There is also no way to disprove that the universe was created by a tea pot orbiting Venus. Sure there is. You point your big, large telescope (maybe Hubble, if you can get some time on that precious instrument... especially when you are going to point it so near the sun) in the neighborhood of Venus, and if you don't find a tea pot orbiting Venus, then the universe was not created by a tea pot orbiting Venus.
Also, that statement can be logically ruled out rather easily, by what some people call "causality" (yes, damn experimental verification). The argument roughly follows as below: 1) The sun is at the very least a second-generation star, because it has too many heavy elements around it to be a first generation star (which would be formed entirely from hydrogen). 2) Venus, because it orbits the sun with relatively circular orbit (i.e. low energy for its angular momentum), it should have formed around the sun (i.e. it's not an extra-solar object caught by Sun's gravity, as we suspect some of the comets to be). 3) Universe began (... there are still some on-going debates on this, but let's suspend our sense of scientific doubt and disbelief and say that Big Bang marks a definite beginning of our universe) before the formation of our sun (if only to provide the space-time in which to exist, not to mention the raw material... which had to come from the first generation supernovae). 4) Therefore, the tea pot orbiting Venus, if it exists, existed after the creation of universe, and what did not exist before universe began could not have created the universe.
I'll leave disproving God as an exercise for the reader.
As a college teacher, I'm uncomfortable with the place that AP exams now occupy in our educational system. When I went to college, it was considered unusual to take AP exams, and nobody had ever heard of a GPA higher than 4.0. Now, with AP classes counting +1 on the GPA, Berkeley is turning away a sizable fraction of all students with 4.0 GPAs. Don't worry—on many college applications, they will simply renormalize the GPA down to 4.0 (I think UC Berkeley's application tells you to ignore extra weight placed on AP classes and scale "5.0" down to 4.0, but I could be remembering wrong—it's been years since I had to fill out an application for college).
Also, some colleges will do something that's... even better—i.e. they tell the student to re-scale their entire GPA, if the maximum grade point achievable is higher than 4.0. That should nicely backfire on those asshat schools offering "4.3" grade point for A+ or 5.0 grade point for the B.S. (and S. doesn't stand for "Science") that is AP.
Frankly, the best investment I made in high school was taking a few lower-division science classes in community colleges. If you are in California, they are likely to be transferable to U.C. campuses, and, by jolly, you learn a lot more there than in these supposed "college-level" classes. Oh, and did I mention, that for many counties in California, attending community college classes might be free for high school students, unlike these overpriced worthless tests?
And that would be different from the other loves how?;-) It dies the moment money dries up. Other loves tend to... take their sweet time withering away.
Firstly, because SYSTEM and Administrator have different privilege levels. To me, that makes as much difference as between kernel-level access and userland access.
That is, not a whole lot, as long as all you are trying to do is own the system or otherwise do malicious things to it. If you were a virus/trojan writer, would you ever hit yourself on the forehead saying, "Damn, this Administrator access isn't good enough. I need SYSTEM access to totally own this system"?*
The truth is, at least before Vista (I wouldn't know about Vista since I never used it), Windows' security model was broken. No security model where the default user (as pointed out by my sibling poster) runs as superuser ever is.
* On the other hand, if you are trying to install a rootkit, then you might need kernel-level access. But once you have superuser access, such things are fairly easy to do---modifying the kernel in memory may not be completely safe, but it's been done before.
IE does not, and never has, run as SYSTEM. Prior to Vista it runs as the user who starts it. In Vista it runs with privileges lower than a regular user. So, prior to Vista, when it ran as the user who starts it, given that over 90% of the cases the default user has complete and unlimited access to the system files, how is running as user different from running as SYSTEM? (And, yes, I pull that "90%" figure out of my arse---but I'll bet it's higher.)
By the way - as a supplement to the comment above, here is a simple example of the difference between 8 bit and 16 bit colour: Except, of course, the examples touch on corner cases that most people will never have to deal with. The guy had to degrade each picture severely and then restore (two lossy processes) before he could show any difference between 16 bit and 8 bit. Even if you are a professional, how often do you need to deal with badly degraded pictures that needs its contrast boosted by a huge amount, potentially leaving gaps in the spectrum?
To me, this looks just like an audiophile trying to justify the need for a $1000 power cable for his stereo system. Amateurs wouldn't care (for the most part) about the 8-bit vs. 16-bit difference, since the quality difference in the final product is minimal for what they need. Professionals shouldn't care about this difference, since, being a professional, he ought to have better equipments (camera with fast lenses, scanners that can do this sort of adjustment while scanning, not after the fact), and wouldn't need to resort to such drastic enhancements that show the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit.
I'm not saying that flexibility 16-bit gives (BTW, it's only on levels and such things---you can't actually do most of the work in 16-bit, since most actions are disabled in Photoshop until you convert that picture to 8-bit) isn't good. I'm just saying it's not *that* good.
I don't know much about the subject, but not being able to work CYMK color channels seems an awfully big impediment to doing work intended for print. Because working with CMYK converted in real-time to RGB by your monitor is great for matching colors for the printed work?
Forgetting for the moment that more than half of Photoshop functionality doesn't work for CMYK images, since most effects and filters will work only in RGB mode, RGB to CMYK conversion is best done at the print shop, since it's bound to be very device/media-dependent.
And really, do you trust anything other than the proof pages, or better yet, the final product when you really have to match colors so carefully that the fact that you can't do RGB to CMYK conversion yourself is hurting you?
Granted, this is one of the things GIMP lacks that it might be nice to have... but there are a hundred more things that ought to have higher priority than this. Show me a professional who works exclusively in CMYK, and I'll show you someone who just needs a good RGB to CMYK conversion table, not a fancy photo-editing application like Photoshop.
By contrast, I put in a Linux DVD, and I install everything. If I want to install something more, I can do the insanely difficult exercise of typing "sudo apt get install [programname]". On the other hand, I specifically install from Debian netinstall CD so that it won't install everything (I deselect the default-selected "Desktop Environment" and "Standard Installation"). Then, over the next week or so, as I feel the need for a package, I just do, e.g., "sudo aptitude install emacs". Or, if I have to compile something to get the latest that haven't made into Debian stable, "sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape".
This ensures that I don't have a package/software that I don't need on my system.
I doubt this will how things happen, if Windows does go modular, though. Unless they start packaging their own distribution of GNU/Linux.
I recommended my friend try AbiWord, but by then another geek had popped up and installed Microsoft Office on the machine. This is why you need to make this clear to your friends: unless they use free software (office applications like Abiword, or operating systems like GNU/Linux), they are on their own when they have problems.
If enough of us (at least those of us fortunate enough not to be forced to use Windows or support people using them) do this, then even that "neighborhood geek" will realize that he can "help" only so many people this way.
It's not enough that we don't use MS Office ourselves or recommend alternate programs to others. We have to refuse to "help" (I use that word in the sense of giving cocaine to someone suffering from withdrawal symptoms) those who actively undermine the establishment of thriving free and open source software culture.
Maybe this is why hardware companies like Nvidia and ATI aren't forthcoming with the source for their drivers. They're afraid they might be infringing on one or more patents, and that releasing source code would allow the patent holder to find out about the infringements. I don't know about nVidia, but at least ATI claims that they can't release the source because of third party agreements. Otherwise, they (and I presume nVidia as well) have been fairly good with releasing specs.
Really, the standard that's held up to hardware companies is how good they are in releasing specs and providing information necessary for free software developers (so that they don't have to reverse-engineer the protocol, etc.). I don't think anyone expects the hardware companies to develop their own driver, only to donate it away. It would be good if they did, but as far as I know, no one in the hardware business does (if they do release a "free" driver, then something else is packaged away as an unknown binary firmware that has to be loaded into the device before the driver can work).
My point is; that it to call it "Dark Matter" and to be done with it leaves things rather vague. Science rarely is so succinct and simple. You misunderstand. This is the way it happens in science. If you don't understand something, you give it a name.
At least that way, we know what we don't understand.
Super-strong electromagnets are one application of current superconductors. The only problem is, magnetic fields tend to break superconductivity. Magnetic fields break symmetry (either parity or time-reversal; I forget), and superconductors don't like that.
I'm sad to see that article doesn't address this issue (or state what the critical magnetic field value is; I doubt the researchers missed this important characteristic of a new superconducting material), but this is mainly why we still use liquid-helium-cooled magnets in MRI machines---we do have superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen (much cheaper and not in limited supply), but none of those can withstand tens of teslas needed before they lose superconductivity.
I sense a double standard. Yes, and that would be... because there is a double standard of what is "unsupported" driver with, say Windows vs. Linux, the kernel.
With Windows, unsupported means that it didn't receive Microsoft Seal of Approval (regardless of whether the driver itself is in alpha, beta, or production stage, and regardless of whether it correctly uses published API).
With Linux, the kernel, something would be unsupported... because it is impossible to support the driver (i.e. it's a binary blob with no source code available).
With Windows, having one's driver unsupported is not the vendor's fault---it's Microsoft Windows that doesn't work with the driver (assuming, the driver itself was written to some published API). With Linux, having the driver unsupported is precisely the vendor's fault, for not releasing the source code (and complying with GPLv2; although the kernel developers don't seem to mind it too much, it is a widely held opinion that writing an extension to a GPL-covered work for the sole purpose of linking to the covered work makes it a derivative work and hence subject to the terms of GPL).
As far as the users go, I don't see any double standard here. Just normal reactions. If it doesn't seem that way to you, well, prove me wrong and show me a GPL'd Linux kernel module (... that isn't marked "EXPERIMENTAL" or is in alpha stage) that a kernel developer says is unsupported and will do nothing to fix any problems with it.
Not in a novel. Don't you ever run into a character late in a book and then go flipping back madly to try to remember who they were? Nope. That's where total recall comes in useful.
Just kidding. If that happens, I just Google-search for the character. Using my paperback.
In more seriousness, it's actually in "flipping madly" that ebooks really lack. If you don't remember the exact phrase or words, but it feels like a few sentences in the context would bring back your memory (I had that reading Herodotus's History), then there's no substitute for flipping through pages, and the refresh rate on ebook readers, or even PDF readers on a PC isn't that great compared to what you can do with a paperback.
It's open source, right? Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something? A plug-in???? Well, that was good for a laugh. Do you also suppose that if there's something wrong with Linux, the kernel, then we should write userland tools to "fix" it?
As far as patch goes, have you heard about how difficult it is to get the patch accepted by the Mozilla team? And although I wouldn't know too well myself, since I am not a programmer, but I can imagine how ungratifying the job of maintaining such a patch would be (given that the upstream is changing).
I take it you won't be advertising your service? Naw. He will just configure his server as a mail server to send out "informationals" to "potential customers".
Really? How much will you bet me that you can do a text search on your paperback faster than I can on my ebook? Well, I don't know about a "text search", but if you are talking about simply looking up some information, there are these things called "Index". You may have heard of it. It's usually at the end of the book that most people don't bother getting to.
Also there are the blind-deaf-mute to take into consideration. I'm not sure why "they" are allowed to produce computers at all, for any purpose whatsoever! And, how does this stop one from using a keyboard and a tactile screen?
Who was that greek stoic who said "Call no man happy, until he is dead"? It's like that with insurance. Call no man insured, until he is dead. It was no stoic. It was the historian Herodotus.
But then, I guess if you believe that he was telling the truth (there are a lot of reasons to think that this particular account was more a legend than true story), I suppose it would be Solon of Athens, speaking to Croesus of Lydia (... and later, Croesus of Lydia, relaying it to Cyrus of Persia).
FYI I'm against power sellers. They're impossible to communicate with, they don't know anything about the items they're selling, and they take forever to ship items. If you want exactly what you want and want it fast, you gotta buy it from someone with under 250 feedback. I don't know about that. The only time I got burned from an eBay transaction was by someone with 20-odd feedbacks selling an old hard drive. He would claim to guarantee that it worked, but when you actually bought it delayed for 3 to 4 good months before actually shipping it. I found that it arrived in a USPS envelope (yes, an envelope, not a box), and by the time I figured out that the drive was no good (oh, it worked---it just had bad sectors spread all over the drive that would damage random bytes here and there), 40 days passed and I couldn't even leave a bad feedback on him, or make a claim to eBay.
Nowadays, I just don't shop at eBay at all. Why buy anything there when you can actually get lower prices on most items elsewhere when they are on sale? The only things worth buying on eBay are old or rare items, and those are the exact things you shouldn't buy in places without a proven customer service record (and rating system can never be customer service (i.e. what happens when the item is defective?) record).
I don't have flash on this computer, making both the links in the summary a complete and total waste of time. You are righter than you might have imagined—I do have the latest version of Gnash with my Icecat, and it doesn't play. Given the source of inspiration for the free culture movement (which, in turn, is the basis for this change congress movement), one might have thought that Lessig would ensure that the video would play in the free implementation of flash, but no.
I suppose there's not real harm done, since it's not like I need to see the 5-minute presentation to understand why he shouldn't fight a fight he can't win and choose his battles wisely.
The recognition mechanism sounds tricky but nothing a sub-skin RFID can't solve (you authorize people to use the drive by implanting them with authorized RFIDs). Except, of course, RFIDs are notoriously insecure—no physical contact needed to glean all the information one could want, unless it's protected again with a reasonable challenge/response system, but is there even one in existence? I suppose you could try biometric information such as full DNA scan, but then, do you really trust your evil twin?
It really comes down to the fact that for a truly good security, a man really needs his own island. With electrified shores.
This has been a really interesting discussion. Not nitpicking, just asking for clarification. Isn't momentum consistent between m > 0 and m = 0, as long as you always put it in terms of E? Well... that might be an interesting idea, but I think there are a few problems.
gamma( = 1/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2)) does not depend on mass, so if you define it as 1 where v = c, it's rather arbitrary (as v -> c, gamma approaches infinity, so it's not a "removable discontinuity").
When you write E = mc^2, you are talking about a particle's rest energy. In fact, E = gamma * m * c^2 (and, of course, if the particle is at rest, gamma = 1).....
Fixing above problems, this is as far as I can take (... at least from my limited knowledge of undergraduate special relativity): If you write p = E/c (which is certainly the case for photons and all (so far undiscovered) massless particles), then for massive particles, it works out as:
using E = gamma * m * c^2, with gamma = 1/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2) (this is the correct formula for particles that are not at rest; E = mc^2 only gives the "rest energy"), we get:
p = gamma * m * c^2 / c = gamma * m * c
But of course, the correct formula is p = gamma * m * v, so it's not right. I suppose you could "define" momentum as p = E * (v/c^2)... but the real question is, what kind of physical insight does this provide?
I personally don't see anything wrong with having two different formulas for massive case (p = gamma * m * v) and the massless case (p = E/c), as these are fundamentally different cases (see: ongoing question of neutrino mass... although I think by now it's mostly settled that it's not massless).
Slashdot Mirror
Also, that statement can be logically ruled out rather easily, by what some people call "causality" (yes, damn experimental verification). The argument roughly follows as below:
1) The sun is at the very least a second-generation star, because it has too many heavy elements around it to be a first generation star (which would be formed entirely from hydrogen).
2) Venus, because it orbits the sun with relatively circular orbit (i.e. low energy for its angular momentum), it should have formed around the sun (i.e. it's not an extra-solar object caught by Sun's gravity, as we suspect some of the comets to be).
3) Universe began (... there are still some on-going debates on this, but let's suspend our sense of scientific doubt and disbelief and say that Big Bang marks a definite beginning of our universe) before the formation of our sun (if only to provide the space-time in which to exist, not to mention the raw material
4) Therefore, the tea pot orbiting Venus, if it exists, existed after the creation of universe, and what did not exist before universe began could not have created the universe.
I'll leave disproving God as an exercise for the reader.
Also, some colleges will do something that's
Frankly, the best investment I made in high school was taking a few lower-division science classes in community colleges. If you are in California, they are likely to be transferable to U.C. campuses, and, by jolly, you learn a lot more there than in these supposed "college-level" classes. Oh, and did I mention, that for many counties in California, attending community college classes might be free for high school students, unlike these overpriced worthless tests?
That is, not a whole lot, as long as all you are trying to do is own the system or otherwise do malicious things to it. If you were a virus/trojan writer, would you ever hit yourself on the forehead saying, "Damn, this Administrator access isn't good enough. I need SYSTEM access to totally own this system"?*
The truth is, at least before Vista (I wouldn't know about Vista since I never used it), Windows' security model was broken. No security model where the default user (as pointed out by my sibling poster) runs as superuser ever is.
* On the other hand, if you are trying to install a rootkit, then you might need kernel-level access. But once you have superuser access, such things are fairly easy to do---modifying the kernel in memory may not be completely safe, but it's been done before.
To me, this looks just like an audiophile trying to justify the need for a $1000 power cable for his stereo system. Amateurs wouldn't care (for the most part) about the 8-bit vs. 16-bit difference, since the quality difference in the final product is minimal for what they need. Professionals shouldn't care about this difference, since, being a professional, he ought to have better equipments (camera with fast lenses, scanners that can do this sort of adjustment while scanning, not after the fact), and wouldn't need to resort to such drastic enhancements that show the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit.
I'm not saying that flexibility 16-bit gives (BTW, it's only on levels and such things---you can't actually do most of the work in 16-bit, since most actions are disabled in Photoshop until you convert that picture to 8-bit) isn't good. I'm just saying it's not *that* good.
Forgetting for the moment that more than half of Photoshop functionality doesn't work for CMYK images, since most effects and filters will work only in RGB mode, RGB to CMYK conversion is best done at the print shop, since it's bound to be very device/media-dependent.
And really, do you trust anything other than the proof pages, or better yet, the final product when you really have to match colors so carefully that the fact that you can't do RGB to CMYK conversion yourself is hurting you?
Granted, this is one of the things GIMP lacks that it might be nice to have
This ensures that I don't have a package/software that I don't need on my system.
I doubt this will how things happen, if Windows does go modular, though. Unless they start packaging their own distribution of GNU/Linux.
If enough of us (at least those of us fortunate enough not to be forced to use Windows or support people using them) do this, then even that "neighborhood geek" will realize that he can "help" only so many people this way.
It's not enough that we don't use MS Office ourselves or recommend alternate programs to others. We have to refuse to "help" (I use that word in the sense of giving cocaine to someone suffering from withdrawal symptoms) those who actively undermine the establishment of thriving free and open source software culture.
Really, the standard that's held up to hardware companies is how good they are in releasing specs and providing information necessary for free software developers (so that they don't have to reverse-engineer the protocol, etc.). I don't think anyone expects the hardware companies to develop their own driver, only to donate it away. It would be good if they did, but as far as I know, no one in the hardware business does (if they do release a "free" driver, then something else is packaged away as an unknown binary firmware that has to be loaded into the device before the driver can work).
At least that way, we know what we don't understand.
Duct-tape a piece of lead in front of the lens. Problem solved.
I'm sad to see that article doesn't address this issue (or state what the critical magnetic field value is; I doubt the researchers missed this important characteristic of a new superconducting material), but this is mainly why we still use liquid-helium-cooled magnets in MRI machines---we do have superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen (much cheaper and not in limited supply), but none of those can withstand tens of teslas needed before they lose superconductivity.
With Windows, unsupported means that it didn't receive Microsoft Seal of Approval (regardless of whether the driver itself is in alpha, beta, or production stage, and regardless of whether it correctly uses published API).
With Linux, the kernel, something would be unsupported
With Windows, having one's driver unsupported is not the vendor's fault---it's Microsoft Windows that doesn't work with the driver (assuming, the driver itself was written to some published API). With Linux, having the driver unsupported is precisely the vendor's fault, for not releasing the source code (and complying with GPLv2; although the kernel developers don't seem to mind it too much, it is a widely held opinion that writing an extension to a GPL-covered work for the sole purpose of linking to the covered work makes it a derivative work and hence subject to the terms of GPL).
As far as the users go, I don't see any double standard here. Just normal reactions. If it doesn't seem that way to you, well, prove me wrong and show me a GPL'd Linux kernel module (... that isn't marked "EXPERIMENTAL" or is in alpha stage) that a kernel developer says is unsupported and will do nothing to fix any problems with it.
Just kidding. If that happens, I just Google-search for the character. Using my paperback.
In more seriousness, it's actually in "flipping madly" that ebooks really lack. If you don't remember the exact phrase or words, but it feels like a few sentences in the context would bring back your memory (I had that reading Herodotus's History), then there's no substitute for flipping through pages, and the refresh rate on ebook readers, or even PDF readers on a PC isn't that great compared to what you can do with a paperback.
As far as patch goes, have you heard about how difficult it is to get the patch accepted by the Mozilla team? And although I wouldn't know too well myself, since I am not a programmer, but I can imagine how ungratifying the job of maintaining such a patch would be (given that the upstream is changing).
Except, of course, you can't throw them across the room. Not these days.
But then, I guess if you believe that he was telling the truth (there are a lot of reasons to think that this particular account was more a legend than true story), I suppose it would be Solon of Athens, speaking to Croesus of Lydia (... and later, Croesus of Lydia, relaying it to Cyrus of Persia).
Nowadays, I just don't shop at eBay at all. Why buy anything there when you can actually get lower prices on most items elsewhere when they are on sale? The only things worth buying on eBay are old or rare items, and those are the exact things you shouldn't buy in places without a proven customer service record (and rating system can never be customer service (i.e. what happens when the item is defective?) record).
I suppose there's not real harm done, since it's not like I need to see the 5-minute presentation to understand why he shouldn't fight a fight he can't win and choose his battles wisely.
It really comes down to the fact that for a truly good security, a man really needs his own island. With electrified shores.
- gamma( = 1/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2)) does not depend on mass, so if you define it as 1 where v = c, it's rather arbitrary (as v -> c, gamma approaches infinity, so it's not a "removable discontinuity").
- When you write E = mc^2, you are talking about a particle's rest energy. In fact, E = gamma * m * c^2 (and, of course, if the particle is at rest, gamma = 1).
....
Fixing above problems, this is as far as I can take (... at least from my limited knowledge of undergraduate special relativity): If you write p = E/c (which is certainly the case for photons and all (so far undiscovered) massless particles), then for massive particles, it works out as:using E = gamma * m * c^2, with gamma = 1/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2) (this is the correct formula for particles that are not at rest; E = mc^2 only gives the "rest energy"), we get:
p = gamma * m * c^2 / c = gamma * m * c
But of course, the correct formula is p = gamma * m * v, so it's not right. I suppose you could "define" momentum as p = E * (v/c^2)
I personally don't see anything wrong with having two different formulas for massive case (p = gamma * m * v) and the massless case (p = E/c), as these are fundamentally different cases (see: ongoing question of neutrino mass