An object traveling at 0.25 c has a gamma factor of 1.033, hence a kinetic energy equal to 3.3% of its rest energy. A bb has a mass of, say, 5 grams, hence a rest energy of 450 terajoules; hence each of your bbs has a kinetic energy of 15 TJ. These new destroyers apparently output around 80 MW, so they'd be charging up your gun for, let's see, a little over two days per pellet.
Never mind how they'd actually launch the thing.
I mean, orders of magnitude... (Apparently the muzzle velocity of these guns is on the order of Mach 10. This is around 10^-5 c.)
It doesn't seem all that bad to me after reading it. I mean, I'll grant that "the theme is ugly!!!!" with no associated suggestions is useless. (Although, looking at the screenshots, I'm inclined to agree.) But my read on Goodger's blog entry is that he's only interested in people who want to improve the new theme, not people who want to discuss the reasons for / correctness of the decision to adopt it in the first place. For example, I'm inferring that comments like the grandparent would fall under "bellyaching" or "crying over spilled milk". In other words, he doesn't want to hear any discussion which mentions the decision over Qute, whether said discussion is reasonable or not.
Of course, this is only my read. On the other hand, I don't think it's justified to censor anyone, even the useless people, unless they're deliberately flooding the boards or otherwise making them unreadable. If their comments are just useless, let me decide that for myself.
On the third hand, maybe I'm not seeing the true extent of the nastiness you mention because it's already been cleansed. Who knows?
Well, I was going to put in a paragraph comparing this situation to the Python community (disclaimer: of which I am only a curious observer / user). There Guido van Rossum is the respected and liked "benevolent dictator for life". People generally accede when he "pronounces", with occasional discontent but never, as far as I can tell, uproar or dissatisfaction with his leadership.
Why?
I'd venture it's because GvR reads his email and responds calmly to comments. He explains why he wants to do something a given way, and typically allows for a good period of discussion before pronouncing. As far as I can tell, he doesn't keep secrets. He even seems to change his mind now and again.
In short, yes, it does seem to be possible.
In my experience, by the way, the Python community produces a better product, to the extent that you can compare apples to oranges here.
From Ben Goodger's weblog: The transition from the Qute theme has caused quite a stir, and pleas for constructive responses have been widely ignored. All I can say to those upset with how this was negotiated is that in a perfect world, things might have been done better, this isn't that world, it is a more complex and interesting dynamic than has been made public, there is no use in crying over spilled milk, so get over it.
Those of you who have attacked Kevin and Stephen should be ashamed of yourselves. Calm down, take a chill pill, or you'll severely limit the likelihood that anyone that matters will listen to you. Say what you will about me, but be constructive about the new theme or kerz and other MozillaZine moderators will lock your accounts. I have disabled comments since I'm not interested in hearing people bellyache any more. We (myself, VDT, marketing, etc) are frankly sick of it.
Good software development is not done by committee, it requires strong leadership and tough decisions. Time will tell whether or not this was a good one. I think it was, and expect to be vindicated by the release, and the continual improvement and commitment to excellence that the theme's authors have promised.
Yes, he may eventually be "vindicated", but what I see here is a worrisome attitude towards the user and developer communities. "We (I) know what's best, no matter how many people in the community present reasoned arguments to the contrary. If you complain about our decisions you're just a whiner, and we're going to censor you to the extent we can. Oh, and we have hidden secret information we're not telling you, so you can't possibly know what we're talking about." It's walking on thin ice at best, juvenile and egotistical at worst.
I love Firefox and I plan to use 0.9 when it's released (possibly with the Qute theme installed separately). But, whatever you think of the new theme aesthetically, I think the surprise move and disrespect for the community response speaks poorly for the project. They have a good product, which is why it was able to survive multiple name changes and the "loss" of direct AOL support, and I think it'll survive this. But it doesn't encourage me to contribute to Mozilla development, and it'll probably mean I'll pay more attention to alternatives when people mention them.
Open source: live by the community, die by the community.
Sure. After all, 3 GHz --> 4 inches which is certainly smaller than your motherboard, which is one reason, I suppose, the bus runs at a fraction of the processor clock.
The 6 GHz is a little fishy to me, and here's why:
6 GHz --> 0.17 ns per cycle. Light travels 5 cm (about two inches) in 0.17 ns, and information cannot travel faster than light. This means that even at the speed of light (electrical signals in typical electronics propogate at ~0.8 c, IIRC) it will take almost the entire clock cycle to get information across the chip, never mind whatever time it takes the transistors to respond.
In the meantime, those nursing dreams of 100 GHz chips had better look beyond nanotech to picotech-- atom-sized transistors.:-P
Oh no. Now you've done it. The zero-point energy oil-company conspiracy tinfoil hat trolls are going to come out with their one-way mirror blackbody-radiation SECOND-LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS IS A FRAUD!!1!!!111! rants and we'll be modding them down until the end of time.
How exactly is this a work-around? Will you really notice if the entire feed is delayed by a fraction of a second? It seems to me like the right thing to do-- impose an external constraint that the audio and video feeds should be synchronized rather than count on the processors to be fast enough to make the difference unnoticeable. It should help in the future if people want more sophisticated transformations to be applied to either component of the stream.
(number of server compromises you hear about) = (number of servers in existence) * (relative vulnerability of servers) * (willingness of those running servers to reveal compromises)
I realize there are some people who have biases they don't appreciate. But data, taken at face value, is famous for having those same biases. No?
Actually, I once estimated the cost of the lithium ion batteries these folks use. Based on the cost of a similar (but about 10x smaller) battery pack the Yale solar racing team used, around half of the $220k is for the battery pack. Better hope the thing has a good warranty!
I'm trying to decide whether the parent is simply confused or a clever troll. It has enough things wrong with it that I suspect the latter. But just in case, I'll "reply not moderate" (although I'd like to know who modded this up to 4):
- Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide as the primary pollutant (on a global scale at least; locally smog etc. could be considered more important). This is carbon dioxide that was not previously in the atmosphere, since the carbon came from stores in the ground. In comparison, using renewable biomass for fuel, for example, adds no additional carbon to the atmosphere.
- The system described here is closed cycle. Water goes in, hydrogen and oxygen come out; then when the hydrogen is burned it recombines with the oxygen to become water again. Diluting the oceans is impossible in this case (and rather ridiculous in the fossil fuel case; consider the volumes involved).
- The biggest win is probably on the local scale I mentioned. I don't think working to eliminate smog is an "unnecessary expense". Unless you think changing from breathing smog to breathing water vapor is just from "one form of waste to another", in which case I'll take the water and you can have the smog.
I'm personally open to debate about exactly how bad global climate change is. But it's dangerous and dishonest to hide behind bad science to resist progress.
Okay, ha ha ha, funny, yes, great. But I see this as a potentially useful thing in a DMCA-compliant future. You write a perfectly functional and totally innocuous piece of, say, C, and distribute it on the Web for general consumption. Meanwhile, those in the know take the same code and run it in Whitespace for CSS-busting X-box-hacking RIAA-whacking DMCA-violating fun. Yes? (Or should I really be in bed now?)
In free space, at least, and reasonably far from the source, static magnetic (and electric) fields always decay as 1/r^n for some n. People write the field at a distance r from a magnet in what's called a "multipole expansion":
B = [messy coefficient] (1/r^3) + [messier coefficient] (1/r^4) +...
Unless the coefficient of the first term is zero, then, very far from the source the rest of the terms become negligible and the field drops off as the inverse cube (becoming a "magnetic dipole field"). (For electric fields the leading term is 1/r^2, not 1/r^3. This is because there are electric monopoles but not magnetic monopoles.)
The trick, then, and what these guys have presumably done, is to make the field really huge close to the magnet (using all those terms in the... there) but to zero out or minimize the components that reach far away (i.e. the 1/r^3, then the 1/r^4 if you can, etc.)
(Disclaimer: yeah, yeah, this doesn't take into account matter in the way, and the magnetic field is a vector. But that doesn't change the basic idea.)
...is for someone to implement moderation and karma for real life. So this sort of thing, and the others we always hear about, would be continually buried under a flood of (-1 WTF?), (-1 Hello, civil rights?), (-1 Contradicts laws of physics), and (-1 Just Plain Wrong), and fade, like the first posters, trolls, and goatse.cx links, into -2 obscurity...
You might look at the first text offered here, which is an introduction to advanced physics for freshmen modeled after the corresponding course at Yale. You're going to need a good calculus background to get the most out of it, but many sections should be quite interesting without it. A good bridge between physics at the advanced high school or introductory college level and the really fun (fun?) stuff.
I wonder what kind of use the data gathered from this experiment will have for computer scientists studying neural networks. By studying mechanisms of connection formation in the real thing, maybe we could improve the performance of computer neural networks. Of course, the opposite should hold as well, where we could better model the living brain in computers. Unfortunately, I would guess that the optical camera can't pick up on patterns of electrical activity, so we wouldn't gain insight into firing patterns as the network operates. IANA computer scientist, though; does anyone know how practical this would be?
Not exactly... the 34% quoted is the "external quantum efficiency" which I assume refers to the ratio of input photons to output electrons or something similar. On page 1122 of the article it reads, "The power efficiency maximum was 1.95% at 490 nm." This, naturally, doesn't really cut the mustard in comparison with silicon cells.
------------
According to the CDC, Ebola is spread in the air in the laboratory but not, for practical purposes, in humans (yet). In the Africa outbreaks the disease was spread via contact with infected secretions and fluids.
It's long been held that the best strategy for a virus is to be as benign as possible, so that the host lives on to spread the disease and (in the case of humans) doesn't seek treatment. It's not hard to imagine that computer viruses would evolve similarly (who knows how many sleeping viruses there might be out there?). On the other hand, sometimes you wind up seeing selection for certain damaging traits if those traits help the virus multiply. (In the biological world, for example, viruses spread through the water supply often cause severe diahrrea, which damages the host but improves the chances of infecting more hosts. In the computer world, well, I think Code Red is a fine example...)
Does anyone know of attempts to use biological techniques to analyze or fight computer infections? I seem to remember something about a net-based immune-system like construction but I can't find it.
The material itself isn't the biggest problem, since in COS you only deposit a thin film (10-100 nm) of it. The problem is the deposition technique which requires molecular beam epitaxy (think million-dollar finicky vacuum systems, trained operators, etc. etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
One fourth the speed of light? Let's see.
An object traveling at 0.25 c has a gamma factor of 1.033, hence a kinetic energy equal to 3.3% of its rest energy. A bb has a mass of, say, 5 grams, hence a rest energy of 450 terajoules; hence each of your bbs has a kinetic energy of 15 TJ. These new destroyers apparently output around 80 MW, so they'd be charging up your gun for, let's see, a little over two days per pellet.
Never mind how they'd actually launch the thing.
I mean, orders of magnitude... (Apparently the muzzle velocity of these guns is on the order of Mach 10. This is around 10^-5 c.)
It doesn't seem all that bad to me after reading it. I mean, I'll grant that "the theme is ugly!!!! " with no associated suggestions is useless. (Although, looking at the screenshots, I'm inclined to agree.) But my read on Goodger's blog entry is that he's only interested in people who want to improve the new theme, not people who want to discuss the reasons for / correctness of the decision to adopt it in the first place. For example, I'm inferring that comments like the grandparent would fall under "bellyaching" or "crying over spilled milk". In other words, he doesn't want to hear any discussion which mentions the decision over Qute, whether said discussion is reasonable or not.
Of course, this is only my read. On the other hand, I don't think it's justified to censor anyone, even the useless people, unless they're deliberately flooding the boards or otherwise making them unreadable. If their comments are just useless, let me decide that for myself.
On the third hand, maybe I'm not seeing the true extent of the nastiness you mention because it's already been cleansed. Who knows?
Well, I was going to put in a paragraph comparing this situation to the Python community (disclaimer: of which I am only a curious observer / user). There Guido van Rossum is the respected and liked "benevolent dictator for life". People generally accede when he "pronounces", with occasional discontent but never, as far as I can tell, uproar or dissatisfaction with his leadership.
Why?
I'd venture it's because GvR reads his email and responds calmly to comments. He explains why he wants to do something a given way, and typically allows for a good period of discussion before pronouncing. As far as I can tell, he doesn't keep secrets. He even seems to change his mind now and again.
In short, yes, it does seem to be possible.
In my experience, by the way, the Python community produces a better product, to the extent that you can compare apples to oranges here.
I think that about hits the nail on the head.
From Ben Goodger's weblog:
The transition from the Qute theme has caused quite a stir, and pleas for constructive responses have been widely ignored. All I can say to those upset with how this was negotiated is that in a perfect world, things might have been done better, this isn't that world, it is a more complex and interesting dynamic than has been made public, there is no use in crying over spilled milk, so get over it.
Those of you who have attacked Kevin and Stephen should be ashamed of yourselves. Calm down, take a chill pill, or you'll severely limit the likelihood that anyone that matters will listen to you. Say what you will about me, but be constructive about the new theme or kerz and other MozillaZine moderators will lock your accounts. I have disabled comments since I'm not interested in hearing people bellyache any more. We (myself, VDT, marketing, etc) are frankly sick of it.
Good software development is not done by committee, it requires strong leadership and tough decisions. Time will tell whether or not this was a good one. I think it was, and expect to be vindicated by the release, and the continual improvement and commitment to excellence that the theme's authors have promised.
Yes, he may eventually be "vindicated", but what I see here is a worrisome attitude towards the user and developer communities. "We (I) know what's best, no matter how many people in the community present reasoned arguments to the contrary. If you complain about our decisions you're just a whiner, and we're going to censor you to the extent we can. Oh, and we have hidden secret information we're not telling you, so you can't possibly know what we're talking about." It's walking on thin ice at best, juvenile and egotistical at worst.
I love Firefox and I plan to use 0.9 when it's released (possibly with the Qute theme installed separately). But, whatever you think of the new theme aesthetically, I think the surprise move and disrespect for the community response speaks poorly for the project. They have a good product, which is why it was able to survive multiple name changes and the "loss" of direct AOL support, and I think it'll survive this. But it doesn't encourage me to contribute to Mozilla development, and it'll probably mean I'll pay more attention to alternatives when people mention them.
Open source: live by the community, die by the community.
Sure. After all, 3 GHz --> 4 inches which is certainly smaller than your motherboard, which is one reason, I suppose, the bus runs at a fraction of the processor clock.
The 6 GHz is a little fishy to me, and here's why:
:-P
6 GHz --> 0.17 ns per cycle. Light travels 5 cm (about two inches) in 0.17 ns, and information cannot travel faster than light. This means that even at the speed of light (electrical signals in typical electronics propogate at ~0.8 c, IIRC) it will take almost the entire clock cycle to get information across the chip, never mind whatever time it takes the transistors to respond.
In the meantime, those nursing dreams of 100 GHz chips had better look beyond nanotech to picotech-- atom-sized transistors.
Oh no. Now you've done it. The zero-point energy oil-company conspiracy tinfoil hat trolls are going to come out with their one-way mirror blackbody-radiation SECOND-LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS IS A FRAUD!!1!!!111! rants and we'll be modding them down until the end of time.
Shoot me now!
(Please??)
How exactly is this a work-around? Will you really notice if the entire feed is delayed by a fraction of a second? It seems to me like the right thing to do-- impose an external constraint that the audio and video feeds should be synchronized rather than count on the processors to be fast enough to make the difference unnoticeable. It should help in the future if people want more sophisticated transformations to be applied to either component of the stream.
Double negatives do not sometimes fail to not make your point clearer.
Don't you mean less unclear?
Let me offer some pseudo-arithmetic here:
(number of server compromises you hear about) = (number of servers in existence) * (relative vulnerability of servers) * (willingness of those running servers to reveal compromises)
I realize there are some people who have biases they don't appreciate. But data, taken at face value, is famous for having those same biases. No?
Actually, I once estimated the cost of the lithium ion batteries these folks use. Based on the cost of a similar (but about 10x smaller) battery pack the Yale solar racing team used, around half of the $220k is for the battery pack. Better hope the thing has a good warranty!
or maybe troll? Or, if hes serious, stupid?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Sorry for being offtopic, but: so part A and part B work together how?
I'm trying to decide whether the parent is simply confused or a clever troll. It has enough things wrong with it that I suspect the latter. But just in case, I'll "reply not moderate" (although I'd like to know who modded this up to 4):
- Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide as the primary pollutant (on a global scale at least; locally smog etc. could be considered more important). This is carbon dioxide that was not previously in the atmosphere, since the carbon came from stores in the ground. In comparison, using renewable biomass for fuel, for example, adds no additional carbon to the atmosphere.
- The system described here is closed cycle. Water goes in, hydrogen and oxygen come out; then when the hydrogen is burned it recombines with the oxygen to become water again. Diluting the oceans is impossible in this case (and rather ridiculous in the fossil fuel case; consider the volumes involved).
- The biggest win is probably on the local scale I mentioned. I don't think working to eliminate smog is an "unnecessary expense". Unless you think changing from breathing smog to breathing water vapor is just from "one form of waste to another", in which case I'll take the water and you can have the smog.
I'm personally open to debate about exactly how bad global climate change is. But it's dangerous and dishonest to hide behind bad science to resist progress.
Okay, ha ha ha, funny, yes, great. But I see this as a potentially useful thing in a DMCA-compliant future. You write a perfectly functional and totally innocuous piece of, say, C, and distribute it on the Web for general consumption. Meanwhile, those in the know take the same code and run it in Whitespace for CSS-busting X-box-hacking RIAA-whacking DMCA-violating fun. Yes? (Or should I really be in bed now?)
There's commentary on the five earlier games (sixth to come I suppose) and some entertaining speculation at ChessBase, makers of Junior.
In free space, at least, and reasonably far from the source, static magnetic (and electric) fields always decay as 1/r^n for some n. People write the field at a distance r from a magnet in what's called a "multipole expansion":
...
... there) but to zero out or minimize the components that reach far away (i.e. the 1/r^3, then the 1/r^4 if you can, etc.)
B = [messy coefficient] (1/r^3) + [messier coefficient] (1/r^4) +
Unless the coefficient of the first term is zero, then, very far from the source the rest of the terms become negligible and the field drops off as the inverse cube (becoming a "magnetic dipole field"). (For electric fields the leading term is 1/r^2, not 1/r^3. This is because there are electric monopoles but not magnetic monopoles.)
The trick, then, and what these guys have presumably done, is to make the field really huge close to the magnet (using all those terms in the
(Disclaimer: yeah, yeah, this doesn't take into account matter in the way, and the magnetic field is a vector. But that doesn't change the basic idea.)
For the remainder of the (quite interesting) comment from which the above is taken, see this post...
...is for someone to implement moderation and karma for real life. So this sort of thing, and the others we always hear about, would be continually buried under a flood of (-1 WTF?), (-1 Hello, civil rights?), (-1 Contradicts laws of physics), and (-1 Just Plain Wrong), and fade, like the first posters, trolls, and goatse.cx links, into -2 obscurity...
You might look at the first text offered here, which is an introduction to advanced physics for freshmen modeled after the corresponding course at Yale. You're going to need a good calculus background to get the most out of it, but many sections should be quite interesting without it. A good bridge between physics at the advanced high school or introductory college level and the really fun (fun?) stuff.
I wonder what kind of use the data gathered from this experiment will have for computer scientists studying neural networks. By studying mechanisms of connection formation in the real thing, maybe we could improve the performance of computer neural networks. Of course, the opposite should hold as well, where we could better model the living brain in computers. Unfortunately, I would guess that the optical camera can't pick up on patterns of electrical activity, so we wouldn't gain insight into firing patterns as the network operates. IANA computer scientist, though; does anyone know how practical this would be?
Not exactly... the 34% quoted is the "external quantum efficiency" which I assume refers to the ratio of input photons to output electrons or something similar. On page 1122 of the article it reads, "The power efficiency maximum was 1.95% at 490 nm." This, naturally, doesn't really cut the mustard in comparison with silicon cells. ------------
IANAV[irologist], but here's my two cents anyway.
According to the CDC, Ebola is spread in the air in the laboratory but not, for practical purposes, in humans (yet). In the Africa outbreaks the disease was spread via contact with infected secretions and fluids.
It's long been held that the best strategy for a virus is to be as benign as possible, so that the host lives on to spread the disease and (in the case of humans) doesn't seek treatment. It's not hard to imagine that computer viruses would evolve similarly (who knows how many sleeping viruses there might be out there?). On the other hand, sometimes you wind up seeing selection for certain damaging traits if those traits help the virus multiply. (In the biological world, for example, viruses spread through the water supply often cause severe diahrrea, which damages the host but improves the chances of infecting more hosts. In the computer world, well, I think Code Red is a fine example...)
Does anyone know of attempts to use biological techniques to analyze or fight computer infections? I seem to remember something about a net-based immune-system like construction but I can't find it.
--------
The material itself isn't the biggest problem, since in COS you only deposit a thin film (10-100 nm) of it. The problem is the deposition technique which requires molecular beam epitaxy (think million-dollar finicky vacuum systems, trained operators, etc. etc.).