They try to, but most countries discourage (at the point of a gun) such mass immigration. What do you think would happen if 2 billion poor people tried to enter the USA? Firstly, how would they get there? Secondly, would the USA let them in?
If you do random moves, then the time required to `find' a solution is basically infinite. Well, not quite infinite, but he time is proportional to the total number of configurations of the cube, which is, according to Wikipedia, 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. If toy want 50% probability, then expect to do at least half that number of moves[*]. Don't hold your breath.
[*]actually it would be somewhat more than that, as random moves would correspond to a random walk in a 24-dimensional space, and the probability of re-visiting an earlier configuration increases quite substantially as time progresses.
No, that is just a lower bound: by counting the number of possible configurations it can be shown that there exists at least one configuration that takes 18 or more steps to solve. It says nothing about an upper bound, which could (and is!) somewhat larger.
I wouldn't ask this question here, maybe you will get some good responses but you will also get a bunch of seemingly good (but on deeper thought, not so much) responses from more-or-less clueless people that don't actually have any experience at election security. I would try instead Ed Felten at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/, or even Bruce Schneier. Both these people are experts in the field, and both have discussed these issues extensively on their blogs.
What a load of nonsense! And it gets modded +3 ! Instead of sprouting "as far as I know" rubbish, why don't you RTFA, and you will learn that everything that you said in your post is wrong?
The (fundamental) difference is that the bits in the DRAM cells are in a well-defined state of either 0 or 1, but you just haven't measured them yet. In the quantum computer, the qubits are in a superposition of 0 and 1 at the same time.
To be more precise, the 'state space' of a classical bit is, well, 1 bit. Either 0 or 1. In the scenario that you describe, you don't know what the bits are until you measure them, but that is nothing special (imagine another example: tossing a coin with your eyes closed. You don't know the outcome until you open your eyes, but that doesn't mean that anything quantum-mechanical is going on!).
The 'state space' of a qubit, on the other hand, is an angle. Put the '0' result along the x axis and the '1' result along the y axis. Angle 0 corresponds to '0', 90 degrees corresponds to '1', and so on. But the possible physical state is anywhere on the unit circle, not just '0' and '1'. If the physical state of the system is 45 degrees then it really is a mixture of '0' and '1', and you can do interesting things with this state. For example, you can add it to some other state (at a different angle) and get wave-like interference effects.
But it does make sense to speculate on the properties of some distant object as you would see it if you travelled there by the shortest spacetime distance. For the case of this galaxy it would have aged by around 24 billion years by the time you travelled there, and it is probably would have changed quite considerably in that time.
Alternatively, you could define an inertial reference frame from which the velocity of the earth stays the same magnitude of the velocity of the distant galaxy. This is about the best you can do for a 'laboratory frame' from which to observe both the distant galaxy and the earth on an equal footing. With respect to this inertial frame, the passage of time is well defined (but obviously different in some other inertial frame) and again it makes sense to talk about the evolution of the two systems, even if they are separated by a space-like distance.
You say "Things haven't happened until the light of those things intersects with our reality.". Now, whether something has 'happened' or not is a philosophical point, analogous to whether a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it makes a sound or not. I'm not going to get into that argument just now. But I think you are taking relativity too literally. The speed of light gives an upper bound on the speed of information transfer, it doesn't pretend to give a speed of which 'reality' propagates. For example, suppose I had an alarm clock that is carefully crafted to emit no EM radiation at all when the alarm goes off. The only way to tell is by listening for the sound of it. So if I put the alarm clock at the other side of the room to you (say, 10 metres away), you have no way to tell whether it has gone off until the sound reaches you, which will be some 1/30th of a second later - much slower than the time taken for light to travel the same distance. Would you then say that the alarm clock ringing hasn't 'intersected your reality' until that time? Equivalently, would you argue that, say at a time 1/60th of a second, that the alarm has yet to start ringing? If not, what is the essential difference to the example of light instead of sound? (Obviously the physical properties of light are different to that of sound, I'm not interested in an argument based on that - what is the difference with respect to your observable reality?)
Interesting. I'll just throw in a quote here, from this article.
In all jurisdictions, police officers who commit criminal acts can be tried under the criminal law.[170] The fact that they are not prosecuted more frequently is arguably another cost of exclusion and sends the message to both the police officer and the community that criminal conduct by police officers should be tolerated. As long as the exclusion of evidence is seen as a suitable substitute for personal accountability, police officers will continue to avoid responsibility for their actions, resulting in two crimes rather than one going unpunished.
Sorry, I can't make any sense of that statement. For a start, the authority responsible for prosecuting the cop is not the cops themselves. At minimum it would be some kind of internal affairs department, and preferably some kind of independent commission. Secondly,
while I can't speak for the USA, but in every country I have experience with, a department of the government that was collectively willing to break the law would be a serious scandal, at minimum enough to cause the resignation of the responsible minister (I guess that would be the head of the FBI/DHS/etc, in the US system), if it didn't bring down the government itself. I would have thought that 'institutionalized' law breaking was not the problem, rather individual rogues (or a small group).
Anyway, this is getting nowhere fast. Have a look at the paper in my other reply, and respond to that if you have any further arguments.
The United States of America is the birthplace of the 'Exclusionary Rule', an absolute rule of evidence which, with a few exceptions, forbids illegally obtained evidence from being admitted in a criminal trial. However the rule is not an independent entity existing for its own sake.[2] It exists solely as a means of enforcing the people's right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[3] While other means of enforcing the right have been suggested from time to time, the United States Supreme Court has decided (amidst strong dissent) that the exclusion of unconstitutionally seized evidence in subsequent criminal trials is the only effective means of enforcement.
The drastic consequences of the Exclusionary Rule are obvious. The fact that excluded evidence would be likely to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt of the defendant's guilt is not relevant to the issue of exclusion. As a result, harsh criticism has been leveled at the rule for as long as it has been in existence. In 1923, Dean Wigmore referred to the rule as 'misguided sentimentality'[29] saying...it appears indifferent to the result of making justice inefficient,... coddles the criminal classes of the population... and regards the zealous officer of the law as a greater danger to the community than the unpunished murderer or embezzler or panderer.[30]
Until recently, the Canadian approach to dealing with illegally or unfairly obtained evidence was firmly 'inclusionary'. The leading case was R v Wray[35] where the Court held that a trial judge had no discretion to exclude evidence of substantial probative value because it was illegally or unfairly obtained. Any discretion to exclude admissible evidence was 'limited to evidence gravely prejudicial to the accused, the admission of which is tenuous and whose probative force in relation to the main issue before the court is trifling.' [36] Consequently, illegally or unfairly obtained evidence could only be excluded when its prejudicial effect outweighed its probative value or where it was either irrelevant or unreliable.[37]
However, the position changed significantly following the adoption by Canada of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.[38] This is because the Charter did not follow the narrow view expressed by the majority in R v Wray, but instead adopted the wide view of judicial discretion favoured by the minority.
One of the more vocal critics of the post-Charter move towards a more exclusionary rule of illegally obtained evidence can be found on the bench of the Canadian Supreme Court itself. In the 13 years since Collins, Justice L'Heureux-Dub, has been in frequent dissent in many of the decisions involving the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, particularly in cases involving reliable real evidence necessary to establish the guilt of persons accused of serious crimes. [59] She also differs from her colleagues on the bench by her insistence that what may 'bring the administration of justice into disrepute' must be viewed from a community rather than a judicial perspective.[60] She charges the Supreme Court with 'fashioning what has proved, in at least a wide spectrum of cases, to be an extremely aggressive exclusionary remedy' in direct opposition to the original intent of the framers of the Charter who were attempting to fashion 'a cautious exclusionary rule where evidence would be refused only in relatively extreme cases'.[61]
Who said anything about 'allowing' people to break the law? No one ever suggested that cops should get away with it. The topic of the discussion is the exclusionary principle - that is, whether illegally obtained evidence should be automatically inadmissible in court - not on whether cops should be able to get away with breaking the law. If you are suggesting that countries that don't have some equivalent to the exclusionary principle have more law breaking then I invite you to present some evidence. Going by the number of people in prison, the USA is leading the world, both in absolute numbers and per capita.
Where did condemning innocent people come into it? I don't see the connection to illegally obtained evidence. I don't see why it should encourage people to behave illegally either - the only way a cop would get away with it is if they lied about how they obtained the evidence. But in that case, the exclusionary principle wouldn't even come into effect - since according to the (false) story of the cops, the evidence was legal! in other words, the exclusionary principle makes no difference as to whether the cop gets away with it or not. The only difference is that in the case where the cop doesn't get away with it, the evidence is assumed to somehow magically not exist anymore. That doesn't seem much of a disincentive to me - I'd expect a dirty cop would be much more worried about being busted than not getting a conviction.
In fact, I could even imagine the exclusionary principle being used as an excuse to not punish dirty cops. "But Judge, my client was investigating Mr X for three years, only to get the case dismissed when it was found my client obtained the fingerprints on the gun in an unlawful manner. Mr X is walking free today, and this weighs heavily on the conscience of my client. Hasn't he suffered enough?" Ok, this is far-fetched. But it seems like the penalties for being a dirty cop in the USA are not so severe, or perhaps just the chances of being caught are very low.
For instance, we believe that evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment should be quashed. But if the evidence was the admission of the location the body of a murdered little girl by the perpetrator, one would truly consider allowing the evidence into consideration because we don't want this guy to get away with it.
This is something that has always confused me about American law. I've never lived in the USA, but I have lived in a few other places (Australia, several European countries), and I don't remember ever hearing about a controversy on whether a particular piece of evidence is 'admissible' or not, although that seems to be happening all the time in the USA. I don't know what the actual rules are, but as far as I know in other countries, in a criminal case (at least) pretty much any relevant information is admissible. But obviously, if it was obtained illegally then whoever was responsible would also find themselves in the dock, in the courtroom next door.
What would happen, for example, if in the aftermath of a well-publicized murder, someone robbed a house and in the process found a blood-soaked knife and turned it over to the police? Would it then be returned to the owner, no questions asked, on the grounds that under the 4th amendment the robber had no right to search the house and seize the weapon? Or does that apply only to police officers? The amendment itself doesn't mention any such restriction, but perhaps it is implicit? What happens if a police officer pays someone else to break in? AFAIK, in other places in this situation, it wouldn't matter too much to the murder case who exactly had seized the weapon (as long as the evidence trail was clear, etc), but obviously if it was a police officer acting illegally, he/she would be in very serious trouble.
By the way, just having looked at the text of the 4th amendment, "persons, houses, papers, and effects". It seems reasonable to me that 'papers' here should refer to pretty much any communications, including telegraph, phone, email, etc. But I'm not sure that it does? Can you clarify?
As a matter of interest what would be the consequences to modern physics if Gravity waves do not exist?
They do exist. There have been measurements done of the slowing down of a rotating binary pulsar, which is a prediction of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, where the system will emit gravitational radiation and slowly lose energy. This was the subject of the 1993 Nobel prize in Physics.
It is called Computer Science. What has gone wrong with the CS field that it is now turning out people to work as network administrators? What does that have to do with science? If you can't survive 2 years of calculus (or something of similar standard, it doesn't have to focus on calculus, perhaps group theory, algebra, statistics, discrete mathematics, etc), you shouldn't be doing any kind of science degree.
Computer science != software engineering != information technology. But it seems that computer science programs have lost their purpose. It was happening at the school where I was too, by third year it had become a haven for the lazy and less bright students that couldn't handle the workload at physics, mathematics, chemistry etc. This was 10+ years ago, so I expect it is even worse now. I can see the day when computer science gets thrown out of the science faculty, actually. Perhaps into business/commerce, or even away from the university sector completely, into a vocational training school.
At this point, OS/2 is obscure enough that systems still using it really do get security from that obscurity. The only OS/2 installations still around are likely embedded systems (eg, old ATM's) that are not easily updated. If the source was released, there may be some obvious exploitable flaws. True, those flaws (if they exist) could be found without looking at the source, but the source makes it much easier. For example, instead of having to spend thousands of hours banging away at an ATM or reverse engineering binaries, a cracker could just run a code verification tool over the sources and immediately see any potential buffer overflows.
The security benefit of open source is that it is easier to find and fix security flaws. This is fantastic for incrementally improving and evolving systems. I don't think that helps much for old systems that can't be easily updated.
According to "the letter", the scientists are still pissy about something Benedict said 17 years ago. That's a long time to hold a grudge.
Benedict is free to recant that statement at any time, and that would be the end of the protests. Since he has not, we can only assume that his statement continues to represent his current views.
Disagreeing with the Pope is fine. Not being interested in what he has to say is fine. Boycotting a popular leader because you disagree with his views? That's really lame, and yes, shameful. If you don't want to hear him speak then don't go to his speech. It's not fucking rocket science.
I think you fail to grasp the gravity of the situation, if you excuse the pun. This is a leader who is supporting the idea of scientists being locked up or even executed for promoting theories (even if they happen to be correct!) that contradict Catholic dogma.
This is a completely overblown analogy, but I can't think of a milder one off the top of my head. If a bunch of Jews were boycotting and protesting a speech by Hitler, would you call that too "shameful" ?
In an STM machine, there is a single tip that moves over the sample. The sampling is done one pixel at a time, in much the same fashion as the beam of a CRT for example. So 1kHz is rather slow; for your 3 megapixel digital camera it works out at 3000 seconds (almost 1 hour) per frame. So a 1000x increase in speed is really significant!
Sometimes you do this. But a heck of a lot of decisions (probably way more than you realize - for example whether to cross the street before or after that approaching car) are made at a more subconscious level. The `reasoning' comes later, for the purpose of justifying what you already chose.
The question is, does the rationalization come before or afterwards? A possibility is that the choice is made essentially instinctively, for no reason other than consistency with the previous decision (as in the monkey experiment), and then we later rationalize the decision. Of course, 'later' can mean 'immediately after'; perhaps we tend to make decisions instinctively and then fool ourselves into believing we are making a choice when all it is is a crude rationalization of a decision already made subconsciously?
True, I do similar things myself all the time. Another is saying something on a subject you know a lot about (ie, work in the field, etc) but making a minor mistake (notation, or something like that) that gets jumped on and you end up looking like an idiot.
Not really. The baud has a historical usage, and as far as I can tell once baud fell out of usage, bit/sec (without much thought as to what the prefix means) took over. maybe there is a precise technical meaning, but no one knows it.
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Whatever, substitute any country you like. But the USA has a lot more space than, eg, Europe.
They try to, but most countries discourage (at the point of a gun) such mass immigration. What do you think would happen if 2 billion poor people tried to enter the USA? Firstly, how would they get there? Secondly, would the USA let them in?
If you do random moves, then the time required to `find' a solution is basically infinite. Well, not quite infinite, but he time is proportional to the total number of configurations of the cube, which is, according to Wikipedia, 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. If toy want 50% probability, then expect to do at least half that number of moves[*]. Don't hold your breath.
[*]actually it would be somewhat more than that, as random moves would correspond to a random walk in a 24-dimensional space, and the probability of re-visiting an earlier configuration increases quite substantially as time progresses.
No, that is just a lower bound: by counting the number of possible configurations it can be shown that there exists at least one configuration that takes 18 or more steps to solve. It says nothing about an upper bound, which could (and is!) somewhat larger.
I wouldn't ask this question here, maybe you will get some good responses but you will also get a bunch of seemingly good (but on deeper thought, not so much) responses from more-or-less clueless people that don't actually have any experience at election security. I would try instead Ed Felten at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/, or even Bruce Schneier. Both these people are experts in the field, and both have discussed these issues extensively on their blogs.
Right, and that was plenty enough 'fear', 'uncertainty' and 'doubt' that the up-coming Windows 3.1 would work on DR-DOS that sales of DR-DOS tanked.
What a load of nonsense! And it gets modded +3 ! Instead of sprouting "as far as I know" rubbish, why don't you RTFA, and you will learn that everything that you said in your post is wrong?
The (fundamental) difference is that the bits in the DRAM cells are in a well-defined state of either 0 or 1, but you just haven't measured them yet. In the quantum computer, the qubits are in a superposition of 0 and 1 at the same time.
To be more precise, the 'state space' of a classical bit is, well, 1 bit. Either 0 or 1. In the scenario that you describe, you don't know what the bits are until you measure them, but that is nothing special (imagine another example: tossing a coin with your eyes closed. You don't know the outcome until you open your eyes, but that doesn't mean that anything quantum-mechanical is going on!).
The 'state space' of a qubit, on the other hand, is an angle. Put the '0' result along the x axis and the '1' result along the y axis. Angle 0 corresponds to '0', 90 degrees corresponds to '1', and so on. But the possible physical state is anywhere on the unit circle, not just '0' and '1'. If the physical state of the system is 45 degrees then it really is a mixture of '0' and '1', and you can do interesting things with this state. For example, you can add it to some other state (at a different angle) and get wave-like interference effects.
But it does make sense to speculate on the properties of some distant object as you would see it if you travelled there by the shortest spacetime distance. For the case of this galaxy it would have aged by around 24 billion years by the time you travelled there, and it is probably would have changed quite considerably in that time.
Alternatively, you could define an inertial reference frame from which the velocity of the earth stays the same magnitude of the velocity of the distant galaxy. This is about the best you can do for a 'laboratory frame' from which to observe both the distant galaxy and the earth on an equal footing. With respect to this inertial frame, the passage of time is well defined (but obviously different in some other inertial frame) and again it makes sense to talk about the evolution of the two systems, even if they are separated by a space-like distance.
You say "Things haven't happened until the light of those things intersects with our reality.". Now, whether something has 'happened' or not is a philosophical point, analogous to whether a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it makes a sound or not. I'm not going to get into that argument just now. But I think you are taking relativity too literally. The speed of light gives an upper bound on the speed of information transfer, it doesn't pretend to give a speed of which 'reality' propagates. For example, suppose I had an alarm clock that is carefully crafted to emit no EM radiation at all when the alarm goes off. The only way to tell is by listening for the sound of it. So if I put the alarm clock at the other side of the room to you (say, 10 metres away), you have no way to tell whether it has gone off until the sound reaches you, which will be some 1/30th of a second later - much slower than the time taken for light to travel the same distance. Would you then say that the alarm clock ringing hasn't 'intersected your reality' until that time? Equivalently, would you argue that, say at a time 1/60th of a second, that the alarm has yet to start ringing? If not, what is the essential difference to the example of light instead of sound? (Obviously the physical properties of light are different to that of sound, I'm not interested in an argument based on that - what is the difference with respect to your observable reality?)
Sorry, I can't make any sense of that statement. For a start, the authority responsible for prosecuting the cop is not the cops themselves. At minimum it would be some kind of internal affairs department, and preferably some kind of independent commission. Secondly, while I can't speak for the USA, but in every country I have experience with, a department of the government that was collectively willing to break the law would be a serious scandal, at minimum enough to cause the resignation of the responsible minister (I guess that would be the head of the FBI/DHS/etc, in the US system), if it didn't bring down the government itself. I would have thought that 'institutionalized' law breaking was not the problem, rather individual rogues (or a small group).
Anyway, this is getting nowhere fast. Have a look at the paper in my other reply, and respond to that if you have any further arguments.
I just found a very interesting paper published in the Murdoch University Journal of Law: Suppressing the Truth: Judicial Exclusion of Illegally Obtained Evidence in the United States, Canada, England and Australia. Some highlights:
Who said anything about 'allowing' people to break the law? No one ever suggested that cops should get away with it. The topic of the discussion is the exclusionary principle - that is, whether illegally obtained evidence should be automatically inadmissible in court - not on whether cops should be able to get away with breaking the law. If you are suggesting that countries that don't have some equivalent to the exclusionary principle have more law breaking then I invite you to present some evidence. Going by the number of people in prison, the USA is leading the world, both in absolute numbers and per capita.
Where did condemning innocent people come into it? I don't see the connection to illegally obtained evidence. I don't see why it should encourage people to behave illegally either - the only way a cop would get away with it is if they lied about how they obtained the evidence. But in that case, the exclusionary principle wouldn't even come into effect - since according to the (false) story of the cops, the evidence was legal! in other words, the exclusionary principle makes no difference as to whether the cop gets away with it or not. The only difference is that in the case where the cop doesn't get away with it, the evidence is assumed to somehow magically not exist anymore. That doesn't seem much of a disincentive to me - I'd expect a dirty cop would be much more worried about being busted than not getting a conviction.
In fact, I could even imagine the exclusionary principle being used as an excuse to not punish dirty cops. "But Judge, my client was investigating Mr X for three years, only to get the case dismissed when it was found my client obtained the fingerprints on the gun in an unlawful manner. Mr X is walking free today, and this weighs heavily on the conscience of my client. Hasn't he suffered enough?" Ok, this is far-fetched. But it seems like the penalties for being a dirty cop in the USA are not so severe, or perhaps just the chances of being caught are very low.
This is something that has always confused me about American law. I've never lived in the USA, but I have lived in a few other places (Australia, several European countries), and I don't remember ever hearing about a controversy on whether a particular piece of evidence is 'admissible' or not, although that seems to be happening all the time in the USA. I don't know what the actual rules are, but as far as I know in other countries, in a criminal case (at least) pretty much any relevant information is admissible. But obviously, if it was obtained illegally then whoever was responsible would also find themselves in the dock, in the courtroom next door.
What would happen, for example, if in the aftermath of a well-publicized murder, someone robbed a house and in the process found a blood-soaked knife and turned it over to the police? Would it then be returned to the owner, no questions asked, on the grounds that under the 4th amendment the robber had no right to search the house and seize the weapon? Or does that apply only to police officers? The amendment itself doesn't mention any such restriction, but perhaps it is implicit? What happens if a police officer pays someone else to break in? AFAIK, in other places in this situation, it wouldn't matter too much to the murder case who exactly had seized the weapon (as long as the evidence trail was clear, etc), but obviously if it was a police officer acting illegally, he/she would be in very serious trouble.
By the way, just having looked at the text of the 4th amendment, "persons, houses, papers, and effects". It seems reasonable to me that 'papers' here should refer to pretty much any communications, including telegraph, phone, email, etc. But I'm not sure that it does? Can you clarify?
They do exist. There have been measurements done of the slowing down of a rotating binary pulsar, which is a prediction of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, where the system will emit gravitational radiation and slowly lose energy. This was the subject of the 1993 Nobel prize in Physics.
It is called Computer Science. What has gone wrong with the CS field that it is now turning out people to work as network administrators? What does that have to do with science? If you can't survive 2 years of calculus (or something of similar standard, it doesn't have to focus on calculus, perhaps group theory, algebra, statistics, discrete mathematics, etc), you shouldn't be doing any kind of science degree.
Computer science != software engineering != information technology. But it seems that computer science programs have lost their purpose. It was happening at the school where I was too, by third year it had become a haven for the lazy and less bright students that couldn't handle the workload at physics, mathematics, chemistry etc. This was 10+ years ago, so I expect it is even worse now. I can see the day when computer science gets thrown out of the science faculty, actually. Perhaps into business/commerce, or even away from the university sector completely, into a vocational training school.
At this point, OS/2 is obscure enough that systems still using it really do get security from that obscurity. The only OS/2 installations still around are likely embedded systems (eg, old ATM's) that are not easily updated. If the source was released, there may be some obvious exploitable flaws. True, those flaws (if they exist) could be found without looking at the source, but the source makes it much easier. For example, instead of having to spend thousands of hours banging away at an ATM or reverse engineering binaries, a cracker could just run a code verification tool over the sources and immediately see any potential buffer overflows.
The security benefit of open source is that it is easier to find and fix security flaws. This is fantastic for incrementally improving and evolving systems. I don't think that helps much for old systems that can't be easily updated.
Benedict is free to recant that statement at any time, and that would be the end of the protests. Since he has not, we can only assume that his statement continues to represent his current views.
I think you fail to grasp the gravity of the situation, if you excuse the pun. This is a leader who is supporting the idea of scientists being locked up or even executed for promoting theories (even if they happen to be correct!) that contradict Catholic dogma.
This is a completely overblown analogy, but I can't think of a milder one off the top of my head. If a bunch of Jews were boycotting and protesting a speech by Hitler, would you call that too "shameful" ?
In an STM machine, there is a single tip that moves over the sample. The sampling is done one pixel at a time, in much the same fashion as the beam of a CRT for example. So 1kHz is rather slow; for your 3 megapixel digital camera it works out at 3000 seconds (almost 1 hour) per frame. So a 1000x increase in speed is really significant!
Sometimes you do this. But a heck of a lot of decisions (probably way more than you realize - for example whether to cross the street before or after that approaching car) are made at a more subconscious level. The `reasoning' comes later, for the purpose of justifying what you already chose.
The question is, does the rationalization come before or afterwards? A possibility is that the choice is made essentially instinctively, for no reason other than consistency with the previous decision (as in the monkey experiment), and then we later rationalize the decision. Of course, 'later' can mean 'immediately after'; perhaps we tend to make decisions instinctively and then fool ourselves into believing we are making a choice when all it is is a crude rationalization of a decision already made subconsciously?
Are you seriously suggesting that no humans have a color preference for m&m's ? How many humans have you actually met?
True, I do similar things myself all the time. Another is saying something on a subject you know a lot about (ie, work in the field, etc) but making a minor mistake (notation, or something like that) that gets jumped on and you end up looking like an idiot.
Not really. The baud has a historical usage, and as far as I can tell once baud fell out of usage, bit/sec (without much thought as to what the prefix means) took over. maybe there is a precise technical meaning, but no one knows it.