I'm against homosexual marriage and especially against homosexual adoption. I don't think it is good for kids to be told that they don't need a mommy and a daddy, that mommy and mommy are fine and we don't need a daddy. I think it is harmful on a level that will not manifest itself for a long time, but will eventually. Kids do need both a Mommy and a Daddy, that is optimal. It is sad when we don't strive for Optimal because of selfish desires of people in a relationship that is destined to be sterile.
Personally, I suspect exclusive parenthood by biological progenitors might do more harm then good. We're herd animals, and it's best if there's a whole tribe that takes care of our young. That there's a male and female in privileged position is just an artifact of how reproduction used to work, and science has fixed that.
Of course there's a theoretical solution and you can give it as a power series. The three-body problem just can't be solved via first integrals, and the power series is pretty much useless for practical purposes as it converges too slowly.
And you can't make an object-oriented successor to C because there's already C++, right? Look at Objective-C,
That one was developed in parallel to C++.
And a hypothetical Perl5++ would be developed in parallel to Perl6. Just because C++ was officially relased first did not stop adoption of Objective-C.
D,
That one is explicitly meant as "successor" to C++ ("successor" in quotes because it's actually a quite different language, which is neither C nor C++ compatible).
D is not meant as a successor of C++, but a replacement. The relationship between Perl5++ and Perl5, Perl6 and Perl5, Perl5++ and Perl6 would be pretty close to the relationship between C++ and C (mostly compatible superset), D and C (new language with cleaner semantics, more comprehensise featureset but still close in spirit), C++ and D (siblings with shared heritage) except for the fact that Perl6 would predate Perl5++.
Vala
I never heard about that before.
A C#-inspired language leveraging the GObject object system that compiles to C.
ECMAScript 4
I hope you're not trying to imply that this is a successor to C. It is a very different language.
ES3:ES4:ES5 == Perl5:Perl6:Perl5++, except that Perl5++ is a pipe dream right now and Perl6 not dead.
Main obstacle for Perl's advancement and progress is the Perl6.
That's a pretty bold claim
You can't change the Perl5 because a lot of stuff depends on it. You can't make new version of Perl out of Perl5 because Perl6 is already out there.
And you can't make an object-oriented successor to C because there's already C++, right? Look at Objective-C, D, Vala, just to name the more popular ones: Language evolution is not linear. Also, ECMAScript 4.
All in all, I strongly believe that it is the miserable failure of Perl6 what's killing any potential progress the Perl could have made. Right now, the best thing which could happen to Perl IMO is a fork of the Perl5. Yet, since user/developer base is declining, I very much doubt that would haphttp://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3415413&cid=42724475#pen.
There are two efforts under way right now to do just that.
Because vendor lock-in is a form of monopoly and interferes with free market economy. In general, it's not possible to hire the programmer of your choice to enhance the software you own, and RMS considers this unethical.
My point is that science advances by trial and error, and you'll only know after the fact that it was a bad idea.
Radioactivity? Totally safe, have some glowing toothpaste. Lobotomy? Revolutionary treatment, have a Nobel prize. Asbestos? We know it's deadly, but it's big money and we need those warships, so let's not tell anyone.
Look at what happened to Biosphere 2, the gene flow from engineered crops into the wild and the suspected contribution of MON810 to the demise of polish bees. Even if you accept that the big corporations act in good faith (and given the evidence, that's a pretty big assumption) the fact remains that science cannot really answer the question of innocuousness beforehand, so don't begrudge me my feelings of unease about global-scale bioengineering projects in the name of progress and capitalism.
It seems this is a very specific quantum mechanical perversion, and no classical systems can reach the state quantum physicists call "negative temperature".
This is by no means a quantum perversion, just a natural consequence of the definition of temperature as 1/T = dS/dE. There's nothing mysterious about negative temperatures from a thermodynamical point of view, it just happens that calssical systems don't exhibit this property because they do not come with an upper limit on energy, whereas there are quantum ones that do.
The common interpretation of temperature as average energy per degree of freedom comes in via the equipartition theorem, but breaks down in various edge cases, eg when the energy levels cannot be approximated by continuity (eg heat capacity of diatomic gases) or for non-ergodic systems (some plasmas, I believe).
As to the problem of infinite temperature: In a sense, thermodynamic \beta = 1/kT is the more natural measure of hotness and coldness and has a pole at T = 0. Coming from T > 0, this corresponds to infinite coldness, whereas coming from T < 0, this corresponds to infinite hotness.
Actually, I can imagine such a system working quite well. Just like gradians, the day would be divided in 400 units (let's call them grad for now as well).
A centigrad would end up being 2.16 seconds, the grad is 3 minutes 36 seconds, ten grad or one decagrad is 36 minutes and a day 40 decagrad. I believe this would cover the various use cases reasonably well.
There is something endearing about a human being's deep-seated need for meaning which creates such extraordinary stories and beliefs.
Considering the amount of propaganda and descriptions of atrocities committed in the name of God, I find the Bible (as well as many other historical scripture) mostly disturbing and sometimes amusing (the penalty for having sex with livestock, ridiculous claims of old age probably due to mistranslation,...).
Also, taking into account the number of past and present religious belief systems as well as the amount of modern fiction, I don't consider these stories particularly extraordinary, but I agree that this deep-seated need for meaning you mention is fundamental to human nature:
We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
- Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Science of Discworld II
As an aside, I find it quite surprising that a lot of people self-identifying as Christian (as in: follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ) aren't as disturbed by the Bible as I am. Frankly, I don't cosider such people Christian at all, as they have made the Bible their golden calf instead of heeding the word of their living god.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.... For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong... have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.
It isn't (or shouldn't be) about background radiation levels, but concentration and type of radioactive isotopes: The problem is continued direct exposure through bioaccumulation.
The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission disagrees with your assessment - this is what the chairman has to say in the official report:
Message from the Chairman
THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI of March 11, 2011 were natural disasters of a magnitude that shocked the entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response. How could such an accident occur in Japan, a nation that takes such great pride in its global reputation for excellence in engineering and technology? This Commission believes the Japanese people – and the global community – deserve a full, honest and transparent answer to this question.
Our report catalogues a multitude of errors and willful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events of March 11. And it examines serious deficiencies in the response to the accident by TEPCO, regulators and the government.
For all the extensive detail it provides, what this report cannot fully convey – especially to a global audience – is the mindset that supported the negligence behind this disaster. What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.” Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.
Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same.
Following the 1970s “oil shocks,” Japan accelerated the development of nuclear power in an effort to achieve national energy security. As such, it was embraced as a policy goal by government and business alike, and pursued with the same single-minded determination that drove Japan’s postwar economic miracle.
With such a powerful mandate, nuclear power became an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same government bureaucracy responsible for its promotion. At a time when Japan’s self-confidence was soaring, a tightly knit elite with enormous financial resources had diminishing regard for anything ‘not invented here.’
This conceit was reinforced by the collective mindset of Japanese bureaucracy, by which the first duty of any individual bureaucrat is to defend the interests of his organization. Carried to an extreme, this led bureaucrats to put organizational interests ahead of their paramount duty to protect public safety.
Only by grasping this mindset can one understand how Japan’s nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; and how it became accepted practice to resist regulatory pressure and cover up small-scale accidents. It was this mindset that led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. This report singles out numerous individuals and organizations for harsh criticism, but the goal is not—and should not be—to lay blame. The goal must be to learn from this disaster, and reflect deeply on its fundamental causes, in order to ensure that it is never repeated. Many of the lessons relate to policies and procedures, but the most important is one upon which each and every Japanese citizen should reflect very deeply.
The consequences of negligence at Fukushima stand out as catastrophic, but the mindset that supported it can be found across Japan
In C int f(void) is a function with no parameters returning an int, int f() is a function with no parameter specification returning an int. They are not the same and should not be treated as such.
This only applies to declarations which are not part of a definition. In particular,
If gcc was strictly adhering to the C std it would tell you that int main() is undefined behaviour on hosted environments and implementation-defined on freestanding environments.
This is incorrect: Additional prototypes of main() are implementation-defined even on hosted implementations, so as long as gcc documents its behaviour, everything is fine as far as the standard is concerned.
However, this doesn't actually apply in this particular case: When a function declaration is part of a definition, an empty parameter list is equivalent to a prototype declaration with a single unnamed void parameter (see C99 6.7.5.3 10 and 14).
CMS measured multiple channels of decay. If I remember correctly, the 5 sigma combined the data from the most prominent channels, but it dropped below the 5 sigma threshold for the complete dataset.
Quarks come together in groups of 2 or 3 to build particles like protons and neutrons (and a whole bunch more). These are what you'd consider matter (Fermions).
You probably meant hadrons (particles made of quarks), not fermions (particles with half-integer spin, in contrast to bosons with integer spin). In particular, there are both fermionic and bosonic hadrons.
There are also particles that serve as "force carriers" - all the fundamental forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear forces can be thought of as exchanges of these other particles. They have integer spin, and we call them Bosons.
All force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers. Force carriers are also called gauge bosons, as they are bosonic excitations of gauge fields.
The problem with finding bosons is that they're really just intermediary particles - photons are obvious enough only because they travel at the speed of light. Bosons with mass go much slower, and wind up decaying or interacting before we can directly observe them. So this find by the LHC is *indirect* evidence of the Higgs, based on how much energy they're missing from various collision interactions. But it matches the predictions to a very high degree so far, so they're calling it good.
The problem isn't the bosonic nature of the particle, but rather its mass and strength of interaction with other particles, which affect the energy needed for its production, its lifetime and the possible channels of decay.
Are you suggesting wood or coal heating in the HOME!?
Not coal, but wood which makes it CO2 neutral: You only release the amount of CO2 which was previously taken from the atmosphere while growing the trees. Of course the secondary emissions from processing and transport remain.
If there are good economical reasons to switch to renewables in the future, then we'll see investments in them in the future.
Fixed that for you: There are pretty good reasons to switch away from fossil fuels and fission reactors right now. Politics is not about money in the first place (or at least it shoudn't be), and it's the duty of the government to step in where free markets break down.
But I expect you to as well face the reality, how horribly unreliable solar and wind power is. No matter how much money and innovation you throw at wind and solar, they still have long periods, when they produce nothing or next to nothing. That's a design flaw that can't be fixed and should not be ignored.
The solution to that diversification: Wind energy is fairly reliable if distributed over a large enough area, and the final goal would be a European solution: For example, solar power from Spain, hydro power from Norway, wind energy from $anywhere combined with pumped storage and gas turbine plants to cover remaining fluctuations should in priciple be sufficient to cover most of our needs.
However, this can only happen if necessary changes in infrastructure are made, which will take time. I'm arguing for starting with that right now.
The existing 'legacy' facilities (nuclear reactors in France, coal plants in Germany) of course won't go away immediately and can be taken offline when they become unnecessary.
Color me surprised: I'm living in Frankfurt, and I do not think I know anyone who heats electrically, but according to BUND, about 14% of electric power consumption of homes is due to electric heating.
This PDF contains some more information - in particular a ranking of cities by number of electrically heated residence, and it turns out that Frankfurt is in the second-to-last place with an estimate of only 8000 in the whole city.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm against homosexual marriage and especially against homosexual adoption. I don't think it is good for kids to be told that they don't need a mommy and a daddy, that mommy and mommy are fine and we don't need a daddy. I think it is harmful on a level that will not manifest itself for a long time, but will eventually. Kids do need both a Mommy and a Daddy, that is optimal. It is sad when we don't strive for Optimal because of selfish desires of people in a relationship that is destined to be sterile.
Personally, I suspect exclusive parenthood by biological progenitors might do more harm then good. We're herd animals, and it's best if there's a whole tribe that takes care of our young. That there's a male and female in privileged position is just an artifact of how reproduction used to work, and science has fixed that.
Of course there's a theoretical solution and you can give it as a power series. The three-body problem just can't be solved via first integrals, and the power series is pretty much useless for practical purposes as it converges too slowly.
Keep in mind that while Heinlein did not use the term 'space marine' in Starship Troopers, he used it in some of his other stories, among them Misfit.
That one was developed in parallel to C++.
And a hypothetical Perl5++ would be developed in parallel to Perl6. Just because C++ was officially relased first did not stop adoption of Objective-C.
That one is explicitly meant as "successor" to C++ ("successor" in quotes because it's actually a quite different language, which is neither C nor C++ compatible).
D is not meant as a successor of C++, but a replacement. The relationship between Perl5++ and Perl5, Perl6 and Perl5, Perl5++ and Perl6 would be pretty close to the relationship between C++ and C (mostly compatible superset), D and C (new language with cleaner semantics, more comprehensise featureset but still close in spirit), C++ and D (siblings with shared heritage) except for the fact that Perl6 would predate Perl5++.
I never heard about that before.
A C#-inspired language leveraging the GObject object system that compiles to C.
I hope you're not trying to imply that this is a successor to C. It is a very different language.
ES3:ES4:ES5 == Perl5:Perl6:Perl5++, except that Perl5++ is a pipe dream right now and Perl6 not dead.
Main obstacle for Perl's advancement and progress is the Perl6.
That's a pretty bold claim
You can't change the Perl5 because a lot of stuff depends on it.
You can't make new version of Perl out of Perl5 because Perl6 is already out there.
And you can't make an object-oriented successor to C because there's already C++, right? Look at Objective-C, D, Vala, just to name the more popular ones: Language evolution is not linear. Also, ECMAScript 4.
All in all, I strongly believe that it is the miserable failure of Perl6 what's killing any potential progress the Perl could have made.
Right now, the best thing which could happen to Perl IMO is a fork of the Perl5. Yet, since user/developer base is declining, I very much doubt that would haphttp://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3415413&cid=42724475#pen.
There are two efforts under way right now to do just that.
That should have read "I imagine the rationale goes something like this"
(I was hit by a 503/Guru Meditation while previewing and accidentally submitted)
I image the rational goes something like this:
The quality of the software you use for work affects your livelihood. You should be allowed to hire the programmer of your choice to improve it.
Because vendor lock-in is a form of monopoly and interferes with free market economy. In general, it's not possible to hire the programmer of your choice to enhance the software you own, and RMS considers this unethical.
My point is that science advances by trial and error, and you'll only know after the fact that it was a bad idea.
Radioactivity? Totally safe, have some glowing toothpaste. Lobotomy? Revolutionary treatment, have a Nobel prize. Asbestos? We know it's deadly, but it's big money and we need those warships, so let's not tell anyone.
Look at what happened to Biosphere 2, the gene flow from engineered crops into the wild and the suspected contribution of MON810 to the demise of polish bees. Even if you accept that the big corporations act in good faith (and given the evidence, that's a pretty big assumption) the fact remains that science cannot really answer the question of innocuousness beforehand, so don't begrudge me my feelings of unease about global-scale bioengineering projects in the name of progress and capitalism.
Personally, I believe we should be very careful with the use of genetically modified crops, especially considering historical evidence of what can go wrong with new discoveries, scientific consensus can change drastically, the impact of greed and backroom politics.
It seems this is a very specific quantum mechanical perversion, and no classical systems can reach the state quantum physicists call "negative temperature".
This is by no means a quantum perversion, just a natural consequence of the definition of temperature as 1/T = dS/dE. There's nothing mysterious about negative temperatures from a thermodynamical point of view, it just happens that calssical systems don't exhibit this property because they do not come with an upper limit on energy, whereas there are quantum ones that do.
The common interpretation of temperature as average energy per degree of freedom comes in via the equipartition theorem, but breaks down in various edge cases, eg when the energy levels cannot be approximated by continuity (eg heat capacity of diatomic gases) or for non-ergodic systems (some plasmas, I believe).
As to the problem of infinite temperature: In a sense, thermodynamic \beta = 1/kT is the more natural measure of hotness and coldness and has a pole at T = 0. Coming from T > 0, this corresponds to infinite coldness, whereas coming from T < 0, this corresponds to infinite hotness.
Actually, I can imagine such a system working quite well. Just like gradians, the day would be divided in 400 units (let's call them grad for now as well).
A centigrad would end up being 2.16 seconds, the grad is 3 minutes 36 seconds, ten grad or one decagrad is 36 minutes and a day 40 decagrad. I believe this would cover the various use cases reasonably well.
There is something endearing about a human being's deep-seated need for meaning which creates such extraordinary stories and beliefs.
Considering the amount of propaganda and descriptions of atrocities committed in the name of God, I find the Bible (as well as many other historical scripture) mostly disturbing and sometimes amusing (the penalty for having sex with livestock, ridiculous claims of old age probably due to mistranslation, ...).
Also, taking into account the number of past and present religious belief systems as well as the amount of modern fiction, I don't consider these stories particularly extraordinary, but I agree that this deep-seated need for meaning you mention is fundamental to human nature:
We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
- Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Science of Discworld II
As an aside, I find it quite surprising that a lot of people self-identifying as Christian (as in: follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ) aren't as disturbed by the Bible as I am. Frankly, I don't cosider such people Christian at all, as they have made the Bible their golden calf instead of heeding the word of their living god.
While not considering himself an atheist, Einstein's views on the Judeo-Christian religion are pretty explicit:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong ... have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.
we can test the radiation levels
It isn't (or shouldn't be) about background radiation levels, but concentration and type of radioactive isotopes: The problem is continued direct exposure through bioaccumulation.
The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission disagrees with your assessment - this is what the chairman has to say in the official report:
In C int f(void) is a function with no parameters returning an int,
int f() is a function with no parameter specification returning an int.
They are not the same and should not be treated as such.
This only applies to declarations which are not part of a definition. In particular,
int main() { ... }
and
int main(void) { ... }
are the same.
If gcc was strictly adhering to the C std it would tell you that int main() is undefined behaviour on hosted environments and implementation-defined on freestanding environments.
This is incorrect: Additional prototypes of main() are implementation-defined even on hosted implementations, so as long as gcc documents its behaviour, everything is fine as far as the standard is concerned.
However, this doesn't actually apply in this particular case: When a function declaration is part of a definition, an empty parameter list is equivalent to a prototype declaration with a single unnamed void parameter (see C99 6.7.5.3 10 and 14).
CMS measured multiple channels of decay. If I remember correctly, the 5 sigma combined the data from the most prominent channels, but it dropped below the 5 sigma threshold for the complete dataset.
Quarks come together in groups of 2 or 3 to build particles like protons and neutrons (and a whole bunch more). These are what you'd consider matter (Fermions).
You probably meant hadrons (particles made of quarks), not fermions (particles with half-integer spin, in contrast to bosons with integer spin). In particular, there are both fermionic and bosonic hadrons.
There are also particles that serve as "force carriers" - all the fundamental forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear forces can be thought of as exchanges of these other particles. They have integer spin, and we call them Bosons.
All force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers. Force carriers are also called gauge bosons, as they are bosonic excitations of gauge fields.
The problem with finding bosons is that they're really just intermediary particles - photons are obvious enough only because they travel at the speed of light. Bosons with mass go much slower, and wind up decaying or interacting before we can directly observe them. So this find by the LHC is *indirect* evidence of the Higgs, based on how much energy they're missing from various collision interactions. But it matches the predictions to a very high degree so far, so they're calling it good.
The problem isn't the bosonic nature of the particle, but rather its mass and strength of interaction with other particles, which affect the energy needed for its production, its lifetime and the possible channels of decay.
They're turned off nuclear power plants in August/September, so they are net exporter because nuclear power plants worked through most of the year.
That's factually wrong. Dates of shutdown of the reactors under consideration:
Now, take a loook at the import/export 2011-03 - 2012-02. It's not obvious what the result will be at the end of the year.
Are you suggesting wood or coal heating in the HOME!?
Not coal, but wood which makes it CO2 neutral: You only release the amount of CO2 which was previously taken from the atmosphere while growing the trees. Of course the secondary emissions from processing and transport remain.
The relevant technologies would be Pelletheizung and Hackschnitzelheizung (both articles from German Wikipedia - the English version is less detailed).
U235 has a half-life of 7,038 × 10^8 years - perhaps you're mixing it up with Pu239?
Sorry, that should have read 7.038 × 10^8 years - copied the figure from German Wikipedia...
If there are good economical reasons to switch to renewables in the future, then we'll see investments in them in the future.
Fixed that for you: There are pretty good reasons to switch away from fossil fuels and fission reactors right now. Politics is not about money in the first place (or at least it shoudn't be), and it's the duty of the government to step in where free markets break down.
But I expect you to as well face the reality, how horribly unreliable solar and wind power is. No matter how much money and innovation you throw at wind and solar, they still have long periods, when they produce nothing or next to nothing. That's a design flaw that can't be fixed and should not be ignored.
The solution to that diversification: Wind energy is fairly reliable if distributed over a large enough area, and the final goal would be a European solution: For example, solar power from Spain, hydro power from Norway, wind energy from $anywhere combined with pumped storage and gas turbine plants to cover remaining fluctuations should in priciple be sufficient to cover most of our needs.
However, this can only happen if necessary changes in infrastructure are made, which will take time. I'm arguing for starting with that right now.
The existing 'legacy' facilities (nuclear reactors in France, coal plants in Germany) of course won't go away immediately and can be taken offline when they become unnecessary.
Color me surprised: I'm living in Frankfurt, and I do not think I know anyone who heats electrically, but according to BUND, about 14% of electric power consumption of homes is due to electric heating.
This PDF contains some more information - in particular a ranking of cities by number of electrically heated residence, and it turns out that Frankfurt is in the second-to-last place with an estimate of only 8000 in the whole city.