Upon following a river to the sea, ancient man may have thought, "Look! The blue blood of the Mother Earth flows in, but nothing comes out! There is no way to escape the giant hole in our world!"
No ancient man ever thought that. See, ancient man knew what fish were.
Today, we take the same myopic and uninformed view. "Don't go into the black hole at the center of our galaxy! You'll disappear forever!"
Well modern thinking is that you wouldn't necessarily disappear forever; the energy that used to be you would be released as Hawking Radiation at some point.
But who really cares if you'd disappear forever or not when in the process of entering the hole in the first place tidal forces would rip you apart into a stream of particles? Or are you imagining that some miraculous force on the "other side" would put you back together?
Once you grow up you will realize that there are only TWO star trek captains. Kirk and Picard. Everything else is crap.
Meh, if you can't appreciate Sisko then you're just a curmudgeonly old fool stuck in their ways... Or maybe since Picard gets a pass, you're not that old and ST:TNG was when you got into Trek and is thus acceptable, with of course the original brought into the fold for authenticity.
Correlation implies either a causal relationship or a causal relationship with a third factor. In many cases the latter is MORE interesting than the former.
Yes, but a single point of data does not imply correlation.
If they had done a controlled study with several dozen coma patients, and actually showed a statistically significant correlation, then it would be natural to conclude that there is some relationship. In this case? No, not at all.
"Correlation does not imply causation" gets overused around here, probably not even correctly in this case. Nevertheless, I'm not buying it yet.
Ah so this is the type of hypocrisy where you ignore absolutely everything about the circumstance.
The person was being slammed for not having the tiniest scrap of basic human compassion for the victim of a heinous crime. Not having compassion for that inhuman person is not even remotely comparable.
But hey if your sense of hypocrisy is based on one word being the same in both cases, then bully for you. I just find that kind of pedantic linguistic usage of the word hypocrisy to be stupid and useless.
I think a lot of people here on slashdot would like to vot for a third party. It's just that if we act sincerely, we end up more fucked than if we act strategically. Nader got, what, half a million votes? If those votes had gone to Gore and then Kerry, we wouldn't have had 8 years of Bushy shitness. Sure, those people might have liked Nader better, but instead of their candidate, or even the next best candidate in their view, we get... dubya.
Yeah, and I was one of those Nader voters in a swing state, saying "there's no difference between the candidates", and then spent the next eight years saying "Dear Universe, I'm sorry, stop showing me how wrong I was I learned my lesson!" I see the value of strategic votes, and if I was still in a swing state in 04 I would have voted for Kerry even though I thought he was a colossal douche. I wasn't, so I voted for Badnarik because screw the two-party system and the electoral college that enforces it by making my vote useless. Because believe me, I'm with you 100% that feeling able to meaningfully vote third part would be fantastic, and not being able to is a huge detriment to our country.
That said, this time, I'm voting for Obama because I actually want him to be President. I like his ideas, I like him, I think he will do a good job, and I think he will bring about change. Nice, reasonable, positive change. Not the ideal perfect change that I want, not by a longshot, no sir. But you know what? Another lesson I learned is that these super-idealistic never-compromise candidates and their followers who basically want to tear down the system and rebuild it from scratch are fools who won't accomplish anything. The only people of that type who get things done are essentially revolutionaries, not elected political officials, and well I'm hoping that we aren't going to need a revolution, cus they aren't fun.
Do you think President Nader would be able to stop globalization and corporatism? Do you think President Paul would be able to tear down all government intrusion into life and business? No! Because there is no possible President you could elect on November 4th who wouldn't have to deal with our current political system, and neither of those candidates would be able to change the inertia or deal with the compromises that would have to be made to convince those 500-some-odd politicians to go along. So out of all the candidates, who do I best believe will be able to work with that system in order to enact positive change, even bearing as it would the screwed up dysfunctional hallmarks of that system? Barack Obama. Right now, to me, "change I can believe in" means "change that actually has a chance of being accomplished".
And I still see this as an aspect of the same optimism that led me to vote Nader in 2000. Because I also believe that reasonable, achievable change can lead to more reasonable, achievable change, and a better country overall. So that's me.
And the head of McCain's transition team used to lobby for Saddam Hussien. Playing the "associations" game is asinine, because there isn't a person on this planet that can't be connected to an unsavory person in one or two steps.
That's right! And I wish people would stop judging me harshly merely because I can be connected to an unsavory person in zero steps!
classic how your version of compassion only applies to certain situations.
Yes. I lack compassion for those who completely lack it themselves. If possible I would wish upon them, and only them, the world that they wish for, so they could see the cruelty of their ways without others suffering for it. Then maybe they would gain some compassion for others, and thus be deserving of some.
I don't see how this is hypocritical at all. I have compassion for the victim of rape. I have no compassion for someone who lacks compassion for the victim of rape.
Political compass is bullshit. Specifically, it's thinly concealed U.S. Libertarian (i.e. mired in the same skewed political range as the rest of U.S. politics, only kookier) bullshit posing as an objective measure.
Last time I took the test, it labeled me as an anarcho-capitalist, which is so fucking ridiculous I wouldn't trust their ratings of European countries farther than I could throw the corpse of Ayn Rand.
More importantly, a careful reader can see that the whole system is already blowing itself to hell. The robots have already discarded the laws of robotics, substituiting for them a notion that they should generally follow the laws in terms of protecting humans as a group if not as individuals, but hey! ya gotta break a few eggs to mame an omelette. They allow humans to die, both by acts of omission and commission in the name of their new greater mission to serve humanity by ruling them. Where have we heard that crap before?
It doesn't take careful reading at all to see the system is blowing itself to hell. The failure of the 3 Laws begins in the second short story of I, Robot, and by the end of the same book the robots control everything and are already sacrificing individuals for the "good of the whole". The entire point of the book is that he hypothesizes these perfect laws that you can somehow program a robot to never violate, and then proceeds to show all the ways these "perfect" laws fail and yield undesirable results.
So given that he goes out of his way to show you how the system fails in rather deliberate and obvious ways, I'm not sure how you conclude that his point was that totalitarian socialism works as long as you have perfect beings in control. Is it that there are characters who argue in favor of the system, without being overtly evil like O'Brien of 1984? That's not Asimov's style.
I suppose you would also say the point of Foundation is that once you have invented psychohistory, you can control the future perfectly and the masses will simply do what you want with no need for individualism, even though at every point in time it took daring and creative individuals a great deal of effort to actually overcome the obstacles?
Well I'm not about to defend French's, even against the British, so I'll give you that one. Not that I prefer yellow mustard to begin with, so I doubt I'd find Colman's to be a jewel in the rough that is the Kingdom.;)
Passive entertainment is different: why would I spend a bunch of time and money creating some product for a bunch of parasitic consumers? Yes, in theory many versions of the CC license allow modification, but in practice I think that this is much less likely than with software, largely because while code fills a specific need and there are some measurably good and bad ways of doing it, art is far more a personal act of the creator, not very niche-driven, and there are an infinite number of ways to do it right.
Not to mention that free software can benefit from the addition of desirable features. Witness Firefox, where both the base source code and user-created add-ons can add tons of value to the product that never would have been there if only the core team of original authors was able to modify it. Even if only a small number of people want the feature, that's okay as it doesn't really intrude on anyone else's usage of the program.
Whereas on the other hand, I'm rather glad that only J.K. Rowling can modify the Harry Potter series, and the small segment of the population who thinks the 'feature' the series really needed was a Haggard/Dumbledore love scene can be kept at bay.
They probably could, and it's a great idea. It's just that right now our entire transportation infrastructure is built around hydrocarbons, in part because they just happen to be a very dense and convenient source for stored energy. "Usable energy" kinda depends on the use you want to put that energy to.
Not that I wouldn't love to have something like that in my backyard with a power cord running to my house and my electric car. =D
The throwout bearing is also known as the Jesus bearing to those who wrench on cars. Usually after rebuilding the engine, installing it in the car, and topping up the fluids, you'll notice the Jesus bearing sitting on top of the toolbox.
So, it's named after what you say when you realize you forgot to put it back in?
I thought it was named because you pray that it doesn't fail. But I'm no gearhead.
Why would they want to make it look like a broke-ass Mustang wanna-be?
Anyway, I was pretty sure that the Volt's concept design would be changed. Since the whole point is the ability to make short trips on electric power alone, and getting a reasonable all-electric range is still a significant issue (and tortuous to the price buying all those LiIon battery packs), I knew aerodynamics would have to take a front seat. And if it extends the range even a little, it's worth it.
Though I imagine it'll be hard to justify the estimated $50,000 price tag for something that looks like an econo-box. Also I can't say there's anything wrong with attracting people who want bad-ass looking cars into the realm of alternative vehicles. Still, when you need efficiency, efficiency is going to dictate form.
Yeah, but the same crypto that allows digital signatures also allows secure key exchange.
In other words, although this is an impressive achievement, it isn't clear to me that there's any practical application as yet. Particularly when we consider that modern crypto is almost certainly secure, so that intercepting the bits en route is pointless, and that you don't need crypto over a physically secure route.
There's an application: Distribution of the public keys that make digital signatures and secure private key exchange possible.
Key exchange is the fundamental problem of cryptography, and the reason it is so is that you can't solve it with cryptography. At some point you need to give someone an unencrypted copy of a key. You can't use the insecure communication channel to do it, it defeats the whole purpose, and makes man-in-the-middle attacks possible. We get around this in a fairly practical way by distributing keys for the Certificate Authorities on physical media or in widely distributed downloads like web browsers which we assume (and hope and pray) aren't hacked with different keys pointing to false CAs.
But imagine something smaller scale, imagine you wanted to share a public key with another individual/organzation directly rather than relying on them having a certificate from a major CA, and you also don't want to physically meet or send the key in snail mail etc. That's where this is useful.
The main limitation is the "trusted repeaters" thing to get any distance is 30mi is as far as they were able to make a single quantum crypto link. However think of it this way -- if you were trying to distribute a public key over the regular internet, you'd have to worry about whether the rounters/switches were compromised, and in theory anyone who knew where the fiber was laid could dig it up, cut it, and stick their own repeater in and intercept your keys with it looking only like a brief outage, possibly unnoticed. With quantum crypto, that can't happen any interception of your message would be detected. So those 'trusted repeaters' are -really- all you need.
Oh and there's one other application, and that's detecting whether your conversation has been intercepted in situations where you suspect your keys have been compromised. It's a little 24, but suppose you thought there was a mole who shared your keys with someone else, and you wanted to communicate with someone under 30 mi away, you would at least know if someone tried to read your message and was possibly able to decrypt it. With normal encryption, if your keys are compromised, then that's it, you're screwed. Here at least you can have a good idea if your secure channel is really secure.
Quantum computation and communications may well be very useful some year, but 2008 isn't it.
Huh, well, okay, now that I think about it, there is an application, but I guess it's not really all that useful.:P
The wiki article posted earlier will give you more information, but let me tell you the depressing upshot.
Nothing is really being teleported. Nothing can be transported faster than the speed of light using quantum teleportation. Not even information. Especially not information.
There is a quantum interaction between two particles that happens instantly, but the particles themselves, and all the information contained in those particles, was transfered at sub-light speed when you separated them.
It's still useful, just not for anything you would normally associate the words "teleportation" or "instantaneous" with.:P
Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.
Pfft, obviously this thing hasn't had to chew on my picture. It'd be a damn good algorithm that could find it's way out of this local attractiveness minimum.
Slashdot Mirror
Upon following a river to the sea, ancient man may have thought, "Look! The blue blood of the Mother Earth flows in, but nothing comes out! There is no way to escape the giant hole in our world!"
No ancient man ever thought that. See, ancient man knew what fish were.
Today, we take the same myopic and uninformed view. "Don't go into the black hole at the center of our galaxy! You'll disappear forever!"
Well modern thinking is that you wouldn't necessarily disappear forever; the energy that used to be you would be released as Hawking Radiation at some point.
But who really cares if you'd disappear forever or not when in the process of entering the hole in the first place tidal forces would rip you apart into a stream of particles? Or are you imagining that some miraculous force on the "other side" would put you back together?
Once you grow up you will realize that there are only TWO star trek captains. Kirk and Picard. Everything else is crap.
Meh, if you can't appreciate Sisko then you're just a curmudgeonly old fool stuck in their ways... Or maybe since Picard gets a pass, you're not that old and ST:TNG was when you got into Trek and is thus acceptable, with of course the original brought into the fold for authenticity.
Voyager and Enterprise are crap though.
Correlation implies either a causal relationship or a causal relationship with a third factor. In many cases the latter is MORE interesting than the former.
Yes, but a single point of data does not imply correlation.
If they had done a controlled study with several dozen coma patients, and actually showed a statistically significant correlation, then it would be natural to conclude that there is some relationship. In this case? No, not at all.
"Correlation does not imply causation" gets overused around here, probably not even correctly in this case. Nevertheless, I'm not buying it yet.
Ah so this is the type of hypocrisy where you ignore absolutely everything about the circumstance.
The person was being slammed for not having the tiniest scrap of basic human compassion for the victim of a heinous crime. Not having compassion for that inhuman person is not even remotely comparable.
But hey if your sense of hypocrisy is based on one word being the same in both cases, then bully for you. I just find that kind of pedantic linguistic usage of the word hypocrisy to be stupid and useless.
I think a lot of people here on slashdot would like to vot for a third party. It's just that if we act sincerely, we end up more fucked than if we act strategically. Nader got, what, half a million votes? If those votes had gone to Gore and then Kerry, we wouldn't have had 8 years of Bushy shitness. Sure, those people might have liked Nader better, but instead of their candidate, or even the next best candidate in their view, we get ... dubya.
Yeah, and I was one of those Nader voters in a swing state, saying "there's no difference between the candidates", and then spent the next eight years saying "Dear Universe, I'm sorry, stop showing me how wrong I was I learned my lesson!" I see the value of strategic votes, and if I was still in a swing state in 04 I would have voted for Kerry even though I thought he was a colossal douche. I wasn't, so I voted for Badnarik because screw the two-party system and the electoral college that enforces it by making my vote useless. Because believe me, I'm with you 100% that feeling able to meaningfully vote third part would be fantastic, and not being able to is a huge detriment to our country.
That said, this time, I'm voting for Obama because I actually want him to be President. I like his ideas, I like him, I think he will do a good job, and I think he will bring about change. Nice, reasonable, positive change. Not the ideal perfect change that I want, not by a longshot, no sir. But you know what? Another lesson I learned is that these super-idealistic never-compromise candidates and their followers who basically want to tear down the system and rebuild it from scratch are fools who won't accomplish anything. The only people of that type who get things done are essentially revolutionaries, not elected political officials, and well I'm hoping that we aren't going to need a revolution, cus they aren't fun.
Do you think President Nader would be able to stop globalization and corporatism? Do you think President Paul would be able to tear down all government intrusion into life and business? No! Because there is no possible President you could elect on November 4th who wouldn't have to deal with our current political system, and neither of those candidates would be able to change the inertia or deal with the compromises that would have to be made to convince those 500-some-odd politicians to go along. So out of all the candidates, who do I best believe will be able to work with that system in order to enact positive change, even bearing as it would the screwed up dysfunctional hallmarks of that system? Barack Obama. Right now, to me, "change I can believe in" means "change that actually has a chance of being accomplished".
And I still see this as an aspect of the same optimism that led me to vote Nader in 2000. Because I also believe that reasonable, achievable change can lead to more reasonable, achievable change, and a better country overall. So that's me.
And the head of McCain's transition team used to lobby for Saddam Hussien. Playing the "associations" game is asinine, because there isn't a person on this planet that can't be connected to an unsavory person in one or two steps.
That's right! And I wish people would stop judging me harshly merely because I can be connected to an unsavory person in zero steps!
classic how your version of compassion only applies to certain situations.
Yes. I lack compassion for those who completely lack it themselves. If possible I would wish upon them, and only them, the world that they wish for, so they could see the cruelty of their ways without others suffering for it. Then maybe they would gain some compassion for others, and thus be deserving of some.
I don't see how this is hypocritical at all. I have compassion for the victim of rape. I have no compassion for someone who lacks compassion for the victim of rape.
Political compass is bullshit. Specifically, it's thinly concealed U.S. Libertarian (i.e. mired in the same skewed political range as the rest of U.S. politics, only kookier) bullshit posing as an objective measure.
Last time I took the test, it labeled me as an anarcho-capitalist, which is so fucking ridiculous I wouldn't trust their ratings of European countries farther than I could throw the corpse of Ayn Rand.
In Krugman's world, if you don't agree with him... be it economics, politics, whatever... you're not just wrong, you're an idiot.
Sounds like he'd fit in perfectly on Slashdot!
More importantly, a careful reader can see that the whole system is already blowing itself to hell. The robots have already discarded the laws of robotics, substituiting for them a notion that they should generally follow the laws in terms of protecting humans as a group if not as individuals, but hey! ya gotta break a few eggs to mame an omelette. They allow humans to die, both by acts of omission and commission in the name of their new greater mission to serve humanity by ruling them. Where have we heard that crap before?
It doesn't take careful reading at all to see the system is blowing itself to hell. The failure of the 3 Laws begins in the second short story of I, Robot, and by the end of the same book the robots control everything and are already sacrificing individuals for the "good of the whole". The entire point of the book is that he hypothesizes these perfect laws that you can somehow program a robot to never violate, and then proceeds to show all the ways these "perfect" laws fail and yield undesirable results.
So given that he goes out of his way to show you how the system fails in rather deliberate and obvious ways, I'm not sure how you conclude that his point was that totalitarian socialism works as long as you have perfect beings in control. Is it that there are characters who argue in favor of the system, without being overtly evil like O'Brien of 1984? That's not Asimov's style.
I suppose you would also say the point of Foundation is that once you have invented psychohistory, you can control the future perfectly and the masses will simply do what you want with no need for individualism, even though at every point in time it took daring and creative individuals a great deal of effort to actually overcome the obstacles?
Well I'm not about to defend French's, even against the British, so I'll give you that one. Not that I prefer yellow mustard to begin with, so I doubt I'd find Colman's to be a jewel in the rough that is the Kingdom. ;)
Comparable to soy sauce as Orange marmelade is to Strawberry jam :-)
Ah, so it is a nasty British version of soy sauce. ;)
Uh, yeah, it was the wiki article that said it was comparable to soy sauce in flavor.
Except it's British, which means it's probably an even nastier thing to spread on toast than soy sauce would be.
But I kid the British and their terrible, terrible food. ;)
It would be even worse after Marmite on toast :-)
What the heck is Marmite? Is it some kind of industrial orange jam used to weld railroad ties together?
*googles*
Oh, it's some British soy sauce equivalent. I think I'd rather eat my version.
Passive entertainment is different: why would I spend a bunch of time and money creating some product for a bunch of parasitic consumers? Yes, in theory many versions of the CC license allow modification, but in practice I think that this is much less likely than with software, largely because while code fills a specific need and there are some measurably good and bad ways of doing it, art is far more a personal act of the creator, not very niche-driven, and there are an infinite number of ways to do it right.
Not to mention that free software can benefit from the addition of desirable features. Witness Firefox, where both the base source code and user-created add-ons can add tons of value to the product that never would have been there if only the core team of original authors was able to modify it. Even if only a small number of people want the feature, that's okay as it doesn't really intrude on anyone else's usage of the program.
Whereas on the other hand, I'm rather glad that only J.K. Rowling can modify the Harry Potter series, and the small segment of the population who thinks the 'feature' the series really needed was a Haggard/Dumbledore love scene can be kept at bay.
And I'm even better than you because I use an Apple computer, don't even own a TV, and only listen to indie music. You should smell my flowery farts!
I believe it, but only because you didn't specify what kind of flower.
They probably could, and it's a great idea. It's just that right now our entire transportation infrastructure is built around hydrocarbons, in part because they just happen to be a very dense and convenient source for stored energy. "Usable energy" kinda depends on the use you want to put that energy to.
Not that I wouldn't love to have something like that in my backyard with a power cord running to my house and my electric car. =D
The throwout bearing is also known as the Jesus bearing to those who wrench on cars. Usually after rebuilding the engine, installing it in the car, and topping up the fluids, you'll notice the Jesus bearing sitting on top of the toolbox.
So, it's named after what you say when you realize you forgot to put it back in?
I thought it was named because you pray that it doesn't fail. But I'm no gearhead.
What can I say? I know both how to configure WPA2 under linux, and unhook a bra without looking. Call me a renaissance man.
Why would they want to make it look like a broke-ass Mustang wanna-be?
Anyway, I was pretty sure that the Volt's concept design would be changed. Since the whole point is the ability to make short trips on electric power alone, and getting a reasonable all-electric range is still a significant issue (and tortuous to the price buying all those LiIon battery packs), I knew aerodynamics would have to take a front seat. And if it extends the range even a little, it's worth it.
Though I imagine it'll be hard to justify the estimated $50,000 price tag for something that looks like an econo-box. Also I can't say there's anything wrong with attracting people who want bad-ass looking cars into the realm of alternative vehicles. Still, when you need efficiency, efficiency is going to dictate form.
I prefer cars that look like a college woman.
- curvy exterior
- firm
- no blemishes or rust
You forgot to add
- easy to get in and out of.
That looks like an angry OAP; For real bad-assery, you really need a truck
So that's what Voltron has been up to since that "Defender of the Universe" gig dried up. Good that they're keeping busy, I say.
Yeah, but the same crypto that allows digital signatures also allows secure key exchange.
In other words, although this is an impressive achievement, it isn't clear to me that there's any practical application as yet. Particularly when we consider that modern crypto is almost certainly secure, so that intercepting the bits en route is pointless, and that you don't need crypto over a physically secure route.
There's an application: Distribution of the public keys that make digital signatures and secure private key exchange possible.
Key exchange is the fundamental problem of cryptography, and the reason it is so is that you can't solve it with cryptography. At some point you need to give someone an unencrypted copy of a key. You can't use the insecure communication channel to do it, it defeats the whole purpose, and makes man-in-the-middle attacks possible. We get around this in a fairly practical way by distributing keys for the Certificate Authorities on physical media or in widely distributed downloads like web browsers which we assume (and hope and pray) aren't hacked with different keys pointing to false CAs.
But imagine something smaller scale, imagine you wanted to share a public key with another individual/organzation directly rather than relying on them having a certificate from a major CA, and you also don't want to physically meet or send the key in snail mail etc. That's where this is useful.
The main limitation is the "trusted repeaters" thing to get any distance is 30mi is as far as they were able to make a single quantum crypto link. However think of it this way -- if you were trying to distribute a public key over the regular internet, you'd have to worry about whether the rounters/switches were compromised, and in theory anyone who knew where the fiber was laid could dig it up, cut it, and stick their own repeater in and intercept your keys with it looking only like a brief outage, possibly unnoticed. With quantum crypto, that can't happen any interception of your message would be detected. So those 'trusted repeaters' are -really- all you need.
Oh and there's one other application, and that's detecting whether your conversation has been intercepted in situations where you suspect your keys have been compromised. It's a little 24, but suppose you thought there was a mole who shared your keys with someone else, and you wanted to communicate with someone under 30 mi away, you would at least know if someone tried to read your message and was possibly able to decrypt it. With normal encryption, if your keys are compromised, then that's it, you're screwed. Here at least you can have a good idea if your secure channel is really secure.
Quantum computation and communications may well be very useful some year, but 2008 isn't it.
Huh, well, okay, now that I think about it, there is an application, but I guess it's not really all that useful. :P
The wiki article posted earlier will give you more information, but let me tell you the depressing upshot.
Nothing is really being teleported. Nothing can be transported faster than the speed of light using quantum teleportation. Not even information. Especially not information.
There is a quantum interaction between two particles that happens instantly, but the particles themselves, and all the information contained in those particles, was transfered at sub-light speed when you separated them.
It's still useful, just not for anything you would normally associate the words "teleportation" or "instantaneous" with. :P
Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.
Pfft, obviously this thing hasn't had to chew on my picture. It'd be a damn good algorithm that could find it's way out of this local attractiveness minimum.