I have to say, that was the first press release I have read in a while that had me thinking about Enron (no one I know
is rushing to buy Vista, and yet it magically raises Microsoft's profits!).
Re: How do you know that someone looks at any of these? I've sent many a spam to that address, and never had a reply, or anything to confirm that it went somewhere.
Because every once in a while, there is an internal bounce from inside the FTC that goes to the originating email address (i.e., one of mine).
It doesn't prove they are being read, but they are being internally distributed.
Note that the FTC has been doing things like shutting down stock sales for the Pump and Dump scams, and they have to get those emails from somewhere.
I had Verizon ISDN once and it had frequent failures (no link light, no signal, just dead). One of the first times I called up on this they asked what kind of computer I had - a Macintosh - well, we don't support anything but Windows. Uh, there is no link light. I am sorry sir, but we only support Windows.
General relativity is tough because the effects are so small. Basically, special relativity starts to come in (have an influence) at a scale of v (velocity) over c (the speed of light). For an example, a 777 might go at 600 mph or 300 meters per second or v/c of 300 / 300,000,000, or one part in a million. One part per million is not so hard now-a-days, and so a 777 has to take into account special relativity, for example when using GPS.
Now, for General Relativity (GR), effects start to come in at (v/c) squared. And, you can't cheat by going fast, it's (v/c) squared of orbital or free fall velocity that counts. (In GR it is no accident that, in the correct units, the oribtal v/c squared and the Mass of the central body are closely related.) For the Earth, orbital v/c is about 1/100,000, so GR effects start to come in at one part in 10 billion. For the Sun, you can send photons by its surface (more or less), where the effects are about 1 in 10 million, and you can measure the total bending or Doppler delay of those photons to better than one part in a billion, so you can test (some) predictions of GR at the one part in 10,000 to 100,000 level. And, do to meter level positioning from GPS satellites 20,000 km away, you need to model things at one part per 10 million or so, and you don't need to worry about GR in the propagation of photons, but you do in the clocks (because a part per 10 billion clock error is 0.1 nanoseconds per second, and you are trying to do nanosecond level time delay measurements).
But, none of this is not frame dragging, which is a gravito-magnetic effect (a fancy way of saying that it comes from the part of the metric that mixes space and time). That comes in at _another_ factor of (v/c) (i.e., the cube of v/c). For the Earth, frame dragging effects are of order one part in a quadrillion per second. The only thing that makes it even conceivable to measure frame dragging is that the effect accumulates, for each orbit of the spacecraft; over time, it becomes large enough to become in reach. For Gravity Probe B, the frame dragging effect is 40 milli arc seconds per year (or 0.2 parts per million per year). The so called geodetic precession is 170 times larger for this experiment, or 6.8 seconds per year (34 parts per million per year). This is what was measured to about 1 percent. (Probably the best way to think of this effect is that is the non-closure due to curved space times - just as the angles of a triangle don't quite sum to 180 degrees in GR, orbits don't quite close either.) So, the experiment was capable of measuring its precession to about 0.3 parts per million (or 300 parts per billion) per year. That's good, and a remarkable acheivement, but not good enough to measure the frame dragging. To do that, they need to get to at least a factor of 10 better - the goal was about a part per billion per year, or roughly 300 times better that they are doing now.
So, a remarkable achievment, and better than Lunar Laser Ranging, but probably not as good as the binary millisecond pulsars. It's not likely to lead to new physics, which is what of course you really hope for in return for all of the money and time spent, which is a shame, over all. The best tests of GR are still in the time delay / bending of light experiments, which are about a part in 10,000 to 100,000, but as I explained above, they really test different parts of the theory (pieces of the PPN metric expansion).
This disappointment was actually predicted over a decade ago.
The snarky joke was that this was truly a null experiment : if it agreed with General Relativity, it would be believed, but it would change nothing. If it did not agree with General Relativity, it would be viewed as being in error until it could be confirmed, which would likely take more decades. So, no matter what the result, it wouldn't change fundamental physics, which was the whole point.
I was going to post this myself. The goal was to measure frame dragging. The geodetic effect has been measured before (LLR and binary pulsars), and is not nearly as interesting (i.e., its hard to see why you wouldn't have it). It's the frame dragging that motivated the decades of effort and expenditure.
If they can't do frame dragging, the experiment will be deemed a failure.
Uh, no, it was a NASA experiement. They funded it. Lots of people from all over worked on it - the CFA (Harvard) group
was essential to its success, for example.
Here is the original article
on
Caves on Mars?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Re:Artificial intelligence and intellectual proper
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You assume that a "true" AI would have human like emotional reactions. I suspect that if we ever develop true AIs, we will neither understand how it works nor will we be able to communicate with it very well. Lacking our biological imperatives, I also suspect that true AIs would not really want to do anything.
Ugly words, but true. If the party in power in the UK wants to imprison everyone whose last name begins with the letter "A", there is nothing to stop them, as long as they can win votes of confidence and continue to maintain a majority. There are no checks and balances at all, except for the control of the House of Commons.
Look at the Iraq War. Is there any public support for it in the UK ? Not much. Is there any chance of the public's will actually being translated into a change in policy ? Not apparently.
And, as we are finding out in America, it's when your Government is headed by messianic war criminals that you really start to feel the need for checks and balances.
Over-the-air free broadcast - There are no royalties for over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of 100,000 or fewer households. For over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of greater than 100,000 households, royalties are $10,000 per year per local market service (by a transmitter or transmitter simultaneously with repeaters, e.g., multiple transmitters serving one station).
Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) - Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.
So, nothing is owed between now and 2010 on the Intenet. However, the fee could be $ 10K per channel after then; if that's the case, then there will be trouble in 2011. Also note that it is unclear if the VOD is per download (in which case it is quite high) or per title offered (in which case, quite low).
Slashdot Mirror
I think Orwell left out a slogan :
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Spying is Free Speach
If customers aren't clamoring to upgrade to Vista , then why is Microsoft's profit up due to Vista Sales?
I have to say, that was the first press release I have read in a while that had me thinking about Enron (no one I know is rushing to buy Vista, and yet it magically raises Microsoft's profits!).
It's an untapped market.
Re: How do you know that someone looks at any of these? I've sent many a spam to that address, and never had a reply, or anything to confirm that it went somewhere.
Because every once in a while, there is an internal bounce from inside the FTC that goes to the originating email address (i.e., one of mine). It doesn't prove they are being read, but they are being internally distributed.
Note that the FTC has been doing things like shutting down stock sales for the Pump and Dump scams, and they have to get those emails from somewhere.
I forward spams to spam@uce.gov . I know that someone looks at at least some of these; does anyone know if it actually does any good ?
... company robots vow to carry on anyway.
Patents do expire in 20 years. You can sue for past enfringement after it expires, but not on-going infringement.
My guess is, this is one last attempt to make something from a vanishing asset, before it disappears completely later this year.
Count on it.
India is planning on a Moon Mission and a Mars Mission and discussing Manned Space Flight.
I had Verizon ISDN once and it had frequent failures (no link light, no signal, just dead). One of the first times I called up on this they asked
what kind of computer I had - a Macintosh - well, we don't support anything but Windows. Uh, there is no link light. I am sorry sir, but
we only support Windows.
After that, I would avoid that question.
It's the DRM (from Microsoft) which locks Movielink to be Windows only.
In my experience, there are lots more sites that say that they require MIE than actually do.
I have gone several years now without ever using MIE, and can't say that it has really hindered me at all.
General relativity is tough because the effects are so small. Basically, special relativity starts to come in (have an influence) at a scale of v (velocity) over c (the speed of light). For an example, a 777 might go at 600 mph or 300 meters per second or v/c of 300 / 300,000,000, or one part in a million. One part per million is not so hard now-a-days, and so a 777 has to take into account special relativity, for example when using GPS.
Now, for General Relativity (GR), effects start to come in at (v/c) squared. And, you can't cheat by going fast, it's (v/c) squared of orbital or free fall velocity that counts. (In GR it is no accident that, in the correct units, the oribtal v/c squared and the Mass of the central body are closely related.) For the Earth, orbital v/c is about 1/100,000, so GR effects start to come in at one part in 10 billion. For the Sun, you can send photons by its surface (more or less), where the effects are about 1 in 10 million, and you can measure the total bending or Doppler delay of those photons to better than one part in a billion, so you can test (some) predictions of GR at the one part in 10,000 to 100,000 level. And, do to meter level positioning from GPS satellites 20,000 km away, you need to model things at one part per 10 million or so, and you don't need to worry about GR in the propagation of photons, but you do in the clocks (because a part per 10 billion clock error is 0.1 nanoseconds per second, and you are trying to do nanosecond level time delay measurements).
But, none of this is not frame dragging, which is a gravito-magnetic effect (a fancy way of saying that it comes from the part of the metric that mixes space and time). That comes in at _another_ factor of (v/c) (i.e., the cube of v/c). For the Earth, frame dragging effects are of order one part in a quadrillion per second. The only thing that makes it even conceivable to measure frame dragging is that the effect accumulates, for each orbit of the spacecraft; over time, it becomes large enough to become in reach. For Gravity Probe B, the frame dragging effect is 40 milli arc seconds per year (or 0.2 parts per million per year). The so called geodetic precession is 170 times larger for this experiment, or 6.8 seconds per year (34 parts per million per year). This is what was measured to about 1 percent. (Probably the best way to think of this effect is that is the non-closure due to curved space times - just as the angles of a triangle don't quite sum to 180 degrees in GR, orbits don't quite close either.) So, the experiment was capable of measuring its precession to about 0.3 parts per million (or 300 parts per billion) per year. That's good, and a remarkable acheivement, but not good enough to measure the frame dragging. To do that, they need to get to at least a factor of 10 better - the goal was about a part per billion per year, or roughly 300 times better that they are doing now.
So, a remarkable achievment, and better than Lunar Laser Ranging, but probably not as good as the binary millisecond pulsars. It's not likely to lead to new physics, which is what of course you really hope for in return for all of the money and time spent, which is a shame, over all. The best tests of GR are still in the time delay / bending of light experiments, which are about a part in 10,000 to 100,000, but as I explained above, they really test different parts of the theory (pieces of the PPN metric expansion).
This disappointment was actually predicted over a decade ago.
The snarky joke was that this was truly a null experiment : if it agreed with General Relativity, it would be believed, but it would change nothing. If it did
not agree with General Relativity, it would be viewed as being in error until it could be confirmed, which would likely take more decades. So, no matter what the result, it wouldn't change fundamental physics, which was the whole point.
Bingo !
I was going to post this myself. The goal was to measure frame dragging. The geodetic effect has been measured before (LLR and binary pulsars),
and is not nearly as interesting (i.e., its hard
to see why you wouldn't have it). It's the frame dragging that motivated the decades of effort and expenditure.
If they can't do frame dragging, the experiment will be deemed a failure.
Uh, no, it was a NASA experiement. They funded it. Lots of people from all over worked on it - the CFA (Harvard) group was essential to its success, for example.
An extended abstract from the Lunar Planetary Science Conference :
1 .pdf
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/137
For an all girls class, you might start with The Left Hand of Darkness.
You assume that a "true" AI would have human like emotional reactions. I suspect that if we ever develop true AIs, we will neither understand how it works nor will we be able to communicate with it very well. Lacking our biological imperatives, I also suspect that true AIs would not really want to do anything.
Most system admins and network admins have always felt that their systems would run just fine except for all of those pesky users.
And a lot Mac users feel that system admins like Windows to make sure that system admins are needed.
Ugly words, but true. If the party in power in the UK wants to imprison everyone whose last name begins with the letter "A", there
is nothing to stop them, as long as they can win votes of confidence and continue to maintain a majority. There are no checks and balances at all, except for the control of the House of Commons.
Look at the Iraq War. Is there any public support for it in the UK ? Not much. Is there any chance of the public's will actually being
translated into a change in policy ? Not apparently.
And, as we are finding out in America, it's when your Government is headed by messianic war criminals that you really start to feel the need for
checks and balances.
Open standard != open source
MPEG and AAC are open standards, because anyone can buy a copy of the specificiations. They are not open source, as they are encumbered by patents.
By the way, VLC also supports MPEG-4/H.264, and it and Quicktime interoperate at the media and streaming level pretty well.
AmericaFree.TV offers a 50-50 advertising split to indy films as part of the IndyReels program; the money is already going out to ePremier's.
Of course, this is aimed at independent films, not just everyone's home video's.
The whole purpose of publishing patent applications was so that people could submit prior art to the examiner.
So, if you care, and if you think you have prior art, submit it to the examiner.
You let out the crucial internet portions
Over-the-air free broadcast - There are no royalties for over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of 100,000 or fewer households. For over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of greater than 100,000 households, royalties are $10,000 per year per local market service (by a transmitter or transmitter simultaneously with repeaters, e.g., multiple transmitters serving one station).
Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) - Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.
So, nothing is owed between now and 2010 on the Intenet. However, the fee could be $ 10K per channel after then; if that's the case, then there will be trouble in 2011. Also note that it is unclear if the VOD is per download (in which case it is quite high) or per title offered (in which case, quite low).
... away from that new job.
You asked for advice.
(Of course, you get what you pay for is never more true than for advice from Slashdot.)