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Using charcoal would deforest the planet. Besides, it is way dirtier than using coal to create coke.

Only if you do it the same way it was done 2,000 years ago.

There are environmentally-friendly ways of making charcoal.

https://wiki.duke.edu/display/...

People are indeed studying this.

The Alaska Permanent fund also does this on a larger scale, although the amounts of money involved there are probably not enough to make a living except in the Alaskan backcountry, which has limited (but not no) use for money. The Alaska fund is also funded by a severance tax on oil, not a progressive income tax, which seems far less likely to lead to unsustainable fiscal situations or perverse incentives.

Since your answers stem from a complete and possibly willful ignorance of why the public domain is important, I'll just leave this here instead of wasting my time arguing with the brick wall that is yourself. As for Tolkien and other authors whose books only become popular long after they are made, they are a rare exception rather than the rule. Hating on the United States is irrelevant and pointless, so have fun with your anti-U.S. babble if you must, but I won't dignify it with a response.

Sounds very close to a SLAPP suit (alternate link: https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=slapp+suit

Very stupid suing a high profile journalist at a large organization though. Are they that stupid or is there another angle?

Social complexity seems to be a driver for intelligence. Hyena society is quite complex with clans and a dominance hierarchy within each clan. Hyenas seem to have theory of mind and seem to practice tactical deception. Hyenas are also good cooperative problem solvers, outperforming primates.

So here's a serious answer. Gravitational potential energy has the form U = -GMm/r where r is the distance from the center of the earth. Practically speaking, this means that a kilogram of mass sitting on the surface of the Earth has a gravitational potential energy of -GMm/R where R is the radius of the earth and m = 1. If you work out the arithmetic, this is NEGATIVE 64 MJ give or take a hair (GM/R = gR = 6.4x10^7 J).

Total energy is potential energy plus kinetic energy: E = K + U with K = 1/2 mv^2. If you are "infinitely" far from Earth and at rest relative to the Earth, the kilogram of mass has a total energy of zero. Energy is conserved, so as it falls towards Earth (gravity doing work on it to speed it up) its potential energy decreases (because more negative) and its kinetic energy, which is strictly non-negative, increases in order that the total energy REMAINS zero. When it hits, therefore:

K = -U = 64x10^7 J = 64 MJ

"Infinity" here is just any distance that is very large relative to the radius of the Earth so that U is "small" relative to this collision energy and hence an unimportant correction.

Note well that nothing stops our kilogram of mass from being THROWN in from infinity with MORE than zero initial kinetic energy. Indeed, we expect falling asteroids to nearly always start with some speed relative to the Earth and a total energy relative to the Earth GREATER than zero, as they are "unbound" by Earth gravity and in what is called a hyperbolic trajectory when they hit. This means that if they miss, they keep on going and don't eventually come back or end up trapped in orbit around the Earth. It also means that they can hit with a kinetic energy strictly greater than 64 MJ or (solving for the speed of the collision) a speed strictly greater than 11.2 km/sec.

If you really want to understand this further, here is a physics book where it is explained, between chapters 3, 4 and 12:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/C...

        rgb

Will that code pass the Dieharder tests? That was not meant to be snarky but was meant to be something for consideration.

Ok, if it is a known practice, cite it.

Originalism. It's not hard to find.

Find me some supreme court decisions that disregarded amendments in favor of what the Founders thought. Or appeals court decisions. Or circuit court. Or traffic court.

Oh, you want to see it in an American legal context? Most especially you'll want to look at the criticism of the Dred Scott decision for the most infamous example.

More recently, well, there other sources of information as to the patterns and practices of your average self-proclaimed originalists.

It's a bankrupt and destitute moral philosophy.

https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/f...

Citation provided.

Sorry the bias is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you think, because,contrary to what every rightwinger believe -corporate media is biased towards the corporate friendly party. The mainstream media is all rightwing biased. Fox's difference is that they are pro-CRAZY biased the others are not, they are just conservative biased. Old style conservative, like Reagan/Eisenhower conservative... whose policies of course would be labelled "extreme leftwing socialism" by the likes of you today.

https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/f...

Please go fuck yourself for not trusting real news.

Your analogy is off by orders of a magnitude. Quit trying to justify irrational fear.

Here are some actual numbers:

In 2016 'islamic' terrorists were responsible for 0.3% of the all the murders in the US.
Over the last 15 years they were responsible for 123 out of 240,000+ murders or just 0.051%.

In 2015 more people were killed by toddlers than were killed by 'islamic' terrorists.
On average, toddlers kill 2x more americans than 'islamic' extremists do.

instead of pushing for new restrictions on law abiding citizens

I didn't know we had two sets of books.

By the way, in the Chicago Manual, "law abiding" as a modifier is written "law-abiding", so I'm already suspecting you're one of those selective law abiders (to hell with the Nazi rules), who sometimes defers keeping the gun safe locked, and yet you probably don't think you should go straight to jail. After all, what could possibly deter B&E better than an unlocked gun safe?

Crime Gun Theft

The FBI keeps a database of all guns reported stolen and it seems to capture a remarkably high percentage upwards of 75%â"of all of the roughly 240,000 guns stolen from homes each year (according to the National Crime Victims Survey) and the 6,000 reported stolen from licensed dealers

What "law abider" generally references when someone runs it up the flag pole in this way is "righteously selective law abider" (let's not even discuss the speed "limit") whose home is his castle, eighty proof.

Again, I have to say this feels like a complete non-sequitor. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to suggest with your assertion of "ample discussion and explanation of time theology" and how the "same arguments... were answered so long ago". When I google "time theology" (which I wasn't even aware was a reasonable "subject" of hermeneutics, if one imagines that making stuff up so that it all works out is somehow either a subject or reasonable) I get several hits but they do not illuminate your statement. I can't even tell if you are arguing that the Bible is "true" (for some meaning of the word true that is not, in fact, the meaning of the word true) or if you are commiserating the fact that people continue to defend the Bible as being true in spite of the fact that an eight year old child could tell that it was all made up if they weren't brainwashed to think otherwise from when they really were too young to know any better.

But then to jump to physics -- which has a completely different standard for establishing probable truth, one you can actually learn about if you read e.g. E.T. Jaynes' "Probability Theory, the Logic of Science" or "The Algebra of Probable Inference" by Richard Cox (or you are welcome to take a pass at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/a... if you don't mind an eternally not quite finished book that makes the same argument, possibly more broadly) -- physics as a subject actually doesn't have that many "arguers" about things that are well explained by consistent theories plus evidence. Not within the discipline. This is in part because there is something approximating an objective standard for determining when something is (probably) true, (probably) false, or (most definitely) not really resolved yet one way or another. People may well have all sorts of fun in the middle area, but it isn't because of any misuse of faith, it is more a matter of placing your bets as to how experiments will eventually work out to resolve the issue, with both sides knowing that it is a BET and not to be taken seriously (that is, as truth) without experimental evidence to back it.

On /., of course, LOTS of people argue about physics, but most of them aren't physicists, and the ones that are are trying to correct people's egregiously lacking understanding of the physics of what they are arguing about. Which is the point I was making above, BTW. If you take a theory where the idea of standing waves is fairly well understood both mathematically and physically, and try to imagine how to make it explain the galactic rotation data, it is at the very least not easy to see how to proceed. This is a concrete statement, and if you disagree, feel free to actually post your way of proceeding. It wasn't argument, as I'm neither asserting that there is or isn't a fifth force, dark matter, monopoles, a useful standing wave theory of gravitational waves, or for that matter a meaningful "time theology" whatever that might be -- I'm just pointing out that using the terms in their usual sense it isn't easy to see how to explain the galactic data using standing gravitational waves, or even to see how (necessarily monochromatic and coherent) standing gravitational waves could come about.

The place where physicists DO argue is at conferences and workshops, usually where they disagree about some aspect or another of mathematics or experiment in an area of physics that is not yet resolved into probable/accepted provisional truth. I've been in the middle of one of those and it wasn't pretty. How CAN one explain things like conditional convergence of series to somebody that already ought to know it? But in the end, the mathematics and sound reason usually win, because (unlike time theology) there is actually a unique answer and we have an objective method for homing in on it.

rgb

I have a suggestion, rather than everyone sitting around drawing conclusions out of their asses, lets see what actually happens when someone tries it. Let them prove or disprove it and then we will have some results to examine and criticize.

Been done, forty years ago. And the results (WARN: PDF) seem fairly positive. Now, one test is never good enough but it didn't reduce the town to a smoking ruin. So why shouldn't we throw some more at the wall and see what sticks?

This is interesting. Duke University has an immersive VR room that works on similar principles but does it a bit better. Rather than a top-only dome with an external display, it is a 3 meter cube, with the display projected on all six sides including the floor. It even tracks your point of view (via a set of lightweight powered VR glasses) to calculate the proper perspective so that object that are supposed to appear inside the room do so properly. It's really an amazing experience, and just a little bit creepy. http://virtualreality.duke.edu...

"The only reason that DRM is so rampant is because society has proven that they can't be trusted"

No the reason piracy is so rampant is because copyright law is corrupt and people know when the world is unjust even if they can't articulate it, the corporations stole the public domain first. Even if most of the public is ignorant of copyright law they can still smell the evil of corporations and their bought and paid for laws.

This is not new in history:

"Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Copyright_term.svg

The piracy debate is always one sided and privileges business instead of talking about the criminal corporations/businessmen who's been taking your rights to own shit away and trying to pass piracy off a bad thing when games never reach the public domain because it was stolen by people like yourself and valve. Game licensing is a scam, games never go into libraries and are held in "intellectual property" limbo. The whole concept of IP and licensing when applied to games is a legal con and the fact that ignorant people like you eat it up and want to be corporate slaves is sickening.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/265083-barely-any-us-culture-will-enter-public-domain-year/

http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131231/23434825735/grinch-who-stole-public-domain.shtml

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131231/23434825735/grinch-who-stole-public-domain.shtml

Piracy is the only way things like video-games for instance will be preserved given that the source-code is confiscated/locked down and not going into libraries. Corporations stole our culture an illiterate like yourself is chastising the "thieves" when corporations are the biggest thieves of all time.

Wrong.
There have been numerous long-term studies that did exactly that, gave everybody in a community a guaranteed income regardless of whether they were working.
Such studies happened all around the world, generally over 5 and 10 year stretches. The most famous ones in North America was Nixon's 5 year study in Detroit and the MinCome experiment in Canada.

Quite a lot of things universally happened when they did this - a sudden inflation rise was not among them, in fact - no study anywhere has recorded one. It just doesn't happen, because guess what, raising prices would not be beneficial to businesses. You have all those people who now have money, that they didn't have before, you want them to spend it with you so you make more money - the best way to do that is to keep your prices THE SAME - and increase your customer base massively.

A few other things happened every time:
1) Entrepeneurship skyrocketted. People were starting new small businesses like never before. A lot of unemployed people suddenly found employment by working for themselves, and were soon employing others leading to
2) Unemployment rates dropped like a stone.
3) Productivity went UP - this may seem surprising but not only were more people working, everybody was achieving more on the job.

Did anybody JUST live on the money given by the state ? Actually yes, two groups could be found doing that at any given time:
1) Mothers of newborns who often chose not to go back to work for a year or more. This is a GOOD thing - no different to what countries like Denmark actually encourage with legislation
2) Students- lots and lots of people were suddenly enrolling in further education, since they had a way to support themselves they would leave the job market temporarily, gain some new qualifications and return to a higher salary bracket. This was especially prevalent in young adults in their 20s - and the largest increase was among those from the poorest backgrounds who frequently could not otherwise have afforded further education.

All the bad things you predict though ? Not a single one of those longterm experiments recorded even one of them happening.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~e...

Utrecht in the Netherlands is reportedly planning a similar experiment at the moment. I predict that the exact same thing will happen that always happens: the experiment runs, it's a resounding success but by the time it finishes the administration has changed and whoever is in power now would rather die than implement as national policy any idea his predecessor had championed so the results will be logged as academic knowledge but no further benefit would be gained.

>> I believe a province in Canada did it in the mid-60's

Yes, that was "MINCOME" in Manitoba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It was pegged at "60% of Statistics Canada low-income cut-off (LICO)" which translates to about 60% of $15-20K, or $9-12K. However, conclusions are hard to draw from it.

"The fate of the original data themselves – boxes and boxes of paper files on families containing questionnaires related to all aspects of social and economic functioning – was unclear. They were stored in an unpublicized location by the Department of National Health and Welfare. ...data, collected at great expense and some controversy from participants in the first social experiment ever conducted in Canada, were never examined. " http://public.econ.duke.edu/~e...

Um... In case you'd not noticed... That "in peace" part? Doesn't seem to be happening.

Since 9/11 there have been about 40 murders in the USA that could be associated with islamic extremism, and that's using the most lax standards like a radical killing a jew and then stealing his stuff.

In that same period of time there have been 190,000+ murders total. So we are talking about a problem that is 0.016% of all murders. Seems like it is really, really, really far down the list in terms of messing up our peace.

You want a link

Read and enjoy. It may not be strictly correct to say what the Bush administration intended but they did TRIPLE the deduction one fell swoop and when the SUV stories started to make the rounds, they didn't go along with any attempts to curb misuse.

The problem with your depreciation point, as I've already explained is that you are under NO obligation to keep the vehicle once you get the all-in-one-shot deduction.

Those tax breaks and the unfunded wars are a big component of the country's mess and it all hinges on the stuff that Tesla (and others) want us to get off of as soon as possible.
And that's oil.

Here's some examples.

Make a clear statement that pre-1972 recordings have value and those who are profiting from them must pay appropriate royalties for their use

So, royalties for songs that are 43 years old and older... I can hear the founding fathers crying from their graves.

When they give back what was stolen from me.

You notice somehow they aren't bothered by this

https://today.duke.edu/2015/01...

But a christian or jewish student praying in school would send them up the walls.

It just makes the case that unless you punch offensive assholes they just get worse.

You mean, as in "read a physics textbook"?

Seriously. Depending on how much physics you've already studied, the right place to start will vary. A passable (free) intro is in my free online physics textbook http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/C..., or wikipedia articles. A good intermediate treatment might be Griffiths' Classical Electrodynamics. If you want the pure quill uncut stuff, J. D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics is excellent, but it is not for the faint of heart or the wussy of PDE-fu.

In a nutshell, parallel currents of electric charge attract; antiparallel charged currents repel, changing charged currents radiate electromagnetic energy, and there are electrostatic forces happening in there somewhere too, in the cases where the currents are produced by unbalanced moving charge. Oh, and there is a fair bit of twistiness to the magnetic fields (called "curl") and forces, and the currents in question in "magnets" (or the general magnetic susceptibility of materials) tend to be non-dissipative (quantum) nuclear, atomic, or molecular circulations of charge, not Ohm's law type currents in a resistor. Ferromagnets in particular are what is being referred to, and they are characterized by long range order and a "permanent" magnetization in the absence of an external field below a certain temperature.

Hope this fucking helps:-)

rgb

I'd like to know what type of assignment this was. If it's small and specific, there might be only a few basic working solutions. That is, the similarity stems from being correct.

Here is the link to the course assignment page -- http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses... -- which should give you an idea how big/small each assignment is...

Check it out: here.

Pot erased an average of 8 IQ points. And IQ points are becoming a more valuable commodity, as technology eliminates more and more jobs that used to employ unskilled labor.

So the question is, where do you draw the line -- how many IQ points must a substance erase before you're in favor of banning its use -- 30? 80?

Technically, a payroll tax is a tax paid by the employer based on its payroll. An example would be the employer portion of U.S. Social Security (Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance or OASI) or unemployment insurance (FUTA, for Federal Unemployment Tax Act). There may be all sorts of variations, such as limits on the level of wages on which the Social Security tax is applied. Colloquially, I’ve heard the term used for the entire Social Security program, including the employee portion, as you suggest. The income tax comes from the employee based on their income and, from a theoretical or policy (but perhaps not from a psychological) standpoint, is considered distinct. The money isn’t earmarked the same way as OASI or FUTA money. You can read about these topics in standard textbooks or dictionaries of economic or public policy terminology.

http://blogs.library.duke.edu/...

if im reading this correctly, it looks like the payroll tax is paid by the business, not the employee while the income tax is paid by the employee.

~ but they're practically begging FSB and PLA to infiltrate them.

Why would the Fuqua School of Business and the Public Library Association want to infiltrate the FBI?

[Business] Leaders are [Federal] Readers?

In Japan you can buy clothing that deals with this problem. If your country is lucky enough to have Uniqlo shops you can try it out yourself. The material is anti-bacterial and deodorising.

Do these use silver nanoparticles like some antibacterial socks do? Yeah, there's some concern that those might leak into the environment where their anti-microbial action isn't likely to be such a great idea.

(Personally, I'm well convinced that relatively untested nanoparticles getting into the environment is going to be a big issue in the next 20 to 30 years... this will be *after* we've been using them for a long time, and they're well established in the ecosystem and food chain. The only question is which ones are going to cause a problem...)

US's more legally fleshed out rules.

Time to read Fairest of them all and other fairy tales of fair use?

They may seem fleshed out, but prevailing on the rules can be a bit of crapshoot.

...The defendant always as the advantage in US criminal law.

That's hilarious! I wish I had mod points this is definitely a +5 Funny!

C++: Is It Really a Cruel Joke?

You're obviously insane. There have been countless "scientific" studies that contradict your assertions. It's only been since the use of DDT was largely outlawed or banned that the American and Bald Eagles have recovered from near extinction. An article as part of a Duke University course provides a brief summary of the adverse effects of DDT. http://people.chem.duke.edu/~j... There is such a thing as extreme skepticism of which you are a good example. Reminds me of the flat earth philosophy.

The lastest thing is negative index metamaterials. Reduction of backscatter and absorption is the 1980s.

http://www.metamaterials.duke....

A Mantis Shrimp can strike its prey in 8 milliseconds according to the link. Granted, its a little slower, but it's also underwater and that strike has the force of 1500 Newtons. Actually, it's probably a little faster as that time includes strikes from two different appendages and the time it takes for two cavitation bubbles to collapse.

From this link: Peacock mantis shrimp use a hammer-like appendage to smash open snail shells for food. Not only did high speed imaging reveal that peacock mantis shrimp forelimbs reach maximum speeds from 12-23 m/s (in water!), but it also showed that cavitation bubbles were forming between the appendage and snail shell. We found that, as a result of the limb's extraordinary speed, the water cavitates (vaporizes) when the limb strikes the prey. Cavitation is a destructive phenomenon; when these vapor bubbles collapse, they essentially cause a small implosion in the water which produces heat, light and sound. For example, rapidly rotating boat propellers are often badly damaged by cavitation to the point of developing holes in the metal.

By linking high speed imaging with force sensors and acoustic sensors, we were able to show that mantis shrimp wield two types of strike forces â" the first force is due to the appendage physically striking the snail shell and the second is due to the collapse of the cavitation bubble. Thus, for each predatory strike, mantis shrimp work like jack-hammers with a series of four force peaks from the impact of the first appendage, the collapse of the first cavitation bubble and then the impact of the second appendage and the collapse of the second cavitation bubble. All of this happens in less than 800 Âs, with peak forces of 1500 N (over 2500 times the animalâ(TM)s body weight).

...pumped hydro...has an input-to-output efficiency of about 65 percent.

I think that's a pretty low number, perhaps typical of older designs. Newer designs can have efficiencies upwards of 80%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://people.duke.edu/~cy42/P...
http://www.colorado.edu/engine...

...and nuclear generation doesn't need storage to be useful and meet demand...

I believe nuclear tends to be quite bad at load following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Of course, it is excellent for always-on power, but not ideal for surges or lulls. In certain cases -- L.A. in the summer, for instance -- solar power, although intermittent on the whole, is intermittent in the most useful way: on a nice clear hot day, there's the biggest demand for A/C and the best solar power production.

...but no-one ever adds the cost of storage to the cost of renewables when comparing prices.

Well...staunch proponents with an ax to grind may not include such costs, but then, staunch proponents of coal with an ax to grind will ignore any externalities related to airborne toxins. Any legitimate study of renewable energy should really include storage costs.

With all that said, I really think Germany did the wrong thing with the whole anti-nuclear energy thing. To paraphrase that quote about democracy, nuclear is the most dangerous form of energy generation, except for all those other sources we've tried ( http://physics.kenyon.edu/peop... ).

Oh really?

I'm backing up my 40TB music library on Jacquard loom punch cards.

Added bonus: You can use the punched cards to make fabric.
Right now I'm wearing Justin Bieber's "Love Me" ...as a sweater!

https://web.duke.edu/isis/gess...

I was in part responding to the idea that women get to choose to work lesser hours therefore it's fair they get paid less. Many women don't work lesser hours and the roles they more frequently work in are often lower paid per hour.

The reasons for this are varied and complex, but a significant part of that is the 'higher paid' STEM roles are seen as unattainable for women more than for men - even given a broad background of socio-economic factors.

Women are more likely to be channeled into nurturing or service roles such as teaching, nursing, childcare or aged care, rather than more lucrative roles such as sales or STEM roles. At the lower end of the economy, they are more likely to be a waitress than a construction worker - guess what pays more. Yes being a construction worker may be more physically demanding - but being on your feet all day waiting tables isn't being slack either. In Australia, tradesmen are some of the best paid people, I can assure you that the 'professions' for working class women are not paid nearly as well, they are likely to be a hairdresser or beauty therapist or a masseuse.

And you can bet that the construction industry is unwelcoming to women in very similar ways that IT is. I can tell you I've experienced both first hand having started in Architecture and worked directly on building sites as well as moving into IT and working directly with programmers and other IT types from the position of doing both Tech Support and now as a Systems Analyst.

You say that programming jobs aren't lucrative - that is a relative term. They may not be paid as well as a top performing sales person or someone in finance or banking - but they generally pay better than nursing or teaching or any of the personal care professions women tend to get pushed towards.

It has been shown in many developing countries that the best way to improve your economy is to give women more money. Here's a couple of studies to get you started. It makes no sense to keep 50% of the population explicitly in underpaid roles.

Actually, some research suggests that police utilize discretion unjustly. When there are too many laws to enforce every case, police must use (you guessed it) discretion in deciding which cases to pursue.

That could involve "just" discretion, i.e. ignoring minor infractions that don't impose harm to anyone else. It could also involve unjust discretion, such as ignoring infractions by people of your own race and throwing the book at people of other races.

See for example: http://scholarship.law.duke.ed...

Oh, and F*ck Beta. (Why, you ask? Because just a week or so after Dice publishes their mea culpa, we're slowing things way down and we won't push this out because it's not ready yet... the default dns record of slashdot.org redirects to beta. Also, Beta ate this comment the first time I tried posting it.)

Actually, some research shows that the more laws there are to enforce, the more selective police get in enforcing them and (you guessed it), they use discretion in doing so.

Sometimes that discretion is "just" (i.e. ignoring small infractions that don't present a danger to others) and sometimes it is not (i.e. doing the above for people of your own race, and throwing the book at people of other races).

See for example: http://scholarship.law.duke.ed...

Then there are very, very few researchers worth their salt. Even then, it has been shown that a .05 significance under ideal conditions has a chance of being a coincidence of about 1/3. If we add to that the number of errors in the assumptions, the experiments, the unpublished studies, etc., .05 means nothing. I found the work by Jim Berger et al. interesting: http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berg...

see: Leandro decision in NC. Of equal significance, the Supreme Court ruled that the State of North Carolina, not local school districts, has the ultimate constitutional obligation to actively safeguard and successfully deliver every child's Leandro right. No exceptions. No excuses. link: https://law.duke.edu/childedla...

It has to do with the difference between phase and group velocities when dealing with groups of waves. You can have a phase velocity greater than c but information is transferred via the group velocity. One place to start is here, another here. You can find some nice applets around that will show it to you graphically. The topic comes up from time to time because it is at the heart of the misunderstanding of faster-than-light "photons".

Thanks for the link. By the way, eight of the authors there are from China, including the first author. Four are from Australia, one from the USA.

BTW, to be fair to lawyers, it's true that some US lawyers do good things for the general benefit -- civil rights, environmental defense, open access journal articles, open government, FOSS licensing, etc.. Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action
http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/

I guess it comes down to who has the most money to pay the lawyers, and whether some lawyers are willing to make significantly less money to work in the public interest. I guess engineers can also face the same problem -- like working on some destruction-emphasizing defense projects or monopolistic systems like DRM vs. more productive ends or more sharing-oriented approaches.

Another aspect of that:
"Our One-Party Democracy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=0
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. [Actually, more of a corporatist?] But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions. ..."

The fact is, many public benefit things like FOSS or basic R&D should be funded collectively, and government should be spending money or redistributing it to account for positive and negative externalities. For example, renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear since the 1970s if you account for pollution, defense, and risks. But instead of paying more for gas at the pump, we pay a lot of taxes (or incur public debt) for "defense" spending in the middle east, and we have higher medical bills, and people live in fear of Fukushima-style meltdowns, etc..

Still, while I think the climate is changing, but it's not clear the best approach to that is CO2 limits. If I had to choose between CO2 limits versus a global basic income along with free mobility between nations (lawyer-y things), I'd take the latter, given that it is too late to stop lots of climate change and wealth and mobility is a way most people globally could at least deal with it.

And the US Republicans themselves are getting conflicted about things too:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/22/1716216/a-war-over-solar-power-is-raging-within-the-gop

Space settlement is another example of a future p

The picture in this article reminds me of one of my favorite lines from http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/tao/tao.html (The Tao of Programming):

3.4

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: ``How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?''

``It will take one year,'' said the master promptly.

``But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?''

The master programmer frowned. ``In that case, it will take two years.''

``And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?''

The master programmer shrugged. ``Then the design will never be completed,'' he said.

Looking at the number of programmers in the room, that seems about right.

2 seconds with google, first hit:

Originality and Creativity in Copyright Law

You seem to be wanting to make some huge distinction between originality and creativity. There isn't one. If it's original, it's creative, as in the word creation, meaning to create something new, as in something original.

I don't happen to have ready access to the ruling. But I assure you, many of the filings from both Oracle and Google specifically mention "creativity" many times. Just google "oracle google creativity" and you'll get plenty of examples.

The wavelength at 900 MHz is 333 mm, but their SRR design was only 40 mm on a side (a 1/2 wave dipole would have to be 150 mm or so).

Their waveguide/horn is much bigger than 40mm. More like 150mm x 500mm or so. It looks like a reasonable sized horn for 900MHz. They've been able to reduce the size of the rectenna at the focus, but the whole assembly is still big.

Microwave antenna design is weird. Here's some readable background material if anyone cares. Radio hams are routinely able to build 50% efficient microwave antennas. Above that level it starts to get complicated.