> If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, > we will find a "center" of the universe.
But understanding why this is so is what makes all of this fun.
Remember that modern metric theories, of which General Relativity is just one, posit that the universe is four dimensional. Three space dimensions and one time dimension make up a four dimensional "spacetime". Unless you have seen an explaination of exactly what this means, it's just words, like "the universe is gizifa". This can lead to misunderstandings.
I'll try to explain what this means, using a model I'm sure you've seen before, but likely poorly explained. Consider a balloon, partially inflated. The surface of the balloon, the "skin", is effectively a two dimensional object. The balloon as a whole is three dimensional. You have a two dimensional surface enclosing a three dimensional volume. Still with me?
The reason we use this model is because it is very similar to our model of the universe. In this model everything you see around you, the three dimensional world, is the "surface" of a larger four dimensional construct. Just as the skin of a balloon is a 2D surface of a 3D space, everything you see around you is in the 3D skin of a 4D space. Still with me?
Consider the balloon again. Critically, there is no "center" to the surface. Where is the middle of the surface of a sphere? Where is the middle of the surface of the Earth? The question itself is just "wrong". In the case of the Earth we arbitrarily decided to draw lines on it in certain placed, latitude and longitude. You could do the same with a balloon, make the neck the "north pole" for instance. By the same token we could have chosen some other coordinate system entirely, let's put the "west pole" in Ecuador!
There is a point of the balloon as a whole that can be thought of as the center, through. Its in the space "below" the surface that's filled with air. The same is true of the Earth, the center is down below us, about 6400 km away. But, critically, that point does not lie on the surface.
Now one more thing to consider. Draw some dots on the outside of the balloon. Label one of them "milky way". Now start inflating the balloon. You'll notice that the dots will move away from each other as you inflate them. In fact, from the point of view of the "milky way", all the other dots are moving away from it. But the same is true of all the other dots too. No matter which one you pick to observe, you'll see that everything moves away from it. And that's because, for lack of a better way to put it, space itself is getting bigger. In fact, the dots aren't really moving at all relative to their original locations on the surface of the balloon, their real motion is along a line drawn into the middle of the volume, that "real center".
In the case of the universe the same thing applies. We look out in space and we see that everything is moving away from us. This is surprising if the universe is a 3D space, but complete expected if it's 4D. So where is the center of the universe? It's "down" somewhere. And what is that missing direction? Well we already said it, it's time. So what does that mean?
That means the center of the universe is a point in time, not space.
As soon as you really grasp this model you'll see why everyone likes it. For one, it trivially answers lots of different questions:
1) why is everything moving away from us?
it's not, everything is just "inflating" 2) why do we appear to be in the middle?
its just the way it looks, and it looks the same way everywhere else too 3) why are we moving apart at all?
because time is going forward (just look at your watch)
> On a roof, such cells would require less than half the surface area to > produce the same amount of power as today's standard solar panels, > which have an efficiency of about 17%."
The article being quoted clearly states that these cells require concentrated sunlight -- this is true of all thin-film high-TSE cells. So basically you can't mount them on the roof, you'll get no power at all.
Further, most solar panels get about 11% efficiency. There are ones that get into the 15-17% range, but these are much more expensive and see considerably less use as a result.
These new cells will be very useful for large-scale energy developments, like large solar farms in the desert. They are completely useless for rooftop deployment.
Did anyone bother to actually look at the edit logs in question? I did. SlimVirgin's only edit to the article since March (where I gave up looking) was to rv obvious bogus information. There's nothing else.
The article linked from this Slashdot post is nothing more than a blog entry. It claims all sorts of conspiracy theories, and then further states that these were removed from the Operation Entebbe article on the wiki, implying it was by SlimVirgin. Well anyone can click "history", and when you do you'll notice Slim hasn't make a single edit to the page going back as far as 2005, which is when I stopped bothering to look.
Then I went to the discussion page. The entire issue of the material in question is spelled out in complete detail there. The discussion is well balanced, and after reading it over I couldn't agree more: it should be removed because it's basically a bogus conspiracy theory. SlimVirgin DID make an edit to the talk page, in February, to remove a claim that Idi Amin was an Israeli puppet. That's her only edit.
This entire claim is completely and utterly bogus. Didn't anyone bother to check this before spreading it around the internet? I guess not, let's not let reality get in the way of a good bashing.
So then I continued on, and read the articles that claim that SlimVirgin is Linda Mack. What a completely load of hooey. To start with they claim that Slim is very good at "covering her tracks", but any/. regular reading the reason for this will laugh out loud at the complete stupidity of the claim. Everything else is third person friend-of-a-friend, with a single exception of someone that knew Mack in the 1980s but admits that he has no evidence the two people are the same.
Again, this is all a complete load of crap. And I've had dealings with Slim and hated it. It's not like I'd stick up for her under normal circumstances, but I'd like to hope that if the situation were reversed there'd be someone out there who would stick up for me.
Who wrote that press release? A media undergrad? Look at this wonderful statement:
"Expensive, large-scale infrastructures such as wind mills or dams are necessary to drive renewable energy sources, such as wind or hydroelectric power plants."
Gee, really? I always thought we made windmills for hydroelectric power. Or how about this:
"When sunlight falls on an organic solar cell, the energy generates positive and negative charges. If the charges can be separated and sent to different electrodes, then a current flows. If not, the energy is wasted."
Ummm, ok, and where do you explain how these cells cause charge separation? Nowhere? Oh, ok. My fav though, is this one:
"carbon nanotubes complex, which by the way, is a molecular configuration of carbon in a cylindrical shape"
Carbon tubes are tubes of carbon? Wow! Thanks, Mr. Simply Pretends to Understand Anything with More Than One Sylable and Writes About It Anyway.
> The stronger gravity (compared to the moon) makes an Apollo-style powered descent impossible.
Ummm, someone better tell that to teams working on Blue Origin, DC-X, SERV, and the Kankoh-maru. They all do VTO/VTL on Earth. Two of them have already successfully demonstrated it. But hey, what would they know.
> This team is NOT following any of the "Fraud" or "Fake" technology pattern.
Hmmm. I can think of two big perpetual energy machine scams and a couple of more down-to-Earth tech scams over the last couple of decades, and let me tell ya, this is is *absolutely* following the same pattern.
First up, Joseph Newman. Newman was around back in the 80's and claimed to have a device that -get this- uses magnets to generate unlimited power. The company was completely privately funded by angel investors. Quite a bit of money IIRC. Enough to travel around the US giving down-home-revival style shows about the device. He even made it all the way to the Tonight Show. So little difference here it's hard to tell the stories apart.
Next up, Madison Priest. Priest claims to have created a "magic box" (his words) that tapped into zero-point energy. He used this to create -get this- a video compression system! He planned on selling it to the cell phone companies, allowing them to send broadcast quality video over existing low speed channels. He worked up *serious* funding from a wide variety of investors, including Blockbuster, and gave numerous demos that were all apparently faked with hidden cables. Disappeared soon after.
Then there was the Great Oil Sniffer Hoax. An Italian guy named Bonassoli approaches Elf with a device he claims is a gravity wave oil detector. Ends up fleecing them for about $150 MILLION before they finally catch on. Disappears with most of the money soon after.
So:
1) lots of funding 2) public demonstrations 3) often with patents
Please demonstrate how this is any different, as you claim.
> Is this not by definition perpetual motion?
That's the clueless noob definition, yes. The real definition can be found on the wikipedia. Educate yourself.
> haven't done anything here but skewer about a thousand sacred cows.
Yes, I'm sure all the physicists out there are shaking in their shoes. "Oh no, someone on Slash called us dumb! Run for the hills, they're onto us!"
> accept that another opinion might exist.
I'm sure we're all perfectly aware that other opinions exist. After all, Shrub got re-elected.
> we can and must return to that qualitative world where > we can realize our deepest human qualities.
Ohhhh kayyyy....
> as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus... a fictional character...
> His prescription for humanity's emergence from this > present Dark Age also includes developing a strong > sense of history.
JFC! Is he kidding?
I have a strong sense of history, I spend most of my free time reading and writing about it. Here's a quick lesson in history for you:
Five hundred years ago YOU would live in a one-room dirt floor shack. You would have almost no money, only a handful of tools, and little or nothing in the way of personal belongings. You would eat perhaps 25 varieties of food in your entire lifetime, and those would take you a significant portion of the day to prepare. You would work from before sunup to just before sundown, although there were periods of the year where there was little work to do, but due to the lack of artificial light, it wasn't like you were missing much anyway. For entertainment, you did nothing, although there was church on Sundays (which is why anyone went), and for distraction you had the periodic interludes where gangs of some warlord's men would come by, rape you wife and stick something pointy in your stomach. If you were lucky you might make it to 60, but you'd spend a significant portion of the time sick, and in many cases, pain. I'm not talking "I wish I had a new iPod pain", I'm talking "please someone chop off this leg" pain.
> We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality, > and realized their hopes and dreams.
I can answer that too: you didn't have those.
For the first time in recorded history we, as a race, believe that things can actually change. There's only been one period in recent history where people had the same sort of upward mobility as we enjoy today: during the black plague when everyone was dying.
> I'd love for the scientists at Fermilab to make this sort of breakthrough [snip] > attract the attention necessary to help solve the NSF's funding woes.
Let me be perfectly sure I'm understanding what you're saying here: you're saying we should discover an utterly useless bit of information so we can get more money?
> Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any > useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect > enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?"
Who cares? I'm serious. This entire experiment is designed to demonstrate something everyone already agrees we know. This is the same sort of useless activity that monks used to do when debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
What happens if the experiment does work? Absolutely nothing. Well not nothing, everyone will congratulate themselves, throw a Nobel or two, and get their names in the paper. But that's it. We're not _learning_ anything if it comes in as expected.
It only generates useful information if it fails. However, if it does fail, nothing will come of it because the next energy level we'd have to look at is way high. So sorry, we can't build that machine anyway.
Unless someone comes up with a totally new approach that predicts new unseen results that can be found at existing energy levels, this experiment is a massive waste of money. Of course it's not like they have anything else to do, particle physicists aren't exactly in high demand outside the research world.
Maybe, but the big breakout happens if that's NOT true. Remember, there were lots of MP3 players out there when Apple stomped them. They did so by making a techno-geek device into something everyone _trusted_ they could actually use. And that's what "Apple" means now. That's important, if it is the case that people are not buying smartphones because they are too geeky (or people believe they are), then this could really smoke.
It seems to me that this is very much a win-win situation. _If_ Apple has been chaffed into action, well then, great! And if they did it because of Greenpeace, which seems to be the case, well that's fine too.
I guess my only concern is that if Jobs' letter is correct, Greenpeace's data is simply wrong. More accurately, its based on statements of what companies _would_ do, not what was actually happening on the ground. Its almost like, oh I don't know, someone at Greenpeace went to various web sites and looked to see what they said, and took that to be representative of what was actually going on.
As the letter noted, although all of these companies talked about going green, according to Apple, they already were. But because they didn't boast about it, they came off looking bad.
One thing I found interesting was the mention near the end about carbon footprint. Maybe the end result of this will be that Apple puts up a huge solar array over their parking lot, or installs super-effecient lighting, or, well, whatever. Nothing wrong with that.
I think if there is a lesson here is that you really do need to toot your horn on just about everything. Its somewhat odd that Jobs would have to be reminded of this.
Before we get to your comments, remember that Nixon's "solution" to paying for Viet Nam was to go off the gold standard and print lots and lots of money. What happens when you print lots and lots of money? Well the value of the dollar goes down, of course, which means that people have to pay more dollars to get the same things. When you pay more money for the same thing we call that inflation. And what does the gov do to control inflation? Raise interest rates.
So now let's look at what you complained about (slightly re-arranged)...
Devaluation of the dollar.
Inflation was through the roof (12%).
Average mortgage rates during the Carter administration were over 15%! I don't even pay credit cards 15%!!!
Which invariably leads to...
Unemployment was high (7%).
Deficit spending went through the roof (the deficit for the fiscal year 1979 totaled $27.7 billion, and that for 1980 was nearly $59 billion).
You can't blame Carter for these things. That's not to say he did anything to improve the situation, far from it, but let's at least try to blame the right people for the right problems (not that Carter was lacking in them).
> Canceled the B1-B program as well as the MBT-70. (Both badly > needed to compete with our enemy of the time... the Soviets who > had the T-72 and the Tu-160 BLACKJACK)
Pfft.
The MBT-70 was cancelled in 1971. What did he do, go back in time?
Carter did not cancel the B-1B, he cancelled the B-1A. And he replaced it with B-52/ALCM, which EVERYONE not directly tied to the contract will freely admit was a much better system (1500 very small subsonic low-level targets vs 100 -- no brainer). He also funded ATB, or stealth, which was a way better solution.
Regan did an extremely good job of spinning these to make it look like Carter was a moron. But that's just politics.
Again, I'm not trying to support the guy, but these are terrible arguments.
It did not have a faster CPU. It had a CPU running at a higher external bus clock. You'd think that after all these years that people would realize that MHz != performance, but I guess not.
The 6502 ran on a bus multiplier, meaning it ran faster internally than it did externally. This is true of practically any modern CPU, but was not so common back in the day. In general terms the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 ran at the same internal speeds. That said, the 6502 was much more efficient and RISC-like. In practically any benchmark that scales for speed, the 6502 comes out ahead.
Arguably the fastest, in theory, 8-bit machine was the Atari series. They ran a 2 MHz 6502 (declocked to sync with video), which was twice as fast as any of the other 6502 machines and effectively the same as an 8MHz Z80. But again, these machines always finished at the bottom of the heap in BASIC benchmarks, which again demonstrates the point at the top.
1) US and European phone systems operate on different frequencies 2) Europe has been using these frequencies far longer than in the US. Thus if there was any sort of "deployment pattern", it would start there. 3) Europe has higher cell use per capita and higher population density than the US. See (2) 4) Some of these frequencies have been heavily used in the past by high-channel UHF television stations with MUCH greater power (like 10,000 times). Ever wonder where channels above 70 went when cell phones started showing up? If it was something to do with these frequencies, all bees would have been gone back in the 70's.
and the most important one
5) these die-offs have been happening since people have been watching, long before there was any RF except for lightening
You give credits on the online store for "uploads". Say 1 penny per MB (or whatever). Feed 20 songs @ 5 MB, get $1, buy a song for "full price". What could be more transparent than that?
"As a professor in the biosciences, I've seen more than one article/entry on Wikipedia, written by an expert in that field that has been absolutely, shamefully and quite inaccurately edited or altered by well meaning individuals that absolutely have no idea what they are doing/saying."
Then hit "rollback". Look, don't take this the wrong way, but if you have time to complain about it here, and time to blog as well, then you have time to fix the wiki. Right? I'm not asking you to do something you don't want to do: if you don't like writing then don't. I'll even make you this offer; the next time you come across something like this, drop me a note on my wiki talk page (I'm not exactly hard to find) and I'll be happy to fix it for you.
And to be sure I'm not picking on you (ok, maybe a little:-) but I keep reading some variation of this same statement over and over. And it's more than a little ironic. The wikipedia is one of the few cases I can think of where each and every one of us can fix the problem. But I guess we're all so used to complaining about things that our out of our control that when something comes along that _is_ under our control we don't even recognize it and our reflexes snap into action.
Slashdot Mirror
> If things started out as a big bang, on some scale,
> we will find a "center" of the universe.
But understanding why this is so is what makes all of this fun.
Remember that modern metric theories, of which General Relativity is just one, posit that the universe is four dimensional. Three space dimensions and one time dimension make up a four dimensional "spacetime". Unless you have seen an explaination of exactly what this means, it's just words, like "the universe is gizifa". This can lead to misunderstandings.
I'll try to explain what this means, using a model I'm sure you've seen before, but likely poorly explained. Consider a balloon, partially inflated. The surface of the balloon, the "skin", is effectively a two dimensional object. The balloon as a whole is three dimensional. You have a two dimensional surface enclosing a three dimensional volume. Still with me?
The reason we use this model is because it is very similar to our model of the universe. In this model everything you see around you, the three dimensional world, is the "surface" of a larger four dimensional construct. Just as the skin of a balloon is a 2D surface of a 3D space, everything you see around you is in the 3D skin of a 4D space. Still with me?
Consider the balloon again. Critically, there is no "center" to the surface. Where is the middle of the surface of a sphere? Where is the middle of the surface of the Earth? The question itself is just "wrong". In the case of the Earth we arbitrarily decided to draw lines on it in certain placed, latitude and longitude. You could do the same with a balloon, make the neck the "north pole" for instance. By the same token we could have chosen some other coordinate system entirely, let's put the "west pole" in Ecuador!
There is a point of the balloon as a whole that can be thought of as the center, through. Its in the space "below" the surface that's filled with air. The same is true of the Earth, the center is down below us, about 6400 km away. But, critically, that point does not lie on the surface.
Now one more thing to consider. Draw some dots on the outside of the balloon. Label one of them "milky way". Now start inflating the balloon. You'll notice that the dots will move away from each other as you inflate them. In fact, from the point of view of the "milky way", all the other dots are moving away from it. But the same is true of all the other dots too. No matter which one you pick to observe, you'll see that everything moves away from it. And that's because, for lack of a better way to put it, space itself is getting bigger. In fact, the dots aren't really moving at all relative to their original locations on the surface of the balloon, their real motion is along a line drawn into the middle of the volume, that "real center".
In the case of the universe the same thing applies. We look out in space and we see that everything is moving away from us. This is surprising if the universe is a 3D space, but complete expected if it's 4D. So where is the center of the universe? It's "down" somewhere. And what is that missing direction? Well we already said it, it's time. So what does that mean?
That means the center of the universe is a point in time, not space.
As soon as you really grasp this model you'll see why everyone likes it. For one, it trivially answers lots of different questions:
1) why is everything moving away from us?
it's not, everything is just "inflating"
2) why do we appear to be in the middle?
its just the way it looks, and it looks the same way everywhere else too
3) why are we moving apart at all?
because time is going forward (just look at your watch)
Hope this helps!
Maury
> but how can the entire Universe's angular momentum be non-zero?
Excellent question. So excellent that it led to an entire alternate model of gravity. A trip to the wiki is always useful: Brans-Dicke theory
So, anyone want to put odds on dark matter going the way of the cublical atom in, say, ten years?
Maury
> On a roof, such cells would require less than half the surface area to
> produce the same amount of power as today's standard solar panels,
> which have an efficiency of about 17%."
The article being quoted clearly states that these cells require concentrated sunlight -- this is true of all thin-film high-TSE cells. So basically you can't mount them on the roof, you'll get no power at all.
Further, most solar panels get about 11% efficiency. There are ones that get into the 15-17% range, but these are much more expensive and see considerably less use as a result.
These new cells will be very useful for large-scale energy developments, like large solar farms in the desert. They are completely useless for rooftop deployment.
Maury
Did anyone bother to actually look at the edit logs in question? I did. SlimVirgin's only edit to the article since March (where I gave up looking) was to rv obvious bogus information. There's nothing else.
/. regular reading the reason for this will laugh out loud at the complete stupidity of the claim. Everything else is third person friend-of-a-friend, with a single exception of someone that knew Mack in the 1980s but admits that he has no evidence the two people are the same.
The article linked from this Slashdot post is nothing more than a blog entry. It claims all sorts of conspiracy theories, and then further states that these were removed from the Operation Entebbe article on the wiki, implying it was by SlimVirgin. Well anyone can click "history", and when you do you'll notice Slim hasn't make a single edit to the page going back as far as 2005, which is when I stopped bothering to look.
Then I went to the discussion page. The entire issue of the material in question is spelled out in complete detail there. The discussion is well balanced, and after reading it over I couldn't agree more: it should be removed because it's basically a bogus conspiracy theory. SlimVirgin DID make an edit to the talk page, in February, to remove a claim that Idi Amin was an Israeli puppet. That's her only edit.
This entire claim is completely and utterly bogus. Didn't anyone bother to check this before spreading it around the internet? I guess not, let's not let reality get in the way of a good bashing.
So then I continued on, and read the articles that claim that SlimVirgin is Linda Mack. What a completely load of hooey. To start with they claim that Slim is very good at "covering her tracks", but any
Again, this is all a complete load of crap. And I've had dealings with Slim and hated it. It's not like I'd stick up for her under normal circumstances, but I'd like to hope that if the situation were reversed there'd be someone out there who would stick up for me.
Maury
> You don't have to lug your systems and fuel several million miles
And you don't on Mars either. Once you're out of the gravity well, you're out of the gravity well.
> not the same as slowing yourself down from mach 5 before making a crater
True, which is why you'd use multi-pass aerobraking.
It's not like this hasn't been studied before. Repeatedly. Ad nausium.
Maury
Who wrote that press release? A media undergrad? Look at this wonderful statement:
"Expensive, large-scale infrastructures such as wind mills or dams are necessary to drive renewable energy sources, such as wind or hydroelectric power plants."
Gee, really? I always thought we made windmills for hydroelectric power. Or how about this:
"When sunlight falls on an organic solar cell, the energy generates positive and negative charges. If the charges can be separated and sent to different electrodes, then a current flows. If not, the energy is wasted."
Ummm, ok, and where do you explain how these cells cause charge separation? Nowhere? Oh, ok. My fav though, is this one:
"carbon nanotubes complex, which by the way, is a molecular configuration of carbon in a cylindrical shape"
Carbon tubes are tubes of carbon? Wow! Thanks, Mr. Simply Pretends to Understand Anything with More Than One Sylable and Writes About It Anyway.
Maury
> The stronger gravity (compared to the moon) makes an Apollo-style powered descent impossible.
Ummm, someone better tell that to teams working on Blue Origin, DC-X, SERV, and the Kankoh-maru. They all do VTO/VTL on Earth. Two of them have already successfully demonstrated it. But hey, what would they know.
Maury
> This team is NOT following any of the "Fraud" or "Fake" technology pattern.
Hmmm. I can think of two big perpetual energy machine scams and a couple of more down-to-Earth tech scams over the last couple of decades, and let me tell ya, this is is *absolutely* following the same pattern.
First up, Joseph Newman. Newman was around back in the 80's and claimed to have a device that -get this- uses magnets to generate unlimited power. The company was completely privately funded by angel investors. Quite a bit of money IIRC. Enough to travel around the US giving down-home-revival style shows about the device. He even made it all the way to the Tonight Show. So little difference here it's hard to tell the stories apart.
Next up, Madison Priest. Priest claims to have created a "magic box" (his words) that tapped into zero-point energy. He used this to create -get this- a video compression system! He planned on selling it to the cell phone companies, allowing them to send broadcast quality video over existing low speed channels. He worked up *serious* funding from a wide variety of investors, including Blockbuster, and gave numerous demos that were all apparently faked with hidden cables. Disappeared soon after.
Then there was the Great Oil Sniffer Hoax. An Italian guy named Bonassoli approaches Elf with a device he claims is a gravity wave oil detector. Ends up fleecing them for about $150 MILLION before they finally catch on. Disappears with most of the money soon after.
So:
1) lots of funding
2) public demonstrations
3) often with patents
Please demonstrate how this is any different, as you claim.
> Is this not by definition perpetual motion?
That's the clueless noob definition, yes. The real definition can be found on the wikipedia. Educate yourself.
> haven't done anything here but skewer about a thousand sacred cows.
Yes, I'm sure all the physicists out there are shaking in their shoes. "Oh no, someone on Slash called us dumb! Run for the hills, they're onto us!"
> accept that another opinion might exist.
I'm sure we're all perfectly aware that other opinions exist. After all, Shrub got re-elected.
Maury
I couldn't let this one go...
... a fictional character ...
> we can and must return to that qualitative world where
> we can realize our deepest human qualities.
Ohhhh kayyyy....
> as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus
> His prescription for humanity's emergence from this
> present Dark Age also includes developing a strong
> sense of history.
JFC! Is he kidding?
I have a strong sense of history, I spend most of my free time reading and writing about it. Here's a quick lesson in history for you:
Five hundred years ago YOU would live in a one-room dirt floor shack. You would have almost no money, only a handful of tools, and little or nothing in the way of personal belongings. You would eat perhaps 25 varieties of food in your entire lifetime, and those would take you a significant portion of the day to prepare. You would work from before sunup to just before sundown, although there were periods of the year where there was little work to do, but due to the lack of artificial light, it wasn't like you were missing much anyway. For entertainment, you did nothing, although there was church on Sundays (which is why anyone went), and for distraction you had the periodic interludes where gangs of some warlord's men would come by, rape you wife and stick something pointy in your stomach. If you were lucky you might make it to 60, but you'd spend a significant portion of the time sick, and in many cases, pain. I'm not talking "I wish I had a new iPod pain", I'm talking "please someone chop off this leg" pain.
> We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality,
> and realized their hopes and dreams.
I can answer that too: you didn't have those.
For the first time in recorded history we, as a race, believe that things can actually change. There's only been one period in recent history where people had the same sort of upward mobility as we enjoy today: during the black plague when everyone was dying.
We live better than kings did. Never forget that.
Maury
*yawn*
Another sad attempt to scare us all with the techno-boogyman. It was much more fun when he sounded like HAL, not not an iPod. Now it's just so *old*
Maury
> I'd love for the scientists at Fermilab to make this sort of breakthrough
[snip]
> attract the attention necessary to help solve the NSF's funding woes.
Let me be perfectly sure I'm understanding what you're saying here: you're saying we should discover an utterly useless bit of information so we can get more money?
Sqeeeel! - sound of pork
Maury
> Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any
> useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect
> enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?"
Who cares? I'm serious. This entire experiment is designed to demonstrate something everyone already agrees we know. This is the same sort of useless activity that monks used to do when debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
What happens if the experiment does work? Absolutely nothing. Well not nothing, everyone will congratulate themselves, throw a Nobel or two, and get their names in the paper. But that's it. We're not _learning_ anything if it comes in as expected.
It only generates useful information if it fails. However, if it does fail, nothing will come of it because the next energy level we'd have to look at is way high. So sorry, we can't build that machine anyway.
Unless someone comes up with a totally new approach that predicts new unseen results that can be found at existing energy levels, this experiment is a massive waste of money. Of course it's not like they have anything else to do, particle physicists aren't exactly in high demand outside the research world.
Maury
Forget the Chinese, we Canucks already have all your contractors pegged with our Supr-Dupr Spy Coins! All your base are belong to us!
Why does anyone believe anything that comes out of the Pentagon any more?
Anyone else using it too? Not too sure about the font smoothing, but the rest of it does seem pretty nice so far!
Maybe, but the big breakout happens if that's NOT true. Remember, there were lots of MP3 players out there when Apple stomped them. They did so by making a techno-geek device into something everyone _trusted_ they could actually use. And that's what "Apple" means now. That's important, if it is the case that people are not buying smartphones because they are too geeky (or people believe they are), then this could really smoke.
So we pay a little more for CD's, and that money goes to the copyright holders (we hope).
Umm, maybe this isn't such a bad idea? After all, there is a TV Tax in the UK for the same reason. Everyone complains about it, but not *that* much.
Maury
> 'hit criminals in their wallets' ...with an electric shock machine.
> Warner Brothers is canceling movie previews in
> Canadian theaters, starting with Oceans Thirteen.
Thank god.
It seems to me that this is very much a win-win situation. _If_ Apple has been chaffed into action, well then, great! And if they did it because of Greenpeace, which seems to be the case, well that's fine too.
I guess my only concern is that if Jobs' letter is correct, Greenpeace's data is simply wrong. More accurately, its based on statements of what companies _would_ do, not what was actually happening on the ground. Its almost like, oh I don't know, someone at Greenpeace went to various web sites and looked to see what they said, and took that to be representative of what was actually going on.
As the letter noted, although all of these companies talked about going green, according to Apple, they already were. But because they didn't boast about it, they came off looking bad.
One thing I found interesting was the mention near the end about carbon footprint. Maybe the end result of this will be that Apple puts up a huge solar array over their parking lot, or installs super-effecient lighting, or, well, whatever. Nothing wrong with that.
I think if there is a lesson here is that you really do need to toot your horn on just about everything. Its somewhat odd that Jobs would have to be reminded of this.
Maury
Before we get to your comments, remember that Nixon's "solution" to paying for Viet Nam was to go off the gold standard and print lots and lots of money. What happens when you print lots and lots of money? Well the value of the dollar goes down, of course, which means that people have to pay more dollars to get the same things. When you pay more money for the same thing we call that inflation. And what does the gov do to control inflation? Raise interest rates.
So now let's look at what you complained about (slightly re-arranged)...
Devaluation of the dollar.
Inflation was through the roof (12%).
Average mortgage rates during the Carter administration were over 15%! I don't even pay credit cards 15%!!!
Which invariably leads to...
Unemployment was high (7%).
Deficit spending went through the roof (the deficit for the fiscal year 1979 totaled $27.7 billion, and that for 1980 was nearly $59 billion).
You can't blame Carter for these things. That's not to say he did anything to improve the situation, far from it, but let's at least try to blame the right people for the right problems (not that Carter was lacking in them).
> Canceled the B1-B program as well as the MBT-70. (Both badly
> needed to compete with our enemy of the time... the Soviets who
> had the T-72 and the Tu-160 BLACKJACK)
Pfft.
The MBT-70 was cancelled in 1971. What did he do, go back in time?
Carter did not cancel the B-1B, he cancelled the B-1A. And he replaced it with B-52/ALCM, which EVERYONE not directly tied to the contract will freely admit was a much better system (1500 very small subsonic low-level targets vs 100 -- no brainer). He also funded ATB, or stealth, which was a way better solution.
Regan did an extremely good job of spinning these to make it look like Carter was a moron. But that's just politics.
Again, I'm not trying to support the guy, but these are terrible arguments.
Maury
"Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU"
It did not have a faster CPU. It had a CPU running at a higher external bus clock. You'd think that after all these years that people would realize that MHz != performance, but I guess not.
The 6502 ran on a bus multiplier, meaning it ran faster internally than it did externally. This is true of practically any modern CPU, but was not so common back in the day. In general terms the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 ran at the same internal speeds. That said, the 6502 was much more efficient and RISC-like. In practically any benchmark that scales for speed, the 6502 comes out ahead.
Arguably the fastest, in theory, 8-bit machine was the Atari series. They ran a 2 MHz 6502 (declocked to sync with video), which was twice as fast as any of the other 6502 machines and effectively the same as an 8MHz Z80. But again, these machines always finished at the bottom of the heap in BASIC benchmarks, which again demonstrates the point at the top.
Maury
1) US and European phone systems operate on different frequencies
2) Europe has been using these frequencies far longer than in the US. Thus if there was any sort of "deployment pattern", it would start there.
3) Europe has higher cell use per capita and higher population density than the US. See (2)
4) Some of these frequencies have been heavily used in the past by high-channel UHF television stations with MUCH greater power (like 10,000 times). Ever wonder where channels above 70 went when cell phones started showing up? If it was something to do with these frequencies, all bees would have been gone back in the 70's.
and the most important one
5) these die-offs have been happening since people have been watching, long before there was any RF except for lightening
Maury
You give credits on the online store for "uploads". Say 1 penny per MB (or whatever). Feed 20 songs @ 5 MB, get $1, buy a song for "full price". What could be more transparent than that?
$299 for a 720p (only) display extender? Meh.
$299 for a 24/7 torrent node that replaces a PVR? Hmmm.
I'd buy THAT for $299.
"As a professor in the biosciences, I've seen more than one article/entry on Wikipedia, written by an expert in that field that has been absolutely, shamefully and quite inaccurately edited or altered by well meaning individuals that absolutely have no idea what they are doing/saying."
:-) but I keep reading some variation of this same statement over and over. And it's more than a little ironic. The wikipedia is one of the few cases I can think of where each and every one of us can fix the problem. But I guess we're all so used to complaining about things that our out of our control that when something comes along that _is_ under our control we don't even recognize it and our reflexes snap into action.
Then hit "rollback". Look, don't take this the wrong way, but if you have time to complain about it here, and time to blog as well, then you have time to fix the wiki. Right? I'm not asking you to do something you don't want to do: if you don't like writing then don't. I'll even make you this offer; the next time you come across something like this, drop me a note on my wiki talk page (I'm not exactly hard to find) and I'll be happy to fix it for you.
And to be sure I'm not picking on you (ok, maybe a little
Maury