I set up IPv6 through 6to4, and found it to be surprisingly easy and simple — subject to the major proviso that you only want IPv6 on one box. This should be easy, 6to4 gives you every address from 2002:abc:123:0:0:0:0:0 to 2002:abc:123:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff to play with. To get it on other boxes, you need to have the end of the 6to4 tunnel route IPv6 packets, and the end-hosts have to get IPv6 addresses from it. Which turns out to be a problem. It’s easy to give your router 2002:abc:123:0:0:0:0:0, but giving out IPv6 address doesn’t work — the client support for getting IPv6 addresses over DHCP is zilch. Easier to set up Teredo.

This is worrisome. Client vendors have been complaining that the ISPs aren’t deploying IPv6 routing and patting themselves on the back for having their systems support IPv6, without considering that it only works if manually set-up. Suppose some ISP did do all the work of making its network route IPv6 — their customers still aren’t going to be on the IPv6 net, because their computers never ask for IPv6 addresses over DHCP so the ISP never gives them any. Are we expecting each one to call customer support for their IPv6 address and how to tell it to their system? The Internet has as many users as it does because the software lets the computers be plugged together and figure out how to talk on their own, without the user having to know how any of that works. IPv6 can’t work until that’s the case for it as well. If reading an RFC ever enters the picture, you lose: 99.9% of the Internet’s users won’t bother. It has to be made so transparent that the end user needs to do nothing and won’t even notice that another routing protocol is processing the packets.

I’ll give you up only when the sun’s cold
And my hurting you is forbode
    Shan’t ever run aroun’
    Nor ever let you down
You’ve just been limerickrolled.

It’s the twenty-first century. Where are the flying cars? The videophones? What about the robot barbers and tailor engines? I’m kind of glad we didn’t get radium fireplaces though.

More images of the year 2000 from 1910 at the National Library of France.

gdb has this awesome feature that nobody seems to have heard of (including myself before today). You can set breakpoints by regex!

“help rbreak”

In the third century BC, Archimedes calculated an amazing approximation to π, bettering the old value of 256/81 worked out by 17th century Egyptians.
How did he do it? He circumscribed and inscribed a hexagon around a circle, then bisected each hexagon’s central angles to make a dodecagon, then a 24-gon, 48-gon, and finally a 96-gon. The perimeters of the polygons bound π above and below, and each pair of perimeters is related to the ones before.
Consider a pair of polygons being bisected:

If the radius AO = 1, then AB = tan α and AC = tan ½α.
If it has n sides, the outer perimeter P = 2n tan α and the new polygon has perimeter P’ = 4n tan ½α. The inner perimeter is p = 2n sin α, with the new polygon’s perimeter being p’ = 4n sin ½α.

Now, 1/P + 1/p = 1/(2n tan α) + 1/(2n sin α) = (sin α + tan α)/(2n sin α tan α) = (1 + sec α)/(2n tan α) = (cos α + 1)/(2n sin α) = (cos² ½α - sin² ½α + 1)/(4n sin ½α cos ½α) = (2 cos² ½α - 1 + 1)/(4n sin ½α cos ½α) = (1/2n) cot ½α = 2/P’
And, P’ p = (4n tan ½α)(2n sin α) = 16n² tan ½α sin ½α cos ½α = 16n² sin² ½α = p’²
So, we have easy ways to calculate successive perimeters from our basic hexagons, with p = 6, P = 4 √3, using only simple arithmetic and square roots.

which puts 3.1427 > π > 3.1410.

Now, Archimedes didn’t have trigonometric functions to utilize in his calculations, so he calculated the perimeters using similar triangles, a much more complicated process. But it gives the same values. He also lacked decimals, so he worked with rationals instead, producing the bounds 3 1/7 > π > 3 10/71.

I recently was amused by the “song chart” meme, so decided to give it a try.

It’s been pointed out I’m not really addressing what’s wrong with the two arguments which give you different “correct” choices for the Newcomb scenario. So here we go…

Expected Outcome
This argument assumes that the predictor has foreseen our choice [with high probability]. If however we assume that free willed choices are by definition unpredictable, this is a logical impossibility.

Dominant Outcome
This argument assumes that the choice we make is not correlated with the predictor’s choice, because that would involve reverse causation. However, if we assume that we’re not free willed, or that freely willed choices can be predicted (whatever that would involve), then there’s a common cause: Our mind’s tendency to select choice X in the scenario causes both our selection of X when we’re in the scenario and the predictor to anticipate this selection. So, our choice wouldn’t be independent of the predictor’s, and dominance wouldn’t hold.

So, I’ve been thinking about Newcomb’s Paradox lately.
I think part of the issue is it conflates a couple issues, and it might be useful to consider them separately. So, think on these paradoxes:

Determinism vs. Nondeterminism
Consider a superhuman predictor and a fair coin. The predictor predicts what the coin will show, then you flip it. The predictor is [nearly] always right.

Removal of free will
A computer has been programmed to maximize its expected score as a player in the Newcomb scenario, given that the predictor has a copy of the program to analyze, run in simulation or on another computer, etc. How will it play?

My take on Newcomb’s paradox? It reduces to the question of whether free will makes our choices inherently unpredictable, and the paradox is thorny because free will isn’t well defined enough to provide a clear answer.
If we have no free will, it’s just the computer scenario. If we assume free willed actions are inherently unpredictable, then the existence of a predictor contradicts that assumption, just like it contradicts the assumption that the outcome of a fair coin flip cannot be predicted.

It doesn’t help to zip already compressed file formats, like jpeg or mpeg, it only wastes CPU. Uncompressed video, audio, or still images will compress better with algorithms which are dedicated for video, audio, or images than they will with general compressors. JPEG is for photos — for images which are line drawings use PNG.

Okay, so the Periodic Table of the Elements is one of the iconic symbols of Chemistry. Even if you flunked your high school Chem, you’ll recognize it instantly. Unfortunately, if you flunked high school Chem, you won’t actually know what it means.

Not recognizing that it’s a systematic arrangement of all the chemical elements, elucidating their properties in terms of their electron structure, you’re tempted to fill it in instead with items from whatever interest you do have. Make a Periodic Table of Fruit, or a Periodic Table of Government, or a Periodic Table of Rhetoric, then feel like you’ve somehow contributed something useful to Fruit classification. But what does this non-Elemental table mean? Do the properties of fruit recur periodically as something corresponding to atomic number increases? What even corresponds to atomic number? Why should fruit group as if it had electron shells? Does your table actually explain anything? Or are you just capitalizing on the fact that atoms do have electron shells and so elemental properties do arrange into a periodic table which is tremendously useful for chemistry, and applying it to something completely inappropriate?