On the other hand, Willam of Ockam didn't have a razor -- he had a beard. Einstein trumped Newton with a more complex theory, so the parsimony beloved by scientists doesn't always hold. But in this case, I suspect it will.
Although it is true that sometimes the simplest explanation isn't the right one, the breakdown of Newtonian physics at relativistic speeds isn't an example of a failure of Occam's Razor. We say that the simplest explanation that fits observations tends to be the right one. Since Newton's equations don't work at relativistic speeds, it doesn't fit observations, so it's obviously incomplete. That's why it gets trumped. If relativity made the exact same predictions, then we'd say that this whole relative time and distance thing is way too complex and keep the classical view of space and time, as per Occam's Razor:)
What are you talking about? why is it you incorrectly assume I don't care about freedom when all I care about is my kids wellbeing? What about _my_ freedom and _my kids_ freedom to live in a drug-free environment?
Dude, the moment people start forcing you and your kid to take drugs, you'll be right. But if by "freedom to live in a drug-free environment" you mean freedom to live somewhere where everybody else is prohibited from taking drugs, that's not how freedom works. I don't have the freedom to live an environment where everyone is prohibited from drinking coffee, do I?
If you start claiming that there are so many drugs at schools that your kid WILL be forced to take drugs, then you're ignorant of reality. I don't know what the stats are, but I can guarantee you that drug use in schools is not 100%. I don't have a source for you, but I never took illegal drugs, and I went to school, so at most it's 99.999...8% and I'm willing to bet it's not that high either. Hell, I went through school and college and I don't even know WHERE I would go to buy pot. If I had an interest in the stuff, I'm sure I could find out where to get it, but it'd take some digging. And if your kid develops an interest in trying the stuff, you can't blame availability.
So why is it that Americans avoid taking responsibility for their own actions and instead want to blame everyone else?
Smoking is bad for me, cigarettes are addictive, they are available, I know where to buy them, and yet I don't. That's taking responsibility for my actions, I don't need the government to be responsible for my possible lung cancer. I don't need the government to be responsible for my getting addicted to some drug and it interfering with my life. I don't need the government to be responsible for my overdosing. If any of that happens, it's my fault, and it'll be my responsibility to deal with it. Teach your kid THAT and he'll be responsible with his drug use, legal or otherwise.
Alright, I'm replying because I figure I can help you stop assuming the worst in people. I don't know exactly what I said in my post that would give you the impression that I'm a liar, but just because you didn't have the same experiences I have doesn't mean I didn't have mine. Plus I wasn't insulting gcc or autotools. In Linux, I don't really use an IDE, so they're what I thought of as "dev tools". It's great, and it's not always backward compatible, so we try to keep all devs using the same tools to avoid problems.
I currently am. Developers have shiny boxes with gcc 4.1.3, software is also compiled and installed on stable boxes running gcc 3.3.4. Haven't run into any problems recently.
I ran into problems where some syntax that used to be allowed in gcc 3.x, but is no longer allowed in gcc 4.x as they become more standards compliant (a long time ago, we're all running 4.x now). So someone can write stuff that works for them, submit it, the people running 4.x try to compile it, it doesn't work. Yeah, not writing standards code is bad, but it's a problem that's solved by everyone running the latest compiler that forces you to write more standard code, right? Oh yeah, you're a skeptic...an example of a project (not mine) that doesn't compile in gcc4, but compiles in gcc3 is qemu. You can go try it out yourself.
autotools are only needed to create the configure script. You should not need to create the configure script yourself to compile the program.
So, bullshit.
The program in question was comedi. You can download the cvs snapshot and notice that they give you autogen.sh and configure.ac, but you have to generate the configure script yourself. I don't know why they do it, and I really don't mind, I can run an extra script. I wasn't lying and I don't know why you'd automatically assume I was.
They have a few nice features, like intellisense, which Microsoft developers get addicted to and then can't live without.
If programmers can't live without a feature, that's a problem with the programmer, not the feature.
Since you mentioned Orcas, am I going to be able to use it with VS2005 solution files? Or will it convert the solution files into it's own format, preventing me from working with people who haven't upgraded yet? Backwards compatibility is the Achilles heel of Microsoft dev tools. Will it work with VS6 projects?
Oh, c'mon. You can't have developers using different dev tools. Why don't you try working on a c++ project with multiple developers, some of them using gcc 4.x and the others using gcc 3.x, and see what happens. Hell, I had to update autotools the other day to compile a program I downloaded. For some reason, debian had a really old version of autotools installed by default.
And why on earth, when I have two 21 inch LCD screens, do I still need to have all my project files in a single window? X-code lets me separate them and scatter them all over the screen.
"Scatter" them all over the screen is right. I can't STAND that, it's impossible to keep things organized. I recently started using mac os x, and I have no idea how people ever managed to use it before they introduced expose (which is very nice, but also extremely necessary in a non-MDI environment). Whether or not you like MDI, don't assume your preferences matches everyone else's. I also have dual monitors, and I can use nvidia's tools to maximize the visual studio window across all of them easily enough, although I prefer to keep a monitor free for the other stuff like browser and IM.
If you can look at more than one file at a time, and your code is well written, you don't even need intellisense.
Sure, but if I can avoid having files open, I like that. Like I said, if you absolutely MUST have intellisense in order to do your work, that's a problem, but there's nothing wrong with using the feature.
And as for the class libraries, spend a year programming on Cocoa before you start claiming how good they are. Microsoft developers only think.net is good because windows before.net was so extremely bad.
I don't know anything about cocoa, but I agree anyway. I've had the misfortune to have to deal with MFC once or twice...worthless unintuitive piece of shit.
Microsoft does a lot of things really badly. Most people find VS is really good, though. Extremely intuitive and easy to use debugging features too.
That's not what they're doing, but for what you want you can try orbiter. It's free, and it's supposed to be extremely realistic, although I have no experience with the real thing for comparison purposes. You don't get to drive Lunar Rovers, but you get to dock with Hubble and Mir (which is still there thanks to the magic of software). You can also travel and orbit the moon, as well as other planets if you spend enough time to figure out how to plan trajectories and whatnot.
However, if you're really talking about an open source clone, you have no business trying to use Apple's binaries.
Properly done reverse engineering isn't illegal. That might be a reason why you it would be your business to look at Apple's binaries while developing said open source clone, especially if we're talking about badly document API's. That said, it's still possible to do make the clone without it.
The mention of GNU should merely point out how important the GNU is in GNU/Linux.
I don't think anyone ever claimed GNU software isn't an important part (even perhaps the most important part) of distributions everywhere. My beef with GNU/Linux is the ridiculous emphasis on a name. I don't go around saying, "I'm running Microsoft Windows". I say, "I'm running Windows." And people who run mac os x don't say, "I'm running mach/mac os x". I also use a bunch of stuff that's not GNU. Do I need to start including those in the name too?
Feel free to remind people that their distro would be useless without gnu tools. Stop correcting people when they say they're running Linux. They're not lying, they ARE running Linux. They ARE running a Linux distro in the sense that the distro uses linux as a kernel. The fact that the distro also happens to include massive amounts of gnu tools is important but it doesn't mean people need to change what they want to call the thing. Geez...I thought the GPL frowned upon advertisement clauses...
And, whenever the US Gov. really wants to keep a secret - they can't
Well, if an alien spacecraft really did crash in Roswell, they did a horrible job of keeping it a secret. For starters, they screwed up and the USAF initially announced they had recovered a flying saucer. Then they went back on the claim and said it was a weather balloon. Now we're all talking about it, multiple movies have been made...if you say "Roswell" to someone, they know what you're talking about. And that's from 1947, when it was a lot easier to destroy records than it is today.
I know, you still don't believe it happened. Neither do I (the US would have a serious technological advantage over everyone else. Where's my flying car?). And yet, when you hear about wiretapping of US citizens you do believe it. The difference is that one claim is reasonable and the other is not. When news escape of the wiretapping or of the Abu Ghraib incident, we believe it until the government can prove otherwise (and obviously they can't, because it's true). When we hear of captured aliens, we think it's bs, and it's the conspiracy theorist job to prove it did happen. Whoever has the burder of proof has a serious disadvantage in either situation.
Were people clapping at the end of the movie? Is this normal where you live?
I've been to a few movies where this happened, the latest one being spiderman 3. It's a pet peeve of mine. Every single time it happens I want to yell out, "the actors can't hear you clapping, you morons"
It's fine for people to like something. It's fine for them to be excited, and it's just dandy for them to show it. However, I don't understand how you do that by CLAPPING. Who are you clapping to??
And yeah, you can guess how I feel about people clapping when a plane lands...
This reply might be too late for anyone else to read this
Well, at the very least I appreciate it, thanks for the link. I also went wikipedia browsing from that link on and read about multiple other interpretations, so it was very useful.
Thanks for a really good explanation xPsi. I knew observation interaction wasn't the cause of the uncertainty, but I don't really have a grasp as to what is. Your explanation of the wave properties really helped a lot with that. There's just only part of it I don't quite understand, and maybe you can help me with that. Or maybe you can't without going into details beyond what I can deal with, but since your explanation was so easy to follow for everything else, hopefully you can come up with a way of explaining this to me as well.
I think the problem non-physicists have with understanding quantum mechanics is that it's difficult to conceptualize a probability being inherent with the nature of the particles themselves, instead of being just a good way to predict things because we don't really know what's going on. For example, if I'm playing poker, I know the probability someone might have a hand that beats mine is x%. Knowing that will allow me to make better decisions and to play better, but whether or not the other person has that hand is an actual fact. They know what they have, no probability involved.
Now, if I understand your 100 particles experiment correctly, we can actually measure the momentum of those particles even though we know the position exactly. However, since we know the position exactly, we have an extremely wide distribution of wavenumbers, so there's a lot more possible values for the momentum of any one particle. If we measure the momenta of all 100 particles, we thus get a completely random distribution. What I'm not sure about is what that means for the individual particles. The poker-player in me wants to say, "each particle had the momentum we measured before we measured it. Since the possible momenta for the particles has a wide range, if we measure enough of them, we'll get a wide range." At the same time, if momentum and position are physically complementary variables as per your explanation, each individual particle in that experiment doesn't have well defined momentum, so when we measure it I want to do some hand-waving about terms I've heard before like "wave-function collapse" and "schrodinger's cat" and say that each particle had all possible momentum states right up until the point it was measured.
What's actually going on with each particle? For example, I was told that if you do the double-slit experiment with a single photon, you'd still get the interference pattern. What interfered with what?
It's not measurement that's the problem. It's existance. A quantum object does not have a well-defined position/momentum. More information, please? This assertion is the fundamental problem I've always had with quantum theory, and every time I ask someone who thinks they know what they're taking about to explain it, they wave their hands around a bit, say "Heisenberg" a few times, then claim it's lunchtime and they really must go. The uncertainty principle as I've always had it explained to me (for instance, in my university physics course) is that observation of (ie. interaction with) a particle affects that particle in a way that you can't determine, and hence it isn't possible to simultaneously measure some quantities. There seems to be a big jump from "can't measure" to "doesn't exist" and no-one seems willing to talk about it.
I'm not a physicist, I'm an EE. I took one semiconductors class in college that touched a bit on this, and we didn't go very deep, so take this with a grain of salt. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate very much if someone who knows more than I do can correct me. No experiment can ever, no matter how perfect, no matter how much technology improves, measure position and momentum so that the uncertainty on the measurement of momentum times the uncertainty on the measurement of position is less than the planck constant divided by 4 pi. This isn't due to the effect the observation has on the particle. Even if the observation has absolutely no effect on the particle, that's the best you can do. For example, if you two particles are entangled, and you make your measurement on one of them, your observation did not physically interact with the second particle. Nevertheless you still won't be able to measure the position of one of the entangled particles and then measure the momentum of the other and end up with values to a more precise degree than the one described in the equation above.
There are multiple interpretations for what is actually happening that prevents us from getting more precise measurements. Some of these interpretations assume that the reason we can't measure them is because the quantum particle honestly does not have its position and momentum well defined below that point. That seems to be the more accepted interpretation these days, although that wasn't always the case, which is why you were taught that the observer effect is responsible for the measurement uncertainty. Whatever is really going on however, we are sure that the uncertainty in measuring position and momentum is completely independent from the observer effect. Even if your experiment does not disrupt the particle, and even if your measurement device for position and your measurement device for momentum each are somehow individually more precise to values far below planck constant / 4 pi, you still won't be able to make a measurement on a particle without affecting the other measurement.
Einstein and Bohr had some some serious disagreements over the issue. Einstein believed as you do that you should be able to make those measurements given a proper experiment. Bohr held the opposite view. The Boh-Einstein Debates are extremely interesting reading on the subject, and I recommend you take a look. These were two brilliant scientists trying to stump one another, so the arguments on each side were great.
Is it really "irrational"? I mean, isn't it true that the people who're willing to spend $600 on an iPhone (when it still requires a 2-year contract, doesn't support 3G or development, etc.) are, to some extent, preventing those deal-breakers from getting fixed? Just like the people who pay $2 for a ringtone are keeping ringtone prices ridiculously high...
The reasoning that these buyers are messing us up is perfectly rational. The irrational part is expecting others to care about the same things we do. If there are enough people who think $600 is fair for an iPhone, who are we to tell them it's not? And if there are enough people who are willing to pay for ringtones instead of demanding unlocked phones that can use any mp3 I own (I'm not willing to pay for a ringtone at all, I pay for my music once), who are we to tell them they shouldn't?
Yeah, people define the market and take it in a direction some of us think is completely unacceptable, but what it boils down to is that I don't want anybody else telling me what I should buy and what I shouldn't. By extension, I shouldn't tell them how to spend their money. Voting with your wallet is like any other type of voting and sometimes the candidate you don't approve of wins. You can't really get mad at that...
I really don't know exactly why, but I can say for sure that when I spent $600 a piece on my unlocked Treos (as did many others a few years ago), I don't recall a sizable portion of people calling me retarded/dumb/etc. The fact is a lot of people online have some sort of irrational distaste for the iPhone, and for those that buy it.
It's the publicity. The iPhone was hyped up a lot more than treos. Heck, most people have never heard of the treo, but everyone seems to know about the iPhone. The end result is that more people end up wanting them, but since they have decided not to get it for one reason or another, they're mad at you for getting one. See, in their mind, you're ensuring that they will never get one. Since you're helping the iPhone to be successful by buying it, Apple has no motivation to change the iPhone to cater to their wishes (lower price, different network, dev kit). Since you didn't hold out like they did for the same reasons, they feel like you're retarded/dumb/etc, when in reality you just don't care about the same things they do.
I hate to admit that the reason why I understand that motivation so well is because I've suffered from it. I don't particularly care about the iPhone but there have been plenty of products that I *really* wanted to fail because they were really good but contained a serious deal-breaker for me. I voted with my wallet and got really frustrated when others didn't. Or rather, they did, but they didn't care about the issue that was important to me. Now, I was smart enough to understand what it was that I was feeling and why, and thus I didn't lash out at those people, but the irrational anger was there.
As individuals we can theoretically pay down our own debt faster than it accumulates by reigning in our spending, or working harder or whatever. But this can't happen on the macro-scale, if I start paying my debt faster, it just means someone else is falling behind faster (indirectly because they are paying me more, or suffering from me not buying as much).
It's not a zero-sum game. Additional resources enter the economy every day. Increased population means a bigger labor force, improvements to technology means we can use our current resources more efficiently...
Why dont they simply use polycarbonate and use the same coatings used on glasses? There are some anti-scratch coatings for polycarbonate that give you nearly the same durability as glass does with far less weight and problems.
How often do you actually touch the lenses instead of just the frame? The iPhone has a touchscreen so you're going to have your hands all over that screen during normal use. And you'll probably have fingerprints there all the time, so you'll need to clean it a lot.
I've always wondered why my non-touchscreen LCD monitors didn't have a glass cover. It would make them heavier, but I wouldn't have to be in paralyzing fear every time they need to be cleaned. My CRT I can just get any wet cloth and rub the screen until the dirt is out. The LCD in my first laptop, I was extremely careful about and still scratched the hell out of it when I first cleaned it. Then the hunt started for something that wouldn't scratch LCD's as much (tissue paper won, btw), but you still have to be ridiculously careful and gentle as to how you go about it.
Not that I'm buying an iPhone... Maybe if it cost $100 (free with contract).
I was referring to music, not to video games, which are an entirely different thing. (Show me anything other than a Nintendo that can play a Nintendo game CD/DVD ?)
My xbox is modded and has software that allows me to play my old Sega CD games. Even though the games are original games that I bought back in the 90's I think Microsoft (and probably Sega, even though I own the Sega CD too and just don't want to hook it up) frowns upon that use.
Relativism basically states that good and evil are relative...Relative to you personally, relative to your culture, relative to your psychological state. It fits with people's differing views on what is right and wrong; I think it's right, you think it's wrong, we're both correct. Basically it's worthless. If you're a relativist, morals are meaningless, because you can only apply moral judgements to yourself, and what the hell point is there in that?
The point is that you shouldn't be passing moral judgements universally.
Moral relativists don't believe "morals are meaningless", they believe they're relative. So, when the society you live decided that murder is a "bad" thing, everyone that participates in your society agrees to this rule in exchange for the benefits of living in a society where you are protected from being murdered by the other members of that society. If someone breaks the rules of that society, they get excluded (go to jail). In other words, morals aren't meaningless and in the society you and I live in murder is properly defined and we agree that it is wrong to murder.
No moral relativist is going to claim you need to abolish laws that punish those who commit murder because "murder might be ok to that person". Moral relativists will merely claim that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with murder, but rather it's a rule our society came up with because we benefit from having that rule. So we should stop passing moral judgements on societies that have agreed upon different rules. If anyone in our society thinks murder is ok, they should move to a society that shares his moral values, or suffer the consequences of breaking the rules of ours.
The consequence of that for individual morals is that society shouldn't have rules that don't benefit society as a whole. A law against murder is an obvious example of something that benefits our society. Laws prohibiting, say...homosexuality for example, do not. They merely prohibit people who see nothing wrong with it from engaging in those acts. The moral relativist is going to argue that it's fine for you to think homosexuality is wrong, but it's not ok for you to pass judgement on those who don't agree with you unless their actions somehow affect you personally.
Did it work? She thought it was funny, but could you pick up the keyboard right away?
It took about another minute or so for my order to show up on the system, but yes it did work. It was also a Circuit City, not a Best Buy as I realized immediately after posting that story but they essentially use the same tactics.
I went in to a best buy a few years ago for some laptop memory that was quoted as a 512 mb SODIMM for 90 bucks or so and stated nothing about being an online special.
I don't get the "online only" specials. If you pick them up at the same store, what's the point? A few months ago I needed a new keyboard. I saw a wireless mouse / keyboard combo reasonably cheap at Best Buy online, but didn't bother making the purchase online since I was going to pick it up at the store anyway. When I got there it was twice the price. I got the keyboard, told them the price I saw it online for. The clerk checked, and told me it was an online only offer. I asked her if I could still pick it up at the store if I bought it online and she said yes. So I asked her, why don't I just make the purchase at her computer then. She told me that she couldn't let me do that.
At that point, I told her to wait a few minutes. I stepped to the side, got my PDA out, checked to see if they had public wi-fi available and they did. I made the purchase with my PDA in front of her, then showed her the confirmation number and asked, "can I pick it up now?" She thought it was funny as hell:)
Am I the only one who finds this incredibly amusing coming from someone named TrekkieGod?
I did wonder if someone would comment on that:)
Contrary to popular belief it is possible to be both a trekkie and a star wars fan. It's not like we're members of violent factions locked in an endless war against one another. And when we are fighting, we're more comparable to the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. We go out in gang colors (uniforms) whistling Jerry Goldsmith stuff while the other side whistles John Williams. I don't think any actual killing can go on, unless I were to date someone from the Star Wars clan.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well, let me tell you, I'm an independent contractor in a project the Empire has going on over there and even though the money is good and we get lots of benefits (it's a government contract after all), I fear for my life. Heck, a friend of mine refused to take the job because of the risk, but I'm just trying to scrape a living, I have no personal politics.
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Although it is true that sometimes the simplest explanation isn't the right one, the breakdown of Newtonian physics at relativistic speeds isn't an example of a failure of Occam's Razor. We say that the simplest explanation that fits observations tends to be the right one. Since Newton's equations don't work at relativistic speeds, it doesn't fit observations, so it's obviously incomplete. That's why it gets trumped. If relativity made the exact same predictions, then we'd say that this whole relative time and distance thing is way too complex and keep the classical view of space and time, as per Occam's Razor :)
Dude, the moment people start forcing you and your kid to take drugs, you'll be right. But if by "freedom to live in a drug-free environment" you mean freedom to live somewhere where everybody else is prohibited from taking drugs, that's not how freedom works. I don't have the freedom to live an environment where everyone is prohibited from drinking coffee, do I?
If you start claiming that there are so many drugs at schools that your kid WILL be forced to take drugs, then you're ignorant of reality. I don't know what the stats are, but I can guarantee you that drug use in schools is not 100%. I don't have a source for you, but I never took illegal drugs, and I went to school, so at most it's 99.999...8% and I'm willing to bet it's not that high either. Hell, I went through school and college and I don't even know WHERE I would go to buy pot. If I had an interest in the stuff, I'm sure I could find out where to get it, but it'd take some digging. And if your kid develops an interest in trying the stuff, you can't blame availability.
So why is it that Americans avoid taking responsibility for their own actions and instead want to blame everyone else?Smoking is bad for me, cigarettes are addictive, they are available, I know where to buy them, and yet I don't. That's taking responsibility for my actions, I don't need the government to be responsible for my possible lung cancer. I don't need the government to be responsible for my getting addicted to some drug and it interfering with my life. I don't need the government to be responsible for my overdosing. If any of that happens, it's my fault, and it'll be my responsibility to deal with it. Teach your kid THAT and he'll be responsible with his drug use, legal or otherwise.
Alright, I'm replying because I figure I can help you stop assuming the worst in people. I don't know exactly what I said in my post that would give you the impression that I'm a liar, but just because you didn't have the same experiences I have doesn't mean I didn't have mine. Plus I wasn't insulting gcc or autotools. In Linux, I don't really use an IDE, so they're what I thought of as "dev tools". It's great, and it's not always backward compatible, so we try to keep all devs using the same tools to avoid problems.
I currently am. Developers have shiny boxes with gcc 4.1.3, software is also compiled and installed on stable boxes running gcc 3.3.4. Haven't run into any problems recently.I ran into problems where some syntax that used to be allowed in gcc 3.x, but is no longer allowed in gcc 4.x as they become more standards compliant (a long time ago, we're all running 4.x now). So someone can write stuff that works for them, submit it, the people running 4.x try to compile it, it doesn't work. Yeah, not writing standards code is bad, but it's a problem that's solved by everyone running the latest compiler that forces you to write more standard code, right? Oh yeah, you're a skeptic...an example of a project (not mine) that doesn't compile in gcc4, but compiles in gcc3 is qemu. You can go try it out yourself.
autotools are only needed to create the configure script. You should not need to create the configure script yourself to compile the program.
So, bullshit.
The program in question was comedi. You can download the cvs snapshot and notice that they give you autogen.sh and configure.ac, but you have to generate the configure script yourself. I don't know why they do it, and I really don't mind, I can run an extra script. I wasn't lying and I don't know why you'd automatically assume I was.
If programmers can't live without a feature, that's a problem with the programmer, not the feature.
Since you mentioned Orcas, am I going to be able to use it with VS2005 solution files? Or will it convert the solution files into it's own format, preventing me from working with people who haven't upgraded yet? Backwards compatibility is the Achilles heel of Microsoft dev tools. Will it work with VS6 projects?Oh, c'mon. You can't have developers using different dev tools. Why don't you try working on a c++ project with multiple developers, some of them using gcc 4.x and the others using gcc 3.x, and see what happens. Hell, I had to update autotools the other day to compile a program I downloaded. For some reason, debian had a really old version of autotools installed by default.
And why on earth, when I have two 21 inch LCD screens, do I still need to have all my project files in a single window? X-code lets me separate them and scatter them all over the screen."Scatter" them all over the screen is right. I can't STAND that, it's impossible to keep things organized. I recently started using mac os x, and I have no idea how people ever managed to use it before they introduced expose (which is very nice, but also extremely necessary in a non-MDI environment). Whether or not you like MDI, don't assume your preferences matches everyone else's. I also have dual monitors, and I can use nvidia's tools to maximize the visual studio window across all of them easily enough, although I prefer to keep a monitor free for the other stuff like browser and IM.
If you can look at more than one file at a time, and your code is well written, you don't even need intellisense.Sure, but if I can avoid having files open, I like that. Like I said, if you absolutely MUST have intellisense in order to do your work, that's a problem, but there's nothing wrong with using the feature.
And as for the class libraries, spend a year programming on Cocoa before you start claiming how good they are. Microsoft developers only thinkI don't know anything about cocoa, but I agree anyway. I've had the misfortune to have to deal with MFC once or twice...worthless unintuitive piece of shit.
Microsoft does a lot of things really badly. Most people find VS is really good, though. Extremely intuitive and easy to use debugging features too.
Actually, she did did say not to exhale. The episode was "Disaster", Season 5.
Crusher: "Once the air is vented, the first thing you'll feel is an extreme pressure on your lungs. You have to resist the temptation to exhale.TrekkieGod to the rescue!
That's not what they're doing, but for what you want you can try orbiter. It's free, and it's supposed to be extremely realistic, although I have no experience with the real thing for comparison purposes. You don't get to drive Lunar Rovers, but you get to dock with Hubble and Mir (which is still there thanks to the magic of software). You can also travel and orbit the moon, as well as other planets if you spend enough time to figure out how to plan trajectories and whatnot.
Properly done reverse engineering isn't illegal. That might be a reason why you it would be your business to look at Apple's binaries while developing said open source clone, especially if we're talking about badly document API's. That said, it's still possible to do make the clone without it.
I don't think anyone ever claimed GNU software isn't an important part (even perhaps the most important part) of distributions everywhere. My beef with GNU/Linux is the ridiculous emphasis on a name. I don't go around saying, "I'm running Microsoft Windows". I say, "I'm running Windows." And people who run mac os x don't say, "I'm running mach/mac os x". I also use a bunch of stuff that's not GNU. Do I need to start including those in the name too?
Feel free to remind people that their distro would be useless without gnu tools. Stop correcting people when they say they're running Linux. They're not lying, they ARE running Linux. They ARE running a Linux distro in the sense that the distro uses linux as a kernel. The fact that the distro also happens to include massive amounts of gnu tools is important but it doesn't mean people need to change what they want to call the thing. Geez...I thought the GPL frowned upon advertisement clauses...
Well, if an alien spacecraft really did crash in Roswell, they did a horrible job of keeping it a secret. For starters, they screwed up and the USAF initially announced they had recovered a flying saucer. Then they went back on the claim and said it was a weather balloon. Now we're all talking about it, multiple movies have been made...if you say "Roswell" to someone, they know what you're talking about. And that's from 1947, when it was a lot easier to destroy records than it is today.
I know, you still don't believe it happened. Neither do I (the US would have a serious technological advantage over everyone else. Where's my flying car?). And yet, when you hear about wiretapping of US citizens you do believe it. The difference is that one claim is reasonable and the other is not. When news escape of the wiretapping or of the Abu Ghraib incident, we believe it until the government can prove otherwise (and obviously they can't, because it's true). When we hear of captured aliens, we think it's bs, and it's the conspiracy theorist job to prove it did happen. Whoever has the burder of proof has a serious disadvantage in either situation.
I've been to a few movies where this happened, the latest one being spiderman 3. It's a pet peeve of mine. Every single time it happens I want to yell out, "the actors can't hear you clapping, you morons"
It's fine for people to like something. It's fine for them to be excited, and it's just dandy for them to show it. However, I don't understand how you do that by CLAPPING. Who are you clapping to??
And yeah, you can guess how I feel about people clapping when a plane lands...
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Well, at the very least I appreciate it, thanks for the link. I also went wikipedia browsing from that link on and read about multiple other interpretations, so it was very useful.
It helped an awful lot. Thanks for taking the time to explain some of that stuff to us curious folk, xPsi. It's extremely interesting stuff.
Thanks for a really good explanation xPsi. I knew observation interaction wasn't the cause of the uncertainty, but I don't really have a grasp as to what is. Your explanation of the wave properties really helped a lot with that. There's just only part of it I don't quite understand, and maybe you can help me with that. Or maybe you can't without going into details beyond what I can deal with, but since your explanation was so easy to follow for everything else, hopefully you can come up with a way of explaining this to me as well.
I think the problem non-physicists have with understanding quantum mechanics is that it's difficult to conceptualize a probability being inherent with the nature of the particles themselves, instead of being just a good way to predict things because we don't really know what's going on. For example, if I'm playing poker, I know the probability someone might have a hand that beats mine is x%. Knowing that will allow me to make better decisions and to play better, but whether or not the other person has that hand is an actual fact. They know what they have, no probability involved.
Now, if I understand your 100 particles experiment correctly, we can actually measure the momentum of those particles even though we know the position exactly. However, since we know the position exactly, we have an extremely wide distribution of wavenumbers, so there's a lot more possible values for the momentum of any one particle. If we measure the momenta of all 100 particles, we thus get a completely random distribution. What I'm not sure about is what that means for the individual particles. The poker-player in me wants to say, "each particle had the momentum we measured before we measured it. Since the possible momenta for the particles has a wide range, if we measure enough of them, we'll get a wide range." At the same time, if momentum and position are physically complementary variables as per your explanation, each individual particle in that experiment doesn't have well defined momentum, so when we measure it I want to do some hand-waving about terms I've heard before like "wave-function collapse" and "schrodinger's cat" and say that each particle had all possible momentum states right up until the point it was measured.
What's actually going on with each particle? For example, I was told that if you do the double-slit experiment with a single photon, you'd still get the interference pattern. What interfered with what?
I'm not a physicist, I'm an EE. I took one semiconductors class in college that touched a bit on this, and we didn't go very deep, so take this with a grain of salt. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate very much if someone who knows more than I do can correct me. No experiment can ever, no matter how perfect, no matter how much technology improves, measure position and momentum so that the uncertainty on the measurement of momentum times the uncertainty on the measurement of position is less than the planck constant divided by 4 pi. This isn't due to the effect the observation has on the particle. Even if the observation has absolutely no effect on the particle, that's the best you can do. For example, if you two particles are entangled, and you make your measurement on one of them, your observation did not physically interact with the second particle. Nevertheless you still won't be able to measure the position of one of the entangled particles and then measure the momentum of the other and end up with values to a more precise degree than the one described in the equation above.
There are multiple interpretations for what is actually happening that prevents us from getting more precise measurements. Some of these interpretations assume that the reason we can't measure them is because the quantum particle honestly does not have its position and momentum well defined below that point. That seems to be the more accepted interpretation these days, although that wasn't always the case, which is why you were taught that the observer effect is responsible for the measurement uncertainty. Whatever is really going on however, we are sure that the uncertainty in measuring position and momentum is completely independent from the observer effect. Even if your experiment does not disrupt the particle, and even if your measurement device for position and your measurement device for momentum each are somehow individually more precise to values far below planck constant / 4 pi, you still won't be able to make a measurement on a particle without affecting the other measurement.
Einstein and Bohr had some some serious disagreements over the issue. Einstein believed as you do that you should be able to make those measurements given a proper experiment. Bohr held the opposite view. The Boh-Einstein Debates are extremely interesting reading on the subject, and I recommend you take a look. These were two brilliant scientists trying to stump one another, so the arguments on each side were great.
The reasoning that these buyers are messing us up is perfectly rational. The irrational part is expecting others to care about the same things we do. If there are enough people who think $600 is fair for an iPhone, who are we to tell them it's not? And if there are enough people who are willing to pay for ringtones instead of demanding unlocked phones that can use any mp3 I own (I'm not willing to pay for a ringtone at all, I pay for my music once), who are we to tell them they shouldn't?
Yeah, people define the market and take it in a direction some of us think is completely unacceptable, but what it boils down to is that I don't want anybody else telling me what I should buy and what I shouldn't. By extension, I shouldn't tell them how to spend their money. Voting with your wallet is like any other type of voting and sometimes the candidate you don't approve of wins. You can't really get mad at that...
It's the publicity. The iPhone was hyped up a lot more than treos. Heck, most people have never heard of the treo, but everyone seems to know about the iPhone. The end result is that more people end up wanting them, but since they have decided not to get it for one reason or another, they're mad at you for getting one. See, in their mind, you're ensuring that they will never get one. Since you're helping the iPhone to be successful by buying it, Apple has no motivation to change the iPhone to cater to their wishes (lower price, different network, dev kit). Since you didn't hold out like they did for the same reasons, they feel like you're retarded/dumb/etc, when in reality you just don't care about the same things they do.
I hate to admit that the reason why I understand that motivation so well is because I've suffered from it. I don't particularly care about the iPhone but there have been plenty of products that I *really* wanted to fail because they were really good but contained a serious deal-breaker for me. I voted with my wallet and got really frustrated when others didn't. Or rather, they did, but they didn't care about the issue that was important to me. Now, I was smart enough to understand what it was that I was feeling and why, and thus I didn't lash out at those people, but the irrational anger was there.
It's not a zero-sum game. Additional resources enter the economy every day. Increased population means a bigger labor force, improvements to technology means we can use our current resources more efficiently...
How often do you actually touch the lenses instead of just the frame? The iPhone has a touchscreen so you're going to have your hands all over that screen during normal use. And you'll probably have fingerprints there all the time, so you'll need to clean it a lot.
I've always wondered why my non-touchscreen LCD monitors didn't have a glass cover. It would make them heavier, but I wouldn't have to be in paralyzing fear every time they need to be cleaned. My CRT I can just get any wet cloth and rub the screen until the dirt is out. The LCD in my first laptop, I was extremely careful about and still scratched the hell out of it when I first cleaned it. Then the hunt started for something that wouldn't scratch LCD's as much (tissue paper won, btw), but you still have to be ridiculously careful and gentle as to how you go about it.
Not that I'm buying an iPhone... Maybe if it cost $100 (free with contract).
My xbox is modded and has software that allows me to play my old Sega CD games. Even though the games are original games that I bought back in the 90's I think Microsoft (and probably Sega, even though I own the Sega CD too and just don't want to hook it up) frowns upon that use.
The point is that you shouldn't be passing moral judgements universally.
Moral relativists don't believe "morals are meaningless", they believe they're relative. So, when the society you live decided that murder is a "bad" thing, everyone that participates in your society agrees to this rule in exchange for the benefits of living in a society where you are protected from being murdered by the other members of that society. If someone breaks the rules of that society, they get excluded (go to jail). In other words, morals aren't meaningless and in the society you and I live in murder is properly defined and we agree that it is wrong to murder.
No moral relativist is going to claim you need to abolish laws that punish those who commit murder because "murder might be ok to that person". Moral relativists will merely claim that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with murder, but rather it's a rule our society came up with because we benefit from having that rule. So we should stop passing moral judgements on societies that have agreed upon different rules. If anyone in our society thinks murder is ok, they should move to a society that shares his moral values, or suffer the consequences of breaking the rules of ours.
The consequence of that for individual morals is that society shouldn't have rules that don't benefit society as a whole. A law against murder is an obvious example of something that benefits our society. Laws prohibiting, say...homosexuality for example, do not. They merely prohibit people who see nothing wrong with it from engaging in those acts. The moral relativist is going to argue that it's fine for you to think homosexuality is wrong, but it's not ok for you to pass judgement on those who don't agree with you unless their actions somehow affect you personally.
It took about another minute or so for my order to show up on the system, but yes it did work. It was also a Circuit City, not a Best Buy as I realized immediately after posting that story but they essentially use the same tactics.
I don't get the "online only" specials. If you pick them up at the same store, what's the point? A few months ago I needed a new keyboard. I saw a wireless mouse / keyboard combo reasonably cheap at Best Buy online, but didn't bother making the purchase online since I was going to pick it up at the store anyway. When I got there it was twice the price. I got the keyboard, told them the price I saw it online for. The clerk checked, and told me it was an online only offer. I asked her if I could still pick it up at the store if I bought it online and she said yes. So I asked her, why don't I just make the purchase at her computer then. She told me that she couldn't let me do that.
At that point, I told her to wait a few minutes. I stepped to the side, got my PDA out, checked to see if they had public wi-fi available and they did. I made the purchase with my PDA in front of her, then showed her the confirmation number and asked, "can I pick it up now?" She thought it was funny as hell :)
I did wonder if someone would comment on that :)
Contrary to popular belief it is possible to be both a trekkie and a star wars fan. It's not like we're members of violent factions locked in an endless war against one another. And when we are fighting, we're more comparable to the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. We go out in gang colors (uniforms) whistling Jerry Goldsmith stuff while the other side whistles John Williams. I don't think any actual killing can go on, unless I were to date someone from the Star Wars clan.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well, let me tell you, I'm an independent contractor in a project the Empire has going on over there and even though the money is good and we get lots of benefits (it's a government contract after all), I fear for my life. Heck, a friend of mine refused to take the job because of the risk, but I'm just trying to scrape a living, I have no personal politics.