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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.


> 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.


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


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


Sure there was, it just sold a lot of publicity and prestige along with the fish.

"Staged" to me implies that the price was not actually paid, and if you have any information that indicates this was the case, please cite it.


They were paying for the honor (and publicity) that comes with buying the first fish of the season. Seems pretty routine to me.


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.


This kind of functionality is standard on OMAP4 devices.


ARM actually publishes reference code under the library name "OpenMAX" for their mobile processors.

I've read ARM's source code and found they they too use the AAN algorithm for the DCT. (They provide a tonne of code for other multimedia related stuff too.)

I learned a lot from their code, even though my implementation is completely different and original.

I would also dare to say that my asm source is maintainable. I had a very hard time understanding their code as it wasn't very well documented or laid out... but nevertheless a valuable learning tool.


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


I once thought it was at hackers' core to look behind the appearances. Core values and myths are long gone, buried into memory traces of hidden places that never met the instant share button.


I wouldn't have expected my own thoughts on the article could have been summed up so cleverly.


86400s is one day, not one year.


Thanks -- apparently I have not been getting enough sleep. That explains how they can get distances to increase, then decrease (as noted nearby in this thread).


Fat shaming in the first sentence.


Yeah, not at all.


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


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