'It was like we put LSD in the punch at the school prom and it was just way more than they can handle,' said Steven Lisberger.
No, it was like a completely stupid premise.
Nowadays the general audience is prepared for senseless techno-premises, and the tech-savvy audience is resigned to them.
You can't really substitute a current meter for a power meter. If the load of your device is not purely resistive, the currrent it draws is out of phase with the voltage and the power will be less than you would calculate by VxA. The ratio of power to volts-times-amps is called the "power factor," and that's one of the items this device can display.
Just today I had someone say to me, "I don't think I can switch to Mac or Linux because my job requires Excel and MS Access." Sixty seconds of research refuted that unreasoned belief, but there's plenty more where it came from.
That nuclear waste will suddenly represent an enormous fuel resource. You could probably run the UK for centuries just off the amount of fissile junk stacked up at Sellafield already. And we'll really be kicking ourselves if we've thrown it all into a subduction zone.
Sure, if it takes you ten million years to realize you wanted the waste after all, then you will have a problem.
I play in a small punkrock bands. We produce everything "D.I.Y." which means we burn all our CDs on blank CDs and sell them for 3$.
We don't care about the CRIA. We don't care about their crap and we don't want to be on their labels. It seems they'll still have a cut off of every CDs we produce....
Great. Take your story to court and be a hero like Fred Rogers was in the Betamax case!
I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the exact equations are missing.
May I "flip out" (good one) if you're just plain wrong?
If what you've written were correct, ordinary magnetic materials could not exist. We would not see Zeeman splitting of spectral lines.
To bring it down to plain chemistry terms, think about molecular nitrogen and oxygen. How did both of those molecules manage to form "its complete set" when one has more electrons than the other? Even though the electrons are paired up in the molecule, there are still available unfilled states.
I do happen to lean toward the belief that this "invention" in TFA is bunk, but not for your reasons.
You've gotta love it. When you mess with the eco-system, you've pretty much got to be careful-as-hell.
When I first saw this on/. I was thinking "have we learned nothing..." Then I RTFCs and saw that this mistake was made in 1935. That puts it in the great run of eco-mistakes like mongooses to Hawaii, rose bushes to West Virginia, and Kudzu all over the south.
Sure, there will be a new harmonious balance of nature eventually. We generally don't like it. And we pretty much never like the intervening period before the new balance emerges.
I read Zi Mei's affadavit, and if I were counsel for the plaintiff, his credentials as an expert witness would be shredded to dust. His points are generally valid, but he makes some technical errors, such as calling an IP address "a twelve digit code." Make no mistake, I'm defending the RIAA, but its opponents may have to do a bit better than this.
In the old days when VMS mattered (to me), there were 35 or so different privileges a user could have. Most of them were functionally equivalent to "ALL," in that a user with such a privilege could perform a series of actions that would lead to actually having all privileges.
Similarly, giving a Unix user the ability to execute mv or chmod (or quite a variety of other single commands) as root is functionally equivalent to giving that user full root access.
Even if all the authorized users can be trusted not to abuse the power, can anyone be sure they will protect their password (or other access token) so well that no intruder will ever use their account? I think not.
There's a brand-new "C in a Nutshell" title coming out this month. I've seen an advance copy and it sure covers the ground (old and new) with a logical presentation.
What happens if an ant crawls into the box for example? Because it's not 'really' an observer the cat is still half alive??
Yes the cat is still half alive, and the ant is half seeing a dead cat and half seeing a cat alive. What happens when the ant walks in the box is that its state gets correlated to that of the cat.
Note that the either state of the ant is unaware of the other.
When you open the box you will either see a dead cat and an ant that has been seeing a dead cat all along, or a living cat and an ant that has been seeing a cat alive all along
Why do you think the human observer is more special than the ant? Why don't you believe that when you open the box you become correlated with both the ant and the cat, and enter a state which is a mixture of you seeing a dead cat and seeing a live cat - with your own two states each, as you say, "unaware of the other?"
That's what the many-worlds interpretation is all about, not some sci-fi multiple universes schtick we always run across.
Wouldnt this violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
There are certain pairs of quantities ("conjugate variables") which cannot both be measured to arbitrary precision. If you measure, for example, the position of a particle along the x-axis (in your choice of coordinate system) very precisely, you cannot measure the momentum along that same axis very well. The product of the two imprecisions (or uncertainties) is a small but finite lower bound. You can work this out for yourself by making up a wave function localized in space and doing a Fourier transform to get the momentum spread.
You can measure x-position and y-momentum both very precisely, or various other quantities which are not conjugate to each other.
Suppose that at the instant you stopped it, the coin was horizontal. You now know that, at that particular instant, the second coin was vertical
Sorry, no. If the coins aren't at the same place, then this term "at that particular instant" is not well defined.
The tantalizing notions of instant communication involve choosing which of two or more possible measurements to make on one of the photons (after they are separated) and the effects of that choice on the possible outcomes of a fixed or independently-chosen experiment on the other photon. Google "EPR Paradox" for a primer.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it was like a completely stupid premise. Nowadays the general audience is prepared for senseless techno-premises, and the tech-savvy audience is resigned to them.
You can't really substitute a current meter for a power meter. If the load of your device is not purely resistive, the currrent it draws is out of phase with the voltage and the power will be less than you would calculate by VxA. The ratio of power to volts-times-amps is called the "power factor," and that's one of the items this device can display.
Just today I had someone say to me, "I don't think I can switch to Mac or Linux because my job requires Excel and MS Access." Sixty seconds of research refuted that unreasoned belief, but there's plenty more where it came from.
Sure, if it takes you ten million years to realize you wanted the waste after all, then you will have a problem.
Great. Take your story to court and be a hero like Fred Rogers was in the Betamax case!
But where are they going to get cinder blocks that big?
May I "flip out" (good one) if you're just plain wrong?
If what you've written were correct, ordinary magnetic materials could not exist. We would not see Zeeman splitting of spectral lines.
To bring it down to plain chemistry terms, think about molecular nitrogen and oxygen. How did both of those molecules manage to form "its complete set" when one has more electrons than the other? Even though the electrons are paired up in the molecule, there are still available unfilled states.
I do happen to lean toward the belief that this "invention" in TFA is bunk, but not for your reasons.
Giant company? Hundreds of terabytes?
At this facility, the storage people no longer get a pizza party for each petabyte milestone. They just come too fast now.
April 1st already?
When I first saw this on /. I was thinking "have we learned nothing..." Then I RTFCs and saw that this mistake was made in 1935. That puts it in the great run of eco-mistakes like mongooses to Hawaii, rose bushes to West Virginia, and Kudzu all over the south.
Sure, there will be a new harmonious balance of nature eventually. We generally don't like it. And we pretty much never like the intervening period before the new balance emerges.
You have obvisouly read TFA and must be requested to leave the conversation immediately.
I answer your fiction citation with another: Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer.
Which wouldn't be noteworthy, except for the numerous other factions that make no such admission, ever.
Er, did you mean Christian Scientists? Different breed entirely.
(OK, I just threw in that last part for Karma.)
See for yourself: http://info.uibk.ac.at/c/cb/cb26/heim/theorie_raum fahrt/hqtforspacepropphysicsaip2005.pdf
I read Zi Mei's affadavit, and if I were counsel for the plaintiff, his credentials as an expert witness would be shredded to dust. His points are generally valid, but he makes some technical errors, such as calling an IP address "a twelve digit code." Make no mistake, I'm defending the RIAA, but its opponents may have to do a bit better than this.
Similarly, giving a Unix user the ability to execute mv or chmod (or quite a variety of other single commands) as root is functionally equivalent to giving that user full root access.
Even if all the authorized users can be trusted not to abuse the power, can anyone be sure they will protect their password (or other access token) so well that no intruder will ever use their account? I think not.
How do you justify your faith?
Google is your friend
There's a brand-new "C in a Nutshell" title coming out this month. I've seen an advance copy and it sure covers the ground (old and new) with a logical presentation.
I'm here to moderate but there are no posts!
So instead I'll just say that it's normal to embrace enthusiastically any message that tells you you're better than most other people. Caveat lector.
And just who paid for this report?
Why do you think the human observer is more special than the ant? Why don't you believe that when you open the box you become correlated with both the ant and the cat, and enter a state which is a mixture of you seeing a dead cat and seeing a live cat - with your own two states each, as you say, "unaware of the other?"
That's what the many-worlds interpretation is all about, not some sci-fi multiple universes schtick we always run across.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
There are certain pairs of quantities ("conjugate variables") which cannot both be measured to arbitrary precision. If you measure, for example, the position of a particle along the x-axis (in your choice of coordinate system) very precisely, you cannot measure the momentum along that same axis very well. The product of the two imprecisions (or uncertainties) is a small but finite lower bound. You can work this out for yourself by making up a wave function localized in space and doing a Fourier transform to get the momentum spread.
You can measure x-position and y-momentum both very precisely, or various other quantities which are not conjugate to each other.
Sorry, no. If the coins aren't at the same place, then this term "at that particular instant" is not well defined.
The tantalizing notions of instant communication involve choosing which of two or more possible measurements to make on one of the photons (after they are separated) and the effects of that choice on the possible outcomes of a fixed or independently-chosen experiment on the other photon. Google "EPR Paradox" for a primer.