My experience with firefox's performance is generally good - I have not seen the kind of degrading performance many here suffer from. But I have noticed one thing - while the full history window is open, the browser becomes much slower. Perhaps this is the issue for some of the other people here too? I haven't tested this for a while, though, so it might have been fixed already.
Of course, the distance from the Earth to the Moon was much too small in my calculation. It is really 3.8e8m, giving a force of 2.0e20 N, which is indeed less than that the Sun exerts. So you were totally right.
Perhaps I'm just being stupid here, but I can't get the numbers to match what you're saying.
Mass of the Sun (Ms): 1.9e30 kg Mass of the Earth (Me): 6.0e24 kg Mass of the Moon (Mm): 7.3e22 kg Sun-Moon distance (rs): 1.5e11 m Earth-Moon distance (re): 3.8e5 m.
Force on Moon from the Earth: G*Mm*Me/re^2 = 2.0e26 N Force on Moon from the Sun: G*Mm*Ms/rs^2 = 4.4e20 N
So I get the Sun to exert about 500,000 times less force on the Moon than the Earth does. Did I miss something fundamental here? Where did you get your information from?
I think you've got an important nuance wrong here. Wikipedia's article on counterfeiting is quite reasonable, and I think most would agree with this characterization:
"To counterfeit means to imitate something. Counterfeit products are fake replicas of the real product. Counterfeit products are often produced with the intent to take advantage of the superior value of the imitated product. The word counterfeit frequently describes both the forgeries of currency and documents, as well as the imitations of clothing, handbags, shoes, pharmaceuticals, aviation and automobile parts, watches, electronics, software, works of art, toys. Counterfeit products tend to have fake company logos and brands. In the case of goods, it results in patent infringement or trademark infringement."
That is, counterfeiting has connotations of inferior imitation which derives its value from the reputation of the original. The laws most relevant for counterfeiting are typically trademark and patent laws, and I think the core concern is the harming of other's reputation by mislabeling products. Giving somebody a digital copy that is identical in every way does not fit this. That doesn't mean that it is legal, but let us not try to dilute terms by hammering square pegs into round holes.
Copyright infringement: Selling you illegal copies of Microsoft Windows. Counterfeinting: Selling you some other piece of software that has been themed to fool you or your peers into thinking it is Windows.
I see you didn't read my link. CPLEX is discussed there. Yes, D-Wave is faster than CPLEX. But does that matter when other classical implementations exist that are *much* faster than CPLEX? The link disucsses one two such implementations: One, written in plain python (including direct for loops in python, not exactly a recipe for efficiency), that still beats D-Wave by a factor for 120 in speed. It is available on a git repository which is also linked from that article. The other one is a C implementation of the same algorithm, which is 100 times faster than the python version (not unusual), and hence 12000 times faster than D-Wave, and produces the same results. This has been confirmed by others who have run both CPLEX and this program for the same problems, and gotten the same results - see the comment section at the end of the article.
Really? I thought it was 12,000 times slower than a normal computer when solving the one problem it does best, while costing approximately as many times more than said normal computer. That isn't exactly "incredibly fast" or "incredibly useful", is it? Scientists aren't too happy about it either, because the science, if it exists, is not being published.
Your spaceship won't feel the speed at all. That is the whole point of relativity. As far as the spacecraft is concerned, it is sitting still with its normal mass, and only the rest of the universe is moving. So the question isn't if the engine will have problems working due to the speed, but whether it will have enough fuel to keep up that acceleration for so long.
Good question! I would be intersted to hear the answer to this myself. I think the decline could be due to a combination of so many articles already existing, and too much deletionism.
I think the lack of immediate result when editing would greatly decrease the interest in editing Wikipedia for new people, and hence harm recruitment and in the long term retard the growth of the encyclopedia. For fringe articles, there might not be any established editors with knowledge on the subject, but plenty of people outside wikipedia who could start a page. But since nobody would be qualified to review that page, it would hang in limbo indefinitely, and the potential new editor would probably give up and leave wikipedia. I'm sure it would serve its purpose in avoiding vandalism, though. But it would not be worth it.
Well, the original philosophy of wikipedia was that if somebody made an inaccurate article about a subject, then among the thousands of eyes reading the article, there would eventually be somebody knowledgable enough to improve it. That model seemed to work pretty well, and lead to wikipedia growing rapidly while still being pretty high quality, if I recall correctly. This was the big surprise about wikipedia - most people I knew (and myself included) were too cynical to believe something like that could work, but it did!
But it has gradually shifted to an increasing focus on external references. References are very good, don't get me wrong, but I don't agree with the assertion that an article without references is useless. I think a mature article should eventually have references, but the person who writes the first version of the article might not be the same as the person who adds the references.
If any article without references is deleted, then it won't get written until somebody who is both knowledgable about the subject *and* good at tracking down references comes along. On the other hand, if the referenceless article is left alone, then somebody might come along later and add references to it, and it will probably be improved quite a bit by others before that too.
Basically, my experience is that some deletionists want articles to spring fully formed into existence, and kill baby articles on sight.
There is also the question of notability, though that is a bit off-topic with regards to what you said. But I'll say it anyway. I think the appropriate notability threshold is strongly related to the target size of an encyclopedia. For example, if you are trying to build a 100 page mini-encyclopedia, then the notability threshold would have to be extremely high. For a 100-volume encyclopedia the threshold would be much lower. For an encyclopedia like wikipedia, which has is not limited by print size, I think the logical thing to do is to have a gradually falling notability threshold. That way, the most important articles get written first, followed by gradually less notable ones as the encyclopedia grows. So notability should be a guide for the order in which articles are written, rather than a cutoff at which wikipedia is finished.
I think this viewpoint was more common in the early wikipedia, before deletionism became dominant. I remember reading a page of numbers wikipedia aspired to, which as a tounge-in-cheek goal included "6,000,000,000 articles -an article about every person in the world" or something similar. While that is a bit of an exaggeration, I think it shows a very different goal for the project than pruning, guarding and dotting of i's and crossing of t's, and being satisfied with a mere 4 million articles.
Fair enough. For what it's worth, I had a look through the literature now, and I see that this is a much more controversial issue than I thought, and the result seems to hinge upon exactly how one measures the tunneling time.
Did you read the rest of my comment, other than my postscript? What exactly do you mean by it being instantaneous? How could one measure this? Could you explain in detailed, small steps how you think the tunneling works, and which of those steps is instantaneous?
Exactly. Also, if you just link lots of these together naively, the computation would be crashing all the time, never having time to finish, because the currently standard ways of communicating (such as MPI) make it difficult to handle the loss of a single process, and when you're starting to talk about many millions of nodes, the chances that not a single one of them will crash in the space of the minutes to hours a computation takes is pretty minuscule.
You're right that the plot is of the absolute square of the wavefunction, not the wavefunction itself. That wavefunction is what the particle actually is - it contains all the physically relevant information about the particle. But even with your interpretation of it, I think you are being inconsistent. You admit that the wavefunction itself takes time to cross the barrier, so what do you mean by the particle instantaneously tunneling? Are you imagining a situation where you first measure the position of the particle, and find it to be on the left side, and immediately measure it again, and find it to be on the right side, with no time in between. That would qualify as instantaneous motion, but that will not happen. After the first measurement, the wave function will be concentrated on the left side of the barrier, and for part of it to move through the barrier, you have to wait at least long enough for light to pass it. If you try measuring the position of the particle before that, you will have a 0% chance of finding it on the right side.
PS: Most of your argument does not seem to have anything particular to do with tunneling, and would work for any extended wave function. So aren't you also saying that you can get superluminal motion anywhere at any time? It is not difficult to prepare a wave function that has a significant amplitude over large areas.
I think this is an example of good use of tax dollars, and if I lived in the USA and paid taxes there, I would be happy that at least some of it is spent in the service of the public. I'm surprised to see such resistance to this here - I would have thought that even those who believe in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the Free Market would be in favor of this, as the mathematical fundament of free market economics assumes that all actors are perfectly rational and have complete knowledge, and mixing of advertisements and search results pulls them in the opposite direction, towards being emotional and ignorant. That may benefit the advertiser, but it cripples that fictional creature, the Invisible Hand, that is supposed to make a free market economy good for society.
I can't seem to reproduce this. Even when disabling adblock I only get one advertisement at the bottom of the page. I use the encrypted version of google, though. Perhaps that one is different?
Anyway, while I think it is natural to criticize google for mixing propaganda with actual search results, I don't understand why you don't just use adblocking and get rid of the problem on your end. It makes the world-wide web much more pleasant, safer and faster to use, and protects you from brainwashing by advertisers.
Here is a simple 1d simulation of a particle tunneling through a potential barrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV2fkDscwvY As you can see, the signal does not propagate instantaneously through the barrier when tunneling. This matches what I learned at school too. What are your sources for tunneling being instantaneous? Do you have some time-dependent simulations that show how the wave function behaves during this instant tunneling?
If he has a list of spies and sold it for protection, then that would be bad, and would not qualify as whistleblowing. But even if that were true it would not disqualify what we know he has revealed to the public as whistleblowing. Just like somebody can be a war hero and still beat his wife. A bad deed does not remove good ones - they should be considered separately.
PS: I'm new here at slashdot, so I don't know how plentiful mod points are. I haven't gotten any so far, so they seem pretty rare to me. Is it really plausible that somebody has enough mod points to consistently mod you down as you claim in your signature?
Here is a typical definition of the word:
whistleblower: an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it. As you can see, the law does not enter into the definition. How about this hypothetical situation? What if you discovered that not only is the government assassinating dissidents, but also discover the existence of a secret section of the constitution that overrides the rest of it, and gives the government unlimited power to disappear dissidents while making it illegal to reveal the existence of said section of the constitution to the public?
In this case, the government is not doing anything illegal, and you would be breaking the law by revealing it. I think you would still agree that revealing this to the public would be moral, and that doing so would be whistleblowing. Of course, the real situation in the current case is less extreme than that, but what Snowden did was still moral. He did not damage national security, and even if he had, national security is overrated. Political capital was only damaged to the extent that this was both unknown and unpopular with the population. I.e. the only way this could have damaged political capital is if it were moral to release it.
Yes, of course they would be different in other parts of the world! They are different inside the USA, and the differences are probably greater outside it. I do now know how large these differences are, and seeing some statistics on that would be very enlightening. It is pretty common here on Slashdot to react to "Country X has problem Y" by claiming "every other country has problem Y too, to exactly the same degree" with no evidence to back that up, even though "every country is the same" is a tiny point in a huge parameter space.
But be wary in general not to make the opposite mistake too: Just because the world is not black and white doesn't mean that everything is exactly #808080 either.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience with firefox's performance is generally good - I have not seen the kind of degrading performance many here suffer from. But I have noticed one thing - while the full history window is open, the browser becomes much slower. Perhaps this is the issue for some of the other people here too? I haven't tested this for a while, though, so it might have been fixed already.
Of course, the distance from the Earth to the Moon was much too small in my calculation. It is really 3.8e8m, giving a force of 2.0e20 N, which is indeed less than that the Sun exerts. So you were totally right.
Perhaps I'm just being stupid here, but I can't get the numbers to match what you're saying.
Mass of the Sun (Ms): 1.9e30 kg
Mass of the Earth (Me): 6.0e24 kg
Mass of the Moon (Mm): 7.3e22 kg
Sun-Moon distance (rs): 1.5e11 m
Earth-Moon distance (re): 3.8e5 m.
Force on Moon from the Earth: G*Mm*Me/re^2 = 2.0e26 N
Force on Moon from the Sun: G*Mm*Ms/rs^2 = 4.4e20 N
So I get the Sun to exert about 500,000 times less force on the Moon than the Earth does. Did I miss something fundamental here? Where did you get your information from?
I think you've got an important nuance wrong here. Wikipedia's article on counterfeiting is quite reasonable, and I think most would agree with this characterization:
"To counterfeit means to imitate something. Counterfeit products are fake replicas of the real product. Counterfeit products are often produced with the intent to take advantage of the superior value of the imitated product. The word counterfeit frequently describes both the forgeries of currency and documents, as well as the imitations of clothing, handbags, shoes, pharmaceuticals, aviation and automobile parts, watches, electronics, software, works of art, toys. Counterfeit products tend to have fake company logos and brands. In the case of goods, it results in patent infringement or trademark infringement."
That is, counterfeiting has connotations of inferior imitation which derives its value from the reputation of the original. The laws most relevant for counterfeiting are typically trademark and patent laws, and I think the core concern is the harming of other's reputation by mislabeling products. Giving somebody a digital copy that is identical in every way does not fit this. That doesn't mean that it is legal, but let us not try to dilute terms by hammering square pegs into round holes.
Copyright infringement: Selling you illegal copies of Microsoft Windows.
Counterfeinting: Selling you some other piece of software that has been themed to fool you or your peers into thinking it is Windows.
The link I gave was to a more updated article written by the author of the blog comment you linked to.
I see you didn't read my link. CPLEX is discussed there. Yes, D-Wave is faster than CPLEX. But does that matter when other classical implementations exist that are *much* faster than CPLEX? The link disucsses one two such implementations: One, written in plain python (including direct for loops in python, not exactly a recipe for efficiency), that still beats D-Wave by a factor for 120 in speed. It is available on a git repository which is also linked from that article. The other one is a C implementation of the same algorithm, which is 100 times faster than the python version (not unusual), and hence 12000 times faster than D-Wave, and produces the same results. This has been confirmed by others who have run both CPLEX and this program for the same problems, and gotten the same results - see the comment section at the end of the article.
Really? I thought it was 12,000 times slower than a normal computer when solving the one problem it does best, while costing approximately as many times more than said normal computer. That isn't exactly "incredibly fast" or "incredibly useful", is it? Scientists aren't too happy about it either, because the science, if it exists, is not being published.
Your spaceship won't feel the speed at all. That is the whole point of relativity. As far as the spacecraft is concerned, it is sitting still with its normal mass, and only the rest of the universe is moving. So the question isn't if the engine will have problems working due to the speed, but whether it will have enough fuel to keep up that acceleration for so long.
Good question! I would be intersted to hear the answer to this myself. I think the decline could be due to a combination of so many articles already existing, and too much deletionism.
I think the lack of immediate result when editing would greatly decrease the interest in editing Wikipedia for new people, and hence harm recruitment and in the long term retard the growth of the encyclopedia. For fringe articles, there might not be any established editors with knowledge on the subject, but plenty of people outside wikipedia who could start a page. But since nobody would be qualified to review that page, it would hang in limbo indefinitely, and the potential new editor would probably give up and leave wikipedia. I'm sure it would serve its purpose in avoiding vandalism, though. But it would not be worth it.
Well, the original philosophy of wikipedia was that if somebody made an inaccurate article about a subject, then among the thousands of eyes reading the article, there would eventually be somebody knowledgable enough to improve it. That model seemed to work pretty well, and lead to wikipedia growing rapidly while still being pretty high quality, if I recall correctly. This was the big surprise about wikipedia - most people I knew (and myself included) were too cynical to believe something like that could work, but it did!
But it has gradually shifted to an increasing focus on external references. References are very good, don't get me wrong, but I don't agree with the assertion that an article without references is useless. I think a mature article should eventually have references, but the person who writes the first version of the article might not be the same as the person who adds the references.
If any article without references is deleted, then it won't get written until somebody who is both knowledgable about the subject *and* good at tracking down references comes along. On the other hand, if the referenceless article is left alone, then somebody might come along later and add references to it, and it will probably be improved quite a bit by others before that too.
Basically, my experience is that some deletionists want articles to spring fully formed into existence, and kill baby articles on sight.
There is also the question of notability, though that is a bit off-topic with regards to what you said. But I'll say it anyway. I think the appropriate notability threshold is strongly related to the target size of an encyclopedia. For example, if you are trying to build a 100 page mini-encyclopedia, then the notability threshold would have to be extremely high. For a 100-volume encyclopedia the threshold would be much lower. For an encyclopedia like wikipedia, which has is not limited by print size, I think the logical thing to do is to have a gradually falling notability threshold. That way, the most important articles get written first, followed by gradually less notable ones as the encyclopedia grows. So notability should be a guide for the order in which articles are written, rather than a cutoff at which wikipedia is finished.
I think this viewpoint was more common in the early wikipedia, before deletionism became dominant. I remember reading a page of numbers wikipedia aspired to, which as a tounge-in-cheek goal included "6,000,000,000 articles -an article about every person in the world" or something similar. While that is a bit of an exaggeration, I think it shows a very different goal for the project than pruning, guarding and dotting of i's and crossing of t's, and being satisfied with a mere 4 million articles.
Fair enough. For what it's worth, I had a look through the literature now, and I see that this is a much more controversial issue than I thought, and the result seems to hinge upon exactly how one measures the tunneling time.
Did you read the rest of my comment, other than my postscript? What exactly do you mean by it being instantaneous? How could one measure this? Could you explain in detailed, small steps how you think the tunneling works, and which of those steps is instantaneous?
Exactly. Also, if you just link lots of these together naively, the computation would be crashing all the time, never having time to finish, because the currently standard ways of communicating (such as MPI) make it difficult to handle the loss of a single process, and when you're starting to talk about many millions of nodes, the chances that not a single one of them will crash in the space of the minutes to hours a computation takes is pretty minuscule.
You're right that the plot is of the absolute square of the wavefunction, not the wavefunction itself. That wavefunction is what the particle actually is - it contains all the physically relevant information about the particle. But even with your interpretation of it, I think you are being inconsistent. You admit that the wavefunction itself takes time to cross the barrier, so what do you mean by the particle instantaneously tunneling? Are you imagining a situation where you first measure the position of the particle, and find it to be on the left side, and immediately measure it again, and find it to be on the right side, with no time in between. That would qualify as instantaneous motion, but that will not happen. After the first measurement, the wave function will be concentrated on the left side of the barrier, and for part of it to move through the barrier, you have to wait at least long enough for light to pass it. If you try measuring the position of the particle before that, you will have a 0% chance of finding it on the right side.
PS: Most of your argument does not seem to have anything particular to do with tunneling, and would work for any extended wave function. So aren't you also saying that you can get superluminal motion anywhere at any time? It is not difficult to prepare a wave function that has a significant amplitude over large areas.
I think this is an example of good use of tax dollars, and if I lived in the USA and paid taxes there, I would be happy that at least some of it is spent in the service of the public. I'm surprised to see such resistance to this here - I would have thought that even those who believe in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the Free Market would be in favor of this, as the mathematical fundament of free market economics assumes that all actors are perfectly rational and have complete knowledge, and mixing of advertisements and search results pulls them in the opposite direction, towards being emotional and ignorant. That may benefit the advertiser, but it cripples that fictional creature, the Invisible Hand, that is supposed to make a free market economy good for society.
I can't seem to reproduce this. Even when disabling adblock I only get one advertisement at the bottom of the page. I use the encrypted version of google, though. Perhaps that one is different?
Anyway, while I think it is natural to criticize google for mixing propaganda with actual search results, I don't understand why you don't just use adblocking and get rid of the problem on your end. It makes the world-wide web much more pleasant, safer and faster to use, and protects you from brainwashing by advertisers.
Here is a simple 1d simulation of a particle tunneling through a potential barrier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV2fkDscwvY
As you can see, the signal does not propagate instantaneously through the barrier when tunneling. This matches what I learned at school too. What are your sources for tunneling being instantaneous? Do you have some time-dependent simulations that show how the wave function behaves during this instant tunneling?
I have never heard of zones in Norway where public services like police, fire or ambulance won't go. Are you sure you're right about this?
I took the definition from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/whistleblower. Where did you get yours?
If he has a list of spies and sold it for protection, then that would be bad, and would not qualify as whistleblowing. But even if that were true it would not disqualify what we know he has revealed to the public as whistleblowing. Just like somebody can be a war hero and still beat his wife. A bad deed does not remove good ones - they should be considered separately.
PS: I'm new here at slashdot, so I don't know how plentiful mod points are. I haven't gotten any so far, so they seem pretty rare to me. Is it really plausible that somebody has enough mod points to consistently mod you down as you claim in your signature?
Here is a typical definition of the word:
whistleblower: an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it.
As you can see, the law does not enter into the definition. How about this hypothetical situation? What if you discovered that not only is the government assassinating dissidents, but also discover the existence of a secret section of the constitution that overrides the rest of it, and gives the government unlimited power to disappear dissidents while making it illegal to reveal the existence of said section of the constitution to the public?
In this case, the government is not doing anything illegal, and you would be breaking the law by revealing it. I think you would still agree that revealing this to the public would be moral, and that doing so would be whistleblowing. Of course, the real situation in the current case is less extreme than that, but what Snowden did was still moral. He did not damage national security, and even if he had, national security is overrated. Political capital was only damaged to the extent that this was both unknown and unpopular with the population. I.e. the only way this could have damaged political capital is if it were moral to release it.
Yes, of course they would be different in other parts of the world! They are different inside the USA, and the differences are probably greater outside it. I do now know how large these differences are, and seeing some statistics on that would be very enlightening. It is pretty common here on Slashdot to react to "Country X has problem Y" by claiming "every other country has problem Y too, to exactly the same degree" with no evidence to back that up, even though "every country is the same" is a tiny point in a huge parameter space.
Here is a map of countries with extradition treaties with the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_extradition_treaties_countries.PNG
It seems unbelievably broad, and includes all the countries he is speculated to be going to after Russia, it seems.
But be wary in general not to make the opposite mistake too: Just because the world is not black and white doesn't mean that everything is exactly #808080 either.
"Conjectured" is too weak a statement here. It has been shown that a single-core normal classical CPU running a modestly optimized program is 12000 times faster than the D-wave computer at its speciality, the "D-wave problem":
http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-with-classical-computers/