Some energy is lost as heat when you break the bonds, and inefficiencies in the electrical systems also dissipate some energy. The amount of energy in breaking and forming the bonds is constant, yes, but any paractical system to do that will lose some energy in the process so that you end up a net loss.
Of course H2 can still be worthwhile if the amount lost is small and the value as an energy storage medium can be made high enough.
Drat. As someone pointed out, I misspoke and somehow managed to reverse the issue of who was speaking for the long travel and life spans on CFCs.
Those SUPPORTING CFC controls say that they are persistent in the environment and take years to reach the upper atmosphere. Those OPPOSED to controls or just plain NUETRAL, say that they don't know the time span involved.
Don't know how I managed to get that backward when writing it down. Brain fart I guess. Sorry.
Other people have said important things about about differences in the world in the age of the dinosaurs and how you can't destroy the earth but you might make it hard to live on, but I want to add one more.
The highest known levels of CO2, in fact a jump to around 10 times the modern value (IIRC) occurred prior to the age of dinosaurs and is correlated with the extinction of 90% of all species alive at that time. Of course it's not neccesarily causal and might just be a side-effect of whatever killed all those species, but I would be very leary of supporting arbitrary changes in CO2.
A little CO2 increase might have a net positive impact, but I would certainly want to take it slow and not be uncontrolled. Besides I'm not sure I want to live in a world like the one the dinosaurs lived in.
Okay, I don't know that the ozone hole is principally man-made, or all the potentially natural causes involved. I do know that if human CFCs are up there then they will be causing problems for ozone. Since chlorine and bromine act as catalysts for the break down of ozone, they don't need to be present in large amounts to have a large impact.
An interesting question to ask though is where does that 40, 50, 60, 100 years number for travel time and pontency time of CFCs come from. Not surprisingly it comes from those opposed to controls on CFCs. What do people promoting those controls say? If they are honest, they typically say something along the lines of "we haven't the foggiest clue". Before the ozone hole no one really had any expereince with gas diffusion on this scale. And you are kidding yourself if you think anyone in either camp has a really good understanding of high level atmospheric chemistry, they don't. There are constant surprises.
Similar but not directly related, the experience with the carbon cycle suggests that those the numbers for CFCs might be significantly high. Scientists want to know how fast carbon replenishes itself in the low atmosphere, or equivalently how long it takes before the majority of CO2 emitted today is returned to the biosphere. Prevailing theoretical wisdom pegged this number at around 20-30 years, but recent experimental evidence is giving a number more like 4 years. I could believe that the estimates on CFCs were similarly too large.
Ultimately though, if CFCs can reach up that high then they will cause damage. Whether they are a primary (or even a significant) cause of depletion is hard to tell, but the ozone layer will probably be better off that we aren't using them. The issue of the ozone hole won't be resolved by people like us sitting on slashdot, it may be though by people who go out and see if the levels of pollutants in the upper Antartic atmosphere actually are dropping off.
Sunlight naturally converts some oxygen to ozone in the upper atmosphere. Problem is that when CFCs and other chemicals are present, they eat up ozone far faster than it is typically produced.
Ozone is harder to produce and easier to break down when it is cold, which is one reason ozone is at its lowest levels over the poles in winter (also when there is a deficit of sunlight). The poles are also especially vulnerable because global wind patterns circle around them rather then refreshing the air. Even the most stubborn air pollutants will break down or become absorbed by the environment if we stop pumping them out and give the Earth time to get back to normal.
It's simple. Human kind is in race between the forces that make weapons of mass destruction easier to make and more accessible and the forces that bring international community and universal peace.
So far only a few people have access to nuclear weapons and those people have managed to act with reasonable, intelligent constraint. More people have access to anthrax and unfortunately not all of them are so enlightened. Similarly it is not hard to make a truck bomb and certainly some people with that skill still carry malice in their hearts.
The progress of technology seems to be such, that some day the knowledge and tools needed to make a weapon capable of killing millions will fall into the hands of common adults. The question is whether humanity can progress in the pursuit of sanity and mutual respect before we bring doomsday down on our heads.
I'm an optimist about human nature and a pessimist about nanotech and genetic weapon tech, so I'd like to hope we have a chance.
I was wondering when someone was going to mention that...
I have a friend that seriously claims to a be reincarnation of Tesla, and she will "authoritatively" tell you that he never meant to cause as much damage as he did. Needless to say, I don't think she will be looking to seriously at any new asteroid or comet evidence.
Congratulations, you've stumbled on the ages old conflict between determinism and free will.
Maybe you have no free will? There is a whole school of philosophy that argues free will is an illusion and we are all really automatons.
However, determinism went out of vogue with the maturity of quantum mechanics. There is a body of evidence (called the No Hidden Variable Argument) that makes a well accepted case that quantum mechanics truly is random from the point of view of everyone inside the universe. In particular the argument goes that waves are not merely a mathematical tool for judging where a point particle might be, but in fact the wave IS the particle and it IS spread out everywhere that the wave allows, simultaneously. Thus there are no true point-particles only wave-particles.
Randomness comes in through what is refered to as "measurement", waves are allowed to exist in multiple states spread across a significant region, but under certain conditions they collapse to a single state often having a point-like size. According to the best known quantum mechanics this process is neccesarily random to everything inside the universe, because there are NO factors that one could know that would tell you which state it will end up in among all the states allowed. How the quantum state actually decides is beside the question because nothing in the universe can ever have access to information that will tell you about the process.
Whether God rolls dice, or there is so guiding over will, or even a deterministic mathematical function, doesn't matter because we will experience it as random. Also, it is important to note, that whatever principle governs the evolution of quantum states, it maintains the strict probablity distributions. There is no evidence that God (or whatever) ever decides to evolve all the particles in a way that would appear unrandom and not follow the probablity functions.
This whole discussion allows free will a loop hole. If your soul or some other guiding influence exists outside the realm measurable to us and directs the evolution of certain QM states, then it can have an impact on this world. Note that the fact that there appears to be true randomness in the universe does not imply there has to be free will, after all God could just roll dice and not give you any more real control over your life. Of course QM might get replaced someday by a theory that doesn't involve unknowable processes...
One last comment, true free will has to come from outside the chain of causation. If you want to include free will then you have to insert it somewhere where there plausibly is no connection between the cause and a specific effect, thus giving the will something to choose (which effect, ie which quantum state). There is also a whole discussion about false free will, or "good enough" free will which deals with the appearance of choice resulting from chaotic and complicated circumstances that could never be fully understood. It's chaotic, so I could never understand it well enough to accurately predict it's behavior so I might as well treat it as if it has free choice. Not exactly what you want, but it maybe ultimately all we have.
You're right that "dark matter" does get used in the sense of things that aren't emmitting enough light for us to see. The article in question however is using it exclusively in the sense of (non-baryonic) matter which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation and thus can never emit light. Things in this category would be exotics such as nuetrinos, WIMPs, and a variety of other things.
For the record the bright objects we see account for about 3-6% of the needed gravity. Dark normal objects are guessed to account for 4-20%. Nuetrinos probably make up around 10%. Anything left over either has to be accounted for either by exotic dark matter or by a serious reaccounting of the above categories.
What caused the big bang? How was it initiated? What were the bounds of the "universe" as it were before the big bang?
Sometimes bored physicists do try to give serious thought to this. Being a physicist, I've sometimes gotten to listen to what others consider to be serious thoughts on the matter.
Basically there are too camps, people that want the universe to be timeless and exist forever and people that want the Big Bang to be the ultimate start of things. People in the first group will given you various stories about the cyclical nature of the universe (usually expand, collapse, repeat), or some notion of universes spawning other universes, ad infinitum.
People who believe that the Big Bang was THE START of things tend to either believe it to be uncaused, caused by God, or unknowable and irrelevant. There are a few however in this camp that try to posit explanations of what did cause the universe out of nothing. Some bring in exotic theories (such as string theory) to try and construct physical laws that can hold before, during, and after a big bang event. Of course these people also have to change the nature of a big bang away from that strictly based on general relativity (which implicitly prevents any meaningful reference to a "before" the big bang).
One of the most interesting stories I've heard is that the fabric of space has the property of being unstable in a total absence of energy, and at any moment and any location, there is infinitesimal but non zero probablity that it will transition to a different state which has energy, which then billows out into the rest of the universe. So basically the vaccuum has certain properties that exist forever and are timeless, and the big bang has a chance of spontaneously erupting simply because it has never happened. Hence the universe, as we expereince it, has a single well defined start within a larger timeless existence.
As absurd as this might sound, this is quite serious, and as reasonable as many other things people say about "before" the big bang.
Ultimately though, it only transfers the problem of first cause to the "fabric of the universe" and the basic physical laws governing everything. While science may be able to tell you that something is NOT the first cause, it can never say with certainty that something IS the first cause. As far as I'm concerned, whether you choose to believe that the chain of causation goes infinitely backward or has some definably beggining, is a matter of faith.
Everything has a reason, even if it is a loophole. God either does or does not exist, but there is a reason for it. The big bang theory either is or is not true, but there is a reason for it.
Here's the loophole in your argument.
According to Godel's incompleteness theorem, in every nontrivial logical system there exist statements which are either simultaneously true and false (such systems are generally frowned on) or are impossible to prove either true or false.
Mathematics is one of the later. Thus there are statements in mathematics which can be written down but never proved true or false (no easily explained examples exist). It's possible that such a property can be correct, in that it does hold in all possible cases without being able to prove that it does, and of course we can't actually test all cases to know that way.
By extention it doesn't follow that there is neccesarily a reason for the big bang being true or not true. There doesn't strictly have to be any explanation for why it is the way it is.
Of course this is a somewhat silly argument because there probably is a good deal that can be explained about the big bang, and much of science rests on inference and not proof (in the mathematical sense), but it is interesting that even in mathematics there are things for which there can be no reason (ie. proof).
The truth is that there are actually plenty of times when a 386 running qbasic is _exactly_ what is needed for the job
I didn't mean to imply anything to the contrary. Sure it's the right tool for the right job and old computers can be very useful in the labratory environment. When I said it was "disturbing", I just meant the scale of the thing. Computers were invented in research labs and it seems like many of them go back there to die. And lots of those old computers serve as general purpose controllers via qbasic, because of it's ease and excellent serial port tools.
I got my degree in physics, and you're right that off the shell hardware can be a great cost cutting measure. It's honestly disturbing how many times I've seen data collection run on something like a 386 using QBASIC.
The thing to learn though is that consumer hardware is not scientific hardware. There is rarely much quality control with regards to specs, even when they are available. If this hardware is going to be the dominant error source you probably shouldn't be using it in the first place. As tedious as it can be, it's a good idea to test the specification of ANY piece of hardware that you are adding to a research lab, whenever reasonable to do so. I still remember wasting two days of my life because the magnetometer was disturbingly off spec, and that was a serious research tool.
How do you test scanners and cameras? Clearly by scanning and photographing known objects. If you're just scanning diffraction patterns and stuff like that, then find a couple well known, well understood such effects and use them as your benchmark. It's also possible to buy high quality gray scales and precisely known grids to use as references.
The lesson here is, don't use cheap equipment when it will be the dominant error source (preferably use it in parts of the experiment that contribute neglibly to your overall error), and TEST all your equipment and quit relying on spec sheets for anything important. Publication retractions that read the equivalent of "Oops! There really isn't any effect here, but we were too lazy to get it right." are very funny, but won't do anything good for your career.
I'm not sure it's actually funny, but it should earn me idiocy points.
While reading the article I stuck my hand inside my case to get a feel for the air flow, and managed to nick the tip of my finger against the heat sink fan. Ouch. No apparent damage to my finger or the fan, but sure did make me jump.
For those who are wondering why I had an open case, I've been replacing a partially failed hard drive (IBM Deskstar at that, lasted 14 months).
Until I read that part of the article, I thought the guy might have some sense. After the ramble of bits and atoms coming together, I was forced to conclude that this guy fits in the same category as telephone psychics. He provides vaguely interesting impractical information about what he thinks you want to hear or are afraid to hear. Some of the things he says get just plain weird after he strays from 3G and broadband, and what he has to say in those arenas is hardly original to begin with.
For my part, I have a problem with much of the tech that gets put into toys, because it tends to decrease the value of the thing as a toy. For instance stuffed animals with flashing lights and speech capabilities aren't the ones kids take to bed because no one likes feeling the hard boxes inside, nor the distractions of mechanisms that won't turn off. Some electronic toys are so complicated and inflexible that they aren't worth the trouble of playing with or learning to use. Toys which are so inflexible as to only do one trick (and insist on doing regardless of what the child wants) will end up at the bottom of the closet shortly after having demonstrated their one trick.
If all you have to get past are other students, then carrying anything that looks like a present works pretty well for getting into girl's dorms. Assumming you are trying to meet up with someone in particular, and you know where in the building they are, it's not hard to get complete strangers to escort you.
Thankfully most dorms are becoming coed which only makes things easier.;-)
Sneakers was a really good movie, especially since it tried hard to be authentic. Not quite perfect perhaps, but a lot better than most technology / computer movies out there.
Even the math behind the black box was reasonable. Which is to say that it's conceivable that one could find the right group theory construction to rapidly factor numbers of arbitrary size, but no one's figured out how (nor have they shown it can't work). The movie happily tells you that he's done it without saying anything meaningful about how its done.
It would censorship if they started intentionally excluding certain websites or keywords from their free service. Google is under no obligation to include all material on the web for free. For instance they could decide not to include content from high profile sites (such newspapers, technical archives, etc.) within their free service. More likely they might move indexes for technical keywords within a subscription service, and display a message telling you how to sign up if you tried searching for those words on their free system.
I'm not saying they would, but I just hope they can find enough new content streams to provide a basis for subscriptions rather than limiting the existing free service.
Yeah, they really will have to add new content to get this to work. Hopely there is enough added value in periodicals, internal corporate materials and other sources to make it worthwhile to people.
What strikes me though is that they will have to add content which can't be available in the basic search. After all there is no reason to pay for specialty service, if what you want shows up as #3 on their free service. In this regard their technology is almost too good, and makes it hard to come up with information that isn't already available for free. I would be very disappointed if they started censoring what material was freely searchable just to put a price tag on some of it.
The NASA code used on space missions is some of the most throughly debugged anywhere. Can't afford a blue screen of death when lives are actually on the line. Also, you have to be pretty fault tolerant in case cosmic rays or other external phenomena are messing with your data.
Of course the drawback is that most NASA code is too specialized to be of general interest.
If you took a poll, I'd bet the majority of Americans would be fully in support of whatever legislation was put forth. Even more so, I'd bet a poll of informed parties who had studied the bill would probably get the same result (but with a more narrow margin).
Most of America right now, for good or ill, trusts government and believes that significant measures should be taken to combat terrorism. So long as you actually do trust the guy in charge many of the provisions do make sense. And they seem even better with that sunset clause over many of them.
As far as I'm concerned this bill does represent the will of the people, and representative democracy has served its purpose in this case. Of course democracy also tried prohibition and any number of other failed experiments.
My point is that the voices against this legislation appear to be very much in the minority, a fact that can be easily overlooked here on slashdot. If this is law is truly a mistake then you needed not only to convince Congress but also convince your fellow citizens.
Maybe I just don't know better, but I thought part of the reason cases were largely metal was to provide some shielding against electromagnetic interference. Faraday cage and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Some energy is lost as heat when you break the bonds, and inefficiencies in the electrical systems also dissipate some energy. The amount of energy in breaking and forming the bonds is constant, yes, but any paractical system to do that will lose some energy in the process so that you end up a net loss.
Of course H2 can still be worthwhile if the amount lost is small and the value as an energy storage medium can be made high enough.
Drat. As someone pointed out, I misspoke and somehow managed to reverse the issue of who was speaking for the long travel and life spans on CFCs.
Those SUPPORTING CFC controls say that they are persistent in the environment and take years to reach the upper atmosphere. Those OPPOSED to controls or just plain NUETRAL, say that they don't know the time span involved.
Don't know how I managed to get that backward when writing it down. Brain fart I guess. Sorry.
Other people have said important things about about differences in the world in the age of the dinosaurs and how you can't destroy the earth but you might make it hard to live on, but I want to add one more.
The highest known levels of CO2, in fact a jump to around 10 times the modern value (IIRC) occurred prior to the age of dinosaurs and is correlated with the extinction of 90% of all species alive at that time. Of course it's not neccesarily causal and might just be a side-effect of whatever killed all those species, but I would be very leary of supporting arbitrary changes in CO2.
A little CO2 increase might have a net positive impact, but I would certainly want to take it slow and not be uncontrolled. Besides I'm not sure I want to live in a world like the one the dinosaurs lived in.
Okay, I don't know that the ozone hole is principally man-made, or all the potentially natural causes involved. I do know that if human CFCs are up there then they will be causing problems for ozone. Since chlorine and bromine act as catalysts for the break down of ozone, they don't need to be present in large amounts to have a large impact.
An interesting question to ask though is where does that 40, 50, 60, 100 years number for travel time and pontency time of CFCs come from. Not surprisingly it comes from those opposed to controls on CFCs. What do people promoting those controls say? If they are honest, they typically say something along the lines of "we haven't the foggiest clue". Before the ozone hole no one really had any expereince with gas diffusion on this scale. And you are kidding yourself if you think anyone in either camp has a really good understanding of high level atmospheric chemistry, they don't. There are constant surprises.
Similar but not directly related, the experience with the carbon cycle suggests that those the numbers for CFCs might be significantly high. Scientists want to know how fast carbon replenishes itself in the low atmosphere, or equivalently how long it takes before the majority of CO2 emitted today is returned to the biosphere. Prevailing theoretical wisdom pegged this number at around 20-30 years, but recent experimental evidence is giving a number more like 4 years. I could believe that the estimates on CFCs were similarly too large.
Ultimately though, if CFCs can reach up that high then they will cause damage. Whether they are a primary (or even a significant) cause of depletion is hard to tell, but the ozone layer will probably be better off that we aren't using them. The issue of the ozone hole won't be resolved by people like us sitting on slashdot, it may be though by people who go out and see if the levels of pollutants in the upper Antartic atmosphere actually are dropping off.
Sunlight naturally converts some oxygen to ozone in the upper atmosphere. Problem is that when CFCs and other chemicals are present, they eat up ozone far faster than it is typically produced.
Ozone is harder to produce and easier to break down when it is cold, which is one reason ozone is at its lowest levels over the poles in winter (also when there is a deficit of sunlight). The poles are also especially vulnerable because global wind patterns circle around them rather then refreshing the air. Even the most stubborn air pollutants will break down or become absorbed by the environment if we stop pumping them out and give the Earth time to get back to normal.
Well MS-Dos 1.0 was created in 1981, and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, so I'd say UNIX hasn't come as far or as fast as it could have.
The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?
It's simple. Human kind is in race between the forces that make weapons of mass destruction easier to make and more accessible and the forces that bring international community and universal peace.
So far only a few people have access to nuclear weapons and those people have managed to act with reasonable, intelligent constraint. More people have access to anthrax and unfortunately not all of them are so enlightened. Similarly it is not hard to make a truck bomb and certainly some people with that skill still carry malice in their hearts.
The progress of technology seems to be such, that some day the knowledge and tools needed to make a weapon capable of killing millions will fall into the hands of common adults. The question is whether humanity can progress in the pursuit of sanity and mutual respect before we bring doomsday down on our heads.
I'm an optimist about human nature and a pessimist about nanotech and genetic weapon tech, so I'd like to hope we have a chance.
I was wondering when someone was going to mention that...
I have a friend that seriously claims to a be reincarnation of Tesla, and she will "authoritatively" tell you that he never meant to cause as much damage as he did. Needless to say, I don't think she will be looking to seriously at any new asteroid or comet evidence.
Congratulations, you've stumbled on the ages old conflict between determinism and free will.
Maybe you have no free will? There is a whole school of philosophy that argues free will is an illusion and we are all really automatons.
However, determinism went out of vogue with the maturity of quantum mechanics. There is a body of evidence (called the No Hidden Variable Argument) that makes a well accepted case that quantum mechanics truly is random from the point of view of everyone inside the universe. In particular the argument goes that waves are not merely a mathematical tool for judging where a point particle might be, but in fact the wave IS the particle and it IS spread out everywhere that the wave allows, simultaneously. Thus there are no true point-particles only wave-particles.
Randomness comes in through what is refered to as "measurement", waves are allowed to exist in multiple states spread across a significant region, but under certain conditions they collapse to a single state often having a point-like size. According to the best known quantum mechanics this process is neccesarily random to everything inside the universe, because there are NO factors that one could know that would tell you which state it will end up in among all the states allowed. How the quantum state actually decides is beside the question because nothing in the universe can ever have access to information that will tell you about the process.
Whether God rolls dice, or there is so guiding over will, or even a deterministic mathematical function, doesn't matter because we will experience it as random. Also, it is important to note, that whatever principle governs the evolution of quantum states, it maintains the strict probablity distributions. There is no evidence that God (or whatever) ever decides to evolve all the particles in a way that would appear unrandom and not follow the probablity functions.
This whole discussion allows free will a loop hole. If your soul or some other guiding influence exists outside the realm measurable to us and directs the evolution of certain QM states, then it can have an impact on this world. Note that the fact that there appears to be true randomness in the universe does not imply there has to be free will, after all God could just roll dice and not give you any more real control over your life. Of course QM might get replaced someday by a theory that doesn't involve unknowable processes...
One last comment, true free will has to come from outside the chain of causation. If you want to include free will then you have to insert it somewhere where there plausibly is no connection between the cause and a specific effect, thus giving the will something to choose (which effect, ie which quantum state). There is also a whole discussion about false free will, or "good enough" free will which deals with the appearance of choice resulting from chaotic and complicated circumstances that could never be fully understood. It's chaotic, so I could never understand it well enough to accurately predict it's behavior so I might as well treat it as if it has free choice. Not exactly what you want, but it maybe ultimately all we have.
You're right that "dark matter" does get used in the sense of things that aren't emmitting enough light for us to see. The article in question however is using it exclusively in the sense of (non-baryonic) matter which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation and thus can never emit light. Things in this category would be exotics such as nuetrinos, WIMPs, and a variety of other things.
For the record the bright objects we see account for about 3-6% of the needed gravity. Dark normal objects are guessed to account for 4-20%. Nuetrinos probably make up around 10%. Anything left over either has to be accounted for either by exotic dark matter or by a serious reaccounting of the above categories.
What caused the big bang? How was it initiated? What were the bounds of the "universe" as it were before the big bang?
Sometimes bored physicists do try to give serious thought to this. Being a physicist, I've sometimes gotten to listen to what others consider to be serious thoughts on the matter.
Basically there are too camps, people that want the universe to be timeless and exist forever and people that want the Big Bang to be the ultimate start of things. People in the first group will given you various stories about the cyclical nature of the universe (usually expand, collapse, repeat), or some notion of universes spawning other universes, ad infinitum.
People who believe that the Big Bang was THE START of things tend to either believe it to be uncaused, caused by God, or unknowable and irrelevant. There are a few however in this camp that try to posit explanations of what did cause the universe out of nothing. Some bring in exotic theories (such as string theory) to try and construct physical laws that can hold before, during, and after a big bang event. Of course these people also have to change the nature of a big bang away from that strictly based on general relativity (which implicitly prevents any meaningful reference to a "before" the big bang).
One of the most interesting stories I've heard is that the fabric of space has the property of being unstable in a total absence of energy, and at any moment and any location, there is infinitesimal but non zero probablity that it will transition to a different state which has energy, which then billows out into the rest of the universe. So basically the vaccuum has certain properties that exist forever and are timeless, and the big bang has a chance of spontaneously erupting simply because it has never happened. Hence the universe, as we expereince it, has a single well defined start within a larger timeless existence.
As absurd as this might sound, this is quite serious, and as reasonable as many other things people say about "before" the big bang.
Ultimately though, it only transfers the problem of first cause to the "fabric of the universe" and the basic physical laws governing everything. While science may be able to tell you that something is NOT the first cause, it can never say with certainty that something IS the first cause. As far as I'm concerned, whether you choose to believe that the chain of causation goes infinitely backward or has some definably beggining, is a matter of faith.
Everything has a reason, even if it is a loophole. God either does or does not exist, but there is a reason for it. The big bang theory either is or is not true, but there is a reason for it.
Here's the loophole in your argument.
According to Godel's incompleteness theorem, in every nontrivial logical system there exist statements which are either simultaneously true and false (such systems are generally frowned on) or are impossible to prove either true or false.
Mathematics is one of the later. Thus there are statements in mathematics which can be written down but never proved true or false (no easily explained examples exist). It's possible that such a property can be correct, in that it does hold in all possible cases without being able to prove that it does, and of course we can't actually test all cases to know that way.
By extention it doesn't follow that there is neccesarily a reason for the big bang being true or not true. There doesn't strictly have to be any explanation for why it is the way it is.
Of course this is a somewhat silly argument because there probably is a good deal that can be explained about the big bang, and much of science rests on inference and not proof (in the mathematical sense), but it is interesting that even in mathematics there are things for which there can be no reason (ie. proof).
The truth is that there are actually plenty of times when a 386 running qbasic is _exactly_ what is needed for the job
I didn't mean to imply anything to the contrary. Sure it's the right tool for the right job and old computers can be very useful in the labratory environment. When I said it was "disturbing", I just meant the scale of the thing. Computers were invented in research labs and it seems like many of them go back there to die. And lots of those old computers serve as general purpose controllers via qbasic, because of it's ease and excellent serial port tools.
I got my degree in physics, and you're right that off the shell hardware can be a great cost cutting measure. It's honestly disturbing how many times I've seen data collection run on something like a 386 using QBASIC.
The thing to learn though is that consumer hardware is not scientific hardware. There is rarely much quality control with regards to specs, even when they are available. If this hardware is going to be the dominant error source you probably shouldn't be using it in the first place. As tedious as it can be, it's a good idea to test the specification of ANY piece of hardware that you are adding to a research lab, whenever reasonable to do so. I still remember wasting two days of my life because the magnetometer was disturbingly off spec, and that was a serious research tool.
How do you test scanners and cameras? Clearly by scanning and photographing known objects. If you're just scanning diffraction patterns and stuff like that, then find a couple well known, well understood such effects and use them as your benchmark. It's also possible to buy high quality gray scales and precisely known grids to use as references.
The lesson here is, don't use cheap equipment when it will be the dominant error source (preferably use it in parts of the experiment that contribute neglibly to your overall error), and TEST all your equipment and quit relying on spec sheets for anything important. Publication retractions that read the equivalent of "Oops! There really isn't any effect here, but we were too lazy to get it right." are very funny, but won't do anything good for your career.
I'm not sure it's actually funny, but it should earn me idiocy points.
While reading the article I stuck my hand inside my case to get a feel for the air flow, and managed to nick the tip of my finger against the heat sink fan. Ouch. No apparent damage to my finger or the fan, but sure did make me jump.
For those who are wondering why I had an open case, I've been replacing a partially failed hard drive (IBM Deskstar at that, lasted 14 months).
Until I read that part of the article, I thought the guy might have some sense. After the ramble of bits and atoms coming together, I was forced to conclude that this guy fits in the same category as telephone psychics. He provides vaguely interesting impractical information about what he thinks you want to hear or are afraid to hear. Some of the things he says get just plain weird after he strays from 3G and broadband, and what he has to say in those arenas is hardly original to begin with.
For my part, I have a problem with much of the tech that gets put into toys, because it tends to decrease the value of the thing as a toy. For instance stuffed animals with flashing lights and speech capabilities aren't the ones kids take to bed because no one likes feeling the hard boxes inside, nor the distractions of mechanisms that won't turn off. Some electronic toys are so complicated and inflexible that they aren't worth the trouble of playing with or learning to use. Toys which are so inflexible as to only do one trick (and insist on doing regardless of what the child wants) will end up at the bottom of the closet shortly after having demonstrated their one trick.
If all you have to get past are other students, then carrying anything that looks like a present works pretty well for getting into girl's dorms. Assumming you are trying to meet up with someone in particular, and you know where in the building they are, it's not hard to get complete strangers to escort you.
;-)
Thankfully most dorms are becoming coed which only makes things easier.
Sneakers was a really good movie, especially since it tried hard to be authentic. Not quite perfect perhaps, but a lot better than most technology / computer movies out there.
Even the math behind the black box was reasonable. Which is to say that it's conceivable that one could find the right group theory construction to rapidly factor numbers of arbitrary size, but no one's figured out how (nor have they shown it can't work). The movie happily tells you that he's done it without saying anything meaningful about how its done.
No, no.
Clearly you want something that will combust when exposed to air.
After all they called it a "rocket" contest.
It would censorship if they started intentionally excluding certain websites or keywords from their free service. Google is under no obligation to include all material on the web for free. For instance they could decide not to include content from high profile sites (such newspapers, technical archives, etc.) within their free service. More likely they might move indexes for technical keywords within a subscription service, and display a message telling you how to sign up if you tried searching for those words on their free system.
I'm not saying they would, but I just hope they can find enough new content streams to provide a basis for subscriptions rather than limiting the existing free service.
Yeah, they really will have to add new content to get this to work. Hopely there is enough added value in periodicals, internal corporate materials and other sources to make it worthwhile to people.
What strikes me though is that they will have to add content which can't be available in the basic search. After all there is no reason to pay for specialty service, if what you want shows up as #3 on their free service. In this regard their technology is almost too good, and makes it hard to come up with information that isn't already available for free. I would be very disappointed if they started censoring what material was freely searchable just to put a price tag on some of it.
The NASA code used on space missions is some of the most throughly debugged anywhere. Can't afford a blue screen of death when lives are actually on the line. Also, you have to be pretty fault tolerant in case cosmic rays or other external phenomena are messing with your data.
Of course the drawback is that most NASA code is too specialized to be of general interest.
If you took a poll, I'd bet the majority of Americans would be fully in support of whatever legislation was put forth. Even more so, I'd bet a poll of informed parties who had studied the bill would probably get the same result (but with a more narrow margin).
Most of America right now, for good or ill, trusts government and believes that significant measures should be taken to combat terrorism. So long as you actually do trust the guy in charge many of the provisions do make sense. And they seem even better with that sunset clause over many of them.
As far as I'm concerned this bill does represent the will of the people, and representative democracy has served its purpose in this case. Of course democracy also tried prohibition and any number of other failed experiments.
My point is that the voices against this legislation appear to be very much in the minority, a fact that can be easily overlooked here on slashdot. If this is law is truly a mistake then you needed not only to convince Congress but also convince your fellow citizens.
I tried submitting this story myself, but guess they didn't like my version, or he got it in first.
Anyway, here's some commentary that I included with version I wrote:
American Civil Liberties Union
Center for Democracy and Technology
Yahoo! News
Maybe I just don't know better, but I thought part of the reason cases were largely metal was to provide some shielding against electromagnetic interference. Faraday cage and all that.
Is this not a concern?