Now another way of saying this is I am paying 431 dollars less than the true sales price of the iphone. Or another way of saying it is, AT&T is giving me an $18 a month discount for using an Iphone on their network. All upside to me. Of course that mean I should be upset about the unlockers who are preventing them from giving me an even larger discount.
Your logic is faulty, companies charge what the market will bare. Or rather they set the price to maximize profit. Is incorrect to say that if Apple did not receive $431 from AT&T the iPhone would be $431 more expensive. It might be a little more expensive to cover costs, but it's price would be optimized to the market.
This seems to fit some other piece of the puzzle. For example, Why to UK iphones cost so much more? Presumably because of a lower subsidy.
The UK market is actually a very good example. A Macbook in the UK costs the equivalent of $1436 in the US it costs $1099. Why does it cost $337 more in the UK? Because that's the optimal price for the UK market. They can charge that much and people will pay it.
The Mac Mini uses 110W, the fit-PC uses 5W, the Mac Mini is 6.5x6.5x2 inches, the fit-PC is 4.2x4.2x1.5 inches, the Mac Mini is produced on a relatively massive scale compared to the fit-PC, the Mac Mini works at 10-35C, the fit-PC works at 0-70C.
If you're comparing them based on the amount of RAM or processor speed you're being a little less than "eminently logical".
Ah yes, but if your comparing them as space heaters, the Mac Mini clearly wins.
A GPL library means you have to give away your source code.
A LGPL library means you only have to supply the object file of your code which can be linked against an updated version of the library. But you don't have to give away your source code. You do however have to provide any modifications you made to the library itself (as per GPL). This is my understanding correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem is I don't think there are any USB TV capture devices that work in MythTV. There are a bunch. I'm using a Twinham 7041 DVB-T capture device and a Twinham 702x DVB-S (SkyStar 2) at the moment. In general if you can get the device to work on Linux you should be able to get it to work with Myth.
I have been using MythTV for something like 4 years now just because there isn't anything as good but I really hate it. It's so freaking slow and buggy....
I have been wanting to write a better MythTV ever since I tried the first version but I just haven't had time so I keep using the piece 'o crap. I think it's a bad design decision of their part. Basically they seem to have taken the very un-UNIXy approach of adding everything in to one code base rather than reusing and improving other programs. Video playback for example, could have used mplayer. They've written their own DVD playing code rather than improving the other software that's available. You might want to check out Freevo it looks nice and IIRC is writen in Python, it glues mplayer and a bunch of other stuff together to create a PVR. It looks nice, but obviously doesn't have the support Myth does.
I don't buy this analogy, partly because trying your key randomly in order doors isn't going to work (ok there are certain flawed implementations but..) and secondly because it's not the use the tool was designed for.
If anything you could say it's like a lock pick. You can use it to test how easy it is to break in to your house or you could use it to break in to someone else's house. Again, the problem is that people might be inclined to agree that lock picks should only be made available to licensed professionals.
Don't get me wrong, I think both Kismac and lockpicks are fine. But I'm not sure society in general would agree with me.
A hammer isn't really a very good analogy. "Killing" and "Building" are different activities. With KisMac the issue is performing the same activity with different intent.
A better example might be a gun. I can use a gun to murder people, or I can use it to kill in self defense. Unfortunately this doesn't really support the argument as well...
It's true that complexity of any pseudorandom generator is finite.
However, you can't readily tell it from its output
I take a large sample of it's output, I enumerate all possible programs shorter than this output, I run these programs and find the smallest program that outputs this string and then halts.
It might well be possible, that the Universe uses a simple formula to determine the outcome of quantum events.
It's possible, though as I said, it's my understanding that most modern physicist wouldn't agree with you.
In any case, we can just add hardware-based random number generator to classical computer simulating quantum events.
Yes. That's all I'm saying, however such a computer is still in some (perhaps not very useful) sense more powerful than a Turing machine.
What is 'really random number'? Can you define it? A random number source is that which produces a (infinite? or unbound finite) series of numbers which can not be produce by any deterministic algorithm in space less than the size of the number series... Basically the numbers produced by the generator have a high Komolgorov complexity.
We can have pseudorandom numbers behaving exactly like real 'random' numbers (though it requires unlimited resources as you get more and more numbers). I.e. you won't be able to distinguish pseudorandom generator and real random source.
That's not so. The Kolmogorov complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity of a string of pseudo random numbers is very low, by definition I can build a finite length program to produce an infinite string of digits. The digits "look" random with simple tests, that is they have a nice distribution (with I would imagine few periodic features). However they are obviously highly compressible (rather than giving you all the numbers I can just give you a short program to produce them).
This isn't necessarily the case with a Quantum random number generator. The randomness here comes from the inherent probabilistic nature of Quantum events. Now where this randomness comes from is anyones guess the vast majority of modern physicists say that the universe is just inherently probabilistic and the random choice is fundamental. A few physicists few say there are hidden variables which we don't know about and that if/when we know more we'll find that actually it's all deterministic really (but (and please someone correct me) this is kind of way out thinking in phyiscs). Then there are some people who say that actually at every Quantum event ALL possible things happen and multiple universe are created, but we only see one of them (there seems to be little evidence to support this, and to me there appear to be huge holes in the argument logically and I'm not sure if any serious physicists hold this point of view).
AFAIR my university's course, Turing machine with random number generator is computationally equivalent to a common Turing machine.
Your university course is wrong? Here's a problem a common Turing machine can't solve:
Using a program of length n produce n+1 "really" random numbers.
Quantum events are as far as I understand the only source of "really" random numbers we have and are just plain weird. The problem comes in part because we don't have a clear definition of random.
I think your confusing real-world mutation with movie/sci-fi mutation. They are hardly the same.
Mutations are almost always:
1.Useless
2.Harmful in some way to the creature
3.Lost in the next generation(assuming the creature can breed)
Yes, but mutations are obviously sometimes beneficial to an organisms survival. I think the point is that if we create a completely artificial gene/set of genes/organism then we don't really know what trajectory it's evolution will follow in the natural world. Organisms engage in coevolution, whereby organisms can slowly adapt to evolutionary changes in others. If you suddenly add a foreign organism in to the ecosystems and this evolves in such a way as to be damaging to other organisms (or completely out performs them) then it is unlikely they will be able to evolve a countermeasure before they are wiped out, the evolutionary distance is just too great.
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death
Quantum computers can be simulated by classical computers (they're computationally equivalent), so quantum computers are not NEEDED to simulate human mind.
That's not quite true, Quantum computation (perhaps not in the sense your talking about) is more powerful than classical computing in one respect. That is though Quantum randomness a Quantum computer can produce an endless supply of real random numbers. A classical computer can only produce pseudo-random numbers, a way round this is to include a large enough supply of random numbers in the initial configuration. It's not what Penrose was talking about I know but...
It's even worse than that to be honest. Experiments like this were how we discovered that DNA was the "transforming principle" in organism life. Basically Oswald Avery took a pathogenic (disease causing) strain of bacteria and isolated the DNA then transfered this to a non-pathogenic strain and noted the associated transferal of traits (the non-disease causing strain became disease causing). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Avery (this was way back in 1928). This is no huge leap as far as I can see. Even less of a leap toward synthetic life than when Venters team synthesized a virus (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/26/1 5440) which I think someone had done before him anyway. Or the time when Celera claimed to out perform the human genome project, when they actually included all the information from the human genome project and even then came out with a lower quality sequence http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/7/4143 .
So basically they've not done much interesting. But hay, they got a Science paper out of it and Venter got to jump up and down and say how great he is. I guess that's what matters.:)
Try the same experiment in another two or three years, though, and if current rates of progress are anything to go by in OSS world, Microsoft might find themselves with a much more permanent shift taking place that really would damage them seriously. [sob] When can I stop reading this exact same comment, year after year.
Using your analogy, that would be like never verifying you have airbags, but assuming your car is safer because it's red. Don't be daft. Everybody knows red cars are faster and therefore more dangerous.
I'm sorry if paid journalists are finding it too difficult to copy and paste from wikipedia, but a science is about accurate information, not creative writing contests. Actually in general it's about both. The scientific work I've observed generally proceeds in two phases. In the first you run your experiments, collect data and perform your analysis. In the second often longer and some might say more important phase you attempt to communicate these results to the wider community. In general this would be done with a peer reviewed journal or conference publication.
When preparing a publication the first question you'll ask is ``what's the story?''. How do I create a narrative thread running from the beginning of the paper to a conclusion that says ``this is a new contribution of scientific merit''. You need to use the terminology the community is used to (especially important in interdisciplinary research where you may be trying to communicate results to a research community other than your own). You'll need to be aware when your results might prove to be contentious and either downplay the implications or be prepared to back up your results. You may spend hours trying to get the correct phraseology and fiddling with graphs in order to communicate your message more effectively or just make people feel more comfortable.
When you finally submit your paper all sorts of social issues will come in to play. Is one of your referees working on something similar, but in his opinion far superior? Maybe the referee has never seen anything like this before, and for him that's a good enough reason to reject.
Dealing with these issues takes creativity but is important. Unfortunately science isn't pure pursuit people sometimes characterize it to be we have to deal with messy social niggles and arguments just like everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
errr, no!
Hippos
http://xkcd.com/322/
If only the world worked like this...
I didn't think Technocrat had ID numbers. At least not ones that are shown on posts.
Read this: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
Samba appears to be licensed under GPL not LGPL.
A GPL library means you have to give away your source code.
A LGPL library means you only have to supply the object file of your code which can be linked against an updated version of the library. But you don't have to give away your source code. You do however have to provide any modifications you made to the library itself (as per GPL). This is my understanding correct me if I'm wrong.
fair enough, I think the analogy still holds.
I don't buy this analogy, partly because trying your key randomly in order doors isn't going to work (ok there are certain flawed implementations but..) and secondly because it's not the use the tool was designed for. If anything you could say it's like a lock pick. You can use it to test how easy it is to break in to your house or you could use it to break in to someone else's house. Again, the problem is that people might be inclined to agree that lock picks should only be made available to licensed professionals. Don't get me wrong, I think both Kismac and lockpicks are fine. But I'm not sure society in general would agree with me.
A hammer isn't really a very good analogy. "Killing" and "Building" are different activities. With KisMac the issue is performing the same activity with different intent.
A better example might be a gun. I can use a gun to murder people, or I can use it to kill in self defense. Unfortunately this doesn't really support the argument as well...
That's not so. The Kolmogorov complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity of a string of pseudo random numbers is very low, by definition I can build a finite length program to produce an infinite string of digits. The digits "look" random with simple tests, that is they have a nice distribution (with I would imagine few periodic features). However they are obviously highly compressible (rather than giving you all the numbers I can just give you a short program to produce them).
This isn't necessarily the case with a Quantum random number generator. The randomness here comes from the inherent probabilistic nature of Quantum events. Now where this randomness comes from is anyones guess the vast majority of modern physicists say that the universe is just inherently probabilistic and the random choice is fundamental. A few physicists few say there are hidden variables which we don't know about and that if/when we know more we'll find that actually it's all deterministic really (but (and please someone correct me) this is kind of way out thinking in phyiscs). Then there are some people who say that actually at every Quantum event ALL possible things happen and multiple universe are created, but we only see one of them (there seems to be little evidence to support this, and to me there appear to be huge holes in the argument logically and I'm not sure if any serious physicists hold this point of view).
Your university course is wrong? Here's a problem a common Turing machine can't solve:
Using a program of length n produce n+1 "really" random numbers.
Quantum events are as far as I understand the only source of "really" random numbers we have and are just plain weird. The problem comes in part because we don't have a clear definition of random.
Anyway, I've not read this article yet but it looks like it could be of interest: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v318/n6041/ab s/318041a0.html .
That's not quite true, Quantum computation (perhaps not in the sense your talking about) is more powerful than classical computing in one respect. That is though Quantum randomness a Quantum computer can produce an endless supply of real random numbers. A classical computer can only produce pseudo-random numbers, a way round this is to include a large enough supply of random numbers in the initial configuration. It's not what Penrose was talking about I know but...
It's even worse than that to be honest. Experiments like this were how we discovered that DNA was the "transforming principle" in organism life. Basically Oswald Avery took a pathogenic (disease causing) strain of bacteria and isolated the DNA then transfered this to a non-pathogenic strain and noted the associated transferal of traits (the non-disease causing strain became disease causing). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Avery (this was way back in 1928). This is no huge leap as far as I can see. Even less of a leap toward synthetic life than when Venters team synthesized a virus (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/26/1 5440) which I think someone had done before him anyway. Or the time when Celera claimed to out perform the human genome project, when they actually included all the information from the human genome project and even then came out with a lower quality sequence http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/7/4143 .
So basically they've not done much interesting. But hay, they got a Science paper out of it and Venter got to jump up and down and say how great he is. I guess that's what matters. :)
Anyway, took me a while to dig out the original Science article, here's the link: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/11It's already been done: http://www.yoggie.com/
Raw states for Western Europe available at: http://point-topic.com/home/gbsdemo/countryGrowth. asp
Makes quite interesting reading. username: bugmenot password: bugmenot
btw, where's the reply button gone?
When preparing a publication the first question you'll ask is ``what's the story?''. How do I create a narrative thread running from the beginning of the paper to a conclusion that says ``this is a new contribution of scientific merit''. You need to use the terminology the community is used to (especially important in interdisciplinary research where you may be trying to communicate results to a research community other than your own). You'll need to be aware when your results might prove to be contentious and either downplay the implications or be prepared to back up your results. You may spend hours trying to get the correct phraseology and fiddling with graphs in order to communicate your message more effectively or just make people feel more comfortable.
When you finally submit your paper all sorts of social issues will come in to play. Is one of your referees working on something similar, but in his opinion far superior? Maybe the referee has never seen anything like this before, and for him that's a good enough reason to reject.
Dealing with these issues takes creativity but is important. Unfortunately science isn't pure pursuit people sometimes characterize it to be we have to deal with messy social niggles and arguments just like everyone else.