Dark matter sounds really dull, hypothetical particles which only interact with gravity. This would mean about 23% of the Universe's mass is just boring stuff, while only 5% is interesting matter like us.
But what if dark matter does have other interactions? If there were other forces of nature beyond the 4 we know of then dark matter maybe as interesting at normal matter. If these other forces did not interact with our form of matter we would not have found them yet. Maybe to dark matter, we are the dark matter. It would be cool if there was another "shadow universe" which we can hardly notice yet was just as rich as our own.
Fun but probably not true.
As a professional cheapskate I have been using free antivirus programs for years, here are my recent experiences. tl;dr version: Avast or MS Security Essentials are the best choices on a Windows machine.
Avast
Virus Detection: Medium to good
Resource Use: Medium
This is my antivirus of choice, they have recently updated the
interface at long last. A friend had a bunch of malicious software only
a few months back. I ran multiple antivirus and antimalware programs
until nothing was found. Then I installed Avast as his antivirus was
way out of date. Avast's email scanner was going crazy and I realised
the computer was sending out spam. I would never have noticed if it was
not for the email scanner.
Avira AntiVir
Virus Detection: Don't know
Resource Use: Medium to light
Seems OK though it does harass you with a window to buy their products.
AVG
Virus Detection: Don't know
Resource Use: Medium
Last year I had problems on two different machines. For some reason the
AVG browser plugins were blocking access to the Internet. This took me
ages to track down the problem. On another machine a few months before
that it started causing all sorts of problems and crashing. I will
avoid it for now but it seems to be only me who has had these problems.
MS Security Essentials
Virus Detection: Good
Resource Use: Light
MS Security Essentials is very similar to Windows Defender and uses the
same framework and engine which probably accounts for its small
footprint. A great leave and forget solution, I tend to install this on
friends machines.
Symentec Endpoint
Protection
Virus Detection: Good
Resource Use: Double decker bus size.
OK it's not a free program but this is what I have to put up with at work. I
hate it! I hate it! From the 20Gb files it used to create to the recent
problem where they screwed up their date settings. It increases boot
time no end and the weekly scan cripples every computer in the company.
Arrggghh!
Yep.
According to Wikipedia a rock concert loud speaker generates roughly 100W of sound, a jackhammer 1W and a chainsaw about 0.1W. Factor in the inverse square law for distance and it becomes obvious that ambient noise will provide very little energy.
Amusingly this could create the situation, where because of this crack many people who could not play now can. This could mean that Skid-Row's DRM crack will actually increase Ubisoft's sales.
The favoured particle for dark matter is currently the neutralino as it is likely to be the lightest supersymetric particle. It is believed that interactions with other neutralinos would cause annihilation of itself and create gamma rays. Of course you would expect the gamma rays to originate where the dark matter is concentrated which is currently thought to be the Galatic halo around a galaxy.
Hopefully the LHC will uncover evidence for/against supersymmetry and answer many outstanding questions in physics.
The nature article to the news story seems very interesting. As retroviruses have to integrate themselves into the cells genome to replicate, if the retrovirus infects a germline cell the virus can become incorporated into the animals genome and passed to their offspring. This seems to be already happening with this virus and it gives a chance to study the process in action.
About 8% of our genome is probably from ancient viruses which "invaded" our genome millions of years ago. Generally they become deactivated by mutation but they have been implicated in the growth of mammal embryos and the placenta. It would be pretty cool if the placenta, a defining feature of most of the mammals is due to a virus!
That bug is fairly old and has been fixed for awhile, there is a newer security flaw for Foxit reader 3 which is equally as dangerous, SA37049. This is patched as well. I'm not sure you will gain better security by changing to another PDF reader.
As a former circuit designer, and still a CPU engineer, I can say without hesitation that I don't care about graphene. The transistors aren't the big factor anymore. Sure, smaller transistors are good to increase transistors per die, and reduce the distance between them, but wire RC delay is the big deal. Even if the Ioff goes down and Ion goes up, the speed of the chip isn't going to change much.
“Our experimental demonstration of graphene nanowire interconnects on the scale of 20 nanometers shows that their performance is comparable to even the most optimistic projections for copper interconnects at that scale. Under real-world conditions, our graphene interconnects probably already out-perform copper at this size scale.”
Beyond resistivity improvement, graphene interconnects would offer higher electron mobility, better thermal conductivity, higher mechanical strength and reduced capacitance coupling between adjacent wires.
Of course it may never live up to its potential but graphene looks very interesting for many possible uses. It may also be used in spintronics which would be a huge boost to computers.
Your thought experiment is slightly backwards as the difference is that fossil fuel combustion products contains less C13 than the atmosphere. So therefore it would be analogous to a bath already filled with red dye at 1% and the drips we are adding have less than 1% red dye.
That does not invalidate your thought experiment, but what if we approximately knew the volume of our drips, their dye concentration, the size of the bath and what the concentration has been over the last few thousand years? We can estimate our consumption of fossil fuels quite well and therefore its C13 to C12 ratio. We know the mass of the atmosphere and its composition. We can use proxy measurements from (dare I mention it) tree rings to get the historic C12 to C13 ratio.
This evidence points to a source of carbon which is rich in C12, depleted in C13 and which is only recently started to increase, round about 1850.
The carbon isotopes being measured have extremely different properties when is comes to atmospheric scrubbing. So the trace isotopes in the "buried" CO2 are not absorbed, and build up in the atmosphere.
This is wrong for two reasons, we are emitting less C13 than the concentration of the atmosphere so fossil fuel carbon dioxide should be preferentially taken up by plants as they prefer the lighter isotope. Also the chemical difference between C12 and C13 is tiny and there is about a ~2% preference for plant life to take C12.
I will now be modded down because I disclosed a mistake in one of the arguments commonly used in climate change debates, thus confirming the underlying issues in politicizing science.
Well the mistake is your thought experiment did not contain enough information to calculate the number of drips and you lied slightly to make it sound as if the drips would not go down the drain because it is different than the bath water. In fact if you had the data for your bath that we have for the atmosphere it would be possible to get an idea in the change in the amount of water entering the bath.
The media conglomerates really need to get their act together, all their lobbying money and they still haven't reassigned the meaning of theft. They should club together and change the law to reassign copyright as theft, maybe call it the "Alter Copyright to Theft Act (ACTA)".
It does suck for the English, they could use Europium but the best I could find was Rhodium, meaning rose. The next best is Rutherfordium for Ernest Rutherford as he was a British citizen but was born a New Zealander.
Hell even Ytterby a Swedish village has two elements named after it (Ytterbium and Yttrium).
Outsiders take natural resource peculiar to the planet as their own, whilst the native inhabitants are on bad terms with the outsiders.
A young male outsider gets together with the locals and impresses them. He turns against his own people, kicks arse and drives the outsiders from the planet and they can no longer harvest unobtainium.
OK I fail at the other books, the first was confusing enough.
I don't think global warming was being studied 40 years ago. I think they were seeing a different trend.
Well the problem is you are citing the popular press, this is why the uptake of the MMR vaccine hit an all time low in the UK after the Lancet study was released. The media take the stories they like and not those with the most evidence.
Global Cooling?
Paul E. Damon and Steven M. Kunen
Science (6 August 1976): Vol. 193. no. 4252, pp. 447 - 453
"Among the wind farm operators surveyed by Frontier, gearbox failures accounted for the largest amount of downtime, maintenance and loss of power production. Such failures can add up to 15 to 20 percent of the price of the turbine itself, according to Frontier."
Well the best way to raise your child to be a "cynical" atheist is to send them to a Catholic school!
Disclaimer - I went to a Catholic school
P.S. Almost all of the teaching was the same as a state school other than compulsory religious studies and links to local churches and a friary.
Well they are probably concerned with piracy but we all know this system is unlikely to stop it. There is a 2nd benefit for the publisher at the detriment of the consumer.
From Ubisoft.
I agree but this is not where the money is, but the volume. As chip foundries are so expensive and updated every few years the money needs to keep flowing. AMD is making much less profit on many of their chips then Intel are. I believe that this is a tactic of Intel where they take the more profitable higher end chip market relying on their brand, performance and marketing, whilst leaving the less profitable portion for AMD.
This way Intel can have a competitor and not seem a monopoly while still controlling the market and making all the money.
Humans nearly went extinct during the nuclear missile crisis
In that event, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts. The radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
You're really not getting this. Cows don't eat corn, they eat grass. This is why in most of the world, cows are fed on grass or grass-like feed (hay, silage etc)
A lot of the world's livestock is not on marginal land which can not be used for crop production, this is especially true for cattle as they do not fare well in mountainous or boggy ground.
If all the food waste which was unfit for human consumption was used to make compost it would be even more efficient that feeding it to livestock. According to this pro beef site it takes 2.6 lbs of grain for one pound of beef. So even taken propaganda from the other side crops are at least twice as efficient. This figure assumes most of the diet is from grass. Looking at land usage it says one acre can produce 9250 lbs of corn or 3661 lbs of beef. The acreage figure does not include the amount used to grow the grain to feed the cow though.
It is beyond doubt that we have such a love for milk, eggs and meat that we greatly reduce our farming efficiency. Of course the most efficient system does include animals but at a much lower intensity that we have.
I'm not sure what the intent of this post is but it is very relevant to point out that France helped the USA in both of these wars against the British.
See Halton Arp's observations of the redshifts and angular correlations of quasars. Since he started this work, it has been corroborated by a vast body of additional observations. A good overview is given in his book [amazon.com] "Seeing Red".
And an even greater body of evidence against or possibly for? The point is that science which is contentious is at the limit of our understanding. To say that Dr Halton Arp's observations falsify the big bang is almost absurd. That is because there are many lines of evidence for the big bang. Yet despite this it is still not certain and maybe a better theory will come about.
In discussions like this, a considered opinion would present both sides, weigh the evidence and possibly come down on the side which seems most likely. In the debates on the Internet and in the media we get one side and then the other simply shouting the other is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Dark matter sounds really dull, hypothetical particles which only interact with gravity. This would mean about 23% of the Universe's mass is just boring stuff, while only 5% is interesting matter like us. But what if dark matter does have other interactions? If there were other forces of nature beyond the 4 we know of then dark matter maybe as interesting at normal matter. If these other forces did not interact with our form of matter we would not have found them yet. Maybe to dark matter, we are the dark matter. It would be cool if there was another "shadow universe" which we can hardly notice yet was just as rich as our own. Fun but probably not true.
Thanks guys and gals that was hilarious. Slashdot is still worth reading :)
As a professional cheapskate I have been using free antivirus programs for years, here are my recent experiences. tl;dr version: Avast or MS Security Essentials are the best choices on a Windows machine.
Avast
Virus Detection: Medium to good
Resource Use: Medium
This is my antivirus of choice, they have recently updated the interface at long last. A friend had a bunch of malicious software only a few months back. I ran multiple antivirus and antimalware programs until nothing was found. Then I installed Avast as his antivirus was way out of date. Avast's email scanner was going crazy and I realised the computer was sending out spam. I would never have noticed if it was not for the email scanner.
Avira AntiVir
Virus Detection: Don't know
Resource Use: Medium to light
Seems OK though it does harass you with a window to buy their products.
AVG
Virus Detection: Don't know
Resource Use: Medium
Last year I had problems on two different machines. For some reason the AVG browser plugins were blocking access to the Internet. This took me ages to track down the problem. On another machine a few months before that it started causing all sorts of problems and crashing. I will avoid it for now but it seems to be only me who has had these problems.
MS Security Essentials
Virus Detection: Good
Resource Use: Light
MS Security Essentials is very similar to Windows Defender and uses the same framework and engine which probably accounts for its small footprint. A great leave and forget solution, I tend to install this on friends machines.
Symentec Endpoint Protection
Virus Detection: Good
Resource Use: Double decker bus size.
OK it's not a free program but this is what I have to put up with at work. I hate it! I hate it! From the 20Gb files it used to create to the recent problem where they screwed up their date settings. It increases boot time no end and the weekly scan cripples every computer in the company. Arrggghh!
Yep.
According to Wikipedia a rock concert loud speaker generates roughly 100W of sound, a jackhammer 1W and a chainsaw about 0.1W. Factor in the inverse square law for distance and it becomes obvious that ambient noise will provide very little energy.
Amusingly this could create the situation, where because of this crack many people who could not play now can. This could mean that Skid-Row's DRM crack will actually increase Ubisoft's sales.
The favoured particle for dark matter is currently the neutralino as it is likely to be the lightest supersymetric particle. It is believed that interactions with other neutralinos would cause annihilation of itself and create gamma rays. Of course you would expect the gamma rays to originate where the dark matter is concentrated which is currently thought to be the Galatic halo around a galaxy.
Hopefully the LHC will uncover evidence for/against supersymmetry and answer many outstanding questions in physics.
The nature article to the news story seems very interesting. As retroviruses have to integrate themselves into the cells genome to replicate, if the retrovirus infects a germline cell the virus can become incorporated into the animals genome and passed to their offspring. This seems to be already happening with this virus and it gives a chance to study the process in action.
About 8% of our genome is probably from ancient viruses which "invaded" our genome millions of years ago. Generally they become deactivated by mutation but they have been implicated in the growth of mammal embryos and the placenta. It would be pretty cool if the placenta, a defining feature of most of the mammals is due to a virus!
That bug is fairly old and has been fixed for awhile, there is a newer security flaw for Foxit reader 3 which is equally as dangerous, SA37049. This is patched as well. I'm not sure you will gain better security by changing to another PDF reader.
As a former circuit designer, and still a CPU engineer, I can say without hesitation that I don't care about graphene. The transistors aren't the big factor anymore. Sure, smaller transistors are good to increase transistors per die, and reduce the distance between them, but wire RC delay is the big deal. Even if the Ioff goes down and Ion goes up, the speed of the chip isn't going to change much.
Maybe you shouldn't write-off the potential impact of graphene yet. As this article states Graphene May Have Advantages Over Copper For IC Interconnects At The Nanoscale
“Our experimental demonstration of graphene nanowire interconnects on the scale of 20 nanometers shows that their performance is comparable to even the most optimistic projections for copper interconnects at that scale. Under real-world conditions, our graphene interconnects probably already out-perform copper at this size scale.”
Beyond resistivity improvement, graphene interconnects would offer higher electron mobility, better thermal conductivity, higher mechanical strength and reduced capacitance coupling between adjacent wires.
Of course it may never live up to its potential but graphene looks very interesting for many possible uses. It may also be used in spintronics which would be a huge boost to computers.
Your thought experiment is slightly backwards as the difference is that fossil fuel combustion products contains less C13 than the atmosphere. So therefore it would be analogous to a bath already filled with red dye at 1% and the drips we are adding have less than 1% red dye.
That does not invalidate your thought experiment, but what if we approximately knew the volume of our drips, their dye concentration, the size of the bath and what the concentration has been over the last few thousand years? We can estimate our consumption of fossil fuels quite well and therefore its C13 to C12 ratio. We know the mass of the atmosphere and its composition. We can use proxy measurements from (dare I mention it) tree rings to get the historic C12 to C13 ratio.
This evidence points to a source of carbon which is rich in C12, depleted in C13 and which is only recently started to increase, round about 1850.
The carbon isotopes being measured have extremely different properties when is comes to atmospheric scrubbing. So the trace isotopes in the "buried" CO2 are not absorbed, and build up in the atmosphere.
This is wrong for two reasons, we are emitting less C13 than the concentration of the atmosphere so fossil fuel carbon dioxide should be preferentially taken up by plants as they prefer the lighter isotope. Also the chemical difference between C12 and C13 is tiny and there is about a ~2% preference for plant life to take C12.
I will now be modded down because I disclosed a mistake in one of the arguments commonly used in climate change debates, thus confirming the underlying issues in politicizing science.
Well the mistake is your thought experiment did not contain enough information to calculate the number of drips and you lied slightly to make it sound as if the drips would not go down the drain because it is different than the bath water. In fact if you had the data for your bath that we have for the atmosphere it would be possible to get an idea in the change in the amount of water entering the bath.
The media conglomerates really need to get their act together, all their lobbying money and they still haven't reassigned the meaning of theft. They should club together and change the law to reassign copyright as theft, maybe call it the "Alter Copyright to Theft Act (ACTA)".
It does suck for the English, they could use Europium but the best I could find was Rhodium, meaning rose. The next best is Rutherfordium for Ernest Rutherford as he was a British citizen but was born a New Zealander.
Hell even Ytterby a Swedish village has two elements named after it (Ytterbium and Yttrium).
A few more but by no means an exhaustive list.
Outsiders take natural resource peculiar to the planet as their own, whilst the native inhabitants are on bad terms with the outsiders.
A young male outsider gets together with the locals and impresses them. He turns against his own people, kicks arse and drives the outsiders from the planet and they can no longer harvest unobtainium.
OK I fail at the other books, the first was confusing enough.
I don't think global warming was being studied 40 years ago. I think they were seeing a different trend.
Well the problem is you are citing the popular press, this is why the uptake of the MMR vaccine hit an all time low in the UK after the Lancet study was released. The media take the stories they like and not those with the most evidence.
Global Cooling?
Paul E. Damon and Steven M. Kunen
Science (6 August 1976): Vol. 193. no. 4252, pp. 447 - 453
Greenhouse Effects due to Man-Made Perturbations of Trace Gases
W. C. Wang, Y. L. Yung, A. A. Lacis, T. Mo, and J. E. Hansen
Science (12 November 1976): Vol. 194. no. 4266, pp. 685 - 690
Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the "Greenhouse" Effect
J. S. Sawyer
Nature (1 September 1972) 39, pp. 23 - 26
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?
Wallace S. Broecker
Science (8 August 1975): Vol. 189. no. 4201, pp. 460 - 463
"Among the wind farm operators surveyed by Frontier, gearbox failures accounted for the largest amount of downtime, maintenance and loss of power production. Such failures can add up to 15 to 20 percent of the price of the turbine itself, according to Frontier."
Maintaining the wind turbine revolution
The solution a hydraulic "gearbox"? Artemis Intelligent Power.
Well the best way to raise your child to be a "cynical" atheist is to send them to a Catholic school!
Disclaimer - I went to a Catholic school
P.S. Almost all of the teaching was the same as a state school other than compulsory religious studies and links to local churches and a friary.
Well they are probably concerned with piracy but we all know this system is unlikely to stop it. There is a 2nd benefit for the publisher at the detriment of the consumer. From Ubisoft.
Can I resell my game?
Not at this time.
Can I say, FAIL?
I agree but this is not where the money is, but the volume. As chip foundries are so expensive and updated every few years the money needs to keep flowing. AMD is making much less profit on many of their chips then Intel are. I believe that this is a tactic of Intel where they take the more profitable higher end chip market relying on their brand, performance and marketing, whilst leaving the less profitable portion for AMD.
This way Intel can have a competitor and not seem a monopoly while still controlling the market and making all the money.
Humans nearly went extinct during the nuclear missile crisis
In that event, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts. The radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
There is even a simulation for this!
You're really not getting this. Cows don't eat corn, they eat grass. This is why in most of the world, cows are fed on grass or grass-like feed (hay, silage etc)
Really how do you explain this? "About 60% of the world's pasture land is covered by grazing systems.Grazing systems supply approximately 9 percent of the world's production of beef, according to Food and Agriculture Organization FAO statistics."
Well corn is the usual feed used to fatten the cows in a short time, 60% of the corn in the US is used to feed livestock.
A lot of the world's livestock is not on marginal land which can not be used for crop production, this is especially true for cattle as they do not fare well in mountainous or boggy ground.
If all the food waste which was unfit for human consumption was used to make compost it would be even more efficient that feeding it to livestock. According to this pro beef site it takes 2.6 lbs of grain for one pound of beef. So even taken propaganda from the other side crops are at least twice as efficient. This figure assumes most of the diet is from grass. Looking at land usage it says one acre can produce 9250 lbs of corn or 3661 lbs of beef. The acreage figure does not include the amount used to grow the grain to feed the cow though.
It is beyond doubt that we have such a love for milk, eggs and meat that we greatly reduce our farming efficiency. Of course the most efficient system does include animals but at a much lower intensity that we have.
And IE 7 and IE 8. Therefore we should go back to IE 5.5 it's more secure.
It's easy but doesn't work. Even if I hydrate myself with 10 pints of beer I still get a hang over.
I'm not sure what the intent of this post is but it is very relevant to point out that France helped the USA in both of these wars against the British.
See Halton Arp's observations of the redshifts and angular correlations of quasars. Since he started this work, it has been corroborated by a vast body of additional observations. A good overview is given in his book [amazon.com] "Seeing Red".
And an even greater body of evidence against or possibly for? The point is that science which is contentious is at the limit of our understanding. To say that Dr Halton Arp's observations falsify the big bang is almost absurd. That is because there are many lines of evidence for the big bang. Yet despite this it is still not certain and maybe a better theory will come about.
In discussions like this, a considered opinion would present both sides, weigh the evidence and possibly come down on the side which seems most likely. In the debates on the Internet and in the media we get one side and then the other simply shouting the other is wrong.
Global Cooling?
Paul E. Damon and Steven M. Kunen
Science 6 August 1976: Vol. 193. no. 4252, pp. 447 - 453
Greenhouse Effects due to Man-Made Perturbations of Trace Gases
W. C. Wang, Y. L. Yung, A. A. Lacis, T. Mo, and J. E. Hansen
Science 12 November 1976: Vol. 194. no. 4266, pp. 685 - 690
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?
Wallace S. Broecker
Science 8 August 1975: Vol. 189. no. 4201, pp. 460 - 463
Opps I think I picked the wrong selection of citations.