Is there a relatively simple explanation of why we think the space we experience is actually the result of 3 distinct "dimensions"?
Last year, I went to a talk given by a physics professor at my university. The audience for this talk was honors students in natural sciences, so he started out the talk by posing some questions to us to find out our level of expertise (this wasn't just physicists and mathematicians in the audience).
He asked, "Why do we have three spatial dimensions?" We, the audience, then proceeded to guess for a few minutes (for what it's worth, I guessed that it was because of the Holy Trinity). He interrupted us after a while and said that if we figured out the answer we should let him know, because "there is a Nobel Prize in it for us."
Long story short, no, there is no explanation at all for why we have 3 spatial dimensions.
A CSS stylesheet can specify how to style a navigation bar, but cannot actually specify WHAT will appear in that navigation bar. To elaborate, imagine Slashdot, applying a new CSS stylesheet cannot reposition the "Preview" button, nor can it reposition the "Logout" link onto the left-hand navigation menu. This *is* a matter of layout, and this is handled not in CSS, but in XHTML.
CSS most definitely can specify what will appear in the navigation bar. The reason that there is any "layout" without CSS specifically specifying it is because the browser chooses a default "layout" in the absence of an author-specified one.
It is absolutely not handled by the XHTML. The XHTML tells the browser "the element B is a child of this other element A." Then, if no CSS describing where A and B specifically belong is given to the browser by CSS, the browser constructs its own "layout" declaring that, by default, B is going to be drawn inside of A. Thus, the XHTML does not give any layout instructions at all. The browser makes assumptions based on the structure of the document (given by the XHTML) as to how to invent its own presentation.
Talk to developers of any web browser or web standards, and they'll tell you it is true. Of course, there are deprecated exceptions (such as the B, I and U tags), but the main thrust stands: (X)HTML is for structural definition, and CSS is for presentational definition.
I choose to advertise that XHTML is the layout, and CSS is for style/fashion.
I think you're confusing "layout" with "structure." Perhaps we should use the terms "structure" for the (X)HTML and "presentation" for CSS.
CSS is for layout, because layout is positional properties, and those are governed by CSS's height, width, top, bottom, left, right, etc. (X)HTML is for structure, i.e. "here is a division of text (DIV)," "here is a span of text (SPAN)," "here is a very important header (H1)" -- of which I say nothing about how it shall appear to the user.
But you're suggesting in the alternative that we disarm those who are trained properly. This argument is at least as unreasonable as the one I put forth. I know how to defend myself, and I don't like the government telling me, "Oh, no you don't. We're going to let people shoot you while you're unarmed, instead." I thought geeks were supposed to be mad about being held back in school because other people are not as smart. How is the logic you're using any different?
OK, fine. I was thinking of, "Hey he's pointing a gun at me, time to defend myself," but whatever. I'll change the wording: Only two or three people would have had to die. Argument still stands.
our legal system though wants to make that binary classification
Horseshit. The criminal justice system in the US is predicated on so much more than "good" and "bad" -- for example, there are four levels of mens rea with which to judge behavior -- purposefully, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. Beyond that, we have gradations of punishment -- around three degrees of felonies, and many classes of misdemeanors.
The courts have struggled for centuries with levels of culpability, so don't go around belittling those struggles by declaring unilaterally that they want to sort people into "good" and "bad" categories.
Read up on "battered wife syndrome" and Regina v. Dudley & Stevens, 14 Q.B.D. 273 (1884) for two examples of the struggles.
You know what would have worked even better than tighter gun control laws? Looser gun laws: one of the victims possessing a gun on campus yesterday. The person would have shot the mass murderer, and only one person would have had to die.
Mostly due to people not realizing how massive and diverse the US is.
So hopefully my analogy should have worked with you because you are aware of the silliness of thinking TX==NY.
Likewise Czech==(USSR|Russia|Azerbaijan) is a silly proposition, which is why I took exception to the czech mate joke. If we'd been talking about someone from Czech, it would have been well played, but it seemed to me that some people got their geography really wrong, both the OP of the joke, and the subsequent mods.
I don't deny that Czech has had close ties with Russia in the past. What I was confused by was basically what happened between A (editor), B (GGP), and C (mods):
A: Dude from Russia B: Czech joke! C: LOL!!!!!MODMODMODMODMOD
I mean, there's no denying that New York and Texas have a relationship as well, but you don't see this being funny (well, pretend it'd be funny on its merits): -What's a Texan's favorite broadway show? -New York, New York! -LOL!!!
Is there another side to this story? IS there a valid reason for the TV ban? Is it even a TV ban? And so on.
That's what upsets me so much. From what I've read, there isn't a valid reason, and it's pure politics. What upsets me is that Putin had the potential to be THE AWESOMEST WORLD LEADER EVER.
OK, he looks kinda like the new Bond, used to work for the KGB, comes from a modest upbringing, has an acerbic wit, kisses boys on the stomach, and HAS A SIXTH-DEGREE BLACK BELT in judo.
Our president hauls brush and bumbles over words. The Russian president is well known for his sweeping hip throw and rips on America's VP.
I think we should start a list of "world leaders I wouldn't want to fuck with in a dark alley." Putin is on the list. Who else?
I don't understand why this is funny -- I mean, it's a play on words, sure. Do that many Slashdotters think Czech was ever part of the USSR? It wasn't. Beyond that, Kasparov was born in Azerbaijan, which is nowhere near Czech. Also, for the mods: his name is Garry. With two arrs.
Of course Eastern Europe is making a better showing now! Now that the American versions are being forced off the interbutts, people are turning to our Russkie friends: crackz.ru, serialz.ru, and ALLOFFRIGGINMP3.COM.
children are legally required to attend school and those schools are funded and run by the government.
Funded by the local government, and regulated by the state government. Whether that makes any difference or not I don't know right now, but everyone seems to be lumping federal and state laws together as one entity in this discussion, and I'm tired of seeing it.
Think about the people removing things from YouTube: the distributors (Viacom, NBC). You all seem to think that they don't get it, but I'm telling you that they do: the big players don't want internet video distribution to change who the distributors are, because it will render them powerless.
Warning, epithets are used for discussion purposes in this post:
The thing is that he attacked the looks and morals of innocent women who've done nothing to inject themselves into public discourse.
Except, you know, play basketball for one of the top teams in the nation. Imus's insults were no different than if he'd spoken ill of a B-list movie star. He didn't single out an individual, he insulted a famous team; this is analogous to insulting a person of similar fame.
What he said was idiotic, but the reaction was ridiculous. I mean, holy shit. He called them "nappy headed hos." The only part of that phrase that is an insult is "hos." Kind of by definition most of the girls on the team have worn their hair nappy before -- "nappy" describes the natural state of the hair of people of African descent.
Hell, the producer of the show fucking called them jigaboos, and nothing happened to him! Some people have wanted to get Imus fired for a while, and they used this time as the way to do it. Of course CBS has every right to fire him; I don't have much of a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the hypocrisy coming from the liberals here. To speak in incredibly general terms, I've been gradually becoming a liberal the past few years, and this is one of those things that I really hate about many liberals in the US -- it's OK to speak your mind as long as you don't insult a minority. If Imus had called the golf team a bunch of bitches (80% of the team is white), nothing would have happened to him.
In summary, Imus called a bunch of black basketball players "hos." Some people raised a stink, and he got fired. So many people get away with so much worse every single day, and nothing happens to them. In my opinion, that's how it should be. The more you clamp down on racist speech, the more people will rebel. How many people do you think are talking today about "those fucking niggers who got Don fired"?
So please, HTML5 people, don't just talk to computer scientists and advocates for the disabled when creating this new specification. Think of the people who actually have to lay out pages!
HTML isn't for layout. CSS is for layout, and CSS3 has methods of creating true multicolumn pages.
I think the newest version of the ID3 tag (v.4) has an optional tag placed at the end of the file itself, but I haven't read up on v.4 so much yet, so I'm not sure. An older version also puts the tags entirely at the end, and other tagging methods also go at the end.
However, your idea does work if, instead of starting at the beginning, we do some kind of conditional (IF FILETYPE IS MP3 THEN skip any metadata and get right to the binary audio data).
That sorta makes sense if you were to say have a text file "A" that was the same as text file "B" except that someone inserted 3 lines of "Blahblahblah" near the beginning.
Yeah, that's more or less what I was getting at. The tags are stored in MP3 files as a combination of text and binary data (the tag size and encoding are binary -- such as the BOM and whether the tag is unicode or not -- while the actual value of the tag is text). For example, the song title tag may be something like:
TIT2abcdefYellow Lasers
"TIT2" is an indicator for title-of-track; "abcd" are 4 bytes indicating the length of the tag minus 10 bytes, whose value is calculated by the formula ((((a<<7)+b)<<7)+c<<7)+d -- here, abcd should calculate out to 13, if I count correctly "ef" are 2 bytes for certain flags "Yellow Lasers" is the name of the track (and a great track it is)
So, as you can see, ID3 (was I calling it IDE before???) tag data is mostly plaintext.
Of course, it means that all those cheap imports get more expensive, but that only hurts the poor (in both countries)
If we place a tax on imports from China, then the poor cannot buy their goods as cheaply.
If we do not curtail the ridiculous trade deficit in this country, the dollar devalues, and the entire US goes into a depression where we cannot buy anything from another country. Then no one can buy anything (think: no gasoline for cars, thus no gasoline to ship food around the country, thus lots of starving people).
Of course, the best solution is that non-poor people start buying US-made products, even if they are more expensive. As soon as I'm not a poor student (give me 2 years, guys), I'm going to try to buy as many US-made products as possible. I suppose the only obvious exception I'll make is "car," since I view my loyalty to the existence of the human race (by not killing the environment) as higher than loyalty to my country. And US cars are horribly inefficient.
I think that may depend on if the affected metadata affects the length of the entire file. I'm not sure of BT's hashing function, but I think (let X be a constant that is configurable by the guy making the torrent file) when creating a torrent, it creates a hash of each string of X bytes. Thus, if you make the file a different size (by, say, changing the genre tag from "Jpop" to "J-pop" -- assuming there is no NULL padding in the ID3 tag -- or by removing/adding NULL padding in the tag), the hash for each successive part will be different, and thus will only recognize the previous data as valid and uncorrupted (which would be around 1% or less of the file, I'd wager).
Although I could be wrong -- I know an awful lot about ID3 tags, but not so much about BT's torrent-creation process.
Slashdot Mirror
He asked, "Why do we have three spatial dimensions?" We, the audience, then proceeded to guess for a few minutes (for what it's worth, I guessed that it was because of the Holy Trinity). He interrupted us after a while and said that if we figured out the answer we should let him know, because "there is a Nobel Prize in it for us."
Long story short, no, there is no explanation at all for why we have 3 spatial dimensions.
It is absolutely not handled by the XHTML. The XHTML tells the browser "the element B is a child of this other element A." Then, if no CSS describing where A and B specifically belong is given to the browser by CSS, the browser constructs its own "layout" declaring that, by default, B is going to be drawn inside of A. Thus, the XHTML does not give any layout instructions at all. The browser makes assumptions based on the structure of the document (given by the XHTML) as to how to invent its own presentation.
Talk to developers of any web browser or web standards, and they'll tell you it is true. Of course, there are deprecated exceptions (such as the B, I and U tags), but the main thrust stands: (X)HTML is for structural definition, and CSS is for presentational definition.
CSS is for layout, because layout is positional properties, and those are governed by CSS's height, width, top, bottom, left, right, etc. (X)HTML is for structure, i.e. "here is a division of text (DIV)," "here is a span of text (SPAN)," "here is a very important header (H1)" -- of which I say nothing about how it shall appear to the user.
But you're suggesting in the alternative that we disarm those who are trained properly. This argument is at least as unreasonable as the one I put forth. I know how to defend myself, and I don't like the government telling me, "Oh, no you don't. We're going to let people shoot you while you're unarmed, instead." I thought geeks were supposed to be mad about being held back in school because other people are not as smart. How is the logic you're using any different?
OK, fine. I was thinking of, "Hey he's pointing a gun at me, time to defend myself," but whatever. I'll change the wording: Only two or three people would have had to die. Argument still stands.
The courts have struggled for centuries with levels of culpability, so don't go around belittling those struggles by declaring unilaterally that they want to sort people into "good" and "bad" categories.
Read up on "battered wife syndrome" and Regina v. Dudley & Stevens, 14 Q.B.D. 273 (1884) for two examples of the struggles.
Likewise Czech==(USSR|Russia|Azerbaijan) is a silly proposition, which is why I took exception to the czech mate joke. If we'd been talking about someone from Czech, it would have been well played, but it seemed to me that some people got their geography really wrong, both the OP of the joke, and the subsequent mods.
I don't deny that Czech has had close ties with Russia in the past. What I was confused by was basically what happened between A (editor), B (GGP), and C (mods):
A: Dude from Russia
B: Czech joke!
C: LOL!!!!!MODMODMODMODMOD
I mean, there's no denying that New York and Texas have a relationship as well, but you don't see this being funny (well, pretend it'd be funny on its merits):
-What's a Texan's favorite broadway show?
-New York, New York!
-LOL!!!
OK, he looks kinda like the new Bond, used to work for the KGB, comes from a modest upbringing, has an acerbic wit, kisses boys on the stomach, and HAS A SIXTH-DEGREE BLACK BELT in judo.
Our president hauls brush and bumbles over words. The Russian president is well known for his sweeping hip throw and rips on America's VP.
I think we should start a list of "world leaders I wouldn't want to fuck with in a dark alley." Putin is on the list. Who else?
I don't understand why this is funny -- I mean, it's a play on words, sure. Do that many Slashdotters think Czech was ever part of the USSR? It wasn't. Beyond that, Kasparov was born in Azerbaijan, which is nowhere near Czech. Also, for the mods: his name is Garry. With two arrs.
Of course Eastern Europe is making a better showing now! Now that the American versions are being forced off the interbutts, people are turning to our Russkie friends: crackz.ru, serialz.ru, and ALLOFFRIGGINMP3.COM.
Think about the people removing things from YouTube: the distributors (Viacom, NBC). You all seem to think that they don't get it, but I'm telling you that they do: the big players don't want internet video distribution to change who the distributors are, because it will render them powerless.
What he said was idiotic, but the reaction was ridiculous. I mean, holy shit. He called them "nappy headed hos." The only part of that phrase that is an insult is "hos." Kind of by definition most of the girls on the team have worn their hair nappy before -- "nappy" describes the natural state of the hair of people of African descent.
Hell, the producer of the show fucking called them jigaboos, and nothing happened to him! Some people have wanted to get Imus fired for a while, and they used this time as the way to do it. Of course CBS has every right to fire him; I don't have much of a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the hypocrisy coming from the liberals here. To speak in incredibly general terms, I've been gradually becoming a liberal the past few years, and this is one of those things that I really hate about many liberals in the US -- it's OK to speak your mind as long as you don't insult a minority. If Imus had called the golf team a bunch of bitches (80% of the team is white), nothing would have happened to him.
In summary, Imus called a bunch of black basketball players "hos." Some people raised a stink, and he got fired. So many people get away with so much worse every single day, and nothing happens to them. In my opinion, that's how it should be. The more you clamp down on racist speech, the more people will rebel. How many people do you think are talking today about "those fucking niggers who got Don fired"?
I think the newest version of the ID3 tag (v.4) has an optional tag placed at the end of the file itself, but I haven't read up on v.4 so much yet, so I'm not sure. An older version also puts the tags entirely at the end, and other tagging methods also go at the end.
However, your idea does work if, instead of starting at the beginning, we do some kind of conditional (IF FILETYPE IS MP3 THEN skip any metadata and get right to the binary audio data).
"abcd" are 4 bytes indicating the length of the tag minus 10 bytes, whose value is calculated by the formula ((((a<<7)+b)<<7)+c<<7)+d -- here, abcd should calculate out to 13, if I count correctly
"ef" are 2 bytes for certain flags
"Yellow Lasers" is the name of the track (and a great track it is)
So, as you can see, ID3 (was I calling it IDE before???) tag data is mostly plaintext.
If we do not curtail the ridiculous trade deficit in this country, the dollar devalues, and the entire US goes into a depression where we cannot buy anything from another country. Then no one can buy anything (think: no gasoline for cars, thus no gasoline to ship food around the country, thus lots of starving people).
Of course, the best solution is that non-poor people start buying US-made products, even if they are more expensive. As soon as I'm not a poor student (give me 2 years, guys), I'm going to try to buy as many US-made products as possible. I suppose the only obvious exception I'll make is "car," since I view my loyalty to the existence of the human race (by not killing the environment) as higher than loyalty to my country. And US cars are horribly inefficient.
If the file length was affected, the 16KB chunks would absolutely differ starting at the point where the length was affected.
Although I could be wrong -- I know an awful lot about ID3 tags, but not so much about BT's torrent-creation process.