Who modded this up? Obviously no one who understood the physics of the story. So let's explain.
The process described is neither fission nor fusion. Instead, it's analogous to how a light bulb works.
(What? Yes, a light bulb. Bear with me.)
In a lightbulb, you add energy to a fillament. The electrons (mostly) in the fillament are placed into excited states by the energy, then very quickly release the energy in the form of photons (visible light) and fall from the excited state into a ground state.
A similar thing can be done to particles other than electrons -- such as neutrons. In most cases, the neutrons fall from the excited state very quickly and release photons (gamma rays and the like).
In hafnium, however, the excited state of the neutrons is metastable -- which is just a fancy way of saying they stay excited for a long time between when they're excited and when they release photons.
If a way could be developed to induce the grounding, then hafnium could be used to store large amounts of energy in the metastable state, and then induced to release it all at once, resulting in much larger discharges than ordinary chemical reactions can store/release.
It doesn't yield energy; at best you get from the grounding the energy you put in to get the neutrons excited. It isn't fission, and it isn't fusion; not what we typically call a "nuclear" reaction. However, it is a beyond-chemical-bond-capacity energy release based on the nucleus.
Oh, and by the way, there are middlish-weight elements that are unstable, and thus can provide nuclear energy through ordinary radioactive decay. The classic example is Technetium, number 43 on the Periodic Table, atomic mass 98.
You know, when our probes hit the sphere surrounding the solar system and reveal the entire cosmos beyond 250 AU is just an animated image on the shell of the Universe, you're going to feel awfully silly for believing in dark matter.
Of course, since Shiva will then destroy the world, you won't be feeling silly very long, which is a blessing.
I didn't say "country", I said sovereign power. It has official diplomatic recognition from 99 countries, which is more than can be said of some places with populations and governments (the Republic of China, for example.)
Yeah, but that just means either Intel will have to get off its ass and fix its problems, or everybody will be using AMD chips (or, perhaps, PowerPCs) to run Longhorn.
Back in 1950, one might note that the U.S. was responsible for half the world's GWP. In 1965, it was down to 25%? Was this a collapse in the American economy? No -- it was Europe and Japan having sucessfully rebuilt from bombed-out postwar husks into a restored industrialized powers. Sure, the U.S. "lost its industrial dominance" in that it was no longer so far ahead of everyone else, but the only way to keep it would have been to militarily force the Europeans and Japanese to stay backwards.
Similarly, in the last 20 years we've seen South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore emerge as modern economies, and India and China reduce the stultifying power of socialism on their economies. The resulting development has been met with an increase in the amount of science and engineering they produce. Sure, the U.S. "lost its scientific dominance" in that it is no longer so far ahead of everyone else, but the only way to keep it would have been to militarily force the Asians to stay backwards.
How can I claim we've stayed even? Well, when we compare ourselves scientifically to those who were fully developed countries in 1983, we're still ahead, as pointed out in Time Europe.
The U.S. science establishment is still healthy. It's just that the science establisments in Asia are no longer invalids.
Part 1: Whether SCO or Novell has the copyrights to SysV, SCO has licensing rights broad enough to release it under the GPL themselves.
Part 2: A while back, Sun bought a broad license to Unix from SCO. Exactly how broad nobody knows, but SCO at one point publically said that it immunizes Sun from the sort of lawsuit they launched against IBM. Since that involved IBM GPLing what SCO claims is System V code . ..
Again, the exact terms of Sun's license are not known, so this is speculation. But it is intriguing, isn't it?
1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL
Or can they?
Conveniently enough, SCO's licensing rights are broad enough it can release UNIX under the GPL without Novell permission (and they did for V7), and Sun bought a very broad license to UNIX from SCO a few years back.
While exact terms have not been disclosed publically, from SCO statements about Sun's license in the IBM case, it would seem at least possible SCO has already sold Sun a set of rights so broad Sun could GPL all the UNIX in Solaris.
1) How would nature control population growth in koalas? 2) Have we in some way removed that control and can it be re-introduced.
The island itself is not a native habitat for koalas; they were introduced by humans. There is therefore no natural control on the koalas on the island. To restore the natural balance, one would eliminate the artifical infestation by the artificial means of killing all the koalas.
There are only two ways a stock has value; if it pays a dividend, or if there is prospect of somebody buying it.
Now, why would any stock that doesn't pay dividends have anybody interested in buying it? There are three:
1) It gives control over the company's money 2) A dividend is expected in the future 3) The price of the stock is expected to be bidded up despite the lack of tangible benefits to owning it.
1) is essentially zero for non-voting stock; since it exerts no control over the company, it exerts no influence over the company's money. Your only hope is that the voting stock owners sign a merger deal that results in you getting reimbursed.
2) assumes that they will eventually pay a dividend. Since the company says it doesn't intend to, you're betting that they'll change their mind. Since your share is non-voting, you merely have to hope.
3) is the Greater Fool theory.
Non-voting no-dividend stock is almost worthless; its only real value is the possibility of a future change of policy by the voting-stock owners to give up control (a merger) or pay dividends. To value it highly, then, one must expect a Greater Fool to come along and buy it despite the lack of tangibles.
First, it might be pointed out two countries jointly invaded Poland in September, 1939, and one of them was the USSR. France and England pleaded with Stalin for a united front against Hitler, and Stalin instead chose to ally with Hitler. The Soviets then busily shipped supplies to Germany in alliance with fascism against liberal democracy right up until the very day that the Nazis invaded. They only went to war with the Nazis when forced to by a direct invasion.
Second, you know when the USSR entered the war with Japan? August 8, 1945. As in two days after Hiroshima. The Russians waited until after Japan had been nuked to take sides.
The USSR was not an anti-fascist bulwark. It was just another totalitarian state that tried to ally itself with the others against liberal democracy, and only changed course 1) when it was forced to do so by an invasion, or 2) when it ran no risks in exchange for the fruits of victory.
There are already cases such as police using infrared video cameras to find houses giving off a lot of heat and using that as probable cause that marijuana is being grown there under sun lamps.
And that was found by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, with the concurrence of no less than the so-called "ultraconservative" Justice Thomas. Because, you see, that was a violation of the privacy of a person in his house.
Similarly, your other attempts at reductios (the tent and the bathroom) also run into the plain meaning of the Fourth Amendment -- good ol' "effects" and "persons", respectively.
Whatever your reason is for wanting the public to lose its (what I will call) public semi-anonymity . . . your children and grandchildren will have to live in the police state
So, small towns in rural areas are police states? Public semi-anonymity is an artifact of high-density population centers. Outside of them, it does not and never has existed, and didn't exist even in cities to the current degree until after the invention of the automobile. Merely because you're used to it doesn't make it either natural or right, much less a natural right.
Fine. So a copy of you isn't you, no matter how exact.
What if I took every atom in your body and replaced it with a different one? Would that be you, or just a copy of you built to the same pattern wile the real you was destroyed?
How about if I recycled 10% of your own atoms into the copy, but in different places?
Okay, now even worse -- the new person, while similar to you, is not an exact duplicate of who you were before I started the repacement, either physically or mentally. Surely the new being isn't you.
Now, consider that the "you" that existed ten years ago today probably shares less than 10% of the atoms that the you of today has, and is not an exact duplicate of the you that existed 10 years ago, either. You're an inexact copy of someone who is clearly no longer in existence; the you of 10 years ago is dead.
So, how can you say that the person who was alive 10 years ago is still alive? Perhaps a poor copy that exists today is, but definitely not that person.
It switches the processor to 386 Protected mode and installs its own set of hardware, filesystem, network, and other drivers. It replaces the int 0x21 interface with its own. Applications use Windows 9X for access to system resources (ram, files, network, etc.)
By that standard, Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode with 32-Bit Disk Access enabled was an operating system, too, back in 1992. It did all of that too.
Practically every serious physicist knows that GR as currently stated and QM as currently stated are mutually contradictory in certain domains, and that thus one or both are incorrect in the same sense Newton's laws were.
Me, I'm hoping we find a divergence with the GR expectation. Some inexplicable data will hopefully inspire a future Nobel Prize winner into making sense of the contradictions and get us a unified theory that can be tested.
As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.
Yeah, but x86-32 processors themselves have built-in virtual 8086 processor hardware support. A virtual x86-32 processor is much trickier to implement on an x86-32 machine, since the x86-32 doesn't supply hardware support for that.
OS/2 isn't the only OS that supports virtual 8086s, either -- Linux/DOSEmu and Windows back to 3.0 (in 386 Enhanced Mode) do, too. Though on Windows you're limited to what OS/2 called Virtual DOS Machines, while Linux supports Virtual Machine Boots.
Your mail is sitting in plain text on their servers. The privacy issue -- will (Spymac|Google) violate its privacy policy and read your email -- is the same whichever you use.
Austrian (the gold standard laissez-faire capitalist theory) economics only fails to apply (or more properly, shows distortions and inefficiencies) if the monopoly or cartel is established by special privileges and immunities not avialable to competitors attempting to enter the market.
A monopoly or cartel that comes together under natural market forces is still under market constraints in Austrian theory because of the ability for new entrants to enter the field and the ability of consumers to make good substitutions and use reductions (if only on the margins).
Slashdot Mirror
Who modded this up? Obviously no one who understood the physics of the story. So let's explain.
The process described is neither fission nor fusion. Instead, it's analogous to how a light bulb works.
(What? Yes, a light bulb. Bear with me.)
In a lightbulb, you add energy to a fillament. The electrons (mostly) in the fillament are placed into excited states by the energy, then very quickly release the energy in the form of photons (visible light) and fall from the excited state into a ground state.
A similar thing can be done to particles other than electrons -- such as neutrons. In most cases, the neutrons fall from the excited state very quickly and release photons (gamma rays and the like).
In hafnium, however, the excited state of the neutrons is metastable -- which is just a fancy way of saying they stay excited for a long time between when they're excited and when they release photons.
If a way could be developed to induce the grounding, then hafnium could be used to store large amounts of energy in the metastable state, and then induced to release it all at once, resulting in much larger discharges than ordinary chemical reactions can store/release.
It doesn't yield energy; at best you get from the grounding the energy you put in to get the neutrons excited. It isn't fission, and it isn't fusion; not what we typically call a "nuclear" reaction. However, it is a beyond-chemical-bond-capacity energy release based on the nucleus.
Oh, and by the way, there are middlish-weight elements that are unstable, and thus can provide nuclear energy through ordinary radioactive decay. The classic example is Technetium, number 43 on the Periodic Table, atomic mass 98.
You know, when our probes hit the sphere surrounding the solar system and reveal the entire cosmos beyond 250 AU is just an animated image on the shell of the Universe, you're going to feel awfully silly for believing in dark matter.
Of course, since Shiva will then destroy the world, you won't be feeling silly very long, which is a blessing.
I didn't say "country", I said sovereign power. It has official diplomatic recognition from 99 countries, which is more than can be said of some places with populations and governments (the Republic of China, for example.)
Katz was as eloquent as a mynah bird.
Bah. My bedroom is larger than the territory ruled by one soverign power (not counting its extrateritorial enclaves).
Yeah, but that just means either Intel will have to get off its ass and fix its problems, or everybody will be using AMD chips (or, perhaps, PowerPCs) to run Longhorn.
Hey, I'd gladly outsource the job of spanking my monkey to a young Indian woman . . .
Back in 1950, one might note that the U.S. was responsible for half the world's GWP. In 1965, it was down to 25%? Was this a collapse in the American economy? No -- it was Europe and Japan having sucessfully rebuilt from bombed-out postwar husks into a restored industrialized powers. Sure, the U.S. "lost its industrial dominance" in that it was no longer so far ahead of everyone else, but the only way to keep it would have been to militarily force the Europeans and Japanese to stay backwards.
Similarly, in the last 20 years we've seen South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore emerge as modern economies, and India and China reduce the stultifying power of socialism on their economies. The resulting development has been met with an increase in the amount of science and engineering they produce. Sure, the U.S. "lost its scientific dominance" in that it is no longer so far ahead of everyone else, but the only way to keep it would have been to militarily force the Asians to stay backwards.
How can I claim we've stayed even? Well, when we compare ourselves scientifically to those who were fully developed countries in 1983, we're still ahead, as pointed out in Time Europe.
The U.S. science establishment is still healthy. It's just that the science establisments in Asia are no longer invalids.
Linux 2.0 was released in June 1996, and got a patch to 2.0.40 in February of this year.
.27-pre2 came out in later April.
Linux 2.2 was released in January 1999, was patched to 2.26 in February of this year, and a
Aw, and I had already started composing my flame over the other post . . .
They bought a supplementary license from SCO in the last few years, actually.
Part 1: Whether SCO or Novell has the copyrights to SysV, SCO has licensing rights broad enough to release it under the GPL themselves.
.
Part 2: A while back, Sun bought a broad license to Unix from SCO. Exactly how broad nobody knows, but SCO at one point publically said that it immunizes Sun from the sort of lawsuit they launched against IBM. Since that involved IBM GPLing what SCO claims is System V code . .
Again, the exact terms of Sun's license are not known, so this is speculation. But it is intriguing, isn't it?
1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL
Or can they?
Conveniently enough, SCO's licensing rights are broad enough it can release UNIX under the GPL without Novell permission (and they did for V7), and Sun bought a very broad license to UNIX from SCO a few years back.
While exact terms have not been disclosed publically, from SCO statements about Sun's license in the IBM case, it would seem at least possible SCO has already sold Sun a set of rights so broad Sun could GPL all the UNIX in Solaris.
Again, not certain, merely possible.
Yes, I can: Right Here.
Money quote:
Not native to Kangaroo Island, Koalas are now devastating, through overeating, these eucalypts.
And I agree that the Reuters article (the actual source, CNN just reprinted it) was basically worthless.
1) How would nature control population growth in koalas?
2) Have we in some way removed that control and can it be re-introduced.
The island itself is not a native habitat for koalas; they were introduced by humans. There is therefore no natural control on the koalas on the island. To restore the natural balance, one would eliminate the artifical infestation by the artificial means of killing all the koalas.
There are only two ways a stock has value; if it pays a dividend, or if there is prospect of somebody buying it.
Now, why would any stock that doesn't pay dividends have anybody interested in buying it? There are three:
1) It gives control over the company's money
2) A dividend is expected in the future
3) The price of the stock is expected to be bidded up despite the lack of tangible benefits to owning it.
1) is essentially zero for non-voting stock; since it exerts no control over the company, it exerts no influence over the company's money. Your only hope is that the voting stock owners sign a merger deal that results in you getting reimbursed.
2) assumes that they will eventually pay a dividend. Since the company says it doesn't intend to, you're betting that they'll change their mind. Since your share is non-voting, you merely have to hope.
3) is the Greater Fool theory.
Non-voting no-dividend stock is almost worthless; its only real value is the possibility of a future change of policy by the voting-stock owners to give up control (a merger) or pay dividends. To value it highly, then, one must expect a Greater Fool to come along and buy it despite the lack of tangibles.
First, it might be pointed out two countries jointly invaded Poland in September, 1939, and one of them was the USSR. France and England pleaded with Stalin for a united front against Hitler, and Stalin instead chose to ally with Hitler. The Soviets then busily shipped supplies to Germany in alliance with fascism against liberal democracy right up until the very day that the Nazis invaded. They only went to war with the Nazis when forced to by a direct invasion.
Second, you know when the USSR entered the war with Japan? August 8, 1945. As in two days after Hiroshima. The Russians waited until after Japan had been nuked to take sides.
The USSR was not an anti-fascist bulwark. It was just another totalitarian state that tried to ally itself with the others against liberal democracy, and only changed course 1) when it was forced to do so by an invasion, or 2) when it ran no risks in exchange for the fruits of victory.
There are already cases such as police using infrared video cameras to find houses giving off a lot of heat and using that as probable cause that marijuana is being grown there under sun lamps.
And that was found by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, with the concurrence of no less than the so-called "ultraconservative" Justice Thomas. Because, you see, that was a violation of the privacy of a person in his house.
Similarly, your other attempts at reductios (the tent and the bathroom) also run into the plain meaning of the Fourth Amendment -- good ol' "effects" and "persons", respectively.
Whatever your reason is for wanting the public to lose its (what I will call) public semi-anonymity . . . your children and grandchildren will have to live in the police state
So, small towns in rural areas are police states? Public semi-anonymity is an artifact of high-density population centers. Outside of them, it does not and never has existed, and didn't exist even in cities to the current degree until after the invention of the automobile. Merely because you're used to it doesn't make it either natural or right, much less a natural right.
he EU is all about opening up markets, not closing them
Oh? Three letters for you -- CAP.
Fine. So a copy of you isn't you, no matter how exact.
What if I took every atom in your body and replaced it with a different one? Would that be you, or just a copy of you built to the same pattern wile the real you was destroyed?
How about if I recycled 10% of your own atoms into the copy, but in different places?
Okay, now even worse -- the new person, while similar to you, is not an exact duplicate of who you were before I started the repacement, either physically or mentally. Surely the new being isn't you.
Now, consider that the "you" that existed ten years ago today probably shares less than 10% of the atoms that the you of today has, and is not an exact duplicate of the you that existed 10 years ago, either. You're an inexact copy of someone who is clearly no longer in existence; the you of 10 years ago is dead.
So, how can you say that the person who was alive 10 years ago is still alive? Perhaps a poor copy that exists today is, but definitely not that person.
Why confine it to Windows 9x?
It switches the processor to 386 Protected mode and installs its own set of hardware, filesystem, network, and other drivers. It replaces the int 0x21 interface with its own. Applications use Windows 9X for access to system resources (ram, files, network, etc.)
By that standard, Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode with 32-Bit Disk Access enabled was an operating system, too, back in 1992. It did all of that too.
Practically every serious physicist knows that GR as currently stated and QM as currently stated are mutually contradictory in certain domains, and that thus one or both are in correct in the same sense Newton's laws were.
Me, I'm hoping we find a divergence with the GR expectation. Some inexplicable data will hopefully inspire a future Nobel Prize winner into making sense of the contradictions and get us a unified theory that can be tested.
As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.
Yeah, but x86-32 processors themselves have built-in virtual 8086 processor hardware support. A virtual x86-32 processor is much trickier to implement on an x86-32 machine, since the x86-32 doesn't supply hardware support for that.
OS/2 isn't the only OS that supports virtual 8086s, either -- Linux/DOSEmu and Windows back to 3.0 (in 386 Enhanced Mode) do, too. Though on Windows you're limited to what OS/2 called Virtual DOS Machines, while Linux supports Virtual Machine Boots.
without all the privacy issues of GMail.
Your mail is sitting in plain text on their servers. The privacy issue -- will (Spymac|Google) violate its privacy policy and read your email -- is the same whichever you use.
Austrian (the gold standard laissez-faire capitalist theory) economics only fails to apply (or more properly, shows distortions and inefficiencies) if the monopoly or cartel is established by special privileges and immunities not avialable to competitors attempting to enter the market.
A monopoly or cartel that comes together under natural market forces is still under market constraints in Austrian theory because of the ability for new entrants to enter the field and the ability of consumers to make good substitutions and use reductions (if only on the margins).