In theory, yes, but only in theory. A share in a corporation represents fractional ownership, but an individual shareholder can't exchange his share for that fraction of company assets. The best he could do is vote for directors who promise to auction off the company and give the proceeds to shareholders; it's quite rare that a publically traded company goes through that.
In practice, that share has monetary value because of two possibilities:
1) The company will distribute a portion of its profits as dividends. You own a fraction of the company, so you get a fraction of the profits. Just like owning your own company, but without the hassles of sole proprietorship.
2a) Someone else will buy the share from you. Now, this someone else is motivated by possibility #1, perhaps in the distant future
OR
2b) In principle, even if dividends were not being paid, a person or corporation with enough resources could buy a majority of the shares and either begin paying dividends, OR, take the company private or as a subsidiary, and take the profits or liquidate assets that way.
2B is usually just a theoretical floor to a stock's value when the possibility of dividends is still remote. I.e., why a "growth" company losing tons of money doesn't immediately go to zero stock price. In a bull market, the price is kept up by 2A, otherwise known as the "greater fool theory."
Actually, the critical point is the "upper right" end of the liquid-gas phase boundary. The solid phase does not exist at the critical point.
The triple point is where all three phases meet, but it is at lower temperatures where the substance can freeze. For water, for instance, the triple point is at 0.01 C, at a pressure of 4.5 torr. The critical point of water, by contrast, is at 374 C, and 165467 torr.
Triple points are useful because they are single points in the phase plane that are relatively easy to realize. In fact, several triple points are used to define the international temperature scale.
The reason the critical point is interesting theoretically is that it means you can manipulate temperature and pressure to go around the critical point, going from liquid to gas and back without crossing a phase transition line; this is possible because the liquid and gas actually have the same symmetry. In fact, the transition AT the critical point tends to take place very slowly; theoretically, this is known as "critical slowing", and experimentally, this is seen as "critical opalescence." Studies and measurements at the critical point are made difficult by this slowing: it is very hard to be sure your sample is at equilibrium. This is in contrast to the triple point, which is relatively easy to verify.
From an industrial perspective (such as decaffeination), the critical point is interesting because that phase transition line is what causes disruptive effects such as surface tension and boiling. If you can maneuver around that point without crossing the line, you can, for instance, vaporize liquid to dry something out without destroying the delicate structures that were wet.
The FUNDAMENTAL law of economics or human behavior, which you seem to disbelieve, is that people RESPOND to incentives. They don't just keep doing the same thing because it is "necessary." If prices go up for a resource, consumers use less because they CHANGE their behavior.
When the price of gasoline goes up PEOPLE WILL USE LESS. They might still commute to work, but the summer drive to the beach or to the family reunion looks less necessary. They will check more often that their tires are inflated properly. They will buy a motorcycle to ride to work. As the price of gasoline increases, the adjustments will become greater.
The whole picture of reality that you paint, of people living so far from work without access to public transportation, of having fresh food in large supply, grew up IN RESPONSE TO cheap fuel for transportation. If gasoline ever becomes drastically expensive THE PICTURE WILL CHANGE. Perhaps the picture will look like 50, 100, 500 years ago, or perhaps it will look much different, with plenty of nuclear fission plants and electric vehicles. We might end up eating lots more salted, smoked, and pickled food, and riding horses. But it won't be people driving SUVs in three hour commutes if gas goes up to $20 a gallon.
You admit the same thing yourself, when you admit "Yes, we can live without gasoline." That means it is not a necessity, now, is it?
For almost everything, the term "necessity" is emotive, not technically precise.
So you are equating gasoline with food in the heirarchy of human needs? Civilization existed for thousands of years without the benefit of gasoline (though not without agriculture), and you claim that gas is as essential as food?
Yes, undoubtedly, one lives much better with gasoline than without, which is why people continue to buy gasoline readily as the price rises. But it is hardly indispensible. Evidently, the price hasn't yet risen enough to force you to be more creative. If the price of gasoline rose to $1000 per gallon, I'm sure you find some other job that didn't require a commute (you know, perhaps using this newfangled Internet thing), or riding a bike, or even go in a horsedrawn stagecoach.
Yes, your life would be harder. If you really couldn't find *any* job that was accessible without gasoline, you might end up living in a cardboard box, eating rice and beans for a couple dollars a week that you scratch together. But I think you could live for a pretty long time without buying gasoline, if forced to. Plenty of people in the third world do so.
Do you have a point to make? Because you haven't said anything that convinces me that the gasoline market is not competitive.
If these customers are so captive, and the market non-competitive, then why isn't gasoline $100 a gallon, then? Seems like an easy way for the oil companies to make even bigger profits, right?
The reason is that people aren't actually forced to buy gas, they choose to, just as they *choose* to go places and have jobs and go to the doctor.
If gas goes up to $100 a gallon, you can bet more people will bike to work or move closer to work, or decide that a second income in the family does not cover the extra cost of gas. All choices freely made.
The technical term for what you are trying to describe is "elasticity" of demand. Rising prices do discourage consumption. Less for gasoline than for baseball tickets, but there is an effect. This has nothing to do with the competitiveness of the market.
Well, when reading those fuel economy figures, you have to remember that these economies are measured under test conditions, such as a dynamometer.
Most people driving a 'Vette have driving habits which probably cause a performance different than measured by a dynamometer run. I.e., how many 'Vette owners really "baby it"?
Re:Inflation.
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
People always come out of the woodwork to talk about "cartels" and "price gouging" but the simple fact is that if any group could voluntarily band together to increase the price of gasoline or petroleum THEY WOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IT. Meaning that $2 gas in the US wouldn't be news, but rather old hat.
The fact that gasoline prices go through these wild gyrations is exactly because the market *is* competitive, so there isn't any deliberate control which can be used to smooth things out.
Cartels like Major League baseball and monopolies like Microsoft do have price changes, of course, but not daily, and not with such violent disruptive effects. Instead, they apply the slow squeeze.
This sort of thinking misses the point: it usually falls under the name "broken window fallacy." For instance, after every hurricane, you hear about how there is a boom in home construction and window repair to fix damaged buildings. If you just watched the local news on TV, you might naively wonder "if hurricanes are so good for business, why don't we break windows all year round?"
The answer is that all the resources (capital, raw materials, and labor) that went into fixing the broken windows could have been used, in the absence of a hurricane, to build new structures, so that over the same period, you would have had more buildings, instead of the same number of buildings returned to pre-storm condition.
You can't simply count the money and claim that it is a net benefit to the nation's welfare (in the sense of happiness/utility). If we paid billions of dollars to dig a hole in the ground and billions more to fill it up, you should agree that is a net waste of resources, even if that money got paid to Earthlings. Sure, the hole diggers and fillers will claim all sorts of spin-off benefits (better technology to dig holes!) and "jobs created" by their efforts, but it doesn't make it a good policy.
Any government-mandated spending has the effect of distorting capital, labor, and resource markets, in ways which might (might: I'm not some die-hard starve-the-government type) reduce overall welfare.
Spending billions of dollars to place robotic go-karts on Mars, for instance, is not self-evidently the best way to spend the money.
By 1750 or so, the previous reign of Latin as the scientific language of the West was coming to an end. Take Newton for example: Principia in Latin, Optics in English.
In the late 1800s, organic chemistry was being done by the Germans. Huge amounts of reference material are (or at least were 10 years ago, when I cared) still in German, unlikely to be translated. In the early 20th century, they were the ones doing quantum mechanics.
In other fields, such as mathematics, Latin persisted longer, or languages like Russian are more common.
The French, of course, have done more than most other language communities to force the use of their preferred tongue (such as in diplomacy) where most people would rather drop it as redundant with English.
Actually, the difficulty of word formation in Chinese is a major obstacle to its use in technical contexts.
Imagine trying to come up with a unique ideogram or compound ideogram to use for every new chemical compound you discover, or every new invention. It quickly becomes cumbersome: Chinese has a (for practical purposes) fixed set of ideograms which are already pretty much full with all the meanings they can handle. Even if you could invent ideograms, how would you standardize them and include them in font sets, etc.
Plus, even if you come up with a compound (like "electric brain" for instance), it's stuck. It's hard to make it more precise (think of electric vs. electronic in English) or evolve in other directions as computers evolve from humans running mechanical calculators to electromechanical devices to electronic tubes to integrated circuits to quantum computers. quantum electric brain? Hardly as perspicuous as quantum computer. You can even end up in contradictions if you pick the wrong thing to use. Imagine if telephone had a used a compound like "wire talker" how do you describe a wireless or cordless phone: "no wire wire talker"? "air talker"? Well, maybe that's already used for television, it just gets crazy.
In English, we have the possibility to go grab whatever we want from Greek, Latin, German, Russian, even Chinese, and add whatever prefixes, compounds, or suffixes we want, and we can make it work.
Chinese worked great for a relatively static Confucian academic tradition. For a rapidly evolving technological society, it has difficulties.
Because in lasers, one is stimulating the emission with the same frequency (=energy) of the transition. The hafnium claim is that one is able with X-ray (lower) energies excite a transition in the hafnium nucleus into a state of nearly the same excited energy that has a much quicker decay path to the ground state.
Except that nuclear physicists claim that the current theories of nuclear structure predict a reaction rate/efficiency *much* lower than the advocates claim to have observed, and the experimentalists have not been able to reproduce the advocates' results.
No, actually, when the article says "nuclear isomer" it means "nuclear isomer" as in same nuclear constitutents, different quantum mechanical state.
Long-lived nuclear isomers are basically "stuck" in an excited state that takes a long while to find its way to the ground state of the nucleus. They have the same number of protons and neutrons (i.e. are the same "isotope") as the ground state nucleus, but slightly more energy (on a nuclear scale).
The (probably bogus) claim is that you might be able to control (accelerate) the release of the extra energy by external means.
Depends on what you mean by "led to" in your transistor example, but AT&T was mostly interested in low-noise repeaters for long distance telephone service, not in radar.
Which is not to play down the enormous contributions to technology made by the Rad Lab and other research groups in radar.
The difference is that these "graduate students" (about 20 of whom won Nobel prizes), were trained in the latest developments in atomic and nuclear physics at the time, and had the technical training to use and adapt that knowledge.
Al Qaeda, by contrast, puts its highest emphasis on knoweldge of the Koran, and secondarily on guerrilla training and weapons with minimal technical sophistication. Yes, they have desire, but they have the wrong mindset and training to have any success in such an engineering endeavor.
The only likely way for Al Qaeda to get nuclear weapons is to persuade their allies in the Pakistani intelligence organization or Iran to arrange for a bomb to be "misplaced" on its way to North Korea or some such.
I'm sorry, but writing device drivers in Lisp (non-functionally) would be a freaking dream come true. Serious Lisp environments have an assembler layer with Lispy syntax available, for starters.
The main win is macros; you can create all sorts of syntactic and semantic sugar to abstract this Lispy assembler syntax into something that makes sense. Synchronization primitives, etc., can be abstracted into intelligent macros which can be context-aware. Plus, Lisp is there at every stage of the process, including before compilation/assembly. Need to precompute a lookup table? Write Lisp code to generate it at compile time.
Hey, I'm certainly not going to call debuggers useless; I use them, albeit usually in a crude way to do stepping where I need to check hardware state. But I must say that I have rarely felt comfortable using an IDE debugger to find a logic error; the old insert printfs and read, or interactive use of a Lisp REPL or test harness have always felt more comfortable.
Another advantage of printfs or adding code to the app is that most languages are more powerful than the UIs of interactive debuggers; even the best inspectors make it hard to filter out large arrays to find the problem in element 1085. But I can add a little helper function to scan through the array in code and find exactly what I want. In Lisp, the full language is available in the debugger, so the debugging and coding are hard to distinguish. Sometimes the tools you write to make the code are the same tools that are useful for debugging, whether you plan it that way or not.
Different strokes for different folks---we're all fighting the same enemy: the bugs.
There is something weird about debugging, however, which I can't quite put my finger on. Powerful language features have a return on investment which has a longer time to compound. You can attack bigger problems by understanding the language better, so spending time to understand the language pays off.
Powerful debugger features don't really have time to compound. Sure, they may save you 50% of your time tracking down a particular bug, but only if you recognize that the bug you have is solved with that tool.If you get a lot of practice using that tool, however, you'll tend to stop making the kind of specific mistake that makes the tool valuable.
Before you know how to use a language feature, you can write toy examples until you can feel comfortable. It's hard to practice with a debugger; how do you make toy mistakes---make a mistake deliberately and forget what mistake you made?
The reason people use C-like languages is still because of "Worse is Better."
Kernighan mentions that in the interview as well: people who can think in the very abstract way that is the true power of Lisp and functional languages are usually smart enough to be able to sweep all sorts of practical issues away very easily.
Most people, even software people, however, can't or won't think abstractly. They need something concrete, and C is nothing if not concrete. Whatever you want to do, you can bang the C rocks together until it happens mostly the way you want, and move on. I've seen people code in C by adding and subtracting & and * operators until their code works. Yes, it makes me want to puke, but you could never explain to people like this how to code in ML, or how ML would be better.
The main advantage of printfs over IDE/interactive debugging is that you can collect a lot of data in one burst, then look at the text output as a whole.
The tricky part about IDE/interactive debugging is understanding the behavior of loops, for instance. Sure you can put a breakpoint in the loop, and check things everytime, but you quickly find out that the first 99 times are fine, and somewhere after 100 you get into trouble, but you don't quite know where, because after the loop, everything is total chaos. So you have to switch gears; put in some watch condition that still traps too often (because if you knew exactly what to watch for, you would know what the bug was, and would just fix it), and hope that things went wrong, but left enough evidence, when it traps.
Whereas print statements let you combine the best of both worlds: expose the data you care about (what you would examine at breakpoints), but the ability to scan through the text result to find the particular conditions that cause the problem (what you could potentially get from watch conditions).
Don't know about the separately turning off the phone function, but for your second point, I asked a Palm phone user, and he says the speakerphone feature is the way to get around the speak-and-write-at-the-same-time problem. I suppose a headset would work as well.
Other benefits of a combined device: only one travel charger, and only one gizmo to stow somewhere.
Get a grip. Name dropping doesn't lend credibility to the names being dropped. Especially when the names are being dropped by an anonymous coward.
I've read through some of the Stapp papers you linked to, and they are pretty lousy. One example had some handwavy discussion about the various "kinds of observers" possible under classical vs. quantum theory and a quick assumption that the crude list was exhaustive, followed by a long discussion based on this shaky foundation. Written as if Bohr and von Neumann were the pinnacle of quantum theory; i.e. that nothing like, say, modern quantum electrodynamics, had happened since 1950.
Guess I won't be ordering an advance copy of the Handbook of Consciousness.
The upside is that universities have a potential way to reduce the bandwidth and support drain and legal risks that come from students doing their own filesharing of copyrighted tunes.
Whether that is realistic, of course, depends on how cynical you are.:-)
The point is that it is not relevant literature, but rather philosophical hairsplitting of the proper quantum numbers to describe angels dancing on pins.
Quantum mechanics does not offer an explanation of "consciousness" any more than classical mechanics or even simple arithmetic does. It was never intended to, and covering it with a whitewash of philosophical terminology does not change that. Unfortunately, it gives philosophers a toolbox of ways to make silly statements sound empirical and scientific.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory, yes, but only in theory. A share in a corporation represents fractional ownership, but an individual shareholder can't exchange his share for that fraction of company assets. The best he could do is vote for directors who promise to auction off the company and give the proceeds to shareholders; it's quite rare that a publically traded company goes through that.
In practice, that share has monetary value because of two possibilities:
1) The company will distribute a portion of its profits as dividends. You own a fraction of the company, so you get a fraction of the profits. Just like owning your own company, but without the hassles of sole proprietorship.
2a) Someone else will buy the share from you. Now, this someone else is motivated by possibility #1, perhaps in the distant future
OR
2b) In principle, even if dividends were not being paid, a person or corporation with enough resources could buy a majority of the shares and either begin paying dividends, OR, take the company private or as a subsidiary, and take the profits or liquidate assets that way.
2B is usually just a theoretical floor to a stock's value when the possibility of dividends is still remote. I.e., why a "growth" company losing tons of money doesn't immediately go to zero stock price. In a bull market, the price is kept up by 2A, otherwise known as the "greater fool theory."
Look out, iRiver, Creative, and Rio!
Yeah, those players are going to get even further ahead of the iPod in market share....
More like, "look out, the iPod might get so far ahead, you can't even see it from the back of the pack."
SLDT02004071000004(x, y) - "In Soviet Russia, x y YOU!"
This should, of course, be "In Soviet Russia, y x YOU!"
Actually, the critical point is the "upper right" end of the liquid-gas phase boundary. The solid phase does not exist at the critical point.
The triple point is where all three phases meet, but it is at lower temperatures where the substance can freeze. For water, for instance, the triple point is at 0.01 C, at a pressure of 4.5 torr. The critical point of water, by contrast, is at 374 C, and 165467 torr.
Triple points are useful because they are single points in the phase plane that are relatively easy to realize. In fact, several triple points are used to define the international temperature scale.
The reason the critical point is interesting theoretically is that it means you can manipulate temperature and pressure to go around the critical point, going from liquid to gas and back without crossing a phase transition line; this is possible because the liquid and gas actually have the same symmetry. In fact, the transition AT the critical point tends to take place very slowly; theoretically, this is known as "critical slowing", and experimentally, this is seen as "critical opalescence." Studies and measurements at the critical point are made difficult by this slowing: it is very hard to be sure your sample is at equilibrium. This is in contrast to the triple point, which is relatively easy to verify.
From an industrial perspective (such as decaffeination), the critical point is interesting because that phase transition line is what causes disruptive effects such as surface tension and boiling. If you can maneuver around that point without crossing the line, you can, for instance, vaporize liquid to dry something out without destroying the delicate structures that were wet.
The FUNDAMENTAL law of economics or human behavior, which you seem to disbelieve, is that people RESPOND to incentives. They don't just keep doing the same thing because it is "necessary." If prices go up for a resource, consumers use less because they CHANGE their behavior.
When the price of gasoline goes up PEOPLE WILL USE LESS. They might still commute to work, but the summer drive to the beach or to the family reunion looks less necessary. They will check more often that their tires are inflated properly. They will buy a motorcycle to ride to work. As the price of gasoline increases, the adjustments will become greater.
The whole picture of reality that you paint, of people living so far from work without access to public transportation, of having fresh food in large supply, grew up IN RESPONSE TO cheap fuel for transportation. If gasoline ever becomes drastically expensive THE PICTURE WILL CHANGE.
Perhaps the picture will look like 50, 100, 500 years ago, or perhaps it will look much different, with plenty of nuclear fission plants and electric vehicles. We might end up eating lots more salted, smoked, and pickled food, and riding horses. But it won't be people driving SUVs in three hour commutes if gas goes up to $20 a gallon.
You admit the same thing yourself, when you admit "Yes, we can live without gasoline." That means it is not a necessity, now, is it?
For almost everything, the term "necessity" is emotive, not technically precise.
So you are equating gasoline with food in the heirarchy of human needs? Civilization existed for thousands of years without the benefit of gasoline (though not without agriculture), and you claim that gas is as essential as food?
Yes, undoubtedly, one lives much better with gasoline than without, which is why people continue to buy gasoline readily as the price rises. But it is hardly indispensible. Evidently, the price hasn't yet risen enough to force you to be more creative. If the price of gasoline rose to $1000 per gallon, I'm sure you find some other job that didn't require a commute (you know, perhaps using this newfangled Internet thing), or riding a bike, or even go in a horsedrawn stagecoach.
Yes, your life would be harder. If you really couldn't find *any* job that was accessible without gasoline, you might end up living in a cardboard box, eating rice and beans for a couple dollars a week that you scratch together. But I think you could live for a pretty long time without buying gasoline, if forced to. Plenty of people in the third world do so.
Do you have a point to make? Because you haven't said anything that convinces me that the gasoline market is not competitive.
If these customers are so captive, and the market non-competitive, then why isn't gasoline $100 a gallon, then? Seems like an easy way for the oil companies to make even bigger profits, right?
The reason is that people aren't actually forced to buy gas, they choose to, just as they *choose* to go places and have jobs and go to the doctor.
If gas goes up to $100 a gallon, you can bet more people will bike to work or move closer to work, or decide that a second income in the family does not cover the extra cost of gas. All choices freely made.
The technical term for what you are trying to describe is "elasticity" of demand. Rising prices do discourage consumption. Less for gasoline than for baseball tickets, but there is an effect. This has nothing to do with the competitiveness of the market.
Well, when reading those fuel economy figures, you have to remember that these economies are measured under test conditions, such as a dynamometer.
Most people driving a 'Vette have driving habits which probably cause a performance different than measured by a dynamometer run. I.e., how many 'Vette owners really "baby it"?
People always come out of the woodwork to talk about "cartels" and "price gouging" but the simple fact is that if any group could voluntarily band together to increase the price of gasoline or petroleum THEY WOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IT. Meaning that $2 gas in the US wouldn't be news, but rather old hat.
The fact that gasoline prices go through these wild gyrations is exactly because the market *is* competitive, so there isn't any deliberate control which can be used to smooth things out.
Cartels like Major League baseball and monopolies like Microsoft do have price changes, of course, but not daily, and not with such violent disruptive effects. Instead, they apply the slow squeeze.
This sort of thinking misses the point: it usually falls under the name "broken window fallacy." For instance, after every hurricane, you hear about how there is a boom in home construction and window repair to fix damaged buildings. If you just watched the local news on TV, you might naively wonder "if hurricanes are so good for business, why don't we break windows all year round?"
The answer is that all the resources (capital, raw materials, and labor) that went into fixing the broken windows could have been used, in the absence of a hurricane, to build new structures, so that over the same period, you would have had more buildings, instead of the same number of buildings returned to pre-storm condition.
You can't simply count the money and claim that it is a net benefit to the nation's welfare (in the sense of happiness/utility). If we paid billions of dollars to dig a hole in the ground and billions more to fill it up, you should agree that is a net waste of resources, even if that money got paid to Earthlings. Sure, the hole diggers and fillers will claim all sorts of spin-off benefits (better technology to dig holes!) and "jobs created" by their efforts, but it doesn't make it a good policy.
Any government-mandated spending has the effect of distorting capital, labor, and resource markets, in ways which might (might: I'm not some die-hard starve-the-government type) reduce overall welfare.
Spending billions of dollars to place robotic go-karts on Mars, for instance, is not self-evidently the best way to spend the money.
It depends strongly on the context.
By 1750 or so, the previous reign of Latin as the scientific language of the West was coming to an end. Take Newton for example: Principia in Latin, Optics in English.
In the late 1800s, organic chemistry was being done by the Germans. Huge amounts of reference material are (or at least were 10 years ago, when I cared) still in German, unlikely to be translated. In the early 20th century, they were the ones doing quantum mechanics.
In other fields, such as mathematics, Latin persisted longer, or languages like Russian are more common.
The French, of course, have done more than most other language communities to force the use of their preferred tongue (such as in diplomacy) where most people would rather drop it as redundant with English.
Actually, the difficulty of word formation in Chinese is a major obstacle to its use in technical contexts.
Imagine trying to come up with a unique ideogram or compound ideogram to use for every new chemical compound you discover, or every new invention. It quickly becomes cumbersome: Chinese has a (for practical purposes) fixed set of ideograms which are already pretty much full with all the meanings they can handle. Even if you could invent ideograms, how would you standardize them and include them in font sets, etc.
Plus, even if you come up with a compound (like "electric brain" for instance), it's stuck. It's hard to make it more precise (think of electric vs. electronic in English) or evolve in other directions as computers evolve from humans running mechanical calculators to electromechanical devices to electronic tubes to integrated circuits to quantum computers. quantum electric brain? Hardly as perspicuous as quantum computer. You can even end up in contradictions if you pick the wrong thing to use. Imagine if telephone had a used a compound like "wire talker" how do you describe a wireless or cordless phone: "no wire wire talker"? "air talker"? Well, maybe that's already used for television, it just gets crazy.
In English, we have the possibility to go grab whatever we want from Greek, Latin, German, Russian, even Chinese, and add whatever prefixes, compounds, or suffixes we want, and we can make it work.
Chinese worked great for a relatively static Confucian academic tradition. For a rapidly evolving technological society, it has difficulties.
Because in lasers, one is stimulating the emission with the same frequency (=energy) of the transition. The hafnium claim is that one is able with X-ray (lower) energies excite a transition in the hafnium nucleus into a state of nearly the same excited energy that has a much quicker decay path to the ground state.
Except that nuclear physicists claim that the current theories of nuclear structure predict a reaction rate/efficiency *much* lower than the advocates claim to have observed, and the experimentalists have not been able to reproduce the advocates' results.
No, actually, when the article says "nuclear isomer" it means "nuclear isomer" as in same nuclear constitutents, different quantum mechanical state.
Long-lived nuclear isomers are basically "stuck" in an excited state that takes a long while to find its way to the ground state of the nucleus. They have the same number of protons and neutrons (i.e. are the same "isotope") as the ground state nucleus, but slightly more energy (on a nuclear scale).
The (probably bogus) claim is that you might be able to control (accelerate) the release of the extra energy by external means.
Depends on what you mean by "led to" in your transistor example, but AT&T was mostly interested in low-noise repeaters for long distance telephone service, not in radar.
Which is not to play down the enormous contributions to technology made by the Rad Lab and other research groups in radar.
The difference is that these "graduate students" (about 20 of whom won Nobel prizes), were trained in the latest developments in atomic and nuclear physics at the time, and had the technical training to use and adapt that knowledge.
Al Qaeda, by contrast, puts its highest emphasis on knoweldge of the Koran, and secondarily on guerrilla training and weapons with minimal technical sophistication. Yes, they have desire, but they have the wrong mindset and training to have any success in such an engineering endeavor.
The only likely way for Al Qaeda to get nuclear weapons is to persuade their allies in the Pakistani intelligence organization or Iran to arrange for a bomb to be "misplaced" on its way to North Korea or some such.
Sorry to nitpick, but zero is even unless you pick some seriously wacky definition for "even."
I'm sorry, but writing device drivers in Lisp (non-functionally) would be a freaking dream come true. Serious Lisp environments have an assembler layer with Lispy syntax available, for starters.
The main win is macros; you can create all sorts of syntactic and semantic sugar to abstract this Lispy assembler syntax into something that makes sense. Synchronization primitives, etc., can be abstracted into intelligent macros which can be context-aware. Plus, Lisp is there at every stage of the process, including before compilation/assembly. Need to precompute a lookup table? Write Lisp code to generate it at compile time.
Hey, I'm certainly not going to call debuggers useless; I use them, albeit usually in a crude way to do stepping where I need to check hardware state. But I must say that I have rarely felt comfortable using an IDE debugger to find a logic error; the old insert printfs and read, or interactive use of a Lisp REPL or test harness have always felt more comfortable.
Another advantage of printfs or adding code to the app is that most languages are more powerful than the UIs of interactive debuggers; even the best inspectors make it hard to filter out large arrays to find the problem in element 1085. But I can add a little helper function to scan through the array in code and find exactly what I want. In Lisp, the full language is available in the debugger, so the debugging and coding are hard to distinguish.
Sometimes the tools you write to make the code are the same tools that are useful for debugging, whether you plan it that way or not.
Different strokes for different folks---we're all fighting the same enemy: the bugs.
There is something weird about debugging, however, which I can't quite put my finger on. Powerful language features have a return on investment which has a longer time to compound. You can attack bigger problems by understanding the language better, so spending time to understand the language pays off.
Powerful debugger features don't really have time to compound. Sure, they may save you 50% of your time tracking down a particular bug, but only if you recognize that the bug you have is solved with that tool.If you get a lot of practice using that tool, however, you'll tend to stop making the kind of specific mistake that makes the tool valuable.
Before you know how to use a language feature, you can write toy examples until you can feel comfortable. It's hard to practice with a debugger; how do you make toy mistakes---make a mistake deliberately and forget what mistake you made?
The reason people use C-like languages is still because of "Worse is Better."
Kernighan mentions that in the interview as well: people who can think in the very abstract way that is the true power of Lisp and functional languages are usually smart enough to be able to sweep all sorts of practical issues away very easily.
Most people, even software people, however, can't or won't think abstractly. They need something concrete, and C is nothing if not concrete. Whatever you want to do, you can bang the C rocks together until it happens mostly the way you want, and move on. I've seen people code in C by adding and subtracting & and * operators until their code works. Yes, it makes me want to puke, but you could never explain to people like this how to code in ML, or how ML would be better.
The main advantage of printfs over IDE/interactive debugging is that you can collect a lot of data in one burst, then look at the text output as a whole.
The tricky part about IDE/interactive debugging is understanding the behavior of loops, for instance. Sure you can put a breakpoint in the loop, and check things everytime, but you quickly find out that the first 99 times are fine, and somewhere after 100 you get into trouble, but you don't quite know where, because after the loop, everything is total chaos. So you have to switch gears; put in some watch condition that still traps too often (because if you knew exactly what to watch for, you would know what the bug was, and would just fix it), and hope that things went wrong, but left enough evidence, when it traps.
Whereas print statements let you combine the best of both worlds: expose the data you care about (what you would examine at breakpoints), but the ability to scan through the text result to find the particular conditions that cause the problem (what you could potentially get from watch conditions).
Don't know about the separately turning off the phone function, but for your second point, I asked a Palm phone user, and he says the speakerphone feature is the way to get around the speak-and-write-at-the-same-time problem. I suppose a headset would work as well.
Other benefits of a combined device: only one travel charger, and only one gizmo to stow somewhere.
Get a grip. Name dropping doesn't lend credibility to the names being dropped. Especially when the names are being dropped by an anonymous coward.
I've read through some of the Stapp papers you linked to, and they are pretty lousy. One example had some handwavy discussion about the various "kinds of observers" possible under classical vs. quantum theory and a quick assumption that the crude list was exhaustive, followed by a long discussion based on this shaky foundation. Written as if Bohr and von Neumann were the pinnacle of quantum theory; i.e. that nothing like, say, modern quantum electrodynamics, had happened since 1950.
Guess I won't be ordering an advance copy of the Handbook of Consciousness.
The upside is that universities have a potential way to reduce the bandwidth and support drain and legal risks that come from students doing their own filesharing of copyrighted tunes.
:-)
Whether that is realistic, of course, depends on how cynical you are.
The point is that it is not relevant literature, but rather philosophical hairsplitting of the proper quantum numbers to describe angels dancing on pins.
Quantum mechanics does not offer an explanation of "consciousness" any more than classical mechanics or even simple arithmetic does. It was never intended to, and covering it with a whitewash of philosophical terminology does not change that. Unfortunately, it gives philosophers a toolbox of ways to make silly statements sound empirical and scientific.