The theorem is about some important property of this equetion/operator could be derived only form topology of the curved space and some highed degree coefficients of the equation. Basically how underlying topology of the space influence this equation. It's told this theorem very important for physics, especially particle physics, which deal a lot with differential operators on the curved spaces...
So I guess they're saying that, despite decades-- nay, CENTURIES-- of mathematicians striving to keep their feet firmly planted in the air, mathematics actually does apply to reality, but only the part of reality that's very small and theoretical.
What atiyah and singer found is that there is a deep connection between the Index of the analytic operators on a smooth compact complex manifold without boundary and its topological invariants.
*WHOOOSH!*
There it goes again. What IS that thing?
No doubt. I read that blurb three times, and every time I heard this *WHOOOSH!* sound right above my head. This story gets a "+1 - Inscrutable" rating from me.
You could always get a Twiddler, one of these one-handed keyboards, or one of these.
Ugh. You can keep the twiddler. I tried one of those for a while. It was an older Twiddler 1, awhich is a slight bit less ergonomic than the Twiddler 2, but they haven't fixed the real problem. Try it yourself: put your hand in this position for a few seconds and you feel your whole forearm start to freeze up. It's great as a one handed, no desktop keyboard, but it's an RSI waiting to happen. That Frogpad thing looks interesting though...
This is very fitting timing, and a reminder, to the Three Mile Island accident which happened 25 years ago on March 28. We were extremely close to experiencing a total catsrophe, but avoided it narrowly mostly due to luck.
Luck? TMI not being a catastrophe wasn't due to luck. It was Due to adequate containment vessel design. Whay do you call adequate engineering "luck"?
The type of WWII war where massive civilian casualties are accepted so long as you kill lots of enemy combatants are long gone.
I wish that were true. But in each of the 2 Iraq wars the US has prosecuted, more civilian noncombatants were killed by a single poorly-considered American shot than the total number of US deaths.
What he says is true. Your counter argument citing the ratio of civilian to US combatant casualties has more to do with the effictiveness of US body armor, better intelligence, better equipment, and better field medicine than anything else. The original poster's argument still stands. The firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden would never be allowed to happen these days.
Ironically, if the US forces tightened up their ROE, they'd save not only civilian lives, but their own (since rate of fratricide keeps on going up in each "major combat")
The fratricide problem is nothing new. It's been a fact of war since the first time man first fielded long-range projectile weapons. What makes it stand out in sharp relief nowadays is that fratricide deaths are no longer obscured by deaths due to enemy action. In the past, it was often difficult to tell who was killed by what. Now, when the enemy is no longer an effective threat, the number of friendly fire deaths inherent to warfare becomes more apparent.
Then if the plane did crash or get captured, they would still have the data they were looking for. Cheap and disposable would be the best solution for these micro planes.
Then the problem isn't cost, but weight and bulk. How many of these 13" disposable aircraft do you expect a soldier to carry?
I've seen this "feature" extolled before in reference to fixed-wing drones, and I have the same question now that I had then: Have they ever tried to fly a remote control airplane indoors? Why the hell would anyone ever fly one of these through a window? You can't buzz around near the ceiling in there-- all you can do is crash and lose your fancy plane. Sure, that'd be useful if it were a bomb, but it's a spy plane.
It's the first aircraft ever to have this capability, dubbed "supercruise"
Before some wiseguy points out that the Concorde cruised above mach 1 without afterburners, the difference is that the Concorde needed afterburners to GET above mach 1. The F-22 does not.
So privacy is a nice idea, but unfortunately, that is all that it is.
Our government is out of control in more ways than one.
Yeah, I agree. The rights of man are a noble idea, but adherence to the noble ideal has been eroded continuously since the beginning, and even then it was on shaky ground because, among other things, "man" essentially meant "property owning male non-slave".
Almost as interesting as the X programs is the B-52 mothership that launches them. There was an Air & Space article years ago (no online version at airspacemag.com) about it.
It's an aging early-model B-52B, evidenced by the non-pointy nose and is 49 years old.
Here's a picture of the old B-52B (foreground) and their new B-52H (background) from the "50th Anniversary of the B-52" event a couple years ago. I personally like the old-fashioned 1950's "Right Stuff" look of the older one more than the hospital-white new one.
You want an 11-year old going to images.google.com and typing in this new word 'lesbian'...?
Actually, I tried it myself and I think it'd be educational for an 11 year old. If nothing else, they'd get a sense for the difference between "porn lesbian" and "real lesbian". I agree though, school is probably not the appropriate place for this.
Yes it is. As the other poster noted, see Roe v. Wade and the 9th Amendment. The ninth essentially says that just because a right didn't come up specifically in the founding fathers Top Ten List doesn't me it doesn't exist. It is important to remember that our right do not come from the Constitution, they are only protected by it. Rights are intrinsic to our existence as human beings. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence says it pretty well: (emphasis mine)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
In fact, right now, I'm smoking a "paleolithic" pipe I made out of, and with, only things I found in the parking lot next to my house...you'd have to be a complete idiot to do it one of the ways... I mean dumber than that that Butthead who lives next door to me.
Heh. The butthead kids that live next door to me come up with some of the most ingenuous contraptions for smoking pot. Those kids can randomly pull three pieces of garbage out of the can and turn it into a dang pipe. Of course, once they're done they throw it in the bushes next to my driveway, so I get to examine their handywork. Just goes to show how even the most mutton-headed mook is still capable of amazing craftiness.
No one said that the US is or is not a republic, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that issue up. He claimed that it is a democracy, which is obviously true.
The implication of the original poster was that we, the people, have direct control over government. I was pointing out that this is only true in a direct democracy, and we have a representative repulic.
The point of the observation is that the original poster implied that government can do anything it wants (including forming arbitrary utility monopolies), so long as 51% of the people vote for it. The nature of our constitutional republic is such that this is not the case, as evidenced by the court decision.
For purposes of my comment, I used "democracy" to mean "direct democracy" just as did the statement by the original poster. Notice I did mention that our republic is based on democratic elections. My apologies for not being more specific.
A democracy and a republic are not mutually exclusive. In fact, a republic requires democracy to exist. Shit, I never took even a simple civics course after I got out of high school and I understand that. What the hell is wrong with you people?
The original comment of "it's a democracy-- whatever the people vote, goes" describes a direct democracy rather than the representative republic. I was merely pointing out that we have the latter form of government and the way THAT works is "whatever the popularly elected representatives vote, goes". My apologies for saying "democracy" when I meant "direct democracy".
I remember a case in Roswell (or was it Alpharetta), GA where a car (Lexus?) dealership huffed and puffed and blew down the wishes of the people who wanted to keep the area as a nature preserve. That community lost the battle to the car dealership. Not related to telco, but none the less, an erosion of community rights, not to mention common sense.
Common sense says that if the community wanted a nature preserve there, they should have purchased the property and made it one. Running to the government to bar development of private property after the fact* is not a community rights issue. The community has no right to selectively and arbitrarily prohibit development based on its whims and fancies.
* the property was likely previously purchased based on its suitability for building and it zoning
The government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
Actually, the US is a representative republic. We elect people to public office who, in theory, do what best serves the needs of the citizenry as enumerated by the constitution. The idea of a rep. republic is to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Majority rule is not some gloriously perfect ideal. We have democratic election, but we do not have a democracy.
While I agree that the LADWP managed to avoid the California power debacle, this has less to do with the primary fact that it's a city-run utility, but rather the secondary effect that it was exempted from the semi-deregulation scam that the private utilities were sunk by. Under the earlier regulated scheme, LADWP was hardly the model of efficiency. I've lived in the Los Angeles area for most of my life, and my electric bills were cheaper and my service more reliable living in areas served by PG&E and SoCal Edison, at least back under regulation.
Of course, I do have a bit of a bias against LADWP at present, as I live next door to a DWP substation and those bastards stand outside my bedroom window throwing metal struts and bus-bars into the back of their trucks at 5am.:)
Thats assuming noone would be smart enough to equip the *trucks* and *warehouses* with GPS antennas
Trucks are already tracked via GPS, yes. Warehouses though? They don't move. They don't need to be tracked. In either case, this has no bearing on the suggestion that the RFID tags themselves be GPS equipped, which is the premise of the original argument. Or are you talking about broadcasting a localized GPS signal for the RFID tags to receive? That's not feasible.
and build a controller that keeps track of RFIDs within its sphere of influence.
Then you could track RFIDs via gps.
No, then you're tracking RFIDs with a "controller" (whatever THAT might be). The original poster was suggesting the inclusion of GPS receivers in RFID tags. If you are suggesting something else, well, then that's something else.
People need to stop suggesting things are infeasable without actually considering them.
People need to understand what we're talking about if they want to be taken seriously. You have not coherently outlined a method for making GPS-enabled RFID tags workable, which is the subject of the discussion.
I see. So the space program is "welfare for engineers."
Essentially, everything the government spends money on can be considered, to some degree, "welfare for (X)". As far as the space program goes, it's not too bad a "welfare" program. The engineers and scientists it employs can at least be made to do work that advances human knowledge. My preference would be to not paythe tax money in the first place, but if they are going to take it I'd rather it was spent on something that produces something, unlike (say) those programs that pay giant corporate farms not to grow wheat.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess they're saying that, despite decades-- nay, CENTURIES-- of mathematicians striving to keep their feet firmly planted in the air, mathematics actually does apply to reality, but only the part of reality that's very small and theoretical.
HAN: But who's going to fly it, kid! You?
LUKE: You bet I could. I'm not such a bad wireless network architect myself!
*WHOOOSH!*
There it goes again. What IS that thing?
No doubt. I read that blurb three times, and every time I heard this *WHOOOSH!* sound right above my head. This story gets a "+1 - Inscrutable" rating from me.
Ugh. You can keep the twiddler. I tried one of those for a while. It was an older Twiddler 1, awhich is a slight bit less ergonomic than the Twiddler 2, but they haven't fixed the real problem. Try it yourself: put your hand in this position for a few seconds and you feel your whole forearm start to freeze up. It's great as a one handed, no desktop keyboard, but it's an RSI waiting to happen. That Frogpad thing looks interesting though...
Luck? TMI not being a catastrophe wasn't due to luck. It was Due to adequate containment vessel design. Whay do you call adequate engineering "luck"?
I wish that were true. But in each of the 2 Iraq wars the US has prosecuted, more civilian noncombatants were killed by a single poorly-considered American shot than the total number of US deaths.
What he says is true. Your counter argument citing the ratio of civilian to US combatant casualties has more to do with the effictiveness of US body armor, better intelligence, better equipment, and better field medicine than anything else. The original poster's argument still stands. The firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden would never be allowed to happen these days.
Ironically, if the US forces tightened up their ROE, they'd save not only civilian lives, but their own (since rate of fratricide keeps on going up in each "major combat")
The fratricide problem is nothing new. It's been a fact of war since the first time man first fielded long-range projectile weapons. What makes it stand out in sharp relief nowadays is that fratricide deaths are no longer obscured by deaths due to enemy action. In the past, it was often difficult to tell who was killed by what. Now, when the enemy is no longer an effective threat, the number of friendly fire deaths inherent to warfare becomes more apparent.
Funnier when no innocents are hurt.
Doonesbury is supposed to be funny?
I think Gary Trudeau ran out of good jokes in 1973. Even my ultra-left, former communist wife thinks Doonesbury is smug middle-class liberal tripe.
Then the problem isn't cost, but weight and bulk. How many of these 13" disposable aircraft do you expect a soldier to carry?
I've seen this "feature" extolled before in reference to fixed-wing drones, and I have the same question now that I had then: Have they ever tried to fly a remote control airplane indoors? Why the hell would anyone ever fly one of these through a window? You can't buzz around near the ceiling in there-- all you can do is crash and lose your fancy plane. Sure, that'd be useful if it were a bomb, but it's a spy plane.
Before some wiseguy points out that the Concorde cruised above mach 1 without afterburners, the difference is that the Concorde needed afterburners to GET above mach 1. The F-22 does not.
Our government is out of control in more ways than one.
Yeah, I agree. The rights of man are a noble idea, but adherence to the noble ideal has been eroded continuously since the beginning, and even then it was on shaky ground because, among other things, "man" essentially meant "property owning male non-slave".
Here's a picture of the old B-52B (foreground) and their new B-52H (background) from the "50th Anniversary of the B-52" event a couple years ago. I personally like the old-fashioned 1950's "Right Stuff" look of the older one more than the hospital-white new one.
Wow. Lot's more NASA B-52 pics
No, I mean the court decision that municipalities must obey state laws forbidding them to form city-run telcos. Where did that come from?
Actually, I tried it myself and I think it'd be educational for an 11 year old. If nothing else, they'd get a sense for the difference between "porn lesbian" and "real lesbian". I agree though, school is probably not the appropriate place for this.
Yes it is. As the other poster noted, see Roe v. Wade and the 9th Amendment. The ninth essentially says that just because a right didn't come up specifically in the founding fathers Top Ten List doesn't me it doesn't exist. It is important to remember that our right do not come from the Constitution, they are only protected by it. Rights are intrinsic to our existence as human beings. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence says it pretty well: (emphasis mine)
Heh. The butthead kids that live next door to me come up with some of the most ingenuous contraptions for smoking pot. Those kids can randomly pull three pieces of garbage out of the can and turn it into a dang pipe. Of course, once they're done they throw it in the bushes next to my driveway, so I get to examine their handywork. Just goes to show how even the most mutton-headed mook is still capable of amazing craftiness.
The implication of the original poster was that we, the people, have direct control over government. I was pointing out that this is only true in a direct democracy, and we have a representative repulic.
The point of the observation is that the original poster implied that government can do anything it wants (including forming arbitrary utility monopolies), so long as 51% of the people vote for it. The nature of our constitutional republic is such that this is not the case, as evidenced by the court decision.
For purposes of my comment, I used "democracy" to mean "direct democracy" just as did the statement by the original poster. Notice I did mention that our republic is based on democratic elections. My apologies for not being more specific.
The original comment of "it's a democracy-- whatever the people vote, goes" describes a direct democracy rather than the representative republic. I was merely pointing out that we have the latter form of government and the way THAT works is "whatever the popularly elected representatives vote, goes". My apologies for saying "democracy" when I meant "direct democracy".
I know it's only a typo, but it's still very funny.
Common sense says that if the community wanted a nature preserve there, they should have purchased the property and made it one. Running to the government to bar development of private property after the fact* is not a community rights issue. The community has no right to selectively and arbitrarily prohibit development based on its whims and fancies.
* the property was likely previously purchased based on its suitability for building and it zoning
The government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
Actually, the US is a representative republic. We elect people to public office who, in theory, do what best serves the needs of the citizenry as enumerated by the constitution. The idea of a rep. republic is to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Majority rule is not some gloriously perfect ideal. We have democratic election, but we do not have a democracy.
While I agree that the LADWP managed to avoid the California power debacle, this has less to do with the primary fact that it's a city-run utility, but rather the secondary effect that it was exempted from the semi-deregulation scam that the private utilities were sunk by. Under the earlier regulated scheme, LADWP was hardly the model of efficiency. I've lived in the Los Angeles area for most of my life, and my electric bills were cheaper and my service more reliable living in areas served by PG&E and SoCal Edison, at least back under regulation.
Of course, I do have a bit of a bias against LADWP at present, as I live next door to a DWP substation and those bastards stand outside my bedroom window throwing metal struts and bus-bars into the back of their trucks at 5am. :)
Trucks are already tracked via GPS, yes. Warehouses though? They don't move. They don't need to be tracked. In either case, this has no bearing on the suggestion that the RFID tags themselves be GPS equipped, which is the premise of the original argument. Or are you talking about broadcasting a localized GPS signal for the RFID tags to receive? That's not feasible.
and build a controller that keeps track of RFIDs within its sphere of influence.
Then you could track RFIDs via gps.
No, then you're tracking RFIDs with a "controller" (whatever THAT might be). The original poster was suggesting the inclusion of GPS receivers in RFID tags. If you are suggesting something else, well, then that's something else.
People need to stop suggesting things are infeasable without actually considering them.
People need to understand what we're talking about if they want to be taken seriously. You have not coherently outlined a method for making GPS-enabled RFID tags workable, which is the subject of the discussion.
Essentially, everything the government spends money on can be considered, to some degree, "welfare for (X)". As far as the space program goes, it's not too bad a "welfare" program. The engineers and scientists it employs can at least be made to do work that advances human knowledge. My preference would be to not paythe tax money in the first place, but if they are going to take it I'd rather it was spent on something that produces something, unlike (say) those programs that pay giant corporate farms not to grow wheat.