America learned once why it can't let dictators like Putin just invade
their neighbors with impunity.
Well then maybe they should stop putting people like Putin in power.
The current political system in Russia is the direct result of the
disastrous neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the West after the
collapse of the USSR.
Let's stop fucking up other parts of the world and then fucking them up
further by using military intervention to clean up our previous fuck
ups. How quickly we forget where this all goes.
I keep hearing the Gnome 3 haters shout from the rooftops "LOL!! nobody
wants to use Gnome 3!!!" so far I have not seen anybody actually cite
any statistics to prove it.
Really? How many times are you going to spend years of your life
creating something awesome... only to have someone else like Facebook
or Zynga copy it, market it, and put you out of business?
Exactly! The current patent system gives all the power to large
corporations who own lots of expensive lawyers. Independent developers
are screwed, blued, and tattooed.
Software patents are most dangerous to creative, independent developers.
You could spend all of your time just researching patents that might
cover what you are working on. And as Linus said, all you get for this
effort is the threat of treble damages for willful infringement.
The current patent system is completely incapable of separating
the obvious from the non-obvious in the realm of software. That
is because the patent system is filled with non-practitioners.
Nowadays even someone who is an expert in one field of software
may not know enough about other areas to separate the obvious from
the non. [This is not an endorsement for patents on non-obvious
software but that is a separate issue].
If you are a creative and productive software designer then you are
probably creating code that infringes software patents on a weekly or
monthly basis. Not because you are stealing ideas but because you are
developing them independently. Since the presumption of validity is
given to the patent holder, even one totally bogus software patent can
put you out of business.
HFT should be banned, there is nothing these robo-traders contribute to
society except for profit for themselves.
Exactly! But instead of banning, it should just be taxed. They
are basically imposing a tax on society that makes them filthy rich
while providing no benefit to society. Yet these are the same people
who scream bloody murder whenever someone proposes a bona fide tax on
stock transactions. If they insist on acting like spoiled young
brats then we need to treat them as such.
At its heart, this corruption is similar to the *IAA corruption. In
both cases technological advances that should have made the middle-men
obsolete are flipped around to provide a disservice to society while
enriching the unscrupulous.
According to the reference, the reason for the speed improvement
had to do with the vastly different CPU architecture and specifically
with getting more cache misses due to an increase in the size of the
code base because of the unrolled loops.
It seems rather silly to imply that Duff's device is no longer
elegant merely because it does not apply to current CPU
architectures.
Historically, the arts have been funded by patronage. The
commercialization of the arts is a fairly recent phenomenon. Yes, many
great artists have died penniless with their genius unrecognized. But
that means they created out of love for their art and the need to
express their genius not out of a desire for financial renumeration.
In addition, original works of art are far more valuable than
reproductions. So not only is there an innate desire in true creators
to create, there is also an innate desire in others to reward this
creation, after the fact. There is joy in the act of creation and there
is joy in others when they appreciate what was created. I've been in
movie theaters where the audience stood up and gave the movie standing
ovation even though none of the creators were there to hear the
applause. There is no doubt that at that point in time many people
would have paid generously if making a payment was as easy as tapping a
button on their phone. Films that moved people would be rewarded.
The notion that patronage does not work is only in the context of a
world where the arts have been bastardized and exploited for monetary
gain. Of course people who are embedded in the commercialization model
will have a difficult time making the transition. This is a feature not
a bug. It would be a benefit to have the exploiters weeded out so more
genuine creation and genius can flourish. It is insane to for us to
give the role of story-teller to Hollywood writers. They are not the
people who should be teaching our children about relationships. Sex
sells. Violence sells. But these are not the stories and myths we want
our children to be raised on. The information we pass on to the next
generation should not be based primarily on what is most titillating.
As the cost to copy, store, and transmit information continues to
plummet, the commercialization model becomes less and less tenable,
requiring draconian measure to give content owners more and more control
over all aspects of information transfer and processing. It would
require a fascist dictatorship over information.
OTOH, the patronage model becomes easier as information technology
advances. It can be fueled by instant micropayments so everyone who
chooses to can participate and vote with their wallets. In the long
run it is the only sensible approach. But even in the short term,
it is the only way I know of to stem the tide of cultural exploitation
and destruction that the commercialization of the arts has caused.
Culture belongs to everybody. It is our birthright and it is the
lifeblood of our civilization. It is crazy to lock it up tightly due to
the fact that the cost of information transfer and storage is getting
close to zero. The cost to our society and to our civilization for this
lock-up is enormous because we are denying our children and our
children's children their birthright. It is a form of cultural and
societal suicide. The miracle of life is based on passing genetic
information from one generation to the next. Human beings were able to
supercharge this passing on of information by creating side-channels:
art, language, history, science and the humanities, even religion.
Evolution in these side-channel information transfers was staggeringly
fast compared to genetic evolution. Stifling this form of evolution is
the ultimate triumph of mediocrity over genius.
Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new
content stops,...
Devaluing content until mercenary content creation gets starved out
would be a great service to our culture and to humanity in general.
Right now a bunch of ass-hats are raping our culture based on the
ridiculous notion that anything that makes a buck is good and virtuous.
For example, imagine if people paid for films (or other content) after
having experienced it. Micopayments could be seen as a form of
applause. There would be much less demand for massive misleading
advertising campaigns since misleading consumers would result in
lowering revenue. In addition, these payments would be a form of voting
for what future content gets created. If some people choose to take a
free ride and never pay for anything, that's perfectly fine. It does
not harm anyone else and it removes the freeloaders from the content
creation gene pool. It is a win win.
The real evil of these copyright extremist is not that they are ripping
us all off (which they are) the real evil is they are destroying our
culture, replacing things made from love with things made solely (or
mostly) to exploit others. They thrive in an unfair and unfree market
where consumers have to buy their products like buying a pig in a poke.
When it comes down to it, what they are afraid of and what they are
fighting against is to have their products evaluated based on merit
instead of a rigged system that brain washes people with massive
advertising campaigns. In our totally upside down society, advertising
is a business expense so we are subsidizing corporations to gobble up
our limited time and attention.
It should be the other way around. If corporations want a piece of my
limited time and attention then they should have to pay me to get it,
just like I would pay a lawyer or a doctor to get their time and
attention. There is no reason for corporations to have free access to
these valuable resources. Your time and attention are limited
and valuable. It is ridiculous that we are subsidizing corporations to
consume them.
I like to keep a close eye on CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage,
and network usage. Without that information it feels like I'm
flying blind. It is often important on a new system when I
don't know what is running and consuming resources.
I talked about the problem of highly radioactive water spewing
from Fukushima back in
April
2011:
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl escaped upward into the
air. This made it easier to get a handle on the magnitude of the
total amount of radioactivity released. The release at the light
water reactors at Fukushima is for the most part traveling
downward, to basements, tunnels, ground water, and the ocean.
This makes it extremely difficult to get a handle on the total
amount of radioactivity that has been released. They really don't
know [if] the bulk of it is in the thousands of tons they have
already discovered or if that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course I was called an alarmist and other things for bringing
this up back then.
Clearly what they had discovered by April 1 2011 was
just the tip of the iceberg. As I had predicted, it is the
radioactive water that is the main cause for concern.
Algorithmic information theory (AIT) explains very clearly and simply
why we are still writing text-based code. AIT is based on the
idea of measuring the amount of information in a series of bits
(or bytes or however you want to chunk it) based on the size
of the smallest possible program that can create the series.
There are simply not enough bits of information in a GUI based
coding system to create the algorithms we want/need to create.
Even though almost all programming languages have a lot of
redundancy built-in in order to make them easier to understand,
programs written in these languages still have a much greater
amount of information than what is available by simple
point-and-click which is equivalent to a series of multiple
choice questions. For example 80 multiple choice questions with
100 options in each question only give you the information
contained in a line of 80 ASCII characters.
Shouldn't there be a simpler, more robust way to
translate an algorithm into something a computer can understand?
One that's language agnostic and without all the cryptic jargon?
I believe people have tried to make universal programming
languages. I don't think any of them caught on in the sense of
replacing coding in real programming languages. And for very
good reasons.
One problem is the conflict between simpler and more
robust. Shorter programs require higher information density
and hence less redundancy and robustness. If you want to make
a language simpler by reducing the number of keywords and special
symbols then you will force programs to be longer or harder to
understand or both.
In the limit of the shortest program possible, the program itself
appears to be a random series of bits, every one of which is
significant. If there is any pattern or bias in the bits then it
is not the shortest possible program.
OTOH, some higher level-languages such as R or MatLab (Octave) do
make it easier to express many algorithms. This is mostly
because they have vector and matrix data types. Their forerunner
in many ways was
APL which has a fairly high information density partly
because it uses a wider range of characters than are available in
ASCII. Perhaps you should learn R or Matlab or maybe even
Mathematica. These languages give you a high-level means of
expressing algorithms in a way that computers can understand.
Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to
the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us
to test drive this new design.
Given how obviously horrible the beta design is, this sentiment
on the best way to test drive it is quite galling. OTOH, I
am thankful they are not responsible for design airplanes
or automobiles:
Yes, for the first test-flight we have filled 25% of the new
plane with unsuspecting passengers but this is the best way
for us to test drive our new design.
It has occured to me that maybe they trying to alienate the
slashdot community
When a nation has conflicting laws it tends to cover illegal
activities as any court can choose to take the view that supports
the government.
Welcome to the new USA-beta!
We've had only a few major redesigns since 1776; we think it's
time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments
you've made about the look and functionality of the beta
government that will control our country's future.
Excellent comment. OTOH, my cynical side is suspicious of
how tone-deaf the site owners seem to be. It makes me wonder
if the following item was on an NSA todo list somewhere:
Destroy Slashdot. After those damned Snowden leaks the
Slashdot community seems to be united against us. As
long as they were divided and bickering, they were not
a threat.
They don't delete externally collected data. They obviously
delete or age-off internal records.
Prime Minister John Key, who is in charge of GCSB
said:
This is a spy agency. We don't delete things. We archive them.
Key's office confirmed that Key was talking about the video
that his lawyers had claimed was deleted.
AC opined:
Isn't claiming that Dotcom was illegally spied upon putting the
cart before the horse here? Where is the evidence? Regardless of
whether it was deleted or not, by making the statement one is
assuming the conclusion and puts their own credibility at risk.
Here are some links from the fine article showing that the
government and the police have already admitted malfeasance:
Oddly enough you are correct that these admissions of malfeasance
do put the credibility of the police and the Prime Minister at
risk although that is probably not what you meant.
Most physicists fully expect a useful quantum computer to eventually emerge,
[...]
I am a physicist and I don't think a useful quantum computer will
ever emerge. The problem is very simple. In order for a quantum
system to calculate exponentially faster than a classical system,
it must contain exponentially more useful information which makes
it exponentially more sensitive to noise. An early computer
researcher (perhaps Jon von Neumann) used a similar argument to
conclude that digital computers would eventually supersede analog
computers because the precision of analog computers is limited by
the noise floor which is very hard to beat back while you can
make digital systems arbitrarily more precise by simply adding
more circuits (or more time).
In simple terms, for every extra decimal digit you want to add to
the size of a number you can factor with a quantum computer you
need to reduce the effect of noise by roughly a factor of 10. I
don't think this is greatly different from the limitation of
classical computers where for every decimal digit you want to add
to the size of numbers you want to factor you must multiply the
time/size of computation by roughly a factor of 10.
Despite this reservation, I think we should continue funding
research in quantum computing.
so you never wear a safety harness, because your freedom is more
important than your safety?
Saying freedom is more important than safety does not
imply that safety is unimportant just like
Saying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is taller than Shaquille O'Neal
does imply Shaq is not tall.
The point to note here is that at equlibrium (which must occur),
flux in = flux out. That means that under no circumtances will
the temperature ever exceed the input.
Again, you are confusing heat and temperature. The input is
energy (heat), the input is not temperature. No one who has
grasped basic thermodynamics would take your argument seriously
after that fundamental mistake. You seem to be just stringing
together scientific jargon in a nonsensical way to reach a
conclusion you like.
In a different post you claim that convection plays a significant
role in the heat loss of the Earth. The upper atmosphere is
close to being a vacuum. At a high enough altitude the amount of
heat transfer due to conduction and convection is negligible.
Do yourself a favor and Google(thermosphere).
You claimed the fine Nature article was wrong because it was
based on radiative forcing yet you have never defined what
you mean by that term. Your definition seems to be at odds with
the definition given by the Wikipedia. The term was never used
in the article nor was it used in the two references you gave to
back up your claim that radiative forcing had been debunked.
Again, I ask, in the Earth-Sun system what is the "input"
temperature if it is not the temperature of the surface of
the Sun?
And BTW I do have a Ph.D. in physics. A Nobel Laureate was
the chairman of my thesis defense and I've study thermodynamics
with some of the leading experts in the world.
And [At?] equilibrium, the "limiting temperature", assuming a
black body, is the temperature that corresponds to radiating the
same amount of energy as the input. Anything else is nonsensical.
0) Requiring your arguments to be in accord with basic
physics is not nit picking.
1) The Earth is not in thermal equilibrium with the Sun.
If it were then it would be at the same temperature as the
surface of the Sun. The only reason life can exist on Earth is
because of the gradient caused by the Earth not being in thermal
equilibrium with the Sun.
2)
A black body is not the same thing as a perfect insulator. They
are opposites in a way. A perfect insulator would block all
radiative cooling (or else it would not be a very good insulator).
My point is that the limiting temperature is a function of the
insulating properties of the Earth. It is not an intrinsic
property of the strength of solar heating.
If you treat the Earth as a black body you are explicitly
ignoring all insulation effects. IOW you are ignoring
all greenhouse effects. In simple layman's terms, how hot
something gets when it is left out in the sun depends greatly
on how well it is insulated. Even the temperature inside a
conventional greenhouse is highly dependent on how well it
is insulated.
3) When you say a black body in equilibrium radiates the
same amount of energy it absorbs, you seem to be repeating the
definition of radiative forcing, not debunking it.
If you believe there is a limiting temperature to the
strength of solar heating that is much less than
the temperature of the surface of the Sun, please tell
us what that temperature limit is.
Neither of the fine articles linked to in the summary nor either
or your two references even mention radiative forcing.
If you have sources that don't conflict with basic physics
which debunk whatever it is you mean by radiative forcing
I would like to see them. Perhaps part of the problem is that
your definition of radiative forcing differs from the definition
given by the Wikipedia. So far you have given nothing more than
your opinion that the authors of the Nature article made a
serious (and probably job-threatening) mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
a premium that went from $119 to $276 - a 231% increase in premiums
By your logic, a premium that went up by 1% from $100 to $101 would be a 101% increase.
Does it run Linux?
America learned once why it can't let dictators like Putin just invade their neighbors with impunity.
Well then maybe they should stop putting people like Putin in power. The current political system in Russia is the direct result of the disastrous neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the West after the collapse of the USSR.
Let's stop fucking up other parts of the world and then fucking them up further by using military intervention to clean up our previous fuck ups. How quickly we forget where this all goes.
Umm, she shut up shop because of Snowden.
Blame the messenger much? Her decision to stop working on Groklaw was triggered by an announcement by the owner of Lavabit:
The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.
There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.
The reason she stopped was the invasive and Unconstitutional spying by the NSA.
Next question.
I keep hearing the Gnome 3 haters shout from the rooftops "LOL!! nobody wants to use Gnome 3!!!" so far I have not seen anybody actually cite any statistics to prove it.
FYI: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money
Really? How many times are you going to spend years of your life creating something awesome ... only to have someone else like Facebook
or Zynga copy it, market it, and put you out of business?
Exactly! The current patent system gives all the power to large corporations who own lots of expensive lawyers. Independent developers are screwed, blued, and tattooed.
Software patents are most dangerous to creative, independent developers. You could spend all of your time just researching patents that might cover what you are working on. And as Linus said, all you get for this effort is the threat of treble damages for willful infringement.
The current patent system is completely incapable of separating the obvious from the non-obvious in the realm of software. That is because the patent system is filled with non-practitioners. Nowadays even someone who is an expert in one field of software may not know enough about other areas to separate the obvious from the non. [This is not an endorsement for patents on non-obvious software but that is a separate issue].
If you are a creative and productive software designer then you are probably creating code that infringes software patents on a weekly or monthly basis. Not because you are stealing ideas but because you are developing them independently. Since the presumption of validity is given to the patent holder, even one totally bogus software patent can put you out of business.
HFT should be banned, there is nothing these robo-traders contribute to society except for profit for themselves.
Exactly! But instead of banning, it should just be taxed. They are basically imposing a tax on society that makes them filthy rich while providing no benefit to society. Yet these are the same people who scream bloody murder whenever someone proposes a bona fide tax on stock transactions. If they insist on acting like spoiled young brats then we need to treat them as such.
At its heart, this corruption is similar to the *IAA corruption. In both cases technological advances that should have made the middle-men obsolete are flipped around to provide a disservice to society while enriching the unscrupulous.
Will there be poniez?
No, but there will be plenty of Ponzis.
According to the reference, the reason for the speed improvement had to do with the vastly different CPU architecture and specifically with getting more cache misses due to an increase in the size of the code base because of the unrolled loops.
It seems rather silly to imply that Duff's device is no longer elegant merely because it does not apply to current CPU architectures.
Historically, the arts have been funded by patronage. The commercialization of the arts is a fairly recent phenomenon. Yes, many great artists have died penniless with their genius unrecognized. But that means they created out of love for their art and the need to express their genius not out of a desire for financial renumeration. In addition, original works of art are far more valuable than reproductions. So not only is there an innate desire in true creators to create, there is also an innate desire in others to reward this creation, after the fact. There is joy in the act of creation and there is joy in others when they appreciate what was created. I've been in movie theaters where the audience stood up and gave the movie standing ovation even though none of the creators were there to hear the applause. There is no doubt that at that point in time many people would have paid generously if making a payment was as easy as tapping a button on their phone. Films that moved people would be rewarded.
The notion that patronage does not work is only in the context of a world where the arts have been bastardized and exploited for monetary gain. Of course people who are embedded in the commercialization model will have a difficult time making the transition. This is a feature not a bug. It would be a benefit to have the exploiters weeded out so more genuine creation and genius can flourish. It is insane to for us to give the role of story-teller to Hollywood writers. They are not the people who should be teaching our children about relationships. Sex sells. Violence sells. But these are not the stories and myths we want our children to be raised on. The information we pass on to the next generation should not be based primarily on what is most titillating.
As the cost to copy, store, and transmit information continues to plummet, the commercialization model becomes less and less tenable, requiring draconian measure to give content owners more and more control over all aspects of information transfer and processing. It would require a fascist dictatorship over information.
OTOH, the patronage model becomes easier as information technology advances. It can be fueled by instant micropayments so everyone who chooses to can participate and vote with their wallets. In the long run it is the only sensible approach. But even in the short term, it is the only way I know of to stem the tide of cultural exploitation and destruction that the commercialization of the arts has caused.
Culture belongs to everybody. It is our birthright and it is the lifeblood of our civilization. It is crazy to lock it up tightly due to the fact that the cost of information transfer and storage is getting close to zero. The cost to our society and to our civilization for this lock-up is enormous because we are denying our children and our children's children their birthright. It is a form of cultural and societal suicide. The miracle of life is based on passing genetic information from one generation to the next. Human beings were able to supercharge this passing on of information by creating side-channels: art, language, history, science and the humanities, even religion. Evolution in these side-channel information transfers was staggeringly fast compared to genetic evolution. Stifling this form of evolution is the ultimate triumph of mediocrity over genius.
Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new content stops, ...
Devaluing content until mercenary content creation gets starved out would be a great service to our culture and to humanity in general. Right now a bunch of ass-hats are raping our culture based on the ridiculous notion that anything that makes a buck is good and virtuous.
For example, imagine if people paid for films (or other content) after having experienced it. Micopayments could be seen as a form of applause. There would be much less demand for massive misleading advertising campaigns since misleading consumers would result in lowering revenue. In addition, these payments would be a form of voting for what future content gets created. If some people choose to take a free ride and never pay for anything, that's perfectly fine. It does not harm anyone else and it removes the freeloaders from the content creation gene pool. It is a win win.
The real evil of these copyright extremist is not that they are ripping us all off (which they are) the real evil is they are destroying our culture, replacing things made from love with things made solely (or mostly) to exploit others. They thrive in an unfair and unfree market where consumers have to buy their products like buying a pig in a poke. When it comes down to it, what they are afraid of and what they are fighting against is to have their products evaluated based on merit instead of a rigged system that brain washes people with massive advertising campaigns. In our totally upside down society, advertising is a business expense so we are subsidizing corporations to gobble up our limited time and attention.
It should be the other way around. If corporations want a piece of my limited time and attention then they should have to pay me to get it, just like I would pay a lawyer or a doctor to get their time and attention. There is no reason for corporations to have free access to these valuable resources. Your time and attention are limited and valuable. It is ridiculous that we are subsidizing corporations to consume them.
Agreed. Have you tried Glances? In some ways it is like htop on steroids.
The first thing I install is a system monitor.
I like to keep a close eye on CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, and network usage. Without that information it feels like I'm flying blind. It is often important on a new system when I don't know what is running and consuming resources.
I talked about the problem of highly radioactive water spewing from Fukushima back in April 2011:
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl escaped upward into the air. This made it easier to get a handle on the magnitude of the total amount of radioactivity released. The release at the light water reactors at Fukushima is for the most part traveling downward, to basements, tunnels, ground water, and the ocean. This makes it extremely difficult to get a handle on the total amount of radioactivity that has been released. They really don't know [if] the bulk of it is in the thousands of tons they have already discovered or if that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course I was called an alarmist and other things for bringing this up back then.
Clearly what they had discovered by April 1 2011 was just the tip of the iceberg. As I had predicted, it is the radioactive water that is the main cause for concern.
Einstein was wrong. DICE does play God with the Slashdot-verse.
Algorithmic information theory (AIT) explains very clearly and simply why we are still writing text-based code. AIT is based on the idea of measuring the amount of information in a series of bits (or bytes or however you want to chunk it) based on the size of the smallest possible program that can create the series.
There are simply not enough bits of information in a GUI based coding system to create the algorithms we want/need to create. Even though almost all programming languages have a lot of redundancy built-in in order to make them easier to understand, programs written in these languages still have a much greater amount of information than what is available by simple point-and-click which is equivalent to a series of multiple choice questions. For example 80 multiple choice questions with 100 options in each question only give you the information contained in a line of 80 ASCII characters.
Shouldn't there be a simpler, more robust way to translate an algorithm into something a computer can understand? One that's language agnostic and without all the cryptic jargon?
I believe people have tried to make universal programming languages. I don't think any of them caught on in the sense of replacing coding in real programming languages. And for very good reasons. One problem is the conflict between simpler and more robust. Shorter programs require higher information density and hence less redundancy and robustness. If you want to make a language simpler by reducing the number of keywords and special symbols then you will force programs to be longer or harder to understand or both. In the limit of the shortest program possible, the program itself appears to be a random series of bits, every one of which is significant. If there is any pattern or bias in the bits then it is not the shortest possible program.
OTOH, some higher level-languages such as R or MatLab (Octave) do make it easier to express many algorithms. This is mostly because they have vector and matrix data types. Their forerunner in many ways was APL which has a fairly high information density partly because it uses a wider range of characters than are available in ASCII. Perhaps you should learn R or Matlab or maybe even Mathematica. These languages give you a high-level means of expressing algorithms in a way that computers can understand.
The summary reminds me of the lollipop Perlisim:
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
Interesting how 90& of all FB-haters are ACs ...
That is probably associated with the fact that 25% of them are forced to use it:
Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us to test drive this new design.
Given how obviously horrible the beta design is, this sentiment on the best way to test drive it is quite galling. OTOH, I am thankful they are not responsible for design airplanes or automobiles:
Yes, for the first test-flight we have filled 25% of the new plane with unsuspecting passengers but this is the best way for us to test drive our new design.
It has occured to me that maybe they trying to alienate the slashdot community
When a nation has conflicting laws it tends to cover illegal activities as any court can choose to take the view that supports the government.
Welcome to the new USA-beta!
We've had only a few major redesigns since 1776; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta government that will control our country's future.
Excellent comment. OTOH, my cynical side is suspicious of how tone-deaf the site owners seem to be. It makes me wonder if the following item was on an NSA todo list somewhere:
Destroy Slashdot. After those damned Snowden leaks the Slashdot community seems to be united against us. As long as they were divided and bickering, they were not a threat.
AC opined:
They don't delete externally collected data. They obviously delete or age-off internal records.
Prime Minister John Key, who is in charge of GCSB said:
This is a spy agency. We don't delete things. We archive them.
Key's office confirmed that Key was talking about the video that his lawyers had claimed was deleted.
AC opined:
Isn't claiming that Dotcom was illegally spied upon putting the cart before the horse here? Where is the evidence? Regardless of whether it was deleted or not, by making the statement one is assuming the conclusion and puts their own credibility at risk.
Here are some links from the fine article showing that the government and the police have already admitted malfeasance:
Police Admit That NZ Spy Agency Illegally Spied On Kim Dotcom
NZ Prime Minister Admits That The Government Illegally Wiretapped Megaupload Employees
Oddly enough you are correct that these admissions of malfeasance do put the credibility of the police and the Prime Minister at risk although that is probably not what you meant.
And in conclusion: FUCK BETA!
The fine article claims:
Most physicists fully expect a useful quantum computer to eventually emerge, [...]
I am a physicist and I don't think a useful quantum computer will ever emerge. The problem is very simple. In order for a quantum system to calculate exponentially faster than a classical system, it must contain exponentially more useful information which makes it exponentially more sensitive to noise. An early computer researcher (perhaps Jon von Neumann) used a similar argument to conclude that digital computers would eventually supersede analog computers because the precision of analog computers is limited by the noise floor which is very hard to beat back while you can make digital systems arbitrarily more precise by simply adding more circuits (or more time).
In simple terms, for every extra decimal digit you want to add to the size of a number you can factor with a quantum computer you need to reduce the effect of noise by roughly a factor of 10. I don't think this is greatly different from the limitation of classical computers where for every decimal digit you want to add to the size of numbers you want to factor you must multiply the time/size of computation by roughly a factor of 10.
Despite this reservation, I think we should continue funding research in quantum computing.
so you never wear a safety harness, because your freedom is more important than your safety?
Saying freedom is more important than safety does not imply that safety is unimportant just like Saying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is taller than Shaquille O'Neal does imply Shaq is not tall.
The point to note here is that at equlibrium (which must occur), flux in = flux out. That means that under no circumtances will the temperature ever exceed the input.
Again, you are confusing heat and temperature. The input is energy (heat), the input is not temperature. No one who has grasped basic thermodynamics would take your argument seriously after that fundamental mistake. You seem to be just stringing together scientific jargon in a nonsensical way to reach a conclusion you like.
In a different post you claim that convection plays a significant role in the heat loss of the Earth. The upper atmosphere is close to being a vacuum. At a high enough altitude the amount of heat transfer due to conduction and convection is negligible. Do yourself a favor and Google(thermosphere).
You claimed the fine Nature article was wrong because it was based on radiative forcing yet you have never defined what you mean by that term. Your definition seems to be at odds with the definition given by the Wikipedia. The term was never used in the article nor was it used in the two references you gave to back up your claim that radiative forcing had been debunked.
Again, I ask, in the Earth-Sun system what is the "input" temperature if it is not the temperature of the surface of the Sun?
And BTW I do have a Ph.D. in physics. A Nobel Laureate was the chairman of my thesis defense and I've study thermodynamics with some of the leading experts in the world.
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And [At?] equilibrium, the "limiting temperature", assuming a black body, is the temperature that corresponds to radiating the same amount of energy as the input. Anything else is nonsensical.
0) Requiring your arguments to be in accord with basic physics is not nit picking.
1) The Earth is not in thermal equilibrium with the Sun. If it were then it would be at the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. The only reason life can exist on Earth is because of the gradient caused by the Earth not being in thermal equilibrium with the Sun.
2) A black body is not the same thing as a perfect insulator. They are opposites in a way. A perfect insulator would block all radiative cooling (or else it would not be a very good insulator). My point is that the limiting temperature is a function of the insulating properties of the Earth. It is not an intrinsic property of the strength of solar heating.
If you treat the Earth as a black body you are explicitly ignoring all insulation effects. IOW you are ignoring all greenhouse effects. In simple layman's terms, how hot something gets when it is left out in the sun depends greatly on how well it is insulated. Even the temperature inside a conventional greenhouse is highly dependent on how well it is insulated.
3) When you say a black body in equilibrium radiates the same amount of energy it absorbs, you seem to be repeating the definition of radiative forcing, not debunking it.
If you believe there is a limiting temperature to the strength of solar heating that is much less than the temperature of the surface of the Sun, please tell us what that temperature limit is.
Neither of the fine articles linked to in the summary nor either or your two references even mention radiative forcing. If you have sources that don't conflict with basic physics which debunk whatever it is you mean by radiative forcing I would like to see them. Perhaps part of the problem is that your definition of radiative forcing differs from the definition given by the Wikipedia. So far you have given nothing more than your opinion that the authors of the Nature article made a serious (and probably job-threatening) mistake.