Here in the US we've got something similar, and I bet the Aussies do too.
It's not on your computer, but it's on your phone, and has been for a while. You can pick up your phone and dial 911, and instantly get to talk to the police. You can use this to report crimes, ask for medical help, or even ask someone to come put out a fire! And this was/before/ the Internets, even.
Why the hell should Facebook have to provide yet another way to get in touch with the cops?
How exactly does the standard model demand that neutrinos have mass?
The SM works just fine with massive neutrinos. After all, most of the fun stuff in the SM concerns the gauge couplings; whether or not a few fermions have mass doesn't affect the overall theory.
Neutrinos could constitute dark matter if they had *more* mass. But we can put an upper limit on the masses of the electron, muon, and tau neutrinos, and that's not enough to account for the amount of dark matter we know is out there. Some sort of exotic thing -- sterile neutrino flavors or some SUSY mumbo-jumbo --/could/ be a dark matter candidate.
I don't know of any superselection-rule -- it's possible, in theory, for the electron neutrino to have zero mass but the muon neutrino to have nonzero mass.
But then you'd have to explain why one flavor was massive while the other was massless, which has never happened before. Since there's lots of precedent for three flavors with different nonzero masses, people just figure that the neutrinos are the same way.
It's that all the bits of the nature of the Universe that we/do/ understand are simple, so we figure that the bits we're still trying to understand are probably also simple.
If you're Intel you have more money to spend on marketing, which means "we'll give you a cut rate on a lot of 10000 processors just so we can have the bragging rights."
Parallel tasks are the whole point of using a supercomputer. The gains made in speed for sequential tasks really haven't been that great; Moore's Law for sequential tasks fell apart a while back.
Being able to parallelize a task is a prerequisite for putting it on a supercomputer.
Exactly. If the MPAA started selling DVD's containing a Theora file, or some other format that I can look up on Wikipedia how to decode, I'd buy them.
But they don't -- instead, they sell disks that I can't decode and do with what I want to. (Suppose I want to watch a movie on my netbook on a plane.) So, if I want a movie, I have to pirate it.
'Course, most of the movies made recently blow goats, so I don't do either and just play Nethack on plane flights.
Theft is a criminal offense. Unauthorized copying isn't theft, but in some circumstances it is also a criminal offense.
However, the people in charge of prosecuting criminal offenses (the government prosecutors) don't care about chasing around bittorrenters. They're not going to waste time on it -- they're more interested in chasing around weed-smokers (and, occasionally, real criminals).
Plus, the **AA doesn't want criminal prosecutions anyway -- as mentioned earlier it's harder to get a conviction than a civil verdict, and a criminal conviction doesn't get them any $$.
(Besides, losing a few cable channels for a little while isn't much compared to actually losing satellites from debris hits. People can do without Fox News for a few days.)
If those people get an internet with everything arranged just so for them so they don't have to see boobies, and are allowed to pitch royal hell if they accidentally do, then I should be able to get one where I don't have to see spam or ads and can throw a hissy if I do.
They don't want to see boobies. I don't want to see Punch the Monkey. What's the difference?
Can somebody tell me why images of people having sex, or naked, unique among all categories of images, deserves a special classification?
Why shouldn't images of people eating, or military propaganda, or lions killing buffalo, or even birds having sex, get special treatment? What is it about porn that makes everyone care so damn much?
Because typically TLD's are reserved for descriptions of the status of the hosting entity, not the content..uk tells me a site is in Britain..org tells me they're a nonprofit.
Gallons per day are better than barrels per day because nobody knows how big a barrel is.
Liters are better than gallons, because nobody outside the US measures shit in gallons.
Your point about the media sucking stands, of course -- they do. But their job is to report the news to people who aren't used to measuring fluid volume in "barrels".
The problem with nuclear power is the high up-front cost. Once you get the damn things built they're cheaper than coal, but if you want to build safe ones it costs a lot up front.
The upfront cost to build enough nuclear power generating capacity to replace EVERY coal plant in China, India, and the US is... roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq war.
Birds and cats kill pigeons, of which there are a shitload, and other common city birds that only exist in the numbers they do because we support them.
Oil spills kill things like gannets, which are much bigger birds of which there are *not* a shitload, and kill all of them for miles. This is a much bigger impact than natural predation or bonking into windows on the ecosystem.
This is because the cost (to society) of something truly catastrophic is so high that they can't be asked to bear it (how do you buy another Mississippi Delta? You can't)... so they just don't bother.
So I agree -- the cost-benefit math doesn't work, because they don't care about the benefit (in this case, not having to pay for cleanup, which they won't fully anyway)
As evidence I cite the fact that conservatives say that progressives are trying to turn our country into Europe, and that Europe (for all its growing pains) is a pretty good place for humanity.
The difference between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island was that the Americans had plans B, C, and D to stop massive environmental damage if something went apeshit, and the Russians omitted them because of greed.
At Three Mile Island plans A, B, and C all failed, but plan D (the steel containment building) held, and no damage was done.
The cleanup cost should include the cost to purchase new land in similar habitat as a wildlife preserve to make up for the damage done to habitat in the Mississippi Delta region.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the US we've got something similar, and I bet the Aussies do too.
It's not on your computer, but it's on your phone, and has been for a while. You can pick up your phone and dial 911, and instantly get to talk to the police. You can use this to report crimes, ask for medical help, or even ask someone to come put out a fire! And this was /before/ the Internets, even.
Why the hell should Facebook have to provide yet another way to get in touch with the cops?
How exactly does the standard model demand that neutrinos have mass?
The SM works just fine with massive neutrinos. After all, most of the fun stuff in the SM concerns the gauge couplings; whether or not a few fermions have mass doesn't affect the overall theory.
Neutrinos could constitute dark matter if they had *more* mass. But we can put an upper limit on the masses of the electron, muon, and tau neutrinos, and that's not enough to account for the amount of dark matter we know is out there. Some sort of exotic thing -- sterile neutrino flavors or some SUSY mumbo-jumbo -- /could/ be a dark matter candidate.
I don't know of any superselection-rule -- it's possible, in theory, for the electron neutrino to have zero mass but the muon neutrino to have nonzero mass.
But then you'd have to explain why one flavor was massive while the other was massless, which has never happened before. Since there's lots of precedent for three flavors with different nonzero masses, people just figure that the neutrinos are the same way.
It's that all the bits of the nature of the Universe that we /do/ understand are simple, so we figure that the bits we're still trying to understand are probably also simple.
If you're Intel you have more money to spend on marketing, which means "we'll give you a cut rate on a lot of 10000 processors just so we can have the bragging rights."
Parallel tasks are the whole point of using a supercomputer. The gains made in speed for sequential tasks really haven't been that great; Moore's Law for sequential tasks fell apart a while back.
Being able to parallelize a task is a prerequisite for putting it on a supercomputer.
Exactly. If the MPAA started selling DVD's containing a Theora file, or some other format that I can look up on Wikipedia how to decode, I'd buy them.
But they don't -- instead, they sell disks that I can't decode and do with what I want to. (Suppose I want to watch a movie on my netbook on a plane.) So, if I want a movie, I have to pirate it.
'Course, most of the movies made recently blow goats, so I don't do either and just play Nethack on plane flights.
Is there a way to use the streaming-video-on-demand feature in Linux now?
My mom runs Ubuntu, has a Netflix account, and would be very interested.
Theft is a criminal offense. Unauthorized copying isn't theft, but in some circumstances it is also a criminal offense.
However, the people in charge of prosecuting criminal offenses (the government prosecutors) don't care about chasing around bittorrenters. They're not going to waste time on it -- they're more interested in chasing around weed-smokers (and, occasionally, real criminals).
Plus, the **AA doesn't want criminal prosecutions anyway -- as mentioned earlier it's harder to get a conviction than a civil verdict, and a criminal conviction doesn't get them any $$.
... and nothing of value would be lost.
(Besides, losing a few cable channels for a little while isn't much compared to actually losing satellites from debris hits. People can do without Fox News for a few days.)
... because a big debris cloud in orbit is a whole lot safer than one satellite in a known orbit.
If you're looking at 15-year break-even in the South, then we in the Southwest have to be a lot less (330 days of sun a year).
If those people get an internet with everything arranged just so for them so they don't have to see boobies, and are allowed to pitch royal hell if they accidentally do, then I should be able to get one where I don't have to see spam or ads and can throw a hissy if I do.
They don't want to see boobies. I don't want to see Punch the Monkey. What's the difference?
Out of curiosity, what's the service life on those panels?
Less effective.
To make weed you have to grow it.
To make porn you just have to take your damn clothes off.
Can somebody tell me why images of people having sex, or naked, unique among all categories of images, deserves a special classification?
Why shouldn't images of people eating, or military propaganda, or lions killing buffalo, or even birds having sex, get special treatment? What is it about porn that makes everyone care so damn much?
Because typically TLD's are reserved for descriptions of the status of the hosting entity, not the content. .uk tells me a site is in Britain. .org tells me they're a nonprofit.
Gallons per day are better than barrels per day because nobody knows how big a barrel is.
Liters are better than gallons, because nobody outside the US measures shit in gallons.
Your point about the media sucking stands, of course -- they do. But their job is to report the news to people who aren't used to measuring fluid volume in "barrels".
The problem with nuclear power is the high up-front cost. Once you get the damn things built they're cheaper than coal, but if you want to build safe ones it costs a lot up front.
The upfront cost to build enough nuclear power generating capacity to replace EVERY coal plant in China, India, and the US is ... roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq war.
Birds and cats kill pigeons, of which there are a shitload, and other common city birds that only exist in the numbers they do because we support them.
Oil spills kill things like gannets, which are much bigger birds of which there are *not* a shitload, and kill all of them for miles. This is a much bigger impact than natural predation or bonking into windows on the ecosystem.
This is because the cost (to society) of something truly catastrophic is so high that they can't be asked to bear it (how do you buy another Mississippi Delta? You can't)... so they just don't bother.
So I agree -- the cost-benefit math doesn't work, because they don't care about the benefit (in this case, not having to pay for cleanup, which they won't fully anyway)
"or both" is redundant, if you're talking about physicists who measure distance in Planck lengths.
The saner types among us use either light-years or $SI_PREFIX-meters.
I don't think that's the progressive agenda.
As evidence I cite the fact that conservatives say that progressives are trying to turn our country into Europe, and that Europe (for all its growing pains) is a pretty good place for humanity.
The difference between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island was that the Americans had plans B, C, and D to stop massive environmental damage if something went apeshit, and the Russians omitted them because of greed.
At Three Mile Island plans A, B, and C all failed, but plan D (the steel containment building) held, and no damage was done.
Put a fission plant in my backyard, too.
The cleanup cost should include the cost to purchase new land in similar habitat as a wildlife preserve to make up for the damage done to habitat in the Mississippi Delta region.