Hmm, when I did the same thing just now, the top petition was for "Justice for Travon Martin" with 2.3 million signatures, second was "Caylee's Law" with 1.3 megasigantures, and #6 is "Stop Wildlife crime" with almost half-a-million. Either they fixed a bug (I know one of the IT guys there, they try to stay on top of bugs), or perhaps you had some kind of filter in place?
But the peak current is tens-of-thousands of amps, and the connections are between superconducting cables made of exotic materials, and once the connection is made at room temperature it has to be cooled down by almost 300 degrees (150 times colder than where it started) with all the flexing and stressing that causes, and still can't have more than one or two nano-ohms resistance or the whole experiment blows up.
Yes, the electrical connections in the LHC are the equivalent of rocket science.
I have to agree, if you are a law abiding citizen what is wrong with proving who you are?
Well, for one thing, no one can possibly be a law-abiding citizen any more. The shear volume of law makes it impossible, and most people (myself included) knowingly break the law on a routine basis. Traffic law (ever broken the speed limit?), copyright law (made a mix tape for a friend?), decency laws (swear in front of a lady?), tax law (bought tobacco out-of-state?), building codes (grass more than 4" high?), and a host of others make it a 100% certainty that every last one of us is guilty of some punishable offense.
It should always be the responsibility of the authorities to prove who you are and what you did, not for you to prove otherwise.
As the second paragraph says: 1280 inward facing to detect events in the tank + 240 outward facing to detect background events = 1520 total tubes. Not exactly rocket science, that.
Am I the only one who's skeptical of this claim? It all seems just a little too perfect, especially given the original article appeared near the beginning of April...
Probably never. Page and Plant have always been extremely reluctant to license Led Zeppelin songs. If you've seen the extras on the School of Rock DVD, you know that Jack Black had to literally beg to be allowed to use about 20 seconds of The Immigrant Song. You won't find Led Zeppelin on iTunes or any other (legal) online music service either.
While caution is still warranted, it looks like Adobe indeed intends to foster open development. From the current PDF Reference section 1.4:
Adobe Systems Incorporated and its subsidiaries own a number of patents covering technology disclosed in the PDF Reference. [...] Nonetheless, Adobe desires to encourage implementation of the PDF computer file format on a wide variety of devices and platforms, and for this reason offers certain royalty-free patent licenses to PDF implementors worldwide. To review those licenses, please visit
http://www.adobe.com/go/developer_legalnotices.
Of course a question remains of what other possibly relevant patents Adobe holds but is not licensing under those terms...
So, are they planning on adding features that will be incompatible with GPLv3?
Sure, every change they've made or will make that's licensed GPLv2 only. You can indeed download the most-recent "GPLv2 or higher" code, but if you then patch it with any "GPLv2 only" code you can only redistribute under GPLv2.
Test data sucks: there are too many real-world situations the developers fail to think of.
We're a pretty small shop, but here's what we do: The production server backup is loaded to the test server daily. Every developer maintains a set of scripts which make any needed databae structure modifications after the backup has loaded. All development and QA testing is done against this test database. Where the production data isn't stable enough for unit testing we force-feed a few specific rows (as few as possible). This gives us fresh, real-world data for development and testing, and when an application rolls out, the exact same set of modification scripts are usually run on the production server (i.e. the modification scripts have been indirectly but repeatedly tested themselves).
Besides I do not se how the existence of Mecos would prevent the existence of black holes in general. We are still using the same Einstein Equations, right?
As I understand it (disclaimer: I'm just a well-read layman with no credentials), it's not Einstien that's the excluding factor, but Quantum Mechanics. When something sufficiently massive collapses its density reaches a point where no classical force can prevent its further collapse. And Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence means that a huge mass density is also a huge energy density. This much, as I understand it, everyone agrees on. But, QM says that such a huge energy density will give rise to a huge amount of virtual partical formation, which can -- similarly to the casimir effect -- create a non-classical pressure to oppose the collapse. The either/or question becomes: is the virtual partical pressure strong enough to halt the collapse (MECOs), or is it insufficient and a singularity will form instead (black holes). It would appear that you can't have it both ways -- either there's a denisty limit above which the virtual particle pressure halts the collapse, or there isn't.
In any case, they appear to act very similarly under most circumstances -- with the exception of their magnetic properties -- they're both massively-dense collections of mass/energy in some exotic non-classical form -- that it will likely take an exceptional set of observations to experimentally distinguish the two theories. And since our current best QM theories predect a fantistically wrong value for the vacuum energy constant, quantum theory doesn't (yet) shed much light on the matter.
You are correct that they had no leagl basis to hinder individual experimentation, but there were many avenues open to TLG (The Lego Group) to stifle the disemination of experimenters' information. There can be little doubt that much of the hobbiest effort infringes many of TLG's copyrights (firmware source code, circuit schematics, etc.) or, more importantly, that implementing many of the hobbiest projects infringes on patents held by TLG, and I'm not talking "IP" or software patents, but honest how-sensors-work type engineering patents.
Other than one project which was asked to change its name for trademark reasons (a custom firmware supporting cross-compiling with gcc or g++ renamed from LegOS to BrickOS), TLG chose to allow the free sharing of their copyrighted and patented design information throughout the hobbiest community. They could have said "You're free to experiment, but you have to keep your discoveries to yourself," but they chose not to, even to the point of letting companies sellsensors for the RCX (the Lego Mindstorms brain) which directly compete with TLG's own oferings in the same market.
That, to me, is a company "embracing and encouraging" experimenters and hobbiests when they were under no obligation to do so.
It sounds more like, well we couldn't bring the game back ourselves and didn't really have the drive to, but someone else has given us money so lets see if we can do something with that.
It's not that Cyan didn't have the drive; they didn't have the funding, simple as that. Cyan Worlds sunk something like $11 million in capital into Uru. Its failure has reduced Cyan to a handful of core employees barely scraping by from pay period to pay period. They
actually closed the doors entirely for a while a few months back.
Cyan doesn't view itself as a game company; it views itself as an art company. That artistry, down to the last virtual nail, is what enthralled so many Myst fans over the years, it's why they wanded to do Uru -- to provide an ongoing venue for the development of new art without the necessity of developing a new game every time. Cyan's committment to Uru has never wavered, but, like many artists, they're currently going through a "starving" period. I'm sure Rand Miller begged for every penny of that "limited third party funding."
A bit offtopic, but just how does one pronounce "pwned", anyway? I tend to go with the Welsh and make it "pooned" as in spoon, but maybe "poned" as in own or "pawned" as in, well, pawned, is more common?
Each channel had a transmitter on the Huygens probe abd a receiver on the Cassini spacecraft. The *receiver* for channel A was never activated, but the transmitter was working perfectly, and its signal was received here on Earth--allowing scientists to study its doppler shift.
The 6510 had the ability to look at several address in zero page memory and use that information to "bank" certain ROM and memory mampped I/O out so that the RAM underneith could be used.
Er, Sort of. In the interest of accuracy, the 6510 had an 8-bit "I/O port", separate from the address and data bus. This port was controlled by reading/writing to addresses 0 and 1, where the bits in address 1 set the data direction (read or write) for each of the 8 I/O pins, and data was read or written to address 0.
In the C64, some of the bits of this I/O port were connected to the MMU (if you can call it that, really just a handfull of logic gates controlling address select lines) which controlled whether data access went to RAM or to the usual ROM/memory-mapped I/O for each of the controllable address blocks ($8000-$9FFF, normally Game Cartridge ROM if present, $A000-$BFFF, normally BASIC ROM; $D000-$DFFF, normally memory-mapped I/O; $E000-$FFFF, normally KERNEL ROM). The Character Generator ROM, which normally didn't appear in the memory map, could be mapped in in a similar way.
(Incidentally, two other pins of the 6510's I/O Port were connected directly to the cassette drive! One for data and one for motor control.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, when I did the same thing just now, the top petition was for "Justice for Travon Martin" with 2.3 million signatures, second was "Caylee's Law" with 1.3 megasigantures, and #6 is "Stop Wildlife crime" with almost half-a-million. Either they fixed a bug (I know one of the IT guys there, they try to stay on top of bugs), or perhaps you had some kind of filter in place?
You were making a good point, right up to the part where you turned into a bigoted asshole with that "brown people" remark.
http://twitter.com/CERN
But the peak current is tens-of-thousands of amps, and the connections are between superconducting cables made of exotic materials, and once the connection is made at room temperature it has to be cooled down by almost 300 degrees (150 times colder than where it started) with all the flexing and stressing that causes, and still can't have more than one or two nano-ohms resistance or the whole experiment blows up. Yes, the electrical connections in the LHC are the equivalent of rocket science.
but where the heck is Ubuntu?!
I just compared against my TiVo copy from my local NBC affiliate and found the same: the broadcast order matched Wikipedia. --SMQ
I have to agree, if you are a law abiding citizen what is wrong with proving who you are?
Well, for one thing, no one can possibly be a law-abiding citizen any more. The shear volume of law makes it impossible, and most people (myself included) knowingly break the law on a routine basis. Traffic law (ever broken the speed limit?), copyright law (made a mix tape for a friend?), decency laws (swear in front of a lady?), tax law (bought tobacco out-of-state?), building codes (grass more than 4" high?), and a host of others make it a 100% certainty that every last one of us is guilty of some punishable offense.
It should always be the responsibility of the authorities to prove who you are and what you did, not for you to prove otherwise.
As the second paragraph says: 1280 inward facing to detect events in the tank + 240 outward facing to detect background events = 1520 total tubes. Not exactly rocket science, that.
Am I the only one who's skeptical of this claim? It all seems just a little too perfect, especially given the original article appeared near the beginning of April...
Probably never. Page and Plant have always been extremely reluctant to license Led Zeppelin songs. If you've seen the extras on the School of Rock DVD, you know that Jack Black had to literally beg to be allowed to use about 20 seconds of The Immigrant Song. You won't find Led Zeppelin on iTunes or any other (legal) online music service either.
They're still being manufactured by Unicomp; same layout, same technology. Plus, they come in black!
While caution is still warranted, it looks like Adobe indeed intends to foster open development. From the current PDF Reference section 1.4:
Of course a question remains of what other possibly relevant patents Adobe holds but is not licensing under those terms...
So, are they planning on adding features that will be incompatible with GPLv3?
Sure, every change they've made or will make that's licensed GPLv2 only. You can indeed download the most-recent "GPLv2 or higher" code, but if you then patch it with any "GPLv2 only" code you can only redistribute under GPLv2.
H. G. Wells seems to have thought of this over a hundred years ago...
Test data sucks: there are too many real-world situations the developers fail to think of.
We're a pretty small shop, but here's what we do: The production server backup is loaded to the test server daily. Every developer maintains a set of scripts which make any needed databae structure modifications after the backup has loaded. All development and QA testing is done against this test database. Where the production data isn't stable enough for unit testing we force-feed a few specific rows (as few as possible). This gives us fresh, real-world data for development and testing, and when an application rolls out, the exact same set of modification scripts are usually run on the production server (i.e. the modification scripts have been indirectly but repeatedly tested themselves).
Besides I do not se how the existence of Mecos would prevent the existence of black holes in general. We are still using the same Einstein Equations, right?
As I understand it (disclaimer: I'm just a well-read layman with no credentials), it's not Einstien that's the excluding factor, but Quantum Mechanics. When something sufficiently massive collapses its density reaches a point where no classical force can prevent its further collapse. And Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence means that a huge mass density is also a huge energy density. This much, as I understand it, everyone agrees on. But, QM says that such a huge energy density will give rise to a huge amount of virtual partical formation, which can -- similarly to the casimir effect -- create a non-classical pressure to oppose the collapse. The either/or question becomes: is the virtual partical pressure strong enough to halt the collapse (MECOs), or is it insufficient and a singularity will form instead (black holes). It would appear that you can't have it both ways -- either there's a denisty limit above which the virtual particle pressure halts the collapse, or there isn't.
In any case, they appear to act very similarly under most circumstances -- with the exception of their magnetic properties -- they're both massively-dense collections of mass/energy in some exotic non-classical form -- that it will likely take an exceptional set of observations to experimentally distinguish the two theories. And since our current best QM theories predect a fantistically wrong value for the vacuum energy constant, quantum theory doesn't (yet) shed much light on the matter.
You are correct that they had no leagl basis to hinder individual experimentation, but there were many avenues open to TLG (The Lego Group) to stifle the disemination of experimenters' information. There can be little doubt that much of the hobbiest effort infringes many of TLG's copyrights (firmware source code, circuit schematics, etc.) or, more importantly, that implementing many of the hobbiest projects infringes on patents held by TLG, and I'm not talking "IP" or software patents, but honest how-sensors-work type engineering patents.
Other than one project which was asked to change its name for trademark reasons (a custom firmware supporting cross-compiling with gcc or g++ renamed from LegOS to BrickOS), TLG chose to allow the free sharing of their copyrighted and patented design information throughout the hobbiest community. They could have said "You're free to experiment, but you have to keep your discoveries to yourself," but they chose not to, even to the point of letting companies sell sensors for the RCX (the Lego Mindstorms brain) which directly compete with TLG's own oferings in the same market.
That, to me, is a company "embracing and encouraging" experimenters and hobbiests when they were under no obligation to do so.
It's not that Cyan didn't have the drive; they didn't have the funding, simple as that. Cyan Worlds sunk something like $11 million in capital into Uru. Its failure has reduced Cyan to a handful of core employees barely scraping by from pay period to pay period. They actually closed the doors entirely for a while a few months back.
Cyan doesn't view itself as a game company; it views itself as an art company. That artistry, down to the last virtual nail, is what enthralled so many Myst fans over the years, it's why they wanded to do Uru -- to provide an ongoing venue for the development of new art without the necessity of developing a new game every time. Cyan's committment to Uru has never wavered, but, like many artists, they're currently going through a "starving" period. I'm sure Rand Miller begged for every penny of that "limited third party funding."
A bit offtopic, but just how does one pronounce "pwned", anyway? I tend to go with the Welsh and make it "pooned" as in spoon, but maybe "poned" as in own or "pawned" as in, well, pawned, is more common?
Each channel had a transmitter on the Huygens probe abd a receiver on the Cassini spacecraft. The *receiver* for channel A was never activated, but the transmitter was working perfectly, and its signal was received here on Earth--allowing scientists to study its doppler shift.
Linked from TFA: Eternal September
I don't know whether that's +1 Insightful or just plain nuts. I've got mod points today, but there's no "Say What?!" option...
Er, Adobe eBook/US DoJ vs. Elcomsoft, anyone?
Yeah, I had the direction register and the port addresses swapped, too. That's what I get for posting before checking the reference guide...
Er, Sort of. In the interest of accuracy, the 6510 had an 8-bit "I/O port", separate from the address and data bus. This port was controlled by reading/writing to addresses 0 and 1, where the bits in address 1 set the data direction (read or write) for each of the 8 I/O pins, and data was read or written to address 0.
In the C64, some of the bits of this I/O port were connected to the MMU (if you can call it that, really just a handfull of logic gates controlling address select lines) which controlled whether data access went to RAM or to the usual ROM/memory-mapped I/O for each of the controllable address blocks ($8000-$9FFF, normally Game Cartridge ROM if present, $A000-$BFFF, normally BASIC ROM; $D000-$DFFF, normally memory-mapped I/O; $E000-$FFFF, normally KERNEL ROM). The Character Generator ROM, which normally didn't appear in the memory map, could be mapped in in a similar way.
(Incidentally, two other pins of the 6510's I/O Port were connected directly to the cassette drive! One for data and one for motor control.)