I agree that there is nothing special about the market. But state intervention can destroy a market. If He-3 had not been a state monopoly, a market would have developed - and might well have found cheaper ways of producing the desired commodity. And the current shortage may result in such a market appearing, in five or ten years. It is just a pity that it was not enabled to do so earlier
They made it for one purpose - building H-bombs. Once they had stockpiles of it, other more constructive uses were found for it. Then they more-or-less gave up the original purpose, so they abandoned the production line. precisely because there was no free market, the new uses had been getting a free ride from the bomb makers. When the bomb makers stopped producing it, the others were left flailing around. This is/precisely/ the kind of problem that arises when resources are allocated by the commands of bureaucrats instead of a market mechanism - the Soviet Union was full of it. The value of something is either ignored completely ir is frozen arbitrarily at some point early in the life of the product.
There was only one relevant accident. Bea struck a pedestrian - by her account because the sun was in her eyes, by the claimants account because she was facebooking. The first accident is only relevant in that it explains Volez position as a pedestrian where normally no pedestrian would be expected. He was uninjured in the first accident, but called 911 when the second accident, by Bea, cause injuries of which he subsequently died. Your assumption is that it was a car/car accident, or a one-car accident, not a car/pedestrian accident.
No. Energy created at the centre of the sun is absorbed and re-emitted many times before reaching the surface. Which is why it takes thousands of years to make the trip.
It is, however, transparent to neutrinos, which zip straight out
Lawyers making work for themselves. Once they have got all those IPs, they will get junior, just qualified legal staff to check laboriously through them. Said staff are paid $50/hour but billed at $250-500/hour. $$$ PROFIT $$$ for the partners in the legal practice.
Which suggests to me that these patents could quite possibly be invalidated by a good (but therefore expensive) search for prior art. These all strike me as things that have probably been done before, but probably in a rather different manner. For example, I am sure that someone has recorded multiple camera angles on a single medium (e.g. a Raid array) before, but you need a lawyer to find the appropriate language to say that, as a recording medium, a raid array is the equivalent of a Blu-Ray,
I think that DEC had lost it long before they were taken over by Compaq. One thing was cosmetic: they insisted that they were called "Digital" instead of the name everybody knew and loved them by, "DEC". But more importantly, they put their effort into increasingly large VAXes instead of the low end machines they had made their fortune on. They killed off the PDP-11 line, and had to bring it back because of customer demand. They has made their fortune on relatively simple boxes that people could use and abuse to their particular needs: you simply couldn't do that with their big VAXes. But you could do it with PCs, and people did, They invented more sophisticated internal busses, so it became much harder to build a board to add in to a system, at just the time the PC was making available a standard (albeit pretty crappy) bus for everybody. Basically, they left their territory and tried to move into IBM's at a time when IBM was losing it as well.
When I started, every engineer had a shelf or purple PDP-11 handbooks, even if they didn't used them. So when you were designing something, you could look up the DEC solution. Later, everybody had a shelf-full of PC book. But nobody who didn't really need it had a shelf-full of Vax book.
The problem is the appearance of putting in a "puppet" regime. While the populace, quite reasonably, want Mubarak out, they don't want a "US puppet" put in: they want to choose their own rulers. And given the US past history, any intervention however benevolent this time will be seen as US interference. The US, unfortunately, has considerable form in this area - in the Arab world, the current governments in both Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as US constructs, if not puppets; and they are but the latest in decades of well intentioned but not necessarily successful interventions. If the US threw in "full support", the people would quite possibly turn the US and elect anti-US politicians out of spite. Think of it like a "domestic", where the police intervene to stop a husband beating up his wife (or vice versa), and both husband and wife turn on the police.
No. Firstly, it is at least twice that (we can see things 14 bullion years old in bot directions), and secondly space has expanded since the light set out, so it was, as it were, running up the down escalator and had to travel further to get to us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
Indeed so, and there was a recent report of a galaxy being spotted that was formed when the Universe was only 480 million years old. The report said that this galaxy was red-shifted to the limit of the Hubble telescopes's range, so they don't expect to find any older ones until the James Webb goes up.
The 250 times is in relation to the sphere we can see, about 45 billion light years across.
As the name Relativity implies, that is no absolute space. It is all Relative. It is not meaningful to ask how fast we are moving through space, only how fast we are moving relative to some other thing. We can ask how fast the earth ism moving relative to the Sun, to Betelgeuse, to the Galactic Centre, to another Galaxy and so on - which is the same as asking how fast these things are moving relative to us. So you car cannot have a single "total speed", just speed relative tot the speed cop.
Similarly, time dilation effects are relative, not absolute. They say how one observer will se time behaving for another observer. There is no absolute time: time passes at different rates for observers in different frames of reference.
The limit on all (Special) relativistic distortions is the speed of light, As something approaches the speed of light, as seen by some fixed observer, its mass increases (so it finds it harder to accelerate even more)and its time slows down (which neatly conceals the slower acceleration from those on board) in such a way that you can never reache the speed of light or a dead stop to time: it would take a literally infinite amount of energy to do so.
No, the speed of light appears to be the one absolute. The speed of light is always the same. So, as the Univese expands, it takes longer and longer for light to travel between two particles which were once close together.
The trouble is that certainty is impossible. You can say that it is very, very unlikely, but no-one is ging to put his neck on the line and say that it is flat our impossible for a piece of consumer equipment (possibly malfunctioning) to bring down a plane.
However, I think the risk is lower than the risk of faulty battery packs shorting out and causing a fire which brings down the plane - a known risk. So if they allow laptops with batteries on the plane, they should also allow cellphones to be used: the risk, whatever it may be, is lower than a risk we are already accepting.
Or, much more insignificantly, when you are too old. I am in my 50s, and I saw how significantly my parent's lives changed when they had to stop driving in their 70s. If my car can manage to drive me to local shopping areas, long range transport nodes, other useful places like the doctor, and my friend's houses, it will make a dramatic difference to my quality of life in old age (provided I don't follow my mother into Alzheimer's). And there is just about long enough for it to get rolled out before I need it.
With respect to the current set of leaks, allegedly via Bradley Manning, I entirely agree. Even if one had an appropriate court and perfect witnesses, who would be prosecuted for the things revealed? Diplomats lie. Other diplomats know that. The Manning leaks are merely gossip, on an international rather than local scale.
This differs sharply from the earlier leaks of helicopters allegedly shooting down civilians. That could, in a perfect world, lead to trials for war crimes. In an imperfect world, they can at least be tried by public opinion.
The Manning leaks have severely damaged Wikileaks in my view. What they/were/ doing was revealing information in the public interest. What they/are/ doing is revealing information that the public is interested in, which is not at all the same thing. And Assange has become a publicity whore.
#5: So fire service will refuse to protect their house, police will refuse to defend them, they cannot get driving license, they cannot access the courts, children/parents cannot access life-critical Medicare/Medicaid. Sounds pretty Stalinist to me.
It is an overreaction to the report on 9/11, which showed that various different police and intelligence agencies had information which, if correlated, would have given a loud warning that something bad related to flying airplanes was being planned, and thus might have allowed preventive action. In the intelligence arena, you can never tell which bit of intelligence might match up with which other bit, So they reacted by building a huge database with absolutely everything in it. And then - the real mistake - they gradually opened the whole database up to more and more people. But it is very hard to decide, in such a huge and miscellaneous database intended to show up unexpected correlations, who is allowed to access what.
As occurred in a company I worked for, where an employee in one of the overseas sales offices responded to being dumped by his girlfriend by going into the office and throwing the computer with the main sales database into the canal. He wasn't. so far as I know, pissed of with the company but with the whole world. But the company suffered.
Backups? Outlying offices don't have IT staff who think of that. But a data recovery company retrieved the data - expensively.
Someone with a sense of grievance can take out their anger in strange ways.
It depends upon your application, but in many, quite a lot. One reason quoted for the popularity if the iPad is its "instant on". 1 second cold boot means 1 second from zero power consumption to operation. If it is a display in your car, you want it to start in a second.
Regrettably, I have seen factual reports from a fairly reliable source (The Economist) that exactly what GP said is happening, A lot of flood relief money is sticking to fingers or being routed to the preferted groups rather than the needy groups.
It may or may not be racist, but Pakistan has a pretty corrupt administration. The President used to be known as "Mr 10%", and many accusations of corruption have been made against him. He asserts, possibly correctly, that the accusations were political; on the other hand, it may be that his non-prosecution is political. Whichever way it is, it is an atmosphere in which heavyweight accusations of corruption are not enough to block a political career.
Very unlikely. This reports show energies in the MeV range, required to create electron/positron pairs. To create micro-black-holes requires energies in the TeV range, a million times higher. If those energies were around, as well as huge numbers of MeV positron gammas, you would also be seeing large quantities of GeV anti-proton gammas. And presumably the exploding micro-black-hole would have a fairly dramatic signal as well.
Yes, by a truly minute amount. On the other hand, the anti-matter came from energy, and the energy came from sunlight, and the sunlight was matter/energy arriving from the sun. So it is not contributing to a net weight loss from the earth.
And the amount is probably dwarfed by the steady trickle of atmosphere being lost into space.
I doubt strongly that they are being formed "without a matter counterpart". That would violate a number of cherished conservation rules. A positron/electron pair is formed when a gamma ray of sufficient energy passes close to a nucleus. But it would be difficult to detect the new electrons in the maelstrom of displaced electrons that is a thunderstorm, whereas the positrons are extremely distinctive,
I disagree. I am very mush in favour of the free market, but a free market needs full disclosure. I think the government definitely has a place in the market in defining and administering standards - which includes disclosure of interest. By all means let buyers make their own purchasing decisions, including to by, if they wish, substandard goods or goods endorsed by celebrities or whatever. But a market requires proper knowledge, and the consumer is at a huge disadvantage compared to large corporations unless the government steps in and forces disclosure on the corporations.
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I agree that there is nothing special about the market. But state intervention can destroy a market. If He-3 had not been a state monopoly, a market would have developed - and might well have found cheaper ways of producing the desired commodity. And the current shortage may result in such a market appearing, in five or ten years. It is just a pity that it was not enabled to do so earlier
They made it for one purpose - building H-bombs. Once they had stockpiles of it, other more constructive uses were found for it. Then they more-or-less gave up the original purpose, so they abandoned the production line. precisely because there was no free market, the new uses had been getting a free ride from the bomb makers. When the bomb makers stopped producing it, the others were left flailing around. This is /precisely/ the kind of problem that arises when resources are allocated by the commands of bureaucrats instead of a market mechanism - the Soviet Union was full of it. The value of something is either ignored completely ir is frozen arbitrarily at some point early in the life of the product.
There was only one relevant accident. Bea struck a pedestrian - by her account because the sun was in her eyes, by the claimants account because she was facebooking. The first accident is only relevant in that it explains Volez position as a pedestrian where normally no pedestrian would be expected. He was uninjured in the first accident, but called 911 when the second accident, by Bea, cause injuries of which he subsequently died. Your assumption is that it was a car/car accident, or a one-car accident, not a car/pedestrian accident.
No. Energy created at the centre of the sun is absorbed and re-emitted many times before reaching the surface. Which is why it takes thousands of years to make the trip.
It is, however, transparent to neutrinos, which zip straight out
Lawyers making work for themselves. Once they have got all those IPs, they will get junior, just qualified legal staff to check laboriously through them. Said staff are paid $50/hour but billed at $250-500/hour. $$$ PROFIT $$$ for the partners in the legal practice.
Which suggests to me that these patents could quite possibly be invalidated by a good (but therefore expensive) search for prior art. These all strike me as things that have probably been done before, but probably in a rather different manner. For example, I am sure that someone has recorded multiple camera angles on a single medium (e.g. a Raid array) before, but you need a lawyer to find the appropriate language to say that, as a recording medium, a raid array is the equivalent of a Blu-Ray,
I think that DEC had lost it long before they were taken over by Compaq. One thing was cosmetic: they insisted that they were called "Digital" instead of the name everybody knew and loved them by, "DEC". But more importantly, they put their effort into increasingly large VAXes instead of the low end machines they had made their fortune on. They killed off the PDP-11 line, and had to bring it back because of customer demand. They has made their fortune on relatively simple boxes that people could use and abuse to their particular needs: you simply couldn't do that with their big VAXes. But you could do it with PCs, and people did, They invented more sophisticated internal busses, so it became much harder to build a board to add in to a system, at just the time the PC was making available a standard (albeit pretty crappy) bus for everybody. Basically, they left their territory and tried to move into IBM's at a time when IBM was losing it as well.
When I started, every engineer had a shelf or purple PDP-11 handbooks, even if they didn't used them. So when you were designing something, you could look up the DEC solution. Later, everybody had a shelf-full of PC book. But nobody who didn't really need it had a shelf-full of Vax book.
The problem is the appearance of putting in a "puppet" regime. While the populace, quite reasonably, want Mubarak out, they don't want a "US puppet" put in: they want to choose their own rulers. And given the US past history, any intervention however benevolent this time will be seen as US interference. The US, unfortunately, has considerable form in this area - in the Arab world, the current governments in both Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as US constructs, if not puppets; and they are but the latest in decades of well intentioned but not necessarily successful interventions. If the US threw in "full support", the people would quite possibly turn the US and elect anti-US politicians out of spite. Think of it like a "domestic", where the police intervene to stop a husband beating up his wife (or vice versa), and both husband and wife turn on the police.
According to Wikipedia, they did predict the Saints, but 2008 was their miss: they predicted Giants as losing Superbowlers.
No. Firstly, it is at least twice that (we can see things 14 bullion years old in bot directions), and secondly space has expanded since the light set out, so it was, as it were, running up the down escalator and had to travel further to get to us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
Indeed so, and there was a recent report of a galaxy being spotted that was formed when the Universe was only 480 million years old. The report said that this galaxy was red-shifted to the limit of the Hubble telescopes's range, so they don't expect to find any older ones until the James Webb goes up.
The 250 times is in relation to the sphere we can see, about 45 billion light years across.
As the name Relativity implies, that is no absolute space. It is all Relative. It is not meaningful to ask how fast we are moving through space, only how fast we are moving relative to some other thing. We can ask how fast the earth ism moving relative to the Sun, to Betelgeuse, to the Galactic Centre, to another Galaxy and so on - which is the same as asking how fast these things are moving relative to us. So you car cannot have a single "total speed", just speed relative tot the speed cop.
Similarly, time dilation effects are relative, not absolute. They say how one observer will se time behaving for another observer. There is no absolute time: time passes at different rates for observers in different frames of reference.
The limit on all (Special) relativistic distortions is the speed of light, As something approaches the speed of light, as seen by some fixed observer, its mass increases (so it finds it harder to accelerate even more)and its time slows down (which neatly conceals the slower acceleration from those on board) in such a way that you can never reache the speed of light or a dead stop to time: it would take a literally infinite amount of energy to do so.
No, the speed of light appears to be the one absolute. The speed of light is always the same. So, as the Univese expands, it takes longer and longer for light to travel between two particles which were once close together.
The trouble is that certainty is impossible. You can say that it is very, very unlikely, but no-one is ging to put his neck on the line and say that it is flat our impossible for a piece of consumer equipment (possibly malfunctioning) to bring down a plane.
However, I think the risk is lower than the risk of faulty battery packs shorting out and causing a fire which brings down the plane - a known risk. So if they allow laptops with batteries on the plane, they should also allow cellphones to be used: the risk, whatever it may be, is lower than a risk we are already accepting.
I hope they never travel on those communist airlines.
Or, much more insignificantly, when you are too old. I am in my 50s, and I saw how significantly my parent's lives changed when they had to stop driving in their 70s. If my car can manage to drive me to local shopping areas, long range transport nodes, other useful places like the doctor, and my friend's houses, it will make a dramatic difference to my quality of life in old age (provided I don't follow my mother into Alzheimer's). And there is just about long enough for it to get rolled out before I need it.
With respect to the current set of leaks, allegedly via Bradley Manning, I entirely agree. Even if one had an appropriate court and perfect witnesses, who would be prosecuted for the things revealed? Diplomats lie. Other diplomats know that. The Manning leaks are merely gossip, on an international rather than local scale.
This differs sharply from the earlier leaks of helicopters allegedly shooting down civilians. That could, in a perfect world, lead to trials for war crimes. In an imperfect world, they can at least be tried by public opinion.
The Manning leaks have severely damaged Wikileaks in my view. What they /were/ doing was revealing information in the public interest. What they /are/ doing is revealing information that the public is interested in, which is not at all the same thing. And Assange has become a publicity whore.
#5: So fire service will refuse to protect their house, police will refuse to defend them, they cannot get driving license, they cannot access the courts, children/parents cannot access life-critical Medicare/Medicaid. Sounds pretty Stalinist to me.
It is an overreaction to the report on 9/11, which showed that various different police and intelligence agencies had information which, if correlated, would have given a loud warning that something bad related to flying airplanes was being planned, and thus might have allowed preventive action. In the intelligence arena, you can never tell which bit of intelligence might match up with which other bit, So they reacted by building a huge database with absolutely everything in it. And then - the real mistake - they gradually opened the whole database up to more and more people. But it is very hard to decide, in such a huge and miscellaneous database intended to show up unexpected correlations, who is allowed to access what.
As occurred in a company I worked for, where an employee in one of the overseas sales offices responded to being dumped by his girlfriend by going into the office and throwing the computer with the main sales database into the canal. He wasn't. so far as I know, pissed of with the company but with the whole world. But the company suffered.
Backups? Outlying offices don't have IT staff who think of that. But a data recovery company retrieved the data - expensively.
Someone with a sense of grievance can take out their anger in strange ways.
It depends upon your application, but in many, quite a lot. One reason quoted for the popularity if the iPad is its "instant on". 1 second cold boot means 1 second from zero power consumption to operation. If it is a display in your car, you want it to start in a second.
Regrettably, I have seen factual reports from a fairly reliable source (The Economist) that exactly what GP said is happening, A lot of flood relief money is sticking to fingers or being routed to the preferted groups rather than the needy groups.
It may or may not be racist, but Pakistan has a pretty corrupt administration. The President used to be known as "Mr 10%", and many accusations of corruption have been made against him. He asserts, possibly correctly, that the accusations were political; on the other hand, it may be that his non-prosecution is political. Whichever way it is, it is an atmosphere in which heavyweight accusations of corruption are not enough to block a political career.
Very unlikely. This reports show energies in the MeV range, required to create electron/positron pairs. To create micro-black-holes requires energies in the TeV range, a million times higher. If those energies were around, as well as huge numbers of MeV positron gammas, you would also be seeing large quantities of GeV anti-proton gammas. And presumably the exploding micro-black-hole would have a fairly dramatic signal as well.
Yes, by a truly minute amount. On the other hand, the anti-matter came from energy, and the energy came from sunlight, and the sunlight was matter/energy arriving from the sun. So it is not contributing to a net weight loss from the earth.
And the amount is probably dwarfed by the steady trickle of atmosphere being lost into space.
I doubt strongly that they are being formed "without a matter counterpart". That would violate a number of cherished conservation rules. A positron/electron pair is formed when a gamma ray of sufficient energy passes close to a nucleus. But it would be difficult to detect the new electrons in the maelstrom of displaced electrons that is a thunderstorm, whereas the positrons are extremely distinctive,
I disagree. I am very mush in favour of the free market, but a free market needs full disclosure. I think the government definitely has a place in the market in defining and administering standards - which includes disclosure of interest. By all means let buyers make their own purchasing decisions, including to by, if they wish, substandard goods or goods endorsed by celebrities or whatever. But a market requires proper knowledge, and the consumer is at a huge disadvantage compared to large corporations unless the government steps in and forces disclosure on the corporations.