I was at Diamond last weekend, and while idling around the foyer I was having a look at their big posters boasting about how bright their beam was. A closer look at the units indicated that it's even more abstract than "photons per unit area". The units they're talking about are (deep breath...) "Photons per second per square millimetre per millirad per 0.1% beam width". So they're not only counting area, but also divergence and how well-defined the beam is. All things the sun tends to be rather poor at, really, so it's not the fairest comparison ever.
Actually, it's a mathematics textbook whose name happens to be quite close to the name of a physics textbook. Although you are right about it being a hard read - the proof that 1+1=2 famously isn't introduced until several hundred pages in.
I don't think any of these things particularly benefit from this type of processor. All of the situations you describe involve some degree of randomness, but this CPU doesn't sound like a source of useful random values at all.
The randomness in these processes occurs in particular places, in particular quantities - this processor presumably produces some characteristic amount of randomness in each calculation, but the odds on it being a meaningful amount for whatever arbitrary calculation you're doing is vanishingly small - and given it's apparently treated to give different amounts of randomness in different bits, it's almost certainly non-uniform as well.
In almost all simulations you want to make use of extremely well-controlled random numbers - something which adding some noise as part of your floating-point calculations is not.
Obviously this is the potential argument for these chips, but the majority of these systems have a trade-off between between speed and accuracy: Most numerical mathematical methods have a clear trade-off between speed and accuracy. It's pointless to gain speed if it pulls your accuracy down more than simply reducing the complexity of your algorithms.
Given that, I would expect this hardware - if it proves useful - would primarily be in the "entertainment" sector of the market. Of course making this judgment is pretty much impossible at the moment as there's no real information on just how bad the accuracy loss is with these chips.
The issue is, what does this CPU actually offer- specifically, how large would the loss in quality be? Would simply cutting down on the accuracy of the algorithms used to reduce its computational burden and thus the amount of processing power needed work just as well?
There's a dearth of hard information in the article on the chip in the article (all the headline-grabbing speedup values, but no details on exactly how much accuracy is lost), but it seems to me that such a chip would really need to conclusively prove that the accuracy trade-offs cannot be just as well made at the software level as at the hardware level.
Those assumptions are not relevant (since, even if you could only send a single bit of data, this can obviously be built up into an arbitrarily complex set of information). It is not possible for the "sender" to influence what the "observer" receives in any fashion which can be interpreted without additional information being sent along some other channel, even if "what to look for and when" is already established. The issue arises because even if you know what observation and when it is made by the "sender", you are still left with a probability distribution at the other end. A probability distribution which is impossible to distinguish from randomness without additional information.
That's why I mentioned quantum entanglement alone - there is certainly the possibility of higher physics being discovered which facilitates it, but quantum entanglement by itself is not the answer.
There are incompatibilities between the current formulations of relativity and quantum mechanics, certainly. However, this limit on the transmission of information is not one of them.
Quantum entanglement obviously exists, and it does produce effects which appear to propagate faster than the speed of light. However, if you look at the mathematics of the system, without the addition of a "traditional" information channel (all of which we know of being limited by the speed of light at present) given two people each with one of a pair of entangled particles, it is impossible for the "receiver" to definitively determine that the "sender" has interacted with his particle at all, let alone extract any information.
Thus the requirement that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light is preserved, despite the appearance of the "spooky action at a distance" so derided by Einstein.
There may be a way to produce faster than light transfer of information, but Quantum Entanglement isn't it.
Instantaneous communication via quantum entanglement alone is also not possible, since thanks to the requirements of relativity it's impossible to send any information faster than the speed of light, and quantum entanglement is no exception.
(See this wiki article as an example of a slightly technical description of why)
You're slightly misunderstanding the effects of time dilation here - time dilation from the probe's point of view has absolutely no effect on the time a "stationary" observer sees its journey take.
As the probe speeds up, the time the observer on earth sees it take remains equal to the distance it must travel divided by its velocity (in Earth's frame). Time dilation affects the probe because what the probe sees is a relativistic shortening of the distance it must travel, thus giving a reduced total time of travel. This is resolved by the probe experiencing a reduced journey time compared to the time which passes on earth.
As a result, the second paradox you describe does not occur (although the concept of simultaneity does get kind of wacky in relativity in other ways).
These restrictions on cash are quite often legal - "Legal Tender" by definition is by definition only required to be accepted for debts. Until a transaction has taken place in a store, no debt is owed.
While there are obvious exceptions (restaurants or non pre-pay gas come to mind) and there may be territories where laws handle this differently,
in a large number of cases where there is no existing debt until payment has been agreed, shops are free to impose any sort of restriction they like.
While the basic foundation of your argument is correct (That, when it comes down to it, there are plenty of ways to kill people), the articles you cite do somewhat make the counter-point that access to guns makes it much easier to kill people.
Considering the three cases you've linked, the death toll at Dunblane was 17. The total death toll of the other two (despite the "impressive" flame-thrower) was 0. It's impossible to say if people would definitely have been killed if the men in those cases had access to firearms, but I don't think it's a completely unreasonable assumption to make.
People may try to kill other people all the time - but that doesn't mean we have to make it easy on them.
As I said, and you seem to agree, for the "Learning Curve" discussion with regards to how EVE handles new players, it basically boils down to the rather abstract question of whether such a market exists, and if EVE as a game wants it. It's certainly not something which can be addressed here in any conclusive fashion - although given that about two thirds of the posts on this article are talking about EVE, it seems that everyone wants to try.
I think this is where the discussion breaks down a bit - Evaluated in the sense of an introduction to a product you know little or nothing else about, I don't think anyone claims it's a particularly good introduction to the game as a whole. Rather, EVE proponents identify what others identify as flaws in its design as deliberate (or in keeping with the rest of the game's ethos), and that those who object to them simply "don't get it" and wouldn't enjoy the game anyway.
The idea seems to reduce to the claim that anyone who could enjoy the gameplay will like it regardless of how it is introduced and presented, which is something I certainly don't believe. There is a market in between "will love it unconditionally" and "want to grind murlocs, but IN SPACE!" which many people seem to fail to consider, and they're the market which could potentially be reached by touching up how players are introduced to the game, which is the point of TFA.
I didn't mean to suggest that a tutorial covering basic mechanics was unnecessary - on the contrary, it's quite essential given EVE has a fairly unique interface method. The issue I was pointing out was that most of these interesting mechanics are almost completely obscured - as you say, you need to check out writeups and the like to get a feel for what there actually is to do in the game.
To clarify the newbie zone issue I mentioned (I did a bit of research to jog my memory, it's the "Deadspace training complex" that you begin the game in) is that the tutorial does make a distinction, in that it will not continue if you leave the area. But getting back is not explained anywhere, you're just constantly prompted that you need to return.
And lastly, my objection to the "Data dump" is not the volume of data, but rather the way it is dumped (lots and lots of nested, textual descriptions of things). To a new player who may not be familiar with the game or how it refers to various things, it's not a very enticing thought to dig through that looking for bits of info.
You're probably right in that the tutorial is sufficient in that all the information you could need to get started is in there somewhere.
But a really good introduction can also provide the impetus to get a person out and exploring the game world, which I think is somewhat lacking in EVE's at the moment.
The problem I observed with the EVE tutorial is not that there's too much information, but rather that it's presented extremely poorly and that the tutorial is not particularly engaging.
In particular, your second and third paragraph is typical of the response given by people when asked why they play EVE - the problem is, all of this interesting and exciting content doesn't seem to be represented at all in the tutorial.
Instead the tutorial seems to mostly just cover simple game mechanics (and often in a very poor way - does the game direct you about how to actually get back to the newbie zone if you leave it yet? That seemed to be the most mystifying thing to most people when I checked EVE out) and then dumps you with vast amounts of text-based information describing all the systems that weren't actually addressed in the tutorial.
While you may argue that this is good because it weeds out the weak people, it has the issue that a player checking it out for the trial will probably completely fail to notice all this wonderful complexity as it can look like just poor implementation unless there's someone supplementing the tutorial and encouraging you to persevere - which seems to be almost the definition of a poorly designed new user experience.
In reality, he didn't even get the "Things will get smaller" prediction that right. He was qualitatively right, in that "smaller" is the way things go, but he missed by probably an order of magnitude or two - suggesting that people would be wearing dozens of PCs across their body embedded in clothing and jewellery is a rather different view of "personal computing" than someone carrying around a netbook.
The question is, are the students paying enough? Universities have some really quite impressive financial bullshit going on, and the amount they claim many things cost seems quite divorced from reality, even compared to the already high costs of tuition.
The situation is somewhat different in the UK, but the costs my university reports to funding bodies and the like is typically 5 to 10 times that of the actual tuition/salary level - pretty much regardless of the levels of facilities used. Thus the position of the university is that the student's education is in all cases heavily subsidized by university money, and that justifies their position on IPR (which, to be fair, is also much more lax than the one reported in the article at my university at least).
What's new is the scope of this database - the goal is to contain details of every single communication in the country. Information about every website accessed, every phone call made, every e-mail sent would be recorded in a database held by the government (or their appointed company), although not their contents (for now).
Previously this data wasn't collected in a central location and was only gathered from providers as required by criminal investigations etc, but the goal here would be that the government should have every bit of communications data directly at hand at all times, even if it's not suspect in any fashion.
What impresses me the most is that according to this graph, AoC has seen a 300% decrease in number of logins from the start to the end of their sample period. Which means that for every person playing at the start of the period, two anti-people are playing now. That's quite an impressive failure, all in all.
Seriously though, these charts are dubious at best - looking at WoW, it has an almost perfectly straight graph, showing 150% growth over the 6 months of last year, which I don't think anyone thinks is meaningful or accurate. They freely admit that they're taking the sample of GamerDNA members logging in, but then they just present the data without any attempt to discover true meaning. For example, if we take the assumption that WoW's userbase is fairly constant (I haven't heard any boasts about new subscriber numbers recently, so I figure that's a fair guess) than that 150% increase in subscribers is simply down to new GamerDNA members registering and adding to the time. If we assume gamers are equally likely to subscribe regardless of game they play, this means any game which shows less than ~150% growth in that period is actually losing subscribers, which includes titles like Tabula Rasa.
That's probably not the actual case either, but it just goes to show that this really needs some more analysis than the simple "Here's some login numbers" which is presented. Accurate descriptions of what's actually being graphed would be a start.
No, there's absolutely nothing new about it. It's the same model that's been available all around the world for quite some time now - the summary is terribly worded, but this is simply the first of these devices to be installed in the UK. I suspect the private clinic which has had it installed has simply aggressively pushed press releases about how great they are to have bought it to get some free publicity.
I never found an AI which... knows when to avoid a fight.
I found quite the opposite problem in Rome and most especially Medieval 2, in that the enemy seemed absolutely terrified of facing me in open ground if I took an even slightly agressive stance. Any attacks seemed to lead to the enemy almost immediately fleeing back to their local town/castle and waiting for me to come to them.
While this may have been a reasonably sound tactic for slowing down an oncoming army, it annoyed me no end as I just don't think the seiges are up to the standard of the open field engagements. It's stopped me actually finishing campaigns in M2 simply because of how very dull everything tends to get in the end-game.
While slashdot is often not on the bleeding edge, this news isn't exactly ancient: the article itself is dated just last week, and correctly cites a paper which was only published a month ago. Don't believe everything you read in a copyright tag.
As for the rest of it, yes, much of the article is rather terrible.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at Diamond last weekend, and while idling around the foyer I was having a look at their big posters boasting about how bright their beam was. A closer look at the units indicated that it's even more abstract than "photons per unit area". The units they're talking about are (deep breath...) "Photons per second per square millimetre per millirad per 0.1% beam width". So they're not only counting area, but also divergence and how well-defined the beam is. All things the sun tends to be rather poor at, really, so it's not the fairest comparison ever.
Actually, it's a mathematics textbook whose name happens to be quite close to the name of a physics textbook. Although you are right about it being a hard read - the proof that 1+1=2 famously isn't introduced until several hundred pages in.
The randomness in these processes occurs in particular places, in particular quantities - this processor presumably produces some characteristic amount of randomness in each calculation, but the odds on it being a meaningful amount for whatever arbitrary calculation you're doing is vanishingly small - and given it's apparently treated to give different amounts of randomness in different bits, it's almost certainly non-uniform as well.
In almost all simulations you want to make use of extremely well-controlled random numbers - something which adding some noise as part of your floating-point calculations is not.
Given that, I would expect this hardware - if it proves useful - would primarily be in the "entertainment" sector of the market. Of course making this judgment is pretty much impossible at the moment as there's no real information on just how bad the accuracy loss is with these chips.
There's a dearth of hard information in the article on the chip in the article (all the headline-grabbing speedup values, but no details on exactly how much accuracy is lost), but it seems to me that such a chip would really need to conclusively prove that the accuracy trade-offs cannot be just as well made at the software level as at the hardware level.
To be fair, I think it's more like 45% "America are teh ghay!" and 50% "Hur hur, farts are funny!"
Those assumptions are not relevant (since, even if you could only send a single bit of data, this can obviously be built up into an arbitrarily complex set of information). It is not possible for the "sender" to influence what the "observer" receives in any fashion which can be interpreted without additional information being sent along some other channel, even if "what to look for and when" is already established. The issue arises because even if you know what observation and when it is made by the "sender", you are still left with a probability distribution at the other end. A probability distribution which is impossible to distinguish from randomness without additional information.
That's why I mentioned quantum entanglement alone - there is certainly the possibility of higher physics being discovered which facilitates it, but quantum entanglement by itself is not the answer.
Quantum entanglement obviously exists, and it does produce effects which appear to propagate faster than the speed of light. However, if you look at the mathematics of the system, without the addition of a "traditional" information channel (all of which we know of being limited by the speed of light at present) given two people each with one of a pair of entangled particles, it is impossible for the "receiver" to definitively determine that the "sender" has interacted with his particle at all, let alone extract any information.
Thus the requirement that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light is preserved, despite the appearance of the "spooky action at a distance" so derided by Einstein.
There may be a way to produce faster than light transfer of information, but Quantum Entanglement isn't it.
(See this wiki article as an example of a slightly technical description of why)
As the probe speeds up, the time the observer on earth sees it take remains equal to the distance it must travel divided by its velocity (in Earth's frame). Time dilation affects the probe because what the probe sees is a relativistic shortening of the distance it must travel, thus giving a reduced total time of travel. This is resolved by the probe experiencing a reduced journey time compared to the time which passes on earth.
As a result, the second paradox you describe does not occur (although the concept of simultaneity does get kind of wacky in relativity in other ways).
While there are obvious exceptions (restaurants or non pre-pay gas come to mind) and there may be territories where laws handle this differently, in a large number of cases where there is no existing debt until payment has been agreed, shops are free to impose any sort of restriction they like.
Considering the three cases you've linked, the death toll at Dunblane was 17. The total death toll of the other two (despite the "impressive" flame-thrower) was 0. It's impossible to say if people would definitely have been killed if the men in those cases had access to firearms, but I don't think it's a completely unreasonable assumption to make.
People may try to kill other people all the time - but that doesn't mean we have to make it easy on them.
I would want to read a real paper on it in a journal.
If you're that fussy about your sources, at least read down to the bottom of the article to see if they have citations. Like this one:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat2357.html
As I said, and you seem to agree, for the "Learning Curve" discussion with regards to how EVE handles new players, it basically boils down to the rather abstract question of whether such a market exists, and if EVE as a game wants it. It's certainly not something which can be addressed here in any conclusive fashion - although given that about two thirds of the posts on this article are talking about EVE, it seems that everyone wants to try.
The idea seems to reduce to the claim that anyone who could enjoy the gameplay will like it regardless of how it is introduced and presented, which is something I certainly don't believe. There is a market in between "will love it unconditionally" and "want to grind murlocs, but IN SPACE!" which many people seem to fail to consider, and they're the market which could potentially be reached by touching up how players are introduced to the game, which is the point of TFA.
To clarify the newbie zone issue I mentioned (I did a bit of research to jog my memory, it's the "Deadspace training complex" that you begin the game in) is that the tutorial does make a distinction, in that it will not continue if you leave the area. But getting back is not explained anywhere, you're just constantly prompted that you need to return.
And lastly, my objection to the "Data dump" is not the volume of data, but rather the way it is dumped (lots and lots of nested, textual descriptions of things). To a new player who may not be familiar with the game or how it refers to various things, it's not a very enticing thought to dig through that looking for bits of info.
You're probably right in that the tutorial is sufficient in that all the information you could need to get started is in there somewhere. But a really good introduction can also provide the impetus to get a person out and exploring the game world, which I think is somewhat lacking in EVE's at the moment.
In particular, your second and third paragraph is typical of the response given by people when asked why they play EVE - the problem is, all of this interesting and exciting content doesn't seem to be represented at all in the tutorial.
Instead the tutorial seems to mostly just cover simple game mechanics (and often in a very poor way - does the game direct you about how to actually get back to the newbie zone if you leave it yet? That seemed to be the most mystifying thing to most people when I checked EVE out) and then dumps you with vast amounts of text-based information describing all the systems that weren't actually addressed in the tutorial.
While you may argue that this is good because it weeds out the weak people, it has the issue that a player checking it out for the trial will probably completely fail to notice all this wonderful complexity as it can look like just poor implementation unless there's someone supplementing the tutorial and encouraging you to persevere - which seems to be almost the definition of a poorly designed new user experience.
In reality, he didn't even get the "Things will get smaller" prediction that right. He was qualitatively right, in that "smaller" is the way things go, but he missed by probably an order of magnitude or two - suggesting that people would be wearing dozens of PCs across their body embedded in clothing and jewellery is a rather different view of "personal computing" than someone carrying around a netbook.
The situation is somewhat different in the UK, but the costs my university reports to funding bodies and the like is typically 5 to 10 times that of the actual tuition/salary level - pretty much regardless of the levels of facilities used. Thus the position of the university is that the student's education is in all cases heavily subsidized by university money, and that justifies their position on IPR (which, to be fair, is also much more lax than the one reported in the article at my university at least).
Previously this data wasn't collected in a central location and was only gathered from providers as required by criminal investigations etc, but the goal here would be that the government should have every bit of communications data directly at hand at all times, even if it's not suspect in any fashion.
Seriously though, these charts are dubious at best - looking at WoW, it has an almost perfectly straight graph, showing 150% growth over the 6 months of last year, which I don't think anyone thinks is meaningful or accurate. They freely admit that they're taking the sample of GamerDNA members logging in, but then they just present the data without any attempt to discover true meaning. For example, if we take the assumption that WoW's userbase is fairly constant (I haven't heard any boasts about new subscriber numbers recently, so I figure that's a fair guess) than that 150% increase in subscribers is simply down to new GamerDNA members registering and adding to the time. If we assume gamers are equally likely to subscribe regardless of game they play, this means any game which shows less than ~150% growth in that period is actually losing subscribers, which includes titles like Tabula Rasa.
That's probably not the actual case either, but it just goes to show that this really needs some more analysis than the simple "Here's some login numbers" which is presented. Accurate descriptions of what's actually being graphed would be a start.
No, there's absolutely nothing new about it. It's the same model that's been available all around the world for quite some time now - the summary is terribly worded, but this is simply the first of these devices to be installed in the UK. I suspect the private clinic which has had it installed has simply aggressively pushed press releases about how great they are to have bought it to get some free publicity.
I never found an AI which ... knows when to avoid a fight.
I found quite the opposite problem in Rome and most especially Medieval 2, in that the enemy seemed absolutely terrified of facing me in open ground if I took an even slightly agressive stance. Any attacks seemed to lead to the enemy almost immediately fleeing back to their local town/castle and waiting for me to come to them.
While this may have been a reasonably sound tactic for slowing down an oncoming army, it annoyed me no end as I just don't think the seiges are up to the standard of the open field engagements. It's stopped me actually finishing campaigns in M2 simply because of how very dull everything tends to get in the end-game.
As for the rest of it, yes, much of the article is rather terrible.