I don't know about process documents, but most scientific journals long ago decided that being slaves to the passive voice is dumb. Typically we write journals in first person plural (i.e., say "we" even if there is a single author), and it is fine to use passive voice when that is the clearest way to write things. It really makes things easier to read.
Only $35/seller goes to the government (and probably some certification fee for the school, but not all of the tuition). But this really doesn't seem like a bad idea or something particularly likely to extend to people selling their personal junk on eBay any more than it applies to garage sales.
I am against dumb regulation on the internet, but this looks at a smart way to protect against fraud with relatively low cost.
Also, even if it is difficult to regulate, that is not by itself a reason to not to do something. I suspect it is easy to enforce. Sellers need to provide enough identifying information to eBay anyway, and it would be easy to verify every person selling a certain quantity of goods who didn't display their auctioneer ID to see if they were legitimate.
Sorry, my point was not to claim that you cannot make a digital recording that does not limit the reproduction quality -- obviously you can. The point was that a lot of people do not understand and therefore incorrectly use the sampling theorem. To not pay very close attention to factors such as quantization error, aliasing an the non-linear response of output elements will lead to a system with dramatically lower SNR than you would like or expect. I have found a tendancy of people to ignore the digital part of the signal, assuming that if the sampling rate is high enough it will be lossless, and in practice this is often not true.
Though the parent was wrong about the stairstep effect (all audioe D/A converters have output filtering to remove the high frequency components) that does not change the fact that a finite sampling rate cannot perfectly reproduce an analoge signal. It may be good enough for people, since humans have limited response to frequencies over 20 KHz, but it still isn't a perfect reproduction.
Also, even with band limited signals, a fixed sampling rate can only perfectly reproduce a signal if the samples have infinite precision, otherwise you will have quantization errors.
It is worth noting that an unfiltered D/A output (with stairsteps) will sound awful despite the fact that our ears cannot directly hear the high frequency noise being filtered out. Since our ears, all speakers, and objects in the environment are non-linear, high frequency components can generate audible difference frequency signals. The upshot of all this is that working at a higher sampling rate, giving you more room to do filtering and reject ultrasonic noise makes an audible difference, at least to some people on some equipment.
[p.s. read this quick;/. moderators prefer to prevent discussion of failures of mainstream cosmology and astrophysics.]
Most/. moderators would not recognize mainstream cosmology and astrophysics if it hit them in the face, thus I suspect that systematic discrimination against challenges to it are products of an overactive, paranoid imagination.
From what I have heard talking to several astrophysicists is that they are as uncomfortable with dark energy and inflation as the next guy (dark matter is a little easier -- we know lots of types of matter that don't radiate light -- basically everything except stars). However, they have been unable to come up with any other theories that are as successful at describing the phenomena you mentioned, so inflation is accepted as the current best theory.
That just isn't true. Electric fields can and do contain angular momentum as well as linear momentum and energy. In the paraxial apprximation, the circular polarizations are angular momentum eigenstates, and higher order modes can carry additonal angular momentum. Decay of positronium conserves total angular momentum, which includes the intrinsic (spin) angular momentum of the leptons as well as the orbital angular momentum about their common center of mass.
Furthermore, angular momentum and energy are two different conserved quantities (though they are strongly linked in relativity), so in the unlikely event that angular momentum was found to not be conserved, it would not necessarily violate conservation of energy.
It isn't always about the money. Some people just love to do this kind of thing, and don't really understand that others would rather not. Also, some of us are so good at this that it is just as easy to do it yourself and get something you are happier with. That is costs less is just a bonus.
There is a lot of experimental evidence for black holes, evidence not well explained by any other known theory. Even after black holes were found to be a possible solution to the GR field equations, people were hesitant to accept them as a "physical" solution. It was only a large body of evidence that has convinced us that they exist.
Despite what you may believe, physicists will listen to challenges to almost any theory (and are proven wrong on a regular basis, science advances!). However, if you just say something can't happen because it is patently silly, without providing a compelling alternative explanation of loads of experemental results, you will be dismissed out of hand. Also, the longer and more successfully a theory has been used, the more substantial evidence against it you will need. Black holes have only been accepted for a short period of time, but if you challenge conservation of energy be prepared. Extraodinary claims require extraodinary evidence.
Also, frequently an outsider to a field will have an alternate theory rejected immediately not because it is absurd but because the experts have already thought of it, done the calculations, and shown that that explanation is inadequate.
Of course, scientists make mistakes, too, but not usually for long in the face of strong evidence.
Mostly what we don't have is a name for the type of thing our model describes. So we just call it a wave or a particle, depending on what is convenient at the time.
That is actually the "standard" behavior in most US states unless you have an employment contract to the contrary, though typically your employer will automatically gain "shop rights" to the code as well.
The obvious way to solve this is to solicit ideas. i.e., "submit your best player AI or city advisor program and we will publish a collection of them online"
At that time, nobody would buy any chips from anyone (Intel, TI, National, etc.) without a second source. It wasn't just in case the manufacturer tanked, it helped if they couldn't meet production quotas or had a fab go non-operational for a long time of course, either of these happening too much would cause you to tank, but while the high density IC market was starting off, manufacturing problems were the norm.
I have had my key snap off in the ignition in cold weather. (like -10 or so). A key/lock without moving parts is not as subject to that failure mode which is almost certainly higher than "running over your keys with a cement truck" -- which might also bend a normal key to the point it won't work, especially if it is on a keychain and unable to lie flat.
Gun nuts claim that there are no recorded cases of police wearing kevlar jackets dying to to failure of the jacket to stop a bullet.
Also, the jackets that police wear are not designed to make them immune to bullets, but to prevent them from being killed by them. If you are shot in the arm, or injured by a bullet to the torso, you will likely recover. It seems reasonable that if you are willing to pay a lot and give up some flexibility (or train enough to compensate for it) you could make armor that was much better.
I recommend you check it out. While my sci-fi loving friends widely regard it as at least one of the best TV shows ever made, I have personally introduced it to around a dozen people who are not sci-fi fans (including those who make fun of me for liking the various star trek shows), and all of them have liked Firefly. It is a well written show with interesting characters and engaging plots that has appeal well outside the genre for which it is known.
I love sci-fi, but I understand how many people aren't interested. Firefly, however, is special.
I found the article somewhat less than compelling, but the question is almost the right one. Smart people do dumb things because they are human -- a species possed of both remarkable logical abilities and considerable instict, but with less ability to tell the two apart than we imagine.
Everyone has a large set of preconceived notions that form the basis for our understanding of the world. In general, some of these notions will be correct, others incorrect, and some of them will be contradictory. Smart people have these, too, but when confronted with a contradiction are more likely/able to go back and examine all of the assumptions to find out which ones are false, or less widely applicable than previously believed. Even smarter people will do this proactivly -- looking for assumptions they hold that may be untenable.
The real question (to be fair, also the question the author attempted to answer) is not why smart people defend stupid ideas, but how do we (smart or no) recognize when we are defending stupid ideas and fix it.
Unfortunately, what the author really addressed is people who don't recognize that they have weaknesses. Those people usually aren't smart. Those are probably people who, as you said, did well in all of their subjects in school.
This is clearly not obvious to many people. It is easy to work a average job and think that to be rich you have to make more money, but that just isn't the case (or isn't the whole story). If it were obvious that you could become rich on a middle-class income, we would have a lot more rich people.
I have never seen a news article about something that I had first hand information about be accurate, so I am innately distrustful of mainstream news' coverage of science in particular.
That said, it would be very useful (as others pointed out) to know how cold or warm an environment can be before worker error increases dramatically. It can be valuable information for me, for instance, to convince my boss that it is bad to keep our lab as cold as it is.
In this could easily be results from a larger study of work environment and error rates. I suspect that I could pick 10 potential factors, all of which you would say "obviously" hurt performance, and find that three of them had no effect, 3 had minor effect, and 4 had moderate to major impact. That would be important.
I suspect that based soley on intuition, many people would say that increasing background noise in the workplace obviously lowers productivity, yet it has been shown that low levels of white noise actually increase productivity.
Actually, I meant U-238 (though, according to nuclearweaponarchive.org, it is likely that the US and others use enriched uranium as the tamper to get the highest yield possible).
You don't want to absorb neutrons in a fission bomb, or in the trigger stage of a thermonuclear bomb, since they will moderate the chain reaction. However, once fusion begins, a huge number of very fast neutrons will be produced. These can be made to start fast-fission in U-238 or other "non-fissionable" isotopes, providing potentially more energy than the fusion reaction itself.
U-238 produces a large fraction of the yield in many "fusion" bombs. Depleted U-238 is used as a tamper to confine the fusion fuel, which produces fast neutrons and cause fission of the U-238. This has a higher yield to mass ratio than a straight up fusion bomb, but produces more fallout.
This is, of course, the problem with vigilante justice, and the reason it is illegal. The 'outmoded' idea of due process that makes our legal system too slow do deal with phishing and other fraudlent sites are designed to make sure the only the guilty are punished, and that the punishment is comensurate with the crime. If I get my paypal 'change your password' scam-of-the-week email, go to the site it points to, hack in, and shut down their webserver, I have maybe stopped some crimes being committed. But I refuse to trust myself to do so without disrupting anyone elses business, leaving the server open for other spambots and the like, or in general causing a mess. In the world where the chances of the perpetrator being caught were high, by hacking in myself, I might even destroy evidence that could be used to legally prosecute them.
I actually think the grandparent was saying that juries can make 'vigilante justice' legal by refusing to convict people for hacking into phishing sites and shutting them down. Or maybe I read that wrong.
Remember, it isn't *just* about short-term revenue. It sounds like his main concern is the change in atmosphere when you are saturated with (potentially) reclusive WiFi users. There are lots of ways that they could extract money from the people who sit there for 8 hours using the network (turning them into "ethical" users), but that doesn't fix the atmosphere problem. In the long run, that will drive them out of business since they will be just like Starbucks with higher operating costs.
This "solution" is certainly not ideal, but I haven't thought of a better idea yet (including in the posts on the link and here on/.)
Even fission is not so simple. If you put too much uranium in a room, you can generate a critical reaction that produces lethal doses of radiation and gets very hot, but assembling a super-critical mass neccesary for a bomb is somewhat hard, it tends to blow itself appart with only a tiny fission yield. Obviously, it is nothing like as hard as fusion, but you can't make a bomb by accident, especially if you are using something other than nearly pure U-235.
The grandparents point, which seems to have eluded you, is that the point is not to use this laser to detonate fusion bombs (since fission bombs do that very well already), but to simulate the ignition conditions and determine if our bombs are going to go off if we need them.
This is being sold under the heading of "stockpile stewardship", not weapons development, much less to be part of an actual weapons system.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about process documents, but most scientific journals long ago decided that being slaves to the passive voice is dumb. Typically we write journals in first person plural (i.e., say "we" even if there is a single author), and it is fine to use passive voice when that is the clearest way to write things. It really makes things easier to read.
Only $35/seller goes to the government (and probably some certification fee for the school, but not all of the tuition). But this really doesn't seem like a bad idea or something particularly likely to extend to people selling their personal junk on eBay any more than it applies to garage sales.
I am against dumb regulation on the internet, but this looks at a smart way to protect against fraud with relatively low cost.
Also, even if it is difficult to regulate, that is not by itself a reason to not to do something. I suspect it is easy to enforce. Sellers need to provide enough identifying information to eBay anyway, and it would be easy to verify every person selling a certain quantity of goods who didn't display their auctioneer ID to see if they were legitimate.
Sorry, my point was not to claim that you cannot make a digital recording that does not limit the reproduction quality -- obviously you can. The point was that a lot of people do not understand and therefore incorrectly use the sampling theorem. To not pay very close attention to factors such as quantization error, aliasing an the non-linear response of output elements will lead to a system with dramatically lower SNR than you would like or expect. I have found a tendancy of people to ignore the digital part of the signal, assuming that if the sampling rate is high enough it will be lossless, and in practice this is often not true.
Though the parent was wrong about the stairstep effect (all audioe D/A converters have output filtering to remove the high frequency components) that does not change the fact that a finite sampling rate cannot perfectly reproduce an analoge signal. It may be good enough for people, since humans have limited response to frequencies over 20 KHz, but it still isn't a perfect reproduction.
Also, even with band limited signals, a fixed sampling rate can only perfectly reproduce a signal if the samples have infinite precision, otherwise you will have quantization errors.
It is worth noting that an unfiltered D/A output (with stairsteps) will sound awful despite the fact that our ears cannot directly hear the high frequency noise being filtered out. Since our ears, all speakers, and objects in the environment are non-linear, high frequency components can generate audible difference frequency signals. The upshot of all this is that working at a higher sampling rate, giving you more room to do filtering and reject ultrasonic noise makes an audible difference, at least to some people on some equipment.
Most
From what I have heard talking to several astrophysicists is that they are as uncomfortable with dark energy and inflation as the next guy (dark matter is a little easier -- we know lots of types of matter that don't radiate light -- basically everything except stars). However, they have been unable to come up with any other theories that are as successful at describing the phenomena you mentioned, so inflation is accepted as the current best theory.
That just isn't true. Electric fields can and do contain angular momentum as well as linear momentum and energy. In the paraxial apprximation, the circular polarizations are angular momentum eigenstates, and higher order modes can carry additonal angular momentum. Decay of positronium conserves total angular momentum, which includes the intrinsic (spin) angular momentum of the leptons as well as the orbital angular momentum about their common center of mass.
Furthermore, angular momentum and energy are two different conserved quantities (though they are strongly linked in relativity), so in the unlikely event that angular momentum was found to not be conserved, it would not necessarily violate conservation of energy.
It isn't always about the money. Some people just love to do this kind of thing, and don't really understand that others would rather not. Also, some of us are so good at this that it is just as easy to do it yourself and get something you are happier with. That is costs less is just a bonus.
There is a lot of experimental evidence for black holes, evidence not well explained by any other known theory. Even after black holes were found to be a possible solution to the GR field equations, people were hesitant to accept them as a "physical" solution. It was only a large body of evidence that has convinced us that they exist.
Despite what you may believe, physicists will listen to challenges to almost any theory (and are proven wrong on a regular basis, science advances!). However, if you just say something can't happen because it is patently silly, without providing a compelling alternative explanation of loads of experemental results, you will be dismissed out of hand. Also, the longer and more successfully a theory has been used, the more substantial evidence against it you will need. Black holes have only been accepted for a short period of time, but if you challenge conservation of energy be prepared. Extraodinary claims require extraodinary evidence.
Also, frequently an outsider to a field will have an alternate theory rejected immediately not because it is absurd but because the experts have already thought of it, done the calculations, and shown that that explanation is inadequate.
Of course, scientists make mistakes, too, but not usually for long in the face of strong evidence.
Mostly what we don't have is a name for the type of thing our model describes. So we just call it a wave or a particle, depending on what is convenient at the time.
That is actually the "standard" behavior in most US states unless you have an employment contract to the contrary, though typically your employer will automatically gain "shop rights" to the code as well.
The obvious way to solve this is to solicit ideas. i.e., "submit your best player AI or city advisor program and we will publish a collection of them online"
At that time, nobody would buy any chips from anyone (Intel, TI, National, etc.) without a second source. It wasn't just in case the manufacturer tanked, it helped if they couldn't meet production quotas or had a fab go non-operational for a long time of course, either of these happening too much would cause you to tank, but while the high density IC market was starting off, manufacturing problems were the norm.
I have had my key snap off in the ignition in cold weather. (like -10 or so). A key/lock without moving parts is not as subject to that failure mode which is almost certainly higher than "running over your keys with a cement truck" -- which might also bend a normal key to the point it won't work, especially if it is on a keychain and unable to lie flat.
Gun nuts claim that there are no recorded cases of police wearing kevlar jackets dying to to failure of the jacket to stop a bullet.
Also, the jackets that police wear are not designed to make them immune to bullets, but to prevent them from being killed by them. If you are shot in the arm, or injured by a bullet to the torso, you will likely recover. It seems reasonable that if you are willing to pay a lot and give up some flexibility (or train enough to compensate for it) you could make armor that was much better.
I recommend you check it out. While my sci-fi loving friends widely regard it as at least one of the best TV shows ever made, I have personally introduced it to around a dozen people who are not sci-fi fans (including those who make fun of me for liking the various star trek shows), and all of them have liked Firefly. It is a well written show with interesting characters and engaging plots that has appeal well outside the genre for which it is known.
I love sci-fi, but I understand how many people aren't interested. Firefly, however, is special.
I found the article somewhat less than compelling, but the question is almost the right one. Smart people do dumb things because they are human -- a species possed of both remarkable logical abilities and considerable instict, but with less ability to tell the two apart than we imagine.
Everyone has a large set of preconceived notions that form the basis for our understanding of the world. In general, some of these notions will be correct, others incorrect, and some of them will be contradictory. Smart people have these, too, but when confronted with a contradiction are more likely/able to go back and examine all of the assumptions to find out which ones are false, or less widely applicable than previously believed. Even smarter people will do this proactivly -- looking for assumptions they hold that may be untenable.
The real question (to be fair, also the question the author attempted to answer) is not why smart people defend stupid ideas, but how do we (smart or no) recognize when we are defending stupid ideas and fix it.
Unfortunately, what the author really addressed is people who don't recognize that they have weaknesses. Those people usually aren't smart. Those are probably people who, as you said, did well in all of their subjects in school.
This is clearly not obvious to many people. It is easy to work a average job and think that to be rich you have to make more money, but that just isn't the case (or isn't the whole story). If it were obvious that you could become rich on a middle-class income, we would have a lot more rich people.
I have never seen a news article about something that I had first hand information about be accurate, so I am innately distrustful of mainstream news' coverage of science in particular.
That said, it would be very useful (as others pointed out) to know how cold or warm an environment can be before worker error increases dramatically. It can be valuable information for me, for instance, to convince my boss that it is bad to keep our lab as cold as it is.
In this could easily be results from a larger study of work environment and error rates. I suspect that I could pick 10 potential factors, all of which you would say "obviously" hurt performance, and find that three of them had no effect, 3 had minor effect, and 4 had moderate to major impact. That would be important.
I suspect that based soley on intuition, many people would say that increasing background noise in the workplace obviously lowers productivity, yet it has been shown that low levels of white noise actually increase productivity.
Actually, I meant U-238 (though, according to nuclearweaponarchive.org, it is likely that the US and others use enriched uranium as the tamper to get the highest yield possible).
You don't want to absorb neutrons in a fission bomb, or in the trigger stage of a thermonuclear bomb, since they will moderate the chain reaction. However, once fusion begins, a huge number of very fast neutrons will be produced. These can be made to start fast-fission in U-238 or other "non-fissionable" isotopes, providing potentially more energy than the fusion reaction itself.
U-238 produces a large fraction of the yield in many "fusion" bombs. Depleted U-238 is used as a tamper to confine the fusion fuel, which produces fast neutrons and cause fission of the U-238. This has a higher yield to mass ratio than a straight up fusion bomb, but produces more fallout.
This is, of course, the problem with vigilante justice, and the reason it is illegal. The 'outmoded' idea of due process that makes our legal system too slow do deal with phishing and other fraudlent sites are designed to make sure the only the guilty are punished, and that the punishment is comensurate with the crime. If I get my paypal 'change your password' scam-of-the-week email, go to the site it points to, hack in, and shut down their webserver, I have maybe stopped some crimes being committed. But I refuse to trust myself to do so without disrupting anyone elses business, leaving the server open for other spambots and the like, or in general causing a mess. In the world where the chances of the perpetrator being caught were high, by hacking in myself, I might even destroy evidence that could be used to legally prosecute them.
I actually think the grandparent was saying that juries can make 'vigilante justice' legal by refusing to convict people for hacking into phishing sites and shutting them down. Or maybe I read that wrong.
Remember, it isn't *just* about short-term revenue. It sounds like his main concern is the change in atmosphere when you are saturated with (potentially) reclusive WiFi users. There are lots of ways that they could extract money from the people who sit there for 8 hours using the network (turning them into "ethical" users), but that doesn't fix the atmosphere problem. In the long run, that will drive them out of business since they will be just like Starbucks with higher operating costs.
/.)
This "solution" is certainly not ideal, but I haven't thought of a better idea yet (including in the posts on the link and here on
Even fission is not so simple. If you put too much uranium in a room, you can generate a critical reaction that produces lethal doses of radiation and gets very hot, but assembling a super-critical mass neccesary for a bomb is somewhat hard, it tends to blow itself appart with only a tiny fission yield. Obviously, it is nothing like as hard as fusion, but you can't make a bomb by accident, especially if you are using something other than nearly pure U-235.
The grandparents point, which seems to have eluded you, is that the point is not to use this laser to detonate fusion bombs (since fission bombs do that very well already), but to simulate the ignition conditions and determine if our bombs are going to go off if we need them.
This is being sold under the heading of "stockpile stewardship", not weapons development, much less to be part of an actual weapons system.