Even if what Taleyarkan claims is true, it is nothing spectacular. Tokamak research (for one) is really much farther along the road to viable commercial fusion. All that Taleyarkan is claiming is that his lab has acheived fusion, a milestone passed in the 1930s (timeline). It is crucial to acheive power output greater than the power input. Several fusion projects have acheived this. However, it is also crucial to acheive a self-sustaining reaction, something not yet done.
From last semester's Intro to Nuclear and Particle Physics textbook, The Physics of Nuclei and Particles by Richard A. Dunlap, 2004:
[Unthermalized breakeven] refers to the situation where the energy output of the reactor is equal to the energy input but the plasma conditions have been augmented by neutral beam injection.... thermalized breakeven where the plama conditions themselves are sufficient for net energy production.... ignition where the energy output is not only sufficient to yield a net energy gain but is also sufficient to maintain the plasma conditions. This is a self-sustained fusion reaction.
According to a plot in the book, magnetic confinement projects (tokamaks, stellerators, etc) have just barely entered the thermalized breakeven region. It is not clear from another plot where inertial confinement projects stand, except to say that they are still quite far from the ignition region.
Anyway, all that to say that even if the Purdue claims are correct, it isn't anything to get too excited about, merely yet another technique for producing extremely endothermic fusion.
This would be useful reading. One thing that everybody has to deal with, especially when getting started, is asking questions. If everyone had tons of time to answer everyone else's questions, it'd be great. Fact is, we don't. I appreciate that your time is valuable, as you've said. Everybody else's is too. So, the gist of it is, if you don't follow the accepted etiquette, you will find that people are much much less friendly, and much much less willing to spend their own time to help you. On the other hand, if you do follow the etiquette, then sure, some people will still flame you (life is just like that, all over the place), but chances are, you will find several people who are perfectly happy and willing to help you.
Garbage collection, a form of memory management in widespread use today, was invented "around 1959" by John McCarthy as he discovered LISP. This predates K&R, first edition in 1978, by quite a bit.
He did say he thought it would eliminate about 95%. I have this sneaking suspicion that Sony CDs count for significantly less than 5% of all malware.
Convincing everyone to never click on the bright flashing click me banners would help a lot. It wouldn't eliminate the problem, but it would reduce it greatly.
Re:How does it compare to zfs?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
Oh geez. I'm an idiot. Please disregard my other reply to you... Sorry I flamed you. I misread your comment as "actually you need to RTFT...". And then I flamed you for misreading my comment. Kinda makes me look like a big dumkopf, eh? My apologies.
Re:How does it compare to zfs?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
Which was pretty much exactly what I said... Ext4 is proposed, not extant. Thus, it would be largely futile to ask for a real comparison between ext4 and zfs.
In other words, I did RTFT, and I in fact said that ext4 is not here, it is coming. RMFC (My Comment).
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ah yes... slashdot's moderation and karma system. It is excellent at producing . . . groupthink? Let's face it. There is a prevailing set of opinions on slashdot, and if you follow those opinions, then you get karma and mod points, thus reinforcing the groupthink, because only those who follow it can make their way into the (large) group of people who enforce it.
Now, you could say that with a larger group of people, this is exactly what you want in an encyclopedia: the collective thought of humanity. However, slashdot's groupthink is by no means equal to the collective thought of slashdot. I would wager (now, I freely admit that I don't have good empirical evidence for this, so take it with several large grains of salt) that the karma+moderation system has a significant narrowing effect on the thought expressed by high scoring comments here. That's ok here, but not in an encyclopedia. The downside of widening the thought for wikipedia is that there is a lot of crap to trudge through.
The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.
Furthermore, the study was not done by taking people and finding out how quickly they became disinterested in one story or another. A quick glance at the summary informs us that the subject of the study was the number of people reading a news story (more likely downloading the story) at a given time. That this number decreases with time is obvious. However, it was expected that the decrease would follow an exponential curve, whereas the experiment showed a power law curve instead.
No, he was only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do. Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
props to William Goldman
Re:That was actually surprisingly good article
on
The Cost of the iPod
·
· Score: 1
Apple doesn't have a duty to do anything except obey the laws of the geographic region in which it is operating. If the owners don't like what apple does, well, they sell their stock and maybe apple goes under. Duty does not enter the picture.
And the response was that an "evidence-based" definition could reasonably be thought not to exist, without preventing rational discussion of the matter.
Re:How does it compare to zfs?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
Wow. I realized most people didn't RTFA, but this is the first instance I've seen of of not RTFS(ummary)... It is proposed. That is, it doesn't exist yet.
How about this: the US government levies a "Huge, Evil, Multinational Corporation Tax", which would take 50% of profits from huge, evil, multinationals. Who is a huge, evil, multinational would be determined by Slashdot poll.
The real issue here is that particle physicists have received no "surprises" in many years -- perhaps the only genuinely unexpected recent data point being the non-zero value of the cosmological constant.
Excuse me? You should try keeping up with experiment if you're going to make broad statements like this. Minos, up here at fermilab, recently discovered that neutrinos do in fact have mass. This was suspected a year or few ago, which was why Minos was built, but is nonetheless quite surprising. It is surprising because it is really the first definitive measurement which is nearly unquestionably outside the standard model. (I don't need to tell you this, I suppose, but others will read this too: The standard model assumes explicitly that neutrinos have no mass at all.)
Anyway, the problem that most experimentalists, such as myself, see with String Theory is that in some ways it is a step backwards from the standard model. It is purported to be "parameterless", which contrasts with the plethora of unconstrained parameters that the standard model contains. However, this is really only a bit of sleight of hand. Instead of numerical parameters, which are (relatively) easy to measure, and continuous, we now have the topology of space, which is discrete (no smooth change from one topology to the next) and quite difficult to measure, and embodies immensely more variation than the parameters of the standard model.
This: http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/ is really a quite good layman's introduction to particle physics. The site is not the best designed, but the content is quite accessible, without being too inaccurate. Give it a go.
Also, in my experience, most students are so far over their head with debt that another few bucks is hardly a concern, and the rest have families so rich that they don't have to worry about anything.
Well, I'm certainly an exception there. My parents saved up a lot ever since the day I was born (not near enough, of course, except...) and I got a full tuition for 4-years scholarship. The amount they saved almost exactly covers what was left over. My parents are certainly not rich (I just have to look one dorm over to compare...), but I don't have any debt except for my credit card that I pay off every month, so that doesn't really count.
Slashdot Mirror
From last semester's Intro to Nuclear and Particle Physics textbook, The Physics of Nuclei and Particles by Richard A. Dunlap, 2004: According to a plot in the book, magnetic confinement projects (tokamaks, stellerators, etc) have just barely entered the thermalized breakeven region. It is not clear from another plot where inertial confinement projects stand, except to say that they are still quite far from the ignition region.
Anyway, all that to say that even if the Purdue claims are correct, it isn't anything to get too excited about, merely yet another technique for producing extremely endothermic fusion.
This would be useful reading. One thing that everybody has to deal with, especially when getting started, is asking questions. If everyone had tons of time to answer everyone else's questions, it'd be great. Fact is, we don't. I appreciate that your time is valuable, as you've said. Everybody else's is too. So, the gist of it is, if you don't follow the accepted etiquette, you will find that people are much much less friendly, and much much less willing to spend their own time to help you. On the other hand, if you do follow the etiquette, then sure, some people will still flame you (life is just like that, all over the place), but chances are, you will find several people who are perfectly happy and willing to help you.
Best of luck with ubuntu!
google is your friend. see? Was that so hard?
... Is ... My ... Friend. Good.
Now repeat after me so you don't forget it: Google
Garbage collection, a form of memory management in widespread use today, was invented "around 1959" by John McCarthy as he discovered LISP. This predates K&R, first edition in 1978, by quite a bit.
Do you also use Microsoft Works (Ha!) for office stuff?
He did say he thought it would eliminate about 95%. I have this sneaking suspicion that Sony CDs count for significantly less than 5% of all malware.
Convincing everyone to never click on the bright flashing click me banners would help a lot. It wouldn't eliminate the problem, but it would reduce it greatly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
Oh geez. I'm an idiot. Please disregard my other reply to you... Sorry I flamed you. I misread your comment as "actually you need to RTFT ...". And then I flamed you for misreading my comment. Kinda makes me look like a big dumkopf, eh? My apologies.
Which was pretty much exactly what I said... Ext4 is proposed, not extant. Thus, it would be largely futile to ask for a real comparison between ext4 and zfs.
In other words, I did RTFT, and I in fact said that ext4 is not here, it is coming. RMFC (My Comment).
Ah yes... slashdot's moderation and karma system. It is excellent at producing . . . groupthink? Let's face it. There is a prevailing set of opinions on slashdot, and if you follow those opinions, then you get karma and mod points, thus reinforcing the groupthink, because only those who follow it can make their way into the (large) group of people who enforce it.
Now, you could say that with a larger group of people, this is exactly what you want in an encyclopedia: the collective thought of humanity. However, slashdot's groupthink is by no means equal to the collective thought of slashdot. I would wager (now, I freely admit that I don't have good empirical evidence for this, so take it with several large grains of salt) that the karma+moderation system has a significant narrowing effect on the thought expressed by high scoring comments here. That's ok here, but not in an encyclopedia. The downside of widening the thought for wikipedia is that there is a lot of crap to trudge through.
The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.
Furthermore, the study was not done by taking people and finding out how quickly they became disinterested in one story or another. A quick glance at the summary informs us that the subject of the study was the number of people reading a news story (more likely downloading the story) at a given time. That this number decreases with time is obvious. However, it was expected that the decrease would follow an exponential curve, whereas the experiment showed a power law curve instead.
Well, I Am A Physicist, and I certainly find YOU uninteresting!
No, he was only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do. Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
props to William Goldman
Apple doesn't have a duty to do anything except obey the laws of the geographic region in which it is operating. If the owners don't like what apple does, well, they sell their stock and maybe apple goes under. Duty does not enter the picture.
And the response was that an "evidence-based" definition could reasonably be thought not to exist, without preventing rational discussion of the matter.
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html - The text online for anyone too bum lazy to type "Phaedo" into google and click on the first link.
Not sold. Corel licensed it to Xandros.
Wow. I realized most people didn't RTFA, but this is the first instance I've seen of of not RTFS(ummary)... It is proposed. That is, it doesn't exist yet.
How about this: the US government levies a "Huge, Evil, Multinational Corporation Tax", which would take 50% of profits from huge, evil, multinationals. Who is a huge, evil, multinational would be determined by Slashdot poll.
It'd be even better if it found it at 4:20.
The real issue here is that particle physicists have received no "surprises" in many years -- perhaps the only genuinely unexpected recent data point being the non-zero value of the cosmological constant.
Excuse me? You should try keeping up with experiment if you're going to make broad statements like this. Minos, up here at fermilab, recently discovered that neutrinos do in fact have mass. This was suspected a year or few ago, which was why Minos was built, but is nonetheless quite surprising. It is surprising because it is really the first definitive measurement which is nearly unquestionably outside the standard model. (I don't need to tell you this, I suppose, but others will read this too: The standard model assumes explicitly that neutrinos have no mass at all.)
Anyway, the problem that most experimentalists, such as myself, see with String Theory is that in some ways it is a step backwards from the standard model. It is purported to be "parameterless", which contrasts with the plethora of unconstrained parameters that the standard model contains. However, this is really only a bit of sleight of hand. Instead of numerical parameters, which are (relatively) easy to measure, and continuous, we now have the topology of space, which is discrete (no smooth change from one topology to the next) and quite difficult to measure, and embodies immensely more variation than the parameters of the standard model.
Rate yourself, please. Report your score in another post on this thread. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html PS: IAAP
This: http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/ is really a quite good layman's introduction to particle physics. The site is not the best designed, but the content is quite accessible, without being too inaccurate. Give it a go.
Also, in my experience, most students are so far over their head with debt that another few bucks is hardly a concern, and the rest have families so rich that they don't have to worry about anything.
Well, I'm certainly an exception there. My parents saved up a lot ever since the day I was born (not near enough, of course, except...) and I got a full tuition for 4-years scholarship. The amount they saved almost exactly covers what was left over. My parents are certainly not rich (I just have to look one dorm over to compare...), but I don't have any debt except for my credit card that I pay off every month, so that doesn't really count.