On the other hand, when you turn your eyes away from any person or group and give them no penalty when they break the law, they have no incentive to follow the law, and can be expected to break it when this is to their advantage. This is true for rich elites, operators of small businesses, ethnic or racial groups, members of religions (or lack thereof), adherents to political ideologies, members of particular gangs, clubs, or secret societies, or even the general population.
And when you're hunting for causes of problems or ways to solve them - problems such as "spiking" mortality rates among bicyclists - deliberately ignoring certain groups when looking for a cause that might be fixed means that, if there is a cause in something specific to one of those groups, you don't find it and thus can't fix it.
Ignoring the possibility, rather than researching it, could be not just politically-correct avoidance of bad feelings, but negligent homicide.
I would be interested in seeing stats on vehicle/bicycle accidents broken down by country of origin and immigration status of the driver (though I doubt the media would publish the results of such a study even if it were done.)
I also expected the politically-correct volunteer censors to mod down the posting - and my expectations have been met. In 30 minutes it's received at least one down-mod (or one more down- the up-mods).
One of the downsides to Slashdot's mod system is that it can be abused to create an echo-chamber by
The binaries emitted are more or less guaranteed to change every time the compiler is updated.
Sure.
So you compile it with the (perhaps out-of-date) toolset, getting a match to the distributed binaries, then again with the latest-and-greatest toolset if you want to use its output rather than the standard one (and take your own chances that your new compiler revision was compromised.)
The problem being addressed is making sure that your own build environment contains the same source and makes the same binaries as the distribution version, so you know that you have uncorrupted source and an uncorrupted toolset (or as close to it as you can reasonably expect to get - which is pretty close, given that you can apply the same techniques to the tools themselves). Then you can join, and take advantage of, the large "group of eyeballs" checking the source (and build system) for malware inclusions.
Unless you freeze system time for the full duration of the build, every piece of code that builds in __TIME__ or __DATE__ macros, will screw with this.
And I have run into this at my current employment, when checking that I had successfully selected the correct version of an archived source and reproduced the binary build. The source apparently had an instance of __DATE__ in it, and would compile differently on different days.
But the datestamps - at least in the tools I was using - were always the same length (so they didn't move other stuff around as they changed) and easily recognized. I could easily verify that the only differences were the datestamp.
Seems to me that it would be trivial to do a diff-like utility (or add yet another option to diff) that would determine whether files were identical EXCEPT for instances of __TIME__ and __DATE__ expansions - and report both the otherwise-match and the number and values of the date/time stamps.
1) Fraction of the population bicycling. The stats (in the summary) were expressed as a fraction of population in general, though it was also mentioned that, post the Lance Armstrong publicity, more people were cycling.
2) New populations of drivers with different driving styles. Back in the mid-20th century I noticed that driving styles in several regions of the US were substantially different. But (with the possible exception of how traffic lights were treated in Boston) both I and others have noted they are nowhere NEAR as different as all of them are from the style(s) of the influx of drivers from Mexico and other countries from south of the border.
This is especially an issue with the undocumented, who often don't have licenses, insurance, or US driver's training, and have a strong incentive to avoid police involvement, which may lead to leaving the scene rather than calling for medical assistance for a victim.
I would be interested in seeing stats on vehicle/bicycle accidents broken down by country of origin and immigration status of the driver (though I doubt the media would publish the results of such a study even if it were done.)
As for the progressively higher fatality rate with older cyclists who have gotten into an accident, that's not surprising at all. Older bodies are more fragile, injury-prone, and heal less readily.
If you have a 3-dimension region that is so full of information that that information cannot be encoded on a 2-d boundary of that region, then you have a black hole.
And don't "adjust" it - or if they do, at least publish the un-adjusted data and the rationale for the adjustments.
A rule of physics had been that information is not destroyed. (It can be scrambled beyond recovery by any reasonable process, but it's still there.)
Black holes make the information inside them inaccessible - no message gets out. Ok, it's still there but you can't get to it. All you can measure about a black hole is its mass, electric charge, and spin. All those other quantum numbers get hidden.
But Hawking radiation - according to the first formulation - is vacuum virtual particle pairs, appearing near the event horizon, where one got trapped by flying through the event horizon, releasing enough extra energy for the other one to become permanent and fly up the gravity well and away. The lost energy of the particle creation and ejection comes out of the total mass/energy of the black hole, so it shrinks a bit.
It's almost as if a particle tunneled out of the hole, but not really. The type of particle pair is random. If they're charged, the electric field can bias the probability of which one falls in, gradually discharging the hole. But the other fields don't leave memory, so, for instance, you get equal amounts of matter and antimatter, regardless of what you originally squeezed into a black hole.
But the evaporation of the hole leaves nothing behind. So if you built the hole out of mostly anti-matter you get half of it back as antimatter and half as normal matter, changing the matter/antimatter balance of the universe.
Oops!
(If this is correct, perhaps the explanation for the predominance of normal matter in the observed universe is that more anitmatter than matter got squeezed into early black holes, to emerge, if at all, as 50/50? You heard it here first!)
Matter/antimatter and related conservation of this-and-that laws is part of the information that's not supposed to go missing. Even if you DON'T violate those conservations, Hawking radiation was supposed to be random. So when the black hole evaporates (in a blaze of glory right at the end), all the information that went beyond the event horizon is still lost, replaced with an equal amount of purely random noise.
There has been a big discussion in physics on whether the information actually is lost. It got a LOT hotter when a scientist computed how much information should be inside the event horizon of a black hole and discovered that it was exactly proportional to the area of the event horizon, at one bit per plank-length-scaled patch. This led to speculation that maybe the infalling information doesn't actually fall in, but "gets stuck" on, or just above, the event horizon and might be returned to the rest of the universe during the evaporation process.
There were different camps on this, with Hawking being in the "lost" camp and others (including Susskind, who gives public lectures to laymen) in the "maybe it's not lost" camp.
Now Hawking may have been convinced, or convinced himself, that maybe the info isn't lost, and switched positions on the argument. This is big news.
If you have a 3-dimension region that is so full of information that that information cannot be encoded on a 2-d boundary of that region, then you have a black hole
Almost:
If you have a three-dimensional region that is so full of information that it can entirely cover the surface when encoded at one bit per plank-length (diameter?) area, then the mass of the information is enough that its gravitation creates a black hole with exactly that much surface area to the event horizon.
If you throw more information down the black hole, it expands exactly enough that you can STILL exactly encode all the info on the new surface. You can't have MORE information inside that boundary than you can encode on its surface.
Obviously open software and volunteerism has their work cut out for them if they are to make drugs affordable. But I *would* be curious to know where their advocates believe these forces could have significant impact. It'd have to be in the clinical trial phase, where 80% of cost is incurred.
For diseases with too small a community of sufferers to pay off that several-billion-dollar price tag, the alternative drug development/deployment system will have to cover all the steps, one way or another, because a pharma company would normally not be able to profitably perform the steps necessary to develop, test, obtain approval, and deploy. a new drug or treatment. Ditto for new uses of existing drugs or common compounds (such as DMSO) that are beyond IP protection. (Even if they COULD get IP protection on a new use, it would be virtually impossible to enforce.)
Big Pharma is out of the loop unless treating an "orphan disease" falls out as an off-label use of something new they've developed for a more pervasive condition, or there's big-time PR to be had.
Once omething like Open Source Pharma is up and running, Big Pharma companies might be able to harvest some PR benefits, and help out sufferers of orphan diseases, by announcing signs they find that some compound might help some particular orphan disease that they can't afford to pursue, and sign off on others proceeding further with it. That could help Open Source Pharma by relieving them of the costs of the initial search for possibilities (and also distract them from competing with the Big Pharma companies on potential new cash-cow drugs.)
[intensifier] stop referring to anything other than software as open source.
I'm perfectly happy to also use (as the spook community does) "open source" to apply to intelligence gathering by scraping and analyzing the net, news media, government publications, and other generally available information rather than limited-access stuff brought in by spy networks.
It's a slightly different meaning of "source", but an entirely apt usage of the two-word string.
There are airborne optical alternatives that can beat the * out of fiber - provided the weather is clear.
Fibre provides more frequency and better SNR than you'll get in the air, thus more bits
But a single fiber provides ONE PATH. Optics can provide MANY paths.
Imagine ten thousand fibers. Now imagine the ends poking out of a billboard in a 100x100 array - behind a 100x100 array of collimating lenses that beams the light toward your house. At your house imagine a telescope imaging that billboard onto a slide containing another 100x100 array of fiber ends. (Of course the fibers work both ways0 The air path may be of lower quality than physical fibers, but it's hard to beat a four orders of magnitude more paths. You'd need to run an actual bundle of hundreds or thousands of fibers from the billboard site to your house to beat it. : Now go back to the billboard and insert another 100x100 array of fibers through it - slightly offset so the same set of lenses but beams toward your next-door neighbor's house. (We'll assume the array is spaced out sufficiently that an optical telescope can resolve the two houses.) Repeat for ALL the houses served.
Not practical as described, of course. But it shows the principle: Wireless paths can multiplex spatially and reuse the bandwidth a hysterical number of times.
(Of course a real system using spatial multiplexing could be expected to use various wave-mechanical hacks rather than actual resolved paths - just as MIMO does down at radio frequencies.)
Backing a republican is understandable...but risky in this day and age. This is a political party that has shut down the US Government twice.
No, the Democrats are the ones that "shut it down" - to the extent that a "government shutdown" actually shuts anything down - and the Replublicans caved both times and gave them what they wanted.
The "power of the purse" is SUPPOSED to be the House of Representatives' check on a runaway executive branch. When the executive does something Congress doesn't want it to do, Congress is supposed to cut off the money for that, to make the executive branch stop. (This is why military appropriations, in particular, have a constitutional limit of two years: If the President, as Commander in Chief decides to go to war without a declaration, congress can stop the war within a couple years by stopping the money for the military.) This is also supposed to work when the majority of either house of congress is opposed to something.
But in these recent "government shutdowns" the Democratic majority in the Senate, along with the President, held all the services of the government hostage when the Republicans tried to defund the no-longer-popular Obamacare. The Republican-controlled house split the funding for various sections of the government into several bills, and passed essentially all of them, with the idea that Obamacare would be in its own bill which could then be voted on separately - both likely failing to pass it in the House and giving a recorded vote showing which senators and reps supported it, to use in the next election's campaigns.
The Senate leadership and Democratic majority then refused to pass ANY of the fund-a-part-of-the-government bills, holding the popular parts of the government's operations hostage: Give up the House's prerogative to originate all funding bills, pass an omnibus bill including Obamacare, or the government will be shut down - and our pet media will blame YOU for it!
The Republicans tried several iterations, from an everything-but-Obamacare bill, through several sets that added up to funding everything but Obamacare, to a bunch of little fund-somethng-really-important bills, and the Democrats bounced pretty much all of them.
Eventually the old budget timed out. Then the President ordered his people, not to go on vacation for lack of money to pay them, but to do things like actively blockade federal parks and roads. And for days the Democrats and the media said that it was the Republicans who had "shut down the goverment" (when they'd passed bills to fund pretty much all of it).
Eventually the Republican leadership threw in the towel and let an Everything Including Obamacare bill through. But people like you are STILL fooled into thinking it was the Rs, not the Ds, that made it uncomfortable for them by "shutting it down".
(I'd be a lot more impressed, by the way, if cutting off the money actually DID shut down the government, rather than just 17% or so of it, leaving the remaing 83% running full-bore. It would be interesting to try actual anarchy for a change, just to see what would happen.;-) )
The birds that figure out NOT to eat plastic (or how to get their body to deal with plastic after it's consumed) will survive to breed...
Indeed.
There are clouds of seagulls constantly hanging out at the landfills in the San Francisco Bay Area, picking food out of the trash as it's dumped. Lots of plastic in the same load (even now that the plastic grocery bags are banned.) Why haven't THEY gone extinct yet?
Do the "environmentalists" think these gulls are better at distinguishing, or surviving ingestion of, plastic than the ones at sea? Or do we have to put roofs over our landfills to protect these endangered avian pests?
When the government, or any other gang of crooks, steals your resources, and you get the opportunity to take some of them back, letting them keep it (and potentially use it to harm others), rather than taking the "tainted money", isn't "principled", it's "stupid".
I'm following the law as written. If you want to help me change the laws so:
- I don't get the Social Security and
- I don't get Medicare, but
- I also don't have to pay income tax when I earn money in the free market or liquidate my 401(k)s (money earned honestly that hasn't been taxed yet) and
- can buy medical care and insurance, for myself and my family, on an open market, from providers that aren't forced to give free care to all comers and gouge people like me to cover it. I'd be ECSTATIC to work with you.
But if you just want to eliminate the first pair without enabling the second, you're just trying to loot me further and can take a hike.
I see your problem. The benefits don't trickle down from the ruling class. They don't "trickle down" from anywhere. They are shared. If anything, in US late-stage capitalism, the benefits trickle UP to the financial elite.
We're in agreement there - except for the characterization: It's late stage mercantalism, where government supports a handful of the established rich and vice-versa.
Like "True Communism", Capitalism hasn't really been tried, at least within the last century in the US. What aspects had been tried have been subverted by tie-ins among the financial and governmental elites. (And, yes, I agree that actually trying it, in the presence of the perverse incentive systems of governmental/political power, is very difficult.)
A group of people pulling together will always be stronger than one person pulling.
And a group of people pulling together voluntarily, because they each decided for themselves that pulling together helps meet their own goals, will always be stronger than a similarly-sized group being forced to pull by their masters.
Ayn Rand was...
Ah HA! You are far enough away from the subject that you have Objectivism confused with libertarianism and Libertariansim. Oh, my...
Libertarianism (small or large L) is a very big tent. It can include every idea system that contains some variant of "don't hit first" and has at least some recognition of ownership of property.
Objectivism is important - because it is an internally-consistent philosophy, accessible to high-function Psychopaths that teaches them that playing nice with others has big benefits for them. This leaves a high-function compensated psychopath - who thinks he knows the one true way to be free (much like a religious fanatic thinks he knows the one true faith). He gets along with the giant crowd of other sorts, (perhaps seething much of the time at, or pitying them for, how they're "getting it wrong"), because Objectivism includes that same principle. So he has to let them run their own lives as long as they don't try to run the lives of others.
Teaching Objectivism is the one "treatment" that the Canadian prison system's research showed actually DID reduce recidivism - drastically. But Objectivists are just one club in the vast, chaotic, circus that is the union of the (Ll)ibertarians and the "freedom movement".
I've paid into this fund for over 70 line-years. Not sure what the rates were over that time (or how the inflation rate and other cost-of-money factors affected the value that was collected). If it had been at the current rate the dollar count would be maybe a quarter of one subscriber's subsidy. But the dollar has inflated by a factor of about ten over that period, so I expect I've paid in substantially more value than the average amount they'll be spending on one home's subsidy.
It will be interesting to see some of that money actually spent for the stated purpose. But given that this is a government operation I expect the usual level of SNAFU.
I love how the techbro libertarians exaggerate the amount of money "the parasites" have taken from them without ever acknowledging the benefits they have enjoyed, and the privilege they have gained from those benefits. They all believe they earned every cent from their natural talent and the sweat of their own brow.
It doesn't matter how much "benefits" the ruling class chose to trickle down on us. We didn't get the choice to forgo the alleged benefits and keep the money - just as we didn't get to opt out of the draft into the military and "service" in VietNam, along with the "benefits" accruing from that adventure.
Do you also support organized crime's operation, because they provide the benefit of services otherwise unavailable (because they're forbidden by the biggest gang), or in some cases suppressing other crime in the neigborhoods where the kingpins live?
Dirty little secret: They did it for THEMSELVES. What they "did for us" was what any farmer does for his cattle and sheep - keep them as healthy and happy as necessary to keep them productive, before slaughtering then when they've become a liability.
It's easy to snipe others for "sucking off the government teat" when you're young, healthy, and well-to-do. Try it when you're old, sick, unemployed or under-employed, and have been looted your whole working lifetime by that very government, to put milk into those teats for others to suck and ration you a few drops of your own back.
And don't dump on me for voting for it, either. I've voted against it since I was able to vote. (I was there for the founding of the libertarian movement - but didn't actually join the Party due to an issue with their wording of the non-aggression pledge.)
Man complaining about "the Soviet Left Coast" plans to retire comfortably collecting Social Security, using Medicare and sucking off the government teat.
Why not? These parasites sucked down OVER HALF MY PAY for DECADES. Then they'll pay me the social security pittance (and tax it) whether I want them to or not. I'll never get back the amount I paid (allegedly) "into the fund" on just THAT part of the money they took from me - assuming the whole thing doesn't go belly up before I do.
They might possibly end up paying me more inflated dollars if I live to be older than Methuselah. But it will pay nowhere near the actual value they stole. If I'd bought gold with that "social security deduction" instead of handing the money to Uncle Sam, I'd have been far, far ahead, even after storage, insurance, and commissions on both the purchases and the sales.
As for Medicare, they won't LET me do anything else (except pay for add-ons). The insurance companies, operating under the government's laws and mandates, DEMAND that I take the Medicare money: Even if I've paid full premiums for full coverage, and even when I hadn't signed up for medicare, once I was of age to be eligible for medicare they withheld the amount medicare is supposed to pay for a procedure and would only pay the miniscule difference if the doctor or hospital charged more or my deductable with medicare was higher than with the insurance. (Then, with Obamacare, they wouldn't renew.) If I try to refuse the coverage and try to pay it all out of pocket I'm either charged the massive "uninsured patient list price" or just refused service.
It's easy to snipe others for "sucking off the government teat" when you're young, healthy, and well-to-do. Try it when you're old, sick, unemployed or under-employed, and have been looted your whole working lifetime by that very government, to put milk into those teats for others to suck and ration you a few drops of your own back.
How is this worth posting to slashdot? Rural phone subsidies have been around forever. They recently got expanded to broadband.
They've been collecting it for decades. They've been giving it to the companies and not getting service to customers.
JUST NOW we have a company agreeing to take the money and use it to ACTUALLY ROLL OUT BROADBAND INTERNET to the rural areas.
That sure as hell is "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
Especially for me:
- A my Nevada place I get dialup that can't make it past 28k most days (and only works if I hotwire my DNS server selection: AT&T has had their routing tables fouled for over a year and won't route packets the dialup POP and the DNS servers specified by the dialup's DHCP server.) DirecTV/Hughes Net satellite has bad latency and a track record of throttling. The local phone company doesn't do DSL there - reselling HughesNet, see above. The local WISP doesn't point in my direction (and would want >$100/month for reasonable speed if they did). The only high-speed I've got there is via the Verizon LTE service (which is big $$$ for the gigs I'd need to work remotely for more than a weekend at a time - and SUPPOSEDLY doesn't have coverage there).
- If I could get decent internet (at a decent price) I could work from the ranch, sell off the California townhouse, and live for a year on less than it costs to live in CA for a month. (Or retire and live comfortably on my savings, investments, and Social Security - which would crap out in a few years on the Soviet Left Coast.)
It would be useful both for disrupting "business as usual" that they don't like and herding crowds into range of a more lethal device.
I can imagine several of them being flown into, and triggered in, sessions of a legislature that authorized them. But I somehow doubt that would actually happen, even in tyrannical foreign regimes. If the legislature is giving the tyrant and his security forces what they want, why use it on them? And if the opposition can get them in there with "less than lethal" weapons packages, "more than lethal" would be even easier, and have a more lasting effect on future legislation. (Realpolitik is a bitch.)
It looks to me like the field-reversed configuration does the same sort of thing, compressing the plasma in a way that maps the electric fields (both directly applied and created by the magnetic field change) into particle acceleration during the compression, and thus into temperature.
Then again, this machine also builds TWO plasma donuts and crashes them into each other (where they combine) at "a million kph" - no doubt also by electrical-field acceleration. Another opportunity to scale up the heating by scaling up the voltage (or its magnetic equivalent).
First off, there is a big difference between something like a fusor which is basically accelerating a beam of particles to some amount of eV that is similar to the applied voltage, and something going for a thermal distribution with same amount of eV spread out with a tail of the distribution that does most of the reactions
Fusors and polywells aren't about beams. They're about assembling a plasma object that is already hot, by compressing it during the assembly.
The fusor does this by having two concentric spherical electrodes, the inner one skeletal, with a large voltage between them. Positive ions fall inward essentially radially, accelerated by the field until they pass through the inner electrode, and fly on orbits that pass through the center of the spheres. They "pile up" as they pass through the center, thus mapping the acceleration voltage directly into compression temperature as well as high average density. (Unfortunately a small number of ions hit the inner electrode on each pass and are lost. So though it's a great fusion-neutron source breakeven isn't in the cards.)
The polywell does the same thing to electrons - with the added tweak that the inner electrode contains a set of magnet coils that get the electrons to travel in paths that mostly miss the electrode. As they orbit through the center the high average density there is effectively a third high-voltage negative electrode, producing a radial electric field between this "virtual electrode" at the center and the inner physical electrode. Positive ions fall in toward the virtual electrode (nearly neutralizing it) and again you get a high density and inward velocity, mapping the electric field into temperature.
It looks to me like the field-reversed configuration does the same sort of thing, compressing the plasma in a way that maps the electric fields (both directly applied and created by the magnetic field change) into particle acceleration during the compression, and thus into temperature. Unlike Tokamaks and similar devices, you don't "put a low-density plasma in a (magnetic) can" and then have to heat it up. You heat it by squeezing it when you initially assemble it, accelerating the particles toward each other, and that maps your compression forces into temperature - which turns a moderately high voltage into a relative particle speed that has a hysterically high number when expressed as temperature (at the same time that you're also raising the density) Hold it together long enough, don't let it interact with solid matter to cool it, and you've got the holy trinity for fusion. No ongoing heating required.
Also, you don't just easily scale up voltage past several 10s of kV, as you start reaching a lot of material limits for break down (even in vacuum), and engineering gets more difficult for 100+ kV in a small space.
So:
- Expand the space (which also gives you more plasma volume and thus more power output at a given density), and
- Keep anything but ionized, under-control, gasses out of the working region
100+ kV is not all THAT difficult to handle in an industrial-sized volume. Air at atmospheric pressure has a breakdown of about 40,000 v/in (though this drops as pressure is lowered). A clean vacuum (except for the working plasma itself) isn't too tough either: Television picture tubes worked fine with no arc-over at acceleration voltages of about a kilovolt per diagonal inch (i.e. 25 kV for a 25" picture tube) and far more than a kV per inch inside the tube. A machine twenty feet across would have substantially lower electric field at 200 kV.
Which is not to say that there won't be issues trying to scale this. But I wouldn't expect anything insurmountable from what you've alluded to here.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, when you turn your eyes away from any person or group and give them no penalty when they break the law, they have no incentive to follow the law, and can be expected to break it when this is to their advantage. This is true for rich elites, operators of small businesses, ethnic or racial groups, members of religions (or lack thereof), adherents to political ideologies, members of particular gangs, clubs, or secret societies, or even the general population.
And when you're hunting for causes of problems or ways to solve them - problems such as "spiking" mortality rates among bicyclists - deliberately ignoring certain groups when looking for a cause that might be fixed means that, if there is a cause in something specific to one of those groups, you don't find it and thus can't fix it.
Ignoring the possibility, rather than researching it, could be not just politically-correct avoidance of bad feelings, but negligent homicide.
I would be interested in seeing stats on vehicle/bicycle accidents broken down by country of origin and immigration status of the driver (though I doubt the media would publish the results of such a study even if it were done.)
I also expected the politically-correct volunteer censors to mod down the posting - and my expectations have been met. In 30 minutes it's received at least one down-mod (or one more down- the up-mods).
One of the downsides to Slashdot's mod system is that it can be abused to create an echo-chamber by
The binaries emitted are more or less guaranteed to change every time the compiler is updated.
Sure.
So you compile it with the (perhaps out-of-date) toolset, getting a match to the distributed binaries, then again with the latest-and-greatest toolset if you want to use its output rather than the standard one (and take your own chances that your new compiler revision was compromised.)
The problem being addressed is making sure that your own build environment contains the same source and makes the same binaries as the distribution version, so you know that you have uncorrupted source and an uncorrupted toolset (or as close to it as you can reasonably expect to get - which is pretty close, given that you can apply the same techniques to the tools themselves). Then you can join, and take advantage of, the large "group of eyeballs" checking the source (and build system) for malware inclusions.
Unless you freeze system time for the full duration of the build, every piece of code that builds in __TIME__ or __DATE__ macros, will screw with this.
And I have run into this at my current employment, when checking that I had successfully selected the correct version of an archived source and reproduced the binary build. The source apparently had an instance of __DATE__ in it, and would compile differently on different days.
But the datestamps - at least in the tools I was using - were always the same length (so they didn't move other stuff around as they changed) and easily recognized. I could easily verify that the only differences were the datestamp.
Seems to me that it would be trivial to do a diff-like utility (or add yet another option to diff) that would determine whether files were identical EXCEPT for instances of __TIME__ and __DATE__ expansions - and report both the otherwise-match and the number and values of the date/time stamps.
1) Fraction of the population bicycling. The stats (in the summary) were expressed as a fraction of population in general, though it was also mentioned that, post the Lance Armstrong publicity, more people were cycling.
2) New populations of drivers with different driving styles. Back in the mid-20th century I noticed that driving styles in several regions of the US were substantially different. But (with the possible exception of how traffic lights were treated in Boston) both I and others have noted they are nowhere NEAR as different as all of them are from the style(s) of the influx of drivers from Mexico and other countries from south of the border.
This is especially an issue with the undocumented, who often don't have licenses, insurance, or US driver's training, and have a strong incentive to avoid police involvement, which may lead to leaving the scene rather than calling for medical assistance for a victim.
I would be interested in seeing stats on vehicle/bicycle accidents broken down by country of origin and immigration status of the driver (though I doubt the media would publish the results of such a study even if it were done.)
As for the progressively higher fatality rate with older cyclists who have gotten into an accident, that's not surprising at all. Older bodies are more fragile, injury-prone, and heal less readily.
If you have a 3-dimension region that is so full of information that that information cannot be encoded on a 2-d boundary of that region, then you have a black hole.
And don't "adjust" it - or if they do, at least publish the un-adjusted data and the rationale for the adjustments.
(Assuming I have this correctly.):
A rule of physics had been that information is not destroyed. (It can be scrambled beyond recovery by any reasonable process, but it's still there.)
Black holes make the information inside them inaccessible - no message gets out. Ok, it's still there but you can't get to it. All you can measure about a black hole is its mass, electric charge, and spin. All those other quantum numbers get hidden.
But Hawking radiation - according to the first formulation - is vacuum virtual particle pairs, appearing near the event horizon, where one got trapped by flying through the event horizon, releasing enough extra energy for the other one to become permanent and fly up the gravity well and away. The lost energy of the particle creation and ejection comes out of the total mass/energy of the black hole, so it shrinks a bit.
It's almost as if a particle tunneled out of the hole, but not really. The type of particle pair is random. If they're charged, the electric field can bias the probability of which one falls in, gradually discharging the hole. But the other fields don't leave memory, so, for instance, you get equal amounts of matter and antimatter, regardless of what you originally squeezed into a black hole.
But the evaporation of the hole leaves nothing behind. So if you built the hole out of mostly anti-matter you get half of it back as antimatter and half as normal matter, changing the matter/antimatter balance of the universe.
Oops!
(If this is correct, perhaps the explanation for the predominance of normal matter in the observed universe is that more anitmatter than matter got squeezed into early black holes, to emerge, if at all, as 50/50? You heard it here first!)
Matter/antimatter and related conservation of this-and-that laws is part of the information that's not supposed to go missing. Even if you DON'T violate those conservations, Hawking radiation was supposed to be random. So when the black hole evaporates (in a blaze of glory right at the end), all the information that went beyond the event horizon is still lost, replaced with an equal amount of purely random noise.
There has been a big discussion in physics on whether the information actually is lost. It got a LOT hotter when a scientist computed how much information should be inside the event horizon of a black hole and discovered that it was exactly proportional to the area of the event horizon, at one bit per plank-length-scaled patch. This led to speculation that maybe the infalling information doesn't actually fall in, but "gets stuck" on, or just above, the event horizon and might be returned to the rest of the universe during the evaporation process.
There were different camps on this, with Hawking being in the "lost" camp and others (including Susskind, who gives public lectures to laymen) in the "maybe it's not lost" camp.
Now Hawking may have been convinced, or convinced himself, that maybe the info isn't lost, and switched positions on the argument. This is big news.
If you have a 3-dimension region that is so full of information that that information cannot be encoded on a 2-d boundary of that region, then you have a black hole
Almost:
If you have a three-dimensional region that is so full of information that it can entirely cover the surface when encoded at one bit per plank-length (diameter?) area, then the mass of the information is enough that its gravitation creates a black hole with exactly that much surface area to the event horizon.
If you throw more information down the black hole, it expands exactly enough that you can STILL exactly encode all the info on the new surface. You can't have MORE information inside that boundary than you can encode on its surface.
Obviously open software and volunteerism has their work cut out for them if they are to make drugs affordable. But I *would* be curious to know where their advocates believe these forces could have significant impact. It'd have to be in the clinical trial phase, where 80% of cost is incurred.
For diseases with too small a community of sufferers to pay off that several-billion-dollar price tag, the alternative drug development/deployment system will have to cover all the steps, one way or another, because a pharma company would normally not be able to profitably perform the steps necessary to develop, test, obtain approval, and deploy. a new drug or treatment. Ditto for new uses of existing drugs or common compounds (such as DMSO) that are beyond IP protection. (Even if they COULD get IP protection on a new use, it would be virtually impossible to enforce.)
Big Pharma is out of the loop unless treating an "orphan disease" falls out as an off-label use of something new they've developed for a more pervasive condition, or there's big-time PR to be had.
Once omething like Open Source Pharma is up and running, Big Pharma companies might be able to harvest some PR benefits, and help out sufferers of orphan diseases, by announcing signs they find that some compound might help some particular orphan disease that they can't afford to pursue, and sign off on others proceeding further with it. That could help Open Source Pharma by relieving them of the costs of the initial search for possibilities (and also distract them from competing with the Big Pharma companies on potential new cash-cow drugs.)
[intensifier] stop referring to anything other than software as open source.
I'm perfectly happy to also use (as the spook community does) "open source" to apply to intelligence gathering by scraping and analyzing the net, news media, government publications, and other generally available information rather than limited-access stuff brought in by spy networks.
It's a slightly different meaning of "source", but an entirely apt usage of the two-word string.
There are airborne optical alternatives that can beat the * out of fiber - provided the weather is clear.
Fibre provides more frequency and better SNR than you'll get in the air, thus more bits
But a single fiber provides ONE PATH. Optics can provide MANY paths.
Imagine ten thousand fibers. Now imagine the ends poking out of a billboard in a 100x100 array - behind a 100x100 array of collimating lenses that beams the light toward your house. At your house imagine a telescope imaging that billboard onto a slide containing another 100x100 array of fiber ends. (Of course the fibers work both ways0 The air path may be of lower quality than physical fibers, but it's hard to beat a four orders of magnitude more paths. You'd need to run an actual bundle of hundreds or thousands of fibers from the billboard site to your house to beat it.
:
Now go back to the billboard and insert another 100x100 array of fibers through it - slightly offset so the same set of lenses but beams toward your next-door neighbor's house. (We'll assume the array is spaced out sufficiently that an optical telescope can resolve the two houses.) Repeat for ALL the houses served.
Not practical as described, of course. But it shows the principle: Wireless paths can multiplex spatially and reuse the bandwidth a hysterical number of times.
(Of course a real system using spatial multiplexing could be expected to use various wave-mechanical hacks rather than actual resolved paths - just as MIMO does down at radio frequencies.)
Backing a republican is understandable...but risky in this day and age. This is a political party that has shut down the US Government twice.
No, the Democrats are the ones that "shut it down" - to the extent that a "government shutdown" actually shuts anything down - and the Replublicans caved both times and gave them what they wanted.
The "power of the purse" is SUPPOSED to be the House of Representatives' check on a runaway executive branch. When the executive does something Congress doesn't want it to do, Congress is supposed to cut off the money for that, to make the executive branch stop. (This is why military appropriations, in particular, have a constitutional limit of two years: If the President, as Commander in Chief decides to go to war without a declaration, congress can stop the war within a couple years by stopping the money for the military.) This is also supposed to work when the majority of either house of congress is opposed to something.
But in these recent "government shutdowns" the Democratic majority in the Senate, along with the President, held all the services of the government hostage when the Republicans tried to defund the no-longer-popular Obamacare. The Republican-controlled house split the funding for various sections of the government into several bills, and passed essentially all of them, with the idea that Obamacare would be in its own bill which could then be voted on separately - both likely failing to pass it in the House and giving a recorded vote showing which senators and reps supported it, to use in the next election's campaigns.
The Senate leadership and Democratic majority then refused to pass ANY of the fund-a-part-of-the-government bills, holding the popular parts of the government's operations hostage: Give up the House's prerogative to originate all funding bills, pass an omnibus bill including Obamacare, or the government will be shut down - and our pet media will blame YOU for it!
The Republicans tried several iterations, from an everything-but-Obamacare bill, through several sets that added up to funding everything but Obamacare, to a bunch of little fund-somethng-really-important bills, and the Democrats bounced pretty much all of them.
Eventually the old budget timed out. Then the President ordered his people, not to go on vacation for lack of money to pay them, but to do things like actively blockade federal parks and roads. And for days the Democrats and the media said that it was the Republicans who had "shut down the goverment" (when they'd passed bills to fund pretty much all of it).
Eventually the Republican leadership threw in the towel and let an Everything Including Obamacare bill through. But people like you are STILL fooled into thinking it was the Rs, not the Ds, that made it uncomfortable for them by "shutting it down".
(I'd be a lot more impressed, by the way, if cutting off the money actually DID shut down the government, rather than just 17% or so of it, leaving the remaing 83% running full-bore. It would be interesting to try actual anarchy for a change, just to see what would happen. ;-) )
Indeed.
There are clouds of seagulls constantly hanging out at the landfills in the San Francisco Bay Area, picking food out of the trash as it's dumped. Lots of plastic in the same load (even now that the plastic grocery bags are banned.) Why haven't THEY gone extinct yet?
Do the "environmentalists" think these gulls are better at distinguishing, or surviving ingestion of, plastic than the ones at sea? Or do we have to put roofs over our landfills to protect these endangered avian pests?
Somehow I'm not convinced this is a real problem.
I'm with Trump on this one.
When the government, or any other gang of crooks, steals your resources, and you get the opportunity to take some of them back, letting them keep it (and potentially use it to harm others), rather than taking the "tainted money", isn't "principled", it's "stupid".
I'm following the law as written. If you want to help me change the laws so:
- I don't get the Social Security and
- I don't get Medicare, but
- I also don't have to pay income tax when I earn money in the free market or liquidate my 401(k)s (money earned honestly that hasn't been taxed yet) and
- can buy medical care and insurance, for myself and my family, on an open market, from providers that aren't forced to give free care to all comers and gouge people like me to cover it.
I'd be ECSTATIC to work with you.
But if you just want to eliminate the first pair without enabling the second, you're just trying to loot me further and can take a hike.
I see your problem. The benefits don't trickle down from the ruling class. They don't "trickle down" from anywhere. They are shared. If anything, in US late-stage capitalism, the benefits trickle UP to the financial elite.
We're in agreement there - except for the characterization: It's late stage mercantalism, where government supports a handful of the established rich and vice-versa.
Like "True Communism", Capitalism hasn't really been tried, at least within the last century in the US. What aspects had been tried have been subverted by tie-ins among the financial and governmental elites. (And, yes, I agree that actually trying it, in the presence of the perverse incentive systems of governmental/political power, is very difficult.)
A group of people pulling together will always be stronger than one person pulling.
And a group of people pulling together voluntarily, because they each decided for themselves that pulling together helps meet their own goals, will always be stronger than a similarly-sized group being forced to pull by their masters.
Ayn Rand was ...
Ah HA! You are far enough away from the subject that you have Objectivism confused with libertarianism and Libertariansim. Oh, my...
Libertarianism (small or large L) is a very big tent. It can include every idea system that contains some variant of "don't hit first" and has at least some recognition of ownership of property.
Objectivism is important - because it is an internally-consistent philosophy, accessible to high-function Psychopaths that teaches them that playing nice with others has big benefits for them. This leaves a high-function compensated psychopath - who thinks he knows the one true way to be free (much like a religious fanatic thinks he knows the one true faith). He gets along with the giant crowd of other sorts, (perhaps seething much of the time at, or pitying them for, how they're "getting it wrong"), because Objectivism includes that same principle. So he has to let them run their own lives as long as they don't try to run the lives of others.
Teaching Objectivism is the one "treatment" that the Canadian prison system's research showed actually DID reduce recidivism - drastically. But Objectivists are just one club in the vast, chaotic, circus that is the union of the (Ll)ibertarians and the "freedom movement".
I've paid into this fund for over 70 line-years. Not sure what the rates were over that time (or how the inflation rate and other cost-of-money factors affected the value that was collected). If it had been at the current rate the dollar count would be maybe a quarter of one subscriber's subsidy. But the dollar has inflated by a factor of about ten over that period, so I expect I've paid in substantially more value than the average amount they'll be spending on one home's subsidy.
It will be interesting to see some of that money actually spent for the stated purpose. But given that this is a government operation I expect the usual level of SNAFU.
I love how the techbro libertarians exaggerate the amount of money "the parasites" have taken from them without ever acknowledging the benefits they have enjoyed, and the privilege they have gained from those benefits. They all believe they earned every cent from their natural talent and the sweat of their own brow.
It doesn't matter how much "benefits" the ruling class chose to trickle down on us. We didn't get the choice to forgo the alleged benefits and keep the money - just as we didn't get to opt out of the draft into the military and "service" in VietNam, along with the "benefits" accruing from that adventure.
Do you also support organized crime's operation, because they provide the benefit of services otherwise unavailable (because they're forbidden by the biggest gang), or in some cases suppressing other crime in the neigborhoods where the kingpins live?
Dirty little secret: They did it for THEMSELVES. What they "did for us" was what any farmer does for his cattle and sheep - keep them as healthy and happy as necessary to keep them productive, before slaughtering then when they've become a liability.
It's easy to snipe others for "sucking off the government teat" when you're young, healthy, and well-to-do. Try it when you're old, sick, unemployed or under-employed, and have been looted your whole working lifetime by that very government, to put milk into those teats for others to suck and ration you a few drops of your own back.
And don't dump on me for voting for it, either. I've voted against it since I was able to vote. (I was there for the founding of the libertarian movement - but didn't actually join the Party due to an issue with their wording of the non-aggression pledge.)
Man complaining about "the Soviet Left Coast" plans to retire comfortably collecting Social Security, using Medicare and sucking off the government teat.
Why not? These parasites sucked down OVER HALF MY PAY for DECADES. Then they'll pay me the social security pittance (and tax it) whether I want them to or not. I'll never get back the amount I paid (allegedly) "into the fund" on just THAT part of the money they took from me - assuming the whole thing doesn't go belly up before I do.
They might possibly end up paying me more inflated dollars if I live to be older than Methuselah. But it will pay nowhere near the actual value they stole. If I'd bought gold with that "social security deduction" instead of handing the money to Uncle Sam, I'd have been far, far ahead, even after storage, insurance, and commissions on both the purchases and the sales.
As for Medicare, they won't LET me do anything else (except pay for add-ons). The insurance companies, operating under the government's laws and mandates, DEMAND that I take the Medicare money: Even if I've paid full premiums for full coverage, and even when I hadn't signed up for medicare, once I was of age to be eligible for medicare they withheld the amount medicare is supposed to pay for a procedure and would only pay the miniscule difference if the doctor or hospital charged more or my deductable with medicare was higher than with the insurance. (Then, with Obamacare, they wouldn't renew.) If I try to refuse the coverage and try to pay it all out of pocket I'm either charged the massive
"uninsured patient list price" or just refused service.
It's easy to snipe others for "sucking off the government teat" when you're young, healthy, and well-to-do. Try it when you're old, sick, unemployed or under-employed, and have been looted your whole working lifetime by that very government, to put milk into those teats for others to suck and ration you a few drops of your own back.
How is this worth posting to slashdot? Rural phone subsidies have been around forever. They recently got expanded to broadband.
They've been collecting it for decades. They've been giving it to the companies and not getting service to customers.
JUST NOW we have a company agreeing to take the money and use it to ACTUALLY ROLL OUT BROADBAND INTERNET to the rural areas.
That sure as hell is "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
Especially for me:
- A my Nevada place I get dialup that can't make it past 28k most days (and only works if I hotwire my DNS server selection: AT&T has had their routing tables fouled for over a year and won't route packets the dialup POP and the DNS servers specified by the dialup's DHCP server.) DirecTV/Hughes Net satellite has bad latency and a track record of throttling. The local phone company doesn't do DSL there - reselling HughesNet, see above. The local WISP doesn't point in my direction (and would want >$100/month for reasonable speed if they did). The only high-speed I've got there is via the Verizon LTE service (which is big $$$ for the gigs I'd need to work remotely for more than a weekend at a time - and SUPPOSEDLY doesn't have coverage there).
- If I could get decent internet (at a decent price) I could work from the ranch, sell off the California townhouse, and live for a year on less than it costs to live in CA for a month. (Or retire and live comfortably on my savings, investments, and Social Security - which would crap out in a few years on the Soviet Left Coast.)
That works out to just over $2,000 per subscriber ($3B/1.2M subscribers)...
I get $2,500 per subscriber. (dc agrees with me.)
I consider an extra 25% as a bit more than "just over".
It would be useful both for disrupting "business as usual" that they don't like and herding crowds into range of a more lethal device.
I can imagine several of them being flown into, and triggered in, sessions of a legislature that authorized them. But I somehow doubt that would actually happen, even in tyrannical foreign regimes. If the legislature is giving the tyrant and his security forces what they want, why use it on them? And if the opposition can get them in there with "less than lethal" weapons packages, "more than lethal" would be even easier, and have a more lasting effect on future legislation. (Realpolitik is a bitch.)
The Drone Wars Have [] Begun
It's Bode's Ramdove.
It looks to me like the field-reversed configuration does the same sort of thing, compressing the plasma in a way that maps the electric fields (both directly applied and created by the magnetic field change) into particle acceleration during the compression, and thus into temperature.
Then again, this machine also builds TWO plasma donuts and crashes them into each other (where they combine) at "a million kph" - no doubt also by electrical-field acceleration. Another opportunity to scale up the heating by scaling up the voltage (or its magnetic equivalent).
First off, there is a big difference between something like a fusor which is basically accelerating a beam of particles to some amount of eV that is similar to the applied voltage, and something going for a thermal distribution with same amount of eV spread out with a tail of the distribution that does most of the reactions
Fusors and polywells aren't about beams. They're about assembling a plasma object that is already hot, by compressing it during the assembly.
The fusor does this by having two concentric spherical electrodes, the inner one skeletal, with a large voltage between them. Positive ions fall inward essentially radially, accelerated by the field until they pass through the inner electrode, and fly on orbits that pass through the center of the spheres. They "pile up" as they pass through the center, thus mapping the acceleration voltage directly into compression temperature as well as high average density. (Unfortunately a small number of ions hit the inner electrode on each pass and are lost. So though it's a great fusion-neutron source breakeven isn't in the cards.)
The polywell does the same thing to electrons - with the added tweak that the inner electrode contains a set of magnet coils that get the electrons to travel in paths that mostly miss the electrode. As they orbit through the center the high average density there is effectively a third high-voltage negative electrode, producing a radial electric field between this "virtual electrode" at the center and the inner physical electrode. Positive ions fall in toward the virtual electrode (nearly neutralizing it) and again you get a high density and inward velocity, mapping the electric field into temperature.
It looks to me like the field-reversed configuration does the same sort of thing, compressing the plasma in a way that maps the electric fields (both directly applied and created by the magnetic field change) into particle acceleration during the compression, and thus into temperature. Unlike Tokamaks and similar devices, you don't "put a low-density plasma in a (magnetic) can" and then have to heat it up. You heat it by squeezing it when you initially assemble it, accelerating the particles toward each other, and that maps your compression forces into temperature - which turns a moderately high voltage into a relative particle speed that has a hysterically high number when expressed as temperature (at the same time that you're also raising the density) Hold it together long enough, don't let it interact with solid matter to cool it, and you've got the holy trinity for fusion. No ongoing heating required.
Also, you don't just easily scale up voltage past several 10s of kV, as you start reaching a lot of material limits for break down (even in vacuum), and engineering gets more difficult for 100+ kV in a small space.
So:
- Expand the space (which also gives you more plasma volume and thus more power output at a given density), and
- Keep anything but ionized, under-control, gasses out of the working region
100+ kV is not all THAT difficult to handle in an industrial-sized volume. Air at atmospheric pressure has a breakdown of about 40,000 v/in (though this drops as pressure is lowered). A clean vacuum (except for the working plasma itself) isn't too tough either: Television picture tubes worked fine with no arc-over at acceleration voltages of about a kilovolt per diagonal inch (i.e. 25 kV for a 25" picture tube) and far more than a kV per inch inside the tube. A machine twenty feet across would have substantially lower electric field at 200 kV.
Which is not to say that there won't be issues trying to scale this. But I wouldn't expect anything insurmountable from what you've alluded to here.