2560 x 1440 is not "low resolution" regardless of how many thousands of dollars you spent 8 years ago on the tech. Age is irrelevant. MacBook Gen 3 13" Retina Displays are 2560 x 1440. Those are being sold THIS YEAR as high-end displays.
Blu Ray is 1920 x 1080 4K is 3840 x 2160, but 4K has not made it out the showroom yet for TV or most monitors.
IBM came out with some spiffy T220/T221 LCD monitors that you could buy way back in 2003 for about $8,500 each that had 3840 x 2400, but that doesn't mean that 3840 x 2400 is "outdated low resolution" simply because one could buy it 12 years ago.
Radar systems already have this capability. There's no need to upgrade anything. Any radar system not using multiple simultaneous frequencies -- especially in the UHF range isn't a modern system.
I say go ahead and spend a fortune building this new super invisible wonder-woman spyplane with expensive electronic skin... it'll be interesting to see how far it gets before it's detected with current tech. My guess would be about half a mile. Maybe less if we upgrade our tech before the plane is built? Anyone taking bets?
While this is largely true, it's not so much democracy that has been destroyed as it is that the USA's democratic republic has become corrupted.
All governments are susceptible to corruption, and the USA's system which relies on less than 600 elected officials to dictate national law for the other 300 million Americans just took a while to get this bad. I can't imagine any one person representing half a million people effectively. So, if you allow 600 people to be split among mostly 2 parties and have most funding come from either the rich or large special interest groups, you end up with this mess.
Still, democracy itself is alive and well in other countries -- just not here in the USA whose congress was bought and sold so long ago, no one remembers when it last represented the will of the people.
Stealth technology, as hinted at in the article, has been susceptible to UHF radar systems since the 1940s. It's always been a gimmick and it's never worked as advertised since every country in the world has sophisticated enough radar to pick up stealth planes. At best, they reduce the size of the blip on radar a tiny bit depending on where the plane is in relation to the radar dish, but stealth tech changes the shape, and thus the capabilities of the planes as well -- mostly, it makes the planes less maneuverable. Documentaries and interviews with the creators of the F-16 and F-18 fighters dismiss stealth as being practically useless for all intents and purposes. This is especially true for "stealth bombers" -- they fly so high and fast, any decent radar can see them coming because their bottoms are flat and reflect well. If they flew lower to the ground, the stealth shape would reduce their radar footprint, but then they'd be in visual range for other detection.
Better stealth materials won't change anything. As soon as this hits the market, new detection methods will render it just as useless as current stealth tech. It's not like loud, hot, fast-moving objects in the skies with hot, smoky trails of spent fuel can't be seen by satellites, thermal imaging, radar, lidar, and other sensors. Even if you could get the radar signature down to the size of a bird, the radar is going to notice your bird is flying at mach 2 and send an alert.
I read a bit on the active stealth tech. It requires at minimum a thin skin of electronics to tune to and absorb the UHF, but it effectively converts the UHF to heat -- which would make the plane glow in infra-red. It also has to survive constant use at super-sonic speeds known to peel paint from planes and be able to have maintenance work done on it -- for the entire coating on the plane. It's not like it's just a coat of paint, it's tiny electronics all over the skin of the plane wired into the main power. That adds weight and complexity, and sounds like a nightmare for maintenance workers. Perhaps it would work best on small drones as there's less surface area to maintain, but then again, drones already have a very small radar footprint to begin with. Maybe it would make a great coating for a nuclear missile. Every second not detected might count when it comes to retaliation or defense, perhaps.
Frankly, this falls into the "interesting, but not especially useful" bin for warfare. The future of air battles is likely satellites and drones with no need for stealth. Air to ground would be similar.
As for China vs USA, they are economic partners and other than a bit of posturing, over Tibet, the south china sea, etc. they're not going to go to war with one another - ever. Vietnam and Korea were puppet wars between China and USA because neither had the guts to assault each other directly. Any imagined battle between the two would be pointless.
I don't know that Mars is the limit for human space exploration, but it likely is our limit for planetary body colonization given that it's the farthest rocky body planet from the sun capable of being terraformed (within our solar system). Gas giants' moons are small and inhospitable with lots of radiation. It wouldn't make much sense to set up a permanent base there -- or even on an asteroid for that matter. Why would any astronaut even want to visit in person when they can send a probe instead?
I don't think using NEVER is hubris. We can never travel faster than the speed of light due to the fundamental laws of the universe. Wormholes and warp drives are fictional, fantasy ideas that require exotic matter or control over undiscovered gravitons to work. Exotic matter likely does not exist (it's possible gravitons don't exist either), and there's no known way to focus gravitons as they don't interact via other fundamental forces, so FTL travel will likely NEVER happen. FTL travel can also create paradoxes, which is why many conclude it's impossible.
So, without FTL travel, it would take many lifetimes to reach another habitable planet to terraform. Assuming we had the technology to do it, why would the human race choose to endure several lifetimes on a ship with scarce resources and constant peril from radiation and destruction only to hurtle towards some destination that could also end in disaster? I imagine if our sun went red giant, we might decide to move on if Mars were no longer hospitable. Perhaps by then, we could simply seed a new planet with stored genetic material and grow new humans at the destination after terraforming instead of sending live humans on the journey. Any living human would be unlikely to survive the journey anyway -- even if we advanced cryonic suspension / hypersleep substantially.
I think it's hubris to assume "almost anything his possible given another 2000 years" -- wow. Talk about hubris in the faith of what mankind can do. I mean, we understand so much more about the universe now than 200 years ago, but that's the problem. We discovered laws of mechanical motion and electricity/magnetism and exploited them to the fullest. We don't have any new laws or forces to exploit anymore. We only need to figure out dark matter, dark energy, and a unified field theory (assuming one exists.. possibly through string theory) and we're done. No more magic to discover. No more undiscovered laws of nature to exploit for future technologies. Our last big life-changing discovery (other than the higgs boson and meta materials) was superconductors over 100 years ago.
We still have a lot to learn, no doubt -- especially in biology and nano-tech, but no new fundamentals to discover.
Have a look at when some of our "modern" tech came about. Today, we're mostly miniaturizing, combining, and refining tech that we invented many decades if not centuries ago. Until some new fundamental forces pop out of the LHC for physicists to exploit, there will be no FTL drives. Unfortunately, the standard model of particle physics doesn't lend itself to there being any other forces, and the higgs boson was the last missing piece of the puzzle save for perhaps the graviton.
Steam Locomotive - 1804 Telephones - 1876 Incandescent Light Bulbs - 1879 Automobiles - 1885 X-ray machine - 1890 Airplanes - 1903 Television - 1925 Computers - 1822 mechanical, 1946 electrical Microwave Oven - 1946 LEDs - 1962 Saturn V rocket (moon launch) -- 1969 MRI - 1977 internet - 1982 (with research started as early as 1960 and various government implementations internally used)
All science is based on statistics, you anonymous moron. There is always uncertainty in experiments and measurements because one can never be certain about anything - even the instruments used to measure observations have inherent uncertainties. Is the ruler you're using precise down to the atomic level? No! Can you be certain your instruments are perfectly calibrated?!?!? No!
This higgs was discovered with 6 sigma accuracy, which is more certain than the precision of manufacturing of most things you can purchase. It's the standard for declaring experimental certainty. If you're 99.9999998 % (which is what six sigma means) certain , there is literally a 0.0000002 % chance that the results were wrong. No one is going to bother to test beyond that, because the possibility of an error is so small it may as well be non-existent.
Such an optimist -- thinking SS benefits will exist in a couple of decades. Plans are in progress to set the age for benefits higher than average life expectancy so it almost never has to pay out.
If you really want to understand things, you have to understand what you're reading.
The IPCC never said that global warming had paused -- it was merely increasing at a slower rate than expected over about a decade. The general trend was still upwards, and the decade where it trended slightly less steeply was interesting and unexpected, but it still fits with the general overall trendline of the previous decades quite well given the variation in sampling. If you're reading that trend as flat, there is something wrong with your eyes.... or at the very least something wrong with the software you're using to plot a trendline -- even if you only plot the data during the period mentioned by the IPCC.
"The Pause was an idea from a 2013 UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that concluded the upward global surface temperature trend from 1998 to 2012 was markedly lower than the trend from 1951 to 2012."
It is beyond ridiculous to imply the temperature change was flat for decades given any real data. It may even be premature to describe the temperature change as slowing without more data points to corroborate it wasn't merely an anomaly -- likely brought about through unusual El Nino, La Nina, and other weather patterns which have multiple year cycles.
NOAA investigated this pause/slowdown and used blind studies and multiple statistical methods to prove the cherry-picked period is well within statistical noise and the slowdown or pause is bunk:
Cores mattered when most systems had only 1 core and upgrading to systems with 2 cores or 2 cores with hyperthreading (4 virtual cores) made a huge difference in performance. That was a long time ago, though. The multiple cores meant less latency -- especially for multimedia tasks as the CPU didn't have to stop what it was doing to schedule time for *random background service* or other apps.
Nowadays, it's as you say -- market droid speak. CPU makers hit a wall with Mhz and needed a new marketing ploy, so they went with cores. Now, even Intel is shying away from that and just going with the cryptic corei3, i5, i7 nonsense -- barely differentiating between the different generations of those..
number of cores over 4 doesn't really matter unless you're doing virtualization, heavy multimedia processing, or just running tons of programs and services simultaneously that are heavy CPU intensive. I can't imagine a 16 or 32 core machine offering any improvements for my daily usage -- at least not unless a killer app like realistic AI becomes the norm.
I agree. Also, if I understand correctly, that shared FPU can be used either by one CPU core as a 256 bit FPU, or by both simultaneously as 2 independent 128 bit FPUs.
So, shared, but not likely to be a bottleneck.
Also, since when do cores have to include all the "extras" ? I recall when 486's had a math co-processor and there were no mmx instructions or other such multimedia or physics sets. This guy is going to have a really tough time explaining how exactly AMD's architecture doesn't provide exactly the number of cores listed -- even if the architecture has its limitations due to sharing resources.
It exists in part because the Linux kernel is GPL 2, and will never move to GPL3. The FSF wants its own kernel and doesn't really care if it takes them decades to catch up to Linux.
The issue is likely moot as systemd has won the init wars. It is not surprising that dependencies are now expecting the init system to be systemd.
MATE is developed by the Linux Mint team, and Linux Mint is switching to systemd for future releases because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which uses systemd. They do have a Debian Edition, but that's also switching to systemd. Considering Red Hat (and derivatives), Suse, Debian (and Ubuntu and derivatives), Arch Linux, et al. are all switching to systemd, the best option is for those rare systems not (yet) running systemd to fork everything. Devuan Linux is your best bet as the maintainer of the new "non-systemd fork."
MATE is just a fork of Gnome2 to begin with. It can be forked again if there are enough systemd haters to care to maintain it.
No. You're taking "observation" too literally. A better explanation is -- nothing exists in any definable state until it interacts with something else.
That's what "measurement," "observation," and "detection" generally mean -- some sensor capable of being triggered by an event was triggered... something in a quantum state interacted with something else and the wave function collapsed.
No conscious observer is required. Just stuff interacting with stuff.
No. France gets about 17% of its electricity from spent nuclear fuel. France's energy sources are nuclear (74.5%), renewables (19.5%). They've simply decided to change the mix so that 40% of the electricity comes from renewable energy sources by adding in more wind and solar by 2025.
That doesn't mean they are dropping the nuclear power, though -- in fact, they are building a Generation III plant that is much more fuel efficient and has less radioactive waste to boot. It should come online in 2018.
The problem in the USA is that we haven't built a nuclear reactor in almost 20 years. The average age of a US facility is 34 years. They were designed to run only 30 to 40 years (licenses expire at 40 years, but they can be extended another 20). They're all older model Gen II reactors.
What we do today is stupid; we spend the fuel in an old, inefficient reactor, then instead of re-using the spent fuel in a breeder reactor, we mix it and encase it in concrete to store for several thousands years. If we built a Gen IV breeder reactor, we could burn uranium and/or thorium and have very little waste which would only need to be stored for a few centuries instead of tens of thousands of years. But, you'll likely never live to see a new nuclear reactor come online in the USA -- it takes decades just to get approval for a site -- mounds of red tape and lots of NIMBYs.
unprecedented... that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Let's see... when has the US government hidden nefarious motives from the unsuspecting public in the past? Oh yes! The many, many chemical, biological, radioactive, and psychological experiments it did on its own people in secret during the last couple centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The federal government does what it wants when it wants and doesn't care what you think about it. You aren't wrong to blame Obama for this particular instance as the DOE is chaired by a cabinet position under his administration, but let's not kid ourselves that this president has somehow ushered in a new era of cronyism when the previous ones instated mass spying on the populace's phone calls and internet traffic and the ones before that sold weapons to Iran and invaded Iraq knowing the country wasn't directly responsible for 9-11 and had no WMDs.
No one can measure time at intervals anywhere near Planck time, and no one can measure distances anywhere near as small as Planck lengths. Planck time is defined as the length of time it takes a photon to travel a Planck length.
It's a handy unit, but it may not have any special significance -- any more than a meter, a yard, or a rod.
From the wiki:
"Because the Planck time comes from dimensional analysis, which ignores constant factors, there is no reason to believe that exactly one unit of Planck time has any special physical significance. Rather, the Planck time represents a rough time scale at which quantum gravitational effects are likely to become important. "
The future I envision is having Tony Stark's Jarvis personal assistant program open-sourced and running on my personal home Linux cluster behind a firewall with all of my devices connected locally or remotely through that interface... most likely all Linux devices. The computing power is mine, the data is mine, the agent that collects my preferences and conducts searches runs locally and for me, not some third party that wants to sell my information or could get easily hacked and cause numerous headaches.
Windows 10 is the most intrusive software yet -- even includes a keylogger. But, hey... if you want an OS that scans your file contents and file names, uploads your searches (local machine and internet), searches to see what software you're running (and disable any it thinks are dubious), and uploads a ton of personal information (possibly even passwords and your personal files) into the cloud for the world to hack, go for it.
Personally, I don't want to deal with the identity theft, the theft of my intellectual property, and/or threats of blackmail from those that will gain access to that information.
As for Apple, they're so much more popular now than they were 20 years ago. I'm impressed with how many university students have them. Many of my family members have Macs, too. I always tell them that PCs are cheaper, but an Apple will "just work" with less hassle. Apple will lock you into their ecosystem and cost a small fortune for simple cables and adapters, but it's a really nice prison.
I've toyed with Linux for decades, but now that I've found Cubuntu -- Ubuntu with Cinnamon and no zeitgeist crap; I've found a Linux distro that does literally everything I used Windows for. Web browsing (chromium) 90% of my usage, movie watching (vlc) 5%, then libreoffice, steam, wine for a few games, etc.
Linux was always behind in terms of hardware support, but it's mostly caught up. Most hardware "just works" same as with Windows and OSX... and it's getting better every day.
I see a future without Windows. So does Microsoft, which is why they're desperately trying to monetize their users by giving away their OS for free.
Neutrinos with mass certainly DO fit in the Standard Model. In fact, all 3 known left-handed neutrinos are a part of the standard model. Neutrinos are even known to oscillate between the 3 types. Originally, neutrinos were assumed to be massless as their mass is so incredibly tiny it couldn't be detected when the particles were first proposed and discovered. Their insignificant mass didn't alter any predictions the model made on particle physics at the time. That does not mean that they aren't more well understood today, nor that they have some magical capability that doesn't fit the framework of the standard model. They were just assumed to be massless because they moved at near light speed and there didn't seem to be any right-handed neutrinos detected that would show they interacted with the Higgs... also, every particle interaction that created them didn't have any missing mass that would need to be accounted for by the neutrino ejected from the collision.
There are theories on how and why the neutrinos oscillate between the 3 mass states and on how they interact with the Higgs to generate those masses. There are even theories that include right-handed "sterile" neutrinos that we haven't yet detected (and possibly can't ever hope to detect based on theories of their properties.) The fact that we can't prove it and don't have any good experiments in progress to figure it out doesn't mean the 3 flavors of neutrinos with their various masses don't fit perfectly well into the standard model as-is. These tiny, fast, ghostly particles just don't interact with regular matter very often, nor do they interact with electro-magnetic fields... so, it's very difficult if not impossible to devise experiments to definitively tell us much about how they generate their masses from the Higgs (or some unknown source) or why there are no detectable right-handed neutrinos (assuming they even exist... and if they do, that they exist for long enough to be detected before flipping back to left-handed ones).
Actually, you have that a bit backwards. The Standard Model says we're done finding new particles. The Higgs was the last one we expected to find, and it was so necessary to the theory that we could describe all of its attributes long before we actually found it. When we did, it matched the theory perfectly -- too perfectly. We knew its mass, spin, decay rate, and interaction with other particles just from the math before we even found it in the lab. Physicists were both relieved and saddened by the discovery as it meant the standard model was correct and there were no new physics to be found.
It's the idea of finding new particles that is all supposition. We know the standard model can't explain everything, but we don't know that missing particles are the solution. We also don't know how to detect those new particles if they do exist. Gravitons, sterile neutrinos, and black matter particles (whatever those may be) would be electrically neutral and barely interact with anything -- much less a particle detector. We suspect we will be able to detect them indirectly if they exist at all. There is a slim chance that there may be more than one type of Higgs, but other Higgs are not necessary for the theory to work and other Higgs would be at much higher energy levels.
You are correct that no one knows for certain -- that's the whole reason they conduct the experiments. But, the very well known math and theory strongly suggest that we're done. It's the wild supposition arguments that hope there's something more.
And that's not because they don't WANT to find new physics... it's just... quantum mechanics and particle physics are so well understood that it would be extremely surprising to find other fundamental particles -- b/c if they exist, they must be very very weakly interacting with all the known particles or at least very short lived to not cause chaos with the currently understood theory.
Venus has no magnetosphere, and it's got a hellish thick atmosphere... so, yes, you're right in a sense that gravity alone is enough to hold certain types of gasses in an atmosphere for a reasonable amount of time. But, Venus is bleeding that atmosphere away in a comet-like tail. Venus once was very much like Earth with vast oceans, but almost all of that water turned into water vapor which was then split by ionizing radiation from the solar wind. The lighter hydrogen and oxygen ions were blown into space. It's still happening today, though almost all of the water is gone. Eventually the other gasses will also be ionized and blown away.
Mars has no magnetosphere and even less gravity than Venus, but it is much further from the sun, and the intensity of the solar wind dies off proportional to the square of the distance. I'm sure someone has done the math, but my guess is the lower gravity is a much larger issue than the lack of a magnetic field when it comes to maintaining a Martian atmosphere.
The missing magnetosphere is a much bigger problem for life than for the atmosphere. We can build domes to hold an atmosphere... even pump out gasses as they dissipate to maintain a planet-wide atmosphere. How do we protect against cosmic rays, though? magnetize the domes?
I love Mint... but, I like Cubuntu more -- it's mostly a French distro, but has English releases... It's just Ubuntu w/ the spyware ripped out and the Cinnamon and Mate interfaces instead of Unity. It's missing a few small nice Linux Mint customizations for nemo and Mint's specific software updater; but, it gains 100% compatibility with Ubuntu repositories and has newer packages.
I made the switch b/c I had a lot of issues with Mint's older kernels, drivers, codecs, and older VLC repository that led to crashes - Nemo crashes, Nautilus crashes, complete X crashes, etc. Since switching to Cubuntu -- not a single issue.
The only problem w/ Cubuntu was on the install -- it wouldn't let me move forward w/ the installer if I chose an encrypted home drive on an already encrypted volume... but, you can encrypt the home directory later if they haven't fixed that.
Do you already have a version of Office? Maybe it only nags those without a copy installed. I have Win 10 on multiple laptops. It took a month or two, but surely enough -- office 365 pop up in the notifications tray on all of them. I turned off those notifications the second they started. It could have been from an update (wouldn't be the first time they put a nag notification on my tray -- that's how I got Win10 to start with from the Win8 upgrade nag tray icon)
Monetary and Fiscal policy (like controlling the interest rates) has actually lessened the boom/bust cycle since it was implemented. Before the fed controlled the interest rates, bubbles were far more common and much more disastrous when they popped. Just look at the USA's list of booms and busts... and how many "financial panics" there were long ago:
We used to have deep recessions every 10 years or so. Around the late 1930s, we started manipulating the rates and now the markets crash every 20 to 30 years, but when they do dip, we recover much faster -- except for this last recession. The housing market just touched every aspect of life -- banking, credit, home ownership, ability to move, investments... you name it.
And spot on about the housing bubble -- policies let people buy homes that should not have purchased those particular homes. People signed up for ARM mortgages and just incredulously believed the rates would never go up. People purchased huge houses they could barely afford while working paycheck to paycheck. It was crazy. Banks traded mortgages as if they were stocks or bonds -- ones with perfect credit ratings that could never go down in value. Stupidity and insanity all around. It was a house of cards that only took a little bump to fall apart -- and many saw it coming long before it folded.
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2560 x 1440 is not "low resolution" regardless of how many thousands of dollars you spent 8 years ago on the tech. Age is irrelevant. MacBook Gen 3 13" Retina Displays are 2560 x 1440. Those are being sold THIS YEAR as high-end displays.
Blu Ray is 1920 x 1080
4K is 3840 x 2160, but 4K has not made it out the showroom yet for TV or most monitors.
IBM came out with some spiffy T220/T221 LCD monitors that you could buy way back in 2003 for about $8,500 each that had 3840 x 2400, but that doesn't mean that 3840 x 2400 is "outdated low resolution" simply because one could buy it 12 years ago.
Radar systems already have this capability. There's no need to upgrade anything. Any radar system not using multiple simultaneous frequencies -- especially in the UHF range isn't a modern system.
I say go ahead and spend a fortune building this new super invisible wonder-woman spyplane with expensive electronic skin... it'll be interesting to see how far it gets before it's detected with current tech. My guess would be about half a mile. Maybe less if we upgrade our tech before the plane is built? Anyone taking bets?
While this is largely true, it's not so much democracy that has been destroyed as it is that the USA's democratic republic has become corrupted.
All governments are susceptible to corruption, and the USA's system which relies on less than 600 elected officials to dictate national law for the other 300 million Americans just took a while to get this bad. I can't imagine any one person representing half a million people effectively. So, if you allow 600 people to be split among mostly 2 parties and have most funding come from either the rich or large special interest groups, you end up with this mess.
Still, democracy itself is alive and well in other countries -- just not here in the USA whose congress was bought and sold so long ago, no one remembers when it last represented the will of the people.
Stealth technology, as hinted at in the article, has been susceptible to UHF radar systems since the 1940s. It's always been a gimmick and it's never worked as advertised since every country in the world has sophisticated enough radar to pick up stealth planes. At best, they reduce the size of the blip on radar a tiny bit depending on where the plane is in relation to the radar dish, but stealth tech changes the shape, and thus the capabilities of the planes as well -- mostly, it makes the planes less maneuverable. Documentaries and interviews with the creators of the F-16 and F-18 fighters dismiss stealth as being practically useless for all intents and purposes. This is especially true for "stealth bombers" -- they fly so high and fast, any decent radar can see them coming because their bottoms are flat and reflect well. If they flew lower to the ground, the stealth shape would reduce their radar footprint, but then they'd be in visual range for other detection.
Better stealth materials won't change anything. As soon as this hits the market, new detection methods will render it just as useless as current stealth tech. It's not like loud, hot, fast-moving objects in the skies with hot, smoky trails of spent fuel can't be seen by satellites, thermal imaging, radar, lidar, and other sensors. Even if you could get the radar signature down to the size of a bird, the radar is going to notice your bird is flying at mach 2 and send an alert.
I read a bit on the active stealth tech. It requires at minimum a thin skin of electronics to tune to and absorb the UHF, but it effectively converts the UHF to heat -- which would make the plane glow in infra-red. It also has to survive constant use at super-sonic speeds known to peel paint from planes and be able to have maintenance work done on it -- for the entire coating on the plane. It's not like it's just a coat of paint, it's tiny electronics all over the skin of the plane wired into the main power. That adds weight and complexity, and sounds like a nightmare for maintenance workers. Perhaps it would work best on small drones as there's less surface area to maintain, but then again, drones already have a very small radar footprint to begin with. Maybe it would make a great coating for a nuclear missile. Every second not detected might count when it comes to retaliation or defense, perhaps.
Frankly, this falls into the "interesting, but not especially useful" bin for warfare. The future of air battles is likely satellites and drones with no need for stealth. Air to ground would be similar.
As for China vs USA, they are economic partners and other than a bit of posturing, over Tibet, the south china sea, etc. they're not going to go to war with one another - ever. Vietnam and Korea were puppet wars between China and USA because neither had the guts to assault each other directly. Any imagined battle between the two would be pointless.
I don't know that Mars is the limit for human space exploration, but it likely is our limit for planetary body colonization given that it's the farthest rocky body planet from the sun capable of being terraformed (within our solar system). Gas giants' moons are small and inhospitable with lots of radiation. It wouldn't make much sense to set up a permanent base there -- or even on an asteroid for that matter. Why would any astronaut even want to visit in person when they can send a probe instead?
I don't think using NEVER is hubris. We can never travel faster than the speed of light due to the fundamental laws of the universe. Wormholes and warp drives are fictional, fantasy ideas that require exotic matter or control over undiscovered gravitons to work. Exotic matter likely does not exist (it's possible gravitons don't exist either), and there's no known way to focus gravitons as they don't interact via other fundamental forces, so FTL travel will likely NEVER happen. FTL travel can also create paradoxes, which is why many conclude it's impossible.
So, without FTL travel, it would take many lifetimes to reach another habitable planet to terraform. Assuming we had the technology to do it, why would the human race choose to endure several lifetimes on a ship with scarce resources and constant peril from radiation and destruction only to hurtle towards some destination that could also end in disaster? I imagine if our sun went red giant, we might decide to move on if Mars were no longer hospitable. Perhaps by then, we could simply seed a new planet with stored genetic material and grow new humans at the destination after terraforming instead of sending live humans on the journey. Any living human would be unlikely to survive the journey anyway -- even if we advanced cryonic suspension / hypersleep substantially.
I think it's hubris to assume "almost anything his possible given another 2000 years" -- wow. Talk about hubris in the faith of what mankind can do. I mean, we understand so much more about the universe now than 200 years ago, but that's the problem. We discovered laws of mechanical motion and electricity/magnetism and exploited them to the fullest. We don't have any new laws or forces to exploit anymore. We only need to figure out dark matter, dark energy, and a unified field theory (assuming one exists.. possibly through string theory) and we're done. No more magic to discover. No more undiscovered laws of nature to exploit for future technologies. Our last big life-changing discovery (other than the higgs boson and meta materials) was superconductors over 100 years ago.
We still have a lot to learn, no doubt -- especially in biology and nano-tech, but no new fundamentals to discover.
Have a look at when some of our "modern" tech came about. Today, we're mostly miniaturizing, combining, and refining tech that we invented many decades if not centuries ago. Until some new fundamental forces pop out of the LHC for physicists to exploit, there will be no FTL drives. Unfortunately, the standard model of particle physics doesn't lend itself to there being any other forces, and the higgs boson was the last missing piece of the puzzle save for perhaps the graviton.
Steam Locomotive - 1804
Telephones - 1876
Incandescent Light Bulbs - 1879
Automobiles - 1885
X-ray machine - 1890
Airplanes - 1903
Television - 1925
Computers - 1822 mechanical, 1946 electrical
Microwave Oven - 1946
LEDs - 1962
Saturn V rocket (moon launch) -- 1969
MRI - 1977
internet - 1982 (with research started as early as 1960 and various government implementations internally used)
All science is based on statistics, you anonymous moron. There is always uncertainty in experiments and measurements because one can never be certain about anything - even the instruments used to measure observations have inherent uncertainties. Is the ruler you're using precise down to the atomic level? No! Can you be certain your instruments are perfectly calibrated?!?!? No!
This higgs was discovered with 6 sigma accuracy, which is more certain than the precision of manufacturing of most things you can purchase. It's the standard for declaring experimental certainty. If you're 99.9999998 % (which is what six sigma means) certain , there is literally a 0.0000002 % chance that the results were wrong. No one is going to bother to test beyond that, because the possibility of an error is so small it may as well be non-existent.
Such an optimist -- thinking SS benefits will exist in a couple of decades. Plans are in progress to set the age for benefits higher than average life expectancy so it almost never has to pay out.
If you really want to understand things, you have to understand what you're reading.
The IPCC never said that global warming had paused -- it was merely increasing at a slower rate than expected over about a decade. The general trend was still upwards, and the decade where it trended slightly less steeply was interesting and unexpected, but it still fits with the general overall trendline of the previous decades quite well given the variation in sampling. If you're reading that trend as flat, there is something wrong with your eyes.... or at the very least something wrong with the software you're using to plot a trendline -- even if you only plot the data during the period mentioned by the IPCC.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
"The Pause was an idea from a 2013 UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that concluded the upward global surface temperature trend from 1998 to 2012 was markedly lower than the trend from 1951 to 2012."
It is beyond ridiculous to imply the temperature change was flat for decades given any real data. It may even be premature to describe the temperature change as slowing without more data points to corroborate it wasn't merely an anomaly -- likely brought about through unusual El Nino, La Nina, and other weather patterns which have multiple year cycles.
NOAA investigated this pause/slowdown and used blind studies and multiple statistical methods to prove the cherry-picked period is well within statistical noise and the slowdown or pause is bunk:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Cores mattered when most systems had only 1 core and upgrading to systems with 2 cores or 2 cores with hyperthreading (4 virtual cores) made a huge difference in performance. That was a long time ago, though. The multiple cores meant less latency -- especially for multimedia tasks as the CPU didn't have to stop what it was doing to schedule time for *random background service* or other apps.
Nowadays, it's as you say -- market droid speak. CPU makers hit a wall with Mhz and needed a new marketing ploy, so they went with cores. Now, even Intel is shying away from that and just going with the cryptic corei3, i5, i7 nonsense -- barely differentiating between the different generations of those..
number of cores over 4 doesn't really matter unless you're doing virtualization, heavy multimedia processing, or just running tons of programs and services simultaneously that are heavy CPU intensive. I can't imagine a 16 or 32 core machine offering any improvements for my daily usage -- at least not unless a killer app like realistic AI becomes the norm.
I agree. Also, if I understand correctly, that shared FPU can be used either by one CPU core as a 256 bit FPU, or by both simultaneously as 2 independent 128 bit FPUs.
So, shared, but not likely to be a bottleneck.
Also, since when do cores have to include all the "extras" ? I recall when 486's had a math co-processor and there were no mmx instructions or other such multimedia or physics sets. This guy is going to have a really tough time explaining how exactly AMD's architecture doesn't provide exactly the number of cores listed -- even if the architecture has its limitations due to sharing resources.
It exists in part because the Linux kernel is GPL 2, and will never move to GPL3. The FSF wants its own kernel and doesn't really care if it takes them decades to catch up to Linux.
The issue is likely moot as systemd has won the init wars. It is not surprising that dependencies are now expecting the init system to be systemd.
MATE is developed by the Linux Mint team, and Linux Mint is switching to systemd for future releases because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which uses systemd. They do have a Debian Edition, but that's also switching to systemd. Considering Red Hat (and derivatives), Suse, Debian (and Ubuntu and derivatives), Arch Linux, et al. are all switching to systemd, the best option is for those rare systems not (yet) running systemd to fork everything. Devuan Linux is your best bet as the maintainer of the new "non-systemd fork."
MATE is just a fork of Gnome2 to begin with. It can be forked again if there are enough systemd haters to care to maintain it.
No. You're taking "observation" too literally. A better explanation is -- nothing exists in any definable state until it interacts with something else.
That's what "measurement," "observation," and "detection" generally mean -- some sensor capable of being triggered by an event was triggered... something in a quantum state interacted with something else and the wave function collapsed.
No conscious observer is required. Just stuff interacting with stuff.
No. They aren't "arguing against" the Universe having a creator. They simply have no evidence FOR one, so they dismiss the idea.
If you have scientific evidence, then please present it. If not, then it's not science and science has nothing to say about it.
No. France gets about 17% of its electricity from spent nuclear fuel. France's energy sources are nuclear (74.5%), renewables (19.5%). They've simply decided to change the mix so that 40% of the electricity comes from renewable energy sources by adding in more wind and solar by 2025.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That doesn't mean they are dropping the nuclear power, though -- in fact, they are building a Generation III plant that is much more fuel efficient and has less radioactive waste to boot. It should come online in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem in the USA is that we haven't built a nuclear reactor in almost 20 years. The average age of a US facility is 34 years. They were designed to run only 30 to 40 years (licenses expire at 40 years, but they can be extended another 20). They're all older model Gen II reactors.
What we do today is stupid; we spend the fuel in an old, inefficient reactor, then instead of re-using the spent fuel in a breeder reactor, we mix it and encase it in concrete to store for several thousands years. If we built a Gen IV breeder reactor, we could burn uranium and/or thorium and have very little waste which would only need to be stored for a few centuries instead of tens of thousands of years. But, you'll likely never live to see a new nuclear reactor come online in the USA -- it takes decades just to get approval for a site -- mounds of red tape and lots of NIMBYs.
unprecedented... that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Let's see... when has the US government hidden nefarious motives from the unsuspecting public in the past?
Oh yes! The many, many chemical, biological, radioactive, and psychological experiments it did on its own people in secret during the last couple centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The federal government does what it wants when it wants and doesn't care what you think about it. You aren't wrong to blame Obama for this particular instance as the DOE is chaired by a cabinet position under his administration, but let's not kid ourselves that this president has somehow ushered in a new era of cronyism when the previous ones instated mass spying on the populace's phone calls and internet traffic and the ones before that sold weapons to Iran and invaded Iraq knowing the country wasn't directly responsible for 9-11 and had no WMDs.
No one can measure time at intervals anywhere near Planck time, and no one can measure distances anywhere near as small as Planck lengths. Planck time is defined as the length of time it takes a photon to travel a Planck length.
It's a handy unit, but it may not have any special significance -- any more than a meter, a yard, or a rod.
From the wiki:
"Because the Planck time comes from dimensional analysis, which ignores constant factors, there is no reason to believe that exactly one unit of Planck time has any special physical significance. Rather, the Planck time represents a rough time scale at which quantum gravitational effects are likely to become important. "
beautiful. thank goodness others with mod points could mod this up.
You see a very bleak future, my friend.
The future I envision is having Tony Stark's Jarvis personal assistant program open-sourced and running on my personal home Linux cluster behind a firewall with all of my devices connected locally or remotely through that interface... most likely all Linux devices. The computing power is mine, the data is mine, the agent that collects my preferences and conducts searches runs locally and for me, not some third party that wants to sell my information or could get easily hacked and cause numerous headaches.
Windows 10 is the most intrusive software yet -- even includes a keylogger. But, hey... if you want an OS that scans your file contents and file names, uploads your searches (local machine and internet), searches to see what software you're running (and disable any it thinks are dubious), and uploads a ton of personal information (possibly even passwords and your personal files) into the cloud for the world to hack, go for it.
Personally, I don't want to deal with the identity theft, the theft of my intellectual property, and/or threats of blackmail from those that will gain access to that information.
As for Apple, they're so much more popular now than they were 20 years ago. I'm impressed with how many university students have them. Many of my family members have Macs, too. I always tell them that PCs are cheaper, but an Apple will "just work" with less hassle. Apple will lock you into their ecosystem and cost a small fortune for simple cables and adapters, but it's a really nice prison.
I've toyed with Linux for decades, but now that I've found Cubuntu -- Ubuntu with Cinnamon and no zeitgeist crap; I've found a Linux distro that does literally everything I used Windows for. Web browsing (chromium) 90% of my usage, movie watching (vlc) 5%, then libreoffice, steam, wine for a few games, etc.
Linux was always behind in terms of hardware support, but it's mostly caught up. Most hardware "just works" same as with Windows and OSX... and it's getting better every day.
I see a future without Windows. So does Microsoft, which is why they're desperately trying to monetize their users by giving away their OS for free.
Neutrinos with mass certainly DO fit in the Standard Model. In fact, all 3 known left-handed neutrinos are a part of the standard model. Neutrinos are even known to oscillate between the 3 types. Originally, neutrinos were assumed to be massless as their mass is so incredibly tiny it couldn't be detected when the particles were first proposed and discovered. Their insignificant mass didn't alter any predictions the model made on particle physics at the time. That does not mean that they aren't more well understood today, nor that they have some magical capability that doesn't fit the framework of the standard model. They were just assumed to be massless because they moved at near light speed and there didn't seem to be any right-handed neutrinos detected that would show they interacted with the Higgs... also, every particle interaction that created them didn't have any missing mass that would need to be accounted for by the neutrino ejected from the collision.
There are theories on how and why the neutrinos oscillate between the 3 mass states and on how they interact with the Higgs to generate those masses. There are even theories that include right-handed "sterile" neutrinos that we haven't yet detected (and possibly can't ever hope to detect based on theories of their properties.) The fact that we can't prove it and don't have any good experiments in progress to figure it out doesn't mean the 3 flavors of neutrinos with their various masses don't fit perfectly well into the standard model as-is. These tiny, fast, ghostly particles just don't interact with regular matter very often, nor do they interact with electro-magnetic fields... so, it's very difficult if not impossible to devise experiments to definitively tell us much about how they generate their masses from the Higgs (or some unknown source) or why there are no detectable right-handed neutrinos (assuming they even exist... and if they do, that they exist for long enough to be detected before flipping back to left-handed ones).
Actually, you have that a bit backwards. The Standard Model says we're done finding new particles. The Higgs was the last one we expected to find, and it was so necessary to the theory that we could describe all of its attributes long before we actually found it. When we did, it matched the theory perfectly -- too perfectly. We knew its mass, spin, decay rate, and interaction with other particles just from the math before we even found it in the lab. Physicists were both relieved and saddened by the discovery as it meant the standard model was correct and there were no new physics to be found.
It's the idea of finding new particles that is all supposition. We know the standard model can't explain everything, but we don't know that missing particles are the solution. We also don't know how to detect those new particles if they do exist. Gravitons, sterile neutrinos, and black matter particles (whatever those may be) would be electrically neutral and barely interact with anything -- much less a particle detector. We suspect we will be able to detect them indirectly if they exist at all. There is a slim chance that there may be more than one type of Higgs, but other Higgs are not necessary for the theory to work and other Higgs would be at much higher energy levels.
You are correct that no one knows for certain -- that's the whole reason they conduct the experiments. But, the very well known math and theory strongly suggest that we're done. It's the wild supposition arguments that hope there's something more.
And that's not because they don't WANT to find new physics... it's just... quantum mechanics and particle physics are so well understood that it would be extremely surprising to find other fundamental particles -- b/c if they exist, they must be very very weakly interacting with all the known particles or at least very short lived to not cause chaos with the currently understood theory.
Both are important.
Venus has no magnetosphere, and it's got a hellish thick atmosphere... so, yes, you're right in a sense that gravity alone is enough to hold certain types of gasses in an atmosphere for a reasonable amount of time. But, Venus is bleeding that atmosphere away in a comet-like tail. Venus once was very much like Earth with vast oceans, but almost all of that water turned into water vapor which was then split by ionizing radiation from the solar wind. The lighter hydrogen and oxygen ions were blown into space. It's still happening today, though almost all of the water is gone. Eventually the other gasses will also be ionized and blown away.
Mars has no magnetosphere and even less gravity than Venus, but it is much further from the sun, and the intensity of the solar wind dies off proportional to the square of the distance. I'm sure someone has done the math, but my guess is the lower gravity is a much larger issue than the lack of a magnetic field when it comes to maintaining a Martian atmosphere.
The missing magnetosphere is a much bigger problem for life than for the atmosphere. We can build domes to hold an atmosphere... even pump out gasses as they dissipate to maintain a planet-wide atmosphere. How do we protect against cosmic rays, though? magnetize the domes?
I love Mint... but, I like Cubuntu more -- it's mostly a French distro, but has English releases... It's just Ubuntu w/ the spyware ripped out and the Cinnamon and Mate interfaces instead of Unity. It's missing a few small nice Linux Mint customizations for nemo and Mint's specific software updater; but, it gains 100% compatibility with Ubuntu repositories and has newer packages.
I made the switch b/c I had a lot of issues with Mint's older kernels, drivers, codecs, and older VLC repository that led to crashes - Nemo crashes, Nautilus crashes, complete X crashes, etc. Since switching to Cubuntu -- not a single issue.
The only problem w/ Cubuntu was on the install -- it wouldn't let me move forward w/ the installer if I chose an encrypted home drive on an already encrypted volume... but, you can encrypt the home directory later if they haven't fixed that.
Do you already have a version of Office? Maybe it only nags those without a copy installed. I have Win 10 on multiple laptops. It took a month or two, but surely enough -- office 365 pop up in the notifications tray on all of them. I turned off those notifications the second they started. It could have been from an update (wouldn't be the first time they put a nag notification on my tray -- that's how I got Win10 to start with from the Win8 upgrade nag tray icon)
Bingo.
Monetary and Fiscal policy (like controlling the interest rates) has actually lessened the boom/bust cycle since it was implemented. Before the fed controlled the interest rates, bubbles were far more common and much more disastrous when they popped. Just look at the USA's list of booms and busts... and how many "financial panics" there were long ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We used to have deep recessions every 10 years or so. Around the late 1930s, we started manipulating the rates and now the markets crash every 20 to 30 years, but when they do dip, we recover much faster -- except for this last recession. The housing market just touched every aspect of life -- banking, credit, home ownership, ability to move, investments... you name it.
And spot on about the housing bubble -- policies let people buy homes that should not have purchased those particular homes. People signed up for ARM mortgages and just incredulously believed the rates would never go up. People purchased huge houses they could barely afford while working paycheck to paycheck. It was crazy. Banks traded mortgages as if they were stocks or bonds -- ones with perfect credit ratings that could never go down in value. Stupidity and insanity all around. It was a house of cards that only took a little bump to fall apart -- and many saw it coming long before it folded.