I'm not bashing you, but these two statements seem to go against each other:
Meh. Not really. It means, "all other things being more-or-less equal, I'll choose the one with the color I like." Which is what I'd do too.
But you knew that...
And I've got to admit that I probably rejected laptops with good specs specifically for their styling: "gamer" laptops with blinking lights and assorted dumb-nerd bling. Which would make me a hypocrite...
This is not uncommon, e.g., Steve LaValle's Planning Book. Giving books away for free is probably a more effective way to get your name out there than charging $100+ for them. And since the academic 'economy' runs on prestige, it probably helps the author more too in the long run.
You can save the memory and still do it correctly by just re-weighting the "running average".
That is (if your readings are x(0), x(1),...),
a(k+1) = [a(k)*k + x(k)]/(k+1)
a(0) = 0.
If you did this with C-style "'rounding'-by-truncation", however, your estimate would be systematically low because with this rounding scheme (x/y)*y <= x for any integers x,y. "Banker's rounding" (a.k.a. "round-to-even") is slower but avoids this bias.
Encryption cannot solve this problem. For filesharing to work, peers who have data must somehow advertise this fact. It doesn't matter if that data is encrypted; you still know what it is and who has it.
There are only two things filesharers can do:
1. Try to restrict the people that they advertise to so that they are not caught by the authorities. Here, there are conflicting goals: In order to have lots of data available, you want the largest network possible. But in order to keep things secure, you need as few people in on it as possible. So the more pressure the copyright groups put on the networks, the more the equilibrium shifts towards smaller (and less valuable) networks.
2. Give data to intermediaries who pass it on. Either this is done with something like onion routing, or sites like rapidshare are used as the intermediaries. This relies on being able to trust the intermediaries to whom you are adjacent. There also must be some incentive for the intermediaries to pass on your data. In the case of onion routing, the incentive is that other people's traffic serves as "noise" which your own traffic can "hide" in. In the case of Rapidshare et al, it's simply cash, through a combination of paid memberships and advertising revenue.
Neither #1 nor #2 are encryption, really, though #2 may involve some.
AFAIK, ultracaps have better mass-energy density than batteries, but very poor volume-energy density, which is a problem. When I was in college we built a hybrid-electric racecar with two very large ultracap banks. The caps could supply absolutely insane currents and the car could beat the highest-end sports cars at a drag race -- but the amount of energy stored was frankly not that huge; it couldn't run that long. And my understanding was that the ultracaps used were modern and top-of-the-line.
You mean the same tenets that lead to public burnings, torture, mutilation, crusades, brainwashing and censorship? Christianity and the Vatican IS evil. Any religion is. It's a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
You mean the same race that perpetrated public burnings, torture, mutilation, crusades, brainwashing and censorship? White People and Europeans ARE evil. Any white person is. They're a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
You mean the same tenets that lead to public burnings, torture, mutilation, crusades, brainwashing and censorship? Nation States and specifically France IS evil. Any Nation State is. They're a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
You mean the same tenets that lead to Nazi experiments and forced sterilization? Science and specifically Chemistry IS evil. Any science is. They're a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
(The world doesn't need your hate. Your atheism does not make you special or right. Theism and atheism are just semantic games.)
I have never heard anything about that from Vatican, republican party, and other self-professed leaders of Christianity
The Christian Right in the US has historically been strongly anti-Catholic, and it has only been within the last few years that the Republican party has made any inroads with Catholics -- and that has been primarily because of abortion, which in Catholicism is believed to be the murder of a human being.
There's no free lunch unless the food was going into the dumpster anyway. Practical engines throw away tons of heat. Heck, that's what your radiator is explicitly for. So since heat is leaking out of your engine at a prodigious rate anyway, you might as well use that flow to power another heat engine (a thermocouple in this case, I guess).
As other posters have mentioned the physical limit you're concerned with is the Carnot efficiency.
One view of things not yet mentioned by posters is that energy is not what matters but exergy -- the capacity to do work. A bathtub full of lukewarm water contains a great deal of energy, but little exergy. In general, electrical and mechanical energy has a lot of exergy; thermal energy is as low-exergy as you can get, especially at low temperatures.
Note that the above is really just a rephrasing of the idea of entropy.
Requiring that N messages all be correctly classified would lower the guess rate to 1/2^N, assuming that both kinds of messages are equally likely. If N=10, you've already reduced the success rate to less than 1%...
Say my car breaks down on the side of a road, next to farmer's field. I see a farmhouse on the other side of that field, maybe half a mile away, so I decide to cross the field by foot in order to reach the house, so I can ask the owner if I can call a towtruck.
If the right to property were paramount and sacred, then the farmer would, at that point, be perfectly within his rights to kill me at a distance with a high-powered rifle. But this would be completely unreasonable. Any property owner who did this would be guilty of cold-blooded murder.
We live in a society. With other people. You have to consider your rights in relation to theirs.
Furthermore, the law is not a piece of software, and you can't determine whether something is right or wrong by evaluating a simple boolean expression like (ON_MY_PROPERTY)&&(NOT_ME).
They estimate the lost tax revenue at 3.3 million British pounds, which, according to Google, is 4.82724 million U.S. dollars. Let's round to 5 million USD.
Assuming that 5 police officers are paid the equivalent of 60,000 USD a year to do this, and that the investigation takes a year, this will cost Sweden the equivalent of 300,000 USD.
Shucks. So this would be worth it; they'd get a 16x to 17x return on investment... I guess investigating webcam strippers actually does make financial sense for Sweden.
(This of course assumes that their own estimates are accurate, and that mine are reasonable.)
Loud noises tear the cilia in your cochlea out by the roots. In humans, and, as far as I know, other higher mammals, they don't grow back (Can someone who knows confirm that this is true in dolphins as well?).
So the word "temporary" might make this sound less bad than it is: Our sonar may only temporarily cause total deafness, but I suspect it permanently degrades hearing.
Sucks to be a dolphin. Reminds me of Douglas Adams' sympathy for whales, whose songs no longer can be heard across the ocean. (I think Douglas talked about this in Last Chance to See.)
The news outlets took this tiny piece of information, and rephrased what it said in many more words to write "stories" -- but I preferred these few sentences straight from the source. The only thing one would need to add to to it to make it "complete" would be one sentence stating that North Korea continues to claim that the launch was a success.
It'd be nice if there were a news source that cut out all the crap and just gave the facts in quick, terse sentences. That's all I want: Facts and numbers, sans frills.
Don't get me wrong; I like editorial. It's just best kept separate.
Indeed. Does it rescale video decently now, or is it still a pixelated mess (see, this worked fine in old versions, and then, somewhere along the line, it got broken. "It was ffmpeg's fault," but somehow mplayer didn't have the same problem)? And when you use it to transcode, does it produce MPEG-2 output that is correct-enough to be played by... any other player? 'Cus it hasn't yet in any version I've tried previously. And how about subtitles; does it handle them correctly now?
(VLC has an identity crisis. Once upon a time, it was supposed to be for network video streaming. Now it's competing as yet-another-general-purpose-media-player.)
It's certainly in their best interest from an ad sales perspective to get the content in front of as many people as possible, regardless of the display device
That's basically what I'm thinking too.
The ads are (more or less) built directly into the video stream
By "video stream" I should have more specifically said "FLV" -- and it really looks like ads are not just more video within the same FLV.* Two reasons for thinking this: (1) The ad at the beginning looks like a high-res static image, not FLV of the same quality; (2) a Hulu plugin for XBMC, which I assume worked by teasing out the location of the FLV file, did not play any ads (back before Hulu changed things and it stopped working).
More seriously, what are they trying to accomplish? Why bother doing this?
If they want to force people to view ads, they should just include them directly in the video stream. This would keep everyone happy, as it would both make ads hard (enough) to remove (that nobody would bother) and allow Boxee/xbmc/whatever to play back the streams easily. Moreover, they should make getting these videos as simple as possible; e.g., with a single HTTP GET request instead of the pointlessly-obfuscated transaction that they currently use.
being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills
In fact, studies have been shown which do tend to suggest this; the Wikipedia article cites a few of them. I once took a psychology course from a professor who'd done some other research on the subject, with French Canadians IIRC.
As for these studies: You do need to take them with the "correlation-is-not-causation" grain of salt, but, really, you never have a guarantee that you've isolated all the relevant variables in any experiment, so it's more a question of degree than anything.
Slashdot Mirror
To stop government funding would be to stop most research. Who else pays for it?
I'm not bashing you, but these two statements seem to go against each other:
Meh. Not really. It means, "all other things being more-or-less equal, I'll choose the one with the color I like." Which is what I'd do too.
But you knew that...
And I've got to admit that I probably rejected laptops with good specs specifically for their styling: "gamer" laptops with blinking lights and assorted dumb-nerd bling. Which would make me a hypocrite...
So you can aim better.
This didn't seem to help my ex-roommate... He'd seriously leave a puddle on the floor. It was disgusting.
This is not uncommon, e.g., Steve LaValle's Planning Book. Giving books away for free is probably a more effective way to get your name out there than charging $100+ for them. And since the academic 'economy' runs on prestige, it probably helps the author more too in the long run.
You can save the memory and still do it correctly by just re-weighting the "running average".
That is (if your readings are x(0), x(1), ...),
a(k+1) = [a(k)*k + x(k)]/(k+1)
a(0) = 0 .
If you did this with C-style "'rounding'-by-truncation", however, your estimate would be systematically low because with this rounding scheme (x/y)*y <= x for any integers x,y. "Banker's rounding" (a.k.a. "round-to-even") is slower but avoids this bias.
Encryption cannot solve this problem. For filesharing to work, peers who have data must somehow advertise this fact. It doesn't matter if that data is encrypted; you still know what it is and who has it.
There are only two things filesharers can do:
1. Try to restrict the people that they advertise to so that they are not caught by the authorities. Here, there are conflicting goals: In order to have lots of data available, you want the largest network possible. But in order to keep things secure, you need as few people in on it as possible. So the more pressure the copyright groups put on the networks, the more the equilibrium shifts towards smaller (and less valuable) networks.
2. Give data to intermediaries who pass it on. Either this is done with something like onion routing, or sites like rapidshare are used as the intermediaries. This relies on being able to trust the intermediaries to whom you are adjacent. There also must be some incentive for the intermediaries to pass on your data. In the case of onion routing, the incentive is that other people's traffic serves as "noise" which your own traffic can "hide" in. In the case of Rapidshare et al, it's simply cash, through a combination of paid memberships and advertising revenue.
Neither #1 nor #2 are encryption, really, though #2 may involve some.
AFAIK, ultracaps have better mass-energy density than batteries, but very poor volume-energy density, which is a problem. When I was in college we built a hybrid-electric racecar with two very large ultracap banks. The caps could supply absolutely insane currents and the car could beat the highest-end sports cars at a drag race -- but the amount of energy stored was frankly not that huge; it couldn't run that long. And my understanding was that the ultracaps used were modern and top-of-the-line.
Parent is not a troll, just someone you disagree with.
You mean the same tenets that lead to public burnings, torture, mutilation, crusades, brainwashing and censorship? Christianity and the Vatican IS evil. Any religion is. It's a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
You mean the same race that perpetrated public burnings, torture, mutilation, crusades, brainwashing and censorship? White People and Europeans ARE evil. Any white person is. They're a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
You mean the same tenets that lead to public burnings, torture, mutilation, crusades, brainwashing and censorship? Nation States and specifically France IS evil. Any Nation State is. They're a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
You mean the same tenets that lead to Nazi experiments and forced sterilization? Science and specifically Chemistry IS evil. Any science is. They're a plague humanity needs to eradicate if it is to survive..
(The world doesn't need your hate. Your atheism does not make you special or right. Theism and atheism are just semantic games.)
I have never heard anything about that from Vatican, republican party, and other self-professed leaders of Christianity
The Christian Right in the US has historically been strongly anti-Catholic, and it has only been within the last few years that the Republican party has made any inroads with Catholics -- and that has been primarily because of abortion, which in Catholicism is believed to be the murder of a human being.
I just hop on and convert all the waste heat in the room to useful energy
If you're doing exercise, it'd be a Carnot heat pump, n'est-ce pas? One end would get cold, and the other hot...
There's no free lunch unless the food was going into the dumpster anyway. Practical engines throw away tons of heat. Heck, that's what your radiator is explicitly for. So since heat is leaking out of your engine at a prodigious rate anyway, you might as well use that flow to power another heat engine (a thermocouple in this case, I guess).
As other posters have mentioned the physical limit you're concerned with is the Carnot efficiency.
One view of things not yet mentioned by posters is that energy is not what matters but exergy -- the capacity to do work. A bathtub full of lukewarm water contains a great deal of energy, but little exergy. In general, electrical and mechanical energy has a lot of exergy; thermal energy is as low-exergy as you can get, especially at low temperatures.
Note that the above is really just a rephrasing of the idea of entropy.
Requiring that N messages all be correctly classified would lower the guess rate to 1/2^N, assuming that both kinds of messages are equally likely. If N=10, you've already reduced the success rate to less than 1%...
Say my car breaks down on the side of a road, next to farmer's field. I see a farmhouse on the other side of that field, maybe half a mile away, so I decide to cross the field by foot in order to reach the house, so I can ask the owner if I can call a towtruck.
If the right to property were paramount and sacred, then the farmer would, at that point, be perfectly within his rights to kill me at a distance with a high-powered rifle. But this would be completely unreasonable. Any property owner who did this would be guilty of cold-blooded murder.
We live in a society. With other people. You have to consider your rights in relation to theirs.
Furthermore, the law is not a piece of software, and you can't determine whether something is right or wrong by evaluating a simple boolean expression like (ON_MY_PROPERTY)&&(NOT_ME).
They estimate the lost tax revenue at 3.3 million British pounds, which, according to Google, is 4.82724 million U.S. dollars. Let's round to 5 million USD.
Assuming that 5 police officers are paid the equivalent of 60,000 USD a year to do this, and that the investigation takes a year, this will cost Sweden the equivalent of 300,000 USD.
Shucks. So this would be worth it; they'd get a 16x to 17x return on investment... I guess investigating webcam strippers actually does make financial sense for Sweden.
(This of course assumes that their own estimates are accurate, and that mine are reasonable.)
Loud noises tear the cilia in your cochlea out by the roots. In humans, and, as far as I know, other higher mammals, they don't grow back (Can someone who knows confirm that this is true in dolphins as well?).
So the word "temporary" might make this sound less bad than it is: Our sonar may only temporarily cause total deafness, but I suspect it permanently degrades hearing.
Sucks to be a dolphin. Reminds me of Douglas Adams' sympathy for whales, whose songs no longer can be heard across the ocean. (I think Douglas talked about this in Last Chance to See.)
The news outlets took this tiny piece of information, and rephrased what it said in many more words to write "stories" -- but I preferred these few sentences straight from the source. The only thing one would need to add to to it to make it "complete" would be one sentence stating that North Korea continues to claim that the launch was a success.
It'd be nice if there were a news source that cut out all the crap and just gave the facts in quick, terse sentences. That's all I want: Facts and numbers, sans frills.
Don't get me wrong; I like editorial. It's just best kept separate.
Can you? I thought that PS3 linux had no access to the Cell's execution units and so basically had no hardware acceleration? Or am I wrong?
Indeed. Does it rescale video decently now, or is it still a pixelated mess (see, this worked fine in old versions, and then, somewhere along the line, it got broken. "It was ffmpeg's fault," but somehow mplayer didn't have the same problem)? And when you use it to transcode, does it produce MPEG-2 output that is correct-enough to be played by... any other player? 'Cus it hasn't yet in any version I've tried previously. And how about subtitles; does it handle them correctly now?
(VLC has an identity crisis. Once upon a time, it was supposed to be for network video streaming. Now it's competing as yet-another-general-purpose-media-player.)
It's certainly in their best interest from an ad sales perspective to get the content in front of as many people as possible, regardless of the display device
That's basically what I'm thinking too.
The ads are (more or less) built directly into the video stream
By "video stream" I should have more specifically said "FLV" -- and it really looks like ads are not just more video within the same FLV.* Two reasons for thinking this: (1) The ad at the beginning looks like a high-res static image, not FLV of the same quality; (2) a Hulu plugin for XBMC, which I assume worked by teasing out the location of the FLV file, did not play any ads (back before Hulu changed things and it stopped working).
* It sounds like maybe you knew this already.
Some source was quoted in the Newsweek I was reading the other day as saying that 25% of people view internet porn at work.
(This surprised me. Slashdot? Sure. Wikipedia? Definitely. Porn? That's just stupid.)
More seriously, what are they trying to accomplish? Why bother doing this?
If they want to force people to view ads, they should just include them directly in the video stream. This would keep everyone happy, as it would both make ads hard (enough) to remove (that nobody would bother) and allow Boxee/xbmc/whatever to play back the streams easily. Moreover, they should make getting these videos as simple as possible; e.g., with a single HTTP GET request instead of the pointlessly-obfuscated transaction that they currently use.
When in doubt, check Wikipedia: Cognitive Advantages to Bilingualism. I also wrote a little more here.
they're both quite clearly mere claims
re. the statement,
being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills
In fact, studies have been shown which do tend to suggest this; the Wikipedia article cites a few of them. I once took a psychology course from a professor who'd done some other research on the subject, with French Canadians IIRC.
As for these studies: You do need to take them with the "correlation-is-not-causation" grain of salt, but, really, you never have a guarantee that you've isolated all the relevant variables in any experiment, so it's more a question of degree than anything.