(in fact, I find the last two paragraphs of attacks a bit offensive)
To a hard-working academic, the last paragraph is deeply offensive, and serves no purpose in this debate other than provoking angry reactions. Which is the definition of a flamebait. While troll may not have been the most appropriate moderation (a true troll is supposed to be humorous on some level and not meant seriously), "flamebait" would have been pretty much dead-on. Troll comes pretty close (like "interesting" "informative" and "insightful" can sometimes also be used interchangeably).
You will have heard a lot about graphene, especially with regard to its truly wondrous electrical properties
In most press releases about graphene I read lately, the focus was on its mechanical properties, and the fact that it is conductive would be merely an (often convenient) side effect.
I couldn't agree more... except on one small detail: you'll need some kind of mind reading technology to distinguish someone looking at the road from someone staring at a (properly implemented) HUD...
I surely hope you're trolling. What you're doing is essentially accusing Obama of being too much big government and too little big government at the same time. Which way do you want it, anyway?
The gun works by listening in with a directional microphone, and then, after a short delay of around 0.2 seconds, playing it back with a directional speaker. This triggers an effect that psychologists call Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF), which has long been known to interrupt your speech (you might’ve experienced the same effect if you’ve ever heard your own voice echoing through Skype or another voice comms program). According to the researchers, DAF doesn’t cause physical discomfort, but the fact that you’re unable to talk is obviously quite stressful.
Yes, I've experienced this phenomenon, and yes, it's amazing just how badly it affects one's speech... for a while. Just one hour per week fighting with one's own echo for a few months, and one gets used to it, which would most probably imply immunity to the speech-jamming gun.
...they want their MCM-41-PEI back. Same substance (pei polymer on a zeolite matrix), same properties (CO2 capacity, temperatures/partial pressures,...). Discovered more than 10 years ago and currently in use on the ISS as a CO2 scrubber. Some people really have no shame. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MCM-41-PEI&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
I'm not sure "behind" is the right word. I'm sure US cell phone companies could start providing similar service as in the rest of the world for prices like in the rest of the worlds practically overnight. They would see their profit margins shrink dramatically, yet would still be making profit. The thing that stops them from doing so is some handy (perhaps even unspoken) agreements between the companies not to compete too hard. I remember that roughly 5 years ago, the European cell phone providers were forced to lower their text message fees as a result of an EU antitrust investigation (traditional 130-char text messages put negligible load on the provider's network). It struck me that at that time, the fees I was paying in the US for text messages were about double the European ones (before the crack-down), and they haven't gone down since. Perhaps just a little bit more, you know, regulatory interference, would help...
Because the available non-contract plans in large swaths of the US of A are appallingly bad deals, subsidized phone or not. Assuming that you want to avoid paying out of your nose for light cellular usage, you'll be on a contract plan. If so, you can get a decent subsidized phone for free, or a subsidized device that can run angry birds for almost-free. If you decide to buy your own unlocked phone, you'll just end up subsidizing someone else's phone through your overpriced contract plan. That's why.
I personally put at least part of the blame for the mildly overpriced contract plans and the outrageously overpriced non-contract plans on price fixing. If you want to see a firm falsification of the central dogma of laissez-fair capitalism, just go to the country where everyone is indoctrinated with it at school, and study the cellular networks, the internet service providers,... For every American libertarian who claims that the economy is best off with as little as possible legal limitations and government intervention, the country is driven further into the ground. It is widely recognized among non-bigots that competition in a free market cannot be efficient if the lawmaker doesn't aggressively fight oligopolies, trusts and cartels. Of course, it doesn't help to have an election system that practically forces the lawmaker into a multi-million dollar dept to the cartels even before assuming office...
From the article: "Their [the three stradivari] combined value is around 10 million US dollars, a hundred times more than the three new ones."
$10'000'000 / 100 = $100'000
$100'000 / 3 = $33'333
So the average value of the 3 new violins that were indistinguishable from Stradivari is about $33'000. Those are not cheap instruments we're talking about, and in a whole different league than the instrument featured in the paypal affair. As for the difference between a $2500 violin and a $100 violin, you have obviously never been through the traumatic experience of listening to a $100 violin from close by. I can assure you even a non-expert can hear the difference with both eyes^H^H^H^Hears closed. In fact, it would take industrial-strength ear protectors to not notice the difference.
Yes, this is the wrong test - by a very long shot!
That said, on an international scale, I don't thing the sample 10th grade tests are unreasonably difficult. Just a though (maybe I'm missing some point here), but perhaps the US needs an explicitly tiered school system, like in my home country, where we have 3 types of secondary schools for non-handicapped kids:
General education. Most of the students in this tier either get a higher-end white-collar jobs that doesn't require a college degree or go to university. The sample 10th grade questions would be considered too easy for students in this category.
Technical education. The students either go to a professional college (which are less research-oriented than the aforementioned universities), get a mid-range white-collar job, or a skilled blue-collar job. The sample 10th grade questions would be appropriate for this tier.
Vocational education. The students rarely take on higher education, getting blue-collar or lower-end white collar jobs. The sample 10th grade questions would be too difficult for this tier.
All three tiers are free by constitution. Students (or rather, their parents), are free to choose tiers, assisted by recommendations given at the end of primary school. Switching to a higher tier midway would be difficult, motivating parents to put their children as high as possible to start with. The biggest criticism of this system is that children who are placed too high by their parents and are forced to switch to a lower tier often end up wasting one or more years and getting demotivated.
But we're going a bit off-topic... I still find it outrageous that a school board member wouldn't be able to get 50% of the 10th grade questions right with confidence, leave alone "knowing the answers to none of them, and managing to guess ten out of the 60 correctly".
What's wrong with this country that one can just go to a website and casually gloss through the companies contributing to a representative's campaign in relation to their political activities. I mean, kudos for the transparency, but if it is publicly known that a representative of the people accepted large sums of money from a company, and is subsequently seen footing bills in favor of said company, the politician in question should be deposed and put behind bars for corruption in short order, or at the very least be subject to intense media criticism. The USA is one of the few industrialized countries where politicians can openly get away with this kind of shit.
Following good/. tradition, I'm being too lazy to actually read the paper (though I read the news release on the Nature website) and am just expecting someone else to explain it for me. I do accept that the photons at the 2 sides of the beam splitter are entangled - this is expected behavior for photons and has been amply demonstrated. My question is: does this necessarily imply that the phonons in the diamonds are entangled? What if the interaction with the diamond "qualifies" as a measurement? You'd still get a Stokes photon because a photon has interacted with a diamond at some point, and when "reading out" the phonons, you'd still discover that exactly one of the diamonds will have vibrational energy and the other one not, but they've never been entangled...
I'm sure the authors have somehow excluded this possibility, but it is a bit sloppy that the news release doesn't mention how, because that would be the actual tour de force that would make the paper worthy of Nature.
Slashdot Mirror
(in fact, I find the last two paragraphs of attacks a bit offensive)
To a hard-working academic, the last paragraph is deeply offensive, and serves no purpose in this debate other than provoking angry reactions. Which is the definition of a flamebait. While troll may not have been the most appropriate moderation (a true troll is supposed to be humorous on some level and not meant seriously), "flamebait" would have been pretty much dead-on. Troll comes pretty close (like "interesting" "informative" and "insightful" can sometimes also be used interchangeably).
Hey that's cool! How did you type that Ellipsis after your KDE desktop froze up?
You will have heard a lot about graphene, especially with regard to its truly wondrous electrical properties
In most press releases about graphene I read lately, the focus was on its mechanical properties, and the fact that it is conductive would be merely an (often convenient) side effect.
TFA is remarkably devoid of anything insightful or, you know, newsworthy...
Heh good one, but this is a concept that predates capitalism by a fair margin. How about "Trade"?
Wouldn't that make him or her an iDiot ?
- I'll get my coat.
True, but mass spectrometers are also famously sensitive, so the amount of sample you end up losing is usually so small you don't care.
...I thought that's what mass spectrometers were for.
What? He said "store"...
I couldn't agree more... except on one small detail: you'll need some kind of mind reading technology to distinguish someone looking at the road from someone staring at a (properly implemented) HUD...
I surely hope you're trolling. What you're doing is essentially accusing Obama of being too much big government and too little big government at the same time. Which way do you want it, anyway?
The gun works by listening in with a directional microphone, and then, after a short delay of around 0.2 seconds, playing it back with a directional speaker. This triggers an effect that psychologists call Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF), which has long been known to interrupt your speech (you might’ve experienced the same effect if you’ve ever heard your own voice echoing through Skype or another voice comms program). According to the researchers, DAF doesn’t cause physical discomfort, but the fact that you’re unable to talk is obviously quite stressful.
Yes, I've experienced this phenomenon, and yes, it's amazing just how badly it affects one's speech... for a while. Just one hour per week fighting with one's own echo for a few months, and one gets used to it, which would most probably imply immunity to the speech-jamming gun.
http://gizmodo.com/5426453/the-physics-of-space-battles
All your questions answered by an expert.
This is so bad it's almost funny.
...they want their MCM-41-PEI back. Same substance (pei polymer on a zeolite matrix), same properties (CO2 capacity, temperatures/partial pressures,...). Discovered more than 10 years ago and currently in use on the ISS as a CO2 scrubber. Some people really have no shame.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MCM-41-PEI&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
I'm not sure "behind" is the right word. I'm sure US cell phone companies could start providing similar service as in the rest of the world for prices like in the rest of the worlds practically overnight. They would see their profit margins shrink dramatically, yet would still be making profit. The thing that stops them from doing so is some handy (perhaps even unspoken) agreements between the companies not to compete too hard. I remember that roughly 5 years ago, the European cell phone providers were forced to lower their text message fees as a result of an EU antitrust investigation (traditional 130-char text messages put negligible load on the provider's network). It struck me that at that time, the fees I was paying in the US for text messages were about double the European ones (before the crack-down), and they haven't gone down since. Perhaps just a little bit more, you know, regulatory interference, would help...
Oh, silly me, I forgot the big one: healthcare providers.
Because the available non-contract plans in large swaths of the US of A are appallingly bad deals, subsidized phone or not. Assuming that you want to avoid paying out of your nose for light cellular usage, you'll be on a contract plan. If so, you can get a decent subsidized phone for free, or a subsidized device that can run angry birds for almost-free. If you decide to buy your own unlocked phone, you'll just end up subsidizing someone else's phone through your overpriced contract plan. That's why.
I personally put at least part of the blame for the mildly overpriced contract plans and the outrageously overpriced non-contract plans on price fixing. If you want to see a firm falsification of the central dogma of laissez-fair capitalism, just go to the country where everyone is indoctrinated with it at school, and study the cellular networks, the internet service providers,... For every American libertarian who claims that the economy is best off with as little as possible legal limitations and government intervention, the country is driven further into the ground. It is widely recognized among non-bigots that competition in a free market cannot be efficient if the lawmaker doesn't aggressively fight oligopolies, trusts and cartels. Of course, it doesn't help to have an election system that practically forces the lawmaker into a multi-million dollar dept to the cartels even before assuming office...
Just to be pedantic, even in the US, 2 of the 4 biggest providers (AT&T and T-Mobile) use GSM. The other 2 (who use CDMA2000) are Verizon and Sprint Nextel, with only a slightly bigger combined market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless_communications_service_providers
From the article: "Their [the three stradivari] combined value is around 10 million US dollars, a hundred times more than the three new ones."
$10'000'000 / 100 = $100'000
$100'000 / 3 = $33'333
So the average value of the 3 new violins that were indistinguishable from Stradivari is about $33'000. Those are not cheap instruments we're talking about, and in a whole different league than the instrument featured in the paypal affair. As for the difference between a $2500 violin and a $100 violin, you have obviously never been through the traumatic experience of listening to a $100 violin from close by. I can assure you even a non-expert can hear the difference with both eyes^H^H^H^Hears closed. In fact, it would take industrial-strength ear protectors to not notice the difference.
Are you sure? They look pretty much alike to me.
That said, on an international scale, I don't thing the sample 10th grade tests are unreasonably difficult. Just a though (maybe I'm missing some point here), but perhaps the US needs an explicitly tiered school system, like in my home country, where we have 3 types of secondary schools for non-handicapped kids:
All three tiers are free by constitution. Students (or rather, their parents), are free to choose tiers, assisted by recommendations given at the end of primary school. Switching to a higher tier midway would be difficult, motivating parents to put their children as high as possible to start with. The biggest criticism of this system is that children who are placed too high by their parents and are forced to switch to a lower tier often end up wasting one or more years and getting demotivated.
But we're going a bit off-topic... I still find it outrageous that a school board member wouldn't be able to get 50% of the 10th grade questions right with confidence, leave alone "knowing the answers to none of them, and managing to guess ten out of the 60 correctly".
What's wrong with this country that one can just go to a website and casually gloss through the companies contributing to a representative's campaign in relation to their political activities. I mean, kudos for the transparency, but if it is publicly known that a representative of the people accepted large sums of money from a company, and is subsequently seen footing bills in favor of said company, the politician in question should be deposed and put behind bars for corruption in short order, or at the very least be subject to intense media criticism. The USA is one of the few industrialized countries where politicians can openly get away with this kind of shit.
Following good /. tradition, I'm being too lazy to actually read the paper (though I read the news release on the Nature website) and am just expecting someone else to explain it for me. I do accept that the photons at the 2 sides of the beam splitter are entangled - this is expected behavior for photons and has been amply demonstrated. My question is: does this necessarily imply that the phonons in the diamonds are entangled? What if the interaction with the diamond "qualifies" as a measurement? You'd still get a Stokes photon because a photon has interacted with a diamond at some point, and when "reading out" the phonons, you'd still discover that exactly one of the diamonds will have vibrational energy and the other one not, but they've never been entangled...
I'm sure the authors have somehow excluded this possibility, but it is a bit sloppy that the news release doesn't mention how, because that would be the actual tour de force that would make the paper worthy of Nature.
I mean, what's not to like about them? So many uses!