Posts by Mike Bell 754 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2007
*Apparently* you believe everything that you read.
iPhone GPS is perfectly usable, but WiFi detection can improve location accuracy somewhat. Especially if you are in a spot with limited sky (and therefore satellite) coverage.
Space Invaders featured quite heavily in my early introduction to pub life. Our local had a prize offering for the best score each week, and I'd often annoy regulars by grabbing the £5 cash prize. In those days, £5 could get you 13 pints of lager out in the styx :-)
Also, when girlies played the game, they would go into a mad panic when the last remaining alien started zipping across the screen. At which point, yours truly would saunter over and casually thump the FIRE button to destroy the little monster. Ah, those were the days.
I especially like the grave stone and the pram - makes things a little easier to visualise.
However, as for the spooky nature of quantum mechanics, you can gain another insight by sliding all those vertical dash lines and graphics all the way to the left so that they overlap where it says "t=0". You see, as far as a photon is concerned, no elapsed time ever "exists". Its journey begins and ends in *null* time. So what happens to it is like stapling distant pieces of space together.
@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.
I've never bought 'boxed' Adobe software. They've offered the ability to download and pay for software online for a very long time, and that's what I've done on quite a few occasions.
By slipping in the word 'cloud' they're really just offering a different way to pay, and removing the option for their customers to purchase new versions of the software outright.
There's no reason at all why they couldn't continue to offer outright purchases for new software, but they think they're in such a strong position that sheeple will put up with paying in perpetuity.
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.
"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.
It's been there for years, since I've had a smart phone that tells the time, wakes me up, has a nice big display and... er... makes phone calls.
Why would I want an electronic trinket on my wrist? If it featured "Holly" from Red Dwarf on the front, I might be tempted. But otherwise, the screen is going to be too piddling small to be any use for me (other than telling the time).
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.
"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.
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.
It's weird stuff, alright. But, hey, quantum mechanics is as bonkers as things get.
I don't know if I'm right or not, but I think of a pair of QM 'entangled' particles as - in effect - just being a single particle that happens to be pretty darned big. It's adding an unnecessary complication if you think that changing one property results in some kind of information propagating over great distances in virtually no time: You're just changing the state of the single entangled system, that's all. Probably instantaneously, whatever that means. Nobody knows how it happens. So there.
How is it that when a bank lends you money for a mortgage, 90% of the loan value is conjured out of thin air and created as 'new money' that the bank never had in the first place, but will expect to be paid back by the mortgagee. This is called the Fractional Reserve System, which is ubiquitous in modern banking.
Under such circumstances, how the hell could a bank lose money? That's quite an achievement. If I lent 10 of my mates down the pub £100 each I would need to have £1000 in my pocket to start with. The banks, in collusion with the government, would only need £100. The rest is just made up!
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.
That quote is a mistake. The paper itself states that the fluctuation time varies in proportion to the square root of the travelled distance. The effect gets proportionally smaller the further you go, nothing to do with any square metre of crossed vacuum.
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.
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?
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.
Perhaps Apple should block users from installing deadly software like Flash and Java. I can't help thinking it would be for the best, given the track record of Adobe and Oracle.
I have Java disabled in my browser and Flash won't run because the browser doesn't have the most recent Adobe plug-in. I think I'll keep it that way.
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.
I can't see humans colonising space as a safeguard against the rest of us being wiped out, because it would be ridiculously expensive. Would you be happy to give up half your salary in taxes for the rest of your life to be able to send a bunch of monkeys out to the stars? What's in it for you? Not a lot.
@Timmay
Actually, iTunes and the Apple App Store offerings *are* cloud services. By definition, since they provide a service in the cloud (internet).
There's no doubt that Apple's map debacle was a complete fiasco. But I wouldn't say to Apple "With all your billions in the bank, just forget about doing mapping on your own. Google will always be king." Good luck to them in getting it right in the long term. I'd hate to think that just because Google are great at doing mapping now, they should retain a monopoly on it for all time.
With the exception of said maps, I find Apple's cloud offerings to be rather good. Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Messaging and Document sync across Apple devices is a breeze. As is nightly device backup to the cloud. This was brought sharply home when I recently had a device that suffered some water damage after 9 months. Back to the Apple Store, new device handed over, gratis, kick off restore from the cloud, and after the inevitable gigabytes of download, the new device in my hand was indistinguishable from the one I was using the day before.
I like Apple stuff *and* Android stuff. I'd be reticent to say one is definitively better than the other, but for me, I like the simplicity and convenience of owning Apple devices, where iOS certainly wins hands down in this respect.
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.
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