Well, at that point we still have the "why are inertial and gravitational mass the same" question. If the Higgs turns out to be a graviton-and-other-stuff composite, that potentially neatly ties that particular question up (loosely explained, they're the same because the graviton forms a component of the Higgs field in this situation).
That said, the found particle having spin-0 doesn't necessarily rule out it being a graviton composite (there's spin canceling going on in baryons - for example, a proton consists of three spin-1/2 quarks and three spin-1 gluons, plus virtual particles, but only has spin 3/2). The simplest composite would be a graviton and two photons plus some virtual bosons being exchanged between the three to keep them bound. One spin-2 particle and two spin-1 particles: net result could have spin 0, 2, or 4, with the most likely "stable" state being spin 0.
Anyway, yeah, I'm probably wrong because I'm not a theoretical physicist, but stranger things have happened (and regularly do on the quantum level)...
Last time I read up on this subject, the only postulated spin-2 particle was the graviton. I'm starting to lean towards a result of "what we found turns out to be a clump consisting of a graviton and some arbitrary collection of virtual bosons that gives the resulting 'particle' mass", especially if the determination is that the found particle is (to a high degree of likelihood) spin-2.
Well, on the "prove/disprove" front, all this has done is fail to disprove the existence of dark matter. There's a difference between that and actually proving its existence.
Personally, I'd prefer a slightly less ambiguous signal from one of the terrestrial dark matter detector experiments - which are currently giving either a "probably doesn't exist" result or a "these particles interact with normal matter less than neutrinos do" result. (These interactions are necessarily collision events, which means these have an effective cross-section smaller than a neutrino's.)
First off, here's a timeline that's about as consistent as we're going to get.
Meteor impact was about 1600 years prior to the time of the first book; by comparison, the final raid on the attitude jets by the City Builders was probably around the time of the superconductor plague, five hundred years later (as basically a panicked attempt to get away from the problem). The attitude jets at the time of the impact, combined with an existing protector in the Repair Center, would mean that the orbital failure was caught and fixed at the time, probably within hours of impact.
Also, nowhere in the first book does it mention the rosette being stable. Just "safe", which is an entirely different matter (though you do have to wonder about the mindset of a race that thinks that moving planets around in the first place is safe).
This falls more into the "read it to him, cleaning it up slightly as you go" category, but otherwise I firmly approve of this (partly because by the age of 10 - 20 years ago - I'd read the first three books myself).
If you're going to do this, though, insert The Wind in the Keyhole into its "proper" position (between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla) just to minimize his confusion.
... or a ringworld being able to maintain an orbit due to inherent stability.
He doesn't claim that in the first book, and the second one explicitly states that it's not going to have a stable orbit - if it gets just a bit off-center, you've got a fairly short time frame (2-3 years) to either get it recentered (which is a mess) or lose the thing.
As far as the rosette goes... the puppeteers are moving these worlds at large fractions of the speed of light. Whether or not the setup is normally stable isn't mentioned; however, they've been moving planets around (to produce the Fleet of Worlds, the rosette in question) for somewhere around half a million years. So presumably adjustments are made to maintain the rosette as needed due to gravitational forces from bodies outside the rosette.
Not to mention that Accelerando really isn't appropriate for kids under the age of about 13. (And I thought the ending was horrible as well; I've had several people agree with me that it was like the story just kept motoring on until it drove off a cliff, Thelma-and-Louise style.)
Technically, 501 and/or 403 are somewhat correct response codes for censorship, though - the server lacks the ability to fulfill the request (for legal reasons) in the first case, and in the second case it's just refusing to respond to the request. It depends on how the censorship is being done.
To be honest, though, I'd say 35x (or 8xx/15xx) would be an appropriate range for this - indicating a combination of "redirect" and "server can't fulfill this request".
Or, more likely in this case, an intentionally biased selection of the sample. The one thing we can definitely be sure about is that there are roughly 640 companies that are having trouble hiring for IT.
Not necessarily. The example I'll give here is a single selection event for a small population by the creator, who then left things to run their course while pursuing a fruitful career in leaving bricks under hats.
Congratulations on proving that you either failed or just don't understand statistics; a sample size of 1300 gives a margin of error of under 3% even if every person in America is running their own IT company.
So the actual figure is somewhere between, roughly, 46% and 52% (and the figure for the 1300 companies that were surveyed is that roughly 640 are having problems).
Agreed but since I don't seem to be communicating very well let me try a different tack and try a different scenario: 2 authors come to a publisher with equally good books. One has 5 years of copyright, one has 10 years. Which one over the next decade do you think will make the most money?
Obvious answer: the one with the longer term.
Longer and less obvious answer: In terms of annual income, the one with the shorter term will have a higher average. The first five years are likely to cover at least 90% of the money to be made on the book, while the next five will only cover about an additional 9%. So the 10-year term (1) only makes 10% more money and (2) does it over twice as long. (Incidentally, about 37% of the money is made in the first year with the assumption I've made. Also, the 90% figure may be higher - for example, romance novels, where you'll squeeze about 99% of their value out in about six months - or lower, like in sci-fi where there are still 40-year-old books that are now in like their 60th print run. *cough*Dune*cough*)
For obvious reasons, this means there's an incentive to put out books as quickly as possible, preferably maintaining at least the same level of quality in the writing. The duration of the copyright term has very little effect on this outside of whether or not box sets are worthwhile, other than that extremely short terms are obviously going to cause problems for books in genres with longer tails (again, sci-fi is a good example here).
To be honest, I think the ideal copyright situation for books is likely to be something along the lines of "5 years per book, with extensions granted automatically upon continuing a series". So a six-book series, if published about 4 1/2 years apart, will have its first book under copyright for a total of 27 1/2 years. (Obviously this doesn't protect the reading public from crap sequels, but I'm almost certain there's nothing that will protect us from that - or crap first novels, for that matter.)
Doing the math (~7900mi diameter, 11k pixels to a side) it turns out that each pixel covers a square that's slightly less than half a square mile (about 1.2 square kilometers).
I'm pretty sure that any one of the government satellites that are watching everything can pick out the individual hairs on my ass while I'm mooning it, which gives a resolution of closer to one pixel = 1/32 of an inch... or a 1.8-exapixel image of the Earth.
Well, GPU cracking is something like 500 million hashes / sec = 2^29 hashes/sec. Four words out of a 2k-word dictionary (which is small), selected randomly, is a space of 2^44 passwords. That's about 9 GPU-hours, which is not good. Adding a fifth word increases this to roughly 2 GPU-years (a factor of 2^11). Adding numbers in between the four words increases the password space by about 2^5, which is something (~300 GPU-hours) but is not really substantial. (A sixth work makes it 4000ish GPU-years, which is starting to get really cost prohibitive.)
I will note that I didn't suggest a single digit between each word, just "numbers" in general.
Six words plus five two-digit numbers gives you about 0.6 trillion years with present-day GPUs, going with an even smaller pool of 1000 words to work with. Four words plus a date - any date, really, in the last 2000-odd years - still gives you about 44 years' worth of cracking time. (Again, assuming no upgrades to the hardware. With upgrades and assuming no failures of Moore's Law, you're looking at closer to 8 years for this and 52 years for the previous figure.)
I still stand by my opinion that for any cracking time over about six months, it'd be more cost-effective for the cracker to kidnap you and torture you for the password.
Eh, a sentence of random words can still be hit by dictionary attacks (assuming that the attacker is smart enough to go after passphrases as well). Somewhat better is to replace spaces in the sentence with numbers forming a meaningful sequence (preferably only to you), and ending with one piece of punctuation.
It's still easy to remember, and attackers are now pretty much stuck with having to find you and torture the password out of you.
Nope! PSP Vita only. Well, PSP Vita and "PlayStation phone" devices only. And I guess some Sony tablet thingies.
This is basically Sony trying to compete with iOS and Android as far as I can tell.
I'd be moderately surprised if PS3 support isn't on the table for "later, as in once we're out of beta".
Not completely surprised, because Sony's been known to make massively boneheaded moves (like I have to remind anyone here about that), but it'd definitely land in the "dumb moves from a profit standpoint" category.
Nothing different from the current state of XNA, really, I expect. In fact, I suspect the reason Sony's using a version of the CLR (probably without the system.windows.* portion of the class tree) is to try and poach developers who are already used to using XNA.
I'm planning on looking at this just to see whether or not it'd be feasible to write code that operates in all of the XNA-supporting environments as well as the PS-certified devices and PS Vita. If it is... well, $200/year for supporting everything might be worthwhile. (Assuming I can actually get a halfway decent game written.)
...to bring up Firefly and its "dozens of worlds" in one solar system.
Yes, I know it's horribly inaccurate with respect to pretty much every detail on this solar system. I don't care; it's better than stupid resolution jokes.
That's actually a pretty good description of the state of the world in his Known Space stuff prior to the Man-Kzin wars. (Though it doesn't help that the world's population is, if memory serves, somewhere around 18 billion at that point as well. It's looking like that particular guess for the population in the 2200s was high by a factor of 2 or more.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at that point we still have the "why are inertial and gravitational mass the same" question. If the Higgs turns out to be a graviton-and-other-stuff composite, that potentially neatly ties that particular question up (loosely explained, they're the same because the graviton forms a component of the Higgs field in this situation).
That said, the found particle having spin-0 doesn't necessarily rule out it being a graviton composite (there's spin canceling going on in baryons - for example, a proton consists of three spin-1/2 quarks and three spin-1 gluons, plus virtual particles, but only has spin 3/2). The simplest composite would be a graviton and two photons plus some virtual bosons being exchanged between the three to keep them bound. One spin-2 particle and two spin-1 particles: net result could have spin 0, 2, or 4, with the most likely "stable" state being spin 0.
Anyway, yeah, I'm probably wrong because I'm not a theoretical physicist, but stranger things have happened (and regularly do on the quantum level)...
Last time I read up on this subject, the only postulated spin-2 particle was the graviton. I'm starting to lean towards a result of "what we found turns out to be a clump consisting of a graviton and some arbitrary collection of virtual bosons that gives the resulting 'particle' mass", especially if the determination is that the found particle is (to a high degree of likelihood) spin-2.
Well, on the "prove/disprove" front, all this has done is fail to disprove the existence of dark matter. There's a difference between that and actually proving its existence.
Personally, I'd prefer a slightly less ambiguous signal from one of the terrestrial dark matter detector experiments - which are currently giving either a "probably doesn't exist" result or a "these particles interact with normal matter less than neutrinos do" result. (These interactions are necessarily collision events, which means these have an effective cross-section smaller than a neutrino's.)
First off, here's a timeline that's about as consistent as we're going to get.
Meteor impact was about 1600 years prior to the time of the first book; by comparison, the final raid on the attitude jets by the City Builders was probably around the time of the superconductor plague, five hundred years later (as basically a panicked attempt to get away from the problem). The attitude jets at the time of the impact, combined with an existing protector in the Repair Center, would mean that the orbital failure was caught and fixed at the time, probably within hours of impact.
Also, nowhere in the first book does it mention the rosette being stable. Just "safe", which is an entirely different matter (though you do have to wonder about the mindset of a race that thinks that moving planets around in the first place is safe).
Basically, what you want to do is select for the people who least want to do the job of running the country.
This falls more into the "read it to him, cleaning it up slightly as you go" category, but otherwise I firmly approve of this (partly because by the age of 10 - 20 years ago - I'd read the first three books myself).
If you're going to do this, though, insert The Wind in the Keyhole into its "proper" position (between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla) just to minimize his confusion.
... or a ringworld being able to maintain an orbit due to inherent stability.
He doesn't claim that in the first book, and the second one explicitly states that it's not going to have a stable orbit - if it gets just a bit off-center, you've got a fairly short time frame (2-3 years) to either get it recentered (which is a mess) or lose the thing.
As far as the rosette goes... the puppeteers are moving these worlds at large fractions of the speed of light. Whether or not the setup is normally stable isn't mentioned; however, they've been moving planets around (to produce the Fleet of Worlds, the rosette in question) for somewhere around half a million years. So presumably adjustments are made to maintain the rosette as needed due to gravitational forces from bodies outside the rosette.
So... nice job of mischaracterizing the books.
Not to mention that Accelerando really isn't appropriate for kids under the age of about 13. (And I thought the ending was horrible as well; I've had several people agree with me that it was like the story just kept motoring on until it drove off a cliff, Thelma-and-Louise style.)
Technically, 501 and/or 403 are somewhat correct response codes for censorship, though - the server lacks the ability to fulfill the request (for legal reasons) in the first case, and in the second case it's just refusing to respond to the request. It depends on how the censorship is being done.
To be honest, though, I'd say 35x (or 8xx/15xx) would be an appropriate range for this - indicating a combination of "redirect" and "server can't fulfill this request".
None of the holy books say god helped us evolve from microscopic creatures over millions upon millions of years.
That's because the ones that did had a tendency to get burned, along with their writes, in one almighty huge bonfire.
Or, more likely in this case, an intentionally biased selection of the sample. The one thing we can definitely be sure about is that there are roughly 640 companies that are having trouble hiring for IT.
In related news, 86% of Americans believe themselves "above average".
Fixed, and you're welcome.
Not necessarily. The example I'll give here is a single selection event for a small population by the creator, who then left things to run their course while pursuing a fruitful career in leaving bricks under hats.
The approach velocity is pretty low as astronomical speeds go - 187.5 m/s or 675 km/h (a bit under 420mph, for people who want non-metric numbers).
So is it actually a collision that we're headed for, or is someone with horrible depth perception trying to dock? :-)
Congratulations on proving that you either failed or just don't understand statistics; a sample size of 1300 gives a margin of error of under 3% even if every person in America is running their own IT company.
So the actual figure is somewhere between, roughly, 46% and 52% (and the figure for the 1300 companies that were surveyed is that roughly 640 are having problems).
Agreed but since I don't seem to be communicating very well let me try a different tack and try a different scenario:
2 authors come to a publisher with equally good books. One has 5 years of copyright, one has 10 years. Which one over the next decade do you think will make the most money?
Obvious answer: the one with the longer term.
Longer and less obvious answer: In terms of annual income, the one with the shorter term will have a higher average. The first five years are likely to cover at least 90% of the money to be made on the book, while the next five will only cover about an additional 9%. So the 10-year term (1) only makes 10% more money and (2) does it over twice as long. (Incidentally, about 37% of the money is made in the first year with the assumption I've made. Also, the 90% figure may be higher - for example, romance novels, where you'll squeeze about 99% of their value out in about six months - or lower, like in sci-fi where there are still 40-year-old books that are now in like their 60th print run. *cough*Dune*cough*)
For obvious reasons, this means there's an incentive to put out books as quickly as possible, preferably maintaining at least the same level of quality in the writing. The duration of the copyright term has very little effect on this outside of whether or not box sets are worthwhile, other than that extremely short terms are obviously going to cause problems for books in genres with longer tails (again, sci-fi is a good example here).
To be honest, I think the ideal copyright situation for books is likely to be something along the lines of "5 years per book, with extensions granted automatically upon continuing a series". So a six-book series, if published about 4 1/2 years apart, will have its first book under copyright for a total of 27 1/2 years. (Obviously this doesn't protect the reading public from crap sequels, but I'm almost certain there's nothing that will protect us from that - or crap first novels, for that matter.)
Doing the math (~7900mi diameter, 11k pixels to a side) it turns out that each pixel covers a square that's slightly less than half a square mile (about 1.2 square kilometers).
I'm pretty sure that any one of the government satellites that are watching everything can pick out the individual hairs on my ass while I'm mooning it, which gives a resolution of closer to one pixel = 1/32 of an inch... or a 1.8-exapixel image of the Earth.
Well, at least having better hair than your opponent.
Apparently one of the key factors in getting elected to representative government is knowing fuck-all about anything except having good hair.
Fixed for the sad truth.
Well, GPU cracking is something like 500 million hashes / sec = 2^29 hashes/sec. Four words out of a 2k-word dictionary (which is small), selected randomly, is a space of 2^44 passwords. That's about 9 GPU-hours, which is not good. Adding a fifth word increases this to roughly 2 GPU-years (a factor of 2^11). Adding numbers in between the four words increases the password space by about 2^5, which is something (~300 GPU-hours) but is not really substantial. (A sixth work makes it 4000ish GPU-years, which is starting to get really cost prohibitive.)
I will note that I didn't suggest a single digit between each word, just "numbers" in general.
Six words plus five two-digit numbers gives you about 0.6 trillion years with present-day GPUs, going with an even smaller pool of 1000 words to work with. Four words plus a date - any date, really, in the last 2000-odd years - still gives you about 44 years' worth of cracking time. (Again, assuming no upgrades to the hardware. With upgrades and assuming no failures of Moore's Law, you're looking at closer to 8 years for this and 52 years for the previous figure.)
I still stand by my opinion that for any cracking time over about six months, it'd be more cost-effective for the cracker to kidnap you and torture you for the password.
Eh, a sentence of random words can still be hit by dictionary attacks (assuming that the attacker is smart enough to go after passphrases as well). Somewhat better is to replace spaces in the sentence with numbers forming a meaningful sequence (preferably only to you), and ending with one piece of punctuation.
It's still easy to remember, and attackers are now pretty much stuck with having to find you and torture the password out of you.
and PS3
Nope! PSP Vita only. Well, PSP Vita and "PlayStation phone" devices only. And I guess some Sony tablet thingies.
This is basically Sony trying to compete with iOS and Android as far as I can tell.
I'd be moderately surprised if PS3 support isn't on the table for "later, as in once we're out of beta".
Not completely surprised, because Sony's been known to make massively boneheaded moves (like I have to remind anyone here about that), but it'd definitely land in the "dumb moves from a profit standpoint" category.
Nothing different from the current state of XNA, really, I expect. In fact, I suspect the reason Sony's using a version of the CLR (probably without the system.windows.* portion of the class tree) is to try and poach developers who are already used to using XNA.
I'm planning on looking at this just to see whether or not it'd be feasible to write code that operates in all of the XNA-supporting environments as well as the PS-certified devices and PS Vita. If it is... well, $200/year for supporting everything might be worthwhile. (Assuming I can actually get a halfway decent game written.)
...to bring up Firefly and its "dozens of worlds" in one solar system.
Yes, I know it's horribly inaccurate with respect to pretty much every detail on this solar system. I don't care; it's better than stupid resolution jokes.
That's actually a pretty good description of the state of the world in his Known Space stuff prior to the Man-Kzin wars. (Though it doesn't help that the world's population is, if memory serves, somewhere around 18 billion at that point as well. It's looking like that particular guess for the population in the 2200s was high by a factor of 2 or more.)