Autonomous Crowhard (205058) sez: "The problem with your relativity comment is that you're assuming that time moves at a constant rate throughout the universe. Variable time speeds would account for the items we see that appear to be going faster than the speed of light in our frame of reference. Otherwise I agree with you."
So far the things we've seen that appear to be going faster than light are tricks of perspective in jets being emitted in opposite directions from active bodies, at an angle nearly in line with our sight. There's also the trick with wave fronts that make light appear to move faster or slower. The light is the same, the wave interactions cause the effect.
However, you raise the point of a known alternative to the anomalous speed changes in expansion we're blaming on dark energy. That theory is "delta tau". It posits that time is not a constant, that it was faster in the past, and is slowing down. Essentially it is not expanding as the same rate as spatial dimensions, as it is not solidly coupled to them. It predicts the same effects as the parent article without waving the dead chicken of dark anything.
Oh, and an additional point to something I argued elsewhere in the thread, re: space expanding and atoms (I'd go with Plank length) and everything else expanding with it, and so being 'invisible'. If space were expanding, and the quantum scale were not expanding with it, we'd be seeing matter pop into being out of the "quantum foam" for the same reasons that black holes aren't completely black (eg. Hawking radiation). Virtual particles would occasionally be unable to recombine because they'd have moved farther away than their energy allows for their speed. Expanding space without all scales of space-like measurement coupled to it would result in something like what the steady state cosmology theory predicts.
> Except in the real world the size of atoms, the speed of light, etc all stay the same - they don't get stretched. You taking a crude model too seriously.
Not at all. I'm presenting the crude model to illustrate the points rather than expounding bafflingly precise. I got this from a physics course at Purdue that taught relativity using no more math than the Pythagorean theorem and F = ma. Occam's Razor applied to levels of abstraction.
If space itself is expanding, any measuring device is itself expanding. This holds true for yard(or meter)sticks and the Plank length. If everything stayed the same size and space expanded without what's embedded in it, everything would appear to shrink. From what we can see, things may be moving away from us, but they don't appear to be getting smaller than can be accounted for distance. This would have been the case brought up by the other responder who talked about the balloon sliding around under his feet. He'd be appearing to shrink to the balloon universe.
And for the speed of light (the maximum speed, ie. in a vacuum), it is a constant because it crosses a fixed amount of space in a fixed amount of time, as seen from outside the photon*. If the "fixes" aren't, it'll vary, but since everything else will, it won't appear to.
* As a final head bend, consider that a photon travels at c, and so experiences no duration. It observes everything that happens during its lifespan (emission to absorption) simultaneously and instantaneously.
I posted exactly the same statements, without the math, in a response here on/. several months ago. I want my credit for prior publication.
It wasn't even my original work. The same example was used in a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute that I attended almost a decade ago.
The math is trivial. It's decremental time delay applied to acceleration according to position in a rate varying flow. If it were 2 or 3 dimensional, you'd see turbulence. In fact you do see close to 2 dimensional turbulence when people try to drive on the roadside or median strip, or turn around in the traffic.
If they can get this published despite the prior widespread use of the same concepts and math, then perhaps I should just buckle down and invent calculus.
Being "frozen in time" would require a privileged frame of reference from which to observe this. Relativity precludes such a thing.
If time slows down, we slow down with it, and we don't notice because everything looks normal. This is precisely the gedankenexperiment of the moving train. If you can't handle the relativity, read some science fiction that uses it, such as Tau Zero (the ship can't stop accelerating and ends up crossing the entire universe and watching the big crunch and next big bang) or the Heechee stories (where the guy leaves the rest of his crew trapped around a black hole, and they're recovered decades later, havening spent weeks waiting).
To have an absolutely 0 tau would require a completely flat universe. As long as any matter and/or energy (dark or light) exists, this is impossible. The rate may approach 0 but cannot achieve it. Thus, there will always be duration, and we will experience it just as we do now.
Time could be speeding up and slowing down right now, like a lead foot motorist stuck in a traffic jam. We'd never notice because we're stuck in it, no matter what its rate is, like a passenger in said vehicle that can't see outside (minus the inertial effects, because we're talking the universe here, not a locally observable phenomenon).
The same argument applies to "the universe is expanding". We couldn't detect that either, because we're embedded in space time. We'd expand too. All we can see is the supposed effects of previous expansion, that of Hubble red shift. Try the dots-on-the-balloon experiment. The dots get farther apart. But the distance between them as measured by the size of a dot remains constant.
It's the same argument because time and space are integrated as space-time. It's essentially the inability to get outside a frame of reference known as "universe".
Whenever I see one of these goofy assertion articles, I hope for a summary of the math. These goofy results must be arrived at due to an error in assumption. Such an error, if considered to be a valid point, may be just the error that prevents us from integrating gravity with the other forces, and so illuminating and fixing that error could be a major step in theoretical physics.
It's all because of Microsoft, so I for one welcome our new goat overlords because in Soviet Russia Linux runs YOU.
The above is as relevant to the issue of an unfair practices lawsuit over banking as is the gratuitous insertion of a question about copyright.
If the article can't stand on its own without throwing in an irrelevant hot button, it's not worth polluting the bit stream with it. I can see some such things getting by the editors, but there's so many of them that they must be selecting articles that have these.
Maybe next time I submit an interesting but non-inflammatory article, I should spice it up with an otherwise useless mention of RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft and SCO.
Oh, can I mention SCO, or does their bankruptcy proceedings prevent mentioning them on Slashdot?
Yeah, like that.
Mods notice: This is not a troll, because I mean it. It may have hurmorous elements (actually, it's sarcasm), but it's not intended to be funny. It is not flamebait, because it's not intended to elicit flames. It is in fact a flame itself. There is not mod marker for that. Mark it overrated if you like, but it's posted in all seriousness because of the lack of journalistic integrity when having same would cost nothing and produce a better publication.
I will go back to banging my head against a brick wall now.
... and who do you call to pick up and dispose of the used-up unit?
I think it's bogus, but someone who apparently knows a lot more than I do about these things says it's for real. Here's the response I posted in Clicked (MSNBC net blog):
"I can't find details elsewhere (except it's not the 4S reactor Toshiba has been installing at Galena Alaska). However, John Wheeler, a manager in the nuclear , nuclear news blogger and podcaster, and a respondant to the article on Dvorak's site, claims it's for real. Contact him, and you'll probably get real details: http://thisweekinnuclear.com/ But contact him directly (email link on his home page) as there are no relevant results from searching his weekly news report. "
Nature has no laws because nature doesn't care. We observe what we assume are constants and call those laws. Most are proven false, and even some of the supposedly immutable natural constants like the ratio of electron to proton mass, can be shown to be variable in theory, which means we'll probably find them that way. Everything exists in space-time, which is never flat and static. Therefore things are never the same and there are no "constants".
> The best reason for building a machine with humanoid characteristics is that it can use > already existing technology that is made for human beings. Generally, almost everything > people come in contact with was made to fit together in some way with the human body. > You can save a lot of time and money by making a robot that is "backward compatible".
In the short run, yes. In the long run, it'd be cheaper to design and build things that can handle human environments (stairs and keyboards are two quick examples) but also be capable of working in other environments as well. Otherwise you end up building specialized machines for each environment. Some will require that, but many can be handled by a general purpose machine.
As long as they didn't use them (or have to use them) for everything, they could maintain them at a slower pace and lower cost, and keep them flying for a long time.
Consider the B-52. It's been flying for over 50 years. It's not expected to perform all air tasks -- there are other planes for specialized work. Thus, the Buff doesn't get worn out because it's able to be kept up. There are more advanced planes flying. But the Buff is still flying too.
The shuttle could be kept flying for 50 years as long as there were suitable alternatives for certain missions.
Does an airplane fly like a bird? Does a submarine swim like a fish? The human form has many characteristics that are less than optimal, especially for particular tasks. Building something to mimic something else is to build in shortcomings, as well as make the design and implementation harder than it needs to be.
In "The Making of 2001" (IIRC), Arthur Clarke discussed the optimal design for a living thing, with the consideration that aliens would optimize themselves through genetic (or equivalent) engineering. The result was conical, mobile and facile in any direction, sensory organs up top and all the way around, and several other considerations. An optimal general design is just that, living or not, and this would serve as a far bettrer design for a robot. Of course robots with specific purposes should be built for that.
At least one SR-71 had two LOX tanks. The usual one for the cabin, and a second near the fuel tank, almost certainly as oxidizer. I filled them both at Kincheloe AFB, so I know it was there. This makes the top speed and altitude likely to be much higher than advertised. Many details of the SR-71 program were taken from the DynaSoar project, of which I'm quite familiar. It is likely at least this one SR-71 earned some air crews astronauts wings, though they'd never be able to say so. At 50 miles up (the USAF limit for astronaut wings) it could have gone Mach 15 and had an air equivalent spped of just under Mach 1, easily within its heat limit. (Calculations actually done for 230,000 ft, limit of my standard atmosphere equivalence calculator, a bit less than 50 miles.)
It'd have to have oxidizer in order to go high enough to go that fast because it'd have to go much higher than its advertised limit. Mach 3.3 at the advertised altitude was pretty much the heat limit for the airframe, especially the leading edges.
Since equivalent Mach number decrease with altitude, a scram operating at Mach 15, so as not to fry itself, will be flying so high that its Mach equivalent speed will still be within the heat limits of the leading edges. The ground speed will still be 11,250 MPH (Mach 15 equivalent at sea level). A scram would have to balance high altitude to keep from burning up with low altitude for there to be enough air to work with.
There having been advances in materials which would allow higher temperatures, it could easily hit Mach 5 at normal aircraft operating altitudes, and scram up to suborbital speed and trajectory. It'd also have to be a lifting body design, because a scram does nothing to slow it down other than leaving it off and using the drag, and that's not going to be much drag at all unless they put a flap over the intake while at peak altitude (when the scram isn't operating).
A UFO blogger recently obtained the DoD's paper on HAARP through the Freedom of Information Act. Among its uses are, precipitating particles out of the aurora in order to protect satellites during solar storms, and manipulation the aurora to turn it into essentially a long wave radio transmitter.
IIRC, the story was on WIRED, possibly a WIRED blog page.
You can take your tin foil hats off now. HAARP is harmless. If you don't believe this, please email targeting@OMCL.mil. We'll fix things for you.
This is a trivial implementation of a well know phenomenon, that *perception* of time changes with environment. TIME DOES NOT CHANGE, only the perception. It changes with such things as age. The tests for this are so simplistic that I've used many different ones in one-day set ups in undergrad cognitive psych labs. There is absolutely nothing about this article that warrants its inclusion in/. except for the bullshit title it was given. I think a more relevant article would be that peoples' perception of time changes if others around them claim that the rate of time was other than what the person perceived. They will ignore their own senses and 'go with the crowd'. Same for perception of distance and of angular separation. All of these are intertwined.
Now all we need is worm-like robots that burrow through the earth. And of course earwhig robots that burrow into your ear, and tick robots that attach to your skin and suck your blood. Cock roach robots won't need to do anything except run around and freak people out because they're so icky. Then, without a shot being fired, hasta la vista Sarah Conner.
Good science looks for general principles behind similar phenomena. We already know about socially mediated pressure to respond. It's cheap, useless science that ignores general principles and instead goes after specific instances, when the known general principle makes the study trivial.
I don't read Dvorak's stuff. The only things I ever see from him are the rants that get referenced here. Does he have anything good to say about anything?
As for the OLPC, giving those will give them the opportunity to learn how to be self-sustaining, whereas giving them truckloads of rice teaches them to be dependent on governments that are at best inefficient, but in Africa are likely to skim major portions of anything donated. The 'give the man a fish/teach the man to fish' argument applies.
If the African kids get the XO, and they happen to run across Dvorak's writing, they will almost certainly pass it right by as being totally unhelpful to their progress. He's already pretty irrelevant here. That may explain his perpetually sour mood.
Remastering Vangelis's soundtrack is not the half of it. He withdrew his recordings just prior to first release, and the entire soundtrack was rerecorded by a group of musicians Scott hastily put together. Vangelis didn't approve release of his version until 1994. Anyone familiar with Vangelis' work will be confident his recording will be much superior to the impromptu "New American Orchestra". It has been released on CD, but I don't believe it's been included in a version of Blade Runner prior to this.
Is there by any chance anything that says Mozilla got included in the deal that the Chinese end will not use their technology for either censorship or persecution of those who disagree with the party line?
I'm somewhat familiar with the math programs noted. I'm very familiar with the statistics programs such as SAS and SPSS. The programs that require you to learn and use a scripting language do not get as much use in the lab, as opposed to those that have a GUI interface with most of the functions in pull-downs. SPSS has this benefit over SAS. Even better, SPSS records everything you do in its scripting langauge, in a log file. This permits you to cut and paste its (self-written) scripts, use search-and-replace to change the variable names as needed, and put together a script for analyzing a large number of similar things, without having to actually learn the language.
I had to learn SAS, strictly with its scripting langauge, as an undergrad. I never used it again. I got SPSS as a grad student, and when it came time to teach statistics, I taught it with SPSS. People had more trouble with the concepts than they did with the analyses, the opposite of the problems I and others encountered previously.
Spam is not simply a technological problem, so a technological solution will be insufficient.
Spam is in large part a social problem. It requires social solutions. If that requires legislation, so be it. Personally I enjoy tracking down spammers, and publicizing their real name and location, including a map showing where they are. To my knowledge nobody ever made use of these and tracked down a spammer, but it really fucked with their heads to be outed so thoroughly and so publicly. I had one call me and rant at me, including threats of legal action as well as threats of bodily harm. But I had a few call and apologize, claiming they weren't aware it bothered people so much. One of these, in fact, became an anti-spammer.
> Only in America can someone with the last name 'SWINDLE' get appointed to something called the Federal TRADE Commission.
Funny, but not so. The same happens all over the world. The humor columnist L.M. Boyd used to have several such funny name/job listings every week, and the Annals of Improbable Research carries some still.
But I wouldn't say that to his face. He's a 6 foot something, 200 pound retired Marine who, despite being in his sixties, inserted himself bodily between a spammer and an anti-spammer when at said conference the former attempted to get physical against the latter. His sheer presence stopped the attack cold. That sheds some light on the nature of his comment. I greatly appreciated having a government official capable of and willing to kick spammer ass.
"Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue and told the audience that it cost the studios $6 billion annually."
Just think how good movies would be if instead of putting that money into anti-piracy, they put the money into making movies (which *should* be their #1 issue).
What? It's not 'costs', but rather 'lack of money you wish you would have made'?
"Oh. That's different. Never mind." -- Miss Emily Litella
I find it ironic that they're paying people to poison bittorrent streams, forcing people to make multiple attempts to achieve a download, and so multiplying the bandwidth used, while the ISPs are considering or installing packet shaping technology to cut down on the bandwidth usage by bittorrent users. Except, no I don't really find it ironic because they're both trying to steer us towards pay-per content.
Slashdot Mirror
Autonomous Crowhard (205058) sez: "The problem with your relativity comment is that you're assuming that time moves at a constant rate throughout the universe. Variable time speeds would account for the items we see that appear to be going faster than the speed of light in our frame of reference. Otherwise I agree with you."
So far the things we've seen that appear to be going faster than light are tricks of perspective in jets being emitted in opposite directions from active bodies, at an angle nearly in line with our sight. There's also the trick with wave fronts that make light appear to move faster or slower. The light is the same, the wave interactions cause the effect.
However, you raise the point of a known alternative to the anomalous speed changes in expansion we're blaming on dark energy. That theory is "delta tau". It posits that time is not a constant, that it was faster in the past, and is slowing down. Essentially it is not expanding as the same rate as spatial dimensions, as it is not solidly coupled to them. It predicts the same effects as the parent article without waving the dead chicken of dark anything.
Oh, and an additional point to something I argued elsewhere in the thread, re: space expanding and atoms (I'd go with Plank length) and everything else expanding with it, and so being 'invisible'. If space were expanding, and the quantum scale were not expanding with it, we'd be seeing matter pop into being out of the "quantum foam" for the same reasons that black holes aren't completely black (eg. Hawking radiation). Virtual particles would occasionally be unable to recombine because they'd have moved farther away than their energy allows for their speed. Expanding space without all scales of space-like measurement coupled to it would result in something like what the steady state cosmology theory predicts.
> Except in the real world the size of atoms, the speed of light, etc all stay the same - they don't get stretched. You taking a crude model too seriously.
Not at all. I'm presenting the crude model to illustrate the points rather than expounding bafflingly precise. I got this from a physics course at Purdue that taught relativity using no more math than the Pythagorean theorem and F = ma. Occam's Razor applied to levels of abstraction.
If space itself is expanding, any measuring device is itself expanding. This holds true for yard(or meter)sticks and the Plank length. If everything stayed the same size and space expanded without what's embedded in it, everything would appear to shrink. From what we can see, things may be moving away from us, but they don't appear to be getting smaller than can be accounted for distance. This would have been the case brought up by the other responder who talked about the balloon sliding around under his feet. He'd be appearing to shrink to the balloon universe.
And for the speed of light (the maximum speed, ie. in a vacuum), it is a constant because it crosses a fixed amount of space in a fixed amount of time, as seen from outside the photon*. If the "fixes" aren't, it'll vary, but since everything else will, it won't appear to.
* As a final head bend, consider that a photon travels at c, and so experiences no duration. It observes everything that happens during its lifespan (emission to absorption) simultaneously and instantaneously.
To the moderator who heeded my plea: thank you for the -1 overrated rather than something irrelevant.
I posted exactly the same statements, without the math, in a response here on /. several months ago. I want my credit for prior publication.
It wasn't even my original work. The same example was used in a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute that I attended almost a decade ago.
The math is trivial. It's decremental time delay applied to acceleration according to position in a rate varying flow. If it were 2 or 3 dimensional, you'd see turbulence. In fact you do see close to 2 dimensional turbulence when people try to drive on the roadside or median strip, or turn around in the traffic.
If they can get this published despite the prior widespread use of the same concepts and math, then perhaps I should just buckle down and invent calculus.
Being "frozen in time" would require a privileged frame of reference from which to observe this. Relativity precludes such a thing.
If time slows down, we slow down with it, and we don't notice because everything looks normal. This is precisely the gedankenexperiment of the moving train. If you can't handle the relativity, read some science fiction that uses it, such as Tau Zero (the ship can't stop accelerating and ends up crossing the entire universe and watching the big crunch and next big bang) or the Heechee stories (where the guy leaves the rest of his crew trapped around a black hole, and they're recovered decades later, havening spent weeks waiting).
To have an absolutely 0 tau would require a completely flat universe. As long as any matter and/or energy (dark or light) exists, this is impossible. The rate may approach 0 but cannot achieve it. Thus, there will always be duration, and we will experience it just as we do now.
Time could be speeding up and slowing down right now, like a lead foot motorist stuck in a traffic jam. We'd never notice because we're stuck in it, no matter what its rate is, like a passenger in said vehicle that can't see outside (minus the inertial effects, because we're talking the universe here, not a locally observable phenomenon).
The same argument applies to "the universe is expanding". We couldn't detect that either, because we're embedded in space time. We'd expand too. All we can see is the supposed effects of previous expansion, that of Hubble red shift. Try the dots-on-the-balloon experiment. The dots get farther apart. But the distance between them as measured by the size of a dot remains constant.
It's the same argument because time and space are integrated as space-time. It's essentially the inability to get outside a frame of reference known as "universe".
Whenever I see one of these goofy assertion articles, I hope for a summary of the math. These goofy results must be arrived at due to an error in assumption. Such an error, if considered to be a valid point, may be just the error that prevents us from integrating gravity with the other forces, and so illuminating and fixing that error could be a major step in theoretical physics.
It's all because of Microsoft, so I for one welcome our new goat overlords because in Soviet Russia Linux runs YOU.
The above is as relevant to the issue of an unfair practices lawsuit over banking as is the gratuitous insertion of a question about copyright.
If the article can't stand on its own without throwing in an irrelevant hot button, it's not worth polluting the bit stream with it. I can see some such things getting by the editors, but there's so many of them that they must be selecting articles that have these.
Maybe next time I submit an interesting but non-inflammatory article, I should spice it up with an otherwise useless mention of RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft and SCO.
Oh, can I mention SCO, or does their bankruptcy proceedings prevent mentioning them on Slashdot?
Yeah, like that.
Mods notice: This is not a troll, because I mean it.
It may have hurmorous elements (actually, it's sarcasm), but it's not intended to be funny.
It is not flamebait, because it's not intended to elicit flames.
It is in fact a flame itself. There is not mod marker for that.
Mark it overrated if you like, but it's posted in all seriousness because of the lack of journalistic integrity when having same would cost nothing and produce a better publication.
I will go back to banging my head against a brick wall now.
... and who do you call to pick up and dispose of the used-up unit?
I think it's bogus, but someone who apparently knows a lot more than I do about these things says it's for real. Here's the response I posted in Clicked (MSNBC net blog):
"I can't find details elsewhere (except it's not the 4S reactor Toshiba has been installing at Galena Alaska). However, John Wheeler, a manager in the nuclear , nuclear news blogger and podcaster, and a respondant to the article on Dvorak's site, claims it's for real. Contact him, and you'll probably get real details: http://thisweekinnuclear.com/ But contact him directly (email link on his home page) as there are no relevant results from searching his weekly news report. "
Nature has no laws because nature doesn't care. We observe what we assume are constants and call those laws. Most are proven false, and even some of the supposedly immutable natural constants like the ratio of electron to proton mass, can be shown to be variable in theory, which means we'll probably find them that way. Everything exists in space-time, which is never flat and static. Therefore things are never the same and there are no "constants".
> The best reason for building a machine with humanoid characteristics is that it can use
> already existing technology that is made for human beings. Generally, almost everything
> people come in contact with was made to fit together in some way with the human body.
> You can save a lot of time and money by making a robot that is "backward compatible".
In the short run, yes. In the long run, it'd be cheaper to design and build things that can handle human environments (stairs and keyboards are two quick examples) but also be capable of working in other environments as well. Otherwise you end up building specialized machines for each environment. Some will require that, but many can be handled by a general purpose machine.
As long as they didn't use them (or have to use them) for everything, they could maintain them at a slower pace and lower cost, and keep them flying for a long time.
Consider the B-52. It's been flying for over 50 years. It's not expected to perform all air tasks -- there are other planes for specialized work. Thus, the Buff doesn't get worn out because it's able to be kept up. There are more advanced planes flying. But the Buff is still flying too.
The shuttle could be kept flying for 50 years as long as there were suitable alternatives for certain missions.
Does an airplane fly like a bird?
Does a submarine swim like a fish?
The human form has many characteristics that are less than optimal, especially for particular tasks.
Building something to mimic something else is to build in shortcomings, as well as make the design and implementation harder than it needs to be.
In "The Making of 2001" (IIRC), Arthur Clarke discussed the optimal design for a living thing, with the consideration that aliens would optimize themselves through genetic (or equivalent) engineering. The result was conical, mobile and facile in any direction, sensory organs up top and all the way around, and several other considerations. An optimal general design is just that, living or not, and this would serve as a far bettrer design for a robot. Of course robots with specific purposes should be built for that.
At least one SR-71 had two LOX tanks. The usual one for the cabin, and a second near the fuel tank, almost certainly as oxidizer. I filled them both at Kincheloe AFB, so I know it was there. This makes the top speed and altitude likely to be much higher than advertised. Many details of the SR-71 program were taken from the DynaSoar project, of which I'm quite familiar. It is likely at least this one SR-71 earned some air crews astronauts wings, though they'd never be able to say so. At 50 miles up (the USAF limit for astronaut wings) it could have gone Mach 15 and had an air equivalent spped of just under Mach 1, easily within its heat limit. (Calculations actually done for 230,000 ft, limit of my standard atmosphere equivalence calculator, a bit less than 50 miles.)
It'd have to have oxidizer in order to go high enough to go that fast because it'd have to go much higher than its advertised limit. Mach 3.3 at the advertised altitude was pretty much the heat limit for the airframe, especially the leading edges.
Since equivalent Mach number decrease with altitude, a scram operating at Mach 15, so as not to fry itself, will be flying so high that its Mach equivalent speed will still be within the heat limits of the leading edges. The ground speed will still be 11,250 MPH (Mach 15 equivalent at sea level). A scram would have to balance high altitude to keep from burning up with low altitude for there to be enough air to work with.
There having been advances in materials which would allow higher temperatures, it could easily hit Mach 5 at normal aircraft operating altitudes, and scram up to suborbital speed and trajectory. It'd also have to be a lifting body design, because a scram does nothing to slow it down other than leaving it off and using the drag, and that's not going to be much drag at all unless they put a flap over the intake while at peak altitude (when the scram isn't operating).
I want one.
A UFO blogger recently obtained the DoD's paper on HAARP through the Freedom of Information Act. Among its uses are, precipitating particles out of the aurora in order to protect satellites during solar storms, and manipulation the aurora to turn it into essentially a long wave radio transmitter.
IIRC, the story was on WIRED, possibly a WIRED blog page.
You can take your tin foil hats off now. HAARP is harmless. If you don't believe this, please email targeting@OMCL.mil. We'll fix things for you.
Signed,
Your pals at Orbital Mind Control Lasers, Inc.
The US has not "nixed bankrolling" for manned Mars missions. Projects for this are still in progress. For instance http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/troutman-architecture.html
Read NASA's site and NASA watch for the real news.
This is a trivial implementation of a well know phenomenon, that *perception* of time changes with environment. TIME DOES NOT CHANGE, only the perception. It changes with such things as age. The tests for this are so simplistic that I've used many different ones in one-day set ups in undergrad cognitive psych labs. There is absolutely nothing about this article that warrants its inclusion in /. except for the bullshit title it was given. I think a more relevant article would be that peoples' perception of time changes if others around them claim that the rate of time was other than what the person perceived. They will ignore their own senses and 'go with the crowd'. Same for perception of distance and of angular separation. All of these are intertwined.
Now all we need is worm-like robots that burrow through the earth. And of course earwhig robots that burrow into your ear, and tick robots that attach to your skin and suck your blood. Cock roach robots won't need to do anything except run around and freak people out because they're so icky. Then, without a shot being fired, hasta la vista Sarah Conner.
Good science looks for general principles behind similar phenomena. We already know about socially mediated pressure to respond. It's cheap, useless science that ignores general principles and instead goes after specific instances, when the known general principle makes the study trivial.
I don't read Dvorak's stuff. The only things I ever see from him are the rants that get referenced here. Does he have anything good to say about anything?
As for the OLPC, giving those will give them the opportunity to learn how to be self-sustaining, whereas giving them truckloads of rice teaches them to be dependent on governments that are at best inefficient, but in Africa are likely to skim major portions of anything donated. The 'give the man a fish/teach the man to fish' argument applies.
If the African kids get the XO, and they happen to run across Dvorak's writing, they will almost certainly pass it right by as being totally unhelpful to their progress. He's already pretty irrelevant here. That may explain his perpetually sour mood.
Remastering Vangelis's soundtrack is not the half of it. He withdrew his recordings just prior to first release, and the entire soundtrack was rerecorded by a group of musicians Scott hastily put together. Vangelis didn't approve release of his version until 1994. Anyone familiar with Vangelis' work will be confident his recording will be much superior to the impromptu "New American Orchestra". It has been released on CD, but I don't believe it's been included in a version of Blade Runner prior to this.
> It's browser based, and you can try it online, so why are you asking?
To illustrate a problem I've seen with scripted vs. GUI based programs, and to get others, particularly developers, to consider this.
Is there by any chance anything that says Mozilla got included in the deal that the Chinese end will not use their technology for either censorship or persecution of those who disagree with the party line?
I'm somewhat familiar with the math programs noted. I'm very familiar with the statistics programs such as SAS and SPSS. The programs that require you to learn and use a scripting language do not get as much use in the lab, as opposed to those that have a GUI interface with most of the functions in pull-downs. SPSS has this benefit over SAS. Even better, SPSS records everything you do in its scripting langauge, in a log file. This permits you to cut and paste its (self-written) scripts, use search-and-replace to change the variable names as needed, and put together a script for analyzing a large number of similar things, without having to actually learn the language.
I had to learn SAS, strictly with its scripting langauge, as an undergrad. I never used it again. I got SPSS as a grad student, and when it came time to teach statistics, I taught it with SPSS. People had more trouble with the concepts than they did with the analyses, the opposite of the problems I and others encountered previously.
... dictates the nature of the solution.
Spam is not simply a technological problem, so a technological solution will be insufficient.
Spam is in large part a social problem. It requires social solutions. If that requires legislation, so be it. Personally I enjoy tracking down spammers, and publicizing their real name and location, including a map showing where they are. To my knowledge nobody ever made use of these and tracked down a spammer, but it really fucked with their heads to be outed so thoroughly and so publicly. I had one call me and rant at me, including threats of legal action as well as threats of bodily harm. But I had a few call and apologize, claiming they weren't aware it bothered people so much. One of these, in fact, became an anti-spammer.
> Only in America can someone with the last name 'SWINDLE' get appointed to something called the Federal TRADE Commission.
Funny, but not so. The same happens all over the world. The humor columnist L.M. Boyd used to have several such funny name/job listings every week, and the Annals of Improbable Research carries some still.
But I wouldn't say that to his face. He's a 6 foot something, 200 pound retired Marine who, despite being in his sixties, inserted himself bodily between a spammer and an anti-spammer when at said conference the former attempted to get physical against the latter. His sheer presence stopped the attack cold. That sheds some light on the nature of his comment. I greatly appreciated having a government official capable of and willing to kick spammer ass.
"Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue and told the audience that it cost the studios $6 billion annually."
Just think how good movies would be if instead of putting that money into anti-piracy, they put the money into making movies (which *should* be their #1 issue).
What? It's not 'costs', but rather 'lack of money you wish you would have made'?
"Oh. That's different. Never mind." -- Miss Emily Litella
I find it ironic that they're paying people to poison bittorrent streams, forcing people to make multiple attempts to achieve a download, and so multiplying the bandwidth used, while the ISPs are considering or installing packet shaping technology to cut down on the bandwidth usage by bittorrent users. Except, no I don't really find it ironic because they're both trying to steer us towards pay-per content.