"Actually the diameter is more like 250 meters." I know, i was just increasing my size estimate(a factor 50 in mass) to show how ridiculously large the asteroid in the picture was. (the choice of density is rather low too, though depends on type of asteroid) "However, perhaps it's appropriate that an article about an asteroid called Apophis includes an illustration by someone called Don Davis. (Ok, it's a stretch, I know...)" I dont get it, but i am sure its unimportant:). (guess my replies are a bit redundant.)
In that case, a telescope orbiting Jupiter or Mars (prolly the farther away the better) would greatly improve our ability to measure the position of these things. Why no plans to get telescopes there?
The picture is stupid, they say the asteroid is 20-million-tonnes, say it has the (quite low) density of water, 1tonne/m^3, say it weighs actually weighs much more 10^9 tonnes so 10^9 m^3 or a cube with 1 km sides. In the picture the asteroid is way way larger.
How many Euri will it cost to get, burn and send the cd? I doubt having the server do that cost anywhere near that.. Well, you could pay for the cd.. but then again, you could donate with better results..
How about just letting people donate server-time (as i said here)
WikiMedia may be very limited in use of the data that is Wikipedia, but the value of Wikipedia to the world is tremendous. Especially because of the licence. Indeed, I doubt many people would have participated if the licence really was owned by an entity. (and, as someone else said, they have the domain name) Btw why dont they try get server-time donations aswel as money donations. (I suggested here)
I wonder wether they have thought about having people donate server-time rather then money. Maybe a screen-saver/background program combined with a part of wikipedia's (often-served)data can help?
I meant a solution in a way that the compiler can make use of how things are threaded. The implementation of multithreading is exactly that, an implementation in the language, the compiler doesnt use the information well. (ofcourse in principle it could though, i dont think they do now) other reply about this. (continue there if you wish)
Ok i should clarify my third question, and state that with the second one i meant that in some cases, multithreading is easy. (like in multiple non-interacting programs)
With the third question i meant wether there was a language that could take info about how things are threaded, and optimize that way. Also, maybe the syntax/logic of the compiler can spot errors earlier then it would if it were just an library for multithreading. I must note that i am not a very experienced programmer, then again surely enough other slashdotians arent either, so enlighten them a bit.
All, thanks for the replies. "First issue... who says "most" programs CAN be recompiled?" "sometimes the key parts are 20 + years old and the source physically lost" "If it's copyrighted software, there's nobody but the publisher that can legally do that!" For all these, I didnt take into account the politics, and assumed you have the source. And ofcourse the inclination to make a better build of the software. "it's that much low-level stuff needs to be at least looked at and tested even if it's simply recompiled." I guess if it is that low-level you could well be in the position of having to redo it. A lot of code isnt that low level?
From this i get three questions in my head: -Can compilers be improved to automatically use multiple cores and where are the limits of this? -Multiple cores? Why not just treat it multiple computers? -Besides this, is there a solution to this in the form of new programming languages?
True, this is just jobs disapearing because of technology. They should know better, learn from history, this is the same as factory workers trying to destroy machines that could take their jobs. However, I dont think many of the jobs lost here will cause any hunger, as it did in the industrial age. They should fire these guys as best as it is posible, maybe make some new jobs by other people working fewer hours elsewhere, or simply other jobs to be done. It should work that way, too few jobs => work less stupid! Get a hobby!:D ( Ok, the extra peopletime can do some good elsewhere too. And it doesnt always combine well with capitalism. (why i dont like full-blown capitalism) ) BTW what a lowly job, spindoctor pitbull!
Note that the stars arent accelerating aways from eachother, space between them is expanding. Your theory is one similar to the "tired light" idea, and suffers from the same problems: -If light got redshifted by decay somehow, this would also cause impulse changes, blurring the images. (since direction of light changes, also this would happen quite random) -Looking at same sized objects further and further away actually means that eventually the angle of the image increases again. (image becomes larger again.) This cannot be explained with "tired light". It is because that "shell" of space you are looking at had an smaller surface then 4*Pi*R^2 would actually suggest.
There is also a limit how long the universe could have existed in its current state, since the stars would heat it up. For instance if the universe was constant, every line of sight would eventually reach some star, thus the intensity of the sky would be the same as the average surface of a star. (This is one of the earlier arguments against a statonairy universe)
I disagree, Microsoft should pay thousands of people working on GPL-ed projects to make sure all wikipedias reasons saying OOXML is a steaming pile of crap are correct.
Remember that the state of a particle is the wave function. We represent this with a superposition of eigenstates, so each eigenstate needs to have its complex number. Even a particle that has 7 states must be described with 7 complex numbers. A simple system with energy r^2 has an infinite set of eigenstates, so have electrons of a (higher)atom. (but, ofcourse in the higher states are snatched off easily) I must note that i am saying this from my non-relativistic knowledge, and a photon is definitely relativistic. However, i can say more to convince: the article you reffered to talks about how relativistic quantum reduces to electrodynamics with the proper limit. It says how only "Coherent" states are relevant for this limit, so a subset. And we know electrodynamics is not describable with just 6 reals. Ofcourse what you can measure is things like impulse, position, energy states, but those are not the describing values.
"By itself a photon can be described as having, location, and energy." Actually at least in non relativistic quantum, a free particle can be described as a wave function over space, the chances(densities) of having different energies can be determined from that. It could also be described with a wavefunction over impulse. I am sure other descriptions than that are also possible. (many bound particle solutions can be "described" by a integer) I dont know how this works in relativistic quantum, but, since Heisenberg is still valid, it should still be something like this. BTW Remarkably, it has been proven that nature itself "doesnt know a particles position", the condition is really the wave function.
I admit that my comment was overly focussed on the president, but i do believe some people in power out there needed a reason to go to Iraq, and were trying to doctor the public perception. "I mean, why would the Prez believe the friggin director of the CIA. I mean, what the hell does he know about intelligence anyway." Ok i should have said more clearly: Bush didnt believe the director of the CIA, he knew he needed to lie about this, and was happy that people backed him up. (And that if he did believe it, he is incompetetant was just a sideremark) I dont really know exactly the underlying reason to go to iraq, guessing oil, and influence in the region. Maybe he got into this seat exactly for that reason, help from daddy getting him in for a crusady mood. (ok that latter is doubtfull, but i feel i cant rule it out)
Yes, and George bush believed him... right. There was plenty of evidence that the facts were misrepresented. Probably with knowledge of bush himself. And if he didnt know, he was incompetent, he is the president, he shouldnt just believe just anything. Going to war isnt a small decision either..
Ye, we should wait untill nanotechnology proves that organisms are only machines aswel!/joke I know there are ethical concerns, but things like these can be done ethically and with reasonable risks. BTW I mean real nanotechnology! Not the precursor we have now! The small machines need to build themselves for a large part.
If public prosecutors only do exactly what they are rewarded for, they should be fired. They, after all are part of the consiousness of the legal system. Humans cant make a legal system based on only rules, or rewarding systems. You have to use the integerity and respectability of persons themselves. You cant expect a system that is based solely on selfishness to create much "justice". Human beings that only respond on the behaviures that are rewarded are often called sociopaths. In principle, a person that only responds to what it is rewarded to isnt a person at all, but deserves less respect then many animals. (indeed i dont think all animals behave only because of rewarded behaviure, yes, i believe in evolution, but there is lots of noise in it) That the US legal system is (often) based on competition between lawyers may be the cause of the idea that it should all be based on reward systems. (and sometimes used as an excuse) However public prosecutors should damn well prosecute only when they are convinced themselves. Do research on incidents first.. Especially if they know the suspect isnt going to run away. (or it is plain obvious that things arent simple) Another source of the idea that you can do anything with reward systems could be capitalism, but isnt that more a solution to logistics.(which is hardly perfect, but perfect inobtainable) They also should be worrying more about their costumers and workers, not about their shareholders/profit margins. PS with "justice" I mean appropriate actions taken after something went wrong, which result in both significantly lower chances of it happening again, and satisfaction for people around it. The amount of effort in the latter should be minimized. (hate/revenge is irrelevant, but the feelings of people must be dealed with)
"Police and prosecutors don't care what really happened because their job is to arrest and convict - that's what we reward them for. We'd be silly to expect anything different." I bet these people do realise that it is lives what they are playing with. With that in mind it seems that your saying is about equivalent to saying that these people would kill people for some amount of money as reward. Also, we dont reward them, the system does. They damn well know that this is not what they should be doing. You still think it silly to expect something different? That low opinion of people? Or maybe the worst people are attracted to those jobs.
That this happens is absolutely insane... I expected it. American detective/police shows with ostensically decent crime scene often go on a witch hunt in my eyes. They seem to focus on proving some guy did it, rather then keeping their eyes open to other posibilities. Too often i see them digging up enough evidence to convict someone at the end of the programme, while i have in my mind: what if this and this actually happened.
If this is how people think research after what actually happened should be done, how can reality be any better? Also in the series, the people procecuted are right enough to get proper advocates. I probably that in reality the battle in the courts is often between the carreer guy and the get-to-my-retirement guy.
Why not? Our ideas about nudity and sex werent always twisted by our cultural problems you know. The only reason not to do so is that many people cant handle it because of how they grew up.
"I suspect the people who attack science and logic are incapable of understanding the point you just made." Why wouldnt he? Call me naive, but I think he just misspoke. (but no doubt he has got plenty of idiocy in his other ideas)
"But that's beside the point. I submit to you that it's reasonable to say that any climate change could create a "Hell on Earth," because even if the net amount of arable land remained the same, the cost and effort associated with moving all the people and infrastructure around would cause a Hell (excuse the pun) of a lot of discomfort and despair. For example, if there was another ice age where Europe froze but the Sahara turned green, we'd have an entire continent worth of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, and an entire continent worth of cities to rebuild." I was thinking about hot hell, as (i thought) most people asociate it. I think the required work to build the entire new cities can hardly be called hell. These day we can build pretty quick, although the architecture will suck. Also, not like this will happen all at once. I think the sociological/political problems are greater, there may be too little land, and there are already people living there who wont like it. (as we've seen in Israel) These things could pile up ugly, causing problems long after everything is build. I dont think it has to be all that bad if people were reasonable, but they arent. PS I dont actually believe in hell, just talking about what people associate with it.
Slashdot Mirror
... the Iraqi insurgents come up with the 100kW mirror!
"Actually the diameter is more like 250 meters." :). (guess my replies are a bit redundant.)
I know, i was just increasing my size estimate(a factor 50 in mass) to show how ridiculously large the asteroid in the picture was. (the choice of density is rather low too, though depends on type of asteroid)
"However, perhaps it's appropriate that an article about an asteroid called Apophis includes an illustration by someone called Don Davis. (Ok, it's a stretch, I know...)"
I dont get it, but i am sure its unimportant
In that case, a telescope orbiting Jupiter or Mars (prolly the farther away the better) would greatly improve our ability to measure the position of these things. Why no plans to get telescopes there?
The picture is stupid, they say the asteroid is 20-million-tonnes, say it has the (quite low) density of water, 1tonne/m^3, say it weighs actually weighs much more 10^9 tonnes so 10^9 m^3 or a cube with 1 km sides. In the picture the asteroid is way way larger.
whoops, should have checked that, meant http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=221712&cid=179 63924, sorry.
How many Euri will it cost to get, burn and send the cd? I doubt having the server do that cost anywhere near that.. Well, you could pay for the cd.. but then again, you could donate with better results.. How about just letting people donate server-time (as i said here)
WikiMedia may be very limited in use of the data that is Wikipedia, but the value of Wikipedia to the world is tremendous. Especially because of the licence. Indeed, I doubt many people would have participated if the licence really was owned by an entity.
(and, as someone else said, they have the domain name)
Btw why dont they try get server-time donations aswel as money donations. (I suggested here)
I wonder wether they have thought about having people donate server-time rather then money. Maybe a screen-saver/background program combined with a part of wikipedia's (often-served)data can help?
I meant a solution in a way that the compiler can make use of how things are threaded. The implementation of multithreading is exactly that, an implementation in the language, the compiler doesnt use the information well. (ofcourse in principle it could though, i dont think they do now)
other reply about this. (continue there if you wish)
Ok i should clarify my third question, and state that with the second one i meant that in some cases, multithreading is easy. (like in multiple non-interacting programs) With the third question i meant wether there was a language that could take info about how things are threaded, and optimize that way. Also, maybe the syntax/logic of the compiler can spot errors earlier then it would if it were just an library for multithreading. I must note that i am not a very experienced programmer, then again surely enough other slashdotians arent either, so enlighten them a bit.
All, thanks for the replies.
"First issue... who says "most" programs CAN be recompiled?"
"sometimes the key parts are 20 + years old and the source physically lost"
"If it's copyrighted software, there's nobody but the publisher that can legally do that!"
For all these, I didnt take into account the politics, and assumed you have the source. And ofcourse the inclination to make a better build of the software.
"it's that much low-level stuff needs to be at least looked at and tested even if it's simply recompiled."
I guess if it is that low-level you could well be in the position of having to redo it. A lot of code isnt that low level?
From this i get three questions in my head:
-Can compilers be improved to automatically use multiple cores and where are the limits of this?
-Multiple cores? Why not just treat it multiple computers?
-Besides this, is there a solution to this in the form of new programming languages?
True, this is just jobs disapearing because of technology. They should know better, learn from history, this is the same as factory workers trying to destroy machines that could take their jobs. However, I dont think many of the jobs lost here will cause any hunger, as it did in the industrial age. :D
They should fire these guys as best as it is posible, maybe make some new jobs by other people working fewer hours elsewhere, or simply other jobs to be done. It should work that way, too few jobs => work less stupid! Get a hobby!
( Ok, the extra peopletime can do some good elsewhere too. And it doesnt always combine well with capitalism. (why i dont like full-blown capitalism) )
BTW what a lowly job, spindoctor pitbull!
Note that the stars arent accelerating aways from eachother, space between them is expanding.
Your theory is one similar to the "tired light" idea, and suffers from the same problems:
-If light got redshifted by decay somehow, this would also cause impulse changes, blurring the images. (since direction of light changes, also this would happen quite random)
-Looking at same sized objects further and further away actually means that eventually the angle of the image increases again. (image becomes larger again.) This cannot be explained with "tired light". It is because that "shell" of space you are looking at had an smaller surface then 4*Pi*R^2 would actually suggest.
There is also a limit how long the universe could have existed in its current state, since the stars would heat it up. For instance if the universe was constant, every line of sight would eventually reach some star, thus the intensity of the sky would be the same as the average surface of a star. (This is one of the earlier arguments against a statonairy universe)
I disagree, Microsoft should pay thousands of people working on GPL-ed projects to make sure all wikipedias reasons saying OOXML is a steaming pile of crap are correct.
Remember that the state of a particle is the wave function. We represent this with a superposition of eigenstates, so each eigenstate needs to have its complex number. Even a particle that has 7 states must be described with 7 complex numbers. A simple system with energy r^2 has an infinite set of eigenstates, so have electrons of a (higher)atom. (but, ofcourse in the higher states are snatched off easily)
I must note that i am saying this from my non-relativistic knowledge, and a photon is definitely relativistic.
However, i can say more to convince: the article you reffered to talks about how relativistic quantum reduces to electrodynamics with the proper limit. It says how only "Coherent" states are relevant for this limit, so a subset. And we know electrodynamics is not describable with just 6 reals.
Ofcourse what you can measure is things like impulse, position, energy states, but those are not the describing values.
"By itself a photon can be described as having, location, and energy."
Actually at least in non relativistic quantum, a free particle can be described as a wave function over space, the chances(densities) of having different energies can be determined from that. It could also be described with a wavefunction over impulse. I am sure other descriptions than that are also possible. (many bound particle solutions can be "described" by a integer)
I dont know how this works in relativistic quantum, but, since Heisenberg is still valid, it should still be something like this.
BTW Remarkably, it has been proven that nature itself "doesnt know a particles position", the condition is really the wave function.
I admit that my comment was overly focussed on the president, but i do believe some people in power out there needed a reason to go to Iraq, and were trying to doctor the public perception.
"I mean, why would the Prez believe the friggin director of the CIA. I mean, what the hell does he know about intelligence anyway."
Ok i should have said more clearly: Bush didnt believe the director of the CIA, he knew he needed to lie about this, and was happy that people backed him up. (And that if he did believe it, he is incompetetant was just a sideremark) I dont really know exactly the underlying reason to go to iraq, guessing oil, and influence in the region. Maybe he got into this seat exactly for that reason, help from daddy getting him in for a crusady mood. (ok that latter is doubtfull, but i feel i cant rule it out)
Yes, and George bush believed him... right. There was plenty of evidence that the facts were misrepresented. Probably with knowledge of bush himself. And if he didnt know, he was incompetent, he is the president, he shouldnt just believe just anything. Going to war isnt a small decision either..
Ye, we should wait untill nanotechnology proves that organisms are only machines aswel! /joke
I know there are ethical concerns, but things like these can be done ethically and with reasonable risks.
BTW I mean real nanotechnology! Not the precursor we have now! The small machines need to build themselves for a large part.
If public prosecutors only do exactly what they are rewarded for, they should be fired. They, after all are part of the consiousness of the legal system. Humans cant make a legal system based on only rules, or rewarding systems. You have to use the integerity and respectability of persons themselves. You cant expect a system that is based solely on selfishness to create much "justice".
Human beings that only respond on the behaviures that are rewarded are often called sociopaths. In principle, a person that only responds to what it is rewarded to isnt a person at all, but deserves less respect then many animals. (indeed i dont think all animals behave only because of rewarded behaviure, yes, i believe in evolution, but there is lots of noise in it)
That the US legal system is (often) based on competition between lawyers may be the cause of the idea that it should all be based on reward systems. (and sometimes used as an excuse) However public prosecutors should damn well prosecute only when they are convinced themselves. Do research on incidents first.. Especially if they know the suspect isnt going to run away. (or it is plain obvious that things arent simple)
Another source of the idea that you can do anything with reward systems could be capitalism, but isnt that more a solution to logistics.(which is hardly perfect, but perfect inobtainable) They also should be worrying more about their costumers and workers, not about their shareholders/profit margins.
PS with "justice" I mean appropriate actions taken after something went wrong, which result in both significantly lower chances of it happening again, and satisfaction for people around it. The amount of effort in the latter should be minimized. (hate/revenge is irrelevant, but the feelings of people must be dealed with)
"Police and prosecutors don't care what really happened because their job is to arrest and convict - that's what we reward them for. We'd be silly to expect anything different."
I bet these people do realise that it is lives what they are playing with. With that in mind it seems that your saying is about equivalent to saying that these people would kill people for some amount of money as reward. Also, we dont reward them, the system does. They damn well know that this is not what they should be doing. You still think it silly to expect something different? That low opinion of people? Or maybe the worst people are attracted to those jobs.
That this happens is absolutely insane... I expected it. American detective/police shows with ostensically decent crime scene often go on a witch hunt in my eyes. They seem to focus on proving some guy did it, rather then keeping their eyes open to other posibilities. Too often i see them digging up enough evidence to convict someone at the end of the programme, while i have in my mind: what if this and this actually happened. If this is how people think research after what actually happened should be done, how can reality be any better? Also in the series, the people procecuted are right enough to get proper advocates. I probably that in reality the battle in the courts is often between the carreer guy and the get-to-my-retirement guy.
Why not? Our ideas about nudity and sex werent always twisted by our cultural problems you know. The only reason not to do so is that many people cant handle it because of how they grew up.
"I suspect the people who attack science and logic are incapable of understanding the point you just made."
Why wouldnt he? Call me naive, but I think he just misspoke. (but no doubt he has got plenty of idiocy in his other ideas)
"But that's beside the point. I submit to you that it's reasonable to say that any climate change could create a "Hell on Earth," because even if the net amount of arable land remained the same, the cost and effort associated with moving all the people and infrastructure around would cause a Hell (excuse the pun) of a lot of discomfort and despair. For example, if there was another ice age where Europe froze but the Sahara turned green, we'd have an entire continent worth of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, and an entire continent worth of cities to rebuild."
I was thinking about hot hell, as (i thought) most people asociate it. I think the required work to build the entire new cities can hardly be called hell. These day we can build pretty quick, although the architecture will suck. Also, not like this will happen all at once. I think the sociological/political problems are greater, there may be too little land, and there are already people living there who wont like it. (as we've seen in Israel) These things could pile up ugly, causing problems long after everything is build. I dont think it has to be all that bad if people were reasonable, but they arent.
PS I dont actually believe in hell, just talking about what people associate with it.