So... that book is dated 1920. Is there any actual news here, or did some guy just finally connected the gag to the dead parrot sketch and report it to that distinguished journal, The Telegraph?
The telco did an analysis and determined that the project could not be done profitably. Governments are in the unique position of not having to turn a profit. Their "customers" are taxpayers, and legally required to pay whatever the government tells them to pay. Even the ones who don't want the particular service the government is about to provide.
The taxpayers can be astonishingly obtuse about that connection, clamoring for bread, circuses, and cheap fat pipes, and then griping when their taxes go up to pay for it. Or pulling money from other areas, like roads or education, without actually realizing why they have to make that tradeoff.
I can't help the obtuseness of taxpayers, and if they're (collectively) for building a fiber network then the telecom shouldn't be in a position to stop them. It's a privilege of government to force everybody to do what a majority wants, because often there's a profit of scale that goes beyond the obvious returns. Better education with kids doing research over high-speed lines? More web startups? Simple better quality of life?
Still, I think that the telco's suit is not as unfounded as the previous comments suggest. It's reasonable for them to at least make clear to the taxpayers that "government-funded" and "free" aren't the same, and that the confusion between the two can cause unfair competition.
When it comes to central, well known results, the proofs are especially well checked and errors are eventually found. Nevertheless the history of mathematics has many stories about false results that went undetected for a long time.
In other words... maybe, just maybe, there's a hole in one of the theorems we use all the time, and an error would have severe ramifications. Or at the very least, there might be an opportunity lurking in an assumption we didn't realize we were making, like the way non-Euclidean geometry was just sitting there waiting to be discovered.
They're not really "limiting" it to central theorems, so they don't need a definition. But the more important (read, broadly-used) a theorem is, the more interesting it will be to have the proofs double-checked by a computer.
That computer proof may itself be wrong if the programmers are wrong, but as with the proofs we already have, it's just one more set of "eyes" looking for problems.
The Science News article says that they sequenced both a cancer cell and a non-cancer cell from this woman. So we can specifically say "these are the bases that are different" and from there (with luck) to "this is the mutation that happened".
It doesn't seem to differ from the normal instant watch selection. Obviously that selection is limited in that it does not encompass the entire Netflix library- that would be infeasible regardless of the player being used.
It doesn't even come close. Of the 100+ films in my (admittedly nonrepresentative) queue, only 4 are available for instant play.
A lot of studios are clearly waiting for something, but I can't imagine what. All of your films end up on BitTorrent, whether you make them available for online play or not.
I understand it taking time to get the back catalog ready, but they're not rushing to get the new stuff out, either. Perhaps they just haven't been offered the deal they want.
His recent work is on the same song, but it's not about the opening chord. It's about the guitar solo (which was actually a duet with the piano), which Harrison played an octave down, at half speed, and then sped up. Which he proved by noticing where the piano notes went from double-strings to triple-strings, as seen by tiny mis-tunings between the strings.
(Note: slashdot is just reporting the article, which is new. But it comes from Dr. Brown's own school, so I don't know why they're reporting the wrong story, except to guess that the older story was a well-known mystery among guitarists.)
Personally, I do ride a Harley, but I don't run straight pipes or gun my engine in residential neighborhoods.
Thank you for that. I've had more than a few motorcyclists deliberately gun their engines at me when I'm out for a run or cycling. I know that it's just that I remember the ones who do and forget all the ones who don't, so I try to keep a charitable disposition.
I think what you need is to perform whatever operation it is all of the other motorcyclists seem to use that cranks their engine noise into the 110+ dB range. That will alert motorists on side streets, as well as residents in a three-block radius, and make certain that any passing runners can hear it over their headphones.
(As a runner myself, I have no difficulty telling when there are motorcycles coming up.)
It really does feel like they were feeling pretty good about their acronym, but got stuck after the "kids" part, and it was late, and they'd had a lot to drink, so they figured they'd just stick on some Congressy-sounding words and shipped that puppy out of committee.
That was the grandparent's point: people have almost always voted against, rather than for. Every election we say we hope the campaign won't turn negative, and every election it does, because it's a lot easier to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the voters than to actually get them excited about your plan.
Especially once you've fallen behind. Reiterating your plan isn't going to help, and changing it is usually even worse. So you go negative, and if it's even marginally successful, your opponent does the same.
If anything, this is one of the less negative campaigns I've seen. The Democratic primaries got ugly, which actually did most of McCain's negative work for him. There was plenty of ugliness at the grassroots (and astroturf) level but the campaigns themselves held off on the really vicious stuff until recently.
I suppose it's kinda neat that the Spaceguard system actually spotted something, but at this small size the only interesting thing would be that we knew it was coming and could get a nice video. Surely somebody in Sudan is still alive and holding a video camera.
Vehicle not carrying extra protective carapace gets great fuel economy. Film at 11.
If we all drove motorcycles, we would be able to power them off gasoline, because they regularly get two to three times as many miles per gallon as cars. Except that they're wildly dangerous, because they offer no protection in a crash, especially when everybody else is driving cars.
We see the same story in cars all the time: they build a car that's little more than a motorcycle, and by taking away all of the protective (and heavy) metal, it gets huge MPG. Even if there is some sort of useful advance in the engine technology it's dwarfed by just getting rid of all the metal.
So you can build a hydrogen motorcycle. So what? We knew it could be done. All you've done is to offer us a motorcycle that's very safe because you can't refuel it anywhere so you can't actually get it out of the driveway.
> Amusingly, House says that we all lie, but he is the only exception.
He says everybody lies, and he doesn't exempt himself. He lies like crazy, to get his way. He'd say he'd be stupid not to, since it does help him get what he thinks is right.
He just thinks that lying to your DOCTOR is stupid, since that gets you dead, which is usually not what you want.
It's "hard" in the political sense. The ability to cram unrelated items into a bill makes it possible to enforce compromises: "You can have regulations on teaching sex ed IF we prevent new roads being built through the wilderness in my state." When you put both in a single bill, both people now have a strong reason to fight for it, and a horse-trading "vote for mine now and I'll vote for yours later" isn't going to have the same force since neither side is really intent on helping the other.
It sounds mercenary, and it is, but it's how legislation gets passed. Compromise is the nature of politics, and restricting the compromises to things that can be stuck in a single bill makes it even harder.
That said, other countries manage it just fine. In parliamentary procedure it's called a "motion to split the bill". Many parliaments have it; the US Senate and House rules don't.
It WAS a big "stop bothering me" to the fans. And it was something he later regretted. He didn't want it to end on that note, and likely would have continued the series if he'd lived.
Each book is what the author wanted to say at the time, and it's a matter of aesthetic maundering to say that one or the other is the "true" version of the work. "Go away" was what he'd said once, and it's only the fact that he's dead that he can't say that he'd say something different now.
Whether you want to accept the new book as "real" is ultimately up to you. You can also pretend that Star Wars ended at Return of the Jedi, if you want.
But I think that if the book is written right a lot of fans will say that Adams' will had been done.
Damn it, I just ran out of mod points. Instead, you're just going to have to accept my gratitude (and my hope that somebody with mod points will reward the first post to contribute some actual knowledge to the thread.)
Who cares? Do you really think that the President sits at a desk thinking about the best way forward on DRM? Or that he's singlehandedly an expert on our relations with every country from Egypt to Russia to Bangladesh?
The President has advisers, who are supposed to be experts in the fields. The President's job is to pick the advisers and get them to work together.
We're not electing a demigod with supernatural wisdom. The President will be smart, but he's just a guy (or woman, some day). I'd much rather have the collective brain power of his staff working on the solution than getting whatever knowledge he's managed to acquire personally in the short lifespan of a human being.
C13 is heavier than C12, so C12 moves faster. The chemical processes tend to grab up more of the faster-moving atom. They're chemically identical, but the different weights noticeably affect the rate of reaction.
There are different pathways for fixing carbon. The C-4 pathway uses up more carbon faster than the C-3 pathway, and tends to grab up more C13.
Corn (maize) uses the C-4 pathway, and most other plants don't, so you can actually see that people who eat a lot of maize have more C13 in their bodies than people with a diet that doesn't include maize.
I don't think I follow you. I was referring to those forces which want to teach creationism in schools, which are exploiting scientific ignorance. I'm aware that not all creationists want to teach their religious views in schools.
I'm unaware that Planck ever said anything on the subject of six-day creationism. Maxwell predates modern understanding of the origins of the earth and of life.
Belief in God does not contradict science. Belief that God may have had some sort of hand in guiding long-term evolution does not contradict science. Belief that God created the universe and all species in their current forms 6,000 years ago DOES contradict science, and essentially zero modern scientists hold that view.
This isn't about atheism. A scientist is welcome to believe in God; it doesn't have to contradict being a scientist.
The "exploiters of scientific ignorance" ARE trying to contradict science in general and one well-demonstrated theory in particular in order to claim superiority for their distinctly unscientific belief.
I don't know of any statement by Einstein, Planck, or Maxwell in support of creationism, much less young-earth creationism. Their belief in God is up to them; as long as it doesn't contradict observed facts it's perfectly valid.
Slashdot Mirror
So... that book is dated 1920. Is there any actual news here, or did some guy just finally connected the gag to the dead parrot sketch and report it to that distinguished journal, The Telegraph?
You know they're not going to accept that, either. It would just prove that the conspiracy reaches even further. India is a US ally, after all.
Take a deep breath. The discovery of exoplanets isn't news. Even taking pictures of them isn't news.
It's news that we're finding them on stars kinda like our own, but these aren't earth-style planets.
So, it's pretty interesting, but you can push "pause" on the CD player with "Also Sprach Zarathustra" queued up.
The telco did an analysis and determined that the project could not be done profitably. Governments are in the unique position of not having to turn a profit. Their "customers" are taxpayers, and legally required to pay whatever the government tells them to pay. Even the ones who don't want the particular service the government is about to provide.
The taxpayers can be astonishingly obtuse about that connection, clamoring for bread, circuses, and cheap fat pipes, and then griping when their taxes go up to pay for it. Or pulling money from other areas, like roads or education, without actually realizing why they have to make that tradeoff.
I can't help the obtuseness of taxpayers, and if they're (collectively) for building a fiber network then the telecom shouldn't be in a position to stop them. It's a privilege of government to force everybody to do what a majority wants, because often there's a profit of scale that goes beyond the obvious returns. Better education with kids doing research over high-speed lines? More web startups? Simple better quality of life?
Still, I think that the telco's suit is not as unfounded as the previous comments suggest. It's reasonable for them to at least make clear to the taxpayers that "government-funded" and "free" aren't the same, and that the confusion between the two can cause unfair competition.
TFA also says:
When it comes to central, well known results, the proofs are especially well checked and errors are eventually found. Nevertheless the history of mathematics has many stories about false results that went undetected for a long time.
In other words... maybe, just maybe, there's a hole in one of the theorems we use all the time, and an error would have severe ramifications. Or at the very least, there might be an opportunity lurking in an assumption we didn't realize we were making, like the way non-Euclidean geometry was just sitting there waiting to be discovered.
They're not really "limiting" it to central theorems, so they don't need a definition. But the more important (read, broadly-used) a theorem is, the more interesting it will be to have the proofs double-checked by a computer.
That computer proof may itself be wrong if the programmers are wrong, but as with the proofs we already have, it's just one more set of "eyes" looking for problems.
The Science News article says that they sequenced both a cancer cell and a non-cancer cell from this woman. So we can specifically say "these are the bases that are different" and from there (with luck) to "this is the mutation that happened".
That should prove quite illuminating.
The New Scientist article points to a paper at arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5357
with the rather less sensational title:
Study of multi-muon events produced in p-pbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV
I'm amused to note that the author list stretches over three pages, which I gather is common for this sort of paper.
It doesn't seem to differ from the normal instant watch selection. Obviously that selection is limited in that it does not encompass the entire Netflix library- that would be infeasible regardless of the player being used.
It doesn't even come close. Of the 100+ films in my (admittedly nonrepresentative) queue, only 4 are available for instant play.
A lot of studios are clearly waiting for something, but I can't imagine what. All of your films end up on BitTorrent, whether you make them available for online play or not.
I understand it taking time to get the back catalog ready, but they're not rushing to get the new stuff out, either. Perhaps they just haven't been offered the deal they want.
Dr. Brown's work on the opening chord of Hard Day's Night is four years old. His paper is at:
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf
(Note the "oct04" date in the URL).
His recent work is on the same song, but it's not about the opening chord. It's about the guitar solo (which was actually a duet with the piano), which Harrison played an octave down, at half speed, and then sped up. Which he proved by noticing where the piano notes went from double-strings to triple-strings, as seen by tiny mis-tunings between the strings.
It's pretty interesting work:
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/AHDNSoloJIB.pdf
(Note: slashdot is just reporting the article, which is new. But it comes from Dr. Brown's own school, so I don't know why they're reporting the wrong story, except to guess that the older story was a well-known mystery among guitarists.)
Personally, I do ride a Harley, but I don't run straight pipes or gun my engine in residential neighborhoods.
Thank you for that. I've had more than a few motorcyclists deliberately gun their engines at me when I'm out for a run or cycling. I know that it's just that I remember the ones who do and forget all the ones who don't, so I try to keep a charitable disposition.
I think what you need is to perform whatever operation it is all of the other motorcyclists seem to use that cranks their engine noise into the 110+ dB range. That will alert motorists on side streets, as well as residents in a three-block radius, and make certain that any passing runners can hear it over their headphones.
(As a runner myself, I have no difficulty telling when there are motorcycles coming up.)
It really does feel like they were feeling pretty good about their acronym, but got stuck after the "kids" part, and it was late, and they'd had a lot to drink, so they figured they'd just stick on some Congressy-sounding words and shipped that puppy out of committee.
That was the grandparent's point: people have almost always voted against, rather than for. Every election we say we hope the campaign won't turn negative, and every election it does, because it's a lot easier to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the voters than to actually get them excited about your plan.
Especially once you've fallen behind. Reiterating your plan isn't going to help, and changing it is usually even worse. So you go negative, and if it's even marginally successful, your opponent does the same.
If anything, this is one of the less negative campaigns I've seen. The Democratic primaries got ugly, which actually did most of McCain's negative work for him. There was plenty of ugliness at the grassroots (and astroturf) level but the campaigns themselves held off on the really vicious stuff until recently.
I suppose it's kinda neat that the Spaceguard system actually spotted something, but at this small size the only interesting thing would be that we knew it was coming and could get a nice video. Surely somebody in Sudan is still alive and holding a video camera.
Vehicle not carrying extra protective carapace gets great fuel economy. Film at 11.
If we all drove motorcycles, we would be able to power them off gasoline, because they regularly get two to three times as many miles per gallon as cars. Except that they're wildly dangerous, because they offer no protection in a crash, especially when everybody else is driving cars.
We see the same story in cars all the time: they build a car that's little more than a motorcycle, and by taking away all of the protective (and heavy) metal, it gets huge MPG. Even if there is some sort of useful advance in the engine technology it's dwarfed by just getting rid of all the metal.
So you can build a hydrogen motorcycle. So what? We knew it could be done. All you've done is to offer us a motorcycle that's very safe because you can't refuel it anywhere so you can't actually get it out of the driveway.
> Amusingly, House says that we all lie, but he is the only exception.
He says everybody lies, and he doesn't exempt himself. He lies like crazy, to get his way. He'd say he'd be stupid not to, since it does help him get what he thinks is right.
He just thinks that lying to your DOCTOR is stupid, since that gets you dead, which is usually not what you want.
It's "hard" in the political sense. The ability to cram unrelated items into a bill makes it possible to enforce compromises: "You can have regulations on teaching sex ed IF we prevent new roads being built through the wilderness in my state." When you put both in a single bill, both people now have a strong reason to fight for it, and a horse-trading "vote for mine now and I'll vote for yours later" isn't going to have the same force since neither side is really intent on helping the other.
It sounds mercenary, and it is, but it's how legislation gets passed. Compromise is the nature of politics, and restricting the compromises to things that can be stuck in a single bill makes it even harder.
That said, other countries manage it just fine. In parliamentary procedure it's called a "motion to split the bill". Many parliaments have it; the US Senate and House rules don't.
They _did_ continue the Foundation series. With Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin.
I read one of them. It was OK.
It WAS a big "stop bothering me" to the fans. And it was something he later regretted. He didn't want it to end on that note, and likely would have continued the series if he'd lived.
Each book is what the author wanted to say at the time, and it's a matter of aesthetic maundering to say that one or the other is the "true" version of the work. "Go away" was what he'd said once, and it's only the fact that he's dead that he can't say that he'd say something different now.
Whether you want to accept the new book as "real" is ultimately up to you. You can also pretend that Star Wars ended at Return of the Jedi, if you want.
But I think that if the book is written right a lot of fans will say that Adams' will had been done.
Damn it, I just ran out of mod points. Instead, you're just going to have to accept my gratitude (and my hope that somebody with mod points will reward the first post to contribute some actual knowledge to the thread.)
In a world of idiotic Republican memes, this is perhaps the dumbest.
Who cares? Do you really think that the President sits at a desk thinking about the best way forward on DRM? Or that he's singlehandedly an expert on our relations with every country from Egypt to Russia to Bangladesh?
The President has advisers, who are supposed to be experts in the fields. The President's job is to pick the advisers and get them to work together.
We're not electing a demigod with supernatural wisdom. The President will be smart, but he's just a guy (or woman, some day). I'd much rather have the collective brain power of his staff working on the solution than getting whatever knowledge he's managed to acquire personally in the short lifespan of a human being.
C13 is heavier than C12, so C12 moves faster. The chemical processes tend to grab up more of the faster-moving atom. They're chemically identical, but the different weights noticeably affect the rate of reaction.
There are different pathways for fixing carbon. The C-4 pathway uses up more carbon faster than the C-3 pathway, and tends to grab up more C13.
Corn (maize) uses the C-4 pathway, and most other plants don't, so you can actually see that people who eat a lot of maize have more C13 in their bodies than people with a diet that doesn't include maize.
I don't think I follow you. I was referring to those forces which want to teach creationism in schools, which are exploiting scientific ignorance. I'm aware that not all creationists want to teach their religious views in schools.
I'm unaware that Planck ever said anything on the subject of six-day creationism. Maxwell predates modern understanding of the origins of the earth and of life.
Belief in God does not contradict science. Belief that God may have had some sort of hand in guiding long-term evolution does not contradict science. Belief that God created the universe and all species in their current forms 6,000 years ago DOES contradict science, and essentially zero modern scientists hold that view.
This isn't about atheism. A scientist is welcome to believe in God; it doesn't have to contradict being a scientist.
The "exploiters of scientific ignorance" ARE trying to contradict science in general and one well-demonstrated theory in particular in order to claim superiority for their distinctly unscientific belief.
I don't know of any statement by Einstein, Planck, or Maxwell in support of creationism, much less young-earth creationism. Their belief in God is up to them; as long as it doesn't contradict observed facts it's perfectly valid.