Decades ago I discovered as a student (accidently in a chem lab) that you can pump dielectric and polar fluids without moving parts... I didn't patent it.
Why-ever not? Maybe this is a well-known phenomena among chemists, but I've never heard of it before.
Hm. Maybe I'll stop by the PTO later today and rectify this oversight...
And when they where about to eat you they menaced you by repeating the words of the last person they ate. So they'd corner you and yell, "Please don't eat me! Please don't eat me! Oh God! Nooo!"
These vacuum tube machines had CPU horsepower probably in the same ballpark as an 80286, but could draw more than 2 megawatts of power each.
Surprisingly, according to the computations per kWh chart, transistor computers weren't all that more efficient than vacuum tube computers. For example, the Commodore 64 is about the same distance below the best-fit line as one of the Univac II clusters are.
the next LOGICAL step (assuming we are trying move in the direction of eliminating visibility issues/unknown elements from nighttime driving) should be to have some kind of sonar/radar device that can detect and relay a warning to the driver
Lasers could probably help with this...
I was about to say "unless they run the beam through a diffuser and whitener like they've said they'll do." But even if the beam is turned white and spread around, if it stays in-phase in at least one frequency, maybe they can still do something with it.
I once saw a series of diagrams showing the various orbits around the Earth. It included the Moon, to scale. I was surprised at how far out the Moon's orbit was, and also surprised at how far out geosynchronous orbits are.
I admire the entropic gravity theory, from what little I can understand about it, though I am not sure I buy it.
That said, I am not sure I buy Lubos Motl Pilsen's rebuttal, either. He makes two two points that seem weak to me.
Instead of accepting the usual potential force as found by Newton, one must adopt an entropic force that depends on a temperature and an entropy. The temperature should be associated with the Unruh temperature which depends on the gravitational acceleration. This assumption is very problematic and probably inconsistent by itself because different pairs of bodies would have different temperatures which means that they couldn't be in a thermal equilibrium.
The bolded portion reminds me of a situation that requires calculus: when a naive constant multiplication gives the wrong result because the constant actually has to vary over distance or time. In this situation, the entropic potential force equation may have to have a temperature term more complicated than "tv" (me want Unicode) to account for a non-equilibrium. I do not see this as a deal-breaker.
But in agreement with his previous paper, he still assumes that the neutron may be associated with a wave function. If you try to do so, however, the momentum operator in quantum mechanics inevitably contains a non-Hermitian piece which takes care of the separation of the wave function among many microstates when the number of microstates goes up. Well, this is too optimistic because the relative phases between all the microstates would be undetermined and would evolve chaotically because of small differences in the energy between the macroscopically indistinguishable microstates - which would eliminate any trace of quantum coherence. But even if you assume that the quantum coherence is preserved, you get totally wrong new and very large terms in the SchrÃdinger equation that will obviously predict that the neutron interferometry experiments should see something completely different than what they do see.
As I understand it, these paragraphs are saying that as you drift into a sparser region of space and increase your entropy and degrees of freedom (i.e. increase the number of microstates), your wave functions gets noisy and you lose quantum coherence with a distant cohered particle as energy differences between different possibilities opened up by your increased degrees of freedom come into play. As Pilsen puts it, this is "because the relative phases between all the microstates would be undetermined and would evolve chaotically because of small differences in the energy between the macroscopically indistinguishable microstates."
Firstly, why would the microstates have undetermined relative phases? If two particles are coherent, and one exists in a one given space of microstates, and the other in another, then I do not see much of a stretch in saying that those different spaces of microstates are in some respects coherent as well, thus making their relative phases known as soon as one of the particles collapse. (Unless a "relative phase of a microstate" has some definition that is independent of quantum mechanics and cannot be influenced by the collapse of an entangled quantum state.)
Secondly, what does it matter of the microstates are macroscopically indistinguishable? For that part of the sentence to be relevant, I can only assume that Pilsen is talking about one microstate that "splits" into two or more if a particle moves to a place with more degrees of freedom. And so I ask, was it really one microstate to begin with, or was it two or more all along, with differences below some threshold that made them indistinguishable? Or, maybe a microstate can split as degrees of freedom increase, but maybe it does so in a stochastic way that maintains coherence.
Anyway, I am far from qualified to make convincing arguments. I will just wait for wiser heads to decide what's what.
You know when you're answering 2 IM conversations with a phone in your ear, you're cutting corners, missing information, and just trying to shut someone the hell up, so you can slow down and take a breath.... so politely put them off.
I am not sure there is a way to politely put someone off any more. The closest you can do is to say "hey, I'm kinda busy here, can I call you back?" But when someone says that to me, it throws me off for a second or so at the very least, and may leave me ticked off depending on circumstances.
Apparently, you can't safely store an auto_ptr in a collection. That is a pretty common situation. While auto_ptrs are pretty sweet, and by that I mean totally cool, they are not a panacea.
Those who truely grok RAII don't need GC... For the average dev, GC is for the best, really.
Yes, if you have to choose, GC is better for the average programmer, or for any programmer. I don't care how well you grok RAII.
There are ways of doing garbage collection that collects deterministically. You can use reference counting with weak references, like what Objective C does.
But without deterministic GC, RAII actually just makes things worse. RAII ties resource allocation to object lifetime. Without deterministic GC, you will have unexpected object lifetime problems. If throw RAII in to the mix, your unexpected object lifetime problems now become unexpected resource allocation problems. If you do not use RAII, the two lifetime problems would at least be orthogonal.
The jobs we outsource are jobs we don't actually want because they don't pay well enough and are pretty unskilled. If somebody with no education is willing and able to do the job for pennies a day, we should be glad to let them do it and profit off their labors, getting those valuable goods far far cheaper (increasing our standard of living), or selling the stuff they make to the rest of the world. The free market determines the value of the labor involved in making these devices, and let's face it, the value of that labor is not that high. The work is done very efficiently and takes minimal training or education. Nobody in the US would be happy with those jobs' hours, salary, or benefits.
Who is the "we" here? What you should have said is "the jobs companies outsource are the ones that workers don't actually want because they don't pay well enough," and phrased like that, it is obviously not true. Workers here want those jobs. But so do workers elsewhere, and they can ask for lower wages than anyone here can and still afford to live. It isn't that those jobs don't pay well enough. It is that they can't pay well enough.
And, yes, "companies should be glad to let them do it and profit off their labors." And they are. But the workers here are less happy. Outsourcing makes those goods cheaper, yes, but not free, so a worker would still need an income to enjoy those goods. And they don't have a income, because they don't have a job.
We need jobs. And jobs are rarer these days. And not because of outsourcing, either, not primarily. Jobs are scarce because everything requires less labor. And not just blue-collar, unskilled labor. We need less skilled labor too. Architects need fewer draftsmen, lawyers need fewer paralegals, large companies need fewer librarians. All support staff has generally been gutted.
We will need a basic living stipend very VERY soon, be it called permanent unemployment benefits or the purple wage. But given how entrenched and delusional politicians have become — especially Republicans — I have little hope of seeing any orderly steps in that direction. I forsee nothing but economic crisis after economic crisis.
I would think it's sufficient just to disable development mode, so that ADB cannot be hooked into USB, which I think does work when the phone is locked.
I don't know about other phones, but the iPhone does disable development mode when the phone is locked. Which is to say, the phone cannot install, run, and debug an app if you would need to enter a passcode to unlock it.
(It works if you do not have a passcode on the phone, or if you do have a passcode but you are still in the grace period before you need to re-enter it.)
You can still sync if the phone is locked, though, so there is some differential security there.
I do not think there is a way to jailbreak a passcode-protected phone, but if the phone has had a jailbreak applied, the passcode cannot stop a thief from getting to the encrypted passwords.
The difference is in a traditional wheel as you change speed that response doesn't change. In this system, the feedback you get will be dependent on the speed you're going. In a traditional wheel as the response changes (i.e. normal tire wear) there is really no appreciable change in steering or friction.
The added issue is that your velocity *and* direction are dependent on where the tire contacts the driving surface. That really isn't an issue with a flat surface, but I don't typically drive on a dried desert lake bed. On a bumpy surface you'll experience unintended vast changes in speed, direction, and taste (namely if you vomit).
This, I think, is where computer controls and feedback can help. Something to adapt wheel control for differing terrain, wear, angles, and contact points.
The inventor needed none of that for this video; he controlled the gimbal directly from the remote.
"The punishment for most crimes is a fine"' - Which if you have no means to pay you go to jail without access to a jury trial.
I doubt this is true. I've never heard of the US having a debtor's prison. If you can't pay, you work out a payment plan with the court, or do community service instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Decades ago I discovered as a student (accidently in a chem lab) that you can pump dielectric and polar fluids without moving parts... I didn't patent it.
Why-ever not? Maybe this is a well-known phenomena among chemists, but I've never heard of it before.
Hm. Maybe I'll stop by the PTO later today and rectify this oversight...
And when they where about to eat you they menaced you by repeating the words of the last person they ate. So they'd corner you and yell, "Please don't eat me! Please don't eat me! Oh God! Nooo!"
It's the drugs. It's the drugs, isn't it?
I'm skeptical that interacting with humans could increase their odds of survival.
"Bobby, listen! That bird just said 'hey pretty lady!' Oh, do give it some food!"
So, what would that look like in person? Assuming one could somehow survive on the surface to see.
Like dust blowing away in the wind? Embers in a fire? Smoke? Like those animations where the light glows through a body as it is ripped to shreds?
These vacuum tube machines had CPU horsepower probably in the same ballpark as an 80286, but could draw more than 2 megawatts of power each.
Surprisingly, according to the computations per kWh chart, transistor computers weren't all that more efficient than vacuum tube computers. For example, the Commodore 64 is about the same distance below the best-fit line as one of the Univac II clusters are.
the next LOGICAL step (assuming we are trying move in the direction of eliminating visibility issues/unknown elements from nighttime driving) should be to have some kind of sonar/radar device that can detect and relay a warning to the driver
Lasers could probably help with this...
I was about to say "unless they run the beam through a diffuser and whitener like they've said they'll do." But even if the beam is turned white and spread around, if it stays in-phase in at least one frequency, maybe they can still do something with it.
Hey now... let's not draw any hasty conclusions yet.
Yeah. You don't want to paint this guy with a broad brush. Have some perspective.
I once saw a series of diagrams showing the various orbits around the Earth. It included the Moon, to scale. I was surprised at how far out the Moon's orbit was, and also surprised at how far out geosynchronous orbits are.
Wish I could find that diagram now.
I admire the entropic gravity theory, from what little I can understand about it, though I am not sure I buy it.
That said, I am not sure I buy Lubos Motl Pilsen's rebuttal, either. He makes two two points that seem weak to me.
The bolded portion reminds me of a situation that requires calculus: when a naive constant multiplication gives the wrong result because the constant actually has to vary over distance or time. In this situation, the entropic potential force equation may have to have a temperature term more complicated than "tv" (me want Unicode) to account for a non-equilibrium. I do not see this as a deal-breaker.
As I understand it, these paragraphs are saying that as you drift into a sparser region of space and increase your entropy and degrees of freedom (i.e. increase the number of microstates), your wave functions gets noisy and you lose quantum coherence with a distant cohered particle as energy differences between different possibilities opened up by your increased degrees of freedom come into play. As Pilsen puts it, this is "because the relative phases between all the microstates would be undetermined and would evolve chaotically because of small differences in the energy between the macroscopically indistinguishable microstates."
Firstly, why would the microstates have undetermined relative phases? If two particles are coherent, and one exists in a one given space of microstates, and the other in another, then I do not see much of a stretch in saying that those different spaces of microstates are in some respects coherent as well, thus making their relative phases known as soon as one of the particles collapse. (Unless a "relative phase of a microstate" has some definition that is independent of quantum mechanics and cannot be influenced by the collapse of an entangled quantum state.)
Secondly, what does it matter of the microstates are macroscopically indistinguishable? For that part of the sentence to be relevant, I can only assume that Pilsen is talking about one microstate that "splits" into two or more if a particle moves to a place with more degrees of freedom. And so I ask, was it really one microstate to begin with, or was it two or more all along, with differences below some threshold that made them indistinguishable? Or, maybe a microstate can split as degrees of freedom increase, but maybe it does so in a stochastic way that maintains coherence.
Anyway, I am far from qualified to make convincing arguments. I will just wait for wiser heads to decide what's what.
That cheered me right the hell up, thx master5o1!
You know when you're answering 2 IM conversations with a phone in your ear, you're cutting corners, missing information, and just trying to shut someone the hell up, so you can slow down and take a breath.... so politely put them off.
I am not sure there is a way to politely put someone off any more. The closest you can do is to say "hey, I'm kinda busy here, can I call you back?" But when someone says that to me, it throws me off for a second or so at the very least, and may leave me ticked off depending on circumstances.
Apparently, you can't safely store an auto_ptr in a collection. That is a pretty common situation. While auto_ptrs are pretty sweet, and by that I mean totally cool, they are not a panacea.
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/using_auto_ptr_effectively.htm
Those who truely grok RAII don't need GC... For the average dev, GC is for the best, really.
Yes, if you have to choose, GC is better for the average programmer, or for any programmer. I don't care how well you grok RAII.
There are ways of doing garbage collection that collects deterministically. You can use reference counting with weak references, like what Objective C does.
But without deterministic GC, RAII actually just makes things worse. RAII ties resource allocation to object lifetime. Without deterministic GC, you will have unexpected object lifetime problems. If throw RAII in to the mix, your unexpected object lifetime problems now become unexpected resource allocation problems. If you do not use RAII, the two lifetime problems would at least be orthogonal.
Who is the "we" here? What you should have said is "the jobs companies outsource are the ones that workers don't actually want because they don't pay well enough," and phrased like that, it is obviously not true. Workers here want those jobs. But so do workers elsewhere, and they can ask for lower wages than anyone here can and still afford to live. It isn't that those jobs don't pay well enough. It is that they can't pay well enough.
And, yes, "companies should be glad to let them do it and profit off their labors." And they are. But the workers here are less happy. Outsourcing makes those goods cheaper, yes, but not free, so a worker would still need an income to enjoy those goods. And they don't have a income, because they don't have a job.
We need jobs. And jobs are rarer these days. And not because of outsourcing, either, not primarily. Jobs are scarce because everything requires less labor. And not just blue-collar, unskilled labor. We need less skilled labor too. Architects need fewer draftsmen, lawyers need fewer paralegals, large companies need fewer librarians. All support staff has generally been gutted.
We will need a basic living stipend very VERY soon, be it called permanent unemployment benefits or the purple wage. But given how entrenched and delusional politicians have become — especially Republicans — I have little hope of seeing any orderly steps in that direction. I forsee nothing but economic crisis after economic crisis.
They got better.
You can't ostracize a nation or person forever, you know. Eventually, you have to either kill them or let them back in the fold.
I don't know about other phones, but the iPhone does disable development mode when the phone is locked. Which is to say, the phone cannot install, run, and debug an app if you would need to enter a passcode to unlock it.
(It works if you do not have a passcode on the phone, or if you do have a passcode but you are still in the grace period before you need to re-enter it.)
You can still sync if the phone is locked, though, so there is some differential security there.
I do not think there is a way to jailbreak a passcode-protected phone, but if the phone has had a jailbreak applied, the passcode cannot stop a thief from getting to the encrypted passwords.
How low are the power demands of a pacemaker in terms of the Library of Congress?
Couldn't it work the other way? The device is hot and the surroundings are cold?
Discover magazine serves my science news needs admirably. I see a lot of people recommending online sources, but really, reading things online sucks.
This, I think, is where computer controls and feedback can help. Something to adapt wheel control for differing terrain, wear, angles, and contact points.
The inventor needed none of that for this video; he controlled the gimbal directly from the remote.
Just goes to show. It isn't the size of the ship, but the motion in the ocean.
Dude's got a built-in vibrator that he can play like a master.
The whole debacle was definitely not a feather in anyone's cap.
Actually, a better book mentioning the future evolution of spiders is Marooned in Realtime. Also by Vernor Vinge, as it happens.
"The punishment for most crimes is a fine"' - Which if you have no means to pay you go to jail without access to a jury trial.
I doubt this is true. I've never heard of the US having a debtor's prison. If you can't pay, you work out a payment plan with the court, or do community service instead.
They actually listed jobs for Detroit? Does anyone still live there? I thought it was the new "Escape from New York."