I started playing with Arduinos a year ago, and even though I live in Silicon Valley where I can go to Fry's or (even better) Halted, if all I need are a couple of LEDs or resistors or some solder or a 555 timer, it's really convenient to be able to stop in to my neighborhood store on the way to the grocery instead of making a longer trip. Sure, the selection's not extensive (especially for connectors of various types or microcontrollers), but if I just smoked the last green LED or need a resistor value I don't have, they're usually ok.
One of the really annoying things about atheism as a possible alternative to Christianity or other religions that involve an afterlife is that you don't get to know if you were right or wrong. I'm sorry, but when I die, if I don't get a real afterlife or some ghostly existence or reincarnation, I at least want the guy with the scythe to show up and tell me "SORRY, DUDE, THAT'S ALL YOU GET, TIME'S UP." And atheists tell me I won't even get that.
Most of the neurological theories about consciousness treat it as a complex software process of some part running on brain hardware that's built to do a bunch of things which facilitate it. Most of the physics-related theories about how quantum mechanics affects the brain are that it makes the chemistry a bit noisy (as do all the other things affecting heat and vibration of molecules), so it may occasionally affect how many electrons get involved in a signal or how fast the ions moving around in fluid inside a cell move, so it may occasionally affect whether a synapse triggers, where "affect" isn't anything more than just a bit of noise in the timing. Is that enough to say that "quantum mechanics explains consciousness"? I don't think it's likely. If you want to argue that there's quantum entanglement spreading around the brain making signals happen spookily at a distance, feel free to find some appropriate equations to model it.
On the other hand, I'd really like to be able to say there's something other than deterministic materialist physics going on here, because that might possibly be a way for some kind of soul to be attached to the body that might persist after the body dies, and might have a whole bunch of other philosophical implications that are rather deeply embedded in Western philosophy (and also Eastern philosophy, in somewhat different ways), like free will and meaning and such, and to do that, the physics in your head needs some kind of hooks for the soul to mess around with, which probably have to involve quantum mechanics because there's really not much else that could do the job. But that doesn't mean those hooks are lined up in a way that a soul can grab onto them and shake them in any direction that usefully affects consciousness.
Tall Aussie guy, long hair, wears leather jackets, sings a mean Zombie Blues*. Chalmers, who's a philosopher, and Stu Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, started a series of conferences at the University of Arizona on "Towards a Science of Consciousness" a decade or two ago; they alternate between Tucson and Somewhere-outside-North-America, and attract a mixed crowd of neuroscientists, consciousness researchers, philosophers who talk about phenomenology, FMRI imagers, tourists (e.g. me), and a few newagey people and random cranks. A few years ago, there were two "Science and Consciousness" conferences in Arizona around the same time - the scientific one in Tucson, and the Deepak Chopra one in Phoenix**.
Hameroff's done work with Penrose on things like quantum effects in microtubules (which are brain cell parts that are small enough to actually have quantum activity going on, though it's a very long step from saying "quantum noise might be affecting chemical reactions a bit" to "Woo-woo! Consciousness is, like, Quantum, man!". I can't say I really understand Stu's arguments about the connections, because while I know a certain amount of quantum physics and biology and philosophy, I don't do neurology or brain cell structures or phenomenology, so the couple of conferences I got to were interesting and a very steep learning curve.
From one perspective, either the world, and therefore consciousness, are entirely deterministic, or else they're not. (Deterministic doesn't mean calculable - Heisenberg among others make it very clear that you can't really simulate the universe using machinery smaller than the universe - but from a philosophical standpoint it doesn't matter if humans can predict what you're doing to do, it just matters whether you've got free will about it.) If you'd like things to be non-deterministic, physics doesn't give you very many ways to hook that into the world, and you're pretty much stuck with quantum mechanics.*** Does that mean that quantum entanglement is involved in any of the processes, particularly between neurons that aren't directly adjacent to each other? Not necessarily (IMHO, probably not.) Does it mean that a non-physical spirit can grab onto some molecules and shake them around in ways that translate up to conscious thoughts, or does it just mean that the chemistry's a bit noisier because God's playing dice with the Universe but your consciousness is still fundamentally a materialist process?
* "Zombie" is a term of art, referring to a hypothetical person or machine that reacts externally as if it were conscious, but doesn't actually perceive qualia the way conscious beings claim that we do, so for instance it can tell you which ball is the red one or the green one, but doesn't experience redness or greenness. ** So of course Chopra caught on to this, and has been one of the sponsors of the more recent round or two of the scientific conference, and he and Hameroff have put out one or two popular press articles together. There are a number of meditation people who come to the conference, but they tend to be the serious "Here's what an FMRI shows about blood flow in your brain while you're meditating" folks, while the cranks are more likely to have opinions about quantum. *** There are some theories of quantum mechanics that say it's still deterministic, just with underlying hidden variables that we can't observe or measure, but it's been too many decades since college physics for me to remember if those got disproved or are still around.
An IPv6 address has two-and-a-half parts - the network bits your ISP knows about (typically 56 or 48), maybe some subnet bits you control (typically 8-16), and the host bits on each subnet (64.) Sometimes the host bits are assigned by hand (your router might be:what:ever::1), or by DHCP, but they're usually derived automatically from the hardware address of your Ethernet card (48 bits of MAC plus padding, or 64 bits of EUI-64 which would be more likely for lightbulbs.) MAC and EUI-64 addresses have a manufacturer part and an individual-device part.
So if your lightbulb uses automatically assigned addresses, it's going to look something like:56-bits-ISP : 8-subnet : 32-mfr : 32-bulb:, and if you're running a lightbulb database, you can track the 64 bits that belong to the bulb just fine, regardless of how much renumbering you do with the network parts.
The original goals of IPv6 addressing were that it should all be hierarchical with Provider-Assigned addressing, because it keeps the Global Routing Table smaller and cleaner, instead of everybody in the world having to keep track of hundreds of thousands or millions of BGP address blocks, which has been a real problem as the internet grew faster than router translation tables did. In reality, that doesn't work - too many businesses need to be multihomed for reliability reasons, so they still need their address block to show up in the global routing tables, and they usually use Provider-Independent addressing to do it.
The TI Chronos watch has a TI MSP430 microprocessor development system built into the wristwatch, with RF link, accelerometers, temperature gauge, and other tools, for $50. (The RF link goes to a USB frob you plug into your PC.) You can also link up to a heart-rate sensor belt. I haven't gotten around to using the accelerometer app as a sleep sensor, but that's on my "stuff I plan to do" list. MSP430 is the same microprocessor family in TI's Launchpad development board (sold for $4.30.) It's not quite as artist-friendly as an Arduino, but if you're already a C programmer it's pretty cool. The processors are 16 bits as opposed to 8, but there's less memory than in Arduino so you have to program a bit closer to the metal.
The Wii Nunchuck has an accelerometer and some buttons. It uses a proprietary connector which turns out to just be an I2C link with funny-shaped jacks, and there's a "Wiichuck" adapter board for about $3-4 at Sparkfun, Adafruit, and similar places which lets you plug that into an Arduino. It costs a few bucks more than a cheap accelerometer (I paid $20 or so for the Nunchuck), but it's a much more convenient format to fit in your bed than an Arduino plus a breadboard. (I stuck the Arduino in a small box at the foot of the bed, with a long USB cable to power it and upload the data to my laptop.)
An Android phone can be a bit cheaper than an iPhone, and they've all got accelerometers these days.
If you're a gamer on a budget, or a college student on a budget, why are you buying a $699 PC? Seems awfully pricy, and I'd think if you were going to college, either you've already got a game machine, or you picked a really silly time of your life to buy one. I suppose you could buy the $699 PC-Xbox bundle, sell the Xbox, and end up with a better PC than you might have otherwise bought, but it's still kind of silly.
Just about everything except games will work fine in a virtual machine, and even many games will these days, but maybe you'd want to run dual-boot instead of just VM.
Netflix's bandwidth used to be about 1/3 of the total US Internet, back when their transmission method was DVDs in the mail. Latency was a bit higher.
So how big is a Netflix movie download? Is it the full 4.7GB that a typical DVD provides, in which case 40 GB would be ~8 movies/month, or a bit more compressed so 20 movies/month?
Hollywood produces about 600 movies/year, so 1 Mbps would easily let you watch all of them, and 3TB could cache all of them at DVD resolution. Bollywood produces about 800. If the broadband carriers are worried about their download costs, they could do their own caching...
Maybe they're doing a great job of caching some things, but they're mostly hiding the applications I use and making me wait for the animated graphics to pop up different parts of the menu system so I can get at them, so I don't count that as a win.
So far, Unity has gotten me interested in taking the time to learn Lubuntu or Xubuntu, so it may end up having been useful, but I don't think that was how they intended it,
So far it typically takes me 2-3 times as many clicks to get what I want once I know where Unity has hidden it, compared to 10.10, or more when I don't, and no, "everything you have is right there" isn't true if you have more than a dozen or so things.
If you can't tell principals from principles, maybe a field that requires attention to detail and correct use of logic, grammar, and syntax isn't for you.
Wow, you haven't done anything interesting at _all_ on Windows then (or run on hardware that overheats...) XP doesn't blue-screen anywhere near as often as Win98 or 98SE or WinMe did, but it still knows how.
Only marginally, and he'd told us before he got elected that he thought the Afghanistan war was justified, which was the closest we were going to get to a "peace candidate" among the major Democrats. I had hoped he'd have followed through on his promises to close Gitmo, but nope.
And now he's not only started his own war in direct violation of the Constitution, he's said he doesn't need to be limited by the constraints of the War Powers Act. And he's also said that he can order the military to assassinate an American citizen without due process, which even Bush didn't say in public. So he needs to be impeached.
There are other kinds of politics and political correctness. This was an issue of the corporate politics of which manufacturer we bought the box from and whose CPU chips were inside it (though the brand whose logo is on the front of the box isn't necessarily the manufacturer who designed or built the hardware.) A more recent example would be that a few years ago, the price of DRAM was about ten times as high if the box it came in had teal paint on it as opposed to beige paint.
I was in fact asking in the context of the browser simulator (since it does have emacs), but it's interesting to know that a text-based browser can still read Slashdot given the excessive amount of Javascript that's gotten into everything the last few years.
You might as well provide some customized content for your Chinese visitors. Falun Gong literature, Tibetan Buddhist literature, clones of the epochtimes.com newspaper, an occasional Jasmine Revolution or Grass Mud Horse.
Back when I started dealing with VOIP, bandwidth mattered a lot, because a typical home user had a modem, and a typical business office had a T1 voice line or less for a bunch of people and would like to be able to get both voice and data onto the same line to save money, or they were trying to make international connections to countries with extremely overpriced monopoly telcos and wanted to save a lot of money So a 64kbps codec, which burned 80kbps or more after IP overhead, was way too big - an 8kbps codec would fit onto a 14.4 modem, but didn't quite fit into 9600 async. When I first got DSL at home, it was 384kbps symmetric, and when I first got ADSL, it was 1.5/128, which was actually worse for VOIP because you had to be careful to prioritize the VOIP on your upstream.
On the other hand, PCs didn't have a lot of horsepower back then, so if you wanted to run on a 386/33, you couldn't use some low-bit-rate codec that burned 40 bogomips. The crossover hit somewhere around the 486 timeframe, where your processor was fast enough to run a codec that would fit on your modem and sound better than a Speak&Spell. By the time Pentiums came out, 28.8kbps modems were also showing up, and codecs were getting better - there are a number of 16kbps codecs requiring under 30MIPS, and the cruder ones could run fine on an Arduino, but with Pentium horsepower you can easily run codecs at 8kbps or less.
If you're trying to run VOIP on a cellphone to save money, you've probably got a 3G smartphone, so you've got 400+ MHz of CPU to play with, and latency is more of a problem than bandwidth (though it's a lot better than on 2.5G networks.)
The real problems that Skype solved were
NAT traversal
Cheap gateway to public telephone network
Good enough marketing that lots of people were running it so you could call them.
Slashdot Mirror
I started playing with Arduinos a year ago, and even though I live in Silicon Valley where I can go to Fry's or (even better) Halted, if all I need are a couple of LEDs or resistors or some solder or a 555 timer, it's really convenient to be able to stop in to my neighborhood store on the way to the grocery instead of making a longer trip. Sure, the selection's not extensive (especially for connectors of various types or microcontrollers), but if I just smoked the last green LED or need a resistor value I don't have, they're usually ok.
One of the really annoying things about atheism as a possible alternative to Christianity or other religions that involve an afterlife is that you don't get to know if you were right or wrong. I'm sorry, but when I die, if I don't get a real afterlife or some ghostly existence or reincarnation, I at least want the guy with the scythe to show up and tell me "SORRY, DUDE, THAT'S ALL YOU GET, TIME'S UP." And atheists tell me I won't even get that.
It's not really at the level of "faith" - it's more like just "hope" or maybe "wishing".
Most of the neurological theories about consciousness treat it as a complex software process of some part running on brain hardware that's built to do a bunch of things which facilitate it. Most of the physics-related theories about how quantum mechanics affects the brain are that it makes the chemistry a bit noisy (as do all the other things affecting heat and vibration of molecules), so it may occasionally affect how many electrons get involved in a signal or how fast the ions moving around in fluid inside a cell move, so it may occasionally affect whether a synapse triggers, where "affect" isn't anything more than just a bit of noise in the timing. Is that enough to say that "quantum mechanics explains consciousness"? I don't think it's likely. If you want to argue that there's quantum entanglement spreading around the brain making signals happen spookily at a distance, feel free to find some appropriate equations to model it.
On the other hand, I'd really like to be able to say there's something other than deterministic materialist physics going on here, because that might possibly be a way for some kind of soul to be attached to the body that might persist after the body dies, and might have a whole bunch of other philosophical implications that are rather deeply embedded in Western philosophy (and also Eastern philosophy, in somewhat different ways), like free will and meaning and such, and to do that, the physics in your head needs some kind of hooks for the soul to mess around with, which probably have to involve quantum mechanics because there's really not much else that could do the job. But that doesn't mean those hooks are lined up in a way that a soul can grab onto them and shake them in any direction that usefully affects consciousness.
Go read Chalmers's work about "The Hard Problem"...
"... teach the bomb phenomenology"
Tall Aussie guy, long hair, wears leather jackets, sings a mean Zombie Blues*. Chalmers, who's a philosopher, and Stu Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, started a series of conferences at the University of Arizona on "Towards a Science of Consciousness" a decade or two ago; they alternate between Tucson and Somewhere-outside-North-America, and attract a mixed crowd of neuroscientists, consciousness researchers, philosophers who talk about phenomenology, FMRI imagers, tourists (e.g. me), and a few newagey people and random cranks. A few years ago, there were two "Science and Consciousness" conferences in Arizona around the same time - the scientific one in Tucson, and the Deepak Chopra one in Phoenix**.
Hameroff's done work with Penrose on things like quantum effects in microtubules (which are brain cell parts that are small enough to actually have quantum activity going on, though it's a very long step from saying "quantum noise might be affecting chemical reactions a bit" to "Woo-woo! Consciousness is, like, Quantum, man!". I can't say I really understand Stu's arguments about the connections, because while I know a certain amount of quantum physics and biology and philosophy, I don't do neurology or brain cell structures or phenomenology, so the couple of conferences I got to were interesting and a very steep learning curve.
From one perspective, either the world, and therefore consciousness, are entirely deterministic, or else they're not. (Deterministic doesn't mean calculable - Heisenberg among others make it very clear that you can't really simulate the universe using machinery smaller than the universe - but from a philosophical standpoint it doesn't matter if humans can predict what you're doing to do, it just matters whether you've got free will about it.) If you'd like things to be non-deterministic, physics doesn't give you very many ways to hook that into the world, and you're pretty much stuck with quantum mechanics.*** Does that mean that quantum entanglement is involved in any of the processes, particularly between neurons that aren't directly adjacent to each other? Not necessarily (IMHO, probably not.) Does it mean that a non-physical spirit can grab onto some molecules and shake them around in ways that translate up to conscious thoughts, or does it just mean that the chemistry's a bit noisier because God's playing dice with the Universe but your consciousness is still fundamentally a materialist process?
* "Zombie" is a term of art, referring to a hypothetical person or machine that reacts externally as if it were conscious, but doesn't actually perceive qualia the way conscious beings claim that we do, so for instance it can tell you which ball is the red one or the green one, but doesn't experience redness or greenness. ** So of course Chopra caught on to this, and has been one of the sponsors of the more recent round or two of the scientific conference, and he and Hameroff have put out one or two popular press articles together. There are a number of meditation people who come to the conference, but they tend to be the serious "Here's what an FMRI shows about blood flow in your brain while you're meditating" folks, while the cranks are more likely to have opinions about quantum. *** There are some theories of quantum mechanics that say it's still deterministic, just with underlying hidden variables that we can't observe or measure, but it's been too many decades since college physics for me to remember if those got disproved or are still around.
An IPv6 address has two-and-a-half parts - the network bits your ISP knows about (typically 56 or 48), maybe some subnet bits you control (typically 8-16), and the host bits on each subnet (64.) Sometimes the host bits are assigned by hand (your router might be :what:ever::1), or by DHCP, but they're usually derived automatically from the hardware address of your Ethernet card (48 bits of MAC plus padding, or 64 bits of EUI-64 which would be more likely for lightbulbs.) MAC and EUI-64 addresses have a manufacturer part and an individual-device part.
So if your lightbulb uses automatically assigned addresses, it's going to look something like :56-bits-ISP : 8-subnet : 32-mfr : 32-bulb:, and if you're running a lightbulb database, you can track the 64 bits that belong to the bulb just fine, regardless of how much renumbering you do with the network parts.
The original goals of IPv6 addressing were that it should all be hierarchical with Provider-Assigned addressing, because it keeps the Global Routing Table smaller and cleaner, instead of everybody in the world having to keep track of hundreds of thousands or millions of BGP address blocks, which has been a real problem as the internet grew faster than router translation tables did. In reality, that doesn't work - too many businesses need to be multihomed for reliability reasons, so they still need their address block to show up in the global routing tables, and they usually use Provider-Independent addressing to do it.
The TI Chronos watch has a TI MSP430 microprocessor development system built into the wristwatch, with RF link, accelerometers, temperature gauge, and other tools, for $50. (The RF link goes to a USB frob you plug into your PC.) You can also link up to a heart-rate sensor belt. I haven't gotten around to using the accelerometer app as a sleep sensor, but that's on my "stuff I plan to do" list.
MSP430 is the same microprocessor family in TI's Launchpad development board (sold for $4.30.) It's not quite as artist-friendly as an Arduino, but if you're already a C programmer it's pretty cool. The processors are 16 bits as opposed to 8, but there's less memory than in Arduino so you have to program a bit closer to the metal.
The Wii Nunchuck has an accelerometer and some buttons. It uses a proprietary connector which turns out to just be an I2C link with funny-shaped jacks, and there's a "Wiichuck" adapter board for about $3-4 at Sparkfun, Adafruit, and similar places which lets you plug that into an Arduino. It costs a few bucks more than a cheap accelerometer (I paid $20 or so for the Nunchuck), but it's a much more convenient format to fit in your bed than an Arduino plus a breadboard. (I stuck the Arduino in a small box at the foot of the bed, with a long USB cable to power it and upload the data to my laptop.)
An Android phone can be a bit cheaper than an iPhone, and they've all got accelerometers these days.
If you're a gamer on a budget, or a college student on a budget, why are you buying a $699 PC? Seems awfully pricy, and I'd think if you were going to college, either you've already got a game machine, or you picked a really silly time of your life to buy one. I suppose you could buy the $699 PC-Xbox bundle, sell the Xbox, and end up with a better PC than you might have otherwise bought, but it's still kind of silly.
Just about everything except games will work fine in a virtual machine, and even many games will these days, but maybe you'd want to run dual-boot instead of just VM.
Just used my mod points on another article a few minutes ago, and then this shows up :-)
Netflix's bandwidth used to be about 1/3 of the total US Internet, back when their transmission method was DVDs in the mail. Latency was a bit higher.
So how big is a Netflix movie download? Is it the full 4.7GB that a typical DVD provides, in which case 40 GB would be ~8 movies/month, or a bit more compressed so 20 movies/month?
Hollywood produces about 600 movies/year, so 1 Mbps would easily let you watch all of them, and 3TB could cache all of them at DVD resolution. Bollywood produces about 800. If the broadband carriers are worried about their download costs, they could do their own caching...
Hey, Admins, can you make that spammer go away?
Maybe they're doing a great job of caching some things, but they're mostly hiding the applications I use and making me wait for the animated graphics to pop up different parts of the menu system so I can get at them, so I don't count that as a win.
So far, Unity has gotten me interested in taking the time to learn Lubuntu or Xubuntu, so it may end up having been useful, but I don't think that was how they intended it,
So far it typically takes me 2-3 times as many clicks to get what I want once I know where Unity has hidden it, compared to 10.10, or more when I don't, and no, "everything you have is right there" isn't true if you have more than a dozen or so things.
If you can't tell principals from principles, maybe a field that requires attention to detail and correct use of logic, grammar, and syntax isn't for you.
Wow, you haven't done anything interesting at _all_ on Windows then (or run on hardware that overheats...) XP doesn't blue-screen anywhere near as often as Win98 or 98SE or WinMe did, but it still knows how.
Only marginally, and he'd told us before he got elected that he thought the Afghanistan war was justified, which was the closest we were going to get to a "peace candidate" among the major Democrats. I had hoped he'd have followed through on his promises to close Gitmo, but nope.
And now he's not only started his own war in direct violation of the Constitution, he's said he doesn't need to be limited by the constraints of the War Powers Act. And he's also said that he can order the military to assassinate an American citizen without due process, which even Bush didn't say in public. So he needs to be impeached.
No, they didn't, funny thing about that....
But it wasn't that long ago that I walked into a pub in San Francisco and found Noraid fundraising literature.
There are other kinds of politics and political correctness. This was an issue of the corporate politics of which manufacturer we bought the box from and whose CPU chips were inside it (though the brand whose logo is on the front of the box isn't necessarily the manufacturer who designed or built the hardware.) A more recent example would be that a few years ago, the price of DRAM was about ten times as high if the box it came in had teal paint on it as opposed to beige paint.
I was in fact asking in the context of the browser simulator (since it does have emacs), but it's interesting to know that a text-based browser can still read Slashdot given the excessive amount of Javascript that's gotten into everything the last few years.
... same as the old boss. And don't expect the Democrat Senate to vote it down or Obama to veto it, just because they're not Bush Republicans.
You might as well provide some customized content for your Chinese visitors. Falun Gong literature, Tibetan Buddhist literature, clones of the epochtimes.com newspaper, an occasional Jasmine Revolution or Grass Mud Horse.
It was "carriage return".
That's pretty much what my equipment said when I fed 110v to the Ethernets...
Back when I started dealing with VOIP, bandwidth mattered a lot, because a typical home user had a modem, and a typical business office had a T1 voice line or less for a bunch of people and would like to be able to get both voice and data onto the same line to save money, or they were trying to make international connections to countries with extremely overpriced monopoly telcos and wanted to save a lot of money So a 64kbps codec, which burned 80kbps or more after IP overhead, was way too big - an 8kbps codec would fit onto a 14.4 modem, but didn't quite fit into 9600 async. When I first got DSL at home, it was 384kbps symmetric, and when I first got ADSL, it was 1.5/128, which was actually worse for VOIP because you had to be careful to prioritize the VOIP on your upstream.
On the other hand, PCs didn't have a lot of horsepower back then, so if you wanted to run on a 386/33, you couldn't use some low-bit-rate codec that burned 40 bogomips. The crossover hit somewhere around the 486 timeframe, where your processor was fast enough to run a codec that would fit on your modem and sound better than a Speak&Spell. By the time Pentiums came out, 28.8kbps modems were also showing up, and codecs were getting better - there are a number of 16kbps codecs requiring under 30MIPS, and the cruder ones could run fine on an Arduino, but with Pentium horsepower you can easily run codecs at 8kbps or less.
If you're trying to run VOIP on a cellphone to save money, you've probably got a 3G smartphone, so you've got 400+ MHz of CPU to play with, and latency is more of a problem than bandwidth (though it's a lot better than on 2.5G networks.)
The real problems that Skype solved were
The latter problem is the difficult one.