Double-blind means that the person administering the treatment or placebo does not know the difference (in addition to the patient). So if you are being poked in a place other than where the practitioner would plan, then you might have a problem being able to do a double-blind study. In general, if a procedure or theory is not falsifiable (testable) then its probably a sham.
I am actually really looking for an answer to the question posed. Not trolling. Though maybe you mean poetmatt? The question is, would this trial settle the issue for good, or are there other legal time-bombs awaiting developers?
I think I found a loop hole. They have to discard all the failed attempts of the entanglement swapping (75% of the time). Not to mention a 4.4% efficiency of even getting photons through the long fiber to Victor. I don't have Nature Physics, but from the preprint on arxiv.org:
"The probabilistic nature of the Bell-state projection with linear optics decreases the success probability to 1/4." page 15
Though a more honest way to say this might be, that only when Alice and Bob have correlated photons, would it be possible to get the entanglement swapping to work. If we tried to swap the entanglement based when Alice and Bob did not get correlations its clear it would never happen. Their interpretation relies on a strange post selection of the data. If their experiment checked to see if Alice and Bob first got a correlation, and only then tried to do entanglement swapping, I think the experiment would not appear to violate any sense of causality. Its only because they throw away 75% of the data (the failed attempts at entanglement swapping) that the experiment appears magic. I think those 75% contain most of the uncorrelated results from Alice and Bob as there is a reason those attempts failed. Ie. its not chance if Alice and Bob have already performed the measurement. Its only "chance" if we pretend that we don't know.
In the description, they write "by exploiting the corrosion-resistance of copper with the conductive properties of steel". But this is copper clad *telecom* wire, so at megahertz or higher frequencies there will be no current in the steel core. Its all in the skin (effect) and the wire will have just the same conductivity as copper wire, minus any magnetic losses. I assume that they have made nice controlled impedance telecom wire, which is, to my knowledge, something cool and new. Kudos to the company that made it!
While the supply of Bitcoins is limited. There is no reason I see, that someone else could not come up with another bitdollar, bitpeso, digifranc, or other such digital "money" with the same properties. In this sense, these digital monies are not unlimited, and I fail to see why they would have any inherent value. With raw metals, like gold there are alternatives too, paladium, platinum, silver... But the periodic table, chemistry and physics have assured us that there is a limit to the alternatives. The US dollar is backed by a giant military and the strategic resources it controls (also limited). What makes Bitcoins worth having, when tomorrow someone could invent another digital currency? Is this just a popularity contest? What value could you add to bitcoins to make them unique or worth having?
The study is highly suspect. Because it looks like the area they are referring to is the temporal lobe. This is the area involved with hearing and I would not be surprised if putting a muted telephone on one side of the head would increase my brain activity as I strain to hear something. They need to show that if they move the antenna, that the increased activity follows it. This would have been very easy to do, but was not done. Why?
from http://www.neuroskills.com/brain.shtml: Temporal Lobes: Side of head above ears. Functions:
* Hearing ability. Memory acquisition. Some visual perceptions
* Categorization of objects.
The technology is there. I think it is time we finally start to encrypt information stored on web servers. Keeping the contents of email on servers encrypted is fairly do-able. But keeping facebook information private is a bit of an oxymoron. Someone could also produce a USB key which decrypts data (assuming a public/private key system) so that the private keys of individuals could be somewhat limited in how many copies need to be made. Still the headers of email, would be public, but if the account is anonymous and at least one reliable anonymizing mail relay is used, the system could work. I myself don't see my privacy as a big deal. Its the fact that the total privacy of all individuals is being compromised. That means any goverment or corporation able to access and search the data of Google or Facebook could quite easily suppress dissent or stop negative publicity. The email accounts of journalists are especially a concern.
For social networks, I think the solution, is to decentralize the system, encrypt it, and open source it, so it cannot so easily be searched and stored. Diaspora, while still in alpha, seems like a good direction to go. If the user's data is stored encrypted, then the user could issue and revoke public keys associated with the data. In this way "friends" could be managed instead of a simple binary flag in a centralized type system. The issuance and revocation of public keys would also allow for white lists to finally be made to combat spam. If one large internet mover (hear me Google?) started this initiative, then it would start to gain some real traction.
No system is perfect, but the the current system can be very much improved upon.
I checked up on Capacity Factor. A nuclear PP, typically has 90% CF. But thats because it must be run as a baseload plant. I remember visiting a baseload gas fired plant in Rhode Island a ways back. It was brand new, and very cool. The gas turbines always running. Right you are, about gears needing maintenance. Except for solar, I thing they all need maintenance. And even solar needs to get cleaned from dust occasionally.
The thing is, what we need most is power during the day and wind happily mostly blows during this time, since it is after all a solar effect. A baseload plant is great, but only about 1/3 of the power is needed at night. No industry, office lights or air conditioning for the mall. Wind, while intermittent, can really help with this. A friend of mine works in short term weather forecasts. The problem of whether the windfarm will be able to supply energy or not needs to be determined at 5am, otherwise (usually) a fossil fuel plant needs to be fired up. With some good computers and weather models, they can tell whether one needs to fire up the oil/gas/coal peak load plant or not.
The thing is, its much better to run a nuclear plant as baseload because of the huge capital cost. But peakload power is more valuable and thats why wind can compete. In some places they run the nuclear all night at full blast and charge up a hydro resevoir. But its a pretty inefficient process.
I think wind, solar and others can play a huge role in supplying the power needed. Especially the peak load power. Hydro, nuclear and natural gas can keep the baseload. Coal and oil should just be phased out because of the expense. It is much better to heat a place with fossil fuel than make electricity.
And of course the Horse Hollow wind farm had complaints. But nothing compared to a nuclear power plant. Even John Kerry tried to stop a wind farm on the Cape. People always want someone else to do their industry and have a pretty landscape. I wish they would just get a painting and hang it in front of their window.
Every source of power has its drawbacks, but your analysis above seems more interested in detailing what is wrong with environmentalists. This is not news for nerds. I do not care so much whether someone calls themselves an environmentalist or not, but rather that they put forward helpful criticism or suggestions.
Wind power is just one possibility which you deride above. I would like to set the record straight. Its a bit expensive, but the costs have changed a lot with the advent of of large lightweight composite materials. Its now possible to make 3 or even 5 mega watt turbines with a life time greater than 20 years. The largest US single wind farm "Horse Hollow Wind Energy" is 735.5MW. Which is slightly shy of 1/2 of a massive nuclear power plant. It requires no 100 mile evacuation plans and sirens, nor does it make nuclear waste... etc.... Its a good thing. It was probably supported by the govt, like many other things, such as the Hoover Dam, nuclear power, bridges, farming, highways, railroads and so on. Not everything supported by the govt is bad you know.
Sometimes the government supports a technology to get it going and then it takes off. Like the internet.
The private company versions of the internet, such as Compuserve, were pretty bad in comparison. Sometimes it takes a government grant to get good things going.
I think you are so bent on insulting enviro-liberal-goverment loving-commie-pinko-satan-worshipping-gays you miss the fact that some of things, that people you hate want, are really good.
Why does he not just use robots.txt, and then google will not scan or index his sites? He cannot have it both ways, being indexed and not allowing the search results to be displayed. This whole argument seems absurd.
I know replying to oneself is really tacking, but I just wanted to comment that something has gone terribly awry in my life if I am 38 years old, just came home from work where I was building a quantum computer, still ride a bike, checked slashdot.org first thing, and replied on how to get Linux running on a 16 year old laptop. All this on a *friday* night. I think a there should be a little "game over" sign appearing before my eyes.
I can attest to the Debian install. I did this in 2006 with an old 486 laptop with 24MB. Though the above link brought me to the wrong place when I followed it.
Its got a lot of floppy images that will take you back to the old days. I had some sort of trouble with the laptop install. The kernel ran fine, but I think the installer had trouble for some reason. I might have ended up apt-get --ing a lot of things. But in the end the system ran. It runs a nameserver and has been up for over a year. Nice thing about laptops is that they have built in UPSs.
Um... My US history is a little faded, but I would definitely say that the US conquered and made the whole country a state. You don't really think the native indians, mexicans, hawaiians, and quebequois just handed over their land? And I would certainly say that conquering the confederacy was imperialism. We are all just taught that for each of these horrid wars, that the good outweighed the bad. I have always questioned that.
Finally a cool article on/. This is extremely cool! There are a lot of problems in the real world that have extremely large sparse matrices that need to be inverted. Fluid dynamics and solutions to Maxwells equations come to mind. But I am sure there are other applications in relativity and plasma physics. Estimating a solution to a linear dynamic system of say 2^128 degrees of freedom in only 128 cycles would change a lot of things.
And... Yes, we are working very hard on building the computers.
Its not clear what the poster is trying to do. Conformal coating or potting may not be a good option. Is he trying to protect the board from dust, an occasional spraydown, or condensing humidity? Maybe CC or potting would work. THough the heat issues would be pretty bad as mentioned 100 times above.
I would recommend a pressure housing with o-rings and proper feedthrus or liquid proof connectors. For high pressure and heat dissapation, filling the pressure housing with Flourinert would be a nice solution, just put a small pressure compensating bladder on the pressure housing so little air bubbles aren't a problem.
If one is pressed for time, a really good ziplock bag filled with Flourinert, and a potted feedthrough for the wires would also work in a pinch.
Mod parent up. This isn't potentially valuable. This is worth more than all the possible money they could have lost in ad revenue from the 'infringing' Viacom episodes. In my view, the real prize is this data. It tells them what movies to make and its easily searchable. I think the suit is just a cover to get this valuable data!
As an ME who graduated in 1996, I saw it all. I did an immense amount of work in Acad R12-14 in 2D and learned all the tricks to build the orthogonal and isometric views. Soon, ProE and SW hit the scene and I had to spend nearly 1000 hours in each learning how to build models and make decent 2D drawings. It was hammered into me from my mentor, that the drawing is a contract and that it alone can convey intent.
On a whim I took an architecture class and learned to use a mayline and paper/pen/pencils to do the same 2D tricks I had done in Acad and Vellum. Weirdly enough, my first real engineering position was at a shop that used hand drawings with a mayline. Productivity was low, but very few mistakes were made.
I later worked in a Pro/E shop and designed plastic injection molded parts, so almost everything was 3D. We still needed 2D drawings for documentation and there were a few projects with machinining and the intent still had to be put into the drawings.
It'll be a long time before 2D drawings are eliminated because they are the only open document format for making engineered parts. And they do a great job of conveying intent and contracting the job. That said, I really like parametric design, because you can update the location of a bolt hole in the assembly and it goes all the way through to the 2D drawing. What used to take an hour or a day, now take seconds.
Knowing how to use your tools is just as important as having them. 3D programs are really great at increasing productivity, but if all you are doing is speeding up the design of something broken and expensive, then you are just getting nowhere faster.
You say: >If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour, >which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?
Are you claiming to be a top climatologist? A lot of people can write a paper that looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth what its printed on.
I'll give you a personal example. I once worked for a small medical device company owned by an ex surgeon. He was trying to sell patented technologies to very large and rich pharmaceutical firms. He needed to show that the technologies were scientifically tested to standards which the FDA accepts. He hired me (an MIT trained scientist) to perform experiments and prove that these technologies were valid. This process is called "validating" by the FDA.
I had a predecessor who had left on poor terms. So I had an inkling something might be weird. I kept trying to replicate my predecessors results and couldn't. My boss was becoming increasingly agitated that I wasn't successful making his technology work. I was certainly trying. I was working my ass off. At one point in a meeting, my boss told me to change the protocol of the experiment in a subtle way. I instantly recognized that it would guarantee a positive result, but that it wouldn't mean anything about the safety of the underlying technology. It would be fraud. And in fact, it would be very hard for someone to detect that it was fraud. Only someone who had been working on the technology for 60 hours a week for 6 months would be able to understand what it meant.
I refused to make the change in protocol, and started looking for anotehr job that day. The boss and I didn't speak after that. People's lives are at stake with medical devices and I couldn't be a party to fraud. This was a big deal.
Global warming is somewhat similar and its even more complex. You might consider putting your faith in trained scientists instead of paid hacks. Or don't and become a scientist yourself!
The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) has dismissed Martin's plan as "Silicon Valley welfare", claiming that it gives Google an unfair advantage.
John Walls, vice president of public affairs at the CTIA, said that the pledge re-affirms his organisation's belief that the proposed deal smacks of foul play.
"The letter highlights Google's scheme to have the auction rigged with special conditions in its favour," he told vnunet.com.
"Nobody should be able to buy a custom-fit government regulation tailored to their business plan."
-- end excerpt --
I think John Walls might want to add, "except Baby Bells of course." Its so not fair when a brand new billion dollar company gets into your game.
One doesn't really have much to do with the other. The USSR had great science, not much democracy.
A long time ago scientists thought there were these things you couldn't see, hear, smell, feel or taste that caused disease. Parasites, bacteria, germs, and viruses are all well accepted now. Public health policy is against personal freedom. Forcing people to vaccinate their children, health departments and extreme measures like quarantine are certainly not democratic. They are examples of the state being paternalistic (totalitarian if you like) and forcing the population and businesses to do something they otherwise wouldn't for their own long term good. This is a good thing, and its not about freedom. Its about saving people's lives and the society as a whole.
Scientists were ridiculed for their belief in germs, it went against common sense. Doctors debated for ages whether washing their hands made any difference... It does.
Common sense is absurd to mention in a scientific debate. Vaclav Havel is a writer and politician. I don't tell him how to write. Why is he telling me how to do science? Could it have something to do with helping out Bush and his oil buddies now that Bush is putting missiles in the Czech Republic to defend against Russia? I can't help but notice the convenient timing.
Global warming is real, and the cause is most likely human. The proposed fixes aren't trying to roll back the industrial age. They proposed fixes are trying to avoid some really dangerous scenarios (like flooding all the worlds coastal cities and acidification of the oceans). If it turns out that the theories are incorrect, you can certainly go ahead and burn all that fuel. It'll still be in the ground in 20 years.
1. We knew this was going to happen sooner or later. 2. Its better it happens sooner, Linus was getting impatient with the FSF folks and rightly seeing them as paranoid. If it had been a year or so more, the kernel might've been forked with some GPL v3 and GPL v2... This forces the FOSS community to circle their wagons and get along. 3. I welcome this challenge, because what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. MS executives are doing it now to appear like they're working hard because the great Redmond machine is running out of steam and they need to keep that stock price propped up for a few more years while they sell:
When was the last time you saw an insider trade of 'buy' MSFT? They have a good margin and great revenue, but so did Kodak and Palaroid just a short while back.
Ideas can last forever, companies don't.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
While some of the numbers might be arguable, the whole article misses the point of any new technology argument.
-- First movers on new technology almost always are paying more and using more energy than their stick in the mud Hummer counterparts; the *hope* of the new technology is that with increased production efficiency it'll eventually become a good move. This is the argument of ethanol, bio-diesel, solar panels, hybrid cars, etc. The fact that they do more near term environmental damage than their conservative counterparts doesn't mean they shouldn't be explored on a low volume basis.
I do agree with the article though that a truly economical car is better for the pocket book and the environment without having to bet on the environmental returns of a new technology. But what Prius owners are doing is spending all this money and subsidizing en masse Toyota's research of building hybrid cars. I applaud them for doing so. That's something the article misses entirely. In this sense, the Hummer is certainly not more environmentally friendly than a Prius (because the Prius is a search for a better solution).
What the article doesn't mention is that mass transit and bicycles are way further down on the cost / mile and environmental damage than any of these cars. But that would be thinking outside the box.
If it only worked! I've been testing these ODF readers for MS Word since I can't get OO to export a working.doc version of the file I created in OO. The 2007 MS sponsored one works a bit better than this SUN version. There was another I tried that didn't work too.
In short, there's no reliable way to pipe.odt to.doc right now. My test file has a table of contents, some sections and references, and a few figures with embedded images. Guess its a much bigger deal than it ought to be.
At least the big names are trying to get it to work. Maybe in a year it'll be going, unless MS manages to stop this ball from rolling down the hill. Thing is, I don't mind using MS Office, I just hate not being able to edit the documents on my Linux server, the old mac I keep running, or any number of various non supported by MS computers I deal with. Standards would improve productivity for us, but lower MS' profit margin.
Slashdot Mirror
Double-blind means that the person administering the treatment or placebo does not know the difference (in addition to the patient). So if you are being poked in a place other than where the practitioner would plan, then you might have a problem being able to do a double-blind study. In general, if a procedure or theory is not falsifiable (testable) then its probably a sham.
I am actually really looking for an answer to the question posed. Not trolling. Though maybe you mean poetmatt? The question is, would this trial settle the issue for good, or are there other legal time-bombs awaiting developers?
If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?
I think I found a loop hole. They have to discard all the failed attempts of the entanglement swapping (75% of the time). Not to mention a 4.4% efficiency of even getting photons through the long fiber to Victor. I don't have Nature Physics, but from the preprint on arxiv.org:
"The probabilistic nature of the Bell-state projection with linear optics decreases the success probability to 1/4." page 15
Though a more honest way to say this might be, that only when Alice and Bob have correlated photons, would it be possible to get the entanglement swapping to work. If we tried to swap the entanglement based when Alice and Bob did not get correlations its clear it would never happen. Their interpretation relies on a strange post selection of the data. If their experiment checked to see if Alice and Bob first got a correlation, and only then tried to do entanglement swapping, I think the experiment would not appear to violate any sense of causality. Its only because they throw away 75% of the data (the failed attempts at entanglement swapping) that the experiment appears magic. I think those 75% contain most of the uncorrelated results from Alice and Bob as there is a reason those attempts failed. Ie. its not chance if Alice and Bob have already performed the measurement. Its only "chance" if we pretend that we don't know.
In the description, they write "by exploiting the corrosion-resistance of copper with the conductive properties of steel". But this is copper clad *telecom* wire, so at megahertz or higher frequencies there will be no current in the steel core. Its all in the skin (effect) and the wire will have just the same conductivity as copper wire, minus any magnetic losses. I assume that they have made nice controlled impedance telecom wire, which is, to my knowledge, something cool and new. Kudos to the company that made it!
While the supply of Bitcoins is limited. There is no reason I see, that someone else could not come up with another bitdollar, bitpeso, digifranc, or other such digital "money" with the same properties. In this sense, these digital monies are not unlimited, and I fail to see why they would have any inherent value. With raw metals, like gold there are alternatives too, paladium, platinum, silver... But the periodic table, chemistry and physics have assured us that there is a limit to the alternatives. The US dollar is backed by a giant military and the strategic resources it controls (also limited). What makes Bitcoins worth having, when tomorrow someone could invent another digital currency? Is this just a popularity contest? What value could you add to bitcoins to make them unique or worth having?
The study is highly suspect. Because it looks like the area they are referring to is the temporal lobe. This is the area involved with hearing and I would not be surprised if putting a muted telephone on one side of the head would increase my brain activity as I strain to hear something. They need to show that if they move the antenna, that the increased activity follows it. This would have been very easy to do, but was not done. Why?
from http://www.neuroskills.com/brain.shtml:
Temporal Lobes: Side of head above ears.
Functions:
* Hearing ability. Memory acquisition. Some visual perceptions
* Categorization of objects.
OK. I will bite even though I will most likely regret it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elemental_abundances.svg
Shows that lead (Pb) is roughly 10000 times more abundant than gold (Au) in the earth's crust.
What reference were you using? Trollpedia?
The technology is there. I think it is time we finally start to encrypt information stored on web servers. Keeping the contents of email on servers encrypted is fairly do-able. But keeping facebook information private is a bit of an oxymoron. Someone could also produce a USB key which decrypts data (assuming a public/private key system) so that the private keys of individuals could be somewhat limited in how many copies need to be made. Still the headers of email, would be public, but if the account is anonymous and at least one reliable anonymizing mail relay is used, the system could work. I myself don't see my privacy as a big deal. Its the fact that the total privacy of all individuals is being compromised. That means any goverment or corporation able to access and search the data of Google or Facebook could quite easily suppress dissent or stop negative publicity. The email accounts of journalists are especially a concern.
For social networks, I think the solution, is to decentralize the system, encrypt it, and open source it, so it cannot so easily be searched and stored. Diaspora, while still in alpha, seems like a good direction to go. If the user's data is stored encrypted, then the user could issue and revoke public keys associated with the data. In this way "friends" could be managed instead of a simple binary flag in a centralized type system. The issuance and revocation of public keys would also allow for white lists to finally be made to combat spam. If one large internet mover (hear me Google?) started this initiative, then it would start to gain some real traction.
No system is perfect, but the the current system can be very much improved upon.
Cool. You want to talk tech.
I checked up on Capacity Factor. A nuclear PP, typically has 90% CF. But thats because it must be run as a baseload plant. I remember visiting a baseload gas fired plant in Rhode Island a ways back. It was brand new, and very cool. The gas turbines always running. Right you are, about gears needing maintenance. Except for solar, I thing they all need maintenance. And even solar needs to get cleaned from dust occasionally.
The thing is, what we need most is power during the day and wind happily mostly blows during this time, since it is after all a solar effect. A baseload plant is great, but only about 1/3 of the power is needed at night. No industry, office lights or air conditioning for the mall. Wind, while intermittent, can really help with this. A friend of mine works in short term weather forecasts. The problem of whether the windfarm will be able to supply energy or not needs to be determined at 5am, otherwise (usually) a fossil fuel plant needs to be fired up. With some good computers and weather models, they can tell whether one needs to fire up the oil/gas/coal peak load plant or not.
The thing is, its much better to run a nuclear plant as baseload because of the huge capital cost. But peakload power is more valuable and thats why wind can compete. In some places they run the nuclear all night at full blast and charge up a hydro resevoir. But its a pretty inefficient process.
I think wind, solar and others can play a huge role in supplying the power needed. Especially the peak load power. Hydro, nuclear and natural gas can keep the baseload. Coal and oil should just be phased out because of the expense. It is much better to heat a place with fossil fuel than make electricity.
And of course the Horse Hollow wind farm had complaints. But nothing compared to a nuclear power plant. Even John Kerry tried to stop a wind farm on the Cape. People always want someone else to do their industry and have a pretty landscape. I wish they would just get a painting and hang it in front of their window.
Every source of power has its drawbacks, but your analysis above seems more interested in detailing what is wrong with environmentalists. This is not news for nerds. I do not care so much whether someone calls themselves an environmentalist or not, but rather that they put forward helpful criticism or suggestions.
Wind power is just one possibility which you deride above. I would like to set the record straight. Its a bit expensive, but the costs have changed a lot with the advent of of large lightweight composite materials. Its now possible to make 3 or even 5 mega watt turbines with a life time greater than 20 years. The largest US single wind farm "Horse Hollow Wind Energy" is 735.5MW. Which is slightly shy of 1/2 of a massive nuclear power plant. It requires no 100 mile evacuation plans and sirens, nor does it make nuclear waste... etc.... Its a good thing. It was probably supported by the govt, like many other things, such as the Hoover Dam, nuclear power, bridges, farming, highways, railroads and so on. Not everything supported by the govt is bad you know.
Sometimes the government supports a technology to get it going and then it takes off. Like the internet.
The private company versions of the internet, such as Compuserve, were pretty bad in comparison. Sometimes it takes a government grant to get good things going.
I think you are so bent on insulting enviro-liberal-goverment loving-commie-pinko-satan-worshipping-gays you miss the fact that some of things, that people you hate want, are really good.
Why does he not just use robots.txt, and then google will not scan or index his sites? He cannot have it both ways, being indexed and not allowing the search results to be displayed. This whole argument seems absurd.
I know replying to oneself is really tacking, but I just wanted to comment that something has gone terribly awry in my life if I am 38 years old, just came home from work where I was building a quantum computer, still ride a bike, checked slashdot.org first thing, and replied on how to get Linux running on a 16 year old laptop. All this on a *friday* night. I think a there should be a little "game over" sign appearing before my eyes.
-ashamed
I can attest to the Debian install. I did this in 2006 with an old 486 laptop with 24MB. Though the above link brought me to the wrong place when I followed it.
Try
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/20070308/images/floppy/
Its got a lot of floppy images that will take you back to the old days. I had some sort of trouble with the laptop install. The kernel ran fine, but I think the installer had trouble for some reason. I might have ended up apt-get --ing a lot of things. But in the end the system ran. It runs a nameserver and has been up for over a year. Nice thing about laptops is that they have built in UPSs.
Um... My US history is a little faded, but I would definitely say that the US conquered and made the whole country a state. You don't really think the native indians, mexicans, hawaiians, and quebequois just handed over their land? And I would certainly say that conquering the confederacy was imperialism. We are all just taught that for each of these horrid wars, that the good outweighed the bad. I have always questioned that.
Finally a cool article on /. This is extremely cool! There are a lot of problems in the real world that have extremely large sparse matrices that need to be inverted. Fluid dynamics and solutions to Maxwells equations come to mind. But I am sure there are other applications in relativity and plasma physics. Estimating a solution to a linear dynamic system of say 2^128 degrees of freedom in only 128 cycles would change a lot of things.
And... Yes, we are working very hard on building the computers.
Its not clear what the poster is trying to do. Conformal coating or potting may not be a good option. Is he trying to protect the board from dust, an occasional spraydown, or condensing humidity? Maybe CC or potting would work. THough the heat issues would be pretty bad as mentioned 100 times above.
I would recommend a pressure housing with o-rings and proper feedthrus or liquid proof connectors. For high pressure and heat dissapation, filling the pressure housing with Flourinert would be a nice solution, just put a small pressure compensating bladder on the pressure housing so little air bubbles aren't a problem.
If one is pressed for time, a really good ziplock bag filled with Flourinert, and a potted feedthrough for the wires would also work in a pinch.
Mod parent up. This isn't potentially valuable. This is worth more than all the possible money they could have lost in ad revenue from the 'infringing' Viacom episodes. In my view, the real prize is this data. It tells them what movies to make and its easily searchable. I think the suit is just a cover to get this valuable data!
As an ME who graduated in 1996, I saw it all. I did an immense amount of work in Acad R12-14 in 2D and learned all the tricks to build the orthogonal and isometric views. Soon, ProE and SW hit the scene and I had to spend nearly 1000 hours in each learning how to build models and make decent 2D drawings. It was hammered into me from my mentor, that the drawing is a contract and that it alone can convey intent.
On a whim I took an architecture class and learned to use a mayline and paper/pen/pencils to do the same 2D tricks I had done in Acad and Vellum. Weirdly enough, my first real engineering position was at a shop that used hand drawings with a mayline. Productivity was low, but very few mistakes were made.
I later worked in a Pro/E shop and designed plastic injection molded parts, so almost everything was 3D. We still needed 2D drawings for documentation and there were a few projects with machinining and the intent still had to be put into the drawings.
It'll be a long time before 2D drawings are eliminated because they are the only open document format for making engineered parts. And they do a great job of conveying intent and contracting the job. That said, I really like parametric design, because you can update the location of a bolt hole in the assembly and it goes all the way through to the 2D drawing. What used to take an hour or a day, now take seconds.
Knowing how to use your tools is just as important as having them. 3D programs are really great at increasing productivity, but if all you are doing is speeding up the design of something broken and expensive, then you are just getting nowhere faster.
You say:
>If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour,
>which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?
Are you claiming to be a top climatologist? A lot of people can write a paper that
looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth
what its printed on.
I'll give you a personal example. I once worked for a small medical device company
owned by an ex surgeon. He was trying to sell patented technologies to very large
and rich pharmaceutical firms. He needed to show that the technologies were scientifically
tested to standards which the FDA accepts. He hired me (an MIT trained scientist) to
perform experiments and prove that these technologies were valid. This process is
called "validating" by the FDA.
I had a predecessor who had left on poor terms. So I had an inkling something
might be weird. I kept trying to replicate my predecessors results and couldn't.
My boss was becoming increasingly agitated that I wasn't successful making his
technology work. I was certainly trying. I was working my ass off. At one point
in a meeting, my boss told me to change the protocol of the experiment in a subtle
way. I instantly recognized that it would guarantee a positive result, but that
it wouldn't mean anything about the safety of the underlying technology. It
would be fraud. And in fact, it would be very hard for someone to detect that
it was fraud. Only someone who had been working on the technology for 60 hours
a week for 6 months would be able to understand what it meant.
I refused to make the change in protocol, and started looking for anotehr job that
day. The boss and I didn't speak after that. People's lives are at stake
with medical devices and I couldn't be a party to fraud. This was a big deal.
Global warming is somewhat similar and its even more complex. You might consider
putting your faith in trained scientists instead of paid hacks. Or don't and
become a scientist yourself!
-- begin excerpt --
The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) has dismissed Martin's plan as "Silicon Valley welfare", claiming that it gives Google an unfair advantage.
John Walls, vice president of public affairs at the CTIA, said that the pledge re-affirms his organisation's belief that the proposed deal smacks of foul play.
"The letter highlights Google's scheme to have the auction rigged with special conditions in its favour," he told vnunet.com.
"Nobody should be able to buy a custom-fit government regulation tailored to their business plan."
-- end excerpt --
I think John Walls might want to add, "except Baby Bells of course." Its so not fair when a brand new billion dollar company gets into your game.
One doesn't really have much to do with the other. The USSR had great science, not much democracy.
A long time ago scientists thought there were these things you couldn't see, hear, smell, feel or taste that caused disease. Parasites, bacteria, germs, and viruses are all well accepted now. Public health policy is against personal freedom. Forcing people to vaccinate their children, health departments and extreme measures like quarantine are certainly not democratic. They are examples of the state being paternalistic (totalitarian if you like) and forcing the population and businesses to do something they otherwise wouldn't for their own long term good. This is a good thing, and its not about freedom. Its about saving people's lives and the society as a whole.
Scientists were ridiculed for their belief in germs, it went against common sense. Doctors debated for ages whether washing their hands made any difference... It does.
Common sense is absurd to mention in a scientific debate. Vaclav Havel is a writer and politician. I don't tell him how to write. Why is he telling me how to do science? Could it have something to do with helping out Bush and his oil buddies now that Bush is putting missiles in the Czech Republic to defend against Russia? I can't help but notice the convenient timing.
Global warming is real, and the cause is most likely human. The proposed fixes aren't trying to roll back the industrial age. They proposed fixes are trying to avoid some really dangerous scenarios (like flooding all the worlds coastal cities and acidification of the oceans). If it turns out that the theories are incorrect, you can certainly go ahead and burn all that fuel. It'll still be in the ground in 20 years.
The thing I see good about this is as follows:
1. We knew this was going to happen sooner or later.
2. Its better it happens sooner, Linus was getting impatient with the FSF folks
and rightly seeing them as paranoid. If it had been a year or so more, the kernel
might've been forked with some GPL v3 and GPL v2... This forces the FOSS community
to circle their wagons and get along.
3. I welcome this challenge, because what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
MS executives are doing it now to appear like they're working hard because the
great Redmond machine is running out of steam and they need to keep that stock
price propped up for a few more years while they sell:
When was the last time you saw an insider trade of 'buy' MSFT? They have a
good margin and great revenue, but so did Kodak and Palaroid just a short while back.
Ideas can last forever, companies don't.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
While some of the numbers might be arguable, the whole article misses the point of any new technology argument.
-- First movers on new technology almost always are paying more and using more energy than their stick in the mud Hummer counterparts; the *hope* of the new technology is that with increased production efficiency it'll eventually become a good move. This is the argument of ethanol, bio-diesel, solar panels, hybrid cars, etc. The fact that they do more near term environmental damage than their conservative counterparts doesn't mean they shouldn't be explored on a low volume basis.
I do agree with the article though that a truly economical car is better for the pocket book and the environment without having to bet on the environmental returns of a new technology. But what Prius owners are doing is spending all this money and subsidizing en masse Toyota's research of building hybrid cars. I applaud them for doing so. That's something the article misses entirely. In this sense, the Hummer is certainly not more environmentally friendly than a Prius (because the Prius is a search for a better solution).
What the article doesn't mention is that mass transit and bicycles are way further down on the cost / mile and environmental damage than any of these cars. But that would be thinking outside the box.
If it only worked! I've been testing these ODF readers for MS Word since I can't get OO to export a working .doc version of the file I created in OO. The 2007 MS sponsored one works a bit better than this SUN version. There was another I tried that didn't work too.
.odt to .doc right now. My test file has a table of contents, some sections and references, and a few figures with embedded images. Guess its a much bigger deal than it ought to be.
In short, there's no reliable way to pipe
At least the big names are trying to get it to work. Maybe in a year it'll be going, unless MS manages to stop this ball from rolling down the hill. Thing is, I don't mind using MS Office, I just hate not being able to edit the documents on my Linux server, the old mac I keep running, or any number of various non supported by MS computers I deal with. Standards would improve productivity for us, but lower MS' profit margin.