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It's a theory that's been contested. One citation: NYT Magazine article, What Happened to Air France Flight 447?, page 4. Look for the discussion of the pitot probes.

You are right to question the details in that the big bang must have been a very different environment from anything we can observe today so it is not at all obvious that extrapolating our laws of physics all to way to the big bang is correct. On the other hand, we have good reason to believe that the laws of physics are constant.

Where? In what environment and under what circumstances do we know this to be true. When? Define for me what a Minute is with no Milky Way, no Solar System, no Sun, and No Earth - the unit of measurement is meaningless.

A minute is defined at 60 seconds. A second is defined as follows (from Wikipedia):

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

No to mention that it appears time/space/gravity/velocity are all inter-related and effect each other. 15 minutes at the speed of light is different than 15 minutes standing still.

You have a strange interpretation of relativity. I recommend reading up on it some more.

As a side note, I find it interesting that every time we gaze into space, we are looking at the past. The things we observe today actually occurred a very long time ago. Which is to say, if we could see far enough in a certain direction, into the past, we might actually be able to witness the big bang occurring.

The general assumption in cosmology is that on that scale, the big bang happened relatively close to Earth (due to the fact that we see objects moving away from us in every direction at about the same speed), so probably not. On the other hand, I do believe that galaxies further away tend to look younger, giving us hints into the earlier formation of galaxies.

We'll see after this democrat-proposed bill gets passed by a democrat-controlled congress and signed by a democratic president, then enforced by appointees of said democratic president.

But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good old /. republican bash.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SideKick

Was it print.com, that set all this in motion?

I just realized this will never take off. Look at their logo.
Look familiar?

They are trying to measure with the best precision we have the shape of an electron. To do that they employ a multipole moment expansion, which is a very neat mathematical trick to expand an arbitrary shape (much like a Taylor expansion of a function). A monopole term gives contribution for a perfectly spherically symmetrical shape, the next term in the expansion (a dipole) introduces a bit of asymmetry. Here is a dipole http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/VFPt_dipole_electric.svg, the next term in importance is a quadrupole (think of a square with alternating positive and negative charges in its vertices) and so on... As you can see this picture of expanding certain shape in multipole moments is perfectly compatible with the charge of the electron being distributed with a certain probabilistic distribution.

The shape of the electron in the standard model is almost perfectly symmetrical in all directions. It's CP violation (which we know it does occur) which introduces a bit of a dipole moment. They are measuring that and found it to be smaller than |1.05| x 10^(-27) ecm compatible with our current knowledge that speaks of a dipole moment of the order 10^(-30) ecm.

it's impossible to make communism work without despotism. the state dictates the entire economy

Then what is Anarcho-Communism supposed to be? Anarchist are certainly not the kind of people who would install a government, let alone a despotic one. To quote Peter Kropotkin:

"Anarchist Communism maintains that most valuable of all conquests -- individual liberty -- and moreover extends it and gives it a solid basis -- economic liberty -- without which political liberty is delusive; it does not ask the individual who has rejected god, the universal tyrant, god the king, and god the parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of the proceeding -- god the Community, or to abdicate upon its altar his [or her] independence, his [or her] will, his [or her] tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which he formally made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary, 'No society is free so long as the individual is not so! . . .'"

Didn't they try that crap on Microsoft as well over Windows and lose?

Oh yes, yes they did: Apple v Microsoft

"Apple cannot get patent- protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]..."

This passage is especially relevant:

Apple listed 189 GUI elements; the court decided that 179 of these elements had been licensed to Microsoft in the Windows 1.0 agreement and most of the remaining 10 elements were not copyrightable—either they were unoriginal to Apple, or they were the only possible way of expressing a particular idea.

With the Samsung litigation, Apple is not trying to claim a patent on an idea or a metaphor, it is claiming that Samsung copied specific design elements. And, as was mentioned upthread, there are multiple ways of expressing these things. To the extent that they are actually original to Apple (I don't claim to have an answer to this), then they might actually be on decent footing here. Apple didn't license any of this to Samsung, as was the case with the Windows litigation.

Reminds me of this

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/No_U-turn_syndrome

In California, the building code includes measures to survive earthquakes. In our coastal areas where hurricanes are common, the building code includes measures to withstand hurricanes. However, for tornadoes, your options really are underground, concrete dome, or hope you don't get hit by one.

Of course, it's also a matter of odds. Most people who live in the tornado belt never encounter a tornado.

This map may help put it in perspective.

The one I don't understand is when people build on a flood plain and don't put the house on stilts, even when rebuilding after a flood. Unlike tornado victims, if you get flooded once, you're quite likely to be flooded again.

Didn't they try that crap on Microsoft as well over Windows and lose?

Oh yes, yes they did: Apple v Microsoft

"Apple cannot get patent- protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]..."

Just like North Korean radio!

Remember Dmitry Sklyarov?

Yes and No. You can write your code, but good luck finding a punch card reader for the Cray....

Not the least damaging, but pretty low on the list. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg

I disagree.

Like the US, China has laws that affect even the government.

Unlike the US, China has proven willing to actively harass people (including lawyers) who attempt to enforce particular of those laws.

The US, on the other hand, adopts a more defensive strategy: Sovereign Immunity, State secrets privilege and the occasional Selective enforcement incident.

This does not mean that what it does is "legal", either by international standards or even the laws of the nation itself. It just means that the government has the power to avoid the laws.

I disagree.

Like the US, China has laws that affect even the government.

Unlike the US, China has proven willing to actively harass people (including lawyers) who attempt to enforce particular of those laws.

The US, on the other hand, adopts a more defensive strategy: Sovereign Immunity, State secrets privilege and the occasional Selective enforcement incident.

This does not mean that what it does is "legal", either by international standards or even the laws of the nation itself. It just means that the government has the power to avoid the laws.

I disagree.

Like the US, China has laws that affect even the government.

Unlike the US, China has proven willing to actively harass people (including lawyers) who attempt to enforce particular of those laws.

The US, on the other hand, adopts a more defensive strategy: Sovereign Immunity, State secrets privilege and the occasional Selective enforcement incident.

This does not mean that what it does is "legal", either by international standards or even the laws of the nation itself. It just means that the government has the power to avoid the laws.

It would have been nice if they looked at some of those extraordinary rendition flights instead.

Nuclear reactors have to be built near rivers so they can use the water for the cooling. Sometimes these rivers just happen to constitute a border. In fact, most French reactors are fairly far away from any border.

At least they found one to erupt that looks quite pronounceable. I still haven't gotten the other one's pronunciation right.

Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.

No, no, no. That's doesn't count. That's just micro-evolution and is completely different from Darwinism!!! I learned that from uncle, who lives in Texas, no joke. He's a lawyer and his daughter and son-in-law are both medical doctors...

Yeah, lots of creationists have already surrendered to the extent of recognizing microevolution. But they can't explain why millions of years of microevolution don't result in macroevolution.

Wait what? I recall seeing them being sold all over Estonia's markets. Locals really liked eating them too.
Or is this another case of hysterical "they are a few percent more radioactive then mushrooms in [another country], HORROR!".

By the same school of thought, no one should live above sea level. Too radioactive. Not talking about percentages, several TIMES more radioactive. HORROR.
Seriously, I had a flatmate in university who was from Mexico City. He really didn't glow in the dark. Or have two heads.

To spice things up, here is a nice photo of mushrooms from Lithuania on sale, fresh from wikipedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Mashrooms_on_varena_roadside.jpg

Finally, according to huffington post's recent article on the issue, after a lot of scaremongering, the reality sets in:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/01/radioactive-boars-mushrooms-chernobyl_n_843498.html

"About 2 percent of the 50,000 boars hunted are above the legal radioactivity limit, Reddemann said. And the government's radiation protection office says some mushrooms have registered up to 20 times the legal cesium limit.

Eating 200 grams of mushrooms tested seven times above the legal cesium limit, for example, would amount to the same exposure as the altitude radiation taken in during a 2,000-mile flight, according to Germany's Office for Radiation Protection."

So please, whatever you do, DO NOT FLY. And people who fly frequently are true hazards to everyone, as they irradiate us all in addition to clearly dying from radiation poisoning! /sarcasm

Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.

No, no, no. That's doesn't count. That's just micro-evolution and is completely different from Darwinism!!! I learned that from uncle, who lives in Texas, no joke. He's a lawyer and his daughter and son-in-law are both medical doctors...

I assume you mean tallest, not longest ;) And is Vinnufossen a waterfall or did someone leave a tap dripping? ;)

In terms of sheer power, Iceland's easily got you beat. You have no Dettifoss, for example.

Fun fact: "westlake" has known ties to MSFT.

he's a shill, and unlike the other astroturfers on slashdot, doesn't even get paid well do to it.

Obvious only to those familiar with Cockney rhyming slang, which is going to be an extreme minority in the US.

Go on, click the link and have a butcher's.

Instant messaging was also standardized well before AIM, MSN, ICQ and SMS came along. It is called IRC

Moving to IPv6 isn't a solution - it's not like everyone's going to run IPv6 without a firewall. And convincing Joe Average to figure out how to configure their router to let IPv6 through for their SIP phone... not happening.

The one advantage IPv6 will provide is it will have many Joe Averages replacing whatever firewall they have. In the process they'll be getting rid of NAT, and this will mean letting SIP through will be much easier, perhaps even being sent out with the ports open.

Do you really think your phone being an Android or an iPhone protects you? Any intelligency agency could pull whatever they could pull my phone from an Android or iPhone plus everything else. I don't doubt the remote code execution of phones.

The recent phone "hacking" scandal in the UK which I cannot tell if it were server side (provider) or client side (phone side) demonstrates that it's not that hard.

I protect myself from myself by using a dumb phone. Not from others...

The most interesting thing from my point of view was that when i did raise issue with my Chinese friend, he came back with a reply i hadnt anticipated. (and i consider myself very politically aware)

Don't be surprised; they're just repeating the typical talking points of the gov't propaganda. The Chinese Communist Party still needs to sell itself to maintain control (as does any authoritarian dictatorship), and they have a propaganda operation that spreads these carefully-crafted, plausible-sounding talking points (which are complete BS, of course). They even have a hired army to post the propaganda to online forums, referred to jokingly as the Fifty Cent Party (paid 50 cents per post).

It's not at all unusual. Every sophisticated dictatorship in history seems to do the same.

If you're interested in Chinese politics, here are a few relatively credible sources that provide a much more nuanced, sophisticated perspective:
  * The Diplomat: Foreign policy publication from Japan, has some very well-respected writers, and you'll learn much about China you had no idea of. If you read one, I'd read this.
  * Asia Sentinal: AFAIK founded by writers of the defunct but excellent Far East Economic Review, and based in Hong Kong.
  * Caijing: Based in Beijing, so subject to gov't influence, but seems relatively independent, has a good reputation, and provides sophisticated points of view on China.

The most interesting thing from my point of view was that when i did raise issue with my Chinese friend, he came back with a reply i hadnt anticipated. (and i consider myself very politically aware)

Don't be surprised; they're just repeating the typical talking points of the gov't propaganda. The Chinese Communist Party still needs to sell itself to maintain control (as does any authoritarian dictatorship), and they have a propaganda operation that spreads these carefully-crafted, plausible-sounding talking points (which are complete BS, of course). They even have a hired army to post the propaganda to online forums, referred to jokingly as the Fifty Cent Party (paid 50 cents per post).

It's not at all unusual. Every sophisticated dictatorship in history seems to do the same.

If you're interested in Chinese politics, here are a few relatively credible sources that provide a much more nuanced, sophisticated perspective:
  * The Diplomat: Foreign policy publication from Japan, has some very well-respected writers, and you'll learn much about China you had no idea of. If you read one, I'd read this.
  * Asia Sentinal: AFAIK founded by writers of the defunct but excellent Far East Economic Review, and based in Hong Kong.
  * Caijing: Based in Beijing, so subject to gov't influence, but seems relatively independent, has a good reputation, and provides sophisticated points of view on China.

Spain, as I type, is in the midst of a full scale citizens (peaceful) uprising. Protests across the country, 10,000+ people just in one of the main squares, many sleeping there overnight only to have 10K+ more people there the next day (now going on two to three days like this) - all of this has eclipsed the polished marketing election campaigns of the two main political parties (PSOE and PP). The message is simple: Vote for who you like in elections this Sunday, but NOT for the two dominating parties - with chants like "they do not represent us" and "Real Democracy - NOW!". Unlike the US, Spain does have an electoral system that allows meaningful third party choice. This follows hot on the heels of a big (but almost unreported in international media) protest by Spanish journalists over the politicians election campaigns. In particular the press conference/rallies where they are not allowed to do their job and ask questions, or even have access to the political leaders - who rely on delivering a precise polished marketing campaign and do not want to deal with pesky citizen questions, debates and the like.

Manifesto: http://democraciarealya.es/?page_id=814 and Wikipedia entry.

Lets hope that they have some success, and this kind of citizen involvement spreads to other "democracies" - it looks like there is a lot to learn from the Spanish.

Sounds like Archy: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Archy

I'm still waiting for a sleek UI with no buttons, sliders, toggles, or anything else. I just want a brushed aluminum skin on everything, with no controls at all.

It's pretty much been done.

I hesitate to refer people to his work since he turned into a raving bigot, but there's a similar plot point in the short story Dogwalker by Orson Scott Card.

He said china considers the Tibetan leaders to be exploiting its people, the tibetan people didnt have much, and they should have to give it to their leaders. China was trying to 'liberate' the people of tibet. Its the same excuse the US used to to invade iraq.

Falung-Gong is considered to be a font for the pro-democracy movement. Remember how the US persecuted communists and anyone associated with them, well, same thing.

Of course two wrongs dont make a right, and these reasons probably justify such actions in the eyes of most westerners, but its wise to at least consider the opinion of the other side rather than just listen to the biased media of one side.

To say these things are comparable because similar words were used to describe them is absurd:

  * The US invaded Iraq in 2003, deposed a brutal dictator, handed the government to the Iraqi people who select their own leaders (who often oppose US policy), and now is leaving within 10 years. China conquered Tibet in 1951, imposed a Communist dictatorship ruled from Beijing in which the Tibetans have no power or representation, even took over their religion, and claims Tibet will be eternally part of China. I don't think we were right to invade Iraq, but it's not the same thing as Tibet at all. We also liberated the South Koreans, the French, the slaves in the Confederacy and many others; are those all the same because we used the word 'liberation'?

  * Americans did unfairly persecute Communists, but that's not remotely the same as the brutal repression, imprisonment, and re-education camps that the Chinese government use to oppress the Falun Gong. Communism has remained legal in the United States, in fact. Was the persecution of Tutsis in Rwanda the same as the Communists in the US, simply because the same words were used?

When Apple and Creative had their mp3 players out, one was the size of a deck of cards and the other was the size of a portable cd player http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Creative_Nomad_Jukebox_(DAP).jpg . THAT is why one was more popular than the other.

Hah, they should try that test with us GNU/Linux users on Slashdot.

We probably qualify directly as saints.

Recommended Reading:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/sarcasm

Yeah but that term is an existing term. Unless you were trying a pun or something.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Swot up.

He said, sneeringly.

Last time this was used for "defense", I believe it was infused into blankets at the siege of Fort Pitt.

250 years go by, but the leopard does not change his spots so readily...

Give me $1,000,000 per year and I will *happily* pay 50% of it in taxes. At my current meager salary, I can't *afford* to pay 50% of it in taxes and remain a functional member of society.

Unfortunately, you are probably paying close to 50% in taxes already, even at your "meager" salary. It depends on where you live, and your income level.

By the time you account for all federal, state, and local taxes that you pay directly, plus the taxes you pay indirectly (i.e. through your employer, and the businesses from which you buy goods and services), plus the licenses and permits and regulatory costs you pay directly and indirectly, it can easily add up to 50% or more.

But, the data I cited is for federal taxes only (individual income, social insurance, corporate, excise). The average rate for all taxpayers is about 20%:

Total US Federal Tax Rate by Income Level, 1979-2007

Parent might want to try aptosid.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/History_of_corporations#United_States

note how only 8 out of 300 was not providing a public service of some kind.

RF radiation is is up to 300 GHz = 3x10^11 Hz according to wikipedia ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Radio_frequency ). Ionizing radiation is about 100 billion billion Hertz = 10^20 Hz (according to http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/ionize_nonionize.html ), so to get multiple RF photos to have ionizing energies, you only need about 10^8 of them to join together. If the cross section decreases just by a factor of two for each additional photon absorption (which I figure is a huge underestimate) the cross section for a 10^8 photon absorption would be decreased by a factor of 2^(10^8).

That's like a really big tiny number you know.

It does not happen.

Oh - you were probably being a bit sarcastic. There is a way to calculate it.

Allow me.

Instead of sending individual streams over the internet to every customer, they could develop some kind of protocol which could be used to broadcast all the streams to everyone at the same time.

Broadcast to multiple people at once? BRILLIANT! We'll call it broadiple or maybe multicast?

To make sure they don't clog the existing internet lines, they should lay down their own lines.

Or they could build big antennas, and the people who want to receive it could put antennas on their TVs. Also an amazingly original idea.

Anything else ya got? Like a round things attached to objects to aid in their movement? Quick, get a patent!

That procedure would lead to the same results. Maybe some redundancy would be removed, but obviously he doe not understand why the Tax system is complicated. Its the politics, stupid. Many of these 10000 pages are just small little promises somebody has given to *his* voters at some point. And nobody wants to cut such things, because one time this starts, it could be soon the promises to *your* voters. So no matter how absurd something is, it will stay there forever.

s/voters/sponsors/g

The modern politician is a "good" politician, they deliver 10x and higher margin returns in selling out the public to corporations. Some are not as "efficient" as others. The Citizens United ruling pretty much made this law (thanks "supreme" court).

Balanced Budgeting:
First thing is to default on the debt. This will piss off a lot of people but will free us from the debt and prevent us from being able to accumulate any more since nobody likes to lend to a dead beat.

According to Wikipedia only about 57% of the "debt held by the public" is foreign owned, and only 32% of the total debt is owned by foreigners. Thus 78% of the total debt is owed to other parts of the US Government or US citizens and businesses. Defaulting on that might not be so popular or good for the economy - or ethical for that matter. I would be surprised if doing so did not cause an even worse financial crisis than this whole sub-prime thing and the global recession we are starting to climb out of.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Foreign_ownership

Getting hit by a continental earthquake that blows up all our nuke plants would probably be easier for the average family to deal with compared to collapsing our economic system and destroying any hope of international trade for a decade or more. Has any country ever been allowed to default on their debt? I recall that even Haiti managed to pay off their colonial/revolutionary debts back in the 1980s or something like that.

50%?!? I don't understand how anyone can justify giving up half of your income to the government.

If you think of "the government" as some outside thing, that does seem pretty unreasonable. If you think of it more as "society" or the "community" then it doesn't necessarily seem so unreasonable. What percentage does the publisher charge the author? The community provides the entire ecosystem within which each member operates. No individual can succeed to any great extent without the entire community around them working well enough to provide all the bits and pieces necessary for that success to happen.

How to reasonably account for all this sort of stuff is not particularly clear unfortunately. The current way we create and use money, and then tax it to fund the "community" is far from perfect.

One interesting system that Heinlein mentioned in one of his early novels (published posthumously - it wasn't really very good from a writing point of view) was "Social Credit". As I understood the society in the novel, rather than tax anyone, at the end of the year they would calculate the increased value of the society based on some sort of GDP measurement, and then "print" enough new currency so as to keep the value of the "dollar" at the same level - so if the economy increased by 20% you would print 20% more money. The government then drew its revenue from this pot and distributed the rest on a per-capita bases. Of course in this future society there was massive automation and little need for most forms of manual labour, so most people just lived off of their yearly societal income (thus the "social credit" name) spending their large amounts of leisure time in uplifting artistic pursuits and other utopian activities.

I don't really know if the wikipedia article reflects any of this understanding:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_Credit

It does seem as thought it ought to be possible to design a society where increases in productivity and efficiency and technological advancements could have wider societal benefits. Since the 1920s our industrial systems have advanced tremendously and as a society we are way way way richer and more well off - but individually we have not advanced much. It seems like with all of these advances we should have been able to come up with a way to provide full employment while at the same time reducing the working hours of us all. By now we should all have an 8-hour work week and three months of vacation. Maybe such a system would come at the cost of speed of advancement, but I am more than willing to trade the decreased personal labour requirements today for a 1980s middle-class lifestyle which might be our level of advancement if we had somehow done this since the 1940s.

Of course I have no idea how to structure something like this in light of real human behaviour, greed, and the rewards of cheating any system we try to put into place.

Thanks for your amazing math skills, Rush.

Sorry, I can't take credit for it. I knew about the source data from the Congressional Budget Office:

http://cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/all_tables.pdf

But, I only recently discovered that someone had plotted the data and posted it on Wikimedia.

One person in the U.S. earns a few trillion dollars a year. Everyone else earns a few thousand. The government taxes anyone earning over a million at %60. Who's paying most of the taxes? That one guy. Oh... but who SHOULD be paying most of the taxes? That one guy.

Compare this graph:

Share of US Pre-Tax Income by Income Level, 1979-2007

To this graph:

Share of Total US Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

Even you should be able to see the difference. I certainly understand your desire for the "wealthy" to pay more, but you can't claim they aren't paying their share.

Yes, the wealthy are paying for the bulk of government operations, but they should, because nobody else can.

No, the wealthy are paying for the bulk of government operations because you don't want to.