Look at the per capita GDP (in constant dollars). The US in the 1980's was where the Dominican Republic is today. In 1900, the US was far below even the poorest of today's nations. You can also look at carbon emissions: pre-1900, they were less than 1/10th of what they are today; that takes us into the territory of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Morocco. Do you think Americans would be willing to go back to those standards of living? What do you think that would do to Silicon Valley or our other high tech industries?
You are assuming a direct correlation between carbon emissions and GDP that does not exist. CO2/capita in the U.S. has been flat since 1990 while GDP/capita has nearly doubled. Furthermore, the increase in standard of living since 1980 has been driven in large part by advances in computing, which will not go away if fossil fuels are restricted. (Unless your router runs on gasoline?) I haven't been to the Dominican Republic, but American standards of living in 1980 were far from third world, even by today's standards. As for Silicon Valley, I work in the semiconductor industry and I can tell you that semiconductor companies A) do not burn coal in their fabs, and B) are (somewhat) advanced when it comes to environmental friendliness to begin with.
Nation CO2 GDP U.S. 18.8 44623 U.K. 9.1 40481 Canada 16.8 39250 Australia 18 35992 France 5.9 35457 Germany 9.9 35238 Japan 9.7 34102 Italy 7.9 31777 [Slashdot formatting sucks:-( ]
If you plot this, you do indeed get a correlation (R=0.75 for the G7 alone, 0.61 with Australia). But note that it's pretty shallow, and there's a huge variability in carbon emissions. The U.K. has less than half the CO2/capita of the U.S. despite GDP/capita being only 10% lower. France and Germany have nearly indistinguishable GDP/capita but France's emissions are 40% lower. (They have similar population sizes and are right next to each other, too!) Australia has 20% lower GDP than the U.S. despite having similar emissions. None of these countries are bad places to live. If you look at the full list you'll see some of low- to mid-tier countries in the top 20, and some nice developed nations further down.
On top of that, you have the complicating factor of wealth distribution in the U.S., so while GDP per capita has gone up, income per capita for most of the population hasn't. That's mostly an orthogonal issue, but also has a big effect on standard of living.
Nobody has produced a realistic plan for a reduction to 1980's emission levels, let alone pre-1900 emission levels.
We could impose limits through regulation or ramp up a carbon tax over time, but the methods for reducing fossil fuel dependence are left to the private sector, just like they are with e.g. car mileage standards. Governments should set and enforce the goals, but stay out of the details.
And without a firm commitment from China, India, and other developing nations, nothing the US and Europe do would make any significant difference.
North America and Europe account for a third of world CO2 emissions. Making a big cut in that would be a big start, at the very least. Also, the U.S. and Europe are best equipped to develop sustainable technology, so the rest of the world can ride along on our coattails as we figure things out.
If climate change has the impact people claim it has, risk will gradually increase and property values will gradually decline in some areas and increase in others, and people will buy, sell, and move accordingly, with hardly any losses.
If you want to stop climate change, you have to stop burning fossil fuels altogether.
No, you don't, and reductions don't have to happen instantly. A fairly rapid reduction to (picking an arbitrary target) pre-1980s levels could be followed by a lengthier reduction to (also arbitrary) pre-1900 levels, etc. The sooner we start, the more gradual the change can be. The Earth can absorb some CO2 emissions, so we don't ever need to go all the way to zero.
You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.
Of course I do. But nobody's proposing that except deniers.
Those are changes that will take centuries if not millennia.
Miami begs to disagree. We will have infrastructure problems long before any cities are underwater. Miami is an extreme case, but more typical cases certainly will not take centuries, let alone millennia.
Also, climate change isn't the only environmental problem we have. There's the aforementioned air pollution, as well as increasing demands on fresh water supplies, rising oil prices, etc. Resource shortages tend to cause very expensive problems which are very expensive to fix. We need to be addressing these issues now, not waiting around to see just how bad the damage will be.
Humanity has experienced such massive changes throughout most of history and people aren't even aware of it.
Sure they were (and are). Massive environmental change means food shortages, especially when you're a peasant farmer with no trucks or airplanes to transport you far away. We just don't care that much about people that starved to death 500 years ago. Not as many people die today because we spend lots of money to keep them alive through droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.
There are also few costs associated with it anyway: cities and arable land constantly have to be renewed, and moving them gradually as they are being renewed doesn't add extra cost.
This is only true if the changes take place on a time scale much longer than a human lifetime. Otherwise, a lot of people end up with property they can't sell. And moving property lines by fiat takes exactly the sort of totalitarian government that we don't want.
I have strong faith in technology to be able to end carbon emissions. In fact, I think that's what will naturally happen, provided people don't foolishly intervene with heavy-handed governmental interventions, tax incentives, and other such programs.
There are two problems with this. The first is that many, many people are already being hurt by ongoing pollution, and the second is that natural processes have their own timetable. So far market-driven change has proved elusive. It is quite possible for government intervention to advance the state of an art, as it regularly does with military technology. Again, this is a situation where the predicted economic doom and gloom never seems to materialize.
There is no realistic way of stopping the warming that would lead to such a release; short of imposing some kind of totalitarian worldwide government and destroying the world economy, people are not going to stop burning fossil fuels in massive quantities.
How come all the global warming "skeptics" are never skeptical of this kind of economic/political strawman argument? Every helpful government program or regulatory regime ever made has generated far more predictions of doom and gloom than environmental catastrophes. Weren't the Clean Air Act (1963) and Clean Water Act (1972) supposed to destroy the economy too? Wasn't Medicare (1965) supposed to bring about a socialist dictatorship? Wasn't the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) supposed to shutter ever small business in the country? None of that stuff ever happens, but it's always taken for granted that this time is different, this time the economy really *will* be destroyed, you'll see! There is no way that fighting global warming requires a "totalitarian worldwide government", either, any more than fighting ozone depletion did. Of course, no one is actually proposing any such thing, but constantly repeating it has sure convinced a lot of Slashdotters.
How come all the people who are terrified of the "massive" cost of a carbon tax (that they can't quantify) shrug off the idea of having to relocate most of our agriculture and the populations of many major cities? Not to mention conflict caused by mass migration? Or even the general air pollution caused by fossil fuels that results in respiratory problems for millions of people? I guess those are other people's problems.
Finally, how come all the people who have the utmost faith in technology's ability to help us cope with climate change never consider that maybe technology could help us cope with higher carbon prices too? It's not like the price of natural resources has never risen before.
Genuinely: what's this about regular old Flash being unable to store data for more than a year or three? Have I seriously misunderstood or is this a real problem I've been extremely lucky to avoid thus far?
I only know about embedded NOR flash, but in that case the rated lifetime is after the max number of write/erase cycles with storage under worst-case conditions on the worst units to come out of the fab. Note that commodity NAND flash is heavily dependent on ECC, so the spec number might not reflect the true lifetime of the bits themselves. At reasonable temperatures and usage patterns with a more typical unit, the data will likely last much longer.
But again, I haven't seen anyone's internal NAND reliability data, so take this with a grain of salt, and always back up your data.
Question for any physicists in the audience: I have long heard that magnetic forces can be described as relativistic effects of classical electricity (here, for instance). How do magnetic monopoles fit into this? Are they are purely quantum mechanics/QFT concept, or is there some way to describe them classically that makes it clear why so many people are expecting to find them?
Wasn't it also hard to make decent P-type MOSFETS? I seem to remember that GaAs electron mobility is much higher than hole mobility, but it's been a long time since that one semiconductors class in college.
I'm no statistician, but I ran quick-and-dirty linear correlations on the rankings from the MIT site with Excel (shut up; I'm at work). Oddly, the strongest correlation was a negative one between Safer and Depressing -- stronger even than Wealthier/Safer. Here are my results, if anyone's curious. (Some repeated for readability.)
And sooner than he may have thought, the implosion has arrived: in the past couple weeks, six wannabe blockbusters have cratered at the North American box office: 'R.I.P.D.,' 'After Earth,' 'White House Down,' 'Pacific Rim,' and 'The Lone Ranger.'
That's only five movies, not six. Was that number a typo, or did you leave a movie out?
Or when hardware engineers design chips, do they actually model out the components of every single transistor?
Chip design is absurdly complicated (even on the digital side), and involves several layers of abstraction. In roughly increasing level of detail:
* Spec level: high-level behavioral description of the functionality of a digital system, something like "8-bit 115.2kbps UART" or "2MHz PWM with 0-100% duty cycle in 0.1% increments". * HDL/RTL level: software-like description of the complete system design. Can range from higher-level (describing behavior) to lower-level (describing specific logic). When people talk about buying, selling, or creating "IP" in the chip design world, they're usually talking about RTL for a single functional unit. * Gate level: Logic gates and flip-flops and their connections. * Transistor level: The transistors that make up the gates, and their connections. * Device level: The behavior of an individual transistor. * Physical layout: Just what it sounds like; the actual arrangements of metal and silicon.
There are some more in between, but that should give you an idea. HDLs are not necessarily low-level. For large designs (like modern SoCs), it takes some *very* expensive and complex software to go deeper into the list, and the process is not entirely automated. So I wouldn't say hardware design can't be high-level. The difference is that in hardware, you always have to care about the lowest level when you're doing your high-level design, while in software you can take more things for granted. So even though a board-level design might just be a bunch of off-the-shelf chips hooked together, it still takes a lot of work to make sure everything comes out right.
You do know that weather alerts and amber alerts can be turned off, but not alerts sent out by the President of the United States [fcc.gov], right?
That's because wireless alerts are descended from systemsintended to warn the public about an incoming nuclear attack. ICBMs take less than 30 minutes to hit their target (much less for nearby sub-launched missiles), so the warnings were set up to interrupt every TV channel and radio station immediately. The civil defense functionality has never been used, and it probably won't be anytime soon.
I searched for Houston, TX and got drums.spark.rarely, which brings up the problem of ambiguous pronunciation -- is it drum.spark.rarely, drums.park.rarely, or drums.spark.rarely? They might need to add some more filters. Maybe check for homonyms too.
I like the idea of a shorthand for global coordinates. There are places where this could be really useful. Aren't there streets in Tokyo (and London?) with no names? Now everybody in the world has an easy-to-write* address. It would also be useful for meet-ups. A three meter square is a lot less ambiguous than a street address. And while there's no simple distance/direction calculation, there is some built-in error checking -- if you get the wrong word you'll probably get a location a long way off (c.f. lat/long typos, which can give any size error in any direction).
It would be neat if there were a way to algorithmically generate place names from GPS coordinates and get a similar scheme, but that seems unlikely.
Tangential question: What's the advantage of having getters and setters vs. just accessing the variable directly? If automatically generating getters and setters is just an easy/common thing, what function do they really serve?
I've only done OO programming in college (I do embedded C now), so I'm assuming there's some real-world advantage that I'm not aware of.
The real issue with USB keyboards is that if multiple keys are pressed within one polling interval, the order is ignored. For fast typists, this can easily result in swapped letters. It's quite annoying. Unfortunately, this behavior is part of the HID spec so there's not much that can be done now.
To the submitter: I'm very sensitive to input lag, but I've never had noticeable lag from any PS2 keyboard. Right now I'm using a Dell AT101W, and before that I had some junky IBM membrane thing. Do you have any software installed for e.g. multimedia keys on the keyboard? That's the only thing I could see causing a problem unless the keyboard itself is just bad. Not sure I'd trust reaction time sites, though -- that's a pretty coarse measurement. If it's just for gaming, I wouldn't worry about the keyboard. The hand-eye coordination for the mouse is where you really need the tight feedback. It's a rare game that responds that quickly to the keyboard to begin with.
If you're really dedicated to low-latency keypresses, I'd suggest a PS/2 keyboard using laptop-style scissor switches, if any exist. Another option would be Cherry MX Blue keyswitches, which activate closer to the top of the stroke. There's some hysteresis, though, so if you're jamming on the same key in a game it's easier to miss a stroke.
I went crazy looking for a keyboard several years ago, and ended up a connoisseur. Definitely my most boring interest.:-)
At my school (RIT '06), EE proper had more analog work, while CE was almost entirely digital. Sometimes this meant different versions of the same class -- our Control Systems class covered analog and (to a lesser extent) digital control theory, while theirs went in-depth on the digital side. Sometimes it meant different classes altogether -- we had an electrical machines class, they had a VLSI design class. Depending on our electives, we could get pretty close to a CE. I ended up taking a lot of digital classes, and one of my strengths is in programming, so I do embedded development today.
EE is a very broad field, though. Some people went on to become grad students working on image processing, which is basically pure math. At other schools people could study electrical power distribution, which is pure (?) analog.
A long piece of rock (or other material) can be used to encode a huge amount of data with just one mark.
It's a neat idea, but I don't think it gives very much data. If you have a rock as long as the distance from Earth to the sun (~10^11 meters) and you can measure the length of the mark to within one atom (~10^-10 meters), that gives you 21 significant digits in decimal. In binary, you get log2(10^21) = ~70 bits of information.
which is the most logical thing seeing as Ballmer has no background in gaming or devices while waiting for the re-org. This person will most likely have more knowledge and expertise than Ballmer. Or appoint someone under Mattrick to be temporary in charge until the re-org.
Do you work at a large company? I do, and I can confirm that recoiledsnake is correctly describing how things work, at least in my experience. When a manager leaves without an immediate replacement it's common for the their manager to take over the group temporarily. (They are, after all, probably more familiar with it than anyone else in the company.) Getting a new manager up to speed takes time, and if it's temporary that's a big waste. Likewise, when you've got a critical deadline it's a bad idea to distract key team members by suddenly giving them another job.
Re-orgs are often decided on months in advance but not announced until much later, and the announcements are often delayed. The new person might still be getting up to speed. Particularly at the senior management level (which is visible to investors), it's important to have a clear idea of who's in charge.
Again we see that the Courts are saying that citizen groups do not have standing to support laws placed on the books by their elected officials.
Careful -- these are two separate cases with very different rulings. I don't think they're doing the stuff you're worried about.
The California Supreme Court ruled that anti-gay marriage legislation violated the state constitution. Prop 8 was a California ballot initiative that created a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, thus overriding the state courts. Two couples that were denied marriage licenses sued in a federal district court to overturn the amendment. They had standing because they were harmed by the amendment. State officials refused to defend the amendment, so citizen groups intervened and put up their own legal defense. The district court struck down Prop 8. Then (this is the important part), the *defendant-intervenors* appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit Court. The circuit court asked the California Supreme Court whether the intervenors had standing under California law to appeal. The California court said yes, so the Ninth Circuit reviewed the case and affirmed the decision. The intervenors then appealed to the Supreme Court. What SCOTUS actually decided was that the Ninth Circuit should never have taken the case because the defendant-intervenors were not harmed by the district court's decision, and thus had no standing to appeal. To quote from the SCOTUS decision (emphasis mine):
The parties do not contest thatrespondents had standing to initiate this case against the Californiaofficials responsible for enforcing Proposition 8. But once the District Court issued its order, respondents no longer had any injury to redress, and the state officials chose not to appeal. The only individuals who sought to appeal were petitioners, who had intervened in the District Court, but they had not been ordered to do or refrain from doing anything. Their only interest was to vindicate the constitutional validity of a generally applicable California law. As this Court has repeatedly held, such a “generalized grievance”—no matter how sincere—is insufficient to confer standing. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 573–574. Petitioners claim that the California Constitution and election laws give them a “ ‘unique,’ ‘special,’ and ‘distinct’ role in the initiative process,” Reply Brief 5, but that is only true during the process of enacting the law. Once Proposition 8 was approved, it became a duly enacted constitutional amendment. Petitioners have no role—special or otherwise—in its enforcement. They therefore have no “personal stake” in defending its enforcement that is distinguishable from the general interest of every California citizen. No matter how deeply committed petitioners may be to upholding Proposition 8, that is not a particularized interest sufficient to create a case or controversy under Article III.
So basically they said you can't ask a federal court to intervene in state law just for fun; you have to be actually harmed to have standing. The intervenors did, however, get to make their case at the district court, and did so quite thoroughly. (Thoroughly badly, that is, but given that there's no actual case against gay marriage...)
Meanwhile, in the DOMA case, the Supreme Court decided that the "citizen group" (actually the House of Representatives) did have standing to defend DOMA. While the Department of Justice (under Obama) did not actively defend the law, they did continue enforcing DOMA throughout the legal process, appealed each decision, and supported the House's standing. This seems to have been a deliberate strategy to give SCOTUS the final say on the law's constitutionality.
In both cases, the executives branches refused to defend the laws because they believed them to be unconstitutional, but continued enforcing the laws until the courts made a decision. That seems like the opposite of imperial to me.
Frequency (or period, or wavelength) is an inherently non-local idea. It's easy to forget when you're looking at a graph, but mathematically, sine waves are eternal -- they go from t= -inf to +inf. The period is defined such that for all time:
sin(t) = sin(t + period)
If you cut off the sine wave (making a pulse), that's no longer true, and you can't say it has one period (or frequency, or wavelength) anymore. The shorter your sine pulse gets, the less meaningful that single number becomes. Now let's say you cut your pulse down to just part of one cycle -- say, the rising part at the beginning, so your signal is now an eternity of silence with a little bump in the middle. Does it still have a period (or frequency, or wavelength)?
Asking when a pure, eternal sine wave "happens" makes no sense -- it's always "happening". But it does have a well-defined frequency. An infinitesimally short pulse happens at a definite, well-defined time. But it makes no sense to talk about its frequency. In between those two extremes, things get weird.
Fourier Analysis lets us approach this in a more concrete way. It says that a signal can have many frequencies (expressed as sums of pure, eternal sine waves). That infinitesimally short pulse is actually every frequency put together. More complex signals can cover a range of frequencies (approximately finite). As a result of all this, there's an inverse relationship between localization in the time domain and localization in the frequency domain. It's easiest to see with a Gaussian (normal) distribution, which is its own Fourier transform. When the width (standard deviation) expands in the time domain, it narrows in the frequency domain, and vice-versa.
Replace "time" and "frequency" with "position" and "momentum", replace the Gaussian with the statistical distribution of your observations, and you have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
can someone tell me why so much of modern medicine involves controlling or preventing inflammation?
I'm not a doctor either, but I can help answer this part. Inflammation hurts -- think headaches and pulled muscles. There are also a lot of chronic, painful conditions that involve inflammation, like arthritis. It's a big deal for your quality of life.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the per capita GDP (in constant dollars). The US in the 1980's was where the Dominican Republic is today. In 1900, the US was far below even the poorest of today's nations. You can also look at carbon emissions: pre-1900, they were less than 1/10th of what they are today; that takes us into the territory of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Morocco. Do you think Americans would be willing to go back to those standards of living? What do you think that would do to Silicon Valley or our other high tech industries?
You are assuming a direct correlation between carbon emissions and GDP that does not exist. CO2/capita in the U.S. has been flat since 1990 while GDP/capita has nearly doubled. Furthermore, the increase in standard of living since 1980 has been driven in large part by advances in computing, which will not go away if fossil fuels are restricted. (Unless your router runs on gasoline?) I haven't been to the Dominican Republic, but American standards of living in 1980 were far from third world, even by today's standards. As for Silicon Valley, I work in the semiconductor industry and I can tell you that semiconductor companies A) do not burn coal in their fabs, and B) are (somewhat) advanced when it comes to environmental friendliness to begin with.
Here's average CO2 emissions in tons per capita for each of the G7 nations (plus Australia for fun) in 2006, the last year before the financial crisis:
Nation CO2 GDP :-( ]
U.S. 18.8 44623
U.K. 9.1 40481
Canada 16.8 39250
Australia 18 35992
France 5.9 35457
Germany 9.9 35238
Japan 9.7 34102
Italy 7.9 31777
[Slashdot formatting sucks
If you plot this, you do indeed get a correlation (R=0.75 for the G7 alone, 0.61 with Australia). But note that it's pretty shallow, and there's a huge variability in carbon emissions. The U.K. has less than half the CO2/capita of the U.S. despite GDP/capita being only 10% lower. France and Germany have nearly indistinguishable GDP/capita but France's emissions are 40% lower. (They have similar population sizes and are right next to each other, too!) Australia has 20% lower GDP than the U.S. despite having similar emissions. None of these countries are bad places to live. If you look at the full list you'll see some of low- to mid-tier countries in the top 20, and some nice developed nations further down.
On top of that, you have the complicating factor of wealth distribution in the U.S., so while GDP per capita has gone up, income per capita for most of the population hasn't. That's mostly an orthogonal issue, but also has a big effect on standard of living.
Nobody has produced a realistic plan for a reduction to 1980's emission levels, let alone pre-1900 emission levels.
We could impose limits through regulation or ramp up a carbon tax over time, but the methods for reducing fossil fuel dependence are left to the private sector, just like they are with e.g. car mileage standards. Governments should set and enforce the goals, but stay out of the details.
And without a firm commitment from China, India, and other developing nations, nothing the US and Europe do would make any significant difference.
North America and Europe account for a third of world CO2 emissions. Making a big cut in that would be a big start, at the very least. Also, the U.S. and Europe are best equipped to develop sustainable technology, so the rest of the world can ride along on our coattails as we figure things out.
If climate change has the impact people claim it has, risk will gradually increase and property values will gradually decline in some areas and increase in others, and people will buy, sell, and move accordingly, with hardly any losses.
Calculable risk might increase graduall
A carbon tax is laughably ineffective.
You know this how?
If you want to stop climate change, you have to stop burning fossil fuels altogether.
No, you don't, and reductions don't have to happen instantly. A fairly rapid reduction to (picking an arbitrary target) pre-1980s levels could be followed by a lengthier reduction to (also arbitrary) pre-1900 levels, etc. The sooner we start, the more gradual the change can be. The Earth can absorb some CO2 emissions, so we don't ever need to go all the way to zero.
You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.
Of course I do. But nobody's proposing that except deniers.
Those are changes that will take centuries if not millennia.
Miami begs to disagree. We will have infrastructure problems long before any cities are underwater. Miami is an extreme case, but more typical cases certainly will not take centuries, let alone millennia.
Also, climate change isn't the only environmental problem we have. There's the aforementioned air pollution, as well as increasing demands on fresh water supplies, rising oil prices, etc. Resource shortages tend to cause very expensive problems which are very expensive to fix. We need to be addressing these issues now, not waiting around to see just how bad the damage will be.
Humanity has experienced such massive changes throughout most of history and people aren't even aware of it.
Sure they were (and are). Massive environmental change means food shortages, especially when you're a peasant farmer with no trucks or airplanes to transport you far away. We just don't care that much about people that starved to death 500 years ago. Not as many people die today because we spend lots of money to keep them alive through droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.
There are also few costs associated with it anyway: cities and arable land constantly have to be renewed, and moving them gradually as they are being renewed doesn't add extra cost.
This is only true if the changes take place on a time scale much longer than a human lifetime. Otherwise, a lot of people end up with property they can't sell. And moving property lines by fiat takes exactly the sort of totalitarian government that we don't want.
I have strong faith in technology to be able to end carbon emissions. In fact, I think that's what will naturally happen, provided people don't foolishly intervene with heavy-handed governmental interventions, tax incentives, and other such programs.
There are two problems with this. The first is that many, many people are already being hurt by ongoing pollution, and the second is that natural processes have their own timetable. So far market-driven change has proved elusive. It is quite possible for government intervention to advance the state of an art, as it regularly does with military technology. Again, this is a situation where the predicted economic doom and gloom never seems to materialize.
There is no realistic way of stopping the warming that would lead to such a release; short of imposing some kind of totalitarian worldwide government and destroying the world economy, people are not going to stop burning fossil fuels in massive quantities.
How come all the global warming "skeptics" are never skeptical of this kind of economic/political strawman argument? Every helpful government program or regulatory regime ever made has generated far more predictions of doom and gloom than environmental catastrophes. Weren't the Clean Air Act (1963) and Clean Water Act (1972) supposed to destroy the economy too? Wasn't Medicare (1965) supposed to bring about a socialist dictatorship? Wasn't the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) supposed to shutter ever small business in the country? None of that stuff ever happens, but it's always taken for granted that this time is different, this time the economy really *will* be destroyed, you'll see! There is no way that fighting global warming requires a "totalitarian worldwide government", either, any more than fighting ozone depletion did. Of course, no one is actually proposing any such thing, but constantly repeating it has sure convinced a lot of Slashdotters.
How come all the people who are terrified of the "massive" cost of a carbon tax (that they can't quantify) shrug off the idea of having to relocate most of our agriculture and the populations of many major cities? Not to mention conflict caused by mass migration? Or even the general air pollution caused by fossil fuels that results in respiratory problems for millions of people? I guess those are other people's problems.
Finally, how come all the people who have the utmost faith in technology's ability to help us cope with climate change never consider that maybe technology could help us cope with higher carbon prices too? It's not like the price of natural resources has never risen before.
Genuinely: what's this about regular old Flash being unable to store data for more than a year or three? Have I seriously misunderstood or is this a real problem I've been extremely lucky to avoid thus far?
I only know about embedded NOR flash, but in that case the rated lifetime is after the max number of write/erase cycles with storage under worst-case conditions on the worst units to come out of the fab. Note that commodity NAND flash is heavily dependent on ECC, so the spec number might not reflect the true lifetime of the bits themselves. At reasonable temperatures and usage patterns with a more typical unit, the data will likely last much longer.
But again, I haven't seen anyone's internal NAND reliability data, so take this with a grain of salt, and always back up your data.
Question for any physicists in the audience: I have long heard that magnetic forces can be described as relativistic effects of classical electricity (here, for instance). How do magnetic monopoles fit into this? Are they are purely quantum mechanics/QFT concept, or is there some way to describe them classically that makes it clear why so many people are expecting to find them?
Also, WTF is Graal?
Not a great keyword for a tag, I'll tell you that.
Wasn't it also hard to make decent P-type MOSFETS? I seem to remember that GaAs electron mobility is much higher than hole mobility, but it's been a long time since that one semiconductors class in college.
I'm no statistician, but I ran quick-and-dirty linear correlations on the rankings from the MIT site with Excel (shut up; I'm at work). Oddly, the strongest correlation was a negative one between Safer and Depressing -- stronger even than Wealthier/Safer. Here are my results, if anyone's curious. (Some repeated for readability.)
Wealthy/Boring: -.32 .49 .79
Wealthy/Depressing: -.79
Wealthy/Livelier:
Wealthy/Safer:
Safer/Wealthier: .79 .24
Safer/Boring: -.15
Safer/Depressing: -.84
Safer/Livelier:
Livelier/Wealthier: .49 .24
Livelier/Boring: -.61
Livelier/Depressing: -.22
Livelier/Safer:
Depressing/Wealthier: -.79 .27
Depressing/Boring:
Depressing/Livelier: -.22
Depressing/Safer: -.84
Maybe an actual statistician can tell us something more interesting.
And sooner than he may have thought, the implosion has arrived: in the past couple weeks, six wannabe blockbusters have cratered at the North American box office: 'R.I.P.D.,' 'After Earth,' 'White House Down,' 'Pacific Rim,' and 'The Lone Ranger.'
That's only five movies, not six. Was that number a typo, or did you leave a movie out?
Or when hardware engineers design chips, do they actually model out the components of every single transistor?
Chip design is absurdly complicated (even on the digital side), and involves several layers of abstraction. In roughly increasing level of detail:
* Spec level: high-level behavioral description of the functionality of a digital system, something like "8-bit 115.2kbps UART" or "2MHz PWM with 0-100% duty cycle in 0.1% increments".
* HDL/RTL level: software-like description of the complete system design. Can range from higher-level (describing behavior) to lower-level (describing specific logic). When people talk about buying, selling, or creating "IP" in the chip design world, they're usually talking about RTL for a single functional unit.
* Gate level: Logic gates and flip-flops and their connections.
* Transistor level: The transistors that make up the gates, and their connections.
* Device level: The behavior of an individual transistor.
* Physical layout: Just what it sounds like; the actual arrangements of metal and silicon.
There are some more in between, but that should give you an idea. HDLs are not necessarily low-level. For large designs (like modern SoCs), it takes some *very* expensive and complex software to go deeper into the list, and the process is not entirely automated. So I wouldn't say hardware design can't be high-level. The difference is that in hardware, you always have to care about the lowest level when you're doing your high-level design, while in software you can take more things for granted. So even though a board-level design might just be a bunch of off-the-shelf chips hooked together, it still takes a lot of work to make sure everything comes out right.
You do know that weather alerts and amber alerts can be turned off, but not alerts sent out by the President of the United States [fcc.gov], right?
That's because wireless alerts are descended from systems intended to warn the public about an incoming nuclear attack. ICBMs take less than 30 minutes to hit their target (much less for nearby sub-launched missiles), so the warnings were set up to interrupt every TV channel and radio station immediately. The civil defense functionality has never been used, and it probably won't be anytime soon.
Thanks for the examples, everyone! I understand this much better now.
I searched for Houston, TX and got drums.spark.rarely, which brings up the problem of ambiguous pronunciation -- is it drum.spark.rarely, drums.park.rarely, or drums.spark.rarely? They might need to add some more filters. Maybe check for homonyms too.
I like the idea of a shorthand for global coordinates. There are places where this could be really useful. Aren't there streets in Tokyo (and London?) with no names? Now everybody in the world has an easy-to-write* address. It would also be useful for meet-ups. A three meter square is a lot less ambiguous than a street address. And while there's no simple distance/direction calculation, there is some built-in error checking -- if you get the wrong word you'll probably get a location a long way off (c.f. lat/long typos, which can give any size error in any direction).
It would be neat if there were a way to algorithmically generate place names from GPS coordinates and get a similar scheme, but that seems unlikely.
Nobody, apparently. If you search for it you get no results.
"greedy.lying.weasels", on the other hand, is somewhere in Siberia. Awkward.
Tangential question: What's the advantage of having getters and setters vs. just accessing the variable directly? If automatically generating getters and setters is just an easy/common thing, what function do they really serve?
I've only done OO programming in college (I do embedded C now), so I'm assuming there's some real-world advantage that I'm not aware of.
Oops!
I don't know what teh heck you're talking about.
Er... sorry about that? Is there anything in particular you'd like me to clarify?
The real issue with USB keyboards is that if multiple keys are pressed within one polling interval, the order is ignored. For fast typists, this can easily result in swapped letters. It's quite annoying. Unfortunately, this behavior is part of the HID spec so there's not much that can be done now.
To the submitter: I'm very sensitive to input lag, but I've never had noticeable lag from any PS2 keyboard. Right now I'm using a Dell AT101W, and before that I had some junky IBM membrane thing. Do you have any software installed for e.g. multimedia keys on the keyboard? That's the only thing I could see causing a problem unless the keyboard itself is just bad. Not sure I'd trust reaction time sites, though -- that's a pretty coarse measurement. If it's just for gaming, I wouldn't worry about the keyboard. The hand-eye coordination for the mouse is where you really need the tight feedback. It's a rare game that responds that quickly to the keyboard to begin with.
If you're really dedicated to low-latency keypresses, I'd suggest a PS/2 keyboard using laptop-style scissor switches, if any exist. Another option would be Cherry MX Blue keyswitches, which activate closer to the top of the stroke. There's some hysteresis, though, so if you're jamming on the same key in a game it's easier to miss a stroke.
I went crazy looking for a keyboard several years ago, and ended up a connoisseur. Definitely my most boring interest. :-)
At my school (RIT '06), EE proper had more analog work, while CE was almost entirely digital. Sometimes this meant different versions of the same class -- our Control Systems class covered analog and (to a lesser extent) digital control theory, while theirs went in-depth on the digital side. Sometimes it meant different classes altogether -- we had an electrical machines class, they had a VLSI design class. Depending on our electives, we could get pretty close to a CE. I ended up taking a lot of digital classes, and one of my strengths is in programming, so I do embedded development today.
EE is a very broad field, though. Some people went on to become grad students working on image processing, which is basically pure math. At other schools people could study electrical power distribution, which is pure (?) analog.
A long piece of rock (or other material) can be used to encode a huge amount of data with just one mark.
It's a neat idea, but I don't think it gives very much data. If you have a rock as long as the distance from Earth to the sun (~10^11 meters) and you can measure the length of the mark to within one atom (~10^-10 meters), that gives you 21 significant digits in decimal. In binary, you get log2(10^21) = ~70 bits of information.
Replying to undo accidental downmod.
Or Ballmer can have them report to the head of Entertainment and Devices Division in the meantime
That group doesn't seem to exist anymore.
which is the most logical thing seeing as Ballmer has no background in gaming or devices while waiting for the re-org. This person will most likely have more knowledge and expertise than Ballmer. Or appoint someone under Mattrick to be temporary in charge until the re-org.
Do you work at a large company? I do, and I can confirm that recoiledsnake is correctly describing how things work, at least in my experience. When a manager leaves without an immediate replacement it's common for the their manager to take over the group temporarily. (They are, after all, probably more familiar with it than anyone else in the company.) Getting a new manager up to speed takes time, and if it's temporary that's a big waste. Likewise, when you've got a critical deadline it's a bad idea to distract key team members by suddenly giving them another job.
Re-orgs are often decided on months in advance but not announced until much later, and the announcements are often delayed. The new person might still be getting up to speed. Particularly at the senior management level (which is visible to investors), it's important to have a clear idea of who's in charge.
Again we see that the Courts are saying that citizen groups do not have standing to support laws placed on the books by their elected officials.
Careful -- these are two separate cases with very different rulings. I don't think they're doing the stuff you're worried about.
The California Supreme Court ruled that anti-gay marriage legislation violated the state constitution. Prop 8 was a California ballot initiative that created a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, thus overriding the state courts. Two couples that were denied marriage licenses sued in a federal district court to overturn the amendment. They had standing because they were harmed by the amendment. State officials refused to defend the amendment, so citizen groups intervened and put up their own legal defense. The district court struck down Prop 8. Then (this is the important part), the *defendant-intervenors* appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit Court. The circuit court asked the California Supreme Court whether the intervenors had standing under California law to appeal. The California court said yes, so the Ninth Circuit reviewed the case and affirmed the decision. The intervenors then appealed to the Supreme Court. What SCOTUS actually decided was that the Ninth Circuit should never have taken the case because the defendant-intervenors were not harmed by the district court's decision, and thus had no standing to appeal. To quote from the SCOTUS decision (emphasis mine):
The parties do not contest thatrespondents had standing to initiate this case against the Californiaofficials responsible for enforcing Proposition 8. But once the District Court issued its order, respondents no longer had any injury to redress, and the state officials chose not to appeal. The only individuals who sought to appeal were petitioners, who had intervened in the District Court, but they had not been ordered to do or refrain from doing anything. Their only interest was to vindicate the constitutional validity of a generally applicable California law. As this Court has repeatedly held, such a “generalized grievance”—no matter how sincere—is insufficient to confer standing. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 573–574. Petitioners claim that the California Constitution and election laws give them a “ ‘unique,’ ‘special,’ and ‘distinct’ role in the initiative process,” Reply Brief 5, but that is only true during the process of enacting the law. Once Proposition 8 was approved, it became a duly enacted constitutional amendment. Petitioners have no role—special or otherwise—in its enforcement. They therefore have no “personal stake” in defending its enforcement that is distinguishable from the general interest of every California citizen. No matter how deeply committed petitioners may be to upholding Proposition 8, that is not a particularized interest sufficient to create a case or controversy under Article III.
So basically they said you can't ask a federal court to intervene in state law just for fun; you have to be actually harmed to have standing. The intervenors did, however, get to make their case at the district court, and did so quite thoroughly. (Thoroughly badly, that is, but given that there's no actual case against gay marriage...)
Meanwhile, in the DOMA case, the Supreme Court decided that the "citizen group" (actually the House of Representatives) did have standing to defend DOMA. While the Department of Justice (under Obama) did not actively defend the law, they did continue enforcing DOMA throughout the legal process, appealed each decision, and supported the House's standing. This seems to have been a deliberate strategy to give SCOTUS the final say on the law's constitutionality.
In both cases, the executives branches refused to defend the laws because they believed them to be unconstitutional, but continued enforcing the laws until the courts made a decision. That seems like the opposite of imperial to me.
What do you mean by "the time"?
Frequency (or period, or wavelength) is an inherently non-local idea. It's easy to forget when you're looking at a graph, but mathematically, sine waves are eternal -- they go from t= -inf to +inf. The period is defined such that for all time:
sin(t) = sin(t + period)
If you cut off the sine wave (making a pulse), that's no longer true, and you can't say it has one period (or frequency, or wavelength) anymore. The shorter your sine pulse gets, the less meaningful that single number becomes. Now let's say you cut your pulse down to just part of one cycle -- say, the rising part at the beginning, so your signal is now an eternity of silence with a little bump in the middle. Does it still have a period (or frequency, or wavelength)?
Asking when a pure, eternal sine wave "happens" makes no sense -- it's always "happening". But it does have a well-defined frequency. An infinitesimally short pulse happens at a definite, well-defined time. But it makes no sense to talk about its frequency. In between those two extremes, things get weird.
Fourier Analysis lets us approach this in a more concrete way. It says that a signal can have many frequencies (expressed as sums of pure, eternal sine waves). That infinitesimally short pulse is actually every frequency put together. More complex signals can cover a range of frequencies (approximately finite). As a result of all this, there's an inverse relationship between localization in the time domain and localization in the frequency domain. It's easiest to see with a Gaussian (normal) distribution, which is its own Fourier transform. When the width (standard deviation) expands in the time domain, it narrows in the frequency domain, and vice-versa.
Replace "time" and "frequency" with "position" and "momentum", replace the Gaussian with the statistical distribution of your observations, and you have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
can someone tell me why so much of modern medicine involves controlling or preventing inflammation?
I'm not a doctor either, but I can help answer this part. Inflammation hurts -- think headaches and pulled muscles. There are also a lot of chronic, painful conditions that involve inflammation, like arthritis. It's a big deal for your quality of life.