Yes, I remember the artifical rice commodity scam that happened in 2008. Apparently there was plenty of rice, but the price of oil to transport it became a factor when a continuing drought in Austraila changed the typical global distribution pattern of this commodity causing huge price discontinuities and speculation driving up prices.
Do you remember the 2006 Housing Shortage where here in the US we ran out of houses for people to buy (I mean speculate on)? Were all those people who couldn't buy houses homeless?
Not all shortages are a result of actual shortages, but can also occur due to poor distribution and pricing stability.
Everyone knows the biggest greenhouse gas (something that absorbs/emits radiation in the thermal-IR band) is water vapor. Water vapor is responsible for about 50-60% of the greenhouse effect, but there's not much we humans can do about it since you have the ocean constantly able to refresh the water vapor in the air.
The 2nd and 3rd biggest greenhouse gasses are CO2 and CH4. Although CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas (about 20x), there's much more CO2 and that currenty has a bigger impact (~15-20% vs 5-10%).
Apparently people think we can do something about that 15-20%, but as most folks are also aware, it's much easier to agree to try to do something than acutally to be able to do something (just google "miss greenhouse gas target"). It's kinda like going on a diet, we know it's good for us, but it's really hard to do.
FWIW, I personally don't think the CO2-reduction thing is really something we can accomplish. We should just spend the resources to try to figure out how to live in a world where the frozen methane escapes from the ocean floor and causes real global warming (not the kind of stuff that we are seeing now). I doubt that even if we sucked all the CO2 from the atmosphere we could prevent this problem as it is a ocean thermal oscillation, not something that we humans have control over as it has happened in the past long before we walked this earth.
Personally I'd like to trade my car for one of those 240MPG commuter mobiles from VW, but alas they only sell in germany.
Alas this VW XL1 is probably really only a concept car (like the GM-EV1). Maybe they plan to build a 100 or so?http://carandvannews.co.uk/2011/01/26/vw-to-put-super-efficient-xl1-on-sale/
Suppose you have car and emperically you figure out how to drift it into many different turns. In certain configurations, you notice a certain amount of differential side-slip and you collect data. You make a theory about drifting based on various combinations of tires (particles), and road surface types (fields). One thing that you notice is that you don't really know why there's certain side-slip angles with different treads, so you propose a theory that the coupling between the tires and the road surface is different between these situations and that affects the skid dynamics (apparent mass), that you experience. Okay now you have this great theory and a bunch of empirical data of skid dyanmics that works for you by assigning magic number (masses) to various combination tires and surface types.
But you wonder if you can find a way to predict the dynamics and you come up with this idea that this coupling is a fundamental relationship of the coupling between tires and road surfaces (kinda like friction). Your theory is that there is some interaction between the tire and road which is like "friction" caused by the tread design and tire deformation amount. So you devise an experiment to see if you can find the thing causing this "friction".
The higgs field is analgous "friction" and the search for the higgs-boson is analagous to the search for the source of friction. If you think of friction being caused by atomic forces, there is some range of forces that can cause the macroscopic changes in skid dynamics that you see empirically. Likewize with Higgs, the higgs-boson need to be found in a certain range of collision energy if it is consistant with the standard model to match the empirical data of obverved mass and coupling constants up to Planck scale energies (where gravity is more quantized and mass probably has different physics).
If we find the thing that causes atomic forces that is consistant with our theory of "friction" (with say the tread design, or say the tire deformation amount), then probably something else explains the skid dynamics that isn't "friction", but something else. So we have to determine by experiment what the skid dynamics are for each tire and road combination. Likewize, with w/o Higgs we are struggling to have a theory of mass, but that doesn't mean mass (and the resultant dynamical behaviour) doesn't exist, just we don't know why it exists and can't predict it from known theories.
Are you saying we should err on the side of convenience or err on the side of safety? Or are you saying that the extrodinary claim that no consumer electronics cause interference with commercial avionic systems requires extrodinary evidence of that claim?
On the other hand if they can show one counter example of an electronic system causing interference, then it's a low burden of proof, right? Well someone tried this (mythbusters episode 49), and it turned out to be plausable, so the burden of proof shifts to the other side, right?
One take away people should learn is that they shouldn't use hacks for PRNG they "heard about" on Slashdot. People have learned quite a bit about cryptographically secure psuedo random number generators over the years and apparently aren't consulted very often by people who write kernels (open-source or otherwize). http://www.pinkas.net/PAPERS/gpr06.pdf
Even Linux switched from their crappy TGFSR/SHA-1 hack which does NOT use MD5 hack to an expert designed Yarrow/Fortuna which do NOT use MD5. If you must do something different, perhaps use a HASH-DRBG specified in NIST SP 800-90 with an approved hash function (e.g, NOT MD5).
Of course there's no stopping someone from using MD5, in their proprietary crappy PRNG for their toy code that they typed from memory and in this case there's probably no need to have unnecessary discussions about it.
If android infringes on Microsofts IP I can't help but wonder why WP7 sucks so hard. It seems that they are saying that Google took Microsofts idea and implemented it better.
Why would that be a surprise?
Perhaps google did better search than yahoo search and yahoo did better search than altavista search... Apple did a better MP3 player implementation than Creative... Sony did a better TV tube implementation (trinitron) than RCA (shadowmask) or Autometric (chromotron)... Maybe even linux did the unix api better than bsd, which was way better than SystemV unix (thinking about R1-3)?
People that come up with the idea first often have something that tends to suck really hard in comparison... Lots of first movers tend to have lots of arrows in their backs. It doesn't mean their ideas suck, it only means they didn't do the best job of implementing them.
Theoretically, the patent system is supposed to motivate the first movers to invest in thier technology (instead to being resigned to the fact that fruits of their investments would be stolen by a "fast-follower"). Of course the patent system isn't perfect, but w/o any protections at all, it may be tough to attract investment in new ideas as it would be better to invest that money in fast-follower companies that didn't invest in research at all. We'd probably be left only with huge lumbering companies to do try new ideas as they would probably be the only ones that could afford the investment to monetize that research without attracting any new investors. Or perhaps the large companies would just be the only vehicle to make money and they would try to steal ideas outright (say like the intermittant wind-shield wipers, or compressed data storage drivers, etc...) instead of paying for them.
No system is perfect, but probably the only rational argument (to me) that I've heard about changing it is to shorten the duration or have better mechanisms for compulsary licensing (nothing that free/open source advocates really care about)...
Do stall warnings use anything other than airspeed and angle of attack to warn about a stall, or are there some type of sensors on the wings to detect airflow and lift?
IANA-aeronautical-engineer, but I imagine that you cannot easily determine the actual angle of attack w/o sensors to detect airflow. The actual angle of the wing referenced to the ground (or other fixed reference) doesn't determine the angle of attack, it is relative to the windspeed around the winds. Thus the angle of attack is mostly inferred by sensors that measure windspeeds (mostly). AFAIK stall warnings often additionally use measurement devices that measure dynamic differntial pressure around (or nearby) the lift surfaces (aka LRI), and other secondary indicators (e.g., buffeting dynamics of the plane when it nears the stall conditions).
It's also about battery specs. When a device is benchmarked for its battery life, it's at a certain brightness level. Since the lcd backlight is most of the power consumption of these new fangled devices, it make more sense to have a more efficient transmitter of light if you want to score better on this metric.
Matte LCDs have essentially have a polarized light-scattering filter which dims the LCD requiring more backlight for a given user brightness level. This matte light filter also tends to make the images more blurry (depending on viewing angle as the filter generates "moire"-like interference with the pixel elements) and have reduced contrast as well.
Glossy LCDs just have a simple optical coating that effectively pipes the light straight out from the LCD polarizer to your eye, or more importantly to the device measuring the screen's brightness level allowing them to have a lower backlight power for a given brightness level than the corresponding Matte LCD.
They DID build a seawall. They DID design the power plant to handle a tsunami. What they did NOT do, was design the plant to take on a tsunami as large as the one it did, and why didn't they? Because when the plant was built 30-odd years ago, possibly before you were even born, scientists and engineers didn't even have a good understanding of plate tectonics, earthquakes or tsunamis. They designed the plant based on what they thought was the most likely maximum it would experience before being retired.
Except it they did NOT build it to what they knew was a distinct possiblity it could experience before it was retired by selectively dismissing the historical data. Japan has been experiencing tsunami for many generations, there's quite a bit of recorded history on the subject.
For example, the Sanriku quake of 869. Of which the wikipedia has this interesting blurb to say about it...
Three tsunami deposits have been identified within the Holocene sequence of the Sendai plain, all formed within the last 3,000 years, suggesting an 800 to 1,100 year recurrence interval for large tsunamigenic earthquakes. In 2001 it was reckoned that there was a high likelihood of a large tsunami hitting the Sendai plain as more than 1,100 years had then elapsed.[5] As for the other two large tsunamis recognized before the 869 tsunami, one was estimated to have occurred between about 1000 BC and 500 BC and the other about 500 BC and 1 AD.[6] In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw 8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Thoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area.
The rationale for excluding this data point given by TEPCO was that the information prior to 1896 was unreliable. Maybe it wasn't foreseeable that this could have happened, but what was foreseeable was their methodology for deciding what they did for preventative measures was arbitrary (which lends to the suspiscion that it was deliberatly exclusive of the known data to justify their proposed action).
My point is, however little immediate effect the project had, it involved co-operation between politicians much further apart on then-current political spectrum than modern US and China, and if US chosen more rational approach to spaceships development, it would allow more immediately practical uses.
Since Soyuz-Apollo had essentially no immediate effect, and if you think co-operation has more immediate practical uses and more rationality, how do you explain the enormous practical impact and rationality of the highly cooperative International Space Station enterprise?
AFAICS, the only benefit of these non-scientific space programs is continued gainful employment of (in the earlier case of the Space Shuttle) US aerospace engineers, and (of the latter case of the ISS) ex-soviet aerospace engineers. I don't see how co-operation really changes things and make things more rational or immediately practical.
There was a joint Soyuz-Apollo project. Mostly symbolic, but it had some practical value -- it standardized docking equipment and procedures, made it possible at least in theory, for USSR and US spaceships to be used to rescuing crew from each other in case of emergency... Too bad, US ended Apollo soon after that, and placed all its effort into that fat Concorde-shaped thing.
I probably need to read some more history books, but as I recall this mission was totally political/symbolic. There was no standarization of anything. A specially made dongle was made to connect the spacecrafts (the APAS or the so-called Androgynous Peripheral Attach System). The apollo-soyus mission was flow w/o the lunar module and the APAS was stored in it's place. This also meant that like the lunar module, the dongle/dock wasn't connected at launch, but needed to be extracted from the base of the last stage of the rocket (the TD&E manuever, or Transposition, docking and extraction). This particular APAS system (APAS-75 the "75" being the year it was used) was only used on that mission and no other mission.
There were two main reasons for the adapter dongle: First, they wanted to try docking both ways (each ship in the active/passive roles, hence the androgynous part of the name). Second was you needed airlocks to go between the ships as it was Nasa's practice to pressurize with 5% pure oxygen (see apollo 1 for a discussion why), and the Soviets pressurized to to near ground level with oxygen and nitrogen.
The Soviet space agency eventually used APAS-89 which also happend to be use on the US Space Shuttle for connection to MIR (I believe the space station uses a later varient APAS-95, but I could be wrong).
Of course in typical NIH fashion, since APAS was mostly a Soviet/Russian invention, NASA went and developed Yet-another-dock, they called Low-impact-docking-system (or LIDS) for the now-cancelled Orion project, which is a simplified APAS, but of course totally incompatible.
As a result of this mess the international space community finally recently (last year) created the InternationalDockingStandard which is basically a hybrid between APAS-95 and LIDS and of course not implemented by anyone yet...
Of course if your mission doesn't fly with the right APAS, there's theoretically no way to dock which means in practice, there's no way to rescue a crew w/o using an airlock (which you would have to do anyhow if the pressurization was different between the two ships).
Although CBC encryption needs to be done in sequence, CBC decryption can be done mostly in parallel (don't have to wait until you do the AES part of the previous block)...
Also security is better than other modes only in some cases. As a trivial example, in CBC it's easier to tamper with the plain-text.: all you have to do to flip a bit in the plaintext of a CBC encrypted stream is to flip that same bit in the previous block's cipher-text. Although that kills that previous block's decrypted plaintext, it make it possible to easily arbitrarily manipulate somethings (of course if that is a threat model, you should really be doing a MAC, but that is another discussion)...
Many studies have been done with mice delivered by c-sections (google it if you don't believe me). This is often done in studies to provide more control over gestation period and exposure to germs during birth. Atlhough I don't have a pointer handy, I'm pretty sure those studies involved multi-generational research, then scientist have probably considered this variable and either accounted for it, or rejected its influence.
My point is that YOU are making pure speculation whereas people have studied some of the things you are speculating about and your original speculation was likely NOT true. Sure anything might be possible, but not everything that might be possible is actually possible (any many of them are less likely that what the current scientific evidence supports).
Unless you are one of those that insists on "beyond a shadow of a doubt", rather than "beyond reasonable doubt", in which case there's no convincing you about science;^)
There are always unintended consequence to everything. But to carry your analogy. Did the car a net positive or negative? We will never know.
By the way there are things that describe this school of thought...
Obviously there are many reasons for having a Cesarian section, and sure, having a genetically narrow birth canal is pretty far down the list. The point was not to ascribe evolutionary fitness to a wide birth canal, necessarily. The point was rather the reverse -- that the common use of Cesarian sections changes the evolutionary pressure on the female anatomy, in a very explicit and direct way: Before C-sections became common, it was (quite literally) physically impossible for a woman with a genetically narrow birth canal to pass that trait onto her daughters. Now, she can.
Okay, I'll bite... A few of the top reasons for having a Cesarian are OBGYN's avoiding malpractice suits, reduction in pain tolerance, and epidurals that prevent women from bearing down with their contractions causing fetal distress. If so does the change the evolutionary pressure on the women that want epidurals and are pain adverse or compliant with doctors suggestions for a C-section? That's seems just as likely as the narrow birth canal argument.
Also more likely (and probably true), is that the evolutionary pressure has already happened to adapt humans to the "chronic" condition of an average narrow birth canal to head size. The result is likely selective pressure for early birth before our heads become too big as described here http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/04/evolution-may-explain-why-baby-comes-early/
At least this guys ramblings cites studies and comes with graphs, what's your story?
Haven't transistors always been 3D? You may draw them 2D in layout, but it's still a gate sitting on top of a channel with stacks of metal... it has L x W x H. I think that's called 3D. Silly Intel marketing.
Actually integrated transistors have been "planar" for the most part (although there have been "vfets" and other types of 3d channels in the past)...
In planar transistors, the field that chokes off the source/drain path has been mediated by a gate which is just on top of the channel on one plane. Imagine an iron on of a ironing board heating it up the board when you turn it on. Although the ironing board and the iron are both 3-dimensional objects, the interface in a "plane" and the heat diffuses across this plane. In this analogy with a planar transistor, the channel is dug into in the ironing board and the iron is the gate.
In finFET, the gate surrounds the channel on 3 side. Imagine now a tube on an ironing board and the iron has a notch cut in it so the iron surrounds the tube on three side. When you turn on the iron, heat diffuses across all around the notch instead of interfacing on 1 plane. This is "3D" or finFET instead of planar. In this analogy with a finFET transistor, the channel is the tube on the ironing board and the iron with a notch is the gate.
As you might imagine, the finFET architecture should have a better capability to turn on and off the channel since there is field is wrapping around the channel instead of just being applied to one side (okay that's simplification, but you get the idea).
Intel took, this finFET idea and added another twist with a "3", called tri-gate (or tri-channel depending on your point of view). This congolomeration of two independent ideas that both revolve around the number 3 is the kind of thing that drives marketing people to be silly;^)
And for those that don't understand w/o a car analogy, imagine the difference in traction you get with bald tires on ice (planar where tire is the gate and ice is the channel), vs snow tires on dirt (finFET where the tire is the gate and dirt is the channel)...
Doesn't matter what it is, or how crappy it is, sadly some pathetic folks just feel feel a compulsion to steal, others just feel entitled...
Talk to a hard core song or movie pirate. Doesn't matter how crappy the song or movie is, they just want it in their collection (they often do not even listen to the song or watch the movie). That my friend is compulsive behavior...
Talk to a person that constantly whines about faceless corporations underperforming, or overcharging them for stuff, or descriminating... Then you will understand the sense of entitlement that brings a person to steal.... Stick it to the man!
In case you didn't know, it wasn't a reboot, but there was a problem where they actually did have to live patch the voyager 2 computer last year for a bit-flip problem...
Although that's impressive, in general, the SW architecture of voyager is quite complicated and fragile, and during the operation, several mistakes have been made one of which caused the primary receiver on Voyager 2 to be accidently shut down, never to work again (so it's relying on a backup which has a faultly frequency tuning circuit which they compensate in software).
It's really only heroics which keep these probes up and running. The original engineering, while impressive, is really not the thing that's keeping things working now...
I am sorry, but half the US are not trust fund bastards leaching off the backs of the laboring masses.
Are you sure? According to the urban institute, 47% don't owe federal taxes in the US. At first I thought that was didn't need to pay more than they withheld (a common issue), but then I read the report and it does indeed say they don't owe federal taxes.
Of course depending on your point of view, the US government may or may not just look like a big trust fund to those that do not pay into it. And those that do not pay into it, but receive their income from it, may or may not be bastards, but you might just sorrily agree that this 1/2 number is not something pulled out of ones ass (like many a/. statistic)...
There are many ways to apparently inefficiently directly generate electricity that have nothing to do with boiling water...
You can run turbines in several ways w/o boiling water (e.g., wind, water). You can generate electricity w/o turbines through chemistry (e.g., lemon battery) or quantum mechanically (e.g., photoelectric effect in solar).
You never know, this whole thing may turn out to be more like the Casmir effect or similar effect. Interesting, but not quite practical for anything yet. The danger is that this gets morphed into something like the sub-zero ground state and hydrino energy peddlers out there...
FWIW, this "magnetic" effect is not something new or unheard of, and it also not just something "magnetic" as it is also present in the "electrical" version. The primary difference is that in the photo-cell, the first order effect of optical excitation is that an electron absorbs a photon changes energy state (the photo-electric effect), since there aren't any magnetic mono-poles (that we know of), there isn't an analgous photo-magnetic effect. There is, however, in both magnetic and electric a second order effect optical rectification of the wave due to the non-linear properties of the medium (e.g., crystal structure, resonnances, or other non-homogenous properties). Almost nobody cares about this second order effect in photo-electric systems (except when it opposes the charge transport and reduces the photo-electric efficiency). Since there isn't a first-order effect of optical excitation in the magnetic version, we only get the second order effect. When people measure a second order effect, they get excited, but that doesn't mean it will turn out to be very practical...
Thorium reactors do not create plutonium as a byproduct. That's why we're not allowed to use them. The military wants its plutonium.
Although Thorium reactors do not create much plutonium, they still create a little plutonium in their fuel cycle. Normally, it goes Th232 -> Th233 -> U233, but some amount of fuel will transition to U234 instead and then capture free neutrons and go to U235 (the same one that typical nuclear reactors) and some of which will end up as Plutonium.
The more accurate statement is that Thorium reactors do not create plutonium in a form that is easy to convert into weapons grade plutonium as the amount is smaller and it comes poluted with U232 which is has a long half life and has many highly radioactive decay products making it really dangerous to handle and thus plutonium weaponization resistant.
Of course our military might have wanted plutonium for bombs (since plutonium is safer in industrial settings needed for bomb manufactoring), however, since nobody is really making enough A-bombs any more to justify more plutonium production, that is just a red herring. For example, where to you think the MOX fuel (that was in reactor 3 of Fukushima) came from?
The truth of the matter is that Thorium reactors are less efficient and create enough sludge to make a dirty bomb (esp Pa131) that I don't think Thorium reactors are the panacea that some people think they are.
I'm not certain what will happen to light trying to travel directly away from the singularity from a point outside the event horizon - it might get distorted somehow...
The light will get redshifted (move towards lower frequency)...
As I understand it, an outside observer can (relatively) easily calculate the time it will take for the object to reach the singularity...
Relativistically calculating, the outside observer notes that it takes forever for the object to reach the singularity. Of course you might say that observation is really an artifact and you are interested in the "real" time. However, if you are computing correctly, time and space are warped near the singularity time and space are really 1 thing space-time (it's either gravity is bending space so much so the distance is really far away or gravity is dilating time so much so it takes a long time). Strangely, this is just an artifact the computing distortion of space-time. If we assumed space and time were not warped near the singularity, well we just threw out general relativity, right? Of course from the object's view of time and space it'll get to the singularity very quickly;^)
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the 2008 Rice Shortage?
Yes, I remember the artifical rice commodity scam that happened in 2008. Apparently there was plenty of rice, but the price of oil to transport it became a factor when a continuing drought in Austraila changed the typical global distribution pattern of this commodity causing huge price discontinuities and speculation driving up prices.
Do you remember the 2006 Housing Shortage where here in the US we ran out of houses for people to buy (I mean speculate on)? Were all those people who couldn't buy houses homeless?
Not all shortages are a result of actual shortages, but can also occur due to poor distribution and pricing stability.
Everyone knows the biggest greenhouse gas (something that absorbs/emits radiation in the thermal-IR band) is water vapor. Water vapor is responsible for about 50-60% of the greenhouse effect, but there's not much we humans can do about it since you have the ocean constantly able to refresh the water vapor in the air.
The 2nd and 3rd biggest greenhouse gasses are CO2 and CH4. Although CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas (about 20x), there's much more CO2 and that currenty has a bigger impact (~15-20% vs 5-10%).
Apparently people think we can do something about that 15-20%, but as most folks are also aware, it's much easier to agree to try to do something than acutally to be able to do something (just google "miss greenhouse gas target"). It's kinda like going on a diet, we know it's good for us, but it's really hard to do.
FWIW, I personally don't think the CO2-reduction thing is really something we can accomplish. We should just spend the resources to try to figure out how to live in a world where the frozen methane escapes from the ocean floor and causes real global warming (not the kind of stuff that we are seeing now). I doubt that even if we sucked all the CO2 from the atmosphere we could prevent this problem as it is a ocean thermal oscillation, not something that we humans have control over as it has happened in the past long before we walked this earth.
Personally I'd like to trade my car for one of those 240MPG commuter mobiles from VW, but alas they only sell in germany.
Alas this VW XL1 is probably really only a concept car (like the GM-EV1). Maybe they plan to build a 100 or so?http://carandvannews.co.uk/2011/01/26/vw-to-put-super-efficient-xl1-on-sale/
As you can see from this wiki page, this car has been in "concept" stage for quite a while (since 2002)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_1-litre_car
Ok, here's the higgs boson car analogy...
Suppose you have car and emperically you figure out how to drift it into many different turns. In certain configurations, you notice a certain amount of differential side-slip and you collect data. You make a theory about drifting based on various combinations of tires (particles), and road surface types (fields). One thing that you notice is that you don't really know why there's certain side-slip angles with different treads, so you propose a theory that the coupling between the tires and the road surface is different between these situations and that affects the skid dynamics (apparent mass), that you experience. Okay now you have this great theory and a bunch of empirical data of skid dyanmics that works for you by assigning magic number (masses) to various combination tires and surface types.
But you wonder if you can find a way to predict the dynamics and you come up with this idea that this coupling is a fundamental relationship of the coupling between tires and road surfaces (kinda like friction). Your theory is that there is some interaction between the tire and road which is like "friction" caused by the tread design and tire deformation amount. So you devise an experiment to see if you can find the thing causing this "friction".
The higgs field is analgous "friction" and the search for the higgs-boson is analagous to the search for the source of friction. If you think of friction being caused by atomic forces, there is some range of forces that can cause the macroscopic changes in skid dynamics that you see empirically. Likewize with Higgs, the higgs-boson need to be found in a certain range of collision energy if it is consistant with the standard model to match the empirical data of obverved mass and coupling constants up to Planck scale energies (where gravity is more quantized and mass probably has different physics).
If we find the thing that causes atomic forces that is consistant with our theory of "friction" (with say the tread design, or say the tire deformation amount), then probably something else explains the skid dynamics that isn't "friction", but something else. So we have to determine by experiment what the skid dynamics are for each tire and road combination. Likewize, with w/o Higgs we are struggling to have a theory of mass, but that doesn't mean mass (and the resultant dynamical behaviour) doesn't exist, just we don't know why it exists and can't predict it from known theories.
Burden of proof much?
Are you saying we should err on the side of convenience or err on the side of safety? Or are you saying that the extrodinary claim that no consumer electronics cause interference with commercial avionic systems requires extrodinary evidence of that claim?
On the other hand if they can show one counter example of an electronic system causing interference, then it's a low burden of proof, right? Well someone tried this (mythbusters episode 49), and it turned out to be plausable, so the burden of proof shifts to the other side, right?
One take away people should learn is that they shouldn't use hacks for PRNG they "heard about" on Slashdot. People have learned quite a bit about cryptographically secure psuedo random number generators over the years and apparently aren't consulted very often by people who write kernels (open-source or otherwize). http://www.pinkas.net/PAPERS/gpr06.pdf
Even Linux switched from their crappy TGFSR/SHA-1 hack which does NOT use MD5 hack to an expert designed Yarrow/Fortuna which do NOT use MD5. If you must do something different, perhaps use a HASH-DRBG specified in NIST SP 800-90 with an approved hash function (e.g, NOT MD5).
Of course there's no stopping someone from using MD5, in their proprietary crappy PRNG for their toy code that they typed from memory and in this case there's probably no need to have unnecessary discussions about it.
http://www.arcade-gameover.com/1943.asp
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6769
And the obligitory wikilink...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943:_The_Battle_of_Midway
If android infringes on Microsofts IP I can't help but wonder why WP7 sucks so hard. It seems that they are saying that Google took Microsofts idea and implemented it better.
Why would that be a surprise?
Perhaps google did better search than yahoo search and yahoo did better search than altavista search...
Apple did a better MP3 player implementation than Creative...
Sony did a better TV tube implementation (trinitron) than RCA (shadowmask) or Autometric (chromotron)...
Maybe even linux did the unix api better than bsd, which was way better than SystemV unix (thinking about R1-3)?
People that come up with the idea first often have something that tends to suck really hard in comparison... Lots of first movers tend to have lots of arrows in their backs. It doesn't mean their ideas suck, it only means they didn't do the best job of implementing them.
Theoretically, the patent system is supposed to motivate the first movers to invest in thier technology (instead to being resigned to the fact that fruits of their investments would be stolen by a "fast-follower"). Of course the patent system isn't perfect, but w/o any protections at all, it may be tough to attract investment in new ideas as it would be better to invest that money in fast-follower companies that didn't invest in research at all. We'd probably be left only with huge lumbering companies to do try new ideas as they would probably be the only ones that could afford the investment to monetize that research without attracting any new investors. Or perhaps the large companies would just be the only vehicle to make money and they would try to steal ideas outright (say like the intermittant wind-shield wipers, or compressed data storage drivers, etc...) instead of paying for them.
No system is perfect, but probably the only rational argument (to me) that I've heard about changing it is to shorten the duration or have better mechanisms for compulsary licensing (nothing that free/open source advocates really care about)...
Do stall warnings use anything other than airspeed and angle of attack to warn about a stall, or are there some type of sensors on the wings to detect airflow and lift?
IANA-aeronautical-engineer, but I imagine that you cannot easily determine the actual angle of attack w/o sensors to detect airflow. The actual angle of the wing referenced to the ground (or other fixed reference) doesn't determine the angle of attack, it is relative to the windspeed around the winds. Thus the angle of attack is mostly inferred by sensors that measure windspeeds (mostly). AFAIK stall warnings often additionally use measurement devices that measure dynamic differntial pressure around (or nearby) the lift surfaces (aka LRI), and other secondary indicators (e.g., buffeting dynamics of the plane when it nears the stall conditions).
It's also about battery specs. When a device is benchmarked for its battery life, it's at a certain brightness level. Since the lcd backlight is most of the power consumption of these new fangled devices, it make more sense to have a more efficient transmitter of light if you want to score better on this metric.
Matte LCDs have essentially have a polarized light-scattering filter which dims the LCD requiring more backlight for a given user brightness level. This matte light filter also tends to make the images more blurry (depending on viewing angle as the filter generates "moire"-like interference with the pixel elements) and have reduced contrast as well.
Glossy LCDs just have a simple optical coating that effectively pipes the light straight out from the LCD polarizer to your eye, or more importantly to the device measuring the screen's brightness level allowing them to have a lower backlight power for a given brightness level than the corresponding Matte LCD.
They DID build a seawall. They DID design the power plant to handle a tsunami. What they did NOT do, was design the plant to take on a tsunami as large as the one it did, and why didn't they? Because when the plant was built 30-odd years ago, possibly before you were even born, scientists and engineers didn't even have a good understanding of plate tectonics, earthquakes or tsunamis. They designed the plant based on what they thought was the most likely maximum it would experience before being retired.
Except it they did NOT build it to what they knew was a distinct possiblity it could experience before it was retired by selectively dismissing the historical data. Japan has been experiencing tsunami for many generations, there's quite a bit of recorded history on the subject.
For example, the Sanriku quake of 869. Of which the wikipedia has this interesting blurb to say about it...
Three tsunami deposits have been identified within the Holocene sequence of the Sendai plain, all formed within the last 3,000 years, suggesting an 800 to 1,100 year recurrence interval for large tsunamigenic earthquakes. In 2001 it was reckoned that there was a high likelihood of a large tsunami hitting the Sendai plain as more than 1,100 years had then elapsed.[5] As for the other two large tsunamis recognized before the 869 tsunami, one was estimated to have occurred between about 1000 BC and 500 BC and the other about 500 BC and 1 AD.[6] In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw 8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Thoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area.
The rationale for excluding this data point given by TEPCO was that the information prior to 1896 was unreliable. Maybe it wasn't foreseeable that this could have happened, but what was foreseeable was their methodology for deciding what they did for preventative measures was arbitrary (which lends to the suspiscion that it was deliberatly exclusive of the known data to justify their proposed action).
It is much less dangerous, but still you lose land to it.
Less dangerous unless you are a turtle... ;^)
My point is, however little immediate effect the project had, it involved co-operation between politicians much further apart on then-current political spectrum than modern US and China, and if US chosen more rational approach to spaceships development, it would allow more immediately practical uses.
Since Soyuz-Apollo had essentially no immediate effect, and if you think co-operation has more immediate practical uses and more rationality, how do you explain the enormous practical impact and rationality of the highly cooperative International Space Station enterprise?
AFAICS, the only benefit of these non-scientific space programs is continued gainful employment of (in the earlier case of the Space Shuttle) US aerospace engineers, and (of the latter case of the ISS) ex-soviet aerospace engineers. I don't see how co-operation really changes things and make things more rational or immediately practical.
There was a joint Soyuz-Apollo project. Mostly symbolic, but it had some practical value -- it standardized docking equipment and procedures, made it possible at least in theory, for USSR and US spaceships to be used to rescuing crew from each other in case of emergency... Too bad, US ended Apollo soon after that, and placed all its effort into that fat Concorde-shaped thing.
I probably need to read some more history books, but as I recall this mission was totally political/symbolic. There was no standarization of anything. A specially made dongle was made to connect the spacecrafts (the APAS or the so-called Androgynous Peripheral Attach System). The apollo-soyus mission was flow w/o the lunar module and the APAS was stored in it's place. This also meant that like the lunar module, the dongle/dock wasn't connected at launch, but needed to be extracted from the base of the last stage of the rocket (the TD&E manuever, or Transposition, docking and extraction). This particular APAS system (APAS-75 the "75" being the year it was used) was only used on that mission and no other mission.
There were two main reasons for the adapter dongle: First, they wanted to try docking both ways (each ship in the active/passive roles, hence the androgynous part of the name). Second was you needed airlocks to go between the ships as it was Nasa's practice to pressurize with 5% pure oxygen (see apollo 1 for a discussion why), and the Soviets pressurized to to near ground level with oxygen and nitrogen.
The Soviet space agency eventually used APAS-89 which also happend to be use on the US Space Shuttle for connection to MIR (I believe the space station uses a later varient APAS-95, but I could be wrong).
Of course in typical NIH fashion, since APAS was mostly a Soviet/Russian invention, NASA went and developed Yet-another-dock, they called Low-impact-docking-system (or LIDS) for the now-cancelled Orion project, which is a simplified APAS, but of course totally incompatible.
As a result of this mess the international space community finally recently (last year) created the InternationalDockingStandard which is basically a hybrid between APAS-95 and LIDS and of course not implemented by anyone yet...
Of course if your mission doesn't fly with the right APAS, there's theoretically no way to dock which means in practice, there's no way to rescue a crew w/o using an airlock (which you would have to do anyhow if the pressurization was different between the two ships).
Just a couple small nits to pick..
Although CBC encryption needs to be done in sequence, CBC decryption can be done mostly in parallel (don't have to wait until you do the AES part of the previous block)...
Also security is better than other modes only in some cases. As a trivial example, in CBC it's easier to tamper with the plain-text.: all you have to do to flip a bit in the plaintext of a CBC encrypted stream is to flip that same bit in the previous block's cipher-text. Although that kills that previous block's decrypted plaintext, it make it possible to easily arbitrarily manipulate somethings (of course if that is a threat model, you should really be doing a MAC, but that is another discussion)...
So, in short, it depends... ;^)
You are missing my point.
Many studies have been done with mice delivered by c-sections (google it if you don't believe me). This is often done in studies to provide more control over gestation period and exposure to germs during birth. Atlhough I don't have a pointer handy, I'm pretty sure those studies involved multi-generational research, then scientist have probably considered this variable and either accounted for it, or rejected its influence.
My point is that YOU are making pure speculation whereas people have studied some of the things you are speculating about and your original speculation was likely NOT true. Sure anything might be possible, but not everything that might be possible is actually possible (any many of them are less likely that what the current scientific evidence supports).
Unless you are one of those that insists on "beyond a shadow of a doubt", rather than "beyond reasonable doubt", in which case there's no convincing you about science ;^)
There are always unintended consequence to everything. But to carry your analogy. Did the car a net positive or negative? We will never know.
By the way there are things that describe this school of thought...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_probability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian's_fallacy
I suggest you read this page and discuss...
Obviously there are many reasons for having a Cesarian section, and sure, having a genetically narrow birth canal is pretty far down the list. The point was not to ascribe evolutionary fitness to a wide birth canal, necessarily. The point was rather the reverse -- that the common use of Cesarian sections changes the evolutionary pressure on the female anatomy, in a very explicit and direct way: Before C-sections became common, it was (quite literally) physically impossible for a woman with a genetically narrow birth canal to pass that trait onto her daughters. Now, she can.
Okay, I'll bite... A few of the top reasons for having a Cesarian are OBGYN's avoiding malpractice suits, reduction in pain tolerance, and epidurals that prevent women from bearing down with their contractions causing fetal distress. If so does the change the evolutionary pressure on the women that want epidurals and are pain adverse or compliant with doctors suggestions for a C-section? That's seems just as likely as the narrow birth canal argument.
Also more likely (and probably true), is that the evolutionary pressure has already happened to adapt humans to the "chronic" condition of an average narrow birth canal to head size. The result is likely selective pressure for early birth before our heads become too big as described here http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/04/evolution-may-explain-why-baby-comes-early/
At least this guys ramblings cites studies and comes with graphs, what's your story?
Haven't transistors always been 3D? You may draw them 2D in layout, but it's still a gate sitting on top of a channel with stacks of metal... it has L x W x H. I think that's called 3D. Silly Intel marketing.
Actually integrated transistors have been "planar" for the most part (although there have been "vfets" and other types of 3d channels in the past)...
In planar transistors, the field that chokes off the source/drain path has been mediated by a gate which is just on top of the channel on one plane. Imagine an iron on of a ironing board heating it up the board when you turn it on. Although the ironing board and the iron are both 3-dimensional objects, the interface in a "plane" and the heat diffuses across this plane. In this analogy with a planar transistor, the channel is dug into in the ironing board and the iron is the gate.
In finFET, the gate surrounds the channel on 3 side. Imagine now a tube on an ironing board and the iron has a notch cut in it so the iron surrounds the tube on three side. When you turn on the iron, heat diffuses across all around the notch instead of interfacing on 1 plane. This is "3D" or finFET instead of planar. In this analogy with a finFET transistor, the channel is the tube on the ironing board and the iron with a notch is the gate.
As you might imagine, the finFET architecture should have a better capability to turn on and off the channel since there is field is wrapping around the channel instead of just being applied to one side (okay that's simplification, but you get the idea).
Intel took, this finFET idea and added another twist with a "3", called tri-gate (or tri-channel depending on your point of view). This congolomeration of two independent ideas that both revolve around the number 3 is the kind of thing that drives marketing people to be silly ;^)
And for those that don't understand w/o a car analogy, imagine the difference in traction you get with bald tires on ice (planar where tire is the gate and ice is the channel), vs snow tires on dirt (finFET where the tire is the gate and dirt is the channel)...
Apparently this has been going on since May 25, 2010 (almost 1 year ago)...
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2010/05/26/258184/p1/Apple-maker.htm
http://www.chinasourcingnews.com/2010/05/31/552238-foxconns-working-conditions-in-china-under-scrutiny/
Why are people stealing that crap?
Because they can.
Doesn't matter what it is, or how crappy it is, sadly some pathetic folks just feel feel a compulsion to steal, others just feel entitled...
Talk to a hard core song or movie pirate. Doesn't matter how crappy the song or movie is, they just want it in their collection (they often do not even listen to the song or watch the movie). That my friend is compulsive behavior...
Talk to a person that constantly whines about faceless corporations underperforming, or overcharging them for stuff, or descriminating... Then you will understand the sense of entitlement that brings a person to steal.... Stick it to the man!
How many times did they have to reboot Voyager?
In case you didn't know, it wasn't a reboot, but there was a problem where they actually did have to live patch the voyager 2 computer last year for a bit-flip problem...
Of course this was discussed previously
Although that's impressive, in general, the SW architecture of voyager is quite complicated and fragile, and during the operation, several mistakes have been made one of which caused the primary receiver on Voyager 2 to be accidently shut down, never to work again (so it's relying on a backup which has a faultly frequency tuning circuit which they compensate in software).
It's really only heroics which keep these probes up and running. The original engineering, while impressive, is really not the thing that's keeping things working now...
I am sorry, but half the US are not trust fund bastards leaching off the backs of the laboring masses.
Are you sure? According to the urban institute, 47% don't owe federal taxes in the US. At first I thought that was didn't need to pay more than they withheld (a common issue), but then I read the report and it does indeed say they don't owe federal taxes.
Of course depending on your point of view, the US government may or may not just look like a big trust fund to those that do not pay into it. And those that do not pay into it, but receive their income from it, may or may not be bastards, but you might just sorrily agree that this 1/2 number is not something pulled out of ones ass (like many a /. statistic)...
There are many ways to apparently inefficiently directly generate electricity that have nothing to do with boiling water...
You can run turbines in several ways w/o boiling water (e.g., wind, water).
You can generate electricity w/o turbines through chemistry (e.g., lemon battery) or quantum mechanically (e.g., photoelectric effect in solar).
You never know, this whole thing may turn out to be more like the Casmir effect or similar effect. Interesting, but not quite practical for anything yet. The danger is that this gets morphed into something like the sub-zero ground state and hydrino energy peddlers out there...
FWIW, this "magnetic" effect is not something new or unheard of, and it also not just something "magnetic" as it is also present in the "electrical" version. The primary difference is that in the photo-cell, the first order effect of optical excitation is that an electron absorbs a photon changes energy state (the photo-electric effect), since there aren't any magnetic mono-poles (that we know of), there isn't an analgous photo-magnetic effect. There is, however, in both magnetic and electric a second order effect optical rectification of the wave due to the non-linear properties of the medium (e.g., crystal structure, resonnances, or other non-homogenous properties). Almost nobody cares about this second order effect in photo-electric systems (except when it opposes the charge transport and reduces the photo-electric efficiency). Since there isn't a first-order effect of optical excitation in the magnetic version, we only get the second order effect. When people measure a second order effect, they get excited, but that doesn't mean it will turn out to be very practical...
Thorium reactors do not create plutonium as a byproduct. That's why we're not allowed to use them. The military wants its plutonium.
Although Thorium reactors do not create much plutonium, they still create a little plutonium in their fuel cycle.
Normally, it goes Th232 -> Th233 -> U233, but some amount of fuel will transition to U234 instead and then capture free neutrons and go to U235 (the same one that typical nuclear reactors) and some of which will end up as Plutonium.
The more accurate statement is that Thorium reactors do not create plutonium in a form that is easy to convert into weapons grade plutonium as the amount is smaller and it comes poluted with U232 which is has a long half life and has many highly radioactive decay products making it really dangerous to handle and thus plutonium weaponization resistant.
Of course our military might have wanted plutonium for bombs (since plutonium is safer in industrial settings needed for bomb manufactoring), however, since nobody is really making enough A-bombs any more to justify more plutonium production, that is just a red herring. For example, where to you think the MOX fuel (that was in reactor 3 of Fukushima) came from?
The truth of the matter is that Thorium reactors are less efficient and create enough sludge to make a dirty bomb (esp Pa131) that I don't think Thorium reactors are the panacea that some people think they are.
Well, sortof...
The light will get redshifted (move towards lower frequency)...
Relativistically calculating, the outside observer notes that it takes forever for the object to reach the singularity. Of course you might say that observation is really an artifact and you are interested in the "real" time. However, if you are computing correctly, time and space are warped near the singularity time and space are really 1 thing space-time (it's either gravity is bending space so much so the distance is really far away or gravity is dilating time so much so it takes a long time). Strangely, this is just an artifact the computing distortion of space-time. If we assumed space and time were not warped near the singularity, well we just threw out general relativity, right? Of course from the object's view of time and space it'll get to the singularity very quickly ;^)