At least in theory, non-ionizing radiation can cause genetic damage (possibly leading to cancer). This would be if the frequency of the radiation were resonant with the DNA molecules. Only certain frequencies can do that, so it should be avoidable, but the possibility should not be ignored.
"Stable" means it doesn't change. It doesn't mean it works perfectly. If you update something, it's not stable.
So you mean a piece of software is automatically stable when the developers abandon the project?
Some pieces of software reach an asymtotic type of stability where no new features are being added (e.g. TeX), but that's pretty rare so that can't be what's meant by stable.
Stable has more than one meaning. "Unchaning" doesn't make sense in this context since any single revision in a repository is stable by that definition, simply because that revision never changes. The definition of stable that makes sense is that it's unlikely to crash/work improperly. That's what almost everyone means when they talk about software stability.
If you're doing a PhD in the physical sciences, then you're almost certainly not paying tuition directly (let alone a level of tuition proportional to your degree as you seem to claim). Otherwise, absolutely zero people would be doing it. MD, JD, and MBA programs can charge a lot because you'll make a lot of money once you've got the degree. The same cannot be said for a science PhD.
There's something to be said about doing what you love and saying "to hell with chasing the almighty dollar". But then you get paid $12,894 per academic year, and you wonder if a little dollar chasing might not be a bad thing. There are other things in life that are desireable (like a family), and they take money.
A science career means spending ~5-6 years working hard and being paid crap in grad school, and then another couple of years working hard and being paid a bit more as a postdoc, and then maybe you can get a decent paying job doing science, but there aren't all thay many science jobs (at least in physics), in academia or industry (bye bye bell labs -- moreover, just because you like science in academia donesn't mean you'll like science in industry), relative to the number of PhDs so there's a decent chance you'll end up in a non science job.
I'm just saying that it's not as simple as "people don't do science because all they care about is money."
I wouldn't exactly call PCRAM a breakthrough -- people have been working on it since the 1960s. There are a host of new non-volatile memory technologies that claim to be read for prime time Real Soon Now. Just look at the list of upcoming non-volatile memory technologies in the right column at the wikipedia article. You can't go out and buy most of them yet, but any of them could be winners (besides PCRAM, MRAM is available from Everspin/freescale -- you can buy some on DigiKey if you want).
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of these to replace hard drives, they've been a long time in coming and they're still not really here yet. Hopefully by 2020.
but if you don't have economic freedom, you are not free, at all.
What does "at all" mean? That freedom is binary, and since they're missing some freedom, they have none? By that standard, I doubt anyone is free -- most governments have some restrictions on what I can do (e.g. I can't walk around town naked). Taking an all or nothing stance makes it a much less useful concept.
Freedom makes more sense as a spectrum that a binary. I'm mostly free in theory, but almost completely free in practice -- it's hard to think of things I want to do, but am prevented from doing by the government (so the ban on walking around town naked doesn't curtail my freedom since it's not something I wanted to do anyway).
The question is where China fits on this spectrum. Clearly, it's more towards the less free side in theory. In practice, my guess is that people mostly go about their lives much the way as people of similar socioeconomic status do in other places. That would make them mostly free, not "not free, at all"
Maxwell's equations don't preclude magnetic monopoles
False. As you find them in a standard text book, they do exactly that. Div B = 0 means no magnetic monopoles. That said, the standard equations can be easily modified to accomodate magnetic monopoles (a few books do this -- Classical Electrodynamics by Julian Schwinger might be one).
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist.
Well, if there is so much as one magnetic monopole in existance, it would explain the quantization of electric charge. I call that a theoretical reason for monopoles to exist.
Hold Cyclists to the Same Standards as Motorists
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There's no denying that many people on bikes break lots of rules (I keep "random schmuck on a bike" and "cyclist" distinct -- the former is the superset of the latter -- people who also ride bikes for recreation). As a cyclist who obeys most of them, it annoys me to no end, because they piss off drivers, making life harder for everyone.
That said, it doesn't make sense to hold cyclists to a higher standard than motorists. How many people come to a complete stop at a stop sign if there's no cross traffic? Do motorists follow all posted speed limits?
On a related note, what exactly do you expect cyclists to do in a 45mph zone? Go the same speed as the cars? At least in the states I've been in, there's no legal obligation to maintain a minimum speed on such roads. Unless it's a downhill, whatever speed the bike is going will be slow compared to that of the cars, so what does it matter that they're going at a leisurely pace?
Which gets to the real heart of the issue. Many of the things that cyclists do to irritate motorists aren't illegal or are the same illegal things that motorists do. Let's take your cyclist using the shoulder example. Here's some applicable WI law:
A motorist passing a bicyclist in the same lane is require to give the bicyclist at least 3 feet of clearance, and to maintain that clearance until safely past. [346.075] A bicyclist passing a stopped or moving vehicle is also required to give at least 3 feet of clearance when passing. [346.80(2)]
For some reason reason (anger, ignorance, convenience, whatever) most cars don't give 3 feet of clearance. The law says that people on bikes can pass stopped vehicles. Why do you expect them to give 3 feet of clearance in that situation when they were just denied it? How about they stay in the middle of the lane (as suggested by the state) and hold up traffic when the light turns green instead?
Again, I agree that many people on bikes are assholes and break many traffic laws. Their actions annoy me too. For what it's worth, I won't ride down the shoulder at a stopped light unless I have clearance (cyclists have plenty of torque at 0rpm, so can often match a car's acceleration in a green light situation, so it's possible to not hold up traffic while remaining in lane), I don't blow through stop signs (although I don't come to a complete stop unless I have to), and I obey all traffic lights (however, at least in WI, you're allowed to go through a red light under certain situations, since many will not register the presence of a bicycle and so will not turn green). I think those are fair compromises -- similar to the ones cars make all the time. Don't hold cyclists to a higher standard than the average driver on the road.
Slate recently had an article partially along similar lines (palmer vs italic cursive styles). It's also worth a read:
http://www.slate.com/id/2227680/
I too grew up at the Franklin Institute, but it went downhill. They took out the cool mechanics room and replaced it with the dumb sports exhibit. I've heard they also took out the math exhibit and replaced it was god knows what. At least the giant heart is still there.
Here's my experience with other museums (not really organized) :
The Franklin Institute used to rank above the other US science museums I've seen (San Francisco, Cleveland, and Boston), which are all good too (although I'm not sure how I'd rank them -- it's been a while since I've been to them).
However, the ultimate science and technology museum is in Munich Germany -- the Deutsches Museum. You can easily spend several days there -- it covers everything (it even has one of Ben Franklin's glass harmonica's, along with everything else the Franklin Institute has...)
As for natural history museums, I've only seen two. The Philadelphia natural history museum is good, but is on the small side. The natural history museum in New York is huge -- definitely go there (and see the attached Hayden Planetarium, if for no other reason that to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson narrate.)
The Smithsonian is a great technology museum -- you know it's worth visiting. The MIT museum in Boston is small, but has some very interesting stuff (from robots to sculpture).
Use DOSBox -- it runs acceptably.
You can buy it cheap on steam if you've lost your copy. They have it packaged up nicely so you don't have to futz around to get it working (it uses DOSBox).
There's no simulation -- the large group of atoms forms one qubit. That's why this is interesting.
Normally, only very small things (like one atom) exhibit quantum behavior. This system is large for something able to exhibit quantum behavior. All the parts effectively join together to act like one quantum system.
I've done lithography outside of a cleanroom before. The person who ran the facility put it this way (when telling me why they require clean shoes or shoe covers): we don't pretend that this is a cleanroom, but we do try to keep it a not dirty room.
I've had better results with DOSEMU than with DOSBox. Despite it's name, DOSEMU seems to be more virtualization and less emulation (see wikipedia), which means there's less overhead. The downside is it can only run on x86(-64) and I think it only works on Linux at the moment.
The teachers' union in Toledo, Ohio, has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It's called "peer review" and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.
Aren't we losing the arctic and antarctic ice sheets due to global warming? Now we want to cool nuclear power plants with frigid arctic water? Let me phrase that another way. Now we want to warm the arctic waters with the nuclear power plant cooling towers?
It wouldn't have any real impact since it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the other things heating the Arctic. The sun delivers order 100 hundred watts to each square meter of the earth, and even if most of that is reflected the absorbed power from the sun is orders and orders of magnitude above what these power plants will do (you can crunch the numbers if you want).
Moreover, if they weren't using nuclear power, they'd just use something else. Burning oil raises temperatures too. Nuclear power is probably more efficient anyway because it has a higher temperature heat reservoir.
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong is one of the most overused tags on this site. Things could go wrong with anything, but most of the time -- after a moment's reflection -- it's clear that the answer is "nothing special". As with most things, this isn't really anything new (the russians have been putting larger reactors in submarines for years) and is thus unlikely to have unfamiliar (or particularly grave) consequences. Just because you don't understand what's going on and are unwilling to devote thought to it does not mean something is dangerous.
This technology is for discs, like DVDs. So you'd use this for the same reasons we often use DVDs instead of hard drives; hard drives just aren't right for many applications (often because hard drives have moving parts that can break).
Yeah, they host those. But those aren't copyrighted. All they do is link to copyrighted material, in a very indirect manner in fact - they don't even link directly to it.
By your standard, would a zipped version of, say a copyrighted book, be fine to host? It's not the copyrighted work in question. You open it up in a text editor and it's just a garble of characters. But you use another program and all of a sudden it's transformed in to the book, which is copyrighted.
I think we can both agree that hosting a compressed file is equivalent to hosting the work itself. So we have established that you do not have to host the exact work for you to be violating the copyright. You only have to host a file that can be readily transformed in to the work.
Bit torrent is functionally no different from compression. You open the torrent file with a program, wait a little while, and then you have the work. The fact that a torrent file is bunch of hashes that doesn't contain the entire work on it's own isn't relevant since, from the user's prospective, it is functionally no different than just hosting the file.
A torrent files is a file that can be readily transformed in to the work and it has no other use. It's pretty clear that hosting them crosses the line you originally drew.
They provide links to stuff. Probably most of the stuff is copyrighted. But all they do is link to it.
No, The Pirate Bay indexes, stores, and tracks.torrent files (to quote wikipedia). The first part is linking, and that's not my real beef. The second part is what I was referring to in my original post (the.torrent files they host have no real purpose except for distribution of the related work). This is hosting, not linking. The third thing they do is kind of like linking, but it's only for connecting people who are in the process of distributing these works, so I'd say it's more than just providing a link to a file because it is an active process of connecting distributers.
PS, like most car analogies, that isn't a good one.
TPB is just linking to material. They don't host it. Yes, they 'make it easier to infringe', but the line between what TPB is doing and what e.g. the roads are doing (helping bank robbers get away, the horror!) is one of degree, and more importantly, it isn't clear where the line is - or if one can be drawn.
Does anyone really buy this?
I agree that it's hard to describe where exactly the line is, but I think it's pretty clear which side of the line this is on. The site is explicitly for distribution copyrighted works, and that's what they do. It's irrevelent that they use some new fangled technology so that they don't have to host the entire files. There is no other use for the files they host except for distribution of the related work.* It's almost as silly as if someone posted a compressed/ROT13/similarly transformed version of the file and claimed they weren't doing anything wrong because they didn't actually post the work in question.
* Yeah, yeah, I remember a story about using bit torrent to repair corrupt files. This isn't different from using pirate bay as your backup. Perhaps it's not wrong, but it still falls under the category of distributing a copyrighted work. Even if there were other uses for the torrent files, that would not legitimize the pirate bay if, for no other reason, simply because such uses are so rare.
Slashdot Mirror
At least in theory, non-ionizing radiation can cause genetic damage (possibly leading to cancer). This would be if the frequency of the radiation were resonant with the DNA molecules. Only certain frequencies can do that, so it should be avoidable, but the possibility should not be ignored.
"Stable" means it doesn't change. It doesn't mean it works perfectly. If you update something, it's not stable.
So you mean a piece of software is automatically stable when the developers abandon the project?
Some pieces of software reach an asymtotic type of stability where no new features are being added (e.g. TeX), but that's pretty rare so that can't be what's meant by stable.
Stable has more than one meaning. "Unchaning" doesn't make sense in this context since any single revision in a repository is stable by that definition, simply because that revision never changes. The definition of stable that makes sense is that it's unlikely to crash/work improperly. That's what almost everyone means when they talk about software stability.
If you're doing a PhD in the physical sciences, then you're almost certainly not paying tuition directly (let alone a level of tuition proportional to your degree as you seem to claim). Otherwise, absolutely zero people would be doing it. MD, JD, and MBA programs can charge a lot because you'll make a lot of money once you've got the degree. The same cannot be said for a science PhD.
There's something to be said about doing what you love and saying "to hell with chasing the almighty dollar". But then you get paid $12,894 per academic year, and you wonder if a little dollar chasing might not be a bad thing. There are other things in life that are desireable (like a family), and they take money.
A science career means spending ~5-6 years working hard and being paid crap in grad school, and then another couple of years working hard and being paid a bit more as a postdoc, and then maybe you can get a decent paying job doing science, but there aren't all thay many science jobs (at least in physics), in academia or industry (bye bye bell labs -- moreover, just because you like science in academia donesn't mean you'll like science in industry), relative to the number of PhDs so there's a decent chance you'll end up in a non science job.
I'm just saying that it's not as simple as "people don't do science because all they care about is money."
I wouldn't exactly call PCRAM a breakthrough -- people have been working on it since the 1960s. There are a host of new non-volatile memory technologies that claim to be read for prime time Real Soon Now. Just look at the list of upcoming non-volatile memory technologies in the right column at the wikipedia article. You can't go out and buy most of them yet, but any of them could be winners (besides PCRAM, MRAM is available from Everspin/freescale -- you can buy some on DigiKey if you want).
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of these to replace hard drives, they've been a long time in coming and they're still not really here yet. Hopefully by 2020.
but if you don't have economic freedom, you are not free, at all.
What does "at all" mean? That freedom is binary, and since they're missing some freedom, they have none? By that standard, I doubt anyone is free -- most governments have some restrictions on what I can do (e.g. I can't walk around town naked). Taking an all or nothing stance makes it a much less useful concept.
Freedom makes more sense as a spectrum that a binary. I'm mostly free in theory, but almost completely free in practice -- it's hard to think of things I want to do, but am prevented from doing by the government (so the ban on walking around town naked doesn't curtail my freedom since it's not something I wanted to do anyway).
The question is where China fits on this spectrum. Clearly, it's more towards the less free side in theory. In practice, my guess is that people mostly go about their lives much the way as people of similar socioeconomic status do in other places. That would make them mostly free, not "not free, at all"
Maxwell's equations don't preclude magnetic monopoles
False. As you find them in a standard text book, they do exactly that. Div B = 0 means no magnetic monopoles. That said, the standard equations can be easily modified to accomodate magnetic monopoles (a few books do this -- Classical Electrodynamics by Julian Schwinger might be one).
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#Dirac.27s_quantization
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist.
Well, if there is so much as one magnetic monopole in existance, it would explain the quantization of electric charge. I call that a theoretical reason for monopoles to exist.
There's no denying that many people on bikes break lots of rules (I keep "random schmuck on a bike" and "cyclist" distinct -- the former is the superset of the latter -- people who also ride bikes for recreation). As a cyclist who obeys most of them, it annoys me to no end, because they piss off drivers, making life harder for everyone.
That said, it doesn't make sense to hold cyclists to a higher standard than motorists. How many people come to a complete stop at a stop sign if there's no cross traffic? Do motorists follow all posted speed limits?
On a related note, what exactly do you expect cyclists to do in a 45mph zone? Go the same speed as the cars? At least in the states I've been in, there's no legal obligation to maintain a minimum speed on such roads. Unless it's a downhill, whatever speed the bike is going will be slow compared to that of the cars, so what does it matter that they're going at a leisurely pace?
Which gets to the real heart of the issue. Many of the things that cyclists do to irritate motorists aren't illegal or are the same illegal things that motorists do. Let's take your cyclist using the shoulder example. Here's some applicable WI law:
A motorist passing a bicyclist in the same lane is require to give the bicyclist at least 3 feet of clearance, and to maintain that clearance until safely past. [346.075] A bicyclist passing a stopped or moving vehicle is also required to give at least 3 feet of clearance when passing. [346.80(2)]
For some reason reason (anger, ignorance, convenience, whatever) most cars don't give 3 feet of clearance. The law says that people on bikes can pass stopped vehicles. Why do you expect them to give 3 feet of clearance in that situation when they were just denied it? How about they stay in the middle of the lane (as suggested by the state) and hold up traffic when the light turns green instead?
Again, I agree that many people on bikes are assholes and break many traffic laws. Their actions annoy me too. For what it's worth, I won't ride down the shoulder at a stopped light unless I have clearance (cyclists have plenty of torque at 0rpm, so can often match a car's acceleration in a green light situation, so it's possible to not hold up traffic while remaining in lane), I don't blow through stop signs (although I don't come to a complete stop unless I have to), and I obey all traffic lights (however, at least in WI, you're allowed to go through a red light under certain situations, since many will not register the presence of a bicycle and so will not turn green). I think those are fair compromises -- similar to the ones cars make all the time. Don't hold cyclists to a higher standard than the average driver on the road.
Slate recently had an article partially along similar lines (palmer vs italic cursive styles). It's also worth a read: http://www.slate.com/id/2227680/
I too grew up at the Franklin Institute, but it went downhill. They took out the cool mechanics room and replaced it with the dumb sports exhibit. I've heard they also took out the math exhibit and replaced it was god knows what. At least the giant heart is still there. Here's my experience with other museums (not really organized) : The Franklin Institute used to rank above the other US science museums I've seen (San Francisco, Cleveland, and Boston), which are all good too (although I'm not sure how I'd rank them -- it's been a while since I've been to them).
However, the ultimate science and technology museum is in Munich Germany -- the Deutsches Museum. You can easily spend several days there -- it covers everything (it even has one of Ben Franklin's glass harmonica's, along with everything else the Franklin Institute has...)
As for natural history museums, I've only seen two. The Philadelphia natural history museum is good, but is on the small side. The natural history museum in New York is huge -- definitely go there (and see the attached Hayden Planetarium, if for no other reason that to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson narrate.)
The Smithsonian is a great technology museum -- you know it's worth visiting. The MIT museum in Boston is small, but has some very interesting stuff (from robots to sculpture).
Holy shit:
http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/1095/10f_deth.html
Use DOSBox -- it runs acceptably. You can buy it cheap on steam if you've lost your copy. They have it packaged up nicely so you don't have to futz around to get it working (it uses DOSBox).
There's no simulation -- the large group of atoms forms one qubit. That's why this is interesting. Normally, only very small things (like one atom) exhibit quantum behavior. This system is large for something able to exhibit quantum behavior. All the parts effectively join together to act like one quantum system.
I've done lithography outside of a cleanroom before. The person who ran the facility put it this way (when telling me why they require clean shoes or shoe covers): we don't pretend that this is a cleanroom, but we do try to keep it a not dirty room.
I've had better results with DOSEMU than with DOSBox. Despite it's name, DOSEMU seems to be more virtualization and less emulation (see wikipedia), which means there's less overhead. The downside is it can only run on x86(-64) and I think it only works on Linux at the moment.
I think I'll go install XCOM again now...
Listen to the story and some of your questions will be answered.
The teachers' union in Toledo, Ohio, has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It's called "peer review" and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.
...
union members today overwhelmingly support it.
...
The AFT endorsed peer review in 1984.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91327130 Listen to the story -- the text is a poor summary.
Aren't we losing the arctic and antarctic ice sheets due to global warming? Now we want to cool nuclear power plants with frigid arctic water? Let me phrase that another way. Now we want to warm the arctic waters with the nuclear power plant cooling towers?
It wouldn't have any real impact since it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the other things heating the Arctic. The sun delivers order 100 hundred watts to each square meter of the earth, and even if most of that is reflected the absorbed power from the sun is orders and orders of magnitude above what these power plants will do (you can crunch the numbers if you want).
Moreover, if they weren't using nuclear power, they'd just use something else. Burning oil raises temperatures too. Nuclear power is probably more efficient anyway because it has a higher temperature heat reservoir.
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong is one of the most overused tags on this site. Things could go wrong with anything, but most of the time -- after a moment's reflection -- it's clear that the answer is "nothing special". As with most things, this isn't really anything new (the russians have been putting larger reactors in submarines for years) and is thus unlikely to have unfamiliar (or particularly grave) consequences. Just because you don't understand what's going on and are unwilling to devote thought to it does not mean something is dangerous.
I'd wager that sound isn't coming from the DVD.
Of course the drive has moving parts. The point is that the disc and drive are easily separable so you can send one without the other.
This technology is for discs, like DVDs. So you'd use this for the same reasons we often use DVDs instead of hard drives; hard drives just aren't right for many applications (often because hard drives have moving parts that can break).
Yeah, they host those. But those aren't copyrighted. All they do is link to copyrighted material, in a very indirect manner in fact - they don't even link directly to it.
By your standard, would a zipped version of, say a copyrighted book, be fine to host? It's not the copyrighted work in question. You open it up in a text editor and it's just a garble of characters. But you use another program and all of a sudden it's transformed in to the book, which is copyrighted.
I think we can both agree that hosting a compressed file is equivalent to hosting the work itself. So we have established that you do not have to host the exact work for you to be violating the copyright. You only have to host a file that can be readily transformed in to the work.
Bit torrent is functionally no different from compression. You open the torrent file with a program, wait a little while, and then you have the work. The fact that a torrent file is bunch of hashes that doesn't contain the entire work on it's own isn't relevant since, from the user's prospective, it is functionally no different than just hosting the file.
A torrent files is a file that can be readily transformed in to the work and it has no other use. It's pretty clear that hosting them crosses the line you originally drew.
They provide links to stuff. Probably most of the stuff is copyrighted. But all they do is link to it.
No, The Pirate Bay indexes, stores, and tracks .torrent files (to quote wikipedia). The first part is linking, and that's not my real beef. The second part is what I was referring to in my original post (the .torrent files they host have no real purpose except for distribution of the related work). This is hosting, not linking. The third thing they do is kind of like linking, but it's only for connecting people who are in the process of distributing these works, so I'd say it's more than just providing a link to a file because it is an active process of connecting distributers.
PS, like most car analogies, that isn't a good one.
TPB is just linking to material. They don't host it. Yes, they 'make it easier to infringe', but the line between what TPB is doing and what e.g. the roads are doing (helping bank robbers get away, the horror!) is one of degree, and more importantly, it isn't clear where the line is - or if one can be drawn.
Does anyone really buy this?
I agree that it's hard to describe where exactly the line is, but I think it's pretty clear which side of the line this is on. The site is explicitly for distribution copyrighted works, and that's what they do. It's irrevelent that they use some new fangled technology so that they don't have to host the entire files. There is no other use for the files they host except for distribution of the related work.* It's almost as silly as if someone posted a compressed/ROT13/similarly transformed version of the file and claimed they weren't doing anything wrong because they didn't actually post the work in question.
* Yeah, yeah, I remember a story about using bit torrent to repair corrupt files. This isn't different from using pirate bay as your backup. Perhaps it's not wrong, but it still falls under the category of distributing a copyrighted work. Even if there were other uses for the torrent files, that would not legitimize the pirate bay if, for no other reason, simply because such uses are so rare.
Sure. And almost all of that radiation comes from sources other than nuclear tests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation