How does they know these things are unphysical?
on
Physics in the Movies
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm not at all impressed by their movie reviews. Take AI, which gets their worst rating: they're not impressed that the robots are self-sustaining, "what about energy, refuelling, rebuilding?" They claim it violates the laws of thermodynamics. Well, first law -- how do they know it's being violated? Maybe the things run on solar energy, or geothermal energy, or some such thing which is not inexhaustible but is "forever" on the timescales we're concerned with. Second law -- the earth is not a closed system, it constantly gets energy from the sun. Second law doesn't apply. Maybe they have automatic robot factories which run on solar power, it's not impossible.
That wasn't the only example. He can't conceive of a machine which can act as a helicopter and a submarine at the same time -- but a hundred years ago people couldn't have conceived of helicopters in the first place. Why should he evaluate everything by present-day technology?
The Phantom Menace review was even worse. There was no real "physics" being objected to, only stuff like "if the force field can stop water, why doesn't it stop humans who are 80% water?" If we don't know how it works, how can we pass judgements on such things? Perhaps it actively detects the presence of humans or biological objects. Perhaps it only stops liquids and not solids. Perhaps any number of other explanations.
Remember Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Conversely, in the movies, anything which looks like magic could be the product of sufficiently advanced technology.
That's a hilarious characterization if you're talking about speed. The technology is that of the French TGV. In England, it takes over an hour to get to the tunnel (and then half an hour to cross the tunnel.) Once out on the other side, it gets on the high-speed TGV track, and does Calais-Paris in something like an hour and 15 minutes. Basically, London-Dover takes around as long as Calais-Paris. Check out those distances on the map. Apparently the British high-speed track will be up by 2008 or so. (They hope.)
It's true that those high-speed tracks are tremendously expensive. Only a nationalized company like the SNCF can do it on such a large scale (eg, Paris-Marseille, over 800 km, 3 hours, track completed last year). I think the SNCF is a good example of why public services like railways are better not privatized...
Why do you think Chiao is a crackpot? Have you even read his paper?
Podkletnov's experimental results are published, peer reviewed, and seem related.
But they aren't related. They suggest a screening of a static gravitational field, what Chiao calls a "gravitoelectric" field, which is what we observe in everyday life. As Chiao points out, it's impossible to screen such a field within the setup of standard gravity theory, because (as far as we know) only positive masses exist and they can't cancel. (Equation 34 in his paper, keeping in mind that the mass density is always positive. The only way you could produce a static cancelling field is from Equation 35 with a linearly increasing gravitomagnetic field, which again is not a static solution and not a useful idea.)
What Chiao is talking about is the screening of the "gravitomagnetic" field, which is something we do not observe at all in daily life, but should exist according to Einstein's equations. He's not focussing on magnetostatic flux expulsion either (like the Meissner effect) but about some dynamic effect on gravity waves. This, he claims, would lead to a measurable effect. (I find that astonishing, since the effect comes from electrons which have a really tiny mass). If he can prove it experimentally, it will indeed be huge. But it has nothing to do with Podkletnov's claims and I don't think he's obliged to cite them at all.
Most drivers do not really create problems across the different kernel versions of the distributions, in most cases a simple recompile of the kernel module with the modified kernel headers is different.
On top of that, I really suspect that writing drivers across the many Windoze versions is far more difficult because each different Windows type (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and what have you not) is really a different OS.
The point is, you don't need to recompile under Windows. The same driver works under Windows 95, 98, ME (ok, sometimes not under 95), and often works under NT, 2000 and XP too. I can understand
a driver not running under both kernels 2.2 and 2.4, but within the same major kernel version number, surely that should be possible and desirable? Recompiling isn't a thing you ask ordinary users to do, and distributing the source is often not something companies want to do, this should be simplified. I thought the kernel module versioning information was meant for this, but apparently it didn't quite work.
And Mozilla isn't bloated? Keep in mind that OpenOffice is an entire office suite, which has, moreover, received very favourable reviews in comparison with MS Office, while being much less bloated than the latter (comparing the binaries, I mean).
Don't get me wrong, I like Mozilla, but bloated it is.
You could just use the linux binaries. That's what I do (well, I actually use it only 3 or 4 times a year when someone sends me a word document, but that's another matter.) The linux may work better than the native version: Openoffice probably works better on linux, and linux emulation is very good indeed on FreeBSD (and not only for running software: I've actually rebuilt the major part of a gentoo system on freebsd, chroot-ed into a linux partition).
Speak for yourself, Jon.
Grammatically, he can use "we" if he and at least one other person think so. Are you suggesting that not a single reader or editorial member of Slashdot agrees with him?
Also, 16 bits of encoding is pretty lame, and produce a lot of aliasing of the music.
Uh, the number of bits has nothing to do with aliasing. Aliasing depends on the sampling rate and the maximum frequencies present in your original signal.
It does affect the dynamic range, but CDs already have a huge improvement over analog media in that respect. Personally, though I'm reasonably picky about sound quality, I'm quite happy with CDs; I wouldn't mind further improvement but not at a vastly increased price, except perhaps with a handful of truly exceptional recordings. I think most people would feel the same, so persuading people to buy SACDs at a higher price will require either (a) plenty of marketing or (b) retiring the old CD format altogether.
... while at the same time claiming to detest leveraging patents (as opposed to just making good products) as a means of making money!
Where did they claim that? They only say that software patents impede innovation and are inconsistent with open-source software. Not that, given that they exist, they should not be leveraged to make money.
If Red Hat adds to its income, it can pay more developers, pay them better, and thus benefit free software better. And not just the linux kernel. The advances between gcc 2.7/2.8 and gcc 3.0 have been quite significantly driven by Red Hat, as has the initial impetus for the gnome desktop.
What part of "hypocritical" are you having trouble with?
The part which says it's ok to use copyright law to enforce the GPL, but not to use patent law to benefit free software. If you're such a fan of the FSF, by the way, why don't you demand that copyrights to the Linux kernel be handed over to the FSF? There are very good reasons people don't want to do that, even apart from wanting to dual-license and make money (Troll Tech can dual-license Qt, but nobody can do that with linux, too many people hold the copyrights.)
OK, then assign the patents to the FSF. No? Why not? There's only one answer to that question. Red Hat wants to retain the ability to leverage these patents against other Open Source companies.
No, there's another answer. Red Hat wants to retain the ability to license these patents to closed-source companies, and make some money that way. Hey, what an idea, making money. Red Hat must be pretty evil to think of that.
Maybe we should all go use Debian, and get Debian to pay the salaries of Alan Cox and others too.
If you're thinking patriotism, you may be interested in yesterday's and today's editions of The Boondocks.
I'm eagerly waiting to see it evolve over the week...
Actually I may have overstated things a bit: read the thread a little further down.
But telling people how to do this is unquestionably in violation of the DMCA. CNN, Reuters, watch out.
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
The RIAA estimates "piracy" losses at $300 million a year or more. I'm not sure, but I suspect this could be a larger number than the market for felt-tip markers for "other" purposes. Admittedly, the other two conditions (A) and (C) above are probably not applicable, but this one could be (stupider judgements have been made) and it's an "or" clause.
I thought the DMCA only stipulates laws for devices designed specifically copyright violation?
No. Read the DMCA. It outlaws devices which can be used for bypassing digital copy control mechanisms, regardless of possible legitimate uses.
CD burners don't pass copy control mechanisms, photocopiers don't deal with digital media (unless it's a barcode or something...). But a felt-tip pen which is used to bypass the manufacturer's CD copy control mechanism -- that's illegal under the DMCA, and I hope somebody sues for outlawing these evil things, that should show 'em...
"deceptive 'renewal notices'"
Oh, you mean like the dozen or so "helpful reminders" we get from every magazine subscription we own?
No, not like that. It's as if Time magazine sent you a reminder saying that your Newsweek subscription was running out, and suggesting that you had to subscribe to Time magazine to continue receiving any kind of weekly newsmagazine.
Clarification: the oscillator ideas are that recent, but the experimental observation of otoacoustic emissions is much older (I'm not sure exactly how old).
The idea that the ear is a self-tuned oscillator with positive feedback was proposed as far back as 1948, in a paper by Gold (Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, volume B 136, page 492). It wasn't taken seriously back then and there was no evidence, but the evidence -- and more theoretical support and models -- came starting around 1998, in work by Hudspeth (Rockefeller Univ, NY) and others. Since then there have been plenty of papers; it's more than a "few months" old...
One problem, I think, is that too many sites use frames in a stupid way, with the article contained in a single frame with no other content, and it is impossible to link to that article with the surrounding frames intact. So people deep-link to the frame alone, thus losing the masthead, the sidebars, the ads, etc... (can't think of examples offhand but you probably know what I mean.)
This was, I think, the case with some other deep-linking complainants (who didn't think of just fixing their pages instead).
However, in the case of the Dallas News, this doesn't seem to be the problem. Possibly it's an unthinking copycat case. Really, I can't see what they're complaining about -- they gain a visitor, who will view their ads, possibly click on them, possibly browse the site further, which they wouldn't have gained otherwise.
The article covered two vulnerabilities specific to FreeBSD, a few in third party programs which apply to all platforms (the article itself makes no reference to FreeBSD), and some vulnerabilities (mosix, IRIX syslogd) which are specific to other platforms (Linux and IRIX respectively) and have nothing whatever to do with FreeBSD
So how does that make it an article on FreeBSD vulnerabilities?
The above is cut-and-pasted from bero's site (http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html), without acknowledgement and without changing the links (which is why the mplayer discussion points to slashdot.org and doesn't work). The AC has, however, contributed his own adjectives concerning natalie portman etc. That qualifies for +5 informative?
"Banias" are also the business/trader community in India -- more accurately, the "bania" caste is traditionally the caste of traders and merchants (though these days it doesn't necessarily mean anything).
This city is part of the Indus valley civilisation.
If so, it has nothing to do with the surviving shore temple, which is from the Pallava period in the 7th/8th century AD.
But I don't see any evidence for this Indus theory. It is also a very long way off from the Indus valley sites which are, well, in/near the Indus valley on the other side of the subcontinent, mainly in today's Pakistan (look at the map). The likely explanation is surely that this is a Pallava city dating from the same time as the surviving temple.
First, the surviving temple is certainly not 5000
years old: it dates from the 7th or 8th century AD.
Second, Hindu civilization itself is old but not that old. For temples of this kind, 1000 BC would be an optimistic early limit; 3000 BC is out of the question.
From
this article it seems that the claim of 5000 years
comes from Graham Hancock, a controversial writer about "lost civilizations". I'd like to see the opinion backed by some credible evidence.
Write some of your email address using html code
for the ascii characters, like $ 褪 for "r".
(Yes, I've posted about this before, but it does work for me.) Browsers render it so users get the address they want, but spambots try to grab it from the raw html and get something meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
That wasn't the only example. He can't conceive of a machine which can act as a helicopter and a submarine at the same time -- but a hundred years ago people couldn't have conceived of helicopters in the first place. Why should he evaluate everything by present-day technology?
The Phantom Menace review was even worse. There was no real "physics" being objected to, only stuff like "if the force field can stop water, why doesn't it stop humans who are 80% water?" If we don't know how it works, how can we pass judgements on such things? Perhaps it actively detects the presence of humans or biological objects. Perhaps it only stops liquids and not solids. Perhaps any number of other explanations.
Remember Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Conversely, in the movies, anything which looks like magic could be the product of sufficiently advanced technology.
Overall, I'm not impressed.
It's true that those high-speed tracks are tremendously expensive. Only a nationalized company like the SNCF can do it on such a large scale (eg, Paris-Marseille, over 800 km, 3 hours, track completed last year). I think the SNCF is a good example of why public services like railways are better not privatized...
Why do you think Chiao is a crackpot? Have you even read his paper?
Podkletnov's experimental results are published, peer reviewed, and seem related.
But they aren't related. They suggest a screening of a static gravitational field, what Chiao calls a "gravitoelectric" field, which is what we observe in everyday life. As Chiao points out, it's impossible to screen such a field within the setup of standard gravity theory, because (as far as we know) only positive masses exist and they can't cancel. (Equation 34 in his paper, keeping in mind that the mass density is always positive. The only way you could produce a static cancelling field is from Equation 35 with a linearly increasing gravitomagnetic field, which again is not a static solution and not a useful idea.)
What Chiao is talking about is the screening of the "gravitomagnetic" field, which is something we do not observe at all in daily life, but should exist according to Einstein's equations. He's not focussing on magnetostatic flux expulsion either (like the Meissner effect) but about some dynamic effect on gravity waves. This, he claims, would lead to a measurable effect. (I find that astonishing, since the effect comes from electrons which have a really tiny mass). If he can prove it experimentally, it will indeed be huge. But it has nothing to do with Podkletnov's claims and I don't think he's obliged to cite them at all.
On top of that, I really suspect that writing drivers across the many Windoze versions is far more difficult because each different Windows type (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and what have you not) is really a different OS.
The point is, you don't need to recompile under Windows. The same driver works under Windows 95, 98, ME (ok, sometimes not under 95), and often works under NT, 2000 and XP too. I can understand a driver not running under both kernels 2.2 and 2.4, but within the same major kernel version number, surely that should be possible and desirable? Recompiling isn't a thing you ask ordinary users to do, and distributing the source is often not something companies want to do, this should be simplified. I thought the kernel module versioning information was meant for this, but apparently it didn't quite work.
Don't get me wrong, I like Mozilla, but bloated it is.
You could just use the linux binaries. That's what I do (well, I actually use it only 3 or 4 times a year when someone sends me a word document, but that's another matter.) The linux may work better than the native version: Openoffice probably works better on linux, and linux emulation is very good indeed on FreeBSD (and not only for running software: I've actually rebuilt the major part of a gentoo system on freebsd, chroot-ed into a linux partition).
Speak for yourself, Jon. Grammatically, he can use "we" if he and at least one other person think so. Are you suggesting that not a single reader or editorial member of Slashdot agrees with him?
Speak for yourself, catfood.
Uh, the number of bits has nothing to do with aliasing. Aliasing depends on the sampling rate and the maximum frequencies present in your original signal.
It does affect the dynamic range, but CDs already have a huge improvement over analog media in that respect. Personally, though I'm reasonably picky about sound quality, I'm quite happy with CDs; I wouldn't mind further improvement but not at a vastly increased price, except perhaps with a handful of truly exceptional recordings. I think most people would feel the same, so persuading people to buy SACDs at a higher price will require either (a) plenty of marketing or (b) retiring the old CD format altogether.
Where did they claim that? They only say that software patents impede innovation and are inconsistent with open-source software. Not that, given that they exist, they should not be leveraged to make money.
If Red Hat adds to its income, it can pay more developers, pay them better, and thus benefit free software better. And not just the linux kernel. The advances between gcc 2.7/2.8 and gcc 3.0 have been quite significantly driven by Red Hat, as has the initial impetus for the gnome desktop.
What part of "hypocritical" are you having trouble with?
The part which says it's ok to use copyright law to enforce the GPL, but not to use patent law to benefit free software. If you're such a fan of the FSF, by the way, why don't you demand that copyrights to the Linux kernel be handed over to the FSF? There are very good reasons people don't want to do that, even apart from wanting to dual-license and make money (Troll Tech can dual-license Qt, but nobody can do that with linux, too many people hold the copyrights.)
OK, then assign the patents to the FSF.
No? Why not?
There's only one answer to that question. Red Hat wants to retain the ability to leverage these patents against other Open Source companies.
No, there's another answer. Red Hat wants to retain the ability to license these patents to closed-source companies, and make some money that way. Hey, what an idea, making money. Red Hat must be pretty evil to think of that. Maybe we should all go use Debian, and get Debian to pay the salaries of Alan Cox and others too.
If you're thinking patriotism, you may be interested in yesterday's and today's editions of The Boondocks. I'm eagerly waiting to see it evolve over the week...
Actually I may have overstated things a bit: read the thread a little further down. But telling people how to do this is unquestionably in violation of the DMCA. CNN, Reuters, watch out.
The RIAA estimates "piracy" losses at $300 million a year or more. I'm not sure, but I suspect this could be a larger number than the market for felt-tip markers for "other" purposes. Admittedly, the other two conditions (A) and (C) above are probably not applicable, but this one could be (stupider judgements have been made) and it's an "or" clause.
No. Read the DMCA. It outlaws devices which can be used for bypassing digital copy control mechanisms, regardless of possible legitimate uses. CD burners don't pass copy control mechanisms, photocopiers don't deal with digital media (unless it's a barcode or something...). But a felt-tip pen which is used to bypass the manufacturer's CD copy control mechanism -- that's illegal under the DMCA, and I hope somebody sues for outlawing these evil things, that should show 'em...
Quote from "Yes, Minister":
Hacker: We have to nail that leak!
Bernard: Minister, if you nail a leak you make another leak.
Oh, you mean like the dozen or so "helpful reminders" we get from every magazine subscription we own?
No, not like that. It's as if Time magazine sent you a reminder saying that your Newsweek subscription was running out, and suggesting that you had to subscribe to Time magazine to continue receiving any kind of weekly newsmagazine.
Clarification: the oscillator ideas are that recent, but the experimental observation of otoacoustic emissions is much older (I'm not sure exactly how old).
The idea that the ear is a self-tuned oscillator with positive feedback was proposed as far back as 1948, in a paper by Gold (Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, volume B 136, page 492). It wasn't taken seriously back then and there was no evidence, but the evidence -- and more theoretical support and models -- came starting around 1998, in work by Hudspeth (Rockefeller Univ, NY) and others. Since then there have been plenty of papers; it's more than a "few months" old...
This was, I think, the case with some other deep-linking complainants (who didn't think of just fixing their pages instead). However, in the case of the Dallas News, this doesn't seem to be the problem. Possibly it's an unthinking copycat case. Really, I can't see what they're complaining about -- they gain a visitor, who will view their ads, possibly click on them, possibly browse the site further, which they wouldn't have gained otherwise.
The article covered two vulnerabilities specific to FreeBSD, a few in third party programs which apply to all platforms (the article itself makes no reference to FreeBSD), and some vulnerabilities (mosix, IRIX syslogd) which are specific to other platforms (Linux and IRIX respectively) and have nothing whatever to do with FreeBSD
So how does that make it an article on FreeBSD vulnerabilities?
The above is cut-and-pasted from bero's site (http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html), without acknowledgement and without changing the links (which is why the mplayer discussion points to slashdot.org and doesn't work). The AC has, however, contributed his own adjectives concerning natalie portman etc. That qualifies for +5 informative?
"Banias" are also the business/trader community in India -- more accurately, the "bania" caste is traditionally the caste of traders and merchants (though these days it doesn't necessarily mean anything).
If so, it has nothing to do with the surviving shore temple, which is from the Pallava period in the 7th/8th century AD.
But I don't see any evidence for this Indus theory. It is also a very long way off from the Indus valley sites which are, well, in/near the Indus valley on the other side of the subcontinent, mainly in today's Pakistan (look at the map). The likely explanation is surely that this is a Pallava city dating from the same time as the surviving temple.
First, the surviving temple is certainly not 5000 years old: it dates from the 7th or 8th century AD.
Second, Hindu civilization itself is old but not that old. For temples of this kind, 1000 BC would be an optimistic early limit; 3000 BC is out of the question.
From this article it seems that the claim of 5000 years comes from Graham Hancock, a controversial writer about "lost civilizations". I'd like to see the opinion backed by some credible evidence.
Write some of your email address using html code for the ascii characters, like $ # 114 for "r".
(Yes, I've posted about this before, but it does work for me.) Browsers render it so users get the address they want, but spambots try to grab it from the raw html and get something meaningless.