Using quantum entanglement, that may not be so far off. If it turns out information can be transmitted near-instantaneously, telepresence could become a reality.
Unfortunately, this won't work because communications [and encryption, for that matter] using quantum entanglements requires a classical channel and thus information transfer is still light-speed limited.
I don't care if he's brilliant, this guy's a legal liability and he needs an ultimatum: if you ever single out your female co-workers again, you're fired.
He may be good, but he's not worth a sexual-harassment lawsuit.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Each new release of OS X might, at best, be compared to a service pack.
No, the OSX equivalent to service packs are noted by changes to the minor version number (10.5.5 to 10.5.6 was the latest one — in Microsoft language, that would be 10.5SP6). Major releases (10.4 [Tiger] to 10.5 [Leopard]) involve significant changes to the API and introduce new features to the OS, as you can plainly see from Apple's web OSX page (Apple claims 300 new features added with the upgrade to Leopard; I can't verify the count, but I've found many of them to be very useful additions).
So yes, the shift from Vista to Windows.7 is comparable to one of Apple's major releases. That Windows upgrades leave a trail of wreckage has more to do with the general level of quality control [third-party's as well as Microsoft's] than the scale of the changes.
"His science has become his religion,..."
That makes no damn sense.
It makes perfect sense. Science has become Dawkins' "Higher Power," and he has become a religious fundamentalist in the worship of his own deity. Just because it's not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doesn't make it any less a religion.
And if you do pay the big bucks to a publisher for access to a scientific paper, there's no assurance that you'll be able to read it, unless you've spent your life learning to decipher them.
I know that this is a real shock to you humanities majors, but science is hard. And yes, for the record, I do have degrees in both [physics and philosophy, or will as of this May — and the physics was by far the harder of the two].
Here's another shocker. If you think the papers are hard to read, you should see the amount of work that went into processing the data until it's ready to be written up in an academic journal. Ol' Tom Edison wasn't joking when he said its "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." If you think seeing the raw data is going to magically make everything clear, well, I'm sorry, the real world just doesn't work that way. Finally, if you think professional scientists are going to trust random data they downloaded off the web of unknown provenance, well, I'm sorry but that isn't going to happen either. I spend enough time fixing my own problems; I certainly don't have time to waste fixing other peoples' data for them.
(4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
The term you're looking for is "controlled re-entry," and this is already done on a regular basis, when possible. The problem is, as we saw with the Russian satellite, you can't have a controlled re-entry once you've lost ground control (e.g., because of electrical or mechanical failures). For an out-of-control satellite, there is no simple solution.
I always assumed that when nations put stuff in space, they always included a way to make it de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, that would be a faulty assumption, especially when there's a technical failure and a satellite never makes it into a proper orbit.
If ground control can't talk to the satellite, it doesn't matter how much fuel you have on board; the only way to de-orbit then is to wait for atmospheric drag to pull down the satellite for you.
Now, it seems that "laying someone off" is exactly the same thing as "firing that lazy bastard." If we remove the political incorrectness of the latter, then, can ANYONE bloody tell me the difference between how these less-useful people were oh-so-gently laid off, and just fucking firing them?
Individuals get fired, entire divisions of companies get layoffs.
This was more true back in the Regan era (which I was also around for). Now, as you point out, it has displaced "fired" and the distinction between the corporate neutron bomb (your division is losing money because the VP is a moron, but that doesn't matter, we're shutting it down and letting go of all 200 of you) and the individual screw-up (you were sleeping with the boss's wife) has been lost.
In religion, truth is established by authority: the preacher or the bible or (fill in the blank) says it's true, therefor it's true.
In religion, truth also has a communal and experiential component - what has been the community's experience of the divine (this is true of non-Christian religions as well as Christianity).
This explains why some people are so enthusiastic about finding errors in religion. Logically, once the flaw is found, the authority is dethroned, and the whole religion should collapse.
And that's the flaw in your argument. It doesn't collapse first, because religion isn't based only on authority, and second, because logical arguments don't contradict people's personal experiences. It might force a re-interpretation of specific points (eg the age of the earth), but the age of the earth is religiously irrelevant and a 4.6 Gyr earth is not a threat to religion as a whole.
-JS
PS Ethics is not objectively possible without God. Just go to any university philosophy department and you'll see what I mean.
Actually, IIRC, the Pope made a declaration a while back that there's nothing biblical that bars the existence of extraterrestrial life.
It wasn't the pope, it was the director of the Vatican Observatory (although some newspapers mis-attributed it to the Pope).
The Catholic Church does not have an official position on extraterrestrial life.
One study simply said: "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes". The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this?
The earth is bombarded daily with cosmic rays literally billions of times more energetic than anything LHC will produce. There is nothing going on at LHC that hasn't been happening continuously in our upper atmosphere since the very formation of the earth.
In my book, that qualifies as "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes"!
It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.
That's up to Apple. There are really three basic possible scenarios:
Apple uses the patent to kill all possible competition. That will lock everyone else out until the patent is overturned or a non-infringing design becomes available.
Apple licenses the patent for a fee. This limits the field to just the big players, but would also have PR advantages for Apple and could help avoid some potential anti-trust lawsuits.
Apple treats this as a defensive patent — the point is not to lock others out but rather to make sure you control (own or license) all the relevant IP, so that someone else won't come along with a submarine patent and ask you for 15 years of back-royalties.
Which course of action Apple actually intends to pursue, only time will tell...
Technically it was the Church under the Pope that like burned Gallelio right?
Uhh, no.
Head you consulted Wikipedia before posting, you would have seen that Galileo died of natural causes. You're probably thinking of Giordano Bruno, but he was killed because of his theological views, not his scientific views.
What did happen is that
Galileo was convected by the Inquisition on a suspicion of heresy
(namely, holding heliocentric views even after they were declared contrary to Scripture). He was ordered to renounce his views (which he did) and was also ordered imprisoned (later reduced to house arrest) and his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was placed on the Index of forbidden books.
Of course, in hindsight, publicly ridiculing his then-supporter, Pope Urban VIII, in his Dialogue probably wasn't the best PR move Galileo could have made at that time either...
Before that Bush and Reagan had some of the same problem.
No, no, no. The Iran-Contra folks had the same problem that they "lost" their emails, but they soon discovered that the Whitehouse email system made automatic copies which could then be subpoenaed (and which proved to be politically embarrassing). That was the real Washington email problem, and you can be sure Bush-Cheney made sure it was fixed early on.
Hint: you will never have them all, and they will keep changing. But you have to stop at some point so you can move onto design, so when do we stop?
This is a solved problem in engineering. You write the contract so that if the customer [internal or external] changes the requirements it carries a financial penalty and allows you [the developer] to push back the release date. On the other side, if you discover a problem after you've shifted out of the design phase, then you are SOL and your company eats any associated cost. Contracts like these are motivation for both of you to get it right the first time.
It actually caused telegraph wires to short out across Europe and the Americas - some even caught on fire. If that happened now, it would cause global power outages, fried computer equipment (including the ones that control your fancy electronic car), and everything except for milsats in orbit could be knocked out.
Inductance is proportional to the length of the wire in the magnetic field.
Telegraph wires had problems in the 1800's because those big long wires can produce some impressive voltage surges. Modern electrical transmission lines have the same problem (although, being a well-known problem, there are circuit breakers and the like already installed to limit the potential damage).
Your car, on the other hand, will come through just fine — the wires are too short for the voltage surges to amount to anything. Same goes for any other [terrestrial] electronics not actually connected to the power grid or other similar long wires.
Or people who want to see dark skies could just drive for a couple hours and leave the rest of us alone.
You can see city glow for literally over 100 miles. Where, pray tell, on the east coast (where I live) can I drive "a couple hours" and be 150 miles from the nearest town, city, or lighted interstate?
That's the whole point — there is virtually no where in the continental United States left that has truly dark skies anymore. And the sad part is, we could get them back at low cost, but its not expedient.
Start with Fortran. After all, you can write bad Fortran code in any language!
The GNU compiler suite includes a compiler (gfortran) that supports F90/F95 as well as the older F77 that everyone loves to hate (even though most everyone who screams about it has never actually strong used it, and F90 is far nicer and more modern language than F66. Computed GOTO's are still fun though...). Furthermore, with the OpenMP extensions that gfortran includes, you'll be running parallel code in no time, and OpenMP actually works now with multi-core CPU's, unlike those functional-language evangelists' favorite languages...
The advantage is you get rid of your NAT. You can for example use it to access your computer remotly with ssh or file sharing, or get IP telephone provided separately from your ISP.
It's a bit tougher when your NAT and your cable modem are the same physical device (thanks Bell Canada!).
Anyway, does anyone have any sources as to know the other "big" OS's (MS Windows, Mac OS, the BSD's etc.) were able to speak IPv6 (if they are able to at all?)?
Mac OSX has IPv6 enabled by default. If only my NAT did...
I know you said you don't want an undergraduate text, but as a physicist (BS+PhD), trust me, you do want an undergraduate text. The textbooks used in introductory classes (100-series, or equivalent) won't go beyond basic Calculus, because the students haven't had time to learn anything more, and even the intermediate classes (200-series) won't go past ordinary differential equations. Also, looking at the topics you mentioned (heat equation, wave equation, etc), I think what you want is not just a physics textbook, but specifically a mechanics textbook, since that's where these topics are normally covered.
So why do I say you want an intro text? Because you already know the mathematics; what you're trying to learn are the basic concepts of classical mechanics. These are what you'll find in an introductory textbook. More advanced book, on the other hand, will assume you already the difference between a force, an energy, and a momentum, and therefore they don't bother explaining it; they'll instead move on to more sophisticated treatments of the subject building on the student's previous exposure (variational methods, field theory, and the like).
My advice, then, is to go to the university library and check out a random introductory textbook. "Halliday and Resnick" [those are authors, not the title] was the standard intro text when I was a student, and it's a good choice. "Marion" and "Webster" are even older (and a bit more advanced) but they would also be good choices. Anything with the title "Intro to Mechanics" is probably a second-year book, but you might luck out and find something you like there too. "Landau and Lifschitz" is good too, but the series is probably too advanced to just pick up and read. Also, I would avoid the Feynman lectures at all costs -- they're great after you know the subject but piss-poor if you're trying to actually learn physics from them.
If you're bound and determined to use a graduate level text, then Goldstein's Classical Mechanics and Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics would be the standard graduate-level textbooks and will find plenty of partial differential equations in either one.
So why does your fruit need to be picked by illegal immigrants? Why not just have it picked by immigrants on a temporary work visa?
Because the number of temporary work visas available is vastly smaller than the number of migrant fruit pickers the agricultural industry needs. That, and US residents arent' willing to do back-breaking work and then travel all over the country following the crops just to make minimum wage (or worse).
You have yet to provide any evidence of "gestapo methodologies."
[...]
The more hurdles you put in place, the harder it is for the smuggling to go on. [...] Two checkpoints beats the one static "at the border" checkpoint.
In Rochester, NY, they've started stopping every bus to or from Buffalo (which, being the next stop on down the highway, is virtually every bus) and checking drivers license and immigration papers. I know, because I've been stopped too, traveling back to Boston. Coming from New England, though, I-90 is the only highway to take to get to places like Cleveland and Chicago, so the majority of the people they're stopped in Rochester are not planning on crossing the US border.
Furthermore, this is not a drug/smuggling search. The Border Patrol's orders seem to be to find illegal Mexicans (up here, mostly migrant fruit pickers) and Chinese students with visa irregularities. Asians and Hispanics get grilled; Caucasians and African-Americans, on the other hand, they barely look at. This is an illegal infringement on our constitution right of free travel under the pretense of finding undocumented workers! Naturally, the people who hire the illegals, even when caught red-handed, never get prosecuted.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this won't work because communications [and encryption, for that matter] using quantum entanglements requires a classical channel and thus information transfer is still light-speed limited.
-JS
I don't care if he's brilliant, this guy's a legal liability and he needs an ultimatum: if you ever single out your female co-workers again, you're fired.
He may be good, but he's not worth a sexual-harassment lawsuit.
-JS
No, the OSX equivalent to service packs are noted by changes to the minor version number (10.5.5 to 10.5.6 was the latest one — in Microsoft language, that would be 10.5SP6). Major releases (10.4 [Tiger] to 10.5 [Leopard]) involve significant changes to the API and introduce new features to the OS, as you can plainly see from Apple's web OSX page (Apple claims 300 new features added with the upgrade to Leopard; I can't verify the count, but I've found many of them to be very useful additions).
So yes, the shift from Vista to Windows.7 is comparable to one of Apple's major releases. That Windows upgrades leave a trail of wreckage has more to do with the general level of quality control [third-party's as well as Microsoft's] than the scale of the changes.
-JS
These are the same thing as far as I can see. Atheism is not a lack of belief, it's just a belief in a lack.
-JS
It makes perfect sense. Science has become Dawkins' "Higher Power," and he has become a religious fundamentalist in the worship of his own deity. Just because it's not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doesn't make it any less a religion.
-JS
I know that this is a real shock to you humanities majors, but science is hard. And yes, for the record, I do have degrees in both [physics and philosophy, or will as of this May — and the physics was by far the harder of the two].
Here's another shocker. If you think the papers are hard to read, you should see the amount of work that went into processing the data until it's ready to be written up in an academic journal. Ol' Tom Edison wasn't joking when he said its "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." If you think seeing the raw data is going to magically make everything clear, well, I'm sorry, the real world just doesn't work that way. Finally, if you think professional scientists are going to trust random data they downloaded off the web of unknown provenance, well, I'm sorry but that isn't going to happen either. I spend enough time fixing my own problems; I certainly don't have time to waste fixing other peoples' data for them.
-JS
The term you're looking for is "controlled re-entry," and this is already done on a regular basis, when possible. The problem is, as we saw with the Russian satellite, you can't have a controlled re-entry once you've lost ground control (e.g., because of electrical or mechanical failures). For an out-of-control satellite, there is no simple solution.
-JS
Unfortunately, that would be a faulty assumption, especially when there's a technical failure and a satellite never makes it into a proper orbit. If ground control can't talk to the satellite, it doesn't matter how much fuel you have on board; the only way to de-orbit then is to wait for atmospheric drag to pull down the satellite for you.
-JS
Individuals get fired, entire divisions of companies get layoffs.
This was more true back in the Regan era (which I was also around for). Now, as you point out, it has displaced "fired" and the distinction between the corporate neutron bomb (your division is losing money because the VP is a moron, but that doesn't matter, we're shutting it down and letting go of all 200 of you) and the individual screw-up (you were sleeping with the boss's wife) has been lost.
-JS
In religion, truth also has a communal and experiential component - what has been the community's experience of the divine (this is true of non-Christian religions as well as Christianity).
And that's the flaw in your argument. It doesn't collapse first, because religion isn't based only on authority, and second, because logical arguments don't contradict people's personal experiences. It might force a re-interpretation of specific points (eg the age of the earth), but the age of the earth is religiously irrelevant and a 4.6 Gyr earth is not a threat to religion as a whole.
-JS
PS Ethics is not objectively possible without God. Just go to any university philosophy department and you'll see what I mean.
It wasn't the pope, it was the director of the Vatican Observatory (although some newspapers mis-attributed it to the Pope). The Catholic Church does not have an official position on extraterrestrial life.
-JS
The earth is bombarded daily with cosmic rays literally billions of times more energetic than anything LHC will produce. There is nothing going on at LHC that hasn't been happening continuously in our upper atmosphere since the very formation of the earth.
In my book, that qualifies as "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes"!
-JS
That's up to Apple. There are really three basic possible scenarios:
Which course of action Apple actually intends to pursue, only time will tell...
-JS
Uhh, no.
Head you consulted Wikipedia before posting, you would have seen that Galileo died of natural causes. You're probably thinking of Giordano Bruno, but he was killed because of his theological views, not his scientific views.
What did happen is that Galileo was convected by the Inquisition on a suspicion of heresy (namely, holding heliocentric views even after they were declared contrary to Scripture). He was ordered to renounce his views (which he did) and was also ordered imprisoned (later reduced to house arrest) and his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was placed on the Index of forbidden books.
Of course, in hindsight, publicly ridiculing his then-supporter, Pope Urban VIII, in his Dialogue probably wasn't the best PR move Galileo could have made at that time either...
-JS
No, no, no. The Iran-Contra folks had the same problem that they "lost" their emails, but they soon discovered that the Whitehouse email system made automatic copies which could then be subpoenaed (and which proved to be politically embarrassing). That was the real Washington email problem, and you can be sure Bush-Cheney made sure it was fixed early on.
-JS
This is a solved problem in engineering. You write the contract so that if the customer [internal or external] changes the requirements it carries a financial penalty and allows you [the developer] to push back the release date. On the other side, if you discover a problem after you've shifted out of the design phase, then you are SOL and your company eats any associated cost. Contracts like these are motivation for both of you to get it right the first time.
-JS
Inductance is proportional to the length of the wire in the magnetic field.
Telegraph wires had problems in the 1800's because those big long wires can produce some impressive voltage surges. Modern electrical transmission lines have the same problem (although, being a well-known problem, there are circuit breakers and the like already installed to limit the potential damage).
Your car, on the other hand, will come through just fine — the wires are too short for the voltage surges to amount to anything. Same goes for any other [terrestrial] electronics not actually connected to the power grid or other similar long wires.
-JS
You can see city glow for literally over 100 miles. Where, pray tell, on the east coast (where I live) can I drive "a couple hours" and be 150 miles from the nearest town, city, or lighted interstate?
That's the whole point — there is virtually no where in the continental United States left that has truly dark skies anymore. And the sad part is, we could get them back at low cost, but its not expedient.
-JS
Start with Fortran. After all, you can write bad Fortran code in any language!
The GNU compiler suite includes a compiler (gfortran) that supports F90/F95 as well as the older F77 that everyone loves to hate (even though most everyone who screams about it has never actually strong used it, and F90 is far nicer and more modern language than F66. Computed GOTO's are still fun though...). Furthermore, with the OpenMP extensions that gfortran includes, you'll be running parallel code in no time, and OpenMP actually works now with multi-core CPU's, unlike those functional-language evangelists' favorite languages...
-JS
It's a bit tougher when your NAT and your cable modem are the same physical device (thanks Bell Canada!).
-JS
Mac OSX has IPv6 enabled by default. If only my NAT did...
-JS
I know you said you don't want an undergraduate text, but as a physicist (BS+PhD), trust me, you do want an undergraduate text. The textbooks used in introductory classes (100-series, or equivalent) won't go beyond basic Calculus, because the students haven't had time to learn anything more, and even the intermediate classes (200-series) won't go past ordinary differential equations. Also, looking at the topics you mentioned (heat equation, wave equation, etc), I think what you want is not just a physics textbook, but specifically a mechanics textbook, since that's where these topics are normally covered.
So why do I say you want an intro text? Because you already know the mathematics; what you're trying to learn are the basic concepts of classical mechanics. These are what you'll find in an introductory textbook. More advanced book, on the other hand, will assume you already the difference between a force, an energy, and a momentum, and therefore they don't bother explaining it; they'll instead move on to more sophisticated treatments of the subject building on the student's previous exposure (variational methods, field theory, and the like).
My advice, then, is to go to the university library and check out a random introductory textbook. "Halliday and Resnick" [those are authors, not the title] was the standard intro text when I was a student, and it's a good choice. "Marion" and "Webster" are even older (and a bit more advanced) but they would also be good choices. Anything with the title "Intro to Mechanics" is probably a second-year book, but you might luck out and find something you like there too. "Landau and Lifschitz" is good too, but the series is probably too advanced to just pick up and read. Also, I would avoid the Feynman lectures at all costs -- they're great after you know the subject but piss-poor if you're trying to actually learn physics from them.
If you're bound and determined to use a graduate level text, then Goldstein's Classical Mechanics and Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics would be the standard graduate-level textbooks and will find plenty of partial differential equations in either one.
-JS
That applies only to religions that insist that their mythical stories be taken as fact. Not all religions do that.
Most Christians, for example, do not insist on a literal 6-day creation either.
-JS
Because the number of temporary work visas available is vastly smaller than the number of migrant fruit pickers the agricultural industry needs. That, and US residents arent' willing to do back-breaking work and then travel all over the country following the crops just to make minimum wage (or worse).
In Rochester, NY, they've started stopping every bus to or from Buffalo (which, being the next stop on down the highway, is virtually every bus) and checking drivers license and immigration papers. I know, because I've been stopped too, traveling back to Boston. Coming from New England, though, I-90 is the only highway to take to get to places like Cleveland and Chicago, so the majority of the people they're stopped in Rochester are not planning on crossing the US border.
Furthermore, this is not a drug/smuggling search. The Border Patrol's orders seem to be to find illegal Mexicans (up here, mostly migrant fruit pickers) and Chinese students with visa irregularities. Asians and Hispanics get grilled; Caucasians and African-Americans, on the other hand, they barely look at. This is an illegal infringement on our constitution right of free travel under the pretense of finding undocumented workers! Naturally, the people who hire the illegals, even when caught red-handed, never get prosecuted.