That's right. The speed of light 'c', is just a conversion factor (like 2.54cm/inch).
Before, we could measure lenghts more accurately than velocities, and so we defined c in terms of meters per second.
But now, since we can measure velocity with more precision and accuracy than distance, a meter is now defined in terms of the length of a second and c.
Now: The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. (think atomic clock)
The speed of light in a vacuum is defined to be exactly 299,792,458 meters per second.
The "length" of a meter then is a derived value!
So there are consequences of a changing c, since a different value of c will change the amount of energy needed to accelerate a mass, and will affect the structure of the universe....but I'm not sure how they would go about figuring that out.:)
% ftp reports.experian.com
Connected to ilovedancing.org.
220 ProFTPD 1.2.0rc3 Server (ProFTPD Default Installation) [reports.experian.com]
User (reports.experian.com:(none)): ford
331 Password required for ford.
Password: 12345
230 User ford logged in.
ftp> prompt
Interactive mode Off.
ftp> mget *
It really ticks me off when I see people saying that publicly funded code should GPLed. That is *less* free. The GPL (or any license) *restricts* the use of the code. Public Domain is the only way to go. Public domain meaning that anyone and any company can do what ever they want with the code, including the freedom to not tell anyone that they are using it! The modifications they make are their own, and they can sell, license, GPL those modifications as they wish. However, they can't patent the original code, since there is prior art (the Public Domain code).
Hehe....from the Shop-Intel site (emphasis mine): You're free to roam about the workplace or campus with secure connections...
and later on: Supports 0, 40-bit and 128-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption.
Fear my ROT26 encryption!:)
Covin Technologies Announces Technology Breakthrough! May 14th, 2002 at 11:55AM EST
Covin Technologies has innovated a new innovative technology! Our new innovation: the Diaphoresis Device can scientifically measure *exactly* what your programmers were doing all day just from their caffeine intake!
This will be a boon to middle managers everywhere! Just think -- you won't have to look over their shoulders or visit their dank caves^H^H^H^H^Hcubicles anymore!
All you have to do, is go through their trash at the end of the day, put all the empty Coke bottles and coffee cups into your brand new Diaphoresis Device, and it will tell you: 1) How many hours they spent programming 2) How many times they left for the bathroom 3) How many emails they sent making fun of *you*! 4) How many times they reloaded Slashdot
They can't do this from afar. They have to actually be in physical possession of your smart card, scrape the protective layers off, and put it under a microscope. The problem is that because smart cards are more "secure", they are trusted more, and so actual breaks in such security are harder to prove. So this is like an easy way to find out someone's PIN number once you have their ATM card.
The problem with people is that we fear the unknown.
What did Yoda say? Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate....leads to suffering!
How true that is.
Global communications, and the Internet in particular, is creating an odd kind of de-segragation.
However, it is desegration without real direct interation.
It is kind of like desegragating the schools in Alabama, but ONLY Alabama -- how do you think the people in Mississippi would feel?
They just hear about it, but don't actually interact with the "other side" -- and so will only breed distrust, fear, anger, and hate.
Before, people distrusted others who were different, but they were separated -- either geographically or socially, and were not in their mental world.
Now however, these "others" are forced down their throats, and can't ignore them.
It is so easy to marginalize, make fun of, and distrust those that are different from ourselves, even in this "enlightened country".
Why? Because putting others down makes us feel just a bit superior and better.
Having something to hate also makes you feel you have a purpose...and in those countries with limited opportunities, freedoms, and low quality of life...having a bad purpose is better than trying anything else.
As for people who believe everything on the Internet to be true? Well, I hate to sound like a troll, but half of the population IS below average in terms of intelligence.....
First of all, some basic particle physics:
There are 6 kinds of quarks (in increasing mass):
up, down, strage, charm, bottom (beauty), and top (truth).
The last of which was experimentally verified only recently.
All matter is made up of combinations of quarks, usually either in pairs (mesons), or trios (baryons).
For example, protons are made up of two ups and one down; neutrons are made up of one up and two downs.
Strange quarks are named such because the particles that contain them are produced fast and decay slow (ie., they have very long lifetimes), which is very odd considering that they are much more massive (heavier things tend to decay faster).
Strangelets now, are an odd beast. They usually contain more than 2 or 3 quarks, and can contain quarks other than strange quarks.
One variety (the more common one) contains a large mixture of up and some down quarks along with the strange, and has a net positive charge.
These are quite safe as they will bond with a pair of electrons and act like an unusually heavy helium isotope.
One that is mostly strange will have a net negative charge, and (I don't quite understand the process) gobble up all the positively charged atomic nuclei that it encounters.
As a side note, strangelets are supposed to only occur in conditions of high pressure and (relatively) low temperature, like inside of a neutron star.
The article is discussing what can be patented. Can the USPTO give a patent on a human embryo? (whatever that entains). Certainly they have allowed patents on: - genes - DNA (a person's DNA)
Is a person patentable? Can someone's be "owned" by private hands? And then an extention on that -- can life be patentable?
They were not until GE took a case to the supreme court on an oil eating bacterium (and won).
I am not a writer. I do not pretent to be.
However, I believe that anyone who does claim to be a writer has to follow some simple guidelines:
Accuracy -- check your facts (Wolverine of X-Men fame has adamatine claws, and so does "drink with his buddies") before you write about them.
Consistency -- Have your essay actually make one point. Don't seesaw back and forth on different topics hoping to stumble upon a point. It is like having a plot -- please actually have one!
Integrity -- Say what you believe in. If Star Wars does better than Spider-Man, should we be expecting an article on how complex themes appeals to the mass audience more than "simple" story lines?
Quality -- Don't make your 'editorials' your personal diary. At least don't make it read like your personal diary -- a meandering mess. Don't use buzz words like some clueless PHB. I'm sure some other/. poster will have the "check list" (geek empowerment check, reference to hackers check, references to terrorism/Sept11 check, etc)
Perhaps you do some reading before you write next. May I suggest:
Don't you know that we programmers start counting at number 0?:) Either that or China just conquered South Korea and claimed their country code.;) On a different note, I'm surprised that Thailand beat China. I wonder how accurate this is. They seem to be just doing a reverse lookup on IPs, many of which are probably faked.
Currently, LED lights are fairly directed (ie, they are not as good for filling a room).
So they won't necessarily replace the light bulb yet. However, they are excellent replacements for flashlights, traffic lights, car lamps -- ie, any kind of directed light.
They are brighter, more efficient, and last longer than regular incandescent or fluorescent bulbs.
They do cost more though, but that might change with economies of scale.
A friend of mine who works for a Senator told me this:
Many, many bills are introduced that the introducers have no intention of passing. They are used for only one purpose -- to show to their constituents and say "See? I tried to prevent another Columbine from happening".
They know the bill is stupid. They also know it won't pass. But the attempt will look good at the next election.
The moral of the story? Don't get your underwear all twisted over this.
While the/. Editors can't spell, do simple searches for duplicates, or even real the articles they are posting, the errors in this/. snippet were not written by the editors! The words in italics are copied verbatim from the user post, and any words that are in normal font face are the editors annotations.
I have a lot of small business clients who request recommendations on what laptops to buy.
They don't always take my recommendations of course.:)
From the service calls I get, I can safely say the following:
Get IBM or Toshiba -- they are rock solid, never any problems.
The Dells, Gateways (whatever you do, NEVER get a Gateway laptop), and Compaqs have many, many problems.
One possible problem is that they don't actually make their own laptops.
They all outsource them, and are mostly quite bad -- overheating, systems, crashing, the screen turning itself off at random times. One Dell laptop had its internal speaker go nuts every time it was docked with the docking station.
Note though that IBM and Toshiba laptops don't have a touchpad, which some people crave (but they break faster, and most decent people prefer the nub once they get used to it).
Sony laptops are fairly good, but tend to be overpriced.
Apple Powerbooks are quite nice too -- stable, long battery life, feature filled, if you can stand using a Mac, but hey, they run Linux too!
One thing is that if you run a M$ OS, run a NT derivative (NT4, 2000, XP) -- 98/ME has issues with power management, and may cause your laptop to hang when going to sleep mode and standby mode.
arsDigita has great engineers, and pretty good technology (a few bugs, but mostly worked out now). The really bad part (and what drove aD into the ground) was bad management. As the only (AFAIK) profitable open source based company, Redhat should know a thing or two about running a business well. Hopefully they'll be able to restructure the aD assets and personnel, and really add to the community.
Hold on Johnny, we all know that space is not a vacuum. After all, if space were a vacuum, what would the elephants that hold up the world breath? Not to mentioni the giant space turtle.
Since Ghana does not have a 1st tier air connection, it is MUCH more difficult for "at large" users to attend (and complain). Only the current power holders (who can use ICANN funds to fly there) will go. Poor geeks who want to have a say, won't be.
hehe...someone apparently made a somewhat subtle hack to the article. On the first page, about 2/3rds down, in the paragraph starting with 'In Napster's heyday, pirated TV shows were a rarity on the Net.
'. Read the last sentence in that paragraph.:)
I wonder if they will be able to see how antimatter interacts with the gravitational field. It has been theorized that antimatter will go "up" in a gravitational field, and not down. This was hard to prove previously since if you only had anti-protons or anti-electrons (positrons), the electic repulsion overrode any minute differences due to gravity...but with neutral anti-atoms, it might be possible to detect which way they go under gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right. The speed of light 'c', is just a conversion factor (like 2.54cm/inch).
:)
Before, we could measure lenghts more accurately than velocities, and so we defined c in terms of meters per second.
But now, since we can measure velocity with more precision and accuracy than distance, a meter is now defined in terms of the length of a second and c.
Now:
The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. (think atomic clock)
The speed of light in a vacuum is defined to be exactly 299,792,458 meters per second.
The "length" of a meter then is a derived value!
So there are consequences of a changing c, since a different value of c will change the amount of energy needed to accelerate a mass, and will affect the structure of the universe....but I'm not sure how they would go about figuring that out.
% ftp reports.experian.com
Connected to ilovedancing.org.
220 ProFTPD 1.2.0rc3 Server (ProFTPD Default Installation) [reports.experian.com]
User (reports.experian.com:(none)): ford
331 Password required for ford.
Password: 12345
230 User ford logged in.
ftp> prompt
Interactive mode Off.
ftp> mget *
Don't pass that around!
It really ticks me off when I see people saying that publicly funded code should GPLed.
That is *less* free. The GPL (or any license) *restricts* the use of the code.
Public Domain is the only way to go.
Public domain meaning that anyone and any company can do what ever they want with the code,
including the freedom to not tell anyone that they are using it!
The modifications they make are their own, and they can sell, license, GPL those modifications as they wish.
However, they can't patent the original code, since there is prior art (the Public Domain code).
Hehe....from the Shop-Intel site (emphasis mine): :)
You're free to roam about the workplace or campus with secure connections...
and later on:
Supports 0, 40-bit and 128-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption.
Fear my ROT26 encryption!
Newsflash!
Covin Technologies Announces Technology Breakthrough!
May 14th, 2002 at 11:55AM EST
Covin Technologies has innovated a new innovative technology!
Our new innovation: the Diaphoresis Device can scientifically measure *exactly*
what your programmers were doing all day just from their caffeine intake!
This will be a boon to middle managers everywhere!
Just think -- you won't have to look over their shoulders or visit their dank caves^H^H^H^H^Hcubicles anymore!
All you have to do, is go through their trash at the end of the day, put all the empty Coke bottles and coffee cups into your brand new Diaphoresis Device, and it will tell you:
1) How many hours they spent programming
2) How many times they left for the bathroom
3) How many emails they sent making fun of *you*!
4) How many times they reloaded Slashdot
You can have it all!
They can't do this from afar. They have to actually be in physical possession of your smart card, scrape the protective layers off, and put it under a microscope. The problem is that because smart cards are more "secure", they are trusted more, and so actual breaks in such security are harder to prove. So this is like an easy way to find out someone's PIN number once you have their ATM card.
The problem with people is that we fear the unknown.
What did Yoda say? Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate....leads to suffering!
How true that is.
Global communications, and the Internet in particular, is creating an odd kind of de-segragation.
However, it is desegration without real direct interation.
It is kind of like desegragating the schools in Alabama, but ONLY Alabama -- how do you think the people in Mississippi would feel?
They just hear about it, but don't actually interact with the "other side" -- and so will only breed distrust, fear, anger, and hate.
Before, people distrusted others who were different, but they were separated -- either geographically or socially, and were not in their mental world.
Now however, these "others" are forced down their throats, and can't ignore them.
It is so easy to marginalize, make fun of, and distrust those that are different from ourselves, even in this "enlightened country".
Why? Because putting others down makes us feel just a bit superior and better.
Having something to hate also makes you feel you have a purpose...and in those countries with limited opportunities, freedoms, and low quality of life...having a bad purpose is better than trying anything else.
As for people who believe everything on the Internet to be true? Well, I hate to sound like a troll, but half of the population IS below average in terms of intelligence.....
Yeah, I just bought a Kinesis Ergonomic keyboard....it takes some getting used to.
First of all, some basic particle physics:
There are 6 kinds of quarks (in increasing mass):
up, down, strage, charm, bottom (beauty), and top (truth).
The last of which was experimentally verified only recently.
All matter is made up of combinations of quarks, usually either in pairs (mesons), or trios (baryons).
For example, protons are made up of two ups and one down; neutrons are made up of one up and two downs.
Strange quarks are named such because the particles that contain them are produced fast and decay slow (ie., they have very long lifetimes), which is very odd considering that they are much more massive (heavier things tend to decay faster).
Strangelets now, are an odd beast. They usually contain more than 2 or 3 quarks, and can contain quarks other than strange quarks.
One variety (the more common one) contains a large mixture of up and some down quarks along with the strange, and has a net positive charge.
These are quite safe as they will bond with a pair of electrons and act like an unusually heavy helium isotope.
One that is mostly strange will have a net negative charge, and (I don't quite understand the process) gobble up all the positively charged atomic nuclei that it encounters.
As a side note, strangelets are supposed to only occur in conditions of high pressure and (relatively) low temperature, like inside of a neutron star.
The article is discussing what can be patented.
Can the USPTO give a patent on a human embryo? (whatever that entains).
Certainly they have allowed patents on:
- genes
- DNA (a person's DNA)
Is a person patentable?
Can someone's be "owned" by private hands?
And then an extention on that -- can life be patentable?
They were not until GE took a case to the supreme court on an oil eating bacterium (and won).
However, I believe that anyone who does claim to be a writer has to follow some simple guidelines:
- Accuracy -- check your facts (Wolverine of X-Men fame has adamatine claws, and so does "drink with his buddies") before you write about them.
- Consistency -- Have your essay actually make one point. Don't seesaw back and forth on different topics hoping to stumble upon a point. It is like having a plot -- please actually have one!
- Integrity -- Say what you believe in. If Star Wars does better than Spider-Man, should we be expecting an article on how complex themes appeals to the mass audience more than "simple" story lines?
- Quality -- Don't make your 'editorials' your personal diary. At least don't make it read like your personal diary -- a meandering mess. Don't use buzz words like some clueless PHB. I'm sure some other
/. poster will have the "check list" (geek empowerment check, reference to hackers check, references to terrorism/Sept11 check, etc)
Perhaps you do some reading before you write next. May I suggest:Don't you know that we programmers start counting at number 0? :) ;)
Either that or China just conquered South Korea and claimed their country code.
On a different note, I'm surprised that Thailand beat China.
I wonder how accurate this is. They seem to be just doing a reverse lookup on IPs, many of which are probably faked.
Currently, LED lights are fairly directed (ie, they are not as good for filling a room).
So they won't necessarily replace the light bulb yet.
However, they are excellent replacements for flashlights, traffic lights, car lamps -- ie, any kind of directed light.
They are brighter, more efficient, and last longer than regular incandescent or fluorescent bulbs.
They do cost more though, but that might change with economies of scale.
Some links:
EETimes Article: White LEDs to overtake the light bulb, keynoter says
TechWEB Article: LED: The End Of the Light Bulb As We Know It?
A friend of mine who works for a Senator told me this:
Many, many bills are introduced that the introducers have no intention of passing. They are used for only one purpose -- to show to their constituents and say "See? I tried to prevent another Columbine from happening".
They know the bill is stupid. They also know it won't pass. But the attempt will look good at the next election.
The moral of the story? Don't get your underwear all twisted over this.
While the /. Editors can't spell, do simple searches for duplicates, or even real the articles they are posting, the errors in this /. snippet were not written by the editors! The words in italics are copied verbatim from the user post, and any words that are in normal font face are the editors annotations.
The page does not seem to exists on CNN anymore. At least I could not find it on CNN or via Google in a 5 min search.
I have a lot of small business clients who request recommendations on what laptops to buy. :)
They don't always take my recommendations of course.
From the service calls I get, I can safely say the following:
Get IBM or Toshiba -- they are rock solid, never any problems.
The Dells, Gateways (whatever you do, NEVER get a Gateway laptop), and Compaqs have many, many problems.
One possible problem is that they don't actually make their own laptops.
They all outsource them, and are mostly quite bad -- overheating, systems, crashing, the screen turning itself off at random times. One Dell laptop had its internal speaker go nuts every time it was docked with the docking station.
Note though that IBM and Toshiba laptops don't have a touchpad, which some people crave (but they break faster, and most decent people prefer the nub once they get used to it).
Sony laptops are fairly good, but tend to be overpriced.
Apple Powerbooks are quite nice too -- stable, long battery life, feature filled, if you can stand using a Mac, but hey, they run Linux too!
One thing is that if you run a M$ OS, run a NT derivative (NT4, 2000, XP) -- 98/ME has issues with power management, and may cause your laptop to hang when going to sleep mode and standby mode.
Back to Floppies we go....
arsDigita has great engineers, and pretty good technology (a few bugs, but mostly worked out now). The really bad part (and what drove aD into the ground) was bad management. As the only (AFAIK) profitable open source based company, Redhat should know a thing or two about running a business well. Hopefully they'll be able to restructure the aD assets and personnel, and really add to the community.
Plus, I know the buttons on my PDA will not stand the kind of abuse that gamepad do. Not to mention people jabbing at their screen with a stylus.
Hold on Johnny, we all know that space is not a vacuum. After all, if space were a vacuum, what would the elephants that hold up the world breath? Not to mentioni the giant space turtle.
Now I have to redo my decor to match the universe again! What am I supposed to do with all of this ugly turquoise green furniture?!!?!
It's called "stacking the deck".
Since Ghana does not have a 1st tier air connection, it is MUCH more difficult for "at large" users to attend (and complain). Only the current power holders (who can use ICANN funds to fly there) will go. Poor geeks who want to have a say, won't be.
hehe...someone apparently made a somewhat subtle hack to the article. On the first page, about 2/3rds down, in the paragraph starting with 'In Napster's heyday, pirated TV shows were a rarity on the Net. '. Read the last sentence in that paragraph. :)
I wonder if they will be able to see how antimatter interacts with the gravitational field. It has been theorized that antimatter will go "up" in a gravitational field, and not down. This was hard to prove previously since if you only had anti-protons or anti-electrons (positrons), the electic repulsion overrode any minute differences due to gravity...but with neutral anti-atoms, it might be possible to detect which way they go under gravity.