Neither sunglasses nor traditional head wear is illegal in Turkey. There is an embarrassing issue of ban on turban for students (when they are inside public schools or universities) and government officers (while they are working.) But one can wear anything they want on streets, in public places and also in majority of government offices. The military has an funny twist on the ban that wearing turbans (by civilians, inside military offices) is banned while traditional head wear is not.
I think we are arguing from different perspectives. In my belief system preservation of the environment is not a goal on its own. I recognize changes to the biosphere, even when it results in extinctions, is the normal state of affairs. I also subscribe to the idea that Earth does not need my attention to its well being. Even though the geologic history of the Earth makes it obvious that constant change in environment, with some major changes every now and then is the norm, I realize that one could -rather than accepting the continuation of history as inevitable- arrive to the opposite conclusion that life is fragile and need our attention to preserve. That is not my view at all.
I am on the same side with preservation policies only as far as they relate to well being of human beings. If some policy helps human beings, that are alive and living right now, its environmental cost may or may not be acceptable. That has to be decided in its own context; the "right" case cannot be argued from a general principle such as "we should preserve the environment". From this perspective, your suggestion that industrialization efforts of less developed countries need your forbearance sounds ridiculous. Those people owe nothing to you and need jobs. It is your responsibility to make sure that their short term well being does not harm your long term well being. After all, you have already endangered their long term being (without knowing the consequences, I'll give you that) and still reaping the benefits of prior industrialization (why do you think you have much less poverty? because money rained from the sky until 90ties?) Now that all real manufacturing has gone to third world countries, with the rich getting richer by producing nothing but "services" to each other, you can't just say "hey, you need our forbearance for doing exactly what we had done, for exactly the same reason why we have done it. We may even forbid you from doing it, because it is GLOBAL environment and we have to PRESERVE it!" It is exactly the opposite, IMNSHO. You need their forbearance to let them you continue polluting.
I think I have already answered your "what?" question in the parts of my post you decided not to quote. The people are already alive and they are already suffering from poverty. Lessening their suffering is the morally correct choice, even if it exacerbates an already existing problem for the future generations. Following quote is exactly what I mean when I say "selfish and arrogant": The world can't sustain their populations without industrialization, and certainly cannot sustain them with it.
They have more important and more pressing issues to worry about than world's pollution level. It is certainly easy for you to say that they should not industrialize when you are comfortably sitting in your chair, worrying about future. I don't think you would be able to do that if you were hungry, or penniless, or sick and without healthcare. Telling them to take eco-frienldy route (which does not really exist for carbon emissions anyway) is also telling them not to industrialize. If it were possible to lessen poverty while going eco-friendly, they would already do that. Being nice to environment in general, and reducing carbon emissions without reducing production in particular, has a cost. It is just not possible to industrialize nearly as fast if you do that. They don't need anyone's permission to live better lives. None of the industrialized nations ever asked for one. Moreover, they certainly don't need your permission, as your country is one of the responsible for the current state of GCC in the first place. So if you want to solve the problem, reduce your own carbon emissions, do that cheaply and show the developing countries that going eco-friendly has economical merit in the short term. If you can't do that, you can create incentive by directly paying them to not follow your example. Right now, there is no other realistic option.
I have a more apt analogy than your pizza one.... just because Jack murders a dozen people doesn't excuse John from killing one.
You think this analogy is apt because you have no clue what poverty is. These countries are not trying to develop so that their people can buy a second car or a PS3. It is literally a matter of life and death. There is a great amount of undernourished people without access to proper education and healthcare, especially in India. The development effort to lessen their poverty is not a greedy choice, it is the morally correct choice even when that is done at the expense of the global environment. If the countries responsible for current state of affairs (who does not suffer from poverty nearly as much as undeveloped ones) can come up with better technologies such that development need not pollute the environment as much, better for all of us. But if you want to argue that underdeveloped countries should sacrifice their current and future generations for lessening a global problem, for which they have almost no responsibility, you must be a very selfish and arrogant person.
A lot of scientific, engineering and other number crunching apps were written in Fortran, and there's no reason to rewrite them just because they're thirty years old. The apps might have brand new GUI and visualization front ends, but deep in the heart there is some Fortran code encapsulating the domain specific math.
Actually, what is keeping that code alive is not that it has working domain specific code in it. The real users of fortran are people who wait days to months for a calculation to finish. They demand speed and correctness above all and the ancient language actually delivers. Fortran's best compilers are and have always been the best compilers for math code. If another language allowed to write significantly faster code all fortran libraries will be converted overnight.
...being good at IT requires an intelligence level far above average. It requires a sponge like memory, an amazing ability to learn and comprehend problems, and effective cognitive abilities.
I agree with most of what you said. I also agree with the quote. However, I have to ask: what do you think being good at other fields entail? Do you think you need more intelligence and better memory to be good at IT than to be good at medicine, civil engineering or journalism? That is not my experience at all. Of all the brightest people I know, there is only one computer scientist (and he is a very good one.) If I was delusional enough to think my experience is a representative sample of the population, I would say physicists are (by far) the most intelligent people, followed by mathematicians, electronics engineers, musicians, chemical engineers and chemists. Of course, my experience is not a representative sample and neither is yours. Half of the list can be explained away by the fact that I'm a chemical engineer, employing chemists, interested in music and work with civil engineers. I befriend intelligent people more frequently than stupid ones, so the brightest people I know comes from professions I'm in contact with. If you work in IT field, it is only natural that the most intelligent-and-successful people you have known are in IT. Don't let that fool you into thinking your own field requires more intelligence to be successful than average.
That and the fact that IT requires someone to be well within the top 1% of mental and cognitive ability and those abilities peak at the age of 22 and begin to show measurable decline at 27.
Whaa??? IT people are typically, well, typical. Good computer scientists are an intelligent bunch, but most of the IT professionals are not computer scientists, let alone good ones. In my experience about half of IT professionals are less intelligent than average college graduate, and average collage graduate is at best at the top 10% of the whole population.
Lots of people postulated connections between gravity and electromagnetism. None, including Tesla, could say what it was or demonstrated a real connection though. Tesla might be a genius but not in the way his admirers think. He was an "ordinary genius", if you know what I mean.
Application developers reasonably expect that writes to the disk which happen far apart in time will happen in order. If I write to a file and then rename the file, I expect that the rename will not complete significantly before the write. Certainly not 60 seconds before the write.
That is sounds like a reasonable assumption but it is certainly not reasonable to write code that depends on that. 60 seconds is an eternity for a computer, but so is a second. Therefore the fact that 60 seconds is much longer than what you would expect has no bearing on the situation. If your applications depend on frequent data writes, they will have exactly the same file zeroing problem regardless of the actual amount of delay. You can't know that a crash will happen a least -say- 0.06 seconds after a write and rename, so you will still be losing files on crashes, only 1000 times less frequently with a 0.06 sec delay instead of 60. Considering how many times the problematic idiom may be used in 0.06 seconds, and how many computers are using linux, that is still an unacceptable way to write programs.
It seems dead obvious, at least to me, that the update of the directory entry should be deferred until after ext4 flushes that part of the file written prior to the change in the directory entry.
Ensuring rename happens after write is fundamentally different from not ensuring it but writing data frequently enough that it often happens that way. This is also exactly what has been done with ext3's ordered mode and what is being proposed for fixing ext4.
I can't give you any advice on how to document your procedures for your company. However, I have some experience in managing documents. Dead tree doesn't work. Very soon (and especially in the beginning of documentation process) you will run into problems with keeping everyone on the same version of documents. I looked into various open source CMSs based on wikis and other engines and decided to deploy alfresco in the end. Alfresco does everything my company needs: it can keep different revisions and translations of documents with ease, has a simple but functional access control system and an easy way to start workflows and discussions on documents. It also has interfaces for web publishing, network drives, wikis etc. The free version is a bit hard to deploy right but once deployed it is trouble free.
will there come a time when there will be two distinct groups of humans?
It is almost impossible now, because there is very little genetic isolation. You can't have different species when idividuals mix genes much faster than mutations accumulate. It may happen it current conditions change drasticaly. Eg. if humans colonize other starts without finding FTL or humans cannot recover from a major, planet-wide disaster.
Yes, but only when you already have an alternate explanation. I actually don't believe in God, so evolution is definetly not superfulous for me; it is the only explanation that makes sense.
I actually find intelligent design a solid, even scientific way of thinking about how the universe works. People like you want The Believers to believe in God, while accepting theory of evolution as an explanation to biological diversity and historical record. This is completely superfulous. You see, the believers already have an entitiy which is capable of creating all the life as it sees fit. The entity also claims have done so. It makes no scientific sense whatsoever to have two perfectly valid and conflicting explanations of a single phenomenon. It violates common sense. And an explanation like "God created beings by using evolution" violates Occam's Razor - which is a great the tool to recognize bad explanations.
The problem is God. As long as people believe in God, it is better they also believe in ID. It just makes more sense than the alternative. ID exposes the stupidness of God as an explanation to *anything at all.*
... MOST compounds are far less clear cut. Even H2O's bonds, which are fairly polar and is composed of 2 species with very different electronegativity the bond is generally characterized as having both an ionic and a covalent character.
So, our boron boride is also going to be a compound which is not going to be entirely clearly either ionic nor covalent.
I think you are missing the point of ionic character of boron boride. It doesn't really matter to what extend the bonds between boron atoms are ionic, but they are ionic at all. You are correct that partial electrical charges in "covalent" bonds are the norm between atoms of of different elements. Also covalent bonds between atoms of the same element may also have some electrical polarity due to nearby atoms of different electronegativity. However, I'm not aware of any partial charge on a covalent bond when there is only one element involved. Conventional wisdom says, since atoms with same atom number are chemically indistinguishable from each other, there should not be a negatively charged one and a positively charged one when two of them bond. You can't tell one boron atom from another before they bond, so you shouldn't be able to tell them apart after they bond either. Their bonds are supposed to be *purely* covalent, without any ionic character at all.
Obviously, the conventional wisdom is a bit outdated. Symmetry breaking does not actually require an instrinct difference. If some system is not stable when all of its constituents are in the same state, but (more) stable when some of its constituents are in one state (say S1) and others in another (S2), it usually is the case the the system spontaneously breaks enough symmetry to reach the stable state. This happens even when the constituents in the initial state are identical, such that there is no apriori reason that some of them should tend to S1 and others to S2.
It turns out boron caught up with times and the most stable form of pure boron has both positively and negatively charged atoms, defying conventional wisdom.
I fully agree with parent. My gripe with ggp was none of your speculations (except "not readily visible dimensions" of B, where "readily" suggests they might be visible with enough understanding of theory and more advanced technology) had observable qualities, at all. No one can ever know if there is antimatter trapped in causally disconnected parts of the universe, residing in inaccessible dimensions or in a shadow universe going back in time since bing bang.
I mean it is true we do not OBSERVE much antimatter in this universe, but that doesn't mean it is not present in some sense:
A) It could be in some other part of the universe beyond our effective observational horizon. Granted there are some reasons to think not, but it is a possibility.
B) It could be that the antimatter simply exists in some 'other place'. Given that we haven't at all settled the actual architecture of spacetime, it could be that the antimatter is in a location which is either topologically distant/inaccessible or in dimensions not readily visible to us.
C) Antimatter could be segregated in a different part of time itself. If we imagined that the arrow of time in our universe reverses every now and then, some form of oscillating universe, then perhaps we would find that when time runs backwards, matter looks like antimatter and that may balance the books.
All of that could happen. Perhaps it is just that our assumptions about how antimatter looks from distance is flawed. Or it may be just that we have a matter bias in our minds and refuse to see evidence of antimatter around us. Or mighty invisible aliens controlling our experiments may be rigging them to conceal the fact antimatter is plenty... Once you start making hypotheses based on what we don't know, don't observe or can't observe, matter-antimatter asymmetry ceases to be a problem, but I hope you realize your explanations also cease to have any scientific value whatsoever.
In my experience Citrix has some serious out-of-band issues with modifier keys on Linux and Mac OS X. Shift key events don't send correctly.
C'mon, that is a problem that could be solved in an afternoon! It could be solved at the citrix client level or at the linux host level.
I know nothing about Citrix, but existence of problems that should take about a minute to identify and an afternoon to solve usually means there are fundamental problems with technology and/or project management.
The problem with all kinds of batteries are that they (must) depend on a reversible chemical reaction and during the reaction some chemicals must physically move. That is not so bad when discharging, or when charging at a rate similar to discharge rate. However when charging the batteries quickly, charging rate is proportional to speed of the reaction, which is proportional to the charge passing through the cell. In order to increase charging rate, more current must pass through the cell. In order to have more current, more potential difference between the electrodes must be supplied. However the chemical reaction only provides a relatively constant potential difference between electrodes, so any potential difference applied above the reaction's potential must be converted in to heat. In other words, as long as battery must be charged (much) quicker than discharge speed, a surplus of energy must be supplied to the cell, only to be wasted and increasing the cell's temperature in the process. This is a concern for charging at "gas stations" as well as for regenerative braking systems. Quick charge with long discharge times is fundementally inefficient with batteries. http://www.williamshybridpower.com/ however, has a new twist on mechanical energy storage systems, which, AFAICT, has no such drawback. Hopefully, they will prove the technology on track and obsolete use of batteries as primary energy storage in cars.
You are correct, I didn't consider N.Korea in my post. But N.Korea haven't demonstrated a successful nuclear device yet. They haven't tested any other unsuccessful device either. They might be missing the hardest component: enough of refined plutonium. If you need a nuclear device to use as a bargaining chip, a dud using non-weapons grade plutonium is as good as the real thing. No outside observer can know whether the fizzle is due to a simple malfunction, a correctable manufacturing error, fundamentally bad design or lack of sufficient amount of sufficiently pure plutonium. They must take the treat seriously.
As an engineer, I tend to agree. Many devices have deceptively simple explanations of how they function, however impossibly complicated to build. An explosive lens with an almost perfectly spherical explosion front seems to be one of those. It doesn't seem that hard to design, but it seems very very hard to actually build. The materials are hard to work with, the precision is absurd, timing is critical etc. It sound like a real engineering nightmare, impossible without resources of a country.
However, when I put on my management hat, things look a lot different. No nuclear nation failed to detonate its first implosion device. Among nuclear nations, there are a variety of different explosive lens designs but few nuclear tests resulted in a fizzle. I'm not aware of any fizzles publicly admitted to be due to faulty explosive lens design or manufacture. If getting it right was so hard, there should have been more failures. Perhaps there is a simple way, which is understandably kept secret.
FreeBSD, and the other BSD's for that matter, belong in the data center. I'd argue the same for Linux, but that might get me slaughtered in these parts...
I don't understand. Do you think desktop should be proprietary? Or do you think writing a new, free desktop OS is better than using an existing server OS as a base?
While risking putting words in to your mouth, I can help clarifying the absurdness of your line of reasoning. What you are saying is, in effect, the argument that violence in the region is Israel's own doing is harder to refute when a rocket hits the intended target, but "is beyond most people's BS-meters" when it accidental hits elsewhere. Well, that is beyond my BS meter. You could say Palestinians are trying their best to kill Israelis due to their own choice, or due to being forced to resist Israel with non-conventional warfare. The fact that one rocket killed people the Palestinians didn't mean to kill, doesn't weaken or add support to either argument. If one subscribes to the idea that violence in the region is Israel's own doing, obviously the dead girls are killed (ultimately) due to actions of Israel. What is the relevance of targeting skills (or rocket building skills; I didn't read that news piece so I don't know how they died) of the terrorists to this argument?
A patent is granted for an invention, but an invention is not a physical thing. It is a physical thing and a use associated for that thing. This is quite apparent in my field of work (chemistry) where it is seldom that a new compound is discovered, but there are many patents describing use of a known compound for a specific, novel purpose. You can't patent using a fork to transport meal to mouth, no matter what the meal is or where it is eaten. But you can patent using a certain device to tie shoe laces, even if the device is physically identical to ordinary fork. As long as the "fork" works for a different purpose from its previously known functions, it is an invention.
The cooling of immediate surroundings by evaporation is not scalable to planetary level. The misters rely on this effect and on this effect alone, which is fine for an open system like a house's backyard. However, it doesn't work at all in a closed system, such as a room or a planet. Regardless of where you place misters, or how big they are, the water vapor is just a carrier of heat. The heat doesn't get magically destroyed once it is used for turning water in vapor. It is released in exactly the same amount, when the vapor turns into water. This fact is irrelevant when designing or using a garden mister, as you wouldn't care where or how far the heat goes as long as it goes away from you. Once the heat is removed from the target area, the mister has fulfilled its purpose.
The means of cooling Earth is by making sure the water condenses where it loses some of its heat into space. The physical mechanism for this is radiating some of heat to space, by making sure the condensation occurs away from potential absorbers. This is fundamentally different idea from cooling by evaporation. Also this idea is independent of the way how you produce high altitude condensation. It would work as long as you control where the condensation occurs, even if you haven't produced the vapor yourself.
However an idea isn't patentable, while an implementation is. Their chosen implementation is using carefully located misters such that vapor they create condenses where some heat would be released into space. The primary use of misters in the previously known setting (local cooling by evaporation) is just a step in a longer process for a different purpose (dumping heat into space by radiation), when misters are used for cooling the planet. This is why it is an invention.
In this case, the effect is the same idea, the operation, and the invention are the same.
No it isn't the same effect. On the small scale, water cools immediate surroundings by evaporation. This is all there is to it. On planetary scale, the mist do cool immediate surroundings by evaporation too. However, if it were to condense in the lower atmosphere, it would release heat while condensing and would have no overall cooling effect. The patentable idea in the planet-scale application is that, it is possible to dump the heat into space by controlling where the water condenses.
So please do me a favor and write a purely functional doubly linked list. Any abstract equivalent of a doubly linked list that can add or remove an element after a given element or before a given element in constant time without requiring any additional memory will also do. This is a honest inquiry. I gave up on Haskell because I couldn't find a simple way to write a purely functional equivalent to a doubly linked list and I would be delighted to know that it is possible without monads.
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Neither sunglasses nor traditional head wear is illegal in Turkey. There is an embarrassing issue of ban on turban for students (when they are inside public schools or universities) and government officers (while they are working.) But one can wear anything they want on streets, in public places and also in majority of government offices. The military has an funny twist on the ban that wearing turbans (by civilians, inside military offices) is banned while traditional head wear is not.
I am on the same side with preservation policies only as far as they relate to well being of human beings. If some policy helps human beings, that are alive and living right now, its environmental cost may or may not be acceptable. That has to be decided in its own context; the "right" case cannot be argued from a general principle such as "we should preserve the environment". From this perspective, your suggestion that industrialization efforts of less developed countries need your forbearance sounds ridiculous. Those people owe nothing to you and need jobs. It is your responsibility to make sure that their short term well being does not harm your long term well being. After all, you have already endangered their long term being (without knowing the consequences, I'll give you that) and still reaping the benefits of prior industrialization (why do you think you have much less poverty? because money rained from the sky until 90ties?) Now that all real manufacturing has gone to third world countries, with the rich getting richer by producing nothing but "services" to each other, you can't just say "hey, you need our forbearance for doing exactly what we had done, for exactly the same reason why we have done it. We may even forbid you from doing it, because it is GLOBAL environment and we have to PRESERVE it!" It is exactly the opposite, IMNSHO. You need their forbearance to let them you continue polluting.
They have more important and more pressing issues to worry about than world's pollution level. It is certainly easy for you to say that they should not industrialize when you are comfortably sitting in your chair, worrying about future. I don't think you would be able to do that if you were hungry, or penniless, or sick and without healthcare. Telling them to take eco-frienldy route (which does not really exist for carbon emissions anyway) is also telling them not to industrialize. If it were possible to lessen poverty while going eco-friendly, they would already do that. Being nice to environment in general, and reducing carbon emissions without reducing production in particular, has a cost. It is just not possible to industrialize nearly as fast if you do that. They don't need anyone's permission to live better lives. None of the industrialized nations ever asked for one. Moreover, they certainly don't need your permission, as your country is one of the responsible for the current state of GCC in the first place. So if you want to solve the problem, reduce your own carbon emissions, do that cheaply and show the developing countries that going eco-friendly has economical merit in the short term. If you can't do that, you can create incentive by directly paying them to not follow your example. Right now, there is no other realistic option.
You think this analogy is apt because you have no clue what poverty is. These countries are not trying to develop so that their people can buy a second car or a PS3. It is literally a matter of life and death. There is a great amount of undernourished people without access to proper education and healthcare, especially in India. The development effort to lessen their poverty is not a greedy choice, it is the morally correct choice even when that is done at the expense of the global environment. If the countries responsible for current state of affairs (who does not suffer from poverty nearly as much as undeveloped ones) can come up with better technologies such that development need not pollute the environment as much, better for all of us. But if you want to argue that underdeveloped countries should sacrifice their current and future generations for lessening a global problem, for which they have almost no responsibility, you must be a very selfish and arrogant person.
Actually, what is keeping that code alive is not that it has working domain specific code in it. The real users of fortran are people who wait days to months for a calculation to finish. They demand speed and correctness above all and the ancient language actually delivers. Fortran's best compilers are and have always been the best compilers for math code. If another language allowed to write significantly faster code all fortran libraries will be converted overnight.
I agree with most of what you said. I also agree with the quote. However, I have to ask: what do you think being good at other fields entail? Do you think you need more intelligence and better memory to be good at IT than to be good at medicine, civil engineering or journalism? That is not my experience at all. Of all the brightest people I know, there is only one computer scientist (and he is a very good one.) If I was delusional enough to think my experience is a representative sample of the population, I would say physicists are (by far) the most intelligent people, followed by mathematicians, electronics engineers, musicians, chemical engineers and chemists. Of course, my experience is not a representative sample and neither is yours. Half of the list can be explained away by the fact that I'm a chemical engineer, employing chemists, interested in music and work with civil engineers. I befriend intelligent people more frequently than stupid ones, so the brightest people I know comes from professions I'm in contact with. If you work in IT field, it is only natural that the most intelligent-and-successful people you have known are in IT. Don't let that fool you into thinking your own field requires more intelligence to be successful than average.
Whaa??? IT people are typically, well, typical. Good computer scientists are an intelligent bunch, but most of the IT professionals are not computer scientists, let alone good ones. In my experience about half of IT professionals are less intelligent than average college graduate, and average collage graduate is at best at the top 10% of the whole population.
Lots of people postulated connections between gravity and electromagnetism. None, including Tesla, could say what it was or demonstrated a real connection though. Tesla might be a genius but not in the way his admirers think. He was an "ordinary genius", if you know what I mean.
That is sounds like a reasonable assumption but it is certainly not reasonable to write code that depends on that. 60 seconds is an eternity for a computer, but so is a second. Therefore the fact that 60 seconds is much longer than what you would expect has no bearing on the situation. If your applications depend on frequent data writes, they will have exactly the same file zeroing problem regardless of the actual amount of delay. You can't know that a crash will happen a least -say- 0.06 seconds after a write and rename, so you will still be losing files on crashes, only 1000 times less frequently with a 0.06 sec delay instead of 60. Considering how many times the problematic idiom may be used in 0.06 seconds, and how many computers are using linux, that is still an unacceptable way to write programs.
It seems dead obvious, at least to me, that the update of the directory entry should be deferred until after ext4 flushes that part of the file written prior to the change in the directory entry.
Ensuring rename happens after write is fundamentally different from not ensuring it but writing data frequently enough that it often happens that way. This is also exactly what has been done with ext3's ordered mode and what is being proposed for fixing ext4.
I can't give you any advice on how to document your procedures for your company. However, I have some experience in managing documents. Dead tree doesn't work. Very soon (and especially in the beginning of documentation process) you will run into problems with keeping everyone on the same version of documents. I looked into various open source CMSs based on wikis and other engines and decided to deploy alfresco in the end. Alfresco does everything my company needs: it can keep different revisions and translations of documents with ease, has a simple but functional access control system and an easy way to start workflows and discussions on documents. It also has interfaces for web publishing, network drives, wikis etc. The free version is a bit hard to deploy right but once deployed it is trouble free.
will there come a time when there will be two distinct groups of humans?
It is almost impossible now, because there is very little genetic isolation. You can't have different species when idividuals mix genes much faster than mutations accumulate. It may happen it current conditions change drasticaly. Eg. if humans colonize other starts without finding FTL or humans cannot recover from a major, planet-wide disaster.
Yes, but only when you already have an alternate explanation. I actually don't believe in God, so evolution is definetly not superfulous for me; it is the only explanation that makes sense.
The problem is God. As long as people believe in God, it is better they also believe in ID. It just makes more sense than the alternative. ID exposes the stupidness of God as an explanation to *anything at all.*
... MOST compounds are far less clear cut. Even H2O's bonds, which are fairly polar and is composed of 2 species with very different electronegativity the bond is generally characterized as having both an ionic and a covalent character.
So, our boron boride is also going to be a compound which is not going to be entirely clearly either ionic nor covalent.
I think you are missing the point of ionic character of boron boride. It doesn't really matter to what extend the bonds between boron atoms are ionic, but they are ionic at all. You are correct that partial electrical charges in "covalent" bonds are the norm between atoms of of different elements. Also covalent bonds between atoms of the same element may also have some electrical polarity due to nearby atoms of different electronegativity. However, I'm not aware of any partial charge on a covalent bond when there is only one element involved. Conventional wisdom says, since atoms with same atom number are chemically indistinguishable from each other, there should not be a negatively charged one and a positively charged one when two of them bond. You can't tell one boron atom from another before they bond, so you shouldn't be able to tell them apart after they bond either. Their bonds are supposed to be *purely* covalent, without any ionic character at all.
Obviously, the conventional wisdom is a bit outdated. Symmetry breaking does not actually require an instrinct difference. If some system is not stable when all of its constituents are in the same state, but (more) stable when some of its constituents are in one state (say S1) and others in another (S2), it usually is the case the the system spontaneously breaks enough symmetry to reach the stable state. This happens even when the constituents in the initial state are identical, such that there is no apriori reason that some of them should tend to S1 and others to S2.
It turns out boron caught up with times and the most stable form of pure boron has both positively and negatively charged atoms, defying conventional wisdom.
I fully agree with parent. My gripe with ggp was none of your speculations (except "not readily visible dimensions" of B, where "readily" suggests they might be visible with enough understanding of theory and more advanced technology) had observable qualities, at all. No one can ever know if there is antimatter trapped in causally disconnected parts of the universe, residing in inaccessible dimensions or in a shadow universe going back in time since bing bang.
I mean it is true we do not OBSERVE much antimatter in this universe, but that doesn't mean it is not present in some sense:
A) It could be in some other part of the universe beyond our effective observational horizon. Granted there are some reasons to think not, but it is a possibility.
B) It could be that the antimatter simply exists in some 'other place'. Given that we haven't at all settled the actual architecture of spacetime, it could be that the antimatter is in a location which is either topologically distant/inaccessible or in dimensions not readily visible to us.
C) Antimatter could be segregated in a different part of time itself. If we imagined that the arrow of time in our universe reverses every now and then, some form of oscillating universe, then perhaps we would find that when time runs backwards, matter looks like antimatter and that may balance the books.
All of that could happen. Perhaps it is just that our assumptions about how antimatter looks from distance is flawed. Or it may be just that we have a matter bias in our minds and refuse to see evidence of antimatter around us. Or mighty invisible aliens controlling our experiments may be rigging them to conceal the fact antimatter is plenty... Once you start making hypotheses based on what we don't know, don't observe or can't observe, matter-antimatter asymmetry ceases to be a problem, but I hope you realize your explanations also cease to have any scientific value whatsoever.
In my experience Citrix has some serious out-of-band issues with modifier keys on Linux and Mac OS X. Shift key events don't send correctly.
C'mon, that is a problem that could be solved in an afternoon! It could be solved at the citrix client level or at the linux host level.
I know nothing about Citrix, but existence of problems that should take about a minute to identify and an afternoon to solve usually means there are fundamental problems with technology and/or project management.
The problem with all kinds of batteries are that they (must) depend on a reversible chemical reaction and during the reaction some chemicals must physically move. That is not so bad when discharging, or when charging at a rate similar to discharge rate. However when charging the batteries quickly, charging rate is proportional to speed of the reaction, which is proportional to the charge passing through the cell. In order to increase charging rate, more current must pass through the cell. In order to have more current, more potential difference between the electrodes must be supplied. However the chemical reaction only provides a relatively constant potential difference between electrodes, so any potential difference applied above the reaction's potential must be converted in to heat. In other words, as long as battery must be charged (much) quicker than discharge speed, a surplus of energy must be supplied to the cell, only to be wasted and increasing the cell's temperature in the process. This is a concern for charging at "gas stations" as well as for regenerative braking systems. Quick charge with long discharge times is fundementally inefficient with batteries. http://www.williamshybridpower.com/ however, has a new twist on mechanical energy storage systems, which, AFAICT, has no such drawback. Hopefully, they will prove the technology on track and obsolete use of batteries as primary energy storage in cars.
You are correct, I didn't consider N.Korea in my post. But N.Korea haven't demonstrated a successful nuclear device yet. They haven't tested any other unsuccessful device either. They might be missing the hardest component: enough of refined plutonium. If you need a nuclear device to use as a bargaining chip, a dud using non-weapons grade plutonium is as good as the real thing. No outside observer can know whether the fizzle is due to a simple malfunction, a correctable manufacturing error, fundamentally bad design or lack of sufficient amount of sufficiently pure plutonium. They must take the treat seriously.
However, when I put on my management hat, things look a lot different. No nuclear nation failed to detonate its first implosion device. Among nuclear nations, there are a variety of different explosive lens designs but few nuclear tests resulted in a fizzle. I'm not aware of any fizzles publicly admitted to be due to faulty explosive lens design or manufacture. If getting it right was so hard, there should have been more failures. Perhaps there is a simple way, which is understandably kept secret.
I don't understand. Do you think desktop should be proprietary? Or do you think writing a new, free desktop OS is better than using an existing server OS as a base?
While risking putting words in to your mouth, I can help clarifying the absurdness of your line of reasoning. What you are saying is, in effect, the argument that violence in the region is Israel's own doing is harder to refute when a rocket hits the intended target, but "is beyond most people's BS-meters" when it accidental hits elsewhere. Well, that is beyond my BS meter. You could say Palestinians are trying their best to kill Israelis due to their own choice, or due to being forced to resist Israel with non-conventional warfare. The fact that one rocket killed people the Palestinians didn't mean to kill, doesn't weaken or add support to either argument. If one subscribes to the idea that violence in the region is Israel's own doing, obviously the dead girls are killed (ultimately) due to actions of Israel. What is the relevance of targeting skills (or rocket building skills; I didn't read that news piece so I don't know how they died) of the terrorists to this argument?
The cooling of immediate surroundings by evaporation is not scalable to planetary level. The misters rely on this effect and on this effect alone, which is fine for an open system like a house's backyard. However, it doesn't work at all in a closed system, such as a room or a planet. Regardless of where you place misters, or how big they are, the water vapor is just a carrier of heat. The heat doesn't get magically destroyed once it is used for turning water in vapor. It is released in exactly the same amount, when the vapor turns into water. This fact is irrelevant when designing or using a garden mister, as you wouldn't care where or how far the heat goes as long as it goes away from you. Once the heat is removed from the target area, the mister has fulfilled its purpose.
The means of cooling Earth is by making sure the water condenses where it loses some of its heat into space. The physical mechanism for this is radiating some of heat to space, by making sure the condensation occurs away from potential absorbers. This is fundamentally different idea from cooling by evaporation. Also this idea is independent of the way how you produce high altitude condensation. It would work as long as you control where the condensation occurs, even if you haven't produced the vapor yourself.
However an idea isn't patentable, while an implementation is. Their chosen implementation is using carefully located misters such that vapor they create condenses where some heat would be released into space. The primary use of misters in the previously known setting (local cooling by evaporation) is just a step in a longer process for a different purpose (dumping heat into space by radiation), when misters are used for cooling the planet. This is why it is an invention.
No it isn't the same effect. On the small scale, water cools immediate surroundings by evaporation. This is all there is to it. On planetary scale, the mist do cool immediate surroundings by evaporation too. However, if it were to condense in the lower atmosphere, it would release heat while condensing and would have no overall cooling effect. The patentable idea in the planet-scale application is that, it is possible to dump the heat into space by controlling where the water condenses.
So please do me a favor and write a purely functional doubly linked list. Any abstract equivalent of a doubly linked list that can add or remove an element after a given element or before a given element in constant time without requiring any additional memory will also do. This is a honest inquiry. I gave up on Haskell because I couldn't find a simple way to write a purely functional equivalent to a doubly linked list and I would be delighted to know that it is possible without monads.