Not if you simply throw out the contaminated data -- i.e. ask the subjects (after the fact) whether they'd heard of Milgram et al., and if they answer in the affirmative, discard that person's responses for the analysis.
Because this experiment only involves a single experimental subject at a time (the "teacher" role), there's no difficulty in throwing out the entire trial after the fact.
Re: different behavior depending on which quark is closest, yep, the behavior of an electron hitting a neutron is essentially random because it depends on which quarks are where at that moment. Since the up quark and the electron don't generally interact, the electron will just zip toward the up quark, then go right through -- well, going out on a limb since I don't really know particle physics, I suppose they could have a weak interaction that did something like electron + up => e-neutrino + down, but the down+down+down baryon (Delta minus) isn't a stable particle so the electron would have to be moving rather fast to do that. Too slow, and it'll just zip through the up quark and bounce off the negative charge of one of the down quarks behind it.
Re: composite quarks, modern physics says that it's extremely unlikely. The most obvious argument is from entropy. The more levels you have to dig through to find something "whole" (non-composite), the more entropy the entire system will have because those smaller parts have ways they can move around (degrees of freedom) that will suck up as much entropy as they can. Especially when you combine this with the fact that modern physics says there is a maximum possible entropy for a given volume (which happens to be a black hole that fills the volume), it seems very unlikely that quarks are made of something deeper. At the absolute most, there's one more layer to go, but even that seems rather unlikely.
The neutron, despite having a net charge of 0, is not truly "chargeless": the neutron is a composite particle, made up of 3 quarks (1 up, 2 down). The up quark has a positive charge (+2/3), and the two down quarks each have a weaker negative charge (-1/3). At a good distance from the neutron, it is indeed neutral. However, if you throw an electron at it, the electron can bounce off (the electron's -1 charge repels a down quark's -1/3 charge) or otherwise change direction. A similar thing happens if you throw a proton at it, except that the strong force is likely to glue them together instead.
(Aside: the neutron and proton are themselves examples of the same phenomenon if you replace electric charge with color charge. A proton looks "white" (strong neutral) from a distance, because it has one quark each of red, green, and blue. A neutron is the same. However, when a neutron and a proton get close, the quarks stick together because, say, the neutron's red quark was closest to the proton while the proton's blue quark was closest to the neutron. They start trading gluons, causing them to stick together and form a nucleus, which is best described as a gluon orgy between tri-curious quarks.)
The axion, if it's a real particle (way too early to tell), would be a non-composite neutral particle. That is, like an electron or a neutrino, it doesn't have anything hiding inside it, so it doesn't look different when you're up close.
What makes the axion interesting is that it doesn't interact at all via the strong or weak forces, and it's electrically neutral so it doesn't even do much with the electromagnetic force. Only gravity and strong magnetic fields affect it. A different axion, one that's light-weight and stable (as opposed to the heavy, unstable "axions" suggested by this experiment), is actually a dark matter candidate. If a bunch of low-energy axions clump together, they can form a Bose-Einstein Condensate and act as a single dark matter WIMP (weakly-interacting massive particle).
Ugh, who in their right mind would choose to use XSL? It's one of the more truly horrible XML-based standards to come out of the W3C. Programming is not markup; it doesn't make any sense to write your code in XML tags. (That is, unless you're one of the 5 programmers on the planet that actually likes typing Java monstrosities like ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. If so, XSL should feel like home to you.)
XSL would be freakin' awesome if it was specified as a set of LISP macros and functions with which to write your XML-transforming code. As it is, though, it's painful enough to use that I can't imagine any sane person who enjoys writing XSL code -- at least, not if they have any experience with any real language with even the slightest whiff of functional programming to it.
What outside species would Homo sapiens hybridize with? Homo neanderthalensis died out, along with the rest of the Homo genus (modulo us). Our closest living relatives are the chimpanzee and the bonobo, and I'm fairly sure that we can't interbreed with either one.
(Dear Lord, I'm sorry about the atheism thing, but I pray to you now, please tell me that we can't interbreed with chimps...)
As far as intra-species mating preferences go, we really don't have the forces in place to speciate by assortative mating. While pretty people are attracted to other pretty people, ugly people are attracted to pretty people too. For a speciation to occur, there would have to be no genetic flow between the ugly and pretty populations, which would only happen if ugly people were attracted to ugly people. As it is, there's a strong selection towards the ever-changing concept of "pretty", but it's been that way for much, much longer than civilization. If we were going to speciate into Morlocks and Eloi, we would have done it already.
Hey, I use patch a lot more than I ever use Perl. I've always viewed Perl as just a better awk. In fact, that was Larry Wall's reason for creating it. That's why I'm not surprised that he was left off the list. Perl just wasn't really anything all that new.
Problem is, nothing is all that new. It was all done 50 years ago, by LISP (or rarely FORTRAN). Every other language in existence is just an exercise in pushing LISP and FORTRAN features around.
Once you see things from that perspective, Perl is actually quite nice: it's moving more and more towards the power of LISP, yet it still retains a familiar C-like syntax and is still useful for quick AWK-like one-liners. (And yes, based on the current language design, that'll still be true for Perl 6, which is going to be far LISP-ier with a bit of APL on the side.)
The tty part is easy to work around. If sudo didn't tie the credentials to a particular tty, the trojan could just use/dev/ptmx (or one of the older equivalents) to allocate a new pseudo-tty. However, since sudo does tie the credentials to the tty, all the program has to do is change the controlling tty to whichever one the user is running sudo on. (Changing the controlling tty is so simple that it's quite easy to do it by accident. First you setsid() to disconnect from your current tty and daemonize, then you open() the tty without using the O_NOCTTY flag. If you don't mind crapping all over the logfiles, you can just run one copy of sudo per each tty on the system that the current user has write access on.)
I'm not the OP, but lateral gene transfer between plants and animals seems extremely unlikely. Plant DNA and Animal DNA, although they share some similarities as they are both eukaryotic (e.g. large amounts of non-coding "junk", much of it regulatory), they're very different in other important respects. More importantly, there's no obvious mechanism by which lateral gene transfer could occur, since plant-infecting viruses don't affect humans and vice versa. Viruses have a hard enough time jumping from apes to humans, much less jumping from Kingdom to Kingdom.
Supposing that Morgellon's is a true infectious disease and not e.g. a type of delusional parasitosis or other psychosomatic disease, it sounds less like human-plant gene transfer and more like a parasitic infection, somewhat reminiscent of a lichen (a mutually beneficial symbiosis between fungi and algae). Based on the most common reported symptom (fibrous growths), it sounds like the hyphae of a parasitic fungus, but that's at odds with the presence of plant DNA. The plant DNA might just be incidental contamination from gardening, or I suppose an undiscovered infectious lichen isn't entirely out of the question (however unprecedented it may be), although one would expect fungal DNA to be present in either case. Either way, it sounds like something that a single application of hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol could easily kill, so long as the wound is then covered and allowed to heal naturally. (Peroxide and alcohol kill your own skin cells, in addition to anything else. This prevents healing, so they shouldn't be used more than once.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the dot.com bubble burst start around March/April 2000? I distinctly remember being in college at the time, which narrows down the timeframe considerably since I dropped out at the end of the Spring 2000 semester. Jan 2001 sounds like the right timeframe that the dot.com burst started bleeding over into telecom stocks. YHOO (Yahoo!), for instance, lost about 85% of its value over the course of 2000, and Lucent was down about 75% from its peak by Oct 2000.
So, given that, is Jan 2001 really such a bad time to use as a comparison point?
The basic problem is that the old ?: operator wastes two very useful single characters for an operator that is not used often enough to justify the waste of two characters. It's bad Huffman coding, in other words. Every proposed use of colon in the RFCs conflicted with the ?: operator. I think that says something.
If you haven't been keeping up, one of Larry's basic premises in Perl 6 is to improve the "Huffman coding" of the language: things that people use every day should be easy to type, and things that people use infrequently should be harder to type. There's only a finite number of punctuation marks to use for operators, so something has to give.
For instance, the change from -> to. is a big win because method calls are heavily used. The change will save a bit of typing, cut down on typos (>-, -. and the like), and help the C++ and Java refugees figure out what's going on. However, in the process it ousts the string concatenation operator, which gets stuck playing musical punctuation since it's not as frequently used.
Similarly, the change from (?:...) to [...] is a big win. In a regex, non-capture grouping is an extremely common operation, but it looks like line noise in Perl 5. You can just use plain parens to create capture groupings, which are easier to type and read, but now your regex uses more memory to run and might take much, much longer to run. (We're talking about optimizations that can cut match time from days to seconds in some extreme cases. Captures don't actually fit very well into the finite automaton model that underlies the regex.) In comparison, while character ranges are still occasionally useful, they're going out of fashion thanks to Unicode, and they're hogging some valuable punctuation real estate. The change from [A-Z] to <[A-Z]> or <Upper>, while breaking compatibility in a major way and making character ranges less handy, frees up some punctuation to make other things more handy (and gets rid of the ugly \p{Property} construct to boot).
Finally, to address your main complaint, the change from a ? b : c to a ?? b:: c frees up both the question mark (possibly for a new boolean cast operator) and the colon ("Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon") while making an ugly and infrequently used operator look more visually distinctive and less confusing to read. That's a huge win in my book. It's not hypocrisy; it's what Larry's been promising all along for Perl 6.
The more I read Linus soapboxing over the GPL3, the more he rubs me the wrong way. Not that this is really a big shock: he's quite well-known for being stubborn and opinionated, it's just that he's usually on the side that makes the most sense. Lately, though, he's been sounding less like a firebrand for good code and more like an old coot with a sign reading "No Trespassing - Violators Will Be Shot".
Now, I'm hardly one to claim that the GPL3 is all hugs and puppies, and RMS has always rubbed me the wrong way far more than Linus. However, I do think that the FSF's Four Freedoms are a solid foundation, and I do think that the current GPL2 leaves too many pitfalls WRT submarine patents and, to a lesser extent, Tivoization -- both of which the GPL3 is tackling.
That being said, I also agree with Linus that the GPL3 design process is flawed, and that the current GPL3-as-drafted isn't nearly as elegant as the GPL2. (Not that the GPL2 was perfect -- the parts that redefine "derived work" to cover dynamic linking are clunky.) I think a lot of this owes to the fact that the "benevolent dictator" model that works so well in FS/OS was replaced with "design by committee", resulting in the classic problem: too many cooks spoil the broth. After all, if "benevolent dictator" works for computer code, shouldn't the same approach work for legal code?
One last gripe: Linus complains about 3/4 down that the GPL3 explicitly aims for compatibility with the Apache license. In the case of the 1.0 and 1.1 licenses, they're clearly BSD-derived and implicitly allow anyone anywhere to relicense them, including to create closed source products or to irreversibly convert an entire fork to another FS/OS license, like GPL2 or GPL3. In the case of the new 2.0 license, a cursory glance suggests that it's largely based on the GPL2 model, except that it does the exact same jig over software patents that the GPL3 does. In fact, it's got more similarity to GPL3 than GPL2.
In a nutshell, Linus is basically complaining that the GPL3 will meet the demands of the developers who use the Apache licenses, without giving back to those developers. However, this is the exact same situation that Linux is already in WRT the various BSDs, and a situation which Linux itself has previously taken advantage of on a rare handful of occasions. He's being a rank hypocrite on that point.
Newton was wrong with his description of gravity. It was the best he could do to describe it, however in the end, its wrong. Could this be the same?
Almost certainly not. Newton's Laws were incomplete, not wrong. Newton's Laws are today seen as a mere special case of General Relativity, and yet we still use Newton's Laws on a day to day basis, and when some new theory of quantum gravity replaces GR, Newton's Laws will still be used on a day to day basis, because they're not wrong.
The "EMDrive", on the other hand, would throw out one of the most established principles of physics, Conservation of Momentum, a principle found in every coherent system of physics a human being has ever written (at least, those systems of physics meant to describe the universe we live in). And while it's conceivable that we really do need to rewrite the physics textbooks from scratch and add an error bar to Conservation of Momentum (then figure out why it's possible to break it in the first place), the article hardly constitutes a good reason to do so. Science isn't done by asking "Wouldn't it be great if X were possible?"
FWIW, the Display Manager is a login screen. The different *DM options are essentially analogous to what Windows would call the GINA layer. Of course GDM runs as root.
Why the concern about miniature black holes? Every single day, perfectly ordinary cosmic rays impact the Earth's atmosphere with more energy than the LHC could ever hope to achieve. If modern accelerators can create miniature black holes (and there's a good chance they can), then so can cosmic rays.
The LHC is specced to accelerate protons to 7 TeV, and they'll be colliding two proton beams head-on for a total of 14 TeV (1.4×10^13 eV). In comparison, Oh My God! particles are in the vicinity of 10^20 eV (10 million times LHC), and even cosmic rays of 10^16 eV (1 thousand times LHC) are a fairly ordinary occurence. And if you're thinking that the LHC is creating a type of collision that doesn't happen in nature, most cosmic rays are themselves protons or nuclei, which then collide with air nuclei to produce particle showers, the exact same thing the LHC is doing. The collisions are proton-proton in both LHC and nature, so there's no good reason why the LHC would produce black holes but strong cosmic rays wouldn't.
What's more, there's no justification for fearing short-lived microscopic black holes. Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners; they don't magically pull things in. Things fall in because of gravity -- i.e. because the black hole is heavy -- and a microscopic black hole doesn't have a strong gravitational field, because it just doesn't weigh that much. That means that a microscopic black hole can only grow because things randomly wander into it -- and keep in mind that it's far, far smaller than an atom. Instead, Earth would pull the black hole into it!
Now, assuming that by some miracle the particle physicists were exactly right about the existence and behavior of protons yet exactly wrong about Hawking radiation, a miniature black hole granted such immortality would fall right through the Earth, whoosh past the center, zip through the other side, then proceed to orbit within the Earth in a similar fashion for the next 10,000 years, gradually nibbling away at the occasional nucleus that happened to be in the way. Eventually it would grow in mass enough that it would settle within the solid iron core of the planet, where it would eventually eat enough to destabilize the core, causing massive earthquakes and very slowly devouring the Earth from within, ultimately resulting in a black hole smaller than a marble (9 mm, roughly 0.2 in), possibly surrounded by an asteroid-size chunk of solid rock that could support its own weight with a hollow core.
Frankly, though, I'm more worried about George W. Bush gaining highly improbable mutant powers, flying into space to save the Space Shuttle, inadvertently merging with the Dark Phoenix, and scheming to destroy the world. It's about as likely, i.e. no chance in hell, and worrying about it occupies the same amount of time, i.e. zero seconds lifetime total.
... There's one thing though. If he's a heterosexual male, you have to feel sorry for the fact he saw the genitalia of other men....
Eh, not really. I'm a gay male, and I'm not exactly quaking at the idea that someone's going to wave a picture of female genitalia in my face. Hell, a good chunk of the Internet makes good money doing that, so I can hardly avoid it. I just shrug, grunt an apathetic "meh", and move on.
Similarly, at least one of my good friends -- who I unfortunately haven't seen in a bit over a year, due to a job-related parting of ways -- is quite straight (sadly for me) but wasn't the least bit squeamish about seeing e.g. gay porn bloopers, or even mainstream straight porn for that matter.
If "intentional act" equals "thoughtcrime", then all degrees of murder and manslaughter are equivalent. Law has a long basis of judging degree of guilt depending on intent, and for good reason: someone who did it intentionally is more likely do it again. This makes the most sense in the murder/manslaughter distinction, but also applies to e.g. 2nd degree murder (a crime of passion, unique to the situation) versus 1st degree murder (a planned murder, something that might become a pattern) versus 1st degree murder with a hate crime enhancement (a planned murder targeting an entire class of people, something that's clearly a pattern already). These details are specific to U.S. law and even then vary from state to state, but the principles apply broadly.
There is, of course, a key distinction between "intent" and "thoughtcrime": thoughtcrime is a thought that is illegal in itself; intent, while a thought, is only relevant if an actual physical crime has been committed beyond mere intent. (The line gets a bit blurry, of course, when you start dealing with charges like "Conspiracy to commit Foo", where the act of Foo was never actually carried out and might never have happened.)
No... the odds of at least one tails flip (that is, the sum of exactly one tails flip, exactly two tails flips, exactly three tails flips, etc.) is the complement of exactly zero tails flips -- that is, all heads flips. The probability of 8 heads flips in a series of 8 flips is (0.5)^8 = 0.00390625; the probability of less than eight heads flips in a series of 8 flips (that is, the odds of one or more tails flips) is therefore 1-(0.5)^8 = 0.99609375. Please study some high school statistics.
I'm no physicist, but I like to think my understanding of GR is solid for an amateur.
In my understanding, GR operates on energy only, so rest mass is irrelevant except for its contribution to energy. The full energy-mass equation is E^2 = m_0^2*c^4 + p^2*c^2. Electrons, even those at rest, have m_0 (rest mass) and thus produce gravity (warp spacetime). Photons, though they have no rest mass, always have p (momentum) and thus produce gravity (warp spacetime) as well. In GR, any particle which produces gravity must have energy (rest mass, momentum, or both) and any particle with energy must produce gravity. In practice, it follows that all particles produce gravity, since energy-free particles at c would never interact with the universe in any way, and energy-free particles at less than c cannot exist (both because v=c for massless particles, and because energy is relative to the observer, and thus the "no energy" statement is only true for an observer matching velocity and acceleration with the particle).
As stated in your post, gravity warps spacetime and thus would affect even energy-free particles if they existed. However, it's purely an academic question: there's no way to measure that a particle with E=0 has or has not been deflected by gravity, if such a particle existed.
No, your parent post deliberately sidestepped the Gambler's Fallacy. He clearly indicated that he meant "more likely" in the sense of "the odds of at least one tails after one flip is 50%; the odds of at least one tails after 8 flips is 99.6%", since the total number of tails/mutations accumulates. After a very long time, the probability of one or more mutations is nearly certain, even if the probability of each mutation occuring is constant.
The primary mechanism keeping the air warm in a real greenhouse is the suppression of convection (the exchange of air between the inside and outside). Thus, a real greenhouse does act like a blanket to prevent bubbles of warm air from being carried away from the surface. As we have seen, this is not how the atmosphere keeps the Earth's surface warm. Indeed, the atmosphere facilitates rather than suppresses convection.
I'm sorry, but does this source seriously claim that the Earth's atmosphere convects heat into the vacuum of space? If so, I call stupidity. A greenhouse does convect -- within the greenhouse. When the heat reaches the edge of the greenhouse, the heat conducts through the windows/walls into the surrounding atmosphere, which is cooler and thus a heat sink, where it then merrily convects away. When the Earth's atmosphere dumps heat, it radiates it directly into space (or back to the surface, or sideways, or any direction whatsoever until it finally reaches space). Radiation is the slowest of the 3 ways to dump heat, but it's better than the alternative: the Earth also convects the heat upward, one layer at a time, each layer acting like its own greenhouse, until the heat slowly trickles upward to the edge of space; most of this heat gets radiated from there, since more directions point into the vacuum, and the rest goes into the kinetic energy of the rarefied atmosphere and causes a tiny and insignificant bit of atmospheric leakage into space. Because CO2 reabsorbs the IR directly radiated from the surface and lower atmosphere, the Earth has to rely more on slower processes like this onion convection to dump heat. And since the rate of solar input is constant, or perhaps even going up a bit (as the Mars warming suggests), that means that the absolute temperature of Earth will rise.
On reading the entire source, it seems that the author (Dr. Alistair Fraser) is a pedantic asshole who, while not quite wrong and even having the occasional point, posesses a black/white worldview where there's no difference between a simplified explanation and a wrong one. (I should know, I had a similar attitude in high school. I grew out of it; he apparently got a PhD in it.) Contrast this with, for instance, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, and the difference is night and day. For one, Phil Plait has a personality.
As an example, Dr. Fraser takes issue with the word "reradiate". The common understanding of this word in science is "a particle, such as an electron or atom, absorbs a photon of energy, waits an indeterminate amount of time, then emits a photon of energy, often of a lower wavelength than the original photon". This follows from the Latin roots: "re-" again + "radiare" to emit/radiate, i.e. that there are two separate events of a photon being radiated, even though the two events are connected. He seems to think this word means "a particle deflects a photon's path without otherwise interacting with it", which never occurs in nature (ignoring gravitational lensing, where "radiate" is never used). If his definition were the correct one, the word would not exist at all, giving him no opportunity to ridicule it as "a nonsense term which should never be used to explain anything", and he then proceeds to explain the common definition of the very word he is deriding. This pedantry might be appropriate for 100-level physics, where students might not understand yet that temperature = energy = light/EM and that things seek the lowest energy level.
What's more, the entire page has nothing to do whatsoever with global warming, and says nothing at all about CO2. In the pedantic sesquipedalian verbosity that your source would understand: CO2 has an absorption spectrum that partially overlaps with the thermal emission spectrum of the atmosphere. Consider any photon within the CO2 absorption spectrum: as the amount of CO2 is increased, the chances that the photon will be absorbed by the atmosphere are inc
The big problem with profiling is that there's a simple exploit: the act of profiling leaks information about who is being profiled. If a group like Al-Qaeda, for instance, wants to commit an act of terrorism against the US, all they have to do is tell their potential attackers to fly on US planes a few times (with nothing incriminating on hand). If the system is 100% biased toward profiling, either all of them or none of them will be searched. If the system is a mix of profiling and random selection, then they can still figure out who's being profiled with as little as, say, 10 plane trips per attacker over the course of, say, a year or 2. If there aren't enough un-profiled attackers to carry out an attack, they can start picking more candidates, and this time they'll have some information that will let them guess the criteria.
OTOH, if the system is 100% biased in favor of random searches, the terrorist group can do nothing to reduce the risk of getting caught. While this might be acceptable when only one or two attackers per plane is involved in the plot, each additional member exponentially increases the odds of getting caught, to the point that 10% random searches cut the odds to about 60% that a 5-man team (with incriminating evidence on all 5 members) can sneak on board any one plane, and only 13.5% that something on the scale of 9/11 could be pulled off without any advance warning from attackers stopped in random searches. That's in contrast to 100% chance of sneaking on board in a pure profiling world, or a reduced chance in a mixed world (since resources must be diverted from random searches to conduct profiled searches). Profiling only catches stupid terrorists, not effective ones.
AFAIK, Ethernet is already electrically isolated from line voltage. This is pretty much universal for any cable that uses balanced signals (Ethernet, USB, Firewire), and everyone's been switching to balanced signals over the last 20 years because they radiate less EMI. The resulting electrical isolation is a happy accident.
A question that still nags me though is that since I looked briefly at the code to understand what it did and then rewrote it; does my code count as a derivate of the original GPL code?
No, of course not. Although clean-room reverse engineering is the only way to be absolutely sure that a judge will take your side versus a lawsuit-happy copyright holder (e.g. Compaq versus IBM circa 1982), writing your own code after seeing someone else's doesn't inherently contaminate what you've written, legally, though it does leave your code's originality open to questioning. However, if it's a short enough piece of code that you could actually remember the whole thing and recognize it, odds are that any similarities in structure unavoidably fall out of the algorithm and aren't evidence of derivation.
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Not if you simply throw out the contaminated data -- i.e. ask the subjects (after the fact) whether they'd heard of Milgram et al., and if they answer in the affirmative, discard that person's responses for the analysis.
Because this experiment only involves a single experimental subject at a time (the "teacher" role), there's no difficulty in throwing out the entire trial after the fact.
Hey, now! Dr. Crusher did a decent job in that TNG two-parter.
Re: different behavior depending on which quark is closest, yep, the behavior of an electron hitting a neutron is essentially random because it depends on which quarks are where at that moment. Since the up quark and the electron don't generally interact, the electron will just zip toward the up quark, then go right through -- well, going out on a limb since I don't really know particle physics, I suppose they could have a weak interaction that did something like electron + up => e-neutrino + down, but the down+down+down baryon (Delta minus) isn't a stable particle so the electron would have to be moving rather fast to do that. Too slow, and it'll just zip through the up quark and bounce off the negative charge of one of the down quarks behind it.
Re: composite quarks, modern physics says that it's extremely unlikely. The most obvious argument is from entropy. The more levels you have to dig through to find something "whole" (non-composite), the more entropy the entire system will have because those smaller parts have ways they can move around (degrees of freedom) that will suck up as much entropy as they can. Especially when you combine this with the fact that modern physics says there is a maximum possible entropy for a given volume (which happens to be a black hole that fills the volume), it seems very unlikely that quarks are made of something deeper. At the absolute most, there's one more layer to go, but even that seems rather unlikely.
Speculation from a non-physicist follows...
The neutron, despite having a net charge of 0, is not truly "chargeless": the neutron is a composite particle, made up of 3 quarks (1 up, 2 down). The up quark has a positive charge (+2/3), and the two down quarks each have a weaker negative charge (-1/3). At a good distance from the neutron, it is indeed neutral. However, if you throw an electron at it, the electron can bounce off (the electron's -1 charge repels a down quark's -1/3 charge) or otherwise change direction. A similar thing happens if you throw a proton at it, except that the strong force is likely to glue them together instead.
(Aside: the neutron and proton are themselves examples of the same phenomenon if you replace electric charge with color charge. A proton looks "white" (strong neutral) from a distance, because it has one quark each of red, green, and blue. A neutron is the same. However, when a neutron and a proton get close, the quarks stick together because, say, the neutron's red quark was closest to the proton while the proton's blue quark was closest to the neutron. They start trading gluons, causing them to stick together and form a nucleus, which is best described as a gluon orgy between tri-curious quarks.)
The axion, if it's a real particle (way too early to tell), would be a non-composite neutral particle. That is, like an electron or a neutrino, it doesn't have anything hiding inside it, so it doesn't look different when you're up close.
What makes the axion interesting is that it doesn't interact at all via the strong or weak forces, and it's electrically neutral so it doesn't even do much with the electromagnetic force. Only gravity and strong magnetic fields affect it. A different axion, one that's light-weight and stable (as opposed to the heavy, unstable "axions" suggested by this experiment), is actually a dark matter candidate. If a bunch of low-energy axions clump together, they can form a Bose-Einstein Condensate and act as a single dark matter WIMP (weakly-interacting massive particle).
Ugh, who in their right mind would choose to use XSL? It's one of the more truly horrible XML-based standards to come out of the W3C. Programming is not markup; it doesn't make any sense to write your code in XML tags. (That is, unless you're one of the 5 programmers on the planet that actually likes typing Java monstrosities like ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. If so, XSL should feel like home to you.)
XSL would be freakin' awesome if it was specified as a set of LISP macros and functions with which to write your XML-transforming code. As it is, though, it's painful enough to use that I can't imagine any sane person who enjoys writing XSL code -- at least, not if they have any experience with any real language with even the slightest whiff of functional programming to it.
So that's why I'm gay! I hate pine!
;-)
What outside species would Homo sapiens hybridize with? Homo neanderthalensis died out, along with the rest of the Homo genus (modulo us). Our closest living relatives are the chimpanzee and the bonobo, and I'm fairly sure that we can't interbreed with either one.
(Dear Lord, I'm sorry about the atheism thing, but I pray to you now, please tell me that we can't interbreed with chimps...)
As far as intra-species mating preferences go, we really don't have the forces in place to speciate by assortative mating. While pretty people are attracted to other pretty people, ugly people are attracted to pretty people too. For a speciation to occur, there would have to be no genetic flow between the ugly and pretty populations, which would only happen if ugly people were attracted to ugly people. As it is, there's a strong selection towards the ever-changing concept of "pretty", but it's been that way for much, much longer than civilization. If we were going to speciate into Morlocks and Eloi, we would have done it already.
Problem is, nothing is all that new. It was all done 50 years ago, by LISP (or rarely FORTRAN). Every other language in existence is just an exercise in pushing LISP and FORTRAN features around.
Once you see things from that perspective, Perl is actually quite nice: it's moving more and more towards the power of LISP, yet it still retains a familiar C-like syntax and is still useful for quick AWK-like one-liners. (And yes, based on the current language design, that'll still be true for Perl 6, which is going to be far LISP-ier with a bit of APL on the side.)
The tty part is easy to work around. If sudo didn't tie the credentials to a particular tty, the trojan could just use /dev/ptmx (or one of the older equivalents) to allocate a new pseudo-tty. However, since sudo does tie the credentials to the tty, all the program has to do is change the controlling tty to whichever one the user is running sudo on. (Changing the controlling tty is so simple that it's quite easy to do it by accident. First you setsid() to disconnect from your current tty and daemonize, then you open() the tty without using the O_NOCTTY flag. If you don't mind crapping all over the logfiles, you can just run one copy of sudo per each tty on the system that the current user has write access on.)
I'm not the OP, but lateral gene transfer between plants and animals seems extremely unlikely. Plant DNA and Animal DNA, although they share some similarities as they are both eukaryotic (e.g. large amounts of non-coding "junk", much of it regulatory), they're very different in other important respects. More importantly, there's no obvious mechanism by which lateral gene transfer could occur, since plant-infecting viruses don't affect humans and vice versa. Viruses have a hard enough time jumping from apes to humans, much less jumping from Kingdom to Kingdom.
Supposing that Morgellon's is a true infectious disease and not e.g. a type of delusional parasitosis or other psychosomatic disease, it sounds less like human-plant gene transfer and more like a parasitic infection, somewhat reminiscent of a lichen (a mutually beneficial symbiosis between fungi and algae). Based on the most common reported symptom (fibrous growths), it sounds like the hyphae of a parasitic fungus, but that's at odds with the presence of plant DNA. The plant DNA might just be incidental contamination from gardening, or I suppose an undiscovered infectious lichen isn't entirely out of the question (however unprecedented it may be), although one would expect fungal DNA to be present in either case. Either way, it sounds like something that a single application of hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol could easily kill, so long as the wound is then covered and allowed to heal naturally. (Peroxide and alcohol kill your own skin cells, in addition to anything else. This prevents healing, so they shouldn't be used more than once.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the dot.com bubble burst start around March/April 2000? I distinctly remember being in college at the time, which narrows down the timeframe considerably since I dropped out at the end of the Spring 2000 semester. Jan 2001 sounds like the right timeframe that the dot.com burst started bleeding over into telecom stocks. YHOO (Yahoo!), for instance, lost about 85% of its value over the course of 2000, and Lucent was down about 75% from its peak by Oct 2000.
So, given that, is Jan 2001 really such a bad time to use as a comparison point?
To quote Larry in Apocalypse 3:
If you haven't been keeping up, one of Larry's basic premises in Perl 6 is to improve the "Huffman coding" of the language: things that people use every day should be easy to type, and things that people use infrequently should be harder to type. There's only a finite number of punctuation marks to use for operators, so something has to give.
For instance, the change from -> to . is a big win because method calls are heavily used. The change will save a bit of typing, cut down on typos (>-, -. and the like), and help the C++ and Java refugees figure out what's going on. However, in the process it ousts the string concatenation operator, which gets stuck playing musical punctuation since it's not as frequently used.
Similarly, the change from (?:...) to [...] is a big win. In a regex, non-capture grouping is an extremely common operation, but it looks like line noise in Perl 5. You can just use plain parens to create capture groupings, which are easier to type and read, but now your regex uses more memory to run and might take much, much longer to run. (We're talking about optimizations that can cut match time from days to seconds in some extreme cases. Captures don't actually fit very well into the finite automaton model that underlies the regex.) In comparison, while character ranges are still occasionally useful, they're going out of fashion thanks to Unicode, and they're hogging some valuable punctuation real estate. The change from [A-Z] to <[A-Z]> or <Upper> , while breaking compatibility in a major way and making character ranges less handy, frees up some punctuation to make other things more handy (and gets rid of the ugly \p{Property} construct to boot).
Finally, to address your main complaint, the change from a ? b : c to a ?? b :: c frees up both the question mark (possibly for a new boolean cast operator) and the colon ("Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon") while making an ugly and infrequently used operator look more visually distinctive and less confusing to read. That's a huge win in my book. It's not hypocrisy; it's what Larry's been promising all along for Perl 6.
The more I read Linus soapboxing over the GPL3, the more he rubs me the wrong way. Not that this is really a big shock: he's quite well-known for being stubborn and opinionated, it's just that he's usually on the side that makes the most sense. Lately, though, he's been sounding less like a firebrand for good code and more like an old coot with a sign reading "No Trespassing - Violators Will Be Shot".
Now, I'm hardly one to claim that the GPL3 is all hugs and puppies, and RMS has always rubbed me the wrong way far more than Linus. However, I do think that the FSF's Four Freedoms are a solid foundation, and I do think that the current GPL2 leaves too many pitfalls WRT submarine patents and, to a lesser extent, Tivoization -- both of which the GPL3 is tackling.
That being said, I also agree with Linus that the GPL3 design process is flawed, and that the current GPL3-as-drafted isn't nearly as elegant as the GPL2. (Not that the GPL2 was perfect -- the parts that redefine "derived work" to cover dynamic linking are clunky.) I think a lot of this owes to the fact that the "benevolent dictator" model that works so well in FS/OS was replaced with "design by committee", resulting in the classic problem: too many cooks spoil the broth. After all, if "benevolent dictator" works for computer code, shouldn't the same approach work for legal code?
One last gripe: Linus complains about 3/4 down that the GPL3 explicitly aims for compatibility with the Apache license. In the case of the 1.0 and 1.1 licenses, they're clearly BSD-derived and implicitly allow anyone anywhere to relicense them, including to create closed source products or to irreversibly convert an entire fork to another FS/OS license, like GPL2 or GPL3. In the case of the new 2.0 license, a cursory glance suggests that it's largely based on the GPL2 model, except that it does the exact same jig over software patents that the GPL3 does. In fact, it's got more similarity to GPL3 than GPL2.
In a nutshell, Linus is basically complaining that the GPL3 will meet the demands of the developers who use the Apache licenses, without giving back to those developers. However, this is the exact same situation that Linux is already in WRT the various BSDs, and a situation which Linux itself has previously taken advantage of on a rare handful of occasions. He's being a rank hypocrite on that point.
Newton was wrong with his description of gravity. It was the best he could do to describe it, however in the end, its wrong. Could this be the same?
Almost certainly not. Newton's Laws were incomplete, not wrong. Newton's Laws are today seen as a mere special case of General Relativity, and yet we still use Newton's Laws on a day to day basis, and when some new theory of quantum gravity replaces GR, Newton's Laws will still be used on a day to day basis, because they're not wrong.
The "EMDrive", on the other hand, would throw out one of the most established principles of physics, Conservation of Momentum, a principle found in every coherent system of physics a human being has ever written (at least, those systems of physics meant to describe the universe we live in). And while it's conceivable that we really do need to rewrite the physics textbooks from scratch and add an error bar to Conservation of Momentum (then figure out why it's possible to break it in the first place), the article hardly constitutes a good reason to do so. Science isn't done by asking "Wouldn't it be great if X were possible?"
FWIW, the Display Manager is a login screen. The different *DM options are essentially analogous to what Windows would call the GINA layer. Of course GDM runs as root.
Why the concern about miniature black holes? Every single day, perfectly ordinary cosmic rays impact the Earth's atmosphere with more energy than the LHC could ever hope to achieve. If modern accelerators can create miniature black holes (and there's a good chance they can), then so can cosmic rays.
The LHC is specced to accelerate protons to 7 TeV, and they'll be colliding two proton beams head-on for a total of 14 TeV (1.4×10^13 eV). In comparison, Oh My God! particles are in the vicinity of 10^20 eV (10 million times LHC), and even cosmic rays of 10^16 eV (1 thousand times LHC) are a fairly ordinary occurence. And if you're thinking that the LHC is creating a type of collision that doesn't happen in nature, most cosmic rays are themselves protons or nuclei, which then collide with air nuclei to produce particle showers, the exact same thing the LHC is doing. The collisions are proton-proton in both LHC and nature, so there's no good reason why the LHC would produce black holes but strong cosmic rays wouldn't.
What's more, there's no justification for fearing short-lived microscopic black holes. Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners; they don't magically pull things in. Things fall in because of gravity -- i.e. because the black hole is heavy -- and a microscopic black hole doesn't have a strong gravitational field, because it just doesn't weigh that much. That means that a microscopic black hole can only grow because things randomly wander into it -- and keep in mind that it's far, far smaller than an atom. Instead, Earth would pull the black hole into it!
Now, assuming that by some miracle the particle physicists were exactly right about the existence and behavior of protons yet exactly wrong about Hawking radiation, a miniature black hole granted such immortality would fall right through the Earth, whoosh past the center, zip through the other side, then proceed to orbit within the Earth in a similar fashion for the next 10,000 years, gradually nibbling away at the occasional nucleus that happened to be in the way. Eventually it would grow in mass enough that it would settle within the solid iron core of the planet, where it would eventually eat enough to destabilize the core, causing massive earthquakes and very slowly devouring the Earth from within, ultimately resulting in a black hole smaller than a marble (9 mm, roughly 0.2 in), possibly surrounded by an asteroid-size chunk of solid rock that could support its own weight with a hollow core.
Frankly, though, I'm more worried about George W. Bush gaining highly improbable mutant powers, flying into space to save the Space Shuttle, inadvertently merging with the Dark Phoenix, and scheming to destroy the world. It's about as likely, i.e. no chance in hell, and worrying about it occupies the same amount of time, i.e. zero seconds lifetime total.
... There's one thing though. If he's a heterosexual male, you have to feel sorry for the fact he saw the genitalia of other men. ...
Eh, not really. I'm a gay male, and I'm not exactly quaking at the idea that someone's going to wave a picture of female genitalia in my face. Hell, a good chunk of the Internet makes good money doing that, so I can hardly avoid it. I just shrug, grunt an apathetic "meh", and move on.
Similarly, at least one of my good friends -- who I unfortunately haven't seen in a bit over a year, due to a job-related parting of ways -- is quite straight (sadly for me) but wasn't the least bit squeamish about seeing e.g. gay porn bloopers, or even mainstream straight porn for that matter.
If "intentional act" equals "thoughtcrime", then all degrees of murder and manslaughter are equivalent. Law has a long basis of judging degree of guilt depending on intent, and for good reason: someone who did it intentionally is more likely do it again. This makes the most sense in the murder/manslaughter distinction, but also applies to e.g. 2nd degree murder (a crime of passion, unique to the situation) versus 1st degree murder (a planned murder, something that might become a pattern) versus 1st degree murder with a hate crime enhancement (a planned murder targeting an entire class of people, something that's clearly a pattern already). These details are specific to U.S. law and even then vary from state to state, but the principles apply broadly.
There is, of course, a key distinction between "intent" and "thoughtcrime": thoughtcrime is a thought that is illegal in itself; intent, while a thought, is only relevant if an actual physical crime has been committed beyond mere intent. (The line gets a bit blurry, of course, when you start dealing with charges like "Conspiracy to commit Foo", where the act of Foo was never actually carried out and might never have happened.)
No... the odds of at least one tails flip (that is, the sum of exactly one tails flip, exactly two tails flips, exactly three tails flips, etc.) is the complement of exactly zero tails flips -- that is, all heads flips. The probability of 8 heads flips in a series of 8 flips is (0.5)^8 = 0.00390625; the probability of less than eight heads flips in a series of 8 flips (that is, the odds of one or more tails flips) is therefore 1-(0.5)^8 = 0.99609375. Please study some high school statistics.
I'm no physicist, but I like to think my understanding of GR is solid for an amateur.
In my understanding, GR operates on energy only, so rest mass is irrelevant except for its contribution to energy. The full energy-mass equation is E^2 = m_0^2*c^4 + p^2*c^2. Electrons, even those at rest, have m_0 (rest mass) and thus produce gravity (warp spacetime). Photons, though they have no rest mass, always have p (momentum) and thus produce gravity (warp spacetime) as well. In GR, any particle which produces gravity must have energy (rest mass, momentum, or both) and any particle with energy must produce gravity. In practice, it follows that all particles produce gravity, since energy-free particles at c would never interact with the universe in any way, and energy-free particles at less than c cannot exist (both because v=c for massless particles, and because energy is relative to the observer, and thus the "no energy" statement is only true for an observer matching velocity and acceleration with the particle).
As stated in your post, gravity warps spacetime and thus would affect even energy-free particles if they existed. However, it's purely an academic question: there's no way to measure that a particle with E=0 has or has not been deflected by gravity, if such a particle existed.
No, your parent post deliberately sidestepped the Gambler's Fallacy. He clearly indicated that he meant "more likely" in the sense of "the odds of at least one tails after one flip is 50%; the odds of at least one tails after 8 flips is 99.6%", since the total number of tails/mutations accumulates. After a very long time, the probability of one or more mutations is nearly certain, even if the probability of each mutation occuring is constant.
The primary mechanism keeping the air warm in a real greenhouse is the suppression of convection (the exchange of air between the inside and outside). Thus, a real greenhouse does act like a blanket to prevent bubbles of warm air from being carried away from the surface. As we have seen, this is not how the atmosphere keeps the Earth's surface warm. Indeed, the atmosphere facilitates rather than suppresses convection.
I'm sorry, but does this source seriously claim that the Earth's atmosphere convects heat into the vacuum of space? If so, I call stupidity. A greenhouse does convect -- within the greenhouse. When the heat reaches the edge of the greenhouse, the heat conducts through the windows/walls into the surrounding atmosphere, which is cooler and thus a heat sink, where it then merrily convects away. When the Earth's atmosphere dumps heat, it radiates it directly into space (or back to the surface, or sideways, or any direction whatsoever until it finally reaches space). Radiation is the slowest of the 3 ways to dump heat, but it's better than the alternative: the Earth also convects the heat upward, one layer at a time, each layer acting like its own greenhouse, until the heat slowly trickles upward to the edge of space; most of this heat gets radiated from there, since more directions point into the vacuum, and the rest goes into the kinetic energy of the rarefied atmosphere and causes a tiny and insignificant bit of atmospheric leakage into space. Because CO2 reabsorbs the IR directly radiated from the surface and lower atmosphere, the Earth has to rely more on slower processes like this onion convection to dump heat. And since the rate of solar input is constant, or perhaps even going up a bit (as the Mars warming suggests), that means that the absolute temperature of Earth will rise.
On reading the entire source, it seems that the author (Dr. Alistair Fraser) is a pedantic asshole who, while not quite wrong and even having the occasional point, posesses a black/white worldview where there's no difference between a simplified explanation and a wrong one. (I should know, I had a similar attitude in high school. I grew out of it; he apparently got a PhD in it.) Contrast this with, for instance, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, and the difference is night and day. For one, Phil Plait has a personality.
As an example, Dr. Fraser takes issue with the word "reradiate". The common understanding of this word in science is "a particle, such as an electron or atom, absorbs a photon of energy, waits an indeterminate amount of time, then emits a photon of energy, often of a lower wavelength than the original photon". This follows from the Latin roots: "re-" again + "radiare" to emit/radiate, i.e. that there are two separate events of a photon being radiated, even though the two events are connected. He seems to think this word means "a particle deflects a photon's path without otherwise interacting with it", which never occurs in nature (ignoring gravitational lensing, where "radiate" is never used). If his definition were the correct one, the word would not exist at all, giving him no opportunity to ridicule it as "a nonsense term which should never be used to explain anything", and he then proceeds to explain the common definition of the very word he is deriding. This pedantry might be appropriate for 100-level physics, where students might not understand yet that temperature = energy = light/EM and that things seek the lowest energy level.
What's more, the entire page has nothing to do whatsoever with global warming, and says nothing at all about CO2. In the pedantic sesquipedalian verbosity that your source would understand: CO2 has an absorption spectrum that partially overlaps with the thermal emission spectrum of the atmosphere. Consider any photon within the CO2 absorption spectrum: as the amount of CO2 is increased, the chances that the photon will be absorbed by the atmosphere are inc
The big problem with profiling is that there's a simple exploit: the act of profiling leaks information about who is being profiled. If a group like Al-Qaeda, for instance, wants to commit an act of terrorism against the US, all they have to do is tell their potential attackers to fly on US planes a few times (with nothing incriminating on hand). If the system is 100% biased toward profiling, either all of them or none of them will be searched. If the system is a mix of profiling and random selection, then they can still figure out who's being profiled with as little as, say, 10 plane trips per attacker over the course of, say, a year or 2. If there aren't enough un-profiled attackers to carry out an attack, they can start picking more candidates, and this time they'll have some information that will let them guess the criteria.
OTOH, if the system is 100% biased in favor of random searches, the terrorist group can do nothing to reduce the risk of getting caught. While this might be acceptable when only one or two attackers per plane is involved in the plot, each additional member exponentially increases the odds of getting caught, to the point that 10% random searches cut the odds to about 60% that a 5-man team (with incriminating evidence on all 5 members) can sneak on board any one plane, and only 13.5% that something on the scale of 9/11 could be pulled off without any advance warning from attackers stopped in random searches. That's in contrast to 100% chance of sneaking on board in a pure profiling world, or a reduced chance in a mixed world (since resources must be diverted from random searches to conduct profiled searches). Profiling only catches stupid terrorists, not effective ones.
AFAIK, Ethernet is already electrically isolated from line voltage. This is pretty much universal for any cable that uses balanced signals (Ethernet, USB, Firewire), and everyone's been switching to balanced signals over the last 20 years because they radiate less EMI. The resulting electrical isolation is a happy accident.
A question that still nags me though is that since I looked briefly at the code to understand what it did and then rewrote it; does my code count as a derivate of the original GPL code?
No, of course not. Although clean-room reverse engineering is the only way to be absolutely sure that a judge will take your side versus a lawsuit-happy copyright holder (e.g. Compaq versus IBM circa 1982), writing your own code after seeing someone else's doesn't inherently contaminate what you've written, legally, though it does leave your code's originality open to questioning. However, if it's a short enough piece of code that you could actually remember the whole thing and recognize it, odds are that any similarities in structure unavoidably fall out of the algorithm and aren't evidence of derivation.