I'm a big fan of a well-funded military. Aside from the importance in providing safety and stability against outside intrusion, for better or worse, the power of the US military plays a huge role in the US's world strength: the US would never be able to sustain it's economic and political position if it did not have the most powerful military in the world, and achieving that requires massive funding. In addition, if that funding is properly spent, it goes back into the US economy, boosting the R&D and manufacturing capabilities, and can attract foreign trade as well (in the form of sale of military hardware).
That said, there are three major caveats. The first is proper spending. The F-35? Yeah, not only are we wasting massive amounts of money on a unified platform that doesn't work as well for any job as a dedicated one, the cost and time overruns means more and more potential buyers are switching to the Eurofighter or similar. The problem isn't that the military doesn't have enough money: it's that it isn't being spent properly. Instead of being spent in the best interest of the US, it's spent in the best interest of the politicians who use it as political capital, and in the best interests of the corporations who support them.
The second caveat is that the US military isn't just well-funded, it's vastly overfunded. A well-funded military is a solid bulwark necessary for the US and it's interests. An overfunded military is a waste of money and, if anything, ends up leading to a weaker military (since money ends up being poured into pork instead of into providing what the military actually needs).
Finally, again for better or worse, a well-funded NASA is more or less just as necessary to the long-term military interests of the US as the actual military is. Space is the next major frontier for warfare, and whether there is an open war on earth, or just proxy wars and scrabbles over the resources of space, without a well-funded and developed space program the US is going to be at a massive military disadvantage in 20-50 years (or sooner).
Apparently, I had to look into the forum posts that the FA referenced, and FMA instructions are Fused Multiply Add, whatever the fuck that is.
After looking at Wikipedia for 5 seconds, FMA instructions perform round(a+b*c) in a single operation, so you can a) speed up and b) get more accurate results whenever you need such a mathematical operation (which is actually reasonably frequently, in numerical computing).
Yes. By construction, straight lines on a Mercator map have constant bearing towards magnetic north. That means if you take out your compass, face a given angle with respect to north, and follow it, you make a straight line on the Mercator map. That's extremely useful, probably one of the most useful properties a map can have for navigational purposes (unless you're really really good at doing some rather complicated coordinate transformations).
So I would expect there to be a time-corollary of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle [wikipedia.org].
There is, but it's probably not what you're thinking of. Technically speaking, the Heisenberg uncertainty pair applies to any two pairs of non-commutating quantum variables (or, depending on how you look at it, any two Fourier partners). Position and momentum happen to be one such pair. Another is time and energy. What that means, however, is that the energy of a particle in an unstable state (i.e. a state that can spontaneously decay into a lower energy state) is not perfectly well-defined, and the variance in energy is inversely proportional to the average decay time. In other words, the faster a particle (or state) decays, the wider the range of energies that particle/state is allowed to have, so that only long-lived states of physical systems have well-defined energies (by "long lived" I mean something like microseconds or even nanoseconds, which is long by quantum standards).
In the case of time measurements, this would generally mean the energy of our clock becomes less well defined as we make more and more precise measurements of the time. That's not really a problem, though: we just have to be greater that 1/2 h_bar, which is ~3e-16 eV*s. That means if the uncertainty in our time is 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000 (modern atomic clocks are very roughly in that range), we have an uncertainty of about 1 eV in the energy of our state. That's decently large (in terms of atomic scale physics), but pretty negligible in terms of everything else (nuclear physics involves energies a million times greater than that).
It's amusing that you consider this "relegated to a second-hand internet user". If Google can't track you, they can't use said tracking to verify that you're a human. Of course that means you have to do more work to prove you are a human. If you deliberately choose to opt out of a feature of the internet that makes your life more convenient for the sake of privacy, your internet usage is going to be less convenient. This isn't the only area where that happens (for instance, if you don't want credit card companies tracking your purchases, you have to use cash, which is less convenient). This isn't difficult, and let's be honest, it's also not a big deal (these reCaptchas take like 30 seconds maybe every couple of days). Privacy and convenience are, and always have been, a tradeoff.
Manned exploration of the Moon is honestly kinda pointless. It's close enough that signal delay isn't an issue for robots, and that's one of, maybe even the *only*, advantage humans have over robots for exploration. Robots are cheaper, simpler, lighter, less fragile, easier to handle, and less likely to malfunction. Even in the 60s manned Moon missions were as much a pissing match between the US and USSR as they were a valid scientific goal. Now, if they send people to the Moon and keep them there for extended periods of time (weeks to months), I'll be impressed, and cheering them on the whole way. Long-term manned space travel, with the eventual goal of colonization, is a practically necessary step forwards in human development. Mars has some attractive aspects over the Moon, but colonization of it is well outside our capability in the near future. But we could have a long-term lunar scientific colony operating right now, if we really wanted to, and it's almost an embarrassment to mankind that we don't, nearly 50 years after Apollo 11.
Oh good lord, I missed that story. Slashdot linking to fucking Buzzfeed? Are you fucking serious? Anyways, that story doesn't show anything of the sort. You know why? Because even if all those tweets are real (and I wouldn't put it past Buzzfeed to make them up, or pay people to write them), and even if they're all serious (which they're probably not), a handful of tweets still doesn't mean anything about anything.
It's weird how Wikileaks was "just trying to get the information out there" and "serving the people" when they leaked information critical of a Republican, but now they're leaking information critical of Democrats, they're a "highly political organization" that's carefully timing their leaks. Or did you forget how Wikileaks came into being? When they leaked information about the Bush administration? I swear, it's like people on the Internet have the memory of a goldfish.
Since people are going to inevitably make the accusations: I'm not a Republican, not a Trump supporter, and also not a Democrat, and not a Clinton supporter. Also not an Assange supporter (he's a jackass who's just claiming the US is going to extradite him to avoid facing the charges and to keep himself in the limelight), though WikiLeaks itself frequently serves a useful and necessary purpose. I just think people are so blinded by partisanship they can't see that both sides of the political aisle in the US are corrupt, self-serving corporate sellouts who need to be replaced.
Did you literally not even read the first sentence of the damned summary? UC Berkeley is removing the content because the federal government requires any content they provide to be handicap accessible. Since it'd cost a prohibitive amount to make this content accessible, instead of keeping it up (which benefits 99% of the world) they're removing it because that 1% (or less) might have trouble accessing it. In other words, instead of content that was available to 99% of people, now it's available to 0% of people. In other words, instead of nearly everyone winning, and no one actually losing, everyone loses.
No, the consensus of scientific facts says AGW is true. Scientists are in consensus because the facts are in consensus. There are areas of science where the consensus hypothesis is not yet backed up by facts, and the scientists involved recognize that fact (and as a result usually devise many, many scientific experiments looking to confirm or disprove the hypothesis). The Higgs boson is a recently confirmed example of such a hypothesis. AGW, however, is well-supported by a *huge* body of scientific evidence, not just opinion.
Are they? Or are they simply a smaller or less appealing target for the media than Uber? It's an honest question: I've heard little or nothing about Lyft one way or the other, mostly because Uber tends to dominate the news.
CPU time is perfectly well defined, though only really meaningful in terms of absolute value if you also give the relevant CPU you're talking about (obviously, 1 hour on a 386 and 1 hour on a modern Xeon are orders of magnitude difference levels of computation). Incidentally, they don't give the CPU used for the attack, as due to the fact they used cloud infrastructure the CPU time was spread over many different kinds of CPUs, but their "average CPU" unit reference is a 2.3Ghz Xeon E5-2650v3 (and for GPUs, they again used a spread of kinds, but they give the number of 114 years of device time for a cluster of K20s).
Maybe once angry displaced workers start attacking and killing robots I'll have the same reaction.
Waaaay to late on that score. The legend goes, the term "sabotage" comes from workers in the Industrial Revolution throwing their wooden shoes (called "sabots") into the machines which were replacing them.
If you're doing something important on your computer that requires error checking and correction, you should either a) get your employer to pay for the hardware to run it on (if it's a work thing), or b) pay for the hardware to run it on yourself (if it's a personal/self-employed thing). What you should *not* do, is use the wrong tool for the job, like running important error-sensitive operations on consumer grade hardware.
There's something you can do about it. It's very easy, but you won't like it.
Make every component in triplicate. Everything in the CPU, everything in the RAM, everything in storage, etc. If the three aren't equal, go with the value shared by two of them and rewrite the different one with that value.
Not only is this not actually all that easy (all of your triplicate systems have to be clocked together in sync, you need a shitload of extra hardware to do the comparison, etc.) it's grossly unnecessary. Standard off-the-shelf error detection and correction can (and routinely does) handle radiation induced errors. It just costs a bit more, because it's a business-level feature. It doesn't matter if that MP3 of Taylor Swift gets mildly corrupted (might even sound better that way, zing), but it very much *does* matter if that bank account gets a flipped bit.
The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
That's an incredibly cynical point of view. It's also completely and frankly rather obviously bullshit. The increase of technology and the rise of human civilization has done nothing but vastly increase the dependency each human has on each other. It used to be every couple fed themselves and their children. Then humans banded into tribes and the hunter/gatherers did the feeding, and the others took care of the children/old/weak. Then we made cities, and one farmer fed three or four. Now we have combine harvesters, and one farmer feeds a hundred. There is maybe a few dozen humans alive today in the US who are truly self-sufficient, who do and could continue to survive with the help of no others, while even a few hundred years ago half or more of the human population could do so (at least for a few years). Technology has made specialization a requirement, and with that has come a level of interdependence unrivaled in human history, and that interdependence is if anything getting stronger (now entire countries rely on other countries, in a hundred years that could become entire planets).
VR in it's current form has many flaws. The resolution, while pretty good, is closer (relatively speaking) to flip-phones than it is a modern smartphone. The headsets are a bit too heavy, the FOV while good isn't great, the wires are annoying, and you need a beefy computer to power them. And of course it's expensive.
What it is not, is sickness inducing. The technology, as it is now, does not cause nausea. I suppose someone extremely sensitive could feel unwell after using it for a while, but for the average (or indeed even for most fairly sensitive people) the technology itself will not cause sickness. Now, some software for it certainly *can* induce some pretty gut-wrenching nausea, if it wasn't developed properly: developers are used to flatscreen 3D programming, where you can do horribly unnatural camera movements that'd make the most iron-stomached person upchuck in VR (I mean, some games on flatscreen monitors can make people nauseous). But the technology? No, nausea is solved from a hardware point of view. Of course there'll be naysayers, especially on Slashdot ("less space than a Nomad", anyone?), but VR isn't a gimmick, it isn't 3D TV (though ironically it's probably the best way to actually view 3D movie content), it isn't the VirtualBoy, it's a gamechanging technology. Which also isn't to say it's about to change the game anytime soon. Like any early technology, it's a few generations away from really coming into its own, but it's already well on its way.
If you have a resource that's cheap and you wall it off, what do you call that? Typically, we call it "artificial scarcity." Somehow it's different if the resource is labor.
Yes, yes it is. That's why we banned slavery some time ago: because we recognized that human beings are more than just a resource. It's also why we restrict strip mining operations, require environment impact analysis, and set minimum wages, despite the fact that all of those artificially increase costs. Because the moral and practical consequences of *not* doing so outweight the financial burdens.
For leftist liberals, you have Barack Obama who kindly waited for hecklers during his speech, Michele Obama and her "when they go low, we go high" and Hillary Clinton, who maybe smiled too much but did not creep up behind Trump in a threatening/stalking manner during the Town Hall debate. This has led to, for example, the Women's March with about 4 arrests among 3 million marchers (around one part per million) across the country.
And, of course, Black Lives Matter followers torturing and murdering a special needs person (not to mention rioting and looting, which I guess I did just mention), "liberals" successfully using threats of violance to ban speakers from campuses, etc. Of course, most BLM and "liberals" don't do anything of the kind, and totally wouldn't endorse behaviour like that. It's just super easy to make a political side (any political side) look good or bad if you start cherry-picking. Shit, I bet I could make Mister Rogers look bad if you gave me enough time. Well, maybe not Mister Rogers, but just about anyone and anything else.
Attractor and repeller are, in this case, being used as very technical terms to describe the behavior of those regions of space in the velocity field of the universe. Neither the repeller nor attractor needs to actually be exerting any physical force at all.
Damned slashdot with no edit button. That should say "within a few standard deviations of each other". Also, the numbers should read as "67 km per second per megaparsec" and "72 km per second per megaparsec" (I dropped the seconds, and you should ignore the 1's).
I don't know all the ramifications (as I don't work in either CMB or distance measurement astrophysics), but the difference is pretty small (the Planck measurement was ~67 1/(km*Mpc), compared to this which was 72 1/(km*Mpc)). This measurement, now I look at the actual numbers, is actually closer to the measurement most of the CMB experiments have gotten (Planck got lower than most, albeit with smaller error bars). FWIW, the measurements are all a few standard deviations away from each other (as a rule you need more than 5 standard deviation for results to really be considered in disagreement), so really it's not a major discrepancy.
If the CMB measurement turns out to be wrong, it *could* indicate some interesting new physics (modified gravity, some new species of dark matter, dark energy doesn't behave quite like we think it does, that kind of thing) which would be very interesting indeed. But, we're still a ways away from being able to say that with any certainty.
This is one of the "many more measurements". Basically, there are two traditionally two ways to measure the Hubble constant: from supernovae, and from the CMB. Recently (i.e. the past few years) these two sets of measurements have disagreed about the value, with the CMB measurement shooting lower, and supernovae shooting higher, and both sides of the debate having good reasons to doubt the other. This looks to be a method independent of both of the others, which is a really good thing. Not that the linked article explains this, or gives a link to the damned paper which would probably explain this itself.
I mean, I'm not Trump supporter (by any means), but from the original Bloomberg report:
In late November, IBM completed at least its third round of firings in 2016, according to former and current employees. They don't know how many people have lost their jobs but say it's probably in the thousands, with many of the positions shipped to Asia and Eastern Europe.
Or, in other words, TFA has absolutely zero numbers on how many people were actually fired. They instead asked employees to estimate how many of their fellow employees they thought were fired. No facts, no figures, pure 100% speculation from employees who we have no reason to suspect know anything at all about how many people were actually fired. It might be true, but there's precisely zero evidence that it is, and it's being reported like a well-sourced fact. Modern day journalism, everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a big fan of a well-funded military. Aside from the importance in providing safety and stability against outside intrusion, for better or worse, the power of the US military plays a huge role in the US's world strength: the US would never be able to sustain it's economic and political position if it did not have the most powerful military in the world, and achieving that requires massive funding. In addition, if that funding is properly spent, it goes back into the US economy, boosting the R&D and manufacturing capabilities, and can attract foreign trade as well (in the form of sale of military hardware).
That said, there are three major caveats. The first is proper spending. The F-35? Yeah, not only are we wasting massive amounts of money on a unified platform that doesn't work as well for any job as a dedicated one, the cost and time overruns means more and more potential buyers are switching to the Eurofighter or similar. The problem isn't that the military doesn't have enough money: it's that it isn't being spent properly. Instead of being spent in the best interest of the US, it's spent in the best interest of the politicians who use it as political capital, and in the best interests of the corporations who support them.
The second caveat is that the US military isn't just well-funded, it's vastly overfunded. A well-funded military is a solid bulwark necessary for the US and it's interests. An overfunded military is a waste of money and, if anything, ends up leading to a weaker military (since money ends up being poured into pork instead of into providing what the military actually needs).
Finally, again for better or worse, a well-funded NASA is more or less just as necessary to the long-term military interests of the US as the actual military is. Space is the next major frontier for warfare, and whether there is an open war on earth, or just proxy wars and scrabbles over the resources of space, without a well-funded and developed space program the US is going to be at a massive military disadvantage in 20-50 years (or sooner).
Apparently, I had to look into the forum posts that the FA referenced, and FMA instructions are Fused Multiply Add, whatever the fuck that is.
After looking at Wikipedia for 5 seconds, FMA instructions perform round(a+b*c) in a single operation, so you can a) speed up and b) get more accurate results whenever you need such a mathematical operation (which is actually reasonably frequently, in numerical computing).
useful for navigation.
Not!
Yes. By construction, straight lines on a Mercator map have constant bearing towards magnetic north. That means if you take out your compass, face a given angle with respect to north, and follow it, you make a straight line on the Mercator map. That's extremely useful, probably one of the most useful properties a map can have for navigational purposes (unless you're really really good at doing some rather complicated coordinate transformations).
So I would expect there to be a time-corollary of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle [wikipedia.org].
There is, but it's probably not what you're thinking of. Technically speaking, the Heisenberg uncertainty pair applies to any two pairs of non-commutating quantum variables (or, depending on how you look at it, any two Fourier partners). Position and momentum happen to be one such pair. Another is time and energy. What that means, however, is that the energy of a particle in an unstable state (i.e. a state that can spontaneously decay into a lower energy state) is not perfectly well-defined, and the variance in energy is inversely proportional to the average decay time. In other words, the faster a particle (or state) decays, the wider the range of energies that particle/state is allowed to have, so that only long-lived states of physical systems have well-defined energies (by "long lived" I mean something like microseconds or even nanoseconds, which is long by quantum standards).
In the case of time measurements, this would generally mean the energy of our clock becomes less well defined as we make more and more precise measurements of the time. That's not really a problem, though: we just have to be greater that 1/2 h_bar, which is ~3e-16 eV*s. That means if the uncertainty in our time is 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000 (modern atomic clocks are very roughly in that range), we have an uncertainty of about 1 eV in the energy of our state. That's decently large (in terms of atomic scale physics), but pretty negligible in terms of everything else (nuclear physics involves energies a million times greater than that).
It's amusing that you consider this "relegated to a second-hand internet user". If Google can't track you, they can't use said tracking to verify that you're a human. Of course that means you have to do more work to prove you are a human. If you deliberately choose to opt out of a feature of the internet that makes your life more convenient for the sake of privacy, your internet usage is going to be less convenient. This isn't the only area where that happens (for instance, if you don't want credit card companies tracking your purchases, you have to use cash, which is less convenient). This isn't difficult, and let's be honest, it's also not a big deal (these reCaptchas take like 30 seconds maybe every couple of days). Privacy and convenience are, and always have been, a tradeoff.
Manned exploration of the Moon is honestly kinda pointless. It's close enough that signal delay isn't an issue for robots, and that's one of, maybe even the *only*, advantage humans have over robots for exploration. Robots are cheaper, simpler, lighter, less fragile, easier to handle, and less likely to malfunction. Even in the 60s manned Moon missions were as much a pissing match between the US and USSR as they were a valid scientific goal. Now, if they send people to the Moon and keep them there for extended periods of time (weeks to months), I'll be impressed, and cheering them on the whole way. Long-term manned space travel, with the eventual goal of colonization, is a practically necessary step forwards in human development. Mars has some attractive aspects over the Moon, but colonization of it is well outside our capability in the near future. But we could have a long-term lunar scientific colony operating right now, if we really wanted to, and it's almost an embarrassment to mankind that we don't, nearly 50 years after Apollo 11.
A remarkable number of people think the martian is based on a true story
Oh good lord, I missed that story. Slashdot linking to fucking Buzzfeed? Are you fucking serious? Anyways, that story doesn't show anything of the sort. You know why? Because even if all those tweets are real (and I wouldn't put it past Buzzfeed to make them up, or pay people to write them), and even if they're all serious (which they're probably not), a handful of tweets still doesn't mean anything about anything.
It's weird how Wikileaks was "just trying to get the information out there" and "serving the people" when they leaked information critical of a Republican, but now they're leaking information critical of Democrats, they're a "highly political organization" that's carefully timing their leaks. Or did you forget how Wikileaks came into being? When they leaked information about the Bush administration? I swear, it's like people on the Internet have the memory of a goldfish.
Since people are going to inevitably make the accusations: I'm not a Republican, not a Trump supporter, and also not a Democrat, and not a Clinton supporter. Also not an Assange supporter (he's a jackass who's just claiming the US is going to extradite him to avoid facing the charges and to keep himself in the limelight), though WikiLeaks itself frequently serves a useful and necessary purpose. I just think people are so blinded by partisanship they can't see that both sides of the political aisle in the US are corrupt, self-serving corporate sellouts who need to be replaced.
Did you literally not even read the first sentence of the damned summary? UC Berkeley is removing the content because the federal government requires any content they provide to be handicap accessible. Since it'd cost a prohibitive amount to make this content accessible, instead of keeping it up (which benefits 99% of the world) they're removing it because that 1% (or less) might have trouble accessing it. In other words, instead of content that was available to 99% of people, now it's available to 0% of people. In other words, instead of nearly everyone winning, and no one actually losing, everyone loses.
No, the consensus of scientific facts says AGW is true. Scientists are in consensus because the facts are in consensus. There are areas of science where the consensus hypothesis is not yet backed up by facts, and the scientists involved recognize that fact (and as a result usually devise many, many scientific experiments looking to confirm or disprove the hypothesis). The Higgs boson is a recently confirmed example of such a hypothesis. AGW, however, is well-supported by a *huge* body of scientific evidence, not just opinion.
Lyft is also a less scummy company,
Are they? Or are they simply a smaller or less appealing target for the media than Uber? It's an honest question: I've heard little or nothing about Lyft one way or the other, mostly because Uber tends to dominate the news.
CPU time is perfectly well defined, though only really meaningful in terms of absolute value if you also give the relevant CPU you're talking about (obviously, 1 hour on a 386 and 1 hour on a modern Xeon are orders of magnitude difference levels of computation). Incidentally, they don't give the CPU used for the attack, as due to the fact they used cloud infrastructure the CPU time was spread over many different kinds of CPUs, but their "average CPU" unit reference is a 2.3Ghz Xeon E5-2650v3 (and for GPUs, they again used a spread of kinds, but they give the number of 114 years of device time for a cluster of K20s).
Maybe once angry displaced workers start attacking and killing robots I'll have the same reaction.
Waaaay to late on that score. The legend goes, the term "sabotage" comes from workers in the Industrial Revolution throwing their wooden shoes (called "sabots") into the machines which were replacing them.
If you're doing something important on your computer that requires error checking and correction, you should either a) get your employer to pay for the hardware to run it on (if it's a work thing), or b) pay for the hardware to run it on yourself (if it's a personal/self-employed thing). What you should *not* do, is use the wrong tool for the job, like running important error-sensitive operations on consumer grade hardware.
There's something you can do about it. It's very easy, but you won't like it.
Make every component in triplicate. Everything in the CPU, everything in the RAM, everything in storage, etc. If the three aren't equal, go with the value shared by two of them and rewrite the different one with that value.
Not only is this not actually all that easy (all of your triplicate systems have to be clocked together in sync, you need a shitload of extra hardware to do the comparison, etc.) it's grossly unnecessary. Standard off-the-shelf error detection and correction can (and routinely does) handle radiation induced errors. It just costs a bit more, because it's a business-level feature. It doesn't matter if that MP3 of Taylor Swift gets mildly corrupted (might even sound better that way, zing), but it very much *does* matter if that bank account gets a flipped bit.
The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
That's an incredibly cynical point of view. It's also completely and frankly rather obviously bullshit. The increase of technology and the rise of human civilization has done nothing but vastly increase the dependency each human has on each other. It used to be every couple fed themselves and their children. Then humans banded into tribes and the hunter/gatherers did the feeding, and the others took care of the children/old/weak. Then we made cities, and one farmer fed three or four. Now we have combine harvesters, and one farmer feeds a hundred. There is maybe a few dozen humans alive today in the US who are truly self-sufficient, who do and could continue to survive with the help of no others, while even a few hundred years ago half or more of the human population could do so (at least for a few years). Technology has made specialization a requirement, and with that has come a level of interdependence unrivaled in human history, and that interdependence is if anything getting stronger (now entire countries rely on other countries, in a hundred years that could become entire planets).
Corporations are like political factions. It's always OK when we do it, it's those other guys doing it that's bad!
VR in it's current form has many flaws. The resolution, while pretty good, is closer (relatively speaking) to flip-phones than it is a modern smartphone. The headsets are a bit too heavy, the FOV while good isn't great, the wires are annoying, and you need a beefy computer to power them. And of course it's expensive.
What it is not, is sickness inducing. The technology, as it is now, does not cause nausea. I suppose someone extremely sensitive could feel unwell after using it for a while, but for the average (or indeed even for most fairly sensitive people) the technology itself will not cause sickness. Now, some software for it certainly *can* induce some pretty gut-wrenching nausea, if it wasn't developed properly: developers are used to flatscreen 3D programming, where you can do horribly unnatural camera movements that'd make the most iron-stomached person upchuck in VR (I mean, some games on flatscreen monitors can make people nauseous). But the technology? No, nausea is solved from a hardware point of view. Of course there'll be naysayers, especially on Slashdot ("less space than a Nomad", anyone?), but VR isn't a gimmick, it isn't 3D TV (though ironically it's probably the best way to actually view 3D movie content), it isn't the VirtualBoy, it's a gamechanging technology. Which also isn't to say it's about to change the game anytime soon. Like any early technology, it's a few generations away from really coming into its own, but it's already well on its way.
If you have a resource that's cheap and you wall it off, what do you call that? Typically, we call it "artificial scarcity." Somehow it's different if the resource is labor.
Yes, yes it is. That's why we banned slavery some time ago: because we recognized that human beings are more than just a resource. It's also why we restrict strip mining operations, require environment impact analysis, and set minimum wages, despite the fact that all of those artificially increase costs. Because the moral and practical consequences of *not* doing so outweight the financial burdens.
For leftist liberals, you have Barack Obama who kindly waited for hecklers during his speech, Michele Obama and her "when they go low, we go high" and Hillary Clinton, who maybe smiled too much but did not creep up behind Trump in a threatening/stalking manner during the Town Hall debate. This has led to, for example, the Women's March with about 4 arrests among 3 million marchers (around one part per million) across the country.
And, of course, Black Lives Matter followers torturing and murdering a special needs person (not to mention rioting and looting, which I guess I did just mention), "liberals" successfully using threats of violance to ban speakers from campuses, etc. Of course, most BLM and "liberals" don't do anything of the kind, and totally wouldn't endorse behaviour like that. It's just super easy to make a political side (any political side) look good or bad if you start cherry-picking. Shit, I bet I could make Mister Rogers look bad if you gave me enough time. Well, maybe not Mister Rogers, but just about anyone and anything else.
Attractor and repeller are, in this case, being used as very technical terms to describe the behavior of those regions of space in the velocity field of the universe. Neither the repeller nor attractor needs to actually be exerting any physical force at all.
Damned slashdot with no edit button. That should say "within a few standard deviations of each other". Also, the numbers should read as "67 km per second per megaparsec" and "72 km per second per megaparsec" (I dropped the seconds, and you should ignore the 1's).
I don't know all the ramifications (as I don't work in either CMB or distance measurement astrophysics), but the difference is pretty small (the Planck measurement was ~67 1/(km*Mpc), compared to this which was 72 1/(km*Mpc)). This measurement, now I look at the actual numbers, is actually closer to the measurement most of the CMB experiments have gotten (Planck got lower than most, albeit with smaller error bars). FWIW, the measurements are all a few standard deviations away from each other (as a rule you need more than 5 standard deviation for results to really be considered in disagreement), so really it's not a major discrepancy.
If the CMB measurement turns out to be wrong, it *could* indicate some interesting new physics (modified gravity, some new species of dark matter, dark energy doesn't behave quite like we think it does, that kind of thing) which would be very interesting indeed. But, we're still a ways away from being able to say that with any certainty.
This is one of the "many more measurements". Basically, there are two traditionally two ways to measure the Hubble constant: from supernovae, and from the CMB. Recently (i.e. the past few years) these two sets of measurements have disagreed about the value, with the CMB measurement shooting lower, and supernovae shooting higher, and both sides of the debate having good reasons to doubt the other. This looks to be a method independent of both of the others, which is a really good thing. Not that the linked article explains this, or gives a link to the damned paper which would probably explain this itself.
I mean, I'm not Trump supporter (by any means), but from the original Bloomberg report:
In late November, IBM completed at least its third round of firings in 2016, according to former and current employees. They don't know how many people have lost their jobs but say it's probably in the thousands, with many of the positions shipped to Asia and Eastern Europe.
Or, in other words, TFA has absolutely zero numbers on how many people were actually fired. They instead asked employees to estimate how many of their fellow employees they thought were fired. No facts, no figures, pure 100% speculation from employees who we have no reason to suspect know anything at all about how many people were actually fired. It might be true, but there's precisely zero evidence that it is, and it's being reported like a well-sourced fact. Modern day journalism, everybody.