Urban California has a growing population. It will divert water from agriculture to support its increasing population. "New California" is an attempt by the agricultural counties to prevent that change.
The NSA or other authorities should have access under NDA to the Kaspersky source code. This is what happens when software such as MS WIndows is sold to foreign governments for use in sensitive roles.
I dumped Fedora for the same reason, but returned when Red Hat relaxed its lifecycle: my desktop is on Fedora 24, which still receives updates. I will probably upgrade to Fedora 26.
RHEL/CentOS is great for servers, but its upgrade cycle is too slow for the desktop.
Fedora is often mis-characterised as the testing branch for RHEL, but in fact its release engineering and updates are at least as good as those of any other desktop distro.
Dr Piper Harron, writing on the AMS "Inclusion/Exclusion" blog, informs us:
"If you are a white cis man you almost certainly should resign from your position of power."
A reply from an anonymous University mathematician serves equally well as a reply to Dr Heather Metcalf.
"We are all painfully aware of the inequalities in faculty composition and trying hard to fix it. *Every* math department I know of is trying really hard to hire every qualified minority and female applicant out there (and by qualified I mean: a *very* generous ballpark within the hiring range of each department). The real problem is that there are not enough such candidates, and most departments end up making offers to the same few that are available in the market each year. By the way, our departments are aware of the problem, and so are our Deans and higher administration. In my experience, they are all very supportive of us hiring under-represented minorities, even offering additional positions when such opportunities occur, *as long as we conform with the laws*, and as long as the hire is within the 'generous ballpark'."
In other words, departments are willing to lower the standards for minority and female candidates, by a "*very* generous ballpark", with the consent of the University administration; but they are still unable to find sufficient candidates.
It is no wonder that there is "pushback" from white men; or that women and minorities are treated with suspicion as having benefitted from "affirmative action".
How thick is the initial anode foil of Li or Na? This determines the capacity of the battery. All quantities in the paper are expressed per gram of lithium.
The cathode has particles of glass electrolyte, carbon, and sulphur, with a copper collector. When the lithium is plated onto the cathode, upon which of these components is it plated, and how thick is the plating?
The chip manufacturers are funding research on these and other technologies, but they are all a long way from viability. It is easy to forget that silicon CPUs with a billion transistors are the outcome of 60 years' research, development, and investment.
Silicon processing is made easier because silicon's oxide is an extremely good insulator. For diamond and graphene, the oxide is a gas, and so insulating areas cannot be created by oxidising the material: another substance must be deposited.
I tend to browse with a lot of windows and tabs open. In this use case, Firefox typically consumes 100% of CPU for one core. If it becomes multi-process, it would end up consuming 100% of CPU of every core.
If the long-term plan for Firefox is to dump XUL and migrate to WebKit or one of its forks, then I have to wonder what would be the point of the resulting product. Users might as well migrate to Chrome, Safari, or Opera.
American individuals who play this game, and do not have Mafia lawyers, will eventually receive long prison sentences for multiple counts of extortion.
The upside is the rush of power, and revenues in the thousands of dollars. These are poor compensation for a decade or more in the slammer.
Unless the thrust is 1/c newtons per watt - then the same problem arises - the exploitation simply gets harder. Some of the earlier Chinese tests reported thrusts in the exploitable range - 1N/2000W comes to mind.
I cannot find the thrust per watt of this latest claimed chinese verification.
Yes, last time I looked they were putting kilowatts of power into a small device. It would be surprising if differential heating did not produce a small force from convection or even radiation pressure.
My hunch is that the devil is in the experimental details, and the laws of physics will not need to be rewritten.
What the article's title means by "Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake" is simply that the growth rate over the last 14 years is constant, i.e. the rate itself is not increasing (as it had been for the previous 44 years). The growth rate is not zero. Its derivative, the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 with time, is zero.
The use of the word "pause" makes the result seem more dramatic than it really is, and is wide open to misinterpretation by climate change deniers. It is a pity that the journal and its reviewers did not pick up on this - but then dramatic headlines improve circulation, just as they improve researchers' careers. A paper with a less dramatic title might not have been accepted by such a prestigious journal.
Many large companies have a lot of trouble with git. It's not a coincidence that Facebook and Google have been working on Mercurial backends: For their needs, Git is absolutely insufficient.
These companies should consider using Fossil. Fossil is a mature DVCS, BSD-licensed. It is extremely elegantly written, and provides client, server, GUI, CGI executable and web server in a single binary file. It includes a Wiki and a bug tracker for each project. It does not litter your working copy with unnecessary files - only a single dot-file in the highest directory. It was not written in two weeks.
Fossil deserves to be much better known, but for some reason Git gets all the attention.
I have given up contributing to Wikipedia. My contributions are invariably reversed by an editor. Collectively, editors seem to spend their time annotating pages with [who?], [reference needed], etc, but then they revert any attempt to fill in the missing information.
No need to wait for self-driving cars. If the NSA is using neural networks to analyse big data and look for terrorists, it will sometimes miss obvious terrorists, and sometimes classify harmless people as terrorists. I would hope that the latter would be screened out by human review, but there's not much we can do about the former without improving our understanding of neural nets.
When a web page is slow to load, it is often because of all the data that must be loaded from 3rd-party sites - Google Analytics is one of the worst, but there is also Facebook, Twitter, etc (probably for 3rd-party logins). SPDY is not going to fix that. If Google wants to speed up the web, it should start by reducing the latency of its own services.
Exactly right. Also, from the purchaser's viewpoint, he wants good quality oranges but wants to pay the poor-quality price.
There are purchasers all over the country who could make best-selling orange juice, if only they could buy good quality fruit at trash prices. The flaw is in their own business model, not in the way that oranges are produced.
(1) It would not be a QCD simulation of the whole universe, because in most times and places a simpler approximation than QCD would be sufficient. (2) Special Relativity - helps the simulation, because it constrains the crosstalk between different star systems, different galaxies etc. A full simulation of the entire universe would not be necessary. (3) Quantum Mechanics - hinders the simulation, by increasing the computational complexity. Incompletely decohered multiple worlds must be simulated, and this is hugely computationally expensive - unless you have a quantum computer.
A corollary of the simulation hypothesis is therefore: if we are living in a computer simulation, then quantum computers are physically possible, at least in the host world.
The original story is ambiguous, but the linked articles appear to state that it was the operator of Freedom Hosting, not TorMail, who was charged with enabling CP. If the feds can run a Tor client to see what a site on the dark web is offering, it is a reasonable assumption that the hosting provider can do the same, and should do some basic diligence to ensure that the sites he is hosting comply with the law.
It is interesting of course that GMail, EC2, AT&T etc escape responsibility for what their customers do.
Bruce Schneier said "What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it's in. Period."
This applies even if you are using TOR. TOR conceals your IP address, but it cannot remove the vulnerability of the end points - the client and server of the web/mail/whatever service. The Silk Road server was running PHP, and was probably compromised within hours of coming to the attention of the authorities. For the next two years the FBI was most likely building a case by parallel construction.
It is not a smart idea to use TOR or other services to break the law.
Well spotted. The figure guessed above (0.13V) is incorrect because the maximum power density and maximum current density do not occur under the same conditions.
The paper claims "an order of magnitude" higher power density than Li ion batteries. The table in the png file shows that, by "an order of magnitude", they mean a factor of two.
Some of the technological problems are mentioned in comments below.
It's a very nice piece of scientific work, but I don't expect these batteries will be coming to our phones any time soon.
The real danger comes not from a 50% confusion between standard deviation and mean absolute deviation; but from the assumption that the statistical distribution is Gaussian.
Before the credit crunch, financiers who considered themselves "masters of the universe" believed on the basis of the Black–Scholes equation that they could hedge their risks with a mean time to failure of billions of years. The probability distributions were assumed to be Gaussian, but this bore no relation to the past performance of the stock market.
Old machines are much less power-efficient than modern ones, and it is wasteful to have them on 24/7. If OpenBSD were adapted for cross-compiling, all the builds could be performed on a single high-end Xeon server, and the old machines switched on only occasionally when it is necessary to do a native build for verification or testing.
Slashdot Mirror
Urban California has a growing population. It will divert water from agriculture to support its increasing population. "New California" is an attempt by the agricultural counties to prevent that change.
The NSA or other authorities should have access under NDA to the Kaspersky source code. This is what happens when software such as MS WIndows is sold to foreign governments for use in sensitive roles.
I dumped Fedora for the same reason, but returned when Red Hat relaxed its lifecycle: my desktop is on Fedora 24, which still receives updates. I will probably upgrade to Fedora 26.
RHEL/CentOS is great for servers, but its upgrade cycle is too slow for the desktop.
Fedora is often mis-characterised as the testing branch for RHEL, but in fact its release engineering and updates are at least as good as those of any other desktop distro.
One of Firefox's strengths was that it would only max out one CPU core. Now it will take down all four. This is not progress.
Dr Piper Harron, writing on the AMS "Inclusion/Exclusion" blog, informs us:
"If you are a white cis man you almost certainly should resign from your position of power."
A reply from an anonymous University mathematician serves equally well as a reply to Dr Heather Metcalf.
"We are all painfully aware of the inequalities in faculty composition and trying hard to fix it. *Every* math department I know of is trying really hard to hire every qualified minority and female applicant out there (and by qualified I mean: a *very* generous ballpark within the hiring range of each department). The real problem is that there are not enough such candidates, and most departments end up making offers to the same few that are available in the market each year. By the way, our departments are aware of the problem, and so are our Deans and higher administration. In my experience, they are all very supportive of us hiring under-represented minorities, even offering additional positions when such opportunities occur, *as long as we conform with the laws*, and as long as the hire is within the 'generous ballpark'."
In other words, departments are willing to lower the standards for minority and female candidates, by a "*very* generous ballpark", with the consent of the University administration; but they are still unable to find sufficient candidates.
It is no wonder that there is "pushback" from white men; or that women and minorities are treated with suspicion as having benefitted from "affirmative action".
How thick is the initial anode foil of Li or Na? This determines the capacity of the battery. All quantities in the paper are expressed per gram of lithium.
The cathode has particles of glass electrolyte, carbon, and sulphur, with a copper collector. When the lithium is plated onto the cathode, upon which of these components is it plated, and how thick is the plating?
The chip manufacturers are funding research on these and other technologies, but they are all a long way from viability. It is easy to forget that silicon CPUs with a billion transistors are the outcome of 60 years' research, development, and investment.
Silicon processing is made easier because silicon's oxide is an extremely good insulator. For diamond and graphene, the oxide is a gas, and so insulating areas cannot be created by oxidising the material: another substance must be deposited.
I tend to browse with a lot of windows and tabs open. In this use case, Firefox typically consumes 100% of CPU for one core. If it becomes multi-process, it would end up consuming 100% of CPU of every core.
If the long-term plan for Firefox is to dump XUL and migrate to WebKit or one of its forks, then I have to wonder what would be the point of the resulting product. Users might as well migrate to Chrome, Safari, or Opera.
American individuals who play this game, and do not have Mafia lawyers, will eventually receive long prison sentences for multiple counts of extortion.
The upside is the rush of power, and revenues in the thousands of dollars. These are poor compensation for a decade or more in the slammer.
Unless the thrust is 1/c newtons per watt - then the same problem arises - the exploitation simply gets harder.
Some of the earlier Chinese tests reported thrusts in the exploitable range - 1N/2000W comes to mind.
I cannot find the thrust per watt of this latest claimed chinese verification.
Yes, last time I looked they were putting kilowatts of power into a small device. It would be surprising if differential heating did not produce a small force from convection or even radiation pressure.
My hunch is that the devil is in the experimental details, and the laws of physics will not need to be rewritten.
What the article's title means by "Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake" is simply that the growth rate over the last 14 years is constant, i.e. the rate itself is not increasing (as it had been for the previous 44 years). The growth rate is not zero. Its derivative, the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 with time, is zero.
The use of the word "pause" makes the result seem more dramatic than it really is, and is wide open to misinterpretation by climate change deniers. It is a pity that the journal and its reviewers did not pick up on this - but then dramatic headlines improve circulation, just as they improve researchers' careers. A paper with a less dramatic title might not have been accepted by such a prestigious journal.
The stable version of Chrome for Fedora includes the PPAPI Flash plugin. The same is probably true for the builds for other Linux distros.
Many fine physicists have burned away their lives grappling with the problem of quantum gravity. - R. P. Woodard
Many large companies have a lot of trouble with git. It's not a coincidence that Facebook and Google have been working on Mercurial backends: For their needs, Git is absolutely insufficient.
These companies should consider using Fossil. Fossil is a mature DVCS, BSD-licensed. It is extremely elegantly written, and provides client, server, GUI, CGI executable and web server in a single binary file. It includes a Wiki and a bug tracker for each project. It does not litter your working copy with unnecessary files - only a single dot-file in the highest directory. It was not written in two weeks.
Fossil deserves to be much better known, but for some reason Git gets all the attention.
https://www.fossil-scm.org/
Free project hosting is available here:
http://chiselapp.com/
I have given up contributing to Wikipedia. My contributions are invariably reversed by an editor. Collectively, editors seem to spend their time annotating pages with [who?], [reference needed], etc, but then they revert any attempt to fill in the missing information.
Thank you, Forrest Mims, for "Science Probe!".
No need to wait for self-driving cars. If the NSA is using neural networks to analyse big data and look for terrorists, it will sometimes miss obvious terrorists, and sometimes classify harmless people as terrorists. I would hope that the latter would be screened out by human review, but there's not much we can do about the former without improving our understanding of neural nets.
When a web page is slow to load, it is often because of all the data that must be loaded from 3rd-party sites - Google Analytics is one of the worst, but there is also Facebook, Twitter, etc (probably for 3rd-party logins). SPDY is not going to fix that. If Google wants to speed up the web, it should start by reducing the latency of its own services.
Exactly right. Also, from the purchaser's viewpoint, he wants good quality oranges but wants to pay the poor-quality price.
There are purchasers all over the country who could make best-selling orange juice, if only they could buy good quality fruit at trash prices. The flaw is in their own business model, not in the way that oranges are produced.
How would a mathematician run a simulation?
(1) It would not be a QCD simulation of the whole universe, because in most times and places a simpler approximation than QCD would be sufficient.
(2) Special Relativity - helps the simulation, because it constrains the crosstalk between different star systems, different galaxies etc. A full simulation of the entire universe would not be necessary.
(3) Quantum Mechanics - hinders the simulation, by increasing the computational complexity. Incompletely decohered multiple worlds must be simulated, and this is hugely computationally expensive - unless you have a quantum computer.
A corollary of the simulation hypothesis is therefore: if we are living in a computer simulation, then quantum computers are physically possible, at least in the host world.
Yes, the mass hysteria in Britain is terrifying.
Children evacuated from swimming pool after prosthetic leg mistaken for paedophile
The original story is ambiguous, but the linked articles appear to state that it was the operator of Freedom Hosting, not TorMail, who was charged with enabling CP. If the feds can run a Tor client to see what a site on the dark web is offering, it is a reasonable assumption that the hosting provider can do the same, and should do some basic diligence to ensure that the sites he is hosting comply with the law.
It is interesting of course that GMail, EC2, AT&T etc escape responsibility for what their customers do.
Bruce Schneier said "What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it's in. Period."
This applies even if you are using TOR. TOR conceals your IP address, but it cannot remove the vulnerability of the end points - the client and server of the web/mail/whatever service. The Silk Road server was running PHP, and was probably compromised within hours of coming to the attention of the authorities. For the next two years the FBI was most likely building a case by parallel construction.
It is not a smart idea to use TOR or other services to break the law.
Well spotted. The figure guessed above (0.13V) is incorrect because the maximum power density and maximum current density do not occur under the same conditions.
The paper claims "an order of magnitude" higher power density than Li ion batteries. The table in the png file shows that, by "an order of magnitude", they mean a factor of two.
Some of the technological problems are mentioned in comments below.
It's a very nice piece of scientific work, but I don't expect these batteries will be coming to our phones any time soon.
The real danger comes not from a 50% confusion between standard deviation and mean absolute deviation; but from the assumption that the statistical distribution is Gaussian.
Before the credit crunch, financiers who considered themselves "masters of the universe" believed on the basis of the Black–Scholes equation that they could hedge their risks with a mean time to failure of billions of years. The probability distributions were assumed to be Gaussian, but this bore no relation to the past performance of the stock market.
Old machines are much less power-efficient than modern ones, and it is wasteful to have them on 24/7. If OpenBSD were adapted for cross-compiling, all the builds could be performed on a single high-end Xeon server, and the old machines switched on only occasionally when it is necessary to do a native build for verification or testing.