I find this odd. A file is just a string of 1's and 0's, and given any string of 1's and 0's, one can find an encoding to turn it into a digital replication of the Mona Lisa, or, if the file is big enough, a divx copy of Ms. Congeniality. That is to say, any file is an encrypted version of every *smaller* file (under a suitable encryption scheme).
Does this mean reading slashdot is illegal because we can decrypt the data into the latest Harry Potter? Hell, under this interpretation, slashdot is trafficking in trade secrets, as all of Apple's plans for the future are in here somewhere.
Obviously, the intent to distribute is missing. But what if I write a decryption algorithm to "recover" this data?
The long answer is: People can obviously correctly grasp broad outlines. The problem is that, in mathematics anyway, the broad outline is the mathematics. This is woefully imprecise. Let's see if I can successfully clarify.
Consider Fermat's Last theorem and the introductory exposition here. Notice that to understand, in broad strokes, the content (not even the method!) of the proof, you have to understand elliptic curves, elliptic functions, zeta functions, L-functions, galois groups and their matrix representations over p-adic rings. The properties of objects in each of these topics are essential to the proof, and seeing as the proof is in some sense a description of "how these objects interact," any description that fails to include one of these fields is going to be inadequate even for framing a broad outline. Even if the idea that lead to Wile's final proof was simple, one needs all of this machinery to even comprehend what it means.
The issue in physics is similar, but distinct. Equations are one thing, and anyone can write a story about a physicist staring at a peice of paper and yelling "Eureka!" But giving these equations physical meaning is another. It is becoming more and more common for physical meanings to be given in terms of complex mathematical constructs, and for the expositor, we're back at the trouble above.
That said, magazines like Scientific American and shows like Nova do make people interested in mathematics, if only because they're so incomplete. And they can serve as an introductory guide to the literature. But their value as informative sources is nil.
I think the grandparent was referring to the shoddiness of the press release.
I'm a math guy, and I've studied quite a bit of physics, so it always kills me to watch or read popular accounts of mathematician/physicst 's work. They try to boil down very complex topics so that the layman can understand them. But they fail miserably -- often, they're either too complicated for the layman to understand or so vague as to be truisms. And they're still factually incorrect.
Nova is a particularly bad example of this. Take the Fermat's Last theorem episode. This is a topic that only a couple dozen mathematicians in the world actually understand, but in their infinite hubris, Nova tried to compress it into an hour episode! Their Superstrings episode was a similar debacle.
Stopping power. If securing a strategic advantage is your aim, you don't need killing power, just stopping power. This is true both on the battle field and for home defense. Remember, for strategic purposes, the enemy is just as neutralized with a bullet through his stomach as he is through his aorta.
The difference is that hydrogen generation is to be done in large, centralized, high efficiency plants. Car engines and the like are nowhere near as efficient in converting fossil fuels to energy as a smartly designed hydrogen plant would be. And converting hydrogen into energy is trivial.
But until we find a source for elemental hydrogen, we're still reliant on fossil fuels. The term "hydrogen economy" refers to the use of elemental hydrogen as an "energy currency."
This is my point -- there is no correct/complete/thorough/proper outside of whether or not a bit of language communicates what it was intended to. Language isn't constrained to fit any logic, so nothing outside of what is meant by a statement follows from it.
I definitely think Microsoft deserves credit for popularizing computer usage. But I think that's more a function of Microsoft's marketting than their technology.
(I'm putting myself out on a limb here, but) Microsoft got their really big break with Windows 95, when their marketting department actually managed to make an operating system release an event. Before Windows 95, Microsoft was just another operating systems vendor, with an inferior product than the competition, but one that proved relatively suitable for mundane tasks like word processing -- it was an acceptable solution for small businesses. Windows 95 (and the ensuing Bill Gates mania) made Microsoft a household name.
Actually - the CMS project has been a real eye opener to the problems of getting corporates to understand open source... another story for another time:)
I'd be very interested in hearing it. If you ever find yourself with some free time, write something up and slashdot it.;-)
Rolled off high frequencies? Surely you jest. Tape compression causes an upwards shift in the frequency spectrum.
However, if you're used to that crisp, clear digital sound, with its quantization effects and massive spectrum shift, analog audio can sound a bit dull. People who know what instruments sound like when played in good surroundings know that analog preserves fidelity better.
In theory. But you're not going to find any ADC's with enough dynamic range to actually do anything with digital post-processing.
Think about what's going on with tape. You have non-linear smooshing of the wave form as the input reaches a critical value. This (by Fourier analysis) causes a shift upwards in frequency and (also by Fourier analysis) causes the maximum relative variation to decrease. (The maximum relative variation is the supremum of the absolute values of differences of waveform values in an interval).
Now consider what a (linear) ADC is doing. It's sampling 44.1 or 96.whatever thousand times per second. Each sample consists of an input waveform measurement. You have 16 or 24 bits of accuracy to work with. That is a lot of dynamic range -- but you're still sort of screwed because if you try to do digital compression, you're going to end up with a bunch of data points in between bits.
The obvious solution is to use non-linear weighting in your ADC. But this isn't going to work with ProTools or any other digital audio gear (without conversion to linear weighting, negating the benefits), and there's major inertia to deal with in the professional audio market.
Considering that electronics engineers study a *lot* more than just transformers, I'd say that the EE's opinion on the matter is justified, whereas you're isn't.
I said *un-refined* hydrogen. Open a tap, get some water.
Oil companies hire geologists and engineers and lease satellites looking for the next big oil deposit. It isn't as simple as "drilling a hole, getting some oil."
If you really think it is, go through on the experiment I suggested. Start with your backyard.
Do an experiment. Go outside and collect all the crude oil you can find. Try for a whole day! See how much you can get!
Sheesh. Finding unrefined hydrogen would be *much* easier than finding unrefined oil.
A "friend" of mine spent some time doing mp3 trading through several forums for a few years before Napster came out. Basically, he joined a niche channel on EFnet and got to know the regulars. I talked with them too -- they were really nice actually. Within a few months, he was a channel operator, was constantly invited to the "big" channels, and had access to a terabyte of mp3's (in 1997!) through various ftp servers.
It's kind of like buying drugs -- you have to know when you've met the right people. Being really funny helps, too.
You're not being particularly sensical yourself. Defense of property is not a valid defense for murder. If a homeowner shoots a burglar without a clear and imminent danger to himself or others, the homeowner is legally attempting to murder the buglar.
Slashdot Mirror
I find this odd. A file is just a string of 1's and 0's, and given any string of 1's and 0's, one can find an encoding to turn it into a digital replication of the Mona Lisa, or, if the file is big enough, a divx copy of Ms. Congeniality. That is to say, any file is an encrypted version of every *smaller* file (under a suitable encryption scheme).
Does this mean reading slashdot is illegal because we can decrypt the data into the latest Harry Potter? Hell, under this interpretation, slashdot is trafficking in trade secrets, as all of Apple's plans for the future are in here somewhere.
Obviously, the intent to distribute is missing. But what if I write a decryption algorithm to "recover" this data?
The short answer is: No.
The long answer is: People can obviously correctly grasp broad outlines. The problem is that, in mathematics anyway, the broad outline is the mathematics. This is woefully imprecise. Let's see if I can successfully clarify.
Consider Fermat's Last theorem and the introductory exposition here. Notice that to understand, in broad strokes, the content (not even the method!) of the proof, you have to understand elliptic curves, elliptic functions, zeta functions, L-functions, galois groups and their matrix representations over p-adic rings. The properties of objects in each of these topics are essential to the proof, and seeing as the proof is in some sense a description of "how these objects interact," any description that fails to include one of these fields is going to be inadequate even for framing a broad outline. Even if the idea that lead to Wile's final proof was simple, one needs all of this machinery to even comprehend what it means.
The issue in physics is similar, but distinct. Equations are one thing, and anyone can write a story about a physicist staring at a peice of paper and yelling "Eureka!" But giving these equations physical meaning is another. It is becoming more and more common for physical meanings to be given in terms of complex mathematical constructs, and for the expositor, we're back at the trouble above.
That said, magazines like Scientific American and shows like Nova do make people interested in mathematics, if only because they're so incomplete. And they can serve as an introductory guide to the literature. But their value as informative sources is nil.
I think the grandparent was referring to the shoddiness of the press release.
I'm a math guy, and I've studied quite a bit of physics, so it always kills me to watch or read popular accounts of mathematician/physicst 's work. They try to boil down very complex topics so that the layman can understand them. But they fail miserably -- often, they're either too complicated for the layman to understand or so vague as to be truisms. And they're still factually incorrect.
Nova is a particularly bad example of this. Take the Fermat's Last theorem episode. This is a topic that only a couple dozen mathematicians in the world actually understand, but in their infinite hubris, Nova tried to compress it into an hour episode! Their Superstrings episode was a similar debacle.
This might get modded down, but screw it: :-D
Stopping power. If securing a strategic advantage is your aim, you don't need killing power, just stopping power. This is true both on the battle field and for home defense. Remember, for strategic purposes, the enemy is just as neutralized with a bullet through his stomach as he is through his aorta.
Yes, you're right.
The difference is that hydrogen generation is to be done in large, centralized, high efficiency plants. Car engines and the like are nowhere near as efficient in converting fossil fuels to energy as a smartly designed hydrogen plant would be. And converting hydrogen into energy is trivial.
But until we find a source for elemental hydrogen, we're still reliant on fossil fuels. The term "hydrogen economy" refers to the use of elemental hydrogen as an "energy currency."
His name is Nicholas.
This is my point -- there is no correct/complete/thorough/proper outside of whether or not a bit of language communicates what it was intended to. Language isn't constrained to fit any logic, so nothing outside of what is meant by a statement follows from it.
Language evolves whether or not we, the ones who noticed, like it.
Yes, you are missing something.
Neither Fortune nor EU Laws are binding in Canada.
Jim Lehrer is not fair and balanced. Read some Chomsky sometime.
I definitely think Microsoft deserves credit for popularizing computer usage. But I think that's more a function of Microsoft's marketting than their technology.
(I'm putting myself out on a limb here, but) Microsoft got their really big break with Windows 95, when their marketting department actually managed to make an operating system release an event. Before Windows 95, Microsoft was just another operating systems vendor, with an inferior product than the competition, but one that proved relatively suitable for mundane tasks like word processing -- it was an acceptable solution for small businesses. Windows 95 (and the ensuing Bill Gates mania) made Microsoft a household name.
No, idiot, look it up. It doesn't have an apostrophee.
(This stuff is only funny if you're factually correct but purposefully make an error elsewhere)
The correect capitalization is "Nazis."
Parent and Grandparent: Way to get ECHELON on us.
Rolled off high frequencies? Surely you jest. Tape compression causes an upwards shift in the frequency spectrum.
However, if you're used to that crisp, clear digital sound, with its quantization effects and massive spectrum shift, analog audio can sound a bit dull. People who know what instruments sound like when played in good surroundings know that analog preserves fidelity better.
In theory. But you're not going to find any ADC's with enough dynamic range to actually do anything with digital post-processing. Think about what's going on with tape. You have non-linear smooshing of the wave form as the input reaches a critical value. This (by Fourier analysis) causes a shift upwards in frequency and (also by Fourier analysis) causes the maximum relative variation to decrease. (The maximum relative variation is the supremum of the absolute values of differences of waveform values in an interval). Now consider what a (linear) ADC is doing. It's sampling 44.1 or 96.whatever thousand times per second. Each sample consists of an input waveform measurement. You have 16 or 24 bits of accuracy to work with. That is a lot of dynamic range -- but you're still sort of screwed because if you try to do digital compression, you're going to end up with a bunch of data points in between bits. The obvious solution is to use non-linear weighting in your ADC. But this isn't going to work with ProTools or any other digital audio gear (without conversion to linear weighting, negating the benefits), and there's major inertia to deal with in the professional audio market.
Considering that electronics engineers study a *lot* more than just transformers, I'd say that the EE's opinion on the matter is justified, whereas you're isn't.
I said *un-refined* hydrogen. Open a tap, get some water. Oil companies hire geologists and engineers and lease satellites looking for the next big oil deposit. It isn't as simple as "drilling a hole, getting some oil." If you really think it is, go through on the experiment I suggested. Start with your backyard.
Do an experiment. Go outside and collect all the crude oil you can find. Try for a whole day! See how much you can get! Sheesh. Finding unrefined hydrogen would be *much* easier than finding unrefined oil.
Yeah, I think it was "Beyond 2000."
Dude, it's new year's day. Some of us are still hungover.
A "friend" of mine spent some time doing mp3 trading through several forums for a few years before Napster came out. Basically, he joined a niche channel on EFnet and got to know the regulars. I talked with them too -- they were really nice actually. Within a few months, he was a channel operator, was constantly invited to the "big" channels, and had access to a terabyte of mp3's (in 1997!) through various ftp servers. It's kind of like buying drugs -- you have to know when you've met the right people. Being really funny helps, too.
You're not being particularly sensical yourself. Defense of property is not a valid defense for murder. If a homeowner shoots a burglar without a clear and imminent danger to himself or others, the homeowner is legally attempting to murder the buglar.