Economics should be classified similar to Logic and Math.
No. Economics is supposed to be a science, and hence valid only to the extent that it jibes w/ empirical data. Math is a whole different animal, since everything flows from pure reason applied to a set of self-consistent axioms (logic is a branch of math, the watered down rhetorical version of logic notwithstanding). There are no axioms in science. What are called first principles are basic and well demonstrated theories, but always subject to empirical invalidation.
One of the biggest criticisms aimed at many economists is that they try to treat economics as though it were math, using their pet assumptions in lieu of axioms. It's garbage. Aside from not being how science works, many of their "axioms" have even been demonstrated to be false, yet they continue with them anyway. It's a circle jerk, with a set of "first principles" that can be chosen to come to any ideologically based conclusion you want.
Using Newton in this day and age is a bit disingenuous. His output was merely some well-thought out thoughts.
Yeah, I don't know what the big deal was about Sir Isaac. All that fame over a few intelligent musings. Big deal, we probably get 100 of those per day on Slashdot.
Unfortunately these threads have degenerated into YASSS (yet another Slashdot science seminar), where a few insightful or useful comments are made, and everyone else is trying to prove they remember or misremember their freshman physics. There has been almost no discussion of the tunneling device, which is a shame because I'd love to hear from people who have a better understanding than me.
Probably because you can never prove a scientific theory right. You can however repeatedly fail to prove it wrong, and that's been done many many times w/ Einstein's theories.
We won't see this tech for at least 20 years before it get's applied to consumer products, if at all.
OTOH, it is exciting to see the kinds of research being done that will advance computing beyond our wildest dreams.
Who cares about consumer products. The transistor was invented in 1947 and was being used by the early 50's. Even for consumer products the first transistor radio was being sold by 1954. The IC was invented in 1958 and was being used by the early 60's.
mediamatters is a biased and not necessarily honest source. Same for AP. WSJ is better.
WSJ is "better" because they promote the ideology that you like. Mediamatters is clearly on the left, but calling AP biased and dishonest compared to Rupert's rag? Oh, sorry, didn't realize you must be being facetious.
but it suddenly occurs to me... am I using my idle cycles to provide some pharmaceutical company with more patents? Once this distributed computing program reaches its goal... who will be making money? Should I worry about that/them?
For this project you'd be using your idle cycles to provide some solar cell company with more patents (probably a Chinese company too, since American ones seem to dead or dying). That's the problem with making universities use patents to fund themselves - it defeats the entire idea of open research that universities are supposed to be about. The Bayh-Dole Act seemed like a good idea at the time (I supported it), but in hindsight it was a mistake. Let's get rid of it. I know that many university researchers hate it too, because the university "intellectual property office" pressures people to not publish too much, or to delay publication at least until the patents are filed. Here's a simple idea: universities shouldn't have intellectual property offices, and they worked fine (actually better) for centuries without them.
For privacy reasons, I'd rather not disclose where I live, but it's in the Northeast.
I fully understand people's desire not to give out any info that would specifically identify them, and I do it myself. However, my saying that I live on Long Island doesn't really do much to identify me, as there are several million people here. At least Northeast is smaller than US. If anyone wants to know exactly who "ebno-10db" is, they can always ask the NSA.
As for where I'm from, yes, all homes have 3-phase 4-wire electricity with floating neutral and local earth. (IT system with high impedance floating ground). The electricity is taken from the differential of any two live wires, and if one goes down (or too far up), the local filter transformer will switch over. This may cause a dip in voltage and uneven distribution depending on how local the outage is, and isn't true redundancy. But it beats always losing power.
I see that 3-phase does provide a small amount of redundancy courtesy of the delta-wye transformers used between the local transmission lines and customer feeds. However, it's limited to 57% capacity. Perhaps that's enough with a momentary glitch, or if the system is not fully loaded (actually pretty common). I'm not sure that does much except for very local line problems. Typically in the US 3-phase comes into residential neighborhoods, with a single phase broken off for one street and another phase for a different street. I see 3-phase within a few hundred feet of my house.
Given the disparity between your experience and other people's, I wonder if you're relying too much on what your UPS reports. They're purposely very sensitive and cut in at the slightest glitch or momentary voltage drop, just in case it turns out to be not so momentary. I judge by what a non-battery backed computer does in practice (e.g. desktop w/o UPS). That's different because all power supplies have some holdup time, and my concern is only whether its a problem in practice. I rarely have problems w/ such a setup.
One can also (rightly) argue that a floating neutral system is more dangerous for consumers, but it's highly resilient to things like lightning strikes - there's no feedback into the system.
Are you sure the neutral is completely floating? US practice is to ground the neutral close to the transformer (for both 3-phase and the split-phase I mentioned earlier). That keeps the transformer secondary from floating too far from ground. Nevertheless the neutral is never to be used as a safety, and you need a separate safety ground (I think that's pretty much universal across the world).
unwillingness of the power companies to... bring multiphase to the homes. First a 3 day outage and then a 9 day outage in two successive years. No, it's not fallen branches that's to blame - it's relying on two-phase... (and single-phase to the home)
3-phase does not improve reliability. Your "relying on two-phase... (and single-phase to the home)" doesn't make sense either. We haven't used 2 phase in the US in a hundred years. BTW, what comes into homes is technically called split-phase. The local transformers have a center-tapped 240V secondary. In a house you have either 240V for heavy loads, or 120V for most things (center-tap to hot).
Are you from Germany? It's one of the few countries that has residential 3-phase. It has advantages for large motors and very large power supplies. It would be good for people who have central air conditioning. Unless I'm mistaken, CAC isn't common in Germany, so ironically the residential 3-phase is of minimal value. I've had difficulties convincing some Germans with very modest knowledge of electrical systems, who seem to attribute magical superiority to it.
The above ground lines are another matter. They're bad, but what makes them worse, at least around here (Long Island) is lack of maintenance. It's much less of a problem if the trees are pruned regularly, which around power lines is the power company's responsibility.
It depends on how you define brownout. If you include short outages of a second or less
That's not a brownout. Nobody defines it that way. A brownout is a sustained period (minutes to hours) of line voltage that's below the lower limit of the tolerance.
Lights flicker so often that people born and raised here don't even recognize it. It's considered normal. My UPSes log an average of 3-4 of them per day, and did so before too, when I lived in a different town.
Where the hell is that? You still haven't given any specifics, so it's very hard to evaluate your credibility. macpacheco above, who said he never saw any problems, gave specifics, as have I.
Long Island, where I live, is notorious for electrical supply problems, and I've never seen anything like what you're talking about.
First a 3 day outage and then a 9 day outage in two successive years.
Presumably you're talking about hurricanes Irene and Sandy. I had basically the same experience, and wasn't happy about it. The above ground lines are a major problem, although the flooding of the 14th street substation in Manhattan shows that buried electrical infrastructure has its problems too. Before you get too smug about the superiority of European electric utilities though, I should remind you that there are no hurricanes in Europe.
the 1.21 GW of power that each person will eventually need
That figure is very deceptive - it's the peak load required per time machine (not per capita). Not only does that 1.21GW peak need to be converted to the much small average load, but time machine pooling can substantially reduce per capita use (we should convert to 4+ seaters instead of 2 seat Deloreans).
Natural Gas Fuel Cell power plants are twice as efficient as thermal natural gas plants
Maybe compared to inefficient natural gas plants, but Combined-cycle plants have efficiencies over 50% (approaching 60%) so what you say is not possible in general.
I've got nothing against natural gas fuel cells, and would be interested in any links, but overstatements are always undesirable.
You don't have to compile Firefox from source. If an open source product has an NSA backdoor, it only takes ONE user to bring down the entire product, or the Mozilla Foundation in the example, and shame them forever. This in itself is a guarantee.
Assuming that it's clear that it's a backdoor, as opposed to something that appears to be an ordinary security bug.
"Surgeon uses camera and computer to capture live procedure and stream it" ?
Problem: that's only slightly newer than "surgeon washes hands before operation". Though w/ the Google hype machine, they might be able to convince people that soap and water are revolutionary.
Can you provide examples of what those are? Also, are these questions and the "correct" answers one size fits all or are they supposed to vary from company to company?
Google also has the advantage that they're considered a hot place to work, so they probably get a lot of very good applicants. The work atmosphere you describe sounds good. It's always pleasure to work with good people, as you can learn more and it keeps you on your toes.
Slashdot Mirror
Economics should be classified similar to Logic and Math.
No. Economics is supposed to be a science, and hence valid only to the extent that it jibes w/ empirical data. Math is a whole different animal, since everything flows from pure reason applied to a set of self-consistent axioms (logic is a branch of math, the watered down rhetorical version of logic notwithstanding). There are no axioms in science. What are called first principles are basic and well demonstrated theories, but always subject to empirical invalidation.
One of the biggest criticisms aimed at many economists is that they try to treat economics as though it were math, using their pet assumptions in lieu of axioms. It's garbage. Aside from not being how science works, many of their "axioms" have even been demonstrated to be false, yet they continue with them anyway. It's a circle jerk, with a set of "first principles" that can be chosen to come to any ideologically based conclusion you want.
Using Newton in this day and age is a bit disingenuous. His output was merely some well-thought out thoughts.
Yeah, I don't know what the big deal was about Sir Isaac. All that fame over a few intelligent musings. Big deal, we probably get 100 of those per day on Slashdot.
Unfortunately these threads have degenerated into YASSS (yet another Slashdot science seminar), where a few insightful or useful comments are made, and everyone else is trying to prove they remember or misremember their freshman physics. There has been almost no discussion of the tunneling device, which is a shame because I'd love to hear from people who have a better understanding than me.
Since Einstein hasn't been proven right
Probably because you can never prove a scientific theory right. You can however repeatedly fail to prove it wrong, and that's been done many many times w/ Einstein's theories.
Dear OP, transistors are f****** semiconductors!
Strictly speaking transistors are made of semiconductor materials. Calling the devices themselves semiconductors is just an informal shorthand.
The rest of the article is at best starry-eyed fantasy.
Would you care to elaborate on why?
Phase velocity exceeds c, not group velocity. If you guys wanna prove Einstein wrong, you're gonna have to work a little harder.
We won't see this tech for at least 20 years before it get's applied to consumer products, if at all.
OTOH, it is exciting to see the kinds of research being done that will advance computing beyond our wildest dreams.
Who cares about consumer products. The transistor was invented in 1947 and was being used by the early 50's. Even for consumer products the first transistor radio was being sold by 1954. The IC was invented in 1958 and was being used by the early 60's.
You mean the 1950s are back? Tunnel diodes were supposed to rule the world back then too! How exciting!
Tunneling is an old friend. It's also used for erasing NOR Flash.
mediamatters is a biased and not necessarily honest source. Same for AP. WSJ is better.
WSJ is "better" because they promote the ideology that you like. Mediamatters is clearly on the left, but calling AP biased and dishonest compared to Rupert's rag? Oh, sorry, didn't realize you must be being facetious.
infectious footprint in the epidemiological record.
What's an infectious footprint? Since bacteria lack feet, I don't see how they can leave footprints.
but it suddenly occurs to me ... am I using my idle cycles to provide some pharmaceutical company with more patents? Once this distributed computing program reaches its goal ... who will be making money? Should I worry about that/them?
For this project you'd be using your idle cycles to provide some solar cell company with more patents (probably a Chinese company too, since American ones seem to dead or dying). That's the problem with making universities use patents to fund themselves - it defeats the entire idea of open research that universities are supposed to be about. The Bayh-Dole Act seemed like a good idea at the time (I supported it), but in hindsight it was a mistake. Let's get rid of it. I know that many university researchers hate it too, because the university "intellectual property office" pressures people to not publish too much, or to delay publication at least until the patents are filed. Here's a simple idea: universities shouldn't have intellectual property offices, and they worked fine (actually better) for centuries without them.
It's nevertheless a subsidy, because you can get lower interest rates with a loan guarantee, and the guarantor is on-the-hook if you stop paying.
For privacy reasons, I'd rather not disclose where I live, but it's in the Northeast.
I fully understand people's desire not to give out any info that would specifically identify them, and I do it myself. However, my saying that I live on Long Island doesn't really do much to identify me, as there are several million people here. At least Northeast is smaller than US. If anyone wants to know exactly who "ebno-10db" is, they can always ask the NSA.
As for where I'm from, yes, all homes have 3-phase 4-wire electricity with floating neutral and local earth. (IT system with high impedance floating ground). The electricity is taken from the differential of any two live wires, and if one goes down (or too far up), the local filter transformer will switch over. This may cause a dip in voltage and uneven distribution depending on how local the outage is, and isn't true redundancy. But it beats always losing power.
I see that 3-phase does provide a small amount of redundancy courtesy of the delta-wye transformers used between the local transmission lines and customer feeds. However, it's limited to 57% capacity. Perhaps that's enough with a momentary glitch, or if the system is not fully loaded (actually pretty common). I'm not sure that does much except for very local line problems. Typically in the US 3-phase comes into residential neighborhoods, with a single phase broken off for one street and another phase for a different street. I see 3-phase within a few hundred feet of my house.
Given the disparity between your experience and other people's, I wonder if you're relying too much on what your UPS reports. They're purposely very sensitive and cut in at the slightest glitch or momentary voltage drop, just in case it turns out to be not so momentary. I judge by what a non-battery backed computer does in practice (e.g. desktop w/o UPS). That's different because all power supplies have some holdup time, and my concern is only whether its a problem in practice. I rarely have problems w/ such a setup.
One can also (rightly) argue that a floating neutral system is more dangerous for consumers, but it's highly resilient to things like lightning strikes - there's no feedback into the system.
Are you sure the neutral is completely floating? US practice is to ground the neutral close to the transformer (for both 3-phase and the split-phase I mentioned earlier). That keeps the transformer secondary from floating too far from ground. Nevertheless the neutral is never to be used as a safety, and you need a separate safety ground (I think that's pretty much universal across the world).
also a faulty design in that a single downed wire can cause an outage, unlike in (I would guess) most of the industrialized world
No. There is no redundancy for local lines in any country that I'm familiar with.
unwillingness of the power companies to ... bring multiphase to the homes. First a 3 day outage and then a 9 day outage in two successive years. No, it's not fallen branches that's to blame - it's relying on two-phase ... (and single-phase to the home)
3-phase does not improve reliability. Your "relying on two-phase ... (and single-phase to the home)" doesn't make sense either. We haven't used 2 phase in the US in a hundred years. BTW, what comes into homes is technically called split-phase. The local transformers have a center-tapped 240V secondary. In a house you have either 240V for heavy loads, or 120V for most things (center-tap to hot).
Are you from Germany? It's one of the few countries that has residential 3-phase. It has advantages for large motors and very large power supplies. It would be good for people who have central air conditioning. Unless I'm mistaken, CAC isn't common in Germany, so ironically the residential 3-phase is of minimal value. I've had difficulties convincing some Germans with very modest knowledge of electrical systems, who seem to attribute magical superiority to it.
The above ground lines are another matter. They're bad, but what makes them worse, at least around here (Long Island) is lack of maintenance. It's much less of a problem if the trees are pruned regularly, which around power lines is the power company's responsibility.
It depends on how you define brownout. If you include short outages of a second or less
That's not a brownout. Nobody defines it that way. A brownout is a sustained period (minutes to hours) of line voltage that's below the lower limit of the tolerance.
Lights flicker so often that people born and raised here don't even recognize it. It's considered normal.
My UPSes log an average of 3-4 of them per day, and did so before too, when I lived in a different town.
Where the hell is that? You still haven't given any specifics, so it's very hard to evaluate your credibility. macpacheco above, who said he never saw any problems, gave specifics, as have I.
Long Island, where I live, is notorious for electrical supply problems, and I've never seen anything like what you're talking about.
First a 3 day outage and then a 9 day outage in two successive years.
Presumably you're talking about hurricanes Irene and Sandy. I had basically the same experience, and wasn't happy about it. The above ground lines are a major problem, although the flooding of the 14th street substation in Manhattan shows that buried electrical infrastructure has its problems too. Before you get too smug about the superiority of European electric utilities though, I should remind you that there are no hurricanes in Europe.
I don't understand this story. What does it have to do with Edward Snowden?
the 1.21 GW of power that each person will eventually need
That figure is very deceptive - it's the peak load required per time machine (not per capita). Not only does that 1.21GW peak need to be converted to the much small average load, but time machine pooling can substantially reduce per capita use (we should convert to 4+ seaters instead of 2 seat Deloreans).
nuclear wasn't being subsidized in the way most people think. They are subsidized loans
Which are subsidies, plain and simple. Interest on construction loans is a standard cost that has to be dealt with.
'Sufficiently distributed' wind power can also eliminate all those pesky birds.
Better tell the Audubon Society, because they support wind power.
Natural Gas Fuel Cell power plants are twice as efficient as thermal natural gas plants
Maybe compared to inefficient natural gas plants, but Combined-cycle plants have efficiencies over 50% (approaching 60%) so what you say is not possible in general.
I've got nothing against natural gas fuel cells, and would be interested in any links, but overstatements are always undesirable.
You don't have to compile Firefox from source. If an open source product has an NSA backdoor, it only takes ONE user to bring down the entire product, or the Mozilla Foundation in the example, and shame them forever. This in itself is a guarantee.
Assuming that it's clear that it's a backdoor, as opposed to something that appears to be an ordinary security bug.
"Surgeon uses camera and computer to capture live procedure and stream it" ?
Problem: that's only slightly newer than "surgeon washes hands before operation". Though w/ the Google hype machine, they might be able to convince people that soap and water are revolutionary.
Call it what you like, the creators are billionaires and still have their youth.
By your logic I have no right to criticize the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe because BP is a big successful company.
validated personality and work-style questions
Can you provide examples of what those are? Also, are these questions and the "correct" answers one size fits all or are they supposed to vary from company to company?
Google also has the advantage that they're considered a hot place to work, so they probably get a lot of very good applicants. The work atmosphere you describe sounds good. It's always pleasure to work with good people, as you can learn more and it keeps you on your toes.