Taxation in the US is often used as a deterrent; like alcohol or cigarettes, but also things that the government would prefer conserved, such as gasoline. I think that motion to tax video games is proposing that they should be placed in the former category, hence the sort of sideways "You have all these kids buying video games, and sometimes they are good, some are bad and that's not my call".
You might as well challenge the truth of the Pythagorean theorem.
It doesn't hold in non-Euclidean geometry.
Yes--the Pythagorean theorem has to be modified to hold true in non-Euclidean universes. Likewise, this form of encryption might not be unbreakable if our fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics is incorrect. It might be, but counting on an attacker understanding a unifying theorem that supersedes quantum mechanics is asking a bit much. I think this can be called "unbreakable" without dishonesty.
It seems like it might be much more difficult to stage a man-in-the-middle attack, since this system disallows any form of routing or repeating during the transmission--the attacker would have to physically cut into the fiber optic cable connecting the two parties, install a reciever on one end and a transmitter on the other, and then operate as they wish. This is location specific, and seems MUCH more risky than most cyber attacks.
Am I missing something?
One thing that's being totally ignored is that there are many types of people, and some of them don't like hanging out with people like themselves.
My friend Max loves to argue. He can't stand sticking around people who share his opinions for too long. (sound like anybody you know?)
My friend Addie is really girly, but can't stand hanging out around too many girls, because she likes being the "most girly" one in the group.
The point is that some people very much like diversity in their social circles. Some don't, but if the preference engines are perfect, many people will not be pidgeon-holed into interacting with people like themselves, which might even mean that some people who would be auto-segregated won't be.
Of course, this might not show up as a result now, because there's still a lot of work that needs to be done on the preference engines, so they don't necessarily detect that kind of thing. But we shouldn't ignore it.
The idea that glass is a liquid is something of an urban myth derived in all likelihood from the method in which glass used to be blown.
In fact, glass is an amorphous solid. If you heat it up enough, it becomes a supercooled liquid.
The example generally used to explain how glass is a liquid is that in old houses the glass has "flowed" down over time and is thicker at the bottom of the pane than it is at the top. This isn't necessarily true, but when it is it's generally because of the very old Venetian method of glass blowing, before it became common to float molten glass on mercury to get panes with even thicknesses. If glass actually flowed at rates that were visually perceptible even after centuries, then optical telescopes that rely on massive lenses and mirrors to maintain accuracy to fractions of a second wouldn't last very long at all. This isn't the case.
IIRC, holographic media has long been heralded as the future of storage, not for space reasons so much as the fact that holograms degrade gracefully. That is, if you take a holographic plate and scratch it, you don't eliminate information (the image) where the scratch is, you degrade the quality of the information across the whole image in proportion to the area of the scratch over the area of the entire hologram (which should be very small).
This makes sense because if you take a hologram (play with a key fob if you have one, this is inherently true of holograms) and cover half the image, you can still rotate the uncovered half in a way that allows you to see the remainder of the hologram, so you haven't deleted that sector of information--however, the resolution is half what it would be otherwise. In this way, small amounts of damage are undetectable, and don't result in errors until the "resolution" of the bits drops low enough that they can't be read.
So, my understanding was that in digital media, bits aren't stored in discrete positions, but the information for each bit is spread across the entirety of the medium, and thus the media would be much more resistant to damage. However, for such an amazing benefit, I don't see any mention of this, so maybe this works on a different principle--does anybody else know about this?
But the rural spread of our population makes market penetration quite difficult, thus resulting in countries with higher population densities pulling ahead.
You mean countries like Canada? If population density was the primary factor in broadband penetration, we'd be way ahead of them. Our population density is almost eight times higher than theirs (31/km^2 vs. 4/km^2).
Damn those Canadians and their penetrating brodband.
However, it seems like the verification process might speed up quite a bit. I'm sure the engineers at Google throughly tested it before putting the beta up, but just the same, it IS a beta, and I wonder if they're honing the verification process. I imagine the human portion of verification is very small compared to the software checks, if they want to extend this to any significant distribution. If this is the case, they could for the time being have decided to manually oversee their algorithms much more closely than they expect to when it's out of beta.
Okay, apparently my post was really not clear enough. Balloons, at least flexible elastic balloons (not talking about tires!), equalize the pressure inside and outside the latex. They don't completely do this--expanding stretches the latex, imparts potential energy to it, and under tension it pressurizes the air inside the balloon. But the extent to which it does this is fairly minimal--a fully inflated balloon, one that is inflated to the point where it will almost pop on its own, has an internal pressure about 1.007 times external pressure.
People tend to have the impression that the air inside a balloon is very pressurized, because it seems like it is. We don't feel the pressure of air, but we do feel the pressure inside a balloon when we try to squeeze it. However, as a demonstration, if we were able to blow up a balloon and "freeze" the latex in place, so that it held its shape and no longer had tension in it, we could poke holes in it and it wouldn't pop, and only a small amount of air would escape through those holes--perhaps half a percent of the air inside--before the pressures inside and outside are precisely equal. With differences that small, it should become clear why it's frequently assumed that the pressures inside and outside are equal. The relevant phenomenon is finding and maintaining equilibrium, and the only reason that air rushes out when you untie a filled balloon is because the elasticity of the latex continues to pull the balloon to a smaller shape, maintaining a small pressure gradient until the balloon is entirely deflated.
I'm really tired of typing balloon. You know it has two 'l's AND two 'o's?
The pressure inside the balloon is much greater than the pressure outside the balloon
The pressure outside the balloon is the same as the pressure inside the balloon. The reason balloons expand when you fill them with air is so that they equalize the pressures. Since the balloon is made of an elastic material without a rigid structure, maintaining equal pressures on either side of the membrane is the configuration that requires the least energy. As the balloon becomes really inflated, the latex can't stretch easily, and it does compress the air inside--but not much, just 5 or 6 mm of mercury.
when you prick it, the pressure equalizes, causing the balloon to pop
The "pop" isn't really related to the pressure equalizing. The latex is under high hoop and axial stress, and when it gets pricked, the hole that forms breaks lines of stress and the latex gets pulled away from the hole. This tears the latex, very rapidly--considerably faster than the speed of sound. The ends of the latex are under so much stress that they contract as fast as the tears occur, and create a small shockwave/sonic boom. When put scotch tape on the balloon where you prick it (before pricking it, of course), the strain around the hole isn't enough to start the tears, since that also requires tearing the scotch tape (or tearing away from it).
However, you're very right that we can't compare this to the earth, because the crust of the earth certainly isn't under high uniform elastic tension attempting to maintain internal and external pressures.
Just for a second, I want to look at this from the perspective of the RIAA and their reaction to this study, as well as the many other before it that came to the same conclusions.
Why are they so insistent that they're losing money? Obviously, regardless of the number of studies and surveys done that say that P2P isn't costing the industry money, they'll continue persuing what I must assume is very expensive legal action, not to mention all the money they're putting into getting governments to follow suit.
Are they idiots? I can't help but imagine that as a very succesful orginization (abeit evil--those aren't mutually exclusive in the least) they have some idea of what to spend their money on and what will be a serious drain on their pocketbooks.
So are they making money in some strange way by spending millions for litigation and lobbying (are those lawsuits profitable in the long run?), or do they just have a mad desire for./ers to hate them?
I'm really very glad that the onslaught of gags is over, but if that's all anybody will talk about, there should be a "Slashdot ain't broken no more!!" topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Taxation in the US is often used as a deterrent; like alcohol or cigarettes, but also things that the government would prefer conserved, such as gasoline. I think that motion to tax video games is proposing that they should be placed in the former category, hence the sort of sideways "You have all these kids buying video games, and sometimes they are good, some are bad and that's not my call".
Yes--the Pythagorean theorem has to be modified to hold true in non-Euclidean universes. Likewise, this form of encryption might not be unbreakable if our fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics is incorrect. It might be, but counting on an attacker understanding a unifying theorem that supersedes quantum mechanics is asking a bit much. I think this can be called "unbreakable" without dishonesty.
It seems like it might be much more difficult to stage a man-in-the-middle attack, since this system disallows any form of routing or repeating during the transmission--the attacker would have to physically cut into the fiber optic cable connecting the two parties, install a reciever on one end and a transmitter on the other, and then operate as they wish. This is location specific, and seems MUCH more risky than most cyber attacks. Am I missing something?
One thing that's being totally ignored is that there are many types of people, and some of them don't like hanging out with people like themselves.
My friend Max loves to argue. He can't stand sticking around people who share his opinions for too long. (sound like anybody you know?)
My friend Addie is really girly, but can't stand hanging out around too many girls, because she likes being the "most girly" one in the group.
The point is that some people very much like diversity in their social circles. Some don't, but if the preference engines are perfect, many people will not be pidgeon-holed into interacting with people like themselves, which might even mean that some people who would be auto-segregated won't be.
Of course, this might not show up as a result now, because there's still a lot of work that needs to be done on the preference engines, so they don't necessarily detect that kind of thing. But we shouldn't ignore it.
The idea that glass is a liquid is something of an urban myth derived in all likelihood from the method in which glass used to be blown.
In fact, glass is an amorphous solid. If you heat it up enough, it becomes a supercooled liquid.
The example generally used to explain how glass is a liquid is that in old houses the glass has "flowed" down over time and is thicker at the bottom of the pane than it is at the top. This isn't necessarily true, but when it is it's generally because of the very old Venetian method of glass blowing, before it became common to float molten glass on mercury to get panes with even thicknesses. If glass actually flowed at rates that were visually perceptible even after centuries, then optical telescopes that rely on massive lenses and mirrors to maintain accuracy to fractions of a second wouldn't last very long at all. This isn't the case.
In short, mythbusted.
IIRC, holographic media has long been heralded as the future of storage, not for space reasons so much as the fact that holograms degrade gracefully. That is, if you take a holographic plate and scratch it, you don't eliminate information (the image) where the scratch is, you degrade the quality of the information across the whole image in proportion to the area of the scratch over the area of the entire hologram (which should be very small).
This makes sense because if you take a hologram (play with a key fob if you have one, this is inherently true of holograms) and cover half the image, you can still rotate the uncovered half in a way that allows you to see the remainder of the hologram, so you haven't deleted that sector of information--however, the resolution is half what it would be otherwise. In this way, small amounts of damage are undetectable, and don't result in errors until the "resolution" of the bits drops low enough that they can't be read.
So, my understanding was that in digital media, bits aren't stored in discrete positions, but the information for each bit is spread across the entirety of the medium, and thus the media would be much more resistant to damage. However, for such an amazing benefit, I don't see any mention of this, so maybe this works on a different principle--does anybody else know about this?
However, it seems like the verification process might speed up quite a bit. I'm sure the engineers at Google throughly tested it before putting the beta up, but just the same, it IS a beta, and I wonder if they're honing the verification process. I imagine the human portion of verification is very small compared to the software checks, if they want to extend this to any significant distribution. If this is the case, they could for the time being have decided to manually oversee their algorithms much more closely than they expect to when it's out of beta.
Okay, apparently my post was really not clear enough. Balloons, at least flexible elastic balloons (not talking about tires!), equalize the pressure inside and outside the latex. They don't completely do this--expanding stretches the latex, imparts potential energy to it, and under tension it pressurizes the air inside the balloon. But the extent to which it does this is fairly minimal--a fully inflated balloon, one that is inflated to the point where it will almost pop on its own, has an internal pressure about 1.007 times external pressure.
People tend to have the impression that the air inside a balloon is very pressurized, because it seems like it is. We don't feel the pressure of air, but we do feel the pressure inside a balloon when we try to squeeze it. However, as a demonstration, if we were able to blow up a balloon and "freeze" the latex in place, so that it held its shape and no longer had tension in it, we could poke holes in it and it wouldn't pop, and only a small amount of air would escape through those holes--perhaps half a percent of the air inside--before the pressures inside and outside are precisely equal. With differences that small, it should become clear why it's frequently assumed that the pressures inside and outside are equal. The relevant phenomenon is finding and maintaining equilibrium, and the only reason that air rushes out when you untie a filled balloon is because the elasticity of the latex continues to pull the balloon to a smaller shape, maintaining a small pressure gradient until the balloon is entirely deflated.
I'm really tired of typing balloon. You know it has two 'l's AND two 'o's?
The pressure inside the balloon is much greater than the pressure outside the balloon
The pressure outside the balloon is the same as the pressure inside the balloon. The reason balloons expand when you fill them with air is so that they equalize the pressures. Since the balloon is made of an elastic material without a rigid structure, maintaining equal pressures on either side of the membrane is the configuration that requires the least energy. As the balloon becomes really inflated, the latex can't stretch easily, and it does compress the air inside--but not much, just 5 or 6 mm of mercury.
when you prick it, the pressure equalizes, causing the balloon to pop
The "pop" isn't really related to the pressure equalizing. The latex is under high hoop and axial stress, and when it gets pricked, the hole that forms breaks lines of stress and the latex gets pulled away from the hole. This tears the latex, very rapidly--considerably faster than the speed of sound. The ends of the latex are under so much stress that they contract as fast as the tears occur, and create a small shockwave/sonic boom. When put scotch tape on the balloon where you prick it (before pricking it, of course), the strain around the hole isn't enough to start the tears, since that also requires tearing the scotch tape (or tearing away from it).
However, you're very right that we can't compare this to the earth, because the crust of the earth certainly isn't under high uniform elastic tension attempting to maintain internal and external pressures.
Just for a second, I want to look at this from the perspective of the RIAA and their reaction to this study, as well as the many other before it that came to the same conclusions.
./ers to hate them?
Why are they so insistent that they're losing money? Obviously, regardless of the number of studies and surveys done that say that P2P isn't costing the industry money, they'll continue persuing what I must assume is very expensive legal action, not to mention all the money they're putting into getting governments to follow suit.
Are they idiots? I can't help but imagine that as a very succesful orginization (abeit evil--those aren't mutually exclusive in the least) they have some idea of what to spend their money on and what will be a serious drain on their pocketbooks.
So are they making money in some strange way by spending millions for litigation and lobbying (are those lawsuits profitable in the long run?), or do they just have a mad desire for
...can we mention something else?
n ess_theorem
I'm really very glad that the onslaught of gags is over, but if that's all anybody will talk about, there should be a "Slashdot ain't broken no more!!" topic.
Instead, if you care about mathematics appriciation, go look up something really facinating, like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%F6del's_incomplete
I'm tired of jokes today.