The Western Nations (US,Canada, UK, etc.) also have starving and homeless people and yet they also send things into space and spend billions of dollars on defence. It may not seem like a worthwhile endevour but the technological fallout from a project of this scope (in experience, new materials, new technology, etc) will benefit everyone in the long term.
Acutally that won't happen because if it happend, it would imply information travelling faster than light, and that does not happen. Even if you have a pair of perfectly entangled qubits (called an e-bit), and you seperate them by a great distance and perform a quantum operation on the first qubit, the measurment outcome of the first qubit will not affect the measurement outcome of the second qubit.
The idea of Quantum Teleportation has been misunderstood. Quantum Teleportation is not like the Star Trek transporters. Quantum Teleportation is a method of sending a qubit to another person. In order to do this you need to share an e-bit. Ex. Alice has a qubit Y she wants to send to Bob. Alice and Bob also share an e-bit E (which is a perfectly entagled pair of qubits 1/sqrt(2)(|00>+|11>). Alice performs a controlled-not operation on her part of the e-bit Y, then she does a Haddamard transformation (Quatum Fourrier Tranform on 1 bit) on the qubit Y, then she measures both the qubit Y and her part of the e-bit E. At this point we have two classical bits 00, 01, 10, or 11. She then sends this to Bob. Bob the performs a controlled-not on his part of the e-bit Y based on the first bit, and a controlled phase-flip based on the second bit at which point Bob's qubit that he now has is Y. This process perfectly sends a qubit from Alice to Bob, but the key part of this method that needs to be remembered is that the two classical bits that Alice measured had to be sent to Bob. Without these bits Bob would not be able to get Y and sending the classical bits, takes the usual ammount of time.
What's even cooler is that if Alice's qubit Y had been entangled with another qubit X, the entanglement is preserved after the QT process so that the qubit Bob has is now entangled with X.
Disclaimer: I am not a quantum physicist. I am a recent computer science grad who just took a course on Quantum Computing. Just one.
Acutally Mos Def is a very good actor and has been in a range of movies form Monsters Ball to The Italian Job to The Woodsman. Why can't his casting choice have been based on the fact that he is a good actor?
While it may seem redundant to have closed book exams in this day of fast access to information, there is some value in knowing things without having to look them up.
For really complex ideas sure have an open book test but people should know the basics without having to look them up. It's just plain laziness not knowing basic concepts in whatever field your exam is in.
By the time it takes a person to flip through a text book, read the relevant text, understand the concept, and correctly answer the question, the person who has this already in memory and already understands will have answered three questions.
Its about efficiency really. You could write your program faster if you already know what you need instead of wasting time looking it up on the web. And just because you have something memorized does not mean that you are not capable of analyzing the data.
On a side note: In my experience closed book exams are always easier than open book exams. I find that if the instructor says open book, I get lazy and don't bother studying and when it comes time to write the test I find that I spend 50% of my time fliping through pages trying to figure out what concepts to apply. On top of this instructors will deliberatly make the tests harder because "hey, it's open book, they should be able to look it up." Where as if the exam is closed book, I actually study for it and can finish the exam early so I could go do something else more enjoyable.
1) Wives will just get tired of thier husbands if they have to live together that long and vice versa.
I agree with your point but if people can live for large number of years marriage will just become a contract in which person A and B agree to be married for X number of years after which they have the option to extend the contract for another Y years or go find a new marriage contract. With the rate of divorces they way they are right now, marriage is already starting to resemble this.
2)If people won't just die on their own then someone will end up killing them. Right now, we at least have the feeling that some peopel will just die someday.
I disagree with the notion that murder will increase. On the contrary I see it decreasing, same with wars. Imagine if you can live for 500 years. Would you go skydiving at 30 knowing that if an accident happens you wiping away 470 years of your life? Would you join the army at 30 and fight a war where the likleyhood of you dying increases 100 fold and once again you will be wiping away 470 years of life? How about the concequences of murder -- when you kill someone at 30 you are taking away 470 years of their potential contribution to society. What would be the penalty for shuch a crime? Would you be willing to spend 100 years in prison? 200 years in prison? Because thats how severe a penalty would have to be for a crime that has such a big impact on someones life.
3)If you have my neighbors for that long of a time you might kill them too.
Why stay in one place for that long? You have the potential to learn new things, meet new people, experience new cultures. Why would you want to stay in one spot for so long? Go live in Japan for 30 years, then move to Brasil and be a painter for 20, then move to France and enjoy wine for 10 years before moving back to North America to try your hand at Mechanical Engineering. Move to Texas and become a cattle ranger for 15 years. Whatever, the possibilities are endless.
Anyone know what these are? Dual Xeons? Do they take advantage of fast graphics hardware to speed up the rendering?
Fast graphics processors do not help when rendering movie quality graphics, ie Raytracing or Radiosity. GPU's are built to accelerate simple shading models such as Phong shading. All high quality rendering is done in software on the cpu.
In order to have high quality ray traced scenes you would need to have a high recursion limit, somewhere near 5.
So for each ray that intersects, you need to calculate shadow rays to ALL lights, reflected ray (which will generate more shadow, refl, trans), and transmitted ray ( also generate shadow, refl, trans).
Say you have 10 lights in the scene, thats 12 rays. Going to recursive limit of 5 each incident ray at the worst case scenario would generate 692 rays.
Now do that for a large scene with many objects at high resolution. Then before all this rendering takes place add all the AI calculations for each object, animation (translation, rotations, etc) for each object and you can see that the ammount of computation required to render one frame quickly gets out of hand.
Now imagine it being done for 10 000 orcs, 10 000 humans, plus structurs (castles,towers,etc), plus dynamic lights (torches, burning balls of fire tossed by siege equipment, burning pitch). Now you can see why it would take 2 hours.
7. Scientific studies have demonstrated that approximately two-thirds of all human cancer cells have an activated Ras pathway, one of the most common set of mutations leading to cancer. An activated Ras pathway leads to a constant barrage of growth signals to the cell, causing uncontrolled growth. In cells with an activated Ras pathway, the anti-viral response appears to be turned off. When reovirus infects one of these cancer cells, it is able to replicate and eventually kill the cancer cell. Up to 5,000 progeny virus organisms can then infect and kill surrounding cancer cells. Theoretically, the cycle of infection, replication and cell death will continue until there are no longer any cancer cells accessible.
So even if you have been infected by the Reovirus previously, your immune system won't respond to the virus in the cancer cells as the anti-viral response is turned off.
P.S. University of Calgary Rocks! Take that Macleans!
Slashdot Mirror
The Western Nations (US,Canada, UK, etc.) also have starving and homeless people and yet they also send things into space and spend billions of dollars on defence. It may not seem like a worthwhile endevour but the technological fallout from a project of this scope (in experience, new materials, new technology, etc) will benefit everyone in the long term.
Acutally that won't happen because if it happend, it would imply information travelling faster than light, and that does not happen. Even if you have a pair of perfectly entangled qubits (called an e-bit), and you seperate them by a great distance and perform a quantum operation on the first qubit, the measurment outcome of the first qubit will not affect the measurement outcome of the second qubit.
The idea of Quantum Teleportation has been misunderstood. Quantum Teleportation is not like the Star Trek transporters. Quantum Teleportation is a method of sending a qubit to another person. In order to do this you need to share an e-bit. Ex. Alice has a qubit Y she wants to send to Bob. Alice and Bob also share an e-bit E (which is a perfectly entagled pair of qubits 1/sqrt(2)(|00>+|11>). Alice performs a controlled-not operation on her part of the e-bit Y, then she does a Haddamard transformation (Quatum Fourrier Tranform on 1 bit) on the qubit Y, then she measures both the qubit Y and her part of the e-bit E. At this point we have two classical bits 00, 01, 10, or 11. She then sends this to Bob. Bob the performs a controlled-not on his part of the e-bit Y based on the first bit, and a controlled phase-flip based on the second bit at which point Bob's qubit that he now has is Y. This process perfectly sends a qubit from Alice to Bob, but the key part of this method that needs to be remembered is that the two classical bits that Alice measured had to be sent to Bob. Without these bits Bob would not be able to get Y and sending the classical bits, takes the usual ammount of time.
What's even cooler is that if Alice's qubit Y had been entangled with another qubit X, the entanglement is preserved after the QT process so that the qubit Bob has is now entangled with X.
Disclaimer: I am not a quantum physicist. I am a recent computer science grad who just took a course on Quantum Computing. Just one.
Acutally Mos Def is a very good actor and has been in a range of movies form Monsters Ball to The Italian Job to The Woodsman. Why can't his casting choice have been based on the fact that he is a good actor?
While it may seem redundant to have closed book exams in this day of fast access to information, there is some value in knowing things without having to look them up.
For really complex ideas sure have an open book test but people should know the basics without having to look them up. It's just plain laziness not knowing basic concepts in whatever field your exam is in.
By the time it takes a person to flip through a text book, read the relevant text, understand the concept, and correctly answer the question, the person who has this already in memory and already understands will have answered three questions.
Its about efficiency really. You could write your program faster if you already know what you need instead of wasting time looking it up on the web. And just because you have something memorized does not mean that you are not capable of analyzing the data.
On a side note: In my experience closed book exams are always easier than open book exams. I find that if the instructor says open book, I get lazy and don't bother studying and when it comes time to write the test I find that I spend 50% of my time fliping through pages trying to figure out what concepts to apply. On top of this instructors will deliberatly make the tests harder because "hey, it's open book, they should be able to look it up." Where as if the exam is closed book, I actually study for it and can finish the exam early so I could go do something else more enjoyable.
1) Wives will just get tired of thier husbands if they have to live together that long and vice versa.
I agree with your point but if people can live for large number of years marriage will just become a contract in which person A and B agree to be married for X number of years after which they have the option to extend the contract for another Y years or go find a new marriage contract. With the rate of divorces they way they are right now, marriage is already starting to resemble this.
2)If people won't just die on their own then someone will end up killing them. Right now, we at least have the feeling that some peopel will just die someday.
I disagree with the notion that murder will increase. On the contrary I see it decreasing, same with wars. Imagine if you can live for 500 years. Would you go skydiving at 30 knowing that if an accident happens you wiping away 470 years of your life? Would you join the army at 30 and fight a war where the likleyhood of you dying increases 100 fold and once again you will be wiping away 470 years of life? How about the concequences of murder -- when you kill someone at 30 you are taking away 470 years of their potential contribution to society. What would be the penalty for shuch a crime? Would you be willing to spend 100 years in prison? 200 years in prison? Because thats how severe a penalty would have to be for a crime that has such a big impact on someones life.
3)If you have my neighbors for that long of a time you might kill them too.
Why stay in one place for that long? You have the potential to learn new things, meet new people, experience new cultures. Why would you want to stay in one spot for so long? Go live in Japan for 30 years, then move to Brasil and be a painter for 20, then move to France and enjoy wine for 10 years before moving back to North America to try your hand at Mechanical Engineering. Move to Texas and become a cattle ranger for 15 years. Whatever, the possibilities are endless.
Anyone know what these are? Dual Xeons? Do they take advantage of fast graphics hardware to speed up the rendering?
Fast graphics processors do not help when rendering movie quality graphics, ie Raytracing or Radiosity. GPU's are built to accelerate simple shading models such as Phong shading. All high quality rendering is done in software on the cpu.
In order to have high quality ray traced scenes you would need to have a high recursion limit, somewhere near 5.
So for each ray that intersects, you need to calculate shadow rays to ALL lights, reflected ray (which will generate more shadow, refl, trans), and transmitted ray ( also generate shadow, refl, trans).
Say you have 10 lights in the scene, thats 12 rays. Going to recursive limit of 5 each incident ray at the worst case scenario would generate 692 rays.
Now do that for a large scene with many objects at high resolution. Then before all this rendering takes place add all the AI calculations for each object, animation (translation, rotations, etc) for each object and you can see that the ammount of computation required to render one frame quickly gets out of hand.
Now imagine it being done for 10 000 orcs, 10 000 humans, plus structurs (castles,towers,etc), plus dynamic lights (torches, burning balls of fire tossed by siege equipment, burning pitch). Now you can see why it would take 2 hours.
Actuallyl from the FAQ:
7. Scientific studies have demonstrated that approximately two-thirds of all human cancer cells have an activated Ras pathway, one of the most common set of mutations leading to cancer. An activated Ras pathway leads to a constant barrage of growth signals to the cell, causing uncontrolled growth. In cells with an activated Ras pathway, the anti-viral response appears to be turned off. When reovirus infects one of these cancer cells, it is able to replicate and eventually kill the cancer cell. Up to 5,000 progeny virus organisms can then infect and kill surrounding cancer cells. Theoretically, the cycle of infection, replication and cell death will continue until there are no longer any cancer cells accessible.
So even if you have been infected by the Reovirus previously, your immune system won't respond to the virus in the cancer cells as the anti-viral response is turned off.
P.S. University of Calgary Rocks! Take that Macleans!