I fully agree with you that if we are at the end of Moore's
Law then it is because of physical limitations and not
economics.
As for no preceding tech breakthroughs, Intel's first CTO
said (in 2008):
I compare Moore's Law to driving down the road on a foggy night, how
far can you see? Does the road stop after 100 metres? How far can
you go?
[...] That's what it's been like with Moore's Law. We thought there
were physical limits and [now] we casually speak about going to 10
nanometres. We have work going on different transistor structures.
Silicon has become scaffolding for the rest of the periodic table.
We're putting these other structures into the materials. We see no
end in sight and we've had 10 years of visibility for the last 30
years.
I think it is quite possible he is wrong about Moore's Law
extending out to 2028 but I find it very hard to believe he is
wrong about the history of Moore's Law leading up to 2008. He
was in a position to see the tech breakthroughs first-hand.
I don't see why he would lie about it.
Your overall point may (or may not) be valid but this passage
in particular is either incorrect or grossly misleading:
Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult
because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means
that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop
fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current
technology.
We have had to develop new technology after new technology for
decades to keep pace with Moore's Law. This is one of the things
that makes Moore's Law so fascinating -- it has already spanned
over five orders of magnitude (powers of ten). Take a look at
the section on enabling factors and future trends on the
Wikipedia page. It is possible we have finally reached the
end of Moore's Law but to me it seems equally possible that we have
not.
[screed that equates a relatively small number of Islamic
fundamentalists with the hundreds of millions of people throughout
the world who practice the Muslim religion]
Here is a quote from the introduction of the 2005 book
Devil's Game: How the US unleashed fundamentalist Islam
by Robert Dreyfuss:
The United States played not with Islam -- that is, the religion,
the traditional, organized system of belief of hundreds of millions
-- but with Islamism. Unlike the faith, with fourteen centuries of
history behind it, Islamism is of a more recent vintage. It is a
political creed with its origins in the late nineteenth century, a
militant, all-encompassing philosophy whose tenets would appear
foreign or heretical to most of the Muslims of earlier ages and that
still appear so to many educated Muslims today. Whether it is
called pan-Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam,
it is an altogether different creature from the spiritual
interpretation of Muslim life as contained in the Five Pillars
of Islam. It is, in fact, a perversion of that religious faith.
That is the mutant ideology that the United States encouraged,
supported, organized, or funded. It is the same one variously
represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, by Ayatollah Khomeini's
Iran, by Saudi Arabia's ultra-orthodox Wahhabism, by Hamas
and Hezbollah, by the Afghan jihadis, and by Osama bin Laden.
As others have said, while some people who claim to be Muslims
attack innocent civilians, so do some people who claim to follow
other faiths or claim to have no faith. Generalizing to the larger
group of all Muslims is extremely counter-productive (unless you
goal is to increase the number of and ferocity of attacks against
innocent civilians in the West). The mechanism for how fear-based
anti-Muslim screeds in the West fuel fundamentalist attacks against
the West was explained in the Adam Curtis documentary series The Power of
Nightmares.
In addition, while nothing can justify attacks against innocent
civilians anywhere in the world -- regardless of the race,
nationality, or religion of the attackers or the victims -- by
ignoring the causes of the attacks, by disavowing any
responsibility for our own actions, and by instead opting for a
fear-based knee-jerk emotional reaction, we only make the situation
worse, not better.
Fear is the mind-killer. Often the purpose of attacks against
innocent civilians is to instill fear and terror. If we drop
our reasoning ability and indulge ourselves in these emotions
then we are feeding the cycle of violence, reprisals, and
incriminations. Over-generalizations, collective blame, xenophobia,
and ignoring the obvious consequences of our own actions just fan
the flames of conflict. They do nothing to quell it.
If you consider the people who perpetrated these attacks to be you
enemy then know your enemy! Certainly avoid aiding and
abetting them by reacting exactly how they want you to react!
Blaming, attacking, or murdering other innocents just because they
share a country, a religion, or a family with people who are
responsible for the attacks fuels the conflict. The problem is
not that group-A is mostly bad and group-B is mostly good by
comparison. The problem is attacking, killing, and even blaming
innocent people. This is happening on both sides of the conflict.
For example, blaming Iraq for the 9/11 attacks led to the war on
Iraq that killed over one hundred thousand innocent civilians
and led to the destabilization of the entire area, the rise of
ISIS and the massive refuge crisis. Absolving ourselves of
any responsibility for the obvious consequences of our actions
and instead continuing on the same path of blaming and punishing
more innocent people will continue to have the same disastrous
consequences.
You have a choice. You can either keep feeding the conflict or you
can work to stop it. Even if your fear-based beliefs were correct
and they are somehow morally worse than us then it
is even more incumbent on us to stop the conflict instead of feeding
it.
There are valid arguments for not including certain labeling. People
that think they need to know if something is GMO should be grouped
in with people that think vaccines cause autism. It has no place in
labeling
So by avoiding GMO foods someone can cause harm to others via an
outbreak of measles or other potentially deadly diseases? Can
you explain how that works?
Another difference is that people know when they are getting
vaccinations and they have access to information about what
is in the vaccinations.
The only similarity perhaps is that you think both groups are
idiots. I have no sympathy for the anti-vaxers but I do have
sympathy for people who want to personally avoid GMO foods,
just like I had sympathy 40 years ago for people who had the
far-out idea of avoiding non-organic foods. If people want
to pay extra to avoid GMO foods then more power to them.
I don't see how they are harming others by this choice.
An example of the common perception of organic/health food in the
1970s is illustrated in the lyrics of Escape (the Pina Colada
Song):
If you're not into yoga, if you have half a brain
[...] I'm not much into health food
I don't know how to fix the anti-vaxer problem but one thing I do
know is that restricting information about the vaccines (like
information on GMO foods is restricted) will only make the problem
worse, not better.
Great writers don't tend to be highly intelligent (if they were,
they'd get work that pays better).
What you say may sound reasonable and obvious but it is based on the
assumption that money is a good motivator for creative behavior
which has been scientifically proven to be factually incorrect.
Take a look at this TED Talk by Dan Pink for an easily digested
explanation: On
Motivation.
In a more global context, the fact that monetary rewards stifle
creativity could explain many deep, systematic problems in
our society. Perhaps it is unwise for us to put people who are
strongly motivated by monetary rewards into positions of leadership.
Not only is fear the mind-killer, it seems money is a mind-killer
as well. If we want creative solutions to our problems then the
last thing we need are leaders who are primarily motivated by fear
and money.
You do understand, don't you, that nVidia has never provided OSS
drivers for Linux? Their Linux drivers are nothing more than binary
blobs that you can only install by booting into a CLI, then
rebooting after the installation is complete.
About 10 or 12 years ago I had a Dell laptop that had Nvidia
graphics. I was running Gentoo Linux. I reported some bug with the
Nvidia driver. Within hours late Saturday, early Sunday I got a
reply from Nvidia with a patch to the MM kernel that fixed the
problem. The bug was not in the Nvidia driver but was caused by
recent change in the MM kernel. I was very impressed. In this case
they were acting like an FOSS shop not a proprietary software shop.
I grant you the closed portions of the Nvidia drivers can be
a royal pain in the neck, especially when combined with the closed
Flash player. There were times when it was maddening but that
was partly driven by an obsession by some Gentoo devs to be overly
zealous with purging versions of the Nvidia driver from the portage
system. Things have been mostly stable for a good number of years
now.
I appreciate the Linux support Nvidia does provide. For example,
I've been using VDPAU which does video decoding on the graphics card
which let me play blu-rays on a machine with a not so powerful CPU.
Also, I've never had to reboot in order to update the Nvidia driver.
I do have to rmmod the old driver after I stop X but that's no
biggie. YMMVG
I am interested in seeing the Nvidia distro if they release one but
I'm not holding my breath.
I recommended a Google search. Is that useless too? I also
referred to the sources referenced by the Wikipedia article. Are
those useless too? Is the entire Internet useless?
I agree that, as with any encyclopedia, the Wikipedia should
not be used as the last word on almost any topic which is why I
didn't suggest it as such. It is a good starting place, which makes
it far from useless. The information GLMDesigns demands is readily
available. It is readily available from sources besides just the
Wikipedia. Your comment is wrong. Even if it were right it would
be irrelevant since I recommended other on-line sources in
addition to the Wikipedia.
Since the overwhelming evidence from a large variety of sources
confirms that the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth was a vicious smear
campaign that used widely publicized and then discredited claims,
the onus is on GLMDesigns to provide proof that those discredited
claims are true. Simply repeating the discredited claims does not
make them more credible. If GLMDesigns believes that the Internet
is useless as a tool for gathering information about this topic then
I can understand why they are stuck with their own wildly incorrect
personal opinions and are confused about what the truth is.
If the Wikipedia and all of the articles it references, and
common knowledge are all wrong (or part of a giant "left-wing"
(ha ha)) conspiracy then the onus is on you to provide facts
that prove/show this. The mountains of evidence that are only
are simple Google search away are not proof positive but your
demand that someone else do this simple Google search for you
is ridiculous.
I blame Political correctness and SJWs for the rise in trump.
The Republicans have also been blamed for resorting to the
politics of hate. The best explanation I've seen has two
components:
1) The inclination of some people to turn to
authoritarianism when times get rough.
2) The concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands
is making things rough for the working class. Things aren't really
bad yet (like in the great depression) but people's prospects are
bleak. They are worse off now than they were 10 years ago without
much hope in sight.
If this simple analysis is correct then the problem is not Trump.
There are always Trumps around. The problem is that economic times
(more accurately, prospects) are bad enough that a sizable fraction
of the population is turning to a strongman/bully who promises
to protect them even if those promises don't make any rational
sense.
This has several implications. First, if there is a successful
large-scale terrorist attack in the US then this could easily
raise the overall level of fear enough to sweep Trump into the
White House. Second, if the powers-that-be stay in power and
continue their policies of transferring wealth away from the
working class then the levels of economic distress and fear
will grow, creating even more support for Trump or the next
authoritarian strongman/bully who comes along.
The only real solution is to stop waging economic warfare on
the working class. Unfortunately, even if Bernie Sanders gets
elected, it is going to be nigh on impossible to quickly change
the course of the best government that money could buy.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Twin primes.
Yes, they are most likely related. Both the twin prime conjecture
and these results about the final digits can be derived from the
prime k-tuple conjecture. Or so says the fine article. It is
not immediately obvious to me why the current result is predicted
by the prime k-tuple conjecture but it does sound reasonable.
That is the speaker's fault. He had updates scheduled and when he
shut his machine down, he left it in a state of "partly updated" so
that it finished updating when it was turned on.
It also sounds like he has a REALLY crappy laptop with a slow HDD,
which he shouldn't if he is a "really important speaker".
Frankly, the speaker was unprepared. This is not Windows' fault,
this is his.
Certainly it was his fault. What was he thinking relying on Windows
to hold something that was mission critical to him. Just kidding.
Sort of.
Seriously, the important question is not whether the speaker was
partial responsible for the debacle, the question is whether people
want an OS that behaves that way or if they want an OS that is
easier to use.
I've been working with computers for over 40 years (can't believe
it has been that long). I'm most comfortable when I feel like I'm
in control of the machine and not the other way around. That's
why I mostly use Linux. I admit, Linux is not for everyone. The
opposite extreme from Linux is Apple's iOS. I bought a used iPad
and I'm fine with it too. I like to drive but I don't mind if
someone else drives as long as they are competent at it and
don't make me want to jump out of the car or hold on for dear life.
I now have three Windows 8.1 machines that I have been using to test
Linux distros and Linux UEFI booting. Windows really is the worst
of both worlds. It grabs control of the car and then immediately
drives it into the ditch. If Windows creates an NPE (negative play
experience) when it is used on small, underpowered laptops with a
hard drive then it should not come pre-installed on those machines.
Blaming someone who uses the pre-installed OS on a computer they
bought is kind of silly. If the OS is going to take the driver's
seat then it needs to do it with such ease and competence that I
don't have to worry about it just like I don't have to worry about
the hardware (most of the time).
On Linux I don't have to wrestle for control because it is easy
for me to take control. I don't have to wrestle for control with
iOS (on my iPad) because I can easily do what I want to do and
let the OS do the driving. With Windows I often want to wrestle
for control (don't do that update now dammit!) but I always lose.
My supposition is that ALL primaries need to be open, and no parties
are allowed. Why should tax payers support parties that we don't
agree with? My party doesn't require taxpayer "Primary" elections;-)
As someone already mentioned, the problem is that the "winner
take all" electorial system that is baked into the US Constitution
automatically creates a two-party system whether you want one or
not. Trying to outlawing politics parties will not solve the
problem. You need to change the Constitution to make the electorial
system more fair than "winner take all".
A simple introduction to these ideas is available in a few short
videos at
Politics in the Animal Kingdom. We know what the problem
is. We know what the solution is. The difficulty is that whoever
is in power has little motivation to drastically change the
system that put them in power.
The US Constitution was the prototype. Many of the Countries that
followed us learned from our mistakes.
Six months later: "The version of your OS is too outdated to
continue, click here to upgrade now!".
Your estimate is off by six months. The forced upgrade was
announced today. I just got this email:
important update required for your Kindle e-reader
Your Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) requires an important software
update to continue downloading e-books and using Kindle services.
This important update applies to Kindle e-readers released prior to
2014.
***sigh***. Amazon was very convenient. It is not going to be
convenient to ditch them, I live in a very rural area. If you don't
count Walmart there are not a lot of shopping options in the area.
Despite the inconvenience, the encryption announcement followed by
the forced upgrade (with no explanation of why the upgrade is
needed) leaves me no choice.
On the plus side, I will probably save a lot of money.
Slightly off-topic, but who says Trump will win the nomination?
You're right. I should not ASSume. OTOH I was responding to a
post that had already made that assumption and also assumed
Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. Perhaps I should not
have corrected one assumption without correcting the other one.
Cruz and Rubio could just as easily get together, pool their
delegates, and become a Pres-VP combo, with whichever one having the
biggest # of delegates coming out at the top of the billing. Top guy
does 4-8 years, VP then does 4-8 years more as President.
This seems extremely far-fetched to me. It seems extremely unlikely
there would be so much cooperation and even if there were, such a
move would tear apart the Republican party (cue a quote from the
Lord of the Rings movies about sharing power). The Democrats would
have a similar problem if Sanders has the majority of pledged
delegates but the superdelegates give the nod to Clinton.
Perhaps one of the reasons I ASSumed Trump would win the Republican
nomination was that I had recently read:
The rise of American authoritarianism. If they are correct
then Trump should easily win the nomination barring unforeseen disasters
(although I'm in the camp that sees a Trump presidency as a disaster).
This article is the only thing I've read about Trump that makes
sense to me. I think most commentators don't understand the
situation. TL;DR: Trump appeals to the burgeoning authoritarian
wing of the Republican party; fear is the mind-killer.
That article gave me hope that a Trump victory in the general
election is not a given, even if he runs against an establishment
candidate like Clinton.
If the indictment comes out before the Democratic convention then
it would be very bad for Trump. It is only good for Trump if
it comes out after the convention and if Clinton is the Democratic
nominee.
Adblock Pro claim, and I believe them, that no one can buy their
way on to the acceptable ads list. Ads have to meet their
guidelines to get on there.
What ABP do do however, is to refuse to put ads they deem acceptable
on the list if payment is demanded but refused. Somewhat
distasteful, but they wouldn't have a business without it.
If ABP does screen ads (and the screening is effective) then they are
providing a useful service and it is fine (in my book) for them to
charge money for it. Some Internet advertisers are a step up (or
maybe a step down) from spammers. It is an nasty field. If you
are a legitimate Internet advertiser then ISTM you should want to
get approval of your ads by Adblock Pro and you should be happy to
pay for that approval.
For example, Underwriters Laboratory does not give away their
services for free. If you want your product certified then you have
to pay for it. This is not a scam. They are providing a useful
service. ISTM Adblock pro is doing something similar. If you want
them to make sure your ads meet their guidelines then you need to
pay them for this service. To some extent they are taking on the
liability for bad ads (or even malware). In the long term this
will be a very positive thing for legitimate Internet advertisers.
It only works if one assumes that this level of school is merely job
training. Some could argue that education is about broadening
knowledge and exercising the brain, not just 'how am I going to use
this in real life?'
I fully agree with you that school should be about broadening minds.
I think that a statistics class like the one discussed in the fine
article (which uses a real-world hands-on approach) would broaden
minds much better than a class in algebra or calculus. I honestly
think the world would be a much better place if more people had even
a vague understanding of Bayesian probability and statistics. This
really is much more important and relevant than algebra or calculus.
It is not about job training, it is about perceiving and
understanding the world around us.
The fine article also discusses the underlying problem: math
is often taught by people who don't understand or enjoy math.
Teaching statistics poorly will be no better than teaching
algebra or calculus poorly. Although the worst of the problem
IMO is the teaching at the elementary school and middle school
levels. When I was in 6th grade I was taught that the set of
no apples was distinguishable from the set of no pears.
There is also a problem with the teaching of calculus in college by
math professors and grad students who are not interested in
calculus. It seemed to me that if you didn't learn calculus in high
school then you were screwed (at least at the university I
attended). Years later when I was a grad student, some of the
physics grad students ended up being TAs for the intro calculus
course. The grades of the students shot way up. I think the reason
was that calculus is extremely relevant to all physics grad students
but is not of much interest to most math grad students.
I was basically repeating/interpreting what the fine article said:
FRBs show a frequency-dependent dispersion, a delay in the radio
signal caused by how much material it has gone through.
I believe interstellar dispersion of electromagnetic waves is
caused by interactions with ionized interstellar medium. A quick
Google(interstellar dispersion) brought up
this page which gives a formula that relates the integral of
electron density along the path of the signal to the dispersion of
the signal. On that page they assume they know the density of
interstellar medium inside our galaxy and use the dispersion of
signals from pulsars to estimate their distance.
In the FRB experiment they did it the other way around and used the
known distance (using the red-shift of the source galaxy) and the
dispersion to estimate the integral of the density. Integral
measurements such as this usually give much more accurate results
than point measurements.
If the interstellar medium were entirely made up of ionized hydrogen
then knowing the electron density would give you the total density
since there would be one proton for every electron. You need to add
corrections because only about 70% of the interstellar medium is
hydrogen so you need to estimate the number of neutrons. You also
need to make a small correction since the interstellar medium is not
100% ionized.
The reason why the dispersion is related to the electron density is
given, for example, in J. D. Jackson's Classical
Electrodynamics where the dielectric "constant" (and hence the
speed of light) is shown to be a function of the frequency. The
electromagnetic wave causes the electrons to wiggle (just a little),
the higher the frequency, the less wiggling so the higher
frequencies are slowed down less than the lower frequencies. You
can think of it like having an eccentricity in a front tire of your
car that makes the steering wheel vibrate. When you go fast enough
so the frequency of the oscillations is much greater then the
resonant frequencies of the components then the amount of vibration
you experience goes down because the direction reverses before
things can move very far. In the interstellar medium each electron
slows down the wave just a little and the total amount of slowing
down is proportional to the number of electrons encountered.
Usually, the "closeness" of the electrons is not considered, instead
the integrated electron density is used. But it is possible to
calculate how close the electrons have to be to a line between the
source and the receiver using what is called the 3-point function.
The cross section of the volume that contributes to a fixed
percentage of the signal will be roughly elliptical with the source
and the receiver at each focus of the ellipse.
Given the vast intergalactic distances involved, it will probably be
extremely wide near the middle by any earthly standards but this
width is independent of the calculation of the dispersion. I'd
imagine the width would scale as sqrt(d * c * t) where d is the
distance between the source and the receiver, c is the speed of
light, and t is roughly the duration of the signal (more accurately,
the inverse of the bandwidth).
The reason the closeness (the width of the 3-point function)
doesn't matter is because the more spread out the 3-point function
is, the weaker it is. All that matters is what you get when you
sum it all up.
Nope. The mass of the universe universe is 70% dark energy, 25% dark
matter, 5% familiar matter. But only about half of that 5% can be
accounted for by direct observation - the rest is "missing".
Correct.
TFA claims that the radio burst let researchers find a very dim
(radio) galaxy that would not have otherwise been found - the matter
is "missing" simply because you have to point a very good telescope
at exactly the right part of the sky for a long time to find it.
Incorrect. It doesn't even make sense that finding one more galaxy
would somehow account for half the normal mass of the Universe.
Finding the originating galaxy was part of the solution but it
helped because it gave them the distance to the FRB source.
They already knew the dispersion (different frequencies arriving at
different times) of the FRB. The dispersion tells you how much
non-dark matter the signal passed near during its trip here. By
also knowing the distance to the source, they were able to calculate
the average density of the non-dark matter along the line of travel.
This average density was then be used to estimate the amount of
non-dark matter in the Universe.
Though if they want to maximize readability, why aren't the using
fonts with the little training wheels specially designed to make
letters faster to read and easier to recognize in bad reading
conditions, what's the name: SERIF fonts!
For road signs, they don't want to maximize readability, they want
to maximize legibility, which is not the same thing. For
example see: It's
About Legibility:
While the argument continues to rage about whether sans serifs
are easier to read than serif fonts in text copy, sans serif
typefaces, because their letter shapes are simpler, have been
proven to be slightly more legible than their serifed cousins.
I agree that serif fonts are generally more readable than
sans-serif fonts. Having to read a book that is entirely
sans-serif is a chore. The serifed fonts are usually easier to
read because the serifs help guide your eye to scan an entire
line of text. But for road signs, it is more important to
recognize words than to scan lines. That's why they use
sans-serif fonts which have been found to be more legible.
For signs, you don't need serifs to guide your eye like when
you are reading a page of text. In addition, the serifs act like
noise and make it slightly more difficult to recognize single
letters, especially when parts of the letters are obscured.
I started reading the "study" you base your entire argument on
and it seemed to be a suspicious jumble of cherry-picked facts,
and thus more of a political polemic with an axe to grind than an
objective scientific study so I did a search to find out more
about the authors and discovered that either you were purposely
misleading people here or you were misled yourself.
For example, Snopes
highlights many of the flaws with the non-peer reviewed paper you
cite as a "study":
Claim: A 2007 Harvard University study proved that areas
with higher rates of gun ownership have lower crime rates.
FALSE
WHAT'S TRUE: Gun rights advocates Gary Mauser and Don
Kates jointly authored a 2007 paper in the Harvard Journal of Law
& Public Policy arguing that higher rates of gun ownership
correlated with lower crime rates.
WHAT'S FALSE: The paper in question was not
peer-reviewed, it didn't constitute a study, and it
misrepresented separate research to draw shaky, unsupported
conclusions.
[...] Of primary importance is the subsequent, widely misapplied
label of the word "study" with reference to the 2007 item in
question. The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy describes
itself as "one of the most widely circulated student-edited law
reviews and the nation's leading forum for conservative and
libertarian legal scholarship." Papers published in that journal
are (while perhaps competitively sourced) in no way equivalent to
peer-reviewed research published in a credible science-related
journals as "studies." Use of the term "study" to refer that 2007
article dishonestly suggested that the assertions made by its
authors were gathered and vetted under more rigorous study
conditions, which didn't appear to be the case.
[...] In short, the purported 2007 Harvard "study" with
"astonishing" findings was in fact a polemic paper penned by two
well-known gun rights activists. Its findings were neither
peer-reviewed nor subject to academic scrutiny of any sort prior
to its appearance, and the publication that carried it was a
self-identified ideology-based editorial outlet edited by Harvard
students.
What if their goal isn't to make a testable prediction that
diverges from the current best theory, but merely to explain
more elegantly what's already explained? Shouldn't that count
as scientific progress too?
An excellent question! Yes, more elegant explanations of
existing phenomena are definitely a big part of science. The
unification of electricity and magnetism is an example .
But that unification led to new predictions that the non-unified
models did not. Yet, even if string theory was able to make the
same predictions as the standard model and no new predictions
then, hell yeah, it is would be science. The problem is that it
makes no predictions. Well, to be more accurate, it makes way
too many predictions which is pretty much the same thing.
You see, explaining what has already been explained involves
making testable predictions. String theory does not do this
which is why it is not science. That doesn't mean it is
worthless to pursue.
Slashdot Mirror
I fully agree with you that if we are at the end of Moore's Law then it is because of physical limitations and not economics. As for no preceding tech breakthroughs, Intel's first CTO said (in 2008):
I compare Moore's Law to driving down the road on a foggy night, how far can you see? Does the road stop after 100 metres? How far can you go?
[...] That's what it's been like with Moore's Law. We thought there were physical limits and [now] we casually speak about going to 10 nanometres. We have work going on different transistor structures. Silicon has become scaffolding for the rest of the periodic table. We're putting these other structures into the materials. We see no end in sight and we've had 10 years of visibility for the last 30 years.
I think it is quite possible he is wrong about Moore's Law extending out to 2028 but I find it very hard to believe he is wrong about the history of Moore's Law leading up to 2008. He was in a position to see the tech breakthroughs first-hand. I don't see why he would lie about it.
Your overall point may (or may not) be valid but this passage in particular is either incorrect or grossly misleading:
Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current technology.
We have had to develop new technology after new technology for decades to keep pace with Moore's Law. This is one of the things that makes Moore's Law so fascinating -- it has already spanned over five orders of magnitude (powers of ten). Take a look at the section on enabling factors and future trends on the Wikipedia page. It is possible we have finally reached the end of Moore's Law but to me it seems equally possible that we have not.
[screed that equates a relatively small number of Islamic fundamentalists with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world who practice the Muslim religion]
Here is a quote from the introduction of the 2005 book Devil's Game: How the US unleashed fundamentalist Islam by Robert Dreyfuss:
The United States played not with Islam -- that is, the religion, the traditional, organized system of belief of hundreds of millions -- but with Islamism. Unlike the faith, with fourteen centuries of history behind it, Islamism is of a more recent vintage. It is a political creed with its origins in the late nineteenth century, a militant, all-encompassing philosophy whose tenets would appear foreign or heretical to most of the Muslims of earlier ages and that still appear so to many educated Muslims today. Whether it is called pan-Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, it is an altogether different creature from the spiritual interpretation of Muslim life as contained in the Five Pillars of Islam. It is, in fact, a perversion of that religious faith. That is the mutant ideology that the United States encouraged, supported, organized, or funded. It is the same one variously represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, by Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, by Saudi Arabia's ultra-orthodox Wahhabism, by Hamas and Hezbollah, by the Afghan jihadis, and by Osama bin Laden.
As others have said, while some people who claim to be Muslims attack innocent civilians, so do some people who claim to follow other faiths or claim to have no faith. Generalizing to the larger group of all Muslims is extremely counter-productive (unless you goal is to increase the number of and ferocity of attacks against innocent civilians in the West). The mechanism for how fear-based anti-Muslim screeds in the West fuel fundamentalist attacks against the West was explained in the Adam Curtis documentary series The Power of Nightmares.
In addition, while nothing can justify attacks against innocent civilians anywhere in the world -- regardless of the race, nationality, or religion of the attackers or the victims -- by ignoring the causes of the attacks, by disavowing any responsibility for our own actions, and by instead opting for a fear-based knee-jerk emotional reaction, we only make the situation worse, not better.
Fear is the mind-killer. Often the purpose of attacks against innocent civilians is to instill fear and terror. If we drop our reasoning ability and indulge ourselves in these emotions then we are feeding the cycle of violence, reprisals, and incriminations. Over-generalizations, collective blame, xenophobia, and ignoring the obvious consequences of our own actions just fan the flames of conflict. They do nothing to quell it.
If you consider the people who perpetrated these attacks to be you enemy then know your enemy! Certainly avoid aiding and abetting them by reacting exactly how they want you to react! Blaming, attacking, or murdering other innocents just because they share a country, a religion, or a family with people who are responsible for the attacks fuels the conflict. The problem is not that group-A is mostly bad and group-B is mostly good by comparison. The problem is attacking, killing, and even blaming innocent people. This is happening on both sides of the conflict. For example, blaming Iraq for the 9/11 attacks led to the war on Iraq that killed over one hundred thousand innocent civilians and led to the destabilization of the entire area, the rise of ISIS and the massive refuge crisis. Absolving ourselves of any responsibility for the obvious consequences of our actions and instead continuing on the same path of blaming and punishing more innocent people will continue to have the same disastrous consequences.
You have a choice. You can either keep feeding the conflict or you can work to stop it. Even if your fear-based beliefs were correct and they are somehow morally worse than us then it is even more incumbent on us to stop the conflict instead of feeding it.
There are valid arguments for not including certain labeling. People that think they need to know if something is GMO should be grouped in with people that think vaccines cause autism. It has no place in labeling
So by avoiding GMO foods someone can cause harm to others via an outbreak of measles or other potentially deadly diseases? Can you explain how that works? Another difference is that people know when they are getting vaccinations and they have access to information about what is in the vaccinations.
The only similarity perhaps is that you think both groups are idiots. I have no sympathy for the anti-vaxers but I do have sympathy for people who want to personally avoid GMO foods, just like I had sympathy 40 years ago for people who had the far-out idea of avoiding non-organic foods. If people want to pay extra to avoid GMO foods then more power to them. I don't see how they are harming others by this choice.
An example of the common perception of organic/health food in the 1970s is illustrated in the lyrics of Escape (the Pina Colada Song):
If you're not into yoga, if you have half a brain
[...] I'm not much into health food
I don't know how to fix the anti-vaxer problem but one thing I do know is that restricting information about the vaccines (like information on GMO foods is restricted) will only make the problem worse, not better.
Great writers don't tend to be highly intelligent (if they were, they'd get work that pays better).
What you say may sound reasonable and obvious but it is based on the assumption that money is a good motivator for creative behavior which has been scientifically proven to be factually incorrect. Take a look at this TED Talk by Dan Pink for an easily digested explanation: On Motivation.
In a more global context, the fact that monetary rewards stifle creativity could explain many deep, systematic problems in our society. Perhaps it is unwise for us to put people who are strongly motivated by monetary rewards into positions of leadership. Not only is fear the mind-killer, it seems money is a mind-killer as well. If we want creative solutions to our problems then the last thing we need are leaders who are primarily motivated by fear and money.
You do understand, don't you, that nVidia has never provided OSS drivers for Linux? Their Linux drivers are nothing more than binary blobs that you can only install by booting into a CLI, then rebooting after the installation is complete.
About 10 or 12 years ago I had a Dell laptop that had Nvidia graphics. I was running Gentoo Linux. I reported some bug with the Nvidia driver. Within hours late Saturday, early Sunday I got a reply from Nvidia with a patch to the MM kernel that fixed the problem. The bug was not in the Nvidia driver but was caused by recent change in the MM kernel. I was very impressed. In this case they were acting like an FOSS shop not a proprietary software shop.
I grant you the closed portions of the Nvidia drivers can be a royal pain in the neck, especially when combined with the closed Flash player. There were times when it was maddening but that was partly driven by an obsession by some Gentoo devs to be overly zealous with purging versions of the Nvidia driver from the portage system. Things have been mostly stable for a good number of years now.
I appreciate the Linux support Nvidia does provide. For example, I've been using VDPAU which does video decoding on the graphics card which let me play blu-rays on a machine with a not so powerful CPU. Also, I've never had to reboot in order to update the Nvidia driver. I do have to rmmod the old driver after I stop X but that's no biggie. YMMVG
I am interested in seeing the Nvidia distro if they release one but I'm not holding my breath.
Wikipedia is useless for political subjects. Duh.
I recommended a Google search. Is that useless too? I also referred to the sources referenced by the Wikipedia article. Are those useless too? Is the entire Internet useless?
I agree that, as with any encyclopedia, the Wikipedia should not be used as the last word on almost any topic which is why I didn't suggest it as such. It is a good starting place, which makes it far from useless. The information GLMDesigns demands is readily available. It is readily available from sources besides just the Wikipedia. Your comment is wrong. Even if it were right it would be irrelevant since I recommended other on-line sources in addition to the Wikipedia.
Since the overwhelming evidence from a large variety of sources confirms that the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth was a vicious smear campaign that used widely publicized and then discredited claims, the onus is on GLMDesigns to provide proof that those discredited claims are true. Simply repeating the discredited claims does not make them more credible. If GLMDesigns believes that the Internet is useless as a tool for gathering information about this topic then I can understand why they are stuck with their own wildly incorrect personal opinions and are confused about what the truth is.
Refusing to mention any facts; and more than that refusing to dispute a stated fact / proposition is another.
LMGTFY
If the Wikipedia and all of the articles it references, and common knowledge are all wrong (or part of a giant "left-wing" (ha ha)) conspiracy then the onus is on you to provide facts that prove/show this. The mountains of evidence that are only are simple Google search away are not proof positive but your demand that someone else do this simple Google search for you is ridiculous.
I blame Political correctness and SJWs for the rise in trump.
The Republicans have also been blamed for resorting to the politics of hate. The best explanation I've seen has two components:
1) The inclination of some people to turn to authoritarianism when times get rough.
2) The concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is making things rough for the working class. Things aren't really bad yet (like in the great depression) but people's prospects are bleak. They are worse off now than they were 10 years ago without much hope in sight.
If this simple analysis is correct then the problem is not Trump. There are always Trumps around. The problem is that economic times (more accurately, prospects) are bad enough that a sizable fraction of the population is turning to a strongman/bully who promises to protect them even if those promises don't make any rational sense.
This has several implications. First, if there is a successful large-scale terrorist attack in the US then this could easily raise the overall level of fear enough to sweep Trump into the White House. Second, if the powers-that-be stay in power and continue their policies of transferring wealth away from the working class then the levels of economic distress and fear will grow, creating even more support for Trump or the next authoritarian strongman/bully who comes along.
The only real solution is to stop waging economic warfare on the working class. Unfortunately, even if Bernie Sanders gets elected, it is going to be nigh on impossible to quickly change the course of the best government that money could buy.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Twin primes.
Yes, they are most likely related. Both the twin prime conjecture and these results about the final digits can be derived from the prime k-tuple conjecture. Or so says the fine article. It is not immediately obvious to me why the current result is predicted by the prime k-tuple conjecture but it does sound reasonable.
That is the speaker's fault. He had updates scheduled and when he shut his machine down, he left it in a state of "partly updated" so that it finished updating when it was turned on. It also sounds like he has a REALLY crappy laptop with a slow HDD, which he shouldn't if he is a "really important speaker". Frankly, the speaker was unprepared. This is not Windows' fault, this is his.
Certainly it was his fault. What was he thinking relying on Windows to hold something that was mission critical to him. Just kidding. Sort of.
Seriously, the important question is not whether the speaker was partial responsible for the debacle, the question is whether people want an OS that behaves that way or if they want an OS that is easier to use.
I've been working with computers for over 40 years (can't believe it has been that long). I'm most comfortable when I feel like I'm in control of the machine and not the other way around. That's why I mostly use Linux. I admit, Linux is not for everyone. The opposite extreme from Linux is Apple's iOS. I bought a used iPad and I'm fine with it too. I like to drive but I don't mind if someone else drives as long as they are competent at it and don't make me want to jump out of the car or hold on for dear life.
I now have three Windows 8.1 machines that I have been using to test Linux distros and Linux UEFI booting. Windows really is the worst of both worlds. It grabs control of the car and then immediately drives it into the ditch. If Windows creates an NPE (negative play experience) when it is used on small, underpowered laptops with a hard drive then it should not come pre-installed on those machines. Blaming someone who uses the pre-installed OS on a computer they bought is kind of silly. If the OS is going to take the driver's seat then it needs to do it with such ease and competence that I don't have to worry about it just like I don't have to worry about the hardware (most of the time).
On Linux I don't have to wrestle for control because it is easy for me to take control. I don't have to wrestle for control with iOS (on my iPad) because I can easily do what I want to do and let the OS do the driving. With Windows I often want to wrestle for control (don't do that update now dammit!) but I always lose.
My supposition is that ALL primaries need to be open, and no parties are allowed. Why should tax payers support parties that we don't agree with? My party doesn't require taxpayer "Primary" elections ;-)
As someone already mentioned, the problem is that the "winner take all" electorial system that is baked into the US Constitution automatically creates a two-party system whether you want one or not. Trying to outlawing politics parties will not solve the problem. You need to change the Constitution to make the electorial system more fair than "winner take all".
A simple introduction to these ideas is available in a few short videos at Politics in the Animal Kingdom. We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. The difficulty is that whoever is in power has little motivation to drastically change the system that put them in power.
The US Constitution was the prototype. Many of the Countries that followed us learned from our mistakes.
Six months later: "The version of your OS is too outdated to continue, click here to upgrade now!".
Your estimate is off by six months. The forced upgrade was announced today. I just got this email:
important update required for your Kindle e-reader
Your Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) requires an important software update to continue downloading e-books and using Kindle services. This important update applies to Kindle e-readers released prior to 2014.
***sigh***. Amazon was very convenient. It is not going to be convenient to ditch them, I live in a very rural area. If you don't count Walmart there are not a lot of shopping options in the area. Despite the inconvenience, the encryption announcement followed by the forced upgrade (with no explanation of why the upgrade is needed) leaves me no choice.
On the plus side, I will probably save a lot of money.
Slightly off-topic, but who says Trump will win the nomination?
You're right. I should not ASSume. OTOH I was responding to a post that had already made that assumption and also assumed Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. Perhaps I should not have corrected one assumption without correcting the other one.
Cruz and Rubio could just as easily get together, pool their delegates, and become a Pres-VP combo, with whichever one having the biggest # of delegates coming out at the top of the billing. Top guy does 4-8 years, VP then does 4-8 years more as President.
This seems extremely far-fetched to me. It seems extremely unlikely there would be so much cooperation and even if there were, such a move would tear apart the Republican party (cue a quote from the Lord of the Rings movies about sharing power). The Democrats would have a similar problem if Sanders has the majority of pledged delegates but the superdelegates give the nod to Clinton.
Perhaps one of the reasons I ASSumed Trump would win the Republican nomination was that I had recently read: The rise of American authoritarianism. If they are correct then Trump should easily win the nomination barring unforeseen disasters (although I'm in the camp that sees a Trump presidency as a disaster). This article is the only thing I've read about Trump that makes sense to me. I think most commentators don't understand the situation. TL;DR: Trump appeals to the burgeoning authoritarian wing of the Republican party; fear is the mind-killer.
That article gave me hope that a Trump victory in the general election is not a given, even if he runs against an establishment candidate like Clinton.
If the indictment comes out before the Democratic convention then it would be very bad for Trump. It is only good for Trump if it comes out after the convention and if Clinton is the Democratic nominee.
Adblock Pro claim, and I believe them, that no one can buy their way on to the acceptable ads list. Ads have to meet their guidelines to get on there. What ABP do do however, is to refuse to put ads they deem acceptable on the list if payment is demanded but refused. Somewhat distasteful, but they wouldn't have a business without it.
If ABP does screen ads (and the screening is effective) then they are providing a useful service and it is fine (in my book) for them to charge money for it. Some Internet advertisers are a step up (or maybe a step down) from spammers. It is an nasty field. If you are a legitimate Internet advertiser then ISTM you should want to get approval of your ads by Adblock Pro and you should be happy to pay for that approval.
For example, Underwriters Laboratory does not give away their services for free. If you want your product certified then you have to pay for it. This is not a scam. They are providing a useful service. ISTM Adblock pro is doing something similar. If you want them to make sure your ads meet their guidelines then you need to pay them for this service. To some extent they are taking on the liability for bad ads (or even malware). In the long term this will be a very positive thing for legitimate Internet advertisers.
It only works if one assumes that this level of school is merely job training. Some could argue that education is about broadening knowledge and exercising the brain, not just 'how am I going to use this in real life?'
I fully agree with you that school should be about broadening minds. I think that a statistics class like the one discussed in the fine article (which uses a real-world hands-on approach) would broaden minds much better than a class in algebra or calculus. I honestly think the world would be a much better place if more people had even a vague understanding of Bayesian probability and statistics. This really is much more important and relevant than algebra or calculus. It is not about job training, it is about perceiving and understanding the world around us.
The fine article also discusses the underlying problem: math is often taught by people who don't understand or enjoy math. Teaching statistics poorly will be no better than teaching algebra or calculus poorly. Although the worst of the problem IMO is the teaching at the elementary school and middle school levels. When I was in 6th grade I was taught that the set of no apples was distinguishable from the set of no pears.
There is also a problem with the teaching of calculus in college by math professors and grad students who are not interested in calculus. It seemed to me that if you didn't learn calculus in high school then you were screwed (at least at the university I attended). Years later when I was a grad student, some of the physics grad students ended up being TAs for the intro calculus course. The grades of the students shot way up. I think the reason was that calculus is extremely relevant to all physics grad students but is not of much interest to most math grad students.
I was basically repeating/interpreting what the fine article said:
FRBs show a frequency-dependent dispersion, a delay in the radio signal caused by how much material it has gone through.
I believe interstellar dispersion of electromagnetic waves is caused by interactions with ionized interstellar medium. A quick Google(interstellar dispersion) brought up this page which gives a formula that relates the integral of electron density along the path of the signal to the dispersion of the signal. On that page they assume they know the density of interstellar medium inside our galaxy and use the dispersion of signals from pulsars to estimate their distance. In the FRB experiment they did it the other way around and used the known distance (using the red-shift of the source galaxy) and the dispersion to estimate the integral of the density. Integral measurements such as this usually give much more accurate results than point measurements.
If the interstellar medium were entirely made up of ionized hydrogen then knowing the electron density would give you the total density since there would be one proton for every electron. You need to add corrections because only about 70% of the interstellar medium is hydrogen so you need to estimate the number of neutrons. You also need to make a small correction since the interstellar medium is not 100% ionized.
The reason why the dispersion is related to the electron density is given, for example, in J. D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics where the dielectric "constant" (and hence the speed of light) is shown to be a function of the frequency. The electromagnetic wave causes the electrons to wiggle (just a little), the higher the frequency, the less wiggling so the higher frequencies are slowed down less than the lower frequencies. You can think of it like having an eccentricity in a front tire of your car that makes the steering wheel vibrate. When you go fast enough so the frequency of the oscillations is much greater then the resonant frequencies of the components then the amount of vibration you experience goes down because the direction reverses before things can move very far. In the interstellar medium each electron slows down the wave just a little and the total amount of slowing down is proportional to the number of electrons encountered.
Usually, the "closeness" of the electrons is not considered, instead the integrated electron density is used. But it is possible to calculate how close the electrons have to be to a line between the source and the receiver using what is called the 3-point function. The cross section of the volume that contributes to a fixed percentage of the signal will be roughly elliptical with the source and the receiver at each focus of the ellipse. Given the vast intergalactic distances involved, it will probably be extremely wide near the middle by any earthly standards but this width is independent of the calculation of the dispersion. I'd imagine the width would scale as sqrt(d * c * t) where d is the distance between the source and the receiver, c is the speed of light, and t is roughly the duration of the signal (more accurately, the inverse of the bandwidth). The reason the closeness (the width of the 3-point function) doesn't matter is because the more spread out the 3-point function is, the weaker it is. All that matters is what you get when you sum it all up.
Nope. The mass of the universe universe is 70% dark energy, 25% dark matter, 5% familiar matter. But only about half of that 5% can be accounted for by direct observation - the rest is "missing".
Correct.
TFA claims that the radio burst let researchers find a very dim (radio) galaxy that would not have otherwise been found - the matter is "missing" simply because you have to point a very good telescope at exactly the right part of the sky for a long time to find it.
Incorrect. It doesn't even make sense that finding one more galaxy would somehow account for half the normal mass of the Universe. Finding the originating galaxy was part of the solution but it helped because it gave them the distance to the FRB source. They already knew the dispersion (different frequencies arriving at different times) of the FRB. The dispersion tells you how much non-dark matter the signal passed near during its trip here. By also knowing the distance to the source, they were able to calculate the average density of the non-dark matter along the line of travel. This average density was then be used to estimate the amount of non-dark matter in the Universe.
Though if they want to maximize readability, why aren't the using fonts with the little training wheels specially designed to make letters faster to read and easier to recognize in bad reading conditions, what's the name: SERIF fonts!
For road signs, they don't want to maximize readability, they want to maximize legibility, which is not the same thing. For example see: It's About Legibility:
While the argument continues to rage about whether sans serifs are easier to read than serif fonts in text copy, sans serif typefaces, because their letter shapes are simpler, have been proven to be slightly more legible than their serifed cousins.
I agree that serif fonts are generally more readable than sans-serif fonts. Having to read a book that is entirely sans-serif is a chore. The serifed fonts are usually easier to read because the serifs help guide your eye to scan an entire line of text. But for road signs, it is more important to recognize words than to scan lines. That's why they use sans-serif fonts which have been found to be more legible. For signs, you don't need serifs to guide your eye like when you are reading a page of text. In addition, the serifs act like noise and make it slightly more difficult to recognize single letters, especially when parts of the letters are obscured.
I started reading the "study" you base your entire argument on and it seemed to be a suspicious jumble of cherry-picked facts, and thus more of a political polemic with an axe to grind than an objective scientific study so I did a search to find out more about the authors and discovered that either you were purposely misleading people here or you were misled yourself.
For example, Snopes highlights many of the flaws with the non-peer reviewed paper you cite as a "study":
Claim: A 2007 Harvard University study proved that areas with higher rates of gun ownership have lower crime rates.
FALSE
WHAT'S TRUE: Gun rights advocates Gary Mauser and Don Kates jointly authored a 2007 paper in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy arguing that higher rates of gun ownership correlated with lower crime rates.
WHAT'S FALSE: The paper in question was not peer-reviewed, it didn't constitute a study, and it misrepresented separate research to draw shaky, unsupported conclusions.
[...] Of primary importance is the subsequent, widely misapplied label of the word "study" with reference to the 2007 item in question. The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy describes itself as "one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship." Papers published in that journal are (while perhaps competitively sourced) in no way equivalent to peer-reviewed research published in a credible science-related journals as "studies." Use of the term "study" to refer that 2007 article dishonestly suggested that the assertions made by its authors were gathered and vetted under more rigorous study conditions, which didn't appear to be the case.
[...] In short, the purported 2007 Harvard "study" with "astonishing" findings was in fact a polemic paper penned by two well-known gun rights activists. Its findings were neither peer-reviewed nor subject to academic scrutiny of any sort prior to its appearance, and the publication that carried it was a self-identified ideology-based editorial outlet edited by Harvard students.
The battery must last for years before it needs to be recharged. I imagine they use turbo mode for the benchmarks.
And if you have physical access to a booting machine, its owner may already be f#cked.
Using that logic, nobody should ever be required to type a password when physically present at the console.
Using that logic then we should never implement security features that deter passersby but will not stop a determined attacker.
Gosh it was slow code. Not so much bad code.
I fail to see the distinction. This is painfully bad code. I, for one, would not enjoy working with people who think this is not really bad code.
What if their goal isn't to make a testable prediction that diverges from the current best theory, but merely to explain more elegantly what's already explained? Shouldn't that count as scientific progress too?
An excellent question! Yes, more elegant explanations of existing phenomena are definitely a big part of science. The unification of electricity and magnetism is an example . But that unification led to new predictions that the non-unified models did not. Yet, even if string theory was able to make the same predictions as the standard model and no new predictions then, hell yeah, it is would be science. The problem is that it makes no predictions. Well, to be more accurate, it makes way too many predictions which is pretty much the same thing.
You see, explaining what has already been explained involves making testable predictions. String theory does not do this which is why it is not science. That doesn't mean it is worthless to pursue.