Second, because this is actually passing much closer than the lunar orbit and is thus not a daily event.
Third, because we do know about it, but also know it would most likely cause no damage, is information worth conveying.
Fourth, because some of us are quite interested in space and space objects and the field of asteroid tracking, especially as it relates to near earth objects.
Fifth, because there's a slim chance we could see it! TFA says you'd need a "moderate" sized telescope, which could mean a lot of things in different contexts. The JPL NEO tracker page gives an absolute planetary magnitude of 28, which if my math is right is 10.8 apparent magnitude ideally (i.e. appears 'full' from our perspective, is roughly spherical etc) Which would be within the capabilities of plenty of amateur telescopes.
Ultimately and obviously, how much this is newsworthy to you is subjective. But I think it's cool.
Nonsense. This was obviously a rock launched via Bug Plasma, an attack which fortunately will miss us. Join the Mobile Infantry and fight back before they succeed and destroy Buenos Aires!
I was kinda alarmed when I read the name "2010 T" which means it was discovered in the first half of October, 2010 (as opposed to discovered in the second half via time travel). And in fact TFA says it was discovered Oct 9.
TFA also says it's a pretty small asteroid only a few meters across, which is a pretty good excuse for not finding it sooner (and makes it Mostly Harmless), but still... More funding to asteroid finding/tracking pls thx.
Given the nature of modern surveillance techniques, I would have thought a thicket of missile launchers "popping up" in a new location, without any movement provenance would raise suspicions, even given US military ham-handedness.
That only works if you have continuous (and fool-proof) observation. Which is not the case for either aerial or satellite surveillance. Even the Taleban has learned how to (sometimes) move undetected by knowing when satellites are overhead.
Seeing a new set of missile launchers "popping up" when they weren't visible anywhere on any previous surveilance, and thus assuming they must be decoys inflated in-situ, would be very foolish.
My AI prof said that the term "AI" refers to software systems which address the class of problems which are easy for biological brains but difficult for computers.
That's not the definition my AI prof gave (or Wikipedia or any of my textbooks on the subject). The definition he (and the other sources) gave was that it is (simplifying and paraphrasing) any program that made decisions and took actions based on environmental inputs.
"Ease" has nothing to do with it. The first multiplayer bots for Quake back in 1996? They were AI then and they are AI now ever though they are completely trivial and primitive in comparison to modern game AIS. Hell, even the default behavior of the monsters in single player is AI although it was trivial even for computers of the day (by necessity since it was producing 3d texture mapped graphics when good floating point, much less dedicated 3d graphics cards, were rare to non-existent in desktops).
For example: summing a thousand numbers is superior intelligence, but it isn't AI. Recognizing a face, on the other hand, is AI.
Summing a thousand numbers is not AI. Summing a thousand numbers, which represent the last thousand nanoseconds of photomultiplier output, and adjusting telescope aperture size as a consequence, is AI.
Are you sure your prof wasn't talking about popular scientific media uses of the term? Because my prof talked about that too, and in that context is much closer to what you're saying.
Agreed, they look mostly like sophisticated expert systems.
Expert systems are a type of AI. In fact a highly successful type of AI. Aside from being highly successful, they also have the useful property of being predictable. Which is beneficial when the idea is to have a probe operating autonomously and without human supervision/observation for periods of time. An expert system may not be programmed to give optimal output in all situations, but unlike some other kinds of AI (neural nets for example) it is unlikely to go completely bonkers when given inputs outside of its training set.
AI simply means a program that tries to select an optimal behavior based on environmental input (and the environment doesn't even have to be the real world). AIs don't necessarily need to learn, self-modify, or do anything more sophisticated than take the set of inputs from sensors, and look up the proper response in a static table (your car probably contains such an AI).
Existing probes contain a small amount of AI, but they are still almost entirely dependent on human operators and this is about expanding their capabilities.
In popular culture, AI means Hal 9000 or Skynet, but in the context of NASA or just about any real, technical application (Expert Systems for example) that is not the definition being used.
There are (fiction) films and books about Aushwitz. If those forms of entertainment are acceptable, why not a game?
I haven't read any fictional novels about Aushwitz. But personally, I don't consider the non-fiction book Night or the semi-fictional movie Schindler's List to be entertainment. They are not entertaining. They may be great works of art, they are deeply moving, but they are not entertaining. The Holocaust Museum is a fantastic museum, but you don't go there if you want to be entertained, and if it tried, or if Schindler's List tried, that would be quite tactless and crass.
So I'll answer your question with another question: Is this game intended to be entertaining? Is it trying to make the reality of the Berlin Wall fun? I think many are assuming this is the case since "game" usually implies at least attempting to be entertaining when that is not necessarily the case for books.
First problem ( of many ) - a representation of something is not that something. This is something that programmers forget all the time. There is no such thing as objects, methods, function calls, etc.
In math it is, and a Turing Machine is a mathematical construct and does not exist as such. Asking if the Universe is a Turing Machine is asking if the Universe can be mathematically represented as a Turing Machine.
In other words, even if you had a machine that was able to represent every single state of the universe, it is not equivalent to the universe.
However if you did have such a machine and it could not only represent every state, it could also calculate the next state, and it was a type of Turing Machine, you could conclude that the Universe was a type of Turing Machine. All Turing Machines are (mathematically) equivalent. "Equivalent" does not mean "is" in a material sense. Two computers with the same parameters are equivalent, but they are not the same physical computer.
However, what you offer is not proof by contradiction. It buys into the idea that there's the possibility that the universe might be represented by a Turing machine. That's the flawed premise (but try to get people to see it when they've got their precious theories on the line).
But that was the question posed. "Is the Universe equivalent to a Turing Machine". The answer is no. You said prove it. It was proven. The Universe is not, and cannot be, any kind of Turing Machine.
Also, the halting problem is trivially solved by allowing the arrow of time to reverse at the end of each calculation. In other words, either the Turing machine continues to exist after one second, or it disappears - stuck in an infinite time loop.
That only "solves" the problem for beings within the universe who are unaware of any such time reversals. If the Universe were a Turing Machine, then it would be performing the time reversals, and it would be the Universe itself that would be stuck in an infinite time loop.
Until we become a space faring race, we're one asteroid away from extinction. The sooner we diversify, the better off we're going to be.
Just to be clear, it's going to be a long, long time until the human race could survive without earth, and a major, major impact to make earth less hospitable to life than anywhere else in the known universe. Actually trying to "put eggs in another basket" and create a sustainable off world colony today would be premature and foolhardy.
On the other hand, the journey of a thousand light years begins with a single space station... or something like that. This space station isn't trying to be a sustainable colony. It's just another toe-dipping venture into space, and an important step on a long, long path.
It's about time they rethink this artificial theoretical/experimental barrier if all the "theories" being cooked up are so far out of the realm of verification that they might as well move to philosophy department....Said the blowhard in the 60s about the theoretical prediction of the W and Z boson twenty years before a device capable of detecting them was built.
It's not an artificial barrier, by the way, it's a practical arrangement. Both coming up with theories, and conducting and executing experiments, take substantial amounts of time that don't leave much left for the other. You might as well say we should eliminate the artificial barrier between academic computer architecture research and production circuit design. It don't work that way.
Saying that we may never find a TOE no more means that everyone should stop looking for one than saying we would find one before the turn of the century means everyone who wasn't looking one should stop what they were doing.
Both of Hawkings' statements were based on where he saw physics heading at the time. He was confident that we would find a TOE, and now he thinks that we may not.
Either way, physicists are going to continue to make theories, predictions, and observations and try to match them. They will go where the evidence directs them. If the universe is amenable to a TOE, then great. If it isn't, the it isn't, and so be it.
It might not be simple or pretty, but if the universe operates on a consistent set of physical laws, it's out there.
You're making a lot more assumptions about the universe than that it is merely consistent. How do you know the universe isn't best described by "a family of interconnected theories.. with each describing a certain reality under specific conditions"? Maybe gravity at the quantum scale really is different than gravity at other scales. Maybe these interactions can't be described by a single set of equations.
The basic problem is this: Projects in NASA take longer than a president will be in office.
So presidents will announce some grand new space project that will take a decade. The next president, in the name of budget cuts, cuts the project.
And the solution is to instead focus on small chunks of basic technology/capabilities rather than grand projects, so that they aren't vulnerable to being canceled, and make it easier to accomplish grand projects in the future without having to take a decade developing all the necessary technology because you already have it. I.e. Obama's plan.
Then Congress went and fucked it up. Oh well, on the plus side at least this shuttle derivative is unlikely to be killed for the same reasons it couldn't be completely killed this time. On the minus side, it is going to suck money out of the actually useful stuff NASA is trying to do, and even once it turns out to be extremely expensive to operate, there will mandatory launches where it's shoe-horned into things just to justify its continued existence, sucking out more money.
But hey, maybe it'll turn out to be useful, and it's certainly not as bad as I'd feared. Ares is dead; good riddance.
That's what Newton was telling Leibniz 300 years ago. Seriously, its called idealizing the past. Science didn't suddenly collapse under its own hubris, but your perception certainly has. The last 15 or so years has been a boon in the astrophysics world.
What a pretentiously misguided response to a post that was basically saying that our progress has been amazing, but it also comes at great effort, so don't be discouraged if it isn't happening as fast as you think it should.
Did you seriously not get that saying it's only been 15 years since we found the first exoplanet ever to finding an earth-sized one in the habitable zone is amazing, in the context of a non-idealized past where breakthroughs actually came at a much slower pace?
Yes, it's amazing that despite expectations Mars has enough wind to mostly blow the solar panels clean. It's not amazing at all that NASA designed every aspect of the rover as robustly as possible even with the presumption of no wind and a consequent 90-sol lifespan. It is, though, amazing what the operations team has done given the practical realities and real difficulties of operating even a robustly designed rover on freaking Mars.
They don't know the location of the dog (the chip is not a GPS device). The only information they have is the contact information for the PERSON who registered the dog, which may not be any indication of the physical location of the dog.
But presuming that the person is still in possession of the dog, then it probably is. And if they aren't, they may know who they sold it to.
"Locating" still has meanings other than "Finding via GPS receiver with wireless broadcast of location to within 3 meters".
If you want to sue the chipping company, you're surely on the losing side. The chip put in place is for identification as you say yourself.
Nonsense. The chip was put in place for both identification and location, which is why the information about location exists to be denied on Data Protection Act terms. Just because the GP said "identification" in a/. post does not make that the one and only purpose of the chip.
That said, suing the chipping company is still a losing proposition, since the company is complying with the law and their contract certainly said that they would do so even if it meant failing to provide the service being sold.
I very much doubt any information was given to the owner that "and oh by the way, when you find you NEED to locate your pet, we're going to use this law as an excuse not to provide you with the service you are purchasing from us today".
So while the chipper technically is behaving legally, the original terms of sale etc are not being honored, and at this point, going after them on these grounds may be the best recourse.
I very much doubt that the Terms and Conditions didn't include a clause that data availability was subject to any applicable laws. In fact I find it utterly implausible that the sales agreement did not include such language.
Yes, it probably didn't specifically say "When your dog is stolen and sold to someone, we won't be able to tell you where it is", but it may well have mentioned the Data Protection Act specifically. Such legal warnings are always vague, both because being vague makes it less likely to scare off customers, and because it pretty much has to be since the legal environment is fluid. Nevertheless, the chipper "technically behaving legally" is certainly honoring the terms of sale.
But then, winning a judgement against the chipper for breach of contract or unfit for purpose won't get them their pet back, but just might win a large enough judgement to force some change.
Right. So aside from the fact that they pretty much don't have a leg to stand on with regards to the whole breach of contract issue, this also will utterly fail to accomplish what is undoubtedly the thing they care about, which is recovering their pet.
Going after the chipper and trying to force them to reveal the location of the pet is the wrong tack to take. They need to treat this like what it is -- the theft of their property -- and go through the courts in that way. The chipper should not be involved except as a source of information for the investigation. Not as a defendant.
Haven't AMD's recent profits come from a) ATI and b) Intel?
No, ATI is a small portion of AMD's revenue, and yes, without the Intel settlement AMD was in the red.
Of course the Intel settlement is but a tiny fraction of the money AMD lost over the years due to Intel pressuring the OEMs to not sell AMD no matter how attractive they were. While this was a serious dampener for AMD since the K6 days, it's particularly ludicrous that they were unable to get more marketshare in the K8 days when they were far ahead in perf/watt, perf/dollar, and perf/watt. There was a brief period where they were fab limited, but in fact a big factor in their current financial woes and the reason they had to spin off their fabs is because they spent all this money on a building a new fab, but the marketshare didn't come so the fab was mostly empty.
Obviously that's good for us, because you can get a decent AMD system for less than Intel at the same performance level, but their low prices certainly aren't keeping them in business... I'm pretty sure that everyone at AMD wishes they could be selling their chips for twice as much.
I'm sure they would. To enable that, they need to get back in the game on a perf/core level. Or perf/core needs to stop mattering, but frankly even with the increase in multithreading thanks to multi-core mania "sure the cores are slower but you make it up with thread count!" is unlikely to be a generally true statement any time soon, imo. This is on the desktop, obviously. Anyway, part of why their prices are so low is because their top of the line is priced to look good compared to Intel's 2nd or 3rd stringers.
But really, their current margins are keeping them in business. A company AMD's size can last a long time losing "only" tens of millions of dollars a quarter. When it was hundreds of millions, that was rather troubling.:)
Probably the point is not so much to shield radiation, but to reduce / prevent direct contact, or (worse) ingestion of radioactive material. Depending on conditions & duration of the job, masks, goggles & gloves may just be adequate.
Right. The key is to limit exposure to the precise amount where you don't die, but do gain superpowers.
Not... exactly, but in a way, yes. For a more elaborate explanation, read the manga version of Nausicaa. Or just read it because it rules, like the movie does.:)
Slashdot Mirror
First, yes, because we know about it.
Second, because this is actually passing much closer than the lunar orbit and is thus not a daily event.
Third, because we do know about it, but also know it would most likely cause no damage, is information worth conveying.
Fourth, because some of us are quite interested in space and space objects and the field of asteroid tracking, especially as it relates to near earth objects.
Fifth, because there's a slim chance we could see it! TFA says you'd need a "moderate" sized telescope, which could mean a lot of things in different contexts. The JPL NEO tracker page gives an absolute planetary magnitude of 28, which if my math is right is 10.8 apparent magnitude ideally (i.e. appears 'full' from our perspective, is roughly spherical etc) Which would be within the capabilities of plenty of amateur telescopes.
Ultimately and obviously, how much this is newsworthy to you is subjective. But I think it's cool.
Nonsense. This was obviously a rock launched via Bug Plasma, an attack which fortunately will miss us. Join the Mobile Infantry and fight back before they succeed and destroy Buenos Aires!
I was kinda alarmed when I read the name "2010 T" which means it was discovered in the first half of October, 2010 (as opposed to discovered in the second half via time travel). And in fact TFA says it was discovered Oct 9.
TFA also says it's a pretty small asteroid only a few meters across, which is a pretty good excuse for not finding it sooner (and makes it Mostly Harmless), but still... More funding to asteroid finding/tracking pls thx.
Given the nature of modern surveillance techniques, I would have thought a thicket of missile launchers "popping up" in a new location, without any movement provenance would raise suspicions, even given US military ham-handedness.
That only works if you have continuous (and fool-proof) observation. Which is not the case for either aerial or satellite surveillance. Even the Taleban has learned how to (sometimes) move undetected by knowing when satellites are overhead.
Seeing a new set of missile launchers "popping up" when they weren't visible anywhere on any previous surveilance, and thus assuming they must be decoys inflated in-situ, would be very foolish.
"Is that really Johnny? He isn't moving or talking or eating."
"Well, you know the old saying. If it looks like a duck, and it has the same heat and radar signature as a duck, then it's probably a duck."
"You're right. I'm sorry Johnny!"
Um, to the unwashed masses, AI is Skynet or Agent Smith.
To technical people, yes, your thermostat is (an extremely primitive) AI.
But what is discussed in the article sounds much more like an expert system.
My AI prof said that the term "AI" refers to software systems which address the class of problems which are easy for biological brains but difficult for computers.
That's not the definition my AI prof gave (or Wikipedia or any of my textbooks on the subject). The definition he (and the other sources) gave was that it is (simplifying and paraphrasing) any program that made decisions and took actions based on environmental inputs.
"Ease" has nothing to do with it. The first multiplayer bots for Quake back in 1996? They were AI then and they are AI now ever though they are completely trivial and primitive in comparison to modern game AIS. Hell, even the default behavior of the monsters in single player is AI although it was trivial even for computers of the day (by necessity since it was producing 3d texture mapped graphics when good floating point, much less dedicated 3d graphics cards, were rare to non-existent in desktops).
For example: summing a thousand numbers is superior intelligence, but it isn't AI. Recognizing a face, on the other hand, is AI.
Summing a thousand numbers is not AI. Summing a thousand numbers, which represent the last thousand nanoseconds of photomultiplier output, and adjusting telescope aperture size as a consequence, is AI.
Are you sure your prof wasn't talking about popular scientific media uses of the term? Because my prof talked about that too, and in that context is much closer to what you're saying.
Agreed, they look mostly like sophisticated expert systems.
Expert systems are a type of AI. In fact a highly successful type of AI. Aside from being highly successful, they also have the useful property of being predictable. Which is beneficial when the idea is to have a probe operating autonomously and without human supervision/observation for periods of time. An expert system may not be programmed to give optimal output in all situations, but unlike some other kinds of AI (neural nets for example) it is unlikely to go completely bonkers when given inputs outside of its training set.
AI simply means a program that tries to select an optimal behavior based on environmental input (and the environment doesn't even have to be the real world). AIs don't necessarily need to learn, self-modify, or do anything more sophisticated than take the set of inputs from sensors, and look up the proper response in a static table (your car probably contains such an AI).
Existing probes contain a small amount of AI, but they are still almost entirely dependent on human operators and this is about expanding their capabilities.
In popular culture, AI means Hal 9000 or Skynet, but in the context of NASA or just about any real, technical application (Expert Systems for example) that is not the definition being used.
There are (fiction) films and books about Aushwitz. If those forms of entertainment are acceptable, why not a game?
I haven't read any fictional novels about Aushwitz. But personally, I don't consider the non-fiction book Night or the semi-fictional movie Schindler's List to be entertainment. They are not entertaining. They may be great works of art, they are deeply moving, but they are not entertaining. The Holocaust Museum is a fantastic museum, but you don't go there if you want to be entertained, and if it tried, or if Schindler's List tried, that would be quite tactless and crass.
So I'll answer your question with another question: Is this game intended to be entertaining? Is it trying to make the reality of the Berlin Wall fun? I think many are assuming this is the case since "game" usually implies at least attempting to be entertaining when that is not necessarily the case for books.
First problem ( of many ) - a representation of something is not that something. This is something that programmers forget all the time. There is no such thing as objects, methods, function calls, etc.
In math it is, and a Turing Machine is a mathematical construct and does not exist as such. Asking if the Universe is a Turing Machine is asking if the Universe can be mathematically represented as a Turing Machine.
In other words, even if you had a machine that was able to represent every single state of the universe, it is not equivalent to the universe.
However if you did have such a machine and it could not only represent every state, it could also calculate the next state, and it was a type of Turing Machine, you could conclude that the Universe was a type of Turing Machine. All Turing Machines are (mathematically) equivalent. "Equivalent" does not mean "is" in a material sense. Two computers with the same parameters are equivalent, but they are not the same physical computer.
However, what you offer is not proof by contradiction. It buys into the idea that there's the possibility that the universe might be represented by a Turing machine. That's the flawed premise (but try to get people to see it when they've got their precious theories on the line).
But that was the question posed. "Is the Universe equivalent to a Turing Machine". The answer is no. You said prove it. It was proven. The Universe is not, and cannot be, any kind of Turing Machine.
Also, the halting problem is trivially solved by allowing the arrow of time to reverse at the end of each calculation. In other words, either the Turing machine continues to exist after one second, or it disappears - stuck in an infinite time loop.
That only "solves" the problem for beings within the universe who are unaware of any such time reversals. If the Universe were a Turing Machine, then it would be performing the time reversals, and it would be the Universe itself that would be stuck in an infinite time loop.
Assuming that the old problems haven't come back by then.
Well never get past step one. The children need to be fed almost every day!
Until we become a space faring race, we're one asteroid away from extinction. The sooner we diversify, the better off we're going to be.
Just to be clear, it's going to be a long, long time until the human race could survive without earth, and a major, major impact to make earth less hospitable to life than anywhere else in the known universe. Actually trying to "put eggs in another basket" and create a sustainable off world colony today would be premature and foolhardy.
On the other hand, the journey of a thousand light years begins with a single space station... or something like that. This space station isn't trying to be a sustainable colony. It's just another toe-dipping venture into space, and an important step on a long, long path.
Allowed, yes. Guaranteed, no. The point, hopefully received.
It's about time they rethink this artificial theoretical/experimental barrier if all the "theories" being cooked up are so far out of the realm of verification that they might as well move to philosophy department. ...Said the blowhard in the 60s about the theoretical prediction of the W and Z boson twenty years before a device capable of detecting them was built.
It's not an artificial barrier, by the way, it's a practical arrangement. Both coming up with theories, and conducting and executing experiments, take substantial amounts of time that don't leave much left for the other. You might as well say we should eliminate the artificial barrier between academic computer architecture research and production circuit design. It don't work that way.
Saying that we may never find a TOE no more means that everyone should stop looking for one than saying we would find one before the turn of the century means everyone who wasn't looking one should stop what they were doing.
Both of Hawkings' statements were based on where he saw physics heading at the time. He was confident that we would find a TOE, and now he thinks that we may not.
Either way, physicists are going to continue to make theories, predictions, and observations and try to match them. They will go where the evidence directs them. If the universe is amenable to a TOE, then great. If it isn't, the it isn't, and so be it.
It might not be simple or pretty, but if the universe operates on a consistent set of physical laws, it's out there.
You're making a lot more assumptions about the universe than that it is merely consistent. How do you know the universe isn't best described by "a family of interconnected theories.. with each describing a certain reality under specific conditions"? Maybe gravity at the quantum scale really is different than gravity at other scales. Maybe these interactions can't be described by a single set of equations.
The basic problem is this: Projects in NASA take longer than a president will be in office.
So presidents will announce some grand new space project that will take a decade. The next president, in the name of budget cuts, cuts the project.
And the solution is to instead focus on small chunks of basic technology/capabilities rather than grand projects, so that they aren't vulnerable to being canceled, and make it easier to accomplish grand projects in the future without having to take a decade developing all the necessary technology because you already have it. I.e. Obama's plan.
Then Congress went and fucked it up. Oh well, on the plus side at least this shuttle derivative is unlikely to be killed for the same reasons it couldn't be completely killed this time. On the minus side, it is going to suck money out of the actually useful stuff NASA is trying to do, and even once it turns out to be extremely expensive to operate, there will mandatory launches where it's shoe-horned into things just to justify its continued existence, sucking out more money.
But hey, maybe it'll turn out to be useful, and it's certainly not as bad as I'd feared. Ares is dead; good riddance.
That's what Newton was telling Leibniz 300 years ago. Seriously, its called idealizing the past. Science didn't suddenly collapse under its own hubris, but your perception certainly has. The last 15 or so years has been a boon in the astrophysics world.
What a pretentiously misguided response to a post that was basically saying that our progress has been amazing, but it also comes at great effort, so don't be discouraged if it isn't happening as fast as you think it should.
Did you seriously not get that saying it's only been 15 years since we found the first exoplanet ever to finding an earth-sized one in the habitable zone is amazing, in the context of a non-idealized past where breakthroughs actually came at a much slower pace?
Go indirectly to Hell. Do pass Go, and seven other affiliates. Do collect for us $200 in click-through money.
Yes, it's amazing that despite expectations Mars has enough wind to mostly blow the solar panels clean. It's not amazing at all that NASA designed every aspect of the rover as robustly as possible even with the presumption of no wind and a consequent 90-sol lifespan. It is, though, amazing what the operations team has done given the practical realities and real difficulties of operating even a robustly designed rover on freaking Mars.
They don't know the location of the dog (the chip is not a GPS device). The only information they have is the contact information for the PERSON who registered the dog, which may not be any indication of the physical location of the dog.
But presuming that the person is still in possession of the dog, then it probably is. And if they aren't, they may know who they sold it to.
"Locating" still has meanings other than "Finding via GPS receiver with wireless broadcast of location to within 3 meters".
If you want to sue the chipping company, you're surely on the losing side. The chip put in place is for identification as you say yourself.
Nonsense. The chip was put in place for both identification and location, which is why the information about location exists to be denied on Data Protection Act terms. Just because the GP said "identification" in a /. post does not make that the one and only purpose of the chip.
That said, suing the chipping company is still a losing proposition, since the company is complying with the law and their contract certainly said that they would do so even if it meant failing to provide the service being sold.
I very much doubt any information was given to the owner that "and oh by the way, when you find you NEED to locate your pet, we're going to use this law as an excuse not to provide you with the service you are purchasing from us today".
So while the chipper technically is behaving legally, the original terms of sale etc are not being honored, and at this point, going after them on these grounds may be the best recourse.
I very much doubt that the Terms and Conditions didn't include a clause that data availability was subject to any applicable laws. In fact I find it utterly implausible that the sales agreement did not include such language.
Yes, it probably didn't specifically say "When your dog is stolen and sold to someone, we won't be able to tell you where it is", but it may well have mentioned the Data Protection Act specifically. Such legal warnings are always vague, both because being vague makes it less likely to scare off customers, and because it pretty much has to be since the legal environment is fluid. Nevertheless, the chipper "technically behaving legally" is certainly honoring the terms of sale.
But then, winning a judgement against the chipper for breach of contract or unfit for purpose won't get them their pet back, but just might win a large enough judgement to force some change.
Right. So aside from the fact that they pretty much don't have a leg to stand on with regards to the whole breach of contract issue, this also will utterly fail to accomplish what is undoubtedly the thing they care about, which is recovering their pet.
Going after the chipper and trying to force them to reveal the location of the pet is the wrong tack to take. They need to treat this like what it is -- the theft of their property -- and go through the courts in that way. The chipper should not be involved except as a source of information for the investigation. Not as a defendant.
Haven't AMD's recent profits come from a) ATI and b) Intel?
No, ATI is a small portion of AMD's revenue, and yes, without the Intel settlement AMD was in the red.
Of course the Intel settlement is but a tiny fraction of the money AMD lost over the years due to Intel pressuring the OEMs to not sell AMD no matter how attractive they were. While this was a serious dampener for AMD since the K6 days, it's particularly ludicrous that they were unable to get more marketshare in the K8 days when they were far ahead in perf/watt, perf/dollar, and perf/watt. There was a brief period where they were fab limited, but in fact a big factor in their current financial woes and the reason they had to spin off their fabs is because they spent all this money on a building a new fab, but the marketshare didn't come so the fab was mostly empty.
Obviously that's good for us, because you can get a decent AMD system for less than Intel at the same performance level, but their low prices certainly aren't keeping them in business... I'm pretty sure that everyone at AMD wishes they could be selling their chips for twice as much.
I'm sure they would. To enable that, they need to get back in the game on a perf/core level. Or perf/core needs to stop mattering, but frankly even with the increase in multithreading thanks to multi-core mania "sure the cores are slower but you make it up with thread count!" is unlikely to be a generally true statement any time soon, imo. This is on the desktop, obviously. Anyway, part of why their prices are so low is because their top of the line is priced to look good compared to Intel's 2nd or 3rd stringers.
But really, their current margins are keeping them in business. A company AMD's size can last a long time losing "only" tens of millions of dollars a quarter. When it was hundreds of millions, that was rather troubling. :)
Probably the point is not so much to shield radiation, but to reduce / prevent direct contact, or (worse) ingestion of radioactive material. Depending on conditions & duration of the job, masks, goggles & gloves may just be adequate.
Right. The key is to limit exposure to the precise amount where you don't die, but do gain superpowers.
These scientists know what they're doing.
Not... exactly, but in a way, yes. For a more elaborate explanation, read the manga version of Nausicaa. Or just read it because it rules, like the movie does. :)