I think this is because it is actually easier to run the "backups" than imports. I was actually considering getting one that would only play backups (since they don't require soldering and I am not a big fan of soldering to my PS2), then ripping and reburning imported DVDs to play them.
I assume you don't buy lightbulbs, then? And it is shameful that you have to refill your gas tank every few hundred miles.
I am pretty sure this is a joke some engineer at AOpen wanted to have at the expense of the particularly dumb crop of audiophile wannabes who think they can be leet by having a tube amp hooked up to their AC97 audio codec.
Well, there is a difference between a guitar amp and a stereo amp. For a guitar, the amp is really part of the instrument. Tube amps definately do mess with the sound, but the player desires that to get the sound they want.
For stereo use, the goal of the amp is (or should be) to reproduce with the highest fidelity possible the sound as recorded. There, while tube amps tend to be better than "cheap" solid state amps, a high end SS amp is at least as good as a high end tube amp.
I do know people, however, who prefer tubes on their stereo for whatever reason (mostly snobbery, IMHO). A lot of audiophile companies make ones with tube pre-amps and a SS final stage and/or all tubes. I haven't found these systems to sound particularly better than some high end SS amps.
Re:Slashdot: News for thieves. Like ethics matter.
on
What Free Cable?
·
· Score: 2
My philosophy, which is probaly legally wrong, is that if they give me cable, I am going to hook it up. This happened at the last place I lived: I ordered cable modem but not cable, and they gave me both. I just hooked up my TV and it worked. When I moved, they remembered to install the filter on my incomming line, and even though I could remove it in about 5 minutes, I am going to leave it there. I ordered a satelite system instead -- it is much cheaper and I get the sci-fi channel.
As near as I can tell from the article, GMR technology was expected to scale to Tb/in^2 densities, but this guy A) thinks that magnetic noise will prevent that density from being achieved, and B) has a (as far as I know) new idea for a technology that is not succeptible to the same type of noise.
For anyone who cares about things other than where they keep their pr0n and if they will have a fast enough GPU to run Quake n, this is potentially very interesting. I wish more news was like this, and less "Foo Bar Inc. has just released a new 23 terawhoosit widget, brining unprecedented levels of frobing to a consumer device" which should properly be called a press release, not news.
> Good GOD, the side effects sound worse than the > illness!
People advertising drugs are required by law to mention any known side effect, regardless of the frequency. In almost every case, most of the serious side effects are extremely rare. Frequently, people with a likely succeptability to those side effects can be identified by their doctor, and an alternative used. Likewise, if you start to take medication and have serious side effects, your doctor should look for alternative treatments, or find some way to mitigate the side effects.
It is important for patients to be aware of the potential side effects, but a lot of people take it the wrong way.
I think the problem with our health care is not the over medication that people complain about (though that happens to some extent) but under doctoring. The process doesn't work without a feedback loop to the doctor so that he can decide if the treatment is being effective.
Personally, I don't think a human embryo is the same as a human, and I think that stem cell research is one of the most important areas of current research. I can understand how some people would object to using human embryos for research, but I strongly disagree that there is anything grotesque about growing replacement organs even aside from the human embryo issue.
/me wonders if "our fearless leader" has the organ doner checked on his drivers license.
By invokin the DMCA, they use the safe harbor clause as leverage against the ISP. The ISP is guaranteed no legal liability if the act promptly to remove or block access to the alleged illegal material. If they try and stand up for the rights of their client, they are liable as accomplices to theft.
I don't know what the particular situation is here, there are dozens of version of PGP and PGP-like programs, and no indication of what the actual supposedly infringing material was. If it was the actual no longer for sale commercial version of PGP, they are regrettably well within their rights to ask it to be removed, otherwise this is nonsense.
No system that I know of "easily" implements quantum computing, which is why I don't have on on my desk. Spintronics is, however, one of the most promising avenues of research, and one that may be very useful in making faster classical computers as well.
Even if you have public accounts, if you ask someone to stop emailing you, they should. If you are being loud and obnoxious in a resteraunt, you will be asked to leave, and if you don't, they will call the cops. That is the way life in the real world is. The biggest danger special interest lobbies pose to the Internet is that they want to treat it as somehow special, subject to different laws than the real world just because it is digital. While there is some truth to the distiction (particularly the lack of national boundaries), the laws should be the same in both cases, and we will have to learn to live with the fact that people from different countries are subject to different laws even when they use the same internet.
Intel wanted him to stop, and he didn't. And while the cost of disk space and CPU time are insignificant, it has exactly the same cost as spam in terms of time and effort expended to deal with it.
So, the issue becomes whether we think that free speach include the right to send email critizing a company using their mail servers, and if so how that is different from allowing spammers to send solicitations on my mail server when I don't want them to.
My feeling is that Intel more or less has the right to control what goes through their email servers, but I would be much more inclined to side with Hamidi if he had not sent the messages in bulk, but in "private" emails to people he knew. Then, unless the company has a strict and enforced "no personal email" policy (which I highly doubt) I would say it was OK to send the messages in question.
Also, it is important that Intel asked him to stop, and tried to block him, and he deliberately circumvented it. Had he stopped when asked, it would have been fine.
Actually it is possible to have both a group and phase velocity faster than c. For a cool applet demonstration by Greg Egan, visit this.
You can also do an experement yourself with a high bandwidth op amp. Make a current follower circuit (hook the output up to the - input) but introduce a long delay into that connection with a long cable. Now send a gaussian pulse into the + input and watch the output with an oscilliscope. If your op amp has high enough bandwith, the output pulse will appear before the input pulse. What is happening is that the very leading edge of the pulse is being amplified into the whole pulse in order to satisfy the golden rule of op amps: the two inputs must be at the same voltage.
This (and all other systems like it) only work on waves that are analytic functions, which means that then entire function can be completely reconstructed from the behavior at one point. Analytic functions cannot be used to transmit information, so we still cannot use this to communicate faster than light.
Well, I think that this is one of the lesser attacks on the first amendment. I am not sure I agree that it should be illegal, but I certainly can understand people thinking it is a "clear and present threat" or whatever the wording is.
But I think the real issue is to not treat online publication any different than other forms. If someone took out an add in a national newspaper and published personally identifying information of abortion clinic doctors, along with claims that they deserved to be killed for crimes against humanity, I think it would be considered an immediate and clear threat to those doctors. On the other hand, if the newspaper ad would not be considered illegal, then neither should the website.
The whole thing makes me uneasy. I don't want to silence anyones opinion, but I think that they can freely express their opinions without directly threatening people. At the same time, most of the information found there could be looked up in a phone directory by anyone really wanting the information anyway, which makes banning publishing it on the internet seem a little silly. That aspect is kind of like the "they think terrorists can't type" thing with cryptography. I really believe that anyone who is "dedicated" (or insane) enough to their cause to go shooting people in the name of being pro-life is probably going to be able to find out the address of the doctors at their local abortion clinic.
It is either a lame attempt at smart quotes, or someone cut-and-pasting an incorrect TeX source file (which turns `` and '' into real directed quotes).
My understanding that the default ownership depends on whether the software is a work for hire. If you were specifically hired to write a piece of software, the company owns it, if it was incedental work, the author owns it. So, if your contract specifically says that you will write a timesheet management program, the company owns it. On the other hand, if you are hired to implement a timesheet management system, and you choose one from scratch, you wound own it.
I think this is even true for regular employees, barring any IP assignment contract (which most places require you to sign). If your job is to do payroll, and you write software that automates the process, you own that software, though your employer gets a "shop-rights" license to use the software without royalties.
In any case, you shouldn't rely on this. A good contract should specify who gets what.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan
Yes, most of the radical ideas in science have been ridiculed at one point in time. And scientists have regrettably supressed legitimate research because of their personal egos. A good (and unfortunate) relatively recent example is Brian Jospephson. It is unfortunate that this happens, and can really be hell on the people involved. Scientists are humans too, and sometime that gets in the way -- just like in every other field of human endevour.
But the thing in science is that if your theory is right, eventually people gather evidence for it, and scientists *do* accept it. And for every one misunderstood genius, there are hundreds of genuine crackpots who really get ridiculed more than they deserve, but still shouldn't be published alongside good research. Which is the whole purpose of peer review: to collect the small fraction of material that is interesting to the readers of the journal.
If you want to see what happens without peer review, go visit the lanl archives, which are a very valuable resource, but only if you realize that a large fraction of what is there is, while often written by respectable "Profs", wrong.
Propose another system that works better, and, if it does, it will evetually be adopted.
POTS is, among other things, limited by the resoultion of the ADC at the telco. Since you telephone signal goes into a 64 kbps digital channel there, you cannot get any more than 64 kbps out of the analog end. DSL requires the telco to install new hardware that splits the high frequency and low freqency components, sends one to the phone connection and one to the DSL hardware.
Even so, noise, loss, and crosstalk are all problems for DSL causing it to be limited range, especially for the high bandwidth versions. In addition, equipment installed to prevent ground loops and improve the quality of audio freqnecy transmission, especially in older or long distance phone runs wasn't designed to pass high frequency and can wreak havoc on DSL. None of these problems have to do with the wire itself, though. Copper has plenty of bandwidth, the purpose of coax and so forth is to decrease losses and interference.
But it sounds like this guy was claiming to jam several megabits of data through the 64 kbit phone switch, which is obviously impossible.
Ah yes, the Watt hour. Why is it that people tell jokes about measuring the c in furlongs/fortnight, but don't even blink when they get an electric bill measured in Watt hours? What is so bad about kJ?
Yeah, incadecent bulbs flicker at 120 Hz (both the positive and negative current phases heat the filament), but only by a few percent. It is easy to see with an oscilloscope, but not perceptable.
Every flourecent bulb I have seen flickers by almost 100%, and while it is not usually visible unless the bulb is failing, can still cause fatigue.
Much more importantly is that incandecent bulbs have a more natural color spectrum than most flourecents, since they work by black body radiation. I don't know why the "full spectrum" flourecents are not more popular, but they can really make a difference.
That is true, but we can always tell how the universe doesn't work. I believe violation of Bell's inequality is sufficient to forbid any law of physics that would allow tapping quantum key exchanges.
Violation of Bell's inequality has been expermentally demonstrated, subject to a few caveats, which mostly boil down to having to assume that God is not maliciously manipulating our results. Of course, all of physics has to assume that, so I don't really think it is a big deal.
What is more, unlike classical cryptography, where the eavesdropper can copy the cyphertext and spend an infinite amount of time decyphering it, quantum key exchange requires that the eavesdropper have the techonology to intercept the signal right now. Quantum key exchange today is immune to future advances in technology (with the possible exception of a working time machine--but then that screws things up no matter what).
All that said, the posts above are absolutely correct in saying that there are always other weak links. This system is not immune to man-in-the middle attacks, tampering with the "trusted" equipment at either end, or social engineering. In addition, some forms of quantum key exchange are potentially vulnerable to tempest style attacks.
But he isn't taxed "extra" for it. That is the point. As it stands, almost all taxes go into a general fund, which then pays for everything, whether a given taxpayer supports it or not. Then we hire people to decide what things a large chunk of taxpayers want, and pay for those things. While paying taxes is sometimes painful, I think I get a reasonable value for my tax dollars, and I don't resent that that is the price to pay to live in my country.
I also support the space program. I think in the short term there is a lot of valuble science that we can do in space, and in the long term our destiny lies in the stars. NASA has some problems, but overall I support both manned and unmanned space exploration.
However, if the government is charging me extra to support the space program, I want tax credits back for the missle defense system, which I think is a useless, worthless waste of money and time that is unlikely to work reliably and less likely to protect against relevent threats in the next 20 years. But that is not a choice I get to make alone. and if in 15 years, and ICBM with a nuclear warhead is shot down by the system (unlikely as it seems to me) lots of people will be glad that military and technology experts much more familiar with threats and countermeasures got to make the decision rather than just one guy.
Finally, earmarked taxes have been found to be extremely ineffective. Lottery revenue in some states is earmarked for education. On the face of it, this is an effective idea: tax stupid people to fund education to make more smart people. Unfortunately, in practice this tends to make the legeslatures allocate correspondingly less from the general fund to education. Education gets little or no real benefit, but the belief that it is "supporting education" sells lottery tickets.
The problem is, that doesn't work until you have already started using their software. How can we have checks on vendors honesty before everyone and his brother starts using their software?
I use free software almost exclusively, and use almost no zero cost commercial software, which seems to help, but is there anything people who need/want to use commercial software can do about this?
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
Really, we do have proofs in physics(for example) that are just as provable as those in mathematics. You just have to understand that proofs of any kind are made based on certain assumtions (axioms + rules of logic).
For instance, the quantum no-cloning theorom states that you cannot exactly duplicate an unknown quantum mechanical state. This is an absolutely proven theorom -- one of the axioms of which is the Schrodinger equation. If we ever find that quantum mechanics is not the correct description for our universe, the no-cloning theorom will still be entirely valid within the constructs of QM, as well as the regime of the universe under which QM is applicable.
Likewise, Euclid said the sum of the angles of a triangle is Pi, but this is only true for trinagles in spaces that have a certain structure, which is why we call it Euclidian. It turns out that in general, space is non-Euclidian, though unless you are near a black hole or a neutron star, the difference is hardly noticable.
Computer scientists have "proven" using very general methods, that there are no algorithms for computing certain things that are faster than a given bound -- There is no way to search an unordered list in faster than O(N) time, no way to sort arbitrary numbers in less than O(N*Log(N)) time, etc. However, this is based on a Turing machine model of computation, and the laws of quantum mechanics as we understand them allow computers intrinsically more powerful than a turing machine. We still don't understand much about what these quantum computers can and can't do better than a classical computer, but we do know that they can search unordered lists faster than any classical computer, though I think it has been shown that they cannot sort lists faster than a classical computer.
Re:An explanation of why this man is a crank.
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think this person is necessarily on crack, though I am skeptical he is going to achieve conclusive evidence of time travel. I would very much like to read a paper on the theory of how this thing is supposed to work.
However, the page you linked to looks to be pretty much a crackpot. Basically, his claim is that since it doesn't make any sense (to him) for time to be relative, it can't be. This is primarily based on an attemt to "reason" if it can be called that, about relatavistic physics based on non relatavistic assumtions.
The big givaway for people who don't understand enough physics to realize this is that he starts off his rant by resorting to namecalling at people who believed things he can't understand and therefore must be impossible, without any evidence other than his lack of understanding.
Take for instance, Godel. He claims, "He is known for his incompleteness theorem, the most obfuscated, non-scientific, chicken feather voodoo nonsense ever penned by a member of the human species... The only thing Gödel proved, in my opinion, was the incompleteness of his frontal lobe."
He never actually even says what he thinks is wrong with Godel's incompleteness theorom, which is probably because there are legions of mathematicians who would dearly love for it to be wrong, but have been unable to find any problem with it. This is the mark of a crackpot. If he can restate his objections in a form more convincing than "this obviously doesn't make any sense" and restrict himself to science and leave the namecalling out of it, I might be inclinded to read it and figure out if it made sense or not.
This is exactly what the first amendment is about. This is not about giving libraries the right to choose what books the buy, it is about people with heads stuck up their asses trying to get the government to tell libraries that they must not distribute certain kinds of material to patrons, in the name of protecting the children.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is because it is actually easier to run the "backups" than imports. I was actually considering getting one that would only play backups (since they don't require soldering and I am not a big fan of soldering to my PS2), then ripping and reburning imported DVDs to play them.
I assume you don't buy lightbulbs, then? And it is shameful that you have to refill your gas tank every few hundred miles.
I am pretty sure this is a joke some engineer at AOpen wanted to have at the expense of the particularly dumb crop of audiophile wannabes who think they can be leet by having a tube amp hooked up to their AC97 audio codec.
But tubes burn out, and have to be replaced.
Well, there is a difference between a guitar amp and a stereo amp. For a guitar, the amp is really part of the instrument. Tube amps definately do mess with the sound, but the player desires that to get the sound they want.
For stereo use, the goal of the amp is (or should be) to reproduce with the highest fidelity possible the sound as recorded. There, while tube amps tend to be better than "cheap" solid state amps, a high end SS amp is at least as good as a high end tube amp.
I do know people, however, who prefer tubes on their stereo for whatever reason (mostly snobbery, IMHO). A lot of audiophile companies make ones with tube pre-amps and a SS final stage and/or all tubes. I haven't found these systems to sound particularly better than some high end SS amps.
My philosophy, which is probaly legally wrong, is that if they give me cable, I am going to hook it up. This happened at the last place I lived: I ordered cable modem but not cable, and they gave me both. I just hooked up my TV and it worked. When I moved, they remembered to install the filter on my incomming line, and even though I could remove it in about 5 minutes, I am going to leave it there. I ordered a satelite system instead -- it is much cheaper and I get the sci-fi channel.
As near as I can tell from the article, GMR technology was expected to scale to Tb/in^2 densities, but this guy A) thinks that magnetic noise will prevent that density from being achieved, and B) has a (as far as I know) new idea for a technology that is not succeptible to the same type of noise.
For anyone who cares about things other than where they keep their pr0n and if they will have a fast enough GPU to run Quake n, this is potentially very interesting. I wish more news was like this, and less "Foo Bar Inc. has just released a new 23 terawhoosit widget, brining unprecedented levels of frobing to a consumer device" which should properly be called a press release, not news.
> Good GOD, the side effects sound worse than the
> illness!
People advertising drugs are required by law to mention any known side effect, regardless of the frequency. In almost every case, most of the serious side effects are extremely rare. Frequently, people with a likely succeptability to those side effects can be identified by their doctor, and an alternative used. Likewise, if you start to take medication and have serious side effects, your doctor should look for alternative treatments, or find some way to mitigate the side effects.
It is important for patients to be aware of the potential side effects, but a lot of people take it the wrong way.
I think the problem with our health care is not the over medication that people complain about (though that happens to some extent) but under doctoring. The process doesn't work without a feedback loop to the doctor so that he can decide if the treatment is being effective.
Personally, I don't think a human embryo is the same as a human, and I think that stem cell research is one of the most important areas of current research. I can understand how some people would object to using human embryos for research, but I strongly disagree that there is anything grotesque about growing replacement organs even aside from the human embryo issue.
/me wonders if "our fearless leader" has the organ doner checked on his drivers license.
By invokin the DMCA, they use the safe harbor clause as leverage against the ISP. The ISP is guaranteed no legal liability if the act promptly to remove or block access to the alleged illegal material. If they try and stand up for the rights of their client, they are liable as accomplices to theft.
I don't know what the particular situation is here, there are dozens of version of PGP and PGP-like programs, and no indication of what the actual supposedly infringing material was. If it was the actual no longer for sale commercial version of PGP, they are regrettably well within their rights to ask it to be removed, otherwise this is nonsense.
s/easily/possibly/
No system that I know of "easily" implements quantum computing, which is why I don't have on on my desk. Spintronics is, however, one of the most promising avenues of research, and one that may be very useful in making faster classical computers as well.
Even if you have public accounts, if you ask someone to stop emailing you, they should. If you are being loud and obnoxious in a resteraunt, you will be asked to leave, and if you don't, they will call the cops. That is the way life in the real world is. The biggest danger special interest lobbies pose to the Internet is that they want to treat it as somehow special, subject to different laws than the real world just because it is digital. While there is some truth to the distiction (particularly the lack of national boundaries), the laws should be the same in both cases, and we will have to learn to live with the fact that people from different countries are subject to different laws even when they use the same internet.
Intel wanted him to stop, and he didn't. And while the cost of disk space and CPU time are insignificant, it has exactly the same cost as spam in terms of time and effort expended to deal with it.
So, the issue becomes whether we think that free speach include the right to send email critizing a company using their mail servers, and if so how that is different from allowing spammers to send solicitations on my mail server when I don't want them to.
My feeling is that Intel more or less has the right to control what goes through their email servers, but I would be much more inclined to side with Hamidi if he had not sent the messages in bulk, but in "private" emails to people he knew. Then, unless the company has a strict and enforced "no personal email" policy (which I highly doubt) I would say it was OK to send the messages in question.
Also, it is important that Intel asked him to stop, and tried to block him, and he deliberately circumvented it. Had he stopped when asked, it would have been fine.
Actually it is possible to have both a group and phase velocity faster than c. For a cool applet demonstration by Greg Egan, visit this.
You can also do an experement yourself with a high bandwidth op amp. Make a current follower circuit (hook the output up to the - input) but introduce a long delay into that connection with a long cable. Now send a gaussian pulse into the + input and watch the output with an oscilliscope. If your op amp has high enough bandwith, the output pulse will appear before the input pulse. What is happening is that the very leading edge of the pulse is being amplified into the whole pulse in order to satisfy the golden rule of op amps: the two inputs must be at the same voltage.
This (and all other systems like it) only work on waves that are analytic functions, which means that then entire function can be completely reconstructed from the behavior at one point. Analytic functions cannot be used to transmit information, so we still cannot use this to communicate faster than light.
Only if you are a tool and don't end you text files with \n.
Well, I think that this is one of the lesser attacks on the first amendment. I am not sure I agree that it should be illegal, but I certainly can understand people thinking it is a "clear and present threat" or whatever the wording is.
But I think the real issue is to not treat online publication any different than other forms. If someone took out an add in a national newspaper and published personally identifying information of abortion clinic doctors, along with claims that they deserved to be killed for crimes against humanity, I think it would be considered an immediate and clear threat to those doctors. On the other hand, if the newspaper ad would not be considered illegal, then neither should the website.
The whole thing makes me uneasy. I don't want to silence anyones opinion, but I think that they can freely express their opinions without directly threatening people. At the same time, most of the information found there could be looked up in a phone directory by anyone really wanting the information anyway, which makes banning publishing it on the internet seem a little silly. That aspect is kind of like the "they think terrorists can't type" thing with cryptography. I really believe that anyone who is "dedicated" (or insane) enough to their cause to go shooting people in the name of being pro-life is probably going to be able to find out the address of the doctors at their local abortion clinic.
It is either a lame attempt at smart quotes, or someone cut-and-pasting an incorrect TeX source file (which turns `` and '' into real directed quotes).
My understanding that the default ownership depends on whether the software is a work for hire. If you were specifically hired to write a piece of software, the company owns it, if it was incedental work, the author owns it. So, if your contract specifically says that you will write a timesheet management program, the company owns it.
On the other hand, if you are hired to implement a timesheet management system, and you choose one from scratch, you wound own it.
I think this is even true for regular employees, barring any IP assignment contract (which most places require you to sign). If your job is to do payroll, and you write software that automates the process, you own that software, though your employer gets a "shop-rights" license to use the software without royalties.
In any case, you shouldn't rely on this. A good contract should specify who gets what.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they
also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan
Yes, most of the radical ideas in science have been ridiculed at one point in time. And scientists have regrettably supressed legitimate research because of their personal egos. A good (and unfortunate) relatively recent example is Brian Jospephson. It is unfortunate that this happens, and can really be hell on the people involved. Scientists are humans too, and sometime that gets in the way -- just like in every other field of human endevour.
But the thing in science is that if your theory is right, eventually people gather evidence for it, and scientists *do* accept it. And for every one misunderstood genius, there are hundreds of genuine crackpots who really get ridiculed more than they deserve, but still shouldn't be published alongside good research. Which is the whole purpose of peer review: to collect the small fraction of material that is interesting to the readers of the journal.
If you want to see what happens without peer review, go visit the lanl archives, which are a very valuable resource, but only if you realize that a large fraction of what is there is, while often written by respectable "Profs", wrong.
Propose another system that works better, and, if it does, it will evetually be adopted.
POTS is, among other things, limited by the resoultion of the ADC at the telco. Since you telephone signal goes into a 64 kbps digital channel there, you cannot get any more than 64 kbps out of the analog end. DSL requires the telco to install new hardware that splits the high frequency and low freqency components, sends one to the phone connection and one to the DSL hardware.
Even so, noise, loss, and crosstalk are all problems for DSL causing it to be limited range, especially for the high bandwidth versions. In addition, equipment installed to prevent ground loops and improve the quality of audio freqnecy transmission, especially in older or long distance phone runs wasn't designed to pass high frequency and can wreak havoc on DSL. None of these problems have to do with the wire itself, though. Copper has plenty of bandwidth, the purpose of coax and so forth is to decrease losses and interference.
But it sounds like this guy was claiming to jam several megabits of data through the 64 kbit phone switch, which is obviously impossible.
Ah yes, the Watt hour. Why is it that people tell jokes about measuring the c in furlongs/fortnight, but don't even blink when they get an electric bill measured in Watt hours? What is so bad about kJ?
Yeah, incadecent bulbs flicker at 120 Hz (both the positive and negative current phases heat the filament), but only by a few percent. It is easy to see with an oscilloscope, but not perceptable.
Every flourecent bulb I have seen flickers by almost 100%, and while it is not usually visible unless the bulb is failing, can still cause fatigue.
Much more importantly is that incandecent bulbs have a more natural color spectrum than most flourecents, since they work by black body radiation. I don't know why the "full spectrum" flourecents are not more popular, but they can really make a difference.
That is true, but we can always tell how the universe doesn't work. I believe violation of Bell's inequality is sufficient to forbid any law of physics that would allow tapping quantum key exchanges.
Violation of Bell's inequality has been expermentally demonstrated, subject to a few caveats, which mostly boil down to having to assume that God is not maliciously manipulating our results. Of course, all of physics has to assume that, so I don't really think it is a big deal.
What is more, unlike classical cryptography, where the eavesdropper can copy the cyphertext and spend an infinite amount of time decyphering it, quantum key exchange requires that the eavesdropper have the techonology to intercept the signal right now. Quantum key exchange today is immune to future advances in technology (with the possible exception of a working time machine--but then that screws things up no matter what).
All that said, the posts above are absolutely correct in saying that there are always other weak links. This system is not immune to man-in-the middle attacks, tampering with the "trusted" equipment at either end, or social engineering. In addition, some forms of quantum key exchange are potentially vulnerable to tempest style attacks.
But he isn't taxed "extra" for it. That is the point. As it stands, almost all taxes go into a general fund, which then pays for everything, whether a given taxpayer supports it or not. Then we hire people to decide what things a large chunk of taxpayers want, and pay for those things. While paying taxes is sometimes painful, I think I get a reasonable value for my tax dollars, and I don't resent that that is the price to pay to live in my country.
I also support the space program. I think in the short term there is a lot of valuble science that we can do in space, and in the long term our destiny lies in the stars. NASA has some problems, but overall I support both manned and unmanned space exploration.
However, if the government is charging me extra to support the space program, I want tax credits back for the missle defense system, which I think is a useless, worthless waste of money and time that is unlikely to work reliably and less likely to protect against relevent threats in the next 20 years. But that is not a choice I get to make alone. and if in 15 years, and ICBM with a nuclear warhead is shot down by the system (unlikely as it seems to me) lots of people will be glad that military and technology experts much more familiar with threats and countermeasures got to make the decision rather than just one guy.
Finally, earmarked taxes have been found to be extremely ineffective. Lottery revenue in some states is earmarked for education. On the face of it, this is an effective idea: tax stupid people to fund education to make more smart people. Unfortunately, in practice this tends to make the legeslatures allocate correspondingly less from the general fund to education. Education gets little or no real benefit, but the belief that it is "supporting education" sells lottery tickets.
The problem is, that doesn't work until you have already started using their software. How can we have checks on vendors honesty before everyone and his brother starts using their software?
I use free software almost exclusively, and use almost no zero cost commercial software, which seems to help, but is there anything people who need/want to use commercial software can do about this?
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
Really, we do have proofs in physics(for example) that are just as provable as those in mathematics. You just have to understand that proofs of any kind are made based on certain assumtions (axioms + rules of logic).
For instance, the quantum no-cloning theorom states that you cannot exactly duplicate an unknown quantum mechanical state. This is an absolutely proven theorom -- one of the axioms of which is the Schrodinger equation. If we ever find that quantum mechanics is not the correct description for our universe, the no-cloning theorom will still be entirely valid within the constructs of QM, as well as the regime of the universe under which QM is applicable.
Likewise, Euclid said the sum of the angles of a triangle is Pi, but this is only true for trinagles in spaces that have a certain structure, which is why we call it Euclidian. It turns out that in general, space is non-Euclidian, though unless you are near a black hole or a neutron star, the difference is hardly noticable.
Computer scientists have "proven" using very general methods, that there are no algorithms for computing certain things that are faster than a given bound -- There is no way to search an unordered list in faster than O(N) time, no way to sort arbitrary numbers in less than O(N*Log(N)) time, etc. However, this is based on a Turing machine model of computation, and the laws of quantum mechanics as we understand them allow computers intrinsically more powerful than a turing machine. We still don't understand much about what these quantum computers can and can't do better than a classical computer, but we do know that they can search unordered lists faster than any classical computer, though I think it has been shown that they cannot sort lists faster than a classical computer.
I don't think this person is necessarily on crack, though I am skeptical he is going to achieve conclusive evidence of time travel. I would very much like to read a paper on the theory of how this thing is supposed to work.
However, the page you linked to looks to be pretty much a crackpot. Basically, his claim is that since it doesn't make any sense (to him) for time to be relative, it can't be. This is primarily based on an attemt to "reason" if it can be called that, about relatavistic physics based on non relatavistic assumtions.
The big givaway for people who don't understand enough physics to realize this is that he starts off his rant by resorting to namecalling at people who believed things he can't understand and therefore must be impossible, without any evidence other than his lack of understanding.
Take for instance, Godel. He claims, "He is known for his incompleteness theorem, the most obfuscated, non-scientific, chicken feather voodoo nonsense ever penned by a member of the human species... The only thing Gödel proved, in my opinion, was the incompleteness of his frontal lobe."
He never actually even says what he thinks is wrong with Godel's incompleteness theorom, which is probably because there are legions of mathematicians who would dearly love for it to be wrong, but have been unable to find any problem with it. This is the mark of a crackpot. If he can restate his objections in a form more convincing than "this obviously doesn't make any sense" and restrict himself to science and leave the namecalling out of it, I might be inclinded to read it and figure out if it made sense or not.
This is exactly what the first amendment is about. This is not about giving libraries the right to choose what books the buy, it is about people with heads stuck up their asses trying to get the government to tell libraries that they must not distribute certain kinds of material to patrons, in the name of protecting the children.