Re: Creative Suite has been on 'cloud' for ages

@Piro

...There's no reason at all why they couldn't continue to offer outright purchases for new software.

"I thought that's exactly what the announcement was about."

Did I miss something? Adobe's announcement was exactly not about that. The announcement was that customers would not, in future, be able to purchase new versions of their software outright - rental is to be the only option. And if you buy it now while you can, you won't be getting any newer version or features that way. Just bug fixes.

Re: *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

I think I saw that documentary, too, donkeys years ago. IIRC, it revealed that a certain isotope of cobalt is seen to preferentially spit out electrons (beta decay) in a different way to its antiparticle.

The fact that there is an asymmetry in the universe has always troubled me. I imagined that if I was God, and created a left hand and a right hand, how would I know which is which? For a human, it's not too hard to do, because we're surrounded by large scale asymmetries, like generally having a heart on the left, and halves of the brain that work in different ways. But if you're the supreme being, dealing with the building blocks of nature, there can be no such external reference. "This is an anti-particle because I say it is, and this one is a particle because it's the opposite of the other one that I said was an anti-particle" sounds like a bit of a dodgy argument. How God gets away with it is a mystery to me.

And a mystery to me, it's likely to remain, since descriptions of the subject bring horrible imaginary numbers and matrix multiplications into the frame. Far too baffling for me to understand.

Re: Fluffy

Yep. Like a SysAdmin with a hangover can.

Did it already.

http://www.apple.com/uk/icloud/features/find-my-friends.html

Re: My watch is in the bedroom drawer

"Can't hang up and check what time it is, and you can't check your watch because you don't have one. What do you do man WHAT DO YOU DO!"

Firstly, I take some advice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: DON'T PANIC

Then, I move the phone from my ear and have a look at the top of the screen, where the time is clearly displayed in front of my lazy eyes.

Re: "200KW of solar panels .. about the same as .. the panels around the ISS"

Solar flux varies with the inverse square of distance rather than exponentially. Mars would probably be OK, because it's only 1.7 times further from the Sun than we are.

Re: So...

Any measurement that you do of an entangled photon on Earth will affect the state of its counterpart on Mars. But if you do any measurement of its counterpart on Mars, you have affected the state of its counterpart on Earth. So, no matter what you do, it's not possible to set/know the state on Earth and have someone on Mars also measure the state over there. Roughly speaking. That's the basis of quantum cryptography: that any such attempt is doomed to failure due to the devious nature of quantum mechanics.

Re: Is this an actual physical effect or a mathematical one?

"The intersection of a pair of scissors can travel faster than light, but seeing as it's just a geometric point along two lines, it's not an actual thing, and therefore can travel as fast as it likes.

Is this "information transfer" something similar? As nothing physical is actually being transmitted between Alice and Bob."

Your scissors analogy is an example of a thought experiment that's often used to postulate that FTL is possible. As you have said, no information is actually transferred, so it's not a demonstration of FTL at all, but an illusion. No part of the scissors can receive a message from another part of the scissors sent at a speed greater than that of light.

It's problematic to think of entangled particles as having 'parts' that might send each other signals. I don't know that that analogy works at all well. As I mentioned earlier, it might be better to think about the system as a single large particle. Although I wait to stand corrected by anyone with greater knowledge of this kind of thing.

Re: One for the physicists

Sorry, you can't do that.

Any real wire is made of atoms. When you pull on a wire, you're jiggling the atoms about. The individual atoms can't jiggle about faster than the speed of light. So you can't propagate any kind of force through the wire at that kind of speed, either.

Re: Fractional Reserve Bollocks

DavCrav, here's a video that might clear up your confusion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov2Sd-QRi_g

There are plenty of other resources on the web that show how a tiny reserve held by a bank can result in a massive amount of 'newly created' private money.

Re: All of this is just pure fantasy. It's not science!

Where did you come up with those numbers? Off the back of a Cornflakes packet?

Do you need to simulate every atom in a snooker ball to come up with a good mathematical model of how it bounces off a cushion? No. Do you need to simulate every atom in a galaxy to have a decent idea of how discrete clumps of 10^30kg matter (stars) behave in aggregation? No.

What you do need is a lot of simulated stars, a few clouds and a lot of computing power. They only put in the laws of physics, and visualisation techniques, and – presto – out pops spiral structures.

Kudos to them.

Back in the day when I studied astronomy at uni, it was widely believed that spiral arms were density waves, and could only really be understood as being examples of emergent behaviour. An n-body gravitational problem is a tough nut to crack when n is 10^11. So it's nice to see computing power making such simulations possible.

Re: Second Deadbolt on the Front Door

With this option selected, Joe Blow (anyone, in fact) is denied the opportunity of phoning Apple and duping the staff into resetting the account password. Has to be useful, since that form of attack has been used successfully in the past. Your analogy is a bit dumb, really.

Re: Jailbreaking

An Apple logo on the back and dodgy software on the front don't go down well in Cupertino. If you're not happy with that, buy another product.

Jail break if you wish, but don't go crying when your phone stops working and you want tech support from Apple because your flimsy keyboard or home-made protocol stack has buggered things up. You can get up to those kind of tricks with certain phones, but can you walk into a stop and ask them to fix it?

Re: Remember those old "Get a Mac" commercials?

Macs *are* safer than PCs if you don't use dodgy software like Flash. And even if you do, Apple move with lightning speed to make sure that Safari can't use an out-of-date Flash plug-in.

I got down voted last week for saying the world would be a better place without Flash. I'm happy to repeat that here, and not at all fussed that I have it blocked on my machine.

Re: Space Monkeys

NB, don't get me wrong. I love space science more than most (believe me), and look forward to every space mission that takes place. But it's completely ridiculous to imagine that the human race will have the inclination or capacity to travel beyond our solar system. It's sheer science fiction. The practicalities of interstellar travel mean that resources spread across the Milky Way would never be at 'our' disposal, and you come back to the question, why devote a massive portion of the economy to provide a possible alternative habitat for a relatively small group of people? It just doesn't make any sense. Sure, we should and do spend a ton of cash on space science, but it's entirely fanciful to dream of mankind venturing far into the cosmos. Also, don't forget that we live on a planet that is perfectly made for our purposes. Rather than dreaming of sending monkeykind out into the pristine cosmos, we should instead think more carefully about how to care for and protect our wonderful planet.

If one day we get splatted by a mega-asteroid, I for one won't be thinking it's a shame that we don't have ambassadors on Beetlejuice 6. For all I know, that planet already has a lovely ecosystem, and good luck to them.

By the way, it would be great if we didn't have to spend money on wars, and I'd love to see a world where the defence budget was zero and the science budget was enormous. But we do have politics and human nature to deal with, which kind of gets in the way. All the war spend in history wouldn't be enough to get a goldfish to Alpha Centauri.

Re: Media consumption?

Years ago, I would take a laptop on holiday with me, with a bunch of DVDs to get over jet lag.

These days, thank goodness, I don't need a relatively bulky device and spinning bits of plastic to do that.

And when I'm at home, I download to my iPad, where I often beam the movie to a 50" plasma display, via AirPlay.

Re: Whatever.

Let me guess... Piranha 3DD is more your cup of tea?

Re: Pricing

"So if they choose to throttle you down to early dial up speeds but allow you to use all the data you've paid for eventually then you'd consider that ok?"

Of course not. I'd take my business elsewhere.

These guys should be partaking in competition, where they provide a continually improving service in order to retain my business. With a 4G monopoly in place, there is no competition, and that's why EE may be tempted to fleece their customers for what they can get away with. At least, that seems to be the general opinion here of what will happen.

Re: Hopefully that'll put an end to it ...

Yeah, it's great fun leading these chancers on.

Last time this happened to me, I wasn't feeling particularly imaginative and simply answered "yes" to every question that was put to me by some guy with a strong Indian accent. It took him several minutes to figure out what was going on and eventually vented his frustration by announcing that I was a "dirty dog".

Woof woof! That one cut me to the quick.

Re: Pricing

"so are you saying you want something better / faster and you don't think you should pay extra for it ?"

You're dead right that I want a faster connection without paying more. I pay for the amount of data that is transmitted, not the speed that it moves. I get a snappy connection on my home broadband and that doesn't cost me any more than the era of 14K modems (a lot less, in fact).

Charging extra for 4G would be profiteering. Like the bad old days when you were penalised for installing a wireless router in your home.

Re: Am I the only one...

The human retina can respond to single photon events. But these don't make it as far as your brain - otherwise it would be swamped with noise in low light.