You are, obviously, correct. Furthermore, as far as this story is concerned, one can even doubt that any correlation has in fact been measured. The German Spiegel had an article on this a couple of days ago. Two objections were raised against the theory of Taipei 101 causing earthquakes:
-First, it is unlikely that the forces the skyscraper exerts on the ground will reach down to a depth of 10km where earthquakes actually happen (John Vidale, University of California, LA).
-Second, and more to the point the parent made, the period of observation is allegedely much too small to draw any conclusions. Data of earthquakes will have to be analysed over thousands, maybe even millions of years before you can begin to talk about correlations (Unnamed source).
So, if Taipei 101 hasn't been taken down by earthquakes around the year 50 of the 5th Galactic Emperor (1,002,005AD by carbonbiped reckoning), we can repost this story:)
You may not want the Windows Media Player, which is understandable and fair enough, but you'll still want to see all those funny wmv videos people keep emailing you, so you'll still need the codecs. So you might as well take the normal version of windows, ignore the Windows Media Player and install whatever you want to use instead. Remember, you are not forced to use it just because it's on your hard disk!
All the 'M$ is just copying the OS of the Gods again' aside, and not doubting for a minute that symlinks are powerful little thingies, does the average user *really* need them? I certainly can't remember ever having said 'Damn, I wish this piece-of-crap-OS would support symlinks' during my Windows days. Even under Linux, leaving OS-related symlinks aside, the only ones I have are in my home folder - they point to data directories on other partitions and their function is exactly that of a shortcut under Windows - they merely replace the clutter of folder shortcuts on my Windows desktop.
So, yeah, they are cool and more powerful than Windows shortcuts... but did anyone *really* need them?
Going to UTC won't change a thing. I would go to work from 0900 to 1700, the guy in Germany from 1000 to 1800, the American from 0200 to 1000 or whatever. You haven't gotten rid of timezones at all, you've simply hidden them away in a more confusing system.
As it is now, at least I know when I go to the States, that I'll be able to go shopping at 1500 hours, because that's the way it is in my country too and human life tends to follow similar patterns. In your system, if I try buying something at 1500 hours, I'll get a strange look from people and they'll say 'you're not from around here, are you?' So you've made it worse for me - not only am I jetlagged, I also have no ideas at what time I'm supposed to do what things - I'll simply be the laughing stock of the hotel employess when I demand my breakfast at 0800 hours.
If I want to call someone in Calfiornia now, I'll have to check timezones to make sure I won't wake him up in the middle of the night. If I want to call someone in your system, I have to check at what time people go to bed and when they wake up over there to make sure of the same thing. So - it really is the same difference.
if a collegue is asking a question about the current project you're working on, prioritise it a little higher than a message asking if you're up for a game of pool later
Not that simple.... the reply to the second one will be a simple "yup" or "nope". The reply to the first one risks being rather involved. Hence, taking response times into account, replying to the second one first will offset the reply to the project email by a second or two, whereas replying to the first one first means your pool buddy might only hear from you in half an hour. The trick, I think, is to find the order which minimises delays due to other replies as much as possible per message. Easy in your example, more involved if there are more emails.
If you want to prioritise work over personal stuff, then do not even read emails that look like they could be personal.
I challenge the poster to find where Cook said there will be more iPods before the end of the year.
I'm not the poster, but still.... how about this? "Over a year ago, we set out to create revolutionary updates to our core iPod lineup," Cook said. "Last quarter was the final quarter for the older products. We think we did rather well with the prior lineup and believe that we will do even better with the new lineup that we have for the holiday season, including the new iPod Nano and some very innovative new products that we have yet to introduce."
True. Then again, the only sequel that actually followed the story of a prequel was 'The Adventure of Link'. All the other games were simply variations on the theme, so for all practical purposes, you still identify the character you play with as Link, regardless of the particular storyline. Technically, you're absolutely right, of course.
I'm not sure what the issue with the other graphics were. 8 bit Zelda was rather cartoonish, as was the 16 bit SNES Zelda.
True. However, then along came the N64 and with it two truly awesome Zelda games. The graphics there were *phenomenal*. At last Link looked like the drawings of him in the user manuals of the earlier games. And that's the thing.... 8 and 16bit Zeldas might have been cartoonish, but we always had an image of Link from these drawings. For the NES games, he was drawn smaller than we know him now but even the 16bit manual had a Link who looked pretty closely like the one in the N64 games. Then along came Windwaker. And with it a complete change in Link's image. And that's, I think, what upset so many people (including me:) ). It was not a variation on a theme we came to like, it was a 'and now for something completely different' trick that just didn't go down well with the fanbase (that and the fact that the game was ridiculously easy to complete). Just didn't work. I guess that the fallacy of this argument is that lots of people have never played the original Zeldas, but then it probably only takes playing the N64 ones to see that Windwaker somehow skidded off the track and smashed into a pile of tyres.
Anyway. Looking forward to the new one. And no hard feelings about Windwaker, most Zeldas until then were fantastic (apart from Link's Adventure), they're allowed a miss every once in a while (not too often though, mind you:) )
Yes, well... except that the laser printer they used was actually dead and there was a need for a bulk shredder. And why, so the reasoning goes, buy an expensive bulk shredder when you can build one using the knackered laser printer?
So yeah, it is like turning a 911 into a Chevette.... except that you've slammed the 911 into a tree the day before and actually have a use for a Chevette - maybe some Chevette fan is offering you loads of money for it?:)
It's been successful enough to generate a soon to be released followup: Stitch Has A Glitch.
To be abbreviated SHAG I take it? Mentioning Stitch and insinuating something about shagging in one sentence is very very very disturbing you know.... baaaad images in my head now. bad bad bad *hammers head on desk*
Yeah. Although I guess the idea is to stop spammers from signing up a million gmail accounts or whatever. It's still weird - the invite system did a good job at this too.
At any rate, I'm glad I've got my gmail account already (even though I'm not using it:) )
Anybody who wants to do anything serious with it will buy a Mac.
I agree. Although I would simply say, any normal person who may even only be slightly tempted by OSX will buy a Mac provided they're not significantly more expensive. After all you'll still be able to run Windows or Linux but you finally get to have a shiny Mac and play around with OSX.
Apple could potentially take over a very significant portion of the x86 market... using the OS as a bait for people to buy the hardware. The only way they could really fuck it up is by stopping other OSes to work on their boxes or by making them too expensive. If they play it right, we're just witnessing the birth of the Golden Age of Apple.
Oh, yes, they do. One concept: Pizza Crumbs Collector;)
And greasy fingers and dandruff and sticky stuff where you really don't want to know what it is and so on and so forth....
Further, something tells me that using a screwdriver to pop out all the keys of this fancy Optimus thing in order to give it a good clean is just not going to work;)
No, actually, you're not. The injunction also prevents you from discussing the book in public. You'd be in breach of that order.
If someone really wanted to, they could give the book to a friend in the US
Also, you can't give the book to anyone else, I'm afraid.
From TFA:
The terms of the Court Order mean that if you have obtained a copy of the book early you must not disclose or reveal any information about its contents or give any copies that you may have to anyone else.
I agree with one of the previous posters saying that it'll be pretty hard to enforce the return of the bok, particularly if you paid by cash and in that case you can probably just send the book to whomever but technically, you're in breach of the court order.
Anyway, to me this just sounds like Yet Another Marketing Trick (TM) to artificially hype the anticipation of the book even further.
The random numbers thing is a red herring imho - just require a supply of random numbers as an input. (I think its called a random turing machine or something).
Well, not so sure. We are talking true random numbers after all and when you input a random string taken from wherever into a Turing Machine to compute another random string then you simply end up with a pseudo-random number generator in the sense that the numbers outputted by your Machine might be random, but can be reproduced if you input the same inital random string again. So you end up with a reproducible random number string, which is not true randomness. With QTMs however, as I understand it, you can really produce truly random numbers - they will not be reproducible, even if you do put the machine back in the exact same initial starting condition.
And as far as I know, even Probabilistic Turing Machines (which is I think what you were referring to) cannot generate truly random numbers, because even though you introduce a level of randomness through the probabilities, that level is still only pseudo-random and hence the outcome will be pseudo-random too.
But anyway, I'm straying too far into realms I don't really know in a very detailed fashion now, so I'll call it a day. But have fun reading:)
But can you write a Turing Machine that can check whether itself will halt? That's the point I'm trying to make - we seem to be able to do that most of the time (and I would even go as far as postulate that humans can always tell when they are themselves caught in an infinite loop, although I am not able to prove this) - we can catch ourselves going around in circles, a Turing Machine is incapable of doing that. I happily concede the point that you can write specific programs to test specific Turing Machines, but our introspection goes much beyond that and I think you'll be much more hard-pressed to write even a simple Turing Machine that can tell you whether it will halt or not in an as general a way as humans seem to be able to.
I'll also concede the point that I cannot prove definitely that human brains are not Turing Machines. But I will point out that you cannot prove that it is one and I'll put forward that it is much more likely that our brains are not Turing Machines, given our introspection ability and the fact that even Quantum Computers are not Turing Machines (so we know that computation devices that are not TMs exist - why should our brain be one?).
One of the papers you definitely want to read is:
Deutsch, D. (1985) Quantum Theory, the Church-Turning Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer, Proc. of the Royal Soc. of London A, 400, pp97-117
It gives you an introduction to Quantum Turing Machines.
More relevant to your question is the following:
Feyman, R. (1982) Simulating Physics with Computers, Internat. J. Theoret. Phys., 21, pp467-488.
The main point in this paper is that you cannot simulate quantum phenomenon on a Turing Machine (however, you can on a Quantum Turing Machine).
Then there is the fact that quantum computers are able to generate true random numbers, whereas Turing Machines can't. I forgot the reference for that.... it might even be in the Feyman paper but I'm a bit short on time to hunt that down now.
In a longer reply - I don't think it can be proven explicitly. It can be shown however, that humans can solve it in certain cases, which is still more than Turing Machines can do.
Quite simply, you are aware of your own internal states. When you ponder a problem, you will usually be able to figure out if you're going to end up with a solution, be it good or bad, or if you're just running around in circles. This is something a Turing Machine cannot do - it is impossible to create a Turing Machine which is aware of whether it itself is going to halt or not.
On the other hand, I'm sure that you will have little difficulty in writing an algorithm which is hard for a human to tract and hence for a human to decide upon regarding its halting state. But for me, the more important point is that we have this kind of introspection ability which allows us to solve the Halting Problem in our own case for most of the time, things which a Turing Machine is incapable of.
I'm sure the argument can be formalised further, but, although my background is Cognitive Science, I work almost solely in Neuroscience these days and my reflexes are a bit rusty. I'm sure you can catch the thrust of my argument though.
There is something called the 'Halting problem'. Basically, for any computation, a Turing Machine can: -halt with success -halt with failure -get caught in a loop
The question is, if it hasn't halted yet, will it halt in the future or will it get caught in a loop? And you can prove that it is impossible to construct a Turing Machine that is able to answer that question. This is called the halting problem.
It can be generalised to prove that you cannot construct a single Turing Machine to decide whether a given statement is true or false and this is where it ties back into Gödel's theorem and it is this argument that some people use to relate Gödel's incompleteness theorem to the brain (which I find intriguing but I'm not sure whether I agree with it.) The important point here, however, is that you, as a human being, can solve the Halting Problem. It follows, that you are NOT a Turing Machine.
It can also be proven that Quantum Computers are not Turing Machines by the way, but even Quantum Computers are unable to solve the Halting Problem, so our brain is a step up even from Quantum Computers.
Let me repeat the point here again: The brain is NOT a Turing Machine and as such the limitations of a Turing Machine do not apply.
I'd suggest something like Dvorak for SMS; rearrange the letters on the keys so that the most normal characters are one click, and the least normal characters are 3 clicks.
Nice idea, but it presupposes, just like Dvorak, that people only ever write in English. I regularly text in 5 different languages and what may be a good character layout in one could be awful in another.
To be honest, I think the T9 dictionary is a good compromise. At least in my experience, it gets the right word nine times out of ten as I enter it, and if it doesn't, then it's usually the next or the third one in the list. So on average you could say that typing with T9 requires n+1 keystrokes, where n is the number of letters in a word. I think that's pretty good.
Doesn't beat a brain interface that reads the characters as you think them though;)
Slashdot Mirror
You are, obviously, correct.
:)
Furthermore, as far as this story is concerned, one can even doubt that any correlation has in fact been measured.
The German Spiegel had an article on this a couple of days ago. Two objections were raised against the theory of Taipei 101 causing earthquakes:
-First, it is unlikely that the forces the skyscraper exerts on the ground will reach down to a depth of 10km where earthquakes actually happen (John Vidale, University of California, LA).
-Second, and more to the point the parent made, the period of observation is allegedely much too small to draw any conclusions. Data of earthquakes will have to be analysed over thousands, maybe even millions of years before you can begin to talk about correlations (Unnamed source).
So, if Taipei 101 hasn't been taken down by earthquakes around the year 50 of the 5th Galactic Emperor (1,002,005AD by carbonbiped reckoning), we can repost this story
You may not want the Windows Media Player, which is understandable and fair enough, but you'll still want to see all those funny wmv videos people keep emailing you, so you'll still need the codecs. So you might as well take the normal version of windows, ignore the Windows Media Player and install whatever you want to use instead. Remember, you are not forced to use it just because it's on your hard disk!
All the 'M$ is just copying the OS of the Gods again' aside, and not doubting for a minute that symlinks are powerful little thingies, does the average user *really* need them? I certainly can't remember ever having said 'Damn, I wish this piece-of-crap-OS would support symlinks' during my Windows days. Even under Linux, leaving OS-related symlinks aside, the only ones I have are in my home folder - they point to data directories on other partitions and their function is exactly that of a shortcut under Windows - they merely replace the clutter of folder shortcuts on my Windows desktop.
So, yeah, they are cool and more powerful than Windows shortcuts... but did anyone *really* need them?
Going to UTC won't change a thing.
I would go to work from 0900 to 1700, the guy in Germany from 1000 to 1800, the American from 0200 to 1000 or whatever. You haven't gotten rid of timezones at all, you've simply hidden them away in a more confusing system.
As it is now, at least I know when I go to the States, that I'll be able to go shopping at 1500 hours, because that's the way it is in my country too and human life tends to follow similar patterns. In your system, if I try buying something at 1500 hours, I'll get a strange look from people and they'll say 'you're not from around here, are you?' So you've made it worse for me - not only am I jetlagged, I also have no ideas at what time I'm supposed to do what things - I'll simply be the laughing stock of the hotel employess when I demand my breakfast at 0800 hours.
If I want to call someone in Calfiornia now, I'll have to check timezones to make sure I won't wake him up in the middle of the night. If I want to call someone in your system, I have to check at what time people go to bed and when they wake up over there to make sure of the same thing. So - it really is the same difference.
Not that simple.... the reply to the second one will be a simple "yup" or "nope". The reply to the first one risks being rather involved. Hence, taking response times into account, replying to the second one first will offset the reply to the project email by a second or two, whereas replying to the first one first means your pool buddy might only hear from you in half an hour. The trick, I think, is to find the order which minimises delays due to other replies as much as possible per message. Easy in your example, more involved if there are more emails.
If you want to prioritise work over personal stuff, then do not even read emails that look like they could be personal.
"Over a year ago, we set out to create revolutionary updates to our core iPod lineup," Cook said. "Last quarter was the final quarter for the older products. We think we did rather well with the prior lineup and believe that we will do even better with the new lineup that we have for the holiday season, including the new iPod Nano and some very innovative new products that we have yet to introduce."
True.
Then again, the only sequel that actually followed the story of a prequel was 'The Adventure of Link'. All the other games were simply variations on the theme, so for all practical purposes, you still identify the character you play with as Link, regardless of the particular storyline. Technically, you're absolutely right, of course.
True. However, then along came the N64 and with it two truly awesome Zelda games. The graphics there were *phenomenal*. At last Link looked like the drawings of him in the user manuals of the earlier games. And that's the thing.... 8 and 16bit Zeldas might have been cartoonish, but we always had an image of Link from these drawings. For the NES games, he was drawn smaller than we know him now but even the 16bit manual had a Link who looked pretty closely like the one in the N64 games.
Then along came Windwaker. And with it a complete change in Link's image. And that's, I think, what upset so many people (including me
I guess that the fallacy of this argument is that lots of people have never played the original Zeldas, but then it probably only takes playing the N64 ones to see that Windwaker somehow skidded off the track and smashed into a pile of tyres.
Anyway. Looking forward to the new one. And no hard feelings about Windwaker, most Zeldas until then were fantastic (apart from Link's Adventure), they're allowed a miss every once in a while (not too often though, mind you
So yeah, it is like turning a 911 into a Chevette.... except that you've slammed the 911 into a tree the day before and actually have a use for a Chevette - maybe some Chevette fan is offering you loads of money for it?
Although I guess the idea is to stop spammers from signing up a million gmail accounts or whatever. It's still weird - the invite system did a good job at this too.
At any rate, I'm glad I've got my gmail account already (even though I'm not using it
Apple could potentially take over a very significant portion of the x86 market... using the OS as a bait for people to buy the hardware. The only way they could really fuck it up is by stopping other OSes to work on their boxes or by making them too expensive. If they play it right, we're just witnessing the birth of the Golden Age of Apple.
Or at least, it's distorting the facts. :)
Work keepy interrupting my IMing, not the other way around
There is no spoon.
And greasy fingers and dandruff and sticky stuff where you really don't want to know what it is and so on and so forth....
Further, something tells me that using a screwdriver to pop out all the keys of this fancy Optimus thing in order to give it a good clean is just not going to work
Also, you can't give the book to anyone else, I'm afraid.
From TFA:
I agree with one of the previous posters saying that it'll be pretty hard to enforce the return of the bok, particularly if you paid by cash and in that case you can probably just send the book to whomever but technically, you're in breach of the court order.
Anyway, to me this just sounds like Yet Another Marketing Trick (TM) to artificially hype the anticipation of the book even further.
Damn, you mean I shouldn't have clicked on that "Congratulations, you're a winner!" popup?
Well, not so sure. We are talking true random numbers after all and when you input a random string taken from wherever into a Turing Machine to compute another random string then you simply end up with a pseudo-random number generator in the sense that the numbers outputted by your Machine might be random, but can be reproduced if you input the same inital random string again. So you end up with a reproducible random number string, which is not true randomness. With QTMs however, as I understand it, you can really produce truly random numbers - they will not be reproducible, even if you do put the machine back in the exact same initial starting condition.
And as far as I know, even Probabilistic Turing Machines (which is I think what you were referring to) cannot generate truly random numbers, because even though you introduce a level of randomness through the probabilities, that level is still only pseudo-random and hence the outcome will be pseudo-random too.
But anyway, I'm straying too far into realms I don't really know in a very detailed fashion now, so I'll call it a day. But have fun reading
But can you write a Turing Machine that can check whether itself will halt? That's the point I'm trying to make - we seem to be able to do that most of the time (and I would even go as far as postulate that humans can always tell when they are themselves caught in an infinite loop, although I am not able to prove this) - we can catch ourselves going around in circles, a Turing Machine is incapable of doing that. I happily concede the point that you can write specific programs to test specific Turing Machines, but our introspection goes much beyond that and I think you'll be much more hard-pressed to write even a simple Turing Machine that can tell you whether it will halt or not in an as general a way as humans seem to be able to.
I'll also concede the point that I cannot prove definitely that human brains are not Turing Machines. But I will point out that you cannot prove that it is one and I'll put forward that it is much more likely that our brains are not Turing Machines, given our introspection ability and the fact that even Quantum Computers are not Turing Machines (so we know that computation devices that are not TMs exist - why should our brain be one?).
If you're seriously interested...
One of the papers you definitely want to read is:
Deutsch, D. (1985) Quantum Theory, the Church-Turning Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer, Proc. of the Royal Soc. of London A, 400, pp97-117
It gives you an introduction to Quantum Turing Machines.
More relevant to your question is the following:
Feyman, R. (1982) Simulating Physics with Computers, Internat. J. Theoret. Phys., 21, pp467-488.
The main point in this paper is that you cannot simulate quantum phenomenon on a Turing Machine (however, you can on a Quantum Turing Machine).
Then there is the fact that quantum computers are able to generate true random numbers, whereas Turing Machines can't. I forgot the reference for that.... it might even be in the Feyman paper but I'm a bit short on time to hunt that down now.
Anyway, happy reading!
In a short reply: no :)
In a longer reply - I don't think it can be proven explicitly. It can be shown however, that humans can solve it in certain cases, which is still more than Turing Machines can do. Quite simply, you are aware of your own internal states. When you ponder a problem, you will usually be able to figure out if you're going to end up with a solution, be it good or bad, or if you're just running around in circles. This is something a Turing Machine cannot do - it is impossible to create a Turing Machine which is aware of whether it itself is going to halt or not.
On the other hand, I'm sure that you will have little difficulty in writing an algorithm which is hard for a human to tract and hence for a human to decide upon regarding its halting state. But for me, the more important point is that we have this kind of introspection ability which allows us to solve the Halting Problem in our own case for most of the time, things which a Turing Machine is incapable of.
I'm sure the argument can be formalised further, but, although my background is Cognitive Science, I work almost solely in Neuroscience these days and my reflexes are a bit rusty. I'm sure you can catch the thrust of my argument though.
NO! The brain is NOT a Turing Machine.
There is something called the 'Halting problem'. Basically, for any computation, a Turing Machine can:
-halt with success
-halt with failure
-get caught in a loop
The question is, if it hasn't halted yet, will it halt in the future or will it get caught in a loop? And you can prove that it is impossible to construct a Turing Machine that is able to answer that question. This is called the halting problem.
It can be generalised to prove that you cannot construct a single Turing Machine to decide whether a given statement is true or false and this is where it ties back into Gödel's theorem and it is this argument that some people use to relate Gödel's incompleteness theorem to the brain (which I find intriguing but I'm not sure whether I agree with it.) The important point here, however, is that you, as a human being, can solve the Halting Problem. It follows, that you are NOT a Turing Machine.
It can also be proven that Quantum Computers are not Turing Machines by the way, but even Quantum Computers are unable to solve the Halting Problem, so our brain is a step up even from Quantum Computers.
Let me repeat the point here again: The brain is NOT a Turing Machine and as such the limitations of a Turing Machine do not apply.
To be honest, I think the T9 dictionary is a good compromise. At least in my experience, it gets the right word nine times out of ten as I enter it, and if it doesn't, then it's usually the next or the third one in the list. So on average you could say that typing with T9 requires n+1 keystrokes, where n is the number of letters in a word. I think that's pretty good.
Doesn't beat a brain interface that reads the characters as you think them though