I had the exact same thought. "Getting software right is very, very difficult"... "trust us, we know; we still haven't figure out how to get it right".
And there is one angle in particular that is available for stopping spam:
The damned registrars
But what you are proposing is effectively just another type of filter. It's something that will reduce--but not eliminate--spam, and is something that eventually the botnet folks will figure ways to get around. If you think that spam filters will never work, then increasingly stringent regulation of domain registration will not work either.
The parent's point was that removing the incentive amounts to removing the profit motive, and this is essentially impossible. Your suggestion about `the damned registrars' does nothing to remove the profit motive.
the team said it was able to precisely define the size of a planet called WASP-10b which is orbiting around the star WASP-10, about 300 light-years from Earth.
Next up for the team? Precisely measure planets around stars SPIC-20, CHINK-15, and GRINGO-117.
Actually, I've seen worse than this. I was at this bar attached to a hotel in Switzerland and they had a coin-operated Windoze machine. And old American guy (~70s) felt hip enough to surf the tubes, so he put in his coins, and upon login an IE browser window automatically popped up, full screen. My friend and I painfully watched him spend 10 minutes trying to find IE by going to Google and searching for "Internet Explorer". He even tried to download from one site and install it; when that didn't work he had to drag the bartender over and show him how to use this new-fangled device (bartender/IT? quite a CV).
Once he was on, he spent his time checking hotmail and his bank and stock accounts. But he was mindful of the security risks: when he was typing in passwords, he looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching.
Chu is already the director of LBNL, which is a large Department of Energy laboratory. He is already a high-ranking official IN the DOE; not only does he have the knowledge of the scientific subject material, he also intimately knows the inner bureaucratic structure of the DOE. Putting someone in charge who has experience with EITHER of those two categories would be a good idea; the fact that Chu knows both makes him almost perfect for the job.
I imagine the streets would be safer if one was allowed to make a phone call and report that their entire inventory for narcotics was just stolen and get the police investigating the robbery and trying to return the stolen property.
Indeed. Just consider, how much crime is there today associated with the distribution and sale of alcohol. None, you say? Exactly. But there certainly was tons in the years 1920-1933. If a commodity is in demand, there will be a supply. Rendering it illegal doesn't change that; it only delegates the supply to those willing to break the law.
I could be totally wrong, but I was under the impression that all the 'missing mass' of subatomic particle was believed to be generated by the Higgs Boson/Field.
It's subtly different. If you believe E=mc^2 (and there's no reason not to--it's been verified too many times to count, despite the misleading headline), then the energy in a field (electromagnetic field, gluon field, etc.) is equivalent to mass. In a proton, there is a non-zero gluon field that caries energy and hence mass.
The question then becomes, how can an elementary particle (like an electron) have mass? A free electron is not interacting with any fields, so how can it act like it has mass? This is the question that the Higgs mechanism answers. It says that elementary particles are indeed massless, and they interact with Higgs fields. The Higgs fields have non-zero values in the vacuum, and so provide "mass" to elementary particles through their interactions.
So the Higgs is responsible for giving mass to the individual quarks (via their interactions with the Higgs fields), but the proton/neutron mass is dominated by the energy in the gluon field, not the Higgs field.
This `ask slashdot' is going to sound an awful lot like a previous question posted by an undergraduate math major who was/is going into a masters program in astrophysics (my comment in that thread, which is similar to the parent's, still stands in this case, and I won't bother typing it again, although I will second some other comments which recommend the Feynman lectures).
The OP requests non-undergrad books for undergrads, but I wholeheartedly disagree. The graduate PDE course is covering the technical aspects of the mathematics; one then simply needs a basic understanding of the physics (not another technical mathematical discussion), and I can't think of any better way to browse through undergrad textbooks.
If that's still not your cup of tea, there's always wikipedia.
A sys admin was recently surprised that I didn't use screen. My explaination was that all that C-x stuff reminded me too much of using Emacs.
I've always used emacs whenever I need a quick terminal-based text editor (yeah I know, "real users use vi"; whatever). But one server I used to work on had a problem where for whatever reason emacs wasn't working, and so I would use pico instead. And the problem with pico on this machine was that C-x C-s (which was ingrained in muscle-memory for me, reflex-like) would freeze the whole terminal. The only recourse would be to login separately, find the PID of the pico process and kill -9 (and only -9), whereby none of the changes had been saved. My co-workers sharing my office were both annoyed and amused because they'd be quietly working and at least a few times a day, out of nowhere I would just immediately shout, "FUCK!!".
Isn't earth in danger of an extinction event when a gamma ray burst occurs from something about 6,000 light years away?
Although this thing does emit gamma rays, in discreet packets, this is not an example of the phenomenon knows as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). The "burst" in a genuine GRB lasts much longer (seconds or minutes as opposed to milliseconds), happens only once, and contains orders of magnitude greater energy.
So when we say we're screwed if a GRB happens within 6,000 lt-yr of Earth (and it's pointed in our direction), that's absolutely true, but it doesn't apply to pulsars.
a neutrino isn't actually it's own anti-particle, strictly, it's that a neutrino doesn't actually have a known strictly defined antiparticle equivalent.
IAAPP. Neutrinos have very well-defined antiparticles, and we observe them all the time in nature. We can verify that they and neutrinos have quantum numbers that are opposite to one another. Normally, for charged particles, the antiparticles have the opposite charge and so there is no question that these are distinct. But for neutral particles, really the only non-zero quantum number available is the handedness (this is related to helicity, which describes if their spin is left-handed or right-handed with respect to their motion). We have only observed left-handed neutrinos and only right-handed antineutrinos. But the question arises, is that the ONLY difference? Because with the observation of neutrino oscillations, we have evidence that neutrinos have mass (which is not allowed in the standard model), and so their helicity is not fixed. If this is true, then whether a particle is a neutrino or antineutrino is simply a matter of reference frame, and hence neutrinos are their own antiparticles (similar to the way that photons are their own antiparticles).
...the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy...
Right. Innovation. By that reasoning, FOSS has contributed zero innovation, ever, anywhere. And,
...pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista...
so clearly, Vista is a shining beacon of innovation. Awesome, sounds like air-tight logic to me. Now where the hell did I put that Vista installation dvd?
No kidding. My first thought when reading that it would monitor facial expressions, body heat, etc., is that all of a sudden people will get arrested who have to go to the bathroom really bad. Or people who have the flu.
And what was used for their tests? People who were asked to look suspicious! What a joke.
Of course, as an academic myself, not citing the paper for some software that I used, is sloppy anyway.
And as an academic myself, I completely agree. If someone were to use this guy's code in the results of a publication, they would have to cite the code's maintainers... and that is something that the journal referees should enforce. If a journal's editors are doing their job, they will not let someone publish any results without a thorough explanation of where those results came from.
So I guess my point is, there should ideally be no issue of enforcing such a citation restriction.
Strange quarks have a mass of 95MeV, bottom has 4.2GeV so the total mass of the Omega-sub-b would be 4.39GeV
Up quarks have a mass of 3MeV, down has 6MeV so the total mass of a Proton would be 0.012GeV
It's not quite so simple. The masses of the baryons are usually dominated by the binding energy (i.e. in the 'gluon' field) and not by the masses of the constituent quarks. The proton/neutron are the extreme case where almost all their mass is from binding energy. Estimating the mass of the quarks themselves is a very tricky business; since you cannot observe free quarks, you have to infer their effective mass in bound systems. An up quark in a baryon (bound system of 3 quarks) has a different effective mass than when it is part of a meson (bound system of two quarks). The masses of the up and down quarks you quote are their effective masses in baryons; the mass of the proton is 0.938 GeV, which is clearly MUCH larger than the sum of the quark masses. The same goes for this new baryon (Omega_b), but to a lesser degree.
Actually, the question of the masses of particles can be considered a little bit moot (or not, depending on what you're studying); in the Standard Model, all elementary particles are massless, and pick up effective masses only through their coupling to the Higgs field, similar to the way the proton has its mass due to the quarks coupling to the gluon fields. But at the moment, no one has been able to calculate what the effective particle masses (of any particle) should be, since we don't know enough about the Higgs field (should it exist) to be able to work out the couplings to various particles.
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
But doesn't this restrict people to using secure sites only from their own machines?
Yes, yes it does. Several commenters have suggested workarounds to this, like carrying memory sticks with all your keys and the like. But I think it's highly unlikely that will never catch on. Personally, I don't see any problem using passwords, as long as the user is smart about usage (i.e. no public terminals, use only over encrypted connections, mixed upper/lower case/numbers/special characters, keep it secret, etc.).
All they need to do is keep him from getting at any legit relics storage so he can't go public with an alien tricorder or something that people can verify as ET in origin and the world will just think he's a loon.
Oh c'mon, where do you think weather balloons come from!?
That's unlikely, and as a couple other responders have pointed out, it depends on the radius of the planet. If it has the same average density as the Earth, then the gravitational forces at its surface are 5^(1/3)=1.7 times as strong.
I agree, it's the scale of the cooldown that's impressive. In fact, when the LHC is running at full power, it will be drawing more power than the entire city of Geneva, and most of that power will go towards cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the exact same thought. "Getting software right is very, very difficult" ... "trust us, we know; we still haven't figure out how to get it right".
Filters will never solve the spam problem.
And there is one angle in particular that is available for stopping spam:
But what you are proposing is effectively just another type of filter. It's something that will reduce--but not eliminate--spam, and is something that eventually the botnet folks will figure ways to get around. If you think that spam filters will never work, then increasingly stringent regulation of domain registration will not work either.
The parent's point was that removing the incentive amounts to removing the profit motive, and this is essentially impossible. Your suggestion about `the damned registrars' does nothing to remove the profit motive.
she probably hasn't read this thread yet. Ann Coulter a /.'r? *shudder*
As strange as that would be, it's even stranger that she used to attend Grateful Dead concerts, and still considers herself a fan.
the team said it was able to precisely define the size of a planet called WASP-10b which is orbiting around the star WASP-10, about 300 light-years from Earth.
Next up for the team? Precisely measure planets around stars SPIC-20, CHINK-15, and GRINGO-117.
Actually, I've seen worse than this. I was at this bar attached to a hotel in Switzerland and they had a coin-operated Windoze machine. And old American guy (~70s) felt hip enough to surf the tubes, so he put in his coins, and upon login an IE browser window automatically popped up, full screen. My friend and I painfully watched him spend 10 minutes trying to find IE by going to Google and searching for "Internet Explorer". He even tried to download from one site and install it; when that didn't work he had to drag the bartender over and show him how to use this new-fangled device (bartender/IT? quite a CV).
Once he was on, he spent his time checking hotmail and his bank and stock accounts. But he was mindful of the security risks: when he was typing in passwords, he looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching.
Chu is already the director of LBNL, which is a large Department of Energy laboratory. He is already a high-ranking official IN the DOE; not only does he have the knowledge of the scientific subject material, he also intimately knows the inner bureaucratic structure of the DOE. Putting someone in charge who has experience with EITHER of those two categories would be a good idea; the fact that Chu knows both makes him almost perfect for the job.
I imagine the streets would be safer if one was allowed to make a phone call and report that their entire inventory for narcotics was just stolen and get the police investigating the robbery and trying to return the stolen property.
Indeed. Just consider, how much crime is there today associated with the distribution and sale of alcohol. None, you say? Exactly. But there certainly was tons in the years 1920-1933. If a commodity is in demand, there will be a supply. Rendering it illegal doesn't change that; it only delegates the supply to those willing to break the law.
In Imperial Russia, Czar makes diode out of YOU!
I could be totally wrong, but I was under the impression that all the 'missing mass' of subatomic particle was believed to be generated by the Higgs Boson/Field.
It's subtly different. If you believe E=mc^2 (and there's no reason not to--it's been verified too many times to count, despite the misleading headline), then the energy in a field (electromagnetic field, gluon field, etc.) is equivalent to mass. In a proton, there is a non-zero gluon field that caries energy and hence mass.
The question then becomes, how can an elementary particle (like an electron) have mass? A free electron is not interacting with any fields, so how can it act like it has mass? This is the question that the Higgs mechanism answers. It says that elementary particles are indeed massless, and they interact with Higgs fields. The Higgs fields have non-zero values in the vacuum, and so provide "mass" to elementary particles through their interactions.
So the Higgs is responsible for giving mass to the individual quarks (via their interactions with the Higgs fields), but the proton/neutron mass is dominated by the energy in the gluon field, not the Higgs field.
I hope that is a bit understandable.
This `ask slashdot' is going to sound an awful lot like a previous question posted by an undergraduate math major who was/is going into a masters program in astrophysics (my comment in that thread, which is similar to the parent's, still stands in this case, and I won't bother typing it again, although I will second some other comments which recommend the Feynman lectures).
The OP requests non-undergrad books for undergrads, but I wholeheartedly disagree. The graduate PDE course is covering the technical aspects of the mathematics; one then simply needs a basic understanding of the physics (not another technical mathematical discussion), and I can't think of any better way to browse through undergrad textbooks.
If that's still not your cup of tea, there's always wikipedia.
A sys admin was recently surprised that I didn't use screen. My explaination was that all that C-x stuff reminded me too much of using Emacs.
I've always used emacs whenever I need a quick terminal-based text editor (yeah I know, "real users use vi"; whatever). But one server I used to work on had a problem where for whatever reason emacs wasn't working, and so I would use pico instead. And the problem with pico on this machine was that C-x C-s (which was ingrained in muscle-memory for me, reflex-like) would freeze the whole terminal. The only recourse would be to login separately, find the PID of the pico process and kill -9 (and only -9), whereby none of the changes had been saved. My co-workers sharing my office were both annoyed and amused because they'd be quietly working and at least a few times a day, out of nowhere I would just immediately shout, "FUCK!!".
Isn't earth in danger of an extinction event when a gamma ray burst occurs from something about 6,000 light years away?
Although this thing does emit gamma rays, in discreet packets, this is not an example of the phenomenon knows as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). The "burst" in a genuine GRB lasts much longer (seconds or minutes as opposed to milliseconds), happens only once, and contains orders of magnitude greater energy.
So when we say we're screwed if a GRB happens within 6,000 lt-yr of Earth (and it's pointed in our direction), that's absolutely true, but it doesn't apply to pulsars.
a neutrino isn't actually it's own anti-particle, strictly, it's that a neutrino doesn't actually have a known strictly defined antiparticle equivalent.
IAAPP. Neutrinos have very well-defined antiparticles, and we observe them all the time in nature. We can verify that they and neutrinos have quantum numbers that are opposite to one another. Normally, for charged particles, the antiparticles have the opposite charge and so there is no question that these are distinct. But for neutral particles, really the only non-zero quantum number available is the handedness (this is related to helicity, which describes if their spin is left-handed or right-handed with respect to their motion). We have only observed left-handed neutrinos and only right-handed antineutrinos. But the question arises, is that the ONLY difference? Because with the observation of neutrino oscillations, we have evidence that neutrinos have mass (which is not allowed in the standard model), and so their helicity is not fixed. If this is true, then whether a particle is a neutrino or antineutrino is simply a matter of reference frame, and hence neutrinos are their own antiparticles (similar to the way that photons are their own antiparticles).
...the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy...
Right. Innovation. By that reasoning, FOSS has contributed zero innovation, ever, anywhere. And,
...pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista...
so clearly, Vista is a shining beacon of innovation. Awesome, sounds like air-tight logic to me. Now where the hell did I put that Vista installation dvd?
false positives
No kidding. My first thought when reading that it would monitor facial expressions, body heat, etc., is that all of a sudden people will get arrested who have to go to the bathroom really bad. Or people who have the flu.
And what was used for their tests? People who were asked to look suspicious! What a joke.
Of course, as an academic myself, not citing the paper for some software that I used, is sloppy anyway.
And as an academic myself, I completely agree. If someone were to use this guy's code in the results of a publication, they would have to cite the code's maintainers... and that is something that the journal referees should enforce. If a journal's editors are doing their job, they will not let someone publish any results without a thorough explanation of where those results came from.
So I guess my point is, there should ideally be no issue of enforcing such a citation restriction.
Bad drivers?
No no no... he was referring to Ballmer's new set of golf clubs.
Strange quarks have a mass of 95MeV, bottom has 4.2GeV so the total mass of the Omega-sub-b would be 4.39GeV Up quarks have a mass of 3MeV, down has 6MeV so the total mass of a Proton would be 0.012GeV
It's not quite so simple. The masses of the baryons are usually dominated by the binding energy (i.e. in the 'gluon' field) and not by the masses of the constituent quarks. The proton/neutron are the extreme case where almost all their mass is from binding energy. Estimating the mass of the quarks themselves is a very tricky business; since you cannot observe free quarks, you have to infer their effective mass in bound systems. An up quark in a baryon (bound system of 3 quarks) has a different effective mass than when it is part of a meson (bound system of two quarks). The masses of the up and down quarks you quote are their effective masses in baryons; the mass of the proton is 0.938 GeV, which is clearly MUCH larger than the sum of the quark masses. The same goes for this new baryon (Omega_b), but to a lesser degree.
Actually, the question of the masses of particles can be considered a little bit moot (or not, depending on what you're studying); in the Standard Model, all elementary particles are massless, and pick up effective masses only through their coupling to the Higgs field, similar to the way the proton has its mass due to the quarks coupling to the gluon fields. But at the moment, no one has been able to calculate what the effective particle masses (of any particle) should be, since we don't know enough about the Higgs field (should it exist) to be able to work out the couplings to various particles.
IAAPP
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
But doesn't this restrict people to using secure sites only from their own machines?
Yes, yes it does. Several commenters have suggested workarounds to this, like carrying memory sticks with all your keys and the like. But I think it's highly unlikely that will never catch on. Personally, I don't see any problem using passwords, as long as the user is smart about usage (i.e. no public terminals, use only over encrypted connections, mixed upper/lower case/numbers/special characters, keep it secret, etc.).
But to be fair, no, I did not RTFA.
I tagged this "suddenoutbreakofcrazy"
*ahem* I don't think there was anything "sudden" about it!
But seriously though, I personally don't see how this is significantly more crazy than Scientology.
Really - what's up with the newly-ubiquitous 'signed' tag?
Yeah... I was wondering the same thing actually. Anybody know what that's all about?
All they need to do is keep him from getting at any legit relics storage so he can't go public with an alien tricorder or something that people can verify as ET in origin and the world will just think he's a loon.
Oh c'mon, where do you think weather balloons come from!?
5x mass = 5x gravity
That's unlikely, and as a couple other responders have pointed out, it depends on the radius of the planet. If it has the same average density as the Earth, then the gravitational forces at its surface are 5^(1/3)=1.7 times as strong.
I agree, it's the scale of the cooldown that's impressive. In fact, when the LHC is running at full power, it will be drawing more power than the entire city of Geneva, and most of that power will go towards cooling.