It's not actually the fault of CUPS which basically provides a framework for drivers to sit in and communicate with the printer - more the manufacturers.
It is partly the fault of CUPS. For instance, CUPS tries to remember too much state, and it's difficult to get it back into a known-good state when it's messed up.
I don't care if the manufacturer provides a Linux driver. If it's binary only - then installation is distribution-dependent and may not be possible in a typical Linux distribution a few years from now.
If you take a look at my post, you'll see that I was talking about GPL'd drivers that Brother hired the CUPS developers to write.
If you're buying a laser printer with a view to Linux compatability in the future, look for one which supports Postscript. All this talk of "Drivers this... drivers that...." - it's cobblers. Postscript has been a perfectly good language for printers for something like 20 years, and postscript printers don't command anything like the same premium that they did 10 years ago.
If you look at what drivers for a lot of modern inkjet printers do, it's a lot more than just providing a language for applications to describe what to print. They have all kinds of elaborate GUIs for aligning the print heads, cleaning them, etc. Also, low-end printers don't have postscript, and it's not a very good situation to tell prospective linux users that they have to buy a new, expensive printer because their old one won't work with linux.
It would be interesting to know more about what's planned for Gibbon and Hippo. I'm currently running Feisty on all my home and work machines, and in general it works great. TFA does have a link to a wikified wishlist for Hippo, but that's not the same as knowing what the focus of the release is really going to be: usability, innovation, stability? I'd guess the focus won't be innovation, since they're going to make it a long-term support release.
Here's my person impression of what's already okay in Feisty, and what needs to be improved.
Already okay in Feisty:
64-bit support is perfect, as far as I can tell. I hear a lot of people complaining about it, but all I can say is that I'm running the default packages for firefox, flash, and java, and everything Just Works. The flash and java applet plugins work fine for me. AFAICT, some 64-bit enthusiasts are upset that they can't run these plugins as native 64-bit apps in a 64-bit native browser. What I can't figure out is why that matters...? If it works, it works.
Wifi just worked for me, and is now sufficiently integrated with the Gnome gui to make it easy for my 11-year-old daughter to deal with it on her machine.
The kernel has built-in support for AMD's Cool'n'Quiet energy-saving technology.
Problems with Feisty:
ACPI power management doesn't work. This is a particularly bad problem for laptops. My laptop would shut down as soon as Gnome started, because it believed the battery was dead, when it really wasn't. Hibernation has never worked on any machine I've tried it on. Sleep typically doesn't work. To be fair, this may not be the fault of the linux/ubuntu developers; apparently a lot of hardware manufacturers refuse to supply enough information to allow kernel developers to know what hardware registers need to be restored when waking from sleep or hibernation.
Getting a working java runtime is still more work than it needs to be. At the very least, you have to enable a non-free repository, and then add an obscurely named package. I assume this is basically a licensing issue, and will go away as the open-source runtime matures and has the rest of its proprietary components replaced with free ones.
CUPS and printing suck to high heaven. This is the single biggest problem I'm facing now. It's not as much of a disaster as it was in earlier versions like Breezy, but it's still a disaster. I have pages and pages of notes on how to get my printer working with Feisty, and it still doesn't work very well -- the printer freezes unpredictably and needs to be power cycled. No, this is not a case where the problem is just that the manufacturer won't release specs; it's a Brother laser printer, and Brother actually hired the CUPS developers to write GPL'd drivers.
I'm not saying it's your fault, or you must be wrong, or anything like that, but I installed Feisty on my AMD x64 machine, and it worked just fine. The graphical installer worked fine. Firefox and flash worked fine. So although you've clearly experienced a problem, it's not a problem with all x64 systems, and it may not even be an x64-related issue at all. BTW, if the CD wouldn't boot, one thing to check would be the checksum on the ISO file, if you downloaded it.
My seven-year-old daughter had never heard it. I read the LA Times article this morning, dialed the number nostalgically for myself, and then went and explained it to my daughter. She had all these questions, like "By the time they say what time it is, isn't it already over?" and "Do they do it every second?" I had imagined that it was just part of our universally shared culture, but it was obviously a completely foreign concept to her. I dialed it for her and had her listen. She listened and smiled at me indulgently.
To me, this seems like an issue that could be an important legal precedent, but that, in practice, should be a non-issue for individual users. Realistically, why should Apple care, considering that this is unlikely ever to get popular? The percentage of people modding their iphones like this is likely to be about as big as the percentage of people buying a mac so they can run Yellow Dog Linux. To
make that percentage even smaller, Apple can announce that they refuse to give you support if you modify the phone. I can't imagine that it would be in Apple's or AT&T's best financial interests to spend a lot of money hiring lawyers to sue people under a clearly bogus legal theory, when the number of users involved is going to be infinitesimally small.
There are broader issues that are really important, but they're issues like the fact that the DMCA is a bad law that should be fixed, by removing the anti-circumvention provisions. Another issue is that in the computer, communication, and network industries we have a lot of unhealthy monopolies (MS in operating systems, broadband in some areas), duopolies (broadband in my area), etc. Consumers are always going to get screwed by monopolies and duopolies, and the solution isn't to regulate industries that don't have competition, it's to get rid of the monopolies and duopolies.
I see. I'm just running whatever version of firefox ubuntu installed by default, and I guess that must have been a 32-bit browser. Is there any particular advantage to running a browser that's been compiled natively as a 64-bit application? I would imagine it would actually perform worse, since the code it had to load would be bigger. Or do you need to have >4 Gb of data loaded in your browser, for streaming video or something?
Still limited AMD64 support [...] No javaws, no Mozilla plugin.
Huh? I'm posting this on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, running Firefox under Ubuntu. In another tab, I have a java applet running.
But my estimate for was $75,000 for my system installed,
Wow. How many kW was that, and was that the price before incentives, or after? My system, installed this summer, was $28,000 (after incentives), for a 4.5 kW system, which will handle 80% of our yearly use. Now I happen to be in Southern California, I have a south-facing roof, and no shade on the roof except a little in winter. If you're in Anchorage, your roof faces east, and it's heavily shaded, then of course that's a whole different deal.
but there is one big incentive to tie your solar system to the grid -- by doing that you get to use the grid as an enormous energy buffering system. Without tying to the grid, you'd have to buy a bank of (expensive and unreliable) batteries to buffer up the excess solar energy
People in remote rural areas often buy non-grid-tied systems simply because there is no grid where they live: it's the only way they can get electricity. In an area that does have an electric grid, you have the option of buying the batteries, etc., and get a non-grid-tied system but for the reasons the parent stated, basically nobody does. I believe the batteries, in addition to being expensive and unreliable, are also kind of scary and dangerous if you don't maintain them very carefully.
How many people even live in their houses for that long anymore?
Sure, if you're planning on moving in five years, then you're an idiot to do almost any work on your house. If in doubt, ask a realtor; I believe the investments that tend to help a lot with resale value are things like paint and landscaping, because they improve "curb appeal" a lot, and aren't expensive to do. Solar panels are no different from a kitchen remodeling job in this respect.
Sure, it may add some equity to your home, but not much, especially if the prices DO fall and/or the efficiency of the panels increases significantly during that 10 years. Imagine trying to include your 5 year old computer as part of your home's equity. You're risking a very similar situation with solar.
Apples and oranges. The USA Today article is overstating the rate at which the technology is improving. There's no Moore's Law at work here. It's not like the situation with a computer, where you're guaranteed that it will be obsolete in 5 years.
You're also betting that grid power won't get any cheaper, which may or may not be a good bet, depending on the fuel source of your local power plant.
Where I live (California), the historical trend has been steadily up, in real dollars.
If solar/microgeneration takes off, there could be an abundance of grid power, causing prices to plummet, especially if people start generating more power than they use -- unlikely, but certainly possible if panel efficiencies increase.
No way, not any time in the near future. The number of people who have residential photovoltaic systems installed is extremely small, way too small to lower the market price of power through supply and demand.
especially if people start generating more power than they use -- unlikely, but certainly possible if panel efficiencies increase.
Where I live, the way the deal works is that if you generate more power than you use over the course of 12 months, then you simply don't pay any money to the electric company, but they will never send you a check for the surplus. When you buy a residential PV system, they very carefully size it so that it will cover about 80% of your yearly use. If they sized it too big, it would risk wasting your money by overproducing, which you don't get paid for doing.
Most AGN are variable, most likely due to hydrodynamic instabilities in the accretion disk around the black hole
So why isn't it possible to have one flare that emits relatively low energies, and then four minutes later a second flare that emits relatively high energies?
...even if it can be demonstrated that the higher energy particles traveled faster, this is not a prediction specific to String Theories, but as the arstechnica.com article points out, this is common to most quantum gravity theories.
Yeah, it's even possible to make a pretty reasonable model-independent argument that a variable speed of light must come out of any theory of quantum gravity. Lee Smolin makes a pretty simple model-independent argument that spacetime must be discrete in any theory of quantum gravity. The idea is that the Bekenstein bound says there's a maximum amount of information that can be contained in any region of spacetime (e.g., a black hole has a certain entropy, which is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon). However, if spacetime was continuous, then you could store an infinite amount of energy in any volume of space. (Here is a longer explanation.) Note that none of this requires any specific model such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. If spacetime is discrete, then there's a scale at which its discreteness occurs, and that corresponds to a certain minimum wavelength that a light wave can have. The propagation of light therefore has to be drastically modified as you approach that scale.
What they are saying is that there are still details we don't understand about AGN [active galactic nuclei] like Markarian 501. So, while this effect could be a first sign of quantum gravity (*not* string theory in particular, as others have pointed out), it could also simply be something going on in the intrinsic spectrum of the flares themselves. I'd personally consider the second explanation more likely at this stage.
Yeah, could you say more about this? My basic picture of an AGN would be that you have a big black hole at the center of a galaxy, and it hasn't yet exhausted the cloud of gas and dust surrounding it. I'd imagine an accretion disk, with each part of it emitting blackbody radiation at its own temperature. For a million-solar-mass black hole, you get a Schwarzschild radius on the order of 10 light-seconds, so that's the shortest time scale on which anything can change globally across the whole event horizon, and that's fine because it's plenty short compared to the four-minute time scale of this experiment. What I'm not so clear on is how you get a sudden flare of any kind, since I'd imagine that it would be a very steady process of swallowing the accretion disk. Is it an effect of turbulence? Is it swallowing discrete objects, like stars or brown dwarfs? The preprint of the paper basically dismisses the whole thing in one sentence: "We cannot exclude the possibility that the delay we find...may be due to some energy-dependent effect at the source." Was the mechanism of these flares thought to be well understood, so that it really would be surprising to get different energies emitted at different times?
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
Newton did alchemy at a time when the modern field of chemistry didn't exist. This was a period when the concept of a chemical element was unknown, the periodic table didn't exist, nobody had ever thought of weighing their chemicals or doing any kind of quantitative measurements of reactions, there were no scientific journals of any kind, and people studying what we would now call chemistry were caught up in a tradition in which it was considered normal to keep your results secret and record them in code. Newton basically invented the modern science of physics; I think we can excuse him for not inventing the modern science of chemistry as well. If he'd lived in the 19th century, and chosen to work in the alchemical tradition rather than the newly spawned field of chemistry, then we could rightfully call him a quack, an idiot, or a charlatan.
Newton was also a closet heretic (didn't believe in the trinity), and wrote gazillions of words of theological silliness. So what? It was religion. It wasn't science, and he didn't claim that it was science.
Numerology? I call bullshit, unless you just mean something tied up with his religious ideas.
If any scientist today is a true believer in ESP, etc., then yes, it does call into question that scientist's judgment. The evidence against all that paranormal bullshit is so strong that you'd have to be an incompetent scientist to ignore it.
Just because they've bought the rights, that doesn't mean they'll actually make the movies. It's extremely common for a studio to buy rights to a book, then never make the movie.
The quality of the Oz books is very uneven. Some of the later ones have long, extremely tedious sections that serve no purpose except to bring back a long list of favorite characters like Jack Pumpkinhead. A lot of the plots revolve around lame puns.
I tried it, and have a very negative first impression. It's not open-source, has a very restrictive click-through license, and the Linux version that I tried has one of the worst GUI interfaces I've ever seen -- totally unintelligible.
Some free-as-in-something possibilities that either run on linux or are web-based:
YourSky - This is a very elaborate and sophisticated web-based service that makes star charts; free as in beer, but not open-source
PlanetFinder - A java applet I wrote that concentrates on ease of use; good for figuring out what you're seeing with your naked eyes, or for planning observations, e.g., when is Mars going to rise so I can point my telescope at it?
Stellarium - cool photorealistic planetarium (computer-generated images, as opposed to maps or photos); FOSS
Celestia - lets you fly around the universe in 3d; FOSS
Xephem - Sky maps. Free as in beer. Has some really nasty licensing issues. I used to use it a lot, and it worked great, but it's no longer available as a Debian package.
Note that they all do different things. They're not interchangeable.
Why is this under "your rights online," and why is the word "censorship" used in the summary? Censorship is when the government infringes on your free speech. If a private organization doesn't want to sell you a particular item, that has nothing to do with the first amendment. Joe's Bar and Grill doesn't offer any CDs for sale -- does that constitute censorship? No, it just means that Joe didn't choose to offer a particular item for sale at the bar. It seems particularly ludicrous to complain about this at a time when there are so many real and horrible civil liberties problems in the U.S., e.g., the attorney general declaring that there is no right to habeas corpus in the constitution.
But the fact is that you're using that 2200 Mhz dual-core processor with a modern operating system and applications instead of the 1.8 Mhz Z-80 with Electric Pencil. Why? If the circa 1980 computing experience was better, why not just fire up your old Z-80 and throw your AMD in the trash?
Well, for one thing that machine died a long time ago. Also, the peripherals on those computers were the quality you'd expect from a crackerjack box:-)
But anyway, I honestly think that software quality has gone down precipitously over the years. I worked for Digital Research for a few summers back in the 80's, and when we found a bug, we would fix it and send out a hexadecimal patch to our users by paper mail, which they could key in so they could have the bug fixed, right away. We maintained lists of outstanding bugs, and any user who wanted the list could have it. These days, most software houses won't even let the public know how many bugs are in their software. You buy the next version of the software hoping for a bug fix, and find out that the bug hasn't been fixed. One of the reasons I switched to FOSS was because of the horrible quality of most proprietary software.
You would be "paying" by having less software to run because FOSS developers would all be spending their time optimizing their code instead of creating new and interesting software.
You're making some assumptions here that I don't agree with. One is that new and interesting software is typically better. I don't really see such an upward trend in most cases; the average person is no better off with the latest Word than they were with Word Perfect. What does seem to be true as a matter of business and economics is that in the world of proprietary software, users tend to make buying decisions based on features rather than performance, because it's easy for them to find out what the new features are, but it's hard for them to find out what the performance is going to be on their machines. There's also this very manipulative upgrade treadmill. You buy new software, find out it's too slow on your hardware, so you're expected to go out and buy new hardware.
Also, you seem to be assuming that software is inherently expensive and scarce. It isn't. In typical widely used categories (operating system, word processor), there are lots of choices, and the cost of development is miniscule when you divide it by the number of users. That low cost is the reason FOSS can exist.
Often "less and less efficient code" is cheaper code, in time and money, to write.
Hmm...I don't see the real-world evidence to support that statement. The first word processor I ever used, ca. 1980, was Electric Pencil, which was written by one person, and was very snappy on a 1.8 MHz Z-80 with an 8-bit cpu. Today the best option on my linux box seems to be OpenOffice, which was written by a large team of programmers, and runs dog-slow on a 2200 MHz dual-code amd x64. It seems to me that OpenOffice was orders of magnitude more expensive to write, and is orders of magnitude less efficient (performs worse on a cpu with a clock speed that's 1200 times greater, has a much bigger instruction set, and has a much wider data bus). Seems like the worst of both worlds.
If your processor can make up the difference, why not speed up development process by writig less efficient code?
My experience is that the processor typically can't make up the difference. The trend I've seen is that over the last 30 years, computers have become less and less responsive. A TRS-80 used to boot in a matter of a few seconds; these days my wife complains if I shut off her Mac to save electricity, because it takes several minutes to boot.
Do you really want to pay more for programs that don't run noticeably faster?
I run FOSS, so I don't pay for programs.
for most desktop users, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 programs running actively at a time.
Yeah. I finally thought I had an application where the new dual-core amd system I built could really exploit both processors: encoding CDs in MP3 format. I was ripping a whole CD to disk, then having one cpu encode the even-numbered tracks and the other all the odds. It worked great, until I realized that there was no reason to leave the cpus idle until the whole CD had been read. I rewrote my script to start encoding each track as soon as it was ripped, and lo and behold, I found that I was only ever using one cpu, because the encoding was faster than the I/O.
If you're waiting for your computer, it's almost always because it's waiting on network or hard disk I/O. But not to fear -- just as programmers have been using clock speeds to get sloppier and sloppier for the last 30 years, now they'll continue writing less and less efficient code, with the excuse that people are going to have 65,536 cpus inside their beige boxes.
Actually I'd say it's neither of the two fallacies on your list, but actually:
3. Ascribing a time lag to tunneling.
People who work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics have been talking for many decades about whether there is any meaningful sense in which you can describe a particle tunneling through a barrier as spending a definite amount of time inside the barrier. Basically, the answer is that you can't. One way of seeing that is to recognize that in the classically forbidden region, the particle's potential energy is greater than its total energy. Therefore its kinetic energy must be negative, and if you naively solve KE=(1/2)mv2 for v, you get an imaginary number for v. What that tells you is that the question "how much time does it spend inside the barrier" is an incorrect question, a question that has no answer. (In slightly more formal terms, this is an example of how matrix elements of a quantum mechanical operator can be complex numbers, but expectation values, which are the real observables, are always real.)
Another way of saying it is that if you look at the classical textbook solution to the Schrodinger equation in the case of a rectangular potential barrier, you have two oscillating wavefunctions on the sides, with an exponential wavefunction splicing them together continuously across the classically forbidden region. But this solution is a steady-state solution, so it doesn't carry any information -- it's not modulated. Therefore it doesn't describe anything about the transmission of information. If you solve the same problem with, say, a discrete pulse propagating in from one side, you get it emerging on the other side after a time lag that's perfectly consistent with special relativity. (This explanation does have a lot in common with the phase/group explanation you gave, but it's not exactly the same. In particular, I don't think it makes sense to talk about phase velocity inside the barrier, since it's not a sinusoidal wavefunction.)
There's time travel, but they can't do it routinely using known technology. The technology for warp drive should automatically also be a technology for time travel.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not actually the fault of CUPS which basically provides a framework for drivers to sit in and communicate with the printer - more the manufacturers.
It is partly the fault of CUPS. For instance, CUPS tries to remember too much state, and it's difficult to get it back into a known-good state when it's messed up.
I don't care if the manufacturer provides a Linux driver. If it's binary only - then installation is distribution-dependent and may not be possible in a typical Linux distribution a few years from now.
If you take a look at my post, you'll see that I was talking about GPL'd drivers that Brother hired the CUPS developers to write.
If you're buying a laser printer with a view to Linux compatability in the future, look for one which supports Postscript. All this talk of "Drivers this... drivers that...." - it's cobblers. Postscript has been a perfectly good language for printers for something like 20 years, and postscript printers don't command anything like the same premium that they did 10 years ago.
If you look at what drivers for a lot of modern inkjet printers do, it's a lot more than just providing a language for applications to describe what to print. They have all kinds of elaborate GUIs for aligning the print heads, cleaning them, etc. Also, low-end printers don't have postscript, and it's not a very good situation to tell prospective linux users that they have to buy a new, expensive printer because their old one won't work with linux.
It would be interesting to know more about what's planned for Gibbon and Hippo. I'm currently running Feisty on all my home and work machines, and in general it works great. TFA does have a link to a wikified wishlist for Hippo, but that's not the same as knowing what the focus of the release is really going to be: usability, innovation, stability? I'd guess the focus won't be innovation, since they're going to make it a long-term support release.
Here's my person impression of what's already okay in Feisty, and what needs to be improved.
Already okay in Feisty:
Problems with Feisty:
I'm not saying it's your fault, or you must be wrong, or anything like that, but I installed Feisty on my AMD x64 machine, and it worked just fine. The graphical installer worked fine. Firefox and flash worked fine. So although you've clearly experienced a problem, it's not a problem with all x64 systems, and it may not even be an x64-related issue at all. BTW, if the CD wouldn't boot, one thing to check would be the checksum on the ISO file, if you downloaded it.
My seven-year-old daughter had never heard it. I read the LA Times article this morning, dialed the number nostalgically for myself, and then went and explained it to my daughter. She had all these questions, like "By the time they say what time it is, isn't it already over?" and "Do they do it every second?" I had imagined that it was just part of our universally shared culture, but it was obviously a completely foreign concept to her. I dialed it for her and had her listen. She listened and smiled at me indulgently.
To me, this seems like an issue that could be an important legal precedent, but that, in practice, should be a non-issue for individual users. Realistically, why should Apple care, considering that this is unlikely ever to get popular? The percentage of people modding their iphones like this is likely to be about as big as the percentage of people buying a mac so they can run Yellow Dog Linux. To make that percentage even smaller, Apple can announce that they refuse to give you support if you modify the phone. I can't imagine that it would be in Apple's or AT&T's best financial interests to spend a lot of money hiring lawyers to sue people under a clearly bogus legal theory, when the number of users involved is going to be infinitesimally small.
There are broader issues that are really important, but they're issues like the fact that the DMCA is a bad law that should be fixed, by removing the anti-circumvention provisions. Another issue is that in the computer, communication, and network industries we have a lot of unhealthy monopolies (MS in operating systems, broadband in some areas), duopolies (broadband in my area), etc. Consumers are always going to get screwed by monopolies and duopolies, and the solution isn't to regulate industries that don't have competition, it's to get rid of the monopolies and duopolies.
I see. I'm just running whatever version of firefox ubuntu installed by default, and I guess that must have been a 32-bit browser. Is there any particular advantage to running a browser that's been compiled natively as a 64-bit application? I would imagine it would actually perform worse, since the code it had to load would be bigger. Or do you need to have >4 Gb of data loaded in your browser, for streaming video or something?
You're running windows xp 32 bit right?
No. Read my post. I stated what OS I was using.
Still limited AMD64 support [...] No javaws, no Mozilla plugin.
Huh? I'm posting this on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, running Firefox under Ubuntu. In another tab, I have a java applet running.
But my estimate for was $75,000 for my system installed,
Wow. How many kW was that, and was that the price before incentives, or after? My system, installed this summer, was $28,000 (after incentives), for a 4.5 kW system, which will handle 80% of our yearly use. Now I happen to be in Southern California, I have a south-facing roof, and no shade on the roof except a little in winter. If you're in Anchorage, your roof faces east, and it's heavily shaded, then of course that's a whole different deal.
but there is one big incentive to tie your solar system to the grid -- by doing that you get to use the grid as an enormous energy buffering system. Without tying to the grid, you'd have to buy a bank of (expensive and unreliable) batteries to buffer up the excess solar energy
People in remote rural areas often buy non-grid-tied systems simply because there is no grid where they live: it's the only way they can get electricity. In an area that does have an electric grid, you have the option of buying the batteries, etc., and get a non-grid-tied system but for the reasons the parent stated, basically nobody does. I believe the batteries, in addition to being expensive and unreliable, are also kind of scary and dangerous if you don't maintain them very carefully.
How many people even live in their houses for that long anymore?
Sure, if you're planning on moving in five years, then you're an idiot to do almost any work on your house. If in doubt, ask a realtor; I believe the investments that tend to help a lot with resale value are things like paint and landscaping, because they improve "curb appeal" a lot, and aren't expensive to do. Solar panels are no different from a kitchen remodeling job in this respect.
Sure, it may add some equity to your home, but not much, especially if the prices DO fall and/or the efficiency of the panels increases significantly during that 10 years. Imagine trying to include your 5 year old computer as part of your home's equity. You're risking a very similar situation with solar.
Apples and oranges. The USA Today article is overstating the rate at which the technology is improving. There's no Moore's Law at work here. It's not like the situation with a computer, where you're guaranteed that it will be obsolete in 5 years.
You're also betting that grid power won't get any cheaper, which may or may not be a good bet, depending on the fuel source of your local power plant.
Where I live (California), the historical trend has been steadily up, in real dollars.
If solar/microgeneration takes off, there could be an abundance of grid power, causing prices to plummet, especially if people start generating more power than they use -- unlikely, but certainly possible if panel efficiencies increase.
No way, not any time in the near future. The number of people who have residential photovoltaic systems installed is extremely small, way too small to lower the market price of power through supply and demand.
especially if people start generating more power than they use -- unlikely, but certainly possible if panel efficiencies increase.
Where I live, the way the deal works is that if you generate more power than you use over the course of 12 months, then you simply don't pay any money to the electric company, but they will never send you a check for the surplus. When you buy a residential PV system, they very carefully size it so that it will cover about 80% of your yearly use. If they sized it too big, it would risk wasting your money by overproducing, which you don't get paid for doing.
Most AGN are variable, most likely due to hydrodynamic instabilities in the accretion disk around the black hole
So why isn't it possible to have one flare that emits relatively low energies, and then four minutes later a second flare that emits relatively high energies?
Yeah, it's even possible to make a pretty reasonable model-independent argument that a variable speed of light must come out of any theory of quantum gravity. Lee Smolin makes a pretty simple model-independent argument that spacetime must be discrete in any theory of quantum gravity. The idea is that the Bekenstein bound says there's a maximum amount of information that can be contained in any region of spacetime (e.g., a black hole has a certain entropy, which is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon). However, if spacetime was continuous, then you could store an infinite amount of energy in any volume of space. (Here is a longer explanation.) Note that none of this requires any specific model such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. If spacetime is discrete, then there's a scale at which its discreteness occurs, and that corresponds to a certain minimum wavelength that a light wave can have. The propagation of light therefore has to be drastically modified as you approach that scale.
What they are saying is that there are still details we don't understand about AGN [active galactic nuclei] like Markarian 501. So, while this effect could be a first sign of quantum gravity (*not* string theory in particular, as others have pointed out), it could also simply be something going on in the intrinsic spectrum of the flares themselves. I'd personally consider the second explanation more likely at this stage.
Yeah, could you say more about this? My basic picture of an AGN would be that you have a big black hole at the center of a galaxy, and it hasn't yet exhausted the cloud of gas and dust surrounding it. I'd imagine an accretion disk, with each part of it emitting blackbody radiation at its own temperature. For a million-solar-mass black hole, you get a Schwarzschild radius on the order of 10 light-seconds, so that's the shortest time scale on which anything can change globally across the whole event horizon, and that's fine because it's plenty short compared to the four-minute time scale of this experiment. What I'm not so clear on is how you get a sudden flare of any kind, since I'd imagine that it would be a very steady process of swallowing the accretion disk. Is it an effect of turbulence? Is it swallowing discrete objects, like stars or brown dwarfs? The preprint of the paper basically dismisses the whole thing in one sentence: "We cannot exclude the possibility that the delay we find...may be due to some energy-dependent effect at the source." Was the mechanism of these flares thought to be well understood, so that it really would be surprising to get different energies emitted at different times?
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
Newton did alchemy at a time when the modern field of chemistry didn't exist. This was a period when the concept of a chemical element was unknown, the periodic table didn't exist, nobody had ever thought of weighing their chemicals or doing any kind of quantitative measurements of reactions, there were no scientific journals of any kind, and people studying what we would now call chemistry were caught up in a tradition in which it was considered normal to keep your results secret and record them in code. Newton basically invented the modern science of physics; I think we can excuse him for not inventing the modern science of chemistry as well. If he'd lived in the 19th century, and chosen to work in the alchemical tradition rather than the newly spawned field of chemistry, then we could rightfully call him a quack, an idiot, or a charlatan.
Newton was also a closet heretic (didn't believe in the trinity), and wrote gazillions of words of theological silliness. So what? It was religion. It wasn't science, and he didn't claim that it was science.
Numerology? I call bullshit, unless you just mean something tied up with his religious ideas.
If any scientist today is a true believer in ESP, etc., then yes, it does call into question that scientist's judgment. The evidence against all that paranormal bullshit is so strong that you'd have to be an incompetent scientist to ignore it.
... when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Just because they've bought the rights, that doesn't mean they'll actually make the movies. It's extremely common for a studio to buy rights to a book, then never make the movie.
The quality of the Oz books is very uneven. Some of the later ones have long, extremely tedious sections that serve no purpose except to bring back a long list of favorite characters like Jack Pumpkinhead. A lot of the plots revolve around lame puns.
I tried it, and have a very negative first impression. It's not open-source, has a very restrictive click-through license, and the Linux version that I tried has one of the worst GUI interfaces I've ever seen -- totally unintelligible.
Some free-as-in-something possibilities that either run on linux or are web-based:
Note that they all do different things. They're not interchangeable.
Why is this under "your rights online," and why is the word "censorship" used in the summary? Censorship is when the government infringes on your free speech. If a private organization doesn't want to sell you a particular item, that has nothing to do with the first amendment. Joe's Bar and Grill doesn't offer any CDs for sale -- does that constitute censorship? No, it just means that Joe didn't choose to offer a particular item for sale at the bar. It seems particularly ludicrous to complain about this at a time when there are so many real and horrible civil liberties problems in the U.S., e.g., the attorney general declaring that there is no right to habeas corpus in the constitution.
But the fact is that you're using that 2200 Mhz dual-core processor with a modern operating system and applications instead of the 1.8 Mhz Z-80 with Electric Pencil. Why? If the circa 1980 computing experience was better, why not just fire up your old Z-80 and throw your AMD in the trash? :-)
Well, for one thing that machine died a long time ago. Also, the peripherals on those computers were the quality you'd expect from a crackerjack box
But anyway, I honestly think that software quality has gone down precipitously over the years. I worked for Digital Research for a few summers back in the 80's, and when we found a bug, we would fix it and send out a hexadecimal patch to our users by paper mail, which they could key in so they could have the bug fixed, right away. We maintained lists of outstanding bugs, and any user who wanted the list could have it. These days, most software houses won't even let the public know how many bugs are in their software. You buy the next version of the software hoping for a bug fix, and find out that the bug hasn't been fixed. One of the reasons I switched to FOSS was because of the horrible quality of most proprietary software.
You would be "paying" by having less software to run because FOSS developers would all be spending their time optimizing their code instead of creating new and interesting software.
You're making some assumptions here that I don't agree with. One is that new and interesting software is typically better. I don't really see such an upward trend in most cases; the average person is no better off with the latest Word than they were with Word Perfect. What does seem to be true as a matter of business and economics is that in the world of proprietary software, users tend to make buying decisions based on features rather than performance, because it's easy for them to find out what the new features are, but it's hard for them to find out what the performance is going to be on their machines. There's also this very manipulative upgrade treadmill. You buy new software, find out it's too slow on your hardware, so you're expected to go out and buy new hardware.
Also, you seem to be assuming that software is inherently expensive and scarce. It isn't. In typical widely used categories (operating system, word processor), there are lots of choices, and the cost of development is miniscule when you divide it by the number of users. That low cost is the reason FOSS can exist.
Often "less and less efficient code" is cheaper code, in time and money, to write.
Hmm...I don't see the real-world evidence to support that statement. The first word processor I ever used, ca. 1980, was Electric Pencil, which was written by one person, and was very snappy on a 1.8 MHz Z-80 with an 8-bit cpu. Today the best option on my linux box seems to be OpenOffice, which was written by a large team of programmers, and runs dog-slow on a 2200 MHz dual-code amd x64. It seems to me that OpenOffice was orders of magnitude more expensive to write, and is orders of magnitude less efficient (performs worse on a cpu with a clock speed that's 1200 times greater, has a much bigger instruction set, and has a much wider data bus). Seems like the worst of both worlds.
If your processor can make up the difference, why not speed up development process by writig less efficient code?
My experience is that the processor typically can't make up the difference. The trend I've seen is that over the last 30 years, computers have become less and less responsive. A TRS-80 used to boot in a matter of a few seconds; these days my wife complains if I shut off her Mac to save electricity, because it takes several minutes to boot.
Do you really want to pay more for programs that don't run noticeably faster?
I run FOSS, so I don't pay for programs.
for most desktop users, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 programs running actively at a time.
Yeah. I finally thought I had an application where the new dual-core amd system I built could really exploit both processors: encoding CDs in MP3 format. I was ripping a whole CD to disk, then having one cpu encode the even-numbered tracks and the other all the odds. It worked great, until I realized that there was no reason to leave the cpus idle until the whole CD had been read. I rewrote my script to start encoding each track as soon as it was ripped, and lo and behold, I found that I was only ever using one cpu, because the encoding was faster than the I/O.
If you're waiting for your computer, it's almost always because it's waiting on network or hard disk I/O. But not to fear -- just as programmers have been using clock speeds to get sloppier and sloppier for the last 30 years, now they'll continue writing less and less efficient code, with the excuse that people are going to have 65,536 cpus inside their beige boxes.
Actually I'd say it's neither of the two fallacies on your list, but actually:
3. Ascribing a time lag to tunneling.
People who work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics have been talking for many decades about whether there is any meaningful sense in which you can describe a particle tunneling through a barrier as spending a definite amount of time inside the barrier. Basically, the answer is that you can't. One way of seeing that is to recognize that in the classically forbidden region, the particle's potential energy is greater than its total energy. Therefore its kinetic energy must be negative, and if you naively solve KE=(1/2)mv2 for v, you get an imaginary number for v. What that tells you is that the question "how much time does it spend inside the barrier" is an incorrect question, a question that has no answer. (In slightly more formal terms, this is an example of how matrix elements of a quantum mechanical operator can be complex numbers, but expectation values, which are the real observables, are always real.)
Another way of saying it is that if you look at the classical textbook solution to the Schrodinger equation in the case of a rectangular potential barrier, you have two oscillating wavefunctions on the sides, with an exponential wavefunction splicing them together continuously across the classically forbidden region. But this solution is a steady-state solution, so it doesn't carry any information -- it's not modulated. Therefore it doesn't describe anything about the transmission of information. If you solve the same problem with, say, a discrete pulse propagating in from one side, you get it emerging on the other side after a time lag that's perfectly consistent with special relativity. (This explanation does have a lot in common with the phase/group explanation you gave, but it's not exactly the same. In particular, I don't think it makes sense to talk about phase velocity inside the barrier, since it's not a sinusoidal wavefunction.)
There's time travel, but they can't do it routinely using known technology. The technology for warp drive should automatically also be a technology for time travel.