codehotter

I keep hearing about faster than light communication with quantum entanglement. It seems to be a very persistent misconception. The same "communication" as with quantum entanglement can be done in the classical universe. You can easily create two entangled envelopes. People's minds are blown just because we put the word "quantum" in there.

Take two indistinguishable envelopes. Put a green card in one and a red card in the other. Shuffle the envelopes so that you do not know which card is in which envelope. Have a friend take one of the envelopes many kilometers away. Your envelopes are now entangled.

If you now open your envelope, and it contains the red card, you instantly know your friend's envelope contains the green card. Did information travel faster than light? No, it did not, since in order to communicate by this method you still need to tell your friend what it means to have the green card.

You still need to send slower than light information that Red is 1 and Green is 0 which you can only do once you've measured your own envelope, after which you've destroyed the entanglement of your envelopes.

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where you can tell something about the other part of the entangled pair by measuring one part. Just like with the entangled envelopes, you cannot communicate anything by this since you don't know in advance what you're going to measure.

It is not religion that is the root of all evil but religious authority.

If you are religious but don't give a dime about what the religious leaders claim, then you will never be led down this path.

In general, humans are wired to find authority figures and follow them. Sometimes, this causes us to make great progress towards a common goal. Sometimes it causes very many people to do something very stupid.

We, even the religious among us, should raise our children with some manner of scepticism towards our authority figures. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I have followed these lines of thought before. They contain a fatal mistake.

Anonymous is not a group that can have a reputation. At best, it's a subculture. Anyone can call themselves anonymous. Whoever didn't lie in all the previous incidents may not be behind this one - this could be a totally different person or group of persons with totally different ideals.

The safe spot works for me. The safe spot exploits the fact that ghosts are not allowed to turn upwards in the corridor immediately below the safe spot [1]. That behavior was accurately emulated in this version.

Make sure the red ghost passes below your safe spot from right to left. It wants to turn upwards, but it is not allowed to, so it has to keep going. It then circles around back in a T shape.

Make sure you are facing upwards, so that the blue ghost circles the center of the maze.

Finally, be mindful of the scatter phases [2]. A scatter phase will bring the red ghost out of his loop, so you need to lure him back into it. After the final scatter phase you can stay in the safe spot indefinitely.

[1] http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

[2] http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

Thanks to this article, I can finally put into words what bothers me about "Copyright infringement is theft"!

Yes copyright infringement share some of the properties of theft, but they are sufficiently different that we shouldn't apply our intuitions about theft to copyright infringement, just like we shouldn't apply our intuitions about theft to taxation.

You may be interested in https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv

Here are some more pictures (including color) http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Mars

I wonder what the sky of mars looks like. Can we see earth?

Believing in God - not because you think it is true - but because you are lonely and believing allows you to meet people is selling your soul to the devil.

When you get to a point where the question of whether somebody starts believing in God or not has very little to do with critical thinking and a lot to do with emotions I become uncomfortable. It's like the people are being taken advantage of.

When somebody starts believing because he is lonely, it feels like religion is a virus, taking advantage of a weakness in somebody's critical thinking systems in order to infect their brain.

We are not completely rational beings, we don't always need to focus on evidence and occam's razor and strip all spirituality from our life. It's fine to be religious. That is a choice everyone makes for themselves. I believe that, and it still makes me uncomfortable when religion seeks out to lonely people. It feels a little like looking for a soft mark.

Does this happen at non-IT parties where a lot of men gather to get drunk and to try and socialize? I admit I'm not much of a party person, but from what I have seen, the answer is yes.

I do not believe this has got anything to do with IT nor with sexism. If you are an attractive woman (relative to the attending male population), you are going to attract attention. That is how men are wired. That is our culture. Men have to approach women, or they don't laid.

Pure speculation, but the man who grabbed the woman's ass probably did it because he was in a mischievous mood, and to express his sexuality, and he probably needed to do something like that and get away with it to be happy. In other contexts, the victim might even have smiled at him (or punched him with a smile on her face). That might be what he needed. I grab my girlfriend's ass sometimes and it feels good to be allowed to do that.

The problem is probably that these are men that don't get out much, have low social skills, don't have experience with how to express their sexuality in an appropriate way, and things go wrong. And things go wrong in ways that make women very uncomfortable.

The problem is probably not that women are not being respected or valued. To me, sexism would be like automatically assuming a woman is not going to be able to perform some task, because she is a woman. Grabbing someone's ass is not sexism, it's inappropriate sexuality.

What can we do about it? Teach men how to express their sexuality in a way that works. Teach men that there are places women go to when they want to receive that kind of attention, teach them to recognize the signals, and teach them that IT conferences are not one of those places.

The cards are a really good idea just because it makes men aware that they are making her uncomfortable. Believe it or not, most do not realize.

This is false. There are so called 'natural monopolies' where one large firm really is more efficient than multiple smaller ones. A popular example is google search. Of course, if that monopoly starts engaging in serious rent seeking behaviour, competition could become profitable again.

If they think this is necessary, then at the very least the legislative branch of government should sign this into law - just doing it is not how a democratic government is supposed to work.

I have played starcraft for ten years and reached a reasonable high level of skill. To be a good starcraft player, you need to be skilled in three broad areas

~~~

- Good mechanics and multitasking

This is your ability to have your units do what you want. You want unit X to go to place Y, you are quickly able to give that command, without taking up much of your attention. You're also able to simultaneously build units, advance your build at home, harass your opponent, reposition units, look at the minimap, and micromanage where necessary. Top players can have more than 5 actions per second average.

- Good micromanagement and tactical skill

For example, your ability to spread your units to take less damage from area of effect spells, focus fire on the most important enemy targets to get them down faster, your ability to position your units for flanking, to keep a scouting unit alive while being chased, etc. Maximizing the effectiveness of individual units.

- Good macromanagement and strategical skill

Your ability to advance your build at home correctly (what most effectively counters the opponent), to spend all your resources and not have it stack up in the bank, to choose the correct timings for expanding across the map or amassing an army, and to anticipate your army composition for what your opponent will do.

~~~

If you expect to be playing a game of chess, you'll be far behind even in the first few minutes. Your opponent's scouting unit micromanages and interrupts your build without your being able to kill even the scouting unit, and while your concentration is on the harassing unit, your opponent, who can multitask, executes his build perfectly.

Without a base level of competence mechanically (which in starcraft is about 2 effective actions per second) you cannot even compete strategically.

All three of these areas impress viewers which makes for a very 'spectatable' game.

Good mechanics and multitasking are evident when, after you've watched a battle, you can see how many more units the top player has been able to produce - while he was simultaneously micromanaging his units in battle.

Micromanagement, at least in starcraft, is very fun to watch. You can see the small army outmanoeuvre the larger enemy by individual control of units - it's hard to explain why it is impressive in just words, but the joy of watching good micromanagement is a core feature of spectating starcraft games. Watch for example here, how the player's marines dodges the spines while he keeps shooting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQtPMLOctBg

Starcraft has a lot of 'soft counters' - units that counter other units but not completely. The focus on soft counters rather than hard counters gives players a lot of strategic freedom. Even if one player's units are countered, he can micromanage them and come out ahead. Or, for example, a player can take a risky early expansion to extra resources and rely on micromanagement of his few units to stay alive.

Finally, since the maps that people play on do change, it takes a while to find the optimal builds, so you do see a lot of really innovative strategic play that people love to watch. I really cannot give any examples on this without explaining many more details about the game. I am interested to hear why you think Total Annihilation would have more sophistication.

I must admit I haven't played many other games, but I have heard people complain that either the micromanagement or the multitasking aspect are not as much on the foreground in other games, and the combination of strategy + intense multitasking + micromanagement has kept starcraft exciting for both players and viewers.

I do not feel the kick in the gut when somebody imitates my work. I suspect the feeling is in large part due to how you are socialized.

This is pure speculation - but it is probably important to our social status that we are recognized for our contributions. If others can shamelessly take credit for all our brilliant ideas, they will increase in social status, while we seem not to contribute anything. Thus it makes sense that we would have a deeply seated, hardwired resentment for other people taking credit for our hard work.

Even if somebody copies you and then attributes the work to you, some of the credit for the idea still goes to that person rather than to you. Attributions are often overlooked by 'the public' and the social status often still goes to the person they got it from.

The power of this kick in the gut may lessen the more comfortable you are with your position, and how well esteemed you feel by the people around you. You may be less opposed to having your work copied if you feel, on a deep, emotional level, that you are still in general highly respected for your contributions even if you 'lose' a few to other people copying them and taking credit.

Which reminds me of this comic by Jessica Hagy: http://thisisindexed.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/card2752...

To expand on this: virtually everything is paid for by in game currency you can earn by playing games. Every game you play makes you money (you earn more for longer games). Using that money, you can buy almost everything.

The equipment you can buy with the in game currency gives you a real advantage in player vs player battles. Having no equipment at all means you need a very large skill advantage over the other players to be able to win games.

To get all things you might reasonably want to buy, you need to play an uncomfortable amount of games - which gets many people to take a shortcut and buy the in game currency with real money instead of obtaining it by playing games.

I do not know enough to disagree with you on your main point, but I do have a few nits.

You really don't need a study from Harvard to get data on this. If you don't get it because of a lack of business experience, go talk to your local high-school-educated baker, mechanic or gas-station owner for a quick round-down.

Talking to your local high-school-educated baker is not science. We confidently believe a great deal of things that are untrue, and getting it confirmed with science is valuable. In hindsight, it's usually easy to be unsurprised by a scientific result.

Can you imagine possible circumstances that would lead you to confidently believe taxation and regulation to be the cause of many businesses' failure even if it were untrue?

The evidence is overwhelming. Yet, we keep dicking around and supporting policies, politicians and people who somehow think they can violate the laws of physics and make things better by shafting everyone with more taxes.

I would love to believe this, since that would be a good argument to have less taxes. However, as your only evidence, you offer an example of absurd property taxation on desks and chairs.

Such taxes cost a business in legal, accounting, and administration fees, in addition to the tax itself, and it costs tax money to operate the government bureau to oversee all of this. All this looks to be a blatant example of government inefficiency.

However, every country in the world, at least every democracy, suffers from such problems. At one point or another, the politicians have to trade political capital to push for the policies really important to them, their funders and their voter base, and less than ideal compromises do get made.

I believe that taxation is inherently inefficient and I would like to see as little of it as possible. And I also believe that some functions of government are useful to society at large. A balance must be struck. This balance will include inefficiencies that come with running a political society.

Given that a balance must be struck, it is possible that the optimal level of taxation would be higher than now. I do not know how to judge it - I have no basis for that. I would like to see the evidence that shows where that balance must lie. I find it otherwise unsurprising to see business owners arguing for lower corporate tax.

For anybody reading this and having visions of teleporting to spaceships, this is not that kind of teleportation.

Imagine two indistinguishable envelopes. Put a red piece of paper in one of them and a green piece of paper in the other. Shuffle them so you don't know which is which. Have a friend take one of the envelopes a hundred kilometers away. Then open the envelope you still have with you. It contains the green piece of paper. WHOA INSTANT TELEPORTATION OF INFORMATION! You know that the other envelope has the red paper instantly, even though it is a hundred kilometers away! Information transfer faster than the speed of light. Amazing.

Now, instead of using envelopes, imagine Alice generates a pair of entangled photons. Alice send one half to Bob and measures the other half. Since the photons are entangled, Alice knows what Bob must be measuring, just like with the envelopes. So what makes quantum teleportation special? What can we do with quantum teleportation that we cannot do with envelope teleportation?

One interesting thing about the quantum world is that we cannot measure something without disturbing it. You can use that property to make an ultra-secure cryptographic system.

Alice generates an entangled photon pair so that the photons are either 'pointing left' or 'pointing right' or 'pointing up' or 'pointing down'. Now, there is no way to measure directly what direction the photon is pointing in. You can choose among two tests. Test A gives you the correct answer if the photon is pointing left or right, but gives you a random result if it's pointing up or down. Test B gives you the correct result if it's pointing up or down but a random result if it's pointing right or left.

Doing Test A or Test B completely disturbs the photon, giving it a random state.

If Alice chooses a direction to measure randomly, and Bob chooses a direction to measure randomly, Bob's measurements will agree with Alice 75% of the time. Half the time, they'll choose the same method and their measures will agree, and half the time they will choose a different method and both get a random result, but through pure chance, they will still agree half the time.

If Eve tries to do a 'Man in the middle' attack, intercepting Alice's photons and copying the result to send to Bob, Eve will send with only 75% accuracy and Bob's measurements will be only 62.5% accurate. Thus, Eve can be detected. Watch this video for more details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVzRbU6y7Ks

This result in the link is interesting because the researchers have been able to transport an 'entangled' photon over more than 100 kilometers, maintaining its state. It is quite hard to do since entangled photons are fragile.

However, the photons are not being teleported, just transmitted, and sticking to the speed limit like good space citizens. It is not that Alice can make a change to her half of the entangled pair and have that be reflected in Bob's, it's just that Alice can MEASURE her half and know what Bob must be measuring.

In the book "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman, it is claimed that there is a growing body of evidence that we really have two brain systems. A fast one, which uses heuristics to quickly approximate the answer, and a slow one, capable of deliberate and rational thought. He argues that the fast brain system is really responsible for a lot of our cognitive biases.

For example, our fast brain does not really understand probability. It only knows three categories: either something is impossible, it is possible, or it is a certainty. A lot of human behaviour with regards to probability can be explained by this simple assumption.

Why do people buy lottery tickets? For their intuition, it moves an impossibility into a possibility. The fast brain system that fuels their intuition does not care what the actual probability is and does not understand anyway.

I have no idea whether to be for against government regulation in health care because it's a complicated issue and I am nowhere near an expert. But I would like to ask you if you think the same logic applies to food. Can the food industry extract as much money from me as they want? I will give you the shirt off my back in order to avoid starvation. If no, what is the magic happening in the food industry? Could similar magic apply in health care?

If you don't think you can trust the other participant, you could do the following:

Point at one of the other's balls. Say "I will choose steal unless you pick that one. If you do pick that one, you may choose the ball I'll pick."

Unfortunately, your expected value is only 37.5% with this strategy, not 50%. You can still do better if you trust each other.

I have experience with colemak, not with dvorak, but:

Don't do it for speed. I type exactly as fast in colemak as in qwerty, even after years of using colemak. (110 WPM). The limitation feels to me to be in my brain, not in the keyboard layout. Colemak does feel much more comfortable than qwerty. Although I stopped using qwerty for a month while I initially learned colemak, I have been able to use qwerty or colemak interchangeably since. It takes no effort to switch 'modes'.

The biggest thing I hate about colemak is that it breaks vim keybindings. I actually use this script http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2865 to have qwerty key mappings in vim while having colemak in insert mode

If you're interested in learning a new keyboard layout, I recommend checking out these links before you decide

http://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=Easy_to_learn

http://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ergonomic

Below is from the colemak FAQ on dvorak

http://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#What.27s_wrong_w...

What's wrong with the Dvorak layout?

The main problem with Dvorak is that it's too difficult and frustrating to learn for existing QWERTY typists because it's so different from QWERTY. Colemak has been designed to be easy to learn.

Placing 'L' on the QWERTY 'P' position causes excessive strain on the right pinky. Colemak doesn't place frequent letters where the pinkies stretch.

'F' is on the QWERTY 'Y' position which is a difficult stretch on normal keyboards.

'I' is very frequent but isn't on the home position.

'R' is very frequent but isn't on the home row.

It is significantly lopsided so that the right hand does too much work.

It's not comfortable to use Ctrl-Z/X/C/V shortcuts with the left hand while holding the mouse with the right hand. Colemak conserves those shortcuts in their QWERTY positions.

Even though the design principles are sound, the implementation isn't optimal because it was designed without the aid of computers.

'L' and 'S' form a frequent same-finger digraph on the right pinky. Same-finger for the pinky is very rare in Colemak. In particular, Unix commands such as 'ls -l' are very uncomfortable to type.

Some punctuation (in particular the curly/square brackets) is less comfortable to type on Dvorak. This affects mainly programmers and advanced Unix users.

Check out http://colemak.com (Description copied from website)

The QWERTY layout was designed in the 19th century to allow typewriter salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" and to prevent typebars from sticking. We've been stuck with QWERTY ever since. Colemak is a modern alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English. Learning Colemak is a one-time investment that will allow you to enjoy faster and pain-free typing for the rest of your life. Colemak is now the 3rd most popular keyboard layout for touch typing in English, after QWERTY and Dvorak.

The promise of typing faster is not true, at least not for me. I type exactly as fast in colemak as in qwerty (110 wpm). However, colemak does feel more comfortable. Colemak is much easier to learn than dvorak (I reached the same typing speed as I have in qwerty in about a month). I stopped using qwerty that first month to really acquire colemak, but I have since been able to type in colemak and qwerty interchangeably without any problems.

Those interested in quantum mechanics, and that find the 'textbook interpretation' (the copenhagen interpration) or the "many worlds/everett" interpration frustratingly unintuitive, may find the decoherent/consistent histories interpretation interesting.

That interpretation provides an intuitive way to reason about quantum mechanics and therefore makes it much easier to learn how quantum mechanics works, without getting distracted by paradoxes and philosophical difficulties.

To learn more,

Read a paper by one of decoherent histories' main proponents http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0612065

See if you can understand quantum decoherence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

Read the FAQ: http://quantum.phys.cmu.edu/CHS/quest.html

Dive into a textbook explaining quantum physics in decoherent histories interpration (by the same proponent as above) http://quantum.phys.cmu.edu/CQT/index.html

And of course its Wikipedia page may not be overlooked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_histories

What do you mean with "really" and what do you mean with "mutual" ? In the article, the situation is described where the man in the relationship desires the woman and the woman desires another man. If you're asking "is it always like this?" then answer is simply "No." I don't even think it is very common, but that's judging from anecdotal evidence.

If you would forgive me for being so unromantic on valentine's day, the experience of being in love has similarities to a drug addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder. For most people, such infatuation is short-term, and in long-term romantic relationships usually replaced by feelings similar to friendship and attachment.

In my opinion, fretting over whether your significant other is really as addicted to you as you are to the SO is not productive. Focus on whether you are happy and whether you are getting your needs met in the relationship. If you are not, you are perfectly entitled to do something about it (starting with talking it over). If you are happy and getting your needs met, stop worrying.

This problem was enough hard for me that I want to post my solution.

(a+1)/(b+1) = (a * (1 + 1/a))/(b * (1 + 1/a))

Which in turn, is the same as (a/b) * ((1+1/a)/(1+1/b))

This can only be greater than a/b if (1+1/a) / (1+1/b) > 1.

A fraction is greater than 1 if the numerator is greater than the denominator, which means 1/a > 1/b. Dividing by a greater number leads to a smaller result, so this happens if a < b.

12345 < 54321, so 12346/54322 is greater.

Did I overlook a much easier way to solve this, or is third grade much better at math than I am now?

I originally thought this would be illegal because of the Skype EULA. In Blizzard vs Bnetd the eight circuit ruled that, while reverse engineering for interoperability is permitted in some cases, you waive these rights when you agree to an EULA that says you can't.

https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq#fo...

HOWEVER the skype terms of use read:

4.2 Restrictions. You may not and you agree not to.

(a) sub-license, sell, assign, rent, lease, export, import, distribute or transfer or otherwise grant rights to any third party in the Software;

(b) undertake, cause, permit or authorize the modification, creation of derivative works or improvements, translation, reverse engineering, decompiling, disassembling, decryption, emulation, hacking, discovery or attempted discovery of the source code or protocols of the Software or any part or features thereof (EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW); (emphasis mine)

It is possible to base the currency in commodity. Not the gold standard, but, say, 1 coin is worth the average of a predetermined amount of the top 20 or 30 traded commodities in the market. Banks guarantee to exchange your coins for commodities at any time - bank chooses the exact commodity, but the amount is determined by the value of your coins. It would cost you more money than now to hold an account with the bank, as the bank needs to be able to guarantee to exchange coins for commodities at any time, and thus must store or otherwise arrange access to those commodities. This means you will be paid less interest. On the flip side, the value of your coins is always guaranteed and not based on reputation. That latter property may make it suitable for decentralisation in a way that a fiat currency is not.

Alternative to what? Hosted email? Or the web interface? If the latter: http://roundcube.net/ It access email through imap - so you still need a good mailbox server.