"[C]ocaine is damned expensive, makes you greedy and sociopathic, gives you a sense of entitlemant, makes you stupid, and makes you think it makes you smart." -- sm62704 (957197)
Unfortunately, my co-workers like to cowboy or screencap my desktop if I leave my office door unlocked while I go for coffee. Having it set to automatically return to a black background would be great.
Too bad for me; I have a genuine copy of Windows.:-(
Billy: The fish rots from the head, as they say. So my thinking is, why not cut off the head? Penny: Of the human race? Billy: It's not a perfect metaphor.
You know, I had never actually heard this phrase before.
Bob: I don't know about this, George. We don't know the first thing about what goes on in a television station. George Newman: Don't worry, Bob. It's just like working in a fish-market. Except you don't have to clean and gut fish all day.
Man, how many on-topic quotes does this movie have?
All things "quantum" are portrayed as bizarre, but they aren't; they aren't even that difficult to understand, if presented properly. There's just a whole lot of bad "information" out there.
The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by "hidden variables" that cannot be observed.
Bohm's idea has never been debunked, and is perfectly logical. Remember, the movement of the planets was also once "unpredictable", and then "mostly predictable but with errors" before we understood the hidden variables. Just because something is currently unpredictable, doesn't make it random.
Anyway.
There are a number of statements in this article that lead me to believe that either: A) Conway and Kochen are loony, or B) crappy "science" journalism strikes again. Hopefully it's the latter and something was just lost in the translation from actual-science to journalism-ese. However, the fact that the two of them have been hawking this idea for four years tends toward A.
Repeated throughout the article is the idea that the particle CHOOSES its spin. This is an insane idea. The whole presentation is nuts. Do subatomic particles have free will? What? Does a glass of water have free will? Can you define free will first so that a meaningful discussion can follow?
This article portrays it as a new choice, either determinism or free will. It has always been one or the other, they're mutually exclusive (for certain values of "free will").
But anyway.
Entangle two particles this way, and then send a physicist named Alice with one of them to Mars and leave the other with a physicist named Bob on Earth. That will prevent information from passing between the physicists or the particles, according to relativity theory.
WTF. Again with the lunacy. You don't have to send Alice to Mars to prevent information passing between them. First of all, information isn't going to pass between them, that's not what entangled particles are about (despite massive popular [but factually wrong] ideas to the contrary). Second of all, putting Alice on the other side of Earth gets her out of Bob's immediate light cone.
ANYWAY.
The point of the thought experiment is to "prove" that there's no way to predict the axis of spin of the particle, even with an identically entangled particle, if you "poke" it differently, because no perfect pre-poke state exists.
This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it's measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must "decide" which spin to have on the fly.
Because "poking" it changes its spin. NO SHIT. You change the outcome by measuring it. Oh my science! Alert the media! So their idea is that the spin is not predetermined, and therefore determinism is false and we have "free will". Except it STILL doesn't disprove Bohm's conjecture (see start of rant) that there are unknown rules in play.
So, their idea basically adds nothing to the debate. It "proves" nothing. It tells us nothing. Why is this on/.?
This article is dumb. I'm dumber for having read it. I award the author no points, and may science have mercy on his inevitably destined animating force.
Oh, I know, but as GIF did not enter English via a Romance language (eg, Italian), and all OTHER words that begin with gi- are pronounced with a hard g, and everyone I know (except for one guy) pronounces it with a hard g, and the hard g pronunciation is by far the more common one (despite your personal anecdotal evidence to the contrary) especially with people who don't know the word's origin, I'm going to say that hard-g GIF is the more correct pronunciation.
Or to quote Erik Macki: "English is full of words whose pronunciation deviates from prescribed standards--precisely because usage, and not prescriptive rules, dictates what is "correct." No amount of arguing from pundits and word-coiners can ever change this!" (emphasis mine)
So yes, the creator of the GIF format pronounced it JIF. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't control the minds of everyone on the planet (or DOES he?).
This can be our Shibboleth. Have someone pronounce GIF, and if it's a soft g, you know they're probably an old-school type programmer, the kind who likes to make painful puns and is a wizard on the console. If it's a hard g, they're just a regular person with, you know, social skills and such. ^_^
If you increase the lifespan of the average human to 1000 years would they remain fertile in proportion? Would a women remain fertile until about age 350?
I suspect there's going to be a lot of wrong information in response to this, as what people know often just isn't so.
"When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova." (slide 6)
If the anti-aging technology prevents the woman from reaching menopause, her body will continue to maintain her egg follicles. Menopause doesn't occur because the woman is out of eggs (as most people "know"), but rather because her body is old and has stopped maintaining them.
So, women would remain fertile for much longer. But no, not in proportion. Aging doesn't work like that (just like cavemen [lifespan ~ 18 years] didn't go through puberty when they were 3 years old).
As for overpopulation, it appears to be self correcting. The countries with the largest populations (eg, Japan) are experiencing negative population growth. I shouldn't think longer lifespans would change that.
Don't bother correcting them. They'll come back with arguments about how English is a living language, and prescribed grammar is outdated, blah blah.
Ignore them. But teach your children the proper usage. It will be our shibboleth.
And for people using "begs the question" to mean "raises the question", feel free to continue doing so. Just be aware that those of us who know better may think you are ignorant. If you don't like that, you can lrn 2 English.
What this means is that in an infinite universe that has totally random initial conditions, every possible state will be realized somewhere.
No, no, no.
17, 34, 51, 68, 85...
This sequence of numbers is both infinite (it never ends), and based on a totally random initial condition (why 17?).
However, no matter how far you go, you're never going to reach good old number 1. Or 2 or 5 or 10, etc.
Just because something is infinite doesn't mean that it covers every possibility.
And of course, your premise that the universe is infinite in the first place is far from proven, or even likely. Also, ergodic systems don't work on a macroscopic level anyway. Did you or the mods even READ the links you posted?
ZoneAlarm, AVG and Spybot are _incapable_ of detecting trojans like the aforementioned Kraken simply because they are polymorphic.
Hi, sorry, what?
ZoneAlarm is, in fact, incapable of automatically allowing outgoing access to an infected file because it is polymorphic. If the file's contents change, it loses its permissions. As anyone who uses both ZoneAlarm and Firefox knows. (Can't browse the web? Well, did Firefox update itself?)
Control Panel, and other OS dialogs have been obfuscated and made extremely convoluted for no apparent reason
I disagree, although I thought the exact same thing at first.
Add/Remove Programs, for example is now under Programs (I think; I'm in Ubuntu now). So, instead of being at the beginning of the list, it's near the end. I was frustrated the first time I had to use it and I couldn't find it.
But...think about it. Or I should say, think about it as if you were NOT good with computers. If you are barely computer literate, and you're looking for the setting that affects Programs, are you going to look under A or P? The verb or the noun? I think the new ordering is actually more intuitive than the old, it's just that we're all accustomed to the old.
I also think Vista in general is getting a bit of a bum rap. It's not that Vista is bad per se, but the scaled down versions are... scaled down. They feel incomplete because they are.
My new laptop came with Home. It was crap, and I hated it. I got Business from my school (MSDNAA, so... free). It was crap, and I hated it. And then someone gave me Ultimate. And because it was free, and because I was going to reformat that drive again anyway, I thought I'd try it (curse my insatiable curiousity...).
And actually, it's not too bad. In fact, I think that if they only had Ultimate, Vista wouldn't be getting so much flak. Ultimate is the only complete version of Vista. For me, Ultimate is the only real version of Vista.
And it does work better than XP (gasp!) for some things. Memory management, for one. Especially if you have more than 3 gigs of system RAM.
Yes, UAC is annoying and poorly thought out. Yes, Aero is unnecessary and a resource hog.
Is XP better for low end systems? Yes. Is Ubuntu better for just about every system? Yes. (This is what I use 60% of the time)
Is Vista actually OK for high-end systems?....yes. Is it perfect? No.
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Me too.
Unfortunately, my co-workers like to cowboy or screencap my desktop if I leave my office door unlocked while I go for coffee. Having it set to automatically return to a black background would be great.
Too bad for me; I have a genuine copy of Windows. :-(
You know, I had never actually heard this phrase before.
Ah, TV as it was meant to be seen. In a theater.
Man, how many on-topic quotes does this movie have?
All things "quantum" are portrayed as bizarre, but they aren't; they aren't even that difficult to understand, if presented properly. There's just a whole lot of bad "information" out there.
Bohm's idea has never been debunked, and is perfectly logical. Remember, the movement of the planets was also once "unpredictable", and then "mostly predictable but with errors" before we understood the hidden variables. Just because something is currently unpredictable, doesn't make it random.
Anyway.
There are a number of statements in this article that lead me to believe that either: A) Conway and Kochen are loony, or B) crappy "science" journalism strikes again. Hopefully it's the latter and something was just lost in the translation from actual-science to journalism-ese. However, the fact that the two of them have been hawking this idea for four years tends toward A.
Repeated throughout the article is the idea that the particle CHOOSES its spin. This is an insane idea. The whole presentation is nuts. Do subatomic particles have free will? What? Does a glass of water have free will? Can you define free will first so that a meaningful discussion can follow?
This article portrays it as a new choice, either determinism or free will. It has always been one or the other, they're mutually exclusive (for certain values of "free will").
But anyway.
WTF. Again with the lunacy. You don't have to send Alice to Mars to prevent information passing between them. First of all, information isn't going to pass between them, that's not what entangled particles are about (despite massive popular [but factually wrong] ideas to the contrary). Second of all, putting Alice on the other side of Earth gets her out of Bob's immediate light cone.
ANYWAY.
The point of the thought experiment is to "prove" that there's no way to predict the axis of spin of the particle, even with an identically entangled particle, if you "poke" it differently, because no perfect pre-poke state exists.
Because "poking" it changes its spin. NO SHIT. You change the outcome by measuring it. Oh my science! Alert the media! So their idea is that the spin is not predetermined, and therefore determinism is false and we have "free will". Except it STILL doesn't disprove Bohm's conjecture (see start of rant) that there are unknown rules in play.
So, their idea basically adds nothing to the debate. It "proves" nothing. It tells us nothing. Why is this on /.?
This article is dumb. I'm dumber for having read it. I award the author no points, and may science have mercy on his inevitably destined animating force.
Oh, I know, but as GIF did not enter English via a Romance language (eg, Italian), and all OTHER words that begin with gi- are pronounced with a hard g, and everyone I know (except for one guy) pronounces it with a hard g, and the hard g pronunciation is by far the more common one (despite your personal anecdotal evidence to the contrary) especially with people who don't know the word's origin, I'm going to say that hard-g GIF is the more correct pronunciation.
Or to quote Erik Macki: "English is full of words whose pronunciation deviates from prescribed standards--precisely because usage, and not prescriptive rules, dictates what is "correct." No amount of arguing from pundits and word-coiners can ever change this!" (emphasis mine)
So yes, the creator of the GIF format pronounced it JIF. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't control the minds of everyone on the planet (or DOES he?).
This can be our Shibboleth. Have someone pronounce GIF, and if it's a soft g, you know they're probably an old-school type programmer, the kind who likes to make painful puns and is a wizard on the console. If it's a hard g, they're just a regular person with, you know, social skills and such. ^_^
Do you pronounce GIF (graphics interchange format) with a soft G? How do you pronounce "graphics"? Does it sound like a tall animal?
I know no one else is. Now I finally have an audience!
I suspect there's going to be a lot of wrong information in response to this, as what people know often just isn't so.
"When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova." (slide 6)
If the anti-aging technology prevents the woman from reaching menopause, her body will continue to maintain her egg follicles. Menopause doesn't occur because the woman is out of eggs (as most people "know"), but rather because her body is old and has stopped maintaining them.
So, women would remain fertile for much longer. But no, not in proportion. Aging doesn't work like that (just like cavemen [lifespan ~ 18 years] didn't go through puberty when they were 3 years old).
As for overpopulation, it appears to be self correcting. The countries with the largest populations (eg, Japan) are experiencing negative population growth. I shouldn't think longer lifespans would change that.
Sure. You've heard of the Miracle Bra for women? For men, it's Miracle Gro.
I am unaffected by this "red means angry" distraction. I can't see red; I'm colorblind.
Wait, is that why the red team is completely invisible to me? No wonder they keep winning.
The blue team, on the other hand, stands out quite nicely.
I'm clicking on your link, but nothing is happening. Am I doing it wrong?
DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS.
I, too, WELCOME our BRAIN-surgeon ROBOT overlords.
All GLORY to THE brain-SURGEON robot OVERLORDS!
No! No! We must fight them! Brain surgeon robot overlords? Are you MAD? They could... they could re-program our VERY MINDS!
This is TOO FAR! We =must= take a stand! This far, no further!
In fact, I'm going to go give these overlords a piece of my mind in person! BRB
You don't understand!
Grand Theft Auto Four is gonna make Grand Theft Auto Three look like Grand Theft Auto Two.
Don't bother correcting them. They'll come back with arguments about how English is a living language, and prescribed grammar is outdated, blah blah.
Ignore them. But teach your children the proper usage. It will be our shibboleth.
And for people using "begs the question" to mean "raises the question", feel free to continue doing so. Just be aware that those of us who know better may think you are ignorant. If you don't like that, you can lrn 2 English.
17, 34, 51, 68, 85...
This sequence of numbers is both infinite (it never ends), and based on a totally random initial condition (why 17?).
However, no matter how far you go, you're never going to reach good old number 1. Or 2 or 5 or 10, etc.
Just because something is infinite doesn't mean that it covers every possibility.
And of course, your premise that the universe is infinite in the first place is far from proven, or even likely. Also, ergodic systems don't work on a macroscopic level anyway. Did you or the mods even READ the links you posted?
I'm not having any pro blems.
My ke yb oard works fine.
Well, truthfully, your 'a', 'b', 'e' 'i', 'o', 's', and 'y' keys do seem to be working at least part of the time. ^_^
ZoneAlarm is, in fact, incapable of automatically allowing outgoing access to an infected file because it is polymorphic. If the file's contents change, it loses its permissions. As anyone who uses both ZoneAlarm and Firefox knows. (Can't browse the web? Well, did Firefox update itself?)
Add/Remove Programs, for example is now under Programs (I think; I'm in Ubuntu now). So, instead of being at the beginning of the list, it's near the end. I was frustrated the first time I had to use it and I couldn't find it.
But...think about it. Or I should say, think about it as if you were NOT good with computers. If you are barely computer literate, and you're looking for the setting that affects Programs, are you going to look under A or P? The verb or the noun? I think the new ordering is actually more intuitive than the old, it's just that we're all accustomed to the old.
I also think Vista in general is getting a bit of a bum rap. It's not that Vista is bad per se, but the scaled down versions are
My new laptop came with Home. It was crap, and I hated it. I got Business from my school (MSDNAA, so... free). It was crap, and I hated it. And then someone gave me Ultimate. And because it was free, and because I was going to reformat that drive again anyway, I thought I'd try it (curse my insatiable curiousity...).
And actually, it's not too bad. In fact, I think that if they only had Ultimate, Vista wouldn't be getting so much flak. Ultimate is the only complete version of Vista. For me, Ultimate is the only real version of Vista.
And it does work better than XP (gasp!) for some things. Memory management, for one. Especially if you have more than 3 gigs of system RAM.
Yes, UAC is annoying and poorly thought out. Yes, Aero is unnecessary and a resource hog.
Is XP better for low end systems? Yes.
Is Ubuntu better for just about every system? Yes. (This is what I use 60% of the time)
Is Vista actually OK for high-end systems?