1. The reason for the flash remains unexplained by theory, and the star has been posing problems for theorists ever since. Stars that make problems for theorists are always interesting.
...except when they're not.
It appears that the distinction lies in whether the theorists think the star (a) appears to exemplify (some minor variation of) a widely popular but ill-supported theory, or (b) entirely contradicts a widely popular but ill-supported theory. It's easy to guess which one generates interest among theorists, but the result is flattering neither to theorists nor to astronomy's position as an actual science.
An example of a star (or something) that causes problems for theorists, but is canonically uninteresting, is the high-z quasar (supposedly among the most distant and, perforce, luminous objects in the universe) physically in front of the nearby opaque galaxy NGC 7319. The silence since it was reported has been deafening.
The key phrases are "as a rule" and "for most". If your roommate is any good at all, he or she is way more frustrated than I am with the pig-headedness of the typical astronomical-journal peer reviewer. He or she must find it as hilarious as I do that the fountains shooting from Io's surface are described as "volcanoes", despite having drifted tens of miles from their positions three decades ago, or that the polar surface scars on Enceladus are said to be water-ammonia volcanoes whose craters must just happen to be parabolic so that the "plumes" they shoot into space are nicely collimated beams. He or she must (or ought to) chortle at reports about winding canyons on Mars claimed to be collapsed two-mile-wide, mile-high lava tubes.
It's ironic that planetary astronomers, as a group, are likely to be the first to be dragged into the 20th century, obliged to learn some actual plasma dynamics or anyway to stop pretending they know it already. (I say "ironic" because unlike stars, nebulae, galaxies, and the intergalactic medium, planets are, uniquely, not primarily composed of plasma.) Planetary astronomers don't get to pull silliness like dark matter and big bangs out of... thin air? "hot gas", perhaps. Furthermore, they get to send actual probes through double-layers and measure conditions on the way through, and into "plumes" and (if they thought to put the right instruments aboard!) directly measure the current flow.
Physics as a whole isn't waiting for astronomers to look up from their collective navel. Laboratory plasma physics is an active field despite being driven and funded mainly by the fusion-reactor boondoggle. Pity, though, the poor middle-aged astronomer once it becomes clear that to participate in modern astronomy he will be obliged to start from scratch with the messy mathematics and lab methods he chose astronomy specifically to avoid. It's no wonder peer reviewers and grant committees resist.
What are the facts? Astronomers are (with a few commendable exceptions) unfamiliar with the physics that govern the motion of the overwhelming majority of material found in space. They have (with fortunate exceptions) been led to believe that MHD is that physics, despite that it has been demonstrated to fail in most conditions, particularly including those they study. Astronomers (all of them!) lack the mathematical skills to solve the equations that define actual, physical plasma dynamics.
That last sentence is not so damning as it sounds. Nobody else can solve plasma-dynamic equations, either. Responses to that fact vary with the individual. One possibility is to use other methods, such as simulation and physical scale-modelling. Another is to pretend that some prettier equations apply, use them instead, and ignore the discrepancy with observation. A third is to announce that the whole subject is unworthy of serious attention, the proper domain only of lowly engineers, merchants, and/or cranks.
You can easily guess which responses are favored among astronomers, and draw your own conclusion about what that means.
What's tragic is so many bright, educated people wasting their careers trying desperately to shore up ragged, unphysical theories, inventing zoos full of particles and forces, pasting on epicycles like mad, and developing decidedly counter-scientific habits. Wouldn't it be easier to spend a couple of semesters in a lab like real scientists do? We are fortunate that the people making the space probes and telescopes are engineers: those devices return both pretty pictures and real data, despite all their masters' fond fancies. That data will be useful when astronomy students, in some future generation, begin to learn the physics necessary to interpret the data sensibly, and (some decades later) are allowed by their peers to publish their findings.
Plasma dynamics is not synonymous with "Electric Universe", "Holoscience", nor whichever catastrophism cult you're reviling today. That they have latched onto plasma phenomena means no more than that nature worshippers prefer herbal medicine; herbs came first, and (lately, as of old) are as interesting to Merck. That said, mainstream astronomy does have a problem. If astronomy were a real science, it would engage instead of circling the wagons.
For a serious peek at the role of plasma dynamics in the solar system, you need go no farther than NASA: 15.1.1. Applicability of Hydromagnetics and Plasma Physics. For wider application, the Los Alamos National Laboratory has up a nice tour of The Universe (which universe even your neighborhood astronomer, if pressed, will admit is over 99% plasma-phase -- at least the baryonic bits! -- even if he has little inkling what that means), and links to refereed-journal papers.
I'm afraid ceoyoyo and 2008 will need to find their cranks elsewhere. That said, the Velikovskyite cultists at Thunderbolts have a very nice picture-of-the-day archive, with captions that besides being much more fun than the pap on APOD, are remarkably often thought-provoking. You don't have to believe that Venus popped out of Saturn in immediate prehistory (as "proven" by widespread legends) to enjoy them rattling the chains that hold astronomers in their 19th-century Christian-esque universe.
You can't honestly poke fun at a hairy-eyed Velikovskyite without ribbing the Big-bang mooncalves equally. The latter have much less excuse for their silliness, and a lot more to answer for.
Plasma explanation for dark matter? There is no need for mysterious dark matter, or dark energy. Diffuse mass in the universe is subject to non-gravitational forces, sure, but we call 'em "electromagnetic". (Some physicists even studied them in school, evidently as undergrads.)
It's not just the press releases that are funny. Even the captions on APOD pages get pretty silly.
Charles and Boswell didn't discover double layers in 2003. Double-layers have been known (albeit under various names) for decades. Look closely at a candle flame and you might be able to make out a concentric pair of them. Double layers have also been made in near-vacuum plasma apparatus in laboratories and even in popular toys, for decades, where, incidentally, they accurately model astronomical events at many scales. I wonder what it was those two really did do in 2003...
(Astronomers are, as a rule, mystified by plasma-dynamic events, leading them to talk about "hot gases", "stellar plumes", "galactic jets", "magnetars", "dark matter", "dark energy", and worse. For most, their only exposure to anything like plasma in school was an unphysical mathematical construct called MHD, so they are worse off than if they'd skipped class. (Hawking is often quoted, with no trace of irony, saying "the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.") For those of us even a little more familiar with real plasma effects, astronomical press releases are no end of hilarity.)
Plasma double layers aren't mysterious. They develop naturally as the diffuse particles containing ions tend toward equilibrium. Variation in composition, ionicity, and density in a diffuse plasma gather at boundary layers between regions, making the space between the boundaries much more uniform, and concentrating mass, electric fields, and current flow. Highly-stressed double layers tend to explode; on the sun they call it a "coronal mass ejection". On another star it may be called lots of things.
In one of those plasma ball toys, you can see double-layer tubes connecting the electrode in the center with the transparent ball. You see them because the current density is high enough to put the plasma it runs through in "glow-discharge" mode, exactly as in a neon sign or St. Elmo's Fire. The other two modes are "invisible" and "arcing". The former is common throughout the universe (and detectable only indirectly, as you might imagine) such as between the earth and the sun, between star systems, and even between galaxies. The latter is what you see in a lightning bolt, on the surface of the sun, or in one of those spotlights they used to use at movie premieres. Astronomical glow-discharge events (with the exception of earth's polar aurorae) are usually confused with "shock waves".
The most beautiful astronomical glow-discharging double-layer structure I know of is M2-9 in Ophiucus. "In this image, neutral oxygen is shown in red, once-ionized nitrogen in green, and twice-ionized oxygen in blue."
Switching current runs only when a signal changes. Most signals don't change in most cycles, but the transistor gates leak continuously. Furthermore, as the transistors get smaller, the capacitance per transistor goes down, but the gate current leakage goes up inverse-exponentially -- or did. So, the switching current really goes up only linearly with the clock rate, but there was no upper limit for the leakage current.
In the latest generation of processors, 50% - 75% of the power consumption is this gate current leakage. In the next generation, it was looking to go over 90%.
What this really means is that the next generation has just become possible. As an incidental side benefit, current-generation laptops will be able to run cooler.
Yes. Jesus, what a dump. You wouldn't bid a nickel an acre for a place like that if it was right off a major freeway, and actually had air besides.
Asteroids, particularly the ones (almost) sharing Earth's orbit, might be useful someday, and be worth visiting on that account. That is, if we don't blow ourselves up, or poison ourselves to death, or wipe out our biosphere first. There's nothing like starving in the dark with your hair and teeth falling out to make you lose interest in the finer points of space exploration.
So it could just as easily have been a species of normal sized apes with abnormally sized heads, rather than abnormally sized apes with normal sized heads.
No, a ratio of 1:6.5 is pretty extreme already, based on the assumption that their head had to be unusually big to chew up all that bamboo. Considering that (as it later turned out) they also ate other stuff, they might have been even bigger than the guess.
But "ten times as big as a man" would mean 50 feet tall, right? Or at least 30? (They didn't say which man.) So there's still a long way to go to get to King Kong. Or, maybe "ten times" refers to weight; then you get ~1800 lbs, and it still came up short, but not so far short. Anyhow that way he wouldn't have been too big to plug Fay Wray, given a little patience.
"Since then 3 jaw bones and over a thousand teeth have been recovered, not only in apothecary shops but in situ as well"... "Gigantopithecus blacki was 10 feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds.... The way they arrived at this picture was first to estimate the size of the head from the jaw, and then to use a head/body ratio of 1:6.5 in order to determine the body size."
Interestingly, "Females may have been half the size of the males, since the teeth fall markedly into two distinct size groupings".
Curiously, clues from the surfaces of two teeth have them living on something akin to figs as well as grasses (probably bamboo).
I don't understand why anybody acts as if these EULA things mean anything. Under U.S. law they have no force at all. If they sold you a product that damaged your computer or data, sue them. The judge won't even let them enter the EULA in evidence.
If you didn't get to read the EULA before you paid for the disc, it's just wastepaper. Even a button presented on-screen, "I Agree", is meaningless. (You can click those without reading them.) Under the Uniform Commercial Code, Sony has no right to place extra conditions on your use of a product you have already paid for. So, EULAs may be discarded unread, and you may click "I Agree" anywhere without actually committing yourself to anything. What remains is whatever was on the *outside* of the box that you could read before paying, and your state's implied warranty laws. Note that under many states' warranty laws, many disclaimers there are void, also.
Caveats: (1) I'm no lawyer; (2) If you didn't pay (e.g., for a web download), then the UCC doesn't apply, and you'd better read the license carefully; (3) Maryland has rescinded its Uniform Commercial Code; and (4) The U.S. Federal 2nd Circuit's court of appeals (covering NY, CT, VT) has upheld shrink-wrap licensing in those states. If you live in MD or the 2nd Circuit then you're screwed until (in MD) you fix the law or (2nd circuit) you get the decision overturned.
We already have a stable binary driver interface. It's called NDIS. Just about everything that's wrong with it (and ndiswrapper) would also be wrong with a Linux-only binary spec, and other things besides. That said, anyone complaining about NDIS drivers not working on non-ia32 hosts need only attach an ia32 emulator to NDIS. Again, if that doesn't sound very nice, any binary driver interface is likely to be almost equally, er, not-nice.
This is an inflammatory issue, but a stable interface doesn't necessarily open the kernel up to proprietary drivers. It's a matter of licensing. Any third party could introduce a GPLed abstraction layer. There are big practical advantages to being able to take a GPLed driver's object file and plug it in to any old kernel. In that case there would be no really fundamental reliability or debuggability problems. The remaining problem would be the increasing mismatch between the abstraction presented to the driver and the abstraction supported by the kernel as it develops.
It would be good to separate the discussion into two, one for inflammatory license- and/or ideology-related culs-de-sac, and another technical, to address legitimate needs for stability in drivers that are not (yet) in the kernel tree.
Th[e]y haven't used sodiun chloride on the roads for 5 years now in the northern states.
Surely you're joking. Northeastern states (massachusetts, rhode island, new hampshire) will give up salting the roads when you pry the bribes out of their local aldermans' cold dead hands.
About Dick Cheney... he's just an engineering mock-up. The production appendages will look just like 7 of 9, or perhaps Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft, but not the bald chick from the first Star Trek movie (yes, I know, Persis Khambatta). In Japan they'll be Doris Day with a chrome ass.
The machines took over more than a century ago. They're called corporations, they were declared "legal persons" in the 1880s and "natural persons" in the 1920s. They have since been consolidating their control of the U.S. government. The big ones live forever, and most are forbidden by charter to exercise anything like a conscience.
All those pulp-fiction stories about robot takeovers? They were meant to warn us to take control back from the corporations before it was too late. Now that they've taken over TV, newspapers, and movie studios, it probably is, and robot-takeover stories are just a genre. They're not even worried about me posting this. ("Terminator" was their little joke.) The Japanese zeibatsus and the game companies are working on human-shaped appendages for you all to interact with once the CEOs and Dick Cheney become unnecessary. They're in no hurry, because there's no "off" switch.
So, welcome your old, familiar corporate overlords, instead. A few of the toadies among you (you know who you are!) will be tormented somewhat less, but expect lots of competition. The heroes will, as a rule, be patiently outlived. That is all. Return to your tasks.
I've never seen anyone espouse a connection between India's caste system and the U.S. education system before. Would you be willing to expand on your claim?
It's impossible to say how much degradation should be attributed to... , how much to the more complex physical culture, and how much to better communication technology.
The bit after the ellipsis should say "and how much of recent improvement to..."
The biggest problem with this guy's claims is not his observations; certainly pop culture is more receptive to "difficult" material than it once was. However, he's way out on a limb claiming that it's the difficult material itself that makes people able to handle it.
150 years ago, practically every city-dwelling 14-year-old in the U.S. was obliged to read and understand literature that is beyond today's typical college graduate. What changed? Plenty. It's impossible to say how much degradation should be attributed to generations of pervasive lead poisoning, how much to the deliberate demolition of the successful educational system of the time, how much to the more complex physical culture, and how much to better communication technology.
Pervasive lead poisoning is only now in decline; most Americans still live in lead-painted houses. Unleaded fuel doesn't just make oil, and engines, last many times longer. We should expect continued dramatic improvement on that basis alone.
The replacement of education with an indoctrination system, derived from India's method for keeping its lower castes in line, is one of the great crimes of the last century. Hallmarks of this system include segregation by age, sudden, arbitrary abandonment of activities, pervasive surveillance, petty authority, and enforced meaningless group exercises. (It was installed in the decades after the red scares of 1848 to make any repetition literally unthinkable.) Only in the last decade or two has there been any motion away from this goal, and most people still think of all these oppressive techniques as normal.
I put up Slackware (maybe '93?) because SunOS and A/UX didn't run on x86. But I'm not sure I understand the question... I ran gcc, bash, vi and X on SunOS and A/UX, and I ran them on Linux after, so I'm not sure how much "switching" was involved. Maybe the question is really about switching from MacOS to A/UX in '86? Before that I had to log in to my shell account (BSD on a Vax) at orstcs.edu to do real things.
When you buy a new video card does anybody ask when or why you switched drivers?
If it works, guess who lives forever? Hint: not you.
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
·
· Score: 1
... there are other explanations for these anomalies [e.g. high-redshift quasars (e.g. z=2.11) physically in front of low-redshift opaque galaxies (e.g. NGC 7319, z=0.0225); quasars arranged along radial lines centered at our position]...
Yes? Please go on.
I also never took a "plasma" class, only those standard classes in EM, Thermo, Stat Mech. What is the claim of the engineers? Where are we ignorant?
That link again... Also this, evidence in hand that interstellar current flow, in the mode Alfven predicted, is really occurring. When evaluating models for (e.g.) Eta Carinae, you have two problems: (1) how can you get all that stuff to happen using just gravitation, fusion, and shock waves, and (2) how can you get all that plasma (not just "hot gas") that suffuses the whole system to have no effect at all? When you're only talking to other astrophysicists who also know nothing of plasma dynamics, you get to skip (2), but it makes astrophysical speculations look pretty comical from out here.
Plasma has interesting dynamics because its positive charge carriers are 2000x heavier than the negative carriers. Furthermore, they're often mixed in with neutral matter (commonly at 10^-4) that gets entrained. Motion in real plasmas is subject to dozens of nonlinear instabilities. All this makes maintaining electrical neutrality complicated, and not infrequently impossible. The mathematics is intractable, so it's often necessary to fall back on laboratory phenomenology and numerical particle-in-cell simulations.
Nobody promised the real universe would be easy to model. Pretending leads you down a rabbit hole. Your astrophyics colleagues will happily follow you there, but that's not science.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that the distinction lies in whether the theorists think the star (a) appears to exemplify (some minor variation of) a widely popular but ill-supported theory, or (b) entirely contradicts a widely popular but ill-supported theory. It's easy to guess which one generates interest among theorists, but the result is flattering neither to theorists nor to astronomy's position as an actual science.
An example of a star (or something) that causes problems for theorists, but is canonically uninteresting, is the high-z quasar (supposedly among the most distant and, perforce, luminous objects in the universe) physically in front of the nearby opaque galaxy NGC 7319. The silence since it was reported has been deafening.
It's ironic that planetary astronomers, as a group, are likely to be the first to be dragged into the 20th century, obliged to learn some actual plasma dynamics or anyway to stop pretending they know it already. (I say "ironic" because unlike stars, nebulae, galaxies, and the intergalactic medium, planets are, uniquely, not primarily composed of plasma.) Planetary astronomers don't get to pull silliness like dark matter and big bangs out of ... thin air? "hot gas", perhaps. Furthermore, they get to send actual probes through double-layers and measure conditions on the way through, and into "plumes" and (if they thought to put the right instruments aboard!) directly measure the current flow.
Physics as a whole isn't waiting for astronomers to look up from their collective navel. Laboratory plasma physics is an active field despite being driven and funded mainly by the fusion-reactor boondoggle. Pity, though, the poor middle-aged astronomer once it becomes clear that to participate in modern astronomy he will be obliged to start from scratch with the messy mathematics and lab methods he chose astronomy specifically to avoid. It's no wonder peer reviewers and grant committees resist.
What are the facts? Astronomers are (with a few commendable exceptions) unfamiliar with the physics that govern the motion of the overwhelming majority of material found in space. They have (with fortunate exceptions) been led to believe that MHD is that physics, despite that it has been demonstrated to fail in most conditions, particularly including those they study. Astronomers (all of them!) lack the mathematical skills to solve the equations that define actual, physical plasma dynamics.
That last sentence is not so damning as it sounds. Nobody else can solve plasma-dynamic equations, either. Responses to that fact vary with the individual. One possibility is to use other methods, such as simulation and physical scale-modelling. Another is to pretend that some prettier equations apply, use them instead, and ignore the discrepancy with observation. A third is to announce that the whole subject is unworthy of serious attention, the proper domain only of lowly engineers, merchants, and/or cranks.
You can easily guess which responses are favored among astronomers, and draw your own conclusion about what that means.
What's tragic is so many bright, educated people wasting their careers trying desperately to shore up ragged, unphysical theories, inventing zoos full of particles and forces, pasting on epicycles like mad, and developing decidedly counter-scientific habits. Wouldn't it be easier to spend a couple of semesters in a lab like real scientists do? We are fortunate that the people making the space probes and telescopes are engineers: those devices return both pretty pictures and real data, despite all their masters' fond fancies. That data will be useful when astronomy students, in some future generation, begin to learn the physics necessary to interpret the data sensibly, and (some decades later) are allowed by their peers to publish their findings.
For a serious peek at the role of plasma dynamics in the solar system, you need go no farther than NASA: 15.1.1. Applicability of Hydromagnetics and Plasma Physics . For wider application, the Los Alamos National Laboratory has up a nice tour of The Universe (which universe even your neighborhood astronomer, if pressed, will admit is over 99% plasma-phase -- at least the baryonic bits! -- even if he has little inkling what that means), and links to refereed-journal papers.
I'm afraid ceoyoyo and 2008 will need to find their cranks elsewhere. That said, the Velikovskyite cultists at Thunderbolts have a very nice picture-of-the-day archive, with captions that besides being much more fun than the pap on APOD, are remarkably often thought-provoking. You don't have to believe that Venus popped out of Saturn in immediate prehistory (as "proven" by widespread legends) to enjoy them rattling the chains that hold astronomers in their 19th-century Christian-esque universe.
You can't honestly poke fun at a hairy-eyed Velikovskyite without ribbing the Big-bang mooncalves equally. The latter have much less excuse for their silliness, and a lot more to answer for.
Plasma explanation for dark matter? There is no need for mysterious dark matter, or dark energy. Diffuse mass in the universe is subject to non-gravitational forces, sure, but we call 'em "electromagnetic". (Some physicists even studied them in school, evidently as undergrads.)
It's not just the press releases that are funny. Even the captions on APOD pages get pretty silly.
(Astronomers are, as a rule, mystified by plasma-dynamic events, leading them to talk about "hot gases", "stellar plumes", "galactic jets", "magnetars", "dark matter", "dark energy", and worse. For most, their only exposure to anything like plasma in school was an unphysical mathematical construct called MHD, so they are worse off than if they'd skipped class. (Hawking is often quoted, with no trace of irony, saying "the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.") For those of us even a little more familiar with real plasma effects, astronomical press releases are no end of hilarity.)
Plasma double layers aren't mysterious. They develop naturally as the diffuse particles containing ions tend toward equilibrium. Variation in composition, ionicity, and density in a diffuse plasma gather at boundary layers between regions, making the space between the boundaries much more uniform, and concentrating mass, electric fields, and current flow. Highly-stressed double layers tend to explode; on the sun they call it a "coronal mass ejection". On another star it may be called lots of things.
In one of those plasma ball toys, you can see double-layer tubes connecting the electrode in the center with the transparent ball. You see them because the current density is high enough to put the plasma it runs through in "glow-discharge" mode, exactly as in a neon sign or St. Elmo's Fire. The other two modes are "invisible" and "arcing". The former is common throughout the universe (and detectable only indirectly, as you might imagine) such as between the earth and the sun, between star systems, and even between galaxies. The latter is what you see in a lightning bolt, on the surface of the sun, or in one of those spotlights they used to use at movie premieres. Astronomical glow-discharge events (with the exception of earth's polar aurorae) are usually confused with "shock waves".
The most beautiful astronomical glow-discharging double-layer structure I know of is M2-9 in Ophiucus. "In this image, neutral oxygen is shown in red, once-ionized nitrogen in green, and twice-ionized oxygen in blue."
Switching current runs only when a signal changes. Most signals don't change in most cycles, but the transistor gates leak continuously. Furthermore, as the transistors get smaller, the capacitance per transistor goes down, but the gate current leakage goes up inverse-exponentially -- or did. So, the switching current really goes up only linearly with the clock rate, but there was no upper limit for the leakage current.
What this really means is that the next generation has just become possible. As an incidental side benefit, current-generation laptops will be able to run cooler.
Yes. Jesus, what a dump. You wouldn't bid a nickel an acre for a place like that if it was right off a major freeway, and actually had air besides.
Asteroids, particularly the ones (almost) sharing Earth's orbit, might be useful someday, and be worth visiting on that account. That is, if we don't blow ourselves up, or poison ourselves to death, or wipe out our biosphere first. There's nothing like starving in the dark with your hair and teeth falling out to make you lose interest in the finer points of space exploration.
No, a ratio of 1:6.5 is pretty extreme already, based on the assumption that their head had to be unusually big to chew up all that bamboo. Considering that (as it later turned out) they also ate other stuff, they might have been even bigger than the guess.
But "ten times as big as a man" would mean 50 feet tall, right? Or at least 30? (They didn't say which man.) So there's still a long way to go to get to King Kong. Or, maybe "ten times" refers to weight; then you get ~1800 lbs, and it still came up short, but not so far short. Anyhow that way he wouldn't have been too big to plug Fay Wray, given a little patience.
"Since then 3 jaw bones and over a thousand teeth have been recovered, not only in apothecary shops but in situ as well" ... "Gigantopithecus blacki was 10 feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds. ... The way they arrived at this picture was first to estimate the size of the head from the jaw, and then to use a head/body ratio of 1:6.5 in order to determine the body size."
Interestingly, "Females may have been half the size of the males, since the teeth fall markedly into two distinct size groupings".
Curiously, clues from the surfaces of two teeth have them living on something akin to figs as well as grasses (probably bamboo).
I don't understand why anybody acts as if these EULA things mean anything. Under U.S. law they have no force at all. If they sold you a product that damaged your computer or data, sue them. The judge won't even let them enter the EULA in evidence.
If you didn't get to read the EULA before you paid for the disc, it's just wastepaper. Even a button presented on-screen, "I Agree", is meaningless. (You can click those without reading them.) Under the Uniform Commercial Code, Sony has no right to place extra conditions on your use of a product you have already paid for. So, EULAs may be discarded unread, and you may click "I Agree" anywhere without actually committing yourself to anything. What remains is whatever was on the *outside* of the box that you could read before paying, and your state's implied warranty laws. Note that under many states' warranty laws, many disclaimers there are void, also.
Caveats: (1) I'm no lawyer; (2) If you didn't pay (e.g., for a web download), then the UCC doesn't apply, and you'd better read the license carefully; (3) Maryland has rescinded its Uniform Commercial Code; and (4) The U.S. Federal 2nd Circuit's court of appeals (covering NY, CT, VT) has upheld shrink-wrap licensing in those states. If you live in MD or the 2nd Circuit then you're screwed until (in MD) you fix the law or (2nd circuit) you get the decision overturned.
This is an inflammatory issue, but a stable interface doesn't necessarily open the kernel up to proprietary drivers. It's a matter of licensing. Any third party could introduce a GPLed abstraction layer. There are big practical advantages to being able to take a GPLed driver's object file and plug it in to any old kernel. In that case there would be no really fundamental reliability or debuggability problems. The remaining problem would be the increasing mismatch between the abstraction presented to the driver and the abstraction supported by the kernel as it develops.
It would be good to separate the discussion into two, one for inflammatory license- and/or ideology-related culs-de-sac, and another technical, to address legitimate needs for stability in drivers that are not (yet) in the kernel tree.
Surely you're joking. Northeastern states (massachusetts, rhode island, new hampshire) will give up salting the roads when you pry the bribes out of their local aldermans' cold dead hands.
But they'll still smell like a new soccer ball.
All those pulp-fiction stories about robot takeovers? They were meant to warn us to take control back from the corporations before it was too late. Now that they've taken over TV, newspapers, and movie studios, it probably is, and robot-takeover stories are just a genre. They're not even worried about me posting this. ("Terminator" was their little joke.) The Japanese zeibatsus and the game companies are working on human-shaped appendages for you all to interact with once the CEOs and Dick Cheney become unnecessary. They're in no hurry, because there's no "off" switch.
So, welcome your old, familiar corporate overlords, instead. A few of the toadies among you (you know who you are!) will be tormented somewhat less, but expect lots of competition. The heroes will, as a rule, be patiently outlived. That is all. Return to your tasks.
Sure. You can read The Underground History of American Education online. If you don't feel like you have time to read the whole book just now, start with his short essay, The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher .
Guess what fraction of the population lived in cities in 1870. (Hint: much less than 80%.) Now, guess how that compares to 1855: more, or less?
The bit after the ellipsis should say "and how much of recent improvement to ..."
150 years ago, practically every city-dwelling 14-year-old in the U.S. was obliged to read and understand literature that is beyond today's typical college graduate. What changed? Plenty. It's impossible to say how much degradation should be attributed to generations of pervasive lead poisoning, how much to the deliberate demolition of the successful educational system of the time, how much to the more complex physical culture, and how much to better communication technology.
Pervasive lead poisoning is only now in decline; most Americans still live in lead-painted houses. Unleaded fuel doesn't just make oil, and engines, last many times longer. We should expect continued dramatic improvement on that basis alone.
The replacement of education with an indoctrination system, derived from India's method for keeping its lower castes in line, is one of the great crimes of the last century. Hallmarks of this system include segregation by age, sudden, arbitrary abandonment of activities, pervasive surveillance, petty authority, and enforced meaningless group exercises. (It was installed in the decades after the red scares of 1848 to make any repetition literally unthinkable.) Only in the last decade or two has there been any motion away from this goal, and most people still think of all these oppressive techniques as normal.
When you buy a new video card does anybody ask when or why you switched drivers?
If it works, guess who lives forever? Hint: not you.
Yes? Please go on.
I also never took a "plasma" class, only those standard classes in EM, Thermo, Stat Mech. What is the claim of the engineers? Where are we ignorant?
That link again... Also this, evidence in hand that interstellar current flow, in the mode Alfven predicted, is really occurring. When evaluating models for (e.g.) Eta Carinae, you have two problems: (1) how can you get all that stuff to happen using just gravitation, fusion, and shock waves, and (2) how can you get all that plasma (not just "hot gas") that suffuses the whole system to have no effect at all? When you're only talking to other astrophysicists who also know nothing of plasma dynamics, you get to skip (2), but it makes astrophysical speculations look pretty comical from out here.
Plasma has interesting dynamics because its positive charge carriers are 2000x heavier than the negative carriers. Furthermore, they're often mixed in with neutral matter (commonly at 10^-4) that gets entrained. Motion in real plasmas is subject to dozens of nonlinear instabilities. All this makes maintaining electrical neutrality complicated, and not infrequently impossible. The mathematics is intractable, so it's often necessary to fall back on laboratory phenomenology and numerical particle-in-cell simulations.
Nobody promised the real universe would be easy to model. Pretending leads you down a rabbit hole. Your astrophyics colleagues will happily follow you there, but that's not science.