i'm sure the people who cant even walk on earth due to disease
Oh! Think of the children!
It may have escaped your attention but people who can't walk are normal humans like anyone else. They also have ambitions that are a little more interesting than walking. Maybe you didn't learn that from Stephen Hawking's comments about the colonization of space last week.
For that price we could have hotels in space, a base on the moon, another on Mars, mining in the asteroid belt, a probe on its way to Alpha Centauri and a probe drilling down do the oceans of Europa. When people throw away good money like that it makes me so angry, I just want to go out and make billions myself so I can spend it on something people will actually care about in a thousand years time. That's it, I'm going to start applying some of my math skills to speculating on the markets.
Oh, I've no problem with screaming kids. Note how I don't criticize either the kids or the parents. I just find it hard to imagine being a 6 year old again and remembering just what could have been so awful so often.
Aren't they the little people who you see anoying everyone in public places because they won't stop crying their eyes out? I've always wondered what could be so awful about their lives that they feel the need to cry so much. You've done little to enlighten me.
The existence of God can only be proved subjectively
It's more conventional to write this as "the existence of God cannot be proved". There is no such thing as a 'subjective proof', just as there's no such thing as a one [erspn dialog, a one person society or a one atom liquid. If only one person can 'prove' something it is merely an opinion.
As I say, modulo a polynomial. The complexity of quantum systems typically grows exponentially because we're looking at the tensor product of the subsystems.
I'd love to find out a bit more about the algorithms used here. And I'd be interested to know what kind of validation there is for the methods. I guess I can start here. (My background is more particle physics than many-body systems.)
Lightning strikes can occur on any day, even in the absence of clouds
What does that mean? Any day of the week? Any day regardless of the weather? Are you saying that if it's a lovely sunny day with nary a cloud in sight I can be struck by lightning? If you are, then you're off your head. I might as well worry about my hot coffee quantum tunneling through the mug and burning me.
You wouldn't have to meet them. You just run the program every week. But the catch is that you'd have to run it. You might put off doing it for too long and end up having to go to a meeting.
Aha! Some smart person could get really rich selling another program to run the procrastinator app on a regular basis. All my problems would be solved!
In a classical physical system the time to compute what happens to N particles typically grows as a polynomial in N. The masses and positions of the particles form a 6N dimensional space (3 for velocity, 3 for position) and you're typically trying to trace a path through that 6n-dimensional space.
In quantum mechanics the state of the system is defined by a wavefunction on a 3N dimensional space. The state of a system is no longer a point, it's a *function* on a 3N dimensional space. That means that at any position in this space the function can take any value. So you need to compute the value of this function at every point in this 3N-dimensional space. Suppose we model this really crudely. Instead of considering a wavefunction that varies continuously through this 3N-dimensional space 'discretize' this space. consider just 10 points along each of the 3N axes rather than the infinite number required by quantum mechanics. We can then model the system by computing values of the wavefunction at 10^3N points. Suppose we're dealing with 1000 atoms. Let's model the atoms really crudely as one nucleus and one electron. That means 2000 particles and a 6000-dimensional space. So we need to compute the wavefunction at 100000000...000 points, where we have '1' followed by 6000 zeroes.
I know that physicists have a few tricks up their sleeves but it seems pretty obvious to me that these guys are actually cutting a lot of corners, and to accurately model this many atoms on a computer anything like what they have sounds pretty implausible to me.
There's a quick and easy way to look at this. When you combine two classical systems the work required to simulate the combination is typically the sum of the work required to simulate them separately (modulo a polynomial). When you combine two quantum systems you need to multiply the amount of work. Combining 1000 quantum systems borders on the insane...
But I don't understand. Was there some kind of bug in this application? From the descriptions it sounds like it was 100% effective at postponing all of your appointments by a week.
Make sure you sign up for my campaign too. I'll be dressing like Scrooge and marching up and down outside my local bank complaining about how they have more money than me and won't give me any. If we can get a thousand people dressed like me they're bound to give us lots of money don't you think? Banks are just so selfish!
I can't quite tell what point you're trying to make. My claim is that regardless of the facts, people take great pleasure in bitching and moaning about their loss of rights and they don't like the facts to get in the way of that bitching and moaning. Most posts on this subject are simply knee-jerk reactions and I expect to see the same old (mis)quote from Ben Franklin and others wheeled out. Slashdot provides what people need to indulge in their favorite pleasure and the readers lap it up. Whether or not the story is true or false is neither here nor there (but judging by my own experience of journalism, it's propbably a gross misrepresentation).
You seem to have the wrong end of the stick. News reporting isn't about presenting facts. People get a kick out of hating people. This story gives people the opportunity to bitch about the cops and the government and express their hatred. Just read all the posts to this story that people have made to get an idea of how much pleasure people are getting from this story. So please don't spoil everyone's fun by suggesting that they might not have their facts right.
Well I read a post on/. from some guy who said it was unusually warm at his locale this winter. So that proves it.
If that's not enough, I'm betting that someone is going to post on/. about how they read a comment by someone who read a comment by someone who experienced an unusually warm winter at his locale. That will really prove it.
...some people disagree over whether some bits are actually yours. You say "her own body" as if there is universal agreement over what is and isn't "hers". I can say "I own X" as often as I like, but repeating it doesn't make it so.
Now Poseidon I know about. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that at least two of the companies working on Poseidon, including ILM, composited Poseidon solely with Shake. I don't know about MPC - though I know they produced the effect that was singled out by movie reviewers as being embarassingly bad:-)
Still, it sounds like Digital Fusion has improved. I'll probably bump into it again some time soon.
Kinda weird how a 19 year old is allowed to have sex with more people than a 25 year old, say. In a society that tries hard to control the sexual behavior of younger people it seems doubly weird to impose more restrictions on the older person. Reminds me of a piece of code that someone has patched together by adding yet another conditional to the chain of conditionals that the previous clueless developers added to the code to deal with the bug they really didn't understand...
The constitution says "speech". An interactive simulation isn't speech, it's a simulation.
And I don't know why you stress the ALL in your final sentence as your statement is plainly false and there are countless legal situations that trump the right to free speech, the most obvious one being that you have no right to shout FIRE in a crowded theater.
Slashdot Mirror
...this is a prize for offering a prize?
I just had a peek at Digg for the first time in my life. It seems clear that I've been failing to appreciate how good slashdot actually is!
It may have escaped your attention but people who can't walk are normal humans like anyone else. They also have ambitions that are a little more interesting than walking. Maybe you didn't learn that from Stephen Hawking's comments about the colonization of space last week.
What's NASA? Some kind of lottery agency? Prizes for this. Prizes for that. Are they based in Vegas?
For that price we could have hotels in space, a base on the moon, another on Mars, mining in the asteroid belt, a probe on its way to Alpha Centauri and a probe drilling down do the oceans of Europa. When people throw away good money like that it makes me so angry, I just want to go out and make billions myself so I can spend it on something people will actually care about in a thousand years time. That's it, I'm going to start applying some of my math skills to speculating on the markets.
Oh, I've no problem with screaming kids. Note how I don't criticize either the kids or the parents. I just find it hard to imagine being a 6 year old again and remembering just what could have been so awful so often.
Aren't they the little people who you see anoying everyone in public places because they won't stop crying their eyes out? I've always wondered what could be so awful about their lives that they feel the need to cry so much. You've done little to enlighten me.
I'd love to find out a bit more about the algorithms used here. And I'd be interested to know what kind of validation there is for the methods. I guess I can start here. (My background is more particle physics than many-body systems.)
Aha! Some smart person could get really rich selling another program to run the procrastinator app on a regular basis. All my problems would be solved!
In quantum mechanics the state of the system is defined by a wavefunction on a 3N dimensional space. The state of a system is no longer a point, it's a *function* on a 3N dimensional space. That means that at any position in this space the function can take any value. So you need to compute the value of this function at every point in this 3N-dimensional space. Suppose we model this really crudely. Instead of considering a wavefunction that varies continuously through this 3N-dimensional space 'discretize' this space. consider just 10 points along each of the 3N axes rather than the infinite number required by quantum mechanics. We can then model the system by computing values of the wavefunction at 10^3N points. Suppose we're dealing with 1000 atoms. Let's model the atoms really crudely as one nucleus and one electron. That means 2000 particles and a 6000-dimensional space. So we need to compute the wavefunction at 100000000...000 points, where we have '1' followed by 6000 zeroes.
I know that physicists have a few tricks up their sleeves but it seems pretty obvious to me that these guys are actually cutting a lot of corners, and to accurately model this many atoms on a computer anything like what they have sounds pretty implausible to me.
There's a quick and easy way to look at this. When you combine two classical systems the work required to simulate the combination is typically the sum of the work required to simulate them separately (modulo a polynomial). When you combine two quantum systems you need to multiply the amount of work. Combining 1000 quantum systems borders on the insane...
But I don't understand. Was there some kind of bug in this application? From the descriptions it sounds like it was 100% effective at postponing all of your appointments by a week.
Metaphor? What do they teach in school nowadays? It's an analogy, not a metaphor.
Make sure you sign up for my campaign too. I'll be dressing like Scrooge and marching up and down outside my local bank complaining about how they have more money than me and won't give me any. If we can get a thousand people dressed like me they're bound to give us lots of money don't you think? Banks are just so selfish!
I can't quite tell what point you're trying to make. My claim is that regardless of the facts, people take great pleasure in bitching and moaning about their loss of rights and they don't like the facts to get in the way of that bitching and moaning. Most posts on this subject are simply knee-jerk reactions and I expect to see the same old (mis)quote from Ben Franklin and others wheeled out. Slashdot provides what people need to indulge in their favorite pleasure and the readers lap it up. Whether or not the story is true or false is neither here nor there (but judging by my own experience of journalism, it's propbably a gross misrepresentation).
You seem to have the wrong end of the stick. News reporting isn't about presenting facts. People get a kick out of hating people. This story gives people the opportunity to bitch about the cops and the government and express their hatred. Just read all the posts to this story that people have made to get an idea of how much pleasure people are getting from this story. So please don't spoil everyone's fun by suggesting that they might not have their facts right.
If that's not enough, I'm betting that someone is going to post on /. about how they read a comment by someone who read a comment by someone who experienced an unusually warm winter at his locale. That will really prove it.
...some people disagree over whether some bits are actually yours. You say "her own body" as if there is universal agreement over what is and isn't "hers". I can say "I own X" as often as I like, but repeating it doesn't make it so.
What a bizarre suggestion! Why ever would we name hydrology, hydrodynamics and hydration after a many headed serpent-like creature?
Still, it sounds like Digital Fusion has improved. I'll probably bump into it again some time soon.
Kinda weird how a 19 year old is allowed to have sex with more people than a 25 year old, say. In a society that tries hard to control the sexual behavior of younger people it seems doubly weird to impose more restrictions on the older person. Reminds me of a piece of code that someone has patched together by adding yet another conditional to the chain of conditionals that the previous clueless developers added to the code to deal with the bug they really didn't understand...
And I don't know why you stress the ALL in your final sentence as your statement is plainly false and there are countless legal situations that trump the right to free speech, the most obvious one being that you have no right to shout FIRE in a crowded theater.