I'll just comment on some of the stuff mostly unique to this post:
Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER. This is unfair. Why should someone in the northeast, where there is much less sunlight, have to pay for someone to get cheap electricity in the southwest? In fact, most of the country is not hot and sunny year round. Only the southwest. It's not like you can transmit their energy to people in the northeast. If the state of Arizona or New Mexico wants to do this, great. But it should not be federal.
Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.
Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore). You RAV4 (according to Wikipedia) can do 80-120 miles on a charge. That's nothing. That's not enough to commute for many people if there's nowhere to charge at work. And as for longer trips? 80 miles is just over an hour worth of driving. I like going places, not staying at home.
And even worse, it takes your RAV4 5 hours to charge. So what you're proposing is that I drive for 1 hour only to stop at a gas station for 5 hours.
And yes, I'm sure newer cars are better at this, but not good enough. That's why purely electric cars don't work.
Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues. How do you buy the land? Who funds this? Why coal for at night? What do you do with all the excess energy during the day?
A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. At least in NY, this is required. When you use power off the grid, the meter rolls up. When you give power back to the grid, the meter rolls down.
Your ideas, while perfect in an ideal world, do not work in the real world. Maybe in 30 years we'll have the battery technology to pull of good electric cars. Not right now.
Well, Verizon has already publicly stated that they will open up their network to any device that passes their network tests (which are theoretically defined as causes no interference and properly talks to our towers). Supposedly it costs a bit of money, but if Google wanted to get their devices approved, it would probably be pretty easy for them.
The fact of the matter is that Verizon has no serious issue with opening up access because it can save them money. Right now Verizon provides all technical support for every phone they sell. They would much rather dump that on Google or Motorola or whomever else. Verizon has basically decided that most consumers will buy the same phones that they buy now, while the people who are interested in an open phone probably won't be buying ringtones and applications from them anyway. As it is, its not that hard to re-enable a lot of "open" features on many of VZW's phones. I certainly don't pay to transfer pictures or upload ringtones.
So basically, opening up access is a good PR move and gets rid of having to support the people who don't buy a new ringtone every month. Sounds like a win-win situation for Verizon.
A government institution, to be precise, and the locals were using government computers, government media (CDR's) and various other resources to pirate everything from Windows to Games for Windows Another example of government "honesty" and examples of justice. Piracy reigned, and when notified, my "superiors" felt offended that I did not remove the offending software.
And then they teach kids that "crime doesn't pay". Talk about hypocrisy. Well, to defend schools - they usually don't have the money to spend on software and even if they did, it would be better spent on other technology related stuff. As a high school student 6-10 years ago, I ended up setting up and administering (as well as working on) an set of computers dedicated to A/V production - primarily video with some animation and other stuff thrown in. We only had single copies of much of the Adobe suite because even with Academic discounts, we barely had enough money to buy those. Most of the few thousand a year spent on the program went into hardware (computers, video cameras, etc...) or consumables (tapes, DVD's, etc...). If we had software it was pirated onto all the 10 computers we had.
Was it morally right? No. None of this other students really knew (or cared). But it gave my teacher the opportunity to create an amazing place where people could learn about video production - something most people never get a chance to learn until maybe college. And I bet that Adobe made more money from people leaving the high school having used only their products than they would have ever gotten from us if we had actually paid for all those licenses. In an ideal world we would have asked for corporate sponsorship, but the bureaucracy that would've been involved in getting anything approved would've killed it all off.
On a side note, school IT people are generally unrealistic and stupid. I had the senior IT person in the (very well-funded) district promising me that he would have gigabit links from the high school I went to the central office where they would store all our data on RAID arrays. Guess what? Never happened, even 6 years later. I wisely told my teacher to ignore the guy and just keep buying cheap IDE disks. Wouldn't surprise me if he had been pirating software as well on a district-wide scale.
The primary issue the author of the article has with Wikipedia and the like is that there is no authoritative voice checking the edits. I think there's a simple solution here. A large part of Wikipedia's content is something taught in colleges. Why doesn't Wikipedia ask professors who specialize in the area in which an article is to review the article periodically. I think many professors would not have a serious issue doing this. To insure impartiality, there could either be multiple professors checking one article or a requirement for agreement between the professor and a Wikipedia editor. When a user goes to a reviewed Wikipedia page, he will have the option of either viewing the reviewed version, or the latest version. The default can be the latest reviewed version.
Is this ideal? Probably not. I'm sure it would be abused, but the abuses would probably be less than there are now. It will work especially well in the sciences. In history and other subjects open to interpretation there will be more problems, but solvable I'm sure. And I think professors are generally willing to help (and a lot do help write for Wikipedia). For articles that are not of scholarly nature I'm sure something else can be thought of (journalists maybe?).
Who will fly this? Rich people whose time is worth more than their money. Consider lawyers who make $500/hour. If you reduce a flight from 20 hours to 5 hours you just saved $7500. I'm sure that are at least 300 people/day who would take a flight like this, or one of the other long-haul flights. Remember that these people would already be flying business or first that costs around $10k (or more).
Personally, I was skeptical about the KDE 4.0 release too, initially. But given the scope and size of the project it was unavoidable and did not turn out bad at all. You should compare KDE 4.0 with Linux 2.6.0. There too, the problem of chicken (stable finished code) and egg (large userbase) caused delays which led Linus to make a release. The label '2.6.0' finally got distros to shift to the new release and accelerated stabilization.
dWe are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE. Unfortunately releasing 4.0 like this makes KDE look bad. I really doubt distributions will include it as a default option until it becomes more polished. Granted, I never used KDE much before 3.0, but IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance. No, it wasn't perfect, but it was much more polished than 4.0. The problem is that KDE did so well with the 3.5 branch that no users except for developers are going to want to switch over to something that is not as stable or as polished.
That's one of the same problems that Microsoft messed up with - how do you take something that people mostly liked (2000 and XP) and make it better? Microsoft came out with Vista (which is worse) and KDE came out with 4.0 (which is worse than 3.5 feature and polish wise). Now, in a year 4.1 and 4.2 will probably get close to the 3.5 branch, but I'm just worried that KDE's reputation might suffer in the mean time. Granted, I would rather see KDE 4.0 than Vista (at least 4.0 has a lot of very cool features that will make the desktop much better when they're actually finished), but I wish they had at least stated that 4.0 was a developer release and that users should not switch until 4.1 - it would make things much smoother in my opinion.
Alright, so who do you charge $5? Are you going to charge $5 on my cell phone because I can connect to the internet? What about businesses? Do you charge per employee or per connection? I could be downloading stuff from my business connection. How about college campuses? Do you charge for each connection or for each user? Do you make the college collect the money or does the government do it?. What about libraries? Do they pay? Or how about public wi-fi - the free and the paid variety? And how do you charge for prepaid cell phoness?
What if I have two internet connections for my house - one for business and one for work. And two cell phones. Oh, and a wifi connection for when I'm at the airport. That $25/month from what I can see.
This'll never happen just because of the rules involved.
Well, light is sort of separated. You won't feel the gravitational wave passing through you because the effect is so small and everything will be stretched along with you. However, light has no width and so when the distance between the mirrors increases, it goes out of phase with the cavity and turns up as a signal. Remember that light always travels at the same speed in vacuum, which is why this works.
Ok granted, I tend to take string and quantum theory with a grain of salt. Also, to a large extent, GR makes a lot of sense to me. What I suppose isn't making sense to me is the term used here. Looking over the math in the wikipedia article, it seems that we're looking for some kind of radiated energy, but nothing specifically in the equations seems to relate that what we're looking for is gravity. Or am I still missing something here? Its not gravity. Its a wave in space time. Consider a lake. Drop a pebble into it. You'll see waves emerging from the point of contact between the water and the pebble. Spacetime is the surface of the lake and the merger is the pebble dropping into the lake. General relativity is not a theory of gravity or even forces so much as a theory of space time.
Everything is embedded in our 4-space, including the laser light waves lying along the direction taken by the gravity wave. As the gravity wave compresses and then dilates space-time, the LIGO tube and the laser beam within it will compress and dilate in perfect synchrony. Even the human observers' heads will compress and dilate as the gravity wave passes! The number of light waves per unit length of the LIGO tube (the laser wavelength) will appear unchanged because the actual physical length of the tube will shorten and lengthen as the light waves do, and as the eyeballs of the experimenters do too. If the waves of the re-united beams were re-inforcing peak-to-peak before the gravity wave arrived, they will remain peak-to-peak as the gravity wave passes through also. This alteration in the length of the tube, or arm, of the LIGO experiment, together with the variation in the wavelength of the laser beam, will be completely undetectable for that reason. Basically, as a gravitational wave passes through a section of space time, that section will dilate and contract. To the light between the mirrors (which is not affected because light always travels at the same speed in a vacuum) there is now an additional distance to go. It may make more sense to imagine the light as a stream of photons that have zero volume and thus can't be stretched. When it hits the mirror, it will now be out of phase with the Fabry-Perot cavity and will exit, thus generating a signal on the dark port.
Also note that the effect of the gravitational wave will depend on the gauge used. Basically there's too many free variables and based on the ones that you lock down, you get a different effect (but the same result).
(If I messed this up I apologize and feel free to correct me.)
Yeah yeah, I understand that. So why haven't we ever seen one of these flying pink unicorns? Because they have almost no effect on space time. The fact that we didn't see neutrinos for a long time didn't meant hey didn't exist.
Quantum phsics already "proves" GR as wrong. We just can't articulate how.
In any case, I disagree. The wrongness of GR doesn't necessarily follow from a lack of gravity waves - We simply don't know how gravity works. It could have an underlying mechanism totally outside the scope of GR, thereby not disproving GR but requiring a small modification to it, just as GR didn't "destroy" Newtonian physics. We still use the classic kinetics laws juuuuust fine in day-to-day calculations. Instead, it extended the older work into a realm that Newton had virtually no knowledge of. I don't see why the same idea can't apply here. Quantum physics does not prove GR wrong. GR is a valid theory and will continue to be so. However, for certain circumstances (inside black holes, for example) we need both general relativity and quantum mechanics, and it is at that time that we cannot say what happens. The two theories address completely different problems and a theory like string theory is the attempt to incorporate gravity into the quantum scale.
A wrong theory is something like the ether. There is no ether. What you're saying is that QM/GR proved Newtonian mechanics wrong. That's not the case, because I can still use Newtonian mechanics for most problems.
Maybe it's just the skeptic in me, but did you just claim that it's a very clear and well understood prediction? Doesn't that imply hypothesis phase? Isn't LIGO part of the observation phase? I have a hard time swallowing the idea that it's a solid theory when we haven't even been able to create any reliable, reproducible scientific observations. There are "clear and well understood" theories and there are not clear and poorly understood theories. GR has made several correct predictions that have been tested. The same theory has also predicted gravitational waves of which there is indirect observation (merging binaries). We haven't made any direct observations but that's only a matter of time and money.
Looking at not clear and poorly understood theories, there is string theory, which has changed so many times that its not even close to the original anymore. The latest on string theory is that certain parts of it mimic what we know already, but exactly how it operates no one has any idea of. Another example is quantum gravity. Again, we have a general idea, but nothing concrete. However, just because we don't know the more correct theory doesn't mean we can't use the initial theory. Newtonian mechanics did not become wrong after QM and GR. Its just not as accurate.
Other types of waves (e.g. sound waves, energy waves etc) are composed of particles. What is a gravitational wave composed of? of gravitons? gravitons are not proven to exist. If a gravitational wave has energy (as well as momentum and angular momentum) then what kind of energy is contained in the wave? where does this energy come from? Theoretically, gravitational waves are gravitons, just as light/EM waves are photons. Gravitons have not been detected and there is no solid theory for them, but to be consisted with the rest of particle physics, they need to exist. One of the ways GWs are generated are by inspiraling binary neutron stars or black holes. As they circle each other, GWs are produced and the rotational energy of the binary is sent out in the GWs. This is not a significant effect until in the vest last stages of a merger, at which point it will cause the system to lose enough energy for the two objects to collide.
We have seen binaries losing energy in a manner consisted with GW predictions, so there is a good chance the theory of GWs is correct.
For all the people arguing over whether or not this is a failure of LIGO or not...it doesn't really say much at all. Initial LIGO (which is currently running) is more of a proof of concept sold as a viable project. But if you look at the expected rates of detection, the absolute high end for all binary sources is less than one event/year. The low end is between 4 events every 10000 years and 4 events every 100 years. The other source types are not any better.
This article basically says that because LIGO is known to not be sensitive enough to measure past a certain distance from Earth (which encompasses the Andromeda galaxy, in whose direction this burst occurred) and because no detection was seen, the burst was not caused from a source in the Andromeda Galaxy.
I suppose that after spending all this money its not a bad thing that LIGO can actually produce some useful results (though I doubt they were amazingly useful). Advanced LIGO should be able to do the job - but not for another 5-6 years. At that point, the minimum event rate is supposed to be around 1/year and we should finally get some sort of positive detection.
Personally I'm hoping Advanced LIGO does work, because otherwise all this money will have gone to waste and the field of gravitational wave astronomy will be even more damaged than it already is. The thing is, many people in astronomy who are not affiliated with LIGO are not excited by it. Maybe that interest will be rekindled when Adv LIGO actually works, since right now its more of an engineering problem than an astronomy or physics problem. More people are interested in LISA which (if it ever launches) should have many more interesting sources. Its amusing seeing LIGO people try to point out the flaws of LISA while trying to explain why LIGO doesn't work, but then maybe I'm biased since I am working on LISA (though I have worked on LIGO in the past).
Maybe it's a generational thing, but I have not shopped in a grocery store in almost my entire adult life. The last time I went into a grocery store was 1999. I get my groceries delivered to me with the click of a button. I decide what time I want my groceries, they come to my door and carry them into my kitchen. I spend almost zero time involved in groceries. While this is probably only available in big cities like the bay area, Portland, Denver and others, this is something that should be both available *and* used everywhere by almost every one. You don't still go out and butcher or milk your own cow. You don't go out and pick your own oranges. So why wheel a cart around like some sort of trained monkey in a store full of fluorescent lights and elevator music and snotty whining kids grabbing things off the shelves and throwing tantrums in the middle of the aisle? Then don't shop in traditional supermarkets. Yeah, I agree, they're annoying. But I very rarely go there. I do almost all of my shopping at Trader Joe's, the farmers markets, Whole Foods, and Costco. I doubt you can get stuff delivered from any those stores. Why do I actually take the time to shop at these places? First, quality products. I cook a lot, and I like cooking quality food. For that, you need fresh, quality ingredients. I'm not going to trust someone else to pick out the fruits, vegetables, and meats I use - I doubt they really care about the quality of the food. Second, cheap prices (for the most part). Trader Joe's has amazing products that cost very little. Costco forces you to buy in bulk, but they have very good products that are very cheap compared to most stores. In fact, oftentimes people say that some of the best foods can be found there. The farmers markets in my area (Los Angeles) have amazing deals on many fresh fruits and vegetables. I can buy 25 pounds of oranges for $10. Instead of drinking orange juice from the store, I now make fresh squeezed orange juice every day for almost the same price (just slightly higher than the sale prices of good bottled orange juice). And Whole Foods has a lot of really nice stuff that I can get at any of the other places and, while expensive, is of very high quality.
In short, if you care about what you eat, you need to find it yourself. You might not need to butcher the cow or catch the fish, but you need to be able to look at what's for same and decide if its good quality or not. I doubt what you get is any good.
What benefit is a 3cm range wireless connection? At that range you're practically pushing the devices against each other to get the antennas within 3cm.
"Oh look, the contents of my pocket have shifted around and the pairing is broken." I can definitely see benefits to this. Let's say you want to show the pictures you took of something to your family. Instead of finding a cord or trying to set up W-USB (which I assume requires authentication like bluetooth since its operates of fairly large distances) you just put the camera on the TV and everything works. Similarly, connecting a PDA or iPod or cell phone to a computer would be easy with this method. Or, your usb stick is now just a little box that you put near your computer and it just connects. I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. The benefits increase even more if you integrate wireless power charging into this.
If Sony does this right - i.e. very easy to use, automatic authentication with no/little security (the 3 cm range is itself security), power charging, and customizable (so lots of devices can use this for different things), then it might very well catch on. On the other hand, they'll probably make it impossible to license, full of DRM and "security", and not allow standard drives to be developed. And then it will fail, which might actually be bad convenience wise.
Simple way to accomplish the same means: raise the price during peak hours.
Works for cell phones, right? I actually had this in an apartment I lived in in upstate NY. The primary purpose is to heat during the night hours since this takes up a large chunk of most people's electrical usage. The apartment was supposed to be cheap to heat because of the on/off-peak meter, a water heater that turned on only at night, and ETS heaters that heated big ceramic blocks at night and let them warm the apartment during the day. However, things really don't work that well. First, once two people took showers, there was no more hot water, so you'd have to restart the hot water if you wanted to, say, run the dishwasher. Second, you needed to predict tomorrow's weather for the heaters, and there was not thermostat setting (at least not on ours - just a dial 1 to 6). If you remembered to do this and/or the temperature was the same, everything would be great. If not, you'd be left with a very hot or very cold apartment. Finally, during the summer, it helped a lot less since there was no way to cool the apartment down without running the A/C constantly.
If you actually put money in and had a big house, I'm sure there's some way to move all your heating and cooling needs to off-peak hours, but it would be expensive. Basically, you'd need something like lake-source cooling (where you use water from a nearby lake to cool down buildings and then return the water) but on a smaller scale. I know if definitely saved us some money, but I'm not really sure how much and it didn't really affect our ways of using energy.
The problem with all these super fuel efficient cars is that they're too expensive for a second car, too small for a primary car and overall, they look like toys. I'm sure its a wonderful car to drive, but it can't (for most people) be a primary car. It would be great for a trip across town to pick up groceries or to commute to work, but you need something else as well that can hold more than two people and has much more cargo space. Even a shopping trip to more than a few stores can often fill up a whole trunk in a sedan, and that car looks like it has very little cargo space. Which then brings up the next problem - if its a second car most people can't afford to spend $30k on a second car that's only for commuting. If the price ever gets down to $10-15k, I'm sure plenty of people will buy, but until then, its just not affordable.
Finally, the last point, the car looks like its flimsy and just a toy. I wonder if they've done any crash testing on it. If a minor collision completely destroys the drag profile and requires $15k in repairs then insurance is going to be astronomical for the car. How sturdy are the body panels and how easily replaceable are they? How does it do in a collision with an 18-wheeler? It's going to be hard to convince (especially) Americans that a car like that is safer on the roads than an SUV.
I wish them luck, and maybe in a few generations it will be popular, but it's going to take a lot of work.
I'm sure Microsoft will use this in their 'we support open source' campaign. (I've always reckoned Microsoft should release the code for their unsupported OS's such as Windows 3.11) This'll never happen. Even if they completely change the codebase. Think about how many bugs there are in the Windows codebase that haven't been discovered yet. Think about how many of those bugs probably pertain to the design of the code (and may well be carried over into a completely different codebase). What would happen if MS released the Windows ME codebase as open source? The 1.5% of users out there still using Windows 98/Me are probably going to be hacked in about 5 minutes and Windows 2000/XP/Vista users will follow soon afterwards.
No, much as it might help OSS projects if MS released their code, it would be a disaster security wise and even I don't want to see it happen.
The summary points out E85 as a possible alternative to gasoline that lowers emissions. From what I have read it appears that E85 is not something that will reduce emissions. Looking at Wikipedia's E85 entry and today's NY Times article, it appears that E85 will lower fuel efficiency up to 20-30% (depending on the car). From Wikipdia's Ethanol Fuel article it appears that comparing to gasoline, CO2 emissions are the same, CO emissions are lower, but more ozone is produced. I'm not sure if these numbers are for an equivalent amount of gas vs. ethanol or whether they take into account that you need more ethanol/mile.
I understand if people want to push E85 as a gasoline replacement to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But it definitely does not seem to be something that can easily lower our emissions.
ON my medical application, I coined the new word "Google-gnosis" describing the problem with people self-diagnosing based on information found on the internet, making the point that Doctors are now going to have to make more of an effort to know what information and misinformation is out there, and how Doctors are going to have to spend more time teaching people correct information to dispel popular myths that get spread around. This is case in point for me. Maybe I should bring this up in my next interview... I do the same thing. And I think doctors generally like that patients are more informed. Its a lot easier if the patient has a brain than if he/she doesn't have one. But the problem with the Internet is that there's both good information out there and bad information. The trick is for people to differentiate between good and bad. The good information is medical studies and reports of potential problems. The bad information is people saying stuff that has no scientific backing. And then on top of having to figure out what is valid information is evaluating all that information and reaching a conclusion. Anything you do to your body is risky to some extent. Eating something might cause your death from food poisoning or the like. But you need to eat. Likewise, getting vaccines could be dangerous - it could cause lots of side effects and cause your death. But you have to risk the benefits versus the potential problems. As someone who is in his 20's and healthy, I don't get the flu vaccine. I figure that if I get the flu once ever few years then my body can fight it off without too many problems. On the other hand, if I was 80, I probably would get the vaccine because my body would have a lot more problems fighting it off than it does at 25.
So the crux of the problem is not the availability of information but the lack of intelligence of most people who will believe anything they're told.
Are the advantages of having Hubble outside the atmosphere still worth the expense? I'd rather see NASA spending their money on Mars.
I thought I had heard that new ground-based telescope technology has largely made the benefits of the old Hubble obsolete. Does anyone know anything more specific on that? If we could reliably do this, you would have heard about it. Adaptive optics (AO) is great, but its primarily useful in infrared, not visible. Lucky Imaging (recently deployed at Palomar) is supposed to correct for this, but from what I understand, requires pretty long exposure times to get enough data. Its useful, but we'll have to see how it develops. AO is definitely a way to help control some of the problems with ground based telescopes, but not all. AO infrared images have about as much resolution as Hubble in visible. Lucky imaging is supposed to have more resolution, but I'm not entirely sure how successful they'll be.
Traditional libraries are long dead in a pretty significant percentage of the US. I live in a fairly large city, and it's pretty much useless for anything but the level of book one would expect high school students to need. No real database access, no journals, very little in the way of primary sources for anything. It's all novels, magazines, newspapers, "subject X for dummies", and out of date encyclopedias. The wireless access there has been useful at times, but that's about it. You don't get a good library without a public willing to put in the requisite money, and fewer and fewer people are. How many people actually want journals and technical books? You're talking about a very small portion of the population. The goal of a library is to cater to what people want - and that's mostly basic books about how to do basic things, popular fiction/nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, and basic encyclopedias. There are only two types of people who want access to journals and the like: scientists at companies and universities (who already have it as provided by their employer/school) and the few people who aren't employed in a field they want to learn about. Its not worth thousands of dollars/year/journal for a library to subscribe to even one journal when 2 people will ever read it.
If you really want access, then you have to pay up and/or take the extra time to find somewhere you can get them for free.
First, in my field (astrophysics) most articles are now e-printed or at least opened up after a few years. ApJ (Astrophysical Journal) has unrestricted access to all articles older than 3 years and all articles older than 1996 are available at a free NASA/Harvard site (ADS). So basically, unless you want the absolute latest articles (which for most things you don't need) you can get them for free (and even then usually through arxiv). And if you need the latest article then, as you said, pay the fee and buy it.
Second, if you need some kind of technical book, talk to the librarians. Most of them will try to help and you can usually get it for free (or a small fee) through an inter-library loan. It might take a few weeks, but you can definitely do it without even leaving the library.
Third, take a look at the universities near you. Most allow open access to the stacks and computers. You can spend a whole day reading a book or using the university computers to access journals without paying anything. Some even allow borrowing privileges for free or for a fee. Take a look at Columbia in New York City or UCLA.
So yes, public libraries don't have journals. They're far from dead though, because they don't serve that need. If you really want those sort of things, then you need to go out there and get access yourself.
I, as a US citizen, actually don't have that many complaints about this. I'll also state that I'm a PhD student, so I have a bias towards more science spending
1. A decent chunk of the military budget goes to science and technology development. And very often, the military does a pretty good job of giving money to promising projects that otherwise would not get any money. The computer and arpanet are only two of the very cool military funded projects. Take a look at DARPA sometime - some of the projects are rather amazing if they work out (there was an article about this some time ago). 2. The military provides a good place for many people to go after high school and keeps me out of the military. Personally, I'm opposed to mandatory military service, though I do see some of its benefits. I just know that for me, it would have interfered too much with school for me to be happy with it. In any case, joining the military gives people a chance to mature, learn skills, and make a decent living. Its not for everyone, but from what I've seen it helps a lot of people. And I have no problem paying those people to protect the US. I'd much rather that many of these people are given a good chance at a good life than roaming the streets homeless. You can claim here that its not fair that the poor are more likely to serve in the military. I'm not debating that point but am stating the benefits. 3. As a US citizen, I'm happy that the US has the best military in the world. And I recognize that this costs a lot of money. I'm also glad that we are a superpower. This does not mean I support our foreign policy, but I like the fact that the US maintains a military force like this. 4. While a large chunk of the federal budget, other countries spend more on the military as a percentage of GDP. Yes its a lot, but I personally support the spending that is in the actual budget (though, again, not the wars). Take a look at Wikipedia's page on the US military budget. Most of the money is spent on maintenance, personnel, procurement (building new weapons), and R&D. That doesn't sound too bad to me.
Seriously - class action lawsuits are utterly worthless. "Whoops we ripped you off by conspiring to raise memory prices tenfold. Here's a 2 dollar coupon that expires the day we get around to mailing it out and is only good at a single retailer in northern alaska. "
While in general I'd agree with you, with the right lawyers, enough movement behind the lawsuit, and all the planets in alignment, good things can happen. I used to think the same thing as you, until I got a new phone from Verizon Wireless after the Motorola V710 lawsuit. Basically, they had claimed Bluetooth compatibility, but all it was good for was headsets and dial up networking. People sued and verizon settled to accept the phone and all accessories they had sold you for return in exchange for a credit amount at their store (there were some other options as well). Not great, but I wanted their service anyway, so I got a brand new phone that cost less (and was better) than my original phone, a top of the line bluetooth headset, and a new case. True, they got another year long contract out of me, but I was pretty happy with how things worked out.
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And even worse, it takes your RAV4 5 hours to charge. So what you're proposing is that I drive for 1 hour only to stop at a gas station for 5 hours.
And yes, I'm sure newer cars are better at this, but not good enough. That's why purely electric cars don't work. Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues. How do you buy the land? Who funds this? Why coal for at night? What do you do with all the excess energy during the day? A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. At least in NY, this is required. When you use power off the grid, the meter rolls up. When you give power back to the grid, the meter rolls down.
Your ideas, while perfect in an ideal world, do not work in the real world. Maybe in 30 years we'll have the battery technology to pull of good electric cars. Not right now.
Well, Verizon has already publicly stated that they will open up their network to any device that passes their network tests (which are theoretically defined as causes no interference and properly talks to our towers). Supposedly it costs a bit of money, but if Google wanted to get their devices approved, it would probably be pretty easy for them.
The fact of the matter is that Verizon has no serious issue with opening up access because it can save them money. Right now Verizon provides all technical support for every phone they sell. They would much rather dump that on Google or Motorola or whomever else. Verizon has basically decided that most consumers will buy the same phones that they buy now, while the people who are interested in an open phone probably won't be buying ringtones and applications from them anyway. As it is, its not that hard to re-enable a lot of "open" features on many of VZW's phones. I certainly don't pay to transfer pictures or upload ringtones.
So basically, opening up access is a good PR move and gets rid of having to support the people who don't buy a new ringtone every month. Sounds like a win-win situation for Verizon.
And then they teach kids that "crime doesn't pay". Talk about hypocrisy. Well, to defend schools - they usually don't have the money to spend on software and even if they did, it would be better spent on other technology related stuff. As a high school student 6-10 years ago, I ended up setting up and administering (as well as working on) an set of computers dedicated to A/V production - primarily video with some animation and other stuff thrown in. We only had single copies of much of the Adobe suite because even with Academic discounts, we barely had enough money to buy those. Most of the few thousand a year spent on the program went into hardware (computers, video cameras, etc...) or consumables (tapes, DVD's, etc...). If we had software it was pirated onto all the 10 computers we had.
Was it morally right? No. None of this other students really knew (or cared). But it gave my teacher the opportunity to create an amazing place where people could learn about video production - something most people never get a chance to learn until maybe college. And I bet that Adobe made more money from people leaving the high school having used only their products than they would have ever gotten from us if we had actually paid for all those licenses. In an ideal world we would have asked for corporate sponsorship, but the bureaucracy that would've been involved in getting anything approved would've killed it all off.
On a side note, school IT people are generally unrealistic and stupid. I had the senior IT person in the (very well-funded) district promising me that he would have gigabit links from the high school I went to the central office where they would store all our data on RAID arrays. Guess what? Never happened, even 6 years later. I wisely told my teacher to ignore the guy and just keep buying cheap IDE disks. Wouldn't surprise me if he had been pirating software as well on a district-wide scale.
The primary issue the author of the article has with Wikipedia and the like is that there is no authoritative voice checking the edits. I think there's a simple solution here. A large part of Wikipedia's content is something taught in colleges. Why doesn't Wikipedia ask professors who specialize in the area in which an article is to review the article periodically. I think many professors would not have a serious issue doing this. To insure impartiality, there could either be multiple professors checking one article or a requirement for agreement between the professor and a Wikipedia editor. When a user goes to a reviewed Wikipedia page, he will have the option of either viewing the reviewed version, or the latest version. The default can be the latest reviewed version.
Is this ideal? Probably not. I'm sure it would be abused, but the abuses would probably be less than there are now. It will work especially well in the sciences. In history and other subjects open to interpretation there will be more problems, but solvable I'm sure. And I think professors are generally willing to help (and a lot do help write for Wikipedia). For articles that are not of scholarly nature I'm sure something else can be thought of (journalists maybe?).
Who will fly this? Rich people whose time is worth more than their money. Consider lawyers who make $500/hour. If you reduce a flight from 20 hours to 5 hours you just saved $7500. I'm sure that are at least 300 people/day who would take a flight like this, or one of the other long-haul flights. Remember that these people would already be flying business or first that costs around $10k (or more).
dWe are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE. Unfortunately releasing 4.0 like this makes KDE look bad. I really doubt distributions will include it as a default option until it becomes more polished. Granted, I never used KDE much before 3.0, but IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance. No, it wasn't perfect, but it was much more polished than 4.0. The problem is that KDE did so well with the 3.5 branch that no users except for developers are going to want to switch over to something that is not as stable or as polished.
That's one of the same problems that Microsoft messed up with - how do you take something that people mostly liked (2000 and XP) and make it better? Microsoft came out with Vista (which is worse) and KDE came out with 4.0 (which is worse than 3.5 feature and polish wise). Now, in a year 4.1 and 4.2 will probably get close to the 3.5 branch, but I'm just worried that KDE's reputation might suffer in the mean time. Granted, I would rather see KDE 4.0 than Vista (at least 4.0 has a lot of very cool features that will make the desktop much better when they're actually finished), but I wish they had at least stated that 4.0 was a developer release and that users should not switch until 4.1 - it would make things much smoother in my opinion.
Alright, so who do you charge $5? Are you going to charge $5 on my cell phone because I can connect to the internet? What about businesses? Do you charge per employee or per connection? I could be downloading stuff from my business connection. How about college campuses? Do you charge for each connection or for each user? Do you make the college collect the money or does the government do it?. What about libraries? Do they pay? Or how about public wi-fi - the free and the paid variety? And how do you charge for prepaid cell phoness?
What if I have two internet connections for my house - one for business and one for work. And two cell phones. Oh, and a wifi connection for when I'm at the airport. That $25/month from what I can see.
This'll never happen just because of the rules involved.
Well, light is sort of separated. You won't feel the gravitational wave passing through you because the effect is so small and everything will be stretched along with you. However, light has no width and so when the distance between the mirrors increases, it goes out of phase with the cavity and turns up as a signal. Remember that light always travels at the same speed in vacuum, which is why this works.
Also note that the effect of the gravitational wave will depend on the gauge used. Basically there's too many free variables and based on the ones that you lock down, you get a different effect (but the same result).
(If I messed this up I apologize and feel free to correct me.)
In any case, I disagree. The wrongness of GR doesn't necessarily follow from a lack of gravity waves - We simply don't
know how gravity works. It could have an underlying mechanism totally outside the scope of GR, thereby not disproving
GR but requiring a small modification to it, just as GR didn't "destroy" Newtonian physics. We still use the classic kinetics
laws juuuuust fine in day-to-day calculations. Instead, it extended the older work into a realm that Newton had virtually
no knowledge of. I don't see why the same idea can't apply here. Quantum physics does not prove GR wrong. GR is a valid theory and will continue to be so. However, for certain circumstances (inside black holes, for example) we need both general relativity and quantum mechanics, and it is at that time that we cannot say what happens. The two theories address completely different problems and a theory like string theory is the attempt to incorporate gravity into the quantum scale.
A wrong theory is something like the ether. There is no ether. What you're saying is that QM/GR proved Newtonian mechanics wrong. That's not the case, because I can still use Newtonian mechanics for most problems.
Looking at not clear and poorly understood theories, there is string theory, which has changed so many times that its not even close to the original anymore. The latest on string theory is that certain parts of it mimic what we know already, but exactly how it operates no one has any idea of. Another example is quantum gravity. Again, we have a general idea, but nothing concrete. However, just because we don't know the more correct theory doesn't mean we can't use the initial theory. Newtonian mechanics did not become wrong after QM and GR. Its just not as accurate.
We have seen binaries losing energy in a manner consisted with GW predictions, so there is a good chance the theory of GWs is correct.
For all the people arguing over whether or not this is a failure of LIGO or not...it doesn't really say much at all. Initial LIGO (which is currently running) is more of a proof of concept sold as a viable project. But if you look at the expected rates of detection, the absolute high end for all binary sources is less than one event/year. The low end is between 4 events every 10000 years and 4 events every 100 years. The other source types are not any better.
This article basically says that because LIGO is known to not be sensitive enough to measure past a certain distance from Earth (which encompasses the Andromeda galaxy, in whose direction this burst occurred) and because no detection was seen, the burst was not caused from a source in the Andromeda Galaxy.
I suppose that after spending all this money its not a bad thing that LIGO can actually produce some useful results (though I doubt they were amazingly useful). Advanced LIGO should be able to do the job - but not for another 5-6 years. At that point, the minimum event rate is supposed to be around 1/year and we should finally get some sort of positive detection.
Personally I'm hoping Advanced LIGO does work, because otherwise all this money will have gone to waste and the field of gravitational wave astronomy will be even more damaged than it already is. The thing is, many people in astronomy who are not affiliated with LIGO are not excited by it. Maybe that interest will be rekindled when Adv LIGO actually works, since right now its more of an engineering problem than an astronomy or physics problem. More people are interested in LISA which (if it ever launches) should have many more interesting sources. Its amusing seeing LIGO people try to point out the flaws of LISA while trying to explain why LIGO doesn't work, but then maybe I'm biased since I am working on LISA (though I have worked on LIGO in the past).
In short, if you care about what you eat, you need to find it yourself. You might not need to butcher the cow or catch the fish, but you need to be able to look at what's for same and decide if its good quality or not. I doubt what you get is any good.
"Oh look, the contents of my pocket have shifted around and the pairing is broken." I can definitely see benefits to this. Let's say you want to show the pictures you took of something to your family. Instead of finding a cord or trying to set up W-USB (which I assume requires authentication like bluetooth since its operates of fairly large distances) you just put the camera on the TV and everything works. Similarly, connecting a PDA or iPod or cell phone to a computer would be easy with this method. Or, your usb stick is now just a little box that you put near your computer and it just connects. I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. The benefits increase even more if you integrate wireless power charging into this.
If Sony does this right - i.e. very easy to use, automatic authentication with no/little security (the 3 cm range is itself security), power charging, and customizable (so lots of devices can use this for different things), then it might very well catch on. On the other hand, they'll probably make it impossible to license, full of DRM and "security", and not allow standard drives to be developed. And then it will fail, which might actually be bad convenience wise.
Works for cell phones, right? I actually had this in an apartment I lived in in upstate NY. The primary purpose is to heat during the night hours since this takes up a large chunk of most people's electrical usage. The apartment was supposed to be cheap to heat because of the on/off-peak meter, a water heater that turned on only at night, and ETS heaters that heated big ceramic blocks at night and let them warm the apartment during the day. However, things really don't work that well. First, once two people took showers, there was no more hot water, so you'd have to restart the hot water if you wanted to, say, run the dishwasher. Second, you needed to predict tomorrow's weather for the heaters, and there was not thermostat setting (at least not on ours - just a dial 1 to 6). If you remembered to do this and/or the temperature was the same, everything would be great. If not, you'd be left with a very hot or very cold apartment. Finally, during the summer, it helped a lot less since there was no way to cool the apartment down without running the A/C constantly.
If you actually put money in and had a big house, I'm sure there's some way to move all your heating and cooling needs to off-peak hours, but it would be expensive. Basically, you'd need something like lake-source cooling (where you use water from a nearby lake to cool down buildings and then return the water) but on a smaller scale. I know if definitely saved us some money, but I'm not really sure how much and it didn't really affect our ways of using energy.
The problem with all these super fuel efficient cars is that they're too expensive for a second car, too small for a primary car and overall, they look like toys. I'm sure its a wonderful car to drive, but it can't (for most people) be a primary car. It would be great for a trip across town to pick up groceries or to commute to work, but you need something else as well that can hold more than two people and has much more cargo space. Even a shopping trip to more than a few stores can often fill up a whole trunk in a sedan, and that car looks like it has very little cargo space. Which then brings up the next problem - if its a second car most people can't afford to spend $30k on a second car that's only for commuting. If the price ever gets down to $10-15k, I'm sure plenty of people will buy, but until then, its just not affordable.
Finally, the last point, the car looks like its flimsy and just a toy. I wonder if they've done any crash testing on it. If a minor collision completely destroys the drag profile and requires $15k in repairs then insurance is going to be astronomical for the car. How sturdy are the body panels and how easily replaceable are they? How does it do in a collision with an 18-wheeler? It's going to be hard to convince (especially) Americans that a car like that is safer on the roads than an SUV.
I wish them luck, and maybe in a few generations it will be popular, but it's going to take a lot of work.
No, much as it might help OSS projects if MS released their code, it would be a disaster security wise and even I don't want to see it happen.
The summary points out E85 as a possible alternative to gasoline that lowers emissions. From what I have read it appears that E85 is not something that will reduce emissions. Looking at Wikipedia's E85 entry and today's NY Times article, it appears that E85 will lower fuel efficiency up to 20-30% (depending on the car). From Wikipdia's Ethanol Fuel article it appears that comparing to gasoline, CO2 emissions are the same, CO emissions are lower, but more ozone is produced. I'm not sure if these numbers are for an equivalent amount of gas vs. ethanol or whether they take into account that you need more ethanol/mile.
I understand if people want to push E85 as a gasoline replacement to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But it definitely does not seem to be something that can easily lower our emissions.
So the crux of the problem is not the availability of information but the lack of intelligence of most people who will believe anything they're told.
I thought I had heard that new ground-based telescope technology has largely made the benefits of the old Hubble obsolete. Does anyone know anything more specific on that? If we could reliably do this, you would have heard about it. Adaptive optics (AO) is great, but its primarily useful in infrared, not visible. Lucky Imaging (recently deployed at Palomar) is supposed to correct for this, but from what I understand, requires pretty long exposure times to get enough data. Its useful, but we'll have to see how it develops. AO is definitely a way to help control some of the problems with ground based telescopes, but not all. AO infrared images have about as much resolution as Hubble in visible. Lucky imaging is supposed to have more resolution, but I'm not entirely sure how successful they'll be.
If you really want access, then you have to pay up and/or take the extra time to find somewhere you can get them for free.
First, in my field (astrophysics) most articles are now e-printed or at least opened up after a few years. ApJ (Astrophysical Journal) has unrestricted access to all articles older than 3 years and all articles older than 1996 are available at a free NASA/Harvard site (ADS). So basically, unless you want the absolute latest articles (which for most things you don't need) you can get them for free (and even then usually through arxiv). And if you need the latest article then, as you said, pay the fee and buy it.
Second, if you need some kind of technical book, talk to the librarians. Most of them will try to help and you can usually get it for free (or a small fee) through an inter-library loan. It might take a few weeks, but you can definitely do it without even leaving the library.
Third, take a look at the universities near you. Most allow open access to the stacks and computers. You can spend a whole day reading a book or using the university computers to access journals without paying anything. Some even allow borrowing privileges for free or for a fee. Take a look at Columbia in New York City or UCLA.
So yes, public libraries don't have journals. They're far from dead though, because they don't serve that need. If you really want those sort of things, then you need to go out there and get access yourself.
I, as a US citizen, actually don't have that many complaints about this. I'll also state that I'm a PhD student, so I have a bias towards more science spending
1. A decent chunk of the military budget goes to science and technology development. And very often, the military does a pretty good job of giving money to promising projects that otherwise would not get any money. The computer and arpanet are only two of the very cool military funded projects. Take a look at DARPA sometime - some of the projects are rather amazing if they work out (there was an article about this some time ago).
2. The military provides a good place for many people to go after high school and keeps me out of the military. Personally, I'm opposed to mandatory military service, though I do see some of its benefits. I just know that for me, it would have interfered too much with school for me to be happy with it. In any case, joining the military gives people a chance to mature, learn skills, and make a decent living. Its not for everyone, but from what I've seen it helps a lot of people. And I have no problem paying those people to protect the US. I'd much rather that many of these people are given a good chance at a good life than roaming the streets homeless. You can claim here that its not fair that the poor are more likely to serve in the military. I'm not debating that point but am stating the benefits.
3. As a US citizen, I'm happy that the US has the best military in the world. And I recognize that this costs a lot of money. I'm also glad that we are a superpower. This does not mean I support our foreign policy, but I like the fact that the US maintains a military force like this.
4. While a large chunk of the federal budget, other countries spend more on the military as a percentage of GDP. Yes its a lot, but I personally support the spending that is in the actual budget (though, again, not the wars). Take a look at Wikipedia's page on the US military budget. Most of the money is spent on maintenance, personnel, procurement (building new weapons), and R&D. That doesn't sound too bad to me.
While in general I'd agree with you, with the right lawyers, enough movement behind the lawsuit, and all the planets in alignment, good things can happen. I used to think the same thing as you, until I got a new phone from Verizon Wireless after the Motorola V710 lawsuit. Basically, they had claimed Bluetooth compatibility, but all it was good for was headsets and dial up networking. People sued and verizon settled to accept the phone and all accessories they had sold you for return in exchange for a credit amount at their store (there were some other options as well). Not great, but I wanted their service anyway, so I got a brand new phone that cost less (and was better) than my original phone, a top of the line bluetooth headset, and a new case. True, they got another year long contract out of me, but I was pretty happy with how things worked out.