this time around. I have a physics prof who's part of the project. Part of our lecture on superconductivity was dedicated to the catastrophic malfunction. There's nothing that conveys the epic nature of the failure like technical language.
According to my professor, they were in too much of a rush to get the thing started they didn't fully test the whole thing. One of the superconducting junctions quenched (transitioned from superconductive to non-superconductive states due to the 7-8 Tesla magnetic field), necessitating the dispersal of IIRC 1500 A of current. This turned insulating copper into plasma which breached the chamber wall and caused the explosive vaporization of 2 tons of liquid helium into the accelerating chamber.
Long story short, it's a very large, complicated, and expensive machine. They'd better sure everything works this time.
You make a good point. However, I meant that getting useful input is more difficult than getting useful output. It's possible to tell someone to think of clicking a mouse, measure and store the brain patterns, and then program a computer to recognize those patterns as a click. Any inconsistency can be corrected by the user, who should be able to train themselves to recreate the "click" thought.
Now compare that with the ability to implant an image into someone's mind. Achieving that requires a far deeper understanding of not just the brain, but the particular brain of the subject.
A: I never use my brain implant without cerebellumfox-noscript-adblock plus.
B: But advertising revenue is what pays for all that content that streams into your mind! And mining your memories is what helps marketers know what to sell to you!
A: I was fine when they had simple relevant text advertisements, but ever since they moved to flashing banner ads in my dreams, that was too much.
A) We monetize things because money is a means of encouraging people to contribute work, though if you'd like to do your job completely free, be my guest.
B) I don't care if you hate Steven King's writing. Insert favorite author instead. The money the author makes from selling books is part of the reason they can dedicate hundreds to thousands of hours writing. I'd personally rather have someone writing popular novels rather than having me write them a welfare check.
C) Classed society is what we have. More specifically, specialization of labor. What I called the creative class are professionals who dedicate themselves to creating knowledge and art. Scientists, programmers, and engineers can fall under this category as well.
D) Congrats, you've just made a straw man. Of course you don't have a big wad of cash waiting for you at the end of your daydream because you didn't spend hours writing it into a best-selling novel, painting it into a work of art, or researching to verify in a lab. Creation is far more than conception; real work is involved.
Without copyright, we probably would still have ideas, but monetizing them would be far more difficult. Yes, I've heard the argument that musicians should make their money by doing live shows. That's an exception. Musicians are performing artists and the performance is a service. However, would you expect Steven King to make a living on performance? The truth is that we have a professional creative class because ideas are valuable. The purpose of copyright (and patents, related but different) is (or was until the rise of the evil overlords) to ensure that the professional creative class is compensated for their intellectual contributions to society.
Your requirement for proof is difficult to fulfill since there has been no point in history quite like this. The closest analogy I can think of is when composers and musicians lived off the patronage of noblemen and science was a hobby for the rich. Personally, I'd rather not see art become a hobby for those with spare money and time.
Granted, you (and a lot of/.) are right in saying that the current copyright system is bad. One of the basic premises is that the contribution of knowledge and art to the whole of society is a good thing, thus finite copyright and patent terms. The idea of copyright can be thought of as an exchange between an individual and society. Society agrees to protect the innovations of an individual for a set amount of time provided that after the interval, that innovation becomes part of society's wealth. The trouble has arisen that our evil corporate overlords have decided that they don't want to play the whole game and make society protect their work for eternity. It is in effect extorting the support of society (protection) for their sole gain. Copyright itself is not at fault. Instead the true problem is that copyright is not being honored.
The goods manufactured there are cheaper for us because they export the true cost onto the Chinese population and the environment. Those costs will catch up to them, just as they've caught up to us.
law enforcement is against bad weather because it motivates people to live in houses and that makes citizens more difficult to monitor for criminal activity.
The summary and title are incredibly misleading. The fascinating thing about this is not that they turned aluminum into a transparent state. Rather, they were able to use x-rays to remove a core electron from the Aluminum without (I presume) altering its valent electron states or its crystal structure. Practical applications seem far-off though. The state only lasted a few femtoseconds.
The article was pretty vague about how this applies to planetary cores and fusion though. I'm assuming that they believe high pressures inside planets can remove core electrons. As for fusion, I assume that they refer to the method where lasers are used to induce the reaction. In which case knowing that this happens and is effects is most likely crucial to the success of such a method of fusion generation.
For the record, I am not a nuclear physicist. Are there any/.ers with expertise who can shed more light on how this affects fusion?
This does not mean this process can be used to make transparent armor or other applications for super-strong glass. The article states that the x-rays wereï focused to a spot with a diameter smaller than a human hair's, the aluminum was transparent to ultraviolet, and the state lasted 40 femtoseconds. Details left out of the summary.
Nonetheless, this is incredibly cool. The new state of matter that is being boasted about is one where a non-valent electron is removed from atoms. Very cool.
"...can contain up to 800 hours of footage with the most atrocious content often reserved for the highest levels and can be accessed only by advanced players after hours upon hours of progressive mastery."
Gosh you know, that's what I hated about Quake 3. Your opponents only started blowing up into bits after you played the game to the final tier. And in Gears of War, the lancer chainsaw was actually a love belt until the final act where it became an excuse to splatter gore all over the screen.
In all seriousness, it really takes hours of gameplay to find out whether a game has material you might object to as a parent?
True, they're exercising free speech in the text of their manifesto. They have their right to that. However, while you're entitled to say what you want, how you say it is quite naturally under some limitations. For example, you are free to say that you like flowers. But if you said that by lighting houses on fire so that from the air, the flames could be read, then you'd get arrested for massive arson. Hacking into the site is clearly illegal and this group should get busted for that.
What is the Federal Government going to do with all the data that has already been collected?
Personally, I'd like to see it destroyed. That and I'd like to have a monopoly on a magical river of inflation-proof cash.
Re:Well, now we'll know.
on
Sunspots Return
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· Score: 5, Funny
There is a very strong negative correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth.
Aha! So global warming is causing the sunspots to disappear!
I think you're missing the point of GP. He or she is referring to Christians during a time when they were being persecuted, and the Catholic church was having a rough start. His point being that some people, like Paul, were faced with death for saying that Jesus was resurrected and continued to tell people and write about it. This had nothing to do with the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.
Ads will never "explain themselves" and companies will never reveal how much information they harvest from you (outside of lengthy, dull, usage terms written in Jargon.) Either case would make users skittish, and there's too much money involved for either them or congress to want to do anything about it.
As for medical and financial information, it's incredibly sensitive, yes, but having it tracked is incredibly convenient for both lay people and companies (if inconvenient for the IT staff who have to secure them.) Either way, these records have to be kept somewhere and somehow and be accessible in some way to people who need them (doctors and banks.)
The only change I see possible is improvement in the browsers. If any privacy change does occur, you can bet that it will start with either Firefox, Opera, or some non-mainstream browser, and then be eventually adopted by IE. Don't expect the end-users to know how to enable any privacy features though.
This is great they have a vaccine ready for human trials. However, I went through the article (suprise!) and it seemed absent of any details as to what mechanism the vaccine used to inhibit an HIV infection. I thought the difficulty in making a vaccine was that the virus mutated quickly and attacked the immune system, the typical tool that vaccines train to attack viruses. Does anyone have any more information on what's novel about this vaccine? (Other than it works)
Well that's why EA is planning to debut their brand-new "Mental Protection System" that will fix the problem of sales lost to people who don't want their games. Don't worry, it has no adverse side effects, should be easy to uninstall, and will be completely bug-free.
According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#History the population of Rome dropped to 20,000 after the fall of the empire. Considering that at its height, Rome had over a million residents, 20,000 people could be considered effectively abandoned.
While we're making Rome analogies, I'm kind of sad that I wouldn't live to see the Canadians move in, determined to rebuild Detroit to its former glory and make it the center of the Canadian Renaissance.
My suggestion would be to construct higher-density housing closer to the "live" portions of civilization and make it available to displaced residents. Being closer to actual living parts of the city could boost opportunities for these people, and thus reduce the crime rate.
An other issue is how to get them to move in the first place. The government does have the capacity to declare eminent domain, so that's not a challenge. The issue is that while it may be legal for the government to seize and compensate people for the current values of their property, the whole point of this idea is that their property is worth jack squat (you can buy a house for $10 in Detroit), and so you'd also need to compensate them for more than the property is worth on the market. Perhaps the extra money could be in the form of a subsidization to find an alternate place to live.
Slashdot Mirror
this time around. I have a physics prof who's part of the project. Part of our lecture on superconductivity was dedicated to the catastrophic malfunction. There's nothing that conveys the epic nature of the failure like technical language.
According to my professor, they were in too much of a rush to get the thing started they didn't fully test the whole thing. One of the superconducting junctions quenched (transitioned from superconductive to non-superconductive states due to the 7-8 Tesla magnetic field), necessitating the dispersal of IIRC 1500 A of current. This turned insulating copper into plasma which breached the chamber wall and caused the explosive vaporization of 2 tons of liquid helium into the accelerating chamber.
Long story short, it's a very large, complicated, and expensive machine. They'd better sure everything works this time.
You make a good point. However, I meant that getting useful input is more difficult than getting useful output. It's possible to tell someone to think of clicking a mouse, measure and store the brain patterns, and then program a computer to recognize those patterns as a click. Any inconsistency can be corrected by the user, who should be able to train themselves to recreate the "click" thought.
Now compare that with the ability to implant an image into someone's mind. Achieving that requires a far deeper understanding of not just the brain, but the particular brain of the subject.
A: I never use my brain implant without cerebellumfox-noscript-adblock plus.
B: But advertising revenue is what pays for all that content that streams into your mind! And mining your memories is what helps marketers know what to sell to you!
A: I was fine when they had simple relevant text advertisements, but ever since they moved to flashing banner ads in my dreams, that was too much.
The rants against Comcast would be even better.
is someone trying to figure out a way to get advertising into my mind. We all know someone is going to try.
Fortunately, feeding input directly into the brain is more difficult that reading output from it.
A) We monetize things because money is a means of encouraging people to contribute work, though if you'd like to do your job completely free, be my guest.
B) I don't care if you hate Steven King's writing. Insert favorite author instead. The money the author makes from selling books is part of the reason they can dedicate hundreds to thousands of hours writing. I'd personally rather have someone writing popular novels rather than having me write them a welfare check.
C) Classed society is what we have. More specifically, specialization of labor. What I called the creative class are professionals who dedicate themselves to creating knowledge and art. Scientists, programmers, and engineers can fall under this category as well.
D) Congrats, you've just made a straw man. Of course you don't have a big wad of cash waiting for you at the end of your daydream because you didn't spend hours writing it into a best-selling novel, painting it into a work of art, or researching to verify in a lab. Creation is far more than conception; real work is involved.
Without copyright, we probably would still have ideas, but monetizing them would be far more difficult. Yes, I've heard the argument that musicians should make their money by doing live shows. That's an exception. Musicians are performing artists and the performance is a service. However, would you expect Steven King to make a living on performance? The truth is that we have a professional creative class because ideas are valuable. The purpose of copyright (and patents, related but different) is (or was until the rise of the evil overlords) to ensure that the professional creative class is compensated for their intellectual contributions to society.
Your requirement for proof is difficult to fulfill since there has been no point in history quite like this. The closest analogy I can think of is when composers and musicians lived off the patronage of noblemen and science was a hobby for the rich. Personally, I'd rather not see art become a hobby for those with spare money and time.
Granted, you (and a lot of /.) are right in saying that the current copyright system is bad. One of the basic premises is that the contribution of knowledge and art to the whole of society is a good thing, thus finite copyright and patent terms. The idea of copyright can be thought of as an exchange between an individual and society. Society agrees to protect the innovations of an individual for a set amount of time provided that after the interval, that innovation becomes part of society's wealth. The trouble has arisen that our evil corporate overlords have decided that they don't want to play the whole game and make society protect their work for eternity. It is in effect extorting the support of society (protection) for their sole gain. Copyright itself is not at fault. Instead the true problem is that copyright is not being honored.
The goods manufactured there are cheaper for us because they export the true cost onto the Chinese population and the environment. Those costs will catch up to them, just as they've caught up to us.
law enforcement is against bad weather because it motivates people to live in houses and that makes citizens more difficult to monitor for criminal activity.
"exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation."
The foul stench creeping through your nose right now is the smell of total bare-faced bullshit.
...because they're what I'm going to need to pull to get into heaven.
Getting EA to give developers enough time seems to fall into the "squaring the circle with world peace" pile though.
The summary and title are incredibly misleading. The fascinating thing about this is not that they turned aluminum into a transparent state. Rather, they were able to use x-rays to remove a core electron from the Aluminum without (I presume) altering its valent electron states or its crystal structure. Practical applications seem far-off though. The state only lasted a few femtoseconds.
The article was pretty vague about how this applies to planetary cores and fusion though. I'm assuming that they believe high pressures inside planets can remove core electrons. As for fusion, I assume that they refer to the method where lasers are used to induce the reaction. In which case knowing that this happens and is effects is most likely crucial to the success of such a method of fusion generation.
For the record, I am not a nuclear physicist. Are there any /.ers with expertise who can shed more light on how this affects fusion?
This does not mean this process can be used to make transparent armor or other applications for super-strong glass. The article states that the x-rays wereï focused to a spot with a diameter smaller than a human hair's, the aluminum was transparent to ultraviolet, and the state lasted 40 femtoseconds. Details left out of the summary.
Nonetheless, this is incredibly cool. The new state of matter that is being boasted about is one where a non-valent electron is removed from atoms. Very cool.
"...can contain up to 800 hours of footage with the most atrocious content often reserved for the highest levels and can be accessed only by advanced players after hours upon hours of progressive mastery."
Gosh you know, that's what I hated about Quake 3. Your opponents only started blowing up into bits after you played the game to the final tier. And in Gears of War, the lancer chainsaw was actually a love belt until the final act where it became an excuse to splatter gore all over the screen.
In all seriousness, it really takes hours of gameplay to find out whether a game has material you might object to as a parent?
True, they're exercising free speech in the text of their manifesto. They have their right to that. However, while you're entitled to say what you want, how you say it is quite naturally under some limitations. For example, you are free to say that you like flowers. But if you said that by lighting houses on fire so that from the air, the flames could be read, then you'd get arrested for massive arson. Hacking into the site is clearly illegal and this group should get busted for that.
What is the Federal Government going to do with all the data that has already been collected? Personally, I'd like to see it destroyed. That and I'd like to have a monopoly on a magical river of inflation-proof cash.
There is a very strong negative correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth.
Aha! So global warming is causing the sunspots to disappear!
I think you're missing the point of GP. He or she is referring to Christians during a time when they were being persecuted, and the Catholic church was having a rough start. His point being that some people, like Paul, were faced with death for saying that Jesus was resurrected and continued to tell people and write about it. This had nothing to do with the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.
Ads will never "explain themselves" and companies will never reveal how much information they harvest from you (outside of lengthy, dull, usage terms written in Jargon.) Either case would make users skittish, and there's too much money involved for either them or congress to want to do anything about it.
As for medical and financial information, it's incredibly sensitive, yes, but having it tracked is incredibly convenient for both lay people and companies (if inconvenient for the IT staff who have to secure them.) Either way, these records have to be kept somewhere and somehow and be accessible in some way to people who need them (doctors and banks.)
The only change I see possible is improvement in the browsers. If any privacy change does occur, you can bet that it will start with either Firefox, Opera, or some non-mainstream browser, and then be eventually adopted by IE. Don't expect the end-users to know how to enable any privacy features though.
This is great they have a vaccine ready for human trials. However, I went through the article (suprise!) and it seemed absent of any details as to what mechanism the vaccine used to inhibit an HIV infection. I thought the difficulty in making a vaccine was that the virus mutated quickly and attacked the immune system, the typical tool that vaccines train to attack viruses. Does anyone have any more information on what's novel about this vaccine? (Other than it works)
Well that's why EA is planning to debut their brand-new "Mental Protection System" that will fix the problem of sales lost to people who don't want their games. Don't worry, it has no adverse side effects, should be easy to uninstall, and will be completely bug-free.
saying "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," and expect the automatic stamp of +5 insightful on this story can I.
According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#History the population of Rome dropped to 20,000 after the fall of the empire. Considering that at its height, Rome had over a million residents, 20,000 people could be considered effectively abandoned.
While we're making Rome analogies, I'm kind of sad that I wouldn't live to see the Canadians move in, determined to rebuild Detroit to its former glory and make it the center of the Canadian Renaissance.
Incredibly insightful post from the parent.
My suggestion would be to construct higher-density housing closer to the "live" portions of civilization and make it available to displaced residents. Being closer to actual living parts of the city could boost opportunities for these people, and thus reduce the crime rate.
An other issue is how to get them to move in the first place. The government does have the capacity to declare eminent domain, so that's not a challenge. The issue is that while it may be legal for the government to seize and compensate people for the current values of their property, the whole point of this idea is that their property is worth jack squat (you can buy a house for $10 in Detroit), and so you'd also need to compensate them for more than the property is worth on the market. Perhaps the extra money could be in the form of a subsidization to find an alternate place to live.