13.7GYr is the generally accepted result. Search, in particular, on WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. That's the big experiment recently, but it isn't the only one. There's also the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Supernova Cosmology Project, and a host of others. All of them have, in the last two or three years, converged on 13.7 GYr for the age of the universe.
Well, in a word, Yes! That is the emergency procedure for when the shuttle is at jetliner type altitudes. For instance, see this page under "Abort Modes", or search on "space shuttle escape pole".
Alternatively, if potentially fatal damage is detected during the ascent stage, the mission can be scrubbed before reentry heating becomes a problem. The shuttle can separate from the boosters and tank early, and touch down at any number of locations around the globe.
Proving it MIGHT or COULD have been me != proving it WAS me.
But that isn't the standard of proof, even in criminal trials in the United States... because as you note, it is impossible to "prove" that something happened to someone that wasn't there. The standard of proof in a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "beyond all doubt". Saying "The gubmint done framed me", for instance, without compelling proof of your assertion is generally insufficient to create reasonable doubt.
For instance, you can protest that "the printouts aren't proof of anything, because printouts are easy to forge". But a prosecutor isn't just going to put printouts in front of the jury and expect them to be taken at face value... a good prosecutor will call witnesses to testify as to the chain of evidence, and show that it wasn't broken. Without showing that the chain WAS broken, your protest that "forging printouts is easy!" isn't going to be enough to create reasonable doubt.
Well, you go into your neutrino detector lab, and you measure the number of neutrino interactions that you see in a certain amount of time. When you combine the known properties of the detector with the know properties of neutrinos (from other experiments that don't directly measure rates) with the rate of observed interactions, you can calculate the number of neutrinos that must have gone through the experiment without interacting in order to produce the number that DID interact. Turns out that that number is mind-bogglingly large.
Because we have a model that says "If neutrinos have the following list of properties, then we should see the following things occuring in our experiments." Then we go look in the experiments, and we see "those things" occuring. Thus, we can say with high confidence, "Since neutrinos appear to have those properties after all, we predict with high confidence that thus-and-such a number are passing through you every second."
The US contains 5% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources.
Which is of course, not only completely wrong, even if it was correct, it would be comparing the wrong things.
It is true that the US consumes roughly 25% of the industrially supplied energy on the planet... but that is a far cry from concluding that the US consumes 25% of ALL world resources. In this type of energy to population comparison, Western Europe also fairs poorly by consuming a far larger share of the world's industrial energy production than its population entitles it to consume.
Of course, more relevant comparisons would be to industrially produced energy consumed per unit of economic output, or some such similar metric. In this type of comparison, the industrialized world fairs much better, than most third world nations. The amount of energy required to produce a bushel of grain in the US or France compared to sub-saharan Africa is much, much lower, and a kilo of sheep's wool in Australia is less energy intensive to produce than a kilo from South America. The US just happens to produce vastly more grain than sub-saharan Africa, so overall, so overall its grain production efforts will consume much more energy.
I don't mean to excuse wasteful or inefficient consumption of energy in the industrialized world, because there certainly is a lot of that going on, just to point out that you are not considering a realistic metric for comparison.
This doesn't actually impact NO2 levels, but it does explain some of the pollution reduction.
The primary reason that you don't see this type of pollution in the US is that the federal and local governments have taken a very agressive stance on NOx and SOx reduction from transportation (cars, trucks, and trains) and power plant (coal) sources. Some here have complained that the attack on these pollutants (along with particulate emission) has a lot to do with our lower fuel economy standards, as the rules make it pretty difficult, for instance, to introduce diesel powered cars, and they mandate the use of catalytic converters.
It isn't hard to understand why this has happened, either. NOx and SOx are the primary drivers of acid rain and smog, both of which directly and visibly impact quality of life in densely populated areas, like cities. Fixing them isn't something we have fought against, since the vast majority of Americans work and live in or near major cities, even in the "sparsely populated" parts of the country.
Western Europe on the other hand has chosen to go after consumption, and driven up fuel efficiency at the cost of reducing these types of pollutants. Given that Europeans tend to live in smaller, more distributed communities than Americans, smog, while a problem in Urban areas, directly impacts fewer people on a day to day basis than it does here.
"High Energy" in QCD means anything higher than the QCD scale of a few hundred MeV... so a "high energy interaction" is one in which the parties to the interaction exchange energies that are of the order of 1GeV or more. Certainly, all of the Standard Model breaks down at the gravitational scale, but that is so very much more energetic than the QCD scale that that's not what we're talking about as "high energy". We usually reserve "Planck Scale Physics" for those energies.
Whether the quarks are "real" particles or not is a question of metaphysics, but to the extent that we can do deep inelastic scattering experiments and measure "pointlike constituents" in the "interior" of hadrons (stuff made of quarks), you should consider quarks to be just as "real" as other particles you think of as "real" (like electrons, protons, muons, etc)
if you don't -see- a paper ballot being printed as you finish voting, then as far as I'm concerned, you should have no trust in the system whatsoever.
As I point out every time one of these stories comes up, just because you see a paper ballot printed out that matches what your vote was, doesn't mean that the votes were recorded the same way... if you are going to be paranoid, you have to go all teh way....
But I am sure some Physics adherent to the "Big Bang" will say this is wrong.
I won't say it, but I do invite you to try and build one of you "over unity" wonder devices... when you do, you should be able to sell them by the billions and billions. When you've made your fortune, I'll apologize. Until then, I'll stick with believing in thermodynamics and not crackpots....
If they actually decrypted the file and checked it wouldn't they be in violation of the DCMA?
If it was a movie in which YOU owned the copyright, then maybe you would have a case (I'm not a lawyer).
If it was a commercially produced movie that you bought at the video store (say, "Top Gun"), then since they own the copyright, it would not be a violation... the DMCA only gives the copyright holder additional rights, not the purchaser of said copyrighted material.
This is no more the case with current computerized electronic voting systems than it is with any other type of voting system, human, mechanical, or electrical...
How are you sure that the human counting your paper-and-pencil ballot counted it correctly (multiple election observers are not truly sufficient to prevent collusion)?
How are you sure that your optically scanned ballot was counted correctly?
How are you sure that the mechanical lever you pulled was counted correctly?
How are you sure that the open-source election software loaded on the machine hasn't been tampered with? After all, having the source code doesn't mean that you have THE source code, does it?
How does a correct paper print out guarantee you that the internally stored vote is correct?
How are you sure that, even if the hardware works correctly, the result is transferred from polling place to central election authority correctly?
How are you sure that the reported results match the transmitted results?
How do you know the media reports of those results are correct?
I'm not trying to downplay the issues or potential issues with the current crop of voting machines, but the problems of election fraud, collusion, and equipment failure are not unique to software. No other type of voting system has been asked to pass the stringent tests being demanded of software based election system by open source advocates. Open source may be the best way to go, but it isn't a panacea, and it doesn't magically solve the fraud problem...
It is a true statement that a Parsec is a measure of distance. But that doesn't rule it out as a unit of time. Special Relativity tells us that time and distance units are interchangeable, because the speed of light is a constant value in all reference frames.
So, while I'm sure the original Star Wars quote wasn't meant to delve into the intricacies of modern physics, it certainly isn't technically wrong. Of course, since a Parsec is about 39 years, I certainly wouldn't want to be piloting for that amount of time...
Of similar importance, of course, is the thermal expansion/contraction of water over its liquid range... there is a change in density of 4% between 0degC and 100degC at 1atm. A metric ton of liquid water at 0degC has a volume of 1m^3, while that same metric ton has a volume of 0.962m^3 at 100degC. See this
More likely, Valenti has become well versed in both the technical and non-technical details, and is choosing to play "dumb". When dealing with a small and inconsequential, but extremely vocal, group, it is a standard tactic to pretend you don't understand the issue, and promise to look into it. Getting involved in an argument on the merits of his position is not his job... presenting that position clearly and consistently is. Unless he is actually forced to take on the merits of the pro-freely-distributable-DVD-software argument by a constituency that matters (say, Windows users or Congressmen), there isn't any point in bothering. And there currently isn't any group that has proven that they need to be countered. Like it or not, that's how the politics works.... both for you and against you.
Weinstein then made the point that Linux users were a not-insubstantial portion of the population.
We actually ARE an insubstantial part of the population. Even if the number is 2million, and all of those are in the US, and all of those are using Linux on the desktop, and all of them only want to watch legally purchased DVDs, then it is still only 2/285 ths of the population... and of course it isn't nearly that large a fraction. Well below 1/2 percent. Miniscule by almost any measure.
Which really doesn't matter in the least... Valenti's argument is completely bogus, but not because his data is wrong; it is his PREMISE that is flawed (that it makes sense to restrict what we think is perfectly reasonable behavior just because that behavior is engaged in by a small subset of the population, not because there is an inherent societal damage involved). But countering his argument by suggesting his data is unsound won't get you very far, because few reasonable people are going to be convinced that home desktop Linux users are anything but a miniscule part of the population.
So depending on the task at hand, the cluster might perform very well, or perhaps a little less well.
Surely what you meant to say is that, depending on the task at hand, a cluster might perform very well, or perhaps perform attrociously.:-)
Clusters tend to work well when the various nodes don't need to communicate very often but you need lots of cycles for the subtasks, while dedicated supercomputers tend to perform very well in tasks requiring vast amounts of internode communications bandwidth along with large numbers of cycles. If you need vast bandwidth and relatively low numbers of cycles, your pricepoint is likely a mainframe. And if you don't need either, you get a cheap desktop machine.
Certain problems parallelize well on a cluster... others don't. Some don't parallelize at all, and a cluster won't do you a darn bit of good. The different machines are designed for different uses... and one should be careful not to push a "one size fits all" solution. The Cray guy clearly got it wrong on that point, and likely knows it, but he was marketting, not teaching a course in choosing hardware for the task at hand.
Make sure you discriminate between passenger and freight railroads... there are hundreds of freight railroads in the US, but essentially no private passenger services. The big "Class I" railroads in the US are Kansas City Southern (KCS), Burlington Northern Sante Fe (BNSF), CSX, Canadian National (CN), Union Pacific (UP), and Norfolk Southern (NS). After many huge bankruptcies in the 70s and 80s, the market was deregulated, and real prices for long haul rail transport have fallen dramatically. In fact, most "stuff" sold in the US travels by rail, unless it is produced locally: cars, lumber, containerized imports, grain, coal, ore, etc. etc. etc. There is strong evidence that recent changes to federal regulations on truck driver hours will drive even more long haul freight back to trains.
That's not what the ruling seems to say... it isn't the Congress that said these towns can't play, but the States those towns are a part of. This ruling seems to reaffirm the right of States to make decisions for their own political subdivisions.
Slashdot Mirror
13.7GYr is the generally accepted result. Search, in particular, on WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. That's the big experiment recently, but it isn't the only one. There's also the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Supernova Cosmology Project, and a host of others. All of them have, in the last two or three years, converged on 13.7 GYr for the age of the universe.
Well, in a word, Yes! That is the emergency procedure for when the shuttle is at jetliner type altitudes. For instance, see this page under "Abort Modes", or search on "space shuttle escape pole".
Alternatively, if potentially fatal damage is detected during the ascent stage, the mission can be scrubbed before reentry heating becomes a problem. The shuttle can separate from the boosters and tank early, and touch down at any number of locations around the globe.
Proving it MIGHT or COULD have been me != proving it WAS me.
But that isn't the standard of proof, even in criminal trials in the United States ... because as you note, it is impossible to "prove" that something happened to someone that wasn't there. The standard of proof in a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "beyond all doubt". Saying "The gubmint done framed me", for instance, without compelling proof of your assertion is generally insufficient to create reasonable doubt.
For instance, you can protest that "the printouts aren't proof of anything, because printouts are easy to forge". But a prosecutor isn't just going to put printouts in front of the jury and expect them to be taken at face value ... a good prosecutor will call witnesses to testify as to the chain of evidence, and show that it wasn't broken. Without showing that the chain WAS broken, your protest that "forging printouts is easy!" isn't going to be enough to create reasonable doubt.
From the Good Old OED:
Alt form of stoush
Austral. and N.Z. slang.
n. Fighting; also, to take stoush, to receive a beating. A brawl or fight; a scrap, 'punch-up'
v. To thrash or beat (a person); to punch or strike; to fight.
Well, you go into your neutrino detector lab, and you measure the number of neutrino interactions that you see in a certain amount of time. When you combine the known properties of the detector with the know properties of neutrinos (from other experiments that don't directly measure rates) with the rate of observed interactions, you can calculate the number of neutrinos that must have gone through the experiment without interacting in order to produce the number that DID interact. Turns out that that number is mind-bogglingly large.
Because we have a model that says "If neutrinos have the following list of properties, then we should see the following things occuring in our experiments." Then we go look in the experiments, and we see "those things" occuring. Thus, we can say with high confidence, "Since neutrinos appear to have those properties after all, we predict with high confidence that thus-and-such a number are passing through you every second."
The US contains 5% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources.
Which is of course, not only completely wrong, even if it was correct, it would be comparing the wrong things.
It is true that the US consumes roughly 25% of the industrially supplied energy on the planet ... but that is a far cry from concluding that the US consumes 25% of ALL world resources. In this type of energy to population comparison, Western Europe also fairs poorly by consuming a far larger share of the world's industrial energy production than its population entitles it to consume.
Of course, more relevant comparisons would be to industrially produced energy consumed per unit of economic output, or some such similar metric. In this type of comparison, the industrialized world fairs much better, than most third world nations. The amount of energy required to produce a bushel of grain in the US or France compared to sub-saharan Africa is much, much lower, and a kilo of sheep's wool in Australia is less energy intensive to produce than a kilo from South America. The US just happens to produce vastly more grain than sub-saharan Africa, so overall, so overall its grain production efforts will consume much more energy.
I don't mean to excuse wasteful or inefficient consumption of energy in the industrialized world, because there certainly is a lot of that going on, just to point out that you are not considering a realistic metric for comparison.
This doesn't actually impact NO2 levels, but it does explain some of the pollution reduction.
The primary reason that you don't see this type of pollution in the US is that the federal and local governments have taken a very agressive stance on NOx and SOx reduction from transportation (cars, trucks, and trains) and power plant (coal) sources. Some here have complained that the attack on these pollutants (along with particulate emission) has a lot to do with our lower fuel economy standards, as the rules make it pretty difficult, for instance, to introduce diesel powered cars, and they mandate the use of catalytic converters.
It isn't hard to understand why this has happened, either. NOx and SOx are the primary drivers of acid rain and smog, both of which directly and visibly impact quality of life in densely populated areas, like cities. Fixing them isn't something we have fought against, since the vast majority of Americans work and live in or near major cities, even in the "sparsely populated" parts of the country.
Western Europe on the other hand has chosen to go after consumption, and driven up fuel efficiency at the cost of reducing these types of pollutants. Given that Europeans tend to live in smaller, more distributed communities than Americans, smog, while a problem in Urban areas, directly impacts fewer people on a day to day basis than it does here.
"High Energy" in QCD means anything higher than the QCD scale of a few hundred MeV ... so a "high energy interaction" is one in which the parties to the interaction exchange energies that are of the order of 1GeV or more. Certainly, all of the Standard Model breaks down at the gravitational scale, but that is so very much more energetic than the QCD scale that that's not what we're talking about as "high energy". We usually reserve "Planck Scale Physics" for those energies.
Whether the quarks are "real" particles or not is a question of metaphysics, but to the extent that we can do deep inelastic scattering experiments and measure "pointlike constituents" in the "interior" of hadrons (stuff made of quarks), you should consider quarks to be just as "real" as other particles you think of as "real" (like electrons, protons, muons, etc)
if you don't -see- a paper ballot being printed as you finish voting, then as far as I'm concerned, you should have no trust in the system whatsoever.
As I point out every time one of these stories comes up, just because you see a paper ballot printed out that matches what your vote was, doesn't mean that the votes were recorded the same way ... if you are going to be paranoid, you have to go all teh way....
But I am sure some Physics adherent to the "Big Bang" will say this is wrong.
I won't say it, but I do invite you to try and build one of you "over unity" wonder devices ... when you do, you should be able to sell them by the billions and billions. When you've made your fortune, I'll apologize. Until then, I'll stick with believing in thermodynamics and not crackpots....
If they actually decrypted the file and checked it wouldn't they be in violation of the DCMA?
If it was a movie in which YOU owned the copyright, then maybe you would have a case (I'm not a lawyer).
If it was a commercially produced movie that you bought at the video store (say, "Top Gun"), then since they own the copyright, it would not be a violation ... the DMCA only gives the copyright holder additional rights, not the purchaser of said copyrighted material.
This is no more the case with current computerized electronic voting systems than it is with any other type of voting system, human, mechanical, or electrical ...
I'm not trying to downplay the issues or potential issues with the current crop of voting machines, but the problems of election fraud, collusion, and equipment failure are not unique to software. No other type of voting system has been asked to pass the stringent tests being demanded of software based election system by open source advocates. Open source may be the best way to go, but it isn't a panacea, and it doesn't magically solve the fraud problem...
Oops ... that should have read "... since 12 Parsecs is about 39 years..." You must actually READ your post when you preview it :-)
It is a true statement that a Parsec is a measure of distance. But that doesn't rule it out as a unit of time. Special Relativity tells us that time and distance units are interchangeable, because the speed of light is a constant value in all reference frames.
So, while I'm sure the original Star Wars quote wasn't meant to delve into the intricacies of modern physics, it certainly isn't technically wrong. Of course, since a Parsec is about 39 years, I certainly wouldn't want to be piloting for that amount of time...
Of similar importance, of course, is the thermal expansion/contraction of water over its liquid range ... there is a change in density of 4% between 0degC and 100degC at 1atm. A metric ton of liquid water at 0degC has a volume of 1m^3, while that same metric ton has a volume of 0.962m^3 at 100degC. See this
Google sez..... 12 times a century.
More likely, Valenti has become well versed in both the technical and non-technical details, and is choosing to play "dumb". When dealing with a small and inconsequential, but extremely vocal, group, it is a standard tactic to pretend you don't understand the issue, and promise to look into it. Getting involved in an argument on the merits of his position is not his job ... presenting that position clearly and consistently is. Unless he is actually forced to take on the merits of the pro-freely-distributable-DVD-software argument by a constituency that matters (say, Windows users or Congressmen), there isn't any point in bothering. And there currently isn't any group that has proven that they need to be countered. Like it or not, that's how the politics works.... both for you and against you.
Weinstein then made the point that Linux users were a not-insubstantial portion of the population.
We actually ARE an insubstantial part of the population. Even if the number is 2million, and all of those are in the US, and all of those are using Linux on the desktop, and all of them only want to watch legally purchased DVDs, then it is still only 2/285 ths of the population ... and of course it isn't nearly that large a fraction. Well below 1/2 percent. Miniscule by almost any measure.
Which really doesn't matter in the least ... Valenti's argument is completely bogus, but not because his data is wrong; it is his PREMISE that is flawed (that it makes sense to restrict what we think is perfectly reasonable behavior just because that behavior is engaged in by a small subset of the population, not because there is an inherent societal damage involved). But countering his argument by suggesting his data is unsound won't get you very far, because few reasonable people are going to be convinced that home desktop Linux users are anything but a miniscule part of the population.
But only if they're GNU/Chickens....
So depending on the task at hand, the cluster might perform very well, or perhaps a little less well.
Surely what you meant to say is that, depending on the task at hand, a cluster might perform very well, or perhaps perform attrociously. :-)
Clusters tend to work well when the various nodes don't need to communicate very often but you need lots of cycles for the subtasks, while dedicated supercomputers tend to perform very well in tasks requiring vast amounts of internode communications bandwidth along with large numbers of cycles. If you need vast bandwidth and relatively low numbers of cycles, your pricepoint is likely a mainframe. And if you don't need either, you get a cheap desktop machine.
Certain problems parallelize well on a cluster ... others don't. Some don't parallelize at all, and a cluster won't do you a darn bit of good. The different machines are designed for different uses ... and one should be careful not to push a "one size fits all" solution. The Cray guy clearly got it wrong on that point, and likely knows it, but he was marketting, not teaching a course in choosing hardware for the task at hand.
The article indicates that this comment was not about their search engine, but about how they spend their online advertising budget in placing ads.
Make sure you discriminate between passenger and freight railroads ... there are hundreds of freight railroads in the US, but essentially no private passenger services. The big "Class I" railroads in the US are Kansas City Southern (KCS), Burlington Northern Sante Fe (BNSF), CSX, Canadian National (CN), Union Pacific (UP), and Norfolk Southern (NS). After many huge bankruptcies in the 70s and 80s, the market was deregulated, and real prices for long haul rail transport have fallen dramatically. In fact, most "stuff" sold in the US travels by rail, unless it is produced locally: cars, lumber, containerized imports, grain, coal, ore, etc. etc. etc. There is strong evidence that recent changes to federal regulations on truck driver hours will drive even more long haul freight back to trains.
even the Bill of Rights doesn't directly apply to the states; only through later court rulings did some of the ammendments affect the states
That would be due to the 14th Amendment, and the principle of Incorporation. Brief review here
That's not what the ruling seems to say ... it isn't the Congress that said these towns can't play, but the States those towns are a part of. This ruling seems to reaffirm the right of States to make decisions for their own political subdivisions.