Consider hooking this thing up to a Brownian Ratchet, such as discribed by Feynman in his lectures. (For those not familiar with a Brownian Ratchet, this page give a good introduction and a cool Java thingy to play with. See also R.D. Astumian: Thermodynamics and Kinetics of a Brownian Motor, Science 276, p. 917-922 (1997). Essentially, it works like a very small, normal ratchet. Molecules in the atmosphere hit the system randomly. Sometimes it goes "forward," but it cannot go against the ratcheting mechanism - "backwards" is locked out. So you get a net forward motion on the ratchet essentially for free from the atmosphere.)
Connect the Brownian Ratchet to this little chain thingy. Have it wind something up. User presses button, and thingy unwinds. Basically a free recharging system.
Not all that practical, but pretty cool. I'm sure there are better applications... (anyone?)
We do not share your contact information with any third party without your consent, except to a court or governmental agency.
That's it. Lindows was ordered by a court of law to surrender this information under the rules of discovery. This means that they give the information to the Court. The COURT then gives it to everyone involved in the suit. This path goes both ways - Lindows can subpoena documents from MS too.
Due process trumps corporate policy in all cases. This shouldn't be news to anyone. See, for example, the DoJ v. Microsoft, where we were cheering for the side of due process.
Until then, I'm happy if we just do information- gathering type things: for that, you DON'T need people anywhere but in their office-chairs, except for whoever actually has to slingshot the probes into space.
I would tend to disagree with that point. I think that by far the best way to do science in space is to send scientists. A probe is limited to detecting whatever phenomenon its instruments are designed to detect, but a human scientist can improvise, notice trends, hack together equipment, go digging in rough terrain, follow a hunch, etc. Overall, a human being is an excellent explorer. Properly equipped, I'm sure you'd get superior science results to a string of probes.
Don't get me wrong - probes are very important, especially sample-return missions. I'm just saying that we could do MORE with people.
... on the research, not the fire. If you look at the Professor's homepage, you can see that he was working on:
Our work centers on the mechanisms and regulation of splicing. Splicing is required to remove intron sequences from pre-mRNA and create coding sequences for translation. Yeast has been our organism of choice for these studies because it offers simple, powerful genetic approaches and has a splicing machinery similar to that in mammalian cells. In addition the yeast genome is completely sequenced, the location of nearly every intron is known and genes for most splicing factors have been identified. This provides unique advantages for the study of splicing.
Kinda puts some perspective on what was lost as opposed to "data related to the Human Genome Project."
Indeed - being able to maintain a constant impulse for months is of great benefit to manned spaceflight.
Consider a manned spacecraft equipped with one of these antimatter-catalysed fusion engines. Let's say it produces enough thrust to give 1g of acceleration, and can keep this up for, say, a year.
You want to go to Mars. How do you do it? Heinlein-style: constant thrust. You don't need anything clunky like rotating wheels to keep the crew in the comfort of Earth-normal "gravity." You fire your engine CONSTANTLY, and, according to the equivalence principle, your crew gets pushed against the floor at 1g - just like on Earth. Furthermore, this lets you build up a tremendous speed after several months (after 6mo, for instance, you're going at 1.55 * 10^8 m/s aka half the speed of light (relative to your departure point, of course)). This makes transit times fast, to say the least!
At the halfway point, you flip your spacecraft around (your crew enjoys a few minutes of zero-gee playtime) and you start firing at 1g again. This time, you're decelerating relative to your destination.
You're absolutely right - we hold the government to a higher set of standards than we do a private individual. This is one of the foundations of the US (and most other contries') democracy.
The idea is that the state has vastly superior resources to any given individual, that civil servants are only human, and that we must protect the rights of the individual. We therefore place extra restriction on the state to prevent it from abusing its enormous power, either systematically or through the acts of individuals. The more power that is vested in the hands of an individual, the more likely they are to use that power for their own needs or amusement. The US Constitution recognises this, and thus limits what can (legally) be done with those powers. If all cops were good people, we wouldn't need warrants for searches, seizures, and arrests, now would we?
After all, in a democracy, the state is a collection of individuals. Attitudes like "the state is more limited as a whole than its components are individually" protect those who are in the minority from having their freedoms revoked.
Rather than get into the "University is not a trade school" debate, I'll just make a comment based on my experience.
At my school, we do offer "special certifications" (which are recognised as equivalent to degrees for grad school purposes) to people who have ALREADY COMPLETED A RELATED DEGREE. Example: I'm a Physics major. Once (/if) I graduate, I can take a CS special certification part time in two years. I could not, however, take a special certification in, say, British Constitutional History, because I do not possess the requisite common courses.
Now, what I'm trying to get at is this... What you're probably lacking is not the CS part of your degree, but the common courses. I had a look at CS at my University - in addition to regular CS courses, you are required to take courses from Math (up to the derivative calculus of functions of many variables, which is not too tough (trust your friend the physicist)), the Sciences (usually Physics or Chem, but possibly something more exotic), the Arts (18 credits == 6 courses, same as every other B.Sc. And that means a full-year English course too), and so forth...
Basically, what you would have to make up is the generalised portion of the education. Having taken some CS courses, I also suspect you'd have to get into the symbolic logic and algorithmic analysis that most corporations don't use (but should).
Suggestion: Enroll as a part-time student. Challenge, by writing exams, the courses you already know how to do. This should be more than half. With some luck, you'll be able to complete the degree in 2 - 3 years part time.
Well, you can look at how the Canadian Senate is supposed to work:
In Theory: Senators are appointed by the Queen (or her representative, the Governor-General) until the age of 75. They're supposed to pick outstanding Canadians to fill these spots and watch over the House of Commons' shoulder.
In Practice: The Prime Minister makes "recommendations" to the Queen that the Governor-General signs. These people, old party hacks, become Senators.
Methinks that in order to preserve democracy, both in Canada and the UK, we'd be better served by the Queen exercising her monarchial powers...
Not necessarily true. What the experiments have found is that the Higgs must have an energy over 115 GeV. According to the Standard Model, this is OK. The Standard Model can't predict what the Higgs energy will be - it's an experimental parameter.
So nothing's broken yet. It just seems that if there is a Higgs boson, it's very massive and will require big accelerators to find.
Here it is, in full:
UF-1
Launch Date: Dec. 5, 2001
Launch Vehicle: U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour: STS-108
Elements: Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), Photovoltaic Module batteries
1. Provides for research work by delivering experiment racks for the U.S. Laboratory and two storage racks.
Glad to know that NASA is spending their $600M well on this shuttle launch instead of sending three probes to Mars, something to Pluto, or researching a new technology.
Seriously, can't this stuff be delivered on unmanned craft? (Well, obviously not the new crew, but they could catch a Russian Soyuz for a quarter of the cost)
I tend to disagree a bit. I used to work as a tech support dude for Comcast@Home.
Yes, the tech people treat you like a clueless loser.
Yes, if it isn't Windows, we treated it like it was broken.
No, it's not because we were losers. @Home's internal troubleshooting hierarchy required that. Please understand that the company demanded that it be done that way. I once helped a guy out by giving him tips on how to set up a router to connect multiple computers to a cable modem. I got reamed out for a good half-hour by my supervisor for going "out of my scope of support." He even threatened to fire me.
Tech support people have shitty jobs because no one lets them go above and beyond, no one lets them challenge themselves or, God forbid, actually HELP a customer. Try not to rag on them too much because of it.
That being said, there are also some clueless losers on the phones...:)
Granting, of course, that the upper limit on type I superconductors was 20K twenty years ago (check out good-old BCS theory). And, of course, type II superconductors were discovered by experimentalists before the theorists had any clue they existed.
This field is still very much an experimental one.
Alf
Re:What the hell is wrong with the Judiciary
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Here is part of Justice Byron R. White's decision:
Litigants, therefore, are permitted to challenge a statute not because their own right of free expression are violated, but because of a judicial prediction or assumption that the statute's very existence may cause others not before the court to refrain from constitutionally protected speech or expression.
In other words, you can preemptively sue the government if it is possible for someone to be silenced by a law.
I have recently read a story saying that you were intending to make Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against file-sharing services. In addition to the dubious legality of this, I find that position morally offensive.
In protest, I will never purchase another compact disc. I will never purchase any other form of recorded media. I will buy music only from artists directly, and only in purely downloaded, digital form.
Furthermore, as I run a server that is part of a file-sharing network, I will respond to any DoS attack with legal action.
This letter is governed under the following terms:
If you are an agent of the RIAA or any organisation which is a member thereof, you may not copy, delete or modify this letter in any way
If you do not fit into the above category, this letter shall be governed by the GNU Public License.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider hooking this thing up to a Brownian Ratchet, such as discribed by Feynman in his lectures. (For those not familiar with a Brownian Ratchet, this page give a good introduction and a cool Java thingy to play with. See also R.D. Astumian: Thermodynamics and Kinetics of a Brownian Motor, Science 276, p. 917-922 (1997). Essentially, it works like a very small, normal ratchet. Molecules in the atmosphere hit the system randomly. Sometimes it goes "forward," but it cannot go against the ratcheting mechanism - "backwards" is locked out. So you get a net forward motion on the ratchet essentially for free from the atmosphere.)
Connect the Brownian Ratchet to this little chain thingy. Have it wind something up. User presses button, and thingy unwinds. Basically a free recharging system.
Not all that practical, but pretty cool. I'm sure there are better applications... (anyone?)
We do not share your contact information with any third party without your consent, except to a court or governmental agency.
That's it. Lindows was ordered by a court of law to surrender this information under the rules of discovery. This means that they give the information to the Court. The COURT then gives it to everyone involved in the suit. This path goes both ways - Lindows can subpoena documents from MS too.
Due process trumps corporate policy in all cases. This shouldn't be news to anyone. See, for example, the DoJ v. Microsoft, where we were cheering for the side of due process.
Until then, I'm happy if we just do information- gathering type things: for that, you DON'T need people anywhere but in their office-chairs, except for whoever actually has to slingshot the probes into space.
I would tend to disagree with that point. I think that by far the best way to do science in space is to send scientists. A probe is limited to detecting whatever phenomenon its instruments are designed to detect, but a human scientist can improvise, notice trends, hack together equipment, go digging in rough terrain, follow a hunch, etc. Overall, a human being is an excellent explorer. Properly equipped, I'm sure you'd get superior science results to a string of probes.
Don't get me wrong - probes are very important, especially sample-return missions. I'm just saying that we could do MORE with people.
... on the research, not the fire. If you look at the Professor's homepage, you can see that he was working on:
Our work centers on the mechanisms and regulation of splicing. Splicing is required to remove intron sequences from pre-mRNA and create coding sequences for translation. Yeast has been our organism of choice for these studies because it offers simple, powerful genetic approaches and has a splicing machinery similar to that in mammalian cells. In addition the yeast genome is completely sequenced, the location of nearly every intron is known and genes for most splicing factors have been identified. This provides unique advantages for the study of splicing.
Kinda puts some perspective on what was lost as opposed to "data related to the Human Genome Project."
... I wonder if the DVD disc leaves a bright trail of light behind it if you throw it...
Does anyone know how this works? Is this detecting the Hawking radiation from an evaporating hole, or is it detecting other effects?
Oh, I certainly agree that Firewire is superior to USB. I'm just noting that it requires an (expensive) add-on card for most PCs :)
Well, it's good for all of the PC users who don't have firewire, for instance...
Sure it takes ~4 hours to load up the drive, but who cares if you only have to do it once?
Indeed - being able to maintain a constant impulse for months is of great benefit to manned spaceflight.
Consider a manned spacecraft equipped with one of these antimatter-catalysed fusion engines. Let's say it produces enough thrust to give 1g of acceleration, and can keep this up for, say, a year.
You want to go to Mars. How do you do it? Heinlein-style: constant thrust. You don't need anything clunky like rotating wheels to keep the crew in the comfort of Earth-normal "gravity." You fire your engine CONSTANTLY, and, according to the equivalence principle, your crew gets pushed against the floor at 1g - just like on Earth. Furthermore, this lets you build up a tremendous speed after several months (after 6mo, for instance, you're going at 1.55 * 10^8 m/s aka half the speed of light (relative to your departure point, of course)). This makes transit times fast, to say the least!
At the halfway point, you flip your spacecraft around (your crew enjoys a few minutes of zero-gee playtime) and you start firing at 1g again. This time, you're decelerating relative to your destination.
Makes for a nice, fast, comfortable trip!
You're absolutely right - we hold the government to a higher set of standards than we do a private individual. This is one of the foundations of the US (and most other contries') democracy.
The idea is that the state has vastly superior resources to any given individual, that civil servants are only human, and that we must protect the rights of the individual. We therefore place extra restriction on the state to prevent it from abusing its enormous power, either systematically or through the acts of individuals. The more power that is vested in the hands of an individual, the more likely they are to use that power for their own needs or amusement. The US Constitution recognises this, and thus limits what can (legally) be done with those powers. If all cops were good people, we wouldn't need warrants for searches, seizures, and arrests, now would we?
After all, in a democracy, the state is a collection of individuals. Attitudes like "the state is more limited as a whole than its components are individually" protect those who are in the minority from having their freedoms revoked.
But I LIKE my jet engine start-up...
I even give it a countdown as I power up...
"All systems, report status. Cooling 1"
"Go!"
"Ventral Fan"
"Go!"
"Fluid Pumps"
"Go!"
.
.
.
Rather than get into the "University is not a trade school" debate, I'll just make a comment based on my experience.
At my school, we do offer "special certifications" (which are recognised as equivalent to degrees for grad school purposes) to people who have ALREADY COMPLETED A RELATED DEGREE. Example: I'm a Physics major. Once (/if) I graduate, I can take a CS special certification part time in two years. I could not, however, take a special certification in, say, British Constitutional History, because I do not possess the requisite common courses.
Now, what I'm trying to get at is this... What you're probably lacking is not the CS part of your degree, but the common courses. I had a look at CS at my University - in addition to regular CS courses, you are required to take courses from Math (up to the derivative calculus of functions of many variables, which is not too tough (trust your friend the physicist)), the Sciences (usually Physics or Chem, but possibly something more exotic), the Arts (18 credits == 6 courses, same as every other B.Sc. And that means a full-year English course too), and so forth...
Basically, what you would have to make up is the generalised portion of the education. Having taken some CS courses, I also suspect you'd have to get into the symbolic logic and algorithmic analysis that most corporations don't use (but should).
Suggestion: Enroll as a part-time student. Challenge, by writing exams, the courses you already know how to do. This should be more than half. With some luck, you'll be able to complete the degree in 2 - 3 years part time.
Anyway, just a throught...
Well, you can look at how the Canadian Senate is supposed to work:
In Theory: Senators are appointed by the Queen (or her representative, the Governor-General) until the age of 75. They're supposed to pick outstanding Canadians to fill these spots and watch over the House of Commons' shoulder.
In Practice: The Prime Minister makes "recommendations" to the Queen that the Governor-General signs. These people, old party hacks, become Senators.
Methinks that in order to preserve democracy, both in Canada and the UK, we'd be better served by the Queen exercising her monarchial powers...
That's so weird...
and, of course...
I can't wait!
Not necessarily true. What the experiments have found is that the Higgs must have an energy over 115 GeV. According to the Standard Model, this is OK. The Standard Model can't predict what the Higgs energy will be - it's an experimental parameter.
So nothing's broken yet. It just seems that if there is a Higgs boson, it's very massive and will require big accelerators to find.
Check out the mission summary.
Here it is, in full:
UF-1
Launch Date: Dec. 5, 2001
Launch Vehicle: U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour: STS-108
Elements: Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), Photovoltaic Module batteries
1. Provides for research work by delivering experiment racks for the U.S. Laboratory and two storage racks.
Glad to know that NASA is spending their $600M well on this shuttle launch instead of sending three probes to Mars, something to Pluto, or researching a new technology.
Seriously, can't this stuff be delivered on unmanned craft? (Well, obviously not the new crew, but they could catch a Russian Soyuz for a quarter of the cost)
I tend to disagree a bit. I used to work as a tech support dude for Comcast@Home.
:)
Yes, the tech people treat you like a clueless loser.
Yes, if it isn't Windows, we treated it like it was broken.
No, it's not because we were losers. @Home's internal troubleshooting hierarchy required that. Please understand that the company demanded that it be done that way. I once helped a guy out by giving him tips on how to set up a router to connect multiple computers to a cable modem. I got reamed out for a good half-hour by my supervisor for going "out of my scope of support." He even threatened to fire me.
Tech support people have shitty jobs because no one lets them go above and beyond, no one lets them challenge themselves or, God forbid, actually HELP a customer. Try not to rag on them too much because of it.
That being said, there are also some clueless losers on the phones...
I would go so far as to say that Linux is now the choice solution for enterprise web servers - Apache is all its glory, etc.
Doubly so, given IIS's press lately.
Yeah, and a team at the University of Zagreb has found room temperature superconductors...
Twice, now. (see Physica C, vol. 341-348 (2000), pages 723-725 for their latest attempt)
Strangely, no one ever can seem to reproduce the results...
Alf
Granting, of course, that the upper limit on type I superconductors was 20K twenty years ago (check out good-old BCS theory). And, of course, type II superconductors were discovered by experimentalists before the theorists had any clue they existed.
This field is still very much an experimental one.
Alf
Guess again.
Check out the Notable First Amendment Cases page at the American Library Association. More specifically, see the case of Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601 (1973).
Here is part of Justice Byron R. White's decision:
Litigants, therefore, are permitted to challenge a statute not because their own right of free expression are violated, but because of a judicial prediction or assumption that the statute's very existence may cause others not before the court to refrain from constitutionally protected speech or expression.
In other words, you can preemptively sue the government if it is possible for someone to be silenced by a law.
Ergo Felten was completely in the right.
AlfWell, it's 9:27PM in the Mountain Time Zone right now.
THE SHOW IS HALFWAY THROUGH.
It isn't Eastern time everywhere in the world, despite what New Yorkers tell you.
Dear RIAA:
I have recently read a story saying that you were intending to make Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against file-sharing services. In addition to the dubious legality of this, I find that position morally offensive.
In protest, I will never purchase another compact disc. I will never purchase any other form of recorded media. I will buy music only from artists directly, and only in purely downloaded, digital form.
Furthermore, as I run a server that is part of a file-sharing network, I will respond to any DoS attack with legal action.
This letter is governed under the following terms:
Signed,
Alf