Nowhere on earth is so hot that servers won't run, unless you've built a server room over an active volcano or something.
Given a sufficiently powerful fan, then yes.
All we actually need to do is remove the heat from the servers to the air, and then keep swapping the air with the outside.
Which becomes more difficult the higher the ambient air temperature becomes. Heat transfer is proportional to heat delta, so the closer the air temperature is to the heat sink temperature, the more air you need to blow to remove the same amount of heat. Eventually, the amount of electricity you are spending blowing air over the heat sinks is greater than the savings of using less AC.
This was half the point of the article -- you can save a lot of money by raising server room temperatures, but eventually (at a temperature well below outdoor ambient around here) you actually start to lose money due to all the extra fan activity.
Which happens automatically if you let heat out the top and air in the bottom.
Yes but much too slowly to be of use. Convection is also proportional to temperature difference. By the time your server room temperature is enough higher than outside temperature to create significant airflow, your servers are toast.
As for the first, I've always wondered why they don't use chimney-like devices to generate wind naturally and send it though server racks, instead of fans.
Go ahead and try it. A lot of cases already have ducting that funnels air directly from outside the case to the CPU. A few more pieces of cardboard, a hole and chimney in the top of your case, and you should be ready to remove the fan and see what convection can do for you. Sneak preview: unless you've specifically picked components that can run off passive cooling, you'll be in the market for a new one. Especially if you live in a hot place and turn off your AC for this experiment.
While its conceivable to have an effective server room based entirely off of low-power chips that require no active cooling, space is still a major concern in the server room. The desire for greater compute density is directly fighting against using a large number of low-power chips spread out. Thus performance/watt becomes a major metric for the server room, because they want the most performance for a fixed amount of space and thus cooling.
why not have AC vent into server racks?
That's actually a good idea, and a lot of places do it.
Indeed. The only thing that makes sense as a consequence of the Higgs being hypothetically unobservable is that we get the LHC up and running at full power, it works just fine, but fails to find the Higgs. And that failure will almost certainly be a direct consequence of the physics of the particle, not some retro-active undoing of completely conventional actions that could have hypothetically observed it. No, if observation is impossible it's impossible and the universe doesn't have to "prevent" it.
It's like the speed of light. If you could travel faster than light, you could travel through time and create causal paradoxes. So therefore any attempt to travel faster than light would succeed but will be mysteriously sabotaged, preventing it from happening? No, not exactly. More like accelerating a mass to c takes infinite energy and is therefore impossible, and therefore the attempt will not succeed even if your rocket works perfectly.
So if observing Higgs = time travel (I'm not sure how simply observing something that should theoretically be present all around leads to causality paradoxes), then the LHC will be unable to observe the Higgs, and that's it. Breakage is due to engineers that were more excited than careful.
So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the Higgs Boson is causing Cubs fans to continue to go to games and buy merchandise, preventing them from winning and thus the LHC from ever working?
Our best technology showpieces are still 1930s theory with 2000s engineering.
Something is wrong with this picture.
The only thing obviously 'wrong' with it to me is that our engineering is still lagging our theory by (very) roughly the same amount it always has, so predictions of the future based on ever-increasing rates of advancement (e.g. The Singularity) aren't being borne out by the real trends.
Which doesn't particularly surprise me. After all, while our engineering has become better and better, our unresolved theories are covering scenarios either more energetic, more minute, or both, and are consequently more difficult and expensive to even set up for experimental purposes, much less turn into practical applications. When the theory was about what we would today consider very mundane situations -- gas compression, heat transfer -- it doesn't take anything particularly remarkable to put that theory into practice (though in practice, it did). It only seems like such an explosion because science was so new and there was so much to discover about what was simply laying about. Now, to learn more, you need more than a set of decent glassware and access to some chemicals.
Yet even still, we're making significant progress on making quantum encryption and quantum computers an every-day reality. GR is used in GPS systems. Will the discoveries of the LHC have an impact on technology seventy years from now? That depends on what they are. Maybe. I don't know. But I'm not that depressed that it seems like we've pushed the edges of our uncertainty to more remote reaches of the universe.
I didn't see one scrap of "ID drone" in the OP. I saw someone who showed a surprising amount of open-mindedness and insight for someone carrying around a 30 year old misconception about seemingly unused section of DNA. The "scare quotes" were to imply that what we call "junk" wasn't "junk." Which of course is true even if he didn't know it. It's a tremendous and unjustified leap to go from that to assuming he's say "HAHA GOD DID IT EAT THAT SCIENCE." Do you assume that someone is anti-science any time they speculate about science?
And then you appeared to reinforce that 30-year-old misconception. And still seem to. It's not all vestigial. Much of what was once thought to be vestigial actually serves important purposes in the expression of other genes. Lots of things can be deleted, even actively expressed genes, without noticeable effect. It doesn't mean they aren't having one. Simpler structures absolutely could be possible, but nature does not always opt for "simplest".
You'd think, but the fools are assuming the extra minute of round-trip communication time isn't a problem because it doesn't seriously affect their reaction times. But they fail to understand that in the Martian language, time is a critical component of meaning! And extra minute of latency could make the difference between saying "We accept your offer of peaceful relations. We will begin transmitting cultural information immediately," and "We accept your offer of peaceful relations... Psych! We will begin bombarding you with Vanilla Ice CDs immediately, losers!"
I don't think you can link the vast majority of web apps with a campaign to undermine free software.
No, not at all. But there are people who break the spirit of free software by taking an application someone else wrote and released under the GPL and using that as the foundation of their own service, making some custom improvements, and then not releasing those improvements and hiding behind their technical lack of innovation to avoid having to do so. That's nothing like a "campaign", but it's still annoying for a lot of people who write free software.
It's true that there are a lot of webapps trying to steal content from the users who contribute it, by not providing access to a raw data download.
Yeah, that's the new version of format lock in. We don't have to obfuscate our data format to keep you using our app, we just have to deny you access to the data itself! awesome.
I once wrote a paper that claimed America only pushed for 'unconditional' because they had the bomb.
My paper...uh...bombed.
*winces* Did you make that pun? That might have been why. Heh.
The impression I got from reading was that Truman was heavily against conditional surrender, and felt it would be a betrayal of America and everyone else who had suffered from Japanese aggression to let them get away with surrendering on their own terms. It certainly didn't help that the didn't know what those terms were, and it's not like they could just email Hirohito and ask for clarification.
I'm not sure what would have happened had we not had the bomb. Would getting Japan's complete capitulation be more important than preventing the Russians from having another leg up in the post-war era? I have no idea. But the actual land invasion, while important to make seem like a real threat, was a very improbable outcome in any case.
What I find funny is all the people insisting divB=0 is "just" a reflection of the experimental inability to find a magnetic monopole.
The point of saying that is to make it clear that Maxwell's Theory is not incompatible with magnetic monopoles. It was formulated assuming they don't, properly so because experiments had failed to detect them, but can trivially (and usefully) be extended to include them, were any evidence to be shown.
That's not to say I think they definitely exist, or that we should re-write the equation right now. It's just... Maxwell's Theory doesn't preclude monopoles' existence. Discovering them would not disrupt electromagnetic theory all that much. We've been prepared for their discovery for 100 years. There is no "crying" involved. It's not like claiming to have invented Perpetual Motion.
All of those equations are "just" reflections of the experiments they summarize.
No, not just. Mostly, but the theory goes beyond the experiments of the day. Most theories do. They make predictions that are not, at the time of formulation, borne out by experiment. It can take years for those predictions to be tested and see if the theory holds up, and if the theory is good, then it will. There are many successful theories of the past 100 years that have followed this pattern.
For example, the theory that predicted the existence of the W and Z bosons came decades before experimental verification of them.
I think any experimental result that contradicts the thousands that preceded it deserves a fair amount of skepticism.
Well it's not like they're the same experiment, conducted a thousand times! As our technology catches up to the theory, and we are able to test new scenarios, then one could reasonably expect to find different results. It took high-altitude planes and extremely precise atomic clocks to test Time Dilation. You wouldn't say that every experiment performed before on the ground with a stopwatch "contradicted" that result. Or that experiments in colliders less powerful than the one that detected the Z boson "contradicted" the electroweak theory.
Though you're absolutely right, any claim of the discovery of a true magnetic monopole should be viewed with skepticism, and a requirement for repeatability. Such was the case with the one alleged sighting of a monopole. Further experiments ruled out a monopole as the cause of their results. Yay, science.
On the other hand, if the LHC finds convincing evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson, then we'd better start considering that the only reason we haven't found monopoles is because we haven't been conducting the right experiments yet. Because the same theory that already successfully predicted the W and Z bosons, and predicts the Higgs, also predicts magnetic monopoles.
Gee, I could be mistaken, but I think he's saying all the non-violent offenders in our prisons should consider themselves lucky that we don't just execute them, since that's apparently the other option.
Or he could be saying that it's proper to compare the U.S. to oppressive theocratic regimes, rather than other Western democracies.
Or it's the "Hey, at least we're better than [insert the worst thing here]!" defense, which is a form of unintentionally damning with faint praise.
To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had been dropped from 1939 through 45. Those non-nukes also killed people, including innocent girls and boys that didn't deserve to die but were caught in the middle of the fight. War is hell, no matter if you use nukes or TNT.
It's not odd to single them out. After all, no weapon anything like them had ever been unleashed. Even previous weapons that had changed the face of warfare -- the longbow, cannons, machine guns, iron-clad ships, armored infantry Blitzkrieg, and so on -- had required substantial time, effort, and masses of forces to be effective. The firebombings killed more people, but they consisted of extensive and sustained bombing campaigns, often over the course of days or weeks, starting with flights of bombers dropping conventional explosives, followed by flights of bombers dropping incendiary explosives. Then more flights.
This was two cities destroyed by two planes dropping one bomb each. Unprecedented.
Also, among all the nasty ways to die in war, radiation poisoning was a new and quite nasty way to die. One that was underestimated by Truman et. al.
So it's not surprising why the atom bombs get singled out. Why those civilian deaths -- in what were by the standards of WWII standards military targets, cities with factories in them -- receive so much scrutiny, I don't know for sure, but yes it's odd.
Almost 70 million people died during WW2. Only 0.2% of them died by nuclear fission bomb.
Pretty impressive for two bombs!
But yeah, precious few spend the same effort bemoaning the morality of fire bombing, or carpet bombing for that matter, or any of the other massive slaughters that took place in WWII. It was a nasty, nasty war. Ending it with two decisive explosions is not the worst thing that could happen (though as I mention elsewhere, land invasion of Japan though the worst was about the least likely way for it to end).
The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.
No, they weren't. Truman was never seriously considering invasion when deliberating on how to end the war. Him, his cabinet and advisers, and all his generals were convinced that Japan would surrender without invasion. In particular, they were sure that once Russia declared war on Japan, they would soon surrender before any invasion could actually take place. Part of the decision to use the bomb was to fend off the eventuality that Japan would surrender to Russia and the U.S., which would have created a North/South Japan situation similar to Germany.
Plans are not the same as intent. The military creates plans for every contingency. Hell, today the DoD has plans for an invasion of Canada. Being asked to make plans and estimate casualties isn't the same as actually intending to go though with them. Truman never did. It was not "drop the bomb or invade". It was "drop the bomb, wait for Russia to get involved, or accept the conditional surrender the Japanese had already offered".
Which isn't to say he made the wrong choice -- it's easy to be horrified by the bomb in hindsight, but compared to what had already gone on, it wasn't much. It is to say that the choice was not as simple as just doing some basic moral arithmetic with potential body counts.
The actual situation and decision to be made was much more complex and difficult than the retconned false dichotomy. It does a disservice to the men who made that difficult choice, and to ourselves today trying to learn from history, to simplify it and make it easy.
That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war in Afghanistan look easy.
Um, that wasn't "The Japanese", that was the top Generals and some of their loyalists who were concerned about their own careers and their own necks and most certainly did not consider their Emperor to be a God.
The rest of the country, including most of what remained of the Army, put down their arms and surrendered when the Emperor told them to.
Besides, as I explain in another reply, there were a number of other options Truman was considering and invasion was never a serious contender.
I don't have a problem with tor existing. I've used it myself many times. I'm just not willing to support it with my network resources when child pornography makes up such a large portion of the traffic on the tor network.
Yeah I'm with you on that.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.
LOL, yeah, cus there are no binary files of any kind on usenet. Text only. Sorry, but 'text' is still encoded in binary, it's just another level of encoding to encode anything in binary in text.
Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.
Indeed.
The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
While that is the simplified history, it doesn't really represent the real choice that was being made.
I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.
While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.
The main options under discussion were:
1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.
2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.
3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.
4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.
Which is basically why the actual invasion was off the table. It was unnecessary in any event, and by the time it could have been implemented, Russia would have been involved and we would have been dealing with a joint surrender in any case.
By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.
My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.
Also, how does a 5 minute delay from a regular inactivity time out differ from this so much that this tech is all of the sudden dangerous. It seems to me like people can be monitored via IM just as easy right now as if this was being widely used, just with a tad bit more 'false present' status existing.
Because 5 minutes is the maximum amount of time I can be outside before I get scared of the big ball of fire in the sky and have to run back in. If the crooks think I'm home that whole time, I'll always be safe.
Read and type into your computer. The computer exploring its environment is new.
Webcams.
It's a technology that can just as easily be implemented in closed source..
Then don't use a closed source system if you're worried about The Man putting this technology onto your computer and monitoring the output without your knowledge. And if you are using such a system, how in fact do you know it isn't already there?
Complaining about this in the context of the application stated is kinda silly.
Funny then how the top google results for "lorenz gauge magnetic monopoles" are papers solving for the existence of magnetic monopoles in the lorenz gauge.
But I'm sure it comes down to a single integral, and that the Nobel-winning work of Dirac, Salam, Glasow and Weinberg could be obviated by such a simple observation. Too bad they missed it; we could have avoided wasting all this time building the LHC!
Mouse/keyboard activity timeout works nicely for that.
Er not really. You need to set it to long enough that it doesn't time out every time you read a page of text (unless you just like idly dragging the mouse around while reading... i don't). Yet you want it short enough that it provides power savings. The LCD screen is a big power hog in a laptop. Being able to turn it off instantly as soon as you walk away, and turn back on when you sit back down, would be the best of both worlds of power savings and convenience.
I rather don't have the computer know if I'm walking near it or not. But it seems we're heading in to this "everyone, and every machine, knows where you are" every day.
Yeah I'd be more worried about the fact that your computer knows every single thing you type, and every single thing you read. ZOMG!
But seriously. It knows whether you are in front of your laptop or not. Are you often running your laptop when you aren't around at all, such that the assumption that your laptop being on and connected to the network is generally accurate? Like it's a big danger that the laptop knows you aren't there anymore when you get up for a quick piss break. Not that it knows you went to the bathroom!
Besides, it's open source. If you're that worried that it's going to report your location to The Man, check the source code.
And hey, if you're really worried about realistic ways for The Man to find you, take the battery out of your cellphone. Seriously, that's a real way in which the phone company/police can locate you.
Slashdot Mirror
Nowhere on earth is so hot that servers won't run, unless you've built a server room over an active volcano or something.
Given a sufficiently powerful fan, then yes.
All we actually need to do is remove the heat from the servers to the air, and then keep swapping the air with the outside.
Which becomes more difficult the higher the ambient air temperature becomes. Heat transfer is proportional to heat delta, so the closer the air temperature is to the heat sink temperature, the more air you need to blow to remove the same amount of heat. Eventually, the amount of electricity you are spending blowing air over the heat sinks is greater than the savings of using less AC.
This was half the point of the article -- you can save a lot of money by raising server room temperatures, but eventually (at a temperature well below outdoor ambient around here) you actually start to lose money due to all the extra fan activity.
Which happens automatically if you let heat out the top and air in the bottom.
Yes but much too slowly to be of use. Convection is also proportional to temperature difference. By the time your server room temperature is enough higher than outside temperature to create significant airflow, your servers are toast.
As for the first, I've always wondered why they don't use chimney-like devices to generate wind naturally and send it though server racks, instead of fans.
Go ahead and try it. A lot of cases already have ducting that funnels air directly from outside the case to the CPU. A few more pieces of cardboard, a hole and chimney in the top of your case, and you should be ready to remove the fan and see what convection can do for you. Sneak preview: unless you've specifically picked components that can run off passive cooling, you'll be in the market for a new one. Especially if you live in a hot place and turn off your AC for this experiment.
While its conceivable to have an effective server room based entirely off of low-power chips that require no active cooling, space is still a major concern in the server room. The desire for greater compute density is directly fighting against using a large number of low-power chips spread out. Thus performance/watt becomes a major metric for the server room, because they want the most performance for a fixed amount of space and thus cooling.
why not have AC vent into server racks?
That's actually a good idea, and a lot of places do it.
Indeed. The only thing that makes sense as a consequence of the Higgs being hypothetically unobservable is that we get the LHC up and running at full power, it works just fine, but fails to find the Higgs. And that failure will almost certainly be a direct consequence of the physics of the particle, not some retro-active undoing of completely conventional actions that could have hypothetically observed it. No, if observation is impossible it's impossible and the universe doesn't have to "prevent" it.
It's like the speed of light. If you could travel faster than light, you could travel through time and create causal paradoxes. So therefore any attempt to travel faster than light would succeed but will be mysteriously sabotaged, preventing it from happening? No, not exactly. More like accelerating a mass to c takes infinite energy and is therefore impossible, and therefore the attempt will not succeed even if your rocket works perfectly.
So if observing Higgs = time travel (I'm not sure how simply observing something that should theoretically be present all around leads to causality paradoxes), then the LHC will be unable to observe the Higgs, and that's it. Breakage is due to engineers that were more excited than careful.
So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the Higgs Boson is causing Cubs fans to continue to go to games and buy merchandise, preventing them from winning and thus the LHC from ever working?
It all makes sense!
Our best technology showpieces are still 1930s theory with 2000s engineering.
Something is wrong with this picture.
The only thing obviously 'wrong' with it to me is that our engineering is still lagging our theory by (very) roughly the same amount it always has, so predictions of the future based on ever-increasing rates of advancement (e.g. The Singularity) aren't being borne out by the real trends.
Which doesn't particularly surprise me. After all, while our engineering has become better and better, our unresolved theories are covering scenarios either more energetic, more minute, or both, and are consequently more difficult and expensive to even set up for experimental purposes, much less turn into practical applications. When the theory was about what we would today consider very mundane situations -- gas compression, heat transfer -- it doesn't take anything particularly remarkable to put that theory into practice (though in practice, it did). It only seems like such an explosion because science was so new and there was so much to discover about what was simply laying about. Now, to learn more, you need more than a set of decent glassware and access to some chemicals.
Yet even still, we're making significant progress on making quantum encryption and quantum computers an every-day reality. GR is used in GPS systems. Will the discoveries of the LHC have an impact on technology seventy years from now? That depends on what they are. Maybe. I don't know. But I'm not that depressed that it seems like we've pushed the edges of our uncertainty to more remote reaches of the universe.
"Cache" suggests a rapidly accessible copy, but that's not what's happening.
Only to computer geeks. :)
Most other uses of 'cache' imply that they are hidden out of the way, saved for a rainy day or guerrilla insurgency. :)
Oh man, that's a triple-whammy on my illegal Arson Assault Bingo parlor.
This is a kangaroo court! You didn't even have them spin the bottle first!
I didn't see one scrap of "ID drone" in the OP. I saw someone who showed a surprising amount of open-mindedness and insight for someone carrying around a 30 year old misconception about seemingly unused section of DNA. The "scare quotes" were to imply that what we call "junk" wasn't "junk." Which of course is true even if he didn't know it. It's a tremendous and unjustified leap to go from that to assuming he's say "HAHA GOD DID IT EAT THAT SCIENCE." Do you assume that someone is anti-science any time they speculate about science?
And then you appeared to reinforce that 30-year-old misconception. And still seem to. It's not all vestigial. Much of what was once thought to be vestigial actually serves important purposes in the expression of other genes. Lots of things can be deleted, even actively expressed genes, without noticeable effect. It doesn't mean they aren't having one. Simpler structures absolutely could be possible, but nature does not always opt for "simplest".
L4 and L5 are actually the most stable lagrange points. The satellites would end up basically orbiting the lagrange point itself.
You'd think, but the fools are assuming the extra minute of round-trip communication time isn't a problem because it doesn't seriously affect their reaction times. But they fail to understand that in the Martian language, time is a critical component of meaning! And extra minute of latency could make the difference between saying "We accept your offer of peaceful relations. We will begin transmitting cultural information immediately," and "We accept your offer of peaceful relations... Psych! We will begin bombarding you with Vanilla Ice CDs immediately, losers!"
I don't think you can link the vast majority of web apps with a campaign to undermine free software.
No, not at all. But there are people who break the spirit of free software by taking an application someone else wrote and released under the GPL and using that as the foundation of their own service, making some custom improvements, and then not releasing those improvements and hiding behind their technical lack of innovation to avoid having to do so. That's nothing like a "campaign", but it's still annoying for a lot of people who write free software.
It's true that there are a lot of webapps trying to steal content from the users who contribute it, by not providing access to a raw data download.
Yeah, that's the new version of format lock in. We don't have to obfuscate our data format to keep you using our app, we just have to deny you access to the data itself! awesome.
I once wrote a paper that claimed America only pushed for 'unconditional' because they had the bomb.
My paper...uh...bombed.
*winces* Did you make that pun? That might have been why. Heh.
The impression I got from reading was that Truman was heavily against conditional surrender, and felt it would be a betrayal of America and everyone else who had suffered from Japanese aggression to let them get away with surrendering on their own terms. It certainly didn't help that the didn't know what those terms were, and it's not like they could just email Hirohito and ask for clarification.
I'm not sure what would have happened had we not had the bomb. Would getting Japan's complete capitulation be more important than preventing the Russians from having another leg up in the post-war era? I have no idea. But the actual land invasion, while important to make seem like a real threat, was a very improbable outcome in any case.
What I find funny is all the people insisting divB=0 is "just" a reflection of the experimental inability to find a magnetic monopole.
The point of saying that is to make it clear that Maxwell's Theory is not incompatible with magnetic monopoles. It was formulated assuming they don't, properly so because experiments had failed to detect them, but can trivially (and usefully) be extended to include them, were any evidence to be shown.
That's not to say I think they definitely exist, or that we should re-write the equation right now. It's just... Maxwell's Theory doesn't preclude monopoles' existence. Discovering them would not disrupt electromagnetic theory all that much. We've been prepared for their discovery for 100 years. There is no "crying" involved. It's not like claiming to have invented Perpetual Motion.
All of those equations are "just" reflections of the experiments they summarize.
No, not just. Mostly, but the theory goes beyond the experiments of the day. Most theories do. They make predictions that are not, at the time of formulation, borne out by experiment. It can take years for those predictions to be tested and see if the theory holds up, and if the theory is good, then it will. There are many successful theories of the past 100 years that have followed this pattern.
For example, the theory that predicted the existence of the W and Z bosons came decades before experimental verification of them.
I think any experimental result that contradicts the thousands that preceded it deserves a fair amount of skepticism.
Well it's not like they're the same experiment, conducted a thousand times! As our technology catches up to the theory, and we are able to test new scenarios, then one could reasonably expect to find different results. It took high-altitude planes and extremely precise atomic clocks to test Time Dilation. You wouldn't say that every experiment performed before on the ground with a stopwatch "contradicted" that result. Or that experiments in colliders less powerful than the one that detected the Z boson "contradicted" the electroweak theory.
Though you're absolutely right, any claim of the discovery of a true magnetic monopole should be viewed with skepticism, and a requirement for repeatability. Such was the case with the one alleged sighting of a monopole. Further experiments ruled out a monopole as the cause of their results. Yay, science.
On the other hand, if the LHC finds convincing evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson, then we'd better start considering that the only reason we haven't found monopoles is because we haven't been conducting the right experiments yet. Because the same theory that already successfully predicted the W and Z bosons, and predicts the Higgs, also predicts magnetic monopoles.
Gee, I could be mistaken, but I think he's saying all the non-violent offenders in our prisons should consider themselves lucky that we don't just execute them, since that's apparently the other option.
Or he could be saying that it's proper to compare the U.S. to oppressive theocratic regimes, rather than other Western democracies.
Or it's the "Hey, at least we're better than [insert the worst thing here]!" defense, which is a form of unintentionally damning with faint praise.
To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had been dropped from 1939 through 45. Those non-nukes also killed people, including innocent girls and boys that didn't deserve to die but were caught in the middle of the fight. War is hell, no matter if you use nukes or TNT.
It's not odd to single them out. After all, no weapon anything like them had ever been unleashed. Even previous weapons that had changed the face of warfare -- the longbow, cannons, machine guns, iron-clad ships, armored infantry Blitzkrieg, and so on -- had required substantial time, effort, and masses of forces to be effective. The firebombings killed more people, but they consisted of extensive and sustained bombing campaigns, often over the course of days or weeks, starting with flights of bombers dropping conventional explosives, followed by flights of bombers dropping incendiary explosives. Then more flights.
This was two cities destroyed by two planes dropping one bomb each. Unprecedented.
Also, among all the nasty ways to die in war, radiation poisoning was a new and quite nasty way to die. One that was underestimated by Truman et. al.
So it's not surprising why the atom bombs get singled out. Why those civilian deaths -- in what were by the standards of WWII standards military targets, cities with factories in them -- receive so much scrutiny, I don't know for sure, but yes it's odd.
Almost 70 million people died during WW2. Only 0.2% of them died by nuclear fission bomb.
Pretty impressive for two bombs!
But yeah, precious few spend the same effort bemoaning the morality of fire bombing, or carpet bombing for that matter, or any of the other massive slaughters that took place in WWII. It was a nasty, nasty war. Ending it with two decisive explosions is not the worst thing that could happen (though as I mention elsewhere, land invasion of Japan though the worst was about the least likely way for it to end).
The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.
No, they weren't. Truman was never seriously considering invasion when deliberating on how to end the war. Him, his cabinet and advisers, and all his generals were convinced that Japan would surrender without invasion. In particular, they were sure that once Russia declared war on Japan, they would soon surrender before any invasion could actually take place. Part of the decision to use the bomb was to fend off the eventuality that Japan would surrender to Russia and the U.S., which would have created a North/South Japan situation similar to Germany.
Plans are not the same as intent. The military creates plans for every contingency. Hell, today the DoD has plans for an invasion of Canada. Being asked to make plans and estimate casualties isn't the same as actually intending to go though with them. Truman never did. It was not "drop the bomb or invade". It was "drop the bomb, wait for Russia to get involved, or accept the conditional surrender the Japanese had already offered".
Which isn't to say he made the wrong choice -- it's easy to be horrified by the bomb in hindsight, but compared to what had already gone on, it wasn't much. It is to say that the choice was not as simple as just doing some basic moral arithmetic with potential body counts.
The actual situation and decision to be made was much more complex and difficult than the retconned false dichotomy. It does a disservice to the men who made that difficult choice, and to ourselves today trying to learn from history, to simplify it and make it easy.
That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war in Afghanistan look easy.
Um, that wasn't "The Japanese", that was the top Generals and some of their loyalists who were concerned about their own careers and their own necks and most certainly did not consider their Emperor to be a God.
The rest of the country, including most of what remained of the Army, put down their arms and surrendered when the Emperor told them to.
Besides, as I explain in another reply, there were a number of other options Truman was considering and invasion was never a serious contender.
I don't have a problem with tor existing. I've used it myself many times. I'm just not willing to support it with my network resources when child pornography makes up such a large portion of the traffic on the tor network.
Yeah I'm with you on that.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.
LOL, yeah, cus there are no binary files of any kind on usenet. Text only. Sorry, but 'text' is still encoded in binary, it's just another level of encoding to encode anything in binary in text.
Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.
Indeed.
The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
While that is the simplified history, it doesn't really represent the real choice that was being made.
I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.
While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.
The main options under discussion were:
1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.
2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.
3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.
4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.
Which is basically why the actual invasion was off the table. It was unnecessary in any event, and by the time it could have been implemented, Russia would have been involved and we would have been dealing with a joint surrender in any case.
By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.
My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.
Also, how does a 5 minute delay from a regular inactivity time out differ from this so much that this tech is all of the sudden dangerous. It seems to me like people can be monitored via IM just as easy right now as if this was being widely used, just with a tad bit more 'false present' status existing.
Because 5 minutes is the maximum amount of time I can be outside before I get scared of the big ball of fire in the sky and have to run back in. If the crooks think I'm home that whole time, I'll always be safe.
Seriously, what did they really learn from this?
They learned about brain structure and relationships between cognition and motor control.
You may not think that's worth it, but we've done a lot worse to mice than non-lethal brain surgery in order to learn a lot less.
I wouldn't let anyone involved in this kind of experiment date my sister.
*puts down bouquet of flowers, scalpel, and bundle of electrodes*
Man, you're no fun.
Read and type into your computer. The computer exploring its environment is new.
Webcams.
It's a technology that can just as easily be implemented in closed source..
Then don't use a closed source system if you're worried about The Man putting this technology onto your computer and monitoring the output without your knowledge. And if you are using such a system, how in fact do you know it isn't already there?
Complaining about this in the context of the application stated is kinda silly.
Funny then how the top google results for "lorenz gauge magnetic monopoles" are papers solving for the existence of magnetic monopoles in the lorenz gauge.
But I'm sure it comes down to a single integral, and that the Nobel-winning work of Dirac, Salam, Glasow and Weinberg could be obviated by such a simple observation. Too bad they missed it; we could have avoided wasting all this time building the LHC!
That's Bat-science.
Mouse/keyboard activity timeout works nicely for that.
Er not really. You need to set it to long enough that it doesn't time out every time you read a page of text (unless you just like idly dragging the mouse around while reading... i don't). Yet you want it short enough that it provides power savings. The LCD screen is a big power hog in a laptop. Being able to turn it off instantly as soon as you walk away, and turn back on when you sit back down, would be the best of both worlds of power savings and convenience.
I rather don't have the computer know if I'm walking near it or not. But it seems we're heading in to this "everyone, and every machine, knows where you are" every day.
Yeah I'd be more worried about the fact that your computer knows every single thing you type, and every single thing you read. ZOMG!
But seriously. It knows whether you are in front of your laptop or not. Are you often running your laptop when you aren't around at all, such that the assumption that your laptop being on and connected to the network is generally accurate? Like it's a big danger that the laptop knows you aren't there anymore when you get up for a quick piss break. Not that it knows you went to the bathroom!
Besides, it's open source. If you're that worried that it's going to report your location to The Man, check the source code.
And hey, if you're really worried about realistic ways for The Man to find you, take the battery out of your cellphone. Seriously, that's a real way in which the phone company/police can locate you.