The obvious flaw in such a plan is: who watches the watchers? History has proven time and again that when people are given the power of controlling such information, they will use it to their own gain, and my detriment, eventually. For instance: stalkers, political candidate harassment, election tampering, home invasion/robber informants, etc.
It's not that I think I should hide my activities, it's that I do not believe there is anyone uncorruptible, who could be trusted with the information.
Yeah, people would go for the 30% discount, because people refuse to learn the lessons of history, and generally, are stupid sheeple.
OTOH, Adobe makes their money from selling Flash authoring tools. I'm sure they couldn't give a crap less what the target format for their tools is, if people still buy their authoring tools. Being able to dump the expense of maintaining and distributing the Flash player, but still selling authoring tools that output HTML5 and let Flash slowly die? Sounds like a damn good business decision.
I should also point out that it is not at all certain that the LHC will discover the origin of fundamental particle masses (not all mass), only that it will confirm or rule out the SM Higgs boson.
Going back to your original comment, you pointed out that WW scattering will violate unitarity within the energy reach of the LHC. So the LHC will discover the mechanism of EWSB, whatever it is.
For example gravity mediated breaking models reduce the parameters to 4.5 (the 0.5 being a sign)
MSUGRA is not a theory. It is an arbitrary reduction of the parameter space of the MSSM to make it more palatable to examine that parameter space. There is no reason or symmetry principle that e.g. the scalar masses should be equal at a high scale. I think it's a travesty that this theory has been so heavily used by experimentalists. It closes the mind to a lot of phenomena, and causes people to e.g. exclude reasonable mass ranges or decay modes from their analyses for "theoretiical reasons".
Agreed that a theory with a lot of parameters can parameterize a lot of things, and make anything agree with the data. By this logic the best theory is one with one parameter per experiment. Then you can fit everything. And indeed, in the absence of a compelling theory this is how experimentalists should parameterize their experiments. But, the science (on the theory side) comes when one realizes that you can actually remove some of those parameters... As for the LHC, we need to know what resonances, what masses, what spin, and what decay modes. Then we will spend a lot of time trying to figure out the relationship among them. This is an exercise that should happen after one has data, not before. The reason it has occurred before, in recent years, was the lack of any challenging data for about 20 years. So theory turned in on itself and started dabbling in fantasies.
Every true advance in science has come from reductionism. To think that the universe might just be a complicated mess is an ideological cancer caused by the lack of direction on the theory side. And don't get me started on the anthropic principle...
Really? Care to explain how the Standard Model will survive if we fail to find a Higgs at the LHC then since the WW scattering cross-section will violate unitarity around 1 TeV without a Higgs. Hence we will either see the SM Higgs or exclude it. Seems pretty falsifiable to me.
I clearly was talking about supersymmetry here, in which one can push up the SUSY breaking scale as high as one wants. I did indicate that the LHC will discover the origin of mass...
Actually you will find that SUSY has exactly the same number of free parameters as the Standard Model.
You exemplify everything that is wrong with modern theoretical physics, and the inability of most practitioners to recognize the qualities of a desirable theory, the principle of scientific reductionism and Occam's razor. You have been brainwashed by the noise of the arXiv. Worse, you cannot count. I already cited the Wikipedia pages. Shall I enumerate the squark/slepton/neutralino/chargino mass matrix parameters, soft SUSY breaking masses and trilinears on Slashdot for you too?
Unfortunately physicists stopped looking for falsifiable theories a long time ago. They're bad for your career. They also forgot about Occam's razor. Supersymmetry is not a theory, but a principle, the simplest theory built upon it has 120 new free parameters. That's to be compared with the 19 of the Standard Model. It may solve one or two problems, at the expense of 120 new ones. As a consequence, it is nearly impossible to disprove supersymmetry. (and definitely impossible using only the LHC) One can always push the mass scale of super-partner particles above the energies of the LHC, and the theory lives, though it is now somewhat uglier.
Despite the fact that scientific advancement is always predicated upon reductionism we've created a very large pile of theories, each with a very large number of parameters, that have the same property of being un-falsifiable. This is essentially a consequence of the "publish or perish" nature of modern academic science. A theory with 120 free parameters represents many career's worth of exploring those parameters, in the hopes that one lucky guess and you might win the lottery, and your theory might be real. Hypothesizing a new symmetry, new force, or new particle (with no evidence whatsoever) and exploring its consequences is a game that increases the complexity of the theory, but is a good career path, as it generates an infinite number of papers, but bad for science, since it reduces physicists to monkeys at typewriters, trying to produce the works of Shakespeare. Such brains could be put to better use. We assume we already know the rules of the universe, and we apply them to make new theories. However it is demonstrable that we don't even know the rules. Even with supersymmetry (or any of the other theories), certain calculations give results in contradiction to our observed universe.
Let's contrast that with the way science is supposed to work. Let's try to take those 19 parameters of the Standard Model, and make it 18, or 10, or 1, or 0. For comparison consider the modern theory of Quantum Electrodynamics. We once thought magnetism and the electric force were separate. Feynman, Dirac, and many others built the modern theory, in which they are different aspects of the same force, the coupling constant of which is now one of the most precise measurements in all of science. However making simpler theories is time consuming and error prone, full of blind alleys and fruitless hypotheses that must be navigated. Science does not proceed by "Eureka!" moments in which everything is suddenly clear. It's painstaking work of mapping out what doesn't work, to clear the way for what does. If the path to a better theory were clear, everyone would build a highway to it. To find it, one must enter the wilderness. This is a career killer. Blind alleys are time consuming to navigate, and do not result in publications. During that time your colleagues will look at you strangely and wonder what the hell you're doing with your time. You will soon find yourself without a job.
On a positive note, no matter how degenerate our theories become, experiments like the LHC are our saving grace. They beat us over the head with a blunt instrument, and force us to face reality. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" and that is the situation modern theoretical physics is in. We are theorizing without data, and building theories to explain statistical anomalies and backgrounds. The LHC will discover the origin of mass, whether it is the Higgs particle or not (and whether supersymmetry is participating or not). The LHC is far, far more important than all our fancy theories. We should always take data. It is how we learn. The notion that theorists have correctly guessed at the structure of the universe, absent any data, is naive.
-- Disgruntled and angry, unemployed theoretical physicist
4He is dominantly extracted from natural gas, and according to Wikipedia, the fraction of 3He in it is quite large. Why are we not processing natural gas, or its extracted helium, to remove the 3He? That seems a lot more efficient than making tritium, and waiting for it to decay...
You don't need 10kg of the stuff to make a semiconductor device. Compare it to gold: we produce about 30x more Mo, and you certainly have a few grams of gold somewhere in your house. Anyway my guess is that it might be laid down in layers on top of an insulating substrate (and the substrate doesn't have to be MoS2). So the quantities required are not out of line with production, despite the fact that it is relatively rare in the universe.
Oh I did reply to the right post. I went looking for who posted your bold part, thinking afterwards that it was a quote from the parent. I ride the failboat.
Anyway, I'm just sick and tired of "folk wisdom" being used in place of proper scientific reasoning. It closes doors, and causes otherwise smart people to ignore promising avenues of research. The fact of the matter is, when the majority of the scientific community has examined a problem, and keeps coming up with the same contradictory solution (or a null solution, in this case), it is likely there is an ideological cancer or unexplored avenue that lies just around the corner, for the person willing to ignore "folk wisdom".
As for betting, you're betting with the crowd. Any idiot monkey can do that. The odds are shit, and black swans define the future.
I strongly believe it is the scientific community's responsibility to refute the kooks. In times of serious herd-ism, the revolutionary will, at first, be identified as a kook. This particular guy has communicated his idea in a clear, and most importantly, falsifiable (codified) manner. (Unlike many incoherent kooks) Many things can be easily rejected on grounds of coherency. Trying to understand incoherent kooks is the path to madness... Don't ignore the clear, lucid kooks for sociological reasons. Societies are herds, and are collectively dumb, even when composed of scientists. Prove the kooks wrong instead.
You appear to have used a sociological argument as proof of a mathematical statement.
You fail.
Insufficient creativity is proof of nothing. I know lots of widely-held beliefs by experts that are provably (and some already proven) false.
Once, the entirety of living experts believed the earth was flat, the sun went around the earth, animals did not evolve, etc, etc. They were wrong too.
That actually makes a lot of sense, but I've never heard this explanation before. It also seems relatively easy to deal with... e.g. keep a "reload count" and if things being flushed from the memory cache are immediately reloaded, invoke the OOM. Or, the VM system is swapping the wrong things out. Your explanation also makes perfect sense in that I've observed it has nothing to do with swap or filesystem type.
I believe the parent is talking about the iowait bug #12309, which, maddeningly, has nothing to do with swap, or filesystem type. You can turn off the swap entirely and still trigger the bug. Of course there are use cases where heavy swapping brings the system down, so there is a perceived improvement by most people when turning off the swap.
Every big scientific project looks bad when projected onto the one-dimensional axis of cost. They're big, expensive, and the accounting for them is a discipline onto itself. None of this has anything to do with science. The scientific goals of the JWST are laudable and important, and as a society, we need to figure out how to get them done. The US has a substantial problem in this area. The nature of the US congress is that it cannot force any future congress to do anything, include paying for a project they proposed last year. So, every single year, every big scientific endeavor has to fight for its life. Every big project will run into problems and roadbumps along the way, but these are smart people and they can figure it out. The difficulty of the project makes it more important that it be completed, rather than less.
But what inevitably happens is that Big Science Project reaches some cost overrun or technical snag, or national economics takes a temporary downturn. Gloom-and-doom articles are written. Review panels are formed. Said project gets cancelled next year, after an investment of billions of dollars. You might call it Ares or the Superconducting Supercollider. Meanwhile, countries with more stable funding structures are able to achieve the same goals. You might call them China, India, the ESA or CERN.
I'm a theoretical physicist. Early in my career, the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled. It was three times the energy of the LHC. Had the US had the balls to carry forward with that project, we would have discovered the Higgs boson and answered many important questions, as much as 10 years ago already. Yeah there were some political and funding problems but these could have been fixed. I spent several years at CERN. They have a funding structure in which member states pay into a common pot as a fraction of their GDP as an international treaty. When there are cost overruns or problems (recall the magnet explosion last year that shut down the LHC for a year?) the fixed budget means it just takes longer. The project does not risk cancellation. We still get the important science results. As a consequence, they can go for more speculative, long-term research. They are able to drive advancement. The next CERN collider, CLIC has been in the planning and develoment stages for years. It uses new experimental (and still not fully proved) kind of particle acceleration.
The US will lose in the global science race unless it can establish a more stable funding structure for big science projects, and use them to drive scientific advancement. These things are important. Through the JWST and LHC we gain invaluable knowledge about the structure of our universe. Don't let short-sighted penny pinching bureaucrats or alarmist journalism deprive us of scientific progress.
The name of the magazine is "The Economist". They have a particular viewpoint (hint, it's in the name). On that topic and from that perspective they are very, very good. On non-economic topics, why would you expect them to be any better than your local newspaper? Read it for what it is and what it represents: an economic perspective. Of course there's more to life than economics, and you should look elsewhere for editorials on it.
Ice Cube operates by observing visible Cerenkov radiation from electrons and muons created when high-energy neutrinos hit an atom in the ice, as they traverse the ice. Of course, ice being transparent to visible light is important here, and lunar regolith is opaque to visible light.
However it has been proposed to look for radio waves being emitted in a similar manner. Cerenkov radiation is caused by moving faster than the speed of light in the medium -- it's the "blue glow" if you look at the picture on that wikipedia link, and emits a broad spectrum of radiation, down into radio frequencies. Depending on the composition of the regolith, it may be transparent to radio waves. This can be done from the Earth by pointing your antenna at the moon, or from satellite(s) in orbit around the moon. You might be interested in the Goldstone project. So, at least with proposals I've heard about, getting people on the moon to make big holes is not an important component, but the surface of the moon may still be useful for similar experiments. You never know though, maybe tomorrow someone will post a new idea!
I totally agree. Now, how do you identify a good PSU? I mean, it's always been a popular game for PSU manufacturers to skimp on the internals (because no one ever sees it). Now we have $1000 PSU's. Are they actually any good? How do you tell? My recent experience with "gaming" hardware (which is where the expensive PSU's are) has taught me that it's all crap sold to overclocking suckers, who would never know that the failure was due to their PSU rather than their overclock. For years I used only server-class hardware for my personal machines. I think I should to go back to that. But even that category has been muddied.
AMD and Intel need to have a contest on the shittiest driver category. I have one of each. Each revision of xserver-xorg-video-intel bricks my laptop in a new and exciting way. And AMD's fglrx is a steaming pile of rendering errors, inconsistent performance, and crashes.
On the other hand, both Intel and AMD have released specs and participate in open source development. So in the long run, either one is a better choice than NVidia. So I'll continue to complain about them and submit bug reports. It's the open source way.
Sounds like you need a new power supply, or a surge suppressor, or a power conditioner, or an air conditioner.
You shouldn't see that many failures. Are you overclocking like mad? Silicon should last essentially forever compared to other components in the system, as long as you keep it properly cooled and don't spike the voltage. Removing mechanical connectors by putting things on one die should mean fewer failure modes. A fanless system on a chip using a RAM disk should last essentially forever.
A single chip with N transistors does not have N failure modes. It's essentially tested and will not develop a failure by the time you receive it. A system with N mechanically connected components has a failure rate of N*(probability of failure of one component), and it's always the connectors or the cheap components like power supplies that fail.
You seem to be under the illusion that credit agencies are legitimate businesses, interested in the welfare of their customers, and you are their customer.
Let me fix that for you: Credit reporting agencies are a blackmail and extortion ring that somehow are allowed to legally exist. They don't give a shit that your information is correct or not, or if someone defrauds you. If you get defrauded, they're happy to just put it in the report. After all, if you get defrauded, you're a risk, aren't you? Still not their problem.
No one has ever been contacted by a credit agency, unsolicited, to verify the accuracy of information in their file.
The only way your idea will come to pass is if it is legislated.
Personally I think a better idea is to just get rid of credit agencies. Make holding information about a person without their knowledge or consent illegal. Require that anyone holding information (of a certain nature) about a person notify that person of the content and existence of that data on a regular basis. Thus holding information about people becomes expensive, and illegitimate extortion operations like credit agencies would be forced (economically) to improve.
I walked into the storefronts of T-Mobile, Eplus, and Vodaphone, and asked the representatives. All three told me straight up that data was not possible with their prepaid plans.
If you have contradicting information, please provide a link.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious flaw in such a plan is: who watches the watchers? History has proven time and again that when people are given the power of controlling such information, they will use it to their own gain, and my detriment, eventually. For instance: stalkers, political candidate harassment, election tampering, home invasion/robber informants, etc.
It's not that I think I should hide my activities, it's that I do not believe there is anyone uncorruptible, who could be trusted with the information.
Yeah, people would go for the 30% discount, because people refuse to learn the lessons of history, and generally, are stupid sheeple.
OTOH, Adobe makes their money from selling Flash authoring tools. I'm sure they couldn't give a crap less what the target format for their tools is, if people still buy their authoring tools. Being able to dump the expense of maintaining and distributing the Flash player, but still selling authoring tools that output HTML5 and let Flash slowly die? Sounds like a damn good business decision.
Going back to your original comment, you pointed out that WW scattering will violate unitarity within the energy reach of the LHC. So the LHC will discover the mechanism of EWSB, whatever it is.
MSUGRA is not a theory. It is an arbitrary reduction of the parameter space of the MSSM to make it more palatable to examine that parameter space. There is no reason or symmetry principle that e.g. the scalar masses should be equal at a high scale. I think it's a travesty that this theory has been so heavily used by experimentalists. It closes the mind to a lot of phenomena, and causes people to e.g. exclude reasonable mass ranges or decay modes from their analyses for "theoretiical reasons".
Agreed that a theory with a lot of parameters can parameterize a lot of things, and make anything agree with the data. By this logic the best theory is one with one parameter per experiment. Then you can fit everything. And indeed, in the absence of a compelling theory this is how experimentalists should parameterize their experiments. But, the science (on the theory side) comes when one realizes that you can actually remove some of those parameters... As for the LHC, we need to know what resonances, what masses, what spin, and what decay modes. Then we will spend a lot of time trying to figure out the relationship among them. This is an exercise that should happen after one has data, not before. The reason it has occurred before, in recent years, was the lack of any challenging data for about 20 years. So theory turned in on itself and started dabbling in fantasies.
Every true advance in science has come from reductionism. To think that the universe might just be a complicated mess is an ideological cancer caused by the lack of direction on the theory side. And don't get me started on the anthropic principle...
I clearly was talking about supersymmetry here, in which one can push up the SUSY breaking scale as high as one wants. I did indicate that the LHC will discover the origin of mass...
You exemplify everything that is wrong with modern theoretical physics, and the inability of most practitioners to recognize the qualities of a desirable theory, the principle of scientific reductionism and Occam's razor. You have been brainwashed by the noise of the arXiv. Worse, you cannot count. I already cited the Wikipedia pages. Shall I enumerate the squark/slepton/neutralino/chargino mass matrix parameters, soft SUSY breaking masses and trilinears on Slashdot for you too?
You seem to be confused. You need at least twelve top quarks.
Unfortunately physicists stopped looking for falsifiable theories a long time ago. They're bad for your career. They also forgot about Occam's razor. Supersymmetry is not a theory, but a principle, the simplest theory built upon it has 120 new free parameters. That's to be compared with the 19 of the Standard Model. It may solve one or two problems, at the expense of 120 new ones. As a consequence, it is nearly impossible to disprove supersymmetry. (and definitely impossible using only the LHC) One can always push the mass scale of super-partner particles above the energies of the LHC, and the theory lives, though it is now somewhat uglier.
Despite the fact that scientific advancement is always predicated upon reductionism we've created a very large pile of theories, each with a very large number of parameters, that have the same property of being un-falsifiable. This is essentially a consequence of the "publish or perish" nature of modern academic science. A theory with 120 free parameters represents many career's worth of exploring those parameters, in the hopes that one lucky guess and you might win the lottery, and your theory might be real. Hypothesizing a new symmetry, new force, or new particle (with no evidence whatsoever) and exploring its consequences is a game that increases the complexity of the theory, but is a good career path, as it generates an infinite number of papers, but bad for science, since it reduces physicists to monkeys at typewriters, trying to produce the works of Shakespeare. Such brains could be put to better use. We assume we already know the rules of the universe, and we apply them to make new theories. However it is demonstrable that we don't even know the rules. Even with supersymmetry (or any of the other theories), certain calculations give results in contradiction to our observed universe.
Let's contrast that with the way science is supposed to work. Let's try to take those 19 parameters of the Standard Model, and make it 18, or 10, or 1, or 0. For comparison consider the modern theory of Quantum Electrodynamics. We once thought magnetism and the electric force were separate. Feynman, Dirac, and many others built the modern theory, in which they are different aspects of the same force, the coupling constant of which is now one of the most precise measurements in all of science. However making simpler theories is time consuming and error prone, full of blind alleys and fruitless hypotheses that must be navigated. Science does not proceed by "Eureka!" moments in which everything is suddenly clear. It's painstaking work of mapping out what doesn't work, to clear the way for what does. If the path to a better theory were clear, everyone would build a highway to it. To find it, one must enter the wilderness. This is a career killer. Blind alleys are time consuming to navigate, and do not result in publications. During that time your colleagues will look at you strangely and wonder what the hell you're doing with your time. You will soon find yourself without a job.
On a positive note, no matter how degenerate our theories become, experiments like the LHC are our saving grace. They beat us over the head with a blunt instrument, and force us to face reality. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" and that is the situation modern theoretical physics is in. We are theorizing without data, and building theories to explain statistical anomalies and backgrounds. The LHC will discover the origin of mass, whether it is the Higgs particle or not (and whether supersymmetry is participating or not). The LHC is far, far more important than all our fancy theories. We should always take data. It is how we learn. The notion that theorists have correctly guessed at the structure of the universe, absent any data, is naive.
-- Disgruntled and angry, unemployed theoretical physicist
4He is dominantly extracted from natural gas, and according to Wikipedia, the fraction of 3He in it is quite large. Why are we not processing natural gas, or its extracted helium, to remove the 3He? That seems a lot more efficient than making tritium, and waiting for it to decay...
You don't need 10kg of the stuff to make a semiconductor device. Compare it to gold: we produce about 30x more Mo, and you certainly have a few grams of gold somewhere in your house. Anyway my guess is that it might be laid down in layers on top of an insulating substrate (and the substrate doesn't have to be MoS2). So the quantities required are not out of line with production, despite the fact that it is relatively rare in the universe.
Oh I did reply to the right post. I went looking for who posted your bold part, thinking afterwards that it was a quote from the parent. I ride the failboat.
Anyway, I'm just sick and tired of "folk wisdom" being used in place of proper scientific reasoning. It closes doors, and causes otherwise smart people to ignore promising avenues of research. The fact of the matter is, when the majority of the scientific community has examined a problem, and keeps coming up with the same contradictory solution (or a null solution, in this case), it is likely there is an ideological cancer or unexplored avenue that lies just around the corner, for the person willing to ignore "folk wisdom".
As for betting, you're betting with the crowd. Any idiot monkey can do that. The odds are shit, and black swans define the future.
I strongly believe it is the scientific community's responsibility to refute the kooks. In times of serious herd-ism, the revolutionary will, at first, be identified as a kook. This particular guy has communicated his idea in a clear, and most importantly, falsifiable (codified) manner. (Unlike many incoherent kooks) Many things can be easily rejected on grounds of coherency. Trying to understand incoherent kooks is the path to madness... Don't ignore the clear, lucid kooks for sociological reasons. Societies are herds, and are collectively dumb, even when composed of scientists. Prove the kooks wrong instead.
I have replied to the wrong post. Sorry.
You appear to have used a sociological argument as proof of a mathematical statement.
You fail.
Insufficient creativity is proof of nothing. I know lots of widely-held beliefs by experts that are provably (and some already proven) false.
Once, the entirety of living experts believed the earth was flat, the sun went around the earth, animals did not evolve, etc, etc. They were wrong too.
If you had read TFA, you'd know they did benchmark on Solaris (OpenIndiana).
That actually makes a lot of sense, but I've never heard this explanation before. It also seems relatively easy to deal with... e.g. keep a "reload count" and if things being flushed from the memory cache are immediately reloaded, invoke the OOM. Or, the VM system is swapping the wrong things out. Your explanation also makes perfect sense in that I've observed it has nothing to do with swap or filesystem type.
I believe the parent is talking about the iowait bug #12309, which, maddeningly, has nothing to do with swap, or filesystem type. You can turn off the swap entirely and still trigger the bug. Of course there are use cases where heavy swapping brings the system down, so there is a perceived improvement by most people when turning off the swap.
Every big scientific project looks bad when projected onto the one-dimensional axis of cost. They're big, expensive, and the accounting for them is a discipline onto itself. None of this has anything to do with science. The scientific goals of the JWST are laudable and important, and as a society, we need to figure out how to get them done. The US has a substantial problem in this area. The nature of the US congress is that it cannot force any future congress to do anything, include paying for a project they proposed last year. So, every single year, every big scientific endeavor has to fight for its life. Every big project will run into problems and roadbumps along the way, but these are smart people and they can figure it out. The difficulty of the project makes it more important that it be completed, rather than less.
But what inevitably happens is that Big Science Project reaches some cost overrun or technical snag, or national economics takes a temporary downturn. Gloom-and-doom articles are written. Review panels are formed. Said project gets cancelled next year, after an investment of billions of dollars. You might call it Ares or the Superconducting Supercollider. Meanwhile, countries with more stable funding structures are able to achieve the same goals. You might call them China, India, the ESA or CERN.
I'm a theoretical physicist. Early in my career, the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled. It was three times the energy of the LHC. Had the US had the balls to carry forward with that project, we would have discovered the Higgs boson and answered many important questions, as much as 10 years ago already. Yeah there were some political and funding problems but these could have been fixed. I spent several years at CERN. They have a funding structure in which member states pay into a common pot as a fraction of their GDP as an international treaty. When there are cost overruns or problems (recall the magnet explosion last year that shut down the LHC for a year?) the fixed budget means it just takes longer. The project does not risk cancellation. We still get the important science results. As a consequence, they can go for more speculative, long-term research. They are able to drive advancement. The next CERN collider, CLIC has been in the planning and develoment stages for years. It uses new experimental (and still not fully proved) kind of particle acceleration.
The US will lose in the global science race unless it can establish a more stable funding structure for big science projects, and use them to drive scientific advancement. These things are important. Through the JWST and LHC we gain invaluable knowledge about the structure of our universe. Don't let short-sighted penny pinching bureaucrats or alarmist journalism deprive us of scientific progress.
There aren't enough details in TFA, but this sure sounds like entrapment. i.e. no crime would have been committed if the FBI had not engaged him...
The name of the magazine is "The Economist". They have a particular viewpoint (hint, it's in the name). On that topic and from that perspective they are very, very good. On non-economic topics, why would you expect them to be any better than your local newspaper? Read it for what it is and what it represents: an economic perspective. Of course there's more to life than economics, and you should look elsewhere for editorials on it.
Ice Cube operates by observing visible Cerenkov radiation from electrons and muons created when high-energy neutrinos hit an atom in the ice, as they traverse the ice. Of course, ice being transparent to visible light is important here, and lunar regolith is opaque to visible light.
However it has been proposed to look for radio waves being emitted in a similar manner. Cerenkov radiation is caused by moving faster than the speed of light in the medium -- it's the "blue glow" if you look at the picture on that wikipedia link, and emits a broad spectrum of radiation, down into radio frequencies. Depending on the composition of the regolith, it may be transparent to radio waves. This can be done from the Earth by pointing your antenna at the moon, or from satellite(s) in orbit around the moon. You might be interested in the Goldstone project. So, at least with proposals I've heard about, getting people on the moon to make big holes is not an important component, but the surface of the moon may still be useful for similar experiments. You never know though, maybe tomorrow someone will post a new idea!
1. No. Probability of survival is ~99% or something. Your calculation produces approximately -(N-1) which is negative.
2. It's adding one and dividing by two that is tripping up everyone today. Therein does not lie the problem.
divide by two.
I totally agree. Now, how do you identify a good PSU? I mean, it's always been a popular game for PSU manufacturers to skimp on the internals (because no one ever sees it). Now we have $1000 PSU's. Are they actually any good? How do you tell? My recent experience with "gaming" hardware (which is where the expensive PSU's are) has taught me that it's all crap sold to overclocking suckers, who would never know that the failure was due to their PSU rather than their overclock. For years I used only server-class hardware for my personal machines. I think I should to go back to that. But even that category has been muddied.
AMD and Intel need to have a contest on the shittiest driver category. I have one of each. Each revision of xserver-xorg-video-intel bricks my laptop in a new and exciting way. And AMD's fglrx is a steaming pile of rendering errors, inconsistent performance, and crashes.
On the other hand, both Intel and AMD have released specs and participate in open source development. So in the long run, either one is a better choice than NVidia. So I'll continue to complain about them and submit bug reports. It's the open source way.
Sounds like you need a new power supply, or a surge suppressor, or a power conditioner, or an air conditioner.
You shouldn't see that many failures. Are you overclocking like mad? Silicon should last essentially forever compared to other components in the system, as long as you keep it properly cooled and don't spike the voltage. Removing mechanical connectors by putting things on one die should mean fewer failure modes. A fanless system on a chip using a RAM disk should last essentially forever.
A single chip with N transistors does not have N failure modes. It's essentially tested and will not develop a failure by the time you receive it. A system with N mechanically connected components has a failure rate of N*(probability of failure of one component), and it's always the connectors or the cheap components like power supplies that fail.
You seem to be under the illusion that credit agencies are legitimate businesses, interested in the welfare of their customers, and you are their customer.
Let me fix that for you: Credit reporting agencies are a blackmail and extortion ring that somehow are allowed to legally exist. They don't give a shit that your information is correct or not, or if someone defrauds you. If you get defrauded, they're happy to just put it in the report. After all, if you get defrauded, you're a risk, aren't you? Still not their problem.
No one has ever been contacted by a credit agency, unsolicited, to verify the accuracy of information in their file.
The only way your idea will come to pass is if it is legislated.
Personally I think a better idea is to just get rid of credit agencies. Make holding information about a person without their knowledge or consent illegal. Require that anyone holding information (of a certain nature) about a person notify that person of the content and existence of that data on a regular basis. Thus holding information about people becomes expensive, and illegitimate extortion operations like credit agencies would be forced (economically) to improve.
I walked into the storefronts of T-Mobile, Eplus, and Vodaphone, and asked the representatives. All three told me straight up that data was not possible with their prepaid plans.
If you have contradicting information, please provide a link.