What I usually do is put it in silicon storage. I have a very large glass grid with pits in it about every 3 mm. I then put a single grains of sand in the pits. A pit with sand is a 1, and a pit with no sand is a 0. As long as I don't breathe too hard on it, it works great! And its all solid state, so it'll last for ages!
Re:Irregardless, it's not like anyone cares
on
NY Times On Spam Zombies
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· Score: 2, Informative
You're quite correct. It doesn't make you any smarter. However, it does have a few positive effects:
You don't sound like a 15-year old who slept through elementary school English class, which in turn gains the respect of other people, which in turn helps you to do a lot of things, among others, get a job.
Other people understand what you mean. It is true that in most cases it is fairly trivial to infer the meaning, but there are cases in which both the phrasing which was actually used and the phrasing which was intended form logical, sensible sentences. In this case, the meaning becomes ambiguous.
In answer to your question "Who cares?", many people do. Your professors, publishers, potential (and current) employers, people you do business with, just to name a few.
Amen. One of my closest friends growing up is now a drug addict, in and out of prison, (mostly on incidental wrong place wrong time stuff, but some of it legit, and fact is, he put himself in that place at that time) etc. He was just fine until his mom ran off with some guy when we were ~12.
My girlfriend tells me her brother orders DVDs from Netflix, rips and burns them, and sends them back to get new ones as soon as he is done. Which is a little bit odd, as 1) unless I am mistaken (never having used Netflix myself, I very well could be) it does cost something and 2) he spends all of his time either doing that or playing FPS games and never actually watches any movies.
Oh! Thanks, several days late. I think we need at least a little bit of Quantum Field Theory (a grad level subject) to really understand this. I have some vague idea of what unitarity is, after taking my two semesters of undergrad QM, and attending a number of way-over-my-head guest lectures, but I don't really understand it either.
Yes indeed. I quite agree. My previous post was firmly tongue-in-cheek. Her cheek that is.
Re:One thing I'm a bit confused about...
on
Kernel 2.6.12 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, but one of Linux's strengths, and selling points, has traditionally been its stability. If we throw that out the window, then people will start drifting away to other systems, and then we'll have even *fewer* people using the buggy kernels. Calling buggy code "production" is a M$ tactic. And one of the reasons I moved away from that platform.
Except that everthing in the universe is *continuously* observed by everything else in the universe, and "uncollapsed" wave states are an accounting fiction.
You misunderstand the meaning of "observation". A single observation does not simply collapse the system to a completely deterministic state. It collapses it so that whatever property of the system was measured is now completely determined. As I said, other properties are now undetermined. There is really no qualitative difference between a "collapsed" and an "uncollapsed" wave state. For example, if I measured the position of an electron, then at the moment I measured it, the wave function would collapse to a Dirac Delta function spike about whatever point position the measurement yielded. However, the wave-function (the exact same wave-function, collapsed now) when expressed in momentum space, is completely uncollapsed, in fact, if I measure the position *exactly*, then the momentum space wave function is now uniform, ie all momentum eigenvalues have an equal probability of being measured. Similarly, the wave-function expressed in say angular momentum space is uniform. So, is the electron wave state "collapsed" or "uncollapsed"? No. In fact, there is never any state which could be described as "collapsed" or "uncollapsed". For a particular property, yes. For the system as a whole, no.
Yes, electrons do not exist in isolation, as textbook problems put them, but the continuous interaction does not mean that all uncertainty is destroyed. It means, at any given instant, whatever interaction has just taken place may have collapsed the position-space wave-function, or the momentum-space wave-function, or kinetic-energy-space wave-function, or whathaveyou, but the wave-state itself is still neither "collapsed" nor "uncollapsed".
So, basically, I'm afraid when you say "uncollapsed" wave states it is rather meaningless... I think perhaps you meant to say "Uncollapsed wave states are a fiction produced by not really understanding the theory." Which would of course account for why we've never observed any "collapsed" wave states.
Yes, but if you wanted new features sooner under the old system, all you had to do was use the 2.odd.x series of kernels. I don't see that we gained anything by throwing out the idea of having a stable series of kernels. How can we convince/ask Linus et al to return to the old system?
In pure quantum mechanics, time is a special property because wave function collapse via quantum operators (i.e. "observation") is a privileged thing that moves in only one direction. In general relativity, time doesn't have a privileged status.
In nonrelativistic QM you mean. In the Dirac and Klein-Gordon equations, time is treated identically with the other dimensions, ie, the Dirac and Klein-Gordon equations are Lorentz invariant. So, yes, time-reversal is something that must be dealt with in relativistic QM. Unfortunately, these equations only describe a few very restricted situations, so they are not as generally applicable as the Schroedinger equation. Also, they only include special relativity, not general relativity, which seems to be where the time-travel is coming from in the as you said frustratingly vague article.
More bad science in the article:
Quantum behaviour is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured those possibilities shrink to one - uncertainty is eliminated.
This is a common misconception. Prior to an observation, any system has a perfectly well defined state: its wave-function. This state, however, may or may not determine various properties of the system. In fact, for a given wave-function, or state, most properties (ie position, velocity, kinetic energy, etc) are restricted to a certain set of eigenvalues, and the wave-function merely determines the probability that a measurement of that property will yield any particular eigenvalue. Immediately after the measurement, the system will be in a state such that that particular property is exactly determined (ie the wave-function will have changed so that the probability of measuring that value for that property is 1, and the probability of measuring any other eigenvalue for that property is 0). This is called the collapse of the wave-function. However, other properties, some of which may have been uniquely determined by the previous wave-function, some of which were not, are now not uniquely determined.
In other words, what the article said was precisely wrong. Any system always has exactly one state which it is in, and after a measurement (or observation), whatever was measured is no longer uncertain, but most other properties are still uncertain.
IANA Physicist, yet. I have just finished my junior level undergrad physics courses, and am currently working for the summer at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Just to establish credentials.
Why, oh why must our slashdot science section only post links to badly written articles by journalists who don't have a clue about the actual science? Why do we not have a link to the actual paper? Ack! There is not even a link to a paper, not even a reference or a clue as to where it might be found in the article!
Ok, that just made the decision for me... I was on the verge of subscribing, or waiting until my birthday to find out that noone had gotten me a subscription. (I would tell someone I wanted it of course) But, a free issue I would not get with a birthday subscription.
Futhermore, warrants developed not to allow authorities to search your home, but rather to provide a shield of of immunity from something like a tort suit by ther searchee against the searchor.
Very good point. So, supposing the FBI came in to search my property (of whatever sort, although I guess library records are not my property) then I could sue them, and then, depending on how much money I had (ie what lawyers I had), might be able to take it all the way to the Supreme Court and get something overturned. Is that correct? That would be the real test. Of course, I'm not really sure of the details of PATRIOT, but does it require warrants for searches or not?
Slashdot Mirror
What I usually do is put it in silicon storage. I have a very large glass grid with pits in it about every 3 mm. I then put a single grains of sand in the pits. A pit with sand is a 1, and a pit with no sand is a 0. As long as I don't breathe too hard on it, it works great! And its all solid state, so it'll last for ages!
They're not standards. Period. See here.
You're quite correct. It doesn't make you any smarter. However, it does have a few positive effects:
You don't sound like a 15-year old who slept through elementary school English class, which in turn gains the respect of other people, which in turn helps you to do a lot of things, among others, get a job.
Other people understand what you mean. It is true that in most cases it is fairly trivial to infer the meaning, but there are cases in which both the phrasing which was actually used and the phrasing which was intended form logical, sensible sentences. In this case, the meaning becomes ambiguous.
In answer to your question "Who cares?", many people do. Your professors, publishers, potential (and current) employers, people you do business with, just to name a few.
something like that anyway... oh, never mind.
I think of the virus writers more as maggots... Feeding on the flesh of the wounded and dying. Growing up to one day become flies??
Near the beginning of the post, in the green box, we have:
author | Greg Wilson
And yet, in the final paragraph we see:
In spite of them, it is still a very good and useful book and Mark Wilson has done a good job with a topic all too often ignored.
What's going on?
I suspect that he did, in fact mean electrically charged. See here: http://rtreport.ksc.nasa.gov/techreports/2001repor t/200/206.html
Ah, after an email to the editor, they've added the reference and a link to the abstract! Good BBC. Sit. Stay.
I'm in. I would gladly pay to fund an non trusted-computing network. Count me among the free souls.
Amen. One of my closest friends growing up is now a drug addict, in and out of prison, (mostly on incidental wrong place wrong time stuff, but some of it legit, and fact is, he put himself in that place at that time) etc. He was just fine until his mom ran off with some guy when we were ~12.
My girlfriend tells me her brother orders DVDs from Netflix, rips and burns them, and sends them back to get new ones as soon as he is done. Which is a little bit odd, as 1) unless I am mistaken (never having used Netflix myself, I very well could be) it does cost something and 2) he spends all of his time either doing that or playing FPS games and never actually watches any movies.
Oh! Thanks, several days late. I think we need at least a little bit of Quantum Field Theory (a grad level subject) to really understand this. I have some vague idea of what unitarity is, after taking my two semesters of undergrad QM, and attending a number of way-over-my-head guest lectures, but I don't really understand it either.
Yeah, and we just learned the other day that you can go back in time, so long as you know your dad is in the next room!
you can't use it for "adult" transactions
You must live in another country, because I know the slave trade is illegal in the US, even if it's not children.
I'm off to go deface it right now!
Yes indeed. I quite agree. My previous post was firmly tongue-in-cheek. Her cheek that is.
Yes, but one of Linux's strengths, and selling points, has traditionally been its stability. If we throw that out the window, then people will start drifting away to other systems, and then we'll have even *fewer* people using the buggy kernels. Calling buggy code "production" is a M$ tactic. And one of the reasons I moved away from that platform.
Except that everthing in the universe is *continuously* observed by everything else in the universe, and "uncollapsed" wave states are an accounting fiction.
You misunderstand the meaning of "observation". A single observation does not simply collapse the system to a completely deterministic state. It collapses it so that whatever property of the system was measured is now completely determined. As I said, other properties are now undetermined. There is really no qualitative difference between a "collapsed" and an "uncollapsed" wave state. For example, if I measured the position of an electron, then at the moment I measured it, the wave function would collapse to a Dirac Delta function spike about whatever point position the measurement yielded. However, the wave-function (the exact same wave-function, collapsed now) when expressed in momentum space, is completely uncollapsed, in fact, if I measure the position *exactly*, then the momentum space wave function is now uniform, ie all momentum eigenvalues have an equal probability of being measured. Similarly, the wave-function expressed in say angular momentum space is uniform. So, is the electron wave state "collapsed" or "uncollapsed"? No. In fact, there is never any state which could be described as "collapsed" or "uncollapsed". For a particular property, yes. For the system as a whole, no.
Yes, electrons do not exist in isolation, as textbook problems put them, but the continuous interaction does not mean that all uncertainty is destroyed. It means, at any given instant, whatever interaction has just taken place may have collapsed the position-space wave-function, or the momentum-space wave-function, or kinetic-energy-space wave-function, or whathaveyou, but the wave-state itself is still neither "collapsed" nor "uncollapsed".
So, basically, I'm afraid when you say "uncollapsed" wave states it is rather meaningless... I think perhaps you meant to say "Uncollapsed wave states are a fiction produced by not really understanding the theory." Which would of course account for why we've never observed any "collapsed" wave states.
Yes, but if you wanted new features sooner under the old system, all you had to do was use the 2.odd.x series of kernels. I don't see that we gained anything by throwing out the idea of having a stable series of kernels. How can we convince/ask Linus et al to return to the old system?
What? you don't love code?
In pure quantum mechanics, time is a special property because wave function collapse via quantum operators (i.e. "observation") is a privileged thing that moves in only one direction. In general relativity, time doesn't have a privileged status.
In nonrelativistic QM you mean. In the Dirac and Klein-Gordon equations, time is treated identically with the other dimensions, ie, the Dirac and Klein-Gordon equations are Lorentz invariant. So, yes, time-reversal is something that must be dealt with in relativistic QM. Unfortunately, these equations only describe a few very restricted situations, so they are not as generally applicable as the Schroedinger equation. Also, they only include special relativity, not general relativity, which seems to be where the time-travel is coming from in the as you said frustratingly vague article.
More bad science in the article:
Quantum behaviour is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured those possibilities shrink to one - uncertainty is eliminated.
This is a common misconception. Prior to an observation, any system has a perfectly well defined state: its wave-function. This state, however, may or may not determine various properties of the system. In fact, for a given wave-function, or state, most properties (ie position, velocity, kinetic energy, etc) are restricted to a certain set of eigenvalues, and the wave-function merely determines the probability that a measurement of that property will yield any particular eigenvalue. Immediately after the measurement, the system will be in a state such that that particular property is exactly determined (ie the wave-function will have changed so that the probability of measuring that value for that property is 1, and the probability of measuring any other eigenvalue for that property is 0). This is called the collapse of the wave-function. However, other properties, some of which may have been uniquely determined by the previous wave-function, some of which were not, are now not uniquely determined.
In other words, what the article said was precisely wrong. Any system always has exactly one state which it is in, and after a measurement (or observation), whatever was measured is no longer uncertain, but most other properties are still uncertain.
IANA Physicist, yet. I have just finished my junior level undergrad physics courses, and am currently working for the summer at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Just to establish credentials.
Why, oh why must our slashdot science section only post links to badly written articles by journalists who don't have a clue about the actual science? Why do we not have a link to the actual paper? Ack! There is not even a link to a paper, not even a reference or a clue as to where it might be found in the article!
Ok, that just made the decision for me... I was on the verge of subscribing, or waiting until my birthday to find out that noone had gotten me a subscription. (I would tell someone I wanted it of course) But, a free issue I would not get with a birthday subscription.
actually, they're using gmake.
Futhermore, warrants developed not to allow authorities to search your home, but rather to provide a shield of of immunity from something like a tort suit by ther searchee against the searchor.
Very good point. So, supposing the FBI came in to search my property (of whatever sort, although I guess library records are not my property) then I could sue them, and then, depending on how much money I had (ie what lawyers I had), might be able to take it all the way to the Supreme Court and get something overturned. Is that correct? That would be the real test. Of course, I'm not really sure of the details of PATRIOT, but does it require warrants for searches or not?