Well, this has the feel of a location chosen by bureaucrats for political reasons rather than be engineers for practical reasons (sorry, I don't have much faith in the government of Canada).
However, the Baikonur Cosmodrome is 3 degrees further North and don't have much better weather. This hasn't stopped the Russian (and Soviet) space operations there for more than 50 years.
As a sysop, it was immensely frustrating to work with users who have no idea how computers work. They wanted somebody else to figure out what they had to do and if something unexpected happened they wouldn't think through it. As a mathematician, it's immensely frustrating to teach non-majors who strongly object to having to think (or understand) anything -- they want to be given algorithms they can apply (and don't realize that these algorithms only work for exam problems specifically engineered for their benefit). In ordinary life, it amazing to meet people who drive everyday but have no idea how their car works. My girlfriend just showed my an advert for a product lined with Gore-Tex which explains that the membrane is permeable to "water vapour" molecules (hence is breathable), but blocks the much larger "moisture" molecules (and thus waterproof).
The truth is that people simply don't care to think about anything around them. They don't stop to think "why does this work?" "what does it mean?" and similar questions. Since most people seem to do fine without being universally curious, I try to accept it even if it galls me every time. You can see this when people complain "gadget X doens't do what I want it to do". You rarely see people try to make the gadget behave to their desires. If offered a product that suits them, they're happy, but very few people feel the need to force the world to fit them rather than the other way around.
TFA explains that they are publishing a series of papers. The quoted paragraph is about results on Neon and Argon which were published in Science. Other results were published elsewhere, such as Space Science Reviews.
Actually, even if Radiohead lost some, it would still a mean that a lot more people got to enjoy the music. In other words, the benefit to society was orders of magnitude bigger than the alternative (where most of the benefit would go to the record label). I think I'm beginning to believe Ray Beckerman's insistence that the record labels are history.
It's bad enough on trains and busses. Also, I don't think airline staff (that is the flight attentands) will want to mediate the disputes between people loudly yapping on the phone and people who want to sleep quietly. I suspect that till now the airlines were rather thappy to say "the government says you can't use your phone" and not have to worry about this. In the future they'll have to come down on one side or the other.
If Bush failed to uphold the Constitution, he can be impeached (that is, tried) by Congress. I doubt that this will happen. In this case though it's not Bush but rather Congress that is enacting inappropriately. The solution here is to vote them out in the upcoming election.
The constitution prohibits "ex post facto" laws, but this clearly refers to laws which criminalize what was not criminal at the time, not laws which de-criminalize what was criminal at the time. This "immunity" law enhanced the provincial atmosphere of the US congress, where individual bills are rampant and particular interests trump national issues. The US excepted I haven't encountered countries where laws are commonly passed which, on their terms, apply to only one person or only one company.
Ms. Fiorina's past behaviour notwithstanding, the story submission is rather incendiary. Surely a more civil account of the situation could have bdeen found?
I'm a scientist too (well, a mathematician). Let me tell you: if you can explain what you did in three sentences then either you work in an extremely new field (analytical chemistry in the 18th century; discrete mathematics in the 1930s), or you are lying to your audience. In three sentences I can lie in various ways and give an impression of what I did. You can talk about what was done in the very beginning of the field ("number theory is about prime numbers"), about vague intuition ("quantum particles are sort-of smeared along their trajectory, they don't follow an exact path"), or something similar. To me this feels like lying to the listener. The correct answer to "what did you do?" is "I can't tell you, but here is where we came from way back when...". After 2500 years of thinking about number theory (and 500 years of thinking about gravity), we made a lot of progress. But the price is that the kind of number theory (and gravity) we think about today cannot be easily explained.
As an exercise you can try explaining topological confinement of plasma, or even the workings of the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
A "keen interest" is nice, so is a "sharp mind", but nothing short of a serious degree in the field is useful.
I am a research mathematician; I've also done research in physics (where I have a B.Sc. and have taken some graduate courses).
Almost every science article I read trying to discuss results in these fields is bad beyond words. The words "utter crap" hardly begin to describe how bad they are. The writers so completely fail to grasp what the scientists are talking about that their writing it at best devoid of content and usually simply doesn't make sense. To add insult to injury the description of researchers and research are stereotypical rather than factual, and mostly serve to perpetuate myths rather than to give an impression of what science really is like.
The truth is, of course, that it is nearly impossible to understand current research in many fields. We've been working on problems in number theory for over 2500 years. We have made a lot of progress, but you can't understand what a modern number theorist is talking about without learning the ideas that have been developed to tackle number theory since then (hint: this is a large fraction of mathematics). This is not to say that it's always impossible to give a vague impression of what the number theorist is doing to an average person (though mostly, it is). However, the translation cannot be based on an average mathematician trying to talk at a "sharp-minded" journalist with the hope of information being transmitted. The person doing the translation must be a mathematician with a flair for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians (people like Barry Mazur and Tim Gowers come to mind), and the reporter must have some mathematics. Otherwise what was a coherent explanation from the mathematician becomes completely garbled after paraphrasing and editing by the reporter.
Of course, this situation is difficult for scientists who'd like the public to pay for what they do (luckily, mathematics is cheap to do and we get paid for teaching calculus to students who don't need it), especially theoretical physicists. I know far more physics than the average person and yet cannot understand most of what a theoretical physicist is talking about.
PS: Note that you can't understand where current philosophy is coming from, or why they say what they say, without knowing what the philosophers of the past wrote. Perhaps this is why no journalist is trying to write about current trends in the philosophy of identity or of language.
From the point of view of SCO's execs, this has been a pump-and-dump scheme: they filed the IBM (and Novell) lawsuits, got the stock to soar on the hype and in the years since have been quietly selling their stock. But there are others with a stake here (remember all the cash infusions MS arranged?), who probably want the lawsuits to continue. I wonder what the judge thinks now about Novell's motion for a constructive trust?
Is anyone familiar with the patents in question? Are they as general as "email on a handheld device via cellular network", or more specific? In other words, are they patenting an idea (algorithm, protocol, business method) or something tangible (the keyboard layout) ?
To clear up some confusion: this wrangling has nothing to do with Microsoft's own software. This is with regard to Microsoft's possible distribution of other people's software. To cut the long story short, Microsoft entered into a deal with Novell that could be construed as making them distributors of SuSE Linux, a distribution which includes much software created by the FSF. Futures versions of SuSE might include FSF code licensed under the GPLv3, at which point if Microsoft distributes the software they should be bound by that license (till then most of SuSE Linux is goverend by GPLv2). In a press release, Microsoft tried to distance itself from this possibility by claiming that their deal with Novell would not make Microsoft the distributor, but Novell, at which point indeed they won't be bound by the GPL. The FSF is clarifying that, to the extent Microsoft will distribute their code, they will be bound by the GPL. The FSF is also saying that they might disagree with Microsoft about who is the distributor in fact. That last part is where the lawyers take to the field and the sane people stay home to write code.
Skype is a realtime app (in both a2d and d2a directions). Interrupt statistics, CPU loads etc are vital for the app to decide what quality of encoding/decoding it can afford to do.
Regarding/etc/{passwd,group} others have pointed out this is probably for the GECOS info of the current user. Should be easy to check using a debugger - just need to recompile the C library.
To me, the oddest part is the wholesale reading of mozilla and firefox profiles.
With a reply of "the machine is not that strong" it sounds like the engineering was done on paper. It doesn't take that much force to break an arm -- it's a question of torque more than force, and I'd bet the machine has plenty of leverage.
in IR, UV and X-ray frequencies... so what radiation is he seeing from 3km under the water? (not to speak of 75m into the earth).
Theory is nice and fine, but until it is verified by experiment I'd take it with a grain of salt.
That journals accept anything but TeX/LaTeX. Of course some still accept typewritten documents (with a transcription fee), but if you have access to a computer why use Word (or OO writer) for serious writing?
We've been through this before, but why would the user benefit from multiple standards when they are essentially equivalent? The user does not interact with the document on the disk. He interacts with a computer program -- so there is a natural room for competition in the field of word processors, which benefits the user. In fact, a single accepted office document format will simplify this competition and hence help the user.
A design competition for file formats would persumably benefit programmers who write word processors. But once the design is fixed, they too would rather implement one format rather than two. Again, the word processor has an internal representation of the data, and reading/writing to disk can be done in many ways. Of course, having the format be a dump of the internal (binary) data structures of your program would be a big boost -- but that can hardly be said to foster competition.
Obviously the charge of an electron is constant (in case you get confused eV is a measurement of velocity, not charge). What we use in computers today is the QUANTITY of electrons "flowing" (these days tunnelling may be a better term) through non-conductive layers.
Man, there are so many errors here I don't know where to begin. The Electron-Volt (eV) is a unit of energy (the work required to move an electron across a potential different of one Volt). Digital computers do not depend on the magnitude of the current, but on its abssence or presence. In fact, the goal is to have as little current as possible (less losses due to heat and radiation) -- we are nearing single-electron transistors. "Spintronics" would instead carry the information in the spin state (up or down) of an electron. The reference to "charge" probably stems from memory, where information is stored in the magnetization state of a small amount of matter.
The blurb above looks like a Dr. Evil quote -- I assume you realize that "14 trillion eV" is a miniscule amount of energy? It's about 2 micro Joules, or.5 microcalories.
On the scale of a single particle, this is a tremendous amount of energy (for comparison, the energy scale for chemical reactions such as combustion is a few eV). Imprtaing so much energy to a particle (as well as powering the detectors, cooling appartus etc) means the whole collider has a massive energy budget -- way way bigger than 14 trillion eV, or even <gasp>one Joule</gasp>. Actually, the power required (tens to of Megawatts, enough for a small city) is more impressive than the total energy expended (not so much since the energy is expended over a very short time).
That's for a highly informative post. In particular, I was wondering why it was the function of Congress to investigate scientific fraud. Certainly if they pay for energy research they want to find out what the results are.
One remark: any fusion will be hot in your sense. "Cold fusion" means that most of the apparatus is at room temperature (compare the device in question with a Tokamak).
If your car is powered by the annihilation of elementary particles and anti-particles, kudos to you. For myself, I'm not sure to what extent these objects deserve to be called ``stars''.
I think you are making an unfair comparison. Suppose someone has been doing good genuine research for years. Then it turns out they didn't have the BA they claimed they did when applying to grad school. Who cares? The research is still there, and it's still good -- and that's the main job requirement, right? Whatever the person did 28 years ago is irrelevant. Should this professor sit on the graduate admissions committee? perhaps not. But why shouldn't they run a lab?
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Who built their Cosmodrome 3 degrees further North in Baikonur.
Well, this has the feel of a location chosen by bureaucrats for political reasons rather than be engineers for practical reasons (sorry, I don't have much faith in the government of Canada).
However, the Baikonur Cosmodrome is 3 degrees further North and don't have much better weather. This hasn't stopped the Russian (and Soviet) space operations there for more than 50 years.
As a sysop, it was immensely frustrating to work with users who have no idea how computers work. They wanted somebody else to figure out what they had to do and if something unexpected happened they wouldn't think through it. As a mathematician, it's immensely frustrating to teach non-majors who strongly object to having to think (or understand) anything -- they want to be given algorithms they can apply (and don't realize that these algorithms only work for exam problems specifically engineered for their benefit). In ordinary life, it amazing to meet people who drive everyday but have no idea how their car works. My girlfriend just showed my an advert for a product lined with Gore-Tex which explains that the membrane is permeable to "water vapour" molecules (hence is breathable), but blocks the much larger "moisture" molecules (and thus waterproof).
The truth is that people simply don't care to think about anything around them. They don't stop to think "why does this work?" "what does it mean?" and similar questions. Since most people seem to do fine without being universally curious, I try to accept it even if it galls me every time. You can see this when people complain "gadget X doens't do what I want it to do". You rarely see people try to make the gadget behave to their desires. If offered a product that suits them, they're happy, but very few people feel the need to force the world to fit them rather than the other way around.
TFA explains that they are publishing a series of papers. The quoted paragraph is about results on Neon and Argon which were published in Science. Other results were published elsewhere, such as Space Science Reviews.
Are you claiming that those who don't have computers would be better off if the album was available at the stores for $15 instead?
Actually, even if Radiohead lost some, it would still a mean that a lot more people got to enjoy the music. In other words, the benefit to society was orders of magnitude bigger than the alternative (where most of the benefit would go to the record label). I think I'm beginning to believe Ray Beckerman's insistence that the record labels are history.
Second that!
It's bad enough on trains and busses. Also, I don't think airline staff (that is the flight attentands) will want to mediate the disputes between people loudly yapping on the phone and people who want to sleep quietly. I suspect that till now the airlines were rather thappy to say "the government says you can't use your phone" and not have to worry about this. In the future they'll have to come down on one side or the other.
If Bush failed to uphold the Constitution, he can be impeached (that is, tried) by Congress. I doubt that this will happen. In this case though it's not Bush but rather Congress that is enacting inappropriately. The solution here is to vote them out in the upcoming election. The constitution prohibits "ex post facto" laws, but this clearly refers to laws which criminalize what was not criminal at the time, not laws which de-criminalize what was criminal at the time. This "immunity" law enhanced the provincial atmosphere of the US congress, where individual bills are rampant and particular interests trump national issues. The US excepted I haven't encountered countries where laws are commonly passed which, on their terms, apply to only one person or only one company.
Ms. Fiorina's past behaviour notwithstanding, the story submission is rather incendiary. Surely a more civil account of the situation could have bdeen found?
I'm a scientist too (well, a mathematician). Let me tell you: if you can explain what you did in three sentences then either you work in an extremely new field (analytical chemistry in the 18th century; discrete mathematics in the 1930s), or you are lying to your audience. In three sentences I can lie in various ways and give an impression of what I did. You can talk about what was done in the very beginning of the field ("number theory is about prime numbers"), about vague intuition ("quantum particles are sort-of smeared along their trajectory, they don't follow an exact path"), or something similar. To me this feels like lying to the listener. The correct answer to "what did you do?" is "I can't tell you, but here is where we came from way back when ...". After 2500 years of thinking about number theory (and 500 years of thinking about gravity), we made a lot of progress. But the price is that the kind of number theory (and gravity) we think about today cannot be easily explained.
As an exercise you can try explaining topological confinement of plasma, or even the workings of the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
A "keen interest" is nice, so is a "sharp mind", but nothing short of a serious degree in the field is useful.
I am a research mathematician; I've also done research in physics (where I have a B.Sc. and have taken some graduate courses).
Almost every science article I read trying to discuss results in these fields is bad beyond words. The words "utter crap" hardly begin to describe how bad they are. The writers so completely fail to grasp what the scientists are talking about that their writing it at best devoid of content and usually simply doesn't make sense. To add insult to injury the description of researchers and research are stereotypical rather than factual, and mostly serve to perpetuate myths rather than to give an impression of what science really is like.
The truth is, of course, that it is nearly impossible to understand current research in many fields. We've been working on problems in number theory for over 2500 years. We have made a lot of progress, but you can't understand what a modern number theorist is talking about without learning the ideas that have been developed to tackle number theory since then (hint: this is a large fraction of mathematics). This is not to say that it's always impossible to give a vague impression of what the number theorist is doing to an average person (though mostly, it is). However, the translation cannot be based on an average mathematician trying to talk at a "sharp-minded" journalist with the hope of information being transmitted. The person doing the translation must be a mathematician with a flair for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians (people like Barry Mazur and Tim Gowers come to mind), and the reporter must have some mathematics. Otherwise what was a coherent explanation from the mathematician becomes completely garbled after paraphrasing and editing by the reporter.
Of course, this situation is difficult for scientists who'd like the public to pay for what they do (luckily, mathematics is cheap to do and we get paid for teaching calculus to students who don't need it), especially theoretical physicists. I know far more physics than the average person and yet cannot understand most of what a theoretical physicist is talking about.
PS: Note that you can't understand where current philosophy is coming from, or why they say what they say, without knowing what the philosophers of the past wrote. Perhaps this is why no journalist is trying to write about current trends in the philosophy of identity or of language.
From the point of view of SCO's execs, this has been a pump-and-dump scheme: they filed the IBM (and Novell) lawsuits, got the stock to soar on the hype and in the years since have been quietly selling their stock. But there are others with a stake here (remember all the cash infusions MS arranged?), who probably want the lawsuits to continue. I wonder what the judge thinks now about Novell's motion for a constructive trust?
Is anyone familiar with the patents in question? Are they as general as "email on a handheld device via cellular network", or more specific? In other words, are they patenting an idea (algorithm, protocol, business method) or something tangible (the keyboard layout) ?
The analysis of the trojan already showed that it phoned home. Of course the point of this was to gather data.
To clear up some confusion: this wrangling has nothing to do with Microsoft's own software. This is with regard to Microsoft's possible distribution of other people's software. To cut the long story short, Microsoft entered into a deal with Novell that could be construed as making them distributors of SuSE Linux, a distribution which includes much software created by the FSF. Futures versions of SuSE might include FSF code licensed under the GPLv3, at which point if Microsoft distributes the software they should be bound by that license (till then most of SuSE Linux is goverend by GPLv2). In a press release, Microsoft tried to distance itself from this possibility by claiming that their deal with Novell would not make Microsoft the distributor, but Novell, at which point indeed they won't be bound by the GPL. The FSF is clarifying that, to the extent Microsoft will distribute their code, they will be bound by the GPL. The FSF is also saying that they might disagree with Microsoft about who is the distributor in fact. That last part is where the lawyers take to the field and the sane people stay home to write code.
Skype is a realtime app (in both a2d and d2a directions). Interrupt statistics, CPU loads etc are vital for the app to decide what quality of encoding/decoding it can afford to do.
/etc/{passwd,group} others have pointed out this is probably for the GECOS info of the current user. Should be easy to check using a debugger - just need to recompile the C library.
Regarding
To me, the oddest part is the wholesale reading of mozilla and firefox profiles.
With a reply of "the machine is not that strong" it sounds like the engineering was done on paper. It doesn't take that much force to break an arm -- it's a question of torque more than force, and I'd bet the machine has plenty of leverage.
in IR, UV and X-ray frequencies ... so what radiation is he seeing from 3km under the water? (not to speak of 75m into the earth).
Theory is nice and fine, but until it is verified by experiment I'd take it with a grain of salt.
That journals accept anything but TeX/LaTeX. Of course some still accept typewritten documents (with a transcription fee), but if you have access to a computer why use Word (or OO writer) for serious writing?
A design competition for file formats would persumably benefit programmers who write word processors. But once the design is fixed, they too would rather implement one format rather than two. Again, the word processor has an internal representation of the data, and reading/writing to disk can be done in many ways. Of course, having the format be a dump of the internal (binary) data structures of your program would be a big boost -- but that can hardly be said to foster competition.
Man, there are so many errors here I don't know where to begin. The Electron-Volt (eV) is a unit of energy (the work required to move an electron across a potential different of one Volt). Digital computers do not depend on the magnitude of the current, but on its abssence or presence. In fact, the goal is to have as little current as possible (less losses due to heat and radiation) -- we are nearing single-electron transistors. "Spintronics" would instead carry the information in the spin state (up or down) of an electron. The reference to "charge" probably stems from memory, where information is stored in the magnetization state of a small amount of matter.
The blurb above looks like a Dr. Evil quote -- I assume you realize that "14 trillion eV" is a miniscule amount of energy? It's about 2 micro Joules, or .5 microcalories.
On the scale of a single particle, this is a tremendous amount of energy (for comparison, the energy scale for chemical reactions such as combustion is a few eV). Imprtaing so much energy to a particle (as well as powering the detectors, cooling appartus etc) means the whole collider has a massive energy budget -- way way bigger than 14 trillion eV, or even <gasp>one Joule</gasp>. Actually, the power required (tens to of Megawatts, enough for a small city) is more impressive than the total energy expended (not so much since the energy is expended over a very short time).
That's for a highly informative post. In particular, I was wondering why it was the function of Congress to investigate scientific fraud. Certainly if they pay for energy research they want to find out what the results are. One remark: any fusion will be hot in your sense. "Cold fusion" means that most of the apparatus is at room temperature (compare the device in question with a Tokamak).
If your car is powered by the annihilation of elementary particles and anti-particles, kudos to you. For myself, I'm not sure to what extent these objects deserve to be called ``stars''.
I think you are making an unfair comparison. Suppose someone has been doing good genuine research for years. Then it turns out they didn't have the BA they claimed they did when applying to grad school. Who cares? The research is still there, and it's still good -- and that's the main job requirement, right? Whatever the person did 28 years ago is irrelevant. Should this professor sit on the graduate admissions committee? perhaps not. But why shouldn't they run a lab?