It's also well documented that the lead investigator working on the Pirate Bay case, was hired by Warner Brothers during the investigation, and started his job there the day after the investigation was concluded. Once again, he admitted it publicly. It's also a well-documented fact that the public prosecutor initially decided to not prosecute the Pirate Bay, because he didn't consider what they did (publish links to copyrighted material) to be illegal according to Swedish law. US diplomats had a talk with the Swedish government and demanded they do something about the Pirate Bay problem (publicly admitted). After that, the Swedish justice minister had a talk with the public prosecutor about the problem with pirate sites (again, publicly admitted). The public prosecutor then, by pure coincidence, changed his mind and decided to prosecute Pirate Bay after all. This was a minor scandal when it was revealed in Swedish newspapers (and the Cablegate papers, which are even more incriminating, hadn't even been released at that time).
I'm pretty sure Bodström never admitted publicly to telling a prosecutor what to do, as that would be quite blatantly illegal. He was investigated for that and denied it.
But more importantly: Let's pretend every single thing you say - the usual defense presented by TPB defenders - is absolutely true. The fact remains that none of this says proves anything at all about whether TPB actually were guilty or not. It's pure misdirection. Talk about everything but the actual ruling, or the legal issues at stake. You're looking for bias in the judge's affiliations and connections - but what about his actual words, reasoning and ruling? (A ruling which was confirmed by higher courts!)
The fact remains: The Pirate Bay guys were repeatedly found guilty.Not of copyright infringement, but of being an accessory to criminal copyright infringment. Now the law here is unambiguous - criminal copyright infringment is punishable by prison, and you can be sentenced as an accessory to any crime severe enough to result in a prison sentence. The magnitude of copyright infringement conducted through TPB's trackers clearly was on a criminal scale. They knew this. They were knowingly and deliberately aiding and facilitating that infringement. Not only that, they were making a good deal of money off of it. They never did anything in the slightest to hide these facts. They didn't make any efforts at all to stop it - or even pretend to try.
They thought - obviously - that they were in the clear as long as they themselves weren't distributing any copyrighted material. And they were cleared of all such charges. And the prosecution did prove, in the eyes of the court, that they were behind the site, or they wouldn't have been convicted. They had (among other evidence) e-mails between them talking about the money they were bringing in.
The judge was investigated for - and cleared of- those allegations of undue influence. Bodström was investigated for, and cleared of, those allegations of ministerial rule. The only people not cleared here was the Pirate Bay guys - because they were pretty obviously guilty of what they were charged of. But rather than man-up to the fact that maybe they weren't as clever as they thought they were, and that their own interpretation of the law didn't hold, they just continue to point fingers at everyone else. It's all the fault of the RIAA, the USA, corrupt judges and politicians, yadda yadda.
The Pirate Bay was found guilty of aiding and abetting copyright infringment. Because that's what they were doing. You know it, I know it, the court knows it and the defendants know it. This whole conspiracy theorizing is a lousy attempt to draw attention away from this obvious fact. They ultimately have nobody but themselves to blame here. Just because Slashdotters think TPB should be legal, doesn't make it so.
These arrests must have been influenced/initiated/forced by politicians.
Because it's just unthinkable that someone sentenced for a crime could be extradited for it?
And Assange's case is even more ridiculous. So was it political pressure that made the district attorney _drop_ the case, only for that decision to be successfully appealed by the women's representative? And given that the women and their legal representative are members of the opposition, are they working across the isle on this, too? You're living in a crazy fantasy.
In a healthy country, justice system is independent
But only if they're doing what you want, right? Because Assange doesn't think so. He thinks the Swedish government should provide guarantees he won't be extradited to the USA, despite the fact that this is a decision the courts would make. He's asking for the Swedish executive to tell the judicial what to do.
he is being held on terrorism charges not related to TPB
No, he's not being held on any kind of terrorism charges, nor do your links say that either. It says he's being held by the Cambodian interior ministry's "counter terrorism department", for whatever reason.
Sweden is however seeking Svartholm for questioning on additional charges related to hacking into tax records, which is a case that's been developing for a few months, with several other arrests.
Peter Sunde, a TPB founder, seems to think that it is related to the fact that Svartholm's company used to host WikiLeaks.
Well, that would apparently be wrong. And a stupid gues as well. Why would they go after him now for his company formerly hosting them? Especially since they're currently hosted by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof?
In the Assange case there are so many strange facts that the burden of proof has been shifted.
Why are these "strange facts" then only apparent to ardent Wikileaks supporters, with no working knowledge of Sweden or the Swedish legal system, and a quite selective and distorted set of 'facts'? It'd be a huge scandal (and a violation of the constitution, et cetera) if his prosecution was actually "ordered" at the political/cabinet level. But there isn't one. Now either you could conclude that Swedes don't know what's going on in their country as well as you do, or you could perhaps wonder if you've gotten the whole picture.
It's not like the Swedish administration isn't hiring an ex Bush administration official
They're not. What happened was that two years ago, Rove visited Sweden for a few days, invited by some TV-production company. In 2008 he also visited a few days on the invitation of a Swedish right-wing think-tank. (and prior to that, he'd been in the country some time during the 1980) Without any evidence or justification, that got turned into him an unusubstantiated claim he was 'consulting' for Reinfeldt, from this American left-winger in Sweden, Brian Palmer. Which was then picked up by Amy Goodman (also revealing that Sweden has a big munitions industry. Who knew? Well, everyone in Sweden at least) From there, it becomes a source for your Huffington Post story. Where's the actual evidence?
There's pretty good reason to ask for the evidence, because the Swedish right-wing is substantially to the left of even most Democrats in the US. (true of Europe in general but Sweden in particular) Swedish PM Reinfeldt (who's a centrist within his own party) made no secret of supporting Obama in 2008. Perhaps more importantly, they wouldn't have any good reason to hire Rove as a consultant in the first place. He has no in-depth knowledge of Swedish politics, society or political culture. He simply wouldn't have any useful advice to give, either on policy or strategy. It's absurd. Rove would be as useless to Reinfeldt as Reinfeldt would be in advising Romney. Add to that, the reason why the Reinfeldt won in 2010 wasn't because they used any dirty, 'Rovian' tactics. Anyone who knows Sweden will tell you why they won: Because the Social Democrats were lead by Mona Sahlin, the least popular leader of that party in living memory (with the possible exception of her short-lived successor Juholt, who never saw an election campaign). Of course, if you believe Julian Assange, he's claimed to have 'cables' (e.g. Rolling Stone interview last January), showing that Rove is the best-buddy of Swedish foreign minister Bildt, and Bildt has also worked as a "CIA informant". Said cables have failed to materialize since. (which wouldn't be the first time Assange talked about leaks that never turned up, btw).
In this case it's just a ridiculous example of post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc. Sweden's been giving aid to Cambodia to decades. This aid deal was has been in the works for months if not years (and publicized quite a long time ago). There's nothing unusual about it at all. It's also absurd to think any country would pay that kind of money to get back someone who'd been sentenced to one year in prison (and for a non-violent crime as well). This guy is far from the only Swedish fugitive in the world, and far from the "Most Wanted" as well. On top of all that: There's no real reason at all why Cambodia would actually refuse to hand him over in the first place! Lack of an extradition treaty has never meant they won't extradite you. (Given that he's apparently fallen into some heavy drug abuse now, they may well be glad to get rid of him)
This is pretty well documented in Hadith, an important source of Islamic knowledge for every interpretation of Islam as far as I know.
Not true. Different Islamic groups follow different sets of Hadith, and don't attribute the same importance to all of them either. There's no agreement on which ones should be followed, or even trusted at all, much less how they should be interpreted. In Christian terms, they're Deuterocanonical or Apocrypha.
Add to that there's the whole school of Quranism, which completely rejects all Hadith and holds the Quran as the only canonical text.
A lot of extreme sects confuse a core religion with their own local behaviour. The Taliban, for instance, seem to have adopted the more backward practices of some Arab nomadic tribes
Your point is correct, but the specifics are wrong. The Taliban are known to promote a lot of specifically Pashtun traditions and rules as "Islamic" dogma. The Pashtuns aren't Arabs.
Why? What part of "legacy code" automatically means "toss [it] out"?
He didn't say everything that's legacy should "automatically" be thrown out. But X has a huge amount of cruft nobody uses anymore. Nobody actually writes towards Xlib, they use a toolkit. Nobody uses the orignal font functionality and descriptors, the bitmap fonts, the pixel-based rendering primitives, the image system that has no less than three different ways of storing an image (ximage, xpixbuf, xpixmap), that distinguish drawable and non-drawable images, depending on where they're stored. Et cetera. It's not thread-safe either.
Nobody is using the core X functionality, it's all outdated and largely replaced. The one redeeming feature of X - the network transparency, isn't that 'transparent' (again, the API distinguishes server-side and client-side stuff). Nor does it support modern stuff like drag-and-drop, and cut-and-paste has always been inconsistent (highlight-middle-click not being the same as the desktop or application's cut-and-paste buffer). Since nobody's using the core libraries anymore, the network transparency in X mostly consists of it passing events and bitmaps back and forth, something a simpler protocol like VNC can do just as well if not better.
In short, people don't need any of the things that are unique to X, and the things people actually use X for can be done better without it. It's a big load of cruft that exists for backwards-compatibility purposes only. Which is why it's entirely the correct decision to dump X11 and relegate X11 support to a compatbility library, so we don't need to have stuff held back and complicated by these legacy designs.
Here's how it works in reality: many fjords are home to commercial fishing and aquaculture. All those species are adapted to cold water and don't do well in warm water. What happens if a data center warms the water around the effluent by a couple of degrees? Cold-water fish, shrimp, clams move away and the people who depend on them have to move with them. It's probably fine if there's just one data center in the Fjord, and the warming is highly localized. maybe a few hundred square meter of surface area. But what if there's more? What if there are ten data centers in the Fjord? Or other industries in need of cooling? Suddenly the entire fjord warms, and it's not only the fish, shrimp and clams that are gone, but the livelihood of the people in the area.
Except that's not reality. That's your own speculative fantasy. A retarded one. If fish couldn't handle a few degrees warmer water, they'd die in the summer. Also: The water is not vented to the same thermocline it came from.
In any case, reality is what research and empirical evidence says it is, not what you can imagine and think is plausible. It so happens that there's been decades of research in Norway's neighbor, Sweden, on the environmental effects of the major-river's-worth of 10 C heated cooling water, which the three Forsmark nuclear reactors put out into an enclosed basin in the Baltic. That's far more than an entire district-cooling network would put out. In fact, one of the Forsmark reactors alone puts out more waste heat than the 30-something district-cooling grids that already exist in Sweden.
The results of the research, performed by the government agency for fisheries (not the nuclear industry) actually indicates that, on balance, fish growth is actually promoted, as are many other species of birds etc.
Yeah, life is full of grey and subtilities and hard decisions that aren't black and white. Sorry to disappoint you.
Sorry to dissappoint you: But one of those subtleties is that speculation is not a substitute for actual study, and that those "subtilities" you speak of should include the possibility that environmental impact can actually be a net positive.
There's nothing about the _religion_ here. Nobody's being denied the right to believe whatever the fuck they want to believe.
What happened here was that an ad-hoc religious _organization_ was denied the right to be considered a religious organization in the legal sense. Contrary to what people here are blindly asserting, that does not give them any tax benefits in addition to the ones you already have as a non-profit (which is a prerequisite for becoming a recognized religious organization). It just changes some purely legal/organizational aspects and liabilities.
And the requirements to qualify here is, in the simplest possible terms, that it's a serious organization. That it has a substantial membership, a clear charter, an elected board, organized finances and has exhibited a certain 'permanence'. The "age of the fantasy" is **not** relevant, even though you claim it is. But the age of the organization **is** relevant.
It's got nothing to do with what they believe or whether or not they actually believe it, and everything to do with whether or not they're a serious organization. The law was written more or less specifically with the intent of stopping people from registering merely as a joke. And the letter of the law is being followed here.
There is no reason to think that quantum physics has anything to do with the nature of conciousness. It is not useful to explain free will, or the illusion of free will, of the qualia of objects, or the steadyness of perception on a background of constantly varying spike rates in the brain.
Quantum chemist here (my username's a hint at that), and I couldn't agree more. I fight against this nonsense all the time.. You'd think that if there was anything to it, we'd be all over it - since explaining chemistry and biochemistry in terms of quantum mechanics is exactly what we do. But nope, I don't know anybody in the field who thinks those ideas have any merit whatsoever. (And let's just point out that as merited a guy Penrose is, he's not a quantum chemist, and more a mathematician than a physicist. His main area of expertise is topology, which has applications in cosmology but is totally unrelated to this area)
It breaks down like this: Electrons in atoms and molecules behave entirely quantum-mechanically. It's why QM was invented in the first place. Since chemical properties are the result of how the electrons behave, all of chemistry is intrinsically quantum-mechanical in some sense.
However: Molecules as a whole do not act quantum-mechanically. They move about according to classical mechanics - and that's how we model them physically too. Because once things get as heavy as an atomic nucleus (save for hydrogen, under some circumstances), their quantum 'uncertainty' in position etc is so small that it's chemically insignificant. So you need QM to describe how two atoms are bonded, but classical mech does a good job of describing how the molecules as a whole bounce around.
So the question is: Are there 'non-trivial' quantum effects in biology? I.e. ones that aren't explainable in terms of 'ordinary' chemistry (which is still ultimately quantum-mechanical). There are a few examples, such as magnetoreception in birds, and energy transfer during some photosynthetic processes. But: despite a lot of the hype surrounding them, these things are still dealing with individual, sub-atomic particles. They don't cast any doubt on 'conventional wisdom' that QM phenomena don't happen at the biological scale. There's nothing in the cell that depends on the actions of a single small molecule, or a single chemical reaction, or anything that's small enough to act quantum-mechanically.
The physics here doesn't make sense (Penrose's ideas in particular don't even hinge on established QM, but rather his own speculative ideas about quantum gravity.. of all things), we have every reason to believe you wouldn't have quantum phenomena at that scale in that environment, and no reason to believe otherwise. The chemistry doesn't make sense, as there's basically nothing hitherto found in biochemistry that doesn't fit into established chemistry. (Which isn't to say biochem hasn't expanded the boundaries of established chemistry, but it hasn't changed the foundations at all) And the biology doesn't really make sense, as cells are not built anything like Geiger counters, sitting in a labile state waiting for a single sub-atomic event to trigger them.
Finally, the philosophy doesn't really add up either. The quantum-consciousness people seem to have an agenda along the lines of 1) QM is non-deterministic 2) If the brain's higher functions rely directly on QM processes, then the brain is non-deterministic 3) That nondeterminism means we have free will. Little of that makes sense to me. (1) is in fact a matter of which interpretation of QM you choose, and ultimately a question of metaphysics, since any non-deterministic theory could be postulated to be the result of a deterministic underlying 'reality' (as is the case with the Bohm interpretation of QM), or vice-versa. (2) is unwarranted speculation and (3) especially doesn't make much sense to me, since the philosophical question of 'free will' tends to hinge on whet
I don't think gambling should be a crime (although regulated, for sure).
But you'd have to have stuck your head pretty deep into the sand if you think it's a "victimless" practice. Gambling addiction has destroyed millions of lives and families. That's just indisputable. And online poker is no exception. Yes, gamblers are ultimately responsible for their own behavior. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be shown sympathy. This addiction is a well-documented and established psychological fact, so putting the entire burden of guilt on them is simply cynical and inhumane. So is exonerating the people who willingly aid and profit from that irresponsibility, nor does it help the children and others who depend on the addict and are completely innocent.
It's one thing to feel that gambling should be legal (which I do). But another entirely to pretend like there's no reason behind its criminalization. If you can't see that gambling addicts are, to at least _some_ extent, victims... Well I can only say that a society dictated along those principles isn't one I'd want to live in.
7.4 is a major earthquake. That's about the size of the 1996 Kobe Earthquake, larger than the 1986 Loma Prieta quake. Even by Japanese standards it's large.
It's likely to have mild effects only because it occurred far offshore, not because 7.4 is small.
Being that these guys apparently have a number of products in this market already, I suspect they already know what the price levels are. (I bet a lot of their stuff is paid by insurance in whole or part too)
I'm not saying it's not expensive as heck, but that's how things are in those low-volume/high-margin markets. You know, an PCR machine for a biotech lab isn't a heck of a lot more advanced than a digital toaster, but the price difference is an order of magnitude.
The Three Mile Island incident involved a partial meltdown of a single reactor. Fukushima involves - according to the power company running the plant - the partial meltdown of several reactors, plus overheating at spent fuel pools containing 1,700 tons of highly radioactive waste (and - in the Number 4 reactor's pool - that reactor's live nuclear fuel).
Yes, but the partial meltdowns at Fukushima were not likely as bad or as risky as at TMI. The cooling systems in Fukushima were running for the critical first hours after the SCRAM. At TMI, the meltdown occurred within the first hour. The extent of the uncovering and eventual overheating of the fuel rods, as well as the reactors, isn't known yet. It was years before they know how bad TMI was damaged as well.
It's already released far more radiation into the environment than Three Mile Island ever did.
There are very few estimates out there, and any at this stage aren't terribly reliable. Nevertheless, even if we take that to be true, the amount of radiation released does not correspond directly to the absorbed dosage or resultant health risks. It depends on the isotope composition, wind patterns, etc. Windscale released 10,000 times more radiation than Three Mile Island did, but only about 40 times the absorbed dose. (Chernobyl was about 10,000 times the absorbed dose of TMI)
There's no basis in fact for criticizing Kaku regarding this statement concerning Fukushima.
Why not? You said it yourself: A disaster could be several orders of magnitude smaller than Chernobyl and still be the second-worst ever.
So how is comparing to Chernobyl helpful? It's not Chernobyl, it's been clear almost from the start that it wasn't likely to become a Chernobyl.
Michio Kaku is not necessarily the best in his field, mediocre at best, but he has the biggest voice.
I agree. But this isn't really news; This is how it's _always_ worked. The public is not going to figure out the merits of your scientific achievements on their own, and then give you attention that's proportionate to that. It's the same as in any other area: You have to market yourself.
Linus Pauling was arguably the most famous chemist of the last century. But he wasn't actually that important. The quantum-chemical contributions he made were in reality on-par with those of Mulliken, Hund and Slater. Many would say Slater should've shared in his first Nobel prize. But it was Pauling who wrote "The nature of the chemical bond", it was Pauling who popularized the subject, it was Pauling who was the bigger educator and public figure (which was not limited to chemistry). Richard Feynman was one of the most famous physicists. And while his contributions are also beyond question, they were arguably not a lot larger than those of, say, Murray Gell-Mann, who is nowhere near as famous. Because Gell-Mann was not a big educator. His popular-scientific books didn't sell anywhere near as well. Dirac was as important as Bohr when it came to quantum theory, but he wasn't anywhere near the popular and public figure Bohr was. And so he's also less known.
What bothers me about Kaku isn't the fact that his fame is disproportionate to his scientific contributions, or even the fact that it leads people to think he's a greater scientist than he is. What annoys me about Kaku is his propensity to comment on stuff that he doesn't know much or anything about. For instance, his statements on evolution, which were harshly (but justly) criticized recently by PZ Meyers. Or his commenting on the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Fukushima diaster (which he, IMO recklessly, called the worst diaster second only to Chernobyl, even though it's far from clear that it'd be worse than Three Mile Island or Windscale at this point, and certainly several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl). And now we have him commenting about Moore's Law, even though he's not a solid-state physicist.
I suspect he's letting his ego cloud his better judgment. It's not uncommon - the aforementioned Pauling, for all his scientific merits, had a whole bunch of bad, crankish ideas in areas outside his field (nuclear physics, vitamin megadoses, anesthesiology). I don't believe at all Feynman was the humble guy he tried so hard to make himself out to be, but to his credit, he was quite respectful of other fields and did not have that propensity to make himself out to be an expert on things he didn't know much about. Of course, there's also the possibility that it's not about Kaku's ego and that he just genuinely doesn't actually give a damn about educating the public, and is more interested in just getting attention for himself. But I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that.
"As the arrangement of the nuclei changes, the BO approximation postulates that the electrons will remain in a particular quantum state. " is an entirely correct description.
The BO approximation does not assume that the nuclei are completely stationary. What you're talking about with that is what's called a clamped-nuclei Hamiltonian.
You stated the rationale behind the BO-approximation without understanding it. Because of the difference in mass, the nuclei are practically stationary relative the electron's frame of motion. That does not mean they are stationary. What it means is that the potential the electrons 'see' from the nuclei varies very slowly. If a potential on a particle changes sufficiently slowly, then the particle remains in the same state - that's the adiabatic theorem. "Adiabatic" because no energy is thus being transferred to the particle. In the BO approximation, no kinetic energy is being transferred between the nuclei and electrons. That is what the BO-approximation is.
By assuming that, the nuclear-electronic kinetic-energy coupling terms disappear from the Molecular Hamiltonian, which allows you to separate it into an electronic and nuclear Hamiltonian. Then, you might additionally assume clamped-nuclei. But not necessarily. Quantum molecular-dynamics simulations are usually done with the BO-approximation in place.
You'd think that SCIENCE, of all journals, would get the Born-Oppenheimer approximation right !
You'd think someone would have the common-sense to check up their own knowledge before assuming that a distinguished professor who's been doing quantum chemistry since the early 60's doesn't know the stuff you teach on an introductory course of the subject.
There was a time when project names were chosen to be cute acronyms. I work with digital signal processing where there are algorithms named MUSIC, for "MUltiple SIgnal Classification", and ESPRIT, for "Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques".
That hasn't really changed, how about: Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array - AMANDA?
That's what IceCube was formely known as, or rather, the IceCube array is an extension of the original AMANDA detector array.
The AP is also reporting that China is creating a Confucius Peace Prize to be given out the day before the Nobel Prize.
Well, they're in good company:
"The German National Prize for Art and Science (German: Deutscher Nationalpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft) was an award created by Adolf Hitler in 1937 as a replacement for the Nobel Prize (he had forbidden Germans to accept the latter award in 1936 after an anti-Nazi German writer, Carl von Ossietzky, was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize)."
And of course the Soviets also banned (a bit on-and-off though) their citizens from recieving the Nobel, and Stalin created the Stalin Prize in his own honor.
Actually there appears to be no less than three follow-up commentaries to that article in the same issue.
Apart from the one you mentioned there's R Bender, "Determination of the area under a curve." and T M Wolever, "Comments on Tai's mathematic model.".
In my experience, an article has to be pretty damn bad to get any kind of commentary against it, but three? That basically means it's just as crazy as we think it is.
And sure, numerical integration is a rich field, but real advances in numerical integration aren't published in "Diabetes Care".
Doesn't have to be a math journal, physics or comp sci could be just as plausible, but a medical journal? Not really.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically you just think that educators should work for free?
I'm pretty sure Bodström never admitted publicly to telling a prosecutor what to do, as that would be quite blatantly illegal. He was investigated for that and denied it. But more importantly:
Let's pretend every single thing you say - the usual defense presented by TPB defenders - is absolutely true. The fact remains that none of this says proves anything at all about whether TPB actually were guilty or not. It's pure misdirection. Talk about everything but the actual ruling, or the legal issues at stake. You're looking for bias in the judge's affiliations and connections - but what about his actual words, reasoning and ruling? (A ruling which was confirmed by higher courts!)
The fact remains: The Pirate Bay guys were repeatedly found guilty. Not of copyright infringement, but of being an accessory to criminal copyright infringment. Now the law here is unambiguous - criminal copyright infringment is punishable by prison, and you can be sentenced as an accessory to any crime severe enough to result in a prison sentence. The magnitude of copyright infringement conducted through TPB's trackers clearly was on a criminal scale. They knew this. They were knowingly and deliberately aiding and facilitating that infringement. Not only that, they were making a good deal of money off of it. They never did anything in the slightest to hide these facts. They didn't make any efforts at all to stop it - or even pretend to try.
They thought - obviously - that they were in the clear as long as they themselves weren't distributing any copyrighted material. And they were cleared of all such charges. And the prosecution did prove, in the eyes of the court, that they were behind the site, or they wouldn't have been convicted. They had (among other evidence) e-mails between them talking about the money they were bringing in.
The judge was investigated for - and cleared of- those allegations of undue influence. Bodström was investigated for, and cleared of, those allegations of ministerial rule. The only people not cleared here was the Pirate Bay guys - because they were pretty obviously guilty of what they were charged of. But rather than man-up to the fact that maybe they weren't as clever as they thought they were, and that their own interpretation of the law didn't hold, they just continue to point fingers at everyone else. It's all the fault of the RIAA, the USA, corrupt judges and politicians, yadda yadda.
The Pirate Bay was found guilty of aiding and abetting copyright infringment. Because that's what they were doing. You know it, I know it, the court knows it and the defendants know it. This whole conspiracy theorizing is a lousy attempt to draw attention away from this obvious fact. They ultimately have nobody but themselves to blame here. Just because Slashdotters think TPB should be legal, doesn't make it so.
Because it's just unthinkable that someone sentenced for a crime could be extradited for it? And Assange's case is even more ridiculous. So was it political pressure that made the district attorney _drop_ the case, only for that decision to be successfully appealed by the women's representative? And given that the women and their legal representative are members of the opposition, are they working across the isle on this, too? You're living in a crazy fantasy.
But only if they're doing what you want, right? Because Assange doesn't think so. He thinks the Swedish government should provide guarantees he won't be extradited to the USA, despite the fact that this is a decision the courts would make. He's asking for the Swedish executive to tell the judicial what to do.
No, he's not being held on any kind of terrorism charges, nor do your links say that either. It says he's being held by the Cambodian interior ministry's "counter terrorism department", for whatever reason. Sweden is however seeking Svartholm for questioning on additional charges related to hacking into tax records, which is a case that's been developing for a few months, with several other arrests.
Well, that would apparently be wrong. And a stupid gues as well. Why would they go after him now for his company formerly hosting them? Especially since they're currently hosted by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof?
Why are these "strange facts" then only apparent to ardent Wikileaks supporters, with no working knowledge of Sweden or the Swedish legal system, and a quite selective and distorted set of 'facts'? It'd be a huge scandal (and a violation of the constitution, et cetera) if his prosecution was actually "ordered" at the political/cabinet level. But there isn't one. Now either you could conclude that Swedes don't know what's going on in their country as well as you do, or you could perhaps wonder if you've gotten the whole picture.
They're not. What happened was that two years ago, Rove visited Sweden for a few days, invited by some TV-production company. In 2008 he also visited a few days on the invitation of a Swedish right-wing think-tank. (and prior to that, he'd been in the country some time during the 1980) Without any evidence or justification, that got turned into him an unusubstantiated claim he was 'consulting' for Reinfeldt, from this American left-winger in Sweden, Brian Palmer. Which was then picked up by Amy Goodman (also revealing that Sweden has a big munitions industry. Who knew? Well, everyone in Sweden at least) From there, it becomes a source for your Huffington Post story. Where's the actual evidence?
There's pretty good reason to ask for the evidence, because the Swedish right-wing is substantially to the left of even most Democrats in the US. (true of Europe in general but Sweden in particular) Swedish PM Reinfeldt (who's a centrist within his own party) made no secret of supporting Obama in 2008. Perhaps more importantly, they wouldn't have any good reason to hire Rove as a consultant in the first place. He has no in-depth knowledge of Swedish politics, society or political culture. He simply wouldn't have any useful advice to give, either on policy or strategy. It's absurd. Rove would be as useless to Reinfeldt as Reinfeldt would be in advising Romney. Add to that, the reason why the Reinfeldt won in 2010 wasn't because they used any dirty, 'Rovian' tactics. Anyone who knows Sweden will tell you why they won: Because the Social Democrats were lead by Mona Sahlin, the least popular leader of that party in living memory (with the possible exception of her short-lived successor Juholt, who never saw an election campaign). Of course, if you believe Julian Assange, he's claimed to have 'cables' (e.g. Rolling Stone interview last January), showing that Rove is the best-buddy of Swedish foreign minister Bildt, and Bildt has also worked as a "CIA informant". Said cables have failed to materialize since. (which wouldn't be the first time Assange talked about leaks that never turned up, btw).
In this case it's just a ridiculous example of post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc. Sweden's been giving aid to Cambodia to decades. This aid deal was has been in the works for months if not years (and publicized quite a long time ago). There's nothing unusual about it at all. It's also absurd to think any country would pay that kind of money to get back someone who'd been sentenced to one year in prison (and for a non-violent crime as well). This guy is far from the only Swedish fugitive in the world, and far from the "Most Wanted" as well. On top of all that: There's no real reason at all why Cambodia would actually refuse to hand him over in the first place! Lack of an extradition treaty has never meant they won't extradite you. (Given that he's apparently fallen into some heavy drug abuse now, they may well be glad to get rid of him)
Not true. Different Islamic groups follow different sets of Hadith, and don't attribute the same importance to all of them either. There's no agreement on which ones should be followed, or even trusted at all, much less how they should be interpreted. In Christian terms, they're Deuterocanonical or Apocrypha.
Add to that there's the whole school of Quranism, which completely rejects all Hadith and holds the Quran as the only canonical text.
Your point is correct, but the specifics are wrong. The Taliban are known to promote a lot of specifically Pashtun traditions and rules as "Islamic" dogma. The Pashtuns aren't Arabs.
He didn't say everything that's legacy should "automatically" be thrown out. But X has a huge amount of cruft nobody uses anymore. Nobody actually writes towards Xlib, they use a toolkit. Nobody uses the orignal font functionality and descriptors, the bitmap fonts, the pixel-based rendering primitives, the image system that has no less than three different ways of storing an image (ximage, xpixbuf, xpixmap), that distinguish drawable and non-drawable images, depending on where they're stored. Et cetera. It's not thread-safe either.
Nobody is using the core X functionality, it's all outdated and largely replaced. The one redeeming feature of X - the network transparency, isn't that 'transparent' (again, the API distinguishes server-side and client-side stuff). Nor does it support modern stuff like drag-and-drop, and cut-and-paste has always been inconsistent (highlight-middle-click not being the same as the desktop or application's cut-and-paste buffer). Since nobody's using the core libraries anymore, the network transparency in X mostly consists of it passing events and bitmaps back and forth, something a simpler protocol like VNC can do just as well if not better.
In short, people don't need any of the things that are unique to X, and the things people actually use X for can be done better without it. It's a big load of cruft that exists for backwards-compatibility purposes only. Which is why it's entirely the correct decision to dump X11 and relegate X11 support to a compatbility library, so we don't need to have stuff held back and complicated by these legacy designs.
Except that's not reality. That's your own speculative fantasy. A retarded one. If fish couldn't handle a few degrees warmer water, they'd die in the summer. Also: The water is not vented to the same thermocline it came from.
In any case, reality is what research and empirical evidence says it is, not what you can imagine and think is plausible. It so happens that there's been decades of research in Norway's neighbor, Sweden, on the environmental effects of the major-river's-worth of 10 C heated cooling water, which the three Forsmark nuclear reactors put out into an enclosed basin in the Baltic. That's far more than an entire district-cooling network would put out. In fact, one of the Forsmark reactors alone puts out more waste heat than the 30-something district-cooling grids that already exist in Sweden.
The results of the research, performed by the government agency for fisheries (not the nuclear industry) actually indicates that, on balance, fish growth is actually promoted, as are many other species of birds etc.
Sorry to dissappoint you: But one of those subtleties is that speculation is not a substitute for actual study, and that those "subtilities" you speak of should include the possibility that environmental impact can actually be a net positive.
Woah there. That's pretty fucking far from a reliable source.
There's nothing about the _religion_ here. Nobody's being denied the right to believe whatever the fuck they want to believe.
What happened here was that an ad-hoc religious _organization_ was denied the right to be considered a religious organization in the legal sense. Contrary to what people here are blindly asserting, that does not give them any tax benefits in addition to the ones you already have as a non-profit (which is a prerequisite for becoming a recognized religious organization). It just changes some purely legal/organizational aspects and liabilities.
And the requirements to qualify here is, in the simplest possible terms, that it's a serious organization. That it has a substantial membership, a clear charter, an elected board, organized finances and has exhibited a certain 'permanence'. The "age of the fantasy" is **not** relevant, even though you claim it is. But the age of the organization **is** relevant.
It's got nothing to do with what they believe or whether or not they actually believe it, and everything to do with whether or not they're a serious organization. The law was written more or less specifically with the intent of stopping people from registering merely as a joke. And the letter of the law is being followed here.
Quantum chemist here (my username's a hint at that), and I couldn't agree more. I fight against this nonsense all the time.. You'd think that if there was anything to it, we'd be all over it - since explaining chemistry and biochemistry in terms of quantum mechanics is exactly what we do. But nope, I don't know anybody in the field who thinks those ideas have any merit whatsoever. (And let's just point out that as merited a guy Penrose is, he's not a quantum chemist, and more a mathematician than a physicist. His main area of expertise is topology, which has applications in cosmology but is totally unrelated to this area)
It breaks down like this: Electrons in atoms and molecules behave entirely quantum-mechanically. It's why QM was invented in the first place. Since chemical properties are the result of how the electrons behave, all of chemistry is intrinsically quantum-mechanical in some sense.
However: Molecules as a whole do not act quantum-mechanically. They move about according to classical mechanics - and that's how we model them physically too. Because once things get as heavy as an atomic nucleus (save for hydrogen, under some circumstances), their quantum 'uncertainty' in position etc is so small that it's chemically insignificant. So you need QM to describe how two atoms are bonded, but classical mech does a good job of describing how the molecules as a whole bounce around.
So the question is: Are there 'non-trivial' quantum effects in biology? I.e. ones that aren't explainable in terms of 'ordinary' chemistry (which is still ultimately quantum-mechanical). There are a few examples, such as magnetoreception in birds, and energy transfer during some photosynthetic processes. But: despite a lot of the hype surrounding them, these things are still dealing with individual, sub-atomic particles. They don't cast any doubt on 'conventional wisdom' that QM phenomena don't happen at the biological scale. There's nothing in the cell that depends on the actions of a single small molecule, or a single chemical reaction, or anything that's small enough to act quantum-mechanically.
The physics here doesn't make sense (Penrose's ideas in particular don't even hinge on established QM, but rather his own speculative ideas about quantum gravity.. of all things), we have every reason to believe you wouldn't have quantum phenomena at that scale in that environment, and no reason to believe otherwise. The chemistry doesn't make sense, as there's basically nothing hitherto found in biochemistry that doesn't fit into established chemistry. (Which isn't to say biochem hasn't expanded the boundaries of established chemistry, but it hasn't changed the foundations at all) And the biology doesn't really make sense, as cells are not built anything like Geiger counters, sitting in a labile state waiting for a single sub-atomic event to trigger them.
Finally, the philosophy doesn't really add up either. The quantum-consciousness people seem to have an agenda along the lines of 1) QM is non-deterministic 2) If the brain's higher functions rely directly on QM processes, then the brain is non-deterministic 3) That nondeterminism means we have free will.
Little of that makes sense to me. (1) is in fact a matter of which interpretation of QM you choose, and ultimately a question of metaphysics, since any non-deterministic theory could be postulated to be the result of a deterministic underlying 'reality' (as is the case with the Bohm interpretation of QM), or vice-versa. (2) is unwarranted speculation and (3) especially doesn't make much sense to me, since the philosophical question of 'free will' tends to hinge on whet
Well let's see.. the guy who said it is...
Ah well there you are. He's a VP. So yes, I believe he really does need to bring buzzwords into everything. He's probably contractually obligated to.
I don't think gambling should be a crime (although regulated, for sure).
But you'd have to have stuck your head pretty deep into the sand if you think it's a "victimless" practice. Gambling addiction has destroyed millions of lives and families.
That's just indisputable. And online poker is no exception.
Yes, gamblers are ultimately responsible for their own behavior. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be shown sympathy.
This addiction is a well-documented and established psychological fact, so putting the entire burden of guilt on them is simply cynical and inhumane. So is exonerating the people who willingly aid and profit from that irresponsibility,
nor does it help the children and others who depend on the addict and are completely innocent.
It's one thing to feel that gambling should be legal (which I do). But another entirely to pretend like there's no reason behind its criminalization.
If you can't see that gambling addicts are, to at least _some_ extent, victims... Well I can only say that a society dictated along those principles isn't one I'd want to live in.
7.4 is a major earthquake. That's about the size of the 1996 Kobe Earthquake, larger than the 1986 Loma Prieta quake. Even by Japanese standards it's large.
It's likely to have mild effects only because it occurred far offshore, not because 7.4 is small.
Being that these guys apparently have a number of products in this market already, I suspect they already know what the price levels are. (I bet a lot of their stuff is paid by insurance in whole or part too)
I'm not saying it's not expensive as heck, but that's how things are in those low-volume/high-margin markets. You know, an PCR machine for a biotech lab isn't a heck of a lot more advanced than a digital toaster, but the price difference is an order of magnitude.
I believe the market here is primarily handicapped people who can't necessarily move their heads.
Yes, but the partial meltdowns at Fukushima were not likely as bad or as risky as at TMI. The cooling systems in Fukushima were running for the critical first hours after the SCRAM.
At TMI, the meltdown occurred within the first hour. The extent of the uncovering and eventual overheating of the fuel rods, as well as the reactors, isn't known yet. It was years before they know how bad TMI was damaged as well.
There are very few estimates out there, and any at this stage aren't terribly reliable. Nevertheless, even if we take that to be true, the amount of radiation released does not correspond directly to the absorbed dosage or resultant health risks. It depends on the isotope composition, wind patterns, etc. Windscale released 10,000 times more radiation than Three Mile Island did, but only about 40 times the absorbed dose. (Chernobyl was about 10,000 times the absorbed dose of TMI)
Why not? You said it yourself: A disaster could be several orders of magnitude smaller than Chernobyl and still be the second-worst ever.
So how is comparing to Chernobyl helpful? It's not Chernobyl, it's been clear almost from the start that it wasn't likely to become a Chernobyl.
I agree. But this isn't really news; This is how it's _always_ worked. The public is not going to figure out the merits of your scientific achievements on their own, and then give you attention that's proportionate to that. It's the same as in any other area: You have to market yourself.
Linus Pauling was arguably the most famous chemist of the last century. But he wasn't actually that important. The quantum-chemical contributions he made were in reality on-par with those of Mulliken, Hund and Slater. Many would say Slater should've shared in his first Nobel prize. But it was Pauling who wrote "The nature of the chemical bond", it was Pauling who popularized the subject, it was Pauling who was the bigger educator and public figure (which was not limited to chemistry). Richard Feynman was one of the most famous physicists. And while his contributions are also beyond question, they were arguably not a lot larger than those of, say, Murray Gell-Mann, who is nowhere near as famous. Because Gell-Mann was not a big educator. His popular-scientific books didn't sell anywhere near as well. Dirac was as important as Bohr when it came to quantum theory, but he wasn't anywhere near the popular and public figure Bohr was. And so he's also less known.
What bothers me about Kaku isn't the fact that his fame is disproportionate to his scientific contributions, or even the fact that it leads people to think he's a greater scientist than he is. What annoys me about Kaku is his propensity to comment on stuff that he doesn't know much or anything about. For instance, his statements on evolution, which were harshly (but justly) criticized recently by PZ Meyers. Or his commenting on the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Fukushima diaster (which he, IMO recklessly, called the worst diaster second only to Chernobyl, even though it's far from clear that it'd be worse than Three Mile Island or Windscale at this point, and certainly several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl). And now we have him commenting about Moore's Law, even though he's not a solid-state physicist.
I suspect he's letting his ego cloud his better judgment. It's not uncommon - the aforementioned Pauling, for all his scientific merits, had a whole bunch of bad, crankish ideas in areas outside his field (nuclear physics, vitamin megadoses, anesthesiology). I don't believe at all Feynman was the humble guy he tried so hard to make himself out to be, but to his credit, he was quite respectful of other fields and did not have that propensity to make himself out to be an expert on things he didn't know much about. Of course, there's also the possibility that it's not about Kaku's ego and that he just genuinely doesn't actually give a damn about educating the public, and is more interested in just getting attention for himself. But I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that.
The BO approximation does not assume that the nuclei are completely stationary. What you're talking about with that is what's called a clamped-nuclei Hamiltonian.
You stated the rationale behind the BO-approximation without understanding it. Because of the difference in mass, the nuclei are practically stationary relative the electron's frame of motion. That does not mean they are stationary.
What it means is that the potential the electrons 'see' from the nuclei varies very slowly. If a potential on a particle changes sufficiently slowly, then the particle remains in the same state - that's the adiabatic theorem.
"Adiabatic" because no energy is thus being transferred to the particle. In the BO approximation, no kinetic energy is being transferred between the nuclei and electrons. That is what the BO-approximation is.
By assuming that, the nuclear-electronic kinetic-energy coupling terms disappear from the Molecular Hamiltonian, which allows you to separate it into an electronic and nuclear Hamiltonian.
Then, you might additionally assume clamped-nuclei. But not necessarily. Quantum molecular-dynamics simulations are usually done with the BO-approximation in place.
You'd think someone would have the common-sense to check up their own knowledge before assuming that a distinguished professor
who's been doing quantum chemistry since the early 60's doesn't know the stuff you teach on an introductory course of the subject.
That hasn't really changed, how about: Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array - AMANDA?
That's what IceCube was formely known as, or rather, the IceCube array is an extension of the original AMANDA detector array.
"Hurry up Fnuggi! I can feel you're about to thaw!"
At the bottom: "Icicle time..!"
Well, they're in good company:
"The German National Prize for Art and Science (German: Deutscher Nationalpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft) was an award created by Adolf Hitler in 1937 as a replacement for the Nobel Prize (he had forbidden Germans to accept the latter award in 1936 after an anti-Nazi German writer, Carl von Ossietzky, was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize)."
And of course the Soviets also banned (a bit on-and-off though) their citizens from recieving the Nobel, and Stalin created the Stalin Prize in his own honor.
Actually there appears to be no less than three follow-up commentaries to that article in the same issue.
Apart from the one you mentioned there's R Bender, "Determination of the area under a curve." and T M Wolever, "Comments on Tai's mathematic model.".
In my experience, an article has to be pretty damn bad to get any kind of commentary against it, but three? That basically means it's just as crazy as we think it is.
And sure, numerical integration is a rich field, but real advances in numerical integration aren't published in "Diabetes Care".
Doesn't have to be a math journal, physics or comp sci could be just as plausible, but a medical journal? Not really.
"no support for bitmap fonts" should of course have read "no support for vector fonts".