Native fertility is at or below replacement levels in much of Europe. There are lots of immigrants, but too many of them follow a religion that must not be named and/or are low-IQ Africans.
If I were an oil prince, I would not be happy for them to be my last remaining market.
Americans have a strange tendency, for all their claimed ability to cut through the bs and simplify issues, a weird habit of needing to regulate things that make the rest of us go "duh".
Statists like yourself fail to understand the statistics of small numbers. In a land of ten thousand tiny republics, an individual republic is rather likely to be taken by a bout of foolishness, as reported daily by purveyors of lurid debauchery (i.e., the news). Each one is small enough that a single fool or madman can temporarily convince enough of the people to do something utterly absurd. Statists read this and congratulate themselve for having a strong, rational government that is vastly less likely to be co-opted.
What they ignore is that the localized madness serves as a relief valve, to let the madness free in a contained way, and to hold up as a horrible example to the other tiny republics. The madness runs quickly to completion, and everyone gives it up as a bad idea at around the same time**. Conversely, although a strong centralized government is vastly less likely to come off the rails, when it does there are no internal barriers to keep the fire from consuming everything, and little untouched reserve capacity to rebuild afterwards.
**Remember that school in Colorado whose board decided to ban the teaching of evolution. It was little reported, particularly in the European press, that the locals had reversed the ban before the statist parties could even get going, despite the statists calling in all their favors to ram the case through a Federal court.
Another example is a tendency to irrational paranoia... it's probably because there is a deep-seated insecurity in the very culture about other people who are "out to get you". Witness the red/terrorist scares.
100 million dead. Few of them Americans. A free man's prudence is a statist's paranoia.
Europeans are often derided in the US for creating a nanny state that encourages people not to think for themselves, but it is my impression that we are MUCH better at a lot of the unwritten rules... You just intrinsically know what is appropriate and what is not, as you are more attuned to what the other people around you are about.
You propose to run the most important yet most abstract functions of giant nations with unwritten rules? If one tried that with even a tennis tournament, there would be unending strife and turmoil and likely bloodshed.
Unwritten rules only work for a mono-culture. Clear written rules allow cultures to mingle without either destroying each other or being assimilated Borg-style.
Food for thought -- just supposing Taleyarkhan really produced sonofusion (however much of a stretch that might be), who stands to gain and who stands to lose if someone really produces a net-positive energy fusion reaction? How quickly would Congresscritters bought and paid for by big oil want to shut him up?
American big oil would LOVE commercial fusion. North America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, tar sands, and oil shale, which lack only cheap energy to turn them into quality liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Cheap energy is also a prerequisite for turning fossil fuels into value-added plastics and nanofibers. Small fusion reactors would be excellent for the business of international cargo ships, and might even be adaptable to rail locomotives if the neutron flux is low enough. Fixed-location fusion reactors could also take up much of the New England heating load, perhaps even by effecient steam distribution in dense cities, freeing valuable fuel oils for transportation use, and freeing valuable natural gas for chemical synthesis. Cheap fusion would also help alleviate the impending fuel crisis caused by China's booming industrialization.
What do these things have in common? They cut American, Chinese, and Japanese ties to Middle Eastern oil fields. That would leave graying, shrinking Europe as their last captive market, not an exciting prospect for an ambitious imperial theocrat or Saudi prince.
Sure, commercial fusion would hurt some Big Oil markets, but overall I think it would open more opportunities than it closes. In the long run, all fossil fuels are destined to become more valuable for manufacturing than combustion.
Telling every person that their project idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." is just being downright mean.
Look, this was a test for project managers to see if they had the had the strength of personality to lead a $10M project across a tar pit. Personally I'd be more interested in how well the manager sustains their strength of will when they're eyeball deep in tar, but finding out whether they can take it at all puts you ahead of most of the competition.
In fact looking back at how MS acted during their two biggest trials (the US anti-trust and EU anti-trust) you can see this "bullying" all over the place. Acting like a bully when you're the defendant in court is not a good idea.
It's a great gamble, if you have the bankroll to see it through to the next stage of the game.
It'll just piss the judge (and possibly the jury) off, and they're the ones passing judgment on you.
Exactly! The incensed judges proceeded, at great length and public expense, to give personal how-to-beat-the-government-lessons to Microsoft's people. Now Microsoft is one of the few software companies who knows how to reduce the risk of being caught, and what to do if they are. Now they can beat their competitors by allowing them to appear to win for a few years, then letting the government smash them.
It had been long enough since IBM that the grandstanding public prosecutors forgot the first rule of taking down a tyrant: if you strike at the king, you must not miss.
The 'skin colour' and latitude argument has been dismissed already by evolutionary biologists, not least because humans haven't actually been in Northern Europe for long enough for evolution to have played a role in developing the pale skin colour found there.
They've been there long enough for melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) loss-of-function (which causes red hair, light skin, and freckles) to reach a 5% prevalence. However genetic studies have found that around six distinct mutations are responsible for most European red heads, and occur with about equal prevalence.
The variations we see in humans are more likely caused by the genetic variation of a few early settlers.
The moderate frequency and high variability disprove a founder effect in a recent migration, which would have caused high frequency of a single polymorphism. The zero prevalence in the ancestral African population, as well as in equatorial mammals in general, speaks to non-ancient positive selection. Likewise, the variability tells that it is unlikely to have been under weak positive selection during a long migration, since that circumstance would tend to fix the single best mutation. The probability that the observed frequencies would arise by chance is so low that it can safely be assumed impossible.
The remaining possibility is that the red head phenotype has recently been under strong positive selection. Given its effects on vitamin D, and the importance of vitamin D to reproductive success, it is reasonable to think that vitamin D was a major selection mechanism. This hypothesis can probably be tested using existing records in Ireland, which has little UV and lots of red heads. In fact the effect might be strong enough to measure using post-1940 records, a period covering the dietary deprivations of WWII and the movement to indoor industrial and clerical jobs, and for which reliable hair color information can easily be obtained.
In fact, American Indians have lived on the Equator in America for longer, yet they are lighter coloured than say, Africans.
Many (most?) of whom recently immigrated across the Bering land bridge from high-latitude populations. (Land bridge?! OMG, the Russkimos caused global glaciation so they could finish off the wooly mammoths!)
I am native of Japan, and where I grew up nobody but cops were allowed to carry guns.
Laws do not make a culture civilized. The culture makes certain laws practical. But human culture is written on the wind. "No society is more than three meals away from revolution."
Back there I never worried about getting killed and such,...
The extremes of Japanese Empire are still in the memory of living men and women. You may live to see those calamities repeated, or even exceeded.
Durable civilizations assume that disaster and folly are inevitable. The people take personal responsibility for rebuilding civilization, including the tools as well as the knowledge. It is exactly like an insurance policy, with heavy costs paid now to prevent theoretical future ruin. The American approach to weapons and freedom has high ongoing costs, but the results speak for themselves in terms of the tens of millions of Americans not killed in pointless wars, the American cities not left as smoking ruins, the great industries that continued ceaselessly with only occassional diversions for other people's wars, the political parties that tore themselves to bits because they could not stomach a One True Nationalism. Compare the one great American war (the Civil War) to the wars of Europe and Asia, or the continuing carnage in Africa. There are families in Darfur that would slaughter half of their own children if it would send the survivors to New Jersey.
I'm not saying that Americans are perfect, or even great. The Flood of New Orleans was an object lesson in that regard.
How long will it be before some individual or small group has the ability to destroy thousands of lives or more?
In 1861. The war that followed saw the invention of the land mine, machine gun, and armored battleship.
Ironically, if the fundamentalist crusaders had spent one-tenth as much on automating cotton cultivation, their stated goals would have been accomplish better and sooner. Even worse, the crusaders' stated goals were not their real goals, and they had a singular lack of imagination and optimism when it came to accomplishing any goals.
To those who would learn, this gives lessons for modern living.
this person is the "tech guy" and does not know all that much about licensing (but thinks they do, which is dangerous)
Yes, like you.
A CD, piece of paper or nice pretty hologram doesn't mean jack.
In the U.S. at least, it is prima facie evidence that the license exists and is legit; the more effort the vendor put into making the license document difficult to forge, the stronger the proof. If the vendor wishes to contest that evidence, they have to assert otherwise in a sworn statement. (And in the U.S., a sworn statement that is a lie opens the respondent to considerable personal legal risk.)
They want receipts or invoices.
Er, no. That's not how it works. First they have to come up with clear, convincing evidence of infringement; merely uncommon numbers of licenses don't count. Assuming the licensee has competent counsel, the vendor then has to pry evidence of possession of unlicensed software products out in a long, expensive, highly-focused discovery process. (Sorry, no network scans or other form of indiscriminant fishing expeditions.) Then based on that evidence, they have to claim infringement, and in the U.S. that claim will be made under penalty of perjury. (Meaning prison sentences and unlimited personal liability if the claim can be shown to be deceptive or reckless.) Merely presenting the license certificate or original media presumptively refutes the claim, and can only be countered with further tangible evidence and a further claim under penalty of perjury. Showing the chain of purchase would then conclusively dismiss the infringement claim, and put the claimant and their personnel into seriously deep legal doo doo.
A good attorney can do this for not a lot of money, and make it very expensive for the opposition in the process. A vicious attorney given a little money can personally ruin the claimant's people. BSA cocksuckers like you, of course, simply kneel down at the BSA's pleasure.
An invoice from Adobe, Software Spectrum or Ebuyer (for example) is what licenses you,...
Utterly, utterly wrong. The license is created by consummating the license contract. (For which no evidence might exist, such as with a private cash transaction.) In general, even if an invoice exists, it is dispensable, kept or discarded at the whim of the purchaser. Of course, a clever purchaser will keep the invoices, carefully sprinkling them across other jurisdictions to maximize the expense of frivolously discovering them.
Wavefunction collapse is a formal convention, like virtual particles. It has several nasty epistemological questions, such as How fast does the collapse propagate? and How does the collapse know to limit itself to a single event when the wavefunction is dispersed over a large volume? The naive answers are "instantaneously" and "damned if we know". For entanglement of uncharged particles like photons, there are also the sticky problems of Which force is creating the bound state? and What is the binding energy? "Shut Up and Calculate" will give you your diffraction patterns, but doesn't give you any insight into the underlying reality.
This wasn't just hinted at in the book. It was incredibly glaringly obvious.
Exactly my point. In a few sentences, Tolkien gave us omniscient insight into Faramir's character and motivation. Books are built of high-level symbolic statements and can make that sort of thing believable.
Movies are built of pictures of things happening to people. In a movie, that would have had Frodo meeting a pack of strange soldiers in the middle of a pitched battle, a battle to kill those summoned to Mordor. Frodo would say "I'm going to Mordor too, and by the way I have a powerful weapon of the Enemy's, the one your king has bidden you to collect," and the soldiers would instantly shrug off the king's orders and throw themselves at Frodo's feet.
It would have been utterly unbelievable.
A pervasive narrator could have made it work after a fashion, but at a high cost to smooth flow. And at the cost of main plot becoming "tell" instead of "show".
Boromir came to the eventual realization that the Ring was not for him to take, either.
But because the Power of the Enemy tore it from his grasp, not because his own strength of will won. Faramir prevailed despite having is nose practically rubbed in the Ring's power, time after time, and the extent of his temptation was temporarily continuing to follow duties drummed into him since birth. The movie made their essential differences pretty clear.
I'm talking about, among other things, completely reinterpreting a character such as Faramir, who was at his core good and uncorrupted by a desire for power,...
The thing is, books are omniscient. The author can occasionally spoon-feed the reader direct insight into a character's motivations and mental state. A sentence or two can convey immensities. A reader who gets confused can skip back a page or two, or stop and think for a few seconds.
Whereas in a movie the spectator has to infer it by being shown people doing things, in real time, with unstoppable story progression. If you do exposition, you either need a narrator to be set up and used consistently, or you have to make the watcher view the exposition through the lens of the character doing the talking. (Or, God help you, you can scroll text across a black screen. "It is the year 2147 and robots rule the Earth...") If the exposition is important, it has to be simplified and repeated to make sure the audience doesn't miss it. A flashback to Faramir and Boromir's boyhood could have been used to show their differences, but it would have broken the story flow and introduced at least two new (but not really) characters. Contrast that with how, upon Faramir seeing Pippin's uniform, the movie used a reminiscence to their youth instead of a flashback, which flowed well, burned only a couple of seconds of precious screen time, and gave a great deal of insight into Faramir and his essential humility.
He had long ago resigned himself to being considered weak by his father in comparison to Boromir, because his weakness in the eyes of his father - acting for the good of all rather than the glory of Gondor - was actually a strength worthy of his Numenorean lineage.
Faramir's actions in the movie clearly showed him to be good, not instantly and not starkly, but surely and strongly nonetheless. In his reflection upon the slain enemy, wondering if the enemy's duty and character were any less than his own. In the flashback to Boromir's lament to the king that "He tries to do well and you give him no credit." He held a sword in anger to Frodo's throat, with no possibility of the Ring escaping his grasp, then drew his hand back because the Ring was not his to wield. At Osgiliath, a trusted lieutenant reminded him of his supposed duty to bring the Ring back, and how failing that duty would cost him his honor in his father's eyes and his life, yet Faramir sent the Ring away with a smile and a clear heart, the cobwebs having been shaken away by the Enemy's hand. Likewise, his unselfconscious kindness and optimism with Eowyn were an echo of the grace of the kings of old; it is no trouble to imagine a prideful Boromir in the same circumstance snapping at Eowyn and raging at the wounds that keep him from battle.
Showing a story simply does not work the same way as telling it. That makes it different, not worse. And more's the luck, with this one you get both.
If anything, a new director, handpicked by the studio clowns, will be much, much worse.
I dunno, I'd pay good money to see a version of The Hobbit directed by Harold Ramis, with Bilbo played by Danny DeVito, and Thorin played by Warwick Davis. It would be a thing of beauty, like watching a Nascar race for the crashes. Mind you, not at the expense of not making a Peter Jackson version too.
Yet QE has been demonstrated to sync distant particles faster than lightspeed communication would allow.
Not quite. There are several possibilities. One is that the particles do actually exchange information using particles that travel faster than light. This information creates the statistics when the experiment is repeated several times, but cannot be directly observed or used to transmit tangible information. I consider this unlikely, because it just moves the wrinkle in the rug to the faster-than-light particles, which cannot even be observed.
A second possibility is that the particles have complex internal states that affect their statistics, but which cannot be directly observed. The internal states are synchronized when they are entangled, after which they evolve independently without further communication. For example, the universe could be a cellular automaton and the particles persistent digital excitations; entanglement would be some sort of partial cloning of the digital state. (In terms of the EPR paradox, this is a non-local hidden variable approach.) This theory is also unsatisfying, because nothing suggesting this has been observed, and observing it would probably be damn difficult. On the other hand, it does explain how particles could exhibit randomized behavior that can only be desribed statistically (imagine encrypted messages for which you know neither the algorithm or the key).
A third possibility is that when particles are entangled, they still remain in contact in some geometric sense. For instance, time is stopped in a photon's frame of rest, so its origin and destination are in one sense located at the same point in space. This seems like a reasonable starting point to me: one of the rules of quantum mechanics is that if you add up the likelihood of finding a particle over all points in the universe, you always get exactly 100%. But how do you define a continuous sums-to-100% process over the entire universe, when there's a speed limit? In some sense, a single particle is already pulling an everywhere-at-once trick. Entangling two particles isn't really much of a leap.
The more I've worked with them, the more I can see why they work the way they do and I can also see how the uninformed, without experience or knowledge of how they work could misinterpret what they do if such a person were more interested in denigrating people instead of understanding them.
When two engineers take opposite positions in a disagreement, at least one of them is neccessarily in error. The one(s) found in error are subject to unlimited personal liability that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and may also be subject to criminal sanctions as their actions were necessarily willful.
When a lawyer in a dispute is found to be in error, he is automatically considered innocent despite the situation conclusively proving his guilt. Moreover, his arguments in one case do not permanently estop him from making contradictory arguments in other cases. It is a profession of deceit and contradiction. The lawyer finds invigorating failures that in other professions—mathematics, engineering, medicine, and so forth—would leave a career laying in ruins.
Code segments are typically only mapped in read-only mode, so they are never written back to disk, nor should they be.
That argument breaks down for executables stored on remote servers, or when you're swapping to an array of fast disks (as the machine I'm posting from does).
Phosphorescence is where a molecule absorbs a photon, kicking an electron up into a higher energy state (just like fluorescence) but the energy state it's in has different quantum characteristics than the ground energy state and it can't just emit a photon: it has to reverse its spin or some complicated thing like that.
Bingo. That's the entire distinction between fluorescence and phosphorescence. Excitation lifetimes are completely irrelevant. Some fluorescent excitation lifetimes are longer than some phosphorescence lifetimes.
Fluorescence is a very fast, continuous process, happening basically as fast as the illumination, so you don't have to, nor can you, switch the light off to observe it happening.
Actually, you can turn off the light and measure the exponential decay of the emissions from a fluorescent material. That's one way to perform fluorescence lifetime measurements. A nanosecond is a long time on visible light's timescale.
Yes, and the real takehome message from this "announcement" is that AMD has no answer to Intel for the next year.
Or it means that AMD's true answer is not yet announced.
Noobody is going to put off an upgrade due to such a long-term milestone, so I wonder why they even bothered putting it out there.
Exactly. If you make an announcement that causes your customers to put off purchases, you lose current sales. (The paradigm being Osborne, whose preannoucement of the next version was so successful that they went broke before it could be finished.) The two viable choices are to keep totally quiet, or boost awareness without wrecking sales.
What quantum encryption changes is this: it gives you a secure channel over which to communicate (usually at low bandwidth), so you can use it to move a key for symmetric key encryption, and then perform your encryption with that.
<sigh> Quantum "cryptography" is not what most people seem to think it is. It's mostly snake oil pushed by con artists and deluded academics.
The only thing "quantum encryption" does is tell you that you exchanged a secret message with whatever machine is plugged into the other end of the link. It is quite possible that that machine is owned and operated by an enemy. Therefore you must verify the message using a shared secret and a conventional message authentication algorithm. The overall system is no stronger than that algorithm. But the snake oil salesmen claim you need their system because the enemy has enough money to break any possible deterministic cipher...
Now, assuming that you have proper message authentication and a shared secret, "quantum cryptography" does protect you against passive eavesdropping and analysis years later when computing has become cheaper. That is a far cry from the ironclad protection against active attackers that is promised, and neither is it obviously more cost-effective than deterministic ciphers.
Sealing an electronics enclosure is risky. The electronics generally make varying amounts of heat over time. When they heat up, traces of moisture are driven off and the pressure goes up, and you may get condensation at the coldest point in the box. Unless you are utterly paranoid about sealing, the pressure eventually rises enough to open up a pinhole leak somewhere, and a small amount of slightly-drier air escapes. Then when the temperature falls, the pressure drops, and the slight vaccuum pulls a little slightly-more-humid air into the enclosure. Over thousands of thermal cycles, an impressive amount of water can accumulate. I've seen this fry circuit boards.
The usual solution is to make sure there is always a surface colder than the electronics, and to put a small hole in the lowest part of the enclosure so any water will drain out.
Commercial-spec solid-state electronic components are typically rated for operation between 0 and 70 degrees Celsius.
Digital logic generally copes well with the cold, even if the manufacturer only promises down to zero Celcius (freezing point of water).
The real problem is water-based aluminum electrolytic capacitors. They rely on liquid water for their electrical properties. Go below freezing and the capacitance drops by ~80%. Essentially all commodity computer equipment uses these caps in the power converters. If you take them below freezing, the power supplies flake out. Long-term reliability will be crap, even if they "seem to work".
The advice in another comment is right: All the conventional servers and routers must go in a temperature-controlled room.
Take for example the poor man who can't afford health insurance: he waits until his health problems escalate, then goes to the emergency room. Not being able to pay, the hospitals increase their rates, and the insurance companies pass it on to their paying customers.
It is a Federal crime for a U.S. hospital to give discounts to poor people.
Why should extremely gifted or the extremely lucky be the only ones to partake of what life has to offer?
The biggest health problem for many U.S. poor people is that their food and advanced electronic entertainment is too cheap.
What's the practical application for something like this?
Radar and lidar. The more accurate the instrument's clock, the more accurate its distance measurements.
Also, gravity affects time, so you can use clocks and radios to measure the relative gravitational potential between two points in space. By sending a sufficiently good clock into deep space, we might be able to see if the solar system contains any dark matter.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a specific complaint--one that most interviewers will be sympathetic to--not a nebulous "disagreement with management".
Native fertility is at or below replacement levels in much of Europe. There are lots of immigrants, but too many of them follow a religion that must not be named and/or are low-IQ Africans.
If I were an oil prince, I would not be happy for them to be my last remaining market.
Statists like yourself fail to understand the statistics of small numbers. In a land of ten thousand tiny republics, an individual republic is rather likely to be taken by a bout of foolishness, as reported daily by purveyors of lurid debauchery (i.e., the news). Each one is small enough that a single fool or madman can temporarily convince enough of the people to do something utterly absurd. Statists read this and congratulate themselve for having a strong, rational government that is vastly less likely to be co-opted.
What they ignore is that the localized madness serves as a relief valve, to let the madness free in a contained way, and to hold up as a horrible example to the other tiny republics. The madness runs quickly to completion, and everyone gives it up as a bad idea at around the same time**. Conversely, although a strong centralized government is vastly less likely to come off the rails, when it does there are no internal barriers to keep the fire from consuming everything, and little untouched reserve capacity to rebuild afterwards.
**Remember that school in Colorado whose board decided to ban the teaching of evolution. It was little reported, particularly in the European press, that the locals had reversed the ban before the statist parties could even get going, despite the statists calling in all their favors to ram the case through a Federal court.
100 million dead. Few of them Americans. A free man's prudence is a statist's paranoia.
You propose to run the most important yet most abstract functions of giant nations with unwritten rules? If one tried that with even a tennis tournament, there would be unending strife and turmoil and likely bloodshed.
Unwritten rules only work for a mono-culture. Clear written rules allow cultures to mingle without either destroying each other or being assimilated Borg-style.
American big oil would LOVE commercial fusion. North America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, tar sands, and oil shale, which lack only cheap energy to turn them into quality liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Cheap energy is also a prerequisite for turning fossil fuels into value-added plastics and nanofibers. Small fusion reactors would be excellent for the business of international cargo ships, and might even be adaptable to rail locomotives if the neutron flux is low enough. Fixed-location fusion reactors could also take up much of the New England heating load, perhaps even by effecient steam distribution in dense cities, freeing valuable fuel oils for transportation use, and freeing valuable natural gas for chemical synthesis. Cheap fusion would also help alleviate the impending fuel crisis caused by China's booming industrialization.
What do these things have in common? They cut American, Chinese, and Japanese ties to Middle Eastern oil fields. That would leave graying, shrinking Europe as their last captive market, not an exciting prospect for an ambitious imperial theocrat or Saudi prince.
Sure, commercial fusion would hurt some Big Oil markets, but overall I think it would open more opportunities than it closes. In the long run, all fossil fuels are destined to become more valuable for manufacturing than combustion.
Look, this was a test for project managers to see if they had the had the strength of personality to lead a $10M project across a tar pit. Personally I'd be more interested in how well the manager sustains their strength of will when they're eyeball deep in tar, but finding out whether they can take it at all puts you ahead of most of the competition.
It's a great gamble, if you have the bankroll to see it through to the next stage of the game.
Exactly! The incensed judges proceeded, at great length and public expense, to give personal how-to-beat-the-government-lessons to Microsoft's people. Now Microsoft is one of the few software companies who knows how to reduce the risk of being caught, and what to do if they are. Now they can beat their competitors by allowing them to appear to win for a few years, then letting the government smash them.
It had been long enough since IBM that the grandstanding public prosecutors forgot the first rule of taking down a tyrant: if you strike at the king, you must not miss.
They've been there long enough for melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) loss-of-function (which causes red hair, light skin, and freckles) to reach a 5% prevalence. However genetic studies have found that around six distinct mutations are responsible for most European red heads, and occur with about equal prevalence.
The moderate frequency and high variability disprove a founder effect in a recent migration, which would have caused high frequency of a single polymorphism. The zero prevalence in the ancestral African population, as well as in equatorial mammals in general, speaks to non-ancient positive selection. Likewise, the variability tells that it is unlikely to have been under weak positive selection during a long migration, since that circumstance would tend to fix the single best mutation. The probability that the observed frequencies would arise by chance is so low that it can safely be assumed impossible.
The remaining possibility is that the red head phenotype has recently been under strong positive selection. Given its effects on vitamin D, and the importance of vitamin D to reproductive success, it is reasonable to think that vitamin D was a major selection mechanism. This hypothesis can probably be tested using existing records in Ireland, which has little UV and lots of red heads. In fact the effect might be strong enough to measure using post-1940 records, a period covering the dietary deprivations of WWII and the movement to indoor industrial and clerical jobs, and for which reliable hair color information can easily be obtained.
Many (most?) of whom recently immigrated across the Bering land bridge from high-latitude populations. (Land bridge?! OMG, the Russkimos caused global glaciation so they could finish off the wooly mammoths!)
Laws do not make a culture civilized. The culture makes certain laws practical. But human culture is written on the wind. "No society is more than three meals away from revolution."
The extremes of Japanese Empire are still in the memory of living men and women. You may live to see those calamities repeated, or even exceeded.
Durable civilizations assume that disaster and folly are inevitable. The people take personal responsibility for rebuilding civilization, including the tools as well as the knowledge. It is exactly like an insurance policy, with heavy costs paid now to prevent theoretical future ruin. The American approach to weapons and freedom has high ongoing costs, but the results speak for themselves in terms of the tens of millions of Americans not killed in pointless wars, the American cities not left as smoking ruins, the great industries that continued ceaselessly with only occassional diversions for other people's wars, the political parties that tore themselves to bits because they could not stomach a One True Nationalism. Compare the one great American war (the Civil War) to the wars of Europe and Asia, or the continuing carnage in Africa. There are families in Darfur that would slaughter half of their own children if it would send the survivors to New Jersey.
I'm not saying that Americans are perfect, or even great. The Flood of New Orleans was an object lesson in that regard.
In 1861. The war that followed saw the invention of the land mine, machine gun, and armored battleship.
Ironically, if the fundamentalist crusaders had spent one-tenth as much on automating cotton cultivation, their stated goals would have been accomplish better and sooner. Even worse, the crusaders' stated goals were not their real goals, and they had a singular lack of imagination and optimism when it came to accomplishing any goals.
To those who would learn, this gives lessons for modern living.
You can't get a squid like this inside an owl. Unless you ... Push! Real! Hard!
Yes, like you.
In the U.S. at least, it is prima facie evidence that the license exists and is legit; the more effort the vendor put into making the license document difficult to forge, the stronger the proof. If the vendor wishes to contest that evidence, they have to assert otherwise in a sworn statement. (And in the U.S., a sworn statement that is a lie opens the respondent to considerable personal legal risk.)
Er, no. That's not how it works. First they have to come up with clear, convincing evidence of infringement; merely uncommon numbers of licenses don't count. Assuming the licensee has competent counsel, the vendor then has to pry evidence of possession of unlicensed software products out in a long, expensive, highly-focused discovery process. (Sorry, no network scans or other form of indiscriminant fishing expeditions.) Then based on that evidence, they have to claim infringement, and in the U.S. that claim will be made under penalty of perjury. (Meaning prison sentences and unlimited personal liability if the claim can be shown to be deceptive or reckless.) Merely presenting the license certificate or original media presumptively refutes the claim, and can only be countered with further tangible evidence and a further claim under penalty of perjury. Showing the chain of purchase would then conclusively dismiss the infringement claim, and put the claimant and their personnel into seriously deep legal doo doo.
A good attorney can do this for not a lot of money, and make it very expensive for the opposition in the process. A vicious attorney given a little money can personally ruin the claimant's people. BSA cocksuckers like you, of course, simply kneel down at the BSA's pleasure.
Utterly, utterly wrong. The license is created by consummating the license contract. (For which no evidence might exist, such as with a private cash transaction.) In general, even if an invoice exists, it is dispensable, kept or discarded at the whim of the purchaser. Of course, a clever purchaser will keep the invoices, carefully sprinkling them across other jurisdictions to maximize the expense of frivolously discovering them.
Wavefunction collapse is a formal convention, like virtual particles. It has several nasty epistemological questions, such as How fast does the collapse propagate? and How does the collapse know to limit itself to a single event when the wavefunction is dispersed over a large volume? The naive answers are "instantaneously" and "damned if we know". For entanglement of uncharged particles like photons, there are also the sticky problems of Which force is creating the bound state? and What is the binding energy? "Shut Up and Calculate" will give you your diffraction patterns, but doesn't give you any insight into the underlying reality.
Exactly my point. In a few sentences, Tolkien gave us omniscient insight into Faramir's character and motivation. Books are built of high-level symbolic statements and can make that sort of thing believable.
Movies are built of pictures of things happening to people. In a movie, that would have had Frodo meeting a pack of strange soldiers in the middle of a pitched battle, a battle to kill those summoned to Mordor. Frodo would say "I'm going to Mordor too, and by the way I have a powerful weapon of the Enemy's, the one your king has bidden you to collect," and the soldiers would instantly shrug off the king's orders and throw themselves at Frodo's feet.
It would have been utterly unbelievable.
A pervasive narrator could have made it work after a fashion, but at a high cost to smooth flow. And at the cost of main plot becoming "tell" instead of "show".
But because the Power of the Enemy tore it from his grasp, not because his own strength of will won. Faramir prevailed despite having is nose practically rubbed in the Ring's power, time after time, and the extent of his temptation was temporarily continuing to follow duties drummed into him since birth. The movie made their essential differences pretty clear.
The thing is, books are omniscient. The author can occasionally spoon-feed the reader direct insight into a character's motivations and mental state. A sentence or two can convey immensities. A reader who gets confused can skip back a page or two, or stop and think for a few seconds.
Whereas in a movie the spectator has to infer it by being shown people doing things, in real time, with unstoppable story progression. If you do exposition, you either need a narrator to be set up and used consistently, or you have to make the watcher view the exposition through the lens of the character doing the talking. (Or, God help you, you can scroll text across a black screen. "It is the year 2147 and robots rule the Earth...") If the exposition is important, it has to be simplified and repeated to make sure the audience doesn't miss it. A flashback to Faramir and Boromir's boyhood could have been used to show their differences, but it would have broken the story flow and introduced at least two new (but not really) characters. Contrast that with how, upon Faramir seeing Pippin's uniform, the movie used a reminiscence to their youth instead of a flashback, which flowed well, burned only a couple of seconds of precious screen time, and gave a great deal of insight into Faramir and his essential humility.
Faramir's actions in the movie clearly showed him to be good, not instantly and not starkly, but surely and strongly nonetheless. In his reflection upon the slain enemy, wondering if the enemy's duty and character were any less than his own. In the flashback to Boromir's lament to the king that "He tries to do well and you give him no credit." He held a sword in anger to Frodo's throat, with no possibility of the Ring escaping his grasp, then drew his hand back because the Ring was not his to wield. At Osgiliath, a trusted lieutenant reminded him of his supposed duty to bring the Ring back, and how failing that duty would cost him his honor in his father's eyes and his life, yet Faramir sent the Ring away with a smile and a clear heart, the cobwebs having been shaken away by the Enemy's hand. Likewise, his unselfconscious kindness and optimism with Eowyn were an echo of the grace of the kings of old; it is no trouble to imagine a prideful Boromir in the same circumstance snapping at Eowyn and raging at the wounds that keep him from battle.
Showing a story simply does not work the same way as telling it. That makes it different, not worse. And more's the luck, with this one you get both.
I dunno, I'd pay good money to see a version of The Hobbit directed by Harold Ramis, with Bilbo played by Danny DeVito, and Thorin played by Warwick Davis. It would be a thing of beauty, like watching a Nascar race for the crashes. Mind you, not at the expense of not making a Peter Jackson version too.
Not quite. There are several possibilities. One is that the particles do actually exchange information using particles that travel faster than light. This information creates the statistics when the experiment is repeated several times, but cannot be directly observed or used to transmit tangible information. I consider this unlikely, because it just moves the wrinkle in the rug to the faster-than-light particles, which cannot even be observed.
A second possibility is that the particles have complex internal states that affect their statistics, but which cannot be directly observed. The internal states are synchronized when they are entangled, after which they evolve independently without further communication. For example, the universe could be a cellular automaton and the particles persistent digital excitations; entanglement would be some sort of partial cloning of the digital state. (In terms of the EPR paradox, this is a non-local hidden variable approach.) This theory is also unsatisfying, because nothing suggesting this has been observed, and observing it would probably be damn difficult. On the other hand, it does explain how particles could exhibit randomized behavior that can only be desribed statistically (imagine encrypted messages for which you know neither the algorithm or the key).
A third possibility is that when particles are entangled, they still remain in contact in some geometric sense. For instance, time is stopped in a photon's frame of rest, so its origin and destination are in one sense located at the same point in space. This seems like a reasonable starting point to me: one of the rules of quantum mechanics is that if you add up the likelihood of finding a particle over all points in the universe, you always get exactly 100%. But how do you define a continuous sums-to-100% process over the entire universe, when there's a speed limit? In some sense, a single particle is already pulling an everywhere-at-once trick. Entangling two particles isn't really much of a leap.
When two engineers take opposite positions in a disagreement, at least one of them is neccessarily in error. The one(s) found in error are subject to unlimited personal liability that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and may also be subject to criminal sanctions as their actions were necessarily willful.
When a lawyer in a dispute is found to be in error, he is automatically considered innocent despite the situation conclusively proving his guilt. Moreover, his arguments in one case do not permanently estop him from making contradictory arguments in other cases. It is a profession of deceit and contradiction. The lawyer finds invigorating failures that in other professions—mathematics, engineering, medicine, and so forth—would leave a career laying in ruins.
That argument breaks down for executables stored on remote servers, or when you're swapping to an array of fast disks (as the machine I'm posting from does).
Bingo. That's the entire distinction between fluorescence and phosphorescence. Excitation lifetimes are completely irrelevant. Some fluorescent excitation lifetimes are longer than some phosphorescence lifetimes.
Actually, you can turn off the light and measure the exponential decay of the emissions from a fluorescent material. That's one way to perform fluorescence lifetime measurements. A nanosecond is a long time on visible light's timescale.
Hey, whatever gets your rocks off ...
Or it means that AMD's true answer is not yet announced.
Exactly. If you make an announcement that causes your customers to put off purchases, you lose current sales. (The paradigm being Osborne, whose preannoucement of the next version was so successful that they went broke before it could be finished.) The two viable choices are to keep totally quiet, or boost awareness without wrecking sales.
<sigh> Quantum "cryptography" is not what most people seem to think it is. It's mostly snake oil pushed by con artists and deluded academics.
The only thing "quantum encryption" does is tell you that you exchanged a secret message with whatever machine is plugged into the other end of the link. It is quite possible that that machine is owned and operated by an enemy. Therefore you must verify the message using a shared secret and a conventional message authentication algorithm. The overall system is no stronger than that algorithm. But the snake oil salesmen claim you need their system because the enemy has enough money to break any possible deterministic cipher ...
Now, assuming that you have proper message authentication and a shared secret, "quantum cryptography" does protect you against passive eavesdropping and analysis years later when computing has become cheaper. That is a far cry from the ironclad protection against active attackers that is promised, and neither is it obviously more cost-effective than deterministic ciphers.
Sealing an electronics enclosure is risky. The electronics generally make varying amounts of heat over time. When they heat up, traces of moisture are driven off and the pressure goes up, and you may get condensation at the coldest point in the box. Unless you are utterly paranoid about sealing, the pressure eventually rises enough to open up a pinhole leak somewhere, and a small amount of slightly-drier air escapes. Then when the temperature falls, the pressure drops, and the slight vaccuum pulls a little slightly-more-humid air into the enclosure. Over thousands of thermal cycles, an impressive amount of water can accumulate. I've seen this fry circuit boards.
The usual solution is to make sure there is always a surface colder than the electronics, and to put a small hole in the lowest part of the enclosure so any water will drain out.
Digital logic generally copes well with the cold, even if the manufacturer only promises down to zero Celcius (freezing point of water).
The real problem is water-based aluminum electrolytic capacitors. They rely on liquid water for their electrical properties. Go below freezing and the capacitance drops by ~80%. Essentially all commodity computer equipment uses these caps in the power converters. If you take them below freezing, the power supplies flake out. Long-term reliability will be crap, even if they "seem to work".
The advice in another comment is right: All the conventional servers and routers must go in a temperature-controlled room.
Also, gravity affects time, so you can use clocks and radios to measure the relative gravitational potential between two points in space. By sending a sufficiently good clock into deep space, we might be able to see if the solar system contains any dark matter.