I really wish you could help me out with that. I accidentally erased my old copy of the 5.56 beta for Linux during an upgrade a few years ago. I used to use it a lot, and miss having it. Do you still have your original installation package (tarball?) or could you recreate one, and could you upload it or email it to me?
The peer review in CROI consists of peer-review of the abstracts only, not of the papers themselves, so it isn't nearly as solid as a journal publication. The research itself may be solid, but I'd still prefer to wait for it to appear as a paper in a peer-reviewed journal.
The Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, but it is not a scientifically peer-reviewed journal. I'd wait and see what the peer review process decides about this proposed treatment. It would not be the first time that a "revolutionary" treatment has failed to prove itself in peer review.
And that is why in some other countries, legislation exists that proscribes specific examples of terms in contracts that are deemed to be unfair, i.e. may not be used in any contracts.
No, that's incorrect. You're misunderstanding the fallacy. It doesn't work both ways. The grandparent comment explicitly made the assertion (P or not P), i.e. there may or may not have been such a conspiracy.
No, that's incorrect. As the wikipedia article you linked says, the fallacy exists only if the assertion of P is made (If P, then Q, Q holds, so assert P), but the assertion in IGnatius T Foobar's comment above is I'm not saying that it did or didn't! (regarding government conspracy), which is P or not P, so the fallacy does not apply.
That's not the way managers like to work. Most managers will quickly tell anybody who does that to get on with the job as best they can without sending the manager emails that are progress - or lack of progress - micro-reports.
Sure, I usually just do some web searches for "bullet camera" and "bullet camera exview quantity price". But watch out: there are plenty of junk bullet cameras on sale out there that take terrible junk pictures. Check the technical specifications carefully. You really need one with good resolution (look for "480 lines" resolution as a minimum, 500+ is very good). "EXVIEW" CCDs are great at taking high resolution color pictures in low light / dusk. Check the specs for whether it can take pictures down to "0.3 lux" light levels or lower. A CCD will use quite a lot of power, so you better get some high capacity Li ion batteries too. I've got one sat on my desk right now. It's a cheap little no name/no brand model made in Taiwan by one of the hundreds of manufacturers out there. How much was it? Can't remember - came from a private supplier. "Reasonably priced" is a bit vague anyway. If price is an issue why not share the cost of a wireless setup with several others?
Alternatively, go for CMOS cameras to get much longer battery life, but the image quality is lower. "CMOS color bullet camera" gets plenty of hits. "Nightvision" is generally gets you only black-and-white images.
For the wireless part, do some web searches for "wireless video camera" or "wireless video sender", then look for "micro video recorder" to go with it. Don't forget, if you're gonna waterproof it as well (good idea outdoors), let some air in and out, otherwise it will overheat and destroy itself.
Use a hidden camera - a really small "bullet" camera. If nobody can see the camera, nobody can talk about it, nobody can demand you stop using it, nobody can demand destruction of the footage. Or, use a wireless bullet camera to broadcast the footage to a separate location where the recorder is based. Then, if the camera is found, the recording may not be.
You're comparison with the most powerful laser is misleading. The power density of many ordinary lasers exceeds the luminosity per unit surface area of many ordinary non-supernovae stars. You don't need a very powerful laser. Take the Sun, which has an areal luminosity of 60MW/m^2; that's beaten by an ordinary 3kW 200um CO2 beam, which has a power density of 75GW/m^2.
Yes, but there is a huge difference between natural spectral emissions by atoms and molecules of oxygen and other elements, and purposive signal transmission by an ET. Contrary to the article you linked, detecting the former doesn't imply the existence of ETs. That's why SETI is trying to detect the latter.
Except for a huge assumption you're making: that an advanced civilization wouldn't want to broadcast a distinctive, easily decoded, narrowband signal. Perhaps they might want to do it to announce their existence to the rest of the universe, even though they would have the know-how to sendmuch more efficient broadband signals.
I find it slightly surprising it has taken the SETI project how many years to start checking broadband as well as narrowband signals. All those years spending a fortune in resources but only checking narrowband seems rather a waste of time. I would have been checking all sorts of broadband signal types from the very beginning.
The story of your daughter is sad, but don't give up hope of finding her. From my knowledge I am very confident that universal fingerprinting and identity cards will be introduced in Mexico for both residents and aliens, as it will be eventually at a later date in the US and other countries too. Fingerprinting per se won't help find your daughter or Dara (unless Dara has a record from a previous conviction?), but forcing all residents and aliens of Mexico to go thru a full identity checking process by the authorities has a very high probability of finding Dara and your daughter and exposing any false identities. I can't give you a definite timescale, but the political wheels are already in motion.
You've written her a very nice letter. I am sure she won't forget you. I wish you all the best in your search, and hope your reunion is not much longer delayed.
Attribute the vast majority of UFO "sightings" to known physical phenomena, some to secret experimental aircraft, some to psychological problems in witnesses, some to cosmic rays causing optical effects in peoples' brains and retinas, some to opthalmic "floaters" in peoples' eyes, some to psyops, some to people helping create "UFO excitement" prior to the release of new wannabe blockbuster scifi movies, and you've explained 99.99999% of all sightings.
It's no secret there are some secrets that are necessarily kept secret in the national interest, there are people paid to keep them that way, and there are specific tools to counteract undesirable leaks such as disinfo, misinfo, etc.
Incidentally, micro UAVs similar to the dragon fly, but with micro-turbines, have been in production since at least the 1980s (no links).
And finally:-), we wish to reassure viewers that there is simply no truth in the rumors that fake UFOs have been produced and tested in many countries, and are behind many sightings of strange aerial objects.
No, that is misinformation. Medical consensus is that exposure to mercury from broken fluorescent tubes, even after attempted cleanup (wiping or vacuuming removes relatively very little mercury, primarily because many mercury binds to, or for porous surfaces, penetrates deeply into many types of surfaces), is damaging to health and capable of causing symptoms of mercury poisoning. This has been known since at least Tunnessen WW, McMahon KJ, and Baser M (1987). Acrodynia: Exposure to mercury from fluorescent light bulbs. Pediatrics 79(5):786?9. PMID 3575038
Secondly, in the last 5 years, mercury pollution from coal-burning power stations increased significantly because the amount of coal burned has increased by over 15% due to rising electricity demand, this despite sales and use of CFLs having increased significantly (CFLs make only a small difference to total electricity demand).
The analogy is between the broad pattern of credit expansion/asset price bubble followed by tightening/asset price collapse seen during The Great Depression and again now. I think you must be imagining I wrote that the Fed is tightening credit now, but in fact I didn't. The paragraph you quoted: the "perverse severe tightening of credit by the Fed and other central banks" regards what happened during The Great Depression, not now. In the next paragraph regarding what is happening now, I wrote: "severely tightening credit markets (see ridiculous libor rates etc)." but I didn't say the Fed is tightening credit markets. Although I wasn't explicit on the cause, it was implied by my mentioning libor rates are ridiculous[ly high].
There is severe tightening in wholesale credit. Libor rates are sky high (worse, libor's accuracy is also being questioned, per significantly higher rates estimated from credit default swaps). Banks are scared of lending in the wholesale market because they don't know how much further asset prices will fall across the board - not limited to real estate. Capital reserve requirements are in danger of being breached in many banks (and have already been in several banks, not just IndyMac, while the Fed in panic mode turns a blind eye), with systemic collapse of the banking system around the corner (see CDS and long positions on gold).
This situation is hugely affecting market confidence, including of course retail credit; retail lending is down massively since last year as standards have been tightened a lot (high loan-to-value ratios RIP). The fallout will be severe in the US and the global economy, but the full effects won't be visible until all the time lags in the system have played themselves out. Global economic growth will collapse, with some foreseeing stagflation, though when/whether stagflation occurs is really beside the point.
I agree with you about the need for measures to put the real estate market back on its feet.
I hope you are underestimating the legislature. They need to act to prevent financial apocalypse, not to encourage it. The last horseman would be new banking regulations that serve to tighten credit in any way.
Some take comfort from the other day when The Senate Committee on Banking etc probed Bernanke, asking tough, insightful questions. Others were underwhelmed. The root of all root causes is the intrinsic instability of a financial system based on fractional reserve banking, with all its easy money boom to tight money bust cycles. Even Senator Paul didn't bring that up. Changes to the Fed's role may be on the agenda, but I'd only bank on small change there:-)
"Inflation is just a number, defined and measured by the government." - Obviously prices in different sectors of the economy can move at different rates. Some measures, e.g. Commodity Prices Index, weight selected sectors. We are concerned, however, with what can be called general inflation. Some official figures for general inflation are: Consumer Price Index, GDP deflator, etc. These are often criticized as misleading. There is also some debate on how much general inflation will follow an increasing oil price.
I find your comment very confusing. To talk of "a very different kind of inflation" is meaningless and falsely reassuring. Inflation is just a number, defined and measured by the government. There cannot be different types of inflation, per se. There can, however, be different causes of inflation. I will assume that is what you meant, but what you wrote came across differently.
A severe increase in the oil price ultimately causes a problem of inflation. Different sectors of the economy may see different amounts of inflation or even deflation in a few sectors, as the economy gradually and painfully equilibrates to a higher oil price. Inflation depends on money supply, but government will obfuscate and bury money supply figures to obscure the embarrassing monetary reality. There has been considerable controversy about the credibility of US money supply figures. Ironically, the very same day you posted your comment, the US Govt announced a 5.6 trillion dollar bailout of the effectively bankrupt and directionless corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, effectively promising to double the federal debt in a single stroke, severely expanding the money supply even further, inflation be damned.
This is only the start of the bankruptcies. Several major US banks are likely to fail and go bankrupt in the next six months. It is not only bank insiders who think this is likely to happen. Speculators already have 12 trillion dollars of outstanding credit derivative swaps on that eventuality (more than the entire US federal deficit), a figure growing rapidly by the day, and massive long positions on gold too.
Apart from inflationary effects, a severe oil price increase also creates severe economic disruption as a function of the suddenness of the rise in the proportion of personal and corporate expenditure accounted for by energy costs. The equilibration is slow, painful and damaging, and cashflow is only the first of many casualties to come.
Analyzing oil in terms of it being just another commodity is a mistake. Oil almost literally powers the entire economy. No other commodity has the same extent of critical uses. Every single thing that is traded in a modern economy depends ultimately on oil. The price of oil ultimately affects prices in all sectors, albeit with different time lags and different scale factors.
The term "inflation" means different things to different people, even to different economists. The official inflation figure is widely critized as misleading, even by some economists. It is pretty much meaningless to many ordinary people who feel it does not correspond to their reality. What the average Joe or Joanna on the street intuitively understands by inflation is different. It goes something like this, qualitatively: the subjective amount of anguish to the ordinary householder of rising prices of things that are bought on a daily basis, reflecting the focus of ordinary people on prices of daily purchases such as gas and food. This feeling is running high in ordinary US households at the moment.
I was reporting others' reactions to the current situation: "Some people go further and anticipate economic collapse, others fear something similar to The Great Depression.
The story of the Great Depression is very relevant to today's situation. There was a massive expansion of the money supply in the 1920s (never properly measured in the government's published figures), a severe asset price bubble (never properly measured by official inflation figures, but at least see stock market up to 1929), then a severe asset price crash (see 1929 Wall Street Crash), and then perverse severe tightening of credit by the Fed and other central banks, which enormously compounded the problems. This is analogous to what is happening now.
We have had a massive expansion of the money supply (not properly measured in published figures - M3 buried alive by the Fed in 2006), a severe asset price bubble (
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish you could help me out with that. I accidentally erased my old copy of the 5.56 beta for Linux during an upgrade a few years ago. I used to use it a lot, and miss having it. Do you still have your original installation package (tarball?) or could you recreate one, and could you upload it or email it to me?
The peer review in CROI consists of peer-review of the abstracts only, not of the papers themselves, so it isn't nearly as solid as a journal publication. The research itself may be solid, but I'd still prefer to wait for it to appear as a paper in a peer-reviewed journal.
The Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, but it is not a scientifically peer-reviewed journal. I'd wait and see what the peer review process decides about this proposed treatment. It would not be the first time that a "revolutionary" treatment has failed to prove itself in peer review.
And that is why in some other countries, legislation exists that proscribes specific examples of terms in contracts that are deemed to be unfair, i.e. may not be used in any contracts.
No, that's incorrect. You're misunderstanding the fallacy. It doesn't work both ways. The grandparent comment explicitly made the assertion (P or not P) , i.e. there may or may not have been such a conspiracy.
No, that's incorrect. As the wikipedia article you linked says, the fallacy exists only if the assertion of P is made (If P, then Q, Q holds, so assert P), but the assertion in IGnatius T Foobar's comment above is I'm not saying that it did or didn't! (regarding government conspracy), which is P or not P, so the fallacy does not apply.
That's not the way managers like to work. Most managers will quickly tell anybody who does that to get on with the job as best they can without sending the manager emails that are progress - or lack of progress - micro-reports.
Submitted July 17th
You must be kidding ;)
Alternatively, go for CMOS cameras to get much longer battery life, but the image quality is lower. "CMOS color bullet camera" gets plenty of hits. "Nightvision" is generally gets you only black-and-white images.
For the wireless part, do some web searches for "wireless video camera" or "wireless video sender", then look for "micro video recorder" to go with it. Don't forget, if you're gonna waterproof it as well (good idea outdoors), let some air in and out, otherwise it will overheat and destroy itself.
Use a hidden camera - a really small "bullet" camera. If nobody can see the camera, nobody can talk about it, nobody can demand you stop using it, nobody can demand destruction of the footage. Or, use a wireless bullet camera to broadcast the footage to a separate location where the recorder is based. Then, if the camera is found, the recording may not be.
You're comparison with the most powerful laser is misleading. The power density of many ordinary lasers exceeds the luminosity per unit surface area of many ordinary non-supernovae stars. You don't need a very powerful laser. Take the Sun, which has an areal luminosity of 60MW/m^2; that's beaten by an ordinary 3kW 200um CO2 beam, which has a power density of 75GW/m^2.
Now, let's move up a gear on both sides. The brightest star ever found has an areal luminosity of only 85TW/m^2 (40*10^6 * (solar luminosity 3.846*10^26)/(surface area 4*PI*(3.75*10^9)^2)). However, the power density of the brightest laser is 200YW/m^2 (YW is Yotta Watts, 2*10^22*10^4W/m^2), which is 12 orders of magnitude brighter than the brightest star, so laser massively beats star again.
Pulse duration makes no real difference to the visibility of the pulse. Small cross-section is ideal for aiming.
Yes, but there is a huge difference between natural spectral emissions by atoms and molecules of oxygen and other elements, and purposive signal transmission by an ET. Contrary to the article you linked, detecting the former doesn't imply the existence of ETs. That's why SETI is trying to detect the latter.
Sorry it seemed totally unfunny to me, so I assumed it couldn't be meant even as a bad joke. Give me Douglas Adams for funny, please.
Cool. Just checking:)
Not that kind of broadband - see the other meaning of broadband in telecommunications and signal processing
Except for a huge assumption you're making: that an advanced civilization wouldn't want to broadcast a distinctive, easily decoded, narrowband signal. Perhaps they might want to do it to announce their existence to the rest of the universe, even though they would have the know-how to sendmuch more efficient broadband signals.
I find it slightly surprising it has taken the SETI project how many years to start checking broadband as well as narrowband signals. All those years spending a fortune in resources but only checking narrowband seems rather a waste of time. I would have been checking all sorts of broadband signal types from the very beginning.
You've written her a very nice letter. I am sure she won't forget you. I wish you all the best in your search, and hope your reunion is not much longer delayed.
Attribute the vast majority of UFO "sightings" to known physical phenomena, some to secret experimental aircraft, some to psychological problems in witnesses, some to cosmic rays causing optical effects in peoples' brains and retinas, some to opthalmic "floaters" in peoples' eyes, some to psyops, some to people helping create "UFO excitement" prior to the release of new wannabe blockbuster scifi movies, and you've explained 99.99999% of all sightings.
Incidentally, micro UAVs similar to the dragon fly, but with micro-turbines, have been in production since at least the 1980s (no links).
And finally :-), we wish to reassure viewers that there is simply no truth in the rumors that fake UFOs have been produced and tested in many countries, and are behind many sightings of strange aerial objects.
Secondly, in the last 5 years, mercury pollution from coal-burning power stations increased significantly because the amount of coal burned has increased by over 15% due to rising electricity demand, this despite sales and use of CFLs having increased significantly (CFLs make only a small difference to total electricity demand).
There is severe tightening in wholesale credit. Libor rates are sky high (worse, libor's accuracy is also being questioned, per significantly higher rates estimated from credit default swaps). Banks are scared of lending in the wholesale market because they don't know how much further asset prices will fall across the board - not limited to real estate. Capital reserve requirements are in danger of being breached in many banks (and have already been in several banks, not just IndyMac, while the Fed in panic mode turns a blind eye), with systemic collapse of the banking system around the corner (see CDS and long positions on gold).
This situation is hugely affecting market confidence, including of course retail credit; retail lending is down massively since last year as standards have been tightened a lot (high loan-to-value ratios RIP). The fallout will be severe in the US and the global economy, but the full effects won't be visible until all the time lags in the system have played themselves out. Global economic growth will collapse, with some foreseeing stagflation, though when/whether stagflation occurs is really beside the point.
I agree with you about the need for measures to put the real estate market back on its feet.
I hope you are underestimating the legislature. They need to act to prevent financial apocalypse, not to encourage it. The last horseman would be new banking regulations that serve to tighten credit in any way.
Some take comfort from the other day when The Senate Committee on Banking etc probed Bernanke, asking tough, insightful questions. Others were underwhelmed. The root of all root causes is the intrinsic instability of a financial system based on fractional reserve banking, with all its easy money boom to tight money bust cycles. Even Senator Paul didn't bring that up. Changes to the Fed's role may be on the agenda, but I'd only bank on small change there :-)
"Inflation is just a number, defined and measured by the government." - Obviously prices in different sectors of the economy can move at different rates. Some measures, e.g. Commodity Prices Index, weight selected sectors. We are concerned, however, with what can be called general inflation. Some official figures for general inflation are: Consumer Price Index, GDP deflator, etc. These are often criticized as misleading. There is also some debate on how much general inflation will follow an increasing oil price.
A severe increase in the oil price ultimately causes a problem of inflation. Different sectors of the economy may see different amounts of inflation or even deflation in a few sectors, as the economy gradually and painfully equilibrates to a higher oil price. Inflation depends on money supply, but government will obfuscate and bury money supply figures to obscure the embarrassing monetary reality. There has been considerable controversy about the credibility of US money supply figures. Ironically, the very same day you posted your comment, the US Govt announced a 5.6 trillion dollar bailout of the effectively bankrupt and directionless corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, effectively promising to double the federal debt in a single stroke, severely expanding the money supply even further, inflation be damned.
This is only the start of the bankruptcies. Several major US banks are likely to fail and go bankrupt in the next six months. It is not only bank insiders who think this is likely to happen. Speculators already have 12 trillion dollars of outstanding credit derivative swaps on that eventuality (more than the entire US federal deficit), a figure growing rapidly by the day, and massive long positions on gold too.
Apart from inflationary effects, a severe oil price increase also creates severe economic disruption as a function of the suddenness of the rise in the proportion of personal and corporate expenditure accounted for by energy costs. The equilibration is slow, painful and damaging, and cashflow is only the first of many casualties to come.
Analyzing oil in terms of it being just another commodity is a mistake. Oil almost literally powers the entire economy. No other commodity has the same extent of critical uses. Every single thing that is traded in a modern economy depends ultimately on oil. The price of oil ultimately affects prices in all sectors, albeit with different time lags and different scale factors.
The term "inflation" means different things to different people, even to different economists. The official inflation figure is widely critized as misleading, even by some economists. It is pretty much meaningless to many ordinary people who feel it does not correspond to their reality. What the average Joe or Joanna on the street intuitively understands by inflation is different. It goes something like this, qualitatively: the subjective amount of anguish to the ordinary householder of rising prices of things that are bought on a daily basis, reflecting the focus of ordinary people on prices of daily purchases such as gas and food. This feeling is running high in ordinary US households at the moment.
I was reporting others' reactions to the current situation: "Some people go further and anticipate economic collapse, others fear something similar to The Great Depression.
The story of the Great Depression is very relevant to today's situation. There was a massive expansion of the money supply in the 1920s (never properly measured in the government's published figures), a severe asset price bubble (never properly measured by official inflation figures, but at least see stock market up to 1929), then a severe asset price crash (see 1929 Wall Street Crash), and then perverse severe tightening of credit by the Fed and other central banks, which enormously compounded the problems. This is analogous to what is happening now.
We have had a massive expansion of the money supply (not properly measured in published figures - M3 buried alive by the Fed in 2006), a severe asset price bubble (