I just wish some astrophysicists (or the people who quote/repeat them, not sure who's at fault) would bring humility to their ideas and realize that even after a life-time of thinking and studying they are still no different than an 18 year old just getting out of high school that doesn't know shit about shit.
I think it's more likely you don't know shit about shit. Yes, the word "know" is used loosely, but in general means "all the experimental evidence obtained so far points to this being true within some specified reasonable error margins". Whereas you don't appear even have a basic understanding of the theory being applied (by your own admission) or the experimental evidence available, and yet you feel qualified to comment on whether people "know" things or not.
And you know the temperature of the Universe at the moment of the big bang, how? You're not extrapolating anything or making assumptions about the nature of things before the things ever existed and that similar rules apply? I think you are. I think you'd be arrogant to assume you know anything about the nature of things when the Universe as we know it didn't yet exist.
I think you're being arrogant to presume you have any idea of how such a measurement or prediction is made. There are many theoretical models that describe the state of the early universe and have been verified by observations. It is not that difficult to measure the temperature of the early universe (up to a point), just look really far away. It doesn't involve any assumptions about what existed pre-Big Bang at all.
Where? In what environment and under what circumstances do we know this to be true. When? Define for me what a Minute is with no Milky Way, no Solar System, no Sun, and No Earth - the unit of measurement is meaningless. No to mention that it appears time/space/gravity/velocity are all inter-related and effect each other. 15 minutes at the speed of light is different than 15 minutes standing still.
The SI units have been defined in non-Earth centric ways for many many years now. A minute is 60 seconds where a second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. Which is the same throughout the entire the universe and to the best of our knowledge the same for all time. As for your poorly worded invocation of relativity - you clearly have no idea of how relativity actually works (or any idea what the word effect means) - it is perfectly reasonable to quote average lifetimes of particles in their rest frames, and calculate the apparent lifetime for other observers from that. And average particle speeds would have reduced to sub-relativistic levels pretty fast anyway.
As a side note, I find it interesting that every time we gaze into space, we are looking at the past. The things we observe today actually occurred a very long time ago. Which is to say, if we could see far enough in a certain direction, into the past, we might actually be able to witness the big bang occurring.
Ever heard of the cosmic microwave background, genius?
Basically the advancement in this technique is to take several incoming tributaries of data and use an optical FT method (OFDM) to encode into a single laser for transmission. Apparently the encoding/decoding is simple and low-power enough to fit on a silicon chip so this technology seems very implementable, just by upgrading the hardware on either end of existing fiber optic cables.
The BBC article with their 0.1 Libraries of Congress per second was great too;)
But one of them _underscored_ their worries, while the other _relayed_ them. Clearly two very different personalities despite their other similarities.
"the Chinese government is woefully unprepared to fend off cyber attacks on its own infrastructure."
I don't think anyone is, or even can be, prepared to fend off large-scale "cyber attacks". If there's one thing that you can rely on, its that big organizations are always several years behind on implementing new technology in a large scale. Sure, the NSA etc might be doing cutting edge security research and stuff, but how long does it take to get defences against new attacks actually implemented across the rest of the government infrastructure? And everything is networked together, so one weak link is enough...
It's the same in China, the US, and everywhere. I think the advantage in hacking is always with the hacker because of this - a determined and well-resourced attacker will nearly always find some way to get through simply because he can keep trying until he finds the one attack that was not prepared for. Just look at how easily Sony was carved open.
There's the old saying that the only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead. In a similar way I'd say the only way to keep digital systems secret from remote attackers is not to allow them near any kind of network at all. Physical isolation is the only way to offer meaningful security.
Yes. He did actually have a productive life as a white-hat hacker (he was one of the first famous Australian hackers; he was arrested and given a slap on the wrist at age 20 for breaking into telecommunications networks) and FOSS developer before becoming a media celebrity.
Assange has actually contributed many small interesting projects; IIRC he wrote nntpcache & surfraw, as well as rubberhose...
Note this is quantum information, not classical information. No-communication theorems seem to show that classical information cannot be transferred in this way.
I'm afraid quantum non-locality is old hat; entangled particles really do seem to transmit information at faster than the speed of light. Its one of the reasons that quantum theory and relativity seem incompatible, and why Einstein ended up fighting quantum theory after helping invent it.
"Legal" has two meanings - "to do with law and lawmaking", as in "These are legal papers", and also "in accordance with the law", as in "Is it legal to park here."
Actually on reflection I'm not at all correct in my explanation of why there is no constant of integration in v.
Looking at the integration by parts template: integral u*dv = u*v - integral v*du If v had a constant part c, i.e. was equal to say v(x) = w(x) + c, then integral u*dv = u*(w+c) - integral (w+c)*du = u*w +u*c - integral w*du - integral c*du = u*w +u*c - integral w*du - u*c = u*w - integral w*du i.e. any constant part cancels out and we can safely choose the antiderivative of v that has no constant part.
So I prove my own point about assuming things are trivial when they're not.
The simplest rigorous way to understand integration is to understand it as Riemann described it, as calculating the area under a curve of by partitioning it into rectangles and taking the limit as the rectangle width tends to infinitely small (but not zero!). "dx" is not something just tagged on to the end of every integral, it represents what is actually being summed over - an *infinitesimal* in x.
When you then go on to write things like dv = dx, you are then describing a relation between infinitesimals, which you have to be careful with. The key property of infinitesimals used in this fashion is that dv = (dv/dx) * dx - which seems obvious but its not, dv/dx is a well defined derivative of v w.r.t. x in Leibniz notation (not a division of dv by dx!), but dv and dx are both quantities almost but not quite zero ("infinitesimally small"), that take some serious math to define rigorously. If you write it as dv = v'(x) dx using Lagrange's notation it doesn't look so obvious, for example, but it is the same relation.
Therefore when you write dv = cos(x) dx, what you mean is that dv/dx = cos(x). Note again that this is a derivative, not a division of two quantities - it just happens that using Leibniz notation makes it *look* trivial. Therefore v = sin(x) + c by the Fundamental Rule of Calculus and you can continue your integration by parts. Usually the extra constant of integration is left out because you get one from the second integral as well, and the two can be combined into one constant.
Calculus can be deceptive at times, what looks trivial often isn't and it took a lot of work to create a sound foundation for it mathematically.
He gets the final result wrong, and many of his explanations are incoherent. He doesn't seem to have a good idea of what dx means, for example. I was expecting more than bad high-school level calculus from someone who claims they've rewritten relativity.
If you're gonna compare with RHEL, you have to compare to SLES, not openSUSE. openSUSE is the Fedora equivalent. And SLES has a similar support lifecycle to RHEL.
As an aside the community is experimenting with a long-term support version of openSUSE as well - look for project Evergreen
Article and summary are misleading... the main application is that zinc selenide cores are better than glass at longer wavelengths (so infrared lasers - like the ones the military are very keen on - become more possible). They also suggest it would enable artistic installations to do more fancy stuff with colours.
The potential bandwidth improvements over long-distance glass core fiber optic cables are not mentioned as significant, and it sounds like it would uneconomical anyway given that the manufacturing of these zinc selenide cores doesn't sound easy.
It would be pretty hard to aim a mirror to reflect a laser exactly back to where it came from. A corner cube is what you want.
Depending on the reflectivity of the mirrors used, it would absorb some energy, but a significant portion of the energy would be reflected exactly back to where it came from - the perfect laser defense.
Your point just shows how ridiculous software licenses are. Despite what vendors would have you believe, if you have a fully-functioning copy of the software on your own computer, trying to restrict what you do with it is technically and morally ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
*Sigh* go learn the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation
I like his 3.0 commit message
"Version numbers? We can increment them!"
Thankfully, Linus hasn't rewritten the kernel in VB.
Also this version has codename "Sneaky Weasel"
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
-VERSION = 2
-PATCHLEVEL = 6
-SUBLEVEL = 39
-EXTRAVERSION =
-NAME = Flesh-Eating Bats with Fangs
+VERSION = 3
+PATCHLEVEL = 0
+SUBLEVEL = 0
+EXTRAVERSION = -rc1
+NAME = Sneaky Weasel
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/3/2/247
It was the original intent at the beginning of 2.6.x anyway. Don't know how much it's still stuck to.
I just wish some astrophysicists (or the people who quote/repeat them, not sure who's at fault) would bring humility to their ideas and realize that even after a life-time of thinking and studying they are still no different than an 18 year old just getting out of high school that doesn't know shit about shit.
I think it's more likely you don't know shit about shit. Yes, the word "know" is used loosely, but in general means "all the experimental evidence obtained so far points to this being true within some specified reasonable error margins". Whereas you don't appear even have a basic understanding of the theory being applied (by your own admission) or the experimental evidence available, and yet you feel qualified to comment on whether people "know" things or not.
And you know the temperature of the Universe at the moment of the big bang, how? You're not extrapolating anything or making assumptions about the nature of things before the things ever existed and that similar rules apply? I think you are. I think you'd be arrogant to assume you know anything about the nature of things when the Universe as we know it didn't yet exist.
I think you're being arrogant to presume you have any idea of how such a measurement or prediction is made. There are many theoretical models that describe the state of the early universe and have been verified by observations. It is not that difficult to measure the temperature of the early universe (up to a point), just look really far away. It doesn't involve any assumptions about what existed pre-Big Bang at all.
Where? In what environment and under what circumstances do we know this to be true. When? Define for me what a Minute is with no Milky Way, no Solar System, no Sun, and No Earth - the unit of measurement is meaningless. No to mention that it appears time/space/gravity/velocity are all inter-related and effect each other. 15 minutes at the speed of light is different than 15 minutes standing still.
The SI units have been defined in non-Earth centric ways for many many years now. A minute is 60 seconds where a second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. Which is the same throughout the entire the universe and to the best of our knowledge the same for all time.
As for your poorly worded invocation of relativity - you clearly have no idea of how relativity actually works (or any idea what the word effect means) - it is perfectly reasonable to quote average lifetimes of particles in their rest frames, and calculate the apparent lifetime for other observers from that. And average particle speeds would have reduced to sub-relativistic levels pretty fast anyway.
As a side note, I find it interesting that every time we gaze into space, we are looking at the past. The things we observe today actually occurred a very long time ago. Which is to say, if we could see far enough in a certain direction, into the past, we might actually be able to witness the big bang occurring.
Ever heard of the cosmic microwave background, genius?
Anyway, here's the actual paper on arXiv.
odd = devel, even = stable is still true, but it's in the third digit now e.g. 2.6.37 was devel, 2.6.38 was distro-ready.
Ughh. way to gut the summary I had written.
Anyway here's the original paper in nature photonics
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.74
Basically the advancement in this technique is to take several incoming tributaries of data and use an optical FT method (OFDM) to encode into a single laser for transmission. Apparently the encoding/decoding is simple and low-power enough to fit on a silicon chip so this technology seems very implementable, just by upgrading the hardware on either end of existing fiber optic cables.
The BBC article with their 0.1 Libraries of Congress per second was great too ;)
But one of them _underscored_ their worries, while the other _relayed_ them. Clearly two very different personalities despite their other similarities.
Are you even looking at the same graph? There ain't a peak there ...
"the Chinese government is woefully unprepared to fend off cyber attacks on its own infrastructure."
I don't think anyone is, or even can be, prepared to fend off large-scale "cyber attacks". ...
If there's one thing that you can rely on, its that big organizations are always several years behind on implementing new technology in a large scale. Sure, the NSA etc might be doing cutting edge security research and stuff, but how long does it take to get defences against new attacks actually implemented across the rest of the government infrastructure? And everything is networked together, so one weak link is enough
It's the same in China, the US, and everywhere. I think the advantage in hacking is always with the hacker because of this - a determined and well-resourced attacker will nearly always find some way to get through simply because he can keep trying until he finds the one attack that was not prepared for. Just look at how easily Sony was carved open.
There's the old saying that the only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead. In a similar way I'd say the only way to keep digital systems secret from remote attackers is not to allow them near any kind of network at all. Physical isolation is the only way to offer meaningful security.
Yes. He did actually have a productive life as a white-hat hacker (he was one of the first famous Australian hackers; he was arrested and given a slap on the wrist at age 20 for breaking into telecommunications networks) and FOSS developer before becoming a media celebrity.
Assange has actually contributed many small interesting projects; IIRC he wrote nntpcache & surfraw, as well as rubberhose ...
Note this is quantum information, not classical information. No-communication theorems seem to show that classical information cannot be transferred in this way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
I'm afraid quantum non-locality is old hat; entangled particles really do seem to transmit information at faster than the speed of light. Its one of the reasons that quantum theory and relativity seem incompatible, and why Einstein ended up fighting quantum theory after helping invent it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
"Legal" has two meanings - "to do with law and lawmaking", as in "These are legal papers", and also "in accordance with the law", as in "Is it legal to park here."
So both arguments on this topic have merit.
Actually on reflection I'm not at all correct in my explanation of why there is no constant of integration in v.
Looking at the integration by parts template: integral u*dv = u*v - integral v*du
If v had a constant part c, i.e. was equal to say v(x) = w(x) + c, then
integral u*dv = u*(w+c) - integral (w+c)*du
= u*w +u*c - integral w*du - integral c*du
= u*w +u*c - integral w*du - u*c
= u*w - integral w*du
i.e. any constant part cancels out and we can safely choose the antiderivative of v that has no constant part.
So I prove my own point about assuming things are trivial when they're not.
The simplest rigorous way to understand integration is to understand it as Riemann described it, as calculating the area under a curve of by partitioning it into rectangles and taking the limit as the rectangle width tends to infinitely small (but not zero!). "dx" is not something just tagged on to the end of every integral, it represents what is actually being summed over - an *infinitesimal* in x.
When you then go on to write things like dv = dx, you are then describing a relation between infinitesimals, which you have to be careful with. The key property of infinitesimals used in this fashion is that dv = (dv/dx) * dx - which seems obvious but its not, dv/dx is a well defined derivative of v w.r.t. x in Leibniz notation (not a division of dv by dx!), but dv and dx are both quantities almost but not quite zero ("infinitesimally small"), that take some serious math to define rigorously. If you write it as dv = v'(x) dx using Lagrange's notation it doesn't look so obvious, for example, but it is the same relation. Therefore when you write dv = cos(x) dx, what you mean is that dv/dx = cos(x). Note again that this is a derivative, not a division of two quantities - it just happens that using Leibniz notation makes it *look* trivial. Therefore v = sin(x) + c by the Fundamental Rule of Calculus and you can continue your integration by parts. Usually the extra constant of integration is left out because you get one from the second integral as well, and the two can be combined into one constant.
Calculus can be deceptive at times, what looks trivial often isn't and it took a lot of work to create a sound foundation for it mathematically.
Riemann_integral Infinitesimal
He gets the final result wrong, and many of his explanations are incoherent. He doesn't seem to have a good idea of what dx means, for example. I was expecting more than bad high-school level calculus from someone who claims they've rewritten relativity.
The researchers who parse the data from CERN are based all around Europe, so the papers are probably attributed to their home universities.
If you're gonna compare with RHEL, you have to compare to SLES, not openSUSE. openSUSE is the Fedora equivalent. And SLES has a similar support lifecycle to RHEL.
As an aside the community is experimenting with a long-term support version of openSUSE as well - look for project Evergreen
.
Fedora has similar statistics at at fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics.
There are some statistics based on unique IPs asking for updates on en.opensuse.or/Statistics. Obviously YMMV with those numbers.
Article and summary are misleading ... the main application is that zinc selenide cores are better than glass at longer wavelengths (so infrared lasers - like the ones the military are very keen on - become more possible). They also suggest it would enable artistic installations to do more fancy stuff with colours.
The potential bandwidth improvements over long-distance glass core fiber optic cables are not mentioned as significant, and it sounds like it would uneconomical anyway given that the manufacturing of these zinc selenide cores doesn't sound easy.
It would be pretty hard to aim a mirror to reflect a laser exactly back to where it came from. A corner cube is what you want. Depending on the reflectivity of the mirrors used, it would absorb some energy, but a significant portion of the energy would be reflected exactly back to where it came from - the perfect laser defense.
Your point just shows how ridiculous software licenses are. Despite what vendors would have you believe, if you have a fully-functioning copy of the software on your own computer, trying to restrict what you do with it is technically and morally ridiculous.
People still use Xfire after the ads were introduced?
was oddly addictive ... reminds me of the typing games we used to have at school, but more fun