Now, now, that's not entirely fair. He did something
Come on, not even the Norwegian government would award the Nobel peace prize for building an Archimedian death ray. This is his bid for the Nobel prize for physics or possibly the Ignoble prize for physics...maybe even both.
Those are technically just shear stress as a result of sound
No, transverse (shear) sounds waves can exist in solids completely independently of any longitudinal wave. If you don't believe me pick up any first year (or even secondary school) physics text book or look at Wikipedia.
It's an unrestricted time machine so surely 'when' it is created is irrelevant. Since it does not exist now we can probably conclude that it is very unlikely to be created in the future.
If someone says that, "they just need a programmer", they haven't vetted the idea.
Actually if the "ideas" that this guy receives are like the "ideas" my colleagues and I receive as physics profs I would not even call them ideas but simply wishes as in "I wish physics worked like this and I'd like you to work on proving that it does." vs. "I wish this piece of software existed and I'd like you to work on writing it.". Apparently it is not just profs which get requests for help with "ideas" as amusing exchange shows.
Freezing climates are not a problem - you can use an antifreeze solution in the collectors or use a drainback system that drains water from the system when the collectors are not operating and generating heat.
There are two problems with that: first you are now having to use a closed system with a heat exchanger rather than use the water directly which makes it less efficient and secondly you have to really insulate the liquid well because if it is stuck outside at -20 to -30C the temperature difference will be very large. It sounds like your evacuated tube collectors might be to solution to that but I remain very sceptical that, at the point in the year when northern climes need the most power, that solar power will produce much useful contribution...but for the rest of the world, particularly near the equator, it will help provide power during the day but even there is will still not help keep the lights on at night!
And not even that. More like 49% of the folks who bothered to vote.
Which, in the case of Bush in 2000, actually equates to roughly 18% of all Americans.
So from this we can conclude that: 18% worship morons, slightly more than 18% can identify morons and just under 64% are morons for not voting in the first place.
Questioning has the possibility of leading to a prosecutorial arrest, which is why it must be in person.
Why? What is to stop them interviewing him and then issuing a warrant to arrest him? Ok, so it might be a slightly different warrant but so what? Even if there is some swedish rule that it has to be in person then why can't they go to the UK to do it on their expense or pay for his travel expenses? In fact I presume if he is arrested they will probably end up paying a whole lot more money in court costs and secure transportation to have him extradited so it is not only unreasonable but stupid as well if he would be willing to go if they covered his travel expenses.
...and no I'm not a Swedish lawyer but we are discussing here what is reasonable NOT what is legal. It is quite possible that the swedish authorities are legally required to be unreasonable but that does not alter the argument since Sweden, as a sovereign nation, is responsible for its own laws.
No, it's not unreasonable. They turned down doing an interview by video camera, because if the questioning should warrant an arrest, there would no way to arrest him over video conferencing. This is entirely reasonable.
This is unreasonable and inconsistent. First if there is no way to arrest him if they decide it is needed after interviewing him then what is this international arrest warrant? They seem to think it is possible to arrest him BEFORE they have even interviewed him.
Secondly how is it reasonable to expect someone to attend police questioning at considerable expense to themselves? He has not yet been found guilty of a crime or even charged with a crime. If they offer to cover his travel expenses then fine but to expect him to pay them himself is not reasonable just to satisfy their curiosity during an investigation, especially after they have already interviewed him and told him that he was free to leave the country.
Finally why don't the Swedish police send the interviewer to the UK (assuming that is where he is)? There is a good deal of cooperation between EU police and I've heard of many cases on the news where UK police have visited other European countries to interview and collect evidence for cases based back in the UK. If he is willing to cooperate, as he claims, then what is the problem?
I have no idea whether or not he is guilty of what he is accused but the Swedish authorities seem to be behaving in a completely unreasonable manner.
I don't agree that Solar is not part of the solution.
Solar (and wind, hydro, tide, wave etc.) is certainly part of the solution but it will only ever be a small part unfortunately. The other problem with solar arrays on homes is that the time that you want to have power at home is typically not during the day but in the evening. For example you'll want you charge your car when you get home in the evening not in the middle of the day when the panels are at peak efficiency.
The other problem with solar is that it will not work so well for those of us at higher latitudes (I'm at 53.5 degrees N and in the winter (when I would REALLY want solar power for heating) we don't get that much sunlight and what we do get is pretty feeble...which is of course why it does get so much colder than your southern climes. As for a 'solar water heater' when it drops below -30C the last thing you want to do is pass water through any exposed piping...unless you want a carbon-neutral ice maker!
Could I gently suggest in the future you stick to reviewing technical books that you are either in a position to properly evaluate or are actually wanting to learn from. For example saying things like:
I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company.
Tells me that (a) you are not expert in what the book is about because you have no idea whether it is correct or not and (b) you are not using the book to learn the material for the first time for some pet project in which case you could usefully comment on how clearly the concepts are explained. Indeed your review reads like that of a novel which would be fine if you had actually reviewed a novel but for a technical book you need to include factual details: were the explanations clear? was the information accurate? how easy was it to code a trivial plugin using the book? etc.
As far as not "improving your learning" - it is not the job of the LMS to teach for the educator. This piece of software facilitates and enhances teaching with an emphasis on communication and collaboration, which are key 21st century skills. Moodle preaches the Pedagogy which is the real key in a student "learning".
Moodle can teach if you want it to - it has a lesson module and support for SCORM as well as for online assignments assessed by the site itself. In fact how can you claim enhances teaching if you don't believe that result in improved learning? I'd also point out that communication and collaboration have been key skills since the stone age when we learnt to hunt woolly mammoths. Just because the way we do these things has changed (and is still rapidly changing) that does not make them any more or less important than they always have been.
Moodle preaches the Pedagogy which is the real key in a student "learning".
Moodle does not preach the art of teaching any more than a hammer preaches the art of building. It is a tool to make teaching easier and can be used for a whole variety of pedagogical approaches. This is precisely why it is so successful: any professor or teacher can use it to enhance the way that THEY want to teach without it ramming some preconceived notion about how to teach down your throat.
Moodle 2.0 just came out and there are enough changes that learning to code for the 1.9 interface would be a waste of time. If you are starting out I'd go straight to 2.0 - I'm now having to make the leap in order to update my algebra question plugin.
These book reviews are consistently the most useless things posted here.
In this case the book is probably even more useless than you realize. Moodle just came out with version 2.0 last week and, speaking as a Moodle plugin developer (for a question type which understands algebra), there are enough changes that this book pretty useless.
Solar could help (if workplace charging becomes commonplace), but the most viable proven solution right now is Nuclear.
Actually nuclear is the only solution. If you actually look at the basics physics of the situation (as has been done in the UK) then the size, in terms of land area, you will require will be massive and will destroy the environment in a different way. So while renewable sources are great they simply cannot provide all the energy we need and, if we want to avoid CO2, that only leaves nuclear power.
So the choices at the moment are: massively reduce our power consumption in a way which will severely impact our quality of life, live with the effects of global warming or go nuclear and accept the risks of possible nuclear contamination until we get fusion to work.
Yawn.. and I say thanks as an American taxpayer that RHIC was first
It's true that RHIC came before the LHC but the SPS and ISR came well before RHIC and none of these have really produced compelling evidence of a QGP. However don't worry - as an American taxpayer you also helped pay for the LHC, so thanks!
Now if they would issue 64-bit jobs for Linux hosts on LHC@Home, I would totally help!
Actually you would probably not want to help for long! Analyzing data from an experiment is I/O intensive as well as CPU intensive plus the executables are very large and require ~2GB/core to run so they are not really a suitable scale for an @home project unfortunately.
Thanks, but it is actually an international effort with those of us in Canada working on ATLAS making up ~5% of the collaboration. For those with a more technical mind there is the actual paper which was accepted by PRL this morning (after being submitted yesterday!). To give you an idea of what the events actually look like you can go here. As you can see there are around 1,000 tracks in a typical event!
That's absurd. This type of company doesn't lend itself well to economies of scale
So you would be happy getting ALL your news from a single company? Are you insane? Why not just give them your vote and let them cast it for you while you are at it - it will save time.
...nor are there's[sic] (non-artificial)[sic] barriers to entry, meaning... you'd likely still get monopolistic competition.
Really? How about the requirement to purchase a broadcast license to use certain areas of the bandwidth? How do you have competition if one company owns all the available channels?
And you're saying we need government interfering with the news, to make it better?
No, I'm saying that we need government regulation to ensure that people have access to a variety of different news sources so that one company does not get to dictate what they see. Care to explain how that can possibly prevent news from getting out?
You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
Have you ever wondered what "freedom of the press" is a useful for? Questioning whether it is still fulfilling that essential purpose is not an unreasonable thing to do. Of course if you were that well educated you probably wouldn't have to resort to such childish arguments.
The fact that this information is released, even in this capacity, shows that our government is far more free than those of, let's say, China.
Not really - what it does show is that there are Americans who are disgusted with their government (and believe that other will be when they see what it is up to) and who also believe that they can be held accountable to their fellow citizens. The first provides motivation for wanting the government to change and the second means that they believe that making everyone aware of the information is the way to achieve it.
In China this would be pointless because why would the government care what their people thought?
We need an unregulated media to keep them in check.
No, we need a well informed electorate to keep them in check. Historically that has been best achieved with an unregulated media but, with the rise of companies such as Fox News, that model seems to be under increasing strain. Indeed at an absolute minimum we need regulations to prevent media monopolies.
In any case where you have an oppressive government which is not subject to the will of the people. In a properly functioning democracy it should never be required (unless action has to be taken on a time scale shorter than the election cycle e.g. conflict situations, sudden 40% cuts to the higher education budget etc.). In many real democracies though the will of the people sometimes/often gets obscured by large bags of cash and we need to make a little noise to remind the government that we are still there and some, modest level of civil disobedience is often a good way to do that. However it does help if you don't try to make money off it - that tends to obscure the message as well as leaving you a lot more vulnerable to the courts who will probably be a lot more sympathetic to an ideological motivation than a financial one.
Perhaps there are lots of moderators from Apple at the moment. I doubt they would find a suggestion that they will need to rename 'FaceTime' to 'ArseTime' so amusing.;-)
Apart from the fact that I no longer watch the discovery channel because they seem to have almost completely forgotten what science actually is, I was careful to say "in general" specifically because there are exceptions - the most notable being lions. There are also exceptions the other way e.g. foxes. However IN GENERAL what I said is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
...and if you read the article you link to you'll see the line:
"Its five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament"
Hence the Norwegian government does decide, albeit indirectly, who gets the prize.
Now, now, that's not entirely fair. He did something
Come on, not even the Norwegian government would award the Nobel peace prize for building an Archimedian death ray. This is his bid for the Nobel prize for physics or possibly the Ignoble prize for physics...maybe even both.
Those are technically just shear stress as a result of sound
No, transverse (shear) sounds waves can exist in solids completely independently of any longitudinal wave. If you don't believe me pick up any first year (or even secondary school) physics text book or look at Wikipedia.
Sound is a longitudinal wave
Only in liquids and gases. You can have transverse sounds waves in solids.
Real life TARDIS when?
It's an unrestricted time machine so surely 'when' it is created is irrelevant. Since it does not exist now we can probably conclude that it is very unlikely to be created in the future.
If someone says that, "they just need a programmer", they haven't vetted the idea.
Actually if the "ideas" that this guy receives are like the "ideas" my colleagues and I receive as physics profs I would not even call them ideas but simply wishes as in "I wish physics worked like this and I'd like you to work on proving that it does." vs. "I wish this piece of software existed and I'd like you to work on writing it.". Apparently it is not just profs which get requests for help with "ideas" as amusing exchange shows.
Freezing climates are not a problem - you can use an antifreeze solution in the collectors or use a drainback system that drains water from the system when the collectors are not operating and generating heat.
There are two problems with that: first you are now having to use a closed system with a heat exchanger rather than use the water directly which makes it less efficient and secondly you have to really insulate the liquid well because if it is stuck outside at -20 to -30C the temperature difference will be very large. It sounds like your evacuated tube collectors might be to solution to that but I remain very sceptical that, at the point in the year when northern climes need the most power, that solar power will produce much useful contribution...but for the rest of the world, particularly near the equator, it will help provide power during the day but even there is will still not help keep the lights on at night!
And not even that. More like 49% of the folks who bothered to vote.
Which, in the case of Bush in 2000, actually equates to roughly 18% of all Americans.
So from this we can conclude that: 18% worship morons, slightly more than 18% can identify morons and just under 64% are morons for not voting in the first place.
Questioning has the possibility of leading to a prosecutorial arrest, which is why it must be in person.
Why? What is to stop them interviewing him and then issuing a warrant to arrest him? Ok, so it might be a slightly different warrant but so what? Even if there is some swedish rule that it has to be in person then why can't they go to the UK to do it on their expense or pay for his travel expenses? In fact I presume if he is arrested they will probably end up paying a whole lot more money in court costs and secure transportation to have him extradited so it is not only unreasonable but stupid as well if he would be willing to go if they covered his travel expenses.
...and no I'm not a Swedish lawyer but we are discussing here what is reasonable NOT what is legal. It is quite possible that the swedish authorities are legally required to be unreasonable but that does not alter the argument since Sweden, as a sovereign nation, is responsible for its own laws.
No, it's not unreasonable. They turned down doing an interview by video camera, because if the questioning should warrant an arrest, there would no way to arrest him over video conferencing. This is entirely reasonable.
This is unreasonable and inconsistent. First if there is no way to arrest him if they decide it is needed after interviewing him then what is this international arrest warrant? They seem to think it is possible to arrest him BEFORE they have even interviewed him.
Secondly how is it reasonable to expect someone to attend police questioning at considerable expense to themselves? He has not yet been found guilty of a crime or even charged with a crime. If they offer to cover his travel expenses then fine but to expect him to pay them himself is not reasonable just to satisfy their curiosity during an investigation, especially after they have already interviewed him and told him that he was free to leave the country.
Finally why don't the Swedish police send the interviewer to the UK (assuming that is where he is)? There is a good deal of cooperation between EU police and I've heard of many cases on the news where UK police have visited other European countries to interview and collect evidence for cases based back in the UK. If he is willing to cooperate, as he claims, then what is the problem?
I have no idea whether or not he is guilty of what he is accused but the Swedish authorities seem to be behaving in a completely unreasonable manner.
I don't agree that Solar is not part of the solution.
Solar (and wind, hydro, tide, wave etc.) is certainly part of the solution but it will only ever be a small part unfortunately. The other problem with solar arrays on homes is that the time that you want to have power at home is typically not during the day but in the evening. For example you'll want you charge your car when you get home in the evening not in the middle of the day when the panels are at peak efficiency.
The other problem with solar is that it will not work so well for those of us at higher latitudes (I'm at 53.5 degrees N and in the winter (when I would REALLY want solar power for heating) we don't get that much sunlight and what we do get is pretty feeble...which is of course why it does get so much colder than your southern climes. As for a 'solar water heater' when it drops below -30C the last thing you want to do is pass water through any exposed piping...unless you want a carbon-neutral ice maker!
This being my first review
Could I gently suggest in the future you stick to reviewing technical books that you are either in a position to properly evaluate or are actually wanting to learn from. For example saying things like:
I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company.
Tells me that (a) you are not expert in what the book is about because you have no idea whether it is correct or not and (b) you are not using the book to learn the material for the first time for some pet project in which case you could usefully comment on how clearly the concepts are explained. Indeed your review reads like that of a novel which would be fine if you had actually reviewed a novel but for a technical book you need to include factual details: were the explanations clear? was the information accurate? how easy was it to code a trivial plugin using the book? etc.
As far as not "improving your learning" - it is not the job of the LMS to teach for the educator. This piece of software facilitates and enhances teaching with an emphasis on communication and collaboration, which are key 21st century skills. Moodle preaches the Pedagogy which is the real key in a student "learning".
Moodle can teach if you want it to - it has a lesson module and support for SCORM as well as for online assignments assessed by the site itself. In fact how can you claim enhances teaching if you don't believe that result in improved learning? I'd also point out that communication and collaboration have been key skills since the stone age when we learnt to hunt woolly mammoths. Just because the way we do these things has changed (and is still rapidly changing) that does not make them any more or less important than they always have been.
Moodle preaches the Pedagogy which is the real key in a student "learning".
Moodle does not preach the art of teaching any more than a hammer preaches the art of building. It is a tool to make teaching easier and can be used for a whole variety of pedagogical approaches. This is precisely why it is so successful: any professor or teacher can use it to enhance the way that THEY want to teach without it ramming some preconceived notion about how to teach down your throat.
Moodle 2.0 just came out and there are enough changes that learning to code for the 1.9 interface would be a waste of time. If you are starting out I'd go straight to 2.0 - I'm now having to make the leap in order to update my algebra question plugin.
These book reviews are consistently the most useless things posted here.
In this case the book is probably even more useless than you realize. Moodle just came out with version 2.0 last week and, speaking as a Moodle plugin developer (for a question type which understands algebra), there are enough changes that this book pretty useless.
Solar could help (if workplace charging becomes commonplace), but the most viable proven solution right now is Nuclear.
Actually nuclear is the only solution. If you actually look at the basics physics of the situation (as has been done in the UK) then the size, in terms of land area, you will require will be massive and will destroy the environment in a different way. So while renewable sources are great they simply cannot provide all the energy we need and, if we want to avoid CO2, that only leaves nuclear power.
So the choices at the moment are: massively reduce our power consumption in a way which will severely impact our quality of life, live with the effects of global warming or go nuclear and accept the risks of possible nuclear contamination until we get fusion to work.
Yawn.. and I say thanks as an American taxpayer that RHIC was first
It's true that RHIC came before the LHC but the SPS and ISR came well before RHIC and none of these have really produced compelling evidence of a QGP. However don't worry - as an American taxpayer you also helped pay for the LHC, so thanks!
Now if they would issue 64-bit jobs for Linux hosts on LHC@Home, I would totally help!
Actually you would probably not want to help for long! Analyzing data from an experiment is I/O intensive as well as CPU intensive plus the executables are very large and require ~2GB/core to run so they are not really a suitable scale for an @home project unfortunately.
Thanks, but it is actually an international effort with those of us in Canada working on ATLAS making up ~5% of the collaboration. For those with a more technical mind there is the actual paper which was accepted by PRL this morning (after being submitted yesterday!). To give you an idea of what the events actually look like you can go here. As you can see there are around 1,000 tracks in a typical event!
That's absurd. This type of company doesn't lend itself well to economies of scale
So you would be happy getting ALL your news from a single company? Are you insane? Why not just give them your vote and let them cast it for you while you are at it - it will save time.
...nor are there's[sic] (non-artificial)[sic] barriers to entry, meaning ... you'd likely still get monopolistic competition.
Really? How about the requirement to purchase a broadcast license to use certain areas of the bandwidth? How do you have competition if one company owns all the available channels?
And you're saying we need government interfering with the news, to make it better?
No, I'm saying that we need government regulation to ensure that people have access to a variety of different news sources so that one company does not get to dictate what they see. Care to explain how that can possibly prevent news from getting out?
You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
Have you ever wondered what "freedom of the press" is a useful for? Questioning whether it is still fulfilling that essential purpose is not an unreasonable thing to do. Of course if you were that well educated you probably wouldn't have to resort to such childish arguments.
The fact that this information is released, even in this capacity, shows that our government is far more free than those of, let's say, China.
Not really - what it does show is that there are Americans who are disgusted with their government (and believe that other will be when they see what it is up to) and who also believe that they can be held accountable to their fellow citizens. The first provides motivation for wanting the government to change and the second means that they believe that making everyone aware of the information is the way to achieve it.
In China this would be pointless because why would the government care what their people thought?
We need an unregulated media to keep them in check.
No, we need a well informed electorate to keep them in check. Historically that has been best achieved with an unregulated media but, with the rise of companies such as Fox News, that model seems to be under increasing strain. Indeed at an absolute minimum we need regulations to prevent media monopolies.
If not in this case in what cases?
In any case where you have an oppressive government which is not subject to the will of the people. In a properly functioning democracy it should never be required (unless action has to be taken on a time scale shorter than the election cycle e.g. conflict situations, sudden 40% cuts to the higher education budget etc.). In many real democracies though the will of the people sometimes/often gets obscured by large bags of cash and we need to make a little noise to remind the government that we are still there and some, modest level of civil disobedience is often a good way to do that. However it does help if you don't try to make money off it - that tends to obscure the message as well as leaving you a lot more vulnerable to the courts who will probably be a lot more sympathetic to an ideological motivation than a financial one.
Nevermind security - what happens if you store an MP3 on these things? Sneezing could get you sued for copyright violation.
Perhaps there are lots of moderators from Apple at the moment. I doubt they would find a suggestion that they will need to rename 'FaceTime' to 'ArseTime' so amusing. ;-)
Big cats are not 100% solitary hunters.
Apart from the fact that I no longer watch the discovery channel because they seem to have almost completely forgotten what science actually is, I was careful to say "in general" specifically because there are exceptions - the most notable being lions. There are also exceptions the other way e.g. foxes. However IN GENERAL what I said is correct.