They're sort of framing the question as, "If you ride a bike, could you get hurt?" The answer is, of course, yes. But then, you can get injured while taking a shower. It's pretty sensationalistic saying, 'Lots of my colleagues do not want to ride after seeing these [city biking] injuries.' It's an anecdotal and emotional response, and it doesn't really help to explain the issue.
The question should be, "What is the rate (accounting for severity) of injury in a population, comparing bicycles and other alternate modes of transportation?" I'm sure that formulation could be improved, but a question like that is more appropriate. So if we encourage cycling in New York City, will the total number and severity of injuries increase or decrease? Could someone provide something factual or scientific regarding that specifically?
Because as a logical thought experiment, I would guess that if we stopped using cars for personal transportation completely and rode bicycles instead, I would guess that you'd see an increase in minor injuries (e.g. people falling and skinning their knees), but a huge decrease in serious injuries and fatalities. While we've commonly seen around 40,000 car-related fatalities per year (more than 10x the number of people who died in 9/11, every single year), if you take cars out of the equation, I would bet you'd see very few cycling-related fatalities. Even if you have a serious bicycle crash without a helmet, unless you're hit by a car or truck, you probably won't suffer a permanent injury.
Not only that, but people really should understand that *security is not about absolutes*. Things are not either "secure" or "insecure". Well executed security is essentially about a trade-off between "easy accessibility for authorized usage" and "difficult accessibility for unauthorized usage".
The only way to "completely secure" a computer hard drive, for example, is to completely destroy it. Otherwise, there is some risk that someone can eventually gain access to it and recover some data. Short of that, I can put it in a cement block and sink it in a deep trench in the ocean, which would make it very secure and also very inaccessible. I can encrypt the drive, and then the security task shifts to securing the encryption key (ignoring the possibility of cracking the encryption).
But ultimately, one of the key problems with security is that it's not just about preventing access by an unauthorized person, but also about preventing unauthorized usage by an authorized person. If I give you access to some documents because you need access for legitimate reasons, then I can't really then prevent you from using the information in those documents for some other purpose. A lot of malware ends up on computer systems because someone hit "OK" and granted access. As long as someone has admin rights and can hit "OK" to install software, malware will be able to be installed by tricking that person.
You are correct. What people don't realize is that there are actually two different update mechanisms behind the "App Store" updates. When you check for updates, Apple displays the updates for applications purchased from the App Store along with updates for the OS-- but the fact that they're displayed together doesn't mean that they behave exactly the same way. The updates for App Store apps are downloaded from the App Store and require you to have an App Store account, but the system updates are downloaded from a different location, and no account is required.
I administer these things as part of my job. You definitely don't need an account to download system updates.
Do you really want the newly unemployed rear tire installer from the Ford factory diagnosing your chest pain? How about the inner-city high-school dropout?
As a nurse, after undergoing training? Sure. As a doctor, after completing medical school? I don't see why not.
How about the time available to doctors and nurses to treat people? They can only treat so many people.
I'm not sure that counts as a limited resource, since it doesn't explain why we can't scale up on doctors or nurses to meet the demand. After all, we do have unemployment. I'm not saying you don't have a point, but you're being very picky that we get down to the reason why things are so expensive, and your explanation doesn't quite seem adequate. Scarcity of materials for MRIs could be a real limit, but it would only explain why MRIs are expensive. Why is the aspirin in hospitals so expensive? Aspirin isn't meaningfully limited.
Who cares about fragmentation ? There is fragmentation in car models as well and fancy cars that have weird ways to switch on.
Car model fragmentation isn't much of an issue because most people aren't trying to install additional functionality into their cars. They do try to install applications on their phones.
I'm not sure Star Trek counts. We know you don't need engines to maintain speed for conventional propulsion, but we don't know whether you need them to maintain speed with a Warp Drive.
The other two levels of "filtering" apply in person as well.
Not really, or at least not to the same extent. If I meet you in a coffee shop and we talk, or if we have a meeting at your workplace, I will be exposed to a lot of people in addition to you. That's the first level of filtering. In Facebook and email and other online "virtual" environments, you can minimize accidental/incidental interactions.
Second, in either email or in a "virtual meeting", or even in writing this post, I can take more time to compose myself and control the information flow. If we were having an extemporaneous conversation in real life, you'd get get a different tone, a different sense of my personality, and I'd be more likely to expose my real thoughts accidentally.
Well I think it's probably a comment on the fact that what you see on Facebook is filtered on at least 3 levels. First, you choose your friends on Facebook. Second, your friends filter what they post. Third, Facebook will prioritize items in your feed based on an algorithm designed to highlight information it thinks you're interested in.
I don't know that it's called "The Facebook Effect" more generally, but it's been observed in Facebook and Twitter that people end up seeing news stories and opinions that match up with what they already believe and what they would like to believe, which reenforces existing opinions and rarely challenges them. So if you're a staunch Republican, you end up only seeing posts by other Republicans and you think that Republican opinions have become widely accepted. If you're a Democrat, then you only see what other Democrats are posting.
So I think the AC was relating that kind of blindness to virtual interaction in general, and saying that in "virtual meetings" you miss out on some of the ugliness of real-world interaction by having a greater ability to remove yourself from social unpleasantness. While this might sound good, that 'ugliness' can actually be a beneficial force by providing negative feedback which might help to regulate unhealthy behaviors.
I think Congress should have to telecommute over Internet connections that represent the country's median connection speed for people who make minimum wage.
Second, the massive database is a security risk in its own right. The NSA might think the Snowden leak is bad but it's child's play compared to what would happen if somebody leaks that database!
I think this is a great point, and I'm annoyed at how little it's talked about. For whatever argument people put forward about this sort of data collection being a necessary evil in order to maintain security, you don't hear a lot of people pointing out that it's a pretty big security risk. You have a system that can apparently be used to wiretap communications for even high-level political figures with practically no oversight, and nobody sees this as a problem? What if a foreign agency or terrorist group got access? What if they got an operative hired in the sort of position Snowden was in? What kind of damage could they do?
It's too late for the straightforward sensible conversation.
Yeah, I still want to have a straightforward sensible conversation, but it is sort of too late to *just* talk about the question of, "What level of spying are we comfortable with?" We should have had that conversation before they started engaging in domestic spying. Now, since they started doing that without having the conversation, the conversation also needs to include the question of, "What do we do with the people who engaged in this level of spying that we aren't comfortable?" That leads into questions like, "Did they break laws?" and, "Should they go to jail?" and, "Even if they didn't break laws, should we remove them from office?"
All of this is still part of a nice, calm, sensible conversation. Some people in government engaged in behavior that they shouldn't have. At best it was "inappropriate and unethical," and at worst, "highly illegal."
I seem to remember Obama saying recently in a speech that when politicians say, "we need to have a conversation," it actually means that they aren't going to do anything. The way I see it is this: If you're a public figure, the way you "have a conversation" with the public is by making public statements and seeing what the response is. You don't just say, "We need to have a conversation."
There may be some specific instance where I would consider using DRM, but mostly DRM stupidly prevents valid usage while failing to stop a persistent attacker. It's the nature of such things.
That is unless, of course, you're counting all encryption as "DRM". Encryption is useful. But the main reason Microsoft wants to push DRM for personal/business documents is that, by having their own proprietary DRM scheme, they create a stronger form of vendor lock-in. They can make it so that, if you want to read a standard text file, you *need* to be running Windows because the DRM is only supported on Windows. They might even be able to push you to the newest version of Windows/Office because you'll need Windows 10 and Office 2017 to open a generic text file encrypted with Microsoft DRM v3.
Yes, but think about the number of applications that already have a desktop/mobile version. It has kind of already happened. We already have developers making mobile versions of their apps, and mobile developers making desktop versions. The car interface might be as simple as having the mobile version with support for voice, and most of the difficulty of that can be handled by Apple via Siri.
So while the hardware may have merged, the software hasn't, and I think that's where too many people these days go wrong.
Well I would just refine that distinction in saying that the hardware and software have merged, but the interface hasn't. I foresee a possibility that we could each end up carrying around a computer that runs a single OS and a single set of applications, but where the interface conventions shift depending on the context. You dock it at a desk with a keyboard and mouse, and it behaves like a traditional desktop computer. You dock it in a laptop shell, and it expects you to use trackpad gestures. You dock it on a TV, and it lets you use some kind of remote control. You dock it in your car, and it expects you to use voice commands.
If we each have a sufficiently powerful computer in the form factor of a cell phone (or smaller), then we don't necessarily need separate computers all over the place. Within the Apple ecosystem, you don't really need an iMac *and* a Macbook *and* an iPad *and* an iPhone *and* an AppleTV *and* a Siri-powered onboard computer in your car. Maybe you only need one or two small computers that can take on the appropriate interface for the context in which you use it.
Honestly, it does work a lot. I work in IT and have had to help clients get control of various kinds of accounts to which they have lost usernames, passwords, and other vital information. You know, things like, "A previous employee bought our domain name and set up the DNS for us using his personal account. His name is on the account. We don't know what the associated email address is. We certainly don't have the password. We've tried contacting this ex-employee, and found that his phone number doesn't work anymore."
And really, you'd be surprised what you can get if you call up, sound professional and honest, and just ask people to help you out. Domain registrations are generally kind of a pain in the butt, but even those usually just require some faxed documentation. I've had some accounts (not domain registrations) where the support basically said, "Oh, you're supposed to have access? Let me just reset the password for you." It's pretty disturbing. But then I also legitimately need to do this sort of thing all the time because businesses rarely pay any attention to these things.
I don't agree. I think Apple is going to have a convergence device in the next few years. What makes this claim ridiculous is not the idea that Apple will have a convergence device, but that it was inspired by Shuttleworth. On the contrary, I think there have been signs along the way that Apple had it in mind for years.
I think you're right in that Apple is not Microsoft. They won't try to force you into using an iOS interface on the desktop. But they can have "one OS to rule them all" without having "one GUI to rule them all, all the time." I think what they're moving toward is something smarter than that. Imagine instead that someone offered you an iPhone right now that had 500GB of hard drive space and computational power equivalent to an iMac, and a thunderbolt port instead of a lightning port. Through the Thunderbolt port, you could connect it to a Thunderbolt display, which gets you an 27" monitor, several USB ports, a Firewire port, an ethernet port, webcam and microphone, etc. Now once you had that, you could make the iPhone run a full version of MacOS, and only displaying the iOS GUI while undocked.
Dock the iPhone, you have a full computer. Undock it, and you have an iPhone with an appropriate UI. You could even develop the apps with a framework that runs the same app using a different UI depending on screen size. If you look at the developments and acquisitions Apple has made over the years, it seems like they're at least entertaining the idea of something like that.
So why haven't they done it? Well if we look back at the iPhone development, Apple was developing an iPhone for years before it was released. They were developing iPads at the same time, even though iPads were released years later. Apparently Steve Jobs refused to go with any of the prototypes that they had made before 2007 because he wasn't happy with the feature set they could produce. A big part of the problem is they couldn't squeeze the power/storage they wanted into something as compact as they wanted it to be. I would suggest that the same thing is going on now. They probably have working prototypes of iPads that run a full version of OSX, and become normal computers when docked, but they won't productize it until they can make one that's as small and lightweight as an iPad while being competitive with a Macbook Air. I also wouldn't be surprised if the release coincided with Apple using their own processors (some successor to the A7) for their computers.
You're the one who brought consciousness into the conversation. My point was that, at least as far as I'm understanding it, talking about it in terms of "information" makes it no less about consciousness than the Copenhagen Interpretation. I may still be missing something, though.
Well it's important to note that your "precise mathematical definition" was not a concept that we started with and applied an unfortunate word to it. The "precise technical meaning" was an attempt to refine and nail down what 'information' meant in the context of talking about the information that could be gathered from a physical system.
In other words, the concept of talking about "information" in relativity and quantum mechanics began with talking about 'information' in the normal, everyday usage. As these scientific fields progressed, people wanted to be more clear about what that really meant in these contexts, and so they developed more specific distinctions of what they intended when they used the word.
That's pretty much always how these "precise technical meanings" originate, with some guy trying to explain something using common ideas, the listener getting confused, and the speaker attempting to clarify by being more specific. These terms were not handed down on high from the Science God who knows how the universe actually works.
So the fact that it's a scientific term doesn't give it absolute authority. You still have to ask what it means, and it still means something like 'information' in the proper sense. Information still implies an observer who can make use of the information, and it still bound up with consciousness.
So, in the case of Young's Slits, why is it that when *we* try to interact with a photon its wavefunction collapses (ie. a measurement is made), but it *doesn't* happen when the slits themselves interact with the photons
Well I thought the point is that the slits *are* interacting with the photon, which is why you get interference patterns. Interfering with the light in a way that would require it go through one slit or the other will cause it to go through one slit regardless of what you're "trying" to do. It's not about intention or consciousness.
Personally, I think your notion of "information flow" makes it more weird, spooky, and bound up with consciousness. Because what determines whether a thing is "information" if not consciousness?
It reminds me of how people talk about relativity, and how things can move faster than light as long as they don't contain information. Speaking of it that way implies that we could send a signal back in time, so long as it message was garbled and unintelligible, which is not the point. To my understanding, it's more a way of determining whether the "faster than light" travel is somehow illusory.
Well I wonder if they understand how big and interesting a problem they're trying to tackle. I would state the problem as this: Is it at all possible to create a system which, in the unclear context of 'real life' and all the things related, always makes a correct determination?
If we can invent a logical system that does that, it would be the first of its kind.
Do you actually know what you're talking about, or have you just read too much science fiction? I don't remember the Copenhagen Interpretation being related to "consciousness", either in the requirement that an observer be "conscious" or in using quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. Are you sure that's not just some whacky interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation that people have come up with more recently, due to misunderstanding?
Slashdot Mirror
They're sort of framing the question as, "If you ride a bike, could you get hurt?" The answer is, of course, yes. But then, you can get injured while taking a shower. It's pretty sensationalistic saying, 'Lots of my colleagues do not want to ride after seeing these [city biking] injuries.' It's an anecdotal and emotional response, and it doesn't really help to explain the issue.
The question should be, "What is the rate (accounting for severity) of injury in a population, comparing bicycles and other alternate modes of transportation?" I'm sure that formulation could be improved, but a question like that is more appropriate. So if we encourage cycling in New York City, will the total number and severity of injuries increase or decrease? Could someone provide something factual or scientific regarding that specifically?
Because as a logical thought experiment, I would guess that if we stopped using cars for personal transportation completely and rode bicycles instead, I would guess that you'd see an increase in minor injuries (e.g. people falling and skinning their knees), but a huge decrease in serious injuries and fatalities. While we've commonly seen around 40,000 car-related fatalities per year (more than 10x the number of people who died in 9/11, every single year), if you take cars out of the equation, I would bet you'd see very few cycling-related fatalities. Even if you have a serious bicycle crash without a helmet, unless you're hit by a car or truck, you probably won't suffer a permanent injury.
Securty is a process, not a technology.
Not only that, but people really should understand that *security is not about absolutes*. Things are not either "secure" or "insecure". Well executed security is essentially about a trade-off between "easy accessibility for authorized usage" and "difficult accessibility for unauthorized usage".
The only way to "completely secure" a computer hard drive, for example, is to completely destroy it. Otherwise, there is some risk that someone can eventually gain access to it and recover some data. Short of that, I can put it in a cement block and sink it in a deep trench in the ocean, which would make it very secure and also very inaccessible. I can encrypt the drive, and then the security task shifts to securing the encryption key (ignoring the possibility of cracking the encryption).
But ultimately, one of the key problems with security is that it's not just about preventing access by an unauthorized person, but also about preventing unauthorized usage by an authorized person. If I give you access to some documents because you need access for legitimate reasons, then I can't really then prevent you from using the information in those documents for some other purpose. A lot of malware ends up on computer systems because someone hit "OK" and granted access. As long as someone has admin rights and can hit "OK" to install software, malware will be able to be installed by tricking that person.
You are correct. What people don't realize is that there are actually two different update mechanisms behind the "App Store" updates. When you check for updates, Apple displays the updates for applications purchased from the App Store along with updates for the OS-- but the fact that they're displayed together doesn't mean that they behave exactly the same way. The updates for App Store apps are downloaded from the App Store and require you to have an App Store account, but the system updates are downloaded from a different location, and no account is required.
I administer these things as part of my job. You definitely don't need an account to download system updates.
Do you really want the newly unemployed rear tire installer from the Ford factory diagnosing your chest pain? How about the inner-city high-school dropout?
As a nurse, after undergoing training? Sure. As a doctor, after completing medical school? I don't see why not.
How about the time available to doctors and nurses to treat people? They can only treat so many people.
I'm not sure that counts as a limited resource, since it doesn't explain why we can't scale up on doctors or nurses to meet the demand. After all, we do have unemployment. I'm not saying you don't have a point, but you're being very picky that we get down to the reason why things are so expensive, and your explanation doesn't quite seem adequate. Scarcity of materials for MRIs could be a real limit, but it would only explain why MRIs are expensive. Why is the aspirin in hospitals so expensive? Aspirin isn't meaningfully limited.
This isn't a simple supply and demand issue.
Which limited services are you referring to? What's the limit?
Who cares about fragmentation ? There is fragmentation in car models as well and fancy cars that have weird ways to switch on.
Car model fragmentation isn't much of an issue because most people aren't trying to install additional functionality into their cars. They do try to install applications on their phones.
I'm not sure Star Trek counts. We know you don't need engines to maintain speed for conventional propulsion, but we don't know whether you need them to maintain speed with a Warp Drive.
The other two levels of "filtering" apply in person as well.
Not really, or at least not to the same extent. If I meet you in a coffee shop and we talk, or if we have a meeting at your workplace, I will be exposed to a lot of people in addition to you. That's the first level of filtering. In Facebook and email and other online "virtual" environments, you can minimize accidental/incidental interactions.
Second, in either email or in a "virtual meeting", or even in writing this post, I can take more time to compose myself and control the information flow. If we were having an extemporaneous conversation in real life, you'd get get a different tone, a different sense of my personality, and I'd be more likely to expose my real thoughts accidentally.
Well I think it's probably a comment on the fact that what you see on Facebook is filtered on at least 3 levels. First, you choose your friends on Facebook. Second, your friends filter what they post. Third, Facebook will prioritize items in your feed based on an algorithm designed to highlight information it thinks you're interested in.
I don't know that it's called "The Facebook Effect" more generally, but it's been observed in Facebook and Twitter that people end up seeing news stories and opinions that match up with what they already believe and what they would like to believe, which reenforces existing opinions and rarely challenges them. So if you're a staunch Republican, you end up only seeing posts by other Republicans and you think that Republican opinions have become widely accepted. If you're a Democrat, then you only see what other Democrats are posting.
So I think the AC was relating that kind of blindness to virtual interaction in general, and saying that in "virtual meetings" you miss out on some of the ugliness of real-world interaction by having a greater ability to remove yourself from social unpleasantness. While this might sound good, that 'ugliness' can actually be a beneficial force by providing negative feedback which might help to regulate unhealthy behaviors.
I think Congress should have to telecommute over Internet connections that represent the country's median connection speed for people who make minimum wage.
Second, the massive database is a security risk in its own right. The NSA might think the Snowden leak is bad but it's child's play compared to what would happen if somebody leaks that database!
I think this is a great point, and I'm annoyed at how little it's talked about. For whatever argument people put forward about this sort of data collection being a necessary evil in order to maintain security, you don't hear a lot of people pointing out that it's a pretty big security risk. You have a system that can apparently be used to wiretap communications for even high-level political figures with practically no oversight, and nobody sees this as a problem? What if a foreign agency or terrorist group got access? What if they got an operative hired in the sort of position Snowden was in? What kind of damage could they do?
It's too late for the straightforward sensible conversation.
Yeah, I still want to have a straightforward sensible conversation, but it is sort of too late to *just* talk about the question of, "What level of spying are we comfortable with?" We should have had that conversation before they started engaging in domestic spying. Now, since they started doing that without having the conversation, the conversation also needs to include the question of, "What do we do with the people who engaged in this level of spying that we aren't comfortable?" That leads into questions like, "Did they break laws?" and, "Should they go to jail?" and, "Even if they didn't break laws, should we remove them from office?"
All of this is still part of a nice, calm, sensible conversation. Some people in government engaged in behavior that they shouldn't have. At best it was "inappropriate and unethical," and at worst, "highly illegal."
I seem to remember Obama saying recently in a speech that when politicians say, "we need to have a conversation," it actually means that they aren't going to do anything. The way I see it is this: If you're a public figure, the way you "have a conversation" with the public is by making public statements and seeing what the response is. You don't just say, "We need to have a conversation."
There may be some specific instance where I would consider using DRM, but mostly DRM stupidly prevents valid usage while failing to stop a persistent attacker. It's the nature of such things.
That is unless, of course, you're counting all encryption as "DRM". Encryption is useful. But the main reason Microsoft wants to push DRM for personal/business documents is that, by having their own proprietary DRM scheme, they create a stronger form of vendor lock-in. They can make it so that, if you want to read a standard text file, you *need* to be running Windows because the DRM is only supported on Windows. They might even be able to push you to the newest version of Windows/Office because you'll need Windows 10 and Office 2017 to open a generic text file encrypted with Microsoft DRM v3.
Yes, but think about the number of applications that already have a desktop/mobile version. It has kind of already happened. We already have developers making mobile versions of their apps, and mobile developers making desktop versions. The car interface might be as simple as having the mobile version with support for voice, and most of the difficulty of that can be handled by Apple via Siri.
It's not so crazy.
So while the hardware may have merged, the software hasn't, and I think that's where too many people these days go wrong.
Well I would just refine that distinction in saying that the hardware and software have merged, but the interface hasn't. I foresee a possibility that we could each end up carrying around a computer that runs a single OS and a single set of applications, but where the interface conventions shift depending on the context. You dock it at a desk with a keyboard and mouse, and it behaves like a traditional desktop computer. You dock it in a laptop shell, and it expects you to use trackpad gestures. You dock it on a TV, and it lets you use some kind of remote control. You dock it in your car, and it expects you to use voice commands.
If we each have a sufficiently powerful computer in the form factor of a cell phone (or smaller), then we don't necessarily need separate computers all over the place. Within the Apple ecosystem, you don't really need an iMac *and* a Macbook *and* an iPad *and* an iPhone *and* an AppleTV *and* a Siri-powered onboard computer in your car. Maybe you only need one or two small computers that can take on the appropriate interface for the context in which you use it.
Honestly, it does work a lot. I work in IT and have had to help clients get control of various kinds of accounts to which they have lost usernames, passwords, and other vital information. You know, things like, "A previous employee bought our domain name and set up the DNS for us using his personal account. His name is on the account. We don't know what the associated email address is. We certainly don't have the password. We've tried contacting this ex-employee, and found that his phone number doesn't work anymore."
And really, you'd be surprised what you can get if you call up, sound professional and honest, and just ask people to help you out. Domain registrations are generally kind of a pain in the butt, but even those usually just require some faxed documentation. I've had some accounts (not domain registrations) where the support basically said, "Oh, you're supposed to have access? Let me just reset the password for you." It's pretty disturbing. But then I also legitimately need to do this sort of thing all the time because businesses rarely pay any attention to these things.
I don't agree. I think Apple is going to have a convergence device in the next few years. What makes this claim ridiculous is not the idea that Apple will have a convergence device, but that it was inspired by Shuttleworth. On the contrary, I think there have been signs along the way that Apple had it in mind for years.
I think you're right in that Apple is not Microsoft. They won't try to force you into using an iOS interface on the desktop. But they can have "one OS to rule them all" without having "one GUI to rule them all, all the time." I think what they're moving toward is something smarter than that. Imagine instead that someone offered you an iPhone right now that had 500GB of hard drive space and computational power equivalent to an iMac, and a thunderbolt port instead of a lightning port. Through the Thunderbolt port, you could connect it to a Thunderbolt display, which gets you an 27" monitor, several USB ports, a Firewire port, an ethernet port, webcam and microphone, etc. Now once you had that, you could make the iPhone run a full version of MacOS, and only displaying the iOS GUI while undocked.
Dock the iPhone, you have a full computer. Undock it, and you have an iPhone with an appropriate UI. You could even develop the apps with a framework that runs the same app using a different UI depending on screen size. If you look at the developments and acquisitions Apple has made over the years, it seems like they're at least entertaining the idea of something like that.
So why haven't they done it? Well if we look back at the iPhone development, Apple was developing an iPhone for years before it was released. They were developing iPads at the same time, even though iPads were released years later. Apparently Steve Jobs refused to go with any of the prototypes that they had made before 2007 because he wasn't happy with the feature set they could produce. A big part of the problem is they couldn't squeeze the power/storage they wanted into something as compact as they wanted it to be. I would suggest that the same thing is going on now. They probably have working prototypes of iPads that run a full version of OSX, and become normal computers when docked, but they won't productize it until they can make one that's as small and lightweight as an iPad while being competitive with a Macbook Air. I also wouldn't be surprised if the release coincided with Apple using their own processors (some successor to the A7) for their computers.
Yet traditionally that's how a lot of "hackers" that you hear about have "hacked" into systems. But I know what you mean.
You're the one who brought consciousness into the conversation. My point was that, at least as far as I'm understanding it, talking about it in terms of "information" makes it no less about consciousness than the Copenhagen Interpretation. I may still be missing something, though.
Well it's important to note that your "precise mathematical definition" was not a concept that we started with and applied an unfortunate word to it. The "precise technical meaning" was an attempt to refine and nail down what 'information' meant in the context of talking about the information that could be gathered from a physical system.
In other words, the concept of talking about "information" in relativity and quantum mechanics began with talking about 'information' in the normal, everyday usage. As these scientific fields progressed, people wanted to be more clear about what that really meant in these contexts, and so they developed more specific distinctions of what they intended when they used the word.
That's pretty much always how these "precise technical meanings" originate, with some guy trying to explain something using common ideas, the listener getting confused, and the speaker attempting to clarify by being more specific. These terms were not handed down on high from the Science God who knows how the universe actually works.
So the fact that it's a scientific term doesn't give it absolute authority. You still have to ask what it means, and it still means something like 'information' in the proper sense. Information still implies an observer who can make use of the information, and it still bound up with consciousness.
So, in the case of Young's Slits, why is it that when *we* try to interact with a photon its wavefunction collapses (ie. a measurement is made), but it *doesn't* happen when the slits themselves interact with the photons
Well I thought the point is that the slits *are* interacting with the photon, which is why you get interference patterns. Interfering with the light in a way that would require it go through one slit or the other will cause it to go through one slit regardless of what you're "trying" to do. It's not about intention or consciousness.
Personally, I think your notion of "information flow" makes it more weird, spooky, and bound up with consciousness. Because what determines whether a thing is "information" if not consciousness?
It reminds me of how people talk about relativity, and how things can move faster than light as long as they don't contain information. Speaking of it that way implies that we could send a signal back in time, so long as it message was garbled and unintelligible, which is not the point. To my understanding, it's more a way of determining whether the "faster than light" travel is somehow illusory.
Well I wonder if they understand how big and interesting a problem they're trying to tackle. I would state the problem as this: Is it at all possible to create a system which, in the unclear context of 'real life' and all the things related, always makes a correct determination?
If we can invent a logical system that does that, it would be the first of its kind.
Do you actually know what you're talking about, or have you just read too much science fiction? I don't remember the Copenhagen Interpretation being related to "consciousness", either in the requirement that an observer be "conscious" or in using quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. Are you sure that's not just some whacky interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation that people have come up with more recently, due to misunderstanding?