New Fortran standards don't require upper case anymore (if you can call F77 "new", of course). We don't need caps lock at all. However, the COBOL guys may be a problem (I'm really not up to date with the latest developments on that front).
imagine an fold-up full-size keyboard for the iPhone that could work in any text field
You mean, like the fold-up (almost) full-size keyboard for Palm OS devices that worked in any text field but sold almost nothing?
If you want a device with a keyboard, you get a device with a keyboard. Any external keyboard will add so much weight (and size) in your pocket that it's useless, and you end up never using it.
Yes, the magnetar was outside the tsunami's light cone by around 50000 light-years. Remember, even if the earthquake had enough energy that could propagate through vacuum, that information will only reach the magnetar in ~50 thousand years. Yeah, the earthquake probably emitted some energy in gravitational waves and gravitational waves propagate in vacuum, but a really, really small amount of energy went that way; and you can safely say that the amount of energy from it that will someday reach the magnetar will not be enough to crack anything on it.
That's the minimum specs. They get whatever they can above that; looks like currently, they're offering a 1.6GHz CPU (Atom, probably), 10.2' screen and 160GB HDD.
You assume they need to offer binary compatibility for different architectures; they don't. You install everything from the repositories, which will have ARM, x86/x86_64, MIPS etc versions for everything; and those versions will have been tested by the large Debian community for each architecture. All that is needed is source-code compatibility, which is usually ensured in FLOSS.
Now, WinCE is another beast. I have no idea about their plans for that; but in Linux, there is no problem with this strategy.
The chance that "nothing" (as in, no dark matter around here) would generate a signal as "big" as they saw (2 events) is 23%. If they had so many events that the chance of "nothing" generating that number of events was under 0.1% (they'd need 5 or more events on this analysis), they would be able to say the "null hypothesis", or the absence of dark matter, was proven wrong. With their current equipment, they can't do that, and now I'm sure this will be the same result when they analyse the full data set. It takes a bigger detector to detect those particles; or, they never existed at all, but then we'd need a bigger detector to know that anyway.
If you read CDMS's paper or watch the talks, you'll see that they never said that "there's a 77% chance we are completely correct" or anything like that. All they said (and all they can say with their data) is that, assuming that DM doesn't exist, the probability for the background alone to generate two events is 23%. Or: their result is compatible with a "Dark Matter doesn't exist" hypothesis, within a bit more than one standard deviation; that means their result is absolutely compatible with the absence of dark matter. We could say they had seen a "hint" of DM if they'd seen three events; they would have detected DM if they had seen 5 or more events, because the chance of a background fluctuation to generate five events is below one in one thousand; then other experiments would try to detect it in other ways, to confirm the discovery.
Don't mistake "scientific" journalists for scientists. If you want the facts, go for them, and you'll see MUCH less hype than what you read in the interwebs.
They never said that "it's only 77% or so likely to be a positive signal", or that "the chances that the signals they detected were caused by something other than 'neutralino' dark matter particles was 23 percent". What they said is that there is a 23% chance that, in the total absence of DM particles, the background would generate those two events they found. Or: If they did the same experiment, with the same exposure and analysis (and if DM doesn't exist) hundreds of times, 23% of those experiments would show two or more events.
The chance that you flip a coin three times and get the same side up all three times is 25%, if the coin is honest. This doesn't mean that if you flip a coin three times and get the same side up three times, there is a 75% chance that the coin is not honest.
Going a bit deeper in the statistics, the probability that A happens with the hypothesis B is NOT the same as the probability that hypothesis B is true given that A happened. To "flip" those 23% probability that the background gives you 2 events to a probability that the two events events are caused by the background, you need to apply Bayes' theorem. You can only do that if you use, as prior knowledge, the probability that a dark matter particle exists. This prior can't be defined precisely by anyone, each physicist would give you a different value; so you can't apply Bayes' theorem here without being heavily biased.
What you can infer is that there is a pretty good chance that this was just a background fluctuation, specially since their previous results had zero events (with a similar background expectation). The REAL point that physicists got from the talk was that CDMS reached its limit, and has to be upgraded to SuperCDMS to stay relevant.
Actually you can, but then the "virtual machine" is called an "emulator". With qemu you can install ARM Linux on a VM running on Windows x86_64. The performance is abysmal, though.
2*2 form Mizar, and 2 form Alcor; all six stars are gravitationally bound, and to the (untrained) naked eye look like a single star. So, the whole system is sextuplet.
If the values you're working with are of the order of one, then yes: 3x10^614 would, for all accounts and purposes, be infinite. But if you're working with values of the order of 10^1000, then 3x10^614 would be pretty much zero.
One of the smartest physicists who has never been awarded a Nobel prize I've ever known used to say that "big", "small", "near", "far", etc are meaningless words if used by themselves. They have only meaning when youput them in context; 3x10^614 is big compared to one, but small compared to 10^1000, just like the Sun is very close to us compared to the nearest quasars, but very far away compared to the nearest cloud.
First of all, I work with cosmic rays. You don't need to tell me that there is science to be made with Hi-Res, Auger, IceCube, etc. But that's not the point.
You can't observe a CR collision in the same way that you can observe a collider collision. In a UHECR experiment, you just measure events, hoping to reconstruct the energy, direction and type of primary with some accuracy. You can't identify the exact reaction that happened: all you can see is a bunch of photons, muons, neutrinos and electrons. All hadronic interactions yield that, given a "long" time to develop. If the Higgs, or any new physics, is formed on any CR interaction, the fingerprint of that interaction is lost long before we can see it.
The money is spent on the LHC (and the Tevatron before, and the ILC after) because it's the only way to examine closely the results of an interaction, trace the particles and find out what happened. If you wanted to do that with UHECRs, good luck. You would need a lot of that, and time, and money. In a collider, you know exactly the energy of each particle, its direction, the position of the interaction, etc; you can observe the collision completely. Important science is done in both types of experiments; but that doesn't mean we should dump one, just because the other is doing well.
The LHC accelerates a huge bunch of particles (around 3x10^10 particles per bunch during the physics run) in each direction, and records their collisions. UHECRs come to the Earth at a rate of around one particle per square kilometer, per century. There is ~1000 times more energy in a single LHC bunch than on a single UHECR, and more energy running on it at a given moment than the whole UHECR flux on the planet.
Also, you can't observe UHECR collisions. You don't know where they will collide in the atmosphere to put your ATLAS/CMS in position; and even if you could do so, recording a few events per year would be useless to do particle physics. We need a lot of events to be able to work statistically on them.
The fact that it's for sale has nothing to do with whether it works or not. See FIFA/Pro Evolution Soccer for the Wii for a great example of games whose control systems don't work despite being released.
Yes, but they seem to ignore a simple fact: quantity != quality. You can have 21000 games, but only three or four worth playing; this low signal-to-noise ratio is a problem for the DS, and a much bigger one for the iPhone/iPod. Besides, the lack of a conventional input system makes some types of games much less attractive. Imagine FIFA on the iPhone, for example.
The iPhone, like all phones, is an alternative casual gaming platform. It's not in the same market as the PSP, or even the DS; just like the Wii didn't stop PS3 or Xbox360 sales. It brings more diversity, but doesn't make a "war" with the other, traditional platforms.
Just install the alternative MSN handler, developed by someone who apparently was the main MSN developer for Gaim ages ago; then change the protocol from MSN to WLM. It's working fine for me under Gentoo and Adium/OS X.
A non-falsifiable theory isn't wrong, but it's useless. I could say that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the whole universe out of meatballs and tricked us into believing in a big bang. Being all-powerful and much more intelligent than us, he's able to force every observation to lead to a result predicted by the Big Bang cosmology, while keeping himself undetected. Now, can you prove my theory wrong? No, you can't. Does this mean my theory is valid?
String theory works in the same way. It can't be tested, and it allows for so many different phenomenologies that you can easily "fit" any results inside it (and if it doesn't, just call for an "M" theory, add one dimension or two, and problem solved). It makes no testable predictions, at least for current experiments and for those that could be reasonably build over this century. Is it possible that it's right? Yes, of course. But on the same sense as the FSM-meatballs theory: you can't possibly say it's wrong. That's not science.
Besides, it would only turn the contest from "who is the fastest/stronger/best" to "who can afford the best dope". Or does anyone really expect that hard working athletes from Zimbabwe would be able to squeeze out a medal when every American, Japanese, British, Chinese etc has access to stuff that costs more per dose than his yearly earnings?
Actually, in my experience the package management in OpenSuse 11 has been much faster than in Ubuntu. Haven't had problems either, at least since the end of the beta (when the update-checker always reported a lock on the database and was unable to do anything). Now, unlike Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu), the update-checker actually updates the local repositories and you don't have to re-check them when upgrading your system; it even runs the upgrade itself, resting on the system tray. People who complain about Suse's package management should definitely give 11.0 a try.
By your logic, Hitler was a liberal. He was for a change of the national mindset from the very low national esteem from after the Versailles pact to a stronger sense of nationalism and a stronger belief in the might of the german people
Yes, Godwin's law, but the point is that "change" can be any change, in any direction. Another example: if the liberals wanted "equal rights" and have got that to become the status quo, then the old conservatives (who oppose equal rights) become liberals, in your definition!
Liberalism is an ideology whose values come from the belief in the fundamental right for liberty, as in "freedom of every individual to act under his will and not under any form of coercion". I really find it amusing that in the USA the meaning of this word has been forgotten, and it's used as in "liberal = the damned communist who wants to kill our babies and give all our money to the poor".
Remember that the boards are using an ultra-fast and ultra-power-hungry HD.
Imagine that the HD uses 20W during the test. If the Atom takes 120s to complete it, that's 240 joules of the total that come from the HD; if the Nano takes 60s, that's 120 joules from the HD. My point is that, if you use a low power device, both lines would go down by the same amount, so the integral for the Atom would go down by more than the one for the Nano. This effect could be big enough to make the Atom more attractive.
Unfortunately, they decided to use a power hog to test the energy use of low power systems, making their test very flawed and, therefore, unreliable. I'll wait for a better test before making any conclusion.
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New Fortran standards don't require upper case anymore (if you can call F77 "new", of course). We don't need caps lock at all. However, the COBOL guys may be a problem (I'm really not up to date with the latest developments on that front).
imagine an fold-up full-size keyboard for the iPhone that could work in any text field
You mean, like the fold-up (almost) full-size keyboard for Palm OS devices that worked in any text field but sold almost nothing?
If you want a device with a keyboard, you get a device with a keyboard. Any external keyboard will add so much weight (and size) in your pocket that it's useless, and you end up never using it.
If you have nothing, you can afford nothing, and you buy nothing.
4D? As in, the images change not only with width, height and depth, but also with time? That's genius! Why hasn't anyone thought about this?!
The Pro Evolution Soccer series is pretty successful, at least enough for Konami to launch a new game every year.
Yes, the magnetar was outside the tsunami's light cone by around 50000 light-years. Remember, even if the earthquake had enough energy that could propagate through vacuum, that information will only reach the magnetar in ~50 thousand years. Yeah, the earthquake probably emitted some energy in gravitational waves and gravitational waves propagate in vacuum, but a really, really small amount of energy went that way; and you can safely say that the amount of energy from it that will someday reach the magnetar will not be enough to crack anything on it.
That's the minimum specs. They get whatever they can above that; looks like currently, they're offering a 1.6GHz CPU (Atom, probably), 10.2' screen and 160GB HDD.
You assume they need to offer binary compatibility for different architectures; they don't. You install everything from the repositories, which will have ARM, x86/x86_64, MIPS etc versions for everything; and those versions will have been tested by the large Debian community for each architecture. All that is needed is source-code compatibility, which is usually ensured in FLOSS.
Now, WinCE is another beast. I have no idea about their plans for that; but in Linux, there is no problem with this strategy.
The chance that "nothing" (as in, no dark matter around here) would generate a signal as "big" as they saw (2 events) is 23%. If they had so many events that the chance of "nothing" generating that number of events was under 0.1% (they'd need 5 or more events on this analysis), they would be able to say the "null hypothesis", or the absence of dark matter, was proven wrong. With their current equipment, they can't do that, and now I'm sure this will be the same result when they analyse the full data set. It takes a bigger detector to detect those particles; or, they never existed at all, but then we'd need a bigger detector to know that anyway.
If you read CDMS's paper or watch the talks, you'll see that they never said that "there's a 77% chance we are completely correct" or anything like that. All they said (and all they can say with their data) is that, assuming that DM doesn't exist, the probability for the background alone to generate two events is 23%. Or: their result is compatible with a "Dark Matter doesn't exist" hypothesis, within a bit more than one standard deviation; that means their result is absolutely compatible with the absence of dark matter. We could say they had seen a "hint" of DM if they'd seen three events; they would have detected DM if they had seen 5 or more events, because the chance of a background fluctuation to generate five events is below one in one thousand; then other experiments would try to detect it in other ways, to confirm the discovery.
Don't mistake "scientific" journalists for scientists. If you want the facts, go for them, and you'll see MUCH less hype than what you read in the interwebs.
They never said that "it's only 77% or so likely to be a positive signal", or that "the chances that the signals they detected were caused by something other than 'neutralino' dark matter particles was 23 percent". What they said is that there is a 23% chance that, in the total absence of DM particles, the background would generate those two events they found. Or: If they did the same experiment, with the same exposure and analysis (and if DM doesn't exist) hundreds of times, 23% of those experiments would show two or more events.
The chance that you flip a coin three times and get the same side up all three times is 25%, if the coin is honest. This doesn't mean that if you flip a coin three times and get the same side up three times, there is a 75% chance that the coin is not honest.
Going a bit deeper in the statistics, the probability that A happens with the hypothesis B is NOT the same as the probability that hypothesis B is true given that A happened. To "flip" those 23% probability that the background gives you 2 events to a probability that the two events events are caused by the background, you need to apply Bayes' theorem. You can only do that if you use, as prior knowledge, the probability that a dark matter particle exists. This prior can't be defined precisely by anyone, each physicist would give you a different value; so you can't apply Bayes' theorem here without being heavily biased.
What you can infer is that there is a pretty good chance that this was just a background fluctuation, specially since their previous results had zero events (with a similar background expectation). The REAL point that physicists got from the talk was that CDMS reached its limit, and has to be upgraded to SuperCDMS to stay relevant.
Actually you can, but then the "virtual machine" is called an "emulator". With qemu you can install ARM Linux on a VM running on Windows x86_64. The performance is abysmal, though.
2*2 form Mizar, and 2 form Alcor; all six stars are gravitationally bound, and to the (untrained) naked eye look like a single star. So, the whole system is sextuplet.
If the values you're working with are of the order of one, then yes: 3x10^614 would, for all accounts and purposes, be infinite. But if you're working with values of the order of 10^1000, then 3x10^614 would be pretty much zero.
One of the smartest physicists who has never been awarded a Nobel prize I've ever known used to say that "big", "small", "near", "far", etc are meaningless words if used by themselves. They have only meaning when youput them in context; 3x10^614 is big compared to one, but small compared to 10^1000, just like the Sun is very close to us compared to the nearest quasars, but very far away compared to the nearest cloud.
First of all, I work with cosmic rays. You don't need to tell me that there is science to be made with Hi-Res, Auger, IceCube, etc. But that's not the point.
You can't observe a CR collision in the same way that you can observe a collider collision. In a UHECR experiment, you just measure events, hoping to reconstruct the energy, direction and type of primary with some accuracy. You can't identify the exact reaction that happened: all you can see is a bunch of photons, muons, neutrinos and electrons. All hadronic interactions yield that, given a "long" time to develop. If the Higgs, or any new physics, is formed on any CR interaction, the fingerprint of that interaction is lost long before we can see it.
The money is spent on the LHC (and the Tevatron before, and the ILC after) because it's the only way to examine closely the results of an interaction, trace the particles and find out what happened. If you wanted to do that with UHECRs, good luck. You would need a lot of that, and time, and money. In a collider, you know exactly the energy of each particle, its direction, the position of the interaction, etc; you can observe the collision completely. Important science is done in both types of experiments; but that doesn't mean we should dump one, just because the other is doing well.
The LHC accelerates a huge bunch of particles (around 3x10^10 particles per bunch during the physics run) in each direction, and records their collisions. UHECRs come to the Earth at a rate of around one particle per square kilometer, per century. There is ~1000 times more energy in a single LHC bunch than on a single UHECR, and more energy running on it at a given moment than the whole UHECR flux on the planet.
Also, you can't observe UHECR collisions. You don't know where they will collide in the atmosphere to put your ATLAS/CMS in position; and even if you could do so, recording a few events per year would be useless to do particle physics. We need a lot of events to be able to work statistically on them.
The fact that it's for sale has nothing to do with whether it works or not. See FIFA/Pro Evolution Soccer for the Wii for a great example of games whose control systems don't work despite being released.
Yes, but they seem to ignore a simple fact: quantity != quality. You can have 21000 games, but only three or four worth playing; this low signal-to-noise ratio is a problem for the DS, and a much bigger one for the iPhone/iPod. Besides, the lack of a conventional input system makes some types of games much less attractive. Imagine FIFA on the iPhone, for example. The iPhone, like all phones, is an alternative casual gaming platform. It's not in the same market as the PSP, or even the DS; just like the Wii didn't stop PS3 or Xbox360 sales. It brings more diversity, but doesn't make a "war" with the other, traditional platforms.
Just install the alternative MSN handler, developed by someone who apparently was the main MSN developer for Gaim ages ago; then change the protocol from MSN to WLM. It's working fine for me under Gentoo and Adium/OS X.
s/lossless/lossy/g. Or do you really believe JPEG is lossless?
String theory works in the same way. It can't be tested, and it allows for so many different phenomenologies that you can easily "fit" any results inside it (and if it doesn't, just call for an "M" theory, add one dimension or two, and problem solved). It makes no testable predictions, at least for current experiments and for those that could be reasonably build over this century. Is it possible that it's right? Yes, of course. But on the same sense as the FSM-meatballs theory: you can't possibly say it's wrong. That's not science.
Besides, it would only turn the contest from "who is the fastest/stronger/best" to "who can afford the best dope". Or does anyone really expect that hard working athletes from Zimbabwe would be able to squeeze out a medal when every American, Japanese, British, Chinese etc has access to stuff that costs more per dose than his yearly earnings?
Actually, in my experience the package management in OpenSuse 11 has been much faster than in Ubuntu. Haven't had problems either, at least since the end of the beta (when the update-checker always reported a lock on the database and was unable to do anything). Now, unlike Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu), the update-checker actually updates the local repositories and you don't have to re-check them when upgrading your system; it even runs the upgrade itself, resting on the system tray. People who complain about Suse's package management should definitely give 11.0 a try.
By your logic, Hitler was a liberal. He was for a change of the national mindset from the very low national esteem from after the Versailles pact to a stronger sense of nationalism and a stronger belief in the might of the german people
Yes, Godwin's law, but the point is that "change" can be any change, in any direction. Another example: if the liberals wanted "equal rights" and have got that to become the status quo, then the old conservatives (who oppose equal rights) become liberals, in your definition!
Liberalism is an ideology whose values come from the belief in the fundamental right for liberty, as in "freedom of every individual to act under his will and not under any form of coercion". I really find it amusing that in the USA the meaning of this word has been forgotten, and it's used as in "liberal = the damned communist who wants to kill our babies and give all our money to the poor".
Imagine that the HD uses 20W during the test. If the Atom takes 120s to complete it, that's 240 joules of the total that come from the HD; if the Nano takes 60s, that's 120 joules from the HD. My point is that, if you use a low power device, both lines would go down by the same amount, so the integral for the Atom would go down by more than the one for the Nano. This effect could be big enough to make the Atom more attractive.
Unfortunately, they decided to use a power hog to test the energy use of low power systems, making their test very flawed and, therefore, unreliable. I'll wait for a better test before making any conclusion.