The index of refraction is a human defined constant. It really is always positive unless velocity is imaginary, because n relies on speed and speed is a magnitude and therefore always >= 0.
However Snell's law says that n is negative, but Snell's law is theoretically proven with Maxwell's equations, but only under certain conditions.
So it is Snell's law that is changing.
No amount of experimental evidence can disprove a formal definition, because there is nothing to disprove, it is a definition and not a statement of the nature of the universe.
However on the otherhand, scientists may decide that they like Snell's law just the way it is and may decide to redefine the index to refraction.
While the poster may have been a bit confusing, he was not trolling.
I believe that the poster was refering to a violation in pairity. Pairity, which is like saying that you are in a right-handed or left-handed coordinate system, is conserved in Strong, E&M, and Gravitational interactions, but not in Weak interactions. (Pairity was once thought to always be conserved, and now some think that Pairity, charge, and time reversal are all conserved together)
Refraction has always been thought of as an EM process because light is an EM wave; and E&M forces have always been thought to conserve pairity. So under the previous posters assumption, either E&M does not conserve pairity or there are Weak interactions happening.
And just so you know, the pointing vector is calculated by taking E cross B. The pointing vector points in the direction that the wave propogates.
"The ratio of the speed of an electromagnetic wave in vacuum to that in matter is known as the absolute index of refractionn."
Hecht Optics 3rd Ed.
This is the way that n is defined and nothing will change that. What is different with this situation, is that when you apply Snell's law the angle is on the wrong side of the axis and thus sin(-x)=-sin(x) and the minus sign was absorbed into the constant n. If there is a misapplication of equations it is the misapplication of Snell's law, because there is obviously more going on in Maxwell's equations.
n the index of refraction is the speed of light in the medium v divided by the speed of light in vacuum c.
n between zero and one would mean that light is traveling faster in the medium than in vacuum.
A negative index doesn't really make since in the same way. I would assume that in this special case |n| is greater than one and that the reflection about the axis is caused by some optical effect not having to do with the speed of light.
This leaves you with a singularity that exploded for no apparent reason and existed for no apparent reason. Where did it come from? Why did it explode?
How complex do things have to get before "God did it" becomes the best explanation?
If you like Theosophy or Vedic Philosophy, you would place God before causality and then science would stretch as far as logic permits.
>>Netscape couldn't release Mozilla because of the RSA code that was in it.
>And they didn't - they started from scratch and produced an entirely new Open Source Mozilla tree.
Where were you? Netscape was released without the RSA code (couldn't compile) and when people saw the nasty code they wretched in disgust, babies cried, and angels lost their wings.
And then, Lo, they decided to start from scratch and create the slowest web browser ever.
PS2 sucks DC rules, yea, whatever, but Jesus fucking Christ you must be the most cracked up, die hard Dreamcast advocate in the world to think that its "Tonka Tuff" controller is good. I hate that thing and everyone I know hates that thing. And we all use 3rd party controllers.
And as for the PS2 controller, it is just the dual-shock 2, which is just a hyped up PS1 controller.
Re:Probably not going to happen
on
Mario's Revenge?
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· Score: 1
"The most important thing is that both Nintendo and Microsoft have low-cost development kits available for Gamecube and Xbox respectively. This will quickly speed product development, and already the demos we've seen of Gamecube and Xbox games are nothing short of breathtaking."
With this same application of logic, all new computer games should be released on Linux, BeOS, and BSD first and then last on Windows and the Mac.
Very, very, very few CS students have good enough math skills to do this kind of work. And even many of the really good CS students just don't have the math experience. Not to mention, most wouldn't want to do this.
And almost all of my peers have no programming experience or no practical experience. I am a moderate programmer and I am far better than all of my peers and at least all of my physics profs. (my university is not that big though). I find it sad that we are not required to learn some CS, but we can barely graduate in 4 years as it is.
When I write scientific programs I always have to translate the math into a code algorithm first. Because the way a human approaches a problem requires insight that a computer doesn't have. This translation requires good math skills and wizardry to get the algorithm into its most consice and simplest form.
The next problem is the tools. You need to find good routines for stuff like numerical DE and integration. Most of the time you don't have the time to write these things your self. This is why there is so much Fortran crap left around. There are many powerful and fast Fortran routines and not very many people want to rewrite them.
Most new projects are written in C and maybe some Fortran if there is any old code left around. Though some people like to use C++ for code reuse, it is slower. Things like Java are never ever used. Unfortunately most CS institutions today only teach Java and C++.
Then optimization also requires lots of math skills as well. Many formulae can be reduced. Lots of constants can be factored out and determined beforehand . . . A vanilla CS student may not be able to do this kind of optimization.
Then comes debugging. There are always many bugs in math code (at least in my code). If you are bad at algerbra xor logic, then you will never finish the program.
The only advice I can possibly give is to learn to program your self, like I have, or to find a bright student in your field that can program well, or that can program some and is interested in it.
I would only bother with a CS student if they had a strong math background like a double major math/CS or at the very least a minor.
The only incentive I could see for a nonscientific programmer would be to work with really big machines and clusters, but if you have big machines then you probably don't have the problem of finding programmers.
I will agree with you right up till this statement.
"I can only speculate that the core AbiWord developers don't use word processors in their daily lives and never have. Maybe they wrote their college papers with LaTeX in emacs."
These are the words of and uninformed, inexperienced slashdot poster that doesn't even know that they are being a troll.
Have you ever used LaTeX? If these were LaTeX users, then they would have either stayed within the LaTeX format or made something much better than this.
LaTeX _can_ do tables, footnotes, endnotes (has _the_best_ bibliography support), indexes, tables of contents, customized style sheets and commands, has consideration for paper size and different printing media, and supports all kinds of specialized printing needs like math, of course, guitar tabs, music sheets, electronic circuits and computer boards, and a million other things.
Also LaTeX will look exactly the same if you print it out on a Mac, PC, or UNIX box, now or in the future. This is something that cannot be said about Word and most other cheap wordprocs.
The only fault I find in LaTeX and TeX in general, is its strict application of Tables, I enjoy the way I can stretch and nest tables in HTML more than anything else. However I don't find myself fighting with tables in LaTeX like I do in Word/WordPerfect/Star.
Neither the Mac nor Linux hold much more than 5% of the destop. What is there to win between them?
Linux and Mac users represent about the most orthogonal set computer users there is. How can you compare the two?
OSX is not going to turn the tide from Microsoft to Apple. The common man is not going to buy a Mac instead of PC because the Mac runs on a UNIX core. And mac applications aren't going to be much less buggy than they already are; they just won't crash the whole computer as much.
And as for Linux not taking over the world, Christ, where are my flying cars?
"The point is, if you have the default hardware (that which is on the compatibility lists), and install Windows 2000, every bit of hardware works correctly out of box. You set up the machine and everything just works. I didn't need to run any configuration utilities whatsoever."
If I were to install W2K right now, it wouldn't have my sound card dirver, my printer driver, my ethernet card driver, or my modem driver. I would have to install all of these by hand. Windows has always been this way, they never seem to feel the need to include every driver (I don't mind, actually). So Windows is not so glorious either.
The fact is, RedHat is a server/workstation distro and KDE is not the default desktop for RedHat, Gnome is.
This does not excuse the problem, but it is not as catastrophic and one-sided as you make it seem.
But wasn't the colecovision backwards compatible with atari games, while playing it's own better games and retaining a low price.
I think those factors have alot to do with it as well, and the only way this comparision could apply is if the Indrema was just like the Xbox but with faster proc, more ram,... being able to play Xbox games and perhaps regular PC games as well.
Sonic, Ecco, and Streets of Rage were all excellent games. Also if you had a converter, you could play all the old Master System Classics (Alex, Shinobi, the best version of Double Dragon, Altered Beasts, Phantasy Star...). The game gear used alot of the same technology in the Master System. Unfortunately the master system was never designed for low power consumption and the poor battery life made it a pain in the ass.
Sega turned around and did the same thing with the Nomad::Genesys. Except this time Sega touted that the Nomad was a big battery guzzling Genesys. I wanted one, but damn, 4 hours for tons of batteries is pathetic.
s needs to be greater than 1 for the series to converge.
The series Sum 1/n from n=1 to n=inf does not converge although it diverges very slowly. This can more easily be seen by looking at the integral S 1/n dn which is like log n, which diverges. And more so, for s less than one, the integral really diverges.
"A few months ago a woman here in town slipped and fell in the French Cultural Center gift shop and punctured her spleen on a miniature Eiffel Tower. Nobody in the store happened to have a cell phone to call 911 with, and she sued every last one of them. A jury awarded her over $24m in combined damages."
I don't own a cell phone. And if some clumsy bitch slipped a tower in her ass and sued me for millions, I don't see how it would be justified.
I don't understand how this fact helps your argument.
Portable CD players on the market now are being advertized as CDR compatible; this is a feature that is in demand.
Selling a CD player with such a hinderance would be like selling read only floppy drives. Not only would no person buy such a device, but no company would make it or let alone pay license fees so that their customers would hate them.
This is very different from Macrovision. We have always had the ability to record and copy music, and people will not give up that freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said, it has to do with Snell's Law.
The index of refraction is a human defined constant. It really is always positive unless velocity is imaginary, because n relies on speed and speed is a magnitude and therefore always >= 0.
However Snell's law says that n is negative, but Snell's law is theoretically proven with Maxwell's equations, but only under certain conditions.
So it is Snell's law that is changing.
No amount of experimental evidence can disprove a formal definition, because there is nothing to disprove, it is a definition and not a statement of the nature of the universe.
However on the otherhand, scientists may decide that they like Snell's law just the way it is and may decide to redefine the index to refraction.
While the poster may have been a bit confusing, he was not trolling.
I believe that the poster was refering to a violation in pairity. Pairity, which is like saying that you are in a right-handed or left-handed coordinate system, is conserved in Strong, E&M, and Gravitational interactions, but not in Weak interactions. (Pairity was once thought to always be conserved, and now some think that Pairity, charge, and time reversal are all conserved together)
Refraction has always been thought of as an EM process because light is an EM wave; and E&M forces have always been thought to conserve pairity. So under the previous posters assumption, either E&M does not conserve pairity or there are Weak interactions happening.
And just so you know, the pointing vector is calculated by taking E cross B. The pointing vector points in the direction that the wave propogates.
What index are you using?
Vacuum has an index of 1.
Air has an index of 1.000293
Is this some nonstandard kind of optics you know?
"The ratio of the speed of an electromagnetic wave in vacuum to that in matter is known as the absolute index of refraction n."
Hecht Optics 3rd Ed.
This is the way that n is defined and nothing will change that. What is different with this situation, is that when you apply Snell's law the angle is on the wrong side of the axis and thus sin(-x)=-sin(x) and the minus sign was absorbed into the constant n. If there is a misapplication of equations it is the misapplication of Snell's law, because there is obviously more going on in Maxwell's equations.
Actually it is a fact that phase speed can exceed the speed of light, but that the group speed cannot.
However the information is not traveling faster than the speed of light, think of the phase speed as dispersion.
I think that you have misunderstood his example. Consider two leds 3E10 meters apart and fire them off a half second apart.
Aw christ, I'm sorry I got that ass backwards
n=c/v
n=c/v where c is the speed of light in vacuum
n the index of refraction is the speed of light in the medium v divided by the speed of light in vacuum c.
n between zero and one would mean that light is traveling faster in the medium than in vacuum.
A negative index doesn't really make since in the same way. I would assume that in this special case |n| is greater than one and that the reflection about the axis is caused by some optical effect not having to do with the speed of light.
This leaves you with a singularity that exploded for no apparent reason and existed for no apparent reason. Where did it come from? Why did it explode?
How complex do things have to get before "God did it" becomes the best explanation?
If you like Theosophy or Vedic Philosophy, you would place God before causality and then science would stretch as far as logic permits.
G = 8 pi T
>>Netscape couldn't release Mozilla because of the RSA code that was in it.
>And they didn't - they started from scratch and produced an entirely new Open Source Mozilla tree.
Where were you? Netscape was released without the RSA code (couldn't compile) and when people saw the nasty code they wretched in disgust, babies cried, and angels lost their wings.
And then, Lo, they decided to start from scratch and create the slowest web browser ever.
PS2 sucks DC rules, yea, whatever, but Jesus fucking Christ you must be the most cracked up, die hard Dreamcast advocate in the world to think that its "Tonka Tuff" controller is good. I hate that thing and everyone I know hates that thing. And we all use 3rd party controllers.
And as for the PS2 controller, it is just the dual-shock 2, which is just a hyped up PS1 controller.
"The most important thing is that both Nintendo and Microsoft have low-cost development kits available for Gamecube and Xbox respectively. This will quickly speed product development, and already the demos we've seen of Gamecube and Xbox games are nothing short of breathtaking."
With this same application of logic, all new computer games should be released on Linux, BeOS, and BSD first and then last on Windows and the Mac.
... And I completely understand this.
Very, very, very few CS students have good enough math skills to do this kind of work. And even many of the really good CS students just don't have the math experience. Not to mention, most wouldn't want to do this.
And almost all of my peers have no programming experience or no practical experience. I am a moderate programmer and I am far better than all of my peers and at least all of my physics profs. (my university is not that big though). I find it sad that we are not required to learn some CS, but we can barely graduate in 4 years as it is.
When I write scientific programs I always have to translate the math into a code algorithm first. Because the way a human approaches a problem requires insight that a computer doesn't have. This translation requires good math skills and wizardry to get the algorithm into its most consice and simplest form.
The next problem is the tools. You need to find good routines for stuff like numerical DE and integration. Most of the time you don't have the time to write these things your self. This is why there is so much Fortran crap left around. There are many powerful and fast Fortran routines and not very many people want to rewrite them.
Most new projects are written in C and maybe some Fortran if there is any old code left around. Though some people like to use C++ for code reuse, it is slower. Things like Java are never ever used. Unfortunately most CS institutions today only teach Java and C++.
Then optimization also requires lots of math skills as well. Many formulae can be reduced. Lots of constants can be factored out and determined beforehand . . . A vanilla CS student may not be able to do this kind of optimization.
Then comes debugging. There are always many bugs in math code (at least in my code). If you are bad at algerbra xor logic, then you will never finish the program.
The only advice I can possibly give is to learn to program your self, like I have, or to find a bright student in your field that can program well, or that can program some and is interested in it.
I would only bother with a CS student if they had a strong math background like a double major math/CS or at the very least a minor.
The only incentive I could see for a nonscientific programmer would be to work with really big machines and clusters, but if you have big machines then you probably don't have the problem of finding programmers.
Good Luck
I will agree with you right up till this statement.
"I can only speculate that the core AbiWord developers don't use word processors in their daily lives and never have. Maybe they wrote their college papers with LaTeX in emacs."
These are the words of and uninformed, inexperienced slashdot poster that doesn't even know that they are being a troll.
Have you ever used LaTeX? If these were LaTeX users, then they would have either stayed within the LaTeX format or made something much better than this.
LaTeX _can_ do tables, footnotes, endnotes (has _the_best_ bibliography support), indexes, tables of contents, customized style sheets and commands, has consideration for paper size and different printing media, and supports all kinds of specialized printing needs like math, of course, guitar tabs, music sheets, electronic circuits and computer boards, and a million other things.
Also LaTeX will look exactly the same if you print it out on a Mac, PC, or UNIX box, now or in the future. This is something that cannot be said about Word and most other cheap wordprocs.
The only fault I find in LaTeX and TeX in general, is its strict application of Tables, I enjoy the way I can stretch and nest tables in HTML more than anything else. However I don't find myself fighting with tables in LaTeX like I do in Word/WordPerfect/Star.
Neither the Mac nor Linux hold much more than 5% of the destop. What is there to win between them?
Linux and Mac users represent about the most orthogonal set computer users there is. How can you compare the two?
OSX is not going to turn the tide from Microsoft to Apple. The common man is not going to buy a Mac instead of PC because the Mac runs on a UNIX core. And mac applications aren't going to be much less buggy than they already are; they just won't crash the whole computer as much.
And as for Linux not taking over the world, Christ, where are my flying cars?
"The point is, if you have the default hardware (that which is on the compatibility lists), and install Windows 2000, every bit of hardware works correctly out of box. You set up the machine and everything just works. I didn't need to run any configuration utilities whatsoever."
If I were to install W2K right now, it wouldn't have my sound card dirver, my printer driver, my ethernet card driver, or my modem driver. I would have to install all of these by hand. Windows has always been this way, they never seem to feel the need to include every driver (I don't mind, actually). So Windows is not so glorious either.
The fact is, RedHat is a server/workstation distro and KDE is not the default desktop for RedHat, Gnome is.
This does not excuse the problem, but it is not as catastrophic and one-sided as you make it seem.
But wasn't the colecovision backwards compatible with atari games, while playing it's own better games and retaining a low price.
... being able to play Xbox games and perhaps regular PC games as well.
I think those factors have alot to do with it as well, and the only way this comparision could apply is if the Indrema was just like the Xbox but with faster proc, more ram,
"unlike Sony's poor effort with the PS2 playing PS1 games"
Do you care to back that statement up? The PS2 works perfectly with all but about 25-50 PS1 games, most of which are purely japanese.
And no 25-50 is not that much compared to the thousands of games in the PS1's library.
Ideally you want the portable to be shaped like to a regular controler.
Sonic, Ecco, and Streets of Rage were all excellent games. Also if you had a converter, you could play all the old Master System Classics (Alex, Shinobi, the best version of Double Dragon, Altered Beasts, Phantasy Star ...). The game gear used alot of the same technology in the Master System. Unfortunately the master system was never designed for low power consumption and the poor battery life made it a pain in the ass.
Sega turned around and did the same thing with the Nomad::Genesys. Except this time Sega touted that the Nomad was a big battery guzzling Genesys. I wanted one, but damn, 4 hours for tons of batteries is pathetic.
No it does not have a backlit display. It has a reflective screen.
The battery life is 15-20 hours.
s needs to be greater than 1 for the series to converge.
The series Sum 1/n from n=1 to n=inf does not converge although it diverges very slowly. This can more easily be seen by looking at the integral S 1/n dn which is like log n, which diverges. And more so, for s less than one, the integral really diverges.
"The zeta function is defined as an infinite sum:
zeta(s) = Sum from n=0 to infinity of 1/n^s"
Are you sure, because if s is positive then the first term in the sum would be 1/0
Is it the sum from 1 to inf?
"A few months ago a woman here in town slipped and fell in the French Cultural Center gift shop and punctured her spleen on a miniature Eiffel Tower. Nobody in the store happened to have a cell phone to call 911 with, and she sued every last one of them. A jury awarded her over $24m in combined damages."
I don't own a cell phone. And if some clumsy bitch slipped a tower in her ass and sued me for millions, I don't see how it would be justified.
I don't understand how this fact helps your argument.
Portable CD players on the market now are being advertized as CDR compatible; this is a feature that is in demand.
Selling a CD player with such a hinderance would be like selling read only floppy drives. Not only would no person buy such a device, but no company would make it or let alone pay license fees so that their customers would hate them.
This is very different from Macrovision. We have always had the ability to record and copy music, and people will not give up that freedom.
DAT is dead.