From a purely fiscal standpoint, it makes sense for you to spend that 45 cents every day. Let's assume a worst-case scenario, in which you make the old federal minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. To make up for 45 cents of your time, you'd have to skip 5.24 minutes of commercials. As a rule of thumb, about a quarter of what we watch is commercial. Therefore, if you watch more than 21 minutes of television a day, it would make sense to pay the Tivo fee.
In your original post, you said "it'll be Windows based only." Since the article refers to the IEEE standard, "it" must therefore refer to that standard. And, as both you and the grandparent noted, the standard has nothing to do with the implementation by unrelated companies, so you cannot blame IEEE for any Windows-specific devices.
Calm down. IEEE is the electrical engineering professional organization. They are the ones who collectively decide on most of the electrical standards in use (e.g., IEEE 802.11g). They have no interest in bowing down to corporations.
There's a big difference between not being able to predict chaotic behavior and noticing general trends. For a classic example, look at the Lorenz attractor, the classic example of a chaotic system. Given the initial conditions imprecisely, you will not be able to guess the eventually trajectory of the particle, since the system's chaotic. However, what you do know is that it will always stay in the butterfly shape. For another example, consider a box full of ideal gas at equilibrium. Given the initial conditions, it is impossible to predict the precise position and momenta of all the gas molecules at some time in the future, since quantum effects will have made the system chaotic. In the short term, you can guess imprecisely, but in the long term, you'll be dead wrong. This doesn't mean that there are no useful properties that can be gleaned from the system: there are plenty of macroscopic state variables which are easily measured. Pressure, volume, temperature, and entropy are all quantities that can be determined and predicted.
But I digress. The main point is that climate science is completely different than weather forecasting. Climate science is more about predicting the long term macroscopic properties of the system, while weather forecasting is about predicting the microscopic short term behavior. I can't say with certainty that it will snow tomorrow, but I am damn well confident that it will be warmer on a date six months from now.
Testing for electromigration issues is standard operating procedure for companies like Intel. They basically pump insanely high amounts of current densities through their devices and see how long they take to fail. Then, they can use that figure to extrapolate how long they'll take to fail under normal conditions. Basically, they can test years worth of damage in days. Asking whether Intel checks for this is like asking whether car companies check to see if the engines start up before selling them. Of course they do.
I guess I should've been more clear in my post. What I meant to says was that encyclopedias are okay to get the basic facts about something, and not that those basic facts needed to be cited. Poor word choice on my part: "citing" should've been "using."
I don't know, I think that there are a few instances in which citing an encyclopedia might be appropriate. If you're writing a paper and casually reference something that is only shallowly related to the subject, I would say that it's okay to use an encyclopedia. For example, if you only need the birth date and place of a historical figure not important to the main body of your paper, it'd be fine.
Peer review's still better than the alternative. We already have this alternative: it's called the Internet, and it's full of nonsense like "OMG! QUANTUM MECHANICS IS WRONG!" *cough* Randall Mills *cough*
I'd say that HP sealed their fate when they spun off Agilent in 1999. Agilent does what HP was originally founded to do: to actually perform R&D, and to make test equipment that is widely used in R&D. It's no coincidence that a large majority of the insanely expensive equipment used in my electrical engineering department is Agilent- or HP-made. They went from being a company that actually does interesting things to being a company that manufactures commodities. Is essence, they moved from being a technically-oriented company to being a business-oriented corporation. In the former, there is actually a spirit of scientific camaraderie amongst the employees, but in the latter, it's a solely profit-driven work environment.
I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light.
Microwaves don't utilize quantum effects. They only use good, old-fashioned, dielectric heating. As long as you know the complex permittivity of the material being heating, you can calculate every quantity of interest in the system completely classically.
That's just not true. It's common on Slashdot, but you've missed out on a huge distinction here. Yes, it's true that string theory doesn't make any new predictions that we can compare with experiment. It does, however, agree with quantum mechanics and general relativity, which means that it reproduces all of the quantum and relativistic effects already seen in experiments. Think about it: it only uses a few extremely basic assumptions, but it reproduces all of the effects of the theories that it encompasses. Even if it turns out to be wrong, it's a phenomenal coincidence.
Like it or not, that's how theoretical physics works. If an assumption turns out to be false, just change your assumptions and go from there. For example, in the 19th century, physicists could not explain the blackbody radiation spectrum, since the model predicted the ultraviolet catastrophe. So, what did Planck do? He made the completely unjustified assumption that the energy levels of a blackbody were discrete, and showed that his model predicted the correct spectrum. This bold move eventually helped to usher quantum mechanics, which in turn liberated his assumption.
So you see, these kinds of conceptual leaps are necessary for new physics to come about. Even if their basis seems shaky at first, if they turn out to be correct, then that's all that really matters.
The "speed of light," by definition, is the speed at which all electric fields propagate (not just optical ones). Even though the wire is treated as an object with constant voltage on it, physically, the electric field which creates that voltage is outside of the wire. In fact, you'll find that as long as the conductance of the wire is sufficiently high, it has little effect on the speed of signal propagation. This is because at the frequencies being discussed, the wires behave more like transmission lines than the ideal, lumped-element model used in circuit analysis.
What's actually more important to the propagation speed is the permittivity and permeability of the dielectric (insulator) surrounding the wire. As it turns out, the speed of signal propagation is identically equal to the speed of light in the dielectric medium (not by coincidence, of course). I may be wrong about this, but I believe that modern processors still use undoped silicon as the interconnect dielectric medium, which means that the signal propagation speed is c/3.4.
I'm sure you could, but why do that when you can buy an off-the-shelf quantum RNG? It's so much easier, and probably much more reliable. Furthermore, since it relies on quantum effects, it is 100% random. (Actually, manufacturing irregularities probably bias it slightly in favor of one state. Even if that's the case, it's still non-deterministic, unlike all software implementations.)
If you need only a few random numbers, I'd suggest using this website, which relies on the aforementioned product. To prove that determinism is wrong, I've been using it for months as a sort of "quantum coin flip."
In TFA, John Reed Stark (head of the SEC's Internet division) speculates that one of the reasons the pump-and-dump spams work is because of people who know that it is a scam, and still try to profit from it anyway (becoming dumpers themselves, or by shorting it). I wouldn't try what you're describing if I were you: you might just become another "victim."
I think I should clarify something in the parent's post. In a lot of situations, it's not just that we don't know the solution to a mathematical problem, it's that no general solution exists. (See the n-body problem for an example.) This is not the same thing as saying that a solution doesn't exist, it just means that no mathematical statement can fully solve the equations.
FPGAs are sweet. In addition to what the sibling posts have said, FPGAs are great for prototyping, because programs running on them can be implemented so quickly and easily. Finite state machines are a cinch on FPGAs, which makes them perfect for embedded systems. Plus, when programming them, there's the added benefit that you don't have to worry about the complexity of an actual processor or microcontroller: no stacks, no instruction sets, no interrupts, etc. Obviously it comes with a trade-off of processing power, but it can often be worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
From a purely fiscal standpoint, it makes sense for you to spend that 45 cents every day. Let's assume a worst-case scenario, in which you make the old federal minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. To make up for 45 cents of your time, you'd have to skip 5.24 minutes of commercials. As a rule of thumb, about a quarter of what we watch is commercial. Therefore, if you watch more than 21 minutes of television a day, it would make sense to pay the Tivo fee.
In your original post, you said "it'll be Windows based only." Since the article refers to the IEEE standard, "it" must therefore refer to that standard. And, as both you and the grandparent noted, the standard has nothing to do with the implementation by unrelated companies, so you cannot blame IEEE for any Windows-specific devices.
Calm down. IEEE is the electrical engineering professional organization. They are the ones who collectively decide on most of the electrical standards in use (e.g., IEEE 802.11g). They have no interest in bowing down to corporations.
Translation: We bet our money on the wrong horse, and now we're going to make up for it.
There's a big difference between not being able to predict chaotic behavior and noticing general trends. For a classic example, look at the Lorenz attractor, the classic example of a chaotic system. Given the initial conditions imprecisely, you will not be able to guess the eventually trajectory of the particle, since the system's chaotic. However, what you do know is that it will always stay in the butterfly shape. For another example, consider a box full of ideal gas at equilibrium. Given the initial conditions, it is impossible to predict the precise position and momenta of all the gas molecules at some time in the future, since quantum effects will have made the system chaotic. In the short term, you can guess imprecisely, but in the long term, you'll be dead wrong. This doesn't mean that there are no useful properties that can be gleaned from the system: there are plenty of macroscopic state variables which are easily measured. Pressure, volume, temperature, and entropy are all quantities that can be determined and predicted.
But I digress. The main point is that climate science is completely different than weather forecasting. Climate science is more about predicting the long term macroscopic properties of the system, while weather forecasting is about predicting the microscopic short term behavior. I can't say with certainty that it will snow tomorrow, but I am damn well confident that it will be warmer on a date six months from now.
It's too bad that the bill's Republican co-sponsor is labeled a RINO by many members of her party.
Now I'm disappointed. I had hoped Masi Oka would be working there.
Testing for electromigration issues is standard operating procedure for companies like Intel. They basically pump insanely high amounts of current densities through their devices and see how long they take to fail. Then, they can use that figure to extrapolate how long they'll take to fail under normal conditions. Basically, they can test years worth of damage in days. Asking whether Intel checks for this is like asking whether car companies check to see if the engines start up before selling them. Of course they do.
I'm not a big coffee fan, myself. I much prefer to wake up with an nice, cool can of Diet Dr. Pepper.
They already do. It's called diet soda.
I guess I should've been more clear in my post. What I meant to says was that encyclopedias are okay to get the basic facts about something, and not that those basic facts needed to be cited. Poor word choice on my part: "citing" should've been "using."
I don't know, I think that there are a few instances in which citing an encyclopedia might be appropriate. If you're writing a paper and casually reference something that is only shallowly related to the subject, I would say that it's okay to use an encyclopedia. For example, if you only need the birth date and place of a historical figure not important to the main body of your paper, it'd be fine.
Peer review's still better than the alternative. We already have this alternative: it's called the Internet, and it's full of nonsense like "OMG! QUANTUM MECHANICS IS WRONG!" *cough* Randall Mills *cough*
I'd say that HP sealed their fate when they spun off Agilent in 1999. Agilent does what HP was originally founded to do: to actually perform R&D, and to make test equipment that is widely used in R&D. It's no coincidence that a large majority of the insanely expensive equipment used in my electrical engineering department is Agilent- or HP-made. They went from being a company that actually does interesting things to being a company that manufactures commodities. Is essence, they moved from being a technically-oriented company to being a business-oriented corporation. In the former, there is actually a spirit of scientific camaraderie amongst the employees, but in the latter, it's a solely profit-driven work environment.
I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light.
Microwaves don't utilize quantum effects. They only use good, old-fashioned, dielectric heating. As long as you know the complex permittivity of the material being heating, you can calculate every quantity of interest in the system completely classically.
That's just not true. It's common on Slashdot, but you've missed out on a huge distinction here. Yes, it's true that string theory doesn't make any new predictions that we can compare with experiment. It does, however, agree with quantum mechanics and general relativity, which means that it reproduces all of the quantum and relativistic effects already seen in experiments. Think about it: it only uses a few extremely basic assumptions, but it reproduces all of the effects of the theories that it encompasses. Even if it turns out to be wrong, it's a phenomenal coincidence.
Like it or not, that's how theoretical physics works. If an assumption turns out to be false, just change your assumptions and go from there. For example, in the 19th century, physicists could not explain the blackbody radiation spectrum, since the model predicted the ultraviolet catastrophe. So, what did Planck do? He made the completely unjustified assumption that the energy levels of a blackbody were discrete, and showed that his model predicted the correct spectrum. This bold move eventually helped to usher quantum mechanics, which in turn liberated his assumption.
So you see, these kinds of conceptual leaps are necessary for new physics to come about. Even if their basis seems shaky at first, if they turn out to be correct, then that's all that really matters.
Those laws typically only apply to audio conversations. This is why most security cameras only record video.
Yeah, that makes more sense: I don't know what I was thinking. It's quite difficult to grow crystals on already fabricated devices. :-)
The "speed of light," by definition, is the speed at which all electric fields propagate (not just optical ones). Even though the wire is treated as an object with constant voltage on it, physically, the electric field which creates that voltage is outside of the wire. In fact, you'll find that as long as the conductance of the wire is sufficiently high, it has little effect on the speed of signal propagation. This is because at the frequencies being discussed, the wires behave more like transmission lines than the ideal, lumped-element model used in circuit analysis.
What's actually more important to the propagation speed is the permittivity and permeability of the dielectric (insulator) surrounding the wire. As it turns out, the speed of signal propagation is identically equal to the speed of light in the dielectric medium (not by coincidence, of course). I may be wrong about this, but I believe that modern processors still use undoped silicon as the interconnect dielectric medium, which means that the signal propagation speed is c/3.4.
A computer should be programmed to know it can make mistakes.
How can we do that, when our own president doesn't even know when he's made one?
I'm sure you could, but why do that when you can buy an off-the-shelf quantum RNG? It's so much easier, and probably much more reliable. Furthermore, since it relies on quantum effects, it is 100% random. (Actually, manufacturing irregularities probably bias it slightly in favor of one state. Even if that's the case, it's still non-deterministic, unlike all software implementations.)
If you need only a few random numbers, I'd suggest using this website, which relies on the aforementioned product. To prove that determinism is wrong, I've been using it for months as a sort of "quantum coin flip."
In TFA, John Reed Stark (head of the SEC's Internet division) speculates that one of the reasons the pump-and-dump spams work is because of people who know that it is a scam, and still try to profit from it anyway (becoming dumpers themselves, or by shorting it). I wouldn't try what you're describing if I were you: you might just become another "victim."
I think I should clarify something in the parent's post. In a lot of situations, it's not just that we don't know the solution to a mathematical problem, it's that no general solution exists. (See the n-body problem for an example.) This is not the same thing as saying that a solution doesn't exist, it just means that no mathematical statement can fully solve the equations.
FPGAs are sweet. In addition to what the sibling posts have said, FPGAs are great for prototyping, because programs running on them can be implemented so quickly and easily. Finite state machines are a cinch on FPGAs, which makes them perfect for embedded systems. Plus, when programming them, there's the added benefit that you don't have to worry about the complexity of an actual processor or microcontroller: no stacks, no instruction sets, no interrupts, etc. Obviously it comes with a trade-off of processing power, but it can often be worth it.