Gravity applies a centripetal force. In a swingball, the rope applies a centripetal force on the ball, not a centrifugal force.
While the centripetal force of the swingball rope relies on the momentum of the ball (unlike gravity), it adds a component of acceleration to the ball, which is pretty much the definition of force. However, the apparent centrifugal force does not apply any acceleration whatsoever: it is a tendency to continued, unaltered motion -- momentum.
Again, that's not Jevon's paradox, although it's related. Homeworkers' energy use mostly comes from heating and lighting dozens of people's houses rather than a single shared open-plan office. Urban sprawl is a different problem, so it's far more complex than Jevon's paradox.
The article isn't talking about increased efficiency encouraging consumption. It is basically arguing that for a fixed level of consumption, the internet is less efficient than shops (except where bulk purchasing is involved).
The article says Optimization for mountain rural communities will be very different than for dense urban areas. but the study did account for this -- hence the mention of 50km. If you live 50km from the shops, you're clearly in a sparsely populated rural community, not a dense urban one.
The only variable that's going to really undo this is if you take your car absolutely everywhere and your car uses too much fuel. IE the results will be the same or even more strongly in favour of physical shopping in every country outside the UK... except the USA.
I often have to take sunglasses on board during daytime flights -- the bright sunlight gives me a cracking headache, even with just the small windows. Increasing the light reaching the interior isn't going to make that any better...
Anyway, the reason us in the western world are so rich is that we have enslaved other countries by military might (in colonial times) and by exploitative contracts backed by bribes or threats (in modern times). We make ourselves rich by making others poor. Our cheap consumer goods are only possible by making sure that their wages stay inhumanly low.
What you consider protection of jobs is merely the continuance of economic suppression.
Once we start talking about parallel imports, we have a problem. Intellectual property is only as valuable as the customer is willing to pay. But at the same time, it has base costs. If we talk about academic textbooks, the customer in India, Kenya or Peru is not willing or capable of paying as much as the customer in the US or the UK. So we cut the price in their region so that they can afford it, and this gives them access to education. If import protections didn't exist, the publishers would have a straight choice between losing their developed-world profits by selling at developing-world rates, or losing their developing-world profits by selling at developed-world rates. The big money's in the developed word, so if we were to ban import protection on IP works, education in the developing world would suffer.
Of course, the opposite is true in the case of Hollywood cr*p -- if that wasn't available, education would improve, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth.
When I went through high school (the 90s), I was told I didn't need a calculator for exams, because we were going for reduced complexity, so "3pi" was a better answer than "9.42477796", and "5 sin 45" was better than "4.25451762". I was told that the questions would be designed so that the fractions would cancel out. They were right, and although I had a scientific calculator I barely used it in my exams. (Which is just as well, as it was solar powered and the exam hall was poorly lit.)
When I went to university, I was told pretty much the same thing. The university had a ban on programmable calculators, because of the ability to store notes or even equation solving programs on them. In compensation, the maths department bought a big stack of cheap Casio basic scientifics and offered them at about 5 pounds a piece. They made a clear and unambiguous promise that no exam questions would be set that these calculators couldn't do. The majority of my first year intake -- several hundred across the various maths courses for maths students, engineers, scientists and computer scientist -- bought the standard calculator because it was simpler, quicker, and they knew for certain it would do what they needed. Only a minority of these had banned programmable calculators -- most had standard scientifics, but the confidence of having the "standard" model made everyone happy.
A solar 4-function calculator will cost a couple of pounds/euros/dollars per student -- it's not a hardship to ask them to buy one if the college purchases in bulk on their behalf. Hell, if the college buys on their behalf you could even get a basic non-programmable scientific for about 10 pounds/euros/dollars apiece. That's still nothing compared to the annual spend on books.
And anyone who can't operate a 4 function calculator because it's "unfamiliar" is going to have major problems in the outside world anyway.
The earliest example I know of was a direct predecessor of Ivan Iron Man -- Supersprint.
It was a bit more subtle, though. The enemy cars got faster from track to track, but they did so based on the time it took you to complete each track. The trick to completing the game was therefore to get a good lead, come to a halt in front of the finish line, wait for the other cars to catch up a bit, then win by a small margin. The enemy cars stayed slower and each subsequent race was easier.
AFAIK, this tactic was applied in most arcade racers during the 80s, so that players would get a good "in" on playing, and they'd come back. They would make progress, so they'd come back. But they wouldn't finish the game as quite as if it was fixed difficulty, so they'd keep coming back, maximising the income from the machine.
A cynical money making plot? Nope. We came back because we enjoyed it. Compare with Virtua House of the Rising Taxi Cops in your average modern arcade. Difficult from the get go, so if you're not a current good gamer, there's little point in putting your coin in the slot.
Sorry, but stereoscopic vision is stereoscopic vision -- 3D by triangulation. This is only required for static depth perception.
Parallax is an effect that is caused by motion. It is depth perception due to motion on a PARALLel AXis. Even Wolfenstein 3D had parallax. Strafe sideways -- horizontal movement, horizontal parallax. Die -- fall down the vertical axis, vertical parallax.
All 3d games already have two dimensions of parallax, and the addition of stereoscopic vision is one more element in building the 3D experience. What's missing? Well, as yet focus pulling is beyond our computational means, so we don't get to blur things that the player isn't looking at. Some of the light/contrast effects (eg mach banding) are still too complicated. But all in all we're getting there step by step.
Nope, there is no neutral. What you call "neutral" is in reality "as far away from you as the screen".
The reason you can't consider this "neutral" is that it's not a choice between viewing the crosshair and viewing the game -- the crosshair is part of the game. You don't look at the crosshair for its own sake, you line the crosshair up with your target. A crosshair that "floats" some distance between you and your target distracts your focus and makes it harder to see the target, defeating the object of the exercise.
So why should we accept "God did it" as the reason the universe exists?
Most people here on/. are not saying that you should accept that.
A scientist should occupy himself with science. His motivation should come from the science itself, and it should not matter whether he believes in [a g|G]od or not. Let's all deal with science and leave people to fill in the gaps however they like, because we have no proof (yet) for these gaps.
And the true efficiency of Arabic writing versus Chinese characters (in the computer): font size (not size of text, but size of the font file)
Riddle me this, Batsie: how many fonts do you use on a daily basis? And how many webpages do you read in a year?
If using a data-hungry pictographic font reduces the amount of data used in the long term, it is still more efficient, just like a $15,000 car can be cheaper than a £10,000 one if breaks down less and uses less petrol.
Perhaps then this is an indication you need to simplify your written language?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Computers have introduced something quite extraordinary and unexpected into written language technology -- asymmetric input and output.
While alphabetic writing has always been considered more economical in terms of learning and ease-of-use, pictographs have always been more efficient in terms of space. When the Romans invented the codex (book, more or less), they didn't reduce the need for paper, but they found a way to make large amounts of paper more manageable. The Chinese, on the other hand, were still using scrolls and the like and needed to keep the bulk down, so stuck with the more space-efficient writing method.
In a computer, data is cheap (at the Unicode level, anyway), so what's your benchmark of efficiency now? Ease of reading would suggest alphabet, but screen real-estate favours ideographs. And on mobile phones, data isn't so cheap -- isn't SMS the world's most expensive data transfer? -- so ideographs are massively more efficient to the consumer.
With Latin entry and ideograph display, we get the best of two worlds -- efficient production for the writer, efficient display for the device. Is this asymmetry more efficient overall? We'll just have to wait and see....
Writing is technology, and like any technology, it underwent many incremental improvements and adaptations to different media.
The Latin character set evolved initially for stone carving. Germanic rules evolved to be chiselled in wood. Sanskrit's Devanagari script evolved to be written in soft clay. The script used in Malayalam is an unrecognisable derivative of devanagari, evolved to suit a population etching their texts onto banana leaves.
So yes, writing is a technology, and technology is not culture. The Amish community say they reject technology as it degrades their culture, but that is not true. They have simply "frozen" the evolution of technology at one point. The cart-building and barn-raising techniques they use are (in historical terms) fairly sophisticated and efficient examples of engineering. They could improve on that engineering by incorporating newer technologies.
Giving an Amish family a solar-powered flourescent lamp would not be imposing our culture on them, it would be providing them with a tool to improve their lives. Similarly, in providing Chinese kids with a more efficient tool to write (a phonemically regular alphabet), we are not imposing a culture, just providing a technology.
In fact, by claiming that the alphabet is a cultural imposition, you are encouraging the suppression of technology in the east, which will stunt their potential for intellectual and economic growth.
I didn't know the detail, but I was certainly sure that this was wrong:
If the mystery particle is not a neutrino, "It would have to be something we don't know about, an unknown particle that is also emitted by the sun and has this effect, and that would be even more remarkable," Sturrock said. [TFA]
He says it would have to be a particle, but before they mentioned neutrinos, I was automatically thinking about a field.
Warning: I am not a physicist and I'm thinking out loud. I can learn by being told why I'm wrong, but just calling me an idiot won't help. Correct me or ignore me.
A flare is caused by a disruption in the Sun's magnetic field, right? So if the effect is observed two days before the flare, the effect must be related (NB not necessarily caused by) to the field disruption. So in order to assume neutrinos, we have to propose a mechanism by which it is neutrinos that cause the disruption in the field. I've only read pop-science on the topic, but the description of flares is that they emit neutrinos. Do the more scientifically-literate publications talk about neutrino emissions before and/or after the main flare?
Cos with fields, you've got an initial disruption of the field before the event, and during the flare the Sun's magnetic field stretches out, so the effect on decay rates would increase. It fits the description, anyway.
I suppose the big test would be to build two identical nuclear clocks, leave one on the Earth (preferably near a pole) and park the other on the moon and see if the moon (low magnetic field) clock runs fast relative to the Earth one (high magnetic field).
Unless there was a near-Earth wormhole that spewed anti-neutrinos from another dimension and increased decay rates massively. But that would have flooded the Earth with radiation and would have caused massive genetic variation and speciation, and a focus on speciation (=evolution) would make it an unpalatable theory to young-Earth creationists.
Except of course that business vs home packages in the UK are not "neutral" -- business packages get lower contention ratios so that when the kids come home from school, home users are slowed down more than business users, because if not, all internet-connected UK businesses would cease to function at 4pm.
If they had enough capacity on their network to avoid congestion, they wouldn't *need* to prioritise anything. This appears to be running a poor network, then charging more to compensate for it.
They have enough capacity... on average. The whole point of traffic shaping is to spread the load out.
Even 12 years ago when I was doing the networks module at uni, the future need for traffic shaping was taken as a given. We should have it by now, by rights.
Consider: a gamer or Skype user doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, but that which he uses needs to be quick.
A P2P user downloading warez^H^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs uses a massive amount of bandwidth, but doesn't need an immediate response.
Yet P2P users leave the home PC running during peak time (during work hours), gobbling up bandwidth to no great advantage of their own.
Net neutrality is bad for everyone. In a neutral network, the only way to protect bandwidth is the download limit. It's not very effective, and it's not very popular. But if we prioritise certain traffic, heavy use of batch net use like filesharing no longer gets in the way of real-time net use like gaming and Skype and we no longer need to care about how much any one person downloads.
Each individual gets the net he most needs. Everyone wins.
There's a fundamental similarity between bike hire schemes and public transport: stations.
Modern bike hire schemes aim to have the bike in your hands the least time possible. You go to a bike station, you take the bike, you cycle around a bit and you deposit the bike at a station near your destination. This relies on having bike stations in a lot of places to work.
Where you need a high number of stations, there can only be one provider. When there can only be one provider, there is no competition. Where there's no competition, you need the service to be run by someone accountable to the public.
Can you propose a theory as to how this program contributes, even as a "tip of the wedge", to the surrendering of personal liberty to the government?
Isn't it obvious? Bikes are the last form of anonymous transport -- no license plates. These bikes will be marked and we will all be tracked by the NSA who will share the information with the Rand Corporation who will sell it to their partners in the Bildeberg Group!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Gravity applies a centripetal force. In a swingball, the rope applies a centripetal force on the ball, not a centrifugal force.
While the centripetal force of the swingball rope relies on the momentum of the ball (unlike gravity), it adds a component of acceleration to the ball, which is pretty much the definition of force. However, the apparent centrifugal force does not apply any acceleration whatsoever: it is a tendency to continued, unaltered motion -- momentum.
HAL.
You might as well invoke sky pixies. There is no such thing as centrifugal force!
HAL.
Again, that's not Jevon's paradox, although it's related. Homeworkers' energy use mostly comes from heating and lighting dozens of people's houses rather than a single shared open-plan office. Urban sprawl is a different problem, so it's far more complex than Jevon's paradox.
The article isn't talking about increased efficiency encouraging consumption. It is basically arguing that for a fixed level of consumption, the internet is less efficient than shops (except where bulk purchasing is involved).
HAL.
The article says Optimization for mountain rural communities will be very different than for dense urban areas. but the study did account for this -- hence the mention of 50km. If you live 50km from the shops, you're clearly in a sparsely populated rural community, not a dense urban one.
The only variable that's going to really undo this is if you take your car absolutely everywhere and your car uses too much fuel. IE the results will be the same or even more strongly in favour of physical shopping in every country outside the UK... except the USA.
HAL.
I often have to take sunglasses on board during daytime flights -- the bright sunlight gives me a cracking headache, even with just the small windows. Increasing the light reaching the interior isn't going to make that any better...
HAL.
Well I'm not from the USA, so...
Anyway, the reason us in the western world are so rich is that we have enslaved other countries by military might (in colonial times) and by exploitative contracts backed by bribes or threats (in modern times). We make ourselves rich by making others poor. Our cheap consumer goods are only possible by making sure that their wages stay inhumanly low.
What you consider protection of jobs is merely the continuance of economic suppression.
Or in simpler words, greed and exploitation.
HAL.
Once we start talking about parallel imports, we have a problem. Intellectual property is only as valuable as the customer is willing to pay. But at the same time, it has base costs. If we talk about academic textbooks, the customer in India, Kenya or Peru is not willing or capable of paying as much as the customer in the US or the UK. So we cut the price in their region so that they can afford it, and this gives them access to education. If import protections didn't exist, the publishers would have a straight choice between losing their developed-world profits by selling at developing-world rates, or losing their developing-world profits by selling at developed-world rates. The big money's in the developed word, so if we were to ban import protection on IP works, education in the developing world would suffer.
Of course, the opposite is true in the case of Hollywood cr*p -- if that wasn't available, education would improve, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth.
HAL.
What non-native English speaking foreign student doesn't have an English to "insert foreign language here" treeware dictionary?
Far Eastern ones -- I haven't seen anyone from Korea, Japan or Taiwan with a paper dictionary for several years now.
HAL.
When I went through high school (the 90s), I was told I didn't need a calculator for exams, because we were going for reduced complexity, so "3pi" was a better answer than "9.42477796", and "5 sin 45" was better than "4.25451762". I was told that the questions would be designed so that the fractions would cancel out. They were right, and although I had a scientific calculator I barely used it in my exams. (Which is just as well, as it was solar powered and the exam hall was poorly lit.)
When I went to university, I was told pretty much the same thing. The university had a ban on programmable calculators, because of the ability to store notes or even equation solving programs on them. In compensation, the maths department bought a big stack of cheap Casio basic scientifics and offered them at about 5 pounds a piece. They made a clear and unambiguous promise that no exam questions would be set that these calculators couldn't do. The majority of my first year intake -- several hundred across the various maths courses for maths students, engineers, scientists and computer scientist -- bought the standard calculator because it was simpler, quicker, and they knew for certain it would do what they needed. Only a minority of these had banned programmable calculators -- most had standard scientifics, but the confidence of having the "standard" model made everyone happy.
A solar 4-function calculator will cost a couple of pounds/euros/dollars per student -- it's not a hardship to ask them to buy one if the college purchases in bulk on their behalf. Hell, if the college buys on their behalf you could even get a basic non-programmable scientific for about 10 pounds/euros/dollars apiece. That's still nothing compared to the annual spend on books.
And anyone who can't operate a 4 function calculator because it's "unfamiliar" is going to have major problems in the outside world anyway.
HAL.
Suddenly Flash gaming makes a whole lot of sense for them -- Flash isn't programming, it's animation + glue logic.
North Korea will soon dominate the market, and Jobs will rebrand the iOS Flash ban as a blow for democratic freedom.
HAL.
The earliest example I know of was a direct predecessor of Ivan Iron Man -- Supersprint.
It was a bit more subtle, though. The enemy cars got faster from track to track, but they did so based on the time it took you to complete each track. The trick to completing the game was therefore to get a good lead, come to a halt in front of the finish line, wait for the other cars to catch up a bit, then win by a small margin. The enemy cars stayed slower and each subsequent race was easier.
AFAIK, this tactic was applied in most arcade racers during the 80s, so that players would get a good "in" on playing, and they'd come back. They would make progress, so they'd come back. But they wouldn't finish the game as quite as if it was fixed difficulty, so they'd keep coming back, maximising the income from the machine.
A cynical money making plot? Nope. We came back because we enjoyed it. Compare with Virtua House of the Rising Taxi Cops in your average modern arcade. Difficult from the get go, so if you're not a current good gamer, there's little point in putting your coin in the slot.
HAL.
Sorry, but stereoscopic vision is stereoscopic vision -- 3D by triangulation. This is only required for static depth perception.
Parallax is an effect that is caused by motion. It is depth perception due to motion on a PARALLel AXis. Even Wolfenstein 3D had parallax. Strafe sideways -- horizontal movement, horizontal parallax. Die -- fall down the vertical axis, vertical parallax.
All 3d games already have two dimensions of parallax, and the addition of stereoscopic vision is one more element in building the 3D experience. What's missing? Well, as yet focus pulling is beyond our computational means, so we don't get to blur things that the player isn't looking at. Some of the light/contrast effects (eg mach banding) are still too complicated. But all in all we're getting there step by step.
HAL.
Nope, there is no neutral. What you call "neutral" is in reality "as far away from you as the screen".
The reason you can't consider this "neutral" is that it's not a choice between viewing the crosshair and viewing the game -- the crosshair is part of the game. You don't look at the crosshair for its own sake, you line the crosshair up with your target. A crosshair that "floats" some distance between you and your target distracts your focus and makes it harder to see the target, defeating the object of the exercise.
HAL.
So why should we accept "God did it" as the reason the universe exists?
Most people here on /. are not saying that you should accept that.
A scientist should occupy himself with science. His motivation should come from the science itself, and it should not matter whether he believes in [a g|G]od or not. Let's all deal with science and leave people to fill in the gaps however they like, because we have no proof (yet) for these gaps.
Or, to put it another way, "live and let live".
HAL.
Nothing on that page disagrees with what I said.
HAL.
And the true efficiency of Arabic writing versus Chinese characters (in the computer): font size (not size of text, but size of the font file)
Riddle me this, Batsie: how many fonts do you use on a daily basis? And how many webpages do you read in a year?
If using a data-hungry pictographic font reduces the amount of data used in the long term, it is still more efficient, just like a $15,000 car can be cheaper than a £10,000 one if breaks down less and uses less petrol.
HAL.
Perhaps then this is an indication you need to simplify your written language?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Computers have introduced something quite extraordinary and unexpected into written language technology -- asymmetric input and output.
While alphabetic writing has always been considered more economical in terms of learning and ease-of-use, pictographs have always been more efficient in terms of space. When the Romans invented the codex (book, more or less), they didn't reduce the need for paper, but they found a way to make large amounts of paper more manageable. The Chinese, on the other hand, were still using scrolls and the like and needed to keep the bulk down, so stuck with the more space-efficient writing method.
In a computer, data is cheap (at the Unicode level, anyway), so what's your benchmark of efficiency now? Ease of reading would suggest alphabet, but screen real-estate favours ideographs. And on mobile phones, data isn't so cheap -- isn't SMS the world's most expensive data transfer? -- so ideographs are massively more efficient to the consumer.
With Latin entry and ideograph display, we get the best of two worlds -- efficient production for the writer, efficient display for the device. Is this asymmetry more efficient overall? We'll just have to wait and see....
HAL.
Writing is technology, and like any technology, it underwent many incremental improvements and adaptations to different media.
The Latin character set evolved initially for stone carving. Germanic rules evolved to be chiselled in wood. Sanskrit's Devanagari script evolved to be written in soft clay. The script used in Malayalam is an unrecognisable derivative of devanagari, evolved to suit a population etching their texts onto banana leaves.
So yes, writing is a technology, and technology is not culture. The Amish community say they reject technology as it degrades their culture, but that is not true. They have simply "frozen" the evolution of technology at one point. The cart-building and barn-raising techniques they use are (in historical terms) fairly sophisticated and efficient examples of engineering. They could improve on that engineering by incorporating newer technologies.
Giving an Amish family a solar-powered flourescent lamp would not be imposing our culture on them, it would be providing them with a tool to improve their lives. Similarly, in providing Chinese kids with a more efficient tool to write (a phonemically regular alphabet), we are not imposing a culture, just providing a technology.
In fact, by claiming that the alphabet is a cultural imposition, you are encouraging the suppression of technology in the east, which will stunt their potential for intellectual and economic growth.
HAL.
I didn't know the detail, but I was certainly sure that this was wrong:
If the mystery particle is not a neutrino, "It would have to be something we don't know about, an unknown particle that is also emitted by the sun and has this effect, and that would be even more remarkable," Sturrock said. [TFA]
He says it would have to be a particle, but before they mentioned neutrinos, I was automatically thinking about a field.
Warning: I am not a physicist and I'm thinking out loud. I can learn by being told why I'm wrong, but just calling me an idiot won't help. Correct me or ignore me.
A flare is caused by a disruption in the Sun's magnetic field, right? So if the effect is observed two days before the flare, the effect must be related (NB not necessarily caused by) to the field disruption. So in order to assume neutrinos, we have to propose a mechanism by which it is neutrinos that cause the disruption in the field. I've only read pop-science on the topic, but the description of flares is that they emit neutrinos. Do the more scientifically-literate publications talk about neutrino emissions before and/or after the main flare?
Cos with fields, you've got an initial disruption of the field before the event, and during the flare the Sun's magnetic field stretches out, so the effect on decay rates would increase. It fits the description, anyway.
I suppose the big test would be to build two identical nuclear clocks, leave one on the Earth (preferably near a pole) and park the other on the moon and see if the moon (low magnetic field) clock runs fast relative to the Earth one (high magnetic field).
I'm probably wrong though... but why?
HAL.
Unless there was a near-Earth wormhole that spewed anti-neutrinos from another dimension and increased decay rates massively. But that would have flooded the Earth with radiation and would have caused massive genetic variation and speciation, and a focus on speciation (=evolution) would make it an unpalatable theory to young-Earth creationists.
HAL.
Except of course that business vs home packages in the UK are not "neutral" -- business packages get lower contention ratios so that when the kids come home from school, home users are slowed down more than business users, because if not, all internet-connected UK businesses would cease to function at 4pm.
Net neutrality has always been a fantasy
HAL.
If they had enough capacity on their network to avoid congestion, they wouldn't *need* to prioritise anything. This appears to be running a poor network, then charging more to compensate for it.
They have enough capacity... on average. The whole point of traffic shaping is to spread the load out.
Even 12 years ago when I was doing the networks module at uni, the future need for traffic shaping was taken as a given. We should have it by now, by rights.
Consider: a gamer or Skype user doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, but that which he uses needs to be quick.
A P2P user downloading warez^H^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs uses a massive amount of bandwidth, but doesn't need an immediate response.
Yet P2P users leave the home PC running during peak time (during work hours), gobbling up bandwidth to no great advantage of their own.
Net neutrality is bad for everyone. In a neutral network, the only way to protect bandwidth is the download limit. It's not very effective, and it's not very popular. But if we prioritise certain traffic, heavy use of batch net use like filesharing no longer gets in the way of real-time net use like gaming and Skype and we no longer need to care about how much any one person downloads.
Each individual gets the net he most needs. Everyone wins.
HAL.
There's a fundamental similarity between bike hire schemes and public transport: stations.
Modern bike hire schemes aim to have the bike in your hands the least time possible. You go to a bike station, you take the bike, you cycle around a bit and you deposit the bike at a station near your destination. This relies on having bike stations in a lot of places to work.
Where you need a high number of stations, there can only be one provider. When there can only be one provider, there is no competition. Where there's no competition, you need the service to be run by someone accountable to the public.
HAL.
Can you propose a theory as to how this program contributes, even as a "tip of the wedge", to the surrendering of personal liberty to the government?
Isn't it obvious? Bikes are the last form of anonymous transport -- no license plates. These bikes will be marked and we will all be tracked by the NSA who will share the information with the Rand Corporation who will sell it to their partners in the Bildeberg Group!!!!!