Did you really study computer science? Did you learn about things like the loop-invariant theorem? Did you ever even study the theory of algorithms or finite-state machines? I you did you know that you actually can prove algorithm correctness as well as you can prove anything in mathematics. Bring up Godel if you like but you're bordering crackpot if you actually think that finite mathematics is inconsistent.
Also, have you ever worked on truly critical software projects? Think about things like air traffic control or heart monitors. Consider writing code for the military where you must comment every line of code and it's all reviewed by multiple people.
Computer software is written for deterministic, finite-state machines. It's entirely possible to write software that does not have bugs. It's just very difficult and not often worth the effort.
Antimatter doesn't have negative mass. We've observed antiparticles for quite a while and they don't behave this way. There will indeed be some new particles with some anti-gravity like properties, but it's not simple antimatter.
If you're interested in understanding this stuff, I highly recommend QED by Richard Feynman. It's cheap, a quick read, and accessible to anyone who's interested and has a high school education. It's accurate enough to be used in graduate-level physics courses, but is completely qualitative. I.e., there are no numbers or formulas but only conceptual calculations.
It's too bad you're AC, because you'd benefit from reading this. A good way to sound like a damn fool is to take someone to task for a popular idiom without really understanding it.
If you take a simplistic logical reading, there's a flaw in the original post--agreed. However, it's pretty idiomatic, and language is not always logical.
However, try this page (near the bottom) for a good explanation of why it's perfectly logical, correct and even clever. The phrase is sarcastic!
I know the cases pretty well too. I agree that in the case of radio waves, the interstate commerce argument is pretty sound. You were mentioning things like the purchase of paper plates affecting your business, etc. You sounded pretty educated so I thought you might be interested in some of what was happening.
Maybe I wasn't clear, but I wasn't really disagreeing with your main thrust in regard to this particular case. There might be an interesting argument that low-power, non-profit radio stations aren't really commercial and could be allocated by the states similar to what the FCC recommended.
I mentioned the Lessig article is because he brings up the sort of issue I raise above. His main argument is that our legal system and culture has given up (or moved beyond) the kind of strict divisions that make commercial a rigorous concept. Are local, non-profit radio stations that don't make interference part of commerce? Lessig argues that drawing those distinctions is unsafe and that the Lopez decisions will ultimately fall apart because of the difficulty in maintaining the distinction. This will, he argues, bring us back to a place where interstate commerce means anything the Congress wants.
The really interesting thing about Morrison is that Congress spent years doing studies and documenting substantial effects that violence against women had on commerce. They found all sorts of links to fear, reduced education, lost work time, etc. The Supreme Court acknowledged and agreed that such violence did in fact substantially hurt interstate commerce, but proclaimed that commerce needed to be the main point of the law.
I have studied the Commerce Clause, those cases and their scholarship pretty extensively. I'm not a laywer--or an attorney;-)--but I know about as much as anyone who's not. I think the Commerce Clause, and federalism in general, is fascinating and love educating and discussing it with anyone who seems interested.
Anyway, if you're interested in this stuff you should spend an hour or two reading those cases. The opinions--and that Lessig article--are pretty much a crash course on the Commerce Clause, which is one of the most important parts of our country's legal system. All are accessible to anyone with a good net connection (to Findlaw) and a good vocabulary (or dictionary).
I assume your wife knows about this, so you should ask her. You probably shouldn't call her a lawyer until she passes the test though....
The Court in recent years has clamped down on the Commerce Clause a bit. They've thrown out a few criminal laws that based their jurisdiction on nebulous commercial effects like those you mention. The Court has shown a new interest in these cases in protecting traditional state powers by requiring more direct connections commerce.
The idea is that modern commerce is virtually all of interstate nature due to technology, trade and other advances since the Constitution was written. These new cases are pushing back on the requirement that something is actually commercial. For example, national regulation of crime and illegal drugs in our country has been based on their indirect effects on the economy. It's not clear exactly how commercial something will have to be, but it is clear that the Court is starting to take the words Interstate Commerce as an actual restriction again.
Two cases to look up are Lopez and Morrison if you want to understand the modern contours of the Commerce Clause. You can find both at Findlaw.
There's also an excellent article by Lawrence Lessig called Translating Federalism that discusses the impact of these cases. You'll have to go to your nearest law library to fin dit.
I was completely amazed that someone modded me troll until I saw your comment!;-) I have no complaints about honest dialog though. It may be too late for many others to read this, but at least you seem interested.
You are right about the role of the weak force. The process you are thinking of is beta decay. In this process a neutron is converted into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino.
Beta decay is detected by looking for beta particles, also known as electrons. This is another interesting process, but the article mentions that they looked for and found alpha particles.
I hope this makes things clearer. Incidentally, we've talked about two of the three kinds of radiation here:
Alpha Radiation consists of alpha particles, which are helium nuclei (no electrons). These particles are not particularly stable since they are heavy and have high charge. They travel no more than an inch or so in air and are stopped by skin. Alpha sources are not dangerous unless eaten or inhaled. In fact some smoke detectors measure the rate of emission from radioactive americium because alpha particles are stopped by smoke.
Beta Radiation consists of beta particles, which are electrons. Beta radiation penetrates your body easily and is quite dangerous. The primary danger is the possibility of genetic damage from beta particles tearing through your body.
Gamma Radiation consists of gamma particles, which are photons. These are the particles of light. X-rays, microwaves, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, radio and TV waves, etc. are all systems of photons of varying energies. Gamma radiation is highly dangerous, comparable to beta radiation; X-rays are dangerous in high doses but much safer than gamma rays. Lower frequencies like those of cell phones and microwaves may pose some health risk though studies have at least shown it is not dramatic. Photons are emitted by moving charged particles with energy to spare. Thus, gamma radiation often accompanies other nuclear radiation as an aftereffect of another decay mechanism.
Disclaimer: my degree in physics qualifies me to paint a general picture here. Technical nitpicks are always welcome.
In the article, it mentions that people actually have predicted this decay using theory. The nucleus is not completely understood, but the theory of basic decay phenomena is pretty complete.
Any time you talk about the quanta of physics, you need to use quantum mechanics. The quanta are of course the so-called fundamental particles, including the proton, neutron and electron.
The nucleus is held together by the strong force. This force must be very strong to keep the protons, whose like charge repels one another, very close together. The strong force only pulls over very short distances: if some nucleons get far enough, their electromagnetic repulsion will continue to push each other apart and they will be separated permanently.
However, the particles in the nucleus don't have enough energy to get over the hump, so nuclei are stable. This is where quantum mechanics applies. Even if the hump is very tall, the nonlocality of quantum mechanics means that some particles can escape if the hump isn't very wide. Because they have a probabilistic spread in space, some of them can creep to the other side. When they get lucky like this, a nuclear decay occurs. The details of the nucleus determine how high the barrier and how wide the hump, both of which affect the probability of tunneling.
In stable nuclei, particles are prohibited from escaping. In this case, it's not that the hump is too high, but that it's asymmetrical. If the nuclear force is strong enough compared to the energy of the nucleons, it can dig a deep well for the particles. In this case, having some possibility of getting past the hump doesn't really help: the area on the other side of the hump is prohibited regardless.
One way to think of this process is to say that quantum mechanics would allow you to borrow the energy you need to jump over a fence as long as you fell back down on the other side, no matter how tall the fence.
But you can't keep the borrowed energy, so you could never jump to the top of a roof, even if it were no taller than the wall you just jumped over.
Things like floods, snow storms and hurricanes are highly unlikely to be altered. In the places where they happen, they are elements of the climate, not the weather.
The difference is an important one, and lost on most people. Weather varies from hour to hour, and is fundamentally impossible to predict precisely . Climate is large-scale observations, like how hot the summer will be (in general) and how cold the winter. Predictions of climate are much simpler, and not limited by chaotic interrelations.
Seeding the clouds is not new. The ski mountain where I grew up has been doing it for years to get early snow. It's easy to make a little rain or move it a little upwind; it's probably near impossible to make controllable climatic changes.
We have already made significant climatic changes by emitting greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. Because climate is such a large-scale phenomenon, those are the sorts of changes that will change it. Changing the climate is a very bad thing, and our changes already threaten to make life on earth considerably less pleasant if we're not careful.
People who don't understand this distinction often wonder how we could predict global warming when we can't predict the weather. The average temperature during a month is a basically a thermodynamic function of incoming solar radiation, thermal reradiation and heat shielding. The chaotic local effects mostly cancel out on larger scales.
I wrote my comment in Word on my Mac, pasted it in as plain text and added my HTML formatting. There are apparently some character set issues! Unfortunately they didn't show up in the preview.
The article is a little thin on actual textual references, so I spent a few minutes actually reading the treaty. Iâ(TM)m not a lawyer, but Iâ(TM)m fairly well educated in legal theory.
I would first point out that a treaty with Singapore does not greatly restrict the United States. Should the Congress change its mind, this treaty would not create a substantial barrier to reform legislation. Its purpose is to prevent the manufacture and design of circumvention technologies in Singapore to protect U.S. copyright holders. It seems unlikely that Singapore worries much about Americans pirating their movies and music.
There are indeed comprehensive rules in the treaty very similar to that of the DMCA. It requires the prohibition of circumvention devices, defined as
marketed for circumvention
donâ(TM)t do much else
are primarily designed for circumvention
It has exceptions for legal reverse engineering to achieve interoperation, academic security research, filtering content to protect minors and private investigations to determine security problems. It also seems to exclude public entities, nonprofits and libraries who might access data for archival purposes.
Thereâ(TM)s also an amusing section on patents which suggests that non-obvious is synonymous with inventive step; useful is synonymous with capable of industrial application.
It also prohibits the retransmission of TV and broadcast streams (on the Internet).
There's a reason why the people in the corporations feel that way about AMD processors. I was involved in desktop systems and internal servers purchasing at a previous job.
Our level of hardware stability complaint was more than double on AMD-powered systems. It is likely just as much the fault of the motherboard manufacturers as AMD directly, but this--along with the fact that P3 processors didn't require headache-inducing fans--led us to stop buying AMD altogether. The disparity in failure rates was even higher in hot rooms that had too many servers in too small a space. The boxes were all within specified operating temperature range, though they were indeed a bit hot.
Indeed the P4 runs hot just like the AMD chips do. However, the overheat protection still gives Intel an advantage. If a fan fails or some vents are blocked, it's a big advantage to know that your processor will still operate and will still be stable later.
I agree that most AMD processors are fine, at least if paired with a really good motherboard. However, the conventional wisdom about AMD stability problems has proven itself repeatedly to me and many other systems administrators.
Systems administrators at corporate level would understand that one stability problem costs more than the Intel premium on at least a dozen chips.
I'm sure that some disagree with me. I was personally skeptical of spending extra money on Intel for a while--which is why I could compare installations. Experience and my personal data convinced me that Intel was worth the premium--which is nowhere near 100%.
Actually, Oregon is no exception in their budget problems. The states are having some of the worst budget problems in history. Though you can fairly say that California's the biggest state, their budget deficit is much bigger than Oregon's.
This is pretty easy to deal with. Ntp can achieve sub-millisecond accuracy over a standard DSL line. Read up on some of the documentation for ntp to find out more about how this can be done.
There's a big difference between climate and weather. One is a boundary-value problem; the other is an initial-value problem. For those without the terminology, climate refers to average weather over time.
For example, I can look at the weather for the last few years for wherever you live and tell you very reliably within a few degrees what the average temperatures will be in December and June next year. These are driven mostly by the easily calculable changes in energy flux from the sun.
You might be tempted to dismiss such basic observations, but anyone who is concerned about possible global warming scenarios--and I'd argue everyone should be--should be curious to know what can be predicted about climate
You should really take a look at the case I mentioned.
A farmer was growing corn on his own private land, picking it and feeding it to his pigs on the same farm, all in one state, without transfering anything anywhere. Because of the perceived importance of the New Deal economic stimulus programs, it was ruled that he was participating in interstate commerce by virtue of the existence of a national market. Whether his specific transaction crossed state lines didn't matter: it was economic activity that, when aggregated, affects the whole nation.
There are other cases along these lines, but this one spells the doctrine that continues to dominate. You may not like it, but the Constitution is much more complex than it's most literal meaning.
Perhaps a couple of links would be useful? I'm not sure that there's any F or U involved at all, but I'd be interested in hearing how this is a bunch of D (if it is, and you're not the one spreading FUD;-).
Before people get too confused and start to complain (quite reasonably) about the RIAA, MPAA, etc: this chip is not designed to facilitate DRM. In their "why TCPA" article, they explain why it's not even particularly well suited for such systems.
Rather, it's primarily about protecting a user's private keys and facilitating (through hardware acceleration) a serious increase in the use of encryption to promote security and privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, have you ever worked on truly critical software projects? Think about things like air traffic control or heart monitors. Consider writing code for the military where you must comment every line of code and it's all reviewed by multiple people.
Computer software is written for deterministic, finite-state machines. It's entirely possible to write software that does not have bugs. It's just very difficult and not often worth the effort.
If you're interested in understanding this stuff, I highly recommend QED by Richard Feynman. It's cheap, a quick read, and accessible to anyone who's interested and has a high school education. It's accurate enough to be used in graduate-level physics courses, but is completely qualitative. I.e., there are no numbers or formulas but only conceptual calculations.
If you take a simplistic logical reading, there's a flaw in the original post--agreed. However, it's pretty idiomatic, and language is not always logical.
However, try this page (near the bottom) for a good explanation of why it's perfectly logical, correct and even clever. The phrase is sarcastic!
Maybe I wasn't clear, but I wasn't really disagreeing with your main thrust in regard to this particular case. There might be an interesting argument that low-power, non-profit radio stations aren't really commercial and could be allocated by the states similar to what the FCC recommended. I mentioned the Lessig article is because he brings up the sort of issue I raise above. His main argument is that our legal system and culture has given up (or moved beyond) the kind of strict divisions that make commercial a rigorous concept. Are local, non-profit radio stations that don't make interference part of commerce? Lessig argues that drawing those distinctions is unsafe and that the Lopez decisions will ultimately fall apart because of the difficulty in maintaining the distinction. This will, he argues, bring us back to a place where interstate commerce means anything the Congress wants.
The really interesting thing about Morrison is that Congress spent years doing studies and documenting substantial effects that violence against women had on commerce. They found all sorts of links to fear, reduced education, lost work time, etc. The Supreme Court acknowledged and agreed that such violence did in fact substantially hurt interstate commerce, but proclaimed that commerce needed to be the main point of the law.
I have studied the Commerce Clause, those cases and their scholarship pretty extensively. I'm not a laywer--or an attorney ;-)--but I know about as much as anyone who's not. I think the Commerce Clause, and federalism in general, is fascinating and love educating and discussing it with anyone who seems interested.
Anyway, if you're interested in this stuff you should spend an hour or two reading those cases. The opinions--and that Lessig article--are pretty much a crash course on the Commerce Clause, which is one of the most important parts of our country's legal system. All are accessible to anyone with a good net connection (to Findlaw) and a good vocabulary (or dictionary).I didn't realize the distinction in terminology (attorney vs. lawyer). Anyway, good luck to your wife on the exam!
The Court in recent years has clamped down on the Commerce Clause a bit. They've thrown out a few criminal laws that based their jurisdiction on nebulous commercial effects like those you mention. The Court has shown a new interest in these cases in protecting traditional state powers by requiring more direct connections commerce.
The idea is that modern commerce is virtually all of interstate nature due to technology, trade and other advances since the Constitution was written. These new cases are pushing back on the requirement that something is actually commercial. For example, national regulation of crime and illegal drugs in our country has been based on their indirect effects on the economy. It's not clear exactly how commercial something will have to be, but it is clear that the Court is starting to take the words Interstate Commerce as an actual restriction again.
Two cases to look up are Lopez and Morrison if you want to understand the modern contours of the Commerce Clause. You can find both at Findlaw.
There's also an excellent article by Lawrence Lessig called Translating Federalism that discusses the impact of these cases. You'll have to go to your nearest law library to fin dit.
You are right about the role of the weak force. The process you are thinking of is beta decay. In this process a neutron is converted into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino.
Beta decay is detected by looking for beta particles, also known as electrons. This is another interesting process, but the article mentions that they looked for and found alpha particles.
I hope this makes things clearer. Incidentally, we've talked about two of the three kinds of radiation here:
In the article, it mentions that people actually have predicted this decay using theory. The nucleus is not completely understood, but the theory of basic decay phenomena is pretty complete.
Any time you talk about the quanta of physics, you need to use quantum mechanics. The quanta are of course the so-called fundamental particles, including the proton, neutron and electron.
The nucleus is held together by the strong force. This force must be very strong to keep the protons, whose like charge repels one another, very close together. The strong force only pulls over very short distances: if some nucleons get far enough, their electromagnetic repulsion will continue to push each other apart and they will be separated permanently.
However, the particles in the nucleus don't have enough energy to get over the hump, so nuclei are stable. This is where quantum mechanics applies. Even if the hump is very tall, the nonlocality of quantum mechanics means that some particles can escape if the hump isn't very wide. Because they have a probabilistic spread in space, some of them can creep to the other side. When they get lucky like this, a nuclear decay occurs. The details of the nucleus determine how high the barrier and how wide the hump, both of which affect the probability of tunneling.
In stable nuclei, particles are prohibited from escaping. In this case, it's not that the hump is too high, but that it's asymmetrical. If the nuclear force is strong enough compared to the energy of the nucleons, it can dig a deep well for the particles. In this case, having some possibility of getting past the hump doesn't really help: the area on the other side of the hump is prohibited regardless.
One way to think of this process is to say that quantum mechanics would allow you to borrow the energy you need to jump over a fence as long as you fell back down on the other side, no matter how tall the fence.
But you can't keep the borrowed energy, so you could never jump to the top of a roof, even if it were no taller than the wall you just jumped over.
The difference is an important one, and lost on most people. Weather varies from hour to hour, and is fundamentally impossible to predict precisely . Climate is large-scale observations, like how hot the summer will be (in general) and how cold the winter. Predictions of climate are much simpler, and not limited by chaotic interrelations.
Seeding the clouds is not new. The ski mountain where I grew up has been doing it for years to get early snow. It's easy to make a little rain or move it a little upwind; it's probably near impossible to make controllable climatic changes.
We have already made significant climatic changes by emitting greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. Because climate is such a large-scale phenomenon, those are the sorts of changes that will change it. Changing the climate is a very bad thing, and our changes already threaten to make life on earth considerably less pleasant if we're not careful.
People who don't understand this distinction often wonder how we could predict global warming when we can't predict the weather. The average temperature during a month is a basically a thermodynamic function of incoming solar radiation, thermal reradiation and heat shielding. The chaotic local effects mostly cancel out on larger scales.
I wrote my comment in Word on my Mac, pasted it in as plain text and added my HTML formatting. There are apparently some character set issues! Unfortunately they didn't show up in the preview.
:-(
Sorry.
The article is a little thin on actual textual references, so I spent a few minutes actually reading the treaty. Iâ(TM)m not a lawyer, but Iâ(TM)m fairly well educated in legal theory.
I would first point out that a treaty with Singapore does not greatly restrict the United States. Should the Congress change its mind, this treaty would not create a substantial barrier to reform legislation. Its purpose is to prevent the manufacture and design of circumvention technologies in Singapore to protect U.S. copyright holders. It seems unlikely that Singapore worries much about Americans pirating their movies and music.
The section of the treaty mentioned is the copyrights section.
There are indeed comprehensive rules in the treaty very similar to that of the DMCA. It requires the prohibition of circumvention devices, defined as
- marketed for circumvention
- donâ(TM)t do much else
- are primarily designed for circumvention
It has exceptions for legal reverse engineering to achieve interoperation, academic security research, filtering content to protect minors and private investigations to determine security problems. It also seems to exclude public entities, nonprofits and libraries who might access data for archival purposes.Thereâ(TM)s also an amusing section on patents which suggests that non-obvious is synonymous with inventive step; useful is synonymous with capable of industrial application.
It also prohibits the retransmission of TV and broadcast streams (on the Internet).
There's a reason why the people in the corporations feel that way about AMD processors. I was involved in desktop systems and internal servers purchasing at a previous job.
Our level of hardware stability complaint was more than double on AMD-powered systems. It is likely just as much the fault of the motherboard manufacturers as AMD directly, but this--along with the fact that P3 processors didn't require headache-inducing fans--led us to stop buying AMD altogether. The disparity in failure rates was even higher in hot rooms that had too many servers in too small a space. The boxes were all within specified operating temperature range, though they were indeed a bit hot.
Indeed the P4 runs hot just like the AMD chips do. However, the overheat protection still gives Intel an advantage. If a fan fails or some vents are blocked, it's a big advantage to know that your processor will still operate and will still be stable later.
I agree that most AMD processors are fine, at least if paired with a really good motherboard. However, the conventional wisdom about AMD stability problems has proven itself repeatedly to me and many other systems administrators.
Systems administrators at corporate level would understand that one stability problem costs more than the Intel premium on at least a dozen chips.
I'm sure that some disagree with me. I was personally skeptical of spending extra money on Intel for a while--which is why I could compare installations. Experience and my personal data convinced me that Intel was worth the premium--which is nowhere near 100%.
Actually, Oregon is no exception in their budget problems. The states are having some of the worst budget problems in history. Though you can fairly say that California's the biggest state, their budget deficit is much bigger than Oregon's.
This is pretty easy to deal with. Ntp can achieve sub-millisecond accuracy over a standard DSL line. Read up on some of the documentation for ntp to find out more about how this can be done.
Maybe it would be good to post a link to the actual article, instead of just a rebuttal by the person who was attacked!
There's a big difference between climate and weather. One is a boundary-value problem; the other is an initial-value problem. For those without the terminology, climate refers to average weather over time.
For example, I can look at the weather for the last few years for wherever you live and tell you very reliably within a few degrees what the average temperatures will be in December and June next year. These are driven mostly by the easily calculable changes in energy flux from the sun.
You might be tempted to dismiss such basic observations, but anyone who is concerned about possible global warming scenarios--and I'd argue everyone should be--should be curious to know what can be predicted about climate
.You should really take a look at the case I mentioned.
A farmer was growing corn on his own private land, picking it and feeding it to his pigs on the same farm, all in one state, without transfering anything anywhere. Because of the perceived importance of the New Deal economic stimulus programs, it was ruled that he was participating in interstate commerce by virtue of the existence of a national market. Whether his specific transaction crossed state lines didn't matter: it was economic activity that, when aggregated, affects the whole nation.
There are other cases along these lines, but this one spells the doctrine that continues to dominate. You may not like it, but the Constitution is much more complex than it's most literal meaning.
Interstate commerce is not within the domain of the states and includes lots of things that are naively intrastate.
See Wickard v Filburn for a good summary.
Perhaps a couple of links would be useful? I'm not sure that there's any F or U involved at all, but I'd be interested in hearing how this is a bunch of D (if it is, and you're not the one spreading FUD ;-).
Before people get too confused and start to complain (quite reasonably) about the RIAA, MPAA, etc: this chip is not designed to facilitate DRM. In their "why TCPA" article, they explain why it's not even particularly well suited for such systems.
Rather, it's primarily about protecting a user's private keys and facilitating (through hardware acceleration) a serious increase in the use of encryption to promote security and privacy.