It seemed like a lot of the "attempted attacks" in the wild were more like, the Orcas looked threateningly at our dogs, or the Orcas bumped into people in shallow water where it could easily have been accidental. Extraordinarily rare either way, captivity or no.
I don't understand why you would say that Reserves (with a capital R?) are a debt instrument.
Because they are debt instruments. They are government liabilities which are redeemed in satisfaction of our tax obligations. In the past they could also be redeemed for gold or silver. Modern Reserves even pay interest (capital R for clarity, I guess).
I think "money" is anything that is "current" enough that we can use it to satisfy general obligations in the course of market exchange. Debt instruments can certainly be money and historically, informal credit systems predated other forms of money including shells, bullion and coin. Our disagreement then is not because I don't think Reserves are money, but because you don't seem to think Treasuries are money. Yet Treasuries are, like Reserves, non-convertible, interest bearing liabilities of the Federal government which are highly liquid in transactions within the private sector and between the public and private sectors.
If I go to a printing press and print money, then I have "printed money". And if I do the same thing electronically, then I have still "printed money". If I spend that money to buy assets, you can call my transaction an "asset swap", but clearly my "asset swap" was preceded by "money printing".
Fair enough, but the point is that the net financial assets (NFA) of the private sector are unchanged by the transactions. It's needlessly inflammatory and misleading to say that they are irresponsibly printing money when the new money is just being swapped for other forms of money. The money supply is only increased because we arbitrarily decided that some government liabilities are money and others are not.
Reserves enter the economy whenever banks loan out those reserves.
This is a common misconception. In a single bank model, loans do not affect the bank's reserve balance; in a multiple bank model, loans do not affect the reserve balances of the banking sector as a whole. The reason is that loans create deposits. For example, say that my bank gives me a $100 loan. This creates the following bank balance sheet (where the negative sign goes is just convention):
Reve: +100, Bank A: -100; Bank A: +1000, Fed: -1000
Since the $100 loan created a $100 deposit, the Reserves don't change.
Now, I withdraw the money as cash. Vault cash is part of Reserves.
Reve: +100(cash), Bank A: -100; Bank A: +900, Fed: -1000
Then I buy $100 of product from you. You promptly deposit the money at Bank B.
Reve: 0, Bank A: -100; Bank A: +900, Fed: -1000
MrLib: +100, Bank B: 0; Bank B: +100, Fed: 0
At some point I am going to have to earn $100 to pay back my loan. Say you pay me $100 to do some work, via electronic bank transfer.
MrLib: 0, Bank B: 0; Bank B: 0, Fed: 0
Reve: +100, Bank A: -100; Bank A: +1000, Fed: -1000
Notice how the total reserve balances don't change throughout this process? They would though, if either of us were to pay taxes. Reserves are almost exclusively used to settle payments between banks, or between banks and the government.
lack of reserves [constrain lending] in a system with minimum reserve requirements.
Another misconception. Reserve requirements don't apply to individual loans, they just say that at the end of the day each bank has to have such-and-such amount to hold overnight in their reserve account. But a bank can always obtain the needed Reserves by borrowing from the Fed; the Fed must satisfy their demand or its interest rate target will fail (the rate will go up).
Put it this way. If a bank sees a profitable loan opportunity, it will make the loan. If it needs more Reserves to cover its requirements, it will deal with that later, sure in the knowledge that it can obtain the Reserves in the regular way (no QE or excess reserves needed). The Fed can affect the potential profitability of loans by modulating the ra
I counted the instances on the Wiki page (I forgot to close the anchor tag in my comment) where it seemed an Orca had initiated a successful attack based on the brief descriptions. The 1 is an instance where an Orca actually bit a surfer.
QE, or quantitative easing, is when the Fed buys fixed-income securities on the open market
Which is exactly what I described. Treasuries and Reserves are both government debt instruments. The only difference between them is the interest rate, because in general Treasuries are highly liquid.
Anyway, have you seen what has been happening to the monetary base [stlouisfed.org] since 2008? If that is not "rapidly printing money", then what is?
Call it whatever you want, but it remains a simple fact there is no mechanism in our system for these reserves to enter the economy. Reserves do not constrain bank lending and adding reserves does not increase bank lending.
Of course, all of this money printing hasn't led to a big spike in consumer prices, nor has it been able to push the unemployment rate below 7% for almost 5 years now.
For reasons expressed by me and by the_eric_conspiracy, there is no reason to expect the so-called money printing to do either of those things.
But, we'll have to see what happens when the Fed starts tapering. My guess is that the economy will start tanking, and then it will be time for QE4.
This statement is obviously an explicit contradiction of the statement immediately preceding it. If they taper while maintaining a low target rate, there will be an initial shock due to expectations which will quickly fade as the market realizes its mistake (thinking that QE is either inflationary to prices or expansionary to the money supply).
How many doses do we need before stagflation begins?
You misunderstand the cause of inflation in the 1970's, which was the OPEC oil price hike. It ended when we deregulated natural gas. This explanation is the only one which accounts for the fact that the 70's inflation began and ended at nearly the same times in all countries.
Their savings are held as bank deposits at private banks. The "money" the Fed is creating is held by the banks as reserve balances at the Fed itself. In our financial system there is only one operational pathway for reserve balances to enter the economy separately from their role in settling interbank payments, which is as physical U.S. currency AKA Federal Reserve Notes. Physical currency represents only a very small fraction of total reserves. Thus, the total size of all reserve balances held at the Fed has no bearing on the traded value of bank deposits denominated in dollars but held in the private sector (that is, the value of your and my savings). Like I said, Canada's banks typically have overnight reserve balances of ZERO, but that doesn't mean Canadians have no deposits at their private banks or that those deposits have infinite value.
Yet, QE does negatively affect the future value of our savings, not by harming the traded value of the dollar, but by reducing our interest income. During QE, the Fed exchanges reserves (bearing an 0.25% interest rate since 2008), which it "prints" (into a database), for securities (bearing ~3% in the case of Treasuries). The net financial assets of the private sector is unchanged, but its average rate of interest is decreased, negatively impacting its future income. Basically, the Fed is helping the government refinance at a lower rate, which is like a wealth tax on the government's creditors (including us, pensions, foreigners, companies, etc.).
TL;DR: QE is a Bad Thing, but because it decreases the amount of money we have and not the opposite.
The Fed isn't "printing money," they are conducting asset swaps in which the private sector exchanges one government debt instrument for another with a lower interest rate. The net effect on private financial assets is negative due to the lower interest income.
And even if the Fed were wildly increasing bank reserve balances without buying back bonds from them, it wouldn't matter, because reserves are only used for interbank payments. Banks do not lend out their reserves and their reserve balances do not decrease when they make loans. In fact, reserve requirements do nothing because the Fed must always allow the banks to borrow more reserves or abandon their interest rate target. Look at Canada, which has a very stable banking sector with no reserve requirements whatsoever, and no overnight holdings of central bank reserves.
Prior to the financial crisis, private credit expansion (facilitated but not initiated by Greenspan) led to inflation. When those credit structures collapsed, the supposed financial assets became nearly valueless, which resulted in an epic loss of liquidity. It was the private sector credit expansion which both created the new money and led eventually to that money disappearing. This is in sharp contrast to the "new" (really asset swapped) money from QE, which is "real" government money which can't simply disappear the way private credit can.
The scare-quotes patriotism was meant to imply they rule for the home team. I don't actually think it's patriotic to corrupt the judicial system in that fashion. I agree with your take on our officially sanctioned bribery system.
Not to mention the cynical prosecutors who tell such lies knowingly. What we really need is for all defendants to refuse all plea bargains and insist on trials. That would force reform in short order (since ~80-90% of cases are plea bargained, the courts would immediately grind to a halt).
Maybe they don't have to pay for "patriotism." That is, seems like it's always the domestic firm which wins out in these cases (except this time, until the White House overruled).
The TSA thought my titanium solo cookset and matching titanium fork, stuffed into a mesh bag, looked like a bomb made out of "a razor blade and wires." So, they don't even have to be real electronics or wires.
I figure most of us know what happened to Mitnick, but just in case, what happened was that the government convinced a judge that Mitnick could literally launch America's nuclear-armed ICBMs merely by whistling into a phone.
Replace the continuous Fourier Transform with an iterative Fourier transform
It doesn't matter. The discrete transform approximates the continuous transform; in the case we're discussing we can in fact calculate the continuous transform analytically. If one were to use the discrete transform with an explicit numerical example basically the same result would be obtained (down to numerical error modulo the window function, zero padding and discretization artifacts). That result being a distribution of non-zero amplitudes in frequency space rather than a delta function.
"No definite single frequency" is not equal to "no discoverable single frequency"
There is no single frequency, discoverable or otherwise. The physical reality is that a finite wave packet such as a shout or an electron must be characterized by a distribution of frequencies rather than a single frequency. It is impossible for a single frequency alone to produce a finite wave train. There are two ways to get a finite wave packet, either you have a window of some kind, which creates overtones in the frequency space, or you sum up lots of higher frequency waves, which amounts to the same thing.
The whole reason I brought this up is relevant to TFA: in my opinion the above approach gives the simplest, most accurate portrayal of why the uncertainty relation is a part of nature and not a technological limitation of some kind (we aren't "missing" any information which actually exists). To reiterate: 1) regardless of quantum mechanics, finite wave-trains create "uncertainty," that is a distribution of values which may itself be known exactly, and 2) quantum mechanical systems are finite wave phenomena. Therefore they exhibit what we call "uncertainty" - a distribution of values which can be sampled. Repeated sampling demonstrates that quantum mechanics predicts these distributions with extreme accuracy and precision.
Anyway, uncertainty is actually an important part of quantum mechanical technologies, more than a barrier. Especially in living systems, which use QM in variousways.
The point that the uncertainty principle applies only to simultaneous measurements is critical. Obviously you can make separate measurements of speed and position at different times!
Nevertheless, it is not necessary to invoke destructive measurement to explain uncertainty, because as I said the uncertainty relationship is a necessary feature of any wave-like phenomenon of finite size. It's not just that measurements of parameter require destructive interactions with the system, but that a single true value of the parameter does not exist.
It doesn't matter how many sensors you have or how large or small the wave train is. The "uncertainty" is a fundamental component of all wave-like phenomena with finite extension. For these phenomena there exists only distributions of the variously "uncertain" parameters (e.g. frequency, momentum), which may be sampled by measurement.
Consider an infinite sine wave of a given frequency. Multiply this with a Gaussian to obtain a wave train of finite extension. Now, if you Fourier transform the wave train in order to measure its frequency, you will have the Fourier transform of the sine - a delta function - convolved with the Fourier transform of the Gaussian, itself a Gaussian. This leaves you with a Gaussian in frequency space and thus no definite single frequency. The continuous Fourier transform is used so the result can not be due to discretization effects.
Well, that may not be true. It would seem that when the transporter is operating normally, the original matter is in fact sent. We even see a first person view which is uninterrupted during transport. On the other hand, under special circumstances some people are able to use the transporter to make duplicates or new individuals from patter buffer records (i.e. Data makes a new Picard at one point).
Obviously there is a healthy debate on this subject.
No, the uncertainty principle is not due to technological limitations. The uncertainty relationship is a fundamental property of all phenomena characterized by finite-length wave trains, quantum mechanical or no.
Here we encounter a strange thing about waves; a very simple thing which has nothing to do with quantum mechanics strictly. It is something that anybody who works with waves, even if he knows no quantum mechanics, knows: namely, we cannot define a unique wavelength for a short wave train. Such a wave train does not have a definite wavelength; there is an indefiniteness in the wave number that is related to the finite length of the train, and thus there is an indefiniteness in the momentum.
The simplest way to explain the uncertainty principle is this: if you have a wave train of finite length L, then the uncertainty in the wavenumber is at least 2*Pi/L. To see this imagine (or draw) a wave packet which attenuates to zero at either end (like an infinite wave convolved with a Gaussian). Now count the number of waves in the interval L - not so easy, is it?
Mathematically, one would Fourier transform the wave to obtain its frequency (the FT of the wave is a delta function, one point exactly at the frequency of the wave). But the FT of the wave packet has the delta function of the wave, convolved with the FT of the Gaussian - which is also a Gaussian. This leads to a Guassian in frequency space, and thus an uncertainty in the frequency of the wave packet. This type of uncertainty is a property of all wave-type phenomena, from sound waves to probability amplitudes.
Indeed, this is how Feynman treats the principle in Vol III, Ch. 2 of his mighty lecture series.
In the case of Manning he simply dumped every classified file
You can have the benefit of the doubt, that you are simply misinformed, but Manning did not "dump" the cables. He gave them, in encrypted form, to the Guardian under the expectation that they would select individual documents for release via news reports. Unfortunately, one of their reporters left the private key on a public server.
Lenovo has a massive education discount, about 40%. To use it, you choose a university from a drop-down menu and click through a Terms-of-Service. I've always wondered if that was subsidized by the Chinese government.
One of my favorite things about my ThinkPad is the self-documenting case screws. Each screw is labeled with pictograms of the components which require that screw to be removed for access.
Slashdot Mirror
It seemed like a lot of the "attempted attacks" in the wild were more like, the Orcas looked threateningly at our dogs, or the Orcas bumped into people in shallow water where it could easily have been accidental. Extraordinarily rare either way, captivity or no.
I don't understand why you would say that Reserves (with a capital R?) are a debt instrument.
Because they are debt instruments. They are government liabilities which are redeemed in satisfaction of our tax obligations. In the past they could also be redeemed for gold or silver. Modern Reserves even pay interest (capital R for clarity, I guess).
I think "money" is anything that is "current" enough that we can use it to satisfy general obligations in the course of market exchange. Debt instruments can certainly be money and historically, informal credit systems predated other forms of money including shells, bullion and coin. Our disagreement then is not because I don't think Reserves are money, but because you don't seem to think Treasuries are money. Yet Treasuries are, like Reserves, non-convertible, interest bearing liabilities of the Federal government which are highly liquid in transactions within the private sector and between the public and private sectors.
If I go to a printing press and print money, then I have "printed money". And if I do the same thing electronically, then I have still "printed money". If I spend that money to buy assets, you can call my transaction an "asset swap", but clearly my "asset swap" was preceded by "money printing".
Fair enough, but the point is that the net financial assets (NFA) of the private sector are unchanged by the transactions. It's needlessly inflammatory and misleading to say that they are irresponsibly printing money when the new money is just being swapped for other forms of money. The money supply is only increased because we arbitrarily decided that some government liabilities are money and others are not.
Reserves enter the economy whenever banks loan out those reserves.
This is a common misconception. In a single bank model, loans do not affect the bank's reserve balance; in a multiple bank model, loans do not affect the reserve balances of the banking sector as a whole. The reason is that loans create deposits. For example, say that my bank gives me a $100 loan. This creates the following bank balance sheet (where the negative sign goes is just convention):
Reve: +100, Bank A: -100; Bank A: +1000, Fed: -1000
Since the $100 loan created a $100 deposit, the Reserves don't change.
Now, I withdraw the money as cash. Vault cash is part of Reserves.
Reve: +100(cash), Bank A: -100; Bank A: +900, Fed: -1000
Then I buy $100 of product from you. You promptly deposit the money at Bank B.
Reve: 0, Bank A: -100; Bank A: +900, Fed: -1000
MrLib: +100, Bank B: 0; Bank B: +100, Fed: 0
At some point I am going to have to earn $100 to pay back my loan. Say you pay me $100 to do some work, via electronic bank transfer.
MrLib: 0, Bank B: 0; Bank B: 0, Fed: 0
Reve: +100, Bank A: -100; Bank A: +1000, Fed: -1000
Notice how the total reserve balances don't change throughout this process? They would though, if either of us were to pay taxes. Reserves are almost exclusively used to settle payments between banks, or between banks and the government.
lack of reserves [constrain lending] in a system with minimum reserve requirements.
Another misconception. Reserve requirements don't apply to individual loans, they just say that at the end of the day each bank has to have such-and-such amount to hold overnight in their reserve account. But a bank can always obtain the needed Reserves by borrowing from the Fed; the Fed must satisfy their demand or its interest rate target will fail (the rate will go up).
Put it this way. If a bank sees a profitable loan opportunity, it will make the loan. If it needs more Reserves to cover its requirements, it will deal with that later, sure in the knowledge that it can obtain the Reserves in the regular way (no QE or excess reserves needed). The Fed can affect the potential profitability of loans by modulating the ra
I counted the instances on the Wiki page (I forgot to close the anchor tag in my comment) where it seemed an Orca had initiated a successful attack based on the brief descriptions. The 1 is an instance where an Orca actually bit a surfer.
No, it doesn't mean what you or the moderators apparently think it means.
A homocide is a killing of a human. Someone or something which kills or tries to kill humans is thus homocidal.
Missed a closing tag.
Killer whale attacks on humans
Number of attacks on humans by Orcas not in captivity: 1 documented.
Number of attacks on humans by Orcas in captivity: > 27 documented (3 fatal).
Killer whale attacks on humans
QE, or quantitative easing, is when the Fed buys fixed-income securities on the open market
Which is exactly what I described. Treasuries and Reserves are both government debt instruments. The only difference between them is the interest rate, because in general Treasuries are highly liquid.
Anyway, have you seen what has been happening to the monetary base [stlouisfed.org] since 2008? If that is not "rapidly printing money", then what is?
Call it whatever you want, but it remains a simple fact there is no mechanism in our system for these reserves to enter the economy. Reserves do not constrain bank lending and adding reserves does not increase bank lending.
Of course, all of this money printing hasn't led to a big spike in consumer prices, nor has it been able to push the unemployment rate below 7% for almost 5 years now.
For reasons expressed by me and by the_eric_conspiracy, there is no reason to expect the so-called money printing to do either of those things.
But, we'll have to see what happens when the Fed starts tapering. My guess is that the economy will start tanking, and then it will be time for QE4.
This statement is obviously an explicit contradiction of the statement immediately preceding it. If they taper while maintaining a low target rate, there will be an initial shock due to expectations which will quickly fade as the market realizes its mistake (thinking that QE is either inflationary to prices or expansionary to the money supply).
How many doses do we need before stagflation begins?
You misunderstand the cause of inflation in the 1970's, which was the OPEC oil price hike. It ended when we deregulated natural gas. This explanation is the only one which accounts for the fact that the 70's inflation began and ended at nearly the same times in all countries.
Their savings are held as bank deposits at private banks. The "money" the Fed is creating is held by the banks as reserve balances at the Fed itself. In our financial system there is only one operational pathway for reserve balances to enter the economy separately from their role in settling interbank payments, which is as physical U.S. currency AKA Federal Reserve Notes. Physical currency represents only a very small fraction of total reserves. Thus, the total size of all reserve balances held at the Fed has no bearing on the traded value of bank deposits denominated in dollars but held in the private sector (that is, the value of your and my savings). Like I said, Canada's banks typically have overnight reserve balances of ZERO, but that doesn't mean Canadians have no deposits at their private banks or that those deposits have infinite value.
Yet, QE does negatively affect the future value of our savings, not by harming the traded value of the dollar, but by reducing our interest income. During QE, the Fed exchanges reserves (bearing an 0.25% interest rate since 2008), which it "prints" (into a database), for securities (bearing ~3% in the case of Treasuries). The net financial assets of the private sector is unchanged, but its average rate of interest is decreased, negatively impacting its future income. Basically, the Fed is helping the government refinance at a lower rate, which is like a wealth tax on the government's creditors (including us, pensions, foreigners, companies, etc.).
TL;DR: QE is a Bad Thing, but because it decreases the amount of money we have and not the opposite.
The Fed isn't "printing money," they are conducting asset swaps in which the private sector exchanges one government debt instrument for another with a lower interest rate. The net effect on private financial assets is negative due to the lower interest income.
And even if the Fed were wildly increasing bank reserve balances without buying back bonds from them, it wouldn't matter, because reserves are only used for interbank payments. Banks do not lend out their reserves and their reserve balances do not decrease when they make loans. In fact, reserve requirements do nothing because the Fed must always allow the banks to borrow more reserves or abandon their interest rate target. Look at Canada, which has a very stable banking sector with no reserve requirements whatsoever, and no overnight holdings of central bank reserves.
Prior to the financial crisis, private credit expansion (facilitated but not initiated by Greenspan) led to inflation. When those credit structures collapsed, the supposed financial assets became nearly valueless, which resulted in an epic loss of liquidity. It was the private sector credit expansion which both created the new money and led eventually to that money disappearing. This is in sharp contrast to the "new" (really asset swapped) money from QE, which is "real" government money which can't simply disappear the way private credit can.
The scare-quotes patriotism was meant to imply they rule for the home team. I don't actually think it's patriotic to corrupt the judicial system in that fashion. I agree with your take on our officially sanctioned bribery system.
How about we review our judges?
Not to mention the cynical prosecutors who tell such lies knowingly. What we really need is for all defendants to refuse all plea bargains and insist on trials. That would force reform in short order (since ~80-90% of cases are plea bargained, the courts would immediately grind to a halt).
Maybe they don't have to pay for "patriotism." That is, seems like it's always the domestic firm which wins out in these cases (except this time, until the White House overruled).
The TSA thought my titanium solo cookset and matching titanium fork, stuffed into a mesh bag, looked like a bomb made out of "a razor blade and wires." So, they don't even have to be real electronics or wires.
I figure most of us know what happened to Mitnick, but just in case, what happened was that the government convinced a judge that Mitnick could literally launch America's nuclear-armed ICBMs merely by whistling into a phone.
Replace the continuous Fourier Transform with an iterative Fourier transform
It doesn't matter. The discrete transform approximates the continuous transform; in the case we're discussing we can in fact calculate the continuous transform analytically. If one were to use the discrete transform with an explicit numerical example basically the same result would be obtained (down to numerical error modulo the window function, zero padding and discretization artifacts). That result being a distribution of non-zero amplitudes in frequency space rather than a delta function.
"No definite single frequency" is not equal to "no discoverable single frequency"
There is no single frequency, discoverable or otherwise. The physical reality is that a finite wave packet such as a shout or an electron must be characterized by a distribution of frequencies rather than a single frequency. It is impossible for a single frequency alone to produce a finite wave train. There are two ways to get a finite wave packet, either you have a window of some kind, which creates overtones in the frequency space, or you sum up lots of higher frequency waves, which amounts to the same thing.
The whole reason I brought this up is relevant to TFA: in my opinion the above approach gives the simplest, most accurate portrayal of why the uncertainty relation is a part of nature and not a technological limitation of some kind (we aren't "missing" any information which actually exists). To reiterate: 1) regardless of quantum mechanics, finite wave-trains create "uncertainty," that is a distribution of values which may itself be known exactly, and 2) quantum mechanical systems are finite wave phenomena. Therefore they exhibit what we call "uncertainty" - a distribution of values which can be sampled. Repeated sampling demonstrates that quantum mechanics predicts these distributions with extreme accuracy and precision.
Anyway, uncertainty is actually an important part of quantum mechanical technologies, more than a barrier. Especially in living systems, which use QM in various ways.
The point that the uncertainty principle applies only to simultaneous measurements is critical. Obviously you can make separate measurements of speed and position at different times!
Nevertheless, it is not necessary to invoke destructive measurement to explain uncertainty, because as I said the uncertainty relationship is a necessary feature of any wave-like phenomenon of finite size. It's not just that measurements of parameter require destructive interactions with the system, but that a single true value of the parameter does not exist.
It doesn't matter how many sensors you have or how large or small the wave train is. The "uncertainty" is a fundamental component of all wave-like phenomena with finite extension. For these phenomena there exists only distributions of the variously "uncertain" parameters (e.g. frequency, momentum), which may be sampled by measurement.
Consider an infinite sine wave of a given frequency. Multiply this with a Gaussian to obtain a wave train of finite extension. Now, if you Fourier transform the wave train in order to measure its frequency, you will have the Fourier transform of the sine - a delta function - convolved with the Fourier transform of the Gaussian, itself a Gaussian. This leaves you with a Gaussian in frequency space and thus no definite single frequency. The continuous Fourier transform is used so the result can not be due to discretization effects.
Well, that may not be true. It would seem that when the transporter is operating normally, the original matter is in fact sent. We even see a first person view which is uninterrupted during transport. On the other hand, under special circumstances some people are able to use the transporter to make duplicates or new individuals from patter buffer records (i.e. Data makes a new Picard at one point).
Obviously there is a healthy debate on this subject.
No, the uncertainty principle is not due to technological limitations. The uncertainty relationship is a fundamental property of all phenomena characterized by finite-length wave trains, quantum mechanical or no.
I paraphrased Feynman's explanation as well as the mathematical reasoning in another comment
Feynman sez:
Here we encounter a strange thing about waves; a very simple thing which has nothing to do with quantum mechanics strictly. It is something that anybody who works with waves, even if he knows no quantum mechanics, knows: namely, we cannot define a unique wavelength for a short wave train. Such a wave train does not have a definite wavelength; there is an indefiniteness in the wave number that is related to the finite length of the train, and thus there is an indefiniteness in the momentum.
The simplest way to explain the uncertainty principle is this: if you have a wave train of finite length L, then the uncertainty in the wavenumber is at least 2*Pi/L. To see this imagine (or draw) a wave packet which attenuates to zero at either end (like an infinite wave convolved with a Gaussian). Now count the number of waves in the interval L - not so easy, is it?
Mathematically, one would Fourier transform the wave to obtain its frequency (the FT of the wave is a delta function, one point exactly at the frequency of the wave). But the FT of the wave packet has the delta function of the wave, convolved with the FT of the Gaussian - which is also a Gaussian. This leads to a Guassian in frequency space, and thus an uncertainty in the frequency of the wave packet. This type of uncertainty is a property of all wave-type phenomena, from sound waves to probability amplitudes.
Indeed, this is how Feynman treats the principle in Vol III, Ch. 2 of his mighty lecture series.
Maybe he just thought he would be killed if he tried to escape.
In the case of Manning he simply dumped every classified file
You can have the benefit of the doubt, that you are simply misinformed, but Manning did not "dump" the cables. He gave them, in encrypted form, to the Guardian under the expectation that they would select individual documents for release via news reports. Unfortunately, one of their reporters left the private key on a public server.
Lenovo has a massive education discount, about 40%. To use it, you choose a university from a drop-down menu and click through a Terms-of-Service. I've always wondered if that was subsidized by the Chinese government.
One of my favorite things about my ThinkPad is the self-documenting case screws. Each screw is labeled with pictograms of the components which require that screw to be removed for access.
Sorry to disappoint, but all it might do is stop them from getting West Nile virus.