Don't think they need to. I think the defence went along the lines of:
"Crime was committed at time X in state A. He was seen at this hotel in state B at time Y."
Because it's impossible to get from the airport in state B to the hotel in 28 minutes, he cannot have caught a plane that left state A after time X and therefore could not have committed the crime.
I imagine alibis are established like this all the time. It's presumably not uncommon to be able to prove where you where at times around that which a crime was committed but be unable to prove your precise position at the instant of the crime. This is perhaps slightly unusual in that the precise time of the crime isn't important to the alibi.
If you can't support 5Mb/s don't advertise 5Mb/s! And don't sell people plans with that written on it if you can't support everyone doing it! Oh? You've discovered people will shell out a lot more money for better connections so you like to be able to advertise 5Mb/s? You don't say...
The problem is that different people have different requirements.
I've just gone through my logs for May and I'm averaging 70Mb per day. Yes, my usage would comfortably fit on a POTS 56k modem.
But I don't want to go back to that. I like downloads happening almost instantly etc.
My connection is also "unlimited" in that I can (and do) stay connected all the time.
Now I will agree that the way these packages are advertised is ambiguous. IME however, that ambiguity is resolved in the small print, usually with something along the lines of "usage must be reasonable".
All I want is for google to give me the option to not display hits that I cannot view.
When you try searching for anything vaguely technical you get hundreds or thousands of hits to links like nature, linkinghub.elsevier etc.
Some (most) of us are laymen most of the time, often doing searches "just out of interest". We're NEVER going to pay to view the articles. Even worse, because the searches tend to be in fields we're not familiar with (in the fields we are familiar with we already know about the seminal works, will often have many of them to hand already etc) we'll have no idea which papers to pay for even if we were prepared to pay for one of them.
For example, I was interested in the mechanisms that bone uses to dissipate energy. I know that it first undergoes elastic deformation, then plastic deformation and finally breaks but I've no data on how much energy is involved in each of those stages or whether the proportions of energy depend on the particular bone.
But googling "bone energy dissipation" is useless. I'm never going to write any papers on this. I quite likely won't understand most of what is in most of the papers returned by google if I could read them, and I'm not too worried if any information I do get turns out to be wrong if I ever talk to an expert in the field.
I thought google refused to index sites that showed a different result to google than to google's users but that appears not to apply to pay per view journal articles.
Hydrogen (and the fabric skin) was the fuel that burned in the first minute and destroyed the airship. Hydrogen made up the majority of the fuel that burned. IIRC there were 8 million cubic feet of gas. The diesel fuel continued to burn for hours afterwards.
I know that hydrogen wasn't used to drive the airship but it was still the fuel in the fire that destroyed it and had it been lifted by helium and the covering non-flammable then it shouldn't have been destroyed at all, unlike the R101 which crashed into the ground before burning and the USS Akron which was lifted by helium anyway and so didn't burn)
There were 97 people on the Hindenburg and another 200 or so on the ground underneath it when it caught fire. 35 people on the airship died and one on the ground.
There is an explosion risk from hydrogen, much as there is from natural gas. But the risk comes about from leaks into enclosed spaces, in particular leaks in garages will be an issue. Obviously, hydrogen, like methane, being odorless will require something adding to it to make it smelly. A crash that will cause a hydrogen leak leading to an explosion is highly unlikely, much like burst gas mains don't tend to cause explosions although they sometimes have flames leaping 20+ feet into the air.
Accidents like the St Gotthard Tunnel fire may be made worse by hydrogen but it's not obvious that that would be the case. And the fires on the eurotunnel may be worse but probably not as the majority of the fuel in those fires was goods that the lorries were carrying.
Hydrogen doesn't explode unless well mixed with oxygen. Normally it just burns. (Burning hydrogen is almost invisible so there is a risk that someone might not notice that a leaking hydrogen cylinder is burning) The R101 didn't explode. Neither did the Hindenburg. In fact, despite the hydrogen in the Hindenburg completely burning in less than a minute most of the passengers and crew survived (the diesel continued to burn for a long time afterwards)
Secondly, it's much lighter than air. This means that leaks and flames go upwards, unlike a gasoline spill that spreads out over the ground while it burns.
If the fuel in the Hindenburg had been uncontained gasoline rather than hydrogen it's hard to see how any of the people on board the airship could have got clear in time (and I'd have expected lots of people on the ground to be killed as well)
I would pay the licence fee (for BBC radio 3 and 4) if TVL (television licensing) weren't such complete pains.
Interestingly, it appears that the more uncooperative you are with them the less they hassle you. (Perhaps not surprising in that, AIUI, they actually achieve all their convictions due to self incrimination)
But the thought of the anguish it would cause if I bought a licence to support the BBC and then didn't renew it at some time in the future is sufficient to ensure that I'll never buy one. (I've also never owned a TV)
Good points. I've never tried to recover a drive that fails for thermal reasons. Infact I've never seen a drive fail like this (not saying it doesn't happen)
I've recovered drives that have had an obvious head crash (computer was dropped down the stairs and certain chunks of the disk became unreadable and spread) and those with just corrupted data where the drive itself was rescued once the corrected sectors were dd back.
And I've recovered drives where getting the disk to start was the problem. One instance I had to manually twist the drive as violently as I could as I turned the power on to the computer. That was enough to unstick the platters to start them spinning although you could hear them winding up in speed over about 15 seconds once they were going. This seems to be a fairly common problem with disks that are never stopped. Eventually you have to shut down the computer and then the disk won't start again.
What do you think conv=noerror,sync and iflag=direct are for?
I haven't actually used ddrescue and it looks like it has some valuable automatic features, especially if you have more than one damaged copy but I don't think for the raw reading it will do anything different to my dd command.
Once a drive has started failing the first thing you want to do is get as good a copy of everything as you can manage. If it's a physical problem, especially if it's a damaged platter, then it tends to get worse as the drive is used. Get everything off and then work on the copy.
No. It's not even close to being right. I've messed up when joining all the lines. You'll just have to imagine that a bit of LaTeX that is as irrelevant to an Author as the source code of Word (or whatever editor they typically use) was included there.
I convert stuff to LaTeX and then I can convert it to whatever size/format I'm comfortable with.
Ironically, despite the fact that LaTeX is almost exclusively used in the technical fields, it's almost perfect for novels because there's almost nothing other than plain text required. At the most you might need the odd \part{PART HEADING}, \chapter{CHAPTER HEADING} that isn't just plain text. There are a few odd characters that cannot be used directly - '&' is probably the only one that actually occurs in a typical novel (Oh, and, of course, you don't want to double space your work)
Here's my default.tex that gets included into anything I want to format for my PRS-505
Well it was here in all it's glory but I cannot waste any more time trying to defeat the "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 38.3)." so I've joined all the lines together. Hopefully this is equivalent
(All that Hy stuff at the end is to fix problems with pdflatex where it cannot correctly handle repeated chapter numbers - e.g. if you have a book with Part I, Part II etc with each part starting with chapter 1 then pdflatex cannot handle it. There are some disadvantages with what I've done - adding a new chapter, section etc causes every link to change name forcing you to run pdflatex twice - but it always works)
\setsize{8} sets the font size to 8pt. That's the size that comes closest to line lengths approximately the same as a paperback with a comfortable (for me) easy to read font in low light.
I've been forced to use an IDE with this recently. I regularly find it screwing up my code (worse is the fact that the editor doesn't understand vim keystrokes):
obj.callFunction();
and I want to change callFunction() to doitFunction()
(In a real editor:/call<ret>Rdoit<esc> or, commonly, something like/call<ret>Rdoit<esc>n.n.nn.n.)
So I move the cursor to after call; delete four letters; type "doit" and then start cursoring up or down to move to another line of code. But that causes me to scroll through a dropdown box of methods.
Or I type the do then hit "return" because the dropdown has highlighted the one I want and I get "doitFunctionFunction()"
I suspect it's a bit like remembering telephone numbers. I don't have a "phone book" set up because I can type the number faster than I can look it up in any "phone book" on any phone I've used. And I find that I remember all the important numbers as a result. (And, equally usefully, I find that I can remember telephone numbers for long enough to read them and then type them into the phone for the numerous cases where it's never going to be ready in a "phone book". And that means I'm not constantly switching my gaze between the written number and the screen of my phone)
I'd guess that people who use intellisense all the time never learn their method names so would be lost without it. The rest of us see nothing wrong with having a second screen open with header files/documentation etc - and you need the documentation anyway to be able to tell what a function does.
Actually, the worst spaghetti code I have ever seen (in 30+ years most of it in life-critical systems) is OO C++. It doesn't have to be that way, but I have seen examples that would embarrass the most hackish FORTRAN programmers.
Back in the day when fortran77 was state of the art, (good) fortran programmers had developed "rules" that compensated for many of the "issues" that fortran could cause.
One of them was "never change a function input variable" (except in the very rare case where you needed to use it as a return)
Then, with languages like C with pass by value semantics the problem (mostly) went away. Of course, structs became a problem - they're often really too big to pass by value so we (usually) pass a pointer instead.
Of course, that caused the same issues with accidentally changing the callers data. So C invented const. Now the compiler could protect us from those silly mistakes. C also allowed us to pass pointers so that the function could modify our data if we wanted to. But (with the exception of structs) we could see at the caller code whether our data was going to be modified by the callee code.
Then C++ came along and introduced references. In the case of function calling parameters they add nothing that C cannot do; merely allowing the callee to omit a "(*" ")" (or replacing "->" with ".")
But it gave us non const references. Everything that was the problem with Fortran. But, of course, C programmers are now habitually used to being able to change variables in functions. And it becomes impossible to tell whether a variable is going to change.
I've seen code:
i=0; while(i10)
function(i);
Clearly in C this is just wrong. But in C++ it can be made to work. It's not good code but, IMO, at least 50% of programmers consider code "good" if it gives the correct output for a given input.
"Goto considered harmful." I'd promote "Modifiable reference function parameters considered harmful" over that any day. At least with GOTO you are able to localize your immediate problem with understanding the code. With non-const references you can need to "know" tens of thousands of lines of code before you can understand what function(i) might actually do to i from the callers perspective.
No, I need to know what capacitor I can buy and put in where to make my electric bill drop in half.
You can't.
What you can do is make it more expensive for the utility company to supply you with the electricity that you're being billed for. (In practice as a home consumer you're more likely to set your house wiring on fire before you start causing the utility company any measurable problem)
If you use 1kW of electricity then you will be billed for that 1kW.
In theory (obviously there are practical limits) you can be drawing an arbitrarily large current from the supply to get that 1kW of power.
But that arbitrarily large current is still causing the transmission lines (and the wiring in your house) to heat up. That is lost power.
The utility companies structure their supplies so that, usually, they're supplying the minimum current possible to supply your needs. For domestic use that's actually fairly simple for the utility company to do.
Only when you get to MW users do the utility companies start having problems controlling things so that they're supplying the minimum current. But in that case part of the supply contract is that the user will arrange things so that they're drawing the minimum possible current. If they don't then there will usually be a surcharge on their bill.
I'm running debian and I've only had two problems:
1. There's something wrong with the input amplifier: I can only record at a very low level. Turning up the input level causes distortion before the a2d starts clipping. As a result I use a separate usb a2d.
2. I can't get X to correctly detect single head/dual head configuration. If I want to run on dual screens I have to go and change xorg.conf rather than just leaving the configuration alone and letting it detect if there is a second screen plugged in when it is turned on.
Unless there are extra constraints outside the current relativity theory, any FTL travel or communication can violate causality. This is a simple relativity problem. It does not matter *how* you achieve FTL travel/communication.
It depends on how you define FTL.
Theory does not prohibit the idea of distorting spacetime and relativity also doesn't prohibit that distortion travelling faster than light within spacetime. That is the key to the Alcubierre drive. You travel at the centre of your warped bubble slower than light (infact, IIUC you are in freefall) but your bubbles distortion of spacetime moves through undistorted spacetime faster than light.
Inflation would eventually tear the atom apart. But in the absence of inflation an electron in its lowest orbital state remains in orbit in perpetuity.
Proton decay might also eventually be a problem. Quick google give current minimum lifetime of the proton as 6.6x10^33 years. (and the standard model has it stable)
Sorry, but we already have faster-than-light communication trough quantum entanglement. The change in state happens instantly, without any delay, no matter what the distance is.
Of course in praxis, you would first have to fly a large mass of entangled matter to the other place at sub-light speed. But when it's there, you could communicate at FTL speeds, until the matter is used up.
No. EPR does not allow FTL communication. FTL communication means causality violation: A causes B but B happens before A.
But if I were a betting man, I would bet on light speed as the ultimate speed limit of the universe.
Ditto. There are only two possible universes to consider, one with an ultimate speed limit or one with no speed limit.
If there is a speed limit then the universe _has_ to look like our universe does up to the speeds and energies we've probed with the speed limit being the speed of light.
Newton could not distinguish - his experiments were consistent with both possible universes.
But if there is a way to break the speed of light limit[1] then relativity doesn't just need a minor correction but is completely wrong and needs a completely new theory from which relatively falls out as a trick approximation at low speeds.
Tim.
[1] other than some possibly tiny exception where some things can travel at (1+10e-700)c for example where there is still a speed limit but it's so close to the speed of light that we cannot spot that it's not actually the speed of light.
I'm not sure this is actually correct. The whole point about the Alcubierre drive is that it doesn't violate causality because it actually changes the shape of space.
Two clocks can be synchronized if they are at the same point in space.
I've not read the paper but the linked article seems to suggest that it's a moving bubble that causes the problems with QM. Build your bubble large enough and you don't have to move it at all.
(I'm not convinced that a "warp drive" can exist and I quite like the idea that QM is placing restrictions on GR. But we already know that GR allows some forms of FTL - the inflationary universe being the obvious example)
I mean, where I work we're not upgrading to Vista either. But that was a decision made by IT, after actually looking into it. I highly doubt the politicians have any idea of what they're talking about.
Some large number of years ago I worked at a very large company that deliberately decided not to upgrade the office suite. (Think it was probably the upgrade to office 97, possibly the upgrade after that).
There were procedures in place to handle the handful of cases where things were coming from outside the company that needed converting back to the version of office we were using.
But the upgraded office started trickling in anyway (I don't know for certain but I suspect it started with senior management). Within a year it became essential to upgrade the entire company. Something like 100k desktops upgraded that probably actually benefited 100 people.
That's the advantage for the poor beleaguered IT departments. "Someone very senior" who doesn't know what they are doing can no longer ORDER that their system is "upgraded". "It's illegal" is hard to argue with.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the IT people had actually been lobbying for this rule. It really doesn't sound like something politicians would make up all on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think they need to. I think the defence went along the lines of:
"Crime was committed at time X in state A. He was seen at this hotel in state B at time Y."
Because it's impossible to get from the airport in state B to the hotel in 28 minutes, he cannot have caught a plane that left state A after time X and therefore could not have committed the crime.
I imagine alibis are established like this all the time. It's presumably not uncommon to be able to prove where you where at times around that which a crime was committed but be unable to prove your precise position at the instant of the crime. This is perhaps slightly unusual in that the precise time of the crime isn't important to the alibi.
Tim.
If you can't support 5Mb/s don't advertise 5Mb/s! And don't sell people plans with that written on it if you can't support everyone doing it! Oh? You've discovered people will shell out a lot more money for better connections so you like to be able to advertise 5Mb/s? You don't say ...
The problem is that different people have different requirements.
I've just gone through my logs for May and I'm averaging 70Mb per day. Yes, my usage would comfortably fit on a POTS 56k modem.
But I don't want to go back to that. I like downloads happening almost instantly etc.
My connection is also "unlimited" in that I can (and do) stay connected all the time.
Now I will agree that the way these packages are advertised is ambiguous. IME however, that ambiguity is resolved in the small print, usually with something along the lines of "usage must be reasonable".
Tim.
All I want is for google to give me the option to not display hits that I cannot view.
When you try searching for anything vaguely technical you get hundreds or thousands of hits to links like nature, linkinghub.elsevier etc.
Some (most) of us are laymen most of the time, often doing searches "just out of interest". We're NEVER going to pay to view the articles. Even worse, because the searches tend to be in fields we're not familiar with (in the fields we are familiar with we already know about the seminal works, will often have many of them to hand already etc) we'll have no idea which papers to pay for even if we were prepared to pay for one of them.
For example, I was interested in the mechanisms that bone uses to dissipate energy. I know that it first undergoes elastic deformation, then plastic deformation and finally breaks but I've no data on how much energy is involved in each of those stages or whether the proportions of energy depend on the particular bone.
But googling "bone energy dissipation" is useless. I'm never going to write any papers on this. I quite likely won't understand most of what is in most of the papers returned by google if I could read them, and I'm not too worried if any information I do get turns out to be wrong if I ever talk to an expert in the field.
I thought google refused to index sites that showed a different result to google than to google's users but that appears not to apply to pay per view journal articles.
Tim.
Hydrogen (and the fabric skin) was the fuel that burned in the first minute and destroyed the airship. Hydrogen made up the majority of the fuel that burned. IIRC there were 8 million cubic feet of gas. The diesel fuel continued to burn for hours afterwards.
I know that hydrogen wasn't used to drive the airship but it was still the fuel in the fire that destroyed it and had it been lifted by helium and the covering non-flammable then it shouldn't have been destroyed at all, unlike the R101 which crashed into the ground before burning and the USS Akron which was lifted by helium anyway and so didn't burn)
There were 97 people on the Hindenburg and another 200 or so on the ground underneath it when it caught fire. 35 people on the airship died and one on the ground.
There is an explosion risk from hydrogen, much as there is from natural gas. But the risk comes about from leaks into enclosed spaces, in particular leaks in garages will be an issue. Obviously, hydrogen, like methane, being odorless will require something adding to it to make it smelly. A crash that will cause a hydrogen leak leading to an explosion is highly unlikely, much like burst gas mains don't tend to cause explosions although they sometimes have flames leaping 20+ feet into the air.
Accidents like the St Gotthard Tunnel fire may be made worse by hydrogen but it's not obvious that that would be the case. And the fires on the eurotunnel may be worse but probably not as the majority of the fuel in those fires was goods that the lorries were carrying.
Tim.
Hydrogen doesn't explode unless well mixed with oxygen. Normally it just burns. (Burning hydrogen is almost invisible so there is a risk that someone might not notice that a leaking hydrogen cylinder is burning) The R101 didn't explode. Neither did the Hindenburg. In fact, despite the hydrogen in the Hindenburg completely burning in less than a minute most of the passengers and crew survived (the diesel continued to burn for a long time afterwards)
Secondly, it's much lighter than air. This means that leaks and flames go upwards, unlike a gasoline spill that spreads out over the ground while it burns.
If the fuel in the Hindenburg had been uncontained gasoline rather than hydrogen it's hard to see how any of the people on board the airship could have got clear in time (and I'd have expected lots of people on the ground to be killed as well)
Tim.
I would pay the licence fee (for BBC radio 3 and 4) if TVL (television licensing) weren't such complete pains.
Interestingly, it appears that the more uncooperative you are with them the less they hassle you. (Perhaps not surprising in that, AIUI, they actually achieve all their convictions due to self incrimination)
But the thought of the anguish it would cause if I bought a licence to support the BBC and then didn't renew it at some time in the future is sufficient to ensure that I'll never buy one. (I've also never owned a TV)
Tim.
Good points. I've never tried to recover a drive that fails for thermal reasons. Infact I've never seen a drive fail like this (not saying it doesn't happen)
I've recovered drives that have had an obvious head crash (computer was dropped down the stairs and certain chunks of the disk became unreadable and spread) and those with just corrupted data where the drive itself was rescued once the corrected sectors were dd back.
And I've recovered drives where getting the disk to start was the problem. One instance I had to manually twist the drive as violently as I could as I turned the power on to the computer. That was enough to unstick the platters to start them spinning although you could hear them winding up in speed over about 15 seconds once they were going. This seems to be a fairly common problem with disks that are never stopped. Eventually you have to shut down the computer and then the disk won't start again.
Tim.
What do you think conv=noerror,sync and iflag=direct are for?
I haven't actually used ddrescue and it looks like it has some valuable automatic features, especially if you have more than one damaged copy but I don't think for the raw reading it will do anything different to my dd command.
Tim.
dd if=/dev/sdb of=dump.img bs=512 conv=noerror,sync iflag=direct
Once a drive has started failing the first thing you want to do is get as good a copy of everything as you can manage. If it's a physical problem, especially if it's a damaged platter, then it tends to get worse as the drive is used. Get everything off and then work on the copy.
Tim.
No. It's not even close to being right. I've messed up when joining all the lines. You'll just have to imagine that a bit of LaTeX that is as irrelevant to an Author as the source code of Word (or whatever editor they typically use) was included there.
Tim.
You are right but ...
I convert stuff to LaTeX and then I can convert it to whatever size/format I'm comfortable with.
Ironically, despite the fact that LaTeX is almost exclusively used in the technical fields, it's almost perfect for novels because there's almost nothing other than plain text required. At the most you might need the odd \part{PART HEADING}, \chapter{CHAPTER HEADING} that isn't just plain text. There are a few odd characters that cannot be used directly - '&' is probably the only one that actually occurs in a typical novel (Oh, and, of course, you don't want to double space your work)
Here's my default.tex that gets included into anything I want to format for my PRS-505
Well it was here in all it's glory but I cannot waste any more time trying to defeat the "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 38.3)." so I've joined all the lines together. Hopefully this is equivalent
\usepackage{graphics} \usepackage{calc} \usepackage{ifpdf} \newcommand{\dofontscale}[3]{\setlength{#1}{#2 * 10 / \real{#
\clearpage \thispagestyle{empty}%
\@tempswafalse \null\vfil \secdef\@part\@spart} \renewcommand\chapter{\clearpage \thispagestyle{empty}%
\@afterindentfalse \secdef\@chapter\@schapter} \def\@makechapterhead#1{%
{\parindent \z@ \raggedright \normalfont \ifnum \c@secnumdepth >\m@ne \if@mainmatter \centering\Large\bfseries \@chapapp
\typeout{pdftex: Hy@DestName `#1' `#2' #1.\arabic{Hy@uniquemark}}%
\pdfdest name{#1.\arabic{Hy@uniquemark}}#2\relax } \def\Hy@writebookmark#1#2#3#4#5{%
section number, text, label, level, file %
\typeout{pdftex: writebookmark `#1' `#2' `#3.\arabic{Hy@uniquemark}' `#4' `#5'}%
\ifx\WriteBookmarks\relax%
\else \ifnum#4>\Hy@bookmarksdepth\relax \else \@@writetorep{#1}{#2}{#3.\arabic{Hy@uniquemark}}{#4}{#5}%
\addtocounter{Hy@uniquemark}{1} \fi \fi} \makeatother \newcommand{\misctext}[1]{}
(All that Hy stuff at the end is to fix problems with pdflatex where it cannot correctly handle repeated chapter numbers - e.g. if you have a book with Part I, Part II etc with each part starting with chapter 1 then pdflatex cannot handle it. There are some disadvantages with what I've done - adding a new chapter, section etc causes every link to change name forcing you to run pdflatex twice - but it always works)
\setsize{8} sets the font size to 8pt. That's the size that comes closest to line lengths approximately the same as a paperback with a comfortable (for me) easy to read font in low light.
Tim.
Most cars in London don't actually move fast enough to get to 20Mph, so how exactly would this system save lives?
As someone who cycles every day in London I can tell you that this is absolute bollox.
On many roads in London cars reach 40mph+ in their dash to the back of the next queue.
Their average speed is significantly less than 20mph but their peak speed is much higher.
Tim.
I've been forced to use an IDE with this recently. I regularly find it screwing up my code (worse is the fact that the editor doesn't understand vim keystrokes):
obj.callFunction();
and I want to change callFunction() to doitFunction()
(In a real editor: /call<ret>Rdoit<esc> /call<ret>Rdoit<esc>n.n.nn.n.)
or, commonly, something like
So I move the cursor to after call; delete four letters; type "doit" and then start cursoring up or down to move to another line of code. But that causes me to scroll through a dropdown box of methods.
Or I type the do then hit "return" because the dropdown has highlighted the one I want and I get "doitFunctionFunction()"
I suspect it's a bit like remembering telephone numbers. I don't have a "phone book" set up because I can type the number faster than I can look it up in any "phone book" on any phone I've used. And I find that I remember all the important numbers as a result. (And, equally usefully, I find that I can remember telephone numbers for long enough to read them and then type them into the phone for the numerous cases where it's never going to be ready in a "phone book". And that means I'm not constantly switching my gaze between the written number and the screen of my phone)
I'd guess that people who use intellisense all the time never learn their method names so would be lost without it. The rest of us see nothing wrong with having a second screen open with header files/documentation etc - and you need the documentation anyway to be able to tell what a function does.
Tim.
while(i10) should have been while(i<10)
Tim.
Actually, the worst spaghetti code I have ever seen (in 30+ years most of it in life-critical systems) is OO C++. It doesn't have to be that way, but I have seen examples that would embarrass the most hackish FORTRAN programmers.
Back in the day when fortran77 was state of the art, (good) fortran programmers had developed "rules" that compensated for many of the "issues" that fortran could cause.
One of them was "never change a function input variable" (except in the very rare case where you needed to use it as a return)
Then, with languages like C with pass by value semantics the problem (mostly) went away. Of course, structs became a problem - they're often really too big to pass by value so we (usually) pass a pointer instead.
Of course, that caused the same issues with accidentally changing the callers data. So C invented const. Now the compiler could protect us from those silly mistakes. C also allowed us to pass pointers so that the function could modify our data if we wanted to. But (with the exception of structs) we could see at the caller code whether our data was going to be modified by the callee code.
Then C++ came along and introduced references. In the case of function calling parameters they add nothing that C cannot do; merely allowing the callee to omit a "(*" ")" (or replacing "->" with ".")
But it gave us non const references. Everything that was the problem with Fortran. But, of course, C programmers are now habitually used to being able to change variables in functions. And it becomes impossible to tell whether a variable is going to change.
I've seen code:
i=0;
while(i10)
function(i);
Clearly in C this is just wrong. But in C++ it can be made to work. It's not good code but, IMO, at least 50% of programmers consider code "good" if it gives the correct output for a given input.
"Goto considered harmful." I'd promote "Modifiable reference function parameters considered harmful" over that any day. At least with GOTO you are able to localize your immediate problem with understanding the code. With non-const references you can need to "know" tens of thousands of lines of code before you can understand what function(i) might actually do to i from the callers perspective.
YMMV
Tim.
No, I need to know what capacitor I can buy and put in where to make my electric bill drop in half.
You can't.
What you can do is make it more expensive for the utility company to supply you with the electricity that you're being billed for. (In practice as a home consumer you're more likely to set your house wiring on fire before you start causing the utility company any measurable problem)
If you use 1kW of electricity then you will be billed for that 1kW.
In theory (obviously there are practical limits) you can be drawing an arbitrarily large current from the supply to get that 1kW of power.
But that arbitrarily large current is still causing the transmission lines (and the wiring in your house) to heat up. That is lost power.
The utility companies structure their supplies so that, usually, they're supplying the minimum current possible to supply your needs. For domestic use that's actually fairly simple for the utility company to do.
Only when you get to MW users do the utility companies start having problems controlling things so that they're supplying the minimum current. But in that case part of the supply contract is that the user will arrange things so that they're drawing the minimum possible current. If they don't then there will usually be a surcharge on their bill.
Tim.
I'm running debian and I've only had two problems:
1. There's something wrong with the input amplifier: I can only record at a very low level. Turning up the input level causes distortion before the a2d starts clipping. As a result I use a separate usb a2d.
2. I can't get X to correctly detect single head/dual head configuration. If I want to run on dual screens I have to go and change xorg.conf rather than just leaving the configuration alone and letting it detect if there is a second screen plugged in when it is turned on.
Tim.
Unless there are extra constraints outside the current relativity theory, any FTL travel or communication can violate causality. This is a simple relativity problem. It does not matter *how* you achieve FTL travel/communication.
It depends on how you define FTL.
Theory does not prohibit the idea of distorting spacetime and relativity also doesn't prohibit that distortion travelling faster than light within spacetime. That is the key to the Alcubierre drive. You travel at the centre of your warped bubble slower than light (infact, IIUC you are in freefall) but your bubbles distortion of spacetime moves through undistorted spacetime faster than light.
Tim.
Are you sure?
Inflation would eventually tear the atom apart. But in the absence of inflation an electron in its lowest orbital state remains in orbit in perpetuity.
Proton decay might also eventually be a problem. Quick google give current minimum lifetime of the proton as 6.6x10^33 years. (and the standard model has it stable)
Tim.
Sorry, but we already have faster-than-light communication trough quantum entanglement. The change in state happens instantly, without any delay, no matter what the distance is.
Of course in praxis, you would first have to fly a large mass of entangled matter to the other place at sub-light speed. But when it's there, you could communicate at FTL speeds, until the matter is used up.
No. EPR does not allow FTL communication. FTL communication means causality violation: A causes B but B happens before A.
Tim.
But if I were a betting man, I would bet on light speed as the ultimate speed limit of the universe.
Ditto. There are only two possible universes to consider, one with an ultimate speed limit or one with no speed limit.
If there is a speed limit then the universe _has_ to look like our universe does up to the speeds and energies we've probed with the speed limit being the speed of light.
Newton could not distinguish - his experiments were consistent with both possible universes.
But if there is a way to break the speed of light limit[1] then relativity doesn't just need a minor correction but is completely wrong and needs a completely new theory from which relatively falls out as a trick approximation at low speeds.
Tim.
[1] other than some possibly tiny exception where some things can travel at (1+10e-700)c for example where there is still a speed limit but it's so close to the speed of light that we cannot spot that it's not actually the speed of light.
Faster-than-light travel always causes causality paradoxes
I'm not sure this is actually correct. The whole point about the Alcubierre drive is that it doesn't violate causality because it actually changes the shape of space.
Two clocks can be synchronized if they are at the same point in space.
I've not read the paper but the linked article seems to suggest that it's a moving bubble that causes the problems with QM. Build your bubble large enough and you don't have to move it at all.
(I'm not convinced that a "warp drive" can exist and I quite like the idea that QM is placing restrictions on GR. But we already know that GR allows some forms of FTL - the inflationary universe being the obvious example)
Tim.
I mean, where I work we're not upgrading to Vista either. But that was a decision made by IT, after actually looking into it. I highly doubt the politicians have any idea of what they're talking about.
Some large number of years ago I worked at a very large company that deliberately decided not to upgrade the office suite. (Think it was probably the upgrade to office 97, possibly the upgrade after that).
There were procedures in place to handle the handful of cases where things were coming from outside the company that needed converting back to the version of office we were using.
But the upgraded office started trickling in anyway (I don't know for certain but I suspect it started with senior management). Within a year it became essential to upgrade the entire company. Something like 100k desktops upgraded that probably actually benefited 100 people.
That's the advantage for the poor beleaguered IT departments. "Someone very senior" who doesn't know what they are doing can no longer ORDER that their system is "upgraded". "It's illegal" is hard to argue with.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the IT people had actually been lobbying for this rule. It really doesn't sound like something politicians would make up all on their own.
Tim.
Bach used BACH extensively.
Schostakovich used DSCH, Es being E flat in German.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSCH_(Dmitri_Shostakovich)
Tim.
we just mimicked the sounds and used Dutch words or syllables to replace them
Reminds me of a story I heard on the radio once (no idea if it's actually true).
An opera singer asked his son what his favourite opera was. The son replied "Elephant's Ear". The opera singer was completely bamboozled.
Only later did he discover that the opera was Rigoletto, the words in question were "e di pensier" from La Donna e mobile.
Tim.