Check his wiki, this guy is the real deal. He is the architect of the BeOS file system, something that still hasn't been surpassed in flexibility and efficiency - the crown jewel of the BeOS code. Trolltech's QT also improved a lot under his reign. I would say that this guy knows a lot about writing optimized code, and Google should be very happy that he's turned his attention to Android. If I were Google, I'd be thinking hard about buying out this plucky little startup from Switzerland.
So the ad is telling us that some horny dude knocked up some chick in Paris and was looking for a church to confess his sins, and they told him that he can't leave the country or Jesus will zap him, and that he better buy a crib, but he's so poor that he has to build it instead, and next he'll probably search for "best suicide method"... so thank God for Google, the benign giant who knows every minute detail of his pathetic life.
I see this exactly the way you do. The fact that h.264 is a far superior codec should not be ignored in this debate about standards.
Anyway, all this should be beside the point, because correctly written web browsers should just be able to use whatever decoding codecs are available on any computer. I'm looking at you, Mozilla: I paid for a license to decode h.264 - why won't you let me use it to decode HTML5 videos in the video tag?
I'll store the waste in my backyard, I don't care. It might even be good for you. I'm serious, I'd do it. The world can thank me later. We just need to build build build!
Here are somelinks, and here is a link to a video presentation given to the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley. TWR is teh bomb (well, not literally).
Geez, I don't know why you're making such a big deal. All the waste that Germany has produced in 35 years would fit in a warehouse. Nuclear waste is tiny in size. Why don't you just send your waste to France and let them reprocess it? Or even better, why don't you get some engineers to build you a reprocessing plant? Oh yeah, because German nuclear science is stuck in the stone age, thanks to well-intentioned but horribly short-sighted protesters.
I think it's great how much effort Germany has put into solar and wind power, but you are still making a lot more pollution than France, so if I were German, I'd be agitating your government to get its shit together and start making a serious transition to clean power. In the meanwhile, please keep buying clean electricity from France and don't build any more of those stupid coal plants!
If you think he means that they would use the internet to gather information, you've completely missed the point. Real chemists use computers to analyze data. Of course you can't perfectly duplicate that in a high school class, but I think it is the responsibility of a good teacher to at least give them a flavor of real experimental science looks like.
I actually disagree. I thought it was really cool in chemistry class when I would copy my data points from my notebook into Excel and then have it figure out a regression line for the data. Sometimes we needed to adjust it to a logarithmic scale for the regression line to be a good fit, and the moral of that lesson is still with me. I think it's really cool to get students to work out experimentally certain values, and Excel is the most accessible way of getting them to analyze their data. Also, they learn about important concepts in science like outliers, contaminated data sets, and other things that require hands-on experience in real data analysis.
That's not true. There is great economic value for some in being able to flip their home civilization the bird, get the fuck out of there and start something more sane on their own. This would be even more clear if you imagine the home civilization living in a very crowded and polluted place.
Just how cheap is it though, really? I once tried to run SETI@home on my computers, and my power bill (and thus also CO2 emissions) went up noticeably. When I though about all the thousands of people who are making this sacrifice, it didn't really seem so small anymore. It seems much better to donate that money to poverty relief.
I agree that it's stupid to imagine aliens coming here to take our resources. However, it might still be perfectly rational for them to come and destroy us. If we survive long enough, we might start an era of galactic colonization, where we jump from star system to star system, grinding up whatever material we find into gigantic orbiting space stations.
Any radio-trasmitting civilization has the potential to become a galactic colonizer. So suppose that you belong to a society who also intends to colonize the galaxy and is perhaps a little bit more advanced. Then you notice a potential rival 100 light years away, who just entered their broadcast TV era. You realize that in the far future there might well be a great, catastrophic confrontation, as your wave of colonization bumps into theirs. But there is a cheap way to prevent this calamity: You send a giant sterilization machine or some such thing. Maybe it would drop a small black hole into the sun's gravity well, or maybe it would be a factory to assemble a robotic army from the material in the asteroid belt. In any case, if they could wipe us out before we settle other solar systems, they would save themselves a lot of future grief.
If they're nice, they'll want to study us a bit before they kill us, and they might even keep several thousand of us in some kind of a zoo. However, that would add significantly to the expense of the extermination. At its cheapest, they could just calculate how long we will remain stuck in the solar system - suppose that in our case it will be another thousand years - and then send their mechanical destructive commando to us at a languid 10% the speed of light. That would be the smart thing to do... so expect it to arrive in about 900 years.
I'm surprised that people aren't reaching for the most obvious explanation for this announcement of newly-weakened evidence. Isn't it obvious that it's a part of a deal that Google cut with China, in which it was agreed that tensions will be de-escalated in public?
Google is saying the equivalent of "Oh, did I call your mama a whore in front of the whole world? No, no, of course not! I was saying she was a HORRibly nice woman, but my phone was cutting out! I would never accuse your mama of pulling tricks for a fiver! We're totally BFF's after all, right?"
This is just another step in the hollowing out of the state. Private firms already fight our wars. What's next, private firms taking over the "service" of governing the country? Oh wait...
Interesting! Thank you for the reply, it makes sense. Now I hope even more that we'll be able to make these, and that they will be stable for long enough to interact with electrons and other stuff. These experiments would fill in several gaps in what we know about QM.
I have a feeling that Google does something like this, which is why it's so convenient for so many of us to have our email sifted through Gmail's filters. (I'm not saying it's wise, only that it's convenient.) If there's one thing that Google have, it's lots of data.
Exactly, this will force spammers to just slightly get off their asses and tweak their templates. If I were them, I'd harvest actual personal email from compromised accounts which had images attached, and replace those images with Viagra ads. I get messages like this:
OMG, take a look at this adorable picture of Jake playing with Mike's puppy!
[attached jpeg]
Mary
Now suppose my account were compromised and you got this exact message from my personal email, where the jpeg is a Viagra ad. There is absolutely nothing there for your spam blocker to latch on to, unless it parses the content of the jpeg itself. Anyway, blocking stuff like this would lead to unacceptably many false positives.
In terms of actual developer work, how much do you think went into NeXTStep as a proportion of the total work which culminated with Snow Leopard? I would guess it's about 2%. Even if it's a bit more, it's totally nuts to see OSX as NeXTStep with some polish applied. It's even more nuts to see OSX as BSD that Apple found in the nineties and polished up a bit. That's not true of even Darwin anymore.
It seems to me that the people who say this just resent Apple for being good at marketing. What they say may be right, but the moral of it should be different. Wanna-be freethinking douches who follow trends and have spare cash are a very lucrative demographic, and Apple figured out how to take their money.
So you're looking at that poser at Starbucks and feeling a twinge of envy, because despite the fact that he's an art crime and too old to be rockin a goatee, his Macbook is actually a pretty good computer, probably better than yours.
And therein is a distinction worth making. Yes, Apple may have done a good job with marketing, but they've also done a good job with technology. Imagine if Linux was as good as OSX, but only the present Linux users (1% of the market) realized it and everyone else was kind of turned off by the idea of trying it because they associate it with pimply geeks and D&D. You wouldn't just be in that 1%; you'd be an evangelist.
So you can object all you want to the culture of Apple customers, but realize that this is not commentary on Apple products.
Actually, they are. The very reason why they need such energetic collisions is that the collision energy becomes particles, and some of these are rather interesting. So for example, we didn't "find" the top quark. We made it (a massy particle) out of energy.
I don't know enough of the relevant physics (I do remember the pictures of ground-state probability clouds around atomic nuclei, but only for Hydrogen), but isn't the probability of the electron being literally inside the event horizon still vanishingly small, because the size of the event horizon of such a tiny black hole would be on the Planck scale? I thought there would be Heisenbergian reasons why the position of the electron can't be confined to a volume as tiny as that.
...but if someone proposed a collider that would produce energies "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum," I'd still be for it. Those collisions would be freakin awesome!
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Check his wiki, this guy is the real deal. He is the architect of the BeOS file system, something that still hasn't been surpassed in flexibility and efficiency - the crown jewel of the BeOS code. Trolltech's QT also improved a lot under his reign. I would say that this guy knows a lot about writing optimized code, and Google should be very happy that he's turned his attention to Android. If I were Google, I'd be thinking hard about buying out this plucky little startup from Switzerland.
So the ad is telling us that some horny dude knocked up some chick in Paris and was looking for a church to confess his sins, and they told him that he can't leave the country or Jesus will zap him, and that he better buy a crib, but he's so poor that he has to build it instead, and next he'll probably search for "best suicide method" ... so thank God for Google, the benign giant who knows every minute detail of his pathetic life.
Geez, when you add it all up, doesn't it seem like a lot of money to you just for an opportunity to use the phone?
Anyway, all this should be beside the point, because correctly written web browsers should just be able to use whatever decoding codecs are available on any computer. I'm looking at you, Mozilla: I paid for a license to decode h.264 - why won't you let me use it to decode HTML5 videos in the video tag?
I'll store the waste in my backyard, I don't care. It might even be good for you. I'm serious, I'd do it. The world can thank me later. We just need to build build build!
Here are some links, and here is a link to a video presentation given to the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley. TWR is teh bomb (well, not literally).
It just needs a high up-front investment, but once it's running, the fuel and operation costs are tiny. That's why you need a loan to build one.
Geez, I don't know why you're making such a big deal. All the waste that Germany has produced in 35 years would fit in a warehouse. Nuclear waste is tiny in size. Why don't you just send your waste to France and let them reprocess it? Or even better, why don't you get some engineers to build you a reprocessing plant? Oh yeah, because German nuclear science is stuck in the stone age, thanks to well-intentioned but horribly short-sighted protesters.
I think it's great how much effort Germany has put into solar and wind power, but you are still making a lot more pollution than France, so if I were German, I'd be agitating your government to get its shit together and start making a serious transition to clean power. In the meanwhile, please keep buying clean electricity from France and don't build any more of those stupid coal plants!
If you think he means that they would use the internet to gather information, you've completely missed the point. Real chemists use computers to analyze data. Of course you can't perfectly duplicate that in a high school class, but I think it is the responsibility of a good teacher to at least give them a flavor of real experimental science looks like.
I actually disagree. I thought it was really cool in chemistry class when I would copy my data points from my notebook into Excel and then have it figure out a regression line for the data. Sometimes we needed to adjust it to a logarithmic scale for the regression line to be a good fit, and the moral of that lesson is still with me. I think it's really cool to get students to work out experimentally certain values, and Excel is the most accessible way of getting them to analyze their data. Also, they learn about important concepts in science like outliers, contaminated data sets, and other things that require hands-on experience in real data analysis.
That's not true. There is great economic value for some in being able to flip their home civilization the bird, get the fuck out of there and start something more sane on their own. This would be even more clear if you imagine the home civilization living in a very crowded and polluted place.
Just how cheap is it though, really? I once tried to run SETI@home on my computers, and my power bill (and thus also CO2 emissions) went up noticeably. When I though about all the thousands of people who are making this sacrifice, it didn't really seem so small anymore. It seems much better to donate that money to poverty relief.
I agree that it's stupid to imagine aliens coming here to take our resources. However, it might still be perfectly rational for them to come and destroy us. If we survive long enough, we might start an era of galactic colonization, where we jump from star system to star system, grinding up whatever material we find into gigantic orbiting space stations.
Any radio-trasmitting civilization has the potential to become a galactic colonizer. So suppose that you belong to a society who also intends to colonize the galaxy and is perhaps a little bit more advanced. Then you notice a potential rival 100 light years away, who just entered their broadcast TV era. You realize that in the far future there might well be a great, catastrophic confrontation, as your wave of colonization bumps into theirs. But there is a cheap way to prevent this calamity: You send a giant sterilization machine or some such thing. Maybe it would drop a small black hole into the sun's gravity well, or maybe it would be a factory to assemble a robotic army from the material in the asteroid belt. In any case, if they could wipe us out before we settle other solar systems, they would save themselves a lot of future grief.
If they're nice, they'll want to study us a bit before they kill us, and they might even keep several thousand of us in some kind of a zoo. However, that would add significantly to the expense of the extermination. At its cheapest, they could just calculate how long we will remain stuck in the solar system - suppose that in our case it will be another thousand years - and then send their mechanical destructive commando to us at a languid 10% the speed of light. That would be the smart thing to do... so expect it to arrive in about 900 years.
I'm surprised that people aren't reaching for the most obvious explanation for this announcement of newly-weakened evidence. Isn't it obvious that it's a part of a deal that Google cut with China, in which it was agreed that tensions will be de-escalated in public?
Google is saying the equivalent of "Oh, did I call your mama a whore in front of the whole world? No, no, of course not! I was saying she was a HORRibly nice woman, but my phone was cutting out! I would never accuse your mama of pulling tricks for a fiver! We're totally BFF's after all, right?"
Note to self: Don't be Chaotic Evil in Wisconsin!
This is just another step in the hollowing out of the state. Private firms already fight our wars. What's next, private firms taking over the "service" of governing the country? Oh wait...
Interesting! Thank you for the reply, it makes sense. Now I hope even more that we'll be able to make these, and that they will be stable for long enough to interact with electrons and other stuff. These experiments would fill in several gaps in what we know about QM.
I have a feeling that Google does something like this, which is why it's so convenient for so many of us to have our email sifted through Gmail's filters. (I'm not saying it's wise, only that it's convenient.) If there's one thing that Google have, it's lots of data.
Now suppose my account were compromised and you got this exact message from my personal email, where the jpeg is a Viagra ad. There is absolutely nothing there for your spam blocker to latch on to, unless it parses the content of the jpeg itself. Anyway, blocking stuff like this would lead to unacceptably many false positives.
In terms of actual developer work, how much do you think went into NeXTStep as a proportion of the total work which culminated with Snow Leopard? I would guess it's about 2%. Even if it's a bit more, it's totally nuts to see OSX as NeXTStep with some polish applied. It's even more nuts to see OSX as BSD that Apple found in the nineties and polished up a bit. That's not true of even Darwin anymore.
It seems to me that the people who say this just resent Apple for being good at marketing. What they say may be right, but the moral of it should be different. Wanna-be freethinking douches who follow trends and have spare cash are a very lucrative demographic, and Apple figured out how to take their money.
So you're looking at that poser at Starbucks and feeling a twinge of envy, because despite the fact that he's an art crime and too old to be rockin a goatee, his Macbook is actually a pretty good computer, probably better than yours.
And therein is a distinction worth making. Yes, Apple may have done a good job with marketing, but they've also done a good job with technology. Imagine if Linux was as good as OSX, but only the present Linux users (1% of the market) realized it and everyone else was kind of turned off by the idea of trying it because they associate it with pimply geeks and D&D. You wouldn't just be in that 1%; you'd be an evangelist.
So you can object all you want to the culture of Apple customers, but realize that this is not commentary on Apple products.
They aren't converting energy to mass ... yet.
Actually, they are. The very reason why they need such energetic collisions is that the collision energy becomes particles, and some of these are rather interesting. So for example, we didn't "find" the top quark. We made it (a massy particle) out of energy.
I don't know enough of the relevant physics (I do remember the pictures of ground-state probability clouds around atomic nuclei, but only for Hydrogen), but isn't the probability of the electron being literally inside the event horizon still vanishingly small, because the size of the event horizon of such a tiny black hole would be on the Planck scale? I thought there would be Heisenbergian reasons why the position of the electron can't be confined to a volume as tiny as that.
...but if someone proposed a collider that would produce energies "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum," I'd still be for it. Those collisions would be freakin awesome!
In Soviet Russia the whistles blow you.