In the middle of that stream-of-consciousness rant I noticed something about naming, and how GIMP and Openoffice.org are bad names. Well maybe they are, but are Windows, Word, Excel, Powerpoint examples of *good* names? They say virtually nothing about the product in question, but that hasn't hampered their use.
IIRC it's supposed to be OpenOffice anyway, there were just some trademark issues around that name. Much like Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
How about a mixed unit then, such as the kilobyte/second?
As a user, I'd much prefer things to be:
a) consistent. People know kilo=1000 from kilogram, kilometre etc. b) easy to do mental arithmetic with. Base 2 units may be easier for the computer to work with but I really don't care about that. I'm sure the CPU can handle the conversion when displaying something to the user.
Marx was wrong about a lot - particularly when it came to his proposed solutions, but it's foolish to ignore history and proclaim that laissez-faire capitalism is the one true fair and just system. Its alleged fairness only works if you assume transactions take place in a vacuum and where everyone has a similar level of bargaining power.
The statement of "productive people working for the non-productive people" is still more true for capitalism, given that the really wealthy get most of their wealth from investment, not labour (their money works, so they don't have to). Of course, I'm more concerned with what works well in practice, so I'm not a socialist.
>Socialism is still the productive people working for the non-productive people.
When socialism originated the intention was for it to be the opposite of this state, which existed under capitalism at the time (and still does effectively, but not as dramatically). You had the capitalists, who owned factories and companies, and the workers who did not but had to sell their labour. The workers would actually do the work and produce while most of the benefits went to the owners as profit. The whole point of socialism was that the workers should own the means of production, thus avoiding this issue.
Your analysis is only true at a micro-level, and ignores the environment in which these allegedly "agreed exchanges" take place. Just look at *history* - extremely dangerous working conditions, child labour, sweatshops. Unattractive, but if the only alternative is that or starve, you will inevitably make the "beneficial exchange" even if the benefits of the transaction are vastly skewed against you.
How is Britain socialist? The Labour party ditched outright socialism a long time ago, and they made no attempt to, for example, reverse the Tories' privatization of electricity, gas, water, telecoms and rail.
Now we seem to have settled on capitalism with a welfare state, which is still basically capitalist.
Having a load of intensely radioactive fission products just sloshing around rather than sealed in a solid fuel element doesn't seem like the best idea. All the mess of a reprocessing facility without the benefit of a cooldown period to dramatically reduce the activity of the fuel.
Such things are of course possible, but far from easy. Even if a majority are in favour of change, actually organising one in the presence of an oppressive regime is, to put it mildly, non-trivial and dangerous. People are hardly going to take the risk of imprisonment or execution unless the situation is truly intolerable, not merely oppressive but livable. After all, the communist states in eastern Europe and the USSR lasted for decades.
None of this implies approval of the government, so the idea that the people are fair game for punishment for the government's behaviour is rather absurd.
No, you missed the bit about "finite bandwidth". If the gap between channels is only, say, 1 Hz, then you're not going to get any significant data rate through it, since you can only modulate your carrier at about that rate (*). This is also why you can't cram an arbitrary number of TV channels into the broadcast UHF band, for example.
(*) Well, roughly. Maybe half it, I forget the details. But you can forget trying to send megabits/second down it.
No it isn't. It's very large, but not infinite. Only a certain range of wavelengths will propagate through the fibre with sufficiently low attenuation, giving a finite bandwidth for transmission, which limits the speed at which the signal can be changed. DWDM just uses this capacity in a different way, it can't increase it. Shot noise puts a theoretical lower limit on the minimum optical power needed at the receiver.
We're talking hundreds of terabits per second IIRC, but still finite.
The difference is that ADSL isn't shared in the last mile. It's easier and cheaper to upgrade backhaul than to upgrade the shared part of a cable network.
I never encounter congestion on my Sky ADSL connection, and I believe the same is true for LLU providers in general (such as Be). I get no slowdown, increased latency or packet loss even at peak time.
I assume you meant FTTC in your first sentence. They're mostly doing fibre to the cabinet, yes. However a significant fraction will be genuine FTTP, i.e. fibre all the way to the house. This is mostly for new houses and old houses where they can do it cheaply (I assume where they have ducting that they can blow the fibre through). They like FTTP because of lower operational costs - no need to maintain active equipment outdoors.
One nice thing about FTTP is that it puts an end to the "up to" speeds that you get with ADSL. BT's FTTC claims 40 Mbps, but if the cabinet's too far away, fat chance.
Either way, it'll be better than Virgin's offering thanks to actually having a choice of ISP.
Not really, the real reason is so they don't have to spend lots of money digging up the old copper and replacing it with fibre. I don't know how your phone company does it, but in new build areas BT intend to put fibre in from the start, not copper.
Which happens very often on Virgin, at least if my experience is anything to go by. 500 ms pings / 10% packet loss does not make for a satisfactory internet experience.
My current 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection is much more satisfactory overall than the allegedly 10 Mbps Virgin one I had a couple of years ago.
Do you have any actual support for that view or just lazy cynicism?
I linked to a site showing a reasonably realistic plans. There are also conceptual designs for power stations, plausible materials and a much better understanding of the plasma physics than previously. Additionally, ITER is testing out a lot of technology, such as the large-scale superconducting magnets. There's a lot of work being done.
Why not? It's likely that by the time uranium runs out, fusion will be available. The current rough schedule is for a prototype power station in about 2040. And that's not just pie-in-the-sky, one indicator of progress is that now there's a lot of focus on engineering issues, not just plasma physics.
No guarantee that it'll be as cheap as fission, but if the alternative's no energy at all, that doesn't matter so much.
The graph I saw earlier suggests that we're not doing that at all - the output is very variable indeed.
You can't just increase number of turbines as the fluctuations in output aren't independent. Since they're dependent on a common failure (lack of wind), statistics won't help much here.
>but I can say that in the UK, most of the planned wind farm projects will actually be more reliable than our crappy old aging gas/coal burners.
Well, you say planned, but we can check for the existing ones. When I looked, wind output had changed by a factor of 20 in less than a day - and of course that's uncontrollable, unlike a gas turbine.
>You can't shut it down easily to stop generating overnight, and unless somebody is buying power from it, it's losing money.
You don't need to unless your nuclear share above about 50% of average generation, as demand never drops below that. We're at less than 20% at the moment.
>"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands >anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
No it doesn't. It just means that that particular data set, taken by itself, doesn't *show* warming, not that it shows a lack of warming.
It doesn't provide evidence of no warming either. By itself, it shows nothing. Combining it with other data may do.
Or, to put it another way, absense of statistically significant evidence is not statistically significant evidence of absence.
The Higgs mechanism is often talked about as the source of mass, but what's less well publicised is that it's the dynamics of QCD (the strong interaction) that are responsible for the majority of the mass of ordinary matter, by a similar mechanism. Essentially, the vacuum isn't empty because the empty state isn't the lowest energy state - that requires a non-zero Higgs field and a non-zero quark condensate (from QCD).
The consequences of this are that particles behave as though they have mass when fundamentally they don't - they just behave that way because of their interactions with the background fields. If you excite the system to a high enough temperature though, there's a phase transition to the "free" state in a manner crudely analogous to boiling of a liquid releasing the confinement of adjacent molecules so they behave freely. In the QCD case, this temperature is low enough to be probed by experiments (not so much the electroweak/Higgs case), so we get free, low-mass quarks.
Slashdot Mirror
In the middle of that stream-of-consciousness rant I noticed something about naming, and how GIMP and Openoffice.org are bad names. Well maybe they are, but are Windows, Word, Excel, Powerpoint examples of *good* names? They say virtually nothing about the product in question, but that hasn't hampered their use.
IIRC it's supposed to be OpenOffice anyway, there were just some trademark issues around that name. Much like Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
Not driving fast in a line
That's a bit rich, coming from the land of drag racing.
But yes, F1 is pretty dull. Which is quite an impressive achievement, considering the speeds and extremes of technology involved.
How about a mixed unit then, such as the kilobyte/second?
As a user, I'd much prefer things to be:
a) consistent. People know kilo=1000 from kilogram, kilometre etc.
b) easy to do mental arithmetic with. Base 2 units may be easier for the computer to work with but I really don't care about that. I'm sure the CPU can handle the conversion when displaying something to the user.
Marx was wrong about a lot - particularly when it came to his proposed solutions, but it's foolish to ignore history and proclaim that laissez-faire capitalism is the one true fair and just system. Its alleged fairness only works if you assume transactions take place in a vacuum and where everyone has a similar level of bargaining power.
The statement of "productive people working for the non-productive people" is still more true for capitalism, given that the really wealthy get most of their wealth from investment, not labour (their money works, so they don't have to). Of course, I'm more concerned with what works well in practice, so I'm not a socialist.
>Socialism is still the productive people working for the non-productive people.
When socialism originated the intention was for it to be the opposite of this state, which existed under capitalism at the time (and still does effectively, but not as dramatically). You had the capitalists, who owned factories and companies, and the workers who did not but had to sell their labour. The workers would actually do the work and produce while most of the benefits went to the owners as profit. The whole point of socialism was that the workers should own the means of production, thus avoiding this issue.
Your analysis is only true at a micro-level, and ignores the environment in which these allegedly "agreed exchanges" take place. Just look at *history* - extremely dangerous working conditions, child labour, sweatshops. Unattractive, but if the only alternative is that or starve, you will inevitably make the "beneficial exchange" even if the benefits of the transaction are vastly skewed against you.
How is Britain socialist? The Labour party ditched outright socialism a long time ago, and they made no attempt to, for example, reverse the Tories' privatization of electricity, gas, water, telecoms and rail.
Now we seem to have settled on capitalism with a welfare state, which is still basically capitalist.
Having a load of intensely radioactive fission products just sloshing around rather than sealed in a solid fuel element doesn't seem like the best idea. All the mess of a reprocessing facility without the benefit of a cooldown period to dramatically reduce the activity of the fuel.
Such things are of course possible, but far from easy. Even if a majority are in favour of change, actually organising one in the presence of an oppressive regime is, to put it mildly, non-trivial and dangerous. People are hardly going to take the risk of imprisonment or execution unless the situation is truly intolerable, not merely oppressive but livable. After all, the communist states in eastern Europe and the USSR lasted for decades.
None of this implies approval of the government, so the idea that the people are fair game for punishment for the government's behaviour is rather absurd.
In a democracy, yes. What choice do the Chinese have?
Those regular people are ultimately in charge of their government and their destiny.
In China or Cuba? Seriously?
No, you missed the bit about "finite bandwidth". If the gap between channels is only, say, 1 Hz, then you're not going to get any significant data rate through it, since you can only modulate your carrier at about that rate (*). This is also why you can't cram an arbitrary number of TV channels into the broadcast UHF band, for example.
(*) Well, roughly. Maybe half it, I forget the details. But you can forget trying to send megabits/second down it.
No it isn't. It's very large, but not infinite. Only a certain range of wavelengths will propagate through the fibre with sufficiently low attenuation, giving a finite bandwidth for transmission, which limits the speed at which the signal can be changed. DWDM just uses this capacity in a different way, it can't increase it. Shot noise puts a theoretical lower limit on the minimum optical power needed at the receiver.
We're talking hundreds of terabits per second IIRC, but still finite.
The NSA may not have had RSA, but GCHQ did - and they developed it years before R, S and A.
The difference is that ADSL isn't shared in the last mile. It's easier and cheaper to upgrade backhaul than to upgrade the shared part of a cable network.
I never encounter congestion on my Sky ADSL connection, and I believe the same is true for LLU providers in general (such as Be). I get no slowdown, increased latency or packet loss even at peak time.
>Manual transmission drivers don't have three feet, they can't hold the break, clutch and gas at the same time.
No, but they can use the handbrake, which is what I do for hill starts on steep hills.
It's not sneaky, the "1000 base" has always been the standard for speed in telecommunications. And indeed everything else, except memory and storage.
I assume you meant FTTC in your first sentence. They're mostly doing fibre to the cabinet, yes. However a significant fraction will be genuine FTTP, i.e. fibre all the way to the house. This is mostly for new houses and old houses where they can do it cheaply (I assume where they have ducting that they can blow the fibre through). They like FTTP because of lower operational costs - no need to maintain active equipment outdoors.
One nice thing about FTTP is that it puts an end to the "up to" speeds that you get with ADSL. BT's FTTC claims 40 Mbps, but if the cabinet's too far away, fat chance.
Either way, it'll be better than Virgin's offering thanks to actually having a choice of ISP.
Not really, the real reason is so they don't have to spend lots of money digging up the old copper and replacing it with fibre. I don't know how your phone company does it, but in new build areas BT intend to put fibre in from the start, not copper.
Which happens very often on Virgin, at least if my experience is anything to go by. 500 ms pings / 10% packet loss does not make for a satisfactory internet experience.
My current 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection is much more satisfactory overall than the allegedly 10 Mbps Virgin one I had a couple of years ago.
Do you have any actual support for that view or just lazy cynicism?
I linked to a site showing a reasonably realistic plans. There are also conceptual designs for power stations, plausible materials and a much better understanding of the plasma physics than previously. Additionally, ITER is testing out a lot of technology, such as the large-scale superconducting magnets. There's a lot of work being done.
Why not? It's likely that by the time uranium runs out, fusion will be available. The current rough schedule is for a prototype power station in about 2040. And that's not just pie-in-the-sky, one indicator of progress is that now there's a lot of focus on engineering issues, not just plasma physics.
No guarantee that it'll be as cheap as fission, but if the alternative's no energy at all, that doesn't matter so much.
The graph I saw earlier suggests that we're not doing that at all - the output is very variable indeed.
You can't just increase number of turbines as the fluctuations in output aren't independent. Since they're dependent on a common failure (lack of wind), statistics won't help much here.
>but I can say that in the UK, most of the planned wind farm projects will actually be more reliable than our crappy old aging gas/coal burners.
Well, you say planned, but we can check for the existing ones. When I looked, wind output had changed by a factor of 20 in less than a day - and of course that's uncontrollable, unlike a gas turbine.
>You can't shut it down easily to stop generating overnight, and unless somebody is buying power from it, it's losing money.
You don't need to unless your nuclear share above about 50% of average generation, as demand never drops below that. We're at less than 20% at the moment.
>"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands >anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
No it doesn't. It just means that that particular data set, taken by itself, doesn't *show* warming, not that it shows a lack of warming.
It doesn't provide evidence of no warming either. By itself, it shows nothing. Combining it with other data may do.
Or, to put it another way, absense of statistically significant evidence is not statistically significant evidence of absence.
The Higgs mechanism is often talked about as the source of mass, but what's less well publicised is that it's the dynamics of QCD (the strong interaction) that are responsible for the majority of the mass of ordinary matter, by a similar mechanism. Essentially, the vacuum isn't empty because the empty state isn't the lowest energy state - that requires a non-zero Higgs field and a non-zero quark condensate (from QCD).
The consequences of this are that particles behave as though they have mass when fundamentally they don't - they just behave that way because of their interactions with the background fields. If you excite the system to a high enough temperature though, there's a phase transition to the "free" state in a manner crudely analogous to boiling of a liquid releasing the confinement of adjacent molecules so they behave freely. In the QCD case, this temperature is low enough to be probed by experiments (not so much the electroweak/Higgs case), so we get free, low-mass quarks.