I started writing a response about how your system would more or less guarantee any of Britney's crack-addled spawn automatically got a better education than a genius from a relatively undistinguished family. And then I realized it was also more or less the way the current system works anyway.
We knew deep ocean currents existed, the article really just points out that we have firmer evidence of there being a common flow between all of the southern oceans. The existence of the deep Atlantic currents we knew about was pretty good evidence this one likely existed, we just hadn't found it.
As far as climate goes, the deep return currents (much like this one) are very slow. Much slower than say the Gulf Stream in the north Atlantic. The time scale for these large flows to change is in the hundreds to thousands of years, and have very little bearing on current global warming. The article summary (and you) is really just stirring up needless controversy because if you mention anything to do with climate someone has to bring up global warming. For all practical purposes you could treat the deep currents as constant sources/sinks at the few places they interact with the surface and your climate model would work just as well. From what I recall most of them do just that for short-term (a few decades) timescales.
The climate models are by no means "closed-source". I ran the GFDL-FMS model (and my own variants on it) as a grad student. If you happen to have at least a quad-core processor (or better a cluster) sitting around I'm sure I could dig up the source code in my old files and ship it off to you. Granted, my version wasn't the most realistic model ever created, but it's illustrative. Or you could just go download it directly from NASA.
I prefer the broader definition. Some people want to see the attractive males as well. Turnabout is fair play after all. Or do you have something to hide?
You know, on average (at least on BestBuy.com and Amazon.com) HD-DVD players are about $200-500 whereas Blu Ray players are generally in the $400-600 range. Or you can plunk down $1000 and have the dual format player. And Planet Earth is also in HD-DVD. But it's nice your player also could play games if you wanted;)
Then you're actually talking about buoyancy doing the lifting, not gravity. Unfortunately, gasses don't tend to stratify, they tend to mix. So now you have the complication of separating your hydrogen and oxygen from your inert gas before they recombine on their own. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but you generally don't get something for nothing.... damn thermodynamics anyway.
The simple answer is no. Your system forms a closed loop and if you aren't losing mass at best you spend just as much energy getting the water back to the top as you gained from dropping it to the bottom. In reality you lose some energy through entropy, friction, etc.
This is a simple proof in Newtonian physics actually. Any integral of work over a closed loop in a gravitational field sums to 0 (in an ideal frictionless world).
You're all making a mistake in comparing this to a coin toss. These statistics would be true if we were talking a 3% (or whatever) rate of failure the first time you power up the system. But we're not. This 3% is a meaningless statistic without the context of a time interval. A more telling statistic for 360s (which I haven't seen published) would be the mean time to failure, but even that isn't terribly useful without information about the distribution of failure times.
If you mean irony in that now the Wii is the supply constrained console, I might remind you that it's outselling the PS3 and Xbox360 in pretty much every region. Even supply constrained. From that perspective it seems they aren't performing so poorly production-wise.
The funny part of that statement is most of the world is too poor to afford it (or just unwilling to pony up that kinda cash), which means Sony has effectively priced the PS3 out of the mass market. So yes, that's what waggle is for this generation: the mass market.
right after the sales of either the PS3 or 360 can exceed last get hardware (specifically the PS2) for at least three months
The or makes it seem to me that the criterion is for a system to outsell the top selling last-gen system to be "current" as opposed to just outselling its own predecessor.
I'm actually aware there are 50 separate state bars, but haven't there also been multiple cases in some states? And to further demonstrate my admitted naivete of legal matters I have more questions.
I thought many of these cases had been brought in federal courts? I'm aware of there being separate jurisdictions, but I would hope courts also aren't unaware of decisions that occur in other jurisdictions. My question is why the courts haven't seemed to notice the recurring pattern of behavior that you describe in your blog in How the RIAA Litigation Process Works.
At least to people like myself who only see a small fraction of the high profile cases that get posted on sites like Slashdot, it's a little dumbfounding that behaviors such as the John Doe cases and ex parte discovery motions (with little supporting evidence) are even being entertained let alone granted.
I suspect the real question is why the bar itself hasn't taken action against these lawyers. Surely it seems that if the same lawyers are continuously bringing meritless lawsuits on behalf of the RIAA and dismissing them when it becomes clear the defendant won't settle and the plaintiff's case is sorely lacking evidence that their professional conduct is at least questionable and worthy of investigation. It's my understanding the courts generally don't like to have their time wasted with nonsense where the plaintiff is clearly lacking a credible case and it's in the bar's interest to reprimand the lawyers involved in perpetuating this behavior.
Pluto won't clear its orbital path in the lifetime of the sun for a few reasons. The Kuiper Belt (where Pluto resides) is a very excited region of the solar system in terms of orbital eccentricities and inclications, which results in a very high mean impact velocity between objects out there. This means impacts tend to be destructive rather than letting anything grow larger. Additionally the number of particles in the Kuiper belt is sufficiently small impacts are fairly rare. Basically, the Kuiper Belt never became a planet for much the same reason the asteroid belt hasn't.
Regarding the two planets bit, that's a highly unstable orbital configuration. If they orbited a common center of mass (like the Earth and moon) it would be feasible, but then we'd just call them a twin planetary system, or the smaller of the two would be considered a moon.
Actually, the Martian sky frequently has a pinkish hue due to the large quantities of suspended dust grains. If you live anywhere that has wildfires (like SoCal) think of what it's like when the air is full of smoke.
Yes, they're colored, and lots of things don't look quite normal under the lighting conditions on Mars. Right off the bat I have a lot of reservations about this work.
1. His analysis method is based on stereoscopic image reconstructions of a height field. His claim essentially seems that there was no solution everywhere the picture was blue, so it must be flat. Unfortunately, this technique is pretty lousy for extracting height fields. It's noisy, and contrast issues cause it to fail frequently (I know, I've done it myself).
2. He has no spectral data or any other data to back up his claim. Granted, he's a Lockheed engineer and may not have access. But I have a hard time believing the vast team of scientists analyzing the data overlooked something so obvious.
3. And finally there's Mr. Levin's history of publishing rather dubious claims regarding water on Mars in the Proceedings of the SPIE but never once a full paper in a peer-reviewed journal that covers planetary science. Not that I want to make a personal attack, but this isn't the first time he's made a dubious claim that was never verified.
So, while it's intriguing and might be worth a second look, I'm still firmly in the skeptic category on this one.
I'm reasonably confident they could make these in more than rectangular shapes. Besides, at the size at which a dome theater becomes useable the curvature of each individual element of the display would become quite small. On the software side, the processing to correctly distort the display information for a spherical surface is quite trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
I started writing a response about how your system would more or less guarantee any of Britney's crack-addled spawn automatically got a better education than a genius from a relatively undistinguished family. And then I realized it was also more or less the way the current system works anyway.
We knew deep ocean currents existed, the article really just points out that we have firmer evidence of there being a common flow between all of the southern oceans. The existence of the deep Atlantic currents we knew about was pretty good evidence this one likely existed, we just hadn't found it.
As far as climate goes, the deep return currents (much like this one) are very slow. Much slower than say the Gulf Stream in the north Atlantic. The time scale for these large flows to change is in the hundreds to thousands of years, and have very little bearing on current global warming. The article summary (and you) is really just stirring up needless controversy because if you mention anything to do with climate someone has to bring up global warming. For all practical purposes you could treat the deep currents as constant sources/sinks at the few places they interact with the surface and your climate model would work just as well. From what I recall most of them do just that for short-term (a few decades) timescales.
I previewed and I still missed my own typo. I meant the NOAA not NASA. But the rest of the post still stands.
The climate models are by no means "closed-source". I ran the GFDL-FMS model (and my own variants on it) as a grad student. If you happen to have at least a quad-core processor (or better a cluster) sitting around I'm sure I could dig up the source code in my old files and ship it off to you. Granted, my version wasn't the most realistic model ever created, but it's illustrative. Or you could just go download it directly from NASA.
Uh, maybe if the ambient air temperature is below freezing. In which case your water would likely freeze anyway.
Depends on how long they plan to know each other :)
My first thought for the balance pad: Wii Kama Sutra. I mean, if you can do yoga on the thing it's not much of a stretch.
Sadly attractiveness of men to women usually factors in more than looks (e.g. $$$). But yeah, he did just basically call himself fugly :-)
I prefer the broader definition. Some people want to see the attractive males as well. Turnabout is fair play after all. Or do you have something to hide?
You know, on average (at least on BestBuy.com and Amazon.com) HD-DVD players are about $200-500 whereas Blu Ray players are generally in the $400-600 range. Or you can plunk down $1000 and have the dual format player. And Planet Earth is also in HD-DVD. But it's nice your player also could play games if you wanted ;)
Then you're actually talking about buoyancy doing the lifting, not gravity. Unfortunately, gasses don't tend to stratify, they tend to mix. So now you have the complication of separating your hydrogen and oxygen from your inert gas before they recombine on their own. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but you generally don't get something for nothing.... damn thermodynamics anyway.
The simple answer is no. Your system forms a closed loop and if you aren't losing mass at best you spend just as much energy getting the water back to the top as you gained from dropping it to the bottom. In reality you lose some energy through entropy, friction, etc.
This is a simple proof in Newtonian physics actually. Any integral of work over a closed loop in a gravitational field sums to 0 (in an ideal frictionless world).
Wrong Pasadena, I know, but... still.
You're all making a mistake in comparing this to a coin toss. These statistics would be true if we were talking a 3% (or whatever) rate of failure the first time you power up the system. But we're not. This 3% is a meaningless statistic without the context of a time interval. A more telling statistic for 360s (which I haven't seen published) would be the mean time to failure, but even that isn't terribly useful without information about the distribution of failure times.
If you mean irony in that now the Wii is the supply constrained console, I might remind you that it's outselling the PS3 and Xbox360 in pretty much every region. Even supply constrained. From that perspective it seems they aren't performing so poorly production-wise.
The funny part of that statement is most of the world is too poor to afford it (or just unwilling to pony up that kinda cash), which means Sony has effectively priced the PS3 out of the mass market. So yes, that's what waggle is for this generation: the mass market.
The or makes it seem to me that the criterion is for a system to outsell the top selling last-gen system to be "current" as opposed to just outselling its own predecessor.
So doesn't that criterion by default make the Wii the only "current-gen" system?
I'm actually aware there are 50 separate state bars, but haven't there also been multiple cases in some states? And to further demonstrate my admitted naivete of legal matters I have more questions.
I thought many of these cases had been brought in federal courts? I'm aware of there being separate jurisdictions, but I would hope courts also aren't unaware of decisions that occur in other jurisdictions. My question is why the courts haven't seemed to notice the recurring pattern of behavior that you describe in your blog in How the RIAA Litigation Process Works.
At least to people like myself who only see a small fraction of the high profile cases that get posted on sites like Slashdot, it's a little dumbfounding that behaviors such as the John Doe cases and ex parte discovery motions (with little supporting evidence) are even being entertained let alone granted.
I suspect the real question is why the bar itself hasn't taken action against these lawyers. Surely it seems that if the same lawyers are continuously bringing meritless lawsuits on behalf of the RIAA and dismissing them when it becomes clear the defendant won't settle and the plaintiff's case is sorely lacking evidence that their professional conduct is at least questionable and worthy of investigation. It's my understanding the courts generally don't like to have their time wasted with nonsense where the plaintiff is clearly lacking a credible case and it's in the bar's interest to reprimand the lawyers involved in perpetuating this behavior.
Pluto won't clear its orbital path in the lifetime of the sun for a few reasons. The Kuiper Belt (where Pluto resides) is a very excited region of the solar system in terms of orbital eccentricities and inclications, which results in a very high mean impact velocity between objects out there. This means impacts tend to be destructive rather than letting anything grow larger. Additionally the number of particles in the Kuiper belt is sufficiently small impacts are fairly rare. Basically, the Kuiper Belt never became a planet for much the same reason the asteroid belt hasn't.
Regarding the two planets bit, that's a highly unstable orbital configuration. If they orbited a common center of mass (like the Earth and moon) it would be feasible, but then we'd just call them a twin planetary system, or the smaller of the two would be considered a moon.
Actually, the Martian sky frequently has a pinkish hue due to the large quantities of suspended dust grains. If you live anywhere that has wildfires (like SoCal) think of what it's like when the air is full of smoke.
Yes, they're colored, and lots of things don't look quite normal under the lighting conditions on Mars. Right off the bat I have a lot of reservations about this work.
1. His analysis method is based on stereoscopic image reconstructions of a height field. His claim essentially seems that there was no solution everywhere the picture was blue, so it must be flat. Unfortunately, this technique is pretty lousy for extracting height fields. It's noisy, and contrast issues cause it to fail frequently (I know, I've done it myself).
2. He has no spectral data or any other data to back up his claim. Granted, he's a Lockheed engineer and may not have access. But I have a hard time believing the vast team of scientists analyzing the data overlooked something so obvious.
3. And finally there's Mr. Levin's history of publishing rather dubious claims regarding water on Mars in the Proceedings of the SPIE but never once a full paper in a peer-reviewed journal that covers planetary science. Not that I want to make a personal attack, but this isn't the first time he's made a dubious claim that was never verified.
So, while it's intriguing and might be worth a second look, I'm still firmly in the skeptic category on this one.
I'm reasonably confident they could make these in more than rectangular shapes. Besides, at the size at which a dome theater becomes useable the curvature of each individual element of the display would become quite small. On the software side, the processing to correctly distort the display information for a spherical surface is quite trivial.