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User: michelcolman

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  1. Re:Does it even make sense? on Measurement Shows the Electron's Stubborn Roundness (scientificamerican.com) · · Score: 1

    That linked Wikipedia page doesn't mention the word "round" anywhere. Do they mean it's a point-shaped dipole? (Which is the only occurrence of the word "shape" in that article).

    Calling it "round" brings to mind an image of little tennis balls which electrons, as far as I understood, are not.

  2. Does it even make sense? on Measurement Shows the Electron's Stubborn Roundness (scientificamerican.com) · · Score: 1

    Does it even make sense to say an electron is "round"? Roundness to me seems to be a decidedly macroscopic idea. At those small scales, all you can really say is that there's something there that has a certain effect on the surrounding particles. But it's not like you can touch it and feel its shape. You can't even tell its exact position and speed (certainly not at the same time). So what does this roundness really mean? Its fields are perfectly symmetrical, maybe?

  3. Firstly, if you are going to learn to use a keyboard, you might as well learn the one you are going to find everywhere, and not some weirdness that is mildly more efficient (VHS v Betamax).

    In other words, go with the keyboard that has more porn?

  4. So how do you tell the difference between Titan and Hubble, then? They are both satellites, after all. Also, according to some definitions, Earth is a satellite of the sun. Depends which dictionary you open.

    The word "moon" is a commonly accepted term for natural satellites orbiting planets. If you want to talk about our moon specifically, use "the Moon" with a capital M, or "Luna".

  5. Whenever a bad rumor comes out, lots of people freak out and sell. I've seen many occasions where the stock dropped 5% or more based on a rumor that later turned out to be false. Sometimes it recovers the same day after the rumor is debunked. Lots of small investors together can have a big effect on the stock price.

    Also, I think you overestimate the intelligence of the big investment houses. Lehman Brothers comes to mind...

  6. If the shorts were just making an honest bet on the downfall of the company by selling shares and waiting for the price to drop, that wouldn't be so bad. They don't limit themselves to that, though. Plenty of inaccurate and downright made up stories have been spread to push share price down so the shorts can profit. Like the yellow lines story (factory is unsafe, has no yellow lines because Elon doesn't like the color yellow... quickly debunked with an actual picture of the factory floor full of yellow lines), or the story with lots of newly produced Model 3s in a parking lot supposedly showing there are not enough buyers (never mind the multi-hundred thousand waiting list). The constant stream of negativity does affect bond interest rates. Also, a lower share price means it's harder to raise capital since you have to issue more shares to get the same amount of cash. That means it does affect operations quite a bit.

    Of course not all the negative stories are false, and there's plenty of justified criticism about the performance of the company. But some of them are really completely disconnected from reality, and I understand it can be quite infuriating when you see the share price of your company go down based on what you know to be total bollocks spread by people who are just doing this for personal profit.

    Then again, he ought to know that tweeting about them is actually helping them right now.

  7. When the first people go to Mars, they are committing themselves to staying there for at least a few years. You can't take enough fuel for a round trip. If anything happens to your life support systems, you're pretty much fucked. And you can forget about planting potatoes.

    With the moon, you can go there, test all the long term life support systems, and hop back into the rocket if it doesn't work. Very big difference. Backup systems normally work at least for a few days.

    And why wouldn't we be able to send rescue craft to the moon? In fact, the first SpaceX missions will probably be unmanned so that, when the astronauts get there, a rescue craft will already be there if they need it.

    And there's plenty of scenarios that would leave astronauts with a few weeks of survivability. Oxygen, water recycling, food supply,... On the moon, a few weeks could be enough to send a rescue rocket. On Mars, forget it. Even if you're in the middle of a launch window (which is every few years or so), it will still take many months for anything to get there.

    We already went to the moon, yes. For a few days and then back into the rocket. They didn't even get out of their space suit to change their diapers. Trying to live there for a few months is a whole different ball game. Once we have a base there, and we've proven we're able to survive there, we can think about going to Mars. One step at a time.

  8. Their plans are changing quite often. Last I heard, they would first try landing on the moon before going to Mars. Much easier, and makes a lot of sense to make sure everything is working properly.

  9. The late 2020s, they won't have to worry about uneven terrain then because they can just land at the SpaceX moon base.

  10. Re:Virtue signalling on California Has a New Law: No More All-Male Boards (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    No, what I'm saying is:

    You cannot make a law that says men are not allowed to hit their wife. You can, however, make a law that says people are not allowed hit their spouse.

  11. Re:Virtue signalling on California Has a New Law: No More All-Male Boards (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Every board must have people of both genders. There, no more sexism.

    I know, this does mean that sometimes a male candidate will have to be refused for an all male board, or a female candidate for an all female board, but at least the law treats both genders the same way.

  12. Re:Virtue signalling on California Has a New Law: No More All-Male Boards (cnn.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can try to find arguments as much as you like, and I do understand your point, but in this day and age you simply cannot make laws that apply to one sex but not the other. If you want to abolish sexism, don't use sexist laws.

  13. Re:Virtue signalling on California Has a New Law: No More All-Male Boards (cnn.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And what about companies that only have female board members? Shouldn't they be required to have at least one male board member? If there's no such requirement, this law is clearly sexist and can probably be legally challenged on that ground.

  14. Re:Gutsy move on Elon Musk Pulled Out of Settlement With SEC At Last Minute (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    That's what I thought as well. If he had hard evidence, he would have given it by now. What he showed them apparently wasn't good enough.

  15. Re: Gutsy move on Elon Musk Pulled Out of Settlement With SEC At Last Minute (cnbc.com) · · Score: 2

    And they make it harder to borrow money since a negative image results in higher interest rates (less demand for bonds).

  16. Re: Gutsy move on Elon Musk Pulled Out of Settlement With SEC At Last Minute (cnbc.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The "short sellers" have no impact on the operations of Tesla. Tesla does not depend on its stock price in any way that was created by the "short sellers".

    Actually, short sellers do make it harder to raise capital. Both through their actual selling (lower share price means having to issue more stock to raise the same amount of capital) and, more importantly, through incessant made-up rumors affecting both stock and bonds (with a higher interest rate for the latter).

    Not all the rumors are false, of course, and some of the criticism is certainly justified, but there's a whole lot of completely made up stories out there, too. "Ooh, a parking lot full of newly produced Teslas, they are obviously having trouble selling them" while in reality there's a waiting list of a few hundred thousand, for example. "Working conditions are unsafe, there are no yellow lines because Elon doesn't like the color yellow", quickly debunked with an actual picture of the factory floor with lots of yellow lines everywhere. Those are just some of the more obvious ones, but there's plenty more. That constant stream of negativity, with every debunked story being quickly succeeded by another one, does take its toll on the company's image which for a publicly traded company directly affects operations.

    I don't think Elon minds genuine criticism, or even people selling his stock short based on their honest judgement of his abitity to deliver. But people making millions by spreading false rumors, that's another matter entirely.

  17. Re:Movie quote on Gut-Brain Connection Could Lead To a 'New Sense' (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1

    You've got to love the PR spin they put on this.

    The gut communicates with the brain, boring... wait, what if we tie it to the totally unrelated "gut feeling"? Yeah, good idea, that will get us the headlines. O, and mention a sixth sense! Great, that's a front page right there!

    While all they really discovered, is that our gut has the capacity to send a message to the brain when some kind of trouble happens inside the gut. They certainly did not discover any capacity of a police detective's gut to determine who killed a murder victim.

  18. So how do quantum computers work then? They've made some with several qbits, where those qbits are interacting with each other in an actual computation. Surely there have to be some absorptions in that process?

  19. But what exactly counts as an observer? Physicists are making bigger and bigger quantum systems that delay wavefunction collapse as long as possible, for example to make quantum computers. We currently have no idea why and when exactly decoherence occurs. It might be possible to put a small Geiger counter into a superposition of states. A cat seems decidedly less likely, but where does nature draw the line?

  20. Modern hard drives and SSDs rely on quantum tunneling, which wouldn't be possible without quantum physics. And try designing a modern CPU without any knowledge of quantum physics. Good luck with that.

  21. Re:Indeed on iPhoneXsMax, Now That's a Tongue Twister (om.co) · · Score: 2, Funny

    What is it with gay people and stringing lots of consonants together anyway?

    Not that I have anything against them, I just don't get that particular fetish.

  22. You are right that keyless entry without requiring any button press is a bad idea. I don't understand the added value, why is it so hard to just put your hand into your pocket, feel for the fob, and press the button? Why does anyone want their car to automatically unlock as they are passing by? When you're standing next to your car, anyone can just open your door right away! I want my car to unlock when I tell it to unlock, not whenever I happen to be nearby.

    But if I'm not mistaken, that's an option in the Tesla settings menu anyway. So anyone with common sense can just set it to require a fob button press.

  23. I don't understand why this is so hard. I've only taken a free online cryptography 101 course, and that's all you need to solve this problem. There are pseudo-random number generators that start with a seed value (128 bits, 256 bits or more) and generate numbers that seem so random that you can mathematically prove it would take millions of years to extract the seed from a sequence of generated values, even if you intercept millions of them. By "prove", I mean that if you did manage to find an efficient method, you could break pretty much any cryptographic algorithm out there and make MUCH more money doing that rather than stealing Teslas.

    Simply let both the car and the key prove their identity by sending the next pseudo-random value in the list. The key doesn't respond if the car's code is not correct, and the car doesn't respond if the key's code is not correct.

    If the researchers can extract the seed from two intercepted messages, whoever wrote that authentication mechanism should be banned from ever writing a line of code again. He or she is simply too stupid.

    As for immediate man in the middle (intercepting the broadcast from the car, playing it back near the key, listening for the key's response, playing that back near the car), they should simply be able to check the response time. With processors running at GHz speeds, surely we can measure the number of nanoseconds it took for the fob to respond? If the owner is 30 meters away, that's a whopping 0.2 microseconds for the signal to go back and forth, not even including the delay from the relay device. That's an eternity! I know the fobs are low power, probably running at much lower speeds with high latency, but they can always start with a classic high latency response and then temporarily activate a high power low latency circuit to determine distance. The fob wouldn't need to be in this low latency mode all the time.

  24. Re:TAMPAX on NASA May Sell Corporate Naming Rights For Rockets, Spacecraft (al.com) · · Score: 1

    I can't wait for NASA rockets plastered with ads like Formula 1 cars. Red Bull, Ray Ban, Shell,... Would certainly liven them up a bit.

  25. Re: 5.1 seconds? on Mercedes Unveils First Tesla Rival In $12 Billion Attack (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    The article is wrong. Model X range is 295 miles. And Mercedes is using the old NEDC standard which gives deceivingly high numbers.