dschleef

Joined 14 years ago

Karma

Submissions

Member since

Mar 6

Recent submissions

This article goes to great contortions to avoid talking about electroweak theory or spontaneous symmetry breaking, both of which have decent Wikipedia articles, and are crucial to understanding what's going on here. Spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak interaction and the Higgs mechanism is the reason _why_ the W and Z have mass. The article throws up a "who knows?" at this. When you write down the field equations for a massive boson field, you get an additional m^2 term in the denominator of the propagator, which contributes a e^(-r/m) term to the interaction force at low energy, such as the decay of a neutron or a weak-mediated nuclear decay.

Is there an ELI5 version of this? I think the article tries, and it's always cool to see physics described from a different vantage point.

My ELI5 version would be: fields with a massive gauge boson are "dragged down" in energy by the mass of the boson, so interactions propagate as if they have negative energy. What does a negative energy wave propagation look like? Similar negative energy wave propagations in physics are evanescent waves and electron tunneling, both of which have exponential drop-off terms, so it makes sense to see an exponential factor in massive boson interactions.

Comment · 7 years ago

> There's often a lifetime of work behind the development of that skill.

This is literally true of every senior job role.

It seems like it's mostly software engineers that don't get this.

Comment · 12 years ago

Or, people are realizing that there might not be enough actual BTC to back all those MtGoxBTC.

Comment · 12 years ago

It's hilarious that people believe there was an actual, unstaged market transaction selling a fish for $3k/pound.

Comment · 13 years ago

Compliance rules for Microsoft Playready: http://www.microsoft.com/playready/licensing/compliance/

The encryption part of DRM systems is effectively the same as client-side SSL certificates with a secret SSL certificate. How well it's kept secret is defined in the compliance documents. This secret, plus a secure decoding and output path, are the engineering core of DRM systems.

Studios require "industry standard DRM" for movies and TV shows, with lesser requirements for SD. This effectively means "DRM backed by some entity with lots of money that we can sue if things go wrong". Studios approve each individual device that you serve to, usually with compliance targets at some particular future date for various existing loopholes.

Flash (Adobe Access) is somewhat different, and has an obfuscated method for generating the equivalent of a client cert, thus on laptops it's only rated for SD by most (all?) studios. Apparently studios don't care too much about people copying SD content.

Studios would theoretically approve watermarking DRM systems, but there are two major barriers: having a large (ahem, suable) company offering it, and some way to serve individualized media through a CDN. Neither seem likely. So nobody loses too much sleep about whether studios would actually approve watermarking.

Comment · 13 years ago

This kind of functionality is standard on OMAP4 devices.

Comment · 13 years ago

This link is an artificial construct designed to provide the superficial result of a real article.

Comment · 13 years ago

86400s is one day, not one year.

Comment · 13 years ago

Fat shaming in the first sentence.

Comment · 13 years ago

Is a 10x developer the same as a "10 star" developer?

Comment · 14 years ago

Not directly. Davinci is a different business unit than OMAP.

Comment · 14 years ago

nimius illectus - "the excessive amount that is unread"

Comment · 14 years ago

I will care about companies complaining about too few H1B visas when they start paying equivalent H1B visa holders and citizens the same.

Comment · 14 years ago

The tip atom would be oxygen, as CO adsorbs to metal surfaces via carbon-metal bonding.

Comment · 14 years ago

The author appears to either not know how old Gen-Xer's are, or is smoking crack. We entered the job market during the 90's boom, so we were much better employed in our early careers compared to today's grads. We've never had jobs that had pensions, and have been told our entire lives to save for retirement, so we won't "lose" our pensions. The housing boom/bust affected all ages. And we're not quite old enough to suffer from recession-induced early retirement. Nor are we currently retiring and moving our savings into fixed-income investments with historically low rates. I'd say Gen-X has done well in the Great Recession, comparatively.

EDIT: I reread the article replacing "Gen-X" with "youngin's", and it makes a lot more sense. Also, we were the last generation that could reasonably work their way through college without loans.