That's essentially what Trump's Make America Great Again boils down to: the notion that things have gotten worse and we can see that people like to buy into this notion when it isn't true.
Things have gotten worse for the working class even though the economy as a whole is booming. Of course, the policies put in place by Trump (lower taxes on the rich) and the policies he fights for (dismantle the healthcare system for non-wealthy people) make the situation worse, not better.
The tragedy and danger of electing Trump is that his policies exacerbate the economic problems of the working class, generating more fear and causing more people to turn to Authoritarianism as a way out.
What annoys me about all of these studies into the Em Drive is they try to use such lower power outputs that run into issues of detection and interference. This thing uses a cavity magnetron. Its not exactly hard to build. Consumer microwaves have cavity magnetrons in the single kw range and radar often goes into hundreds of kw if not megawatt range.
The problem is that with those higher powers you get much larger sources of noise and interference. You need to use significant plumbing to pipe the microwaves into the cavity. In addition, you have to deal with more interference from heating, etc. All the while you are try to measure the force needed to levitate a snowflake.
IMO it is not a coincidence that the EM-Drive prediction is devilishly hard to test. I'm not claiming the designer was malicious. But if it were easy to test then it would have been tested thoroughly years ago and either be debunked or verified.
Cold fusion was easier to test so it got debunked sooner. The "face on Mars" required a new mission to the red planet in order to be tested and debunked so that "signal in the noise" idea was rampant for years.
So the spin was that the government implemented ObamaCare and Obama had nothing to do with it? Right...
Furthermore, the current administration seems hellbent on undoing most of the big things Obama got credit for. Your claim that Obama didn't get credit/blame for these things seems utterly ridiculous. The pattern I see is that your own bias is showing loud and clear.
Views like yours are the real problem -- bought and paid for "scientists" with zero incentive to support anything that actually works.
Bullshit. I am not bought and paid for. I never was. All you seem to do is insult those around you without providing any evidence at all that your theory has any value.
My view is I want to support you but you need to provide me with some evidence that your theory has value. If you want to replace the standard model and general relativity and so much more, that's fine but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But I'm not asking for extraordinary evidence, I'm asking for a shred of evidence. Instead of pointing me to that shred, you insult me for offering to help promote your theories.
As for the lists of unsolved problems, it does not make the standard model useless or invalid or unsound. The standard model has made many predictions that later came true. This is the true test of a theory. That is basically what I'm asking you to show with your theory. Show me how to use it to make predictions. If it can't do that then it is not even wrong. It is not even physics.
Didn't you say you've already solved a bunch of the unsolved problems? If so then show me one of the solutions. If you want to replace theories that make, sometimes fantastically accurate, predictions then your new theory has to be able to make the same or better predictions, otherwise we need to keep the current theories.
Even if your new theories can't make predictions, I still honestly want to understand them. I spent time on your web site and I couldn't find anything except very vague arm waving. I got tired of wading through the arm waving so I asked you to point me in the direction of the good stuff so I could understand what you are talking about. Despite your tirades and insults, I still want to understand what you are talking about, if that is possible.
I looked at some of the pages on your site trying to find an example
of an actual prediction of spring-and-loop theory, not just a bunch
of hand waving. For a theory that you claim solves so very many
problems while the existing theories are trash, it shouldn't be so
hard to come up with one explanation.
So please, point me to an example of how to use SAL to make a
numerical prediction. Since you claim to have a better replace
for pretty much all of the existing mainstream physics theories
there should be a plethora of worked examples that make numerical
predictions. The deflection of light by the sun, the
perihelion precession of Mercury, the radius of a hydrogen atom,
its energy levels, the fine structure constant. The list is almost
endless.
Your saying that most of the existing theories are trash even
though they make amazingly accurate predictions about many
aspects of the natural world around us makes it appear you are
a crackpot. The apparent lack of any numerical results from
your new theory that replaces them seems to seal the deal.
I think it would be really really cool if you have come up with
a better theory. If you can show me a worked example then I
will convince mainstream physicists whom I have worked with that
they should stop working on string theory and the standard model
and general relativity and instead follow your lead. It would
be by far the biggest shake up of physics in history. You will
almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.
But until I see a worked example, you seem to be just another
crackpot who is muddying the waters in order to garner undeserved
attention.
And as rule number one for a healthy sex life: no TV in the bed room.
Turns out, the number one thing you can do to get laid more often is to put your tv
in your bedroom. According to a poll in Britain, couples with a tv in their
bedroom have sex twice as often as couples who do not.
Unlike Bill Clinton, who's an accused rapist [...]
While back in the real world, Donald Trump has been
accused of raping a 13 year old girl.
I'm not saying we should condemn people because of accusations
against them but Donald Trump is not free from rape allegations.
Yes, in a non-technical sense there is evidence of something. In
the technical sense (see for example Bayesian Probability for the
technical meaning used in the hard sciences) there is still no
evidence that indicates the EMDrive works as advertised. If
there had been such evidence then scientists across the world
would flock to reproduce the results of the successful
experiment just like people rushed to reproduce the results of
Pons and Fleishman.
A more precise statement might be to say that even though all of
the experiments reported some unexplained thrust, there is no
agreement between the experiments and none of the experiments
have been able to show a clear signal or lack thereof above the
noise floor. Contrast this with the Pons and Fleishman
experiment which did show a clear signal way above the noise
floor (which ended up being non-reproducible) or the CERN
experiment which showed that neutrinos traveled faster than
light, again way way above their noise floor. Those CERN
experimenters had the honestly and humility to say they didn't
think their clear signal was real because the experiment was very
complicated and there was probably something in the experimental
setup they were not accounting for. The reason they said this is
because if their clear signal had been real then it would have
thrown a huge monkey wrench into established theoretical physics.
It turns out that they eventually found their mistake, in one
place in the experimental apparatus a longer cable was used
instead of the short one they assumed was used. This caused an
extra delay in their measurement of the light signal and thus
cause the erroneous results.
If any of the EMDrive experiments provided real, scientific
evidence of the EMDrive mechanism working then the scientific
world would be in an uproar like they were after Pons and
Fleishman. For the EMDrive experiments thus far we have the
worst of both worlds. On the theoretical side, the EMDrive would
upturn the world of theoretical physics much more than the faster
than light neutrinos; on the experimental side, all the
experimental results (except the refuted ones from China) are
consistent with there being no EMDrive effect at all. This is
what I meant. I didn't mean there was no evidence, I meant there
was no evidence that the EMDrive actually works as advertised.
By refuted I mean the early experiments in China that were not
done in a vacuum. Their thrust measurements were orders of
magnitude greater than the results in any of the experiments
that were done in vacuum.
As for citations, read the actual papers published by the experimenters.
If we discount the earlier paper from China which has been refuted,
none of the others demonstrate clearly that the EMDrive mechanism
produces a specific measurable, reproducible, amount of thrust. When
you look at all the experiment results combined, it actually looks
worse than any single experiment because while each of them
measured some unaccounted for thrust, the results are not
consistent across experiments which indicates that each one was
not accounting for a different source of noise.
If any one of the experiments had been a success then the next
step would have been to reproduce the same results in a different
lab, just like people rushed out to reproduces the results of
Pons and Fleischman. Instead, after each paper people try to
make a new and different experiment with more signal and less
noise that will conclusively show that the EMDrive mechanism
produces thrust. This Slashdot article is a perfect example.
If any of the previous experiments had been a success then the
next step would have been to repeat that experiment to confirm
the results. Instead, it is suggested they continue to
try to beat back the noise floor by greatly adding to the cost
and the inconvenience (to say it mildly) by conducting a brand
new experiment in outer space.
What makes you so certain it will fail spectacularly? It hasn't
so far...
ALL of the experiments that have not been totally refuted have
completely and utterly failed to demonstrate a consistent and a
repeatable signal that is higher than the noise threshold. Being
unable to track down all sources of noise is not the same thing
as getting a reliable signal that can be replicated in other
experiments. When we look at all of the experimental evidence
taken together it is completely consistent with zero signal
and only noise.
If you are measuring this as performance art, then sure, it has
been a rip-roaring success but if you are measuring it in terms
of science and engineering then all the experiments have totally
failed to demonstrate that the effect is real.
Just because all of the experiments thus far have either failed
or been refuted, with some experiments getting a signal in the
opposite direction of the one expected, and others getting as much
signal when vital parts of the apparatus are missing, and yet
other early experiments claiming a signal many orders of magnitude
greater than anything seen in the more controlled experiments,
doesn't mean the effect does not exist. It just means that no
matter how carefully they look, somehow, by some miracle, the
signal is always buried in the noise. When you reduce the noise
by a factor of 1,000, that darned signal also gets reduced by a
factor of 1,000.
There is absolutely no coherent theoretical explanation for why
this should work. That doesn't mean it can't work but the fact
that this "new force of nature" with numbers that were pulled out
of a hat just happens to always require an apparatus that creates
enough noise to mask the effect is highly suspicious. Basically
they need to pipe in and dissipate 1,000 Watts of microwaves in
order to create enough thrust to keep a single snowflake from
falling. Certainly it would be great if this worked but so far
there is no theoretical explanation and no experiment evidence to
indicate it does actually work. None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
The signal they are looking for is so darned small, it is almost
impossible to account for all the possible sources of noise.
Claiming that what is left over after all known sources of noise
have been eliminated must be the real signal is ridiculous. This
is why they see the signal in the wrong direction or see a signal
1,000 times greater in the earlier experiments when the noise
floor was 1,000 time greater.
The reaction to the EMDrive is very similar to the reaction to
the "face on Mars" which was also a signal that was down at the
noise threshold. Scientists who tried to explain this to the
public got castigated and got sent tons of hate mail and some may
have lost their jobs over it. When higher resolutions photos
were eventually taken, the doubting, cautious scientists were
right and the wisher and dreamers were wrong.
At the risk of sounding like a far-out social conservative
crossed with a radical feminist, do you have any evidence to
support your assertion that viewing porn satisfies a 'harmless
urge'?
I think you raise an interesting question, especially if we
focus on the outlet of the urges and not the urges themselves.
Just like in (my) software development, there is an ideal
solution and then there are the solutions we can complete
given time, money, and person-power constraints. Of course,
we may not be able to agree on any of these.
I look at the abortion issue this way too. In an ideal world
there would be little need for abortions except for medical
reasons. Unfortunately our world is very far from ideal,
especially around many of the situations where an abortion
seems like a good option for someone.
I think it is essential to look at porn in the same way. IMO in
an ideal world there would be very little need or demand for it
because almost everyone would be getting their urges met with other
consenting adults. But just like a high demand for abortions
indicates a world that is far from ideal, so does a high demand
for pornography. It is not useful to ask if viewing pornography
is harmless or not. The useful question to ask is if it is more
or less harmless than the alternatives.
Some people maintain that sexual repression in the West is tied
to its exploitive, capitalistic structure. I'm not saying they
are necessarily right but it is hard to deny that sexual
repression is deeply ingrained in our society. I also think
the high demand for porn is linked to this systemic sexual
repression.
YMMVG but IMO the ideal solution involves getting rid of the
sexual repression so people in general get laid more often.
I really thing this would have a huge impact and make the
world a much better place. For example, I wonder if the
mass shootings (or shootings in general) would be diminished
if the would-be shooters were getting laid more often.
Unfortunately, sexual repression is deeply ingrained in our
society so we are not going to get the (my) ideal solution
anytime soon. If it is true that pent up sexual frustration
causes some people to lash out violently against strangers then
of the many non-ideal solutions to wide-spread pent up sexual
urges, it could well be that making porn widely available is the
least harmful of the lot.
Except, what would you do with gas on Mars? It's handy here
because the other half of the reaction, oxygen, is abundant
everywhere. On Mars, you'd have to also haul massive tanks of
compressed oxygen around to react with your gas.
If only there were some way to make a solar cell to strip off
the carbon from C02 in order to free up some oxygen. Seriously
though, the missing ingredient here is hydrogen, not oxygen.
Perhaps water in the soil could provide both oxygen and
hydrogen.
sugarcane is pretty close to a tree with a fuel hose...
Excellent! I have a bunch of leftover sugar. I will be
a good Samaritan and dispose of it in my neighbors' gas tanks.
What a pleasant surprise it will be for each of them when they
discover they have a full tank of gas.
If people treated their vote as a joke, then they don't deserve a
re-vote. Simple as that.
That's not the way it works even if it is the way you
want it to work. They deserve a re-vote if they are able to
get a re-vote by going through the proper procedures.
The idea that a decision once made is locked in for ever and
ever just because StillAnonymous happens to like it is absurd.
As has been obvious for over a decade, consumers overwhelmingly
want to be able to use recent technological breakthroughs so then
can listening music easily and conveniently. Most are willing to
pay for this and most probably want to support the artist.
The music labels have been fighting this tooth and nail pretty
ever since it was possible to download music via the internet.
This is slightly bizarre since part of the service they are
supposed to be providing to society is to streamline the
distribution of music (hence the RIAA curve, etc). Instead,
perhaps due to somewhat sociopathic CEOs, they try to cripple
distribution of music in order to create false scarcity which
harms society and harms the artists and only benefits the
labels.
The only reason a 3rd-party can make money from this is because
the labels are totally failing at the task of distributing music
in the best and easiest way possible. The answer is not to close
off 3rd parties who are doing the job the record labels are
supposed to be doing. The answer is for the record labels to do
their damned job and distribute music in a reasonable way given
current technologies. The tighter the labels grip, the more
revenue will slip through their fingers. There is no way
consumers are going back to buying a vinyl album and then a
cassette and then a cd of the same music.
The actual cost for distributing music has plummeted to near zero.
If the record labels are not going to take advantage of this and
distribute music in a reasonable way then good for Google and for
anyone else who steps up and removes the artificial scarcity and
artificial inefficiency create by the music labels.
While we're at it let's shorten the length of time copyright
stays in effect. That way these rock stars won't be lumping
their recent music together with music that was made back in
the 30s and 40s by people who have long been dead.
Okay. Fair enough. Thanks for clearing that up. I agree with you
that the summary is wrong to lump bank accounts in with
prepaid cards. On the other hand it was clear to me that
UnknowingFool was talking about an account associated with a prepaid
card. If UF had used "prepaid card" instead of just "card" then
they would have been even more clear. Your post was misleading
because it makes it seem like nothing has changed regarding seizing
money.
I think we all agree that they can now seize money from prepaid
cards and they weren't able to do this before. I thought that
was the point UnknowingFool was making and you seemed to be
refuting it.
The fine article also says the police are seizing money from
accounts.
If a trooper suspects a person may have money tied to some type
of crime, the highway patrol can scan and seize
money from prepaid cards. ...
Troopers insist this isn't just about seizing cash.
Saying that the police are using this to seize money
accurately reflects what is said in the fine article.
If you think the summary and the article are both wrong
on this point then please provide a link to evidence that
refutes it.
The Oracle lawyer has it completely backwards. If APIs could be protected
by copyright then FOSS could be easily locked out of making compatible
implementations. Oracle is not in this battle to get a few billion
dollars from Google. They are in this battle to kill off all independent
software development. As bad as software patents are, changing the
ground rules so APIs can be protected by copyright would be much
much worse.
How do you get the total number of possible input messages to 2^(2^64)-1
exactly? Break down a simple example of the total number of possible
messages from 0 up to 8 bits.
Satoshi-san, I think you are taking your buffoonery a bit too
far here.
...is that the EM drive's thrust has been reproduced by several
independent institutions.
So now where are all the pedantic Slashdot experts that just
recently were absolutely sure that the EM drive was bunk?
I agree with you, that was a key claim of the article. It made
me extremely skeptical of anything else they had to say because
the experimental results have absolutely not been
reproducible. The results varied by orders of magnitude and
even by direction! The results were always down near the noise
threshold. It is true that many experiments got non-zero results
that could not be fully explained by their analysis of all the
sources of noise. The fact that the magnitude of the non-zero
result scaled with the magnitude of the noise over orders of
magnitude should be tip off that these claims are extremely fishy.
Getting non-zero results right at the noise floor that vary over
orders of magnitude and vary in direction is pretty much the
exact opposite of reproducible results.
Whenever a new anomalous result is found it is always possible that
it will upend established physics but in 999,999 cases out of a
million, the cause is experimental error (incomplete analysis of
all potential sources of noise). That is certainly what seems to
be happening here.
It appears that this is yet another entry in the Nobel Prize
lottery -- and it has about as much chance of paying off as a
lottery ticket.
But for the sake of argument, let's say that despite all of the
experimental results to the contrary, the effect is real and this
is the correct explanation for the effect. Two points:
1) It directly contradicts the previous "theoretical
explanation".
2) The effect does not scale well and would be useless for
any practical applications such as space-flight. The effect only
occurs because the size of the acceleration is very small compared
to the size of the apparatus (the units of size and acceleration are
related through certain natural constants such as the speed of
light).
Can anyone explain why the verbose arguments require 2 dashes?
It is to prevent name-space collisions when you "stack" short
options as in "-rf" (which means the same thing as "-r -f"). The
convention often used is that multiple letters after a single dash
are stacked single character options while multiple letters after
two dashes is a single verbose option.
This convention makes things easier for the user and the designer
because neither one has to worry about being able to spell out a
verbose option with single character options.
Now with floating point 0.5*0.5 = 0.25 which is a smaller number as
expected. If you multiply two positive integers like 50*50 you get
2500, so a larger value which requires further operations on it for
it to be useful.
The only "further operation" needed is to look at the higher word of
the result which takes zero extra effort. For example, if you
multiply two 16-bit words then you get a 32-bit result. The "extra
effort" is taking the upper 16-bits of the result and ignoring the
lower 16-bits.
There may well be good reasons for FP16 to preferred over using
integers but scaling the result of multiplications isn't one of
them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's essentially what Trump's Make America Great Again boils down to: the notion that things have gotten worse and we can see that people like to buy into this notion when it isn't true.
Things have gotten worse for the working class even though the economy as a whole is booming. Of course, the policies put in place by Trump (lower taxes on the rich) and the policies he fights for (dismantle the healthcare system for non-wealthy people) make the situation worse, not better. The tragedy and danger of electing Trump is that his policies exacerbate the economic problems of the working class, generating more fear and causing more people to turn to Authoritarianism as a way out.
Too bad there is no Easy way to find distros that don't use systemd.
The #2 (MX Linux), #11 (ReactOS), and #15 (antiX Linux) distros don't use systemd.
What annoys me about all of these studies into the Em Drive is they try to use such lower power outputs that run into issues of detection and interference. This thing uses a cavity magnetron. Its not exactly hard to build. Consumer microwaves have cavity magnetrons in the single kw range and radar often goes into hundreds of kw if not megawatt range.
The problem is that with those higher powers you get much larger sources of noise and interference. You need to use significant plumbing to pipe the microwaves into the cavity. In addition, you have to deal with more interference from heating, etc. All the while you are try to measure the force needed to levitate a snowflake.
IMO it is not a coincidence that the EM-Drive prediction is devilishly hard to test. I'm not claiming the designer was malicious. But if it were easy to test then it would have been tested thoroughly years ago and either be debunked or verified. Cold fusion was easier to test so it got debunked sooner. The "face on Mars" required a new mission to the red planet in order to be tested and debunked so that "signal in the noise" idea was rampant for years.
No problem ... we can use a big EM-Drive to move the Earth along with us! We'll power the whole thing with safe, efficient cold-fusion.
So the spin was that the government implemented ObamaCare and Obama had nothing to do with it? Right ...
Furthermore, the current administration seems hellbent on undoing most of the big things Obama got credit for. Your claim that Obama didn't get credit/blame for these things seems utterly ridiculous. The pattern I see is that your own bias is showing loud and clear.
Views like yours are the real problem -- bought and paid for "scientists" with zero incentive to support anything that actually works.
Bullshit. I am not bought and paid for. I never was. All you seem to do is insult those around you without providing any evidence at all that your theory has any value.
My view is I want to support you but you need to provide me with some evidence that your theory has value. If you want to replace the standard model and general relativity and so much more, that's fine but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But I'm not asking for extraordinary evidence, I'm asking for a shred of evidence. Instead of pointing me to that shred, you insult me for offering to help promote your theories.
As for the lists of unsolved problems, it does not make the standard model useless or invalid or unsound. The standard model has made many predictions that later came true. This is the true test of a theory. That is basically what I'm asking you to show with your theory. Show me how to use it to make predictions. If it can't do that then it is not even wrong. It is not even physics.
Didn't you say you've already solved a bunch of the unsolved problems? If so then show me one of the solutions. If you want to replace theories that make, sometimes fantastically accurate, predictions then your new theory has to be able to make the same or better predictions, otherwise we need to keep the current theories.
Even if your new theories can't make predictions, I still honestly want to understand them. I spent time on your web site and I couldn't find anything except very vague arm waving. I got tired of wading through the arm waving so I asked you to point me in the direction of the good stuff so I could understand what you are talking about. Despite your tirades and insults, I still want to understand what you are talking about, if that is possible.
I looked at some of the pages on your site trying to find an example of an actual prediction of spring-and-loop theory, not just a bunch of hand waving. For a theory that you claim solves so very many problems while the existing theories are trash, it shouldn't be so hard to come up with one explanation.
So please, point me to an example of how to use SAL to make a numerical prediction. Since you claim to have a better replace for pretty much all of the existing mainstream physics theories there should be a plethora of worked examples that make numerical predictions. The deflection of light by the sun, the perihelion precession of Mercury, the radius of a hydrogen atom, its energy levels, the fine structure constant. The list is almost endless.
Your saying that most of the existing theories are trash even though they make amazingly accurate predictions about many aspects of the natural world around us makes it appear you are a crackpot. The apparent lack of any numerical results from your new theory that replaces them seems to seal the deal. I think it would be really really cool if you have come up with a better theory. If you can show me a worked example then I will convince mainstream physicists whom I have worked with that they should stop working on string theory and the standard model and general relativity and instead follow your lead. It would be by far the biggest shake up of physics in history. You will almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.
But until I see a worked example, you seem to be just another crackpot who is muddying the waters in order to garner undeserved attention.
And as rule number one for a healthy sex life: no TV in the bed room.
Turns out, the number one thing you can do to get laid more often is to put your tv in your bedroom. According to a poll in Britain, couples with a tv in their bedroom have sex twice as often as couples who do not.
Unlike Bill Clinton, who's an accused rapist [...]
While back in the real world, Donald Trump has been accused of raping a 13 year old girl. I'm not saying we should condemn people because of accusations against them but Donald Trump is not free from rape allegations.
Even a measurement error is at first: evidence
Yes, in a non-technical sense there is evidence of something. In the technical sense (see for example Bayesian Probability for the technical meaning used in the hard sciences) there is still no evidence that indicates the EMDrive works as advertised. If there had been such evidence then scientists across the world would flock to reproduce the results of the successful experiment just like people rushed to reproduce the results of Pons and Fleishman.
A more precise statement might be to say that even though all of the experiments reported some unexplained thrust, there is no agreement between the experiments and none of the experiments have been able to show a clear signal or lack thereof above the noise floor. Contrast this with the Pons and Fleishman experiment which did show a clear signal way above the noise floor (which ended up being non-reproducible) or the CERN experiment which showed that neutrinos traveled faster than light, again way way above their noise floor. Those CERN experimenters had the honestly and humility to say they didn't think their clear signal was real because the experiment was very complicated and there was probably something in the experimental setup they were not accounting for. The reason they said this is because if their clear signal had been real then it would have thrown a huge monkey wrench into established theoretical physics. It turns out that they eventually found their mistake, in one place in the experimental apparatus a longer cable was used instead of the short one they assumed was used. This caused an extra delay in their measurement of the light signal and thus cause the erroneous results.
If any of the EMDrive experiments provided real, scientific evidence of the EMDrive mechanism working then the scientific world would be in an uproar like they were after Pons and Fleishman. For the EMDrive experiments thus far we have the worst of both worlds. On the theoretical side, the EMDrive would upturn the world of theoretical physics much more than the faster than light neutrinos; on the experimental side, all the experimental results (except the refuted ones from China) are consistent with there being no EMDrive effect at all. This is what I meant. I didn't mean there was no evidence, I meant there was no evidence that the EMDrive actually works as advertised.
By refuted I mean the early experiments in China that were not done in a vacuum. Their thrust measurements were orders of magnitude greater than the results in any of the experiments that were done in vacuum.
As for citations, read the actual papers published by the experimenters. If we discount the earlier paper from China which has been refuted, none of the others demonstrate clearly that the EMDrive mechanism produces a specific measurable, reproducible, amount of thrust. When you look at all the experiment results combined, it actually looks worse than any single experiment because while each of them measured some unaccounted for thrust, the results are not consistent across experiments which indicates that each one was not accounting for a different source of noise.
If any one of the experiments had been a success then the next step would have been to reproduce the same results in a different lab, just like people rushed out to reproduces the results of Pons and Fleischman. Instead, after each paper people try to make a new and different experiment with more signal and less noise that will conclusively show that the EMDrive mechanism produces thrust. This Slashdot article is a perfect example. If any of the previous experiments had been a success then the next step would have been to repeat that experiment to confirm the results. Instead, it is suggested they continue to try to beat back the noise floor by greatly adding to the cost and the inconvenience (to say it mildly) by conducting a brand new experiment in outer space.
What makes you so certain it will fail spectacularly? It hasn't so far ...
ALL of the experiments that have not been totally refuted have completely and utterly failed to demonstrate a consistent and a repeatable signal that is higher than the noise threshold. Being unable to track down all sources of noise is not the same thing as getting a reliable signal that can be replicated in other experiments. When we look at all of the experimental evidence taken together it is completely consistent with zero signal and only noise.
If you are measuring this as performance art, then sure, it has been a rip-roaring success but if you are measuring it in terms of science and engineering then all the experiments have totally failed to demonstrate that the effect is real.
Just because all of the experiments thus far have either failed or been refuted, with some experiments getting a signal in the opposite direction of the one expected, and others getting as much signal when vital parts of the apparatus are missing, and yet other early experiments claiming a signal many orders of magnitude greater than anything seen in the more controlled experiments, doesn't mean the effect does not exist. It just means that no matter how carefully they look, somehow, by some miracle, the signal is always buried in the noise. When you reduce the noise by a factor of 1,000, that darned signal also gets reduced by a factor of 1,000.
There is absolutely no coherent theoretical explanation for why this should work. That doesn't mean it can't work but the fact that this "new force of nature" with numbers that were pulled out of a hat just happens to always require an apparatus that creates enough noise to mask the effect is highly suspicious. Basically they need to pipe in and dissipate 1,000 Watts of microwaves in order to create enough thrust to keep a single snowflake from falling. Certainly it would be great if this worked but so far there is no theoretical explanation and no experiment evidence to indicate it does actually work. None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
The signal they are looking for is so darned small, it is almost impossible to account for all the possible sources of noise. Claiming that what is left over after all known sources of noise have been eliminated must be the real signal is ridiculous. This is why they see the signal in the wrong direction or see a signal 1,000 times greater in the earlier experiments when the noise floor was 1,000 time greater.
The reaction to the EMDrive is very similar to the reaction to the "face on Mars" which was also a signal that was down at the noise threshold. Scientists who tried to explain this to the public got castigated and got sent tons of hate mail and some may have lost their jobs over it. When higher resolutions photos were eventually taken, the doubting, cautious scientists were right and the wisher and dreamers were wrong.
Whoosh!
...harmless urges...
At the risk of sounding like a far-out social conservative crossed with a radical feminist, do you have any evidence to support your assertion that viewing porn satisfies a 'harmless urge'?
I think you raise an interesting question, especially if we focus on the outlet of the urges and not the urges themselves.
Just like in (my) software development, there is an ideal solution and then there are the solutions we can complete given time, money, and person-power constraints. Of course, we may not be able to agree on any of these.
I look at the abortion issue this way too. In an ideal world there would be little need for abortions except for medical reasons. Unfortunately our world is very far from ideal, especially around many of the situations where an abortion seems like a good option for someone.
I think it is essential to look at porn in the same way. IMO in an ideal world there would be very little need or demand for it because almost everyone would be getting their urges met with other consenting adults. But just like a high demand for abortions indicates a world that is far from ideal, so does a high demand for pornography. It is not useful to ask if viewing pornography is harmless or not. The useful question to ask is if it is more or less harmless than the alternatives.
Some people maintain that sexual repression in the West is tied to its exploitive, capitalistic structure. I'm not saying they are necessarily right but it is hard to deny that sexual repression is deeply ingrained in our society. I also think the high demand for porn is linked to this systemic sexual repression.
YMMVG but IMO the ideal solution involves getting rid of the sexual repression so people in general get laid more often. I really thing this would have a huge impact and make the world a much better place. For example, I wonder if the mass shootings (or shootings in general) would be diminished if the would-be shooters were getting laid more often.
Unfortunately, sexual repression is deeply ingrained in our society so we are not going to get the (my) ideal solution anytime soon. If it is true that pent up sexual frustration causes some people to lash out violently against strangers then of the many non-ideal solutions to wide-spread pent up sexual urges, it could well be that making porn widely available is the least harmful of the lot.
Except, what would you do with gas on Mars? It's handy here because the other half of the reaction, oxygen, is abundant everywhere. On Mars, you'd have to also haul massive tanks of compressed oxygen around to react with your gas.
If only there were some way to make a solar cell to strip off the carbon from C02 in order to free up some oxygen. Seriously though, the missing ingredient here is hydrogen, not oxygen. Perhaps water in the soil could provide both oxygen and hydrogen.
sugarcane is pretty close to a tree with a fuel hose...
Excellent! I have a bunch of leftover sugar. I will be a good Samaritan and dispose of it in my neighbors' gas tanks. What a pleasant surprise it will be for each of them when they discover they have a full tank of gas.
If people treated their vote as a joke, then they don't deserve a re-vote. Simple as that.
That's not the way it works even if it is the way you want it to work. They deserve a re-vote if they are able to get a re-vote by going through the proper procedures.
The idea that a decision once made is locked in for ever and ever just because StillAnonymous happens to like it is absurd.
As has been obvious for over a decade, consumers overwhelmingly want to be able to use recent technological breakthroughs so then can listening music easily and conveniently. Most are willing to pay for this and most probably want to support the artist.
The music labels have been fighting this tooth and nail pretty ever since it was possible to download music via the internet. This is slightly bizarre since part of the service they are supposed to be providing to society is to streamline the distribution of music (hence the RIAA curve, etc). Instead, perhaps due to somewhat sociopathic CEOs, they try to cripple distribution of music in order to create false scarcity which harms society and harms the artists and only benefits the labels.
The only reason a 3rd-party can make money from this is because the labels are totally failing at the task of distributing music in the best and easiest way possible. The answer is not to close off 3rd parties who are doing the job the record labels are supposed to be doing. The answer is for the record labels to do their damned job and distribute music in a reasonable way given current technologies. The tighter the labels grip, the more revenue will slip through their fingers. There is no way consumers are going back to buying a vinyl album and then a cassette and then a cd of the same music.
The actual cost for distributing music has plummeted to near zero. If the record labels are not going to take advantage of this and distribute music in a reasonable way then good for Google and for anyone else who steps up and removes the artificial scarcity and artificial inefficiency create by the music labels.
While we're at it let's shorten the length of time copyright stays in effect. That way these rock stars won't be lumping their recent music together with music that was made back in the 30s and 40s by people who have long been dead.
Okay. Fair enough. Thanks for clearing that up. I agree with you that the summary is wrong to lump bank accounts in with prepaid cards. On the other hand it was clear to me that UnknowingFool was talking about an account associated with a prepaid card. If UF had used "prepaid card" instead of just "card" then they would have been even more clear. Your post was misleading because it makes it seem like nothing has changed regarding seizing money.
I think we all agree that they can now seize money from prepaid cards and they weren't able to do this before. I thought that was the point UnknowingFool was making and you seemed to be refuting it.
Now they are seizing the money in the account.
No, they're not. The summary is wrong.
The fine article also says the police are seizing money from accounts.
If a trooper suspects a person may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan and seize money from prepaid cards.
...
Troopers insist this isn't just about seizing cash.
Saying that the police are using this to seize money accurately reflects what is said in the fine article. If you think the summary and the article are both wrong on this point then please provide a link to evidence that refutes it.
The Oracle lawyer has it completely backwards. If APIs could be protected by copyright then FOSS could be easily locked out of making compatible implementations. Oracle is not in this battle to get a few billion dollars from Google. They are in this battle to kill off all independent software development. As bad as software patents are, changing the ground rules so APIs can be protected by copyright would be much much worse.
How do you get the total number of possible input messages to 2^(2^64)-1 exactly? Break down a simple example of the total number of possible messages from 0 up to 8 bits.
Satoshi-san, I think you are taking your buffoonery a bit too far here.
...is that the EM drive's thrust has been reproduced by several independent institutions. So now where are all the pedantic Slashdot experts that just recently were absolutely sure that the EM drive was bunk?
I agree with you, that was a key claim of the article. It made me extremely skeptical of anything else they had to say because the experimental results have absolutely not been reproducible. The results varied by orders of magnitude and even by direction! The results were always down near the noise threshold. It is true that many experiments got non-zero results that could not be fully explained by their analysis of all the sources of noise. The fact that the magnitude of the non-zero result scaled with the magnitude of the noise over orders of magnitude should be tip off that these claims are extremely fishy. Getting non-zero results right at the noise floor that vary over orders of magnitude and vary in direction is pretty much the exact opposite of reproducible results.
Whenever a new anomalous result is found it is always possible that it will upend established physics but in 999,999 cases out of a million, the cause is experimental error (incomplete analysis of all potential sources of noise). That is certainly what seems to be happening here. It appears that this is yet another entry in the Nobel Prize lottery -- and it has about as much chance of paying off as a lottery ticket.
But for the sake of argument, let's say that despite all of the experimental results to the contrary, the effect is real and this is the correct explanation for the effect. Two points:
1) It directly contradicts the previous "theoretical explanation".
2) The effect does not scale well and would be useless for any practical applications such as space-flight. The effect only occurs because the size of the acceleration is very small compared to the size of the apparatus (the units of size and acceleration are related through certain natural constants such as the speed of light).
Can anyone explain why the verbose arguments require 2 dashes?
It is to prevent name-space collisions when you "stack" short options as in "-rf" (which means the same thing as "-r -f"). The convention often used is that multiple letters after a single dash are stacked single character options while multiple letters after two dashes is a single verbose option. This convention makes things easier for the user and the designer because neither one has to worry about being able to spell out a verbose option with single character options.
Now with floating point 0.5*0.5 = 0.25 which is a smaller number as expected. If you multiply two positive integers like 50*50 you get 2500, so a larger value which requires further operations on it for it to be useful.
The only "further operation" needed is to look at the higher word of the result which takes zero extra effort. For example, if you multiply two 16-bit words then you get a 32-bit result. The "extra effort" is taking the upper 16-bits of the result and ignoring the lower 16-bits.
There may well be good reasons for FP16 to preferred over using integers but scaling the result of multiplications isn't one of them.