Time traveler didn't use various projectors and various pieces of glass... it only used one TV screen hidden inside the case and a frensel-type lens to make the image look like a hologram. But the image itself was flat.
Didn't you ever lean over and look inside when you were a kid?:)
Digital has its applications, but really, in the end, digital is infintely less precise then analog (mathematically speaking).
While this is true in theory, there's no thing in the real world as infinite precision, as that would convey infinite information. There's always some amount of noise, and in audio systems the ambient noise is almost certainly going to be above the quantization noise you get from 32 (or even 24) bit digital precision.
The sample rate you choose, of course, limits the frequencies you can reliably encode, and also the pre-filtering for the AD conversion introduces some phase shift at the upper end of the frequency spectrum, but nowadays we can up the sample rate so high that it really doesn't matter for human listening purposes (observe 192khz sampling for DVD audio, etc).
On the other hand, most of the noise and distortion of your signal through an audio path seems to come from the analog components. Infinite precision doesn't really matter if it's not accurate in the first place! More and more studios are making more and more of the audio stay in the digital domain, for protection against noise and distortion. My guess is that this guitar stays digital for the same reasons. (and cool-geek factor too)
Right now I have very nice 1.5/768k ADSL through a local provider known as "Cyberonic" using Worldcom's bandwidth. It's really cheap, very nice, very fast, very little downtime. Oh yeah we get static IPs and no filtering too...
If this was implemented, I might get stuck with Verizon Online. NOOOOOOOO Just the fact that they've called my house during dinner no less than a dozen times asking if we want to switch to their (slower, less reliable, and less feature-rich) service makes me think I'd rather go without a computer entirely than use their service. Gaaah
This is NOT a good thing for the customers. The big telecoms are buying the FCC and congress out.
XORing two text streams produces cyphertext that is really easy to crack. In fact, one homework assignment in the first or second week of an intro to cryptography class I took a few years ago was to crack a short string which was two english senteces xored with eachother.
This is also why it's bad to use the same one-time pad twice:
Say you encrypt plaintext 1 with the pad to get cyphertext 1: T1 XOR P = C1 And same with plaintext 2: T2 XOR P = C2
Now some spy gets C1 and C2 and suspects that they're based on the same OTP. She xors the two cypher texts to get T1 XOR T2 XOR P XOR P = T1 XOR T2... the two plaintexts xored together. These two messages are now as good as cracked.
Anyone familiar with basic calculus would realise that it's entirely possible that an acceleration decaying to infinity but always existing might *not* overcome some velocities. Think of the acceleration as a curve, and the change in velocity is the area under that curve.
Not all curves integrated to infinity equal infinity... in fact, the area under the curve of acceleration as the apple is traveling away from the earth would be finite: this is exactly what Escape Velocity is.
Gravity will *not* always overcome the momentum. Ever heard of escape velocity? Gravitational binding energy? There is a point where you have enough initial kenetic energy such that gravity loses, and "further explosions" are unnecessary.
That experiment just proves that Cristian teaching is wrong, or at least it is not complete. All living beings have their souls. Including cats and all other animals. You can ignore it, but ignorance doesn't help your own soul.
Uh....
how does this experiment prove *anything* about souls? If you're assuming that differences in personality imply different souls, I'd say you had a flawed assumption. Development and upbringing can have a huge impact on personality (not to mention age -- one's a kitten, the other's an older cat) -- why make the illogical leap to the realm of the soul?. Really, you're just throwing the word "proves" around a tad too easily.
I really don't see how this experiment says anything one way or the other about the nature of "souls."
Maybe it would be a good idea for benchmarks to start reporting even just the standard deviation along with the average fps. I'd certainly find it useful/informative.
(please note that I don't agree with everything mentioned on the evolution-fact.html page. For example, they say that it is a "fact" that all life forms come from previously living forms... but this in itself would make abiogenesis impossible! So yes, some scientists do throw the word "fact" around a bit too lightly)
Before you say that "evolution" has been mislabeled, you should define what you mean by "evolution." There are many different things it can refer to. For example, if you mean that the genetic distribution of populations changes (and has changed) over time, then evolution *is* a fact.
Explaining *how* the populations have changed over time, however, would be a theory.
There are some very high standards that enemy combatants must meet in order to have the right of POW status. If they don't meet all of them than a country doesn't have to give them POW treatment. The factors are:
(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.... one can very easily argue that al queda/ taliban fighters didn't meet all of these requirements.
The only thing I wonder about the detained prisoners is if we met the requirements in this passage: "Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
Did we ever give the detainees a tribunal to confirm that they're not POW's?
-- On a related note, don't go into the "but Congress never declared war" argument unless you can point out *exactly* where it says in the geneva convention that you need a declaration of war. I read "all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict" which seems to make it unnecessary. And the war powers act cited above gives congress the power to give the president specific wartime powers without a formal declaration of war (see "specific statutory authorization" under section 2(c)).
I just want to say that I hate the bush regime and their attitude towards international and domestic affairs (esp the OHS) as much as the next whiny liberal;)... but it seems that all the claims of bush's war acts violating international and domestic law aren't entirely accurate. Both sides of a debate need to be well-informed for it to get anywhere. Perhaps the laws of war need to be reformed, but we're not really breaking them.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's impossible to come to any (useful) purely deductive conclusion without starting from some set of external, a priori axioms. Otherwise you'll be stuck coming to trival, circular, or conditional tautologies no matter how well you reason. (A is A, or if God exists then there is a God, or if God exists and only God should decide when someone dies then we shouldn't have capital punishment. These statements are all true by definition).
Even purely theoretical realms like math. How do you prove that 1+1=2 without reference to anything external? Perhaps you can, but as far as I can tell it's basically assumed by definition.
As far as your example of an "ethical" argument against capital punishment, it makes the assumption that a "greater good" exists and furthermore the assumption that "we shouldn't do things that deprive the society of a greater good" and also that "no one can predict what a person might do in the remainder of his/her natural life" and that "if no one can predict what a person might do, then that person may do things which contribute to the greater good" etc etc. You may disagree with the set of assumptions I've extracted but I think my point is clear.
Pretty much all human knowledge and reasoning is either based on assumptions that are just taken for granted, or inductive truths that are never 100% guaranteed to be true. This fact is somewhat intellectually jarring, but we seem to go on figuring things out about the world just fine nonetheless.
Think about this: If I get shot in the arm, but don't die from it, then have three childeren who all get shot and live, and they have childeren that all get shot and live, and so on for a few hundred generations, does that mean eventually my familial line will produce bullet-resistant childeren?
No. But you don't seem to understand the basic mechanism behind evolution, and your analogy is flawed. Picture not one bacterium, but thousands and thousands of them, all with different resistances to antibiotics. The antibiotics kills off some, but others live. The ones that lived have on average a stronger resistance to antibiotics. They have lots of children, which creates more variation. Then another antibiotic is used, which kills off some but leaves others. The others who are left have an even *higher* average resistance to antibiotics.
And so on... each generation then is more resistant to the drugs than the previous. In other words, it's not *getting shot* that makes you stronger, but the inherent genetic variation that produces the resistance. The act of getting shot (or being exposed to antibiotics) just removes the weaker end of the gene pool, giving the next generation a stronger average, or starting point, if you will.
My understanding was that the "Static" in SRAM meant static ciruit design, meaning no current usage in the idle state, meaning static CMOS gates as you mention. But you say that this only holds true for the "Low Power SRAMS"
So how are the circuits set up in these "high speed SRAMS" so that they draw idle current?
I was under the impression that *all* SRAMS use static cmos circuitry.
Before developers can push the future of gaming development, and allow "4th party" users to create mods, we'll have to invent some pronouns with which to refer to these 4th parties! I mean, we already have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns -- I, you, and he/she/it respectively. What will the 4th person pronouns be like? Are these at all related to the modifications to tenses required by time travel as expanded on by Douglas Adams?
umm minor nitpick but being able to write to the kernel isn't analogous to having "root" in linux terms... it's analogous to being able to write to the kernel;)
What influences natural selection? The environment, i'd say -- If you survive in the environment and are able to pass on your genes, you're selected. That's not a random function, and also doesn't seem to require some sort of higher "intent."
I think the assumption that anything without "intent" must be random is fallacious...
The problem is, pretty much anyone who calculates that "Evolution is this improbable!" makes this pre vs post-specification fallacy that was brought up. That's the point of the people you are arguing with.
I have not read that book either. Maybe you could summarize how Spetner calculates the probability of evolution and explain why it's not subject to this fallacy?
The problem is developers not used to multi-user
on
Shattering Windows
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· Score: 3, Informative
For example, the virus scan writer probably tests, develops and uses windows while logged into the "administrator" account interactively, as do most users. In Win98, it's not even a question -- you're always the "root" of the box. I'd wager that "What access could a non-administrator user obtain through our GUI/message interface?" hardly occurred to the GUI programmers for this particular virus scan software, even though their interface ran at LocalSystem (geeez).
As mentioned elsewhere, there are ways to avoid these problems: If you really need to use gui elements as administrator, run them under a separate desktop or windowstation where the interactive user can't touch it. Run the GUI interface impersonated down to a lower level, such as that of the interactive user. If you have to be administrator or local system, treat all input as untrusted, including (especially) window messages! Don't use edit box constraints as buffer limits. Don't use the default window procedure. etc etc etc.
It's true, however, that the default behavior for WM_TIMER is a pretty big security flaw (IMHO). But contrary to what this writer inaccurately claimed, you can still intercept the WM_TIMER message and handle it yourself, and any security-conscious program should never pass unexamined WM_TIMER functions to the default window procedure. This makes me start to wonder about other flaws in the default window procedures... as Microsoft wants you to think that the defaults it gives you are safe and secure. hmmmm...
If serial were faster, as you said, computers would all have 1 bit address busses with enormous shift registers.
I believe that one of the candidates for the successor to PCI is a serial device bus.
I don't know much about the electromagnetic theory, but my computer hardware design teacher went on and on about how hard it was to get parallel busses to run at insanely high clock speeds, and that serial will be the way to go as clock speeds continue to increase. For some reason, it seems that a serial line running at 32x the clock speed of a 32-bit-wide parallel bus is actually easier to implement with current technology. I recall hearing about data skew and clock skew and capacitance issues and such, but never quite put it all together.
It seems your insistance that parallel is always faster, however, contradicts the current state of the art.
Slashdot Mirror
Time traveler didn't use various projectors and various pieces of glass... it only used one TV screen hidden inside the case and a frensel-type lens to make the image look like a hologram. But the image itself was flat.
:)
Didn't you ever lean over and look inside when you were a kid?
Digital has its applications, but really, in the end, digital is infintely less precise then analog (mathematically speaking).
While this is true in theory, there's no thing in the real world as infinite precision, as that would convey infinite information. There's always some amount of noise, and in audio systems the ambient noise is almost certainly going to be above the quantization noise you get from 32 (or even 24) bit digital precision.
The sample rate you choose, of course, limits the frequencies you can reliably encode, and also the pre-filtering for the AD conversion introduces some phase shift at the upper end of the frequency spectrum, but nowadays we can up the sample rate so high that it really doesn't matter for human listening purposes (observe 192khz sampling for DVD audio, etc).
On the other hand, most of the noise and distortion of your signal through an audio path seems to come from the analog components. Infinite precision doesn't really matter if it's not accurate in the first place! More and more studios are making more and more of the audio stay in the digital domain, for protection against noise and distortion. My guess is that this guitar stays digital for the same reasons. (and cool-geek factor too)
AAAAAGGGHHHHH!!!!
Right now I have very nice 1.5/768k ADSL through a local provider known as "Cyberonic" using Worldcom's bandwidth. It's really cheap, very nice, very fast, very little downtime. Oh yeah we get static IPs and no filtering too...
If this was implemented, I might get stuck with Verizon Online. NOOOOOOOO Just the fact that they've called my house during dinner no less than a dozen times asking if we want to switch to their (slower, less reliable, and less feature-rich) service makes me think I'd rather go without a computer entirely than use their service. Gaaah
This is NOT a good thing for the customers. The big telecoms are buying the FCC and congress out.
XORing two text streams produces cyphertext that is really easy to crack. In fact, one homework assignment in the first or second week of an intro to cryptography class I took a few years ago was to crack a short string which was two english senteces xored with eachother.
... the two plaintexts xored together. These two messages are now as good as cracked.
This is also why it's bad to use the same one-time pad twice:
Say you encrypt plaintext 1 with the pad to get cyphertext 1: T1 XOR P = C1
And same with plaintext 2: T2 XOR P = C2
Now some spy gets C1 and C2 and suspects that they're based on the same OTP. She xors the two cypher texts to get T1 XOR T2 XOR P XOR P = T1 XOR T2
Anyone familiar with basic calculus would realise that it's entirely possible that an acceleration decaying to infinity but always existing might *not* overcome some velocities. Think of the acceleration as a curve, and the change in velocity is the area under that curve.
Not all curves integrated to infinity equal infinity... in fact, the area under the curve of acceleration as the apple is traveling away from the earth would be finite: this is exactly what Escape Velocity is.
actually a body can lose momentum in a perfect vacuum due to gravity... it just has to transfer that momentum somewhere else.
Gravity will *not* always overcome the momentum. Ever heard of escape velocity? Gravitational binding energy? There is a point where you have enough initial kenetic energy such that gravity loses, and "further explosions" are unnecessary.
Yes, but this story is from the "Zion archives" ... implying that the humans in the movie-era should have had access to this information.
>If they could acquire the lock, cam and cam->ops
>cannot be NULL due to the first check.
It *CAN* on an SMP machine, which is the whole point.
Uhm, if cam was NULL after the first check, wouldn't cam->busy_lock cause a segfault (or whatever, i'm not a linux kernel programmer)?
I can't comment on the cam->ops though, since I don't know the implementation details.
That experiment just proves that Cristian teaching is wrong, or at least it is not complete. All living beings have their souls. Including cats and all other animals. You can ignore it, but ignorance doesn't help your own soul.
Uh....
how does this experiment prove *anything* about souls? If you're assuming that differences in personality imply different souls, I'd say you had a flawed assumption. Development and upbringing can have a huge impact on personality (not to mention age -- one's a kitten, the other's an older cat) -- why make the illogical leap to the realm of the soul?. Really, you're just throwing the word "proves" around a tad too easily.
I really don't see how this experiment says anything one way or the other about the nature of "souls."
Interesting!
Maybe it would be a good idea for benchmarks to start reporting even just the standard deviation along with the average fps. I'd certainly find it useful/informative.
(please note that I don't agree with everything mentioned on the evolution-fact.html page. For example, they say that it is a "fact" that all life forms come from previously living forms... but this in itself would make abiogenesis impossible! So yes, some scientists do throw the word "fact" around a bit too lightly)
Before you say that "evolution" has been mislabeled, you should define what you mean by "evolution." There are many different things it can refer to. For example, if you mean that the genetic distribution of populations changes (and has changed) over time, then evolution *is* a fact.
m l
Explaining *how* the populations have changed over time, however, would be a theory.
See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.ht
Just one minor point:
... one can very easily argue that al queda/ taliban fighters didn't meet all of these requirements.
;) ... but it seems that all the claims of bush's war acts violating international and domestic law aren't entirely accurate. Both sides of a debate need to be well-informed for it to get anywhere. Perhaps the laws of war need to be reformed, but we're not really breaking them.
detainees that haven't been declared POW's anyone?
I've heard statements like this a lot, and believed them until I actually did some research and read up on the Geneva convention (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm) and other applicable war laws (ie War Powers Act of 1973).
There are some very high standards that enemy combatants must meet in order to have the right of POW status. If they don't meet all of them than a country doesn't have to give them POW treatment. The factors are:
(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
The only thing I wonder about the detained prisoners is if we met the requirements in this passage: "Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
Did we ever give the detainees a tribunal to confirm that they're not POW's?
--
On a related note, don't go into the "but Congress never declared war" argument unless you can point out *exactly* where it says in the geneva convention that you need a declaration of war. I read "all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict" which seems to make it unnecessary. And the war powers act cited above gives congress the power to give the president specific wartime powers without a formal declaration of war (see "specific statutory authorization" under section 2(c)).
I just want to say that I hate the bush regime and their attitude towards international and domestic affairs (esp the OHS) as much as the next whiny liberal
It's impossible to come to any (useful) purely deductive conclusion without starting from some set of external, a priori axioms. Otherwise you'll be stuck coming to trival, circular, or conditional tautologies no matter how well you reason. (A is A, or if God exists then there is a God, or if God exists and only God should decide when someone dies then we shouldn't have capital punishment. These statements are all true by definition).
Even purely theoretical realms like math. How do you prove that 1+1=2 without reference to anything external? Perhaps you can, but as far as I can tell it's basically assumed by definition.
As far as your example of an "ethical" argument against capital punishment, it makes the assumption that a "greater good" exists and furthermore the assumption that "we shouldn't do things that deprive the society of a greater good" and also that "no one can predict what a person might do in the remainder of his/her natural life" and that "if no one can predict what a person might do, then that person may do things which contribute to the greater good" etc etc. You may disagree with the set of assumptions I've extracted but I think my point is clear.
Pretty much all human knowledge and reasoning is either based on assumptions that are just taken for granted, or inductive truths that are never 100% guaranteed to be true. This fact is somewhat intellectually jarring, but we seem to go on figuring things out about the world just fine nonetheless.
Think about this: If I get shot in the arm, but don't die from it, then have three childeren who all get shot and live, and they have childeren that all get shot and live, and so on for a few hundred generations, does that mean eventually my familial line will produce bullet-resistant childeren?
... each generation then is more resistant to the drugs than the previous. In other words, it's not *getting shot* that makes you stronger, but the inherent genetic variation that produces the resistance. The act of getting shot (or being exposed to antibiotics) just removes the weaker end of the gene pool, giving the next generation a stronger average, or starting point, if you will.
No. But you don't seem to understand the basic mechanism behind evolution, and your analogy is flawed. Picture not one bacterium, but thousands and thousands of them, all with different resistances to antibiotics. The antibiotics kills off some, but others live. The ones that lived have on average a stronger resistance to antibiotics. They have lots of children, which creates more variation. Then another antibiotic is used, which kills off some but leaves others. The others who are left have an even *higher* average resistance to antibiotics.
And so on
I guess the idea is that the two 60hz flickers will be slightly different... "out of tune" ... causing pronounced beat patterns.
:P
a larger difference between frequency (60hz vs 70hz) wouldn't beat as much.
But of course it doesn't explain why the monitor flickers with the light off
My understanding was that the "Static" in SRAM meant static ciruit design, meaning no current usage in the idle state, meaning static CMOS gates as you mention. But you say that this only holds true for the "Low Power SRAMS"
So how are the circuits set up in these "high speed SRAMS" so that they draw idle current?
I was under the impression that *all* SRAMS use static cmos circuitry.
You've aparently never heard of a one-time pad.
The only way to break an OTP is to get your hands on the key.
Before developers can push the future of gaming development, and allow "4th party" users to create mods, we'll have to invent some pronouns with which to refer to these 4th parties! I mean, we already have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns -- I, you, and he/she/it respectively. What will the 4th person pronouns be like? Are these at all related to the modifications to tenses required by time travel as expanded on by Douglas Adams?
umm minor nitpick but being able to write to the kernel isn't analogous to having "root" in linux terms... it's analogous to being able to write to the kernel ;)
What influences natural selection? The environment, i'd say -- If you survive in the environment and are able to pass on your genes, you're selected. That's not a random function, and also doesn't seem to require some sort of higher "intent."
I think the assumption that anything without "intent" must be random is fallacious...
The problem is, pretty much anyone who calculates that "Evolution is this improbable!" makes this pre vs post-specification fallacy that was brought up. That's the point of the people you are arguing with.
I have not read that book either. Maybe you could summarize how Spetner calculates the probability of evolution and explain why it's not subject to this fallacy?
For example, the virus scan writer probably tests, develops and uses windows while logged into the "administrator" account interactively, as do most users. In Win98, it's not even a question -- you're always the "root" of the box. I'd wager that "What access could a non-administrator user obtain through our GUI/message interface?" hardly occurred to the GUI programmers for this particular virus scan software, even though their interface ran at LocalSystem (geeez).
As mentioned elsewhere, there are ways to avoid these problems: If you really need to use gui elements as administrator, run them under a separate desktop or windowstation where the interactive user can't touch it. Run the GUI interface impersonated down to a lower level, such as that of the interactive user. If you have to be administrator or local system, treat all input as untrusted, including (especially) window messages! Don't use edit box constraints as buffer limits. Don't use the default window procedure. etc etc etc.
It's true, however, that the default behavior for WM_TIMER is a pretty big security flaw (IMHO). But contrary to what this writer inaccurately claimed, you can still intercept the WM_TIMER message and handle it yourself, and any security-conscious program should never pass unexamined WM_TIMER functions to the default window procedure. This makes me start to wonder about other flaws in the default window procedures... as Microsoft wants you to think that the defaults it gives you are safe and secure. hmmmm...
If serial were faster, as you said, computers would all have 1 bit address busses with enormous shift registers.
I believe that one of the candidates for the successor to PCI is a serial device bus.
I don't know much about the electromagnetic theory, but my computer hardware design teacher went on and on about how hard it was to get parallel busses to run at insanely high clock speeds, and that serial will be the way to go as clock speeds continue to increase. For some reason, it seems that a serial line running at 32x the clock speed of a 32-bit-wide parallel bus is actually easier to implement with current technology. I recall hearing about data skew and clock skew and capacitance issues and such, but never quite put it all together.
It seems your insistance that parallel is always faster, however, contradicts the current state of the art.