...For that matter I assume it isn't taking into account acceleration (note to physicists: does non-gravity acceleration cause time dilation?).
Still it is free, and makes me feel very very very slightly younger!
IAAP (I am a physicist), so I can confirm that non-gravitational acceleration causes time dilation, under some circumstances. Since I'm waiting for some calculations to finish running through Mathematica, I'll also try to explain.:-)
Non-gravitational acceleration does cause time dilation, at least when viewed in the frame of the accelerated observer. When analyzed in the frame of an inertial observer (read: if someone who isn't accelerating calculates how much time has passed for you based on how you are moving), these effects appear to be the result of your velocity, and *not* your acceleration.
A fun example of this is the Langevin twin paradox problem. Two twins, floating in space, synchronize their watches. Then twin A uses a rocket to travel out a certain distance d at a more or less constant velocity v, turn around, and return, also with velocity v. He only uses his rocket for a very brief period upon leaving, during turnaround, and finally to return to rest relative to his twin. Twin B just sits there. They then compare their clocks.
Twin B sees that twin A spent essentially all of his time moving with velocity v, and figures that time-dilation has caused twin A's clock to record less time than twin B's. This is correct.
From twin A's perspective, it was twin B who moved with velocity v, and so he figures that time-dilation has caused B's clock to record less time than A's. This seems paradoxical until twin A accounts for the fact that he was accelerated at the far end of his trip. During that acceleration, everything not attached to his rocket (including twin B) seemed to accelerate in the direction his engine was pointed. There's a bunch of math one can do to justify it, (see chapter 13 of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's "Gravitation", if you want the full scoop) but the short version is that acceleration acts just like gravity (and vice versa). So twin A figures that twin B's clock must be gravitationally blueshifted relative to twin A's clock (twin B is 'higher' in the apparent gravitational potential produced by the acceleration). It turns out that over the amount of time twin A must accelerate to return to his twin, twin B's clock seems to gain exactly twice as much time as he seems to lose while twin A is coasting, which is just enough to bring each of the twins' calculations into full agreement upon their reunion.
I doubt that much of that 700 lbs would *not* be riddled with rust long before that lease would run out.
If you RTA you'll see that the bodywork is made from carbon composite. I don't think it's that unreallistic for a car to still be going after 20 years - how many cars are there around on the roads from 1989/1990? Still quite a few (esp. Japanese made), in some parts of the world the majority of cars are that old or older.
And every one of those cars has a couple of dings and dents in them. Dings and dents that become gaping holes in carbon fiber bodies. gaping holes that drastically degrade the vehicle's aerodynamics, which in turn have an outsize impact on the vehicle's fuel efficiency. While it's true that there are plenty of cars that are still going after 20 years, none of those cars are the lead models of an entirely new and untested design.
But this post is a great illustration of how many people view cars as throwaway, disposable products, good for only 10 years. Cars don't just impact the environment with CO2 emissions, the material and energy cost of production, maintenance and disposal have to be taken into account, and it's about time seeing a manufacturer taking responsibility in this regard, rather than cashing in on the easy profits of throwaway consumerism
Nice try for putting words in my mouth. My concern is whether the damn thing will still be running in 20 years, or whether the company which is supposedly paying for all your fuel will be around for 20 years to make good on its side of the bargain. If I had any reason to be confident in both of those points, I'd be all for purchasing this kind of rollerskate (provided that the price made sense, of course). Based on the cursory descriptions presently available, which do not address these issues at all, I tend to the conclusion that this whole thing is more PR fluff than substance.
But you could drive the car in a climate that gets snow and salted roads - the body is carbon fiber - no rust!
Not everything can be made of carbon fiber. The metal parts (engine, exhaust system, etc) will still rust. Plus, 20 years is a very long time to commit to a car. Lots of expensive components tend to wear out over such a long period. We're supposed to believe that the company (which has zero track record building, selling, and maintaining cars) is even going to be here after that amount of time?
Of course, based on the fine article, it rapidly becomes clear that this is a vaporware economic model for a vaporware car design. This isn't a plan for designing and building a car --it's a plan for getting media attention for the design firm. As such, it's been successful.
Well I guess that means they aren't planning on marketing this in the Northeast, or anywhere that there's occasionally snow on the ground. I doubt that much of that 700 lbs would *not* be riddled with rust long before that lease would run out.
Seriously, why lease a car for 20 years? And what'd the lease payment be? Not to mention the fact that you could probably just buy the damn thing (or maybe even a nicer car) using a 20 year car loan and cover the fuel out of pocket for far less than what you'd pay these jokers. Effectively locking in the cost of fuel for 20 years may sound attractive, but in practice it's more likely a win-win for the company --sure, you don't pay extra when fuel prices go up, but you also miss out on the downward fuel price fluctuations. The company is certain to make more money from you than you'll get out in fuel in any case, since if the prices are such that the deal would seem to work out in your favor, the company will just go bankrupt.
Pretty soon, people will get used to a bright flash between the previews and the start of the film. Add to that an infrared video camera, and they can keep track of people changing seats during the movie.
Of course, the natural response of the wittier bootleggers will be to wear a Guy Fawkes mask to the theater.:-)
Such a system seems quite dangerous to deploy, since it would inevitably be assumed to be targeting nuclear launch sites (no difference between an ICBM and an anti-sat rocket). Because of its speed to target, an opponent would have no choice but to launch immediately if he saw the slightest hint that you were *preparing* to deploy these puppies.
Well, there is a significant difference between processes that can run in reverse the same way that they go forward (things that are invariant under time reversal) and whether or not they actually *do* for large systems (which is a result of the direction entropy likes to go).
While certainly significant engineering feats can often be accomplished by amateurs who are ignorant of the common "wisdom" of trained engineers, it is extremely unlikely that somebody working in a garage will stumble upon a free-energy (or even merely hidden energy) device. The simple reason for this is that pretty much any apparatus that you can fit into a garage that doesn't cost tons of $$ or isn't so delicate that you don't need to be an expert to use it is going to be primarily coupled to electromagnetic interactions, and restricted to low-energy interactions at that. Electromagnetism is something which has been studied for a _very_ long time, and if there were anything which coupled to it in a way which would give you access to the energy of an unknown field, said coupling would produce an asymmetry in the basic behavior of the electromagnetic field that would have been noticed by now. Especially for the case of someone claiming to have found something which not only violates the conservation of energy, but does so in a big enough way that they can actually see a macroscopic effect after normal mechanical inefficiencies are accounted for.
Ok, I *am* a physicist, so let me just jump in here.
Actually, it's the conservation of angular momentum that is a consequence of the laws of physics being the same in all directions. Energy conservation results from the laws of physics being the same at different times. You get linear momentum conservation from the laws of physics being the same at all positions in space. In this case, what we mean by the laws of physics is actually fairly broadly applicable. If you can write down an equation (it doesn't have to be an equation consistent with "known" physics) which describes how a system behaves, you can check to see if the system must conserve energy simply by translating the equation in time. See the helpful wikipedia article on Noether's theorem. With symmetry comes conservation (of something).
And there are in fact quite a few people (physicists) who perform experiments looking for violations of symmetries the universe is thought to have. Or rather, they are looking for apparent violations of those symmetries, since it is expected that such apparent violations will indicate the presence of as yet undetected kinds of particles or fields which may in turn give clues as to what a grand unified theory (or which flavor of string theory, if you prefer) should look like. Some of these tests, if they found an asymmetry, would yield results that would seem to violate the conservation of energy if you ignored the underlying cause of the asymmetry.
For instance, if the speed of light as measured in some arbitrary reference frame were to be different for light traveling in different directions, or if it were different for different reference frames, one could immediately build a (very small) perpetual motion machine. Things being as they are, however, it is likely that running said machine for very long would suck the energy out of the background field which is causing this asymmetry, and eventually make it impossible for the machine to operate. This in itself is a very strong blow against perpetual motion machines, since if they could exist, it's likely that one would have appeared naturally, and sucked all the (free) energy available to them.
It's all much like the way soap-bubbles like to be round.
*bzzzt*
Wrong! The FSF requires you to sign over the copyright so that they have standing to take legal action against people who violate the GPL with respect to your code without having to get you and all the other contributors on board with them (a truly awful task, for some of the larger projects).
I didn't see the need to offer him an out. His actions are determined by the height of the pile of letters anyway. If he needs to find an out, he has a campaign manager.
Dear Sir,
I was extremely disappointed to learn that you have called for the silencing and arrest of Christopher Soghoian. This man has done nothing more than provide an object lesson of how insecure our so-called airport security really is. A theme that you have used quite often in recent weeks.
In calling for Mr. Soghoian's arrest, you may as well have called for the arrest of your colleague, Senator Chuck Schumer, who posted the exact information on his Congressional pages that Mr. Soghoian expressed in the form of a program. Mr. Soghoian did nothing but offer a "proof of principle" demonstration of what is commonly known to those who pay attention, but willfully ignored by those in charge. The fact that you would take this man's work as an opportunity to attack him, to grandstand on the issue of Homeland Security, is not only the height of hypocrisy, but is utterly shameful.
I am extremely dissatisfied with how the Republicans have been running things, and plan to vote the Democratic ticket in November. Given your actions, however, I cannot but hope that your constituents find a better man for your office as soon as possible. I expect that many of my neighbors and colleagues who live in your district will agree with my appraisal of your fitness for Congress.
Actually, problems like this are much less pronounced in physics. Unlike computer science, physics does not revolve around conferences, but rather journals. Most people read journals online (I've certainly never seen a printed issue of Physical Review Letters since 2001, and then it was older issues sitting on a dusty shelf), where space constraints are essentially nonexistent. Conferences are fun places to go give posters and 10/15 minute presentations of whatever you've been working on for the past year or so and to meet new people. Conference presentations go on your C.V., but carry nowhere near the weight of a journal publication when one comes under review. (invited talks are different, but you've already published many journal articles before you give one of those)
That's not to say that there isn't petty behavior in physics from time to time, but it's nowhere near as systematic as appears in computer science. To get into the top journals, like Science, Nature, or Physical Review Letters, you generally have to have a result that is exciting to a broad audience of physicists --not just to your subfield. Here is where we typically see snobbery from time to time. But even if you can't get an article into PRL, you can often get it into Physical Review A (for example), where it will be seen by everyone in the atomic, molecular, and (quantum) optical physics community. In computer science, if your article isn't considered to be top notch, you're essentially screwed until you can submit it to next year's conference, or until you give up and publish it in a *shudder* Journal, where you can expect it to collect dust and be utterly ignored. In physics, the word "incremental" isn't nearly often used to reject papers. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, but we can also stand on the shoulders of many normal people.
When I read the comments on the forum that Mr Ashikhmin put up, I see post after post suggesting ways that the review process can be made fairer and more objective. All such suggestions require greater coordination and work from the already overloaded reviewers, and consequently will not be applied. The real problem is that you've got a serious bottleneck in your focus on conferences. Perhaps if people would be willing to actually use your journals as something other than a handy archive for conference proceedings (or hell, create one--it's not so hard to launch an online journal!), you could eliminate this bottleneck.
This is of course a chicken and the egg sort of problem, and so would take a certain degree of conscious effort on the part of leaders in the field to use the journals to publish their results and to help fairly maintain a good standard of publication. There is at present no incentive for those at the top of their fields to do anything about it, aside from an altruistic desire to advance the field. So long as conferences trump journals, computer science will be held back from what it might become. Think about it.
After all, what the hell do you think writing was invented for, anyway? I can assure you that it's useful for more than submitting applications for the privilege of orally presenting your work. It's good for actual communication, too!
--a physicist with experience dabbling in computer science
I grew up in Nashua, and my family has had experiences with the Nashua Police department, and I doubt there's a great deal more to the story than we know. From my reading of the story, it looks like this man's son may very well have been guilty of some crime, and the police may well have had every reason to be investigating him. At the same time, it is entirely within the character of the Nashua police to pull crap like this. It looks to me like the officers in question were conducting an, shall we say, aggressive investigation, and were not expecting to have to go through the formalities of things like warrants and court orders for what they can usually get by intimidation. This fellow calls them on it, and they respond by attempting further intimidation to put him back in his place. The result will be that the charges they brought against Mr. Gannon will be tossed out, the police department will be sued, and the city will settle for some suitably large sum of money. My family's property taxes will go up next year. Who knows if anything will be done about his kids, since if the cops really had anything on them, they should have gotten warrants, and have now likely mucked things up enough that no charges will be able to stick anyway.
Now for what has shaped my opinion of the Nashua police. Several years ago, my younger brother, along with two of my younger sisters, were riding their bicycles along Main street in Nashua. There was construction going on at one of the intersections, and so traffic was being directed by a member of the Nashua Police department. As my siblings were crossing the intersection, the police officer decided to direct traffic on the street they were crossing to move through the intersection. My brother was the middle of the three riders, and, because there was construction, neither he nor the truck driver saw what was happening until after my brother was struck by the truck. My brother was knocked unconscious, and his bicycle was mangled. Fortunately, he recovered with no additional complications beyond 10 minutes of amnesia.
Now here's where the honor of Nashua's finest comes into question. In the police report of the accident, the officer stated that my brother was in the lead, and riding recklessly. It also reported an accident geometry which was physically impossible, given the position of the construction, the truck that hit him, and the direction he had been traveling, but which served to absolve the traffic cop of any responsibility for the collision. The name of the officer who directed traffic that day was mysteriously absent from the report, and the police department refused to acknowledge that there had even been an officer directing traffic that day, much less provide his name. CYA all the way. It worked on us because my brother was ok. Looks like it ain't gonna work so well for the police department in this case.
Actually no, Graduate Students are quite expensive to operate. Sure, you don't have to actually pay them much more than cold beans, but the department insists that somebody pay for their tuition, and don't forget the overhead costs associated with allowing them to work in the university-managed facility. Your average US graduate student costs the grant on the order of $70k to $80k per year.
Mallory can only pretend to be Bob to Alice and Alice to Bob if Mallory controls all means of public communication between Alice and Bob. If Alice and Bob have a good set of radios, there's no way that Mallory can prevent Alice and Bob from realizing something's amiss, although he could work to jam their various channels of communication.
QC works because Alice and Bob can compare a subset of their generated key over a public channel without revealing enough information for Mallory to be able to guess it. In schemes like BB84, where the key is generated from the direct transmission of single-photons/weak coherent laser pulses, Alice and Bob use the error rate (determined by quantum mechanics) to be able to tell whether Mallory has been intercepting and measuring the photons.
In schemes which use entangled particle (or photon) pairs, this interception issue is less important, since the attacker essentially causes a decrease in fidelity of the entangled states that Alice and Bob measure, and they can (under some circumstances) use entanglement purification to lock Mallory out of the loop (or at least know that secure communication is impossible). The two schemes are in a sense equivalent, since in BB84 A & B can use classical privacy amplification to lock Mallory out, while in the entanglement scheme, they use entanglement purification to achieve the same end.
A smart person should be able to express an idea in his own words without resorting to quoting somebody who was (a) a writer of fiction and (b) a complete loon.
I'm going to assume that the same person wrote these. It's so nice when people are willing to stand behind everything that they say.
That said, your post clearly fits the definition of a troll because it adds nothing to the discussion aside from: a) You're stupid for quoting somebody, b) you're even stupider for quoting somebody I dislike.
Your continued exploration (?) of this theme in your latest post only confirms that you are: a) a troll, and b) possibly a shithead by your own definition (since I tend to find that I dislike people with nothing better to do than to write "you're stupid!" posts).
Or why don't you post with your real nick, so that we can all see how intelligent and reasonable a person you are, and how wrong I am I so malign you?
A smart person should be able to distinguish between an attempt to express a new opinon and the provision of a nice quote which seemed a nice comparision to the parent post.
Besides, ideas have been explored and introduced in fiction for a long time (the earliest example I can think of offhand is Plato's Republic). And even crazy people can come up with interesting ideas.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Because the stream would still have to be decoded on the individual machines, which are subject to their own set of OS interrupts. Maybe machine A will decide to use some swap space, machine B will have a clock that is slightly faster/slower than machine A, etc. Mostly it's going to be different machines OS's responding to different loads and/or network conditions. Maybe some of this could be helped if you ran the same OS on identically equipped boxes which did nothing but stream music, with nary a blip on their network (which is dedicated to streaming, of course). But you'd still have to work to synchronize them initially.
Unfortunately, I think that the first post in this thread was referring to sound synchronization. It's easy to get multiple machines to have access to the same song files, but it's more difficult to get multiple machines to output that sound in phase with one another.
The only way that you could reliably make that happen would be to calibrate your network of machines via a test sound file and a microphone. And even then, I don't know how well the synchronization would hold up if the machines are running anything else. Maybe you need to continuously run such a calibration program on the master machine, and restart/insert delays via pause/unpause to remote machines to correct slippage?
...that if you are just married but don't have/expect kids for a few years, that you aren't quite as much in need of stability as you may think. Unless your spouse is unemployed, it really isn't the end of the world if you don't have 100% job stability. One salary (well, a $40k salary, for comfort) can feed the both of you, push come to shove. If it's this job or none, certainly take it. Remember that if you're doing contract work, there's no stigma associated with you for taking your services elsewhere if you decide you need more stability (kid arriving unexpectedly, etc). You can still put it on your resume.
My philosophy is that this is the best time you're going to have in your career to take risks. Once you have kids, you have more financial commitments, and you have even more as they get into high school and college. That doesn't mean you should take silly risks, but you shouldn't turn down opportunities flat just because of a moderate risk.
A lot of people seem to think that the LP has lost their court fight, when in fact they only lost the fight for an injuction that would stop this particular debate. It would have been surprising if the court had done otherwise, since the whole thing is very last minute, most of the money in question has probably already been spent, and there really isn't enough time for the defense to make its case before the whole thing would become moot anyway.
The bright side is that if the LP suceeds in pursuing damages, future debate venues may be less thrilled to host the CPD's kind of debates. Either the CPD will allow 3rd parties into the debates (when pigs fly), debates will be moderated by a new entity which is more inclusive (also unlikely), or the campaigns themselves will have to pony up the $$ to pay for these joint commercials (more likely, and would result in fewer of those smarmy little ads we're bombarded with).
Of course, all of this depends very much on the shape of local laws near proposed venues. It's possible that there are locales in which it would be hard to win damages, and we'll see the debates happen there. In any case, it'd be one more thorn in the side of the demopublicans.:-)
The 'nasty rider' bit was a generalization, but it's quite common to attach things that you like to bills that other people don't like to be seen voting against.
In this case, I believe it was that he wanted the $87 billion to be paid for out of tax increases (or decreases in the republican tax breaks, if you like), rather than from out of thin air (borrowing from the fed. reserve).
Given that both sides wanted to send $87 billion to the war effort, it's not like his voting against one form of the bill is going to prevent funding from being made available. It's disingenuous of you to conflate this kind of congressional argument with some kind of attack on 'our troops' (a phrase rather cynically called upon by everyone to support their side of the argument of the day).
If you bothered to start reasoning and stop emoting, maybe you'd be able to come to the same conclusions.
I know, I shouldn't keep feeding him.
Nah, plenty of Bush supporters are perfectly decent folks. I make my judgement of *you* based on what you posted. In addition to being a fascist, you happen to support Bush. There may be a correlation in your case, but I don't believe that supporting Bush is the cause of being a fascist.
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...For that matter I assume it isn't taking into account acceleration (note to physicists: does non-gravity acceleration cause time dilation?).
Still it is free, and makes me feel very very very slightly younger!
IAAP (I am a physicist), so I can confirm that non-gravitational acceleration causes time dilation, under some circumstances. Since I'm waiting for some calculations to finish running through Mathematica, I'll also try to explain. :-)
Non-gravitational acceleration does cause time dilation, at least when viewed in the frame of the accelerated observer. When analyzed in the frame of an inertial observer (read: if someone who isn't accelerating calculates how much time has passed for you based on how you are moving), these effects appear to be the result of your velocity, and *not* your acceleration.
A fun example of this is the Langevin twin paradox problem. Two twins, floating in space, synchronize their watches. Then twin A uses a rocket to travel out a certain distance d at a more or less constant velocity v, turn around, and return, also with velocity v. He only uses his rocket for a very brief period upon leaving, during turnaround, and finally to return to rest relative to his twin. Twin B just sits there. They then compare their clocks.
Twin B sees that twin A spent essentially all of his time moving with velocity v, and figures that time-dilation has caused twin A's clock to record less time than twin B's. This is correct.
From twin A's perspective, it was twin B who moved with velocity v, and so he figures that time-dilation has caused B's clock to record less time than A's. This seems paradoxical until twin A accounts for the fact that he was accelerated at the far end of his trip. During that acceleration, everything not attached to his rocket (including twin B) seemed to accelerate in the direction his engine was pointed. There's a bunch of math one can do to justify it, (see chapter 13 of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's "Gravitation", if you want the full scoop) but the short version is that acceleration acts just like gravity (and vice versa). So twin A figures that twin B's clock must be gravitationally blueshifted relative to twin A's clock (twin B is 'higher' in the apparent gravitational potential produced by the acceleration). It turns out that over the amount of time twin A must accelerate to return to his twin, twin B's clock seems to gain exactly twice as much time as he seems to lose while twin A is coasting, which is just enough to bring each of the twins' calculations into full agreement upon their reunion.
Relativity is fun. :-)
If you RTA you'll see that the bodywork is made from carbon composite. I don't think it's that unreallistic for a car to still be going after 20 years - how many cars are there around on the roads from 1989/1990? Still quite a few (esp. Japanese made), in some parts of the world the majority of cars are that old or older.
And every one of those cars has a couple of dings and dents in them. Dings and dents that become gaping holes in carbon fiber bodies. gaping holes that drastically degrade the vehicle's aerodynamics, which in turn have an outsize impact on the vehicle's fuel efficiency. While it's true that there are plenty of cars that are still going after 20 years, none of those cars are the lead models of an entirely new and untested design.
But this post is a great illustration of how many people view cars as throwaway, disposable products, good for only 10 years. Cars don't just impact the environment with CO2 emissions, the material and energy cost of production, maintenance and disposal have to be taken into account, and it's about time seeing a manufacturer taking responsibility in this regard, rather than cashing in on the easy profits of throwaway consumerism
Nice try for putting words in my mouth. My concern is whether the damn thing will still be running in 20 years, or whether the company which is supposedly paying for all your fuel will be around for 20 years to make good on its side of the bargain. If I had any reason to be confident in both of those points, I'd be all for purchasing this kind of rollerskate (provided that the price made sense, of course). Based on the cursory descriptions presently available, which do not address these issues at all, I tend to the conclusion that this whole thing is more PR fluff than substance.
A 20 year lease sounds like a dumb gimmick.
But you could drive the car in a climate that gets snow and salted roads - the body is carbon fiber - no rust!
Not everything can be made of carbon fiber. The metal parts (engine, exhaust system, etc) will still rust. Plus, 20 years is a very long time to commit to a car. Lots of expensive components tend to wear out over such a long period. We're supposed to believe that the company (which has zero track record building, selling, and maintaining cars) is even going to be here after that amount of time?
Of course, based on the fine article, it rapidly becomes clear that this is a vaporware economic model for a vaporware car design. This isn't a plan for designing and building a car --it's a plan for getting media attention for the design firm. As such, it's been successful.
Well I guess that means they aren't planning on marketing this in the Northeast, or anywhere that there's occasionally snow on the ground. I doubt that much of that 700 lbs would *not* be riddled with rust long before that lease would run out. Seriously, why lease a car for 20 years? And what'd the lease payment be? Not to mention the fact that you could probably just buy the damn thing (or maybe even a nicer car) using a 20 year car loan and cover the fuel out of pocket for far less than what you'd pay these jokers. Effectively locking in the cost of fuel for 20 years may sound attractive, but in practice it's more likely a win-win for the company --sure, you don't pay extra when fuel prices go up, but you also miss out on the downward fuel price fluctuations. The company is certain to make more money from you than you'll get out in fuel in any case, since if the prices are such that the deal would seem to work out in your favor, the company will just go bankrupt.
Pretty soon, people will get used to a bright flash between the previews and the start of the film. Add to that an infrared video camera, and they can keep track of people changing seats during the movie.
Of course, the natural response of the wittier bootleggers will be to wear a Guy Fawkes mask to the theater. :-)
Such a system seems quite dangerous to deploy, since it would inevitably be assumed to be targeting nuclear launch sites (no difference between an ICBM and an anti-sat rocket). Because of its speed to target, an opponent would have no choice but to launch immediately if he saw the slightest hint that you were *preparing* to deploy these puppies.
While certainly significant engineering feats can often be accomplished by amateurs who are ignorant of the common "wisdom" of trained engineers, it is extremely unlikely that somebody working in a garage will stumble upon a free-energy (or even merely hidden energy) device. The simple reason for this is that pretty much any apparatus that you can fit into a garage that doesn't cost tons of $$ or isn't so delicate that you don't need to be an expert to use it is going to be primarily coupled to electromagnetic interactions, and restricted to low-energy interactions at that. Electromagnetism is something which has been studied for a _very_ long time, and if there were anything which coupled to it in a way which would give you access to the energy of an unknown field, said coupling would produce an asymmetry in the basic behavior of the electromagnetic field that would have been noticed by now. Especially for the case of someone claiming to have found something which not only violates the conservation of energy, but does so in a big enough way that they can actually see a macroscopic effect after normal mechanical inefficiencies are accounted for.
Ok, I *am* a physicist, so let me just jump in here. Actually, it's the conservation of angular momentum that is a consequence of the laws of physics being the same in all directions. Energy conservation results from the laws of physics being the same at different times. You get linear momentum conservation from the laws of physics being the same at all positions in space. In this case, what we mean by the laws of physics is actually fairly broadly applicable. If you can write down an equation (it doesn't have to be an equation consistent with "known" physics) which describes how a system behaves, you can check to see if the system must conserve energy simply by translating the equation in time. See the helpful wikipedia article on Noether's theorem. With symmetry comes conservation (of something). And there are in fact quite a few people (physicists) who perform experiments looking for violations of symmetries the universe is thought to have. Or rather, they are looking for apparent violations of those symmetries, since it is expected that such apparent violations will indicate the presence of as yet undetected kinds of particles or fields which may in turn give clues as to what a grand unified theory (or which flavor of string theory, if you prefer) should look like. Some of these tests, if they found an asymmetry, would yield results that would seem to violate the conservation of energy if you ignored the underlying cause of the asymmetry. For instance, if the speed of light as measured in some arbitrary reference frame were to be different for light traveling in different directions, or if it were different for different reference frames, one could immediately build a (very small) perpetual motion machine. Things being as they are, however, it is likely that running said machine for very long would suck the energy out of the background field which is causing this asymmetry, and eventually make it impossible for the machine to operate. This in itself is a very strong blow against perpetual motion machines, since if they could exist, it's likely that one would have appeared naturally, and sucked all the (free) energy available to them. It's all much like the way soap-bubbles like to be round.
*bzzzt* Wrong! The FSF requires you to sign over the copyright so that they have standing to take legal action against people who violate the GPL with respect to your code without having to get you and all the other contributors on board with them (a truly awful task, for some of the larger projects).
Dear Sir,
I was extremely disappointed to learn that you have called for the silencing and arrest of Christopher Soghoian. This man has done nothing more than provide an object lesson of how insecure our so-called airport security really is. A theme that you have used quite often in recent weeks.
In calling for Mr. Soghoian's arrest, you may as well have called for the arrest of your colleague, Senator Chuck Schumer, who posted the exact information on his Congressional pages that Mr. Soghoian expressed in the form of a program. Mr. Soghoian did nothing but offer a "proof of principle" demonstration of what is commonly known to those who pay attention, but willfully ignored by those in charge. The fact that you would take this man's work as an opportunity to attack him, to grandstand on the issue of Homeland Security, is not only the height of hypocrisy, but is utterly shameful.
I am extremely dissatisfied with how the Republicans have been running things, and plan to vote the Democratic ticket in November. Given your actions, however, I cannot but hope that your constituents find a better man for your office as soon as possible. I expect that many of my neighbors and colleagues who live in your district will agree with my appraisal of your fitness for Congress.
Sincerely, MultiModeRb87
That's not to say that there isn't petty behavior in physics from time to time, but it's nowhere near as systematic as appears in computer science. To get into the top journals, like Science, Nature, or Physical Review Letters, you generally have to have a result that is exciting to a broad audience of physicists --not just to your subfield. Here is where we typically see snobbery from time to time. But even if you can't get an article into PRL, you can often get it into Physical Review A (for example), where it will be seen by everyone in the atomic, molecular, and (quantum) optical physics community. In computer science, if your article isn't considered to be top notch, you're essentially screwed until you can submit it to next year's conference, or until you give up and publish it in a *shudder* Journal, where you can expect it to collect dust and be utterly ignored. In physics, the word "incremental" isn't nearly often used to reject papers. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, but we can also stand on the shoulders of many normal people.
When I read the comments on the forum that Mr Ashikhmin put up, I see post after post suggesting ways that the review process can be made fairer and more objective. All such suggestions require greater coordination and work from the already overloaded reviewers, and consequently will not be applied. The real problem is that you've got a serious bottleneck in your focus on conferences. Perhaps if people would be willing to actually use your journals as something other than a handy archive for conference proceedings (or hell, create one--it's not so hard to launch an online journal!), you could eliminate this bottleneck.
This is of course a chicken and the egg sort of problem, and so would take a certain degree of conscious effort on the part of leaders in the field to use the journals to publish their results and to help fairly maintain a good standard of publication. There is at present no incentive for those at the top of their fields to do anything about it, aside from an altruistic desire to advance the field. So long as conferences trump journals, computer science will be held back from what it might become. Think about it.
After all, what the hell do you think writing was invented for, anyway? I can assure you that it's useful for more than submitting applications for the privilege of orally presenting your work. It's good for actual communication, too!
--a physicist with experience dabbling in computer science
I grew up in Nashua, and my family has had experiences with the Nashua Police department, and I doubt there's a great deal more to the story than we know. From my reading of the story, it looks like this man's son may very well have been guilty of some crime, and the police may well have had every reason to be investigating him. At the same time, it is entirely within the character of the Nashua police to pull crap like this. It looks to me like the officers in question were conducting an, shall we say, aggressive investigation, and were not expecting to have to go through the formalities of things like warrants and court orders for what they can usually get by intimidation. This fellow calls them on it, and they respond by attempting further intimidation to put him back in his place. The result will be that the charges they brought against Mr. Gannon will be tossed out, the police department will be sued, and the city will settle for some suitably large sum of money. My family's property taxes will go up next year. Who knows if anything will be done about his kids, since if the cops really had anything on them, they should have gotten warrants, and have now likely mucked things up enough that no charges will be able to stick anyway.
Now for what has shaped my opinion of the Nashua police. Several years ago, my younger brother, along with two of my younger sisters, were riding their bicycles along Main street in Nashua. There was construction going on at one of the intersections, and so traffic was being directed by a member of the Nashua Police department. As my siblings were crossing the intersection, the police officer decided to direct traffic on the street they were crossing to move through the intersection. My brother was the middle of the three riders, and, because there was construction, neither he nor the truck driver saw what was happening until after my brother was struck by the truck. My brother was knocked unconscious, and his bicycle was mangled. Fortunately, he recovered with no additional complications beyond 10 minutes of amnesia.
Now here's where the honor of Nashua's finest comes into question. In the police report of the accident, the officer stated that my brother was in the lead, and riding recklessly. It also reported an accident geometry which was physically impossible, given the position of the construction, the truck that hit him, and the direction he had been traveling, but which served to absolve the traffic cop of any responsibility for the collision. The name of the officer who directed traffic that day was mysteriously absent from the report, and the police department refused to acknowledge that there had even been an officer directing traffic that day, much less provide his name. CYA all the way. It worked on us because my brother was ok. Looks like it ain't gonna work so well for the police department in this case.
I'm sure it's cheaper in China. :-)
-Gruntled Grad Student
Mallory can only pretend to be Bob to Alice and Alice to Bob if Mallory controls all means of public communication between Alice and Bob. If Alice and Bob have a good set of radios, there's no way that Mallory can prevent Alice and Bob from realizing something's amiss, although he could work to jam their various channels of communication.
QC works because Alice and Bob can compare a subset of their generated key over a public channel without revealing enough information for Mallory to be able to guess it. In schemes like BB84, where the key is generated from the direct transmission of single-photons/weak coherent laser pulses, Alice and Bob use the error rate (determined by quantum mechanics) to be able to tell whether Mallory has been intercepting and measuring the photons.
In schemes which use entangled particle (or photon) pairs, this interception issue is less important, since the attacker essentially causes a decrease in fidelity of the entangled states that Alice and Bob measure, and they can (under some circumstances) use entanglement purification to lock Mallory out of the loop (or at least know that secure communication is impossible). The two schemes are in a sense equivalent, since in BB84 A & B can use classical privacy amplification to lock Mallory out, while in the entanglement scheme, they use entanglement purification to achieve the same end.
Go do some reading.
I'm going to assume that the same person wrote these. It's so nice when people are willing to stand behind everything that they say.
That said, your post clearly fits the definition of a troll because it adds nothing to the discussion aside from: a) You're stupid for quoting somebody, b) you're even stupider for quoting somebody I dislike.
Your continued exploration (?) of this theme in your latest post only confirms that you are: a) a troll, and b) possibly a shithead by your own definition (since I tend to find that I dislike people with nothing better to do than to write "you're stupid!" posts).
Or why don't you post with your real nick, so that we can all see how intelligent and reasonable a person you are, and how wrong I am I so malign you?
Besides, ideas have been explored and introduced in fiction for a long time (the earliest example I can think of offhand is Plato's Republic). And even crazy people can come up with interesting ideas.
But here I am, feeding the troll.
Because the stream would still have to be decoded on the individual machines, which are subject to their own set of OS interrupts. Maybe machine A will decide to use some swap space, machine B will have a clock that is slightly faster/slower than machine A, etc. Mostly it's going to be different machines OS's responding to different loads and/or network conditions. Maybe some of this could be helped if you ran the same OS on identically equipped boxes which did nothing but stream music, with nary a blip on their network (which is dedicated to streaming, of course). But you'd still have to work to synchronize them initially.
The only way that you could reliably make that happen would be to calibrate your network of machines via a test sound file and a microphone. And even then, I don't know how well the synchronization would hold up if the machines are running anything else. Maybe you need to continuously run such a calibration program on the master machine, and restart/insert delays via pause/unpause to remote machines to correct slippage?
It's /.'ed
My philosophy is that this is the best time you're going to have in your career to take risks. Once you have kids, you have more financial commitments, and you have even more as they get into high school and college. That doesn't mean you should take silly risks, but you shouldn't turn down opportunities flat just because of a moderate risk.
The bright side is that if the LP suceeds in pursuing damages, future debate venues may be less thrilled to host the CPD's kind of debates. Either the CPD will allow 3rd parties into the debates (when pigs fly), debates will be moderated by a new entity which is more inclusive (also unlikely), or the campaigns themselves will have to pony up the $$ to pay for these joint commercials (more likely, and would result in fewer of those smarmy little ads we're bombarded with).
Of course, all of this depends very much on the shape of local laws near proposed venues. It's possible that there are locales in which it would be hard to win damages, and we'll see the debates happen there. In any case, it'd be one more thorn in the side of the demopublicans. :-)
In this case, I believe it was that he wanted the $87 billion to be paid for out of tax increases (or decreases in the republican tax breaks, if you like), rather than from out of thin air (borrowing from the fed. reserve).
Given that both sides wanted to send $87 billion to the war effort, it's not like his voting against one form of the bill is going to prevent funding from being made available. It's disingenuous of you to conflate this kind of congressional argument with some kind of attack on 'our troops' (a phrase rather cynically called upon by everyone to support their side of the argument of the day).
If you bothered to start reasoning and stop emoting, maybe you'd be able to come to the same conclusions.
I know, I shouldn't keep feeding him. Nah, plenty of Bush supporters are perfectly decent folks. I make my judgement of *you* based on what you posted. In addition to being a fascist, you happen to support Bush. There may be a correlation in your case, but I don't believe that supporting Bush is the cause of being a fascist.
Man, almost half an hour between updates. Admittedly it is a bit longer. Looks like they should have gone with Team Bush's database approach.