Industry in China is fine. Industry in China powered by coal is not; there are lots of other ways to get power, and if adoption of (ex.) nuclear power by China instead of coal caused a 5% rise in the price of Chinese trinkets, so be it.
There are lots of gaming PC's that are plenty portable. I just bought a 5.7 pound machine that's got the same GPU as this one (and nearly the same CPU; I bought a slightly slower i7 to save money).
Gaming desktop PC's are really not that expensive, especially when you consider that most everyone has an ordinary PC anyway. The difference is a $150 graphics card.
I just bought one this week, actually -- the Sager 5165. It's 5.7 pounds, and has the same GPU in it. You can get a faster GPU with a newer Sager model (the 8130) that still weighs less.`
Just because 90% of people can't interpret their gauges doesn't mean that the remaining 10% of us shouldn't have access to them.
And, yes, I know an oil gauge just measures the oil pressure... but an unexplained lack of oil pressure is still cause to pull over, wait, read the dipstick, and check for leaks. I was on a long roadtrip once and only saved the car we were in by noticing a change in engine noise; out of an abundance of caution we pulled over and were completely out of oil.
They've taken engine temp gauges out of new cars, even.
My car has two idiot lights: "engine cold" and "engine too hot".
I've never seen the "engine too hot" light come on. But I did use my old car's temp gauge to diagnose a failing water pump, even before the engine got too hot ("there is no reason this engine should be this hot under these conditions, I'd better check out what is going on").
Old cars once had battery voltage gauges, engine temp gauges, and oil level gauges. Now you don't know if your battery's bad until the car won't start, if your engine is overheating until it does, or if you're low on oil until you see a light that says "You have about ten seconds to shut your engine off before it explodes".
If you can prove that (if it's on his former workstation with files dated to his term of employment, etc.), you ought to be able to send him to prison for a very, very long time, if there's any justice in the world.
"Regardless of whether you agree with software licensing concepts, it is currently the way that our law works - and the BSA are the group that take civil action to uphold that law."
There are sometimes principles of justice that are more fundamental than the law. The law can be bought and sold, and the people who make and enforce laws are prone to error and corruption.
People who recognize, or who should recognize, that the law is flawed, but take advantage of that law (which they're in part responsible for corrupting) to bully and extort others, are fundamentally bad guys.
This guy is a professor at the (not very rigorous*) institution I did my undergraduate work at. (This is the "University of Alabama in Huntsville", not the larger and better-known University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.) I don't remember him specifically, but I know there was a cadre of anti-global-warming "climate scientists" there with a politico-religious axe to grind and who were pretty clearly not doing science for knowledge's sake.
It's notable that if you google this guy's (Spencer's) name, the first couple hits are to "www.drroyspencer.com/".
Nobody that I know who is actually a prominent scientist tries to pimp their public persona to this degree, or (tellingly) makes a big deal about the title "Dr."
*They really do have shitty academic standards. I graduated summa cum laude with a BS in physics, yet had never written $\vec x$ (we never did formal vector algebra), and wound up having to take four "remedial" undergrad classes at the Univ of Arizona where I am finishing up grad school.
Do you have no idea how regenerative braking works?
That energy comes from the kinetic energy of the car when you stop, in large part. Rather than dissipating the kinetic energy of the car as heat (which is what happens when a normal car stops), it is used to power a generator and dumped into batteries, used to start the car moving again.
No, because the point of those top experiments isn't to explore the behavior of the top itself, but to use it as a way to probe the electroweak sector. The Higgs is not composed of two tops, incidentally -- it's a new thing, or in some models a composite made of several new things.
Lattice QCD is tremendously successful at simulating the behavior of quarks interacting with other quarks. Such interactions are responsible for lots of things: the structure and properties of hadrons, the equation of state of quark-gluon plasma, and so forth.
However, it doesn't involve the weak interaction at all. So lattice QCD cannot, for instance, calculate the decay rate of the pi-plus meson by itself, since that decay's mediated by the weak interaction. What it can do (and has done) is to calculate the "quark behavior part" of such interactions, which when multiplied by the electroweak coupling strength gives the decay rate.
The reason the top is interesting to Higgs experiments is that the top has a strong interaction with the Higgs, so if you're looking to probe the behavior (or, well, existence) of the Higgs boson, making a bunch of tops is a good way to go about it. If you're going to be looking at top processes for Higgses, then you'd better understand the properties of the top itself (its mass, decay rate, and mixing angles with other flavors) as well as possible.
The top, incidentally, is mostly notable for its very high mass and thus very rapid weak decay into other quark flavors. Any hadrons it would form would have an extremely short lifespan (shorter by far than this bottom-strange-light creature that Fermilab found).
Confirming that the bottom quark existed -- now *that* was a big, huge deal. But once that was done, the existence of this thing is pretty much a given.
All the quarks have the same strong-force interactions, so you can just as readily make a baryon out of any combination of them. This is where the quark model came from -- the need to understand the proliferation of baryons.
Everyone's familiar with the thing you make out of two ups and a down (proton) and two downs and an up (neutron). But there are also four spin 3/2 particles called deltas that you can make out of ups and downs: uuu, uud, udd, and ddd. So that's six particles using just the lightest two sorts of quarks. If you allow for the use of the lightest five flavors of quarks, you get hundreds of the things. Once upon a time it was sort of a big deal to discover new baryons, since nobody knew why there were so many of the things. Now we do -- we know they're just different combinations of the same basic things.
No, I'm not. I'm a physicist who studies the behavior of hadrons and quarks, so this is sort of relevant to my field. There are some particle physics discoveries that would be an absolutely huge deal -- say, the hints from lattice QCD measurements of the CKM matrix elements that may foretell new physics -- but this isn't one of them.
No, that model very much does *not* need continued validation. Perhaps its detailed consequences do, simply because QCD is nonperturbative and requires large Monte Carlo calculations to solve, but what combinations of quarks you can stick together as a baryon is not one of those things.
It turns out that you can start with that model (the phrase "SU(3) Yang-Mills theory" and an extremely vague idea of what the quark masses are) and a handful (read: less than five) experimental inputs -- not even the quark masses -- and a supercomputer, and measure the masses of all the hadrons you care to calculate. Many of those measurements are fantastically precise, and are sometimes even better than those done by experiments.
This has been done and is ongoing -- I just got back from a conference in the field. Let me reiterate: you can start with nothing more than a description of what the quark model is (the QCD Lagrangian) and a couple of physical observations (which are used to figure out what the quark masses and coupling constant are) and from that calculate pretty much anything about hadrons you care to calculate, and it all comes out right. (Sometimes the answer is "This is hard and this computation needs more computing power", since it's all done Monte Carlo, but that doesn't change anything.)
No, it's *not* another new particle. It's a new arrangement of particles we have known about since the 1970's, when such a re-write happened and the quark model was introduced.
They haven't discovered a new fundamental particle. All they've done is to arrange some quarks into an arrangement we've already known about.
This is an engineering accomplishment -- sticking together an up, a strange, and a bottom quark to make a bound state. It doesn't represent any great discovery in physics; people have known for a long while that such a particle exists, simply from the properties of quarks. In fact, lattice QCD has been able to simulate such things for a while now, and (although I have not seen such a result) could calculate its mass.
Making a big deal about this could be a political move, since the Tevatron (the particle accelerator that the CDF is attached to) is due to shut down soon.
Just because some crackpot someplace called you some naughty words that happened to be crazy doesn't mean that everyone else who points out your authoritarian, militaristic tendencies is also crazy.
You have a history of arguing in favor of state-sponsored violence, and taking great delight in it, as long as I've seen your posts here.
Slashdot Mirror
Industry in China is fine. Industry in China powered by coal is not; there are lots of other ways to get power, and if adoption of (ex.) nuclear power by China instead of coal caused a 5% rise in the price of Chinese trinkets, so be it.
Wow -- not a BSD user, but isn't basically every non-netbook computer (and some of those) sold these days multiprocessor?
Selling something that's in the public domain is perfectly fine, and it does not restrict it.
If somebody sold copies of his speech, this in no way prevents somebody else from handing it out for free, or from selling it for a cheaper price.
There are lots of gaming PC's that are plenty portable. I just bought a 5.7 pound machine that's got the same GPU as this one (and nearly the same CPU; I bought a slightly slower i7 to save money).
They get a lot smaller than this, too.
Gaming desktop PC's are really not that expensive, especially when you consider that most everyone has an ordinary PC anyway. The difference is a $150 graphics card.
I just bought one this week, actually -- the Sager 5165. It's 5.7 pounds, and has the same GPU in it. You can get a faster GPU with a newer Sager model (the 8130) that still weighs less.`
Just because 90% of people can't interpret their gauges doesn't mean that the remaining 10% of us shouldn't have access to them.
And, yes, I know an oil gauge just measures the oil pressure ... but an unexplained lack of oil pressure is still cause to pull over, wait, read the dipstick, and check for leaks. I was on a long roadtrip once and only saved the car we were in by noticing a change in engine noise; out of an abundance of caution we pulled over and were completely out of oil.
They've taken engine temp gauges out of new cars, even.
My car has two idiot lights: "engine cold" and "engine too hot".
I've never seen the "engine too hot" light come on. But I did use my old car's temp gauge to diagnose a failing water pump, even before the engine got too hot ("there is no reason this engine should be this hot under these conditions, I'd better check out what is going on").
Old cars once had battery voltage gauges, engine temp gauges, and oil level gauges. Now you don't know if your battery's bad until the car won't start, if your engine is overheating until it does, or if you're low on oil until you see a light that says "You have about ten seconds to shut your engine off before it explodes".
... but, please, for the love of Elbereth, don't make it cute and avatar-y.
I don't need cute, especially when my car is broken. I want to know what the fuck is wrong.
There are far fewer child molesters in the world than the politicians want you to believe...
If you can prove that (if it's on his former workstation with files dated to his term of employment, etc.), you ought to be able to send him to prison for a very, very long time, if there's any justice in the world.
'Course, there's not, but one can dream.
"Regardless of whether you agree with software licensing concepts, it is currently the way that our law works - and the BSA are the group that take civil action to uphold that law."
There are sometimes principles of justice that are more fundamental than the law. The law can be bought and sold, and the people who make and enforce laws are prone to error and corruption.
People who recognize, or who should recognize, that the law is flawed, but take advantage of that law (which they're in part responsible for corrupting) to bully and extort others, are fundamentally bad guys.
This guy is a professor at the (not very rigorous*) institution I did my undergraduate work at. (This is the "University of Alabama in Huntsville", not the larger and better-known University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.) I don't remember him specifically, but I know there was a cadre of anti-global-warming "climate scientists" there with a politico-religious axe to grind and who were pretty clearly not doing science for knowledge's sake.
It's notable that if you google this guy's (Spencer's) name, the first couple hits are to "www.drroyspencer.com/".
Nobody that I know who is actually a prominent scientist tries to pimp their public persona to this degree, or (tellingly) makes a big deal about the title "Dr."
*They really do have shitty academic standards. I graduated summa cum laude with a BS in physics, yet had never written $\vec x$ (we never did formal vector algebra), and wound up having to take four "remedial" undergrad classes at the Univ of Arizona where I am finishing up grad school.
Do you have no idea how regenerative braking works?
That energy comes from the kinetic energy of the car when you stop, in large part. Rather than dissipating the kinetic energy of the car as heat (which is what happens when a normal car stops), it is used to power a generator and dumped into batteries, used to start the car moving again.
No, because the point of those top experiments isn't to explore the behavior of the top itself, but to use it as a way to probe the electroweak sector. The Higgs is not composed of two tops, incidentally -- it's a new thing, or in some models a composite made of several new things.
Lattice QCD is tremendously successful at simulating the behavior of quarks interacting with other quarks. Such interactions are responsible for lots of things: the structure and properties of hadrons, the equation of state of quark-gluon plasma, and so forth.
However, it doesn't involve the weak interaction at all. So lattice QCD cannot, for instance, calculate the decay rate of the pi-plus meson by itself, since that decay's mediated by the weak interaction. What it can do (and has done) is to calculate the "quark behavior part" of such interactions, which when multiplied by the electroweak coupling strength gives the decay rate.
The reason the top is interesting to Higgs experiments is that the top has a strong interaction with the Higgs, so if you're looking to probe the behavior (or, well, existence) of the Higgs boson, making a bunch of tops is a good way to go about it. If you're going to be looking at top processes for Higgses, then you'd better understand the properties of the top itself (its mass, decay rate, and mixing angles with other flavors) as well as possible.
The top, incidentally, is mostly notable for its very high mass and thus very rapid weak decay into other quark flavors. Any hadrons it would form would have an extremely short lifespan (shorter by far than this bottom-strange-light creature that Fermilab found).
Confirming that the bottom quark existed -- now *that* was a big, huge deal. But once that was done, the existence of this thing is pretty much a given.
All the quarks have the same strong-force interactions, so you can just as readily make a baryon out of any combination of them. This is where the quark model came from -- the need to understand the proliferation of baryons.
Everyone's familiar with the thing you make out of two ups and a down (proton) and two downs and an up (neutron). But there are also four spin 3/2 particles called deltas that you can make out of ups and downs: uuu, uud, udd, and ddd. So that's six particles using just the lightest two sorts of quarks. If you allow for the use of the lightest five flavors of quarks, you get hundreds of the things. Once upon a time it was sort of a big deal to discover new baryons, since nobody knew why there were so many of the things. Now we do -- we know they're just different combinations of the same basic things.
No, I'm not. I'm a physicist who studies the behavior of hadrons and quarks, so this is sort of relevant to my field. There are some particle physics discoveries that would be an absolutely huge deal -- say, the hints from lattice QCD measurements of the CKM matrix elements that may foretell new physics -- but this isn't one of them.
No, that model very much does *not* need continued validation. Perhaps its detailed consequences do, simply because QCD is nonperturbative and requires large Monte Carlo calculations to solve, but what combinations of quarks you can stick together as a baryon is not one of those things.
It turns out that you can start with that model (the phrase "SU(3) Yang-Mills theory" and an extremely vague idea of what the quark masses are) and a handful (read: less than five) experimental inputs -- not even the quark masses -- and a supercomputer, and measure the masses of all the hadrons you care to calculate. Many of those measurements are fantastically precise, and are sometimes even better than those done by experiments.
This has been done and is ongoing -- I just got back from a conference in the field. Let me reiterate: you can start with nothing more than a description of what the quark model is (the QCD Lagrangian) and a couple of physical observations (which are used to figure out what the quark masses and coupling constant are) and from that calculate pretty much anything about hadrons you care to calculate, and it all comes out right. (Sometimes the answer is "This is hard and this computation needs more computing power", since it's all done Monte Carlo, but that doesn't change anything.)
There are a lot more ways to arrange aluminium atoms than there are to arrange three quarks in a baryon.
No, it's *not* another new particle. It's a new arrangement of particles we have known about since the 1970's, when such a re-write happened and the quark model was introduced.
They haven't discovered a new fundamental particle. All they've done is to arrange some quarks into an arrangement we've already known about.
This is an engineering accomplishment -- sticking together an up, a strange, and a bottom quark to make a bound state. It doesn't represent any great discovery in physics; people have known for a long while that such a particle exists, simply from the properties of quarks. In fact, lattice QCD has been able to simulate such things for a while now, and (although I have not seen such a result) could calculate its mass.
Making a big deal about this could be a political move, since the Tevatron (the particle accelerator that the CDF is attached to) is due to shut down soon.
Last year a student asked me for help. He had about a thousand files that he needed to rename, using a simple pattern, on a Win7 machine.
It took us 45 minutes of googling to find a piece of software that would do this, with great amounts of handwringing.
I could have done it in one line using sed.
Yawn, will check back in five more years to see if Windows is an appropriate OS for actually doing work.
It turns out that this is overwhelmingly the attitude of responsible cops -- see http://www.americancopmagazine.com/expecting-privacy-in-public/ and many other views.
Just because some crackpot someplace called you some naughty words that happened to be crazy doesn't mean that everyone else who points out your authoritarian, militaristic tendencies is also crazy.
You have a history of arguing in favor of state-sponsored violence, and taking great delight in it, as long as I've seen your posts here.
You don't have a legal right to disrupt a school class.
You do have a legal right to engage in protected speech on public property.
See the difference?
You're such a troll.