I'm shocked to see this piece get modded up. When there's a story about Red Hat, Red Hat people add stuff in (berol?). When HP is up, Perens often joins the discussion. But these are in support of their own companies, not attacking others. They are positively informative, whilst this is negatively trolling. At least the guy (if this isn't a pure troll) admits to being from MS. I wouldn't put this past someone there, but then again this is so egregious that its difficult to believe its not a fake.
These are great questions, Dimwit! (I must say, I feel a little odd writing your handle and hping it doesn't sound like sarcasm!).
A question back to you (and others): do you see any inherent division between science and the G-d of the Torah? Or between science and "God" as the English call it, or "Allah" as Muslims call it, etc.?
P.S I still don't see why you would want to do this.
Here's a case in point: whilst working in a physics laboratory, I set up machines with 128 MB RAM with two 128 MB swap partitions--this was the standard I'd been taught, and it had never failed me. One of the computers kept hanging whenever a user ran one of his simulation programs. It quickly became obvious that he needed far more memory & swap space. Rather than reformatting (since I was out of partition space), I created a new 512 MB swap file, and that solved his problem (course, buying extra RAM later on also helped, but in a university setting a swapfile is much easier to create than RAM is to buy).
Protection "from the Internet" is only one part of the issue. Analyzing the security issues should include an analysis of the local issues. Let's look at the ship scenario, and come up with some potential non-Internet dangers:
How well protected is the local terminal? Does it run critical guidance software on a Windows 9x box that anyone can hit Escape to log into?
Does the ship have a LAN? Perhaps it is a cruise ship with an 802.11 (whatever) network to keep computers, registers, etc. around the ship connected. How easily can a laptop-ed cracker get in?
Are the ships systems setup (via satellite obviously) on a VPN back to the mainland home office? How secure is the satellite? The VPN?
These are just a few potential worries off the top of my head that do not, intrisically, have anything to do with Internet connectivity, or even necessarily with connectivity at all.
Remember Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) OS patent? If Congress were to enact legislation requiring this kind of copy protection at the OS level, then I imagine MS would be quite intent on making sure everyone pays them royalties, whether they're actually due or not. And that's assuming they'd place "nice" and even "allow" other OS's to contain copy protection. A few years ago, I would have thought the feds wouldn't let them get away without freely sharing a legislated key technology like this, but now I'm not so sure... . Not to sound too pessimist, but royalties like this could be a big pain in the arse for struggling Linux vendors.
Course, if it did happen, I could just start using a European-based Linux distribution, since they don't treat software patents the same. For now, anyway...
this has been another episode of pure speculation and meaningless FUD...
I don't know how strong OSS licenses may be in the print arena, but if you did have to go to court, I think you'd have at least an even shot.
No offense, but it sounds YANAL. Which means that you really don't have any idea what kind of "shot" Wheeler would have in court (and neither do I). Thinking that there would be an "even shot" is logical, rational, etc. The courts don't follow yours and my logic, unfortunately. If there is any serious worry about handling potential OSS violations, then the author(s) should contact an IP lawyer before publishing anything at all.
Hell, the idea of shopping at the mall is an idea about, say, 60 years old
Personally, I don't see that the mall shopping concept is all that different from market-place shopping that has been going on for thousands of years. Though it seems so on the surface, this is not a trite example at all, and in deed could expand into a whole discussion on its own: the evolution of social-dynamics from the marketplace to the suburban mall. Sounds like a sociology dissertation! Hey, if anyone uses it, can you give me a shout out...
+1 interesting (or insightful) anyway, the gist (and most of the statements) are quite good. (As if my pronouncement of such really means anything. My God I'm arrogant!).
+1 Insightful. I wanted to disagree at several points in this editorial, but upon
reflection realized that I couldn't. In my 7 years of wired existence, I've seen this
idealism in talk (and occasionally in deed), and I've seen initiative after initiative fall
flat in their pursuit of building a lasting bridge between disparate people.
-1 Overrated? Despite my basic agreement with many of the observations, I feel that there
are missing elements here...
Re: aging membership of organizations. I was a student and (low-key) activist at The
University of Texas at Austin for 5 years and at the University of North Texas for 2. In
that time, I saw a great deal of idealism (naturally), and, as various books and
commentators have mentioned, a real lack of follow-through in activism. Somehow, we were
just unable to really inspire people, not in the ways we expected and had heard about from,
say, the '60s. The students seemed laconic, with very little motivation. Well, at least when
it came to doing anything outside of classwork or hanging out with friends. And in most
causes this was not related to time spent on the 'net or even on TV. Granted, all of my
friends were of the geek-persuasion (through representing a cross-section of academic
pursuits). But these were the very people that you would expect to be idealist activists.
Instead of participating in organizations, we were all focused on our grades (notice I'm
including myself here...). And this reflects the increasing importance of not just going to
college, but excelling there. No longer does a college degree automagically reward
you with a job--you have to learn something now, and, increasingly, if you want a good job
you need a master's degree at least. And that means spending more time on homework and less
on outside activities. Unless that activity is stress-relieving... I hope you all see how
this relates to the topic at hand.
Re: Internet as a bridge. The idealistic concept of using the Internet as a bridge certainly
has seemed to fail thus far. But from my experience, this seems to be due as much to
technological problems as to social ones. People receive too much e-mail, and don't know how
to filter their spam or just generally coordinate all of their mailing lists and such. So
many non computer geeks are still getting used to the computer, and thus even more so
getting used to using all the tools available to them on the 'net. I am finding, however,
that people are warming up to the ability to use the Internet as a communication tool for
accomplishing diverse goals through diverse peoples. It just takes time and the ironing-out
of bugs. As technologies such as voice recognition software become more prominent, folks
will begin to integrate themselves into the net in more communal ways than they are now. (It
is a simple fact that most people cannot type more than, say, 20 words per minute, which
makes communication through the keyboard extremely slow for them...).
Au contraire... there is no reason to think that The Register is not just paranoid like the rest of us. Now, obviously, this is a pretty decent analysis of a possible use for these patents. But still these are vague threats to the industry that may have been cooked up to spread FUD about MS.
There is enough actual reason to fear and doubt MS out there already. Before adding potential reasons, and spreading them as actual, can we have a reasonable discussion about them? Or is it enough for someone to make generic statements about "avoiding lawsuits?"
Personally, I would like to know on what grounds anyone would be worried about lawsuits. I won't deny the possible existence of such grounds; I just want to actually hear what they are instead of speculate blindly.
Would someone be kind enough to post a basic description of OpenGL's relationship to SGI's technologies, and to the company itself. Was/is SGI involved directly in the formulation of OpenGL? Could MS have purchased patents that OpenGL relies upon, patents that do not have "free" alternative implementations? Is there a GL that OpenGL is compatible too (like OpenSSH to SSH)?
So what, fellow/.ers, are the actual implications of this?
The Register indicates that this probably, primarily, is related to XBox licensing. Perhaps this is actually a rather simple matter, where Microsoft is buying the patents instead of paying royalties. That's what it (appears) to look like on the surface. Of course, just basing this analysis off The Register, I'm not really looking at the surface, now am I? I'm looking at a potentially distorted reflection. Anyway, if this is the case, is this so bad?
Now, there are hints at sinister subliminal intentions on MS's part. No surprise that such accusations are raised here, deserved or not. OpenGL crushing is the first, and basically only, intention discussed here so far. Are there other possible implications from this deal? I do not know much about the gaming/3d-graphics industry, but I am genuinely curious what people think might come out of this.
Is the corporation mimicking the government or vice versa? Or perhaps that's just something about human nature... leading to convergent evolution. Or perhaps at this point, I should say coevolution, symbiosis...
I hate to look like I'm joining the anti-Katz flame crusade here... but I cannot help it that reading this piece reminds me of my high school yearbook. You see, in my yearbook there was this funny little section "most likely to succeed." I always thought, with of course a natural little twinge of jealousy, that this was a crock of ____. Of course, those likely to succeed were all popular people, jocks and the like. But it totally missed the point, which has already been made above--namely, that success has many definitions, and net worth & market domination might not be the best ones.
It strikes me as very odd that this is coming from Katz, given his views on American capitalism, etc. To me, this view of success is exactly what is driving everything that is wrong in American business, from Enron to the Nasdaq to MS abusing its market position. Politically speaking, we could easily find a corollary.
On a side note: next to the "most likely to be successful" was the photo of people voted "most weird." This photo included two of the most intelligent people in the school, along with the one goth-girl in the school, who is quite intelligent herself (this was ca '93). I feel like there's an implicit statement buried in there...
Your observation is probably correct. I did consider reading the manual, in fact I think I even started to, but I quickly found that I was doing just fine with raw LaTeX and liked it that way. So I'm not trying to dis LyX, just saying that I gave up on it. I probably could have given you better reasons two years ago, when I last tried it, but I just can't remember anymore. Besides, I'm stuck in MS land now and have to pretend that Word is good enough for me (the comment about outlining was quite apt. I wasn't thinking about that at the time, can be quite obnoxious till you get used to it). If I don't pretend, I'll go mad, and its just not worth it...
HTML: easy to write, easy to format. HTML TIDY will make everything beautiful for you. HTML actually prints very nicely. I believe most browsers will let you turn off the default page header/footers. I can see, however, that page breaks might be an issue. You'll probably want to use style sheets anyway, and there's a feature in CSS2 that allows for defining page breaks (Paged Media documentation). Also see Converting HTML to other formats.
LaTeX: Personally, I'm a big fan of LaTeX. Never tried pure TeX. However, once (if!) I master the CSS2 paged media commands, I'll probably abandon LaTeX. I don't know that one's really any easier than the other; it's just comes down to the simple fact that I know HTML better.
LyX: I found this very non-intuitive and gave up on it quickly. As I recall, the tab key did not work as I expected it, and various things just weren't what I expected them to be.
Word: I know you, the poster, don't want to use Word, so this is for others who must use it. I dislike MS as much as the next/., but I must say that Word is actually a very good product. There are things that annoy me (especially placement of pictures), and there's the macro virus issue, but you probably don't need macros in documentation anyway. As someone else pointed out, there are versioning features in Word. In addition, there are collaboration features that let you track, accept, and reject changes. The style sheets are pretty powerful (most people never use them), and allow you to quickly and easily create tables of contents. And of course, if you're in Windows and have Word already, and assuming it does not constantly crash, it's really the easiest thing to use. Just don't try exporting your document to HTML!
Part of the problem with all of these online polls is that they are really votes, not polls. Now, granted that these are not dictionary definitions, but it seems that in the common parlance:
VOTE/VOTING: people are solicited to come participate, at a certain place and time, in choosing one or more options over others. Canvassing and other tactics are quite common.
POLL: people are solicited to give an immediate response choosing one or more options over others. A poll in this sense is almost the same as a survey. There is no canvassing, since respondents are chosen randomly and don't have time to consider advertisements, etc., unless they happen to have given thought to the issue already.
Thus, as I see it, most "polls" on the Internet are something closer to your standard vote, with much canvassing and the usual distortion of responses only coming from those who bother to show up. Unfortunately, when people see the word "poll," I suspect that they expect something more along the lines of the definition I've given for "poll". This of course comes down to a matter of perception and education about statistics, doesn't it?
No, this is not what I was saying. I apologize if it sounds so.
The example was intended to help illuminate the meaning/effect of the uncertainty principle, not explain from whence it arises.
Another reply correctly stated that one way of looking at things is that the particle/wave does not have a specific location or momentum until it is measured. I think I said that in my previous post.
So, it has nothing to do with math being an imperfect tool, and there is no judgement on math's perfection or lack of as a tool.
It certainly does have much to do with measurement, probes, etc. This is called practical reality. The theory of quantum mechanics may not care about measurements (that is a anthropocentric term, and QM is supposed to be from the universal perspective, that doesn't know about the human, linguistic, observational perspective), but the users do. And to the users, this is the practical effect.
If I am confused, so are Griffiths, Morrison/Estle/Lane, and Sakarai, who taught me QM I, QM II, and grad QM. Yes, these are basic properties of the FT, but that is not, to my understanding, how we got there, but rather how we justified what we found.
The probe example is obviously highly inaccurate--I thought the use of a pencil made this obvious--but it is generally illuminating to people who have not studied the equations.
No. At this point, there is no established physical way to "break" the uncertainty principle. I'm not sure why it is not the "uncertainty law" at this point--perhaps this is a subtlety of the way the principal was derived. Nevertheless, it has the tenacity of a law of nature, and will not "break". The equation will not be violated--the uncertainty (or change) in position squared times uncertainty (or change) in momentum squared will alwasy be greater than or equal to Plank's constant divided by 2 (dx^2 * dp^2 >= hbar)
This is a good question, and there have already been several good answers. However, I don't feel like they've really answered your question.
Far from destroying the uncertainty principal, the article indicates that one of the "spooky" things about quantum holography is, essentially, the exploitation of the uncertainty principle.
Now, as to direct observation and the uncertainty principle: perhaps these should be explained for the casual/.'ers out there.
The uncertainty principle says that we cannot know exactly both the position and momentum at the same time. Momentum is a combination of mass and velocity. Mass often remains constant, so sometimes this is stated as "position and velocity" instead. Now, I used the word "exactly", and I meant just that. We can have a good idea of both numbers, but the more exact one measurement is, the less exact the other measurement will be. Basically, think of it this way: if we take a probe, like the tip of a pencil, and move it around till we find exactly were a particle is, we'll find it. But we'll also hit it and change its momentum.
Now, all observations require some kind of probe, be it pencils, electrons, or photons (light). A related feature of quantum mechanics is that the equations we use to determine where a particle (or wave, they're the same thing at this level) is going (the famous Schrodinger equations) don't actually tell us where a particle is going--only where its likely to go. So we don't even know how to say where it is going to go. In fact, it is considered that a particle does not have just one specific path until the particle has been measured.
In our case, that measurement--that is, the observation of the photons--occurs at the wall of the chamber. And from this data, convoluted equations work backwards to figure out what the photons bounced off of.
We may have seen Vulcan/human interaction. But if the story is to be true to itself, it must be played out, b/c that's how things would be at this time. Doesn't matter if we happened to see it in a "later" series.
Besides, I imagine they are hoping to grab more than just the standard geek audience. If not, why the cheesy intro music? And this audience just doesn't have the same background.
That intro just has to go, I'd rather hear the Friends theme song for the 10,000th time than that song one more time.
They were all certainly a bit clunky. Let's see, when is this supposed to be? Fairly near future, right? Like 100+ a few years? Well, not hard to imagine that we good old Americans would be acting fairly similar to the way we are now, and this was reflected in what looked like "clunkiness". Seems to me to be a decent projection of current viewpoints and attitudes into the future.
The ethnic diversity thing bugs me. There are no Hispanic characters that I noticed, and Hispanics by current projections will be maybe even the majority in the US by that time. I take for granted that the show's premise is that the US is the leader in things, as is now, so it is no surprise to me that the characters are mostly American. Just the largely white thing that bothers me. Though of course, it didn't really have that many humans in it overall...
The decontamination scene did a fine job of portraying some reasoning, setting up the non-logical side of Vulcans, and giving us some character development in general. But I do feel the lingering camera was a bit overboard. Save that for Scinemax, people!
The music throughout the episode was excellent
The directing was fairly good
I too was very confused as to why Archer stayed on the alien ship
Interesting to note that Rick Berman is no longer the sole Executive Producer -- Brannon Braga is up there too.
Guess that's it. Overall, I found it to be an entertaining and convincing first episode. I definitely plan on watching next week. And I must say there aren't any other television shows on righ now that have convinced me of that (well, Dark Angel and Boston Public had me convinced of that last year, and of course the Simpsons go without saying! So I guess I kind of lied).
Hey people, wake up!/. costs money for someone to run, for servers, for bandwidth. If you block all their ads (or simply always ignore them), how are they going to make any money? Taco, Hemos, et al. now have a parent company (Andover), so they'll probably get paid for some time, whether/. makes money or not... but this can't go on for ever. No matter how flawed you may think the current economic system is in software, and in general even, the people who put time into this still deserve the opportunity to make a living off of this.
Thus by using Junkbusters, or some other filtration system, you are denying a web site of their principle means to support themselves. That is why ads are getting bigger and more obnoxious. That is why content driven sites are folding or diversifying. I've been expecting someone to pull a Salon for the last couple of years now. I don't expect that they'll be the first and last major news site to go back to paid content.
My fellow Texans, please do a little research on Ucita, find out why you don't like it (yes I'm biased), and write to your state representatives, asking them to vote against this bill. You can find your House Representative here and your Senator here.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm shocked to see this piece get modded up. When there's a story about Red Hat, Red Hat people add stuff in (berol?). When HP is up, Perens often joins the discussion. But these are in support of their own companies, not attacking others. They are positively informative, whilst this is negatively trolling. At least the guy (if this isn't a pure troll) admits to being from MS. I wouldn't put this past someone there, but then again this is so egregious that its difficult to believe its not a fake.
These are great questions, Dimwit! (I must say, I feel a little odd writing your handle and hping it doesn't sound like sarcasm!).
A question back to you (and others): do you see any inherent division between science and the G-d of the Torah? Or between science and "God" as the English call it, or "Allah" as Muslims call it, etc.?
P.S I still don't see why you would want to do this.
Here's a case in point: whilst working in a physics laboratory, I set up machines with 128 MB RAM with two 128 MB swap partitions--this was the standard I'd been taught, and it had never failed me. One of the computers kept hanging whenever a user ran one of his simulation programs. It quickly became obvious that he needed far more memory & swap space. Rather than reformatting (since I was out of partition space), I created a new 512 MB swap file, and that solved his problem (course, buying extra RAM later on also helped, but in a university setting a swapfile is much easier to create than RAM is to buy).
Protection "from the Internet" is only one part of the issue. Analyzing the security issues should include an analysis of the local issues. Let's look at the ship scenario, and come up with some potential non-Internet dangers:
These are just a few potential worries off the top of my head that do not, intrisically, have anything to do with Internet connectivity, or even necessarily with connectivity at all.
Remember Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) OS patent? If Congress were to enact legislation requiring this kind of copy protection at the OS level, then I imagine MS would be quite intent on making sure everyone pays them royalties, whether they're actually due or not. And that's assuming they'd place "nice" and even "allow" other OS's to contain copy protection. A few years ago, I would have thought the feds wouldn't let them get away without freely sharing a legislated key technology like this, but now I'm not so sure... . Not to sound too pessimist, but royalties like this could be a big pain in the arse for struggling Linux vendors.
Course, if it did happen, I could just start using a European-based Linux distribution, since they don't treat software patents the same. For now, anyway...
this has been another episode of pure speculation and meaningless FUD...
True, but I presume that its not an official slashdotting unless the "link" came from slashdot...
If we all called to congratulate (assuming she accepts), don't you think we'd see the first official slashdotting of a local telephone exchange?
I don't know how strong OSS licenses may be in the print arena, but if you did have to go to court, I think you'd have at least an even shot.
No offense, but it sounds YANAL. Which means that you really don't have any idea what kind of "shot" Wheeler would have in court (and neither do I). Thinking that there would be an "even shot" is logical, rational, etc. The courts don't follow yours and my logic, unfortunately. If there is any serious worry about handling potential OSS violations, then the author(s) should contact an IP lawyer before publishing anything at all.
Hell, the idea of shopping at the mall is an idea about, say, 60 years old
Personally, I don't see that the mall shopping concept is all that different from market-place shopping that has been going on for thousands of years. Though it seems so on the surface, this is not a trite example at all, and in deed could expand into a whole discussion on its own: the evolution of social-dynamics from the marketplace to the suburban mall. Sounds like a sociology dissertation! Hey, if anyone uses it, can you give me a shout out...
+1 interesting (or insightful) anyway, the gist (and most of the statements) are quite good. (As if my pronouncement of such really means anything. My God I'm arrogant!).
+1 Insightful. I wanted to disagree at several points in this editorial, but upon reflection realized that I couldn't. In my 7 years of wired existence, I've seen this idealism in talk (and occasionally in deed), and I've seen initiative after initiative fall flat in their pursuit of building a lasting bridge between disparate people.
-1 Overrated? Despite my basic agreement with many of the observations, I feel that there are missing elements here...
Re: aging membership of organizations. I was a student and (low-key) activist at The University of Texas at Austin for 5 years and at the University of North Texas for 2. In that time, I saw a great deal of idealism (naturally), and, as various books and commentators have mentioned, a real lack of follow-through in activism. Somehow, we were just unable to really inspire people, not in the ways we expected and had heard about from, say, the '60s. The students seemed laconic, with very little motivation. Well, at least when it came to doing anything outside of classwork or hanging out with friends. And in most causes this was not related to time spent on the 'net or even on TV. Granted, all of my friends were of the geek-persuasion (through representing a cross-section of academic pursuits). But these were the very people that you would expect to be idealist activists. Instead of participating in organizations, we were all focused on our grades (notice I'm including myself here...). And this reflects the increasing importance of not just going to college, but excelling there. No longer does a college degree automagically reward you with a job--you have to learn something now, and, increasingly, if you want a good job you need a master's degree at least. And that means spending more time on homework and less on outside activities. Unless that activity is stress-relieving... I hope you all see how this relates to the topic at hand.
Re: Internet as a bridge. The idealistic concept of using the Internet as a bridge certainly has seemed to fail thus far. But from my experience, this seems to be due as much to technological problems as to social ones. People receive too much e-mail, and don't know how to filter their spam or just generally coordinate all of their mailing lists and such. So many non computer geeks are still getting used to the computer, and thus even more so getting used to using all the tools available to them on the 'net. I am finding, however, that people are warming up to the ability to use the Internet as a communication tool for accomplishing diverse goals through diverse peoples. It just takes time and the ironing-out of bugs. As technologies such as voice recognition software become more prominent, folks will begin to integrate themselves into the net in more communal ways than they are now. (It is a simple fact that most people cannot type more than, say, 20 words per minute, which makes communication through the keyboard extremely slow for them...).
Au contraire... there is no reason to think that The Register is not just paranoid like the rest of us. Now, obviously, this is a pretty decent analysis of a possible use for these patents. But still these are vague threats to the industry that may have been cooked up to spread FUD about MS.
There is enough actual reason to fear and doubt MS out there already. Before adding potential reasons, and spreading them as actual, can we have a reasonable discussion about them? Or is it enough for someone to make generic statements about "avoiding lawsuits?"
Personally, I would like to know on what grounds anyone would be worried about lawsuits. I won't deny the possible existence of such grounds; I just want to actually hear what they are instead of speculate blindly.
Would someone be kind enough to post a basic description of OpenGL's relationship to SGI's technologies, and to the company itself. Was/is SGI involved directly in the formulation of OpenGL? Could MS have purchased patents that OpenGL relies upon, patents that do not have "free" alternative implementations? Is there a GL that OpenGL is compatible too (like OpenSSH to SSH)?
So what, fellow /.ers, are the actual implications of this?
The Register indicates that this probably, primarily, is related to XBox licensing. Perhaps this is actually a rather simple matter, where Microsoft is buying the patents instead of paying royalties. That's what it (appears) to look like on the surface. Of course, just basing this analysis off The Register, I'm not really looking at the surface, now am I? I'm looking at a potentially distorted reflection. Anyway, if this is the case, is this so bad?
Now, there are hints at sinister subliminal intentions on MS's part. No surprise that such accusations are raised here, deserved or not. OpenGL crushing is the first, and basically only, intention discussed here so far. Are there other possible implications from this deal? I do not know much about the gaming/3d-graphics industry, but I am genuinely curious what people think might come out of this.
Is the corporation mimicking the government or vice versa? Or perhaps that's just something about human nature... leading to convergent evolution. Or perhaps at this point, I should say coevolution, symbiosis...
I hate to look like I'm joining the anti-Katz flame crusade here... but I cannot help it that reading this piece reminds me of my high school yearbook. You see, in my yearbook there was this funny little section "most likely to succeed." I always thought, with of course a natural little twinge of jealousy, that this was a crock of ____. Of course, those likely to succeed were all popular people, jocks and the like. But it totally missed the point, which has already been made above--namely, that success has many definitions, and net worth & market domination might not be the best ones.
It strikes me as very odd that this is coming from Katz, given his views on American capitalism, etc. To me, this view of success is exactly what is driving everything that is wrong in American business, from Enron to the Nasdaq to MS abusing its market position. Politically speaking, we could easily find a corollary.
On a side note: next to the "most likely to be successful" was the photo of people voted "most weird." This photo included two of the most intelligent people in the school, along with the one goth-girl in the school, who is quite intelligent herself (this was ca '93). I feel like there's an implicit statement buried in there...
Your observation is probably correct. I did consider reading the manual, in fact I think I even started to, but I quickly found that I was doing just fine with raw LaTeX and liked it that way. So I'm not trying to dis LyX, just saying that I gave up on it. I probably could have given you better reasons two years ago, when I last tried it, but I just can't remember anymore. Besides, I'm stuck in MS land now and have to pretend that Word is good enough for me (the comment about outlining was quite apt. I wasn't thinking about that at the time, can be quite obnoxious till you get used to it). If I don't pretend, I'll go mad, and its just not worth it...
You're right, I completely missed that. Someone please mod up the above post! I can't believe I've missed this feature!
A few notes from my experience:
HTML: easy to write, easy to format. HTML TIDY will make everything beautiful for you. HTML actually prints very nicely. I believe most browsers will let you turn off the default page header/footers. I can see, however, that page breaks might be an issue. You'll probably want to use style sheets anyway, and there's a feature in CSS2 that allows for defining page breaks (Paged Media documentation). Also see Converting HTML to other formats.
LaTeX: Personally, I'm a big fan of LaTeX. Never tried pure TeX. However, once (if!) I master the CSS2 paged media commands, I'll probably abandon LaTeX. I don't know that one's really any easier than the other; it's just comes down to the simple fact that I know HTML better.
LyX: I found this very non-intuitive and gave up on it quickly. As I recall, the tab key did not work as I expected it, and various things just weren't what I expected them to be.
Word: I know you, the poster, don't want to use Word, so this is for others who must use it. I dislike MS as much as the next /., but I must say that Word is actually a very good product. There are things that annoy me (especially placement of pictures), and there's the macro virus issue, but you probably don't need macros in documentation anyway. As someone else pointed out, there are versioning features in Word. In addition, there are collaboration features that let you track, accept, and reject changes. The style sheets are pretty powerful (most people never use them), and allow you to quickly and easily create tables of contents. And of course, if you're in Windows and have Word already, and assuming it does not constantly crash, it's really the easiest thing to use. Just don't try exporting your document to HTML!
Part of the problem with all of these online polls is that they are really votes, not polls. Now, granted that these are not dictionary definitions, but it seems that in the common parlance:
Thus, as I see it, most "polls" on the Internet are something closer to your standard vote, with much canvassing and the usual distortion of responses only coming from those who bother to show up. Unfortunately, when people see the word "poll," I suspect that they expect something more along the lines of the definition I've given for "poll". This of course comes down to a matter of perception and education about statistics, doesn't it?
No, this is not what I was saying. I apologize if it sounds so.
The example was intended to help illuminate the meaning/effect of the uncertainty principle, not explain from whence it arises.
Another reply correctly stated that one way of looking at things is that the particle/wave does not have a specific location or momentum until it is measured. I think I said that in my previous post.
So, it has nothing to do with math being an imperfect tool, and there is no judgement on math's perfection or lack of as a tool.
Inherent, fourier, etc., all true. But...
It certainly does have much to do with measurement, probes, etc. This is called practical reality. The theory of quantum mechanics may not care about measurements (that is a anthropocentric term, and QM is supposed to be from the universal perspective, that doesn't know about the human, linguistic, observational perspective), but the users do. And to the users, this is the practical effect.
If I am confused, so are Griffiths, Morrison/Estle/Lane, and Sakarai, who taught me QM I, QM II, and grad QM. Yes, these are basic properties of the FT, but that is not, to my understanding, how we got there, but rather how we justified what we found.
The probe example is obviously highly inaccurate--I thought the use of a pencil made this obvious--but it is generally illuminating to people who have not studied the equations.
[Disclaimer: IAAP too]
No. At this point, there is no established physical way to "break" the uncertainty principle. I'm not sure why it is not the "uncertainty law" at this point--perhaps this is a subtlety of the way the principal was derived. Nevertheless, it has the tenacity of a law of nature, and will not "break". The equation will not be violated--the uncertainty (or change) in position squared times uncertainty (or change) in momentum squared will alwasy be greater than or equal to Plank's constant divided by 2 (dx^2 * dp^2 >= hbar)
This is a good question, and there have already been several good answers. However, I don't feel like they've really answered your question.
Far from destroying the uncertainty principal, the article indicates that one of the "spooky" things about quantum holography is, essentially, the exploitation of the uncertainty principle.
Now, as to direct observation and the uncertainty principle: perhaps these should be explained for the casual /.'ers out there.
The uncertainty principle says that we cannot know exactly both the position and momentum at the same time. Momentum is a combination of mass and velocity. Mass often remains constant, so sometimes this is stated as "position and velocity" instead. Now, I used the word "exactly", and I meant just that. We can have a good idea of both numbers, but the more exact one measurement is, the less exact the other measurement will be. Basically, think of it this way: if we take a probe, like the tip of a pencil, and move it around till we find exactly were a particle is, we'll find it. But we'll also hit it and change its momentum.
Now, all observations require some kind of probe, be it pencils, electrons, or photons (light). A related feature of quantum mechanics is that the equations we use to determine where a particle (or wave, they're the same thing at this level) is going (the famous Schrodinger equations) don't actually tell us where a particle is going--only where its likely to go. So we don't even know how to say where it is going to go. In fact, it is considered that a particle does not have just one specific path until the particle has been measured.
In our case, that measurement--that is, the observation of the photons--occurs at the wall of the chamber. And from this data, convoluted equations work backwards to figure out what the photons bounced off of.
Hope that helps...
Got work to do, some hurried thoughts...
Guess that's it. Overall, I found it to be an entertaining and convincing first episode. I definitely plan on watching next week. And I must say there aren't any other television shows on righ now that have convinced me of that (well, Dark Angel and Boston Public had me convinced of that last year, and of course the Simpsons go without saying! So I guess I kind of lied).
Hey people, wake up! /. costs money for someone to run, for servers, for bandwidth. If you block all their ads (or simply always ignore them), how are they going to make any money? Taco, Hemos, et al. now have a parent company (Andover), so they'll probably get paid for some time, whether /. makes money or not... but this can't go on for ever. No matter how flawed you may think the current economic system is in software, and in general even, the people who put time into this still deserve the opportunity to make a living off of this.
Thus by using Junkbusters, or some other filtration system, you are denying a web site of their principle means to support themselves. That is why ads are getting bigger and more obnoxious. That is why content driven sites are folding or diversifying. I've been expecting someone to pull a Salon for the last couple of years now. I don't expect that they'll be the first and last major news site to go back to paid content.
My fellow Texans, please do a little research on Ucita, find out why you don't like it (yes I'm biased), and write to your state representatives, asking them to vote against this bill. You can find your House Representative here and your Senator here.