Image quality is not just about resolution: it's also about dynamic range and noise. Digital cameras at low ISO have really low noise which makes for very smooth-looking color transitions in, for example, out-of-focus areas of the image.
That test is seriously flawed: the only real comparison they show is done on buildings with lots of perfect verticals that line up with the pixel grid of the digital sensor, making the enlargement of the digital camera look better than if a scene with lots of small detail is shot through what is essentially an aliasing artifact.
There is a second series of pictures with more details, but there the scans (that have many more pixels than the digital camera image) are then reduced to match the size of the digital camera, throwing away all the details, making the comparison useless.
That doesn't mean high-end digital is worse than medium format film; it just depends on the type of picture: if there's lots of smooth color, and not too much contrast, digital is better. If there is a lot of detail and you want a large print, film is better. I have some 60x90 cm - 24"x36" enlargements off of scanned 6x7 slides and they look incredible.
I'm sure a 50mp sensor would give a better image but I'd rather buy a boat.
On the other hand, the APS journals are OK with you putting your version of your paper on the Arxiv preprint server; they even allow submission to their journals by Arxiv article number -- they will then download your manuscript from Arxiv and send it to the editors.
I've always been under the impression that the copyright they hold is only to the specific, printed, version they publish, not to any manuscripts you have.
If we'd have spent the amounts of money we're spending on the military on just research, we'd be flying in fusion powered cars right now, controlled by THz CPUs that have 1nm transistors.
Your argument is ridiculous given the $5e11 dollars per year the US alone is spending on its military (without Iraq war funding!); compare that to the $3e10 that goes to NSF+NIH (the primary funding sources for research in the US). And this is just the US.
> It's like harnessing the wake in a channel. The boat's going to make the wake regardless of what it impacts on.
That would be true if there were only one car (or boat). If there is a flow of cars, those cars are going to consume less fuel if there is less drag due to an airflow.
Exactly how that flow behaves at the edge of a freeway is fairly important for the efficiency gains: a smooth wall may actually have a beneficial effect, while turbines would do exactly the opposite.
That is probably the very question they're trying to answer.
Ocean water is not stagnant and there are currents that mix surface water with warmer water in places where the surface water is colder (and denser) than the deeper water.
My main issue is that socialize health care still does not provide everyone with everything they need/want. All it really does is shift the priority system from more-or-less dollar driven to some other priority system. Sometimes they try to use "need", usually age is a factor, and position on a waiting list is also used. While on the surface this seems fairer to the poor (and it is!), when I step back and think about it from a moral position, you are still metering out healthcare. All you've done is shift the metering system... if an economic model is arbitrary, so is any other metering system. Yes, the Christian tradition is to be especially considerate to the poor, but I still think that it's arbitrary.
I think that you've hit a very important point; ultimately the best system is the system that promotes the priorities that are chosen by the people. The priorities of socialized healthcare are clear and statistics seem to back up that it actually is successful in promoting general public health --- on average.
What I'm still not sure about are the priorities of the US healthcare system. It doesn't seem to have any, and maybe that's the root cause of the problems with it.
Finally, the US is huge! Compare the US government to the EU and the speed is comparatively high:) Government does not seem to scale very well. Imagine the EU trying to compose a uniform socialized healthcare system for all of Europe!
Good point. After getting to know a little bit about US history, I'm more and more under the impression that the current EU is kind of like the US in the first half of the 19th century: a weak confederation of states.
It's not all bad though: the US is (IMO, at least) a good example that large countries have advantages that smaller countries don't. I don't think people in the EU realize fully that the scale of countries that actually matter has now grown far beyond the size of the typical EU member state. And easy trade within a country the size of a continent has been very good for American corporations.
One interesting trend in the US is that the states are implementing socialized health care. Massachusetts, California, and some others are going for it as we type. I think that this approach is probably best, at least in the short term. Let the individual states figure out what works best for each of them - similar to the current state of health care in Europe. It would be silly to expect the same health system to work in the crowded, urban Northeast as in rural Mississippi.
That's going to be interesting. I wonder why states haven't tried that before.
It is strange though, that both those states have Republican governors backing these proposals..
I don't want to talk past each other with statistics, because that's been done to death, and frankly neither side ever seems to trounce the other. All I know is that I keep seeing wealthy Canadians and even Europeans coming to the States for their elective procedures. You can live a long time and still be miserable because you can't get the knee surgery that you need.
You're right, that's indeed one of the trade-offs. Although on average people do get more and easier access to decent healthcare, that doesn't mean that specific cases are better off -- quite the opposite for some people. If you have a rare disease, you might be out of luck.
The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow. It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.
I don't see how this is an argument against universal healthare in the US. If anything, it would force more equitable prices. There's still a lot of money to be made on sick and unhealthy people, no matter who pays.
There is the other issue, too. The model countries for socialized health care are Germany and France. These countries have horrible economic problems as a result of their social spending. I don't like the thought of 50% unemployment for those under 25. The last thing we need is more government spending.
That argument keeps coming up, but people fail to realize that Germany had jumped in population but not in GDP when it unified; East Germany (1/3 of current Germany) really was bankrupt. Other countries are doing just fine with their socialized care (the Netherlands, Sweden, etc.). The UK (with its uber-socialized NHS) is doing fine, but it's true that France has been a basket-case for quite a while.
I do support reform, however. The current system is not great. Specifically, our "universal health care" is the emergency room. We need to offer free or cheap clinics that will keep people out of the very expensive emergency rooms. I have no problem with government spending or social programs, but I believe that they should have as small a scope as is possible while still attacking the problem. Government is inefficient (by design) and usually inept (not by design, but in practice).
I was in for quite a shock when I had an accident and ended up in an emergency room for the first time in the US. Those places really epitomize the failure of a system where free markets collide with basic ethics (like not turning away people without insurance).
Another shock upon coming here was the inefficiency of government: bureaucracy and slowness are more like what I'd seen in communist countries than like what I've experienced in Northwestern Europe. I think it has to do with the fact that working for government in the US has such low status and that many government agencies are chronically underfunded.
In the case of health care, governments are known for low costs and high quality. Total medical expenditure per capita in western countries with universal healthcare tends to be around a quarter of what it is in the US, and people live longer and healthier lives.
These are fairly well established facts (I'm not going to dig up references now, but for example, there was a Nature article last year on how Brits live longer than Americans -- even if you account for any conceivable cultural/economical/whatever difference, and Brits have a lower life expectancy than other European countries. That should get you started). You can also easily look up medical expenditure per capita.
Whether you want universal healthcare should mainly be a political question: it does, undeniably, take away freedom (you're going to be taxed and you don't have a very direct say on how that money gets spent --- you're still free to go to any doctor you want if you're willing to pay more for it).
In many countries, people think it's worth the trade-off.
There are countries (the Netherlands, for example) that send their nuclear waste to France, too. The deal, however, is usually that the countries take back the reprocessed waste, and the waste processor gets to keep the fuel.
But almost all cars in metric countries don't have imperial units. Imperial units are almost completely absent in other places in the world: you simply don't encounter them. This is one of the reasons people from those countries are so surprised about the US using imperial units: they seem very quaint and something from pre-industrial times.
What you don't seem to understand is that people really are used to thinking in metric and don't find them convoluted at all using them in daily life. Most of the world does this without any trouble and they never think of it twice. In fact, one of the requirements when the metric units were first defined, was that they operate at the human scale
In answer to your argument about height: that's a really subjective one because it's much easier to estimate the height of somebody who is almost your height -- within half an inch, or a centimeter, than it is to estimate accurately the height of somebody much shorter or taller: could you quickly tell the difference between somebody who is 5' and and somebody who is 5'2"? (assuming you're taller than that).
There are three very non-intuitive and non-ergonomic things about the imperial system to people used to the metric system: one is the non-base 10 aspect of it. How much is 1/8" + 3/16"? or is a 20 oz + a cup more or less than a quart? To somebody not used to counting in base 12 or 16 that's does not come quickly, because there are no other situations where one needs fractions like that. Money is counted in decimal, and so is everything else.
Another issue is the multitude of names for seemingly arbitrary subdivisions: 1 yard = 3 feet = 3*12 inches, but is a pound 12 or 16 ounces, and how many cups in a quart? How many feet are in a mile? And you know what? People in the US don't even know these things. Go ask when you're in a supermarket next time how many ounces there are in a pound: they won't know.
The third issue is of course the lack of consistency: how many gallons is a cubic foot? That's seriously un-ergonomic.
AFAIK ID theft also happens in Europe (now that you've posted your information you should really make sure that somebody doesn't try to change the address associated with your bank account). It's more difficult to do in Europe than in the US, for these reasons (I'm not an expert but I've lived in both continents):
1) Credit reporting agencies have a far greater role in the US than they do in Europe. When you apply for a cell phone plan, or open a checking account at a bank, your credit ratings are checked. Factors such as income or current total credit seem to only be secondary to the 'trust factor' of the credit rating. If you've been behaving well in the past you can get an amount of credit for which the monthly payments would exceeds your income.
2) Unlike tax IDs in Europe, the American equivalent, the Social Security Number (which realy is a kind of tax ID) is used as a primary key for credit reporting agencies, and little checking is done on the actual identity of the person supplying that number.
3) The most common ID in the US is the driver's license. Each state in the US has a different driver's license; the average bank clerk from California probably has no idea what a driver's license from Vermont looks like. That's very different from Europe where it's very hard to open a bank account without a passport, driver's license or other ID issued in the country where you're trying to open the account.
4) Governments in Europe tend to have better records of where people actually live. (in the US that information is very fragmented, with the IRS (the federal tax agency) having some info, and the DMV (driver's license issuers) having other info; that's why there are censuses (censi) in the US). I suspect (don't know for sure) that there are legal circumstances where a collection agency can subpoena that information and actually go after somebody. This, I think, causes EU banks to be looking at different things when they give out a loan, and makes it harder to give a fake address.
5) The primary customers of credit reporting agencies are financial institutions and other companies, not people. It's not in their interest to prevent credit and ID fraud (actually their role only gets more important as that kind of crime goes up).
All these things together make people in the US far more vulnerable to ID theft. It's a side effect of the more fragmented government that's so much part of American culture.
Your comment should be modded funny, not insightful.
The only reason you need a HPC cluster is -- indeed -- High Performance Computing. That means you're going to use as many cycles (or messages passed) as you can get from that $50K+ cluster you've just bought. This easily precludes anything but a fast compiled language like Fortran or C (and no, Java with JIT or.net are *not* fast enough. I've tried).
The comment about domain specific languages in your blog for HPC purposes is true: Fortran is exactly that.
That's bullshit. Like any EU member Britain is signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. This treaty established the appropriately named European Court of Human Rights which has very real powers in all EU countries.
Especially in the case of Britain, this court serves as the highest appeals court for many cases involving civil rights issues. It has, for instance, outlawed interrogation techniques that look strangely familiar... This probably has to do with the much less politicized and more independent nature of the European Court.
I've just looked it up (here) and you're mostly right. The main lift comes from the pressure obtained by deflecting the airflow; something that stops working as viscosity increases.
In practice, an airfoil does make of Bernoulli's effect to help deflect air downwards, thus increasing the lift (I'd guess that that's the reason why airplane wings 'bulge' upwards).
Of course it's 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer. It's a rack of 100,000 ordinary computers.
Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?
Yes! and good riddens.
Do you remember having to re-code for every single machine? Because they were such specialized machines, they tended to be extremely fickle: one wrong operation and performance would go down the drain.
In practice, most computational work in the end consists of running many jobs independently. There are rare occasions where a single super fast CPU might be better but it's even rarer for the performance gains to outweigh the incredible cost increases for buying specialized supercomputer hardware.
Whether it's wise to spend so much money on a single enormous cluster is another issue. You could buy many many individual clusters for individual groups and have them operational in a matter of weeks, rather than having wait till 2008. Besides, the thing is going to be obsolete by 2010.
This may seem a very inefficient way to move about, but things work very differently on the lengthscale of bacteria.
For example, most moving bacteria use propellor-like objects (flagellae) to propel themselves, but the way they work is very different from propellors.
Propellors use Bernouilli's principle to create a pressure difference between the front and the rear of the propellor, thereby 'sucking' themselves forward.
Bacteria, because they're so small, live in a surrounding where water has an effective viscosity higher than molasses on our lengthscale (it has to do with a dimensionless number for friction in hydrodynamics called the Reynold's number, that scales with inverse length).
Bacteria have to push themselves forward in something that really doesn't want to move and creates a lot of friction; all kinds of movements that we would think of intuitively possible are impossible under these circumstances. For example, some hydrodynamics people talk about the 'scallop theorem', which states that at these conditions it's impossible something to move forward like a scallop: rapidly closing its shell and opening it again.
Most flagellae are either spiral structures or stiff rods that get swayed back and forth; none use Bernoulli's effect, but tend to make use of the high viscosity by pushing against the fluid.
These bacteria make a starch gel to propel themselves: the sugar concentration doesn't need to be very high to get a decent gel, and the speeds they obtain sound incredible (usually we're talking 10 microns per minute, not per second).
Note regions VIII-XI. With enough pressure yes, water will solidify. HOWEVER there is a temperature point at which the water will no longer solidify (not shown on this scale although you can see the "liquid dome" is increasing as temperature increases. Eventually if you go far enough to the right there is a point where only vapor exists, regardless of pressure.
That's not really true; there may be a temperature where water as a molecule ceases to exist, but there is no critical point for freezing transitions: hard spheres crystallize under pressure, because at a certain density the entropy is actually higher in the ordered crystalline phase. There is a density at which water will always be solid.
It is true, however, that there is always a temperature where a solid at a given pressure will melt; exactly for the reasons you specify: the temperature will counteract the pressure. But inner core temperatures for the earth (a few thousand kelvins) will almost certainly not be enough to counteract the enormous pressure down there.
WTF are you talking about? Scheider lenses are in the same category (or better) as Zeiss: they've been making lenses for Rollei since forever (the one in my early 60's Rolleicord makes it easily beat any digital camera that costs less than a car --- in all aspects of image quality). They also make some of the best large format lenses that money can buy; look here for a modern normal lens.
Why do you think they can get away with charging $2500 for a normal lens (about 50mm equivalent for 35mm photography) that the buyer needs mount onto a lensboard himself?
These lenses make Canon's and Nikon's offerings (with maybe a few exceptions, like Canon's 200/1.8) look like the cheap, mass produced crap they are. Which, BTW, is fine because I also want to be able to actually buy a few lenses.
What exactly is it about Wikipedia that ruffles so many feathers? It seems like no other website has generated as much controversy as Wikipedia; is the Wikipedia foundation to blame or is it a result of the fact that the open source idea is viewed with more skepticism if it's applied to encyclopedias?
Slashdot Mirror
Image quality is not just about resolution: it's also about dynamic range and noise. Digital cameras at low ISO have really low noise which makes for very smooth-looking color transitions in, for example, out-of-focus areas of the image.
That test is seriously flawed: the only real comparison they show is done on buildings with lots of perfect verticals that line up with the pixel grid of the digital sensor, making the enlargement of the digital camera look better than if a scene with lots of small detail is shot through what is essentially an aliasing artifact.
There is a second series of pictures with more details, but there the scans (that have many more pixels than the digital camera image) are then reduced to match the size of the digital camera, throwing away all the details, making the comparison useless.
That doesn't mean high-end digital is worse than medium format film; it just depends on the type of picture: if there's lots of smooth color, and not too much contrast, digital is better. If there is a lot of detail and you want a large print, film is better. I have some 60x90 cm - 24"x36" enlargements off of scanned 6x7 slides and they look incredible.
I'm sure a 50mp sensor would give a better image but I'd rather buy a boat.
On the other hand, the APS journals are OK with you putting your version of your paper on the Arxiv preprint server; they even allow submission to their journals by Arxiv article number -- they will then download your manuscript from Arxiv and send it to the editors.
I've always been under the impression that the copyright they hold is only to the specific, printed, version they publish, not to any manuscripts you have.
I salute you, skinfitz, with one of the better neologisms of 2007: 'kindernet'.
It's beautiful.
And I wish it were feasible.
If we'd have spent the amounts of money we're spending on the military on just research, we'd be flying in fusion powered cars right now, controlled by THz CPUs that have 1nm transistors.
Your argument is ridiculous given the $5e11 dollars per year the US alone is spending on its military (without Iraq war funding!); compare that to the $3e10 that goes to NSF+NIH (the primary funding sources for research in the US). And this is just the US.
> It's like harnessing the wake in a channel. The boat's going to make the wake regardless of what it impacts on.
That would be true if there were only one car (or boat). If there is a flow of cars, those cars are going to consume less fuel if there is less drag due to an airflow.
Exactly how that flow behaves at the edge of a freeway is fairly important for the efficiency gains: a smooth wall may actually have a beneficial effect, while turbines would do exactly the opposite.
That is probably the very question they're trying to answer.
Ocean water is not stagnant and there are currents that mix surface water with warmer water in places where the surface water is colder (and denser) than the deeper water.
My main issue is that socialize health care still does not provide everyone with everything they need/want. All it really does is shift the priority system from more-or-less dollar driven to some other priority system. Sometimes they try to use "need", usually age is a factor, and position on a waiting list is also used. While on the surface this seems fairer to the poor (and it is!), when I step back and think about it from a moral position, you are still metering out healthcare. All you've done is shift the metering system... if an economic model is arbitrary, so is any other metering system. Yes, the Christian tradition is to be especially considerate to the poor, but I still think that it's arbitrary.
I think that you've hit a very important point; ultimately the best system is the system that promotes the priorities that are chosen by the people. The priorities of socialized healthcare are clear and statistics seem to back up that it actually is successful in promoting general public health --- on average.
What I'm still not sure about are the priorities of the US healthcare system. It doesn't seem to have any, and maybe that's the root cause of the problems with it.
Finally, the US is huge! Compare the US government to the EU and the speed is comparatively high :) Government does not seem to scale very well. Imagine the EU trying to compose a uniform socialized healthcare system for all of Europe!
Good point. After getting to know a little bit about US history, I'm more and more under the impression that the current EU is kind of like the US in the first half of the 19th century: a weak confederation of states.
It's not all bad though: the US is (IMO, at least) a good example that large countries have advantages that smaller countries don't. I don't think people in the EU realize fully that the scale of countries that actually matter has now grown far beyond the size of the typical EU member state. And easy trade within a country the size of a continent has been very good for American corporations.
One interesting trend in the US is that the states are implementing socialized health care. Massachusetts, California, and some others are going for it as we type. I think that this approach is probably best, at least in the short term. Let the individual states figure out what works best for each of them - similar to the current state of health care in Europe. It would be silly to expect the same health system to work in the crowded, urban Northeast as in rural Mississippi.
That's going to be interesting. I wonder why states haven't tried that before. It is strange though, that both those states have Republican governors backing these proposals..
I don't want to talk past each other with statistics, because that's been done to death, and frankly neither side ever seems to trounce the other. All I know is that I keep seeing wealthy Canadians and even Europeans coming to the States for their elective procedures. You can live a long time and still be miserable because you can't get the knee surgery that you need.
You're right, that's indeed one of the trade-offs. Although on average people do get more and easier access to decent healthcare, that doesn't mean that specific cases are better off -- quite the opposite for some people. If you have a rare disease, you might be out of luck.
The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow. It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.
I don't see how this is an argument against universal healthare in the US. If anything, it would force more equitable prices. There's still a lot of money to be made on sick and unhealthy people, no matter who pays.
There is the other issue, too. The model countries for socialized health care are Germany and France. These countries have horrible economic problems as a result of their social spending. I don't like the thought of 50% unemployment for those under 25. The last thing we need is more government spending.
That argument keeps coming up, but people fail to realize that Germany had jumped in population but not in GDP when it unified; East Germany (1/3 of current Germany) really was bankrupt. Other countries are doing just fine with their socialized care (the Netherlands, Sweden, etc.). The UK (with its uber-socialized NHS) is doing fine, but it's true that France has been a basket-case for quite a while.
I do support reform, however. The current system is not great. Specifically, our "universal health care" is the emergency room. We need to offer free or cheap clinics that will keep people out of the very expensive emergency rooms. I have no problem with government spending or social programs, but I believe that they should have as small a scope as is possible while still attacking the problem. Government is inefficient (by design) and usually inept (not by design, but in practice).
I was in for quite a shock when I had an accident and ended up in an emergency room for the first time in the US. Those places really epitomize the failure of a system where free markets collide with basic ethics (like not turning away people without insurance).
Another shock upon coming here was the inefficiency of government: bureaucracy and slowness are more like what I'd seen in communist countries than like what I've experienced in Northwestern Europe. I think it has to do with the fact that working for government in the US has such low status and that many government agencies are chronically underfunded.
You get what you pay for, also in government :-)
In the case of health care, governments are known for low costs and high quality. Total medical expenditure per capita in western countries with universal healthcare tends to be around a quarter of what it is in the US, and people live longer and healthier lives.
These are fairly well established facts (I'm not going to dig up references now, but for example, there was a Nature article last year on how Brits live longer than Americans -- even if you account for any conceivable cultural/economical/whatever difference, and Brits have a lower life expectancy than other European countries. That should get you started). You can also easily look up medical expenditure per capita.
Whether you want universal healthcare should mainly be a political question: it does, undeniably, take away freedom (you're going to be taxed and you don't have a very direct say on how that money gets spent --- you're still free to go to any doctor you want if you're willing to pay more for it).
In many countries, people think it's worth the trade-off.
So how is this connected to the two-dimensional Ising model? Is it about enumerating all possible states on a finite lattice?
IAAPhysicist
There are countries (the Netherlands, for example) that send their nuclear waste to France, too. The deal, however, is usually that the countries take back the reprocessed waste, and the waste processor gets to keep the fuel.
But almost all cars in metric countries don't have imperial units. Imperial units are almost completely absent in other places in the world: you simply don't encounter them. This is one of the reasons people from those countries are so surprised about the US using imperial units: they seem very quaint and something from pre-industrial times.
Well, why does everyone seem to care so much?
For about the same reason that people care whether you're running Linux. You're on Slashdot.
What you don't seem to understand is that people really are used to thinking in metric and don't find them convoluted at all using them in daily life. Most of the world does this without any trouble and they never think of it twice. In fact, one of the requirements when the metric units were first defined, was that they operate at the human scale
In answer to your argument about height: that's a really subjective one because it's much easier to estimate the height of somebody who is almost your height -- within half an inch, or a centimeter, than it is to estimate accurately the height of somebody much shorter or taller: could you quickly tell the difference between somebody who is 5' and and somebody who is 5'2"? (assuming you're taller than that).
There are three very non-intuitive and non-ergonomic things about the imperial system to people used to the metric system: one is the non-base 10 aspect of it. How much is 1/8" + 3/16"? or is a 20 oz + a cup more or less than a quart? To somebody not used to counting in base 12 or 16 that's does not come quickly, because there are no other situations where one needs fractions like that. Money is counted in decimal, and so is everything else.
Another issue is the multitude of names for seemingly arbitrary subdivisions: 1 yard = 3 feet = 3*12 inches, but is a pound 12 or 16 ounces, and how many cups in a quart? How many feet are in a mile? And you know what? People in the US don't even know these things. Go ask when you're in a supermarket next time how many ounces there are in a pound: they won't know.
The third issue is of course the lack of consistency: how many gallons is a cubic foot? That's seriously un-ergonomic.
If your clothes are wet, maybe.
AFAIK ID theft also happens in Europe (now that you've posted your information you should really make sure that somebody doesn't try to change the address associated with your bank account). It's more difficult to do in Europe than in the US, for these reasons (I'm not an expert but I've lived in both continents):
1) Credit reporting agencies have a far greater role in the US than they do in Europe. When you apply for a cell phone plan, or open a checking account at a bank, your credit ratings are checked. Factors such as income or current total credit seem to only be secondary to the 'trust factor' of the credit rating. If you've been behaving well in the past you can get an amount of credit for which the monthly payments would exceeds your income.
2) Unlike tax IDs in Europe, the American equivalent, the Social Security Number (which realy is a kind of tax ID) is used as a primary key for credit reporting agencies, and little checking is done on the actual identity of the person supplying that number.
3) The most common ID in the US is the driver's license. Each state in the US has a different driver's license; the average bank clerk from California probably has no idea what a driver's license from Vermont looks like. That's very different from Europe where it's very hard to open a bank account without a passport, driver's license or other ID issued in the country where you're trying to open the account.
4) Governments in Europe tend to have better records of where people actually live. (in the US that information is very fragmented, with the IRS (the federal tax agency) having some info, and the DMV (driver's license issuers) having other info; that's why there are censuses (censi) in the US). I suspect (don't know for sure) that there are legal circumstances where a collection agency can subpoena that information and actually go after somebody. This, I think, causes EU banks to be looking at different things when they give out a loan, and makes it harder to give a fake address.
5) The primary customers of credit reporting agencies are financial institutions and other companies, not people. It's not in their interest to prevent credit and ID fraud (actually their role only gets more important as that kind of crime goes up).
All these things together make people in the US far more vulnerable to ID theft. It's a side effect of the more fragmented government that's so much part of American culture.
Your comment should be modded funny, not insightful.
.net are *not* fast enough. I've tried).
The only reason you need a HPC cluster is -- indeed -- High Performance Computing. That means you're going to use as many cycles (or messages passed) as you can get from that $50K+ cluster you've just bought. This easily precludes anything but a fast compiled language like Fortran or C (and no, Java with JIT or
The comment about domain specific languages in your blog for HPC purposes is true: Fortran is exactly that.
That's bullshit. Like any EU member Britain is signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. This treaty established the appropriately named European Court of Human Rights which has very real powers in all EU countries.
Especially in the case of Britain, this court serves as the highest appeals court for many cases involving civil rights issues. It has, for instance, outlawed interrogation techniques that look strangely familiar... This probably has to do with the much less politicized and more independent nature of the European Court.
I've just looked it up (here) and you're mostly right. The main lift comes from the pressure obtained by deflecting the airflow; something that stops working as viscosity increases.
In practice, an airfoil does make of Bernoulli's effect to help deflect air downwards, thus increasing the lift (I'd guess that that's the reason why airplane wings 'bulge' upwards).
Of course it's 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer. It's a rack of 100,000 ordinary computers.
Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?
Yes! and good riddens.
Do you remember having to re-code for every single machine? Because they were such specialized machines, they tended to be extremely fickle: one wrong operation and performance would go down the drain.
In practice, most computational work in the end consists of running many jobs independently. There are rare occasions where a single super fast CPU might be better but it's even rarer for the performance gains to outweigh the incredible cost increases for buying specialized supercomputer hardware.
Whether it's wise to spend so much money on a single enormous cluster is another issue. You could buy many many individual clusters for individual groups and have them operational in a matter of weeks, rather than having wait till 2008. Besides, the thing is going to be obsolete by 2010.
This may seem a very inefficient way to move about, but things work very differently on the lengthscale of bacteria.
For example, most moving bacteria use propellor-like objects (flagellae) to propel themselves, but the way they work is very different from propellors.
Propellors use Bernouilli's principle to create a pressure difference between the front and the rear of the propellor, thereby 'sucking' themselves forward.
Bacteria, because they're so small, live in a surrounding where water has an effective viscosity higher than molasses on our lengthscale (it has to do with a dimensionless number for friction in hydrodynamics called the Reynold's number, that scales with inverse length).
Bacteria have to push themselves forward in something that really doesn't want to move and creates a lot of friction; all kinds of movements that we would think of intuitively possible are impossible under these circumstances. For example, some hydrodynamics people talk about the 'scallop theorem', which states that at these conditions it's impossible something to move forward like a scallop: rapidly closing its shell and opening it again.
Most flagellae are either spiral structures or stiff rods that get swayed back and forth; none use Bernoulli's effect, but tend to make use of the high viscosity by pushing against the fluid.
These bacteria make a starch gel to propel themselves: the sugar concentration doesn't need to be very high to get a decent gel, and the speeds they obtain sound incredible (usually we're talking 10 microns per minute, not per second).
Note regions VIII-XI. With enough pressure yes, water will solidify. HOWEVER there is a temperature point at which the water will no longer solidify (not shown on this scale although you can see the "liquid dome" is increasing as temperature increases. Eventually if you go far enough to the right there is a point where only vapor exists, regardless of pressure.
That's not really true; there may be a temperature where water as a molecule ceases to exist, but there is no critical point for freezing transitions: hard spheres crystallize under pressure, because at a certain density the entropy is actually higher in the ordered crystalline phase. There is a density at which water will always be solid.
It is true, however, that there is always a temperature where a solid at a given pressure will melt; exactly for the reasons you specify: the temperature will counteract the pressure. But inner core temperatures for the earth (a few thousand kelvins) will almost certainly not be enough to counteract the enormous pressure down there.
WTF are you talking about? Scheider lenses are in the same category (or better) as Zeiss: they've been making lenses for Rollei since forever (the one in my early 60's Rolleicord makes it easily beat any digital camera that costs less than a car --- in all aspects of image quality). They also make some of the best large format lenses that money can buy; look here for a modern normal lens.
Why do you think they can get away with charging $2500 for a normal lens (about 50mm equivalent for 35mm photography) that the buyer needs mount onto a lensboard himself?
These lenses make Canon's and Nikon's offerings (with maybe a few exceptions, like Canon's 200/1.8) look like the cheap, mass produced crap they are. Which, BTW, is fine because I also want to be able to actually buy a few lenses.
What exactly is it about Wikipedia that ruffles so many feathers? It seems like no other website has generated as much controversy as Wikipedia; is the Wikipedia foundation to blame or is it a result of the fact that the open source idea is viewed with more skepticism if it's applied to encyclopedias?
I just don't see it, I suppose.