Exactly this. There's also the issue of quantum effects such as tunneling and other strange behavior. Most people don't know about vapor pressure, though. Zoom into any material far enough, and there are little swirls and eddies of turbulence where the border between the solid and the atmosphere are not clearly defined. Being a metal, the standard weight will also have an "electron sea" casually cascading over its surface, which could also be steadily lost. Even in a vacuum chamber, the mass could react on a quantum level with the surface it rests on, or the chamber itself.
Then of course, can they be sure the material they made the mass from doesn't have an imperceptibly small half-life? Even reacting with the rare passing neutrino can radiate alpha, beta, or gamma radiation in immeasurable quantities unless they've also surrounded the storage chamber with fairly advanced detectors.
Of course, There is no such thing as a stable mass--though they may be surprised by the amount of mass lost through various possible mechanisms. 50-micrograms is relatively quite a bit.
Of course, since the original mass was created 118 years ago, it's possible they couldn't have created it with the sheer amount of accuracy available today. Unless they have a chart of the "weight loss," I'm willing to apply Occam's razor and assume the original was merely miscast by 50-micrograms.
Quantum tunneling. Or, unless the material is 100% physically inert and kept in a 100% vacuum chamber with no other possible reactants (it's not), mass will be lost or gained. Next?
And Bioshock, without all that crappy Steam "ZOMG register u pirate!" garbage. And people wonder why I stopped buying or playing PC games five years ago...
Barely, eh? Well, how much of the 360's shipments are due to the oft-quoted 33% system failure rate? You know, that same one that essentially forced them to lengthen the warranty to save face? If they claim to have shipped 8.9M units, but 33% of those are defective, their actual sales could be as low as 5.9M, depending on how many have been traded for new units.
Either way, the Wii has sold more in 10 months than MS has in 2 years. That alone should say something about the target markets.
Oddly, I was actually considering buying a 360 due to some games that looked interesting. But that 33% chance of a red-ring-of-death definitely puts me off. Yeah, I know the warranty covers it, but if my machine is in the mail every few months, for several weeks at a time, that doesn't seem very useful for playing games.
Did you run top while using Compiz? I'd think letting the video-card handle all the effects (vid cards these days handle games with requirements far more brutal than a wussy little desktop) would be way more efficient than rectally violating the CPU. I've seen X bolt to the top of my CPU lists frequently, and I just roll my eyes every time.
I've actually been waiting for it to stabilize and for Compiz and Beryl to quit arguing amongst themselves for just this reason. The eye candy is nice, but I just want a system that doesn't throw a tantrum because I'm desktop-switching. From the Google videos I've seen of Compiz in action, that doesn't look like a problem.
The funniest part, I think, is that actual pirates never see WGA or its ilk. The pirated version, more like than not, has had all authentication mechanisms removed, and as such, operates in complete ignorance to any "registration woes" genuine copies experience. The same thing happens with Steam.
Once again, the pirated copy is superior to the original.
I just love the irony: buy the software? "ZOMG PIRATE!!" Pirate the software? "Thank you for using this software. Carry on!"
Yeah, I've always wondered that myself. It seems every time one of these "conversations" break out, it's always "Oh yeah? Well my friend/dog/robot-love-slave would never go back to Cuba/China/Libya!" Uh... good? So, we're better than some random 3rd-world country, and we're supposed to celebrate this?
Have our standards really fallen so far that we must rely on cognitive dissonance to explain the disparity?
When I've just had a heart attack, and apoptosis would rather kill 40% of my heart tissue, thereby killing me outright, than possibly increase my cancer risk, it's most certainly unwanted.
For emergency purposes, stopping apoptosis is perfectly valid, and in fact desired to the grim alternative. I'd assume that once the treatment is out of your system, apoptosis is no longer suppressed, and everything goes back to normal... well, after a triple bypass to avoid future heart-attacks due to clogged arteries.
This could also mean prolonged stasis. If cells only die when they reactivate, things like brain death due to lack of oxygen could be almost completely eliminated. Again, apoptosis here is absolutely unwanted. Let's see... death now or possibly cancer later. Yeah, that's a tough one.
The problem is, when a cell is deprived of oxygen, it gets marked for death as soon as it's reactivated. Hence, perfectly salvageable tissue, some that can't be replaced easily like heart muscle, dies merely as an inherent precaution.
Now, I don't know about you... but I'd rather have a slight increased risk of cancer somewhere down the line, than be dead now thanks to my body's overzealous attempt to keep me healthy.
See, I've always wondered about that. I don't have giant hands, but how the hell do people call those tiny things keyboards and moan about devices that don't have them? I type qwerty at over 80wpm... obviously home-row and muscle memory means absolutely nothing when you have to stare at the miniscule keys, since you're forced to type with an index finger or your thumbs... if you can get just the right angle to utilize your fingernails.
If I can't qwerty, having a itty-bitty keyboard, virtual or not, has the same damn drawbacks, and the "real" keyboard takes up way more room, reduces screen real-estate, and each individual key can fail or get sticky separately.
But hey, "ONOZ! Teh keybrod isn't like my blckbery!" is a valid complaint, I guess.
And before anyone accuses me of being a Mac Fanboi, I've never in my entire life owned an Apple product. Ever. And while nothing the iPhone does is individually unique or ground-breaking, the fact they've rolled all these things up into a virtual-tablet with gestures, everything a Palm should have been, barring technological advances, is the real story here. I'm one of possibly many people, that if Apple released something slightly larger, without the phone crap—just a wifi mini-tablet, I'd snap one up in a second.
Because, like many, you're not paying attention. Let the children decide? Decide? Really? Well shit, now that you've solved all the world's problems, there's no end to what deciding can do!
The sky is blue? Bah, I have decided it's puce with accented polka-dots!
Chemistry? Psh! Alchemy!
Heart surgery? Just decide you don't need that coronary bypass! Or, if you're really pressed for time, this crystal over here will heal you right up!
Physics!? Nice try, poindexter. I say fairies did it.
You see? This "other side" is often a false dichotomy. Intelligent Design, or whatever they're calling it these days, is a lot of things, but it isn't science. It doesn't follow the scientific method, it's not falsifiable, it can't be proven or disproven, and it tastes bad with gorgonzola. Have as many insane pet-theories as you like, but passing them off as science and presenting them as valid alternatives is pure chicanery.
Not science. Is that so hard? Does it reduce creationism in any way? You're still welcome to believe it, it's just not science. There. Done.
Any hacker/script-kiddie with a working knowledge of touch and a 'find' command could wreak equal havoc. Combined with a quick filter and another perl script to generate random timestamps, all launched regularly from cron? Forget it. Forensics folks would be better off scouring logs for a non-tainted timestamp and counting directory inode entries for approximate age.
Of course, this says nothing of rootkits, which can be downright subversive, embedding themselves into kernel space where not even the OS knows they exist, where they can wreak untold havoc with historical system data or encryption. I bet there's even a script-kiddie version of anti-forensics tools out there, where it just cron-obfuscates anything trackable. Logs, timestamps, frequent automated sweeps of shred over unallocated disk blocks, inode reordering, and so on.
Now that I think about it, that might be a good idea. I got some work to do.;)
It's not just that. This is freaking 2007! Why the hell do we have to drive to work, when very few jobs actually require being at a specific building every day? Most "work" could be done from a home office, via phone, webcam, or VPN, with maybe an occasional visit to the office for important meetings or mass coordination.
I take the Chicago L for twenty minutes a day so I can... sit at a desk for eight hours and code or manage databases through our VPN.
It's this pointless adherence to 1980's methodology that's filling our highways to capacity daily, giving us hours of gridlock, two or three hour commutes, consumption of millions of unnecessary barrels of oil, etc. I truly want gas prices to shoot ridiculously high so businesses will be forced to either compensate workers for commutes, or relax requirements for being onsite. It's not the urban sprawl screwing us, it's the fact we have to drive from twenty or thirty miles away along with millions of others, for basically no reason.
The sooner that ends, the better. Go gas prices, go!
This is more true than you think. In Illinois, if you get a speeding ticket, they take your license down to the local courthouse, where you have to pay the fine and pick it up, or contest it, and have it sent to you in the mail.
I've only gotten one speeding ticket, and it took them over a month to get my license back to me. Now, if that were my debit card, you can be sure I'd be highly pissed off. This so isn't going to fly.
Ya know... if demons were ever to take over my school back in '96, they would have been up against highly trained demon hunters familiar with the territory. Now? Well, those demons got nothing to worry about.
Let me be the first to welcome this new research as more than a wacky discovery concerning quantum effects. If we can figure this out, which seems to be the case, imagine the efficiency of future solar cells.
Ya know, I really could have been better off not knowing that. I live in Chicago, and our L system is over 100 years old, never breaks 30MPH, never on time, breaks down frequently, and until recently, I compared it to 3rd world quality. Now I see that even the third world is kicking our ass in this technology.
The Metra, our city-to-city train system? It takes over an hour to go 30 miles out of the city; sadly, that's the fast option.
This is in Chicago. I hear New York and DC have much better systems, but still nothing near what Japan, Europe, and apparently China boast. Forget blanketing the US in rapid rail---it'll never happen---but our denser areas have no excuse for being so far behind. Does everything in the US work on momentum? Do we ever upgrade anything out here until it literally collapses with age?
See, this is exactly the argument people seem to miss in the whole DST debacle. Instead of "redefining time," why not just adjust working hours? So it's generally accepted most companies work 9 to 5. Why not 8 to 4? Same effect, and the definition of "noon" still works with sundials. We still get the warm fuzzies of driving home while the sun's out, without the nonsensical clock adjusting twice every year.
Oh yeah, the best you can be in your field, eh? Out of a possible candidate pool of 6 billion, I think my chances of that, even were I arrogant enough to claim a top 0.1% spot, still leaves a mere 6 million people who are better or smarter than me in some capacity. Even in some esoteric field such as: donkey raping, there's probably at least a dozen people who can sexually abuse a donkey much more efficiently than I could even comprehend.
In a pure numbers game played against the entirety of humanity, we all lose.
So? Forget the US in general, then. I'd like to see a study on dense populated areas alone so we can finally put this tired argument to rest. Why not compare the biggest and densest areas of the US to entire countries in the EU? I'm almost certain we'd still lose. Why not pit Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco against Sweeden, or Norway, or Japan? We'd get obliterated. South Korea, a war torn wasteland in the not too distant past, is handing us our asses. Is there even one city in the US that cracks the top ten? Just one?
Forget the damn rural areas already. It's a nice excuse, but our infrastructure is still slapdash, crawling with shoddy and inconsistent speeds, and woefully behind, even in the largest metropolitan areas.
Because that makes it better, right?:) We're not behind China, a country barely pulling itself out of 3rd-world status. Yeah, I'd put that on my resume. We're not the slowest in the world yet, why not mention that?
Thanks, but try again. I live in Chicago, the second largest and densely populated metropolitan city in the country. Your choices here are Cable and DSL, or FIOS if you're really really lucky. The cheap cable company here offers a max speed of 20 Mbps/768 kbps at a whopping $90.95 a month. I don't even want to imagine the equivalent DSL or FIOS. If this is an example of some of the best connectivity in the country, I can only imagine what lesser communities are offered.
Nobody says they have to wire the entire country overnight, but not even our most dense population centers are keeping up with what Europe, Japan, and fucking Korea had five years ago.
Luckily it's slowly improving. I have 5 Mbps for $29.95/mo through RCN out here in Chicago. Still nowhere near the 100 Mbps nearly every other country seems to be boasting, though. Bump it up to 10 Mbps for $39.95, and then the fastest thing you can get in Chicago is 20 Mbps for a whopping $90.95.
Still, that's for one of the largest, most densely populated cities in the entire country, and we're just now getting this level of service, and it's still through crufty old COAX lines. That old argument of "the US is so BIGGGG OMGWTFBBQ!!111" gets trotted out every single time, but if it were true, one could still reasonably assume the gigantic metropolitan areas would exhibit some modicum of parity with our international neighbors.
But don't use Chicago as an example. We have easily the most ancient dilapidated transit rail system in the country.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly this. There's also the issue of quantum effects such as tunneling and other strange behavior. Most people don't know about vapor pressure, though. Zoom into any material far enough, and there are little swirls and eddies of turbulence where the border between the solid and the atmosphere are not clearly defined. Being a metal, the standard weight will also have an "electron sea" casually cascading over its surface, which could also be steadily lost. Even in a vacuum chamber, the mass could react on a quantum level with the surface it rests on, or the chamber itself.
Then of course, can they be sure the material they made the mass from doesn't have an imperceptibly small half-life? Even reacting with the rare passing neutrino can radiate alpha, beta, or gamma radiation in immeasurable quantities unless they've also surrounded the storage chamber with fairly advanced detectors.
Of course, There is no such thing as a stable mass--though they may be surprised by the amount of mass lost through various possible mechanisms. 50-micrograms is relatively quite a bit.
Of course, since the original mass was created 118 years ago, it's possible they couldn't have created it with the sheer amount of accuracy available today. Unless they have a chart of the "weight loss," I'm willing to apply Occam's razor and assume the original was merely miscast by 50-micrograms.
Quantum tunneling. Or, unless the material is 100% physically inert and kept in a 100% vacuum chamber with no other possible reactants (it's not), mass will be lost or gained. Next?
And Bioshock, without all that crappy Steam "ZOMG register u pirate!" garbage. And people wonder why I stopped buying or playing PC games five years ago...
Good answer! I was just curious, since it seems everyone keeps throwing "units shipped" around, like that matters in the long run.
It'll be interesting to watch the sales curve to see when/if the Wii reaches a saturation point.
Barely, eh? Well, how much of the 360's shipments are due to the oft-quoted 33% system failure rate? You know, that same one that essentially forced them to lengthen the warranty to save face? If they claim to have shipped 8.9M units, but 33% of those are defective, their actual sales could be as low as 5.9M, depending on how many have been traded for new units.
Either way, the Wii has sold more in 10 months than MS has in 2 years. That alone should say something about the target markets.
Oddly, I was actually considering buying a 360 due to some games that looked interesting. But that 33% chance of a red-ring-of-death definitely puts me off. Yeah, I know the warranty covers it, but if my machine is in the mail every few months, for several weeks at a time, that doesn't seem very useful for playing games.
Did you run top while using Compiz? I'd think letting the video-card handle all the effects (vid cards these days handle games with requirements far more brutal than a wussy little desktop) would be way more efficient than rectally violating the CPU. I've seen X bolt to the top of my CPU lists frequently, and I just roll my eyes every time.
I've actually been waiting for it to stabilize and for Compiz and Beryl to quit arguing amongst themselves for just this reason. The eye candy is nice, but I just want a system that doesn't throw a tantrum because I'm desktop-switching. From the Google videos I've seen of Compiz in action, that doesn't look like a problem.
The funniest part, I think, is that actual pirates never see WGA or its ilk. The pirated version, more like than not, has had all authentication mechanisms removed, and as such, operates in complete ignorance to any "registration woes" genuine copies experience. The same thing happens with Steam.
Once again, the pirated copy is superior to the original.
I just love the irony: buy the software? "ZOMG PIRATE!!" Pirate the software? "Thank you for using this software. Carry on!"
Yeah, I've always wondered that myself. It seems every time one of these "conversations" break out, it's always "Oh yeah? Well my friend/dog/robot-love-slave would never go back to Cuba/China/Libya!" Uh... good? So, we're better than some random 3rd-world country, and we're supposed to celebrate this?
Have our standards really fallen so far that we must rely on cognitive dissonance to explain the disparity?
I disagree.
When I've just had a heart attack, and apoptosis would rather kill 40% of my heart tissue, thereby killing me outright, than possibly increase my cancer risk, it's most certainly unwanted.
For emergency purposes, stopping apoptosis is perfectly valid, and in fact desired to the grim alternative. I'd assume that once the treatment is out of your system, apoptosis is no longer suppressed, and everything goes back to normal... well, after a triple bypass to avoid future heart-attacks due to clogged arteries.
This could also mean prolonged stasis. If cells only die when they reactivate, things like brain death due to lack of oxygen could be almost completely eliminated. Again, apoptosis here is absolutely unwanted. Let's see... death now or possibly cancer later. Yeah, that's a tough one.
It would only be temporary.
The problem is, when a cell is deprived of oxygen, it gets marked for death as soon as it's reactivated. Hence, perfectly salvageable tissue, some that can't be replaced easily like heart muscle, dies merely as an inherent precaution.
Now, I don't know about you... but I'd rather have a slight increased risk of cancer somewhere down the line, than be dead now thanks to my body's overzealous attempt to keep me healthy.
This is a Good Thing (tm).
See, I've always wondered about that. I don't have giant hands, but how the hell do people call those tiny things keyboards and moan about devices that don't have them? I type qwerty at over 80wpm... obviously home-row and muscle memory means absolutely nothing when you have to stare at the miniscule keys, since you're forced to type with an index finger or your thumbs... if you can get just the right angle to utilize your fingernails.
If I can't qwerty, having a itty-bitty keyboard, virtual or not, has the same damn drawbacks, and the "real" keyboard takes up way more room, reduces screen real-estate, and each individual key can fail or get sticky separately.
But hey, "ONOZ! Teh keybrod isn't like my blckbery!" is a valid complaint, I guess.
And before anyone accuses me of being a Mac Fanboi, I've never in my entire life owned an Apple product. Ever. And while nothing the iPhone does is individually unique or ground-breaking, the fact they've rolled all these things up into a virtual-tablet with gestures, everything a Palm should have been, barring technological advances, is the real story here. I'm one of possibly many people, that if Apple released something slightly larger, without the phone crap—just a wifi mini-tablet, I'd snap one up in a second.
But, alas...
Because, like many, you're not paying attention. Let the children decide? Decide? Really? Well shit, now that you've solved all the world's problems, there's no end to what deciding can do!
The sky is blue? Bah, I have decided it's puce with accented polka-dots!
Chemistry? Psh! Alchemy!
Heart surgery? Just decide you don't need that coronary bypass! Or, if you're really pressed for time, this crystal over here will heal you right up!
Physics!? Nice try, poindexter. I say fairies did it.
You see? This "other side" is often a false dichotomy. Intelligent Design, or whatever they're calling it these days, is a lot of things, but it isn't science. It doesn't follow the scientific method, it's not falsifiable, it can't be proven or disproven, and it tastes bad with gorgonzola. Have as many insane pet-theories as you like, but passing them off as science and presenting them as valid alternatives is pure chicanery.
Not science. Is that so hard? Does it reduce creationism in any way? You're still welcome to believe it, it's just not science. There. Done.
Timestomp? Now I've heard everything.
;)
Any hacker/script-kiddie with a working knowledge of touch and a 'find' command could wreak equal havoc. Combined with a quick filter and another perl script to generate random timestamps, all launched regularly from cron? Forget it. Forensics folks would be better off scouring logs for a non-tainted timestamp and counting directory inode entries for approximate age.
Of course, this says nothing of rootkits, which can be downright subversive, embedding themselves into kernel space where not even the OS knows they exist, where they can wreak untold havoc with historical system data or encryption. I bet there's even a script-kiddie version of anti-forensics tools out there, where it just cron-obfuscates anything trackable. Logs, timestamps, frequent automated sweeps of shred over unallocated disk blocks, inode reordering, and so on.
Now that I think about it, that might be a good idea. I got some work to do.
It's not just that. This is freaking 2007! Why the hell do we have to drive to work, when very few jobs actually require being at a specific building every day? Most "work" could be done from a home office, via phone, webcam, or VPN, with maybe an occasional visit to the office for important meetings or mass coordination.
I take the Chicago L for twenty minutes a day so I can... sit at a desk for eight hours and code or manage databases through our VPN.
It's this pointless adherence to 1980's methodology that's filling our highways to capacity daily, giving us hours of gridlock, two or three hour commutes, consumption of millions of unnecessary barrels of oil, etc. I truly want gas prices to shoot ridiculously high so businesses will be forced to either compensate workers for commutes, or relax requirements for being onsite. It's not the urban sprawl screwing us, it's the fact we have to drive from twenty or thirty miles away along with millions of others, for basically no reason.
The sooner that ends, the better. Go gas prices, go!
This is more true than you think. In Illinois, if you get a speeding ticket, they take your license down to the local courthouse, where you have to pay the fine and pick it up, or contest it, and have it sent to you in the mail.
I've only gotten one speeding ticket, and it took them over a month to get my license back to me. Now, if that were my debit card, you can be sure I'd be highly pissed off. This so isn't going to fly.
Ya know... if demons were ever to take over my school back in '96, they would have been up against highly trained demon hunters familiar with the territory. Now? Well, those demons got nothing to worry about.
The demons have finally won.
Maybe it's not news for nerds, but it's stuff that matters.
Run your international tech-news community your own way. Slashdot's editors are welcome to ignore your input, just as you'd likely ignore theirs.
Let me be the first to welcome this new research as more than a wacky discovery concerning quantum effects. If we can figure this out, which seems to be the case, imagine the efficiency of future solar cells.
Ya know, I really could have been better off not knowing that. I live in Chicago, and our L system is over 100 years old, never breaks 30MPH, never on time, breaks down frequently, and until recently, I compared it to 3rd world quality. Now I see that even the third world is kicking our ass in this technology.
The Metra, our city-to-city train system? It takes over an hour to go 30 miles out of the city; sadly, that's the fast option.
This is in Chicago. I hear New York and DC have much better systems, but still nothing near what Japan, Europe, and apparently China boast. Forget blanketing the US in rapid rail---it'll never happen---but our denser areas have no excuse for being so far behind. Does everything in the US work on momentum? Do we ever upgrade anything out here until it literally collapses with age?
See, this is exactly the argument people seem to miss in the whole DST debacle. Instead of "redefining time," why not just adjust working hours? So it's generally accepted most companies work 9 to 5. Why not 8 to 4? Same effect, and the definition of "noon" still works with sundials. We still get the warm fuzzies of driving home while the sun's out, without the nonsensical clock adjusting twice every year.
Summer Time year round, seconded!
Oh yeah, the best you can be in your field, eh? Out of a possible candidate pool of 6 billion, I think my chances of that, even were I arrogant enough to claim a top 0.1% spot, still leaves a mere 6 million people who are better or smarter than me in some capacity. Even in some esoteric field such as: donkey raping, there's probably at least a dozen people who can sexually abuse a donkey much more efficiently than I could even comprehend.
In a pure numbers game played against the entirety of humanity, we all lose.
So? Forget the US in general, then. I'd like to see a study on dense populated areas alone so we can finally put this tired argument to rest. Why not compare the biggest and densest areas of the US to entire countries in the EU? I'm almost certain we'd still lose. Why not pit Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco against Sweeden, or Norway, or Japan? We'd get obliterated. South Korea, a war torn wasteland in the not too distant past, is handing us our asses. Is there even one city in the US that cracks the top ten? Just one?
Forget the damn rural areas already. It's a nice excuse, but our infrastructure is still slapdash, crawling with shoddy and inconsistent speeds, and woefully behind, even in the largest metropolitan areas.
Because that makes it better, right? :) We're not behind China, a country barely pulling itself out of 3rd-world status. Yeah, I'd put that on my resume. We're not the slowest in the world yet, why not mention that?
Bzzzzzzt!
Thanks, but try again. I live in Chicago, the second largest and densely populated metropolitan city in the country. Your choices here are Cable and DSL, or FIOS if you're really really lucky. The cheap cable company here offers a max speed of 20 Mbps/768 kbps at a whopping $90.95 a month. I don't even want to imagine the equivalent DSL or FIOS. If this is an example of some of the best connectivity in the country, I can only imagine what lesser communities are offered.
Nobody says they have to wire the entire country overnight, but not even our most dense population centers are keeping up with what Europe, Japan, and fucking Korea had five years ago.
Luckily it's slowly improving. I have 5 Mbps for $29.95/mo through RCN out here in Chicago. Still nowhere near the 100 Mbps nearly every other country seems to be boasting, though. Bump it up to 10 Mbps for $39.95, and then the fastest thing you can get in Chicago is 20 Mbps for a whopping $90.95.
;)
Still, that's for one of the largest, most densely populated cities in the entire country, and we're just now getting this level of service, and it's still through crufty old COAX lines. That old argument of "the US is so BIGGGG OMGWTFBBQ!!111" gets trotted out every single time, but if it were true, one could still reasonably assume the gigantic metropolitan areas would exhibit some modicum of parity with our international neighbors.
But don't use Chicago as an example. We have easily the most ancient dilapidated transit rail system in the country.