Haha that would certainly be good. Until then we can all agree to use "a thousand millions" and "a million millions". The sheer irritation of typing all of that out - assuming that journalists won't add some key binding to automate it - will trigger a drive to ensure people know what 10^9 and 10^12 mean. Then we can slowly push them towards 10^{12}, which lets us type 10^121x without ambiguity. A few years down the road we could all be happily writing and reading LaTeX in news articles and do our bit against the dumbing-down of the internet...
the word "billion" in british english means 10^12 to a lot of people too - hence the comment i replied to. before i went into science it meant 10^12 to me, as well, but spend long enough in science and you begin to see just how few people are aware of that - and it seems to get fewer each year.
People raise this kind of thing a lot when they want to be pedants but in reality "a billion" now is 10^9, regardless of where you are. The Americanisation of English could be viewed as sad - and often I think it is - but that's life.
"If we are able to measure the speed of light so precisely that we can declare it inviolate, then there is no excuse for not being able to measure the speed of a neutrino so precisely as well."
Yes, yes there is. For starters, just *detecting* neutrinos is hard enough work, while we can detect photons with a bit of chemical paste smeared on a waxy piece of paper. To measure the speed of neutrinos you need a neutrino beam, containing billions of neutrinos, of which you may detect a few tens. To get errors down, then, you need a beam bunched as tightly together as possible, to ensure as little spread in your detections as you can. Even then, given that we know neutrinos travel at *almost* the speed of light, getting the accuracy to distinguish their velocity from that of light is extremely tough - and since on e flavour may even be massless we might expect some neutrinos to be traveling at exactly the speed of light (as all massless particles must). There's no conspiracy here - just the realities of experimental physics and its limits. One day in the future - maybe the very near future - we'll be able to detect the velocity of neutrinos accurately enough to tell their masses. Until then, for all practical purposes they can be taken to travel at the speed of light.
As for theories that go against SR being shot down, and SR becoming a law, and this odd belief that people think Einstein couldn't be wrong (he could be, and was, quite often), it just doesn't hold up to the evidence. We're postulating theories that break Lorentz invariance *all the time*, and we've still got jobs. The problem is that SR fits all the available data remarkably well, and modern quantum field theories are (typically) formulated to be Lorentz-invariant. But there's no law; feel free to write down a theory that breaks Lorentz invariance all you like - just make sure it's well motivated and fits the data at least as well, and ideally better, than current theories. You won't be shot down.
They didn't say that the neutrinos were moving at the speed of light, they said that the neutrinos were traveling at a speed consistent with the speed of light. Since neutrinos have a miniscule mass of the order of an eV (and one of the flavours could, in principle, still be massless) their speed is going to be indistinguishable from that of light for any experiment we can run on Earth and the difference becomes moot. If one flavour is actually massless, which seems unlikely but to the best of my knowledge can't be ruled out, then that flavour *will* travel at the speed of light.
The difference is that then the politicians lose their job, while this guy is still getting paid the same salary, holding the same professorship - and, frankly, can still travel to all the OPERA conferences. To be honest, given the publicity and the stress that come with heading the collaboration I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there wasn't some relief mixed in with the pain and irritation.
That doesn't negate his point about proprietary (and wasteful) updating programs though.
Out of pure curiosity when I get home from work I'm actually going to go digging on my Windows box to see what stuff is being loaded. I seem to recall a few months back blocking a whole host of shit from loading on boot, which might be helping my machine avoid the slowdown...
All of this makes sense, and if I recall properly was a major concern of people when MS first introduced the registry way back in the mists of time (even though they said it was a wonderful invention and would make our lives perfect). Also the severe swappage makes a lot of sense; I've certainly noticed that over the years and still do. It does still make me wonder why my machines don't slow down (anymore) anything like as much as people say theirs do - though if you're right about IE that at least must help since I haven't touched IE in well over a decade. Also I do clean out my registry every once in a while, which is an old habit dating back at least to 1998 or so, and that must help.
I just posted elsewhere that I only reinstalled Vista once. That was a lie, I also reinstalled it immediately I got my Dell, to get rid of all the shite they'd loaded the hard drive with. I also removed their pointless utility partition which, so far as I could tell, locked off an entire sodding primary partition just so they could give me tools significantly more rubbish than ones I could get with any live CD of a Linux distribution. Fortunately, at that point at least, Dell still gave you a copy of the Windows DVD you'd paid for rather than just having some recovery partition. No idea what they do now.
I'm not trolling here, but I just don't see what people are doing to their Windows systems to make this happen. I remember having to frequently reinstall both Windows 95 and Windows 98, I reinstalled Windows 2000 quite frequently too, skipped XP, and now have Vista which I've reinstalled once. That was a good couple of years ago and it still seems to be running quite happily. Certainly I haven't noticed any significant slowdown, and it's used most days.
I see what you're meaning, but surely the standard user interface on Unix-like OSs these days is the terminal - otherwise the fragmentation is huge even within a single OS (Slackware running GNOME 3 compared to Slackware running Enlightenment, for instance). From the terminal, I can jump between Solaris, varieties of Linux, varieties of BSD, OSX and so on, and have a reasonably consistent experience.
Though if you extend my argument you begin suggesting something like the GNU tools being the standard user interface on Unix-like OSs... which is perhaps a bit farcical.
Yeah, I was just making a rubbish joke. Of those options I'd actually personally choose KDE4 but that might be because I've only messed around with GNOME 3 on a computer with rubbish graphics drivers, so it simply didn't play nicely. I'll try it out on my desktop at some point, actually, and see if I dislike it in reality as much as I dislike what I've heard of it - most likely not.
I liken people who take this subject as seriously as you to people who should find more meaningful causes to pursue. Seriously, Microsoft have acted like an unpleasant multinational - because they are - and Apple have acted like an unpleasant multinational - because they are - and if Ubuntu or Red Hat became big enough they'd act like unpleasant multinationals. And in the meantime, life goes on and we use whichever OS suits us at that moment without getting into flamewars online...
No offense meant, not really, but this isn't a religion. There are good things about Windows - application support for the most part, as others have said in this thread, but also the fact that on the right hardware even Vista is a nice OS (and heavily maligned, not least because it was generally launched onto the *wrong* hardware, and that not least because Microsoft pretty much lied about what it would work on - like I say, they're an unpleasant multinational), and 7 is basically stable and entirely usable. There are also horrible things about Windows. There are good things about Linux, and there are horrible things about Linux. Likewise OSX, the BSDs and whatever other OS you might point at at any time.
On the contrary, quite easily. That word is pronounced as either "casteriskock" or "kestarck", depending on context.
I understand that I've given two pronunciations, but you speak English so you're used to the same word being pronounced in different ways (or different words being spelled the same way).
Eh? Do you actually know the slightest thing you're talking about?
The kernel is a modified Mach kernel, a descendent of BSD Unix - unlike Linux, which has no code inherited from Unix at all. The userspace is almost entirely the FreeBSD userspace, with plenty of GNU tools thrown on top. The only thing that remins from the proprietary OS released in 1984 is the overall look of it. Other than the graphics layers, OSX is very much an updated version of Next. OS1-9 were very definitely nothing to do with Unix. OSX is Unix, unlike Linux which is merely Unix-like. Sure, it doesn't use X, but X doesn't make something Unix.
I'm really not convinced of that, in all seriousness. We're printing enormous reams of paper each day - tons of the stuff. It all looks tedious and inconsequential, it's true, but frankly I've studied history and a lot of the study of history is poring over the tedious and inconsequential to tie together a picture of the past. We're printing books - some of them with very high quality paper which is unlikely to degrade rapidly - and some of those high quality books even give details of our technology. It's certainly not beyond imagination that, even if *every single encyclopedia printed in the last year* and *every single non-Comp Sci textbook* is somehow annihilated in the next millennium, someone won't be able to piece together, from Comp Sci textbooks and the reams of technical logs produced by our many technology firms, how to reconstruct what a hard drive is, and some of our filesystems. Then some hard drives will have readable data on them.
But that's actually beside the point - I don't believe in the first place that every book we produce will die over the next millennium. The Encyclopedia Britannica going online-only is a very sad thing; I fully agree with anyone who's unhappy about that. I have a great fondness for encyclopedias produced by people who at least have their job on the line if they make massive mistakes, unlike the "crowd-sourced" lowest common denominator trash that Wikipedia sometimes serves up -- not to say there aren't Wikipedia articles that are well-written and comprehensive, because there are, just that it's a brave statement that Wikipedia isn't... well, full of lowest common denominator trash, and faces a strong selection bias. It's just that we still produce more than enough physical artifacts that, frankly, I don't see archaeologists in a millennium having anything like the problems we have with artifacts from 3,000 years ago. (Bear in mind that we have little problem piecing together the broad scope of history 1,000 years ago - I'm British, so I naturally focus on England, Wales, Scotland, Norman France, Frankish France, Northern Germany, etc. And we have a very good knowledge of what people wrote back then - we can read the languages and we have plenty of documents. On higher-quality paper than your typical Tor paperback, it's true, but who the fuck wants our civilisation to be remembered for its cheap paperbacks?
actually that's a very good point. same as our archaeologists learn enormous amounts from grade goods even when the skeletons have gone. either future archaeologists will be idiots and think we like filling boxes with glasses and clothing and ear-rings and little metal rods for legs and fake hips, or they'll realise that there were dead bodies in them and learn surprising amounts about our society and way of life, our physiology and so on.
and then smelt down the metals and continue on to the next cemetery.
"Homo sapiens just happens to be the dominant gene source."
Even that becomes a relatively meaningless statement. What we now call Homo Sapiens is the result of tens of thousands of years of evolution *and* interbreeding with closely-related strains of humanity. We know that non sub-Saharan Africans interbred with Neanderthals (meaning most likely that a lot of African populations also have Neanderthal genes spread through them at a lower level, given humanity's tendency to intermingle along population borders). If these guys were a separate species (whatever that's taken to mean) and came into contact with early "homo sapiens" then they interbred too, and their genes will have spread back Westwards to other populations. Sure, we could say that the genes of Cro-Magnon Man are more-or-less dominant in us, but we're still ultimately a cross-breed. We're not Cro-Magnon Man, even though we resemble him more closely than we resemble Neanderthal Man.
In the grossly unlikely event of us meeting another human species on Earth again, I've no doubt that we'll interbreed again, and within a few hundred generations or so the new genes will have spread across the whole population.
I'm pretty sure they won't. We have more than enough lasting memorials that demonstrate the level of technology - and the writing. Even some copies of War and Peace will survive to go along with the stone monuments erected to the glory of despots and the plastic boxes full of silicon and gold with "DELL" stamped on them, and little "Intel Inside!", "Core 2 Duo inside!" and Windows activation code stickers.
1000 years from now people will find skeletons in caskets. We still find skeletons buried 1500 years back (and more) in a range of contexts, from sealed tombs to straight burial in the earth. Not many, it's true, and often in rubbish condition, but we find them. The future will find skeletons from our modern caskets, too - just perhaps not many, and often in rubbish condition. Still, it'll be more than enough for them to conclude that a coffin is a coffin. Plus, they'll have our headstones to work from. The etching degrades over time but we can still read headstones from Roman times - with effort in many cases, but we can read them.
What interests me more is what they'll make of gardens of remembrance for those cremated - all those little headstones with nothing buried beneath. They know we're commemorating something, but that something doesn't exist. Maybe they'll do what modern archaelogists do and immediately declare ritual (which would be accurate) and an offering to the Gods that didn't survive in the soil (which wouldn't be).
They might be even more interested in pet burials, and start wondering whether there were races of intelligent dogs, cats, parrots and goldfish back in the lost days of the concrete civilisation...
Slashdot Mirror
Haha that would certainly be good. Until then we can all agree to use "a thousand millions" and "a million millions". The sheer irritation of typing all of that out - assuming that journalists won't add some key binding to automate it - will trigger a drive to ensure people know what 10^9 and 10^12 mean. Then we can slowly push them towards 10^{12}, which lets us type 10^121x without ambiguity. A few years down the road we could all be happily writing and reading LaTeX in news articles and do our bit against the dumbing-down of the internet...
the word "billion" in british english means 10^12 to a lot of people too - hence the comment i replied to. before i went into science it meant 10^12 to me, as well, but spend long enough in science and you begin to see just how few people are aware of that - and it seems to get fewer each year.
If you read up on Olber's paradox you'll find it's even actually a significantly lower density than you might expect...
People raise this kind of thing a lot when they want to be pedants but in reality "a billion" now is 10^9, regardless of where you are. The Americanisation of English could be viewed as sad - and often I think it is - but that's life.
"If we are able to measure the speed of light so precisely that we can declare it inviolate, then there is no excuse for not being able to measure the speed of a neutrino so precisely as well."
Yes, yes there is. For starters, just *detecting* neutrinos is hard enough work, while we can detect photons with a bit of chemical paste smeared on a waxy piece of paper. To measure the speed of neutrinos you need a neutrino beam, containing billions of neutrinos, of which you may detect a few tens. To get errors down, then, you need a beam bunched as tightly together as possible, to ensure as little spread in your detections as you can. Even then, given that we know neutrinos travel at *almost* the speed of light, getting the accuracy to distinguish their velocity from that of light is extremely tough - and since on e flavour may even be massless we might expect some neutrinos to be traveling at exactly the speed of light (as all massless particles must). There's no conspiracy here - just the realities of experimental physics and its limits. One day in the future - maybe the very near future - we'll be able to detect the velocity of neutrinos accurately enough to tell their masses. Until then, for all practical purposes they can be taken to travel at the speed of light.
As for theories that go against SR being shot down, and SR becoming a law, and this odd belief that people think Einstein couldn't be wrong (he could be, and was, quite often), it just doesn't hold up to the evidence. We're postulating theories that break Lorentz invariance *all the time*, and we've still got jobs. The problem is that SR fits all the available data remarkably well, and modern quantum field theories are (typically) formulated to be Lorentz-invariant. But there's no law; feel free to write down a theory that breaks Lorentz invariance all you like - just make sure it's well motivated and fits the data at least as well, and ideally better, than current theories. You won't be shot down.
They didn't say that the neutrinos were moving at the speed of light, they said that the neutrinos were traveling at a speed consistent with the speed of light. Since neutrinos have a miniscule mass of the order of an eV (and one of the flavours could, in principle, still be massless) their speed is going to be indistinguishable from that of light for any experiment we can run on Earth and the difference becomes moot. If one flavour is actually massless, which seems unlikely but to the best of my knowledge can't be ruled out, then that flavour *will* travel at the speed of light.
The difference is that then the politicians lose their job, while this guy is still getting paid the same salary, holding the same professorship - and, frankly, can still travel to all the OPERA conferences. To be honest, given the publicity and the stress that come with heading the collaboration I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there wasn't some relief mixed in with the pain and irritation.
That doesn't negate his point about proprietary (and wasteful) updating programs though.
Out of pure curiosity when I get home from work I'm actually going to go digging on my Windows box to see what stuff is being loaded. I seem to recall a few months back blocking a whole host of shit from loading on boot, which might be helping my machine avoid the slowdown...
Anyway, enough off-topic from me.
All of this makes sense, and if I recall properly was a major concern of people when MS first introduced the registry way back in the mists of time (even though they said it was a wonderful invention and would make our lives perfect). Also the severe swappage makes a lot of sense; I've certainly noticed that over the years and still do. It does still make me wonder why my machines don't slow down (anymore) anything like as much as people say theirs do - though if you're right about IE that at least must help since I haven't touched IE in well over a decade. Also I do clean out my registry every once in a while, which is an old habit dating back at least to 1998 or so, and that must help.
I just posted elsewhere that I only reinstalled Vista once. That was a lie, I also reinstalled it immediately I got my Dell, to get rid of all the shite they'd loaded the hard drive with. I also removed their pointless utility partition which, so far as I could tell, locked off an entire sodding primary partition just so they could give me tools significantly more rubbish than ones I could get with any live CD of a Linux distribution. Fortunately, at that point at least, Dell still gave you a copy of the Windows DVD you'd paid for rather than just having some recovery partition. No idea what they do now.
I'm not trolling here, but I just don't see what people are doing to their Windows systems to make this happen. I remember having to frequently reinstall both Windows 95 and Windows 98, I reinstalled Windows 2000 quite frequently too, skipped XP, and now have Vista which I've reinstalled once. That was a good couple of years ago and it still seems to be running quite happily. Certainly I haven't noticed any significant slowdown, and it's used most days.
Given the petabytes of data that will pour from SKA, the carrier pigeon would have to carry one hell of a lot of flash drives.
I see what you're meaning, but surely the standard user interface on Unix-like OSs these days is the terminal - otherwise the fragmentation is huge even within a single OS (Slackware running GNOME 3 compared to Slackware running Enlightenment, for instance). From the terminal, I can jump between Solaris, varieties of Linux, varieties of BSD, OSX and so on, and have a reasonably consistent experience.
Though if you extend my argument you begin suggesting something like the GNU tools being the standard user interface on Unix-like OSs... which is perhaps a bit farcical.
Yeah, I was just making a rubbish joke. Of those options I'd actually personally choose KDE4 but that might be because I've only messed around with GNOME 3 on a computer with rubbish graphics drivers, so it simply didn't play nicely. I'll try it out on my desktop at some point, actually, and see if I dislike it in reality as much as I dislike what I've heard of it - most likely not.
I liken people who take this subject as seriously as you to people who should find more meaningful causes to pursue. Seriously, Microsoft have acted like an unpleasant multinational - because they are - and Apple have acted like an unpleasant multinational - because they are - and if Ubuntu or Red Hat became big enough they'd act like unpleasant multinationals. And in the meantime, life goes on and we use whichever OS suits us at that moment without getting into flamewars online...
No offense meant, not really, but this isn't a religion. There are good things about Windows - application support for the most part, as others have said in this thread, but also the fact that on the right hardware even Vista is a nice OS (and heavily maligned, not least because it was generally launched onto the *wrong* hardware, and that not least because Microsoft pretty much lied about what it would work on - like I say, they're an unpleasant multinational), and 7 is basically stable and entirely usable. There are also horrible things about Windows. There are good things about Linux, and there are horrible things about Linux. Likewise OSX, the BSDs and whatever other OS you might point at at any time.
On the contrary, quite easily. That word is pronounced as either "casteriskock" or "kestarck", depending on context.
I understand that I've given two pronunciations, but you speak English so you're used to the same word being pronounced in different ways (or different words being spelled the same way).
Sure. Don't use GNOME 3 ;)
Eh? Do you actually know the slightest thing you're talking about?
The kernel is a modified Mach kernel, a descendent of BSD Unix - unlike Linux, which has no code inherited from Unix at all. The userspace is almost entirely the FreeBSD userspace, with plenty of GNU tools thrown on top. The only thing that remins from the proprietary OS released in 1984 is the overall look of it. Other than the graphics layers, OSX is very much an updated version of Next. OS1-9 were very definitely nothing to do with Unix. OSX is Unix, unlike Linux which is merely Unix-like. Sure, it doesn't use X, but X doesn't make something Unix.
Maybe you should grow up a bit and quit treating computers as a sodding religion.
I'm really not convinced of that, in all seriousness. We're printing enormous reams of paper each day - tons of the stuff. It all looks tedious and inconsequential, it's true, but frankly I've studied history and a lot of the study of history is poring over the tedious and inconsequential to tie together a picture of the past. We're printing books - some of them with very high quality paper which is unlikely to degrade rapidly - and some of those high quality books even give details of our technology. It's certainly not beyond imagination that, even if *every single encyclopedia printed in the last year* and *every single non-Comp Sci textbook* is somehow annihilated in the next millennium, someone won't be able to piece together, from Comp Sci textbooks and the reams of technical logs produced by our many technology firms, how to reconstruct what a hard drive is, and some of our filesystems. Then some hard drives will have readable data on them.
But that's actually beside the point - I don't believe in the first place that every book we produce will die over the next millennium. The Encyclopedia Britannica going online-only is a very sad thing; I fully agree with anyone who's unhappy about that. I have a great fondness for encyclopedias produced by people who at least have their job on the line if they make massive mistakes, unlike the "crowd-sourced" lowest common denominator trash that Wikipedia sometimes serves up -- not to say there aren't Wikipedia articles that are well-written and comprehensive, because there are, just that it's a brave statement that Wikipedia isn't... well, full of lowest common denominator trash, and faces a strong selection bias. It's just that we still produce more than enough physical artifacts that, frankly, I don't see archaeologists in a millennium having anything like the problems we have with artifacts from 3,000 years ago. (Bear in mind that we have little problem piecing together the broad scope of history 1,000 years ago - I'm British, so I naturally focus on England, Wales, Scotland, Norman France, Frankish France, Northern Germany, etc. And we have a very good knowledge of what people wrote back then - we can read the languages and we have plenty of documents. On higher-quality paper than your typical Tor paperback, it's true, but who the fuck wants our civilisation to be remembered for its cheap paperbacks?
actually that's a very good point. same as our archaeologists learn enormous amounts from grade goods even when the skeletons have gone. either future archaeologists will be idiots and think we like filling boxes with glasses and clothing and ear-rings and little metal rods for legs and fake hips, or they'll realise that there were dead bodies in them and learn surprising amounts about our society and way of life, our physiology and so on.
and then smelt down the metals and continue on to the next cemetery.
"Homo sapiens just happens to be the dominant gene source."
Even that becomes a relatively meaningless statement. What we now call Homo Sapiens is the result of tens of thousands of years of evolution *and* interbreeding with closely-related strains of humanity. We know that non sub-Saharan Africans interbred with Neanderthals (meaning most likely that a lot of African populations also have Neanderthal genes spread through them at a lower level, given humanity's tendency to intermingle along population borders). If these guys were a separate species (whatever that's taken to mean) and came into contact with early "homo sapiens" then they interbred too, and their genes will have spread back Westwards to other populations. Sure, we could say that the genes of Cro-Magnon Man are more-or-less dominant in us, but we're still ultimately a cross-breed. We're not Cro-Magnon Man, even though we resemble him more closely than we resemble Neanderthal Man.
In the grossly unlikely event of us meeting another human species on Earth again, I've no doubt that we'll interbreed again, and within a few hundred generations or so the new genes will have spread across the whole population.
I'm pretty sure they won't. We have more than enough lasting memorials that demonstrate the level of technology - and the writing. Even some copies of War and Peace will survive to go along with the stone monuments erected to the glory of despots and the plastic boxes full of silicon and gold with "DELL" stamped on them, and little "Intel Inside!", "Core 2 Duo inside!" and Windows activation code stickers.
Well, all the recorded evidence back as far as the last printed edition of the encyclopedia.
1000 years from now people will find skeletons in caskets. We still find skeletons buried 1500 years back (and more) in a range of contexts, from sealed tombs to straight burial in the earth. Not many, it's true, and often in rubbish condition, but we find them. The future will find skeletons from our modern caskets, too - just perhaps not many, and often in rubbish condition. Still, it'll be more than enough for them to conclude that a coffin is a coffin. Plus, they'll have our headstones to work from. The etching degrades over time but we can still read headstones from Roman times - with effort in many cases, but we can read them.
What interests me more is what they'll make of gardens of remembrance for those cremated - all those little headstones with nothing buried beneath. They know we're commemorating something, but that something doesn't exist. Maybe they'll do what modern archaelogists do and immediately declare ritual (which would be accurate) and an offering to the Gods that didn't survive in the soil (which wouldn't be).
They might be even more interested in pet burials, and start wondering whether there were races of intelligent dogs, cats, parrots and goldfish back in the lost days of the concrete civilisation...