However, the OP's suggesting Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, etc., etc., were not among the best physicists in America is pretty stupid.
Practically anyone of equal or greater talent in America who wasn't working on the Manhattan project was working on radar projects for the U.S. government.
The Manhattan project was an instance of the U.S. goverment getting the smartest people they could, writing them a blank check, and staying the hell out of their way.
Your excuses for UNIX behavior are simply apologies.
Versioning and safe deletion in the file system have real advantages. Version control is not a substitute for all the uses of versioning, and aliasing rm in a shell does not take care of all the shell scripts and make files that use rm directly.
Believe it or not, other operating systems have had behaviors that are useful that UNIX does not have, and really can't have without leaving the essential spirit of UNIX behind.
Simply denying these features are generally useful is silly.
The whole problem with your approach is that you use the word "better" with an "MIT-style" bias. The New Jersey folks simply have a different definition for the word.
I've read "Worse is Better" multiple times over the past decade. But nobody is going to read it when the link is coupled with gratuitous Lisp-machine fanboyism.
Yes, Genera is an amazing piece of software, yet to be matched in many ways, despite today's hardware UNDENIABLY being *much* faster (even running Lisp) than even the fastest Symbolics machine ever made. But that can't be summed up in the one word "better" without becoming a troll or flamebait.
Perhaps before blowing up at an AC, you should elaborate on what *you* think killed Lisp machines. Kent Pitman has said, as I recall, that Symbolics was mainly killed by bad business decisions, unrelated to the technology. But that doesn't mean that there is a different set of decisions which would have left Symbolics systems on top of the heap *today*. Intel still would have beaten their processors soundly in general performance. Without hardware tagging, Genera relies on a virtual machine.
You can't say that totally different OS designs are "better" than one another, as if there were one dimension of "goodness" in computing.
What Symbolics really kicked ass at (I am told), was (essentially) single-user programming workstations with *ultimate* flexibility and customization. Genera lets you inspect and patch virtually every aspect of the system, down to the CPU microcode level.
Securely serving applications to hundreds or thousands of non-developer users simultaneously with fault-tolerance is a different dimension, in which other operating systems beat Symbolics, and mainframes can often beat ordinary UNIX. Raw computing or I/O power is another.
Symbolics machines still exist, and quite a few developers still use them regularly. For compute-intensive stuff, current boxes blow them away, but as the ultimately "pimped-out" developer system, they still can be more efficient to work on.
Yes, I understand the need to have happy engineers.
The point still stands that the Chief Financial Officer is basically in charge of making sure GOOG has enough cash "in the bank" to write paychecks, and write checks to the network providers, hardware vendors, office decorators, and the pasta man, as well, because most of the world does not accept unvested stock options in return for goods and services.
If the CFO fails in that responsibility, the lights turn off. Even the happiest engineer needs his network bill paid in order to get his work done.
Now, GOOG is, at least at this point, profitable, so the CFO job is not as hard as it might be. But lots of dot com companies found out the hard way that the cash spigot can turn off darn fast, and Aeron chairs don't have much of a resale value.
I know people on Slashdot like to dismiss these people as empty suits; in reality, like the electric company, they only appear to be superfluous when they do their job well.
I don't mean to disagree completely, but I think those talented engineers will, in the end, care more about whether their paychecks clear and whether their stock options are worth something than whether their pasta is cooked al dente.
That Chief Financial Officer does have a thing or two to do with engineer satisfaction.
Also, note that I am not suggesting a police state or random "regime change" in the Middle East are or were constructive and helpful responses against the threat. We ought to gauge our actions by a rational evaluation of the risks *added* by such actions as well as the real size of the risks avoided.
Anger does not necessarily lead to action. Sometimes no action is possible. I get pissed off if someone steals my wallet, but there isn't anything I can do about that. So I stew a bit, say a few choice words, and move on.
But simply accepting Al Qaeda's agenda and actions with a shrug, "oh, well, just one of the many risks I face getting up in the morning" seems to me the most callous and nihilistic response possible.
Go ahead, get angry. Just don't get *crazy* and *irrational* in response.
Your idea of "voluntary" acceptance of terrorism is quite bizzare. As if I'm also "voluntarily" accepting the risk that an axe murderer will go on a rampage and kill me and everyone in my family. Sure, sign me up! NOT.
The risk exists, although small, but I am not accepting it voluntarily. There is no way in which I *deliberately* put my self in the way of that kind of violence. In contrast, I *deliberately* put the key in the ignition of my car, with the expectation that I will start it up, and drive on the street, and I might get run into by some teenager or cell-phone yakker.
I don't do it in the expectation that some Mafioso has connected a bomb to the ignition, or that some manager at the auto maker has decided that a known preventable risk of engine fire was not worth the extra $3.50 it would cost them to fix it, and instead chose to keep it quiet. That's the main reason why those kinds of actions are classified as crimes or torts.
Now it is true that I might *deliberately* choose to go on an airline trip. In which case I do so in the voluntary acceptance that the plane might crash. Accidents happen, but I know the NTSB and others are working to reduce these risks. I accept that. Al Qaeda may be working to *increase* these risks, and I find that UNacceptable. I accept that risk only under Osama bin Laden's *coercion,* *in*voluntarily, and that pisses me off.
I'm not an idiot living in some Pollyanna world, where I hope terrorists go away, and everyone dances in fields of daisies. I understand very well that there is a finite risk of terror attacks killing me or my loved ones, which can be increased by boneheads occupying the Oval Office. But I don't accept it *voluntarily*. That's what allows me to get pissed off at terrorists without refusing to get on an airliner or a London bus.
The point is, though, I knowingly and voluntarily accept the risks of driving on the roads, or even eating fatty foods.
I don't choose to get randomly blown up by deranged folks trying to make a political point. They can blab all they want to on the Web or on Arab satellite TV about how the Zionist forces are responsible for all their suffering, and more power to them. But pardon me if I get pissed off when they start blowing up random London commuters.
While I agree that there are opportunists of all kinds who will take advantage of our grief to advance their own warped agenda, there is still a distinct moral difference between death from accidental and natural causes and death from deliberate terrorist attacks (or military action), which justifies getting more pissed off about a quantitatively small group of deaths.
Yes, some Zen Buddhist will claim he can as easily accept death from a suicide bomber as dying in ones sleep after 95 years; expecting all of us to live to the same standard is unfair.
I could simply answer "post hoc ergo propter hoc," but a more complete response is that you are conflating multiple developments in the 20th century with the creation of the U.N.
There was once this thing, for instance, called the "British Empire" where a country called "Great Britain" (perhaps you've heard of it) ruled much of the world. This was a good thing, in that it tended to make major wars rather rare, but a bad thing from the point of view of political rights for many of the world's people.
The collapse of the Great Powers equilibrium caused by the unification of Germany and World War I also coincided with the advent of modern mechanized warfare and modern techniques of insurgency.
Notice, for instance, that the wars you list did not occur between major powers. For example, Great Britain and France have not gone to war with each other or with Germany; for about the past 500 years, that kind of thing was relatively routine.
To be more precise; Apple told people only to use the bits through documented Apple system calls & macros, which DID use the upper bits, but in a way that Apple could compatibly upgrade its way out of, when it became necessary.
Einstein had also reportedly been speculating about electromagnetism from a much earlier time; what it would look like if you were moving at the same velocity as a moving light beam, you would see a static sinusoid of electric & magnetic fields, which doesn't fit with Maxwell's equations. There were also manifest asymmetries in the description of dynamos and motors.
Poincare also had similar ideas to Einstein's, without thinking about trains and clocks.
What gives you "confidence" in such a fantastic development? That it would give you a warm fuzzy feeling? Because you've confused Star Trek with reality?
Do you have similar "confidence" that we'll solve the comparatively simple problems of war and hunger? Do you believe you may wake up one day with superpowers?
The situation of objects moving near the speed of light is completely within the framework of relativity, and gives results that are nothing like your purely speculative ideas. In fact, we know what it looks like when matter goes faster than light *in a medium*; it's called Cerenkov radiation. We have accelerated electrons to an incredibly large fraction of the speed of light in particle colliders, and nothing freaky has happened yet.
Wormholes in general relativity are not guaranteed to be practical or constructible; there might be some left over from creation, but unless you like getting sucked into a black hole, they probably aren't going to be a useful mode of transportation.
I cannot deny that something *might* exist, and *might* be discovered that allows FTL travel. But why the hell should I have confidence that such a thing is possible?
It isn't like you can buy spacetime in five pound bags at the market; space-time itself is a mental construct, a *model* of reality, which has a structure expressed in mathematical terms.
We change the structure of space-time by changing the equations and coordinate systems we use to describe physical theories. Einstein showed that there were implicit assumptions in classical space-time which had no physical basis, and therefore led to incorrect dynamics in mechanical theories. When he eliminated the assumptions of absolute simultaneity and absolute universal time, he both explained the absence of an observable ether (i.e., the absence of stationary light waves), and also showed Newtonian kinematics to be inaccurate at high velocities.
No one with a remotely scientific outlook has ever believed the Earth to be flat.
Columbus, for example, was derided because he claimed the Earth was much smaller and Asia much larger than he had any reason to believe. In fact, Columbus's critics were *RIGHT*. He had no chance to make it to Asia; he would have died somewhere in the Pacific if not for the dumb luck of a completely unknown continent sitting in the way. It was only 19th century revisionism that cast Columbus in the role of revolutionary thinker against a mythical ignorant Catholic authority.
Also, everyone knew bullets, for example, could fly faster than the speed of sound. The question was whether *controlled* flight was possible---you know, like change the direction you are flying in---or whether control surfaces would become inoperable as they approached the speed of sound. Honest scientific-based questions of engineering, answered by experiment.
Exceeding c (speed of light in vacuum) would involve all sorts of disruption to our understanding of space and time; it would no longer be clear how to consistently separate cause from effect, for instance. That's not a technological barrier; that's a hard scientifically tested barrier. Which could simply be illusory; but, more likely, isn't going to go away any more than we are likely to develop "anti-gravity". It simply is contrary to the logical structure of *all* contemporary physics.
Newton's laws *also* seem to be incongruent with how our mind works. That's one reason Physics 1 seems hard to so many people.
Really: every action has an equal and opposite reaction? You mean my body is pulling the Earth toward it with as much force as the Earth is pulling me toward *it*? Bodies remain in motion in a straight line? I can, in principle, throw a ball hard enough that "what goes up need not come down"? Astronauts float in their spaceships, but they are not "beyond the reach of gravity"?
Even basic Newtonian physics takes quite a bit of practice to become "intuitive" to any degree.
Personally, I think Einstein tends to be *under*rated. People forget how incredibly bold his early work in quantum mechanics was: really, the first to apply it to something other than black-body radiation; using it to explain specific heat of solids based on *one* measurement which deviated from Dulong-Petit at low temperatures; using it to explain the photoelectric effect; his derivation of spontaneous emission.
Einstein was much more of a quantum mechanics God than Bohr ever was. He just wasn't as radical in his philosophy, and therefore ended up with a bad rap after he tried (and failed) to poke holes in Bohr's thinking. Given today's experimental evidence, I have to think Einstein would have admitted defeat, but there really wasn't much physics before 1950 that proved quantum mechanics for an *individual* atom, as opposed to predicting spectra which were always observed in discharge tubes with *many* atoms in a thermodynamic ensemble, or chemistry with relatively large quantities of molecules.
Einstein actually realized *before* Planck that Planck's quantum theory really disrupted the continuous nature of classical physics. Planck seems to have based his initial discovery was something like a mathematical trick, where a constant of nature gave physical content to the trick. Poincare realized the same thing about the same time as Einstein.
The wedge product is not the nasty part of string theory; exterior algebra is not yet required in the usual physics/engineering curricula, so a lot of experimentalists can get quite far without really understanding it, but it isn't really any "nastier" than, say, div,grad,curl, or the math involved in thermodynamic transformations.
The nasty part about string theory is the relativistic quantum field theory + supersymmetry + topology needed to *start* understanding strings. At least, that's what I gather. I only ever understood string theory talks up to the third slide or so. Barton Zwiebach seems to have an interesting introductory text, however.
What is it with OGG Vorbis anyway? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig with my click-wheel iPod for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to play a 17 Meg OGG Vorbis file (have to hear my "alternative" music with an "alternative" format, you know). 20 minutes. At home, on my Rio Karma running WMA, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPod, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.....
The problem with trying to DoS the phishers with bad information (other than *any* contact with compromised servers being risky) is that the "signal-to-noise" ratio seen by the phisher is still pretty damn good.
The reason being is that "signal" = "people falling for a con" is much larger than "noise" = "wise people, who have enough spare time to be actively hostile to complete strangers." In the same way that "stupid" is much more common than "clever."
This phishing sites aren't just looking to get account data. They also like installing keyloggers and other nasty software that screws you in other ways. I'm sure, if they don't already, they will eventually craft the URLs to harvest e-mail addresses which actually responded, and queue them up for additional attacks.
Forward it to spoof@ if you feel like helping (although I'm not sure it actually does any good), and delete it without worrying about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Einstein didn't work on the Manhattan project.
However, the OP's suggesting Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, etc., etc., were not among the best physicists in America is pretty stupid.
Practically anyone of equal or greater talent in America who wasn't working on the Manhattan project was working on radar projects for the U.S. government.
The Manhattan project was an instance of the U.S. goverment getting the smartest people they could, writing them a blank check, and staying the hell out of their way.
Your excuses for UNIX behavior are simply apologies.
Versioning and safe deletion in the file system have real advantages. Version control is not a substitute for all the uses of versioning, and aliasing rm in a shell does not take care of all the shell scripts and make files that use rm directly.
Believe it or not, other operating systems have had behaviors that are useful that UNIX does not have, and really can't have without leaving the essential spirit of UNIX behind.
Simply denying these features are generally useful is silly.
The whole problem with your approach is that you use the word "better" with an "MIT-style" bias. The New Jersey folks simply have a different definition for the word.
I've read "Worse is Better" multiple times over the past decade. But nobody is going to read it when the link is coupled with gratuitous Lisp-machine fanboyism.
Yes, Genera is an amazing piece of software, yet to be matched in many ways, despite today's hardware UNDENIABLY being *much* faster (even running Lisp) than even the fastest Symbolics machine ever made. But that can't be summed up in the one word "better" without becoming a troll or flamebait.
Perhaps before blowing up at an AC, you should elaborate on what *you* think killed Lisp machines. Kent Pitman has said, as I recall, that Symbolics was mainly killed by bad business decisions, unrelated to the technology. But that doesn't mean that there is a different set of decisions which would have left Symbolics systems on top of the heap *today*. Intel still would have beaten their processors soundly in general performance. Without hardware tagging, Genera relies on a virtual machine.
You can't say that totally different OS designs are "better" than one another, as if there were one dimension of "goodness" in computing.
What Symbolics really kicked ass at (I am told), was (essentially) single-user programming workstations with *ultimate* flexibility and customization. Genera lets you inspect and patch virtually every aspect of the system, down to the CPU microcode level.
Securely serving applications to hundreds or thousands of non-developer users simultaneously with fault-tolerance is a different dimension, in which other operating systems beat Symbolics, and mainframes can often beat ordinary UNIX. Raw computing or I/O power is another.
Symbolics machines still exist, and quite a few developers still use them regularly. For compute-intensive stuff, current boxes blow them away, but as the ultimately "pimped-out" developer system, they still can be more efficient to work on.
The Anandtech benchmarks were useless. They benchmarked applications tuned for Linux on Linux vs. applications tuned for Linux on Mac OS X.
Ignoring the Apple-provided versions of the same applications tuned for OS X.
Yes, I understand the need to have happy engineers.
The point still stands that the Chief Financial Officer is basically in charge of making sure GOOG has enough cash "in the bank" to write paychecks, and write checks to the network providers, hardware vendors, office decorators, and the pasta man, as well, because most of the world does not accept unvested stock options in return for goods and services.
If the CFO fails in that responsibility, the lights turn off. Even the happiest engineer needs his network bill paid in order to get his work done.
Now, GOOG is, at least at this point, profitable, so the CFO job is not as hard as it might be. But lots of dot com companies found out the hard way that the cash spigot can turn off darn fast, and Aeron chairs don't have much of a resale value.
I know people on Slashdot like to dismiss these people as empty suits; in reality, like the electric company, they only appear to be superfluous when they do their job well.
I don't mean to disagree completely, but I think those talented engineers will, in the end, care more about whether their paychecks clear and whether their stock options are worth something than whether their pasta is cooked al dente.
That Chief Financial Officer does have a thing or two to do with engineer satisfaction.
Also, note that I am not suggesting a police state or random "regime change" in the Middle East are or were constructive and helpful responses against the threat. We ought to gauge our actions by a rational evaluation of the risks *added* by such actions as well as the real size of the risks avoided.
Anger does not necessarily lead to action. Sometimes no action is possible. I get pissed off if someone steals my wallet, but there isn't anything I can do about that. So I stew a bit, say a few choice words, and move on.
But simply accepting Al Qaeda's agenda and actions with a shrug, "oh, well, just one of the many risks I face getting up in the morning" seems to me the most callous and nihilistic response possible.
Go ahead, get angry. Just don't get *crazy* and *irrational* in response.
Your idea of "voluntary" acceptance of terrorism is quite bizzare. As if I'm also "voluntarily" accepting the risk that an axe murderer will go on a rampage and kill me and everyone in my family. Sure, sign me up! NOT.
The risk exists, although small, but I am not accepting it voluntarily. There is no way in which I *deliberately* put my self in the way of that kind of violence. In contrast, I *deliberately* put the key in the ignition of my car, with the expectation that I will start it up, and drive on the street, and I might get run into by some teenager or cell-phone yakker.
I don't do it in the expectation that some Mafioso has connected a bomb to the ignition, or that some manager at the auto maker has decided that a known preventable risk of engine fire was not worth the extra $3.50 it would cost them to fix it, and instead chose to keep it quiet. That's the main reason why those kinds of actions are classified as crimes or torts.
Now it is true that I might *deliberately* choose to go on an airline trip. In which case I do so in the voluntary acceptance that the plane might crash. Accidents happen, but I know the NTSB and others are working to reduce these risks. I accept that. Al Qaeda may be working to *increase* these risks, and I find that UNacceptable. I accept that risk only under Osama bin Laden's *coercion,* *in*voluntarily, and that pisses me off.
I'm not an idiot living in some Pollyanna world, where I hope terrorists go away, and everyone dances in fields of daisies. I understand very well that there is a finite risk of terror attacks killing me or my loved ones, which can be increased by boneheads occupying the Oval Office. But I don't accept it *voluntarily*. That's what allows me to get pissed off at terrorists without refusing to get on an airliner or a London bus.
The point is, though, I knowingly and voluntarily accept the risks of driving on the roads, or even eating fatty foods.
I don't choose to get randomly blown up by deranged folks trying to make a political point. They can blab all they want to on the Web or on Arab satellite TV about how the Zionist forces are responsible for all their suffering, and more power to them. But pardon me if I get pissed off when they start blowing up random London commuters.
While I agree that there are opportunists of all kinds who will take advantage of our grief to advance their own warped agenda, there is still a distinct moral difference between death from accidental and natural causes and death from deliberate terrorist attacks (or military action), which justifies getting more pissed off about a quantitatively small group of deaths.
Yes, some Zen Buddhist will claim he can as easily accept death from a suicide bomber as dying in ones sleep after 95 years; expecting all of us to live to the same standard is unfair.
I could simply answer "post hoc ergo propter hoc," but a more complete response is that you are conflating multiple developments in the 20th century with the creation of the U.N.
There was once this thing, for instance, called the "British Empire" where a country called "Great Britain" (perhaps you've heard of it) ruled much of the world. This was a good thing, in that it tended to make major wars rather rare, but a bad thing from the point of view of political rights for many of the world's people.
The collapse of the Great Powers equilibrium caused by the unification of Germany and World War I also coincided with the advent of modern mechanized warfare and modern techniques of insurgency.
Notice, for instance, that the wars you list did not occur between major powers. For example, Great Britain and France have not gone to war with each other or with Germany; for about the past 500 years, that kind of thing was relatively routine.
To be more precise; Apple told people only to use the bits through documented Apple system calls & macros, which DID use the upper bits, but in a way that Apple could compatibly upgrade its way out of, when it became necessary.
Einstein had also reportedly been speculating about electromagnetism from a much earlier time; what it would look like if you were moving at the same velocity as a moving light beam, you would see a static sinusoid of electric & magnetic fields, which doesn't fit with Maxwell's equations. There were also manifest asymmetries in the description of dynamos and motors.
Poincare also had similar ideas to Einstein's, without thinking about trains and clocks.
But you do have an important point there.
What gives you "confidence" in such a fantastic development? That it would give you a warm fuzzy feeling? Because you've confused Star Trek with reality?
Do you have similar "confidence" that we'll solve the comparatively simple problems of war and hunger? Do you believe you may wake up one day with superpowers?
The situation of objects moving near the speed of light is completely within the framework of relativity, and gives results that are nothing like your purely speculative ideas. In fact, we know what it looks like when matter goes faster than light *in a medium*; it's called Cerenkov radiation. We have accelerated electrons to an incredibly large fraction of the speed of light in particle colliders, and nothing freaky has happened yet.
Wormholes in general relativity are not guaranteed to be practical or constructible; there might be some left over from creation, but unless you like getting sucked into a black hole, they probably aren't going to be a useful mode of transportation.
I cannot deny that something *might* exist, and *might* be discovered that allows FTL travel. But why the hell should I have confidence that such a thing is possible?
Clearly, he was speaking somewhat colloquially.
It isn't like you can buy spacetime in five pound bags at the market; space-time itself is a mental construct, a *model* of reality, which has a structure expressed in mathematical terms.
We change the structure of space-time by changing the equations and coordinate systems we use to describe physical theories. Einstein showed that there were implicit assumptions in classical space-time which had no physical basis, and therefore led to incorrect dynamics in mechanical theories. When he eliminated the assumptions of absolute simultaneity and absolute universal time, he both explained the absence of an observable ether (i.e., the absence of stationary light waves), and also showed Newtonian kinematics to be inaccurate at high velocities.
No one with a remotely scientific outlook has ever believed the Earth to be flat.
Columbus, for example, was derided because he claimed the Earth was much smaller and Asia much larger than he had any reason to believe. In fact, Columbus's critics were *RIGHT*. He had no chance to make it to Asia; he would have died somewhere in the Pacific if not for the dumb luck of a completely unknown continent sitting in the way. It was only 19th century revisionism that cast Columbus in the role of revolutionary thinker against a mythical ignorant Catholic authority.
Also, everyone knew bullets, for example, could fly faster than the speed of sound. The question was whether *controlled* flight was possible---you know, like change the direction you are flying in---or whether control surfaces would become inoperable as they approached the speed of sound. Honest scientific-based questions of engineering, answered by experiment.
Exceeding c (speed of light in vacuum) would involve all sorts of disruption to our understanding of space and time; it would no longer be clear how to consistently separate cause from effect, for instance. That's not a technological barrier; that's a hard scientifically tested barrier. Which could simply be illusory; but, more likely, isn't going to go away any more than we are likely to develop "anti-gravity". It simply is contrary to the logical structure of *all* contemporary physics.
Newton's laws *also* seem to be incongruent with how our mind works. That's one reason Physics 1 seems hard to so many people.
Really: every action has an equal and opposite reaction? You mean my body is pulling the Earth toward it with as much force as the Earth is pulling me toward *it*? Bodies remain in motion in a straight line? I can, in principle, throw a ball hard enough that "what goes up need not come down"? Astronauts float in their spaceships, but they are not "beyond the reach of gravity"?
Even basic Newtonian physics takes quite a bit of practice to become "intuitive" to any degree.
Personally, I think Einstein tends to be *under*rated. People forget how incredibly bold his early work in quantum mechanics was: really, the first to apply it to something other than black-body radiation; using it to explain specific heat of solids based on *one* measurement which deviated from Dulong-Petit at low temperatures; using it to explain the photoelectric effect; his derivation of spontaneous emission.
Einstein was much more of a quantum mechanics God than Bohr ever was. He just wasn't as radical in his philosophy, and therefore ended up with a bad rap after he tried (and failed) to poke holes in Bohr's thinking. Given today's experimental evidence, I have to think Einstein would have admitted defeat, but there really wasn't much physics before 1950 that proved quantum mechanics for an *individual* atom, as opposed to predicting spectra which were always observed in discharge tubes with *many* atoms in a thermodynamic ensemble, or chemistry with relatively large quantities of molecules.
Einstein actually realized *before* Planck that Planck's quantum theory really disrupted the continuous nature of classical physics. Planck seems to have based his initial discovery was something like a mathematical trick, where a constant of nature gave physical content to the trick. Poincare realized the same thing about the same time as Einstein.
The wedge product is not the nasty part of string theory; exterior algebra is not yet required in the usual physics/engineering curricula, so a lot of experimentalists can get quite far without really understanding it, but it isn't really any "nastier" than, say, div,grad,curl, or the math involved in thermodynamic transformations.
The nasty part about string theory is the relativistic quantum field theory + supersymmetry + topology needed to *start* understanding strings. At least, that's what I gather. I only ever understood string theory talks up to the third slide or so. Barton Zwiebach seems to have an interesting introductory text, however.
do you mean as in
....
What is it with OGG Vorbis anyway? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig with my click-wheel iPod for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to play a 17 Meg OGG Vorbis file (have to hear my "alternative" music with an "alternative" format, you know). 20 minutes. At home, on my Rio Karma running WMA, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPod, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
As they say about the classics:
Their quality is no longer in question; they are no longer being tested; instead, you are.
uh, yeah, those well known European Christians like Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose.
Oh, wait, Einstein was a non-observant Jew, and Bose was Indian.
I guess you're full of shit.
The problem with trying to DoS the phishers with bad information (other than *any* contact with compromised servers being risky) is that the "signal-to-noise" ratio seen by the phisher is still pretty damn good.
The reason being is that "signal" = "people falling for a con" is much larger than "noise" = "wise people, who have enough spare time to be actively hostile to complete strangers." In the same way that "stupid" is much more common than "clever."
How does this get rated insightful?
This phishing sites aren't just looking to get account data. They also like installing keyloggers and other nasty software that screws you in other ways. I'm sure, if they don't already, they will eventually craft the URLs to harvest e-mail addresses which actually responded, and queue them up for additional attacks.
Forward it to spoof@ if you feel like helping (although I'm not sure it actually does any good), and delete it without worrying about it.
Cupstacking is for real. You can become famous
Where by "famous" I assume you mean "as famous as Emily Fox."