As someone that used to hate Apple and still does, I use apple products (don't buy them myself). There are many reasons people use Apple products. From the support to the high quality of their products. There's also the fact that a macbook can run all 3 main operating systems at the same time, whereas no other hardware can easily and legally do so. Macbooks are also pretty much the lightest and smallest laptops you can get.
Some people also get them because of loyalty to Apple from the past, or because OSX is unix-compatible.
The point I'm trying to make is, you can disagree with Apple and still use their products. I hate Apple but my work provided me with a mac mini and a macbook, which I use every work day. I also have developed iOS apps even though I've never owned an iPhone.
Also, if you are talking about iPhones, you are going to see a lot of those everywhere because you really only have 2 viable choices anyway.
Poetry is about painting images with words. Often poetry will do this by not saying what is actually happening or the thought it intends to create in the reader.
A program is written to perform math, and it is generally considered bad to waste space with needless things. It doesn't aid the reader or the compiler or the execution to add unused variables. It's really bad in a program to do things in an unclear way.
Poetry can have ambiguities, good software can't.
They do both share some amount of necessity of context. Both often have abstraction. I would say poetry is kind of a playful use of language, whereas programming is really more of a clever use of math.
As many times as the world has come close to nuclear war and mutually assured destruction since the end of WW2, it's actually one of the most reassuring things about humanity that people refused orders to fire missiles every time.
I'm always reminded of "Talking to god..."[1] when I read about these close calls with nuclear weapons. The most important paragraph in the entire short story is the following: "The only ones who reach level two are those who learn to accept and to live with their most dangerous knowledge. Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight. And frankly, they’re the only ones we really want to see leaving their solar systems. Species that haven’t achieved that maturity could not be allowed to infect the rest of the universe, but fortunately that has never required my intervention. The knowledge always does the trick".
As many times as the world has come close to nuclear war and mutually assured destruction since the end of WW2, it's actually one of the most reassuring things about humanity that people refused orders to fire missiles every time
If you accept the account in the linked story, this episode itself is a counterexample:
"...the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles..."
I think the line about "Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homographs" has it backward. Shouldn't it say Mimic substitutes obscure homographs for common ASCII characters?
Never occurred to me before, but here "substitutes" reads to me as being commutative. I read both as having the same meaning. (i.e. you end up with unicode homographs replacing your ascii) Just me?
In many high level languages a break, continue, pass, that sort of thing (where you want to skip or escape a loop iteration) is usually implemented with a goto as well.
Also, a common use of goto in C is when you're doing something in nested for loops and want to break out of all of them. A goto is actually much cleaner here than using sentinel values or boolean flags, or naughty things like setting your loop variables to be outside of the conditional bounds.
My gut says a majority, I believe that the war is truly inward. A flagging system wouldn't be too difficult. You could even flag people who aren't dead and yet haven't raised a flag in some time-frame (Unibomber). Statistical analysis, the data's all there. Set up keys that resemble the analyses's output. Find what you're looking for. Unfortunately, those keys are controllable. You'll always find people who fit a certain profile, you will always find who you're looking for. Unfortunately, you'll require some vagueness to ensure that the net you've cast doesn't have holes too large.
One problem is that you're not only time shifting but space shifting to digital media as well. And the laws as written are very specific as to what is permitted.
Example: In the US, the AHRA that makes personal space shifting digital audio legal (relevant to the submission) is fairly limited in the media that can be used for copying. Though I agree that they're being used for basically the same thing, computer hard drives aren't covered.
A relevant quote from Wikipedia [1] that sums up why I think this act falls short of its purpose: "In each case, the principal distinction between what is and is not covered by the AHRA is determined by whether or not the device is marketed or designed (or in the case of media, commonly used by consumers) to make audio recordings, not the device's capabilities."
Time shifting means copying for the purpose of listening to the recording at a better time, whereas space shifting is relevant here because the intended purpose is to allow the audio to be played in a different environment (i.e. not the YouTube player or app).
The more important thing is that space shifting to different media (digital, personal computer hard drive in this case) is legally treated differently. Though, to be honest, I'm not convinced that any personal recording protections would or should apply to the YouTube situation. It's just one way that the two differ.
Awesome. I've been wanting to use the RFID pet id tags for a feeder that would block out other pets and only allow a certain amount of food (by mass) to be eaten by a specific animal. I'll be going over how they implemented it and see if I can use any of it. Thanks for this post :)
Turns out the antenna that comes with it is way too small for anything other than manually brushing it against the cats neck knowing exactly where the chip is.
However I got some mails from another guy that built a cat feeder thingie. He ended up doing his own, much bigger antenna so that the cats head fit through it (he made a structure in cardboard wrapping the coil around that).
Anyway, he had some contact with the company, and they recommend using the RS232 version instead of the USB one for such applications... They had some better spec in some way.
EDIT:
I looked up the mail, and to summarize he used 0.6mm enamled copper wire and a 120mm computer fan (minus the fan in the middle, that he wrapped the coil around. The reader then outputs the MOF value so you can know what frequency you're getting.
I've bought some copper wire myself and I'm planning to make a better antenna myself, but haven't yet.
Does doing this in silicon mean we may start to see mass produced qubit ICs? You'd have to keep coherence between all of the quantum circuit elements to actually have a calculation carried out properly, wouldn't you?
Perhaps this could lead to some sort of quantum FPGA equivalent within the next few years?
Like I said upthread, it all depends on quantum error correction. Right now they are below the threshold for some surface codes (note: in this context below a threshold is a good thing). However surface codes require a torus topology, and existing chip technology generally flat. They are above the threshold for topologically simple codes like Stein and Shor thus ruling them out. While their research is a step forward, what they have in their lab right this instant cannot be made into a scaleable quantum computer.
Interestingly enough, most quantum computers (both in theory and practice) are more like fpga's than like a classical CPU architecture. The general purpose qubits just kind of sit there and a quantum circuit is implemented on them with laser pulses. The only exception I'm aware of is the silicon waveguides group I mentioned up top.
Here's how I have understood QC and it's current state of engineering: A 2-qbit gate can do 2-qbit problems. A pair of 2-qbit gates can do 2 2-qbit problems at a time, not a 4-qbit problem. For Shor's Algorithm, you need n-qbit gates, where n is the size of your problem. Even if the claims of the paper are true, making n-qbit gates out of silicone is just as hard as making n-qbit gates the way they are done in physics labs.
Is my understanding of the phenomena largely within reality?
What you are interested in knowing about is Universal Quantum Gates. These are the quantum analog of AND, OR, NOT from which all other computations can be built.
In answer to your question, you are mistaken. The Cnot gate plus a few Single qubit gates {haddamard, pi/8, phase shift} are sufficent for any quantum algorithm including shors.
Also not to be pedantic but computers are made of silicon. Breasts are made of silicone.
