I'm doomed if I take a corner because you take the opposite corner and get two wins lined up.
X|_|_ _|O|_ O|_|X
X|_|X _|O|_ O|_|X
X|O|X _|O|_ O|_|X
X|O|X _|O|X O|_|X
So, instead, I force you to take a side.
X|_|_ O|O|_ _|_|X
X|_|_ O|O|X _|_|X
Then I simply block you . . .
X|_|O O|O|X _|_|X
And it doesn't matter where you go next as long as I take one of the two bottom-row squares.
Of course, this simple diagramming has too few characters per line, so a long and unnecessary text block has to be added to get things to work out okay. We can do this by simply pasting in some material, like so: In the cult 1983 film WarGames tic-tac-toe is used as an allegory for nuclear war. In the film a computer hacker David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) in the Cold War era breaks into the missile defense computer WOPR designed to orchestrate nuclear war against the Soviet Union. In the process, he inadvertently triggers the system into "DEFCON 1" mode, whereby the computer arms its missiles in preparation for launch. The hacker eventually influences the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself, whereby the computer determines that neither side can win--an analogy to full scale nuclear war, which is made explicit when the computer then fails to find a winning stratagem for a nuclear strike. The computer then concludes that "[t]he only winning move is not to play" and indicates a desire for a game of chess instead.
Yeah, people tend to screw up when X's second move is to the corner diagonally opposite of the corner O took on the first move. An O player who mechanically follows the move priority list "win, block, center, corner", though, will never lose.
I've seen a statement that Acid3 (and Acid2 before it) is deliberately designed so that no browser available at the time of release can render it correctly, specifically so that it serves as a challenge to all browsers and to avoid the appearance of playing favorites.
Let's look at the basic interest analysis, shall we? Apple has an interest in selling tracks with Apple-exclusive DRM -- to keep people locked into Apple products. The record companies have decided it's in their interest to sell tracks without any DRM (see Amazon), to keep people from being locked into Apple products. Therefore, the only one of the two parties with an interest in keeping DRM on tracks sold through iTMS is Apple.
So, your claim is, Apple is acting in Apple's own interest solely because the record companies are insisting that Apple act against the interests of the record companies.
Uh-huh. That's plausible, I don't know why I didn't see it before. Clearly Steve Jobs is a saint among men.
Right. Apple wouldn't be taking steps to maintain its highly profitable closed iTMS/iPod ecosystem if it wasn't being forced to by the very record companies who consider that closed ecosystem a threat.
1) Adobe isn't doing a port. Google is paying Codeweavers to improve support for running unmodified compiled Windows executables on Linux.
2) Photoshop for OS X uses Carbon, a (modified) implementation of the old Mac "Toolbox" API for OS X. Carbon is closed-source Apple technology, and not available for Linux. You can go Linux to Mac OS X pretty easy because they're both Unix; going Mac OS 8 to Linux is a heck of a lot harder. A clone of Carbon for Linux probably would be an easier project than WINE, but WINE has over a decade of development while a Carbon-copy would have to start from scratch. So even a port would probably be easier from Windows to Linux than OS X to Linux.
Mozilla would've been better off keeping their mouths shut. As it is, they've irresponsibly disclosed a vulnerability in a competitor's product. Except, of course, Mozilla never mentioned that there was a vulnerability in Opera to anyone but the Opera team.
Let's assume that the Mozilla team learned of a bug in Firefox, and spent their time fixing the bug in Firefox. Then, when doing final regression testing of the fix against Firefox by comparing it with other browsers, then they discover that Opera has the same vulnerability, and immediately inform Opera about the vulnerability.
Now the Mozilla team has a choice. They can either release the ready fix for Firefox, or they can refuse to patch Firefox. If they don't patch, the Firefox vulnerability remains open, and Firefox users remain vulnerable to anyone who discovered the vulnerability on their own. If they do patch, they reveal that Firefox used to have a specific vulnerability, and some third party might try the exploit against Opera.
So, the only way Mozilla could have acted "responsibly" under your formula is to leave a known security vulnerability in Firefox unpatched despite having a patch tested and ready. That's a really weird definition of responsible.
No. If you extracted work, the result would be a deceleration of the positive ball (goes slower with less positive energy) and an acceleration of the negative ball (goes faster with more negative energy). The result would be that your wheel could not provide more energy than the molecular binding energy of the rod used to attach the negative balls to the positive balls. As soon as you exceeded that energy, the rod would break and the negative balls would break free, destroying your machine. Your ability to extract energy is thus limited by the tensile strength; all that is necessary to prevent indefinite energy extraction is a demonstration that infinite tensile strength is impossible.
The other choice is to use an infinitely stretchable connector -- which don't have material existence, but an electromagnetic attraction between the two objects would work well enough. What happens then? Then when you extract energy, the distance between the two objects increases, and the gravitational attraction/repulsion goes down at the inverse square of the distance, asymptotically approaching zero. The more energy you extract, the greater the distance, the lower the attraction/repulsion between the objects. The total work you can extract, again, is limited to the strength of the original connecting force.
If you use the Via x86 processors, they have a genuine hardware RNG built in (which seems to be based on thermal noise), and you can buy true RNG peripherals. But pretty much nobody uses them (Via chips are too slow, peripherals are an added expense), which means most systems have to default to PRNGs (because it's marginally cheaper).
Gravitational lensing is an observation of the path photons (part of the observed universe) move in. To explain this motion, we need the existence of dark matter . . . or a new theory of gravity that is really complicated. It's far more elegant to assume dark matter than a theory of gravity with enough special cases to explain, say, the Bullet Cluster results. However, we know nothing positive about the characteristics of dark matter beyond the en masse gravitational effects it has to have to keep our theory of gravitation correct.
The body that has a negative mass will be accelerated towards the body with the positive mass, but the body with the positive mass will be accelerated away from the body with the negative mass. Right, and such acceleration translates to positive energy on the part of the positive mass, and negative energy on the part of the negative mass. The gain in velocity does not translate to a gain of energy; the first law of thermodynamics/the law of conservation of energy is not violated. Any joules you then extract from the positive mass is already paid for with negative joules caused by the acceleration of the negative mass.
Accounts balance, albeit in an unintuitive manner.
Granted, making MOND theories work (even badly) for the observed cases seems to require some sort of non-baryonic dark matter (just a lot less than the pure dark matter theories). But we still haven't come up with any other evidence for non-baryonic dark matter than the gravitational effects of them working en masse. We don't even have the ability to say whether the particle(s) are lighter than a GeV or heavier than a TeV, or whether they interact with the weak force, or what. Unlike antimatter, we can mostly only say what dark matter is not, as opposed to what it is.
The first law states, "The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings."
Accordingly, since no energy is being added to the system, its internal energy must not increase. That's fine, because in you example, the total energy does not increase.
Energy is usually measured in joules. 1 joule is, reduced to base units, 1 kg * (m^2/s^2). So the total energy of your system is defined as:
Joules = (1000 * [x^2/y^2]) + (-1000 * [x^2/y^2])
Now, if x is 0 and y is 0, (the system is at rest), then the energy of the system, in joules, is
Antimatter is something real, observed, understood, and which we can actually make, albeit in tiny quantities.
Dark matter is a shim used to make our theory of gravity and the motion of the observed universe match.
"Phantom matter", properly called "exotic matter", is a purely hypothetical construct, not necessary to explain anything in the universe which has been observed; it's just something the laws of physics don't rule out.
The Athabasca oilsands are recoverable for $36 a fully-converted barrel. Nobody expects the long-term average price of oil will drop far enough to make that long-term unprofitable, but that's substantially different than expecting we've reached the oil production peak.
The oil companies are all still evaluating capital investment (new exploration, new development, etc.) on the assumption that the long-term price of oil is under $40 a barrel. They've got the best petroleum geologists in the world working for them; what do you know about the production situation that they don't?
Because the EV-1 was economically suicidal without the California fleet percentage mandate.
With the fleet mandate, GM would have wound up as the near-monopoly provider of gasoline-powered cars to Californians, because the EV-1 would have vastly outsold (well, out-leased) all other electric cars, and the profit on the gas cars would have made up for the massive losses on the EV-1s. Minus the mandate, it was impossible to make money on EV-1s.
The EV-1 program went ahead after the mandate was repealed because GM had various contracts it had to honor to suppliers, and as long as GM was having to buy certain bits, GM wanted to recoup part of its investment. But after the limited number of cars with those parts were made, marketing them would have been an additional expense that would have driven up demand for cars that GM wasn't going to make anymore. Continuing the program would have been throwing money into a sewer. And the existing cars, if sold, would have been massive potential liabilities. (Sure, GM could make the lessees who wanted to convert to a purchase sign a waiver; that wouldn't do GM a lick of good in court when a third-hand owner ten years later rammed a school bus due to, say, a failure in the regenerative braking system.)
So the answer to the question "why did GM refuse to market, sell, or continue the EV-1?" is simple enough; money. There was no money in marketing them, no money in continuing their production, and no money enough to offset the potential liabilities in selling the handful that were built.
On hydrogen? GM is getting paid by the Federal Government for it, and blue-sky R&D often has useful spinoffs (that is, patents that bring in royalties). If Bush had offered GM a lot of money to build EV-1s, enough to make them profitable, GM would have done that instead. GM's trying to make money, and doesn't care what the hell the cars run on.
When it comes to alcohol, GM has the flex-fuel systems already worked out. Can't hurt to invest a few million on a few startups for something (cheap alcohol fuel) that'll give GM both direct return if the startup succeeds and an advantage over Toyota when it comes to its main business.
Open sourcing is the equivalent of selling the source for zero dollars. And what's your evidence that IBM has the right to sell licenses to the portions of the source copyrighted by Microsoft?
Lacking the text of the Microsoft-IBM contracts, you seem to be saying we should assume IBM is lying when they say there are legal reasons they can't open source OS/2, instead of drawing the inference that the contracts don't allow them to open source the portions of OS/2 IBM didn't write.
AT&T was very liberal in the terms it released Unix code rights to Unix vendors in the later 1980s, and even then, Sun went back and paid the SCO Group ten million dollars to secure additional rights to Unix/Xenix code in Solaris before releasing OpenSolaris. Microsoft is the AT&T of OS/2; there's a reason versions 1.0-1.3 were called Microsoft OS/2. Now, what do you think the chances would be of Microsoft agreeing to sell IBM the sort of rights to OS/2 that Sun was able to get to Unix?
IBM would have to do a lot more core-level rewriting than Sun did, because the core stuff is all Microsoft, and Microsoft isn't going to give it up. It's a lot more work for something people have a lot less interest in.
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If they only did this to D2, that'd be fine by me. Of course, they didn't.
Well, obviously, it actually does matter if you don't take lower-left, because O then wins; but X can't win if O takes either lower-row box.
Ah! Okay, yeah. I take center . . .
X|_|_
_|O|_
_|_|_
. . . you take lower right . . .
X|_|_
_|O|_
_|_|X
I'm doomed if I take a corner because you take the opposite corner and get two wins lined up.
X|_|_
_|O|_
O|_|X
X|_|X
_|O|_
O|_|X
X|O|X
_|O|_
O|_|X
X|O|X
_|O|X
O|_|X
So, instead, I force you to take a side.
X|_|_
O|O|_
_|_|X
X|_|_
O|O|X
_|_|X
Then I simply block you . . .
X|_|O
O|O|X
_|_|X
And it doesn't matter where you go next as long as I take one of the two bottom-row squares.
Of course, this simple diagramming has too few characters per line, so a long and unnecessary text block has to be added to get things to work out okay. We can do this by simply pasting in some material, like so: In the cult 1983 film WarGames tic-tac-toe is used as an allegory for nuclear war. In the film a computer hacker David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) in the Cold War era breaks into the missile defense computer WOPR designed to orchestrate nuclear war against the Soviet Union. In the process, he inadvertently triggers the system into "DEFCON 1" mode, whereby the computer arms its missiles in preparation for launch. The hacker eventually influences the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself, whereby the computer determines that neither side can win--an analogy to full scale nuclear war, which is made explicit when the computer then fails to find a winning stratagem for a nuclear strike. The computer then concludes that "[t]he only winning move is not to play" and indicates a desire for a game of chess instead.
Yeah, people tend to screw up when X's second move is to the corner diagonally opposite of the corner O took on the first move. An O player who mechanically follows the move priority list "win, block, center, corner", though, will never lose.
Bah. You don't need to be old enough to remember the distinguished gentleman from Wisconsin, you just need to have read enough Pournelle and Heinlein.
Yeah. The only reason to buy shares of SCO now is if you want SCO stock certificates to ritually burn, use as toilet paper, or the like.
I've seen a statement that Acid3 (and Acid2 before it) is deliberately designed so that no browser available at the time of release can render it correctly, specifically so that it serves as a challenge to all browsers and to avoid the appearance of playing favorites.
They've said it already passes Acid2.
Let's look at the basic interest analysis, shall we? Apple has an interest in selling tracks with Apple-exclusive DRM -- to keep people locked into Apple products. The record companies have decided it's in their interest to sell tracks without any DRM (see Amazon), to keep people from being locked into Apple products. Therefore, the only one of the two parties with an interest in keeping DRM on tracks sold through iTMS is Apple.
So, your claim is, Apple is acting in Apple's own interest solely because the record companies are insisting that Apple act against the interests of the record companies.
Uh-huh. That's plausible, I don't know why I didn't see it before. Clearly Steve Jobs is a saint among men.
Nah, since you've got a six-digit UID, everybody knows to ignore you anyway.
Right. Apple wouldn't be taking steps to maintain its highly profitable closed iTMS/iPod ecosystem if it wasn't being forced to by the very record companies who consider that closed ecosystem a threat.
1) Adobe isn't doing a port. Google is paying Codeweavers to improve support for running unmodified compiled Windows executables on Linux.
2) Photoshop for OS X uses Carbon, a (modified) implementation of the old Mac "Toolbox" API for OS X. Carbon is closed-source Apple technology, and not available for Linux. You can go Linux to Mac OS X pretty easy because they're both Unix; going Mac OS 8 to Linux is a heck of a lot harder. A clone of Carbon for Linux probably would be an easier project than WINE, but WINE has over a decade of development while a Carbon-copy would have to start from scratch. So even a port would probably be easier from Windows to Linux than OS X to Linux.
Let's assume that the Mozilla team learned of a bug in Firefox, and spent their time fixing the bug in Firefox. Then, when doing final regression testing of the fix against Firefox by comparing it with other browsers, then they discover that Opera has the same vulnerability, and immediately inform Opera about the vulnerability.
Now the Mozilla team has a choice. They can either release the ready fix for Firefox, or they can refuse to patch Firefox. If they don't patch, the Firefox vulnerability remains open, and Firefox users remain vulnerable to anyone who discovered the vulnerability on their own. If they do patch, they reveal that Firefox used to have a specific vulnerability, and some third party might try the exploit against Opera.
So, the only way Mozilla could have acted "responsibly" under your formula is to leave a known security vulnerability in Firefox unpatched despite having a patch tested and ready. That's a really weird definition of responsible.
No. If you extracted work, the result would be a deceleration of the positive ball (goes slower with less positive energy) and an acceleration of the negative ball (goes faster with more negative energy). The result would be that your wheel could not provide more energy than the molecular binding energy of the rod used to attach the negative balls to the positive balls. As soon as you exceeded that energy, the rod would break and the negative balls would break free, destroying your machine. Your ability to extract energy is thus limited by the tensile strength; all that is necessary to prevent indefinite energy extraction is a demonstration that infinite tensile strength is impossible.
The other choice is to use an infinitely stretchable connector -- which don't have material existence, but an electromagnetic attraction between the two objects would work well enough. What happens then? Then when you extract energy, the distance between the two objects increases, and the gravitational attraction/repulsion goes down at the inverse square of the distance, asymptotically approaching zero. The more energy you extract, the greater the distance, the lower the attraction/repulsion between the objects. The total work you can extract, again, is limited to the strength of the original connecting force.
If you use the Via x86 processors, they have a genuine hardware RNG built in (which seems to be based on thermal noise), and you can buy true RNG peripherals. But pretty much nobody uses them (Via chips are too slow, peripherals are an added expense), which means most systems have to default to PRNGs (because it's marginally cheaper).
Gravitational lensing is an observation of the path photons (part of the observed universe) move in. To explain this motion, we need the existence of dark matter . . . or a new theory of gravity that is really complicated. It's far more elegant to assume dark matter than a theory of gravity with enough special cases to explain, say, the Bullet Cluster results. However, we know nothing positive about the characteristics of dark matter beyond the en masse gravitational effects it has to have to keep our theory of gravitation correct.
Accounts balance, albeit in an unintuitive manner.
Granted, making MOND theories work (even badly) for the observed cases seems to require some sort of non-baryonic dark matter (just a lot less than the pure dark matter theories). But we still haven't come up with any other evidence for non-baryonic dark matter than the gravitational effects of them working en masse. We don't even have the ability to say whether the particle(s) are lighter than a GeV or heavier than a TeV, or whether they interact with the weak force, or what. Unlike antimatter, we can mostly only say what dark matter is not, as opposed to what it is.
Where's the violation?
The first law states, "The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings."
Accordingly, since no energy is being added to the system, its internal energy must not increase. That's fine, because in you example, the total energy does not increase.
Energy is usually measured in joules. 1 joule is, reduced to base units, 1 kg * (m^2/s^2). So the total energy of your system is defined as:
Joules = (1000 * [x^2/y^2]) + (-1000 * [x^2/y^2])
Now, if x is 0 and y is 0, (the system is at rest), then the energy of the system, in joules, is
Joules = (1000 * [0^2/0^2]) + (-1000 * [0^2/0^2])
Joules = (1000 * [0/0]) + (-1000 * [0/0])
Joules = (1000 * 0) + (-1000 * 0)
Joules = (0) + (0)
Joules = 0
If x is 10 and y is 1, then the energy of the system, in joules, is
Joules = (1000 * [10^2/1^2]) + (-1000 * [10^2/1^2])
Joules = (1000 * [100/1]) + (-1000 * [100/1])
Joules = (1000 * 100) + (-1000 * 100)
Joules = (100000) + (-100000)
Joules = 0
If x is 500 and y is 2, then the energy of the system, in joules, is
Joules = (1000 * [500^2/2^2]) + (-1000 * [500^2/2^2])
Joules = (1000 * [500/4]) + (-1000 * [500/4])
Joules = (1000 * 125) + (-1000 * 125)
Joules = (125000) + (-125000)
Joules = 0
If x is 1 billion and y is 1, then the energy of the system, in joules, is
Joules = (1000 * [1E9^2/1^2]) + (-1000 * [1E9^2/1^2])
Joules = (1000 * [1E18/1]) + (-1000 * [1E18/1])
Joules = (1000 * 1E18) + (-1000 * 1E18)
Joules = (1E21) + (-1E21)
Joules = 0
Since 0J = 0J = 0J = 0J, no matter how fast the two-ball system accelerates, there is no violation of the first law of thermodynamics.
Antimatter is something real, observed, understood, and which we can actually make, albeit in tiny quantities.
Dark matter is a shim used to make our theory of gravity and the motion of the observed universe match.
"Phantom matter", properly called "exotic matter", is a purely hypothetical construct, not necessary to explain anything in the universe which has been observed; it's just something the laws of physics don't rule out.
The Athabasca oilsands are recoverable for $36 a fully-converted barrel. Nobody expects the long-term average price of oil will drop far enough to make that long-term unprofitable, but that's substantially different than expecting we've reached the oil production peak.
The oil companies are all still evaluating capital investment (new exploration, new development, etc.) on the assumption that the long-term price of oil is under $40 a barrel. They've got the best petroleum geologists in the world working for them; what do you know about the production situation that they don't?
Because the EV-1 was economically suicidal without the California fleet percentage mandate.
With the fleet mandate, GM would have wound up as the near-monopoly provider of gasoline-powered cars to Californians, because the EV-1 would have vastly outsold (well, out-leased) all other electric cars, and the profit on the gas cars would have made up for the massive losses on the EV-1s. Minus the mandate, it was impossible to make money on EV-1s.
The EV-1 program went ahead after the mandate was repealed because GM had various contracts it had to honor to suppliers, and as long as GM was having to buy certain bits, GM wanted to recoup part of its investment. But after the limited number of cars with those parts were made, marketing them would have been an additional expense that would have driven up demand for cars that GM wasn't going to make anymore. Continuing the program would have been throwing money into a sewer. And the existing cars, if sold, would have been massive potential liabilities. (Sure, GM could make the lessees who wanted to convert to a purchase sign a waiver; that wouldn't do GM a lick of good in court when a third-hand owner ten years later rammed a school bus due to, say, a failure in the regenerative braking system.)
So the answer to the question "why did GM refuse to market, sell, or continue the EV-1?" is simple enough; money. There was no money in marketing them, no money in continuing their production, and no money enough to offset the potential liabilities in selling the handful that were built.
On hydrogen? GM is getting paid by the Federal Government for it, and blue-sky R&D often has useful spinoffs (that is, patents that bring in royalties). If Bush had offered GM a lot of money to build EV-1s, enough to make them profitable, GM would have done that instead. GM's trying to make money, and doesn't care what the hell the cars run on.
When it comes to alcohol, GM has the flex-fuel systems already worked out. Can't hurt to invest a few million on a few startups for something (cheap alcohol fuel) that'll give GM both direct return if the startup succeeds and an advantage over Toyota when it comes to its main business.
Lacking the text of the Microsoft-IBM contracts, you seem to be saying we should assume IBM is lying when they say there are legal reasons they can't open source OS/2, instead of drawing the inference that the contracts don't allow them to open source the portions of OS/2 IBM didn't write.
AT&T was very liberal in the terms it released Unix code rights to Unix vendors in the later 1980s, and even then, Sun went back and paid the SCO Group ten million dollars to secure additional rights to Unix/Xenix code in Solaris before releasing OpenSolaris. Microsoft is the AT&T of OS/2; there's a reason versions 1.0-1.3 were called Microsoft OS/2. Now, what do you think the chances would be of Microsoft agreeing to sell IBM the sort of rights to OS/2 that Sun was able to get to Unix?
IBM would have to do a lot more core-level rewriting than Sun did, because the core stuff is all Microsoft, and Microsoft isn't going to give it up. It's a lot more work for something people have a lot less interest in.