The GBA is already port wasteland. With the potental this thing has, I hope it doesn't suffer the same fate. Hopefully it wont get a single port.
The GBA couldn't do a decent job with a lot of SNES games because of its limited button selection. With the DS, many titles (Street Fighter II, anyone?) can be moved over intact (except for figuring out something to put on the second screen). I'm hoping that it continues the tradition of the GBA of being a mecca for classic 2D gaming. There are many great games that are all but forgotten, and probably have never even been encountered by younger gamers.
Yeah, I had to use google to find the Terminal app in OS X. Wasn't that suppose to be a *nix.
The way I found it was like this: "I need the Terminal application. Let's look in the Applications folder where Apple puts all the applications." (clicked on "Applications" in a Finder window navigation bar). "Oops, don't see it. But I do see a Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Terminal is kind of a utility, so let's look in there. What do you know? There it is!"
So far, it sounds like TiVo/DirecTV were trying to do the right thing, upgrading the Series I software even though it is an obsolete model. Unfortunately, they got hit with one of those sporadic, difficult-to-reproduce/diagnose bugs. So while they are trying to figure out the problem, they are offering those people affected a hardware upgrade at what sounds very close to (or perhaps even below) cost.
Hey, a carpenter can keep making the same table over and over and do OK. But the shelf life of information is a lot shorter than that of a physical skill like carpentry. Most authors don't get much income from their old books--they have to keep writing new ones. Revising an old book doesn't make it. The days when a company could prosper for years making small tweaks to the same program are waning. So if you can't develop software for money, working full time, faster and better than people can create in their spare time simply as a service to the computer, then you need to either look for another line of work or come up with a more new ideas for software.
Check out the work on transcranial magnetic stimulation for some interesting research on the input end. It's pretty crude--probably works by disrupting function in a localized brain region--but it is noninvasive. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want anything implanted in my brain if I don't absolutely need it.
Whatever. As someone who has some experience with neurobiology, it is very unlikely you can actually get anything useful from EEG signals. They are totally useless for exploring the brain's functions. Sorry to burst your bubble, but even microelectrode arrays implanted directly into the brain don't provide anything too interesting. At best, you might see a different firing pattern based on external stimulus, and even that is rare.
Actually, this is an area where there has been a lot of progress in recent years. Check out the literature on "hippocampal place cells" for some very interesting results with microelectrode arrays.
i take your point about rate of heat production, jogging over running for example. But I suggest that is NOT dependant on 2 legs or 4, your wolves example, reinforces this.
There are two answers to this
1) Evolution doesn't find global optima very well, it tends to get stuck in local optima. Remember that the starting point was an ape. Our solution was probably "closer" in terms of mutational distance than some quadrapedal wolf-like solution to the problem of long-distance running.
Also, that "less energy" argument sounds weak to me. Transportion is a very important function for all animals, and also energy efficiency right up there too. You mean to say that no other mammal as caught on to this bipedal thing as yet? From the fastest cheetahs to the slowest sloths?
It's not much use for a prey species. Being able to run longer doesn't help if you get caught before that. And most predators rely upon the sprint/pounce strategy instead of tracking and endurance. You have to remember that evolution isn't very good at finding true optima--it is more likely to find a local optimum. Remember that we evolved from apes, not cheetahs, and apes are not exactly renowned for being fast sprinters.
I wish iTunes could let one stream audio to the Express and play music on the host simultaneously. I was surprised to learn that it can't do both.
It's probably not as easy as it sounds. I imagine that automatically getting exact synchronization with different levels of network activity could be tricky. And if they were a bit off, it would sound pretty weird.
I understand that a theory cannot be proven, only disproven (or shown to be inconsistent with experimental results). I also understand that there may be some time in the future that we can test Hawking's idea. But I don't consider this to satisfy the requirements of being a scientific theory. I mean, I could say "There is a pink elephant on the other side of the universe." Well, sometime in the future, we may get a telescope that can see to the other side of the universe with accurate enough precision to pick out a pink elephant. Does this mean my idea is a theory because it is potentially falsifiable?
More of a speculation, and not even one of much interest, since it has so far passed no experimental tests at all, explains no known observations, and is not derived from any fundamental theory. On the other hand, if you could show that gravitational theory or quantum theory required that elephant to be there, then it would be of considerable interest, because the same reasoning that led you to predict that elephant might well yield other predictions that could be tested.
Hawking's conclusions are derived from theories that are already extensively tested, and that are fundamental to how the universe works. The fact that you can't instantly see how the reasoning that led to these conclusions might also yield experimental tests does not mean that it does not.
What makes this any more than a hypothesis arrived at using math?
The fact that it is a mathematically derived consequence of theories that have already been extensively tested.
My feeling is that theoretical physics is pretty useless when it is being used to describe something that can not be realistically verified. I mean, with black holes, we think we've detected them but there's not even any real solid proof that they exist at all.
No theory is ever proved to be true. Theories are only proved to be false. Strictly speaking, we can't even prove that the universe has any physical existence outside our own perceptions, which we cannot prove to be reliable. Verification comes in the form of tests of the predictions of a theory (quite a few of which have already been passed by black hole theory). And mathematically deriving the consequences of a theory is the only way to come up with such tests. In recent years, for example, physicists have managed to test aspects of quantum theory that were once considered to be outside the range of possible verification.
In fact, someone who is good at Doom and thinks that real combat is like Doom, would be *less* dangerous than an average person, probably.
Yeah, I'd be more concerned about the guy with paintball or lasertag experience. I played lasertag partnered with a cop once; he was pretty formidable, even though it was the first time he'd played.
I agree with others that people need to be more involved with their children. There are games my children will not play. I have taught my 8 year old what the ratings are and to ask me.
I very much doubt that violent games per se have any significant detrimental effect on behavior, or to put it the other way, that laws restricting such games have any positive effect. On the other hand, I can well imagine that there might be a beneficial effect of a parent saying to a child, "I don't want you playing this game, because it doesn't reflect the kind of values that I want you to have."
Same for the video games. In the case of the all-too-well-known example of Columbine, those were certainly users of violent video games. In fact, their shot-accuracy was better than the police trained people tend to be because of those video games.
It's funny how many people buy ridiculous statements like this without asking the obvious questions: "Who measured their shot accuracy? How did they measure it?" Just a moment's consideration should tell you how implausible it is. Think about what would have to be be involved to actually be able to honestly make such a claim. Did somebody really go around and try to figure out where every shot was fired from, guess what the kid was aiming at, and calculate how close the shot came to the target? And then somehow work out an appropriate metric to compare it to police accuracy? That would be quite an accomplishment indeed! Where is this tour de force study published?
Oh, yes I did. Try searching for "nordic heat pump" and "climate change", and read some of the many peer-reviewed climatology publications validating the model. Your ignorance of them doesn't stop the climate from changing.
I asked you for generally accepted, peer-reviewed models that predict an ice age as the result of global warming. You give me a Google search (Google is not a peer-reviewed publication) and a paper from a non-peer-reviewed book that states "Most 3-D simulations indicate a reduction of the THC by the year 2060, but not a complete collapse (IPCC 2001). A collapse appears therefore unlikely to occur by 2100 but it can not be ruled out for later." If that is really the best that you can do, it's hard to take this notion seriously.
Now, if they'd let us make backup copies and leave the originals in their cases, we'd be talking
I can't figure out if people who say this sort of thing are really serious, or it's just a pretext to argue for copying. Perhaps some people just have a knee-jerk notion that everything has to be backed up. Let's suppose that the DVD costs $15 new, and blanks cost 50 cents. Then you will, on the average, lose money by backing up your DVDs unless you treat them so harshly that you manage to ruin more than one DVD out of every 30. It's cheaper just to buy a new copy. And this doesn't even take into account the fact that, by the time you manage to screw the original one up, you'll probably be able to pick up a cheap used copy for 6 bucks or so.
So I immediately produced a serious climate model indicating an ice age as a consequence of increased CO2
Uh, no, you didn't. A hand-waving argument is not a serious climate model. A serious climate model is one that is widely accepted among climate theorists, supported by publications in peer-reviewed journals, and that is able to successfully model historical data.
I think I can guess what happened. Initially, Odeon took a common sense approach: "Hey, it's benign, he's a good guy, it's something we should have done ourselves, and if anything it will get us more business."
And then, unfortunately, somebody at Odeon talked to a lawyer. And the lawyer said, "Sure, it looks fine now. But you're exposed here. If you let him leave it up, you become responsible for it, and you don't control it, even though it's got your trademarks all over it. What if after 6 months he decides it would be amusing to redirect people to some disgusting porn site, and some little kid is traumatized? The parents are going to sue you! What if he decides to start collecting credit card numbers for reservations, and then uses them to rip people off? Think of the liability!"
But it's generally defined on earth (which is used in the analogy) that gravity will pull the cat towards the earth, either landing on the earth or a structure that is resting on the surface of the earth.
In orbit, of course, the same is true, except that the trajectory is such that the object keeps overshooting the earth.
In fact, that would be interesting to see - if you take a cat up in space, and toss it towards a wall. Mind you, not with force to hurt it. Anyways, would it know at that point to move itself as it gets closer to a wall, or is it using the acceleration from gravity to know that it needs to re-orient itself?
Actually, in free fall, you can not feel the acceleration of gravity, because every part of your body is accelerated uniformly. The falling cat probably orients itself either visually or by wind resistance. In either case it would probably flip over and land on the wall with its feet.
Just curious... how does something "fall" in zero g? Doesn't falling imply gravity?
It also implies zero G. Gravity is present everywhere in the universe, so there is no such thing as the absence of gravity. What "zero G" actually means is "moving freely under the influence of gravity."
So that either means the analogy is false, or their robot will use motions and contortions to orient itself, and then commence spinning and wriggling out of control, since there is no "down" in space.
The motions used by a cat to orient itself to land on its feet are completely general and do not depend on the presence of gravity. So the falling cat could orient itself any way it wanted--it just happens to prefer to land on its feet.
Nor in any other species. Researchers happened by chance to hit upon a mutation that converted a mild disease into a more virulent one. The same thing happens in nature. Indeed, the kind of mutation they created--a gene knockout--arises relatively frequently in nature. Which raises the question of why the wildtype disease lacks this mutation. The answer, almost certainly, is that the mutant disease doesn't actually spread that well in the wild, probably because it is too rapidly debilitating to its host. For this reason, pathogens often co-evolve with their hosts to have lower virulence. So there is no doubt that a disease can mutate to become more severe. But there is still no indication that any of these laboratory diseases would have 100% spread and fatality in the wild.
Yeah, it might be politically more convenient to take oil and coal company bribes until it's too late, then rake in more money on doomed "seawall" projects, while the coral reefs go extinct, agriculture collapses, millions riot. Then people will cope with the change the way we did in past ice ages: lose all but the most latent vestiges of this civilization, live at the mercy of catastrophic weather for millennia. Or we can reprioritize research from these meteorite paranoias to rebalancing our oceano/atmospheric carbon and energy cycles, while getting ahead of the curve in coping with the changes too late to influence.
None of the serious climate models indicate an ice age as a consequence of increased CO2. Perhaps you are the one who has been watching too many movies? On the other hand, a good-sized asteroid impact might have a shot at triggering an ice age.
No, I'm comparing something like the inundations of Bangladesh, happening now, to something like a movie you saw, possibly happening in the next 1-100 thousand years.
Can't say that I've seen any movies on the topic. What movie did you have in mind? Yes, large numbers of people having to move, or money being spent to build seawalls, is a serious political problem. On the other hand, plausible worst-case scenarios have it happening over a period of decades, so there's lots of time to deal with it. It may well be cheaper and politically more practicable to move them than to institute and enforce the drastic reductions in CO2 emissions that would be required to make much of an impact on global CO2 levels. As you point out, people have managed to deal with climate change in the past.
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The GBA is already port wasteland. With the potental this thing has, I hope it doesn't suffer the same fate. Hopefully it wont get a single port.
The GBA couldn't do a decent job with a lot of SNES games because of its limited button selection. With the DS, many titles (Street Fighter II, anyone?) can be moved over intact (except for figuring out something to put on the second screen). I'm hoping that it continues the tradition of the GBA of being a mecca for classic 2D gaming. There are many great games that are all but forgotten, and probably have never even been encountered by younger gamers.
Yeah, I had to use google to find the Terminal app in OS X. Wasn't that suppose to be a *nix.
The way I found it was like this: "I need the Terminal application. Let's look in the Applications folder where Apple puts all the applications." (clicked on "Applications" in a Finder window navigation bar). "Oops, don't see it. But I do see a Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Terminal is kind of a utility, so let's look in there. What do you know? There it is!"
So far, it sounds like TiVo/DirecTV were trying to do the right thing, upgrading the Series I software even though it is an obsolete model. Unfortunately, they got hit with one of those sporadic, difficult-to-reproduce/diagnose bugs. So while they are trying to figure out the problem, they are offering those people affected a hardware upgrade at what sounds very close to (or perhaps even below) cost.
Hey, a carpenter can keep making the same table over and over and do OK. But the shelf life of information is a lot shorter than that of a physical skill like carpentry. Most authors don't get much income from their old books--they have to keep writing new ones. Revising an old book doesn't make it. The days when a company could prosper for years making small tweaks to the same program are waning. So if you can't develop software for money, working full time, faster and better than people can create in their spare time simply as a service to the computer, then you need to either look for another line of work or come up with a more new ideas for software.
Check out the work on transcranial magnetic stimulation for some interesting research on the input end. It's pretty crude--probably works by disrupting function in a localized brain region--but it is noninvasive. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want anything implanted in my brain if I don't absolutely need it.
Whatever. As someone who has some experience with neurobiology, it is very unlikely you can actually get anything useful from EEG signals. They are totally useless for exploring the brain's functions. Sorry to burst your bubble, but even microelectrode arrays implanted directly into the brain don't provide anything too interesting. At best, you might see a different firing pattern based on external stimulus, and even that is rare.
Actually, this is an area where there has been a lot of progress in recent years. Check out the literature on "hippocampal place cells" for some very interesting results with microelectrode arrays.
i take your point about rate of heat production, jogging over running for example. But I suggest that is NOT dependant on 2 legs or 4, your wolves example, reinforces this.
There are two answers to this
1) Evolution doesn't find global optima very well, it tends to get stuck in local optima. Remember that the starting point was an ape. Our solution was probably "closer" in terms of mutational distance than some quadrapedal wolf-like solution to the problem of long-distance running.
2) We can do it carrying stuff!
Also, that "less energy" argument sounds weak to me. Transportion is a very important function for all animals, and also energy efficiency right up there too. You mean to say that no other mammal as caught on to this bipedal thing as yet? From the fastest cheetahs to the slowest sloths?
It's not much use for a prey species. Being able to run longer doesn't help if you get caught before that. And most predators rely upon the sprint/pounce strategy instead of tracking and endurance. You have to remember that evolution isn't very good at finding true optima--it is more likely to find a local optimum. Remember that we evolved from apes, not cheetahs, and apes are not exactly renowned for being fast sprinters.
Does anyone have any idea if it would be possible to route the audio from the WiFi-interface to the USB port?
Apple emphasizes in its documentation that the USB port is for printers only.
I wish iTunes could let one stream audio to the Express and play music on the host simultaneously. I was surprised to learn that it can't do both.
It's probably not as easy as it sounds. I imagine that automatically getting exact synchronization with different levels of network activity could be tricky. And if they were a bit off, it would sound pretty weird.
I understand that a theory cannot be proven, only disproven (or shown to be inconsistent with experimental results). I also understand that there may be some time in the future that we can test Hawking's idea. But I don't consider this to satisfy the requirements of being a scientific theory.
I mean, I could say "There is a pink elephant on the other side of the universe." Well, sometime in the future, we may get a telescope that can see to the other side of the universe with accurate enough precision to pick out a pink elephant. Does this mean my idea is a theory because it is potentially falsifiable?
More of a speculation, and not even one of much interest, since it has so far passed no experimental tests at all, explains no known observations, and is not derived from any fundamental theory. On the other hand, if you could show that gravitational theory or quantum theory required that elephant to be there, then it would be of considerable interest, because the same reasoning that led you to predict that elephant might well yield other predictions that could be tested.
Hawking's conclusions are derived from theories that are already extensively tested, and that are fundamental to how the universe works. The fact that you can't instantly see how the reasoning that led to these conclusions might also yield experimental tests does not mean that it does not.
What makes this any more than a hypothesis arrived at using math?
The fact that it is a mathematically derived consequence of theories that have already been extensively tested.
My feeling is that theoretical physics is pretty useless when it is being used to describe something that can not be realistically verified. I mean, with black holes, we think we've detected them but there's not even any real solid proof that they exist at all.
No theory is ever proved to be true. Theories are only proved to be false. Strictly speaking, we can't even prove that the universe has any physical existence outside our own perceptions, which we cannot prove to be reliable. Verification comes in the form of tests of the predictions of a theory (quite a few of which have already been passed by black hole theory). And mathematically deriving the consequences of a theory is the only way to come up with such tests. In recent years, for example, physicists have managed to test aspects of quantum theory that were once considered to be outside the range of possible verification.
In fact, someone who is good at Doom and thinks that real combat is like Doom, would be *less* dangerous than an average person, probably.
Yeah, I'd be more concerned about the guy with paintball or lasertag experience. I played lasertag partnered with a cop once; he was pretty formidable, even though it was the first time he'd played.
I agree with others that people need to be more involved with their children. There are games my children will not play. I have taught my 8 year old what the ratings are and to ask me.
I very much doubt that violent games per se have any significant detrimental effect on behavior, or to put it the other way, that laws restricting such games have any positive effect. On the other hand, I can well imagine that there might be a beneficial effect of a parent saying to a child, "I don't want you playing this game, because it doesn't reflect the kind of values that I want you to have."
Same for the video games. In the case of the all-too-well-known example of Columbine, those were certainly users of violent video games. In fact, their shot-accuracy was better than the police trained people tend to be because of those video games.
It's funny how many people buy ridiculous statements like this without asking the obvious questions: "Who measured their shot accuracy? How did they measure it?" Just a moment's consideration should tell you how implausible it is. Think about what would have to be be involved to actually be able to honestly make such a claim. Did somebody really go around and try to figure out where every shot was fired from, guess what the kid was aiming at, and calculate how close the shot came to the target? And then somehow work out an appropriate metric to compare it to police accuracy? That would be quite an accomplishment indeed! Where is this tour de force study published?
Oh, yes I did. Try searching for "nordic heat pump" and "climate change", and read some of the many peer-reviewed climatology publications validating the model. Your ignorance of them doesn't stop the climate from changing.
I asked you for generally accepted, peer-reviewed models that predict an ice age as the result of global warming. You give me a Google search (Google is not a peer-reviewed publication) and a paper from a non-peer-reviewed book that states "Most 3-D simulations indicate a reduction of the THC by the year 2060, but not a complete collapse (IPCC 2001). A collapse appears therefore unlikely to occur by 2100 but it can not be ruled out for later." If that is really the best that you can do, it's hard to take this notion seriously.
Now, if they'd let us make backup copies and leave the originals in their cases, we'd be talking
I can't figure out if people who say this sort of thing are really serious, or it's just a pretext to argue for copying. Perhaps some people just have a knee-jerk notion that everything has to be backed up. Let's suppose that the DVD costs $15 new, and blanks cost 50 cents. Then you will, on the average, lose money by backing up your DVDs unless you treat them so harshly that you manage to ruin more than one DVD out of every 30. It's cheaper just to buy a new copy. And this doesn't even take into account the fact that, by the time you manage to screw the original one up, you'll probably be able to pick up a cheap used copy for 6 bucks or so.
So I immediately produced a serious climate model indicating an ice age as a consequence of increased CO2
Uh, no, you didn't. A hand-waving argument is not a serious climate model. A serious climate model is one that is widely accepted among climate theorists, supported by publications in peer-reviewed journals, and that is able to successfully model historical data.
I think I can guess what happened. Initially, Odeon took a common sense approach: "Hey, it's benign, he's a good guy, it's something we should have done ourselves, and if anything it will get us more business."
And then, unfortunately, somebody at Odeon talked to a lawyer. And the lawyer said, "Sure, it looks fine now. But you're exposed here. If you let him leave it up, you become responsible for it, and you don't control it, even though it's got your trademarks all over it. What if after 6 months he decides it would be amusing to redirect people to some disgusting porn site, and some little kid is traumatized? The parents are going to sue you! What if he decides to start collecting credit card numbers for reservations, and then uses them to rip people off? Think of the liability!"
But it's generally defined on earth (which is used in the analogy) that gravity will pull the cat towards the earth, either landing on the earth or a structure that is resting on the surface of the earth.
In orbit, of course, the same is true, except that the trajectory is such that the object keeps overshooting the earth.
In fact, that would be interesting to see - if you take a cat up in space, and toss it towards a wall. Mind you, not with force to hurt it. Anyways, would it know at that point to move itself as it gets closer to a wall, or is it using the acceleration from gravity to know that it needs to re-orient itself?
Actually, in free fall, you can not feel the acceleration of gravity, because every part of your body is accelerated uniformly. The falling cat probably orients itself either visually or by wind resistance. In either case it would probably flip over and land on the wall with its feet.
Just curious... how does something "fall" in zero g? Doesn't falling imply gravity?
It also implies zero G. Gravity is present everywhere in the universe, so there is no such thing as the absence of gravity. What "zero G" actually means is "moving freely under the influence of gravity."
So that either means the analogy is false, or their robot will use motions and contortions to orient itself, and then commence spinning and wriggling out of control, since there is no "down" in space.
The motions used by a cat to orient itself to land on its feet are completely general and do not depend on the presence of gravity. So the falling cat could orient itself any way it wanted--it just happens to prefer to land on its feet.
Not in humans, anyway. Not yet.
Nor in any other species. Researchers happened by chance to hit upon a mutation that converted a mild disease into a more virulent one. The same thing happens in nature. Indeed, the kind of mutation they created--a gene knockout--arises relatively frequently in nature. Which raises the question of why the wildtype disease lacks this mutation. The answer, almost certainly, is that the mutant disease doesn't actually spread that well in the wild, probably because it is too rapidly debilitating to its host. For this reason, pathogens often co-evolve with their hosts to have lower virulence. So there is no doubt that a disease can mutate to become more severe. But there is still no indication that any of these laboratory diseases would have 100% spread and fatality in the wild.
Yeah, it might be politically more convenient to take oil and coal company bribes until it's too late, then rake in more money on doomed "seawall" projects, while the coral reefs go extinct, agriculture collapses, millions riot. Then people will cope with the change the way we did in past ice ages: lose all but the most latent vestiges of this civilization, live at the mercy of catastrophic weather for millennia. Or we can reprioritize research from these meteorite paranoias to rebalancing our oceano/atmospheric carbon and energy cycles, while getting ahead of the curve in coping with the changes too late to influence.
None of the serious climate models indicate an ice age as a consequence of increased CO2. Perhaps you are the one who has been watching too many movies? On the other hand, a good-sized asteroid impact might have a shot at triggering an ice age.
No, I'm comparing something like the inundations of Bangladesh, happening now, to something like a movie you saw, possibly happening in the next 1-100 thousand years.
Can't say that I've seen any movies on the topic. What movie did you have in mind? Yes, large numbers of people having to move, or money being spent to build seawalls, is a serious political problem. On the other hand, plausible worst-case scenarios have it happening over a period of decades, so there's lots of time to deal with it. It may well be cheaper and politically more practicable to move them than to institute and enforce the drastic reductions in CO2 emissions that would be required to make much of an impact on global CO2 levels. As you point out, people have managed to deal with climate change in the past.