I always hated the bogus "We need higher drug prices or you wouldn't have these drugs in the first place!". If I can't afford those expensive drugs then they are as good as if they had never existed anyway.
Not true at all - the drugs that are expensive today are cheap 10 years later. If they never existed at all then nobody would ever benefit from them.
The drugs that are affordable today all used to be very expensive at some time - and yet they're still very useful to the poor and rich alike.
In the same way high-def TV sets are useful even if most people can't afford them, because one day they'll replace 13" TVs in every bedroom in the world...
You don't need a government to enforce your control over it, either, given the resources and wealth of most companies today. Look at the diamond trade, or the pharmaceutical industry. They can take care of themselves.
Uh, the pharmaceutical industry is HEAVILY dominated by patents on the discovery side. Drugs are very cheap to duplicate (just look at India). Most of the cost of R&D just comes down to an answer of "Yes" or "No" to the question "is this drug safe and effective?" Once somebody knows the answer to that question they can skip the hundreds of millions in cost and just start making drugs at near-marginal cost. If you want new drugs somebody has to pay for the clinical trials. Right now the government doesn't really fund these at all (just a little basic reasearch - which is innovative but not the expensive part), so you have patents.
As for the diamond industry - suffice it to say that I don't think that is a model of how we want most industries to run...
There are lots of industries that are well-run which don't require patents, but those aren't among them. A better example might be cars - they're generally not patent-encumbered and there is a healthy amount of innovation. The difference is that a given model is only sold for a year or two, making copycats less of an issue. Also, they don't have huge risks associated with them - you can build a car that will essentially get the job done without worrying about whether the whole design will just blow up when you turn the key...
I consider myself fairly libertarian, but I don't consider it inappropriate to fund wars in the middle east using gasoline taxes. Ditto for costs associated with smog-reduction/etc. These are externalities and they are best funded by those who purchase gasoline. Why should those who do not drive be forced to pay for wars in the middle east, which would not be necessary if we didn't need so much gas?
Let the cost of goods reflect their true cost - then consumers will pick whatever makes the most sense economically and fix quite a few of society's problems in the meantime...
Honestly, I don't think a kid who has a bunch of atomic weights/numbers memorized is going to have much of an advantage. The symbols come in handy, but even then they only take 5 seconds to look up on a periodic table (any chemistry teacher who doesn't let their students look at a periodic table during an exam is really focusing on the wrong things).
I have an MS in chemistry. I couldn't tell you the atomic weights of 90% of the elements, but I know all the ones I need to get by in most of real life (that would probably be about 10 of them). I was never forced to learn them - and I was always able to look them up. After the millionth time of looking them up I memorized them - just like in any field of study.
Sure, having valences and all that memorized can be handy - but that is INEVITABLE if you study chemistry - again for the important elements.
The things that make chemistry hard for most students is probably the rigorous mathematical treatment, and some of the concepts. You don't need a card game to teach a kid that a catalyst makes a reaction go faster - you can just tell them that. Teaching them that it affects the kinetics of a reaction but not the thermodynamics is a bit harder - and no simple card game is going to do that.
The problem is that it is much easier to teach and test the ability to memorize facts, but that isn't what chemistry is (despite how some teachers operate). Oh, sure, if you're going to be a synthetic organic chemist you're going to have to cram 5000 named reactions at some point, and there isn't much getting around that, but this is more of an exception in the field. Learning chemistry isn't like learning vocabulary. I'd say it isn't like learning history either, except that I think that teachers have that subject all wrong as well (don't make kids memorize dates and the order of presidents/kings/etc - teach them the SIGNIFICANCE of history and they might actually learn something useful!).
And no, I don't think that EVERYBODY needs to know EVERYTHING about Chemistry. But if you don't want to teach real Chemistry, why torture kids with memorizing weights/etc - something which is of nearly no use in the real world? It will just make them hate "Chemistry"... Teaching real Chemistry will expose kids to a very practical and useful field of study - one that is also a good source of income. And if students don't like it at least they're learning a new way of thinking (kind of like geometry - you'll never use those proofs ever again, but it is a different way of thinking about things and a chance to expose students to something they'd otherwise not learn).
I never pay interest on my credit cards. You only have to pay interest if you don't pay the balance in full at the end of the month. Instead, I make interest by leaving the cash in my bank account until I need to pay the bill.
Additionally, if there is a dispute I don't have to pay that part of the bill. With a check card you're forced to go asking to get your money back. With a credit card you tell them that you aren't paying part of it - and then while things get sorted out you keep the cash. There is a difference...
Finally, you generally have to pay for debit cards (or "check cards") that have decent consumer protections. That might be in the form of fees (not necessarily labeled as check card fees - it could be a monthly fee on your checking account), or lower interest (I get paid interest on my checking account - many banks do not pay interest on checking), or some other trade-off.
That act didn't seem clear about transfers that occur when the card and/or other access devices were never stolen. A card doesn't need to be stolen to be used - especially with the lousy security associated with how these cards are currently implemented.
Legally they don't have the consumer protections that credit cards have in the US. Now, many banks might offer these protections to their customers, but they are not required to. And often you pay some kind of fee for these cards (or lower interest on your checking account - a hidden fee).
I personally don't use debit cards for anything - just credit cards. I always pay my balance in full - I don't charge things unless I have the cash. However, if I get burned by some merchant all I need to do is type up a few lines in a letter and mail it to the credit card company, and the transaction is instantly credited pending investigation (as opposed to me having to sue to get my money back). I've done it a handful of times over many years, and every time I've gotten a nice note a few months later stating that everything was closed out in my favor.
Credit cards have some of the most consumer-friendly laws out there in the US. They're only trouble if you spend more than you make, which of course the companies make it REALLY easy to do. I'd recommend that people use them for everything unless they lack self control...
Also, we have NEVER wondered how to write a particular algorithm, then found the solution in some patent disclosure document. Do you realize how absurd that sounds?
Only because the system is so broken for software as to be essentially beyond repair. And also because software progresses SO quickly.
In other disciplines patent searches are a common way to uncover ways of doing things. I once worked on a synthetic chemistry project which started with a method disclosed in a patent. Of course, chemistry patents are much easier to search - they include the chemical structure of the invention, and no matter how horrible the wording of the patent is a molecular structure can easily be searched.
Typically patented methods for compounds tend to be useful only as starting points - they have to prove that they can make the molecule, but they don't have to disclose the best way of making it (unless what they're trying to patent is the method itself and not the final molecule).
Patents on the whole aren't a bad thing, but certain applications of them have caused all kinds of headaches. In many cases the problems could be fixed by defining patent lifetimes based on industry - a 17 year software patent is a whole lot different than a 17 year patent on a power plant design.
Auh, quoting people like Lenin on the nature of capitalism is like quoting George Bush on the nature of people who aren't in 100% agreement with US policy.
If you want a good impartial definition of communism would you ask McCarthy?
Capitalism and the free market are essentially synonymous in common use.
Couldn't agree more - I value my screen real-estate, and I'd rather not have 5mm of it taken up by every website I frequent. Give me an extension which creates a custom search IN THE EXISTING BOX or maybe a menu item, and we'll be talking.
I helped out one of my wife's friends with her computer and was astonished that half of her IE windows was toolbars. I think I did what I could but I wasn't about to spend a week backing up, reimaging, restoring, and spyware-proofing her system. Why somebody would intentionally download more toolbars is beyond me...
And do you not have to pass a color differentiation test to get a license?
Uh, any nation that had such a law would disqualify about 5% of is population from driving - in a country like the USA that is bordering on disability. Male color blindness is much more common than you might think, and many who have it don't even realize it.
My solution would be just to ban human operation of routine transportation vehicles entirely. Let the computers drive the cars and you drop the accidential death rate by probably 10-20% overnight, reduce the cost of parking lots tremendously, eliminate the need for traffic cops, reduce the cost of auto insurance by probably 80%, reduce consumpation of imported oil significantly, and improve general productivity (people can do things while riding around). All transportation/delivery-related costs would also drop tremendously. It would also be feasible for most people to rent their primary car on an as-needed basis (say from 8-8:30 AM, 12-12:30PM, 5-5:30PM, and 20 minutes here and there in the evening) - why pay to keep a car idle 99% of the time. For people avoiding commuting times those rentals would be dirt cheap...
I hate to be pedantic, but I think a given electron crosses the property line in your direction once every cycle - not half-cycle.
Let's start a zero voltage with the electron right on the border of your property. The voltage rises to 110/220, and the electron moves towards your house and you "buy" it. Voltage drops to zero and it comes to a halt inside your house somewhere. Voltage drops to -110/220 and the electron moves away from your house. Voltage rises to zero just as the electron crosses your property line and is "returned" to the utility. Thus completes one cycle.
The same logic applies wherever the electron starts out.
Just to add a little support to what others have stated - I'm definitely curious about group theory, and have an MS in Chemistry. I certainly don't understand half the terminology in that article.
I love to learn - and an encyclopedia should be a place that anybody can learn ABOUT a topic - without necessarily needing to commit 5 years of study to it.
ANY topic can be made understandable at some level. You just have to try...
Agreed - I can't tell you how many physics articles I've been interested in which amount to 3 sentences of general prose followed by 47 pages of linear algebra and very specialized terminology. And I have a graduate degree in a scientific discipline (just not particular-branch-of-physics).
Most academic scientists tend to extremely detailed areas of study - not just protein biology, but maybe one particular protein - and from a certain perspective (structure, genetics, function at a cellular level, or all the way up to the whole-organism level). Most academic articles (even many review articles) become inaccessible to somebody working even within the same general area of study - as authors generally don't bother to point out the significance of things they write (considering it obvious).
I think the lack of clear communication in the sciences is actually stifiling cross-disciplinary research. Once upon a time a biologist could look at something a chemist was doing and say "wow - that has all kinds of implications to what I'm studying!" These days it is a lot harder to stay up on what is going on within your own field of study, let alone everything else. In part this is to be expected with the huge growth of knowledge. However, better communication would certainly help.
I think the irony is that 50 years from now people will be making discoveries only to find that they were made decades ago and forgotten despite being written down. It probably happens today as well...
And how are all these organizations supposed to test their code if they don't know there is a vulnerability, or what might have changed in a product they just got a patch for?
I am under the impression that a bunch of fortune 500s want security bugs disclosed to software vendors and a select group of companies including themselves, and to nobody else. The problem is that EVERYBODY wants to be one of those select companies, which means the bug gets out anyway. So now the bugs leak out to those who would exploit them, but not to all people affected by them (since not everybody ends up in the elite group).
It seems more reasonable to me to just let the original vendor know about the bug for a little while, and then disclose to the world...
You can have all that now - whoever writes a driver releases the source under the GPL, and it can be integrated into the kernel, or maintained by OEMs/distros/whatever.
The only time this breaks down is for proprietary drivers. And the linux devs simply aren't interested in supporting those. They aren't making a profit from linux - they get paid the same whether there are 10 linux users or 10 billion. Think about it - Linux took the time to write linux when there wasn't a framebuffer driver for a simple VGA card, so do you think it is a big deal to him that there isn't GPL-code available to program the vertex shaders on a GForce?...
The whole point of the no-binary-interface to the kernel is to make your life as big of a pain as possible. That discourages you from buying stuff from nvidia/etc. Or at least making a lot of noise. That encourages other vendors to open-source their drivers and integrate them into the kernel.
If anybody could easily maintain binary kernel drivers then more people would do so, and less code would be released open-source. Now, the total amount of code (proprietary+otherwise) might increase, but that isn't really Linus's concern. If the code isn't open it doesn't really benefit him. When you think about it, more people using linux doesn't really benefit him either...
I'm not 100% sure that this is what you're getting at, but for the less physically inclined (including myself) let me try an alternate explanation - please feel free to shoot holes in it.
Ok, you're a hydrogen atom floating in DEEP space. You feel the tug of a galactic cluster, so you start moving towards it. Then you feel the tug of a galaxy, so you start moving towards it. Then you feel the tug of a random planet like the Earth, so you start moving towards it. All along you have been bumping into other hydrogen atoms, so by the time you get to the earth you are moving fast, but not insanely fast. You hit the earth and get stuck in the dirt.
Now, picture that you're a particle of dark matter, whatever that is, with a little bit of apparent mass. You start out in DEEP space and happen to fall all the way to the Earth. But, this time you haven't interacted with anything along the way, and so you're still flying along at 99% of the speed of light. You fly through the Earth, out of the galaxy, out of the cluster, and start slowing down until you fall back towards the cluster. So, you're essentially orbiting on a galactic scale or larger.
So, at any given time there might be dark matter particles within the boundary of the Earth, but they're only transiently present. They don't accumulate on the Earth because most are just orbiting on a galactic scale. That's why you don't see them.
In order to stay around the Earth objects need to have a similar velocity. Not many particles of dark matter would be likely to have a similar velocity to the Earth, because there isn't any real way for them to clump up - except as just big balls of gas on the galactic scale.
Electricity costs can't drop below zero, any drop is unlikely. They can however double and you'll be waiting in a long line with everyone else to buy and install those panels.
Possibly true, but when those prices double I'd be happy to wait in that line to avoid a potentially negative investment now.
As an aside I can't believe the insane rates being tossed around in this discussion. My costs are under a dime per kWh. If I were paying upwards of 20 cents I'd certainly be rethinking the economics of PVs...
Tell me about it - most school projects these days are far to be intricate to be built by the students. Inevitably they just get built by parents, with maybe a little student involvement.
Teachers say "wow - look what my students can do!" and really they're just looking at the output of their parents.
To me a school project should be STUDENT-LED. Sure, the parents should be around to supervise anything hazardous, or to provide a little advice/help. However, a school project shouldn't have a $150 budget and be far beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced students in the class. If the student has no idea how their physics project works, it kind of defeats the purpose of having created it.
My other pet-peeve is science projects that essentially become art projects, because the teacher doesn't want to come up with something the students can actually do, so instead they're asked to come up with some concepts and illustrate them REALLY well.
If your electric bill is $2400/yr, and even with subsidies your panels will cost $28k, then you're looking at at an 11-year-plus break even at zero interest and going off the grid entirely. If you finance those panels at 4% over 10 years they'll cost you $34k in total - so you're still 4 years behind breaking even after a decade.
Now, if you can get by with fewer/cheaper panels or if the cost of grid power goes way up then the economics might change. However, the figures don't even look close to break-even as they currently stand...
I'm sure most military satellites use pretty carefully encrypted transmissions. The NSA does all kinds of cutting-edge R&D on crypto and are probably years ahead of everybody else. Commercial satellites are probably more easily defeated, but we're not talking about DRM, so there is no reason they couldn't be made extremely secure.
The problem with DVDs is that the decryption key is handed to EVERYBODY with a DVD player - it is just hard to get at. If the player can read a DVD, then somebody with physical access to the player can figure out what the keys are.
With satellite links you lack physical access to any component of the link - so the limitations of DRM do not apply. If a satellite link used AES properly it would essentially be impossible to crack. Even if they used relatively-easy-to-crack DES it wouldn't be the sort of thing you could take apart in your basement with $2k worth of equipment.
What is the strategic weakness exposed by satellite imagery, that is not exposed by the other myriad sources of information that are available?
If you're talking about Google Earth - probably not too much.
If you're talking about realtime commercial satellite imagery, that could be worth quite a bit. If you're planning a terrorist attack on a motorcade, being able to watch it live from space would be a nice capability to have. If you're a 3rd world nation being able to see lots of planes stacking up on the deck of an aircraft carrier offshore might be useful information.
Most recon is time-sensitive. If companies don't play ball the US they'll probably see their satellites getting jammed for a few days at a time - or maybe a few weeks. Or they might see their own governments clamping down. The US doesn't care that satellites are snapping photos of military formations if the attack is over by the time the satellite is able to transmit the photos. Then again, general footage of combat tactics is something the US probably would want to keep a lid on (then again most nations that care about such things have their own government satellites).
I think that banning Google Earth photos of bridges is getting a bit silly. On the other hand, realtime survailence can be a different matter and I think that it is rightly regulated to some degree.
Most likely all the nations that in public decry US policies in private have all kinds of secret agreements in place with the US on national security matters. Sure, they don't talk about it with the voters, but in private the powers in charge manage to work out compromises to meet their various ends.
The US isn't concerned with the Chinese government taking pictures of troops in Afganistan. They're concerned with a Chinese company taking pictures and selling them to the Taliban in real time.
And the issue isn't with historical photos for the most part - it is with real-time data collection. If you want to mount a massive surprise invasion you need to stage equipment a few days in advance. Satellites can spot that equipment and give advance warning. So can people on the ground, but the US Air Force probably works hard to make sure that there aren't many people on the ground in the appropriate places, and if there are, that their radio transmitters and telephone exchanges don't work anyway.
Modern warfare is all about controlling access to information. If you know where the enemies troops are, and the enemy is blind, then you can divide and conqueror and every match-up will be against overwhelming force. War is one activity where NOBODY fights fair.
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I always hated the bogus "We need higher drug prices or you wouldn't have these drugs in the first place!". If I can't afford those expensive drugs then they are as good as if they had never existed anyway.
Not true at all - the drugs that are expensive today are cheap 10 years later. If they never existed at all then nobody would ever benefit from them.
The drugs that are affordable today all used to be very expensive at some time - and yet they're still very useful to the poor and rich alike.
In the same way high-def TV sets are useful even if most people can't afford them, because one day they'll replace 13" TVs in every bedroom in the world...
You don't need a government to enforce your control over it, either, given the resources and wealth of most companies today. Look at the diamond trade, or the pharmaceutical industry. They can take care of themselves.
Uh, the pharmaceutical industry is HEAVILY dominated by patents on the discovery side. Drugs are very cheap to duplicate (just look at India). Most of the cost of R&D just comes down to an answer of "Yes" or "No" to the question "is this drug safe and effective?" Once somebody knows the answer to that question they can skip the hundreds of millions in cost and just start making drugs at near-marginal cost. If you want new drugs somebody has to pay for the clinical trials. Right now the government doesn't really fund these at all (just a little basic reasearch - which is innovative but not the expensive part), so you have patents.
As for the diamond industry - suffice it to say that I don't think that is a model of how we want most industries to run...
There are lots of industries that are well-run which don't require patents, but those aren't among them. A better example might be cars - they're generally not patent-encumbered and there is a healthy amount of innovation. The difference is that a given model is only sold for a year or two, making copycats less of an issue. Also, they don't have huge risks associated with them - you can build a car that will essentially get the job done without worrying about whether the whole design will just blow up when you turn the key...
I consider myself fairly libertarian, but I don't consider it inappropriate to fund wars in the middle east using gasoline taxes. Ditto for costs associated with smog-reduction/etc. These are externalities and they are best funded by those who purchase gasoline. Why should those who do not drive be forced to pay for wars in the middle east, which would not be necessary if we didn't need so much gas?
Let the cost of goods reflect their true cost - then consumers will pick whatever makes the most sense economically and fix quite a few of society's problems in the meantime...
Honestly, I don't think a kid who has a bunch of atomic weights/numbers memorized is going to have much of an advantage. The symbols come in handy, but even then they only take 5 seconds to look up on a periodic table (any chemistry teacher who doesn't let their students look at a periodic table during an exam is really focusing on the wrong things).
I have an MS in chemistry. I couldn't tell you the atomic weights of 90% of the elements, but I know all the ones I need to get by in most of real life (that would probably be about 10 of them). I was never forced to learn them - and I was always able to look them up. After the millionth time of looking them up I memorized them - just like in any field of study.
Sure, having valences and all that memorized can be handy - but that is INEVITABLE if you study chemistry - again for the important elements.
The things that make chemistry hard for most students is probably the rigorous mathematical treatment, and some of the concepts. You don't need a card game to teach a kid that a catalyst makes a reaction go faster - you can just tell them that. Teaching them that it affects the kinetics of a reaction but not the thermodynamics is a bit harder - and no simple card game is going to do that.
The problem is that it is much easier to teach and test the ability to memorize facts, but that isn't what chemistry is (despite how some teachers operate). Oh, sure, if you're going to be a synthetic organic chemist you're going to have to cram 5000 named reactions at some point, and there isn't much getting around that, but this is more of an exception in the field. Learning chemistry isn't like learning vocabulary. I'd say it isn't like learning history either, except that I think that teachers have that subject all wrong as well (don't make kids memorize dates and the order of presidents/kings/etc - teach them the SIGNIFICANCE of history and they might actually learn something useful!).
And no, I don't think that EVERYBODY needs to know EVERYTHING about Chemistry. But if you don't want to teach real Chemistry, why torture kids with memorizing weights/etc - something which is of nearly no use in the real world? It will just make them hate "Chemistry"... Teaching real Chemistry will expose kids to a very practical and useful field of study - one that is also a good source of income. And if students don't like it at least they're learning a new way of thinking (kind of like geometry - you'll never use those proofs ever again, but it is a different way of thinking about things and a chance to expose students to something they'd otherwise not learn).
Ok, off my soap-box now...
I never pay interest on my credit cards. You only have to pay interest if you don't pay the balance in full at the end of the month. Instead, I make interest by leaving the cash in my bank account until I need to pay the bill.
Additionally, if there is a dispute I don't have to pay that part of the bill. With a check card you're forced to go asking to get your money back. With a credit card you tell them that you aren't paying part of it - and then while things get sorted out you keep the cash. There is a difference...
Finally, you generally have to pay for debit cards (or "check cards") that have decent consumer protections. That might be in the form of fees (not necessarily labeled as check card fees - it could be a monthly fee on your checking account), or lower interest (I get paid interest on my checking account - many banks do not pay interest on checking), or some other trade-off.
That act didn't seem clear about transfers that occur when the card and/or other access devices were never stolen. A card doesn't need to be stolen to be used - especially with the lousy security associated with how these cards are currently implemented.
Check card == debit card with fancy branding.
They're the same thing.
Legally they don't have the consumer protections that credit cards have in the US. Now, many banks might offer these protections to their customers, but they are not required to. And often you pay some kind of fee for these cards (or lower interest on your checking account - a hidden fee).
I personally don't use debit cards for anything - just credit cards. I always pay my balance in full - I don't charge things unless I have the cash. However, if I get burned by some merchant all I need to do is type up a few lines in a letter and mail it to the credit card company, and the transaction is instantly credited pending investigation (as opposed to me having to sue to get my money back). I've done it a handful of times over many years, and every time I've gotten a nice note a few months later stating that everything was closed out in my favor.
Credit cards have some of the most consumer-friendly laws out there in the US. They're only trouble if you spend more than you make, which of course the companies make it REALLY easy to do. I'd recommend that people use them for everything unless they lack self control...
Also, we have NEVER wondered how to write a particular algorithm, then found the solution in some patent disclosure document. Do you realize how absurd that sounds?
Only because the system is so broken for software as to be essentially beyond repair. And also because software progresses SO quickly.
In other disciplines patent searches are a common way to uncover ways of doing things. I once worked on a synthetic chemistry project which started with a method disclosed in a patent. Of course, chemistry patents are much easier to search - they include the chemical structure of the invention, and no matter how horrible the wording of the patent is a molecular structure can easily be searched.
Typically patented methods for compounds tend to be useful only as starting points - they have to prove that they can make the molecule, but they don't have to disclose the best way of making it (unless what they're trying to patent is the method itself and not the final molecule).
Patents on the whole aren't a bad thing, but certain applications of them have caused all kinds of headaches. In many cases the problems could be fixed by defining patent lifetimes based on industry - a 17 year software patent is a whole lot different than a 17 year patent on a power plant design.
Auh, quoting people like Lenin on the nature of capitalism is like quoting George Bush on the nature of people who aren't in 100% agreement with US policy.
If you want a good impartial definition of communism would you ask McCarthy?
Capitalism and the free market are essentially synonymous in common use.
Couldn't agree more - I value my screen real-estate, and I'd rather not have 5mm of it taken up by every website I frequent. Give me an extension which creates a custom search IN THE EXISTING BOX or maybe a menu item, and we'll be talking.
I helped out one of my wife's friends with her computer and was astonished that half of her IE windows was toolbars. I think I did what I could but I wasn't about to spend a week backing up, reimaging, restoring, and spyware-proofing her system. Why somebody would intentionally download more toolbars is beyond me...
And do you not have to pass a color differentiation test to get a license?
Uh, any nation that had such a law would disqualify about 5% of is population from driving - in a country like the USA that is bordering on disability. Male color blindness is much more common than you might think, and many who have it don't even realize it.
My solution would be just to ban human operation of routine transportation vehicles entirely. Let the computers drive the cars and you drop the accidential death rate by probably 10-20% overnight, reduce the cost of parking lots tremendously, eliminate the need for traffic cops, reduce the cost of auto insurance by probably 80%, reduce consumpation of imported oil significantly, and improve general productivity (people can do things while riding around). All transportation/delivery-related costs would also drop tremendously. It would also be feasible for most people to rent their primary car on an as-needed basis (say from 8-8:30 AM, 12-12:30PM, 5-5:30PM, and 20 minutes here and there in the evening) - why pay to keep a car idle 99% of the time. For people avoiding commuting times those rentals would be dirt cheap...
I hate to be pedantic, but I think a given electron crosses the property line in your direction once every cycle - not half-cycle.
Let's start a zero voltage with the electron right on the border of your property. The voltage rises to 110/220, and the electron moves towards your house and you "buy" it. Voltage drops to zero and it comes to a halt inside your house somewhere. Voltage drops to -110/220 and the electron moves away from your house. Voltage rises to zero just as the electron crosses your property line and is "returned" to the utility. Thus completes one cycle.
The same logic applies wherever the electron starts out.
Just to add a little support to what others have stated - I'm definitely curious about group theory, and have an MS in Chemistry. I certainly don't understand half the terminology in that article.
I love to learn - and an encyclopedia should be a place that anybody can learn ABOUT a topic - without necessarily needing to commit 5 years of study to it.
ANY topic can be made understandable at some level. You just have to try...
Agreed - I can't tell you how many physics articles I've been interested in which amount to 3 sentences of general prose followed by 47 pages of linear algebra and very specialized terminology. And I have a graduate degree in a scientific discipline (just not particular-branch-of-physics).
Most academic scientists tend to extremely detailed areas of study - not just protein biology, but maybe one particular protein - and from a certain perspective (structure, genetics, function at a cellular level, or all the way up to the whole-organism level). Most academic articles (even many review articles) become inaccessible to somebody working even within the same general area of study - as authors generally don't bother to point out the significance of things they write (considering it obvious).
I think the lack of clear communication in the sciences is actually stifiling cross-disciplinary research. Once upon a time a biologist could look at something a chemist was doing and say "wow - that has all kinds of implications to what I'm studying!" These days it is a lot harder to stay up on what is going on within your own field of study, let alone everything else. In part this is to be expected with the huge growth of knowledge. However, better communication would certainly help.
I think the irony is that 50 years from now people will be making discoveries only to find that they were made decades ago and forgotten despite being written down. It probably happens today as well...
And how are all these organizations supposed to test their code if they don't know there is a vulnerability, or what might have changed in a product they just got a patch for?
I am under the impression that a bunch of fortune 500s want security bugs disclosed to software vendors and a select group of companies including themselves, and to nobody else. The problem is that EVERYBODY wants to be one of those select companies, which means the bug gets out anyway. So now the bugs leak out to those who would exploit them, but not to all people affected by them (since not everybody ends up in the elite group).
It seems more reasonable to me to just let the original vendor know about the bug for a little while, and then disclose to the world...
You can have all that now - whoever writes a driver releases the source under the GPL, and it can be integrated into the kernel, or maintained by OEMs/distros/whatever.
The only time this breaks down is for proprietary drivers. And the linux devs simply aren't interested in supporting those. They aren't making a profit from linux - they get paid the same whether there are 10 linux users or 10 billion. Think about it - Linux took the time to write linux when there wasn't a framebuffer driver for a simple VGA card, so do you think it is a big deal to him that there isn't GPL-code available to program the vertex shaders on a GForce?...
The whole point of the no-binary-interface to the kernel is to make your life as big of a pain as possible. That discourages you from buying stuff from nvidia/etc. Or at least making a lot of noise. That encourages other vendors to open-source their drivers and integrate them into the kernel.
If anybody could easily maintain binary kernel drivers then more people would do so, and less code would be released open-source. Now, the total amount of code (proprietary+otherwise) might increase, but that isn't really Linus's concern. If the code isn't open it doesn't really benefit him. When you think about it, more people using linux doesn't really benefit him either...
I'm not 100% sure that this is what you're getting at, but for the less physically inclined (including myself) let me try an alternate explanation - please feel free to shoot holes in it.
Ok, you're a hydrogen atom floating in DEEP space. You feel the tug of a galactic cluster, so you start moving towards it. Then you feel the tug of a galaxy, so you start moving towards it. Then you feel the tug of a random planet like the Earth, so you start moving towards it. All along you have been bumping into other hydrogen atoms, so by the time you get to the earth you are moving fast, but not insanely fast. You hit the earth and get stuck in the dirt.
Now, picture that you're a particle of dark matter, whatever that is, with a little bit of apparent mass. You start out in DEEP space and happen to fall all the way to the Earth. But, this time you haven't interacted with anything along the way, and so you're still flying along at 99% of the speed of light. You fly through the Earth, out of the galaxy, out of the cluster, and start slowing down until you fall back towards the cluster. So, you're essentially orbiting on a galactic scale or larger.
So, at any given time there might be dark matter particles within the boundary of the Earth, but they're only transiently present. They don't accumulate on the Earth because most are just orbiting on a galactic scale. That's why you don't see them.
In order to stay around the Earth objects need to have a similar velocity. Not many particles of dark matter would be likely to have a similar velocity to the Earth, because there isn't any real way for them to clump up - except as just big balls of gas on the galactic scale.
Is this a decent explanation?
Electricity costs can't drop below zero, any drop is unlikely. They can however double and you'll be waiting in a long line with everyone else to buy and install those panels.
Possibly true, but when those prices double I'd be happy to wait in that line to avoid a potentially negative investment now.
As an aside I can't believe the insane rates being tossed around in this discussion. My costs are under a dime per kWh. If I were paying upwards of 20 cents I'd certainly be rethinking the economics of PVs...
I'd have to be nuts to borrow money to build a PV system. The savings would barely be enough to service the debt.
If you are borrowing any money at all, then that money you're using for the PV system could be used to retire that debt, for the same savings.
And if you aren't borrowing any money at all, you could put that money in safe investments and make that kind of money.
So the interest comparison is pretty relevant. If the PVs break even they're still a net loss from a time-value-of-money standpoint...
Tell me about it - most school projects these days are far to be intricate to be built by the students. Inevitably they just get built by parents, with maybe a little student involvement.
Teachers say "wow - look what my students can do!" and really they're just looking at the output of their parents.
To me a school project should be STUDENT-LED. Sure, the parents should be around to supervise anything hazardous, or to provide a little advice/help. However, a school project shouldn't have a $150 budget and be far beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced students in the class. If the student has no idea how their physics project works, it kind of defeats the purpose of having created it.
My other pet-peeve is science projects that essentially become art projects, because the teacher doesn't want to come up with something the students can actually do, so instead they're asked to come up with some concepts and illustrate them REALLY well.
If your electric bill is $2400/yr, and even with subsidies your panels will cost $28k, then you're looking at at an 11-year-plus break even at zero interest and going off the grid entirely. If you finance those panels at 4% over 10 years they'll cost you $34k in total - so you're still 4 years behind breaking even after a decade.
Now, if you can get by with fewer/cheaper panels or if the cost of grid power goes way up then the economics might change. However, the figures don't even look close to break-even as they currently stand...
I'm sure most military satellites use pretty carefully encrypted transmissions. The NSA does all kinds of cutting-edge R&D on crypto and are probably years ahead of everybody else. Commercial satellites are probably more easily defeated, but we're not talking about DRM, so there is no reason they couldn't be made extremely secure.
The problem with DVDs is that the decryption key is handed to EVERYBODY with a DVD player - it is just hard to get at. If the player can read a DVD, then somebody with physical access to the player can figure out what the keys are.
With satellite links you lack physical access to any component of the link - so the limitations of DRM do not apply. If a satellite link used AES properly it would essentially be impossible to crack. Even if they used relatively-easy-to-crack DES it wouldn't be the sort of thing you could take apart in your basement with $2k worth of equipment.
What is the strategic weakness exposed by satellite imagery, that is not exposed by the other myriad sources of information that are available?
If you're talking about Google Earth - probably not too much.
If you're talking about realtime commercial satellite imagery, that could be worth quite a bit. If you're planning a terrorist attack on a motorcade, being able to watch it live from space would be a nice capability to have. If you're a 3rd world nation being able to see lots of planes stacking up on the deck of an aircraft carrier offshore might be useful information.
Most recon is time-sensitive. If companies don't play ball the US they'll probably see their satellites getting jammed for a few days at a time - or maybe a few weeks. Or they might see their own governments clamping down. The US doesn't care that satellites are snapping photos of military formations if the attack is over by the time the satellite is able to transmit the photos. Then again, general footage of combat tactics is something the US probably would want to keep a lid on (then again most nations that care about such things have their own government satellites).
I think that banning Google Earth photos of bridges is getting a bit silly. On the other hand, realtime survailence can be a different matter and I think that it is rightly regulated to some degree.
Most likely all the nations that in public decry US policies in private have all kinds of secret agreements in place with the US on national security matters. Sure, they don't talk about it with the voters, but in private the powers in charge manage to work out compromises to meet their various ends.
The US isn't concerned with the Chinese government taking pictures of troops in Afganistan. They're concerned with a Chinese company taking pictures and selling them to the Taliban in real time.
And the issue isn't with historical photos for the most part - it is with real-time data collection. If you want to mount a massive surprise invasion you need to stage equipment a few days in advance. Satellites can spot that equipment and give advance warning. So can people on the ground, but the US Air Force probably works hard to make sure that there aren't many people on the ground in the appropriate places, and if there are, that their radio transmitters and telephone exchanges don't work anyway.
Modern warfare is all about controlling access to information. If you know where the enemies troops are, and the enemy is blind, then you can divide and conqueror and every match-up will be against overwhelming force. War is one activity where NOBODY fights fair.