100 billion electron volts/meter sounds like a lot. In reality, if the same amount of physical energy were applied to a paper clip over one second, it would be moved 8.0108823 microns. That's 0.000315389067 inches; 0.00080108823 centimeters. Completely not impressive.
The reason this is so awesome is that scientists can apply this to nanotechnology -- actually, the prefix "nano" is not small enough. After all, everything moves in waves, but these waves are only noticeable on a small enough scale. On this scale, electric energy is so much more important than gravity. The fact that this energy is electric and not physical means that, instead of bumping atoms around continuous for a month, something might happen sooner. The fact that it's been proven done might help with something, like (for example) supplying a power source. The question is, "How easy is it to synthesize this phenomenon, and is it worth it?"
What excites me most is the fact that
a technology that could make tabletop high-energy particle accelerators a reality.
Are we still afraid of put explosives into our chemistry kits for fear that kids might get hurt? Just like how, around Sputnik time, the US gov't tried to make all of the children in its public education system little scientists of future, it is (seriously) important to get kids interested in science, math, and academic pursuit at a young age. Can a little kid read the KJ version of the Bible at 4 years old, as was done in days of yore?
It would be a good thing that, with this increased technology, scientists would try to give nuclear chemistry to the public and make atomic physics more tangible. There was an ambitious project some time ago that wanted to create a huge electromagnetic field somewhere in Texas. It was shut down because the US gov't saw no use of it.
If this technology can do something as simple as power a light bulb, the public will notice. No one cares if Element 118 is created in a matter of seconds instead of across the span of a week, but if people can actually see something, this is better for science in general. (So long as John Galt doesn't get angry.)
Goodness. I would hope that, since this comment has been floating around the internet, somebody would have change the greater than sign into a less than. But no.
As a purely constructive Wikipedia contributor, I have a feeling (from my gut, of course, not my head) that there will never in the future be a moment, even a millisecond, when there is absolutely no vandalism present on WP. However, Wikipedia is far more comprehensive, I believe, than any other encyclopedia operating by academic submissions will ever be.
There is far more specific knowledge. Just see this page. Awesome stuff; I would never expect to see anything like that in a regular general encyclopedia. I believe that, given that everything else in the world has an (at most) linear rate of change (in terms of fossil fuels, engineering, knowledge, celebrity divorces), Wikipedia will continue to exist well. Of course, someone could take over Wikipedia and use it for unscrupulous objectives, just like RSA encryption has allowed criminals to flourish. We'll never know, of course, since Douglas Adams died before he wrote that 6th book.
You seem to misunderstand the art/science issue somewhat, or you're just making a bad joke. When juxtaposed to science, an art is something that requires intuition and taking things as they come with adeptness, like looking at the quality of pencils as they pass by on a conveyor belt. A science is something that requires rational thought, like running the robot that cuts the wood into pencil shapes.
The distinction on the list is not so much between art and science as it is between involving sickening substances and involving death. Spilling semen on your shirt is not quite the same thing as spilling magma on your jeans.
The dichotomy that exists between Microsoft Java (which is pretty bad) and Sun Java is, if not jarring, quite irritating. Thankfully, Sun Java is the norm. But if Sun Java is released under the GPL, I expect to see several more versions of Java, most of them incompatible with each other, coming out soon. Iceweasel, anyone?
Did anyone notice that Pirated Web Videos is #5? Web videos include stolen background music, and stolen movies and TV content. I don't see where the line is between Web Videos and other pirated content, and whether certain money counts towards two issues at the same time.
And organizing Illicit Markets by value is a bit tainted: money is not always correlated with prevalence. Just look at small groups of CEOs earning millions of dollars: overall, they're asmall minority.
It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.
Back when Netscape was around en bloc and layers were the norm for many users, it was hell to code for both Netscape and Explorer, and often websites were split into two sections. So if Microsoft is trying to create a new and "better" standard, I don't fear Microsoft; I fear the complaining masses. The burden of being the (relatively) knowledgeable minority!
1. Prove it. Lenin and Stalin during there time killed more of their own people than any direct action of hte US can be linked to. Hitler put to death 6 million Jews and started a war that killed quite a few more. Now lets try to actually use something that is factual.
There is something in mathematics called "negligability". Basically, at x gets arbitrarily large, x squared grows to such a value that x is negligible. Same thing with e^x and x^n, sqrt(x) and ln(x), and other functions. Do not confuse this with humanities. If you allow yourself to compare the US with these regimes using negligability, you ignore the fact that incrementing x by one usually implies a mourning family, and a life of latent potential nixed. It's easy to rationalize away the fact that the Geneva Conventions rates murder on an absolute scale, but the threshhold is one life (and more than that, who knows).
I say screw buy copyrights, that will only encourage people to stick to their damn copyright in hope that someone buys them.
You say, IF copyrights are of greater value THEN people will make better works. Consider the inverse: IF copyrights are weak or don't exist THEN people will not make anything good because they can't get money for it. There are exceptions, of course, with works that have been written for the simple enjoyment thereof (like Gadsby). However, copyright gives incentive for latent authors to participate in a capitalistic quality-ensuring system and get some money. The middle ground between the two is more or less summed up by Nathaniel Hawthorne's explanation of transcribing a non-fiction work into literature (as The Scarlet Letter):
"What have you to do with us?" that expression [of the characters Hawthorne was portraying] seemed to say. "The little power you might have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!"
There already is a wiki for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It takes advantage of WikiMedia formatting and thus is "wikified." Every two or three words, there's a link to some obscure reference that good ol' Jimbo [Joyce] made, so you can understand the novel, if you really really want to.
There is a drawback to this, though. James Joyce did not intend that the novel be understood. It was meant to model a dream -- albeit a boringly long one -- and if someone wakes you up every two seconds to tell you what something means, it's not as fun. Annotated, it's like reading Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, and if given the choice, I would not have that one wikified, with all due respect to that Lolita guy.
While the Wake wiki is good for comprehension and finally understanding what that huge word in the second paragraph was, the addition of technology makes it inferior to the original. Obviously, you can ignore the links, but in several other cases with e-books, reading a book is made more inconvenient by wikifying it. There is no real electronic substitute for "flipping through a book", and the simple format of a single finite page, as opposed to turtles all the way down. (Just check out an e-book: most of the time, the webpages are huge.)
Oh, and Gutenberg? If anything, have Wikipedia partner with them, if the two are not in cahoots already. No use forming a needless schism in the world of free online e-books.
When a non-geek hears about open source, whether it's a layman or member of a spy agency, they shrink away, basically thinking that open ROM (hardware, software) is open RAM (data transfer), if they could phrase it as such.
Well, those people might not vote in the election either because "It's pointless. Those kids are going to go straight off of my lawn and onto that election-hacking machine of theirs" or "My vote won't count", the latter of which is age-old.
So I agree with the concept making voting open source. In my subjective slippery-slope universe, this will cause news-ussavvy "I voted Democrat since 1948" non-nerds not to vote and have the generally better informed of us vote. (Sounds elitist, I suppose.) Top hackers across the country could review the code for vulnerabilities, instead of us downloading "Diebold Security Patches" every 2 minutes under the current system. I realize that the US government will almost never accept this, but in my opinion it's good anyway, and maybe as secure as a completely hidden source code.
Of course, Diebold would lose profit. But that's a sacrifice they'll have to make for the red, white and blue, for the eagle soaring above, soaring... majestically! and the Americanness (Britishness) of apple pie (cobbler) all those other American cliches.
I hope they have a nice animation for when the machine is infected with a virus, like clippy catching fire and then running around in circles screaming.
Dare you attempt sacrilege against Clippy? I'm sure that malicious, libelous fan fiction abounds about him. All those copyright infringements and bad jokes about his simple eagerness to help have hurt the potential millions, in profit, of whoever invented him. Don't you dare insinuate that the software engineer who created Clippy is penniless.
Clippy's long career will end when Vista comes out in favor of a "better" help system. We shall mourn his loss. Undoubtedly not much change in the GUI, eh?
Social Darwinism and ethnic cleansing is something that I can't forgive. It's like someone to whom authority was arbitrarily given referencing his or her superiority upon completing an action, and attributing it to genius. Although rationality does run the world (read Atlas Shrugged, that kind of ego (incidentally, not as Ayn Rand meant it) is stupid.
On the other hand, Social Darwinism may or may not be what these banana guys are doing ideologically. I hate to think about what would happen if the guys got a hold of numerology. *shudder* They probably already have, stooping down to add digits of numbers in an arbitrary base-10 system. "See, if you add up the ASCII numbers of the word 'Evolution' in this obscure language, you get 666."
I support creationism, but not as a crutch. So Darwin's works on microevolution, I agree with entirely. Macroevolution, on the other hand, is somewhat believable, but I choose the alternative b/c of personal conviction (Christianity) and logic, to a certain exist. See The Language of God, although I do not entirely agree with theistic evolution.
On the other hand, I like the superstring theory and its possible snug fit into God's existence. I suppose I'm volatile. I may be wrong.
DNA testing (in its ideal form) definitely works, as Ironsides describes, but the logistics of it are a bit difficult sometimes. I would not base a case solely upon it, especially if the opposition were to hire a lawyer to perform a Chewbacca defense with stunning, and fatal, precision.
Another devastating obstacle is the thing of identical twins. If I wanted to live a life of crime, I would prefer to be an identical twin to someone, because in that case, DNA tests are basically rendered worthless.
Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques. But it needs more publicity and more confidence.-- from the site
These people sound like Charles Lindberg in his book, The Spirit of St. Louis, except that he was writing about the future aviation in general while they're talking about solar naval transportation. "Lucky Lindy" was right, but are the transatlanic21 people as talented prophets as he?
If the people on the journey drift along having their engine shut off for most of the day, and then go at max speed for about 30-40 minutes, they would get to New York at their planned time, assuming that they used the planned course and that no major storms occur. Or, if they were able to keep the engine running for the whole time (going straight across the Atlantic), the trip would take them about 20 days.
Given the complexities inherent in solar panels and the photoelectric effect, I applaud these people for trying to start something. I do wonder why traveling skewedly across the Atlantic is taking them about 8 months, even assuming that there are no anomalies.
Around where I live and go to school (some town in New York), HP-produced calculators are not prevalent in the slightest. I haven't physically seen one, ever. Everyone that uses graphing calculators either has some version of a TI-83 or TI-84, and rarely TI-89's.
Most of the teachers in our school, anyway, are familiar with the concept of resetting all memory before a quiz that involves a calculator. "Helpful," ie illegal, files are quite useless is this case. When such an quiz occurs, people who use their calculator almost entirely for gaming (during class) are usually not happy with the prospect of eliminating a source of diversion. Heaven forbid they multiply 6.62E-34 with 2E20, or divide 733 by 6, by hand.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason this is so awesome is that scientists can apply this to nanotechnology -- actually, the prefix "nano" is not small enough. After all, everything moves in waves, but these waves are only noticeable on a small enough scale. On this scale, electric energy is so much more important than gravity. The fact that this energy is electric and not physical means that, instead of bumping atoms around continuous for a month, something might happen sooner. The fact that it's been proven done might help with something, like (for example) supplying a power source. The question is, "How easy is it to synthesize this phenomenon, and is it worth it?"
What excites me most is the fact that Are we still afraid of put explosives into our chemistry kits for fear that kids might get hurt? Just like how, around Sputnik time, the US gov't tried to make all of the children in its public education system little scientists of future, it is (seriously) important to get kids interested in science, math, and academic pursuit at a young age. Can a little kid read the KJ version of the Bible at 4 years old, as was done in days of yore?
It would be a good thing that, with this increased technology, scientists would try to give nuclear chemistry to the public and make atomic physics more tangible. There was an ambitious project some time ago that wanted to create a huge electromagnetic field somewhere in Texas. It was shut down because the US gov't saw no use of it. If this technology can do something as simple as power a light bulb, the public will notice. No one cares if Element 118 is created in a matter of seconds instead of across the span of a week, but if people can actually see something, this is better for science in general. (So long as John Galt doesn't get angry.)
I don't think that you realize the full import of that comment.
Of course, Rob did submit the same story, but apparently it was rejected corporate sponsorship. Oh, that the world would be modeled after Slashdot!
Goodness. I would hope that, since this comment has been floating around the internet, somebody would have change the greater than sign into a less than. But no.
As a purely constructive Wikipedia contributor, I have a feeling (from my gut, of course, not my head) that there will never in the future be a moment, even a millisecond, when there is absolutely no vandalism present on WP. However, Wikipedia is far more comprehensive, I believe, than any other encyclopedia operating by academic submissions will ever be.
There is far more specific knowledge. Just see this page. Awesome stuff; I would never expect to see anything like that in a regular general encyclopedia. I believe that, given that everything else in the world has an (at most) linear rate of change (in terms of fossil fuels, engineering, knowledge, celebrity divorces), Wikipedia will continue to exist well. Of course, someone could take over Wikipedia and use it for unscrupulous objectives, just like RSA encryption has allowed criminals to flourish. We'll never know, of course, since Douglas Adams died before he wrote that 6th book.
But don't panic. Yet.
You seem to misunderstand the art/science issue somewhat, or you're just making a bad joke. When juxtaposed to science, an art is something that requires intuition and taking things as they come with adeptness, like looking at the quality of pencils as they pass by on a conveyor belt. A science is something that requires rational thought, like running the robot that cuts the wood into pencil shapes.
The distinction on the list is not so much between art and science as it is between involving sickening substances and involving death. Spilling semen on your shirt is not quite the same thing as spilling magma on your jeans.
The dichotomy that exists between Microsoft Java (which is pretty bad) and Sun Java is, if not jarring, quite irritating. Thankfully, Sun Java is the norm. But if Sun Java is released under the GPL, I expect to see several more versions of Java, most of them incompatible with each other, coming out soon. Iceweasel, anyone?
Did anyone notice that Pirated Web Videos is #5? Web videos include stolen background music, and stolen movies and TV content. I don't see where the line is between Web Videos and other pirated content, and whether certain money counts towards two issues at the same time.
And organizing Illicit Markets by value is a bit tainted: money is not always correlated with prevalence. Just look at small groups of CEOs earning millions of dollars: overall, they're asmall minority.
It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.
Back when Netscape was around en bloc and layers were the norm for many users, it was hell to code for both Netscape and Explorer, and often websites were split into two sections. So if Microsoft is trying to create a new and "better" standard, I don't fear Microsoft; I fear the complaining masses. The burden of being the (relatively) knowledgeable minority!
There already is a wiki for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It takes advantage of WikiMedia formatting and thus is "wikified." Every two or three words, there's a link to some obscure reference that good ol' Jimbo [Joyce] made, so you can understand the novel, if you really really want to.
There is a drawback to this, though. James Joyce did not intend that the novel be understood. It was meant to model a dream -- albeit a boringly long one -- and if someone wakes you up every two seconds to tell you what something means, it's not as fun. Annotated, it's like reading Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, and if given the choice, I would not have that one wikified, with all due respect to that Lolita guy.
While the Wake wiki is good for comprehension and finally understanding what that huge word in the second paragraph was, the addition of technology makes it inferior to the original. Obviously, you can ignore the links, but in several other cases with e-books, reading a book is made more inconvenient by wikifying it. There is no real electronic substitute for "flipping through a book", and the simple format of a single finite page, as opposed to turtles all the way down. (Just check out an e-book: most of the time, the webpages are huge.)
Oh, and Gutenberg? If anything, have Wikipedia partner with them, if the two are not in cahoots already. No use forming a needless schism in the world of free online e-books.
When a non-geek hears about open source, whether it's a layman or member of a spy agency, they shrink away, basically thinking that open ROM (hardware, software) is open RAM (data transfer), if they could phrase it as such.
Well, those people might not vote in the election either because "It's pointless. Those kids are going to go straight off of my lawn and onto that election-hacking machine of theirs" or "My vote won't count", the latter of which is age-old.
So I agree with the concept making voting open source. In my subjective slippery-slope universe, this will cause news-ussavvy "I voted Democrat since 1948" non-nerds not to vote and have the generally better informed of us vote. (Sounds elitist, I suppose.) Top hackers across the country could review the code for vulnerabilities, instead of us downloading "Diebold Security Patches" every 2 minutes under the current system. I realize that the US government will almost never accept this, but in my opinion it's good anyway, and maybe as secure as a completely hidden source code.
Of course, Diebold would lose profit. But that's a sacrifice they'll have to make for the red, white and blue, for the eagle soaring above, soaring... majestically! and the Americanness (Britishness) of apple pie (cobbler) all those other American cliches.
Clippy's long career will end when Vista comes out in favor of a "better" help system. We shall mourn his loss. Undoubtedly not much change in the GUI, eh?
Oh, wait -- nevermind.
Social Darwinism and ethnic cleansing is something that I can't forgive. It's like someone to whom authority was arbitrarily given referencing his or her superiority upon completing an action, and attributing it to genius. Although rationality does run the world (read Atlas Shrugged, that kind of ego (incidentally, not as Ayn Rand meant it) is stupid.
On the other hand, Social Darwinism may or may not be what these banana guys are doing ideologically. I hate to think about what would happen if the guys got a hold of numerology. *shudder* They probably already have, stooping down to add digits of numbers in an arbitrary base-10 system. "See, if you add up the ASCII numbers of the word 'Evolution' in this obscure language, you get 666."
I support creationism, but not as a crutch. So Darwin's works on microevolution, I agree with entirely. Macroevolution, on the other hand, is somewhat believable, but I choose the alternative b/c of personal conviction (Christianity) and logic, to a certain exist. See The Language of God, although I do not entirely agree with theistic evolution.
On the other hand, I like the superstring theory and its possible snug fit into God's existence. I suppose I'm volatile. I may be wrong.
DNA testing (in its ideal form) definitely works, as Ironsides describes, but the logistics of it are a bit difficult sometimes. I would not base a case solely upon it, especially if the opposition were to hire a lawyer to perform a Chewbacca defense with stunning, and fatal, precision. Another devastating obstacle is the thing of identical twins. If I wanted to live a life of crime, I would prefer to be an identical twin to someone, because in that case, DNA tests are basically rendered worthless.
Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques. But it needs more publicity and more confidence. -- from the site
These people sound like Charles Lindberg in his book, The Spirit of St. Louis, except that he was writing about the future aviation in general while they're talking about solar naval transportation. "Lucky Lindy" was right, but are the transatlanic21 people as talented prophets as he?
If the people on the journey drift along having their engine shut off for most of the day, and then go at max speed for about 30-40 minutes, they would get to New York at their planned time, assuming that they used the planned course and that no major storms occur. Or, if they were able to keep the engine running for the whole time (going straight across the Atlantic), the trip would take them about 20 days.
Given the complexities inherent in solar panels and the photoelectric effect, I applaud these people for trying to start something. I do wonder why traveling skewedly across the Atlantic is taking them about 8 months, even assuming that there are no anomalies.
Around where I live and go to school (some town in New York), HP-produced calculators are not prevalent in the slightest. I haven't physically seen one, ever. Everyone that uses graphing calculators either has some version of a TI-83 or TI-84, and rarely TI-89's.
Most of the teachers in our school, anyway, are familiar with the concept of resetting all memory before a quiz that involves a calculator. "Helpful," ie illegal, files are quite useless is this case. When such an quiz occurs, people who use their calculator almost entirely for gaming (during class) are usually not happy with the prospect of eliminating a source of diversion. Heaven forbid they multiply 6.62E-34 with 2E20, or divide 733 by 6, by hand.