Um: 'college' kids? Like children who, somehow, are connected with 'college'? You're not allowed to call people at college kids as they are adults. If not, then: Why won't you think of the children, Gene?
In fact, today's children are tomorrow's college kids! You could sue the children out of existence now, while they're weak and vulnerable! That'll save you're industry! What with all the music you're making right now.
Oh, wait. I just remembered. You're the guy who's famous for having a long tongue, right? It wasn't the music at all was it, tonguey?
Perhaps explaining String Theory (or Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or QCD, or etc..) in any amount of time is pointless. It takes longer to explain relativity and quantum mechanics; so explaining any of the theories which try to tie them together will be out of context and not many people learn things when out of context, even if they understand.
My approach would be to explain (as Brian Greene does in T.E.U.) what the fundamental problems are with current theories: primarily is the glaring difference between gravity and the 'other' fundamental force -- the strong/weak-nuclear-electromagnetic force; however you want to call it, electroweak etc... but the other fundamental forces have been united and this leaves gravity by its lonesome. (Inject public interest with the mention that Einstein was trying to do unite gravity and electromagnetism before he died, if you so wish.)
That covers motivation uno and I think most of the public would be able to understand what gravity and EM are; you may be able to get away with saying the strong nuclear force is 'what holds atoms together', but I don't think you would have any way of explaining the weak nuclear force as it isn't relevant to Joe Public's day-to-day activities.
Then you would need to teach them the teeniest bit of science: namely, the point-particle approach. If you could get them to understand this then you may be able to impart that as you get smaller and smaller, the point particle is still infinitely small, and that there is a very clear problem with anything being infinitely small when you get to as small as you can get. String theory thus, instead of treating everything as infinitely minute 'points' _with no dimensions_ (a previously pointed out LIMIT - not flaw - to current models/approximations), takes the next obvious step and says okay, so instead of no dimensions we will have one dimension: a 'string'. Then you can cut to the XKCD comic, which someone linked to above:)
This is of course a heuristic explanation for the general public and in no way to be used as actual science, which most will not be able to understand due to missing four + years of solidly studying physics. It would be seemingly too hard to explain the Gamma function, super-symmetry, and crazy amounts of dimensions, all of which are academic. Note, I didn't need to explain quantum mechanics or relativity in the two minutes.
I don't want to start any flame wars; my belief is that there are _too many_ fundamental gaps in knowledge required to understand string theory, even on a qualitative level, for an average person. I argue that to teach one of these gaps would take more than the two minutes allowed.
From the summary (emphasis mine):
Darwin's theory of evolution. Downplaying its conflict with religion The title of the essay:
Does fundamentalist religion cause the rejection of evolution? or is it the other way around?
I had a look at using multiple PS3s for simulations a while ago. Purely based on the ass-rocking-ness of the CELL chip.
There are servers that use the CELL chip, from IBM, see the Blade server. But the Blade server is quite a bit expensive; that is 8 PS3's at the UK price was cheaper the last time I looked. On top of all that is the 'pooling' that the CELL chip does, while this won't be that good for simulation (with current, popular implementations, e.g. MPI2), it will be awesome for games: succinctly, any process that requires extra 'power' can request another node from the 'pool' and release it back when it is under less strain. The transport latency (often the biggest latency in Parallel, even with fibre optic switches, unless its a purely Monte Carlo sim...) is much reduced by having all processors on a single die. The architecture is a mix with vector based operations as well.
Prima facie it would be perfect to use multiple PS3s. After speaking to some HPC chaps, at Edinburgh Uni,they informed me that the memory on the PS3's is pretty low (512MB split between video and the conventional) which can be a pain if you want to perform REALLY big simulations (which, when scaling is accounted for, is pretty much the point of using supercomputers... not _necessarily_ speed, lets not make this the point of debate, it is simulation dependent.). I will also add that the memory, though small, is bloody fast. If you can code to keep bloat completely removed, you won't need many BG processes; and split memory requirements between each of the PS3s then it is a really, really nice system. Takes a bit of effort and a learning curve, but there are many resources online, native Linux support is an Uber Bonus for Sony (though I am considering NOT buying a PS3, or many, due to their Media departments behavior!).
Divide and conquer:
"Do you want the Linux that works with Windows? Or the one that doesn't?" Might want to watch for those in-community divisions, and then try not to take sides.
Luckily I will deal a devastating blow to Amazons patent with my 'I'll take it' patent. It works thusly:
A person will be browsing a shop (and/or an online shop, definitely both!) at some point they will decide to make a purchase. At this point something in their mind goes 'i'll take it', my patent then is the business method of selling that person (either directly, on the internet, using 2 (OR MORE) clicks, or any and all other methods) immediately after this decision to purchase has been made. This decision in deciding to decide to make the decision (obviously, and hereafter referred to as CUSTOMER ACTION A) to buy is where my business method is. Only if a person has taken CUSTOMER ACTION A will you require my patent in order to sell them the product, otherwise it is business as usual.
NB: My patent will do no harm to MS as they do not require CUSTOMER ACTION A to sell their products.
FTA:
Kent, who publishes the National Gay News website, was criticized by Thompson in last week's court filing for "distribution of hardcore porn to anyone of any age." What, like displaying them on public record? JT is an i-ron.
Well, aside from getting to the moon; ignoring any real launch issues; skipping the radiation issues/solar winds/asteroids/space dust/the temperature gradients/space junk; landing on the moon AND apparently getting permission from the local gatekeepers. Even assuming you land successfully on the moon/metal carrying meteor/celestial body. What are we going to do for food?
I have read a brief history on space food on the NASA site: there was nothing about sustainability. Perhaps we can launch space farms (e.g. on the moon); put them in constant sunlight with compressed C02 which is converted into Oxygen. All of this requires water though, and maybe some advances in recycling and filtering.
Even better would be a star-trek replicator with an nuclear fission/fusion or anti-gravity source; this last line is half-hearted humour. Ultimately, I can't wait to be taking Space-Columbus' birthday off! Chocks away.
Doing some reading around/tfa and allegedly the creationist website is retroactively claiming copyright over videos they released as public domain (apparently stating public release in their videos). I am currently unable to watch vids on youtube (or anywhere) and my sound card isn't supported anyway.*
Does anyone know or is anyone able to verify that: a) the videos were released under public domain and b) if so, would the claiming copyright over public domain material be a legal matter?
I have heard it is Youtube (owned by Google) policy to remove videos with a takedown notice, so they would have been removed anyway, valid DMCA or not.
Lol, D&D aside, could you suggest a better alternative to the opposite of Evil? I don't like the word evil; it polarises the mind into thinking there is a 'side' of Evil (containing: RIAA, MS, Google on off days, etc...etc...) The trouble arises in that slave morales consider rich people to be Evil, the opposite of evil is good, therefore: being poor is good! Um... being poor isn't good, it's bad!
Actually it's Swiss; that was the first flag on the moon. Due to a solar wind experiment they had to unfold/furl some foil apparatus as soon as they got there (so as to have more samples), as the story goes; the designer put a teeny-tiny Swiss flag on it: this was planted first.
Nice joke, but it points out something that is becoming increasingly clear in Slashdot discussions: You're getting dumber. How often is the word 'evil' bandied around nowadays? Thanks Google!
The opposite of bad is good, the opposite of good is bad. The opposite of evil is NOT: Good!
There claim to be so many atheists amongst the Slashdot crowd; well you don't need religion if you see everything as good and evil, why? Because it is what is known as SLAVE MORALITY.
The closest thing I could get to the opposite of Evil is compassion, NB: compassion is not the same as good. So while using the word evil, be very careful to be clear that its opposite is not good, thinking like that will dumb you down.
"though it may be that L2 is in fact smart enough not to obsolete itself by creating L3."
Shame the same couldn't be said for L1...
Also, why would L2 obsolete itself, if it's the case of a machine then why wouldn't it design its OWN upgrades; sounds like a software job, L2 could evolve into L3, no reason it needs to run on different hardware (yet): would you define L2 on better hardware as L2.1 or L3?
(it's or its; if 'it' is truly intelligent would it warrant an apostrophe? hmmm)
My friend works for a hard-drive manufacturer. He told me that the memory miss rate in iPods is 1 in 100. 1% of the time it goes wrong. Compare that to commercial hard-drives where the memory miss is like 1 part in 10^18. I'm not completely certain on these stats, but they are close enough and demonstrate an orders of magnitude difference.
This is what makes the iPod possible, it's a clunky bit of hardware, but the human ear apparently cannot detect the 1 in 100 miss rate and so c'est la vie. Unless of course you haven't bought music in ages and don't charge your iPod using a computer, so no connection to PC. My music starts going missing, I lose songs/podcasts/pictures. I won't be buying another iPod, fancy touch screen or not, when it can't keep track of what songs are on it if you don't have it connected to the PC for a couple of weeks, plus the bit-rate and miss-rate can't be doing any good for my hearing, loudness and decibel filters aside.
"Microsoft today announced that the meltdown of their WGA servers was caused by human error. The problem started when a human erroneously threw a chair into the server causing it to malfunction. Microsoft has promised this will never happen again as they have taken action to chair-proof future servers."
I bought a new laptop with Vista installed; I took my newly purchased DVD and put it in my laptop, to check the screen (as I was informed touchscreen are awful for movies), anyway, it didn't work: Somewhere between the DVD, the decoder, the player and *insert BS here* it refused to play. So I put VLC player on it and it worked perfectly first time.
Why was I prevented from playing my newly purchased DVD on my newly purchased laptop? Sarcasm aside, I have now made the decision to go to Linux entirely, not even dual boot; I no longer care about those couple-of-things(tm) that you can only do with Windows, I'll live without, work around or solve the problem/s myself, on my machine, with my software and all the things I want to do.
As much as I would like to comment on the state of the world and the absurdity of "security" "experts" (each requiring quotation marks to indicate irony), it looks to me as if that article is a spoof.
So now in addition to Tor et al and the things that help privacy (sending Google random data as search queries) all we will have to do is have something in the background opening up male/female sites over all popular age ranges. Way to have to cream everyone's bandwidth. Sheesh, is there anything you CAN get right, MicroJerk?
Profiling is akin to racism in my book. It's against democracy any way you look at it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the plot of Hudson Hawk. Good flick.
Um: 'college' kids? Like children who, somehow, are connected with 'college'? You're not allowed to call people at college kids as they are adults. If not, then: Why won't you think of the children, Gene?
In fact, today's children are tomorrow's college kids! You could sue the children out of existence now, while they're weak and vulnerable! That'll save you're industry! What with all the music you're making right now.
Oh, wait. I just remembered. You're the guy who's famous for having a long tongue, right? It wasn't the music at all was it, tonguey?
If people didn't want privacy, they wouldn't own curtains.
If companies wanted privacy, they wouldn't advertise.
(And don't talk to me about 'corporate secrets' that is a different argument.)
"All sweeping generalisations are false, including this one."
Perhaps explaining String Theory (or Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or QCD, or etc..) in any amount of time is pointless. It takes longer to explain relativity and quantum mechanics; so explaining any of the theories which try to tie them together will be out of context and not many people learn things when out of context, even if they understand.
:)
My approach would be to explain (as Brian Greene does in T.E.U.) what the fundamental problems are with current theories: primarily is the glaring difference between gravity and the 'other' fundamental force -- the strong/weak-nuclear-electromagnetic force; however you want to call it, electroweak etc... but the other fundamental forces have been united and this leaves gravity by its lonesome. (Inject public interest with the mention that Einstein was trying to do unite gravity and electromagnetism before he died, if you so wish.)
That covers motivation uno and I think most of the public would be able to understand what gravity and EM are; you may be able to get away with saying the strong nuclear force is 'what holds atoms together', but I don't think you would have any way of explaining the weak nuclear force as it isn't relevant to Joe Public's day-to-day activities.
Then you would need to teach them the teeniest bit of science: namely, the point-particle approach. If you could get them to understand this then you may be able to impart that as you get smaller and smaller, the point particle is still infinitely small, and that there is a very clear problem with anything being infinitely small when you get to as small as you can get. String theory thus, instead of treating everything as infinitely minute 'points' _with no dimensions_ (a previously pointed out LIMIT - not flaw - to current models/approximations), takes the next obvious step and says okay, so instead of no dimensions we will have one dimension: a 'string'. Then you can cut to the XKCD comic, which someone linked to above
This is of course a heuristic explanation for the general public and in no way to be used as actual science, which most will not be able to understand due to missing four + years of solidly studying physics. It would be seemingly too hard to explain the Gamma function, super-symmetry, and crazy amounts of dimensions, all of which are academic. Note, I didn't need to explain quantum mechanics or relativity in the two minutes.
I don't want to start any flame wars; my belief is that there are _too many_ fundamental gaps in knowledge required to understand string theory, even on a qualitative level, for an average person. I argue that to teach one of these gaps would take more than the two minutes allowed.
I had a look at using multiple PS3s for simulations a while ago. Purely based on the ass-rocking-ness of the CELL chip.
There are servers that use the CELL chip, from IBM, see the Blade server. But the Blade server is quite a bit expensive; that is 8 PS3's at the UK price was cheaper the last time I looked. On top of all that is the 'pooling' that the CELL chip does, while this won't be that good for simulation (with current, popular implementations, e.g. MPI2), it will be awesome for games: succinctly, any process that requires extra 'power' can request another node from the 'pool' and release it back when it is under less strain. The transport latency (often the biggest latency in Parallel, even with fibre optic switches, unless its a purely Monte Carlo sim...) is much reduced by having all processors on a single die. The architecture is a mix with vector based operations as well.
Prima facie it would be perfect to use multiple PS3s. After speaking to some HPC chaps, at Edinburgh Uni,they informed me that the memory on the PS3's is pretty low (512MB split between video and the conventional) which can be a pain if you want to perform REALLY big simulations (which, when scaling is accounted for, is pretty much the point of using supercomputers... not _necessarily_ speed, lets not make this the point of debate, it is simulation dependent.). I will also add that the memory, though small, is bloody fast. If you can code to keep bloat completely removed, you won't need many BG processes; and split memory requirements between each of the PS3s then it is a really, really nice system. Takes a bit of effort and a learning curve, but there are many resources online, native Linux support is an Uber Bonus for Sony (though I am considering NOT buying a PS3, or many, due to their Media departments behavior!).
"Pogue and we..."
Just no.
It's obvious why code is closed source; it's a security matter. You seem to be forgetting ignorance is strength.
(No, really, it was all sarcasm.)
Luckily I will deal a devastating blow to Amazons patent with my 'I'll take it' patent. It works thusly:
A person will be browsing a shop (and/or an online shop, definitely both!) at some point they will decide to make a purchase. At this point something in their mind goes 'i'll take it', my patent then is the business method of selling that person (either directly, on the internet, using 2 (OR MORE) clicks, or any and all other methods) immediately after this decision to purchase has been made. This decision in deciding to decide to make the decision (obviously, and hereafter referred to as CUSTOMER ACTION A) to buy is where my business method is. Only if a person has taken CUSTOMER ACTION A will you require my patent in order to sell them the product, otherwise it is business as usual.
NB: My patent will do no harm to MS as they do not require CUSTOMER ACTION A to sell their products.
Well, aside from getting to the moon; ignoring any real launch issues; skipping the radiation issues/solar winds/asteroids/space dust/the temperature gradients/space junk; landing on the moon AND apparently getting permission from the local gatekeepers. Even assuming you land successfully on the moon/metal carrying meteor/celestial body. What are we going to do for food?
I have read a brief history on space food on the NASA site: there was nothing about sustainability. Perhaps we can launch space farms (e.g. on the moon); put them in constant sunlight with compressed C02 which is converted into Oxygen. All of this requires water though, and maybe some advances in recycling and filtering.
Even better would be a star-trek replicator with an nuclear fission/fusion or anti-gravity source; this last line is half-hearted humour. Ultimately, I can't wait to be taking Space-Columbus' birthday off! Chocks away.
Doing some reading around /tfa and allegedly the creationist website is retroactively claiming copyright over videos they released as public domain (apparently stating public release in their videos). I am currently unable to watch vids on youtube (or anywhere) and my sound card isn't supported anyway.*
Does anyone know or is anyone able to verify that: a) the videos were released under public domain and b) if so, would the claiming copyright over public domain material be a legal matter?
I have heard it is Youtube (owned by Google) policy to remove videos with a takedown notice, so they would have been removed anyway, valid DMCA or not.
* (waiting for a usb soundcard for my laptop)
Lol, D&D aside, could you suggest a better alternative to the opposite of Evil? I don't like the word evil; it polarises the mind into thinking there is a 'side' of Evil (containing: RIAA, MS, Google on off days, etc...etc...) The trouble arises in that slave morales consider rich people to be Evil, the opposite of evil is good, therefore: being poor is good! Um... being poor isn't good, it's bad!
Actually it's Swiss; that was the first flag on the moon. Due to a solar wind experiment they had to unfold/furl some foil apparatus as soon as they got there (so as to have more samples), as the story goes; the designer put a teeny-tiny Swiss flag on it: this was planted first.
Nice joke, but it points out something that is becoming increasingly clear in Slashdot discussions: You're getting dumber. How often is the word 'evil' bandied around nowadays? Thanks Google!
The opposite of bad is good, the opposite of good is bad. The opposite of evil is NOT: Good!
There claim to be so many atheists amongst the Slashdot crowd; well you don't need religion if you see everything as good and evil, why? Because it is what is known as SLAVE MORALITY.
The closest thing I could get to the opposite of Evil is compassion, NB: compassion is not the same as good. So while using the word evil, be very careful to be clear that its opposite is not good, thinking like that will dumb you down.
*Kisses karma bye-bye and ducks*
Shame the same couldn't be said for L1...
Also, why would L2 obsolete itself, if it's the case of a machine then why wouldn't it design its OWN upgrades; sounds like a software job, L2 could evolve into L3, no reason it needs to run on different hardware (yet): would you define L2 on better hardware as L2.1 or L3?
(it's or its; if 'it' is truly intelligent would it warrant an apostrophe? hmmm)
My friend works for a hard-drive manufacturer. He told me that the memory miss rate in iPods is 1 in 100. 1% of the time it goes wrong. Compare that to commercial hard-drives where the memory miss is like 1 part in 10^18. I'm not completely certain on these stats, but they are close enough and demonstrate an orders of magnitude difference.
This is what makes the iPod possible, it's a clunky bit of hardware, but the human ear apparently cannot detect the 1 in 100 miss rate and so c'est la vie. Unless of course you haven't bought music in ages and don't charge your iPod using a computer, so no connection to PC. My music starts going missing, I lose songs/podcasts/pictures. I won't be buying another iPod, fancy touch screen or not, when it can't keep track of what songs are on it if you don't have it connected to the PC for a couple of weeks, plus the bit-rate and miss-rate can't be doing any good for my hearing, loudness and decibel filters aside.
"Microsoft today announced that the meltdown of their WGA servers was caused by human error. The problem started when a human erroneously threw a chair into the server causing it to malfunction. Microsoft has promised this will never happen again as they have taken action to chair-proof future servers."
Question 1) Schroedinger was famous for his:
a. Hat?
b. Cat?
c. Kat?
I bought a new laptop with Vista installed; I took my newly purchased DVD and put it in my laptop, to check the screen (as I was informed touchscreen are awful for movies), anyway, it didn't work: Somewhere between the DVD, the decoder, the player and *insert BS here* it refused to play. So I put VLC player on it and it worked perfectly first time.
Why was I prevented from playing my newly purchased DVD on my newly purchased laptop? Sarcasm aside, I have now made the decision to go to Linux entirely, not even dual boot; I no longer care about those couple-of-things(tm) that you can only do with Windows, I'll live without, work around or solve the problem/s myself, on my machine, with my software and all the things I want to do.
That's just not true is it, Elton?
Chocolate rain is original right here.
As much as I would like to comment on the state of the world and the absurdity of "security" "experts" (each requiring quotation marks to indicate irony), it looks to me as if that article is a spoof.
So now in addition to Tor et al and the things that help privacy (sending Google random data as search queries) all we will have to do is have something in the background opening up male/female sites over all popular age ranges. Way to have to cream everyone's bandwidth. Sheesh, is there anything you CAN get right, MicroJerk?
Profiling is akin to racism in my book. It's against democracy any way you look at it.
Dear Mr Jobs,
Please could you ask Bill to bring along 235 software patents or shut up.
Sincerely, everybody.