"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." - Terry Pratchett
He’s referring to the fact that if you sweep a laser pointer across the moon, the dot can easily move faster than light. This is not proscribed by physics, nor are similar phenomena like the phase velocity of a wave exceeding the speed of light. None of these things allow you to transmit information faster than light.
Another fun example besides projections like laser pointers or the spot of a searchlight on the clouds is the junction between blades of scissors. Almost all the examples one sees of this relate to synchronization defined entities not being physical objects. In my experience explaining this, the larger scale of the searchlight on the clouds seems to help people "get it".
To really kill the illusion, imagine a long line of people, doing "The Wave". The wave can move arbitrarily fast as the delay between people decreases, and even infine speed! (everyone does their part at the same time, assuming they have synced clocks and aren't dependent on their neighbor for the trigger, which is the key feature of the faster-than-light illusion.)
That's also a good one! ..Basically a sub-example of "phase velocity" mentioned in the greatgrandparent. Imagining oneself as an active participant in The Wave seems like it would boost saliency a lot. I'll try that one next time. :)
The moon is a little more than 0.1 light seconds in diameter. Any wag that took more than a tenth of a second to traverse the moon's surface would be moving slower than the speed of light across it. There's no way the ponderous wag displayed in the video was moving so quick. At best, it was moving half the speed of light across it.
What would really be interesting of the things mentioned in the video linked from the stackoverflow question, would be how a perceiver would see the closing scissors occur.
If you were 12 light years from the handle end of the scissors, and only 2 light years from the tips, if the closing motion took a year to occur, you would see the point move backwards from the tip to the handles, since the light would take longer to reach you to see the handles close than the tips.
Not really true. You can definitely falsify someone else's hypothesis without positing one of your own.
This is more of how it should be done in business/politics – not very helpful to say "this is the wrong way to do it" but not propose a better solution. In science, however, falsify things is always useful.
It is a common misconception. You can't falsify anything without your own theory. Some people just can't (at the conscious level) recognize their assumptions (if you don't see air, it doesn't mean there is none).
Hypotheses make predictions. Experimentation can test those predictions without providing an alternative explanation for the phenomena you are testing.
For example, if I came up with a theory of gravity that implied everything should fall towards the earth at the same speed, all you need to do to falsify my theory is show that this is not the case. You do not need to know that wind resistance is the confounding variable to know that the theory which suggests everything should fall at the same speed is wrong.
Again, you can’t make an experiment without an underlying theory.
I understand some concepts are so ingrained, that they are perceived as theories but as reality itself (Newtonian physics before the end of XIX century) but physics is not constrained by our intuition (what we are familiar with).
Could you provide an example? Because I did so, and you repeating exactly what you said earlier doesn't really invalidate mine. As far as I can tell, my example is valid and invalidates your theory that you need a theory to falsify another theory.
Let me try another example: you claim that anyone who drinks a cup of X liquid will die. I drink your cup of liquid, and do not die. I have falsified your theory. I do not know why I did not die, I do not assume anything about why I did not die – I just didn't die. Theory falsified, no alternative theory proposed.
With regard to dark matter: yes there are many competing / mutually exclusive theories surrounding it, but that does not then mean in order to invalidate one of those theories you need to have picked a different one that you like better.
Your examples assume the absolute and complete knowledge. It is not our world. There is no theory of everything (yet or ever).
If I would try to find and explain alternative hypotheses for your "human intuition/everyday experience " examples they would sound contrived this invalidating themselves. Imagine trying to explain quantum theory/general relativity to a Victorian and their counter-examples all use objects from their life.
Did you read anything more than the incredibly poorly worded headline?
The data was harvested by the Facebook pixel as part of their audience building tech for acquisition of new customers. So you are being sold by Facebook, Backblaze just happens to have been quite careless here but they are not "selling your data".
The breach of trust is BB letting third party code on their platform and especially from a particularly untrustworthy third party. That's it, it's egregious and should be taken seriously, that also means discussing it seriously.
This kind of hyperbole is counter-productive, it only makes it easier to ignore your concerns as "crazy overreacting".
This is a technology that is very interesting to me, but I have not gotten my hands on it yet. I know there were some Italians who had gotten some 100s of km using LoRa (I think it was testing for the Guifi network)
Both methods are easy. It's then a case of using FFmpeg with an -activation_bytes parameter to convert to MP3 or whatever (or just remux into an M4A/M4B without transcoding). Tutorial here:
There are a bunch of other tools (both commercial and free) which use the above techniques but add either a nice CLI or GUI. The original was Inaudible itself, which can be found on your favourite torrenting site. Alternatively you can grab it from here, but I'm not sure how up-to-date it is:
The creator presumably gets a very small cut. If you want to pay the creator, why not send the full price, or some amount, directly to them?! I'm sure they would appreciate that.
In England: format shifting isn't a criminal offence (unless you do enough of it to affect business, or you do it as part of a business). The rights holders could sue to recover the cost of the media, but it's confusing what that would be. It keeps going into and out of law -- sometimes it's allowed, sometimes forbidden. I have no idea what the status is now. There's potentially something there about circumventing a technical measure, but again that's not a criminal offence.
There are exceptions if you're making something accessible.
Copyright infringement is generally a criminal act if the act of copying provides an expectation of any type of monetary gain, where monetary is broadly defined to be anything of value [1][2].
So removing the DRM on something that you already have a license to consume? Not a copyright infringement crime. Sending a copy of the DRM free product to a friend who hasn't bought a copyrighted version? Yes a copyright infringement crime. Removing the DRM that limits your ability to consume the product unless you buy a specially licensed version of the product, when you haven't paid for it, yes a copyright crime.
Removing the DRM is a DMCA violation though, even if you have no intent to distribute. The doctrine of first sale was gutted for digital content because Congress is in the pocket of big companies.
When the Learning Disabilities Association complained that the DMCA prohibited people with disabilities from removing DRM to enable their products to work with assistive tools, no change was made to the law as it was deemed the law does not prohibit DRM removal in this case. The Entertainment Software Association stated [1]:
> In addition, DIYAbility’s initial comments do not provide sufficient information to know whether what it would like to do would actually violate Section 1201, rather than, for example, being permitted by Section 1201(f).
Here's a link to section 1201(f) of the Circumvention of copyright protection systems references reverse engineering [2].
> It seems faster/easier just to pirate from the get go.
Others have pointed out that authors won't get paid that way. But I also disagree that it is faster or easier to pirate. First you have to have a decent source (or multiple sources) to search for the books, hope that they are decent enough quality, hope that they have enough peers that you don't have to wait a day to download the book, etc. By contrast, on Audible you press one button to buy and another to download. Even when you take into account any DRM removal, the necessary time and effort are much lower.
I don't consume audio books so I certainly don't pirate them but most of the cost of piracy is frontloaded into 5-10 minutes finding a decent resource and then is as easy to use as any other resource.
This actually mirrors the time where someone who was interested in audiobooks would take to find a source to shop for audiobooks, create an account, confirm the email validation, enter payment info and start buying.
As a test I entered stephen king audiobook into my torrent client's built in search engine and got 210 results any of which can be added with a click. The worlds most well known piracy site is even better listing a torrent with 70 people with 68 different audio books by king among many other torrents.
The annoying part about the default x86 emulator that installs from Android Studio is that it's incompatible with hyper-v. Requiring a reboot to disable.
They go over the effects of compression - which they say only degrades the protection - but at the same time also degrades the identification accuracy of the AI model.
So if your crappy 6 megapixel camera cannot take a clear shot of the cloaked pixels - or effectively applying a blur filter - would also affect the AI detection.
