I think you have it confused with dark energy. Dark matter is tame and well-behaved in comparison.

... I think even dark energy makes more sense than THAT.

From the article:

If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.

No, I meant what I said. The noun phrase "<vector X> in the opposite direction of <vector Y>" makes sense for any vectors X and Y, even though it doesn't define a relationship between their magnitudes or otherwise mention them.

In physics, "deceleration" is just an informal shorthand way of saying "acceleration in the opposite direction of something", where the vector "something" is often "velocity" by default but can be anything else depending on context. Saying "Pioneer is decelerating" is not quite right, then: the Pioneer craft are traveling on hyperbolic paths that slingshot away from the Sun on a curve, not zipping away in straight lines, so an acceleration toward the Sun would not point in the opposite direction from the velocity. It would slow them down since the velocity-acceleration angle is obtuse, but not as much as an actual 180 degree acceleration would. (Perhaps the acceleration is Sun-ward instead of backward because the Pioneer craft aligned their spins to keep their radio dishes pointed toward Earth, and asymmetry makes them emit more RTG heat on the opposite side from the dishes? Pure speculation on my part.)

Can we start marking Kurzweil articles as dupes?

Granted, this is a little less ridiculous than some of his past claims — machine translation has improved a lot in the O(decade) since Babelfish — but translation algorithms are still context-blind for the foreseeable future because no one's yet found a computationally feasible shortcut for the "every Bayesian probability is dependent on every other Bayesian probability" case that natural language seems to teeter in the direction of. Moore's law isn't going to fix it, either, because it's not a polynomial-time problem that can be fixed by just throwing faster clocks or more cores at the problem. We've gotten as far as we have by using dumber, polynomial-time algorithms and just throwing supertankers of training data at the problem, but in the end it's no more contextual than Dissociated Press.

Incidentally, it's clear that natural language translation is not actually as difficult as computing the maximum likelihood of a fully cross-connected Bayes network (i.e. superpolynomial-time), or else the human brain itself would be stumped. But we don't know enough about which shortcuts are useful for convincing human brains versus which shortcuts result in "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten" translations. That means we're stuck theorizing from our armchairs, throwing algorithmic crap at the wall and seeing what sticks, or maybe poking at brains with pointy sticks and fMRIs. On this matter, date predictions are worthless. The breakthrough could come tomorrow or hundreds of years from now, and Kurzweil is no better equipped to predict the date than my cat is.

One interesting element of these findings is that the achievements that are highly correlated – or part of the same clique – do not necessarily have any obvious connection. For example, an achievement dealing with a character’s prowess in unarmed combat is highly correlated to the achievement badge associated with world travel – even though there is no clear link between the two badges to the outside observer.

Really, no clear link? Did they even ask one player? These are both low-hanging fruit for the solo completionist. In particular, I suspect that north of 90% of players with the 400 unarmed weapon skill achievement will have World Explorer, although the relationship will be lower in the reverse direction — the former is a bit more of a time investment, and much more boring and tedious (Blizzard removed weapon skills for a reason), whereas World Explorer is something that can be knocked out by an hour-a-day casual player in two weeks with no problem. Since World Explorer can easily be teamed up with book collecting, critter /love-ing, the zone and continent quest completions, and Loremaster, I suspect those all form a single clique of solo completionist achievements, with some sub-cliques that are a bit more accessible to the casual player.

Device A has an open source driver, proprietary guts, and a firmware blob loaded by the driver on boot.

Device B has an open source driver, proprietary guts, and a firmware blob hidden in an immutable ROM on the device that you don't know about.

For some reason, Debian scorns Device A and praises Device B, even if the firmware blob for Device A allows unlimited redistribution. For the most part I like Debian, but that policy is just silly: Device A is the one that has the greater potential for end-user hackability.

Even in this universe, there are uncountably many uncomputable transcendentals. The canonical example of an uncomputable real is Chaitin's constant, which is the probability that a randomly chosen computer program (in some specified language) will halt. We can figure out the first few digits, but beyond that it's seemingly impossible to calculate. If you had a way to iteratively generate the digits in Chaitin's constant, you could solve the halting problem, and vice versa.

My great-grandparent post was under the seemingly mistaken impression that "transcendental" referred to a distinct subset of the reals, something like "the reals with a well-defined Taylor series that are not algebraic", but instead (per Wikipedia) it appears to be "the reals that are not algebraic", which is a vastly larger set.

Wait, nevermind. I seem to be confused about something, Wikipedia says the transcendentals are uncountable. There's probably an argument for why Turing Machines can't be used to uniquely identify arbitrary transcendentals, e.g. there aren't enough Turing Machines to go around (Cantor argument), or you can't prove that a given Turing Machine identifies the transcendental you're seeking (Halting problem), or something.

I'm still fairly convinced that pi is a computable transcendental, and probably likewise for most of the transcendentals that we've given names to, but I now suspect that the majority of the transcendentals don't fall in that category. Oops.

To be pedantic, the transcendentals are also countably infinite. The integers, rationals, algebraic irrationals, transcendentals, and quite a few others all fall under the heading of "computable numbers", i.e. numbers whose exact solution can be arrived at by a Turing machine given infinite time and tape. Even though it sounds like a ridiculously large set, the set of computable numbers is countable: for any Universal Turing Machine you like, each computable number maps to the natural number that encodes the initial tape for the UTM such that the UTM simulates any one of the TMs that can generate the computable number in question.

For instance, even though pi is a transcendental and has no algebraic representation, there are well-known algorithms that iteratively generate as many digits of pi as you like. The infinite series of pi digits can thus be replaced with a (finite) computer program implementing one of these algorithms, and any finite series of pi digits can be replaced by the same algorithm plus the number of digits to stop at. A finite approximation of pi is merely cached output from the computer program, and therefore {program U finite approximation} adds no new information beyond {program} to help you distinguish pi from the other real numbers, meaning you can uniquely identify pi with just the computer program and no further information.

Notwithstanding your comment about how you already have a patent license through other means, "civil disobedience" isn't the same as "doing it and not getting caught". In the original sense, "civil disobedience" means breaking the law in public, daring the police to arrest you / civil lawsuits to fly, and using the obvious injustice of the response to inflame the public against the bad law. DeCSS in your .signature is civil disobedience, downloading a gray-market codec from a non-US APT repository is merely getting away with it.

FWIW, I highly recommend setting your brightness to the minimum the OS will let you. In my experience, the Nexus One screen is useless in any amount of daylight, no matter how high it cranks up the screen's light levels, so you might as well not waste that energy and find a nice shady spot instead. My "Battery use" screen consistently shows that the display sucks down the vast majority of my power usage, even if I've only had the screen on for 30 minutes throughout the day, and I still get through the day with 40-60% of my battery remaining. In a pinch, I can go 36 hours without charging, especially if I minimize screen activity.

Also, get Watts, and try to correlate the slope of the graph with what you were doing at that time. I found it quite helpful.

Beyond the other comment about 100 miles versus 100 years, I also feel compelled to point out that Switzerland is very well connected with its neighbors via a very reasonably-priced passenger rail system. (And with schedules that are extremely... Swiss... to boot.)

It still blows my puny American mind that it's possible to ride a train and arrive in another country, and moreover to do so as a day trip.

Actually, I'm fairly sure you miscounted. When I looked over that list, I only counted 8.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Star Trek 1)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Star Trek 2)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Star Trek 3)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Star Trek 4)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier FNORD (Star Trek 5)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Star Trek 6)
Star Trek: Generations (Star Trek 7)
Star Trek: First Contact (Star Trek 8)
Star Trek: Insurrection FNORD (Star Trek 9)
Star Trek: Nemesis FNORD (Star Trek 10)
Star Trek (2009 - Star Trek 11)

See? There's a mysterious gap between 4 and 6 that I've never been able to figure out, but you can't seriously mean that the new movie gets a +2 added to its sequel number just because it's a reboot.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a sudden urge to go shopping.

Yes, and as I said, this is exactly what I keep hearing about as the long-term plan. The problem as I understand it is that it will require significant developer time to write an implementation. The easy part is automatically generating, mounting, and unmounting the encrypted loopbacks as needed. The hard part is changing Dalvik, the GUI, etc. so that they all do something sensible when the SD card is yanked out.

(The naïve solution of "SIGSTOP the missing apps until the SD card is reinserted" could well leave the phone effectively hosed if the app was running in the foreground. There are plenty of full-screen apps that hide the notification panel, and apps can capture a surprisingly large set of keypresses — and games, the most likely candidates for installing to an SD card, are also the most likely candidates for capturing keystrokes and going full-screen. Most users won't care that adb shell still works fine.)

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Android and definitely not as a spokesman for Android, and I would be quite shocked if any of this were news outside the company. I'm fairly sure the bulk of this discussion exists in the public Android bug tracking system, as I remember being pointed there when we all got our shiny ADP1s a year ago and the same question came up. At any rate, the problem space is well known since it afflicts non-Android Linux (esp. Knoppix and other removable-media distros, which solve the problem by copying the entire system image to a RAMdisk).