At least the part where you gradually specify the types in your program manually and optionally enforce the types statically can be done in Python today, see mypy.
Note that you two are not discussing the same kind of "type" here, even though they share a word. Dynamic type systems can be regarded as static type systems where all values have a single type. However, Python has been gaining optional static typing capabilities . See mypy, PEP 483, PEP 484 and also the typing and typeshed) modules.
Your data passing through someone else's servers doesn't automatically imply they have means of decrypting that data. Clients can generate keys themselves (or negotiate them securely with each other, in the case of asymmetric encryption) and keep them secret. Data encrypted in such a way can be stored wherever you want without the party owning the infrastructure being able to read it.
This is completely wrong. Modern cryptographically secure PRNGs can generate practically unpredictable sequences of as many numbers you'd like from an initial seed of >= 256 bits of entropy. This is actually how modern cryptography works in general: you wouldn't expect a 256-bit AES key to suddenly become insecure and predictable after encrypting a certain amount of data, would you? Why would a CSPRNG be any different?
In fact, both/dev/random and/dev/urandom are CSPRNGs./dev/random is *not* a true RNG. It's just a CSPRNG that tries to reseed constantly and blocks when it can't based on an/estimate/ of the available entropy, but this constant reseeding is unnecessary for the same reason that we don't have to cycle AES keys constantly. It may make things harder for some contrived threat model when the attacker is able to glean your PRNG state periodically, but the practicality of this model is doubtful. djb has a very good article on this.
To put it bluntly, a serial killer can have well-developed theory of mind but no empathy whatsoever. Theory of mind refers to the ability to simulate the minds of other beings to deduce things about their internal state.
Not "following the theory of mind", rather "had well-developed theory of mind". Despite the name, the term denotes not a theory but an ability of the mind (a specific construct of the mind). It's a term in the same category as terms like perception, self-awareness, decision-making, etc.
Oh god, Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode in comments? If anyone is interested, my previous comment should have contained the Chinese characters and pinyin for "gongfu" as can be seen here.
"kung fu" is an alternative transliteration of (gngfu) which means "skill attained through hard work and effort". In this sense the term "kung fu" can signify a very high profficiency in any skill or art, not just martial arts. In fact, the connotation of "kung fu" with martial arts came about only in the 20th century. Therefore, the shi fu of science and engineering can be said to have a great gongfu (kung fu) in science and engineering.
Except that it has been proven impossible for a local hidden variable theory (which is what you are suggesting) to be able to replicate all of the results of quantum mechanics. This result is called Bell's theorem. This essentially means that either the universe is non-deterministic or it is not completely local (i.e. there are effects not caused by local forces). Either that or counterfactual definiteness does not hold (since Bell's theorem relies on it) due to the results of any experiment and the choice of measurement procedure for that experiment being inseparably linked through exactly the same deterministic factors. In other words, counterfactual definiteness being false means that, given an experiment producing a result A through measurement P, it makes no sense to ask "what would have happened if we chose measurement Q instead?" since the very same deterministic factors that caused result A also caused the experimenter to choose measurement P. While this is possible, it is extremely implausible.
Except that it was proven impossible for a local hidden variable theory (which is what you are suggesting) to reproduce the results of quantum mechanics. This result is called Bell's theorem. This means that either the universe is non-deterministic or it is not completely local (i.e. there are effects which cannot be attributed to a local force). Either that or counterfactual definiteness does not hold, which would essentially mean that the result of any experiment and the choice of measurement the experimenter made for that experiment are both inseparably linked by being caused by the same deterministic factors (i.e. the experimenter got result A when doing a measurement Q and it makes no sense to ask "what would have happened if he chose measurement P instead?" since his choice of measurement was predetermined by exactly the same factors that made the result A). This is possible, but very implausible.
Read my post again. I never said it was a law. I only stated that causality would be violated by superluminal information transfer. Insofar, causality has had the trend of not being violated. While this does not even hint that it is a law, it does tell us taht it doesn't get violated very easily. However, even this is more than what I meant to imply with that statement. I was merely explicitly pointing out that superluminal information transfer would violate causality because it is not an obvious consequence to someone who is not familiar with physics. Nothing and more and nothing less. My choice of words was probably not the happiest solution for expressing this, though.
It needs to be generated by the sender, of course, since the opposite would imply that the information could be generated arbitrarily near the receiver.
Let me explain why the sender needs to send this information. Let's say that the sender and the receiver both have one part of a maximally entangled state (two particles, they both have one). This means that measurement results of the two particles will be correlated. Simplified, if the sender probes the state of her particle and gets a '1', the receiver will also get a '1' if he tries measuring hers. The problem is that the sender cannot control what the result of the measurement will be. Therefore, she cannot send any information to the receiver unless she also sends some information through a classical channel, telling the receiver which bits went through well and which need inverting.
The fact that you cannot predict to which state the waveform will collapse when you measure it. Yes, after the interaction, both Alice's and Bob's particle will be in the same state but since Alice did not choose that state, she did not transmit any information to Bob. Only by using a separate, classical information channel can she inform Bob whether this was the intended state or not.
Also note that transmitting information superluminally would effectively be sending messages into the past. This violates causality.
Even though it is true that the game was bugged, I still find myself installing it and replaying it quite often. There's just something about it that makes me want to "relive the experience" from time to time. And jugding by the fanbase and a numerous amount of fan-made patches and addons... I trust you will find many disagree with you.
What are you getting so worked up about? You mentioned you don't like people forcing their beliefs onto others, but no forcing has happened here whatsoever. If you are saying the truth when you say that you "agree with the evolution point", why is it wrong to say that the disbelief in evolution is stupid?
Spambox is yet another disposable email address service with one notable difference; it doesn't give you access to the box but rather forwards mail to some other address of choice. You can also adjust the time period of the validity of the address.
Depends on what your definition of 'light' is. If you define light as part of the electromagnetic spectrum detectable by the human eye, then no, microwaves are not light. However, microwaves and visible light are equivalent in the sense that they are the same phenomenon, i.e. quantised disturbances in the electromagnetic field otherwise known as photons. They are simply of different wavelengths/energies.
I really don't get it. I've *never* had problems with Firefox memory usage (I started using it a few versions prior to 1.0; I can't remember which), be it on Linux or Windows. I'm currently using the final release of Firefox 2.0 with 15 extensions installed (including one listed as a problematic extension - IETab, for sites which impose restrictions on browsers) and a couple of Java applets opened in separate tabs. The process has been running for 4 days now, during which I had opened over a 100 tabs, with about 20 tabs being the simultaneous maximum. The current memory usage of Firefox is 82,072 KB, with the peak memory usage being 91,042 KB.
This is a serious matter that needs discussing in order to isolate the reasons for the enormous memory usage some people seem to generate. As it's extremely unlikely that everyone is lying about this (and I'm not either), there's obviously a quite concrete reason why this happens. I find it very surprising that no one has been able to clearly outline it. It would be really great if we could figure out what exactly is going on so it can be fixed once and for all.
Actually, platelets, or thrombocytes (that's how they're more widely known down here where I live) are not cells, but cell fragments of a bigger cell called megakaryocyte. Also, they're not the topic of this article.
Slashdot Mirror
At least the part where you gradually specify the types in your program manually and optionally enforce the types statically can be done in Python today, see mypy.
So you're saying a whole class of bugs gets eliminated, but also maintain the code is not necessarily better in any way? I fail to follow your logic.
Note that you two are not discussing the same kind of "type" here, even though they share a word. Dynamic type systems can be regarded as static type systems where all values have a single type. However, Python has been gaining optional static typing capabilities . See mypy, PEP 483, PEP 484 and also the typing and typeshed) modules.
Your data passing through someone else's servers doesn't automatically imply they have means of decrypting that data. Clients can generate keys themselves (or negotiate them securely with each other, in the case of asymmetric encryption) and keep them secret. Data encrypted in such a way can be stored wherever you want without the party owning the infrastructure being able to read it.
This is completely wrong. Modern cryptographically secure PRNGs can generate practically unpredictable sequences of as many numbers you'd like from an initial seed of >= 256 bits of entropy. This is actually how modern cryptography works in general: you wouldn't expect a 256-bit AES key to suddenly become insecure and predictable after encrypting a certain amount of data, would you? Why would a CSPRNG be any different?
In fact, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom are CSPRNGs. /dev/random is *not* a true RNG. It's just a CSPRNG that tries to reseed constantly and blocks when it can't based on an /estimate/ of the available entropy, but this constant reseeding is unnecessary for the same reason that we don't have to cycle AES keys constantly. It may make things harder for some contrived threat model when the attacker is able to glean your PRNG state periodically, but the practicality of this model is doubtful. djb has a very good article on this.
To put it bluntly, a serial killer can have well-developed theory of mind but no empathy whatsoever. Theory of mind refers to the ability to simulate the minds of other beings to deduce things about their internal state.
Not "following the theory of mind", rather "had well-developed theory of mind". Despite the name, the term denotes not a theory but an ability of the mind (a specific construct of the mind). It's a term in the same category as terms like perception, self-awareness, decision-making, etc.
Oh god, Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode in comments? If anyone is interested, my previous comment should have contained the Chinese characters and pinyin for "gongfu" as can be seen here.
See this.
"kung fu" is an alternative transliteration of (gngfu) which means "skill attained through hard work and effort". In this sense the term "kung fu" can signify a very high profficiency in any skill or art, not just martial arts. In fact, the connotation of "kung fu" with martial arts came about only in the 20th century. Therefore, the shi fu of science and engineering can be said to have a great gongfu (kung fu) in science and engineering.
Except that it has been proven impossible for a local hidden variable theory (which is what you are suggesting) to be able to replicate all of the results of quantum mechanics. This result is called Bell's theorem. This essentially means that either the universe is non-deterministic or it is not completely local (i.e. there are effects not caused by local forces). Either that or counterfactual definiteness does not hold (since Bell's theorem relies on it) due to the results of any experiment and the choice of measurement procedure for that experiment being inseparably linked through exactly the same deterministic factors. In other words, counterfactual definiteness being false means that, given an experiment producing a result A through measurement P, it makes no sense to ask "what would have happened if we chose measurement Q instead?" since the very same deterministic factors that caused result A also caused the experimenter to choose measurement P. While this is possible, it is extremely implausible.
Except that it was proven impossible for a local hidden variable theory (which is what you are suggesting) to reproduce the results of quantum mechanics. This result is called Bell's theorem. This means that either the universe is non-deterministic or it is not completely local (i.e. there are effects which cannot be attributed to a local force). Either that or counterfactual definiteness does not hold, which would essentially mean that the result of any experiment and the choice of measurement the experimenter made for that experiment are both inseparably linked by being caused by the same deterministic factors (i.e. the experimenter got result A when doing a measurement Q and it makes no sense to ask "what would have happened if he chose measurement P instead?" since his choice of measurement was predetermined by exactly the same factors that made the result A). This is possible, but very implausible.
VGLZ EBG-68.
Read my post again. I never said it was a law. I only stated that causality would be violated by superluminal information transfer. Insofar, causality has had the trend of not being violated. While this does not even hint that it is a law, it does tell us taht it doesn't get violated very easily. However, even this is more than what I meant to imply with that statement. I was merely explicitly pointing out that superluminal information transfer would violate causality because it is not an obvious consequence to someone who is not familiar with physics. Nothing and more and nothing less. My choice of words was probably not the happiest solution for expressing this, though.
It needs to be generated by the sender, of course, since the opposite would imply that the information could be generated arbitrarily near the receiver.
Let me explain why the sender needs to send this information. Let's say that the sender and the receiver both have one part of a maximally entangled state (two particles, they both have one). This means that measurement results of the two particles will be correlated. Simplified, if the sender probes the state of her particle and gets a '1', the receiver will also get a '1' if he tries measuring hers. The problem is that the sender cannot control what the result of the measurement will be. Therefore, she cannot send any information to the receiver unless she also sends some information through a classical channel, telling the receiver which bits went through well and which need inverting.
The fact that you cannot predict to which state the waveform will collapse when you measure it. Yes, after the interaction, both Alice's and Bob's particle will be in the same state but since Alice did not choose that state, she did not transmit any information to Bob. Only by using a separate, classical information channel can she inform Bob whether this was the intended state or not.
Also note that transmitting information superluminally would effectively be sending messages into the past. This violates causality.
Even though it is true that the game was bugged, I still find myself installing it and replaying it quite often. There's just something about it that makes me want to "relive the experience" from time to time. And jugding by the fanbase and a numerous amount of fan-made patches and addons... I trust you will find many disagree with you.
This is one of the best posts I've read on /. in a while. Great job!
What are you getting so worked up about? You mentioned you don't like people forcing their beliefs onto others, but no forcing has happened here whatsoever. If you are saying the truth when you say that you "agree with the evolution point", why is it wrong to say that the disbelief in evolution is stupid?
Spambox is yet another disposable email address service with one notable difference; it doesn't give you access to the box but rather forwards mail to some other address of choice. You can also adjust the time period of the validity of the address.
Depends on what your definition of 'light' is. If you define light as part of the electromagnetic spectrum detectable by the human eye, then no, microwaves are not light. However, microwaves and visible light are equivalent in the sense that they are the same phenomenon, i.e. quantised disturbances in the electromagnetic field otherwise known as photons. They are simply of different wavelengths/energies.
I really don't get it. I've *never* had problems with Firefox memory usage (I started using it a few versions prior to 1.0; I can't remember which), be it on Linux or Windows. I'm currently using the final release of Firefox 2.0 with 15 extensions installed (including one listed as a problematic extension - IETab, for sites which impose restrictions on browsers) and a couple of Java applets opened in separate tabs. The process has been running for 4 days now, during which I had opened over a 100 tabs, with about 20 tabs being the simultaneous maximum. The current memory usage of Firefox is 82,072 KB, with the peak memory usage being 91,042 KB.
This is a serious matter that needs discussing in order to isolate the reasons for the enormous memory usage some people seem to generate. As it's extremely unlikely that everyone is lying about this (and I'm not either), there's obviously a quite concrete reason why this happens. I find it very surprising that no one has been able to clearly outline it. It would be really great if we could figure out what exactly is going on so it can be fixed once and for all.
Of course, the distraction should have been written as: 'cout "Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!" endl;'
Actually, platelets, or thrombocytes (that's how they're more widely known down here where I live) are not cells, but cell fragments of a bigger cell called megakaryocyte. Also, they're not the topic of this article.
Actually, your theory sucks. You must've forgotten that Gandalf said that Bombadil would also fall if Sauron won.