For those not interested in the fine detail, there's a very simple explanation as to why there isn't any real paradox involved.
Let's start with a quote from the article (looks like the paper is a bit more subtle, but the upshot is the same): "Now imagine how things look from a "moving frame of reference" in which the charge and magnet both glide by at a steady speed. Thanks to the weird effects of relativity, the magnet appears to have more positive charge on one side and more negative charge on the other."
Now, it's true that there's an electric field, and for many purposes it is convenient to imagine that this is due to charges on either side of the magnet. But these charges are fictitious. They aren't really there, as can be easily shown by observing that charge is a scalar, and hence the charge distribution in the magnet cannot be dependent on the frame of reference. Since they aren't there, it's hardly surprising that the external electric field doesn't apply a force to them.
So, basically, a fiction that happens to be convenient in electric engineering is incompatible with relativity; or, if you prefer, in order to make fictitious charges compatible with relativity you also have to have fictitious angular momentum. I'm not sure whether this is a big deal for electrical engineering or not but it certainly isn't any sort of deal as far as fundamental physics is concerned.
Has anybody seen confirmation that Samsung will be repairing affected user's machines under warranty? Definitely a design fault, it should be impossible for software to brick hardware.
Indeed, Amazon should be able to use statistical methods to work out, within some reasonable margin of error, just what percentage of people did come back and which went to buy elsewhere. It would be interesting to see that figure, though I don't suppose they'll release it.
Isn't that kind of the point? I'm not familiar with the incident you're referring to, so perhaps I've misunderstood you, but it seems to me that it is the "permission culture" that made those contributors feel that they were being exploited. If public domain or BSD-like licensing was the default approach, and considered normal, the average programmer would expect that others, including commercial entities, might use his or her work; it wouldn't have come as a nasty surprise.
IMO, this would be a good thing. GPL and similar licenses makes it necessary for work to be repeated. Society as a whole benefits when work does not need to be repeated, because the engineers can instead do something productive.
I'm thinking some of these factors (particularly the shortage in experience) may be specific to the US? I don't think our roundabouts typically take up much more space than lit intersections, although this may be because only the busiest, most important intersections are lit. We have more roundabouts than traffic lights, so I assumed the former were cheaper, but I don't really know. I'll see if the city council can tell me.:-)
According to a study I think I remember reading a while back (!) this is the primary cause of people running red lights; they're simply going to fast to stop. It makes me wonder if there isn't some way to implement a "yellow light camera".
It seems to me that the problem here isn't the red light cameras. It's the fact that you let corrupt local politicians control the traffic lights.
I kind of understand why (many) Americans aren't keen on the federal government taking more responsibility. But surely traffic safety could and should be the responsibility of the state governments?
I wonder whether similar data is available from nations where traffic lights aren't in the hands of the city council?
While affected voters can send their vote by fax or email, they must *also* send the paper ballot by conventional mail. The fax/email votes and the conventional mail votes will be reconciled after the election, and the results are not final until this has been done.
I'm imagining they're mostly intending to sell these to folk currently running open source Linux software on x86. I wonder how much of the existing software has subtle memory ordering bugs that are hidden by the lenient characteristics of the x86 ISA? If ARM servers become thought of as unreliable - even if the cause is properly identified as software bugs - folk may be unwilling to use them.
On the other hand, the big players (such as Google) should be able to fix their own code base in test environments before pushing out to production, and if they see advantages in power consumption and density they could probably keep AMD in business all by themselves.
"Whereas modern fleas range from 1 to 10 millimeters in length..."
Whoa, 1cm sounds pretty darned big for a flea. That's about the same size as a typical bee. Wikipedia says fleas reach up to 3.3mm which seems more reasonable to me.
Anybody know of a modern-day flea species that actually reaches 10mm? (What do they live on, elephants?)
There is little a modern military can do that a militia can't,
I'm doubtful: militias tend to have poor firepower; few or no tanks, airplanes, things like that. Note, for example, that the Libyan militia was proving relatively ineffective against the Libyan military, until the west intervened.
Armed societies with sovereign citizens simply can't be conquered,
But can be exterminated, or forced off the land the invaders want.
Thanks. That's positively bizarre: how often do you need to change settings on the radio when you're driving, anyway?
One quibble: that data is getting rather old, cellphones are a lot more common now than they were then. And they seem to think cellphone use may have been under-reported, though they don't present any actual evidence to that effect. Interesting nonetheless.
Hmmm. When using a WSUS server, the behaviour you describe is typical of an update with a deadline. I suppose it is possible that someone at MS inadvertently configured a deadline on one of the WU updates.
It might be reasonable to include police shootings where the person who was shot had a gun, I suppose, although personally I just don't care about criminals who get shot, so I'd exclude those cases. I'm doubtful about suicides. I'm not aware of any evidence that correlates suicide rates with gun availability. Here in NZ one of the more common suicide methods (amongst a particular demographic, at least) is by deliberately crashing your car. Probably just as "good" an option (from the suicide's POV) as a gun.
My first guess would be that the 3am-10pm discrepancy comes from your time zone: AU uses GMT internally, so if you're in the Eastern Time Zone, a "3am" installation would actually take place at 10pm local time. But I'd need to see the relevant part of the logs to be sure. And perhaps you'd never noticed the "dead man's switch" behaviour before simply because this was the first time you happened to be using the machine while AU was doing it's thing?
It is very unlikely that this month's updates were intentionally configured to behave differently than normal. We'd be seeing news reports by now if this were widespread.:-)
Seriously, pop over to superuser.com if you want to troubleshoot this - no registration required - or just email me.
The "dead-man's switch" is the default setting for AU, the one Microsoft recommend. Personally, I disagree with this, but it's been that way for years. If there hasn't been a lawsuit yet, I can't imagine one happening now.:-)
I've seen a number of complaints over the years that people's AU settings have mysteriously changed. I think in most cases this was due to products like MS Office that reconfigure AU during setup - they ask for user consent, but people often don't realize they're changing AU settings for the entire computer rather than just Office. However, I've never seen AU automatically reboot when it was not configured to do so - are you sure that this is what happened, did you double-check the settings on those machines? Have you looked at WindowsUpdate.log to see what it thought it was doing at the time? (One person I remember helping had AU settings coming from two different places, so AU was switching backwards and forwards between the different settings at different times of day, making it look as if it was ignoring the settings; the log file helped clarify the situation.)
Updates to AU itself are treated differently to other updates, but they shouldn't ever cause a reboot.
(Pop over to superuser.com if you would like troubleshooting assistance with this problem, by the way.)
*actual homicides. Most of the anti-gun lobby statistics list police shootings, accidents, and suicides among "gun deaths."
I'm puzzled. I can see that police shootings and suicides don't belong, but in what sense are gun-related accidents not "gun deaths"? (I'd have thought they were, if anything, more significant than gun homicides: if someone wants to kill you, but doesn't have a gun, they'll probably just find another way.)
Oh, by the way, the problem with providing an example of quantum coherence without entanglement is that if you don't have entanglement, then while the system might still be coherent there is no measurement that will demonstrate the fact. Again, this is by definition: entanglement is just a word for quantum coherence that you can demonstrate experimentally.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is fine for an embedded system, but not for a general-purpose computer.
For those not interested in the fine detail, there's a very simple explanation as to why there isn't any real paradox involved.
Let's start with a quote from the article (looks like the paper is a bit more subtle, but the upshot is the same): "Now imagine how things look from a "moving frame of reference" in which the charge and magnet both glide by at a steady speed. Thanks to the weird effects of relativity, the magnet appears to have more positive charge on one side and more negative charge on the other."
Now, it's true that there's an electric field, and for many purposes it is convenient to imagine that this is due to charges on either side of the magnet. But these charges are fictitious. They aren't really there, as can be easily shown by observing that charge is a scalar, and hence the charge distribution in the magnet cannot be dependent on the frame of reference. Since they aren't there, it's hardly surprising that the external electric field doesn't apply a force to them.
So, basically, a fiction that happens to be convenient in electric engineering is incompatible with relativity; or, if you prefer, in order to make fictitious charges compatible with relativity you also have to have fictitious angular momentum. I'm not sure whether this is a big deal for electrical engineering or not but it certainly isn't any sort of deal as far as fundamental physics is concerned.
Has anybody seen confirmation that Samsung will be repairing affected user's machines under warranty? Definitely a design fault, it should be impossible for software to brick hardware.
Indeed, Amazon should be able to use statistical methods to work out, within some reasonable margin of error, just what percentage of people did come back and which went to buy elsewhere. It would be interesting to see that figure, though I don't suppose they'll release it.
Isn't that kind of the point? I'm not familiar with the incident you're referring to, so perhaps I've misunderstood you, but it seems to me that it is the "permission culture" that made those contributors feel that they were being exploited. If public domain or BSD-like licensing was the default approach, and considered normal, the average programmer would expect that others, including commercial entities, might use his or her work; it wouldn't have come as a nasty surprise.
IMO, this would be a good thing. GPL and similar licenses makes it necessary for work to be repeated. Society as a whole benefits when work does not need to be repeated, because the engineers can instead do something productive.
I'm thinking some of these factors (particularly the shortage in experience) may be specific to the US? I don't think our roundabouts typically take up much more space than lit intersections, although this may be because only the busiest, most important intersections are lit. We have more roundabouts than traffic lights, so I assumed the former were cheaper, but I don't really know. I'll see if the city council can tell me. :-)
According to a study I think I remember reading a while back (!) this is the primary cause of people running red lights; they're simply going to fast to stop. It makes me wonder if there isn't some way to implement a "yellow light camera".
Surely roundabouts are cheaper than traffic lights?
It seems to me that the problem here isn't the red light cameras. It's the fact that you let corrupt local politicians control the traffic lights.
I kind of understand why (many) Americans aren't keen on the federal government taking more responsibility. But surely traffic safety could and should be the responsibility of the state governments?
I wonder whether similar data is available from nations where traffic lights aren't in the hands of the city council?
While affected voters can send their vote by fax or email, they must *also* send the paper ballot by conventional mail. The fax/email votes and the conventional mail votes will be reconciled after the election, and the results are not final until this has been done.
See https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/new-jersey-voting-in-the-aftermath-of-hurricane-sandy/
I'm imagining they're mostly intending to sell these to folk currently running open source Linux software on x86. I wonder how much of the existing software has subtle memory ordering bugs that are hidden by the lenient characteristics of the x86 ISA? If ARM servers become thought of as unreliable - even if the cause is properly identified as software bugs - folk may be unwilling to use them.
On the other hand, the big players (such as Google) should be able to fix their own code base in test environments before pushing out to production, and if they see advantages in power consumption and density they could probably keep AMD in business all by themselves.
For those that aren't familiar with memory ordering issues, Jeff Preshing has quite a good blog. See for example This is why they call it a weekly ordered CPU.
They predicted that a quake was unlikely, not that there wouldn't be one. Can *you* spot the difference?
Skip to the third to last paragraph here, just under the map of Italy. Hilarious.
Yeah, you're probably right. Let me rephrase: that's about the size of a typical housefly. I still think it's kinda on the large size for a flea.
"Whereas modern fleas range from 1 to 10 millimeters in length ..."
Whoa, 1cm sounds pretty darned big for a flea. That's about the same size as a typical bee. Wikipedia says fleas reach up to 3.3mm which seems more reasonable to me.
Anybody know of a modern-day flea species that actually reaches 10mm? (What do they live on, elephants?)
There is little a modern military can do that a militia can't,
I'm doubtful: militias tend to have poor firepower; few or no tanks, airplanes, things like that. Note, for example, that the Libyan militia was proving relatively ineffective against the Libyan military, until the west intervened.
Armed societies with sovereign citizens simply can't be conquered,
But can be exterminated, or forced off the land the invaders want.
Thanks. That's positively bizarre: how often do you need to change settings on the radio when you're driving, anyway?
One quibble: that data is getting rather old, cellphones are a lot more common now than they were then. And they seem to think cellphone use may have been under-reported, though they don't present any actual evidence to that effect. Interesting nonetheless.
Hmmm. When using a WSUS server, the behaviour you describe is typical of an update with a deadline. I suppose it is possible that someone at MS inadvertently configured a deadline on one of the WU updates.
It might be reasonable to include police shootings where the person who was shot had a gun, I suppose, although personally I just don't care about criminals who get shot, so I'd exclude those cases. I'm doubtful about suicides. I'm not aware of any evidence that correlates suicide rates with gun availability. Here in NZ one of the more common suicide methods (amongst a particular demographic, at least) is by deliberately crashing your car. Probably just as "good" an option (from the suicide's POV) as a gun.
My first guess would be that the 3am-10pm discrepancy comes from your time zone: AU uses GMT internally, so if you're in the Eastern Time Zone, a "3am" installation would actually take place at 10pm local time. But I'd need to see the relevant part of the logs to be sure. And perhaps you'd never noticed the "dead man's switch" behaviour before simply because this was the first time you happened to be using the machine while AU was doing it's thing?
It is very unlikely that this month's updates were intentionally configured to behave differently than normal. We'd be seeing news reports by now if this were widespread. :-)
Seriously, pop over to superuser.com if you want to troubleshoot this - no registration required - or just email me.
Uh ... what does "officer jackass" have to do with gun-related accidents? I agreed that police shootings don't belong in the statistics.
The "dead-man's switch" is the default setting for AU, the one Microsoft recommend. Personally, I disagree with this, but it's been that way for years. If there hasn't been a lawsuit yet, I can't imagine one happening now. :-)
I've seen a number of complaints over the years that people's AU settings have mysteriously changed. I think in most cases this was due to products like MS Office that reconfigure AU during setup - they ask for user consent, but people often don't realize they're changing AU settings for the entire computer rather than just Office. However, I've never seen AU automatically reboot when it was not configured to do so - are you sure that this is what happened, did you double-check the settings on those machines? Have you looked at WindowsUpdate.log to see what it thought it was doing at the time? (One person I remember helping had AU settings coming from two different places, so AU was switching backwards and forwards between the different settings at different times of day, making it look as if it was ignoring the settings; the log file helped clarify the situation.)
Updates to AU itself are treated differently to other updates, but they shouldn't ever cause a reboot.
(Pop over to superuser.com if you would like troubleshooting assistance with this problem, by the way.)
Citation, please. I've never heard of any evidence that listening to the radio is a significant distraction.
*actual homicides. Most of the anti-gun lobby statistics list police shootings, accidents, and suicides among "gun deaths."
I'm puzzled. I can see that police shootings and suicides don't belong, but in what sense are gun-related accidents not "gun deaths"? (I'd have thought they were, if anything, more significant than gun homicides: if someone wants to kill you, but doesn't have a gun, they'll probably just find another way.)
Oh, by the way, the problem with providing an example of quantum coherence without entanglement is that if you don't have entanglement, then while the system might still be coherent there is no measurement that will demonstrate the fact. Again, this is by definition: entanglement is just a word for quantum coherence that you can demonstrate experimentally.