still something to be concerned with. Even if not breathing, it can get into mechanical components of suits and machinery and cause wear. Of course this is assuming a system with a pressurized base and the outside area having natural Martian atmosphere (tenuous and oxygen-free, but present.)
That said, dust can be dealt with. The US military has been learning how to do so in Iraq, dust gets into everything there. It takes quite a bit of effort to keep things clean and operational in a dusty desert environment.
I read it as suggesting one of many possible difficulties with starting a mars base. Scientists have studied the issue of lunar dust toxicity, but further studies are needed. Mars has a lot of dust, and if it's toxic then extra precautions will need to be taken. A work of fiction has explored this possibility, so it's not a new idea. I don't think he was trying to imply that Red Mars is factual, merely that it is illustrative and partially based on a real potential problem.
It's posts like that one which make /. worth reading.
Pratchett explains this rather well:
"The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice runs thus:
At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.
Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.
Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month. "
"Deals" often aren't.
Strongly disagree.
Scientific Theory: A set of equations with associated explanation in words, stating in mathematics and natural language how something works, able to make predictions supported by observation.
Scientific Law: Outdated term for a particularly well-tested Theory. Not used outside of historical naming due to the difficulty in defining "particularly well-tested".
Scientific Hypothesis: An idea of how something might work, with a way to make or test predictions. If its predictions are tested and shown to be correct it will become a theory, otherwise it will be revised or abandoned.
This is still incomplete, since there are some "tool" theories of imaginary worlds (such as Super Yang-Mills) that are not able to make predictions of the real world, but which can make certain calculations for the theories that do make predictions of the real world easier. These might better be considered mathematical theories, but they're almost all used only in physics so they tend to get lumped with the scientific theories.
Also note that, even in biology, theories involve mathematics.
First, because with many games that can reduce the challenge, which is seen as bad. EG save after you win each sub-stage of a boss fight, etc. Personally, I find it rather silly; either let me save wherever I want (manually) or don't let me save at all (a la roguelikes.)
"Do Not Call" is enforced by law, you can sue for violations. You can't sue over violations of "Do Not Track" and so it is useless.
That never stopped serious enterprise application development.
Unicode works, but only a small number of characters, due to the use of a whitelist. People were doing strange things with RTL control characters, hiding posts, rewriting parts of the page above, etc, so instead of blacklisting the RTL characters and languages that use them they whitelisted a tiny tiny subset of Unicode. This is of course another terrible idea. The whitelist is never updated. The preview code doesn't seem to use the same list.
They're a legal document database. They index court decisions, filings, laws, etc.
Slashdot uses different code for the preview and the actual post. This is of course a terrible idea, but it's Slashcode. There are lots of terrible ideas.
Because the phrase drone is scary. It invokes imagery of the military's drones, of weddings bombed and people dead. So instead of calling things RC aircraft like they used to people can call them drones, thereby scaring people and getting page views (and thus money) or political influence.
Personally, I think the definition of "drone" should be restricted to aircraft with a remote pilot (or no pilot) capable of some fully autonomous operation. So while a 747 has an autopilot it's not a drone because it has a pilot in the cockpit, and an RC plane isn't a drone because it can't do anything autonomously.
Moore's law doesn't help.
Take Bremermann's Limit. With all the computing power available on Earth right now, assuming it actually doubles every year (instead of simply new computers coming out every 18 months which have double the power) then it will still take more than a few thousand years to do the computation. If someone converts the entire earth into a computer operating at the limit, then simply using a 512-bit key with symmetric algorithms will effectively fix the issue, since the time to brute-force the keyspace (10^72 yrs) is longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.
The Landauer limit is somewhat stronger, but may not be correct. Let's assume we have a good cryptosystem that uses a 256-bit key, with no attack better than brute force. Let us also assume that the Landauer limit is correct (it very probably is) and there is a minimum energy to perform a computation. To break such a cipher with a 256-bit key takes a worst-case time of 2^256 with an average case of 2^255.
Let's assume we're running our cracking computer at the coldest temperature ever produced, 100pK. Then it would take 9.67x10-34 J per operation. Let's pretend we can try a key with only one operation, since in reality it will take a few more but we should be correct to an order of magnitude. It therefore takes 2256*9.57x10-34 J = 1.1081x1044 J to brute force the key space, or about 5.5x1043 J in the average case. The average type 1a supernova puts out about 1.5x1044 J. It's about as much energy as we could get by covering the entire earth (including the oceans) with solar panels and using it all... for 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Even with exponential growth we won't hit the Landauer limit for thousands of years.
So having a better random stream and being more resistant to cryptanalysis is more important than being resistant to increased computing power. It's far easier to use a side-channel attack than to directly attack the crypto, and far easier to attack the crypto than to brute-force the key.
It's being marketed as a medical device, and the FDA also has authority over medical devices. They approve things like MRI machines and EKG machines to ensure they actually work as advertized. Also, this one is apparently capable of using electromyogram electrodes, which may be intramuscular (needles implanted into the muscles) and not just those attached to the skin.
Well, as the old joke goes, everyone knows 30% of C++.
They just all know a different 30%.
If there are no parameters for a model that allow the model to simulate reality, then the model must be incorrect.
If there are parameters for a model that allow the model to simulate reality, then the model may be correct, but may still be incorrect.
This work moves us from the first state to the second, at least when it comes to simulating rather large scale structure.