Maybe they're testing it live. Admittedly, 7k-9k reports/sec seems high even if you factor in Internet Worm-style growth. Ignoring the setting up and tearing down of connections, those bug reports are presumably non-trivial in size (especially if they include any core-dumps). Even if no actual code gets sent, and the article implies otherwise, searching a database for similar (but not necessarily identical) reports and properly digesting them at the rates described would be murder. There aren't many databases that could handle that kind of throughput. (Even Google doesn't have to do the digesting as well as the searching.)
Now, if the claim had been 7k-9k of crash-dump data per second at peak times, that might be more believable - especially if there's a lot of data involved in any specific crash-dump report.
Is it really too difficult to look for yourself and see that neutrino absorbtion has been proposed (several times) by highly reputable physicists?
Is it also too hard to understand that I am referring to a specific underlying assumption that is already established as false? That I am not saying that the conclusions of either side have to be right or wrong, merely that they cannot be right or wrong for the reasons as stated?
And as science reporting is usually inaccurate, why are you assuming that the reasons as stated were the reasons the scientists gave?
As best as I can tell, you had a belief and are looking for reasons to back it up rather than allow yourself to think critically. I have no time for mystics in science. If that's your best, your best won't do.
I dislike the US trying to tell the UK what Constitution it should have, particularly as the US has actively condemned any interference by other nations in the US' legal system. (Including, I might add, efforts by the UN to prevent a Mexican being executed. Seems to me the death penalty is just a tad more severe than the UK's libel system -- even after factoring in listening to the lawyers.)
I doubly resent this clamp-down because the US has profited greatly from countries like the UK exporting civil cases to the US where the US' laws would be better for the plaintiff. Indeed, the US actively encourages lawsuit tourism when it is the money-maker. I'm sorry, but double standards don't wash.
If the US wants to impress anyone with this effort, then it must cut both ways. If they want other nations to respect US Constitutional rights, the the US has to respect its international obligations as well. That includes not letting the RIAA order "DeCSS Jon"-style stormtrooper action, not pressuring India to drop all action against American companies over Bhopal, not pressuring other nations to come up with bogus charges against people like the owner of Wikileaks, honoring the warrant against the 22 CIA agents in Italy for kidnap, etc. Further, if they want cases that are fundamentally American in nature to be heard in America, they must prohibit cases that are fundamentally the property of those nations to hear those cases.
The reality is, we know damn well that the US won't ban foreign lawsuits and will continue to infringe on the sovereignty of other nations. As, indeed, will all other nations. It's not uniquely a US problem. However, just considering the US, it is insanity to have these kinds of one-way barriers. That infringes on freedom far more than the libel cases ever did, especially given the sheer magnitude of some of them. (Any one of the ones I noted are way worse than all of the libel cases exported from the US combined.)
The UK libel laws are a fiasco, that's true, but would you REALLY want the UK to go in the direction of the US where anything goes, where the country is ruled by shock jocks and paid schills? The fundamental concept of libel in the UK would seem pretty sound - anything goes so long as it isn't a disinformation campaign intentionally designed to impair the ability of a reasonable person to assess a given person's character. Notice I said concept and not implementation. The implementation sucks. It's as simple as that. It would seem entirely fair and reasonable to me to limit (not necessarily ban, but limit) disinformation of the sort I mentioned. Unreasonable people (which is most people) will be swayed by almost anything. (How else can you explain McDonald's?) You can't ban everything and you can't stop people taking things the wrong way, so things that are going to sway the already-prejudiced probably aren't things the law can do anything about. At least, not without both looking and being very stupid.
So that leaves a relatively narrow range of things that are intended to distort views. Here we're on more solid ground. I don't think anyone could have considered Spitting Image a form of brainwashing, The Mary Whitehouse Experience was not a cult movement, and the same holds true for more modern satires and parodies. It is equally true that disinformation campaigns are only used by the more extreme media because they do have an affect on even the most reasonable of people. Nobody would bother, otherwise. It wouldn't be necessary on the sheeple who would listen to said extremists, so it is only ever aimed at the wider audience.
It is wider than specific nets to catch things like hate-speech, but at the same time it doesn't impact the ability of people to express their feelings - merely their ability to try and control other people's feelings. (Influence is one thing, control is another.)
I don't know how you'd go about framing something like that as a law, but I would consider it a sensible balance between what the British have traditionally tried to aim towards and what is understood by freedom elsewhere.
No, that is not what it says. Go read it again. And don't bother coming back. I hear K5 is looking for obnoxious and offensive readers, you should fit in nicely there. (Well, let's face it, K5 hasn't got any other sorts of readers. Everyone else left.)
The modern age is way too primitive, filled with small-minded bigots who prefer to make snide remarks than answer a perfectly good question. I did not say the physicists were wrong, I did not state that neutrinos were the cause of the effect they observed, I merely noted that neutrinos must cause a non-zero effect (no matter how close to zero that is, it is still non-zero) and therefore the decay rate CANNOT be an absolute, universal, unalterable constant. It is neither rocket science to understand that not-zero does not imply anything about magnitude, nor is it rocket science to understand that when I say I do not understand where they get their conclusion that they do not understand where they get their conclusion. Your stupidity and grandiosity are at once offensive and obscene. It's no bloody wonder that science gets a bad name with religious freaks like you (and, yes, someone who is religiously devout to what they call science is still religious).
If you cannot understand clear communication, if you will not spend the time to listen, then you have nothing that I can consider worthy of time to listen to. If you want to make your opinions heard, you can only do so by unclogging those lugholes of yours and learning to listen first.
Since it seems that highly trained physicists are divided over whether a problem exists or not, and since it is well-known that the neutrino flux is bloody hard to observe, let alone measure with any accuracy, you might want to ask those highly trained physicists what they think rather than assuming you know.
We already know that some radioactive decay results in the release of a neutrino or anti-neutrino. The release of a neutrino is the same as the absorption of an anti-neutrino and vice versa. Ergo, it should be expected that variations in total numbers of neutrinos of the specific energy linked to that specific type of decay event would result in a change in the number of decay events recorded. I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from, unless they are claiming that neutrinos of the wrong type/energy are involved.
We also already know that what appears random is often the result of never being able to have enough data and never being able to make the step sizes infinitely small in the calculations; that randomness, per-se, is actually pretty rare in nature. (Indeed, randomness would seem to violate the requirement that information cannot be created or destroyed. An event is information and physics prohibits information simply "happening".)
It then follows that radioactive decay almost certainly cannot be a totally random event and therefore almost certainly cannot be absolutely invariate.
(Indeed, plenty of other people claim to have altered radioactive decay rates, so the claim itself isn't that revolutionary. I'm shocked that the scientific community is so ignorant as to what it itself has been saying for decades. If publishing papers is that important, then reading them must be just as important.)
This doesn't sound too difficult. The number one power-consumer is cooling. Distributing the same code over a larger surface area would allow you to reduce just how sophisticated and power-hungry your cooling needs to be. Any SIMD code will distribute just fine over such an architecture. If you're really clever, you'd design the cluster as a series of pentagons and hexagons, allowing you to build a geodesic. This would not only maximize the surface area but would also minimize the distance network traffic has to travel, networking being the biggest cause of latency in supercomputing. The really really clever geeks would then set up additional "regional" networks to allow for much higher performance when handling code that needed to talk much more locally, then distribute the code according to those regions. (Essentially, you then have a cluster of clusters.)
They don't produce much in the way of radio waves, but an atmosphere will absorb specific radio frequencies according to the composition of the atmosphere and reflect others. So any planet with an atmosphere can be detected by radio telescope. If you can resolve to more than one pixel, you can determine any variations across that atmosphere. Of course, if you're going to do that, you can't use long-baseline interferometry as you'd be averaging any variations out. If you are going to use LBI, then seeing multiple pixels for the planet may give you some additional information from which you can derive conditions there (and this is certainly done), but you won't be able to make direct observations on the weather or on any of the conditions James Lovelock has predicted must hold true for planets with any kind of life. So it all depends on what you're looking for.
Now, having said that planets do not produce much in the way of radio waves, early books on amateur radio astronomy (by "early" I mean 1960s) tended to dedicate whole chapters to listening to the radio noise from the gas giants in our own solar system. True, it's way too weak a signal to detect at 100 LY distances or indeed at almost any interstellar distance. On the other hand, it is a good introduction to the problems of tracking planets by this method. The damn things just won't sit still.
I dislike blog postings on Slashdot as a rule - they can get a Slashbox like everybody else - but the arguments made in the article are well-reasoned if somewhat short on detail. How do developers troubleshoot in a production environment? The article acknowledges that troubleshooting in production is necessary and mentions the installing of software, but installing software alone changes the environment (generally a bit of a no-no for debugging, due to Heisenbugs) and debugger hooks can pose a potential security threat (a big no-no for sysadmins). Further, there was no discussion as to whether developers should be the ones troubleshooting - first rule of testing is that you should never rely on programmers to test their own code. They're way too close to it. Either have testers or have programmers test other programmers' code. It is the only way to ensure that there's proper coverage of sufficient corner-cases.
Since the only sneering was by your good self, you should spend a little more time considering the properties of a mirror.
Since there isn't a theory of quantum gravity, I seriously doubt anyone doing a PhD in it is going to be very helpful. (The idea that gravity originates in a different membrane is, at best, suspect - and that is the best suggestion out there so far.) Also, nobody seriously disputes time is curved by gravity - we had measured that effect in the 1950s. Well, apparently YOU dispute this, but since nobody else does, I'm more inclined to believe that they're right. They, after all, don't need to post as anonymous cowards. However, I'm feeling whimsical. Amuse me. Produce your proof that they are wrong. I presented mine to Warwick University and they seemed entirely satisfied.
According to a strict reading of pre-Einstinian spacetime geometry, time would curve with respect to space. (-1)^2 = i^2 = j^2 = k^2 doesn't give you anything else in which time can curve. Indeed, this can be shown to be necessarily true from the way in which the equations of Special Relativity were crafted by Einstein. You do know those equations, right? And you do understand how they can be derived geometrically? Yes? No?
However, in superstring and M-Theory, there are an additional 8 dimensions defined. Geometrically, this doesn't work - 12-dimensional universes are simply too mathematically ugly. The next size that would work is 16 dimensions. Regardless of which you go for, that gives you a hell of a lot of possible things space can curve through (since any combination is possible - it doesn't have to be one).
Indeed, were this mythical quantum gravity theory for which you are apparently studying to exist and be based on the best candidate so far, if gravity bends time and gravity has a source offset in those upper dimensions, then the curvature of time must also have a component in those upper dimensions. (It should be obvious to anyone that applying a force along one vector cannot produce a reaction whose vector is orthogonal to the one along which the force was applied. The only possible way in which time can not be curved at all in any dimension 5-12 would be if this rule were, in fact, false. The fraction is of no importance - either it is zero or it is non-zero.)
Oh, almost certainly. And possibly any emoticons on the sides of the ink cartridges as well. Ink formulae - that might be a stronger case, provided it is not a trivial derivative of any standard or historic ink. However, an ink formula can't be both patented and trade secret at the same time. That's a no-no. Has anyone actually looked at their ink patents to see if they're violating the patent rules there? (Dumb question - no, nobody has; yes, they are.)
It would require a radio telescope with a 1 Km dish (or many with equal collecting area as well as comparable resolving power) to be able to detect an Earth-sized planet 1 AU from its sun at a distance of 100 LY from Earth at a resolution of a single pixel. (Information courtesy of the director of the SETI Institute during an on-site lecture at NASA.) This is 127 LY away and some of the planets are closer to their sun still. The current proposal for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope has it distributed across continents - boosting the resolving power - but the collecting area might still be too feeble to directly observe a whole lot.
(The proposal would likely need to be upgraded to a Square Mile Array or larger before you could do much in the way of direct observation. The SKA project has been painfully slow to advance and, frankly, upgrading it to the size necessary to actually look at Earth-sized alien worlds at that kind of distance just isn't going to happen. It's unclear to me if SKA as it stands will ever really happen.)
(One of the big benefits of OpenSolaris is that there's a hell of a lot of commercial software for Solaris that hasn't been - and may never be - ported to Linux. This would matter less if the ABI/IBCS module had been maintained, as Linux could then run Solaris binaries natively.)
He was 750 in the first season. Some of his off-screen adventures we know. Susan looked at a book on Revolutionary France and exclaimed that it wasn't right. Well, how did she know? The answer would seem obvious. She later mentions that the TARDIS has been a Sedan chair and an Iconic pillar. Given the gaps in her historical knowledge, it should be possible to infer which periods/places would most likely have been involved. (Susan only knows Earth history to the extent that she has been there, so what she knows = what she remembers from being there. She has almost zero background information from other sources.)
Tom Baker's scarf was knitted by Nostradamus' wife. I could see the First Doctor accepting it as a gift then throwing it into a junk box when he returned to the TARDIS. I can't see it making it that far with the Second Doctor. The third would have refused it as outrageous.
The First Doctor's remarks about birds in an alien sky imply that Earth is not the only world he visited in his pre-series travels after leaving Gallifrey. It's hard to infer from that what worlds he has been on, though.
Using the the screen age:real age ratio for known first regenerations (there aren't many), I estimate Gallifreyans age at roughly 1/5th the rate of humans. On that basis, Susan is much too young to have graduated from the Time Academy. Romana was 160 and had only just graduated when she met The Doctor, Susan was less than half that - probably closer to 75 actual Earth years in order to appear only 15. We don't know how old she was when she left, but I'd be surprised if she'd spent more than 5-10 Earth-years traveling with The Doctor. Especially not with such limited knowledge of the universe. Given that the travels involve maybe a few days on each world at most, you're looking at well over a thousand adventures.
(Perhaps her screaming so much was a warning sign of post-traumatic stress disorder.)
This ignores any adventures The Doctor had prior to traveling with Susan. We know that he spent time working with a monk outside of the city on Gallifrey (Spider of the Planets). Given that that was not safe territory, he likely had more than a few scrapes there. Based on interview tapes with Carol Ann Ford, we know that she and William Hartnell thought it most likely they'd escaped from a war or cataclysm on their own world. The only such war we have any in-series knowledge about was the rebellion of Morbius, and The Doctor seemed rather more... aware of him than those present at the time of Morbius' second attempt. On that basis, I'll say that although we have no real knowledge of why The Doctor left, this seems more likely than the rather contrived and strained explanation regarding the Hand of Omega.
So escaping from the uprising may well have been Susan's first "real" adventure. It seems a more likely explanation for her being there than looking after her grandfather (who, frankly, looked after her rather better than she did of him).
I suspect you're right. As for whether it's the right direction, I'm cautious. The virus mutates frighteningly fast and remarkably effectively. (Early vaccines failed because deactivated HIV could reactivate itself. That's bad.) If the researchers have shown the protein has remained effective on SIV in the wild, then it's safer ground - if a close cousin can't mutate around it, there's an excellent chance HIV can't either. As things stand, it's certainly the first candidate since the early vaccine trials that has shown a willingness to think along substantially new lines, and as such the first candidate I'm impressed by as a possibility. But until the numbers are crunched, it's not safe to anticipate. Many of the women believed to have been somehow immune to AIDS have since died from it, indicating that even sincere beliefs by experts isn't a guarantee of anything.
(I wonder if you could use a prion-based cure. The virus is protected by proteins, so disrupting the proteins may reduce their ability to hide. and/or reduce their effectiveness. Of course, it would also swiss-cheese the brain if the wrong prions were used, but there are only a couple of known prion diseases for humans and they have extremely long incubation periods and are extremely slow in their progression in comparison.)
Well, yes. Profiteering in wartime is usually taken as things like smuggling operations, black markets, people trafficking. War stories, war comics, war movies - when they edge into propaganda and black propaganda - are questionable, but people expect heroes and villains in stories. However, in no context are they remotely profiteering. My guess is that the soldier in question has played many a FPS and probably many a wargame of other sorts. I doubt he had any problems with those.
I would also guess that he - and probably many other soldiers - bought weapons for their family after 9/11. Gun merchants who rely on fear by their customers are far closer to profiteering from wartime. Games are not bought out of fear or panic, they don't rely on scare tactics (such as a Democrat getting elected), if their sales alter during a conflict it is because of increased interest and nothing more. But if you asked those same soldiers if gunshops should be penalized for profiteering, there's no way on this planet they would agree. If they even accepted that that is what it was (unlikely), they'd tell you that weapons are a fundamental right (which they're not, since there are many classes of people in the US who cannot own one) and that it doesn't matter if profiteering takes place in a free society (dubious, but of all the arguments it's the most convincing).
So why are games a problem? Ah, well, you see the game itself is NOT the problem. Neither, I suspect, is the fact that you can play a bad guy. (Certainly hasn't hurt game sales where you can only play the bad guy.) I suspect the problem is that the military is extremely good at dehumanizing and that makes it very difficult to connect with a game that starts from the assumption that neither side is less human than the other.
If it is a genuine case of a thief in possession of stolen property, rather than a legal owner who happens to "jailbreak" their phone, then it would be perfectly reasonable in Europe. Mind you, tracking cell phones in Europe has been done without photograph evidence for some time - criminals are caught all the time by phone tracking and even CIA agents have been tracked by that method. If the phone is physically on, its position is recorded and known. If the criminal databases have been supplied with the information on that phone, it can be tracked and the person in possession of it apprehended. Sure, photo evidence would help in a case, provided there can be reasonable certainty that the photo is what Apple and/or the owner claims it is. MD5 hashes are probably insufficient for that at this point. And even then, the onus on the plaintiff would be to show that the person in the photograph was responsible for whatever they are accused of. (I doubt many juries would smile on a claim of thief and/or receiver of stolen goods - you'd need to be a bit more sure of what the person had done wrong than that.) However, there'd likely be plenty of cases where you could indeed claim the photograph was evidence of a specific crime. I have no opposition to such photographs being taken in those cases and being used in evidence.
My opposition is solely when Apple oversteps the mark and uses a perfectly legitimate crime-prevention mechanism to intimidate or harass legitimate owners, or prevent said owners of carrying out lawful activities. Not if, when. The single biggest cause of crime, in my opinion, is the misuse of crime-prevention for personal or corporate gain. There are probably hundreds of brilliant inventions out there, thousands of brilliant ideas, which could be used to genuinely benefit humanity. Of those, many will never be used at all because of the risk of abuse, almost all the rest will be abused and not only cease to prevent harm but actually provoke people into becoming more harmful. Greed and the desire to pervert technology are probably big reasons why we aren't exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations for real. The technology is fine, people are the problem.
Nah. That won't happen until the 25th century, when all the decent Sherlock Holmes stories have been wiped. (Why do you think Data always uses the over-the-top theatrical garb of earlier TV adaptations?)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're testing it live. Admittedly, 7k-9k reports/sec seems high even if you factor in Internet Worm-style growth. Ignoring the setting up and tearing down of connections, those bug reports are presumably non-trivial in size (especially if they include any core-dumps). Even if no actual code gets sent, and the article implies otherwise, searching a database for similar (but not necessarily identical) reports and properly digesting them at the rates described would be murder. There aren't many databases that could handle that kind of throughput. (Even Google doesn't have to do the digesting as well as the searching.)
Now, if the claim had been 7k-9k of crash-dump data per second at peak times, that might be more believable - especially if there's a lot of data involved in any specific crash-dump report.
'69. You may be older, but I'm holding Woodstock on your lawn whether you like it or not.
Is it really too difficult to look for yourself and see that neutrino absorbtion has been proposed (several times) by highly reputable physicists?
Is it also too hard to understand that I am referring to a specific underlying assumption that is already established as false? That I am not saying that the conclusions of either side have to be right or wrong, merely that they cannot be right or wrong for the reasons as stated?
And as science reporting is usually inaccurate, why are you assuming that the reasons as stated were the reasons the scientists gave?
As best as I can tell, you had a belief and are looking for reasons to back it up rather than allow yourself to think critically. I have no time for mystics in science. If that's your best, your best won't do.
I dislike the US trying to tell the UK what Constitution it should have, particularly as the US has actively condemned any interference by other nations in the US' legal system. (Including, I might add, efforts by the UN to prevent a Mexican being executed. Seems to me the death penalty is just a tad more severe than the UK's libel system -- even after factoring in listening to the lawyers.)
I doubly resent this clamp-down because the US has profited greatly from countries like the UK exporting civil cases to the US where the US' laws would be better for the plaintiff. Indeed, the US actively encourages lawsuit tourism when it is the money-maker. I'm sorry, but double standards don't wash.
If the US wants to impress anyone with this effort, then it must cut both ways. If they want other nations to respect US Constitutional rights, the the US has to respect its international obligations as well. That includes not letting the RIAA order "DeCSS Jon"-style stormtrooper action, not pressuring India to drop all action against American companies over Bhopal, not pressuring other nations to come up with bogus charges against people like the owner of Wikileaks, honoring the warrant against the 22 CIA agents in Italy for kidnap, etc. Further, if they want cases that are fundamentally American in nature to be heard in America, they must prohibit cases that are fundamentally the property of those nations to hear those cases.
The reality is, we know damn well that the US won't ban foreign lawsuits and will continue to infringe on the sovereignty of other nations. As, indeed, will all other nations. It's not uniquely a US problem. However, just considering the US, it is insanity to have these kinds of one-way barriers. That infringes on freedom far more than the libel cases ever did, especially given the sheer magnitude of some of them. (Any one of the ones I noted are way worse than all of the libel cases exported from the US combined.)
The UK libel laws are a fiasco, that's true, but would you REALLY want the UK to go in the direction of the US where anything goes, where the country is ruled by shock jocks and paid schills? The fundamental concept of libel in the UK would seem pretty sound - anything goes so long as it isn't a disinformation campaign intentionally designed to impair the ability of a reasonable person to assess a given person's character. Notice I said concept and not implementation. The implementation sucks. It's as simple as that. It would seem entirely fair and reasonable to me to limit (not necessarily ban, but limit) disinformation of the sort I mentioned. Unreasonable people (which is most people) will be swayed by almost anything. (How else can you explain McDonald's?) You can't ban everything and you can't stop people taking things the wrong way, so things that are going to sway the already-prejudiced probably aren't things the law can do anything about. At least, not without both looking and being very stupid.
So that leaves a relatively narrow range of things that are intended to distort views. Here we're on more solid ground. I don't think anyone could have considered Spitting Image a form of brainwashing, The Mary Whitehouse Experience was not a cult movement, and the same holds true for more modern satires and parodies. It is equally true that disinformation campaigns are only used by the more extreme media because they do have an affect on even the most reasonable of people. Nobody would bother, otherwise. It wouldn't be necessary on the sheeple who would listen to said extremists, so it is only ever aimed at the wider audience.
It is wider than specific nets to catch things like hate-speech, but at the same time it doesn't impact the ability of people to express their feelings - merely their ability to try and control other people's feelings. (Influence is one thing, control is another.)
I don't know how you'd go about framing something like that as a law, but I would consider it a sensible balance between what the British have traditionally tried to aim towards and what is understood by freedom elsewhere.
No, that is not what it says. Go read it again. And don't bother coming back. I hear K5 is looking for obnoxious and offensive readers, you should fit in nicely there. (Well, let's face it, K5 hasn't got any other sorts of readers. Everyone else left.)
The modern age is way too primitive, filled with small-minded bigots who prefer to make snide remarks than answer a perfectly good question. I did not say the physicists were wrong, I did not state that neutrinos were the cause of the effect they observed, I merely noted that neutrinos must cause a non-zero effect (no matter how close to zero that is, it is still non-zero) and therefore the decay rate CANNOT be an absolute, universal, unalterable constant. It is neither rocket science to understand that not-zero does not imply anything about magnitude, nor is it rocket science to understand that when I say I do not understand where they get their conclusion that they do not understand where they get their conclusion. Your stupidity and grandiosity are at once offensive and obscene. It's no bloody wonder that science gets a bad name with religious freaks like you (and, yes, someone who is religiously devout to what they call science is still religious).
If you cannot understand clear communication, if you will not spend the time to listen, then you have nothing that I can consider worthy of time to listen to. If you want to make your opinions heard, you can only do so by unclogging those lugholes of yours and learning to listen first.
Since it seems that highly trained physicists are divided over whether a problem exists or not, and since it is well-known that the neutrino flux is bloody hard to observe, let alone measure with any accuracy, you might want to ask those highly trained physicists what they think rather than assuming you know.
We already know that some radioactive decay results in the release of a neutrino or anti-neutrino. The release of a neutrino is the same as the absorption of an anti-neutrino and vice versa. Ergo, it should be expected that variations in total numbers of neutrinos of the specific energy linked to that specific type of decay event would result in a change in the number of decay events recorded. I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from, unless they are claiming that neutrinos of the wrong type/energy are involved.
We also already know that what appears random is often the result of never being able to have enough data and never being able to make the step sizes infinitely small in the calculations; that randomness, per-se, is actually pretty rare in nature. (Indeed, randomness would seem to violate the requirement that information cannot be created or destroyed. An event is information and physics prohibits information simply "happening".)
It then follows that radioactive decay almost certainly cannot be a totally random event and therefore almost certainly cannot be absolutely invariate.
(Indeed, plenty of other people claim to have altered radioactive decay rates, so the claim itself isn't that revolutionary. I'm shocked that the scientific community is so ignorant as to what it itself has been saying for decades. If publishing papers is that important, then reading them must be just as important.)
You never know, the contention for resources might keep them all out of trouble.
This doesn't sound too difficult. The number one power-consumer is cooling. Distributing the same code over a larger surface area would allow you to reduce just how sophisticated and power-hungry your cooling needs to be. Any SIMD code will distribute just fine over such an architecture. If you're really clever, you'd design the cluster as a series of pentagons and hexagons, allowing you to build a geodesic. This would not only maximize the surface area but would also minimize the distance network traffic has to travel, networking being the biggest cause of latency in supercomputing. The really really clever geeks would then set up additional "regional" networks to allow for much higher performance when handling code that needed to talk much more locally, then distribute the code according to those regions. (Essentially, you then have a cluster of clusters.)
They don't produce much in the way of radio waves, but an atmosphere will absorb specific radio frequencies according to the composition of the atmosphere and reflect others. So any planet with an atmosphere can be detected by radio telescope. If you can resolve to more than one pixel, you can determine any variations across that atmosphere. Of course, if you're going to do that, you can't use long-baseline interferometry as you'd be averaging any variations out. If you are going to use LBI, then seeing multiple pixels for the planet may give you some additional information from which you can derive conditions there (and this is certainly done), but you won't be able to make direct observations on the weather or on any of the conditions James Lovelock has predicted must hold true for planets with any kind of life. So it all depends on what you're looking for.
Now, having said that planets do not produce much in the way of radio waves, early books on amateur radio astronomy (by "early" I mean 1960s) tended to dedicate whole chapters to listening to the radio noise from the gas giants in our own solar system. True, it's way too weak a signal to detect at 100 LY distances or indeed at almost any interstellar distance. On the other hand, it is a good introduction to the problems of tracking planets by this method. The damn things just won't sit still.
I dislike blog postings on Slashdot as a rule - they can get a Slashbox like everybody else - but the arguments made in the article are well-reasoned if somewhat short on detail. How do developers troubleshoot in a production environment? The article acknowledges that troubleshooting in production is necessary and mentions the installing of software, but installing software alone changes the environment (generally a bit of a no-no for debugging, due to Heisenbugs) and debugger hooks can pose a potential security threat (a big no-no for sysadmins). Further, there was no discussion as to whether developers should be the ones troubleshooting - first rule of testing is that you should never rely on programmers to test their own code. They're way too close to it. Either have testers or have programmers test other programmers' code. It is the only way to ensure that there's proper coverage of sufficient corner-cases.
Since the only sneering was by your good self, you should spend a little more time considering the properties of a mirror.
Since there isn't a theory of quantum gravity, I seriously doubt anyone doing a PhD in it is going to be very helpful. (The idea that gravity originates in a different membrane is, at best, suspect - and that is the best suggestion out there so far.) Also, nobody seriously disputes time is curved by gravity - we had measured that effect in the 1950s. Well, apparently YOU dispute this, but since nobody else does, I'm more inclined to believe that they're right. They, after all, don't need to post as anonymous cowards. However, I'm feeling whimsical. Amuse me. Produce your proof that they are wrong. I presented mine to Warwick University and they seemed entirely satisfied.
According to a strict reading of pre-Einstinian spacetime geometry, time would curve with respect to space. (-1)^2 = i^2 = j^2 = k^2 doesn't give you anything else in which time can curve. Indeed, this can be shown to be necessarily true from the way in which the equations of Special Relativity were crafted by Einstein. You do know those equations, right? And you do understand how they can be derived geometrically? Yes? No?
However, in superstring and M-Theory, there are an additional 8 dimensions defined. Geometrically, this doesn't work - 12-dimensional universes are simply too mathematically ugly. The next size that would work is 16 dimensions. Regardless of which you go for, that gives you a hell of a lot of possible things space can curve through (since any combination is possible - it doesn't have to be one).
Indeed, were this mythical quantum gravity theory for which you are apparently studying to exist and be based on the best candidate so far, if gravity bends time and gravity has a source offset in those upper dimensions, then the curvature of time must also have a component in those upper dimensions. (It should be obvious to anyone that applying a force along one vector cannot produce a reaction whose vector is orthogonal to the one along which the force was applied. The only possible way in which time can not be curved at all in any dimension 5-12 would be if this rule were, in fact, false. The fraction is of no importance - either it is zero or it is non-zero.)
Can I at least accept the spaces between the words in a Slashdot summary? :)
Oh, almost certainly. And possibly any emoticons on the sides of the ink cartridges as well. Ink formulae - that might be a stronger case, provided it is not a trivial derivative of any standard or historic ink. However, an ink formula can't be both patented and trade secret at the same time. That's a no-no. Has anyone actually looked at their ink patents to see if they're violating the patent rules there? (Dumb question - no, nobody has; yes, they are.)
It would require a radio telescope with a 1 Km dish (or many with equal collecting area as well as comparable resolving power) to be able to detect an Earth-sized planet 1 AU from its sun at a distance of 100 LY from Earth at a resolution of a single pixel. (Information courtesy of the director of the SETI Institute during an on-site lecture at NASA.) This is 127 LY away and some of the planets are closer to their sun still. The current proposal for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope has it distributed across continents - boosting the resolving power - but the collecting area might still be too feeble to directly observe a whole lot.
(The proposal would likely need to be upgraded to a Square Mile Array or larger before you could do much in the way of direct observation. The SKA project has been painfully slow to advance and, frankly, upgrading it to the size necessary to actually look at Earth-sized alien worlds at that kind of distance just isn't going to happen. It's unclear to me if SKA as it stands will ever really happen.)
Why can't we have a knife! I wanna knife! >sniff<
(One of the big benefits of OpenSolaris is that there's a hell of a lot of commercial software for Solaris that hasn't been - and may never be - ported to Linux. This would matter less if the ABI/IBCS module had been maintained, as Linux could then run Solaris binaries natively.)
He was 750 in the first season. Some of his off-screen adventures we know. Susan looked at a book on Revolutionary France and exclaimed that it wasn't right. Well, how did she know? The answer would seem obvious. She later mentions that the TARDIS has been a Sedan chair and an Iconic pillar. Given the gaps in her historical knowledge, it should be possible to infer which periods/places would most likely have been involved. (Susan only knows Earth history to the extent that she has been there, so what she knows = what she remembers from being there. She has almost zero background information from other sources.)
Tom Baker's scarf was knitted by Nostradamus' wife. I could see the First Doctor accepting it as a gift then throwing it into a junk box when he returned to the TARDIS. I can't see it making it that far with the Second Doctor. The third would have refused it as outrageous.
The First Doctor's remarks about birds in an alien sky imply that Earth is not the only world he visited in his pre-series travels after leaving Gallifrey. It's hard to infer from that what worlds he has been on, though.
Using the the screen age:real age ratio for known first regenerations (there aren't many), I estimate Gallifreyans age at roughly 1/5th the rate of humans. On that basis, Susan is much too young to have graduated from the Time Academy. Romana was 160 and had only just graduated when she met The Doctor, Susan was less than half that - probably closer to 75 actual Earth years in order to appear only 15. We don't know how old she was when she left, but I'd be surprised if she'd spent more than 5-10 Earth-years traveling with The Doctor. Especially not with such limited knowledge of the universe. Given that the travels involve maybe a few days on each world at most, you're looking at well over a thousand adventures.
(Perhaps her screaming so much was a warning sign of post-traumatic stress disorder.)
This ignores any adventures The Doctor had prior to traveling with Susan. We know that he spent time working with a monk outside of the city on Gallifrey (Spider of the Planets). Given that that was not safe territory, he likely had more than a few scrapes there. Based on interview tapes with Carol Ann Ford, we know that she and William Hartnell thought it most likely they'd escaped from a war or cataclysm on their own world. The only such war we have any in-series knowledge about was the rebellion of Morbius, and The Doctor seemed rather more... aware of him than those present at the time of Morbius' second attempt. On that basis, I'll say that although we have no real knowledge of why The Doctor left, this seems more likely than the rather contrived and strained explanation regarding the Hand of Omega.
So escaping from the uprising may well have been Susan's first "real" adventure. It seems a more likely explanation for her being there than looking after her grandfather (who, frankly, looked after her rather better than she did of him).
More likely digging foxholes. Trenches involve sharing and that's a socialist principle.
There are no lawyers in heaven, but there are some actors who have played lawyers on TV.
I suspect you're right. As for whether it's the right direction, I'm cautious. The virus mutates frighteningly fast and remarkably effectively. (Early vaccines failed because deactivated HIV could reactivate itself. That's bad.) If the researchers have shown the protein has remained effective on SIV in the wild, then it's safer ground - if a close cousin can't mutate around it, there's an excellent chance HIV can't either. As things stand, it's certainly the first candidate since the early vaccine trials that has shown a willingness to think along substantially new lines, and as such the first candidate I'm impressed by as a possibility. But until the numbers are crunched, it's not safe to anticipate. Many of the women believed to have been somehow immune to AIDS have since died from it, indicating that even sincere beliefs by experts isn't a guarantee of anything.
(I wonder if you could use a prion-based cure. The virus is protected by proteins, so disrupting the proteins may reduce their ability to hide. and/or reduce their effectiveness. Of course, it would also swiss-cheese the brain if the wrong prions were used, but there are only a couple of known prion diseases for humans and they have extremely long incubation periods and are extremely slow in their progression in comparison.)
Well, yes. Profiteering in wartime is usually taken as things like smuggling operations, black markets, people trafficking. War stories, war comics, war movies - when they edge into propaganda and black propaganda - are questionable, but people expect heroes and villains in stories. However, in no context are they remotely profiteering. My guess is that the soldier in question has played many a FPS and probably many a wargame of other sorts. I doubt he had any problems with those.
I would also guess that he - and probably many other soldiers - bought weapons for their family after 9/11. Gun merchants who rely on fear by their customers are far closer to profiteering from wartime. Games are not bought out of fear or panic, they don't rely on scare tactics (such as a Democrat getting elected), if their sales alter during a conflict it is because of increased interest and nothing more. But if you asked those same soldiers if gunshops should be penalized for profiteering, there's no way on this planet they would agree. If they even accepted that that is what it was (unlikely), they'd tell you that weapons are a fundamental right (which they're not, since there are many classes of people in the US who cannot own one) and that it doesn't matter if profiteering takes place in a free society (dubious, but of all the arguments it's the most convincing).
So why are games a problem? Ah, well, you see the game itself is NOT the problem. Neither, I suspect, is the fact that you can play a bad guy. (Certainly hasn't hurt game sales where you can only play the bad guy.) I suspect the problem is that the military is extremely good at dehumanizing and that makes it very difficult to connect with a game that starts from the assumption that neither side is less human than the other.
If it is a genuine case of a thief in possession of stolen property, rather than a legal owner who happens to "jailbreak" their phone, then it would be perfectly reasonable in Europe. Mind you, tracking cell phones in Europe has been done without photograph evidence for some time - criminals are caught all the time by phone tracking and even CIA agents have been tracked by that method. If the phone is physically on, its position is recorded and known. If the criminal databases have been supplied with the information on that phone, it can be tracked and the person in possession of it apprehended. Sure, photo evidence would help in a case, provided there can be reasonable certainty that the photo is what Apple and/or the owner claims it is. MD5 hashes are probably insufficient for that at this point. And even then, the onus on the plaintiff would be to show that the person in the photograph was responsible for whatever they are accused of. (I doubt many juries would smile on a claim of thief and/or receiver of stolen goods - you'd need to be a bit more sure of what the person had done wrong than that.) However, there'd likely be plenty of cases where you could indeed claim the photograph was evidence of a specific crime. I have no opposition to such photographs being taken in those cases and being used in evidence.
My opposition is solely when Apple oversteps the mark and uses a perfectly legitimate crime-prevention mechanism to intimidate or harass legitimate owners, or prevent said owners of carrying out lawful activities. Not if, when. The single biggest cause of crime, in my opinion, is the misuse of crime-prevention for personal or corporate gain. There are probably hundreds of brilliant inventions out there, thousands of brilliant ideas, which could be used to genuinely benefit humanity. Of those, many will never be used at all because of the risk of abuse, almost all the rest will be abused and not only cease to prevent harm but actually provoke people into becoming more harmful. Greed and the desire to pervert technology are probably big reasons why we aren't exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations for real. The technology is fine, people are the problem.
Nah. That won't happen until the 25th century, when all the decent Sherlock Holmes stories have been wiped. (Why do you think Data always uses the over-the-top theatrical garb of earlier TV adaptations?)