Considering movement is relative, the momentum and vector of motion of the Earth does not matter. You want to compare your time dilation to the Earth's, you don't need more than those two frames of reference.
Obviously, there's the problem that the Earth is not an inertial frame of reference (since it is accelerated), and that likewise you are not an inertial frame of reference even when assuming that the Earth is (since you are on its surface, which is spinning), so you'd need to do some fairly complex general relativity calculations to offset this, but I'm assuming this app does this very approximately.
Oh, that just leaves classical mechanics, much of calculus, much of linear algebra, some thermodynamics, some electromagnetism (I won't blame them for not thinking about Maxwell's equations, which were introduced just 8 years prior and were rather obscure in their time)... Could go on.
Nah, it's not that there wasn't a whole lot of science at the end of the XIXth century, it's just that much of the science was done after you'd get in the university. You didn't have baseline education much farther than elementary school back then (or a sort of equivalent, with languages and "humanities" being more developed usually), it was straight to university afterwards (I believe entrance age was earlier than it is now, too, but I'm not a historian). You would be expected to be able to talk, write and calculate, but not so much be half a scientific already like it is now.
I would argue that university is a lot tougher than it has been, though, what with sciences growing over time. I mean, nowadays quantum mechanics and wave-particle duality are part of the common curriculum in a physics degree, and quantum field theory is an almost obligatory passage in a Master's. Mere decades ago this would've been left to postgrads, if taught at all.
IE was forced down the throat of all Windows users. I don't see anything on a default OS forcing you to use Google and making you jump through hoops to disable that.
THAT is Wikipedia's real problem. I'm afraid it might well be the harbinger of its demise if they do not quickly sort things out. Right now adding to Wikipedia is virtually impossible.
I'm a physics undergrad; I plan on moving on to a PhD and I would personally love to add stuff to Wikipedia. It's been a very resourceful starting point for a lot of information and details on courses and I'd be happy to give back. Unfortunately, articles seem to be set in stone by now and I'm not interested in having to fight for every inch of text I'd want to add.
We might run out of uranium in a couple of millenia. Then we have thorium, another couple of millenia (and that's pessimistically low on both accounts). By then fusion or another power source (heck, why not a dyson sphere?) will have replaced baseload generation.
Solar power as it is now is not usable as a baseload source. There's this little nagging thing called "night" that goes in the way, and please don't start speaking about batteries when you whine about nuclear waste.
I don't know for others, but personally I loathe federal elections because I don't know who to vote for. THEY ALL SUCK.
I'd rather shoot myself in the face with a shotgun than vote Conservatives, they embody the very thing I want to run away from. Harper scares me shitless and if he goes full in this time, it's going to be the new dark age for Canada.
Liberals are weak, Ignatieff has no spine just like Dion previously. He's unlikeable, I still can't understand where the hell he wants to go and he's managing to get disliked by everyone even more than Dion, which I didn't think was possible. I wouldn't be surprised to see Liberals lose even more seats with him at the top.
NDP, as much as I'd like for them to be worthwhile, are really just too small. Many of their politics seem hazy and not fledged out properly. They go left and right and most of the time appear to be hugging whichever party is most aligned with them at the time. I would vote for them, but it feels like a throwaway vote. I know that people constantly say "if everybody like you voted for them, they'd get elected". Well yeah, IF. I'm well aware that won't be the case, so I'd rather support a party with more chances to stop the Conservatives.
This leaves me with the Bloc. I'll probably be leaning this way, since I'm in Quebec, but honestly it's in good part because I don't see NDP making much gains here and I don't find Liberals attractive in the slightest. Plus, I'm pretty sure the Bloc will steamroll the opposition here as it has always done. This guarantees one more seat against the Conservatives, which is better than nothing.
In an ideal world, the Liberals and Bloc (and maybe NDP) would form an alliance and get enough seats for at least a minority government this way. Of course, I'm most likely dreaming there.
But yeah, in short, this is why a lot of people are moaning about elections, at least from my point of view. If the political landscape was dynamic and interesting, there might be more reasons to be eager about elections, but right now I think it'll either be the status quo or (please no!) a Conservative majority. Neither are all that pleasing.
Chances are I'll stick with USB2/eSATA for the time being. I use USB for peripherals, which don't benefit from USB3 at all, and for thumbdrives (all USB2) which don't really need all that speed anyways. If I want to plug my external HDD, both my desktop and my laptop have eSATA ports.
In short, USB3 feels somewhat redundant. It will only take off as USB2 gets phased out, mostly because USB2 is still considered "good enough". Obviously, we might not even see USB3 gain dominance if Thunderbolt is more popular and widespread. I'm personally more interested by that than USB3.
Most of the chart measurements have times given in the description (through the year, in a day, in an hour, etc.). The accumulated dose is still an interesting metric and the comparisons are valid as they give you an idea of how small/large a Sv actually is. 0.03387 uSv/hour wouldn't have the same impact as 17 mSv in a year (pulled numbers out of my hat here, not valid calculations).
The measurements that do not have a time given are also very easy to determine (how long does it take for you to eat a banana?).
Many news reports confuse the metrics, that's true. You shouldn't lump what you've obviously not even read throughout in the same category though.
By being secretive, they're letting rumors run rampant. It will surface at some point anyways, so they should just assume that and be more transparent about it.
As it is now, I've heard of everything from 5 deaths and 20 wounded with all reactors in meltdown to nothing going on whatsoever. Uncertainty breeds fear.
No, the problem is that Rockstar made a shoddy PC port for an already relatively old game. You can't exactly see the difference if they didn't bother making any! What you're seeing is the inherent higher quality a PC can do, not an optimized game specifically for the PC. Had they actually worked on making a proper PC port with better graphics, you'd probably be rightfully amazed.
Honestly, I know people who use Linux boxes as routers. I also know of routers that can be configured to run small web servers (not just the configuration pages, mind you).
Why would there be an explanation for it? You're falling for selection bias here. The probability is absurdly small, but for the number of planets there probably are in the universe (the entire universe, not just the known one), it becomes large enough for there to be at least one candidate.
As an observer on that one candidate, obviously you'll find the chance incredibly slight for this to happen, but it doesn't change the fact that it is still just pure luck that we happen to be here.
I know they didn't make quite as much money, but the success of Sins of a Solar Empire was staggering. Reportedly selling 500,000 copies (and at least 20M$ in sales), it cost less than a million to make. This is still a very high profit ratio, yet the game is vastly more complex and deep than Angry Birds.
Yet this didn't change anything for consoles, despite the game being a PC exclusive. I seriously doubt Angry Birds will do anything either.
Mobile is the very opposite of innovative. On top of Angry Birds, you have developers like Gameloft who release strictly nothing but ripoffs of console games, so much so you wonder how the devs there can tolerate being copycats all the damn time.
Innovation has one main source: downloadable indie games (PC, then XBLA and to a lesser extent PSN).
I'm sorry but I disagree. I have never heard of XYZ band getting a few dozen friends to whine about their page deletion. Thousands of people have now heard about Old Man Murray getting its page deleted. I personally didn't know the site, but now I do. You could argue the site is even more notable than it was before.
If you want to be technical, the very fact the news has made the headlines created dozens of back links from sites like/. or RPS. That alone would be enough for notability, thus controversy brings notability but only when it is important enough (like here). Despite this, my point was about common sense. Deleting something should be given a lot of thought and any doubt should put off the deletion. I have a hard time finding good reasons for deleting anything at all (bar the obvious spam), so I'm even less inclined to find any good argument in deleting a page which was known to have at least a certain amount of importance. You can't index always determine that by the amount of sources the article has.
I wasn't trying to downplay the problem, even though we'd need more of that with how just about every journalist is making it look like it's THE major catastrophe that's happened that day. I was mainly trying to emphasize how ridiculous the media coverage is.
I just find it mind-boggling that you can cover the nuclear plant issue more than the tsunami and earthquake. I know it's a severe leak, similar to Three Mile Island but without the additional protective dome that TMI had, thus making it more worrisome. I also know that so far, experts are saying the problem is being majorly overblown. The biggest result of this will be a massive cost to clean up the radioactive waste and obviously the loss of the reactors. However, human lives and the environment are not (so far) at risk and the probabilities of that changing are small.
Then on the flip side, you have entire cities flooded, thousands of people missing, many billions in damage and the toll getting bigger each day. And what are we covering?
As an aside, I'm in full agreement with your point. Old plants like these should've been retired a long time ago and replaced by modern designs. Pebble-bed, fast breeder or (gasp!) thorium reactors would be even better, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Slashdot Mirror
Except those people you speak of would NOT have bought a 60$ game either way. They just wouldn't have gamed at all previously.
It's got rounded corners, it's black, it's rectangular, and it's a tablet.
Beat that, Apple.
DRM only benefits one party, and that's the DRM software provider.
Considering movement is relative, the momentum and vector of motion of the Earth does not matter. You want to compare your time dilation to the Earth's, you don't need more than those two frames of reference.
Obviously, there's the problem that the Earth is not an inertial frame of reference (since it is accelerated), and that likewise you are not an inertial frame of reference even when assuming that the Earth is (since you are on its surface, which is spinning), so you'd need to do some fairly complex general relativity calculations to offset this, but I'm assuming this app does this very approximately.
Let's see... 1869?
Oh, that just leaves classical mechanics, much of calculus, much of linear algebra, some thermodynamics, some electromagnetism (I won't blame them for not thinking about Maxwell's equations, which were introduced just 8 years prior and were rather obscure in their time)... Could go on.
Nah, it's not that there wasn't a whole lot of science at the end of the XIXth century, it's just that much of the science was done after you'd get in the university. You didn't have baseline education much farther than elementary school back then (or a sort of equivalent, with languages and "humanities" being more developed usually), it was straight to university afterwards (I believe entrance age was earlier than it is now, too, but I'm not a historian). You would be expected to be able to talk, write and calculate, but not so much be half a scientific already like it is now.
I would argue that university is a lot tougher than it has been, though, what with sciences growing over time. I mean, nowadays quantum mechanics and wave-particle duality are part of the common curriculum in a physics degree, and quantum field theory is an almost obligatory passage in a Master's. Mere decades ago this would've been left to postgrads, if taught at all.
!!news = news
IE was forced down the throat of all Windows users. I don't see anything on a default OS forcing you to use Google and making you jump through hoops to disable that.
Nice try anyways.
Thank god the old site is still there and works even better:
http://ca.gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before
(the ca. prefix is applicable to all Gawker sites, couldn't live without it)
THAT is Wikipedia's real problem. I'm afraid it might well be the harbinger of its demise if they do not quickly sort things out. Right now adding to Wikipedia is virtually impossible.
I'm a physics undergrad; I plan on moving on to a PhD and I would personally love to add stuff to Wikipedia. It's been a very resourceful starting point for a lot of information and details on courses and I'd be happy to give back. Unfortunately, articles seem to be set in stone by now and I'm not interested in having to fight for every inch of text I'd want to add.
Sorry guys, I know my writing's not the best, but no need to put the FBI on the case sheesh!
We might run out of uranium in a couple of millenia. Then we have thorium, another couple of millenia (and that's pessimistically low on both accounts). By then fusion or another power source (heck, why not a dyson sphere?) will have replaced baseload generation.
Solar power as it is now is not usable as a baseload source. There's this little nagging thing called "night" that goes in the way, and please don't start speaking about batteries when you whine about nuclear waste.
I don't know for others, but personally I loathe federal elections because I don't know who to vote for. THEY ALL SUCK.
I'd rather shoot myself in the face with a shotgun than vote Conservatives, they embody the very thing I want to run away from. Harper scares me shitless and if he goes full in this time, it's going to be the new dark age for Canada.
Liberals are weak, Ignatieff has no spine just like Dion previously. He's unlikeable, I still can't understand where the hell he wants to go and he's managing to get disliked by everyone even more than Dion, which I didn't think was possible. I wouldn't be surprised to see Liberals lose even more seats with him at the top.
NDP, as much as I'd like for them to be worthwhile, are really just too small. Many of their politics seem hazy and not fledged out properly. They go left and right and most of the time appear to be hugging whichever party is most aligned with them at the time. I would vote for them, but it feels like a throwaway vote. I know that people constantly say "if everybody like you voted for them, they'd get elected". Well yeah, IF. I'm well aware that won't be the case, so I'd rather support a party with more chances to stop the Conservatives.
This leaves me with the Bloc. I'll probably be leaning this way, since I'm in Quebec, but honestly it's in good part because I don't see NDP making much gains here and I don't find Liberals attractive in the slightest. Plus, I'm pretty sure the Bloc will steamroll the opposition here as it has always done. This guarantees one more seat against the Conservatives, which is better than nothing.
In an ideal world, the Liberals and Bloc (and maybe NDP) would form an alliance and get enough seats for at least a minority government this way. Of course, I'm most likely dreaming there.
But yeah, in short, this is why a lot of people are moaning about elections, at least from my point of view. If the political landscape was dynamic and interesting, there might be more reasons to be eager about elections, but right now I think it'll either be the status quo or (please no!) a Conservative majority. Neither are all that pleasing.
Chances are I'll stick with USB2/eSATA for the time being. I use USB for peripherals, which don't benefit from USB3 at all, and for thumbdrives (all USB2) which don't really need all that speed anyways. If I want to plug my external HDD, both my desktop and my laptop have eSATA ports.
In short, USB3 feels somewhat redundant. It will only take off as USB2 gets phased out, mostly because USB2 is still considered "good enough". Obviously, we might not even see USB3 gain dominance if Thunderbolt is more popular and widespread. I'm personally more interested by that than USB3.
Not really. A laptop is a superset of a tablet; everything you can do with a tablet, you can do with a laptop, while the reverse is not true.
A television and a video camera are different sets with a fairly small intersection.
Most of the chart measurements have times given in the description (through the year, in a day, in an hour, etc.). The accumulated dose is still an interesting metric and the comparisons are valid as they give you an idea of how small/large a Sv actually is. 0.03387 uSv/hour wouldn't have the same impact as 17 mSv in a year (pulled numbers out of my hat here, not valid calculations).
The measurements that do not have a time given are also very easy to determine (how long does it take for you to eat a banana?).
Many news reports confuse the metrics, that's true. You shouldn't lump what you've obviously not even read throughout in the same category though.
By being secretive, they're letting rumors run rampant. It will surface at some point anyways, so they should just assume that and be more transparent about it.
As it is now, I've heard of everything from 5 deaths and 20 wounded with all reactors in meltdown to nothing going on whatsoever. Uncertainty breeds fear.
No, the problem is that Rockstar made a shoddy PC port for an already relatively old game. You can't exactly see the difference if they didn't bother making any! What you're seeing is the inherent higher quality a PC can do, not an optimized game specifically for the PC. Had they actually worked on making a proper PC port with better graphics, you'd probably be rightfully amazed.
So servers aren't computers?
Honestly, I know people who use Linux boxes as routers. I also know of routers that can be configured to run small web servers (not just the configuration pages, mind you).
This decision is really, really weird.
Why would there be an explanation for it? You're falling for selection bias here. The probability is absurdly small, but for the number of planets there probably are in the universe (the entire universe, not just the known one), it becomes large enough for there to be at least one candidate.
As an observer on that one candidate, obviously you'll find the chance incredibly slight for this to happen, but it doesn't change the fact that it is still just pure luck that we happen to be here.
Modern nuclear reactor designs do not experience meltdown. They are designed to be passively safe.
Why don't we use them? Politics, mainly.
I know they didn't make quite as much money, but the success of Sins of a Solar Empire was staggering. Reportedly selling 500,000 copies (and at least 20M$ in sales), it cost less than a million to make. This is still a very high profit ratio, yet the game is vastly more complex and deep than Angry Birds.
Yet this didn't change anything for consoles, despite the game being a PC exclusive. I seriously doubt Angry Birds will do anything either.
Mobile is the very opposite of innovative. On top of Angry Birds, you have developers like Gameloft who release strictly nothing but ripoffs of console games, so much so you wonder how the devs there can tolerate being copycats all the damn time.
Innovation has one main source: downloadable indie games (PC, then XBLA and to a lesser extent PSN).
Complain the the manufacturer, not Microsoft. Phasing out XP for good is long overdue.
I'm sorry but I disagree. I have never heard of XYZ band getting a few dozen friends to whine about their page deletion. Thousands of people have now heard about Old Man Murray getting its page deleted. I personally didn't know the site, but now I do. You could argue the site is even more notable than it was before.
If you want to be technical, the very fact the news has made the headlines created dozens of back links from sites like /. or RPS. That alone would be enough for notability, thus controversy brings notability but only when it is important enough (like here). Despite this, my point was about common sense. Deleting something should be given a lot of thought and any doubt should put off the deletion. I have a hard time finding good reasons for deleting anything at all (bar the obvious spam), so I'm even less inclined to find any good argument in deleting a page which was known to have at least a certain amount of importance. You can't index always determine that by the amount of sources the article has.
I wasn't trying to downplay the problem, even though we'd need more of that with how just about every journalist is making it look like it's THE major catastrophe that's happened that day. I was mainly trying to emphasize how ridiculous the media coverage is.
I just find it mind-boggling that you can cover the nuclear plant issue more than the tsunami and earthquake. I know it's a severe leak, similar to Three Mile Island but without the additional protective dome that TMI had, thus making it more worrisome. I also know that so far, experts are saying the problem is being majorly overblown. The biggest result of this will be a massive cost to clean up the radioactive waste and obviously the loss of the reactors. However, human lives and the environment are not (so far) at risk and the probabilities of that changing are small.
Then on the flip side, you have entire cities flooded, thousands of people missing, many billions in damage and the toll getting bigger each day. And what are we covering?
As an aside, I'm in full agreement with your point. Old plants like these should've been retired a long time ago and replaced by modern designs. Pebble-bed, fast breeder or (gasp!) thorium reactors would be even better, but I'm not getting my hopes up.