Quantum computers cannot solve NP-Hard or NP-Complete problems -- at least, no faster than a classical computer. This is one of the most basic results in the field, and the author keeps on making hash of it. This article should not be taken seriously if it's rife with such basic errors.
It was a shortening of Micro$oft. We did the same thing with the Compuserve Information Service (CIS), which charged such outrageous rates that we started calling them CI$. Replacing the "s" of rapacious firms with "$" was pretty much standard practice then -- and, at that time, nobody deserved it more than Microsoft.
Apparently, you missed the news from a while ago about Microsoft releasing the CLR under a free software license. Check it out.
I've been a Slashdot reader since back when it was called Chips & Dips. Back then, Microsoft deserved the M$ appellation. Today, not so much. They're cooperating a lot more with the libre software community. Now, you can either shake your fist at them and scream how they'll never be forgiven for their sins... or you can smile, extend a hand, and welcome them to the party.
The world works better if more people choose the latter. And that applies to life in general, not just Microsoft.:)
No, it wasn't like that. After graduating with a CS degree in 1998, the job offer I was planning on taking paid $25K -- or $36K in today's 2015 dollars. I wasn't happy about it, but I was happy to have an offer. At the last minute another offer came through at $35K ($50K in today's dollars), and I was the envy of that year's CS grads for getting the largest job offer. Literally no one received this "started at $40,000" business you're talking about.
Well, in the interests of honesty I have to say the matter in '98 with the shotgun was a lot more of a chaotic mess than I made it out to be. Whenever the fecal matter strikes the rotating metal blade, there's always a whole lot more confusion than the neat after-action writeups indicate.
The incident involving the courthouse, I actually don't recall what I was carrying -- either a Glock or an FN FNP-9.
Beyond that, yes, it's factual.:)
I've never much trusted the language of patriotism or civic duty. Too often they get hijacked by scoundrels to justify their skulduggery. I like to think of it this way: I like my home, I like my neighborhood, I like my neighbors. That gives me a pretty good motivation to give a damn about them. That, to me, is all that civic virtue really is: giving a damn about the people around you.
I recommend it to everyone. Life's better if we give a damn about the people around us.:)
Speaking as someone who has purchased many firearms at gun shows: no commercial firearms dealer has ever sold me anything without requiring an ATF Form 4473, whatever the local equivalent state and/or municipal paperwork is, and a NICS check. No private individual has ever sold me anything without requiring a photo ID and a copy of my concealed carry permit, which guarantees that I'm not prohibited from purchasing arms.
The idea that gun shows are hotbeds of background check-free shopping is completely wrong. According to the FBI, few criminals obtain their firearms at gun shows. I suspect the reason is just simple pragmatism: there are too many cops at gun shows and too many civic-minded people who will tell the cops if they hear someone's looking for a no-paperwork sale. Then the cops get involved, ask who you are, run your ID, discover you've got a felony conviction, and *bam*, you're now under arrest.
If I was a criminal and I wanted to obtain a firearm, I'd do what the guy who stole my SIG P220 did. I left the shooting range, placed my range bag in my trunk, realized I'd left a box of ammunition inside, locked my vehicle, walked back inside, picked up the ammunition, walked outside, and discovered my hatchback's rear window had been shattered and some asshole was already fifty meters away running down the street with my range bag over my shoulder and a tire iron in his hand...
When was the last time you actually saw someone grab a gun and go be a "first responder" to a crime? You haven't.
You seem to believe this doesn't happen. It does. I know because I was the guy with a gun.
In August 1998 a young man was getting beaten to death in my apartment's parking lot. (Whether it was their intent to kill him, I don't know. What I do know is that beating someone with a tire iron is lethal force.) One of my neighbors called 911. I went out with a 12-gauge loaded with deer slug and suggested they leave him alone. They stopped beating him. When the deputy sheriff arrived a few minutes later this young man was in bad shape, but was still alive. He's alive because I had a shotgun.
In 2006 a younger friend of mine who had been the victim of a violent rape ten years before received word that her attacker was being released from prison. The prison psychologist contacted my friend to let her know this rapist was still obsessed with her. He had a three-day window between the time he was released and the time he registered his new domicile with a local county sheriff -- three days during which my friend was intensely vulnerable. The police said they'd send a car past her place twice each shift. That was no comfort at all. But when several of her (armed and trained) friends took shifts in her home with a shotgun, she was able to rest well. (And each day she woke up to a hearty plate of eggs, bacon, toast, and a cup of hot Jamaican Blue Mountain.)
A couple of years ago a friend of mine had to testify at a trial and was afraid to walk to the courthouse for fear the defendant's friends would waylay her. She shared her fears with me. I shrugged, holstered a Glock, and walked her to the courthouse. I didn't go inside (since that would've been a violation of the law), but I handed her off to a sheriff's deputy who took her the rest of the way to the courtroom. She felt safe the entire way.
You seem to believe guns are the problem. Guns are not the problem. Guns in the hands of the irresponsible, the untrained, and the immature... now there's a problem for you, an enormous one, and one I don't have a good answer for.
But a rifle, a shotgun, or a handgun, in the hands of a responsible, mature individual who's been trained in their use and the legal statutes pertaining to violence... we genuinely are the first responders the original poster talked about. And our business is violence *prevention*, not violence. Our presence deters violence. I like that, I like that a lot.
I've got no desire to shoot anyone. Killing is a messy, disgusting business and I recommend everyone avoid it. A gunshot will involve years of nightmares, torturous soul-searching, civil lawsuits, the deceased's friends and family wanting vengeance, and every other damned thing imaginable... and that's for a 100% justified kill. There is literally no upside in shooting someone.
But preventing bad things from happening to people? I have to say... that's kind of cool. I like that. A lot.
I don't know who told you C++ was an object-oriented language. It's not -- ask Bjarne. It supports many different styles of programming, object-oriented being just one of many, but it is in no way object-oriented. You can write large code bases without using a single object.
unique_ptr is normally preferred over shared_ptr -- the former is zero-overhead compared to a pointer, while the latter has a reference count associated with it which has to be incremented and decremented. If you know two or more things will be using the pointer and you don't want to have to worry about ownership semantics, shared_ptr makes a lot of sense. If you know only one will be using it, unique_ptr makes more sense.
And they're not going to get hired as security guards in the U.S., either. Would you hire someone that you already knew, 100%, had violated someone's civil liberties so egregiously? Of course not: your shareholders would can you for hiring them. If you hire people you know are a discipline problem, you're just begging for a lawsuit when they fuck up again while working for you.
If you think the people who hire cops don't bother to check with previous employers and do Google searches on new applicants, you need your head examined. These two are done. They're not going to work as cops ever again.
You weren't breathing pure helium. You were breathing "balloon gas," which is a mixture of helium and normal, breathable room air. The oxygen in the mixture was keeping you conscious.
Helium is an expensive substance and you don't need pure helium in a balloon to give it lift. By cutting the helium with air, the balloon outfit is able to make their expensive resource last much longer.
Cfront worked by translating C++ into C, which was then run through a C compiler. As such, cfront had to be abandoned in the early 90s because there were certain syntactic structures that simply couldn't be expressed in a reasonable amount of C source code.
The original poster is (mostly) correct. Cfront was a compiler only in the sense that it did a transform of one language (C++) into another (C). It was not a compiler to any extent beyond that; compiling to native code was left up to the system C compiler.
Where the original poster is wrong is calling C++ a "preprocessor for C". That's a reasonably-correct way to describe one early implementation of a C++ compilation system, but it's not an accurate way to describe the language itself.
Parody is protected; satire is not. Parody uses the objects of an artistic creation to criticize, lampoon, or make fun of the original creation. Satire uses the objects of one artistic creation to criticize, lampoon, or make fun of other creations. Using A to mock A is fair game in copyright law. Using A to mock B is seen as a violation of the copyright holder of A's rights.
As an example: Demolition Man used commercial jingles and Taco Bell to satirize modern American life and where it was headed, but they weren't really holding up the Oscar-Meyer Company or Taco Bell up for ridicule. The laughs were aimed elsewhere. As a result, they had to get permission from the Oscar-Meyer company to use the Oscar-Meyer wiener jingle, and permission from Taco Bell to use the Taco Bell logo. That's satire.
The Power Rangers fan film is pretty much straight-up parody. They're not scoring points about anything outside the Power Rangers franchise: they're just holding it up for brutal mocking. That's parody, and that means the people who made it were A-OK.
I'm not rejecting Noether's theorem -- I'm rejecting temporal invariance. Spacetime is dynamical, therefore not invariant, etc., etc.
You can definitely torture the definitions of words until you reach a kind of invariance, but I feel this creates more problems than it solves. Better to just say, "conservation of energy only holds true for static backgrounds."
See Sean Carroll's "Energy Is Not Conserved" blogpost for a more detailed explanation. He convinced me to stop talking about the energy of the gravitational field as the escape hatch for conservation.:)
It's commendable that you want to pass on wisdom. But I suspect your daughter isn't going to miss your wisdom anywhere near as much as she's going to miss you. What is it that makes you so uniquely you?
For example: I have some really strong memories associated with science fiction, particularly Poul Anderson's Tau Zero. So I might record myself reading Tau Zero, and whenever I reached a passage that really resonated with me I might go into a long digression about why it resonated with me, and things in my life and history that also strike that same thematic note. By the end of it, she would know not only that I loved Tau Zero, but she'd know a lot more about me and why I loved it and why it spoke to me and why, with only six good months left, I'd choose to spend six hours of it recording it for her.
Wisdom is overrated. It really, truly is. It's valuable but it's not the best thing out there. And I say that as the son of a father who has the keenest mind I've ever known, a guy who has enormous life experience and wisdom and has shared it with me freely throughout my life. If-and-when he goes, I'll miss his wisdom a lot. But I'll miss him more.
The most important gift you have to pass on to your daughter isn't your wisdom. It's you.
This is a great question. Let me rephrase it: "How can we collect dark energy and convert it into something useful?"
Nobody knows. Nobody knows if it's possible, for that matter. But yes, energy is constantly being pumped into spacetime; that's what's causing the expansion of spacetime. The nature of that energy and its origin (is it produced ex nihilo? Is it leaking in from another universe?) are currently hotly debated within physics.
But again, it's a great question. I wish we had an answer for it!:)
Try high-school level details. The basic principles of relativity ("no preferred reference frames; time and space are relative; the speed of light is constant") are taught in high school physics, as are such things as barycenters (although they usually call it the "center of gravity"). The bit about the Uncertainty Principle is college-level physics, but the rest is straight-up high school physics -- and not AP Physics, either.
And if you say the earth goes 'round the sun, you're every bit as wrong as if you say the sun goes 'round the earth. The reason why you're just as wrong is because you're making the same fundamental mistake: you're assuming the existence of a preferred reference frame.
I've never heard of this Goedel guy but he sounds like either a hippy or a troll or both.
Kurt Goedel is widely regarded as the finest logician since Aristotle. Guy was Einstein's best friend (Einstein said he worked at Princeton "solely for the privilege of walking Kurt Goedel home"), did foundational work in general relativity, developed the Goedel Metric for GR, tore mathematics down to its foundations so violently that Bertrand Russell was shaken, lay the foundation for modern computer science, and more.
Not knowing who Kurt Goedel is, is kind of like not knowing who Isaac Newton is. Seriously. The guy was a major player in mathematics and physics from the 20s up until the 1970s. And when people call him the greatest logician since Aristotle, they're not kidding.
From any point of reference the sun is the centre of this solar system and everything in this system orbits the sun.
Not at all. Nothing orbits the sun. The planets and the sun all orbit the barycenter of Sol System, which happens to almost coincide with the center of the Sun. See, e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Anyway, the claim that "from any point of reference the sun is the centre of this solar system" is just wrong. Walk out your front door on a clear night and you can watch the planets and stars rotate around you. You're the center, from that particular frame of reference. Sure, to describe the motions of the planets accurately requires an absurdly complex set of epicycles, so complex that they cannot be evaluated without the use of computers... but you can do it: the math gives equivalent results. The math may be easier in one reference frame, but that doesn't make one reference frame more correct.
Here's another example: stand still and spin around really fast. Your arms will naturally lift and move outwards. In one frame of reference, you're spinning and centrifugal forces are lifting your arms up. In another frame of reference, you're standing still and the entire universe has started spinning around you, and the tidal forces generated by that much mass (at, admittedly, that great a distance) generate a pull on your arms that lift them up.
That may sound pretty out there, and it is -- it was one of the arguments Kurt Goedel used against relativity back in the early 20th century. ("That's all well and good, Einstein, but if there's no preferred reference frame then how do you account for this?") Then Goedel sat down with the math, crunched a ridiculous lot of numbers, and discovered that yes, General Relativity gave the exact same results as classical physics.
We may want to choose one reference frame or another to make the math easier -- but that doesn't make one reference frame more correct than another.
Look at how many people think they're scientifically literate because they think --
The Earth goes around the sun. It doesn't, and in fact, this is just as wrong as saying the sun goes round the Earth. Both positions implicitly advocate there's some privileged and special frame of reference in which to view the universe, and Einstein says there isn't one. It's sort of like people who say there's no such thing as centrifugal force: stand inside a rotating reference frame and derive Newton's Laws and yes, yes it exists, and yes, yes it's real. The mistake: "some reference frames are more true than others." The reality: "you pay your money and you take your frame of reference."
Conservation of energy. Conservation of energy only happens in a static spacetime; astronomy says our spacetime is dynamical; energy is not conserved in our universe.
E=mc**2. Only true for objects at rest, and pretty much nothing in the universe is at rest. The real equation is E**2=m**2c**4 + p**2c**2. This is why light can have energy without mass: a photon's energy is carried entirely in its momentum.
If you measure a particle's position, you'll necessarily tweak its velocity. That's the Uncertainty Principle. No, that's the Observer Effect. The Uncertainty Principle isn't a statement about the fidelity of our measurement apparatus: it's a statement about the total information available, period. If you think the data actually exists but we just can't measure it, then you're subscribing to a Hidden Variables interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Aspect experiments put a pretty comprehensive set of nails in that coffin.
... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. You don't have to talk to flat earthers and antivaxxers to see profound science illiteracy; usually, the people condemning the science illiteracy are just as wrong, but about different things.
As a fellow libertarian fucktard, I'm ashamed of you. Really? Really?
And I'll take a unicorn, as long as you have enough for everyone.
There's never going to be an infinite supply of unicorns! That's why we have markets, so that the buyers and sellers of unicorns can meet and negotiate prices at the intersection of the supply and demand curves, ensuring that everyone who's willing to pay the price for a unicorn is able to get one! Come on! Adam Smith! Invisible Hand! Milt Friedman! Nozick! Rothbard! PAUL KRUG--
-- wait, hold on, belay that last one. My bad. But the rest, yes, carry on!
(Note to the humorless: this is all tongue firmly in cheek.)
This is true and good, so long as you're interested in making software that can be done entirely with existing technologies. As soon as you hit the brick wall of "but there isn't anything in the standard library that does this," you need the old graybeards who spent their entire careers making the standard libraries you rely on.
Speaking as one of them, the pay and hours are both good and it keeps me on the cutting edge of some fascinating technologies.
The common idea is that we over-40s who've been doing this professionally for 25+ years can't adapt to modern software dev practices. Quite the opposite, really. Mostly we're kept so busy that we don't have the time.
None of this is meant to disrespect what the younger generation does with (as you say) "connect the dots library calls". That code needs to be written, and it's best if it's written by smart people who care about their work.:)
Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:
A hard drive that's been at Ground Zero of a Chernobyl-level event, exposed to hundreds of sieverts of ionizing radiation, extraordinary extremes of temperature, a hydrogen-oxygen explosion with such tremendous overpressure that it blew the containment dome, and seawater pumped through the building as a last-ditch effort at cooling the core, is still somehow so readable that it just requires a classified forensics program to recover it fully.
The main bad guy's ultimate plan involves speculating on the future of a commodity that isn't exactly rare.
Targeting nuclear reactors in the U.S. and China as a practice run for the real attack is pretty stupid, as the practice run is so devastating that it guarantees an immediate and vigorous reaction from two world-power countries known to have active cyberwarfare programs, thereby announcing your presence to exactly the people you want to keep completely in the dark
This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum computers cannot solve NP-Hard or NP-Complete problems -- at least, no faster than a classical computer. This is one of the most basic results in the field, and the author keeps on making hash of it. This article should not be taken seriously if it's rife with such basic errors.
I was around when the M$ nickname got coined.
It was a shortening of Micro$oft. We did the same thing with the Compuserve Information Service (CIS), which charged such outrageous rates that we started calling them CI$. Replacing the "s" of rapacious firms with "$" was pretty much standard practice then -- and, at that time, nobody deserved it more than Microsoft.
Apparently, you missed the news from a while ago about Microsoft releasing the CLR under a free software license. Check it out.
I've been a Slashdot reader since back when it was called Chips & Dips. Back then, Microsoft deserved the M$ appellation. Today, not so much. They're cooperating a lot more with the libre software community. Now, you can either shake your fist at them and scream how they'll never be forgiven for their sins... or you can smile, extend a hand, and welcome them to the party.
The world works better if more people choose the latter. And that applies to life in general, not just Microsoft. :)
No, it wasn't like that. After graduating with a CS degree in 1998, the job offer I was planning on taking paid $25K -- or $36K in today's 2015 dollars. I wasn't happy about it, but I was happy to have an offer. At the last minute another offer came through at $35K ($50K in today's dollars), and I was the envy of that year's CS grads for getting the largest job offer. Literally no one received this "started at $40,000" business you're talking about.
Well, in the interests of honesty I have to say the matter in '98 with the shotgun was a lot more of a chaotic mess than I made it out to be. Whenever the fecal matter strikes the rotating metal blade, there's always a whole lot more confusion than the neat after-action writeups indicate.
The incident involving the courthouse, I actually don't recall what I was carrying -- either a Glock or an FN FNP-9.
Beyond that, yes, it's factual. :)
I've never much trusted the language of patriotism or civic duty. Too often they get hijacked by scoundrels to justify their skulduggery. I like to think of it this way: I like my home, I like my neighborhood, I like my neighbors. That gives me a pretty good motivation to give a damn about them. That, to me, is all that civic virtue really is: giving a damn about the people around you.
I recommend it to everyone. Life's better if we give a damn about the people around us. :)
Speaking as someone who has purchased many firearms at gun shows: no commercial firearms dealer has ever sold me anything without requiring an ATF Form 4473, whatever the local equivalent state and/or municipal paperwork is, and a NICS check. No private individual has ever sold me anything without requiring a photo ID and a copy of my concealed carry permit, which guarantees that I'm not prohibited from purchasing arms.
The idea that gun shows are hotbeds of background check-free shopping is completely wrong. According to the FBI, few criminals obtain their firearms at gun shows. I suspect the reason is just simple pragmatism: there are too many cops at gun shows and too many civic-minded people who will tell the cops if they hear someone's looking for a no-paperwork sale. Then the cops get involved, ask who you are, run your ID, discover you've got a felony conviction, and *bam*, you're now under arrest.
If I was a criminal and I wanted to obtain a firearm, I'd do what the guy who stole my SIG P220 did. I left the shooting range, placed my range bag in my trunk, realized I'd left a box of ammunition inside, locked my vehicle, walked back inside, picked up the ammunition, walked outside, and discovered my hatchback's rear window had been shattered and some asshole was already fifty meters away running down the street with my range bag over my shoulder and a tire iron in his hand...
You seem to believe this doesn't happen. It does. I know because I was the guy with a gun.
In August 1998 a young man was getting beaten to death in my apartment's parking lot. (Whether it was their intent to kill him, I don't know. What I do know is that beating someone with a tire iron is lethal force.) One of my neighbors called 911. I went out with a 12-gauge loaded with deer slug and suggested they leave him alone. They stopped beating him. When the deputy sheriff arrived a few minutes later this young man was in bad shape, but was still alive. He's alive because I had a shotgun.
In 2006 a younger friend of mine who had been the victim of a violent rape ten years before received word that her attacker was being released from prison. The prison psychologist contacted my friend to let her know this rapist was still obsessed with her. He had a three-day window between the time he was released and the time he registered his new domicile with a local county sheriff -- three days during which my friend was intensely vulnerable. The police said they'd send a car past her place twice each shift. That was no comfort at all. But when several of her (armed and trained) friends took shifts in her home with a shotgun, she was able to rest well. (And each day she woke up to a hearty plate of eggs, bacon, toast, and a cup of hot Jamaican Blue Mountain.)
A couple of years ago a friend of mine had to testify at a trial and was afraid to walk to the courthouse for fear the defendant's friends would waylay her. She shared her fears with me. I shrugged, holstered a Glock, and walked her to the courthouse. I didn't go inside (since that would've been a violation of the law), but I handed her off to a sheriff's deputy who took her the rest of the way to the courtroom. She felt safe the entire way.
You seem to believe guns are the problem. Guns are not the problem. Guns in the hands of the irresponsible, the untrained, and the immature... now there's a problem for you, an enormous one, and one I don't have a good answer for.
But a rifle, a shotgun, or a handgun, in the hands of a responsible, mature individual who's been trained in their use and the legal statutes pertaining to violence... we genuinely are the first responders the original poster talked about. And our business is violence *prevention*, not violence. Our presence deters violence. I like that, I like that a lot.
I've got no desire to shoot anyone. Killing is a messy, disgusting business and I recommend everyone avoid it. A gunshot will involve years of nightmares, torturous soul-searching, civil lawsuits, the deceased's friends and family wanting vengeance, and every other damned thing imaginable... and that's for a 100% justified kill. There is literally no upside in shooting someone.
But preventing bad things from happening to people? I have to say... that's kind of cool. I like that. A lot.
I don't know who told you C++ was an object-oriented language. It's not -- ask Bjarne. It supports many different styles of programming, object-oriented being just one of many, but it is in no way object-oriented. You can write large code bases without using a single object.
unique_ptr is normally preferred over shared_ptr -- the former is zero-overhead compared to a pointer, while the latter has a reference count associated with it which has to be incremented and decremented. If you know two or more things will be using the pointer and you don't want to have to worry about ownership semantics, shared_ptr makes a lot of sense. If you know only one will be using it, unique_ptr makes more sense.
Please see my original post:
And they're not going to get hired as security guards in the U.S., either. Would you hire someone that you already knew, 100%, had violated someone's civil liberties so egregiously? Of course not: your shareholders would can you for hiring them. If you hire people you know are a discipline problem, you're just begging for a lawsuit when they fuck up again while working for you.
If you think the people who hire cops don't bother to check with previous employers and do Google searches on new applicants, you need your head examined. These two are done. They're not going to work as cops ever again.
You weren't breathing pure helium. You were breathing "balloon gas," which is a mixture of helium and normal, breathable room air. The oxygen in the mixture was keeping you conscious.
Helium is an expensive substance and you don't need pure helium in a balloon to give it lift. By cutting the helium with air, the balloon outfit is able to make their expensive resource last much longer.
Cfront worked by translating C++ into C, which was then run through a C compiler. As such, cfront had to be abandoned in the early 90s because there were certain syntactic structures that simply couldn't be expressed in a reasonable amount of C source code.
The original poster is (mostly) correct. Cfront was a compiler only in the sense that it did a transform of one language (C++) into another (C). It was not a compiler to any extent beyond that; compiling to native code was left up to the system C compiler.
Where the original poster is wrong is calling C++ a "preprocessor for C". That's a reasonably-correct way to describe one early implementation of a C++ compilation system, but it's not an accurate way to describe the language itself.
Parody is protected; satire is not. Parody uses the objects of an artistic creation to criticize, lampoon, or make fun of the original creation. Satire uses the objects of one artistic creation to criticize, lampoon, or make fun of other creations. Using A to mock A is fair game in copyright law. Using A to mock B is seen as a violation of the copyright holder of A's rights.
As an example: Demolition Man used commercial jingles and Taco Bell to satirize modern American life and where it was headed, but they weren't really holding up the Oscar-Meyer Company or Taco Bell up for ridicule. The laughs were aimed elsewhere. As a result, they had to get permission from the Oscar-Meyer company to use the Oscar-Meyer wiener jingle, and permission from Taco Bell to use the Taco Bell logo. That's satire.
The Power Rangers fan film is pretty much straight-up parody. They're not scoring points about anything outside the Power Rangers franchise: they're just holding it up for brutal mocking. That's parody, and that means the people who made it were A-OK.
I'm not rejecting Noether's theorem -- I'm rejecting temporal invariance. Spacetime is dynamical, therefore not invariant, etc., etc.
You can definitely torture the definitions of words until you reach a kind of invariance, but I feel this creates more problems than it solves. Better to just say, "conservation of energy only holds true for static backgrounds."
See Sean Carroll's "Energy Is Not Conserved" blogpost for a more detailed explanation. He convinced me to stop talking about the energy of the gravitational field as the escape hatch for conservation. :)
It's commendable that you want to pass on wisdom. But I suspect your daughter isn't going to miss your wisdom anywhere near as much as she's going to miss you. What is it that makes you so uniquely you?
For example: I have some really strong memories associated with science fiction, particularly Poul Anderson's Tau Zero. So I might record myself reading Tau Zero, and whenever I reached a passage that really resonated with me I might go into a long digression about why it resonated with me, and things in my life and history that also strike that same thematic note. By the end of it, she would know not only that I loved Tau Zero, but she'd know a lot more about me and why I loved it and why it spoke to me and why, with only six good months left, I'd choose to spend six hours of it recording it for her.
Wisdom is overrated. It really, truly is. It's valuable but it's not the best thing out there. And I say that as the son of a father who has the keenest mind I've ever known, a guy who has enormous life experience and wisdom and has shared it with me freely throughout my life. If-and-when he goes, I'll miss his wisdom a lot. But I'll miss him more.
The most important gift you have to pass on to your daughter isn't your wisdom. It's you.
This is a great question. Let me rephrase it: "How can we collect dark energy and convert it into something useful?"
Nobody knows. Nobody knows if it's possible, for that matter. But yes, energy is constantly being pumped into spacetime; that's what's causing the expansion of spacetime. The nature of that energy and its origin (is it produced ex nihilo? Is it leaking in from another universe?) are currently hotly debated within physics.
But again, it's a great question. I wish we had an answer for it! :)
Try high-school level details. The basic principles of relativity ("no preferred reference frames; time and space are relative; the speed of light is constant") are taught in high school physics, as are such things as barycenters (although they usually call it the "center of gravity"). The bit about the Uncertainty Principle is college-level physics, but the rest is straight-up high school physics -- and not AP Physics, either.
And if you say the earth goes 'round the sun, you're every bit as wrong as if you say the sun goes 'round the earth. The reason why you're just as wrong is because you're making the same fundamental mistake: you're assuming the existence of a preferred reference frame.
So, in a sense, thanks for proving my points.
Kurt Goedel is widely regarded as the finest logician since Aristotle. Guy was Einstein's best friend (Einstein said he worked at Princeton "solely for the privilege of walking Kurt Goedel home"), did foundational work in general relativity, developed the Goedel Metric for GR, tore mathematics down to its foundations so violently that Bertrand Russell was shaken, lay the foundation for modern computer science, and more.
Not knowing who Kurt Goedel is, is kind of like not knowing who Isaac Newton is. Seriously. The guy was a major player in mathematics and physics from the 20s up until the 1970s. And when people call him the greatest logician since Aristotle, they're not kidding.
You are correct, sir! I spoke too broadly.
And yes, "tremendous unpopularity" would be a good way of describing the non-local hidden variable theories. :)
Not at all. Nothing orbits the sun. The planets and the sun all orbit the barycenter of Sol System, which happens to almost coincide with the center of the Sun. See, e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Anyway, the claim that "from any point of reference the sun is the centre of this solar system" is just wrong. Walk out your front door on a clear night and you can watch the planets and stars rotate around you. You're the center, from that particular frame of reference. Sure, to describe the motions of the planets accurately requires an absurdly complex set of epicycles, so complex that they cannot be evaluated without the use of computers... but you can do it: the math gives equivalent results. The math may be easier in one reference frame, but that doesn't make one reference frame more correct.
Here's another example: stand still and spin around really fast. Your arms will naturally lift and move outwards. In one frame of reference, you're spinning and centrifugal forces are lifting your arms up. In another frame of reference, you're standing still and the entire universe has started spinning around you, and the tidal forces generated by that much mass (at, admittedly, that great a distance) generate a pull on your arms that lift them up.
That may sound pretty out there, and it is -- it was one of the arguments Kurt Goedel used against relativity back in the early 20th century. ("That's all well and good, Einstein, but if there's no preferred reference frame then how do you account for this?") Then Goedel sat down with the math, crunched a ridiculous lot of numbers, and discovered that yes, General Relativity gave the exact same results as classical physics.
We may want to choose one reference frame or another to make the math easier -- but that doesn't make one reference frame more correct than another.
Look at how many people think they're scientifically literate because they think --
... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. You don't have to talk to flat earthers and antivaxxers to see profound science illiteracy; usually, the people condemning the science illiteracy are just as wrong, but about different things.
As a fellow libertarian fucktard, I'm ashamed of you. Really? Really?
There's never going to be an infinite supply of unicorns! That's why we have markets, so that the buyers and sellers of unicorns can meet and negotiate prices at the intersection of the supply and demand curves, ensuring that everyone who's willing to pay the price for a unicorn is able to get one! Come on! Adam Smith! Invisible Hand! Milt Friedman! Nozick! Rothbard! PAUL KRUG--
-- wait, hold on, belay that last one. My bad. But the rest, yes, carry on!
(Note to the humorless: this is all tongue firmly in cheek.)
This is true and good, so long as you're interested in making software that can be done entirely with existing technologies. As soon as you hit the brick wall of "but there isn't anything in the standard library that does this," you need the old graybeards who spent their entire careers making the standard libraries you rely on.
Speaking as one of them, the pay and hours are both good and it keeps me on the cutting edge of some fascinating technologies.
The common idea is that we over-40s who've been doing this professionally for 25+ years can't adapt to modern software dev practices. Quite the opposite, really. Mostly we're kept so busy that we don't have the time.
None of this is meant to disrespect what the younger generation does with (as you say) "connect the dots library calls". That code needs to be written, and it's best if it's written by smart people who care about their work. :)
Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:
This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.