Exactly... until I see them actually in production and tested by Consumer Reports or some other independent body, their claims smell like pure marketing hype to me.
In fact, the name for the company couldn't be more apt: Nikola Tesla's many great inventions were only eclipsed by his tendency to exaggerate his other, less-real inventions (death rays, anti-gravity machines, mind-reading devices, etc.) I wonder if we'll actually see the claims by Tesla Motors born out, or whether this incredible car will remain perpetually in "prototype" mode.
Re:It's the innermost electrons that have the prob
on
Element 118 Created
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You're thinking of electrons as little planet-like objects orbiting the nucleus. Our current best understanding is that they don't follow orbits exactly, so much as they occupy orbitals (volumes of space where you have 90%+ confidence that the electron can be found inside.) The problem with the superlarge nucleii is that for electrons in the innermost shell to avoid absorption, they need to be moving quickly... in the case of elements higher than atomic number 137, faster than the speed of light.)
> it wasn't a lie about a war. Although, it certainly was an overly paranoid reading of the facts
That could be a (hugely generous) way of interpreting the Bush administration's leadup to the war, if it were not for the Downing Street memo.
We know the neo-conservatives wished to finish the job in Iraq for reasons unrelated to terrorism long before the September 11th attacks. We know that the CIA had major doubts about any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whereas the the intelligence unit inside the Department of Defense tended to be much more enthusiastic about playing up whatever intel supported a WMD conclusion, and downplaying intel to the contrary. Oddly enough, the Bush administration gave more credance to the DoD reports than those coming from the CIA, despite the fact that it is the job of the professional spooks at the CIA, not the military, to assess this kind of intelligence. Without the Downing Street memo, a generous interpretation would be that the President was incompetant in choosing to listen to only one set of advisors, and the less qualified ones at that. A more realistic interpretation is that the President already made up his mind to invade before receiving the reports, and he picked and chose those reports which resonated with his plans for action.
The Downing Street memo makes it clear the second interpretation is the more likely of the two. Consider the so-called "smoking gun" paragraph:
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
Now, no doubt the memo was leaked for political purposes by people opposed to Bush. The wording of the memo also makes it clear that the author does not think much of Bush's preparations for war. Nevertheless, short of claiming that the memo is a complete fabrication (which even the Bush administration hasn't stooped to), it is a damning piece of evidence, and makes it very hard to cling to the generously glib interpretation of events.
I think you'll find that most people have no problem with extra security measures, provided they make sense. How the hell does harassing a guy who wrote "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" on his bag in any way help prevent New York from getting turned into a giant mushroom cloud?
It's sad to see people subscribing to the scaremongering "fighting terror justifies everything" line of reasoning.
And if we remove the incentive of a patent and copyright to (hopefully) get rich, innovation and research will come to a halt.
I can just see it now:
Student: Professor! Professor! Breaking news! The patent system has just been scrapped! Professor:looking up from his microscope. Damn... just when I was on the verge of curing cancer, too. Oh well, there's nothing left to do now but throw all that research into the trash. Student: But- but what about the recognition of your peers? The value of helping others? Or plain-old love of what you're doing? Don't those count for anything? Professor:snorts in contempt. Bah... I was only in it for the money.
Re:Remember Vulcan? ( no, not startrek vulcan )
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about "5 mostly-independent pieces of evidence." It seems to me Dark Matter has become a sort of magic bullet for the astrophysics community, assuming whatever properties are needed in order to explain phenomena which would otherwise be problematic from current theory. Instead of saying "we don't know", the trend seems to be "oh, it's got to be dark matter, in yet another weird permutation. That dark matter such is wacky, no?"
No, it's not the spiral structure of the galaxies that is problematic, it's the uniform motion of the stars themselves that is the puzzle. The two types of motion are different.
If I recall my astrophysics correctly, the arms of a spiral galaxy are somewhat akin to a wave phenomenon. The individual stars revolve around the galactic center far more quickly than the arms themselves move, so the stars actually enter, pass through, and leave each arm as they circle the center. The arms arise because the stars tend to loiter there longer than in the spaces between the arms... a result of the gravitational attraction of the other stars congregating temporarily in that arm.
-----
As for the topic at hand, I have to say it really bugs me when science reporters claim that some new evidence "proves" such and such a theory. This isn't pure math, and it isn't theology either; stop hanging on to comfortable notions of being able to "prove" this or that theory as if to end the debate. One of the glories of science is that it is a work in progress, with precious few certainties.
The analogy is a bit off... a whale is obviously not a fish because it is different qualitatively, not just quantitatively. Meanwhile, the difference between Pluto and other planets in our solar system is more a matter of quantity, not quality.
The analogy would be more apt if you were to say: a star/moon/barbeque is to a planet as a whale is to a fish. There are very significant qualities that make a star different from a planet. Poor little Pluto is different only in that it is somewhat smallish, and its orbit is a bit lopsided.
---
Anyways, I can't see how including Pluto in the definition of planet would really change anything in the science of astronomy. The size cutoff is somewhat arbitrary, so there's no harm in giving in to a little romantic nostalgia and stretching the definition a little to include tiny little Pluto.
This will surely get me labelled as a grammar nazi, but for the love of God don't use "begs the question" as a substitute for "raises the question"! Begs the question means something completely different. There are many good substitutes for the phrase "raises the question", but there are few substitutes for "begs the question"... using it incorrectly needlessly narrows the conceptual lexicon.
Indeed... not to mention the fact that a guy taking his eyes off the road to reach down at least knows he isn't paying attention to the road, and will probably have the urge to look back up if his attention is diverted too long. A person with a HUD, on the other hand, could get lulled into a false sense that what he is doing is safe.
This "improvement" is idiotic. The thing which most limits the quality of a VoIP call is delay and jitter, NOT the sampling rate. Guaranteeing the quality of a telephone conversation over the internet is tricky because the internet was originally designed for best-effort packet delivery, with no guarantees on packet delay, sequence, or even (at the network layer) delivery.
If anything, this feature reduces end-to-end quality by doubling the amount of data being sent down the pipe, as you'd need to buffer more data at the same transmission speed to correct for jitter. Brillant!
Maybe my understanding of IQ is a little outdated, but I thought an IQ of 100 was defined to be the midpoint, no matter how smart or dumb the overall population was. That means (depending on how you define "midpoint") about half the population in each generation would be stopped from breeding. Assuming the upper half doesn't start breeding at double their replacement rate, this sounds like a recipe for extinction to me.
OK, so maybe I'm being needlessly anal over some trivial point. This is slashdot, after all...
I strongly agree with your sentiment that there are times when great risks should be taken to achieve great rewards. However, when it comes to the STS, I have two objections:
1) The rewards from the shuttle program aren't particularly great. We live in an age of computers and robotics, so it seems to me that developing automated systems to do basic things like satellite repairs would be a logical use for the dollars currently used to send humans on routine missions. Apollo at least had romance and glory to justify the risks to human life... the same cannot be said of STS.
2) The risks are insufficiently addressed. Major portions of the design of the shuttle are deeply flawed, and the current approach is to apply patches rather than fundamentally redesign the vehicle. It isn't possible to draw the risk down to zero, but there is a different between courage and carelessness when it comes to risk.
Hayden is an important man. Important men (when intelligent enough) are constantly worried about how history sees them after they die.
By this impeccable logic, I suppose all men of high rank can be expected to be scrupulously honest at all times.
Now that we've got that settled, I can go back to channel surfing between reruns of Clinton's impeachment hearings and Bush's State of the Union address. In POTUS we trust.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't usually post "bravo, well said" posts, but damn...
Thank you for saying what I wanted to say, only better.
Exactly... until I see them actually in production and tested by Consumer Reports or some other independent body, their claims smell like pure marketing hype to me.
In fact, the name for the company couldn't be more apt: Nikola Tesla's many great inventions were only eclipsed by his tendency to exaggerate his other, less-real inventions (death rays, anti-gravity machines, mind-reading devices, etc.) I wonder if we'll actually see the claims by Tesla Motors born out, or whether this incredible car will remain perpetually in "prototype" mode.
You're thinking of electrons as little planet-like objects orbiting the nucleus. Our current best understanding is that they don't follow orbits exactly, so much as they occupy orbitals (volumes of space where you have 90%+ confidence that the electron can be found inside.) The problem with the superlarge nucleii is that for electrons in the innermost shell to avoid absorption, they need to be moving quickly... in the case of elements higher than atomic number 137, faster than the speed of light.)
I'll bite too...
> it wasn't a lie about a war. Although, it certainly was an overly paranoid reading of the facts
That could be a (hugely generous) way of interpreting the Bush administration's leadup to the war, if it were not for the Downing Street memo.
We know the neo-conservatives wished to finish the job in Iraq for reasons unrelated to terrorism long before the September 11th attacks. We know that the CIA had major doubts about any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whereas the the intelligence unit inside the Department of Defense tended to be much more enthusiastic about playing up whatever intel supported a WMD conclusion, and downplaying intel to the contrary. Oddly enough, the Bush administration gave more credance to the DoD reports than those coming from the CIA, despite the fact that it is the job of the professional spooks at the CIA, not the military, to assess this kind of intelligence. Without the Downing Street memo, a generous interpretation would be that the President was incompetant in choosing to listen to only one set of advisors, and the less qualified ones at that. A more realistic interpretation is that the President already made up his mind to invade before receiving the reports, and he picked and chose those reports which resonated with his plans for action.
The Downing Street memo makes it clear the second interpretation is the more likely of the two. Consider the so-called "smoking gun" paragraph:
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
Now, no doubt the memo was leaked for political purposes by people opposed to Bush. The wording of the memo also makes it clear that the author does not think much of Bush's preparations for war. Nevertheless, short of claiming that the memo is a complete fabrication (which even the Bush administration hasn't stooped to), it is a damning piece of evidence, and makes it very hard to cling to the generously glib interpretation of events.
I think you'll find that most people have no problem with extra security measures, provided they make sense. How the hell does harassing a guy who wrote "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" on his bag in any way help prevent New York from getting turned into a giant mushroom cloud?
It's sad to see people subscribing to the scaremongering "fighting terror justifies everything" line of reasoning.
And if we remove the incentive of a patent and copyright to (hopefully) get rich, innovation and research will come to a halt.
I can just see it now:
Student: Professor! Professor! Breaking news! The patent system has just been scrapped!
Professor: looking up from his microscope. Damn... just when I was on the verge of curing cancer, too. Oh well, there's nothing left to do now but throw all that research into the trash.
Student: But- but what about the recognition of your peers? The value of helping others? Or plain-old love of what you're doing? Don't those count for anything?
Professor: snorts in contempt. Bah... I was only in it for the money.
I don't know about "5 mostly-independent pieces of evidence." It seems to me Dark Matter has become a sort of magic bullet for the astrophysics community, assuming whatever properties are needed in order to explain phenomena which would otherwise be problematic from current theory. Instead of saying "we don't know", the trend seems to be "oh, it's got to be dark matter, in yet another weird permutation. That dark matter such is wacky, no?"
No, it's not the spiral structure of the galaxies that is problematic, it's the uniform motion of the stars themselves that is the puzzle. The two types of motion are different.
If I recall my astrophysics correctly, the arms of a spiral galaxy are somewhat akin to a wave phenomenon. The individual stars revolve around the galactic center far more quickly than the arms themselves move, so the stars actually enter, pass through, and leave each arm as they circle the center. The arms arise because the stars tend to loiter there longer than in the spaces between the arms... a result of the gravitational attraction of the other stars congregating temporarily in that arm.
-----
As for the topic at hand, I have to say it really bugs me when science reporters claim that some new evidence "proves" such and such a theory. This isn't pure math, and it isn't theology either; stop hanging on to comfortable notions of being able to "prove" this or that theory as if to end the debate. One of the glories of science is that it is a work in progress, with precious few certainties.
I know exactly how you feel, man. If only it were...
The analogy is a bit off... a whale is obviously not a fish because it is different qualitatively, not just quantitatively. Meanwhile, the difference between Pluto and other planets in our solar system is more a matter of quantity, not quality.
The analogy would be more apt if you were to say: a star/moon/barbeque is to a planet as a whale is to a fish. There are very significant qualities that make a star different from a planet. Poor little Pluto is different only in that it is somewhat smallish, and its orbit is a bit lopsided.
---
Anyways, I can't see how including Pluto in the definition of planet would really change anything in the science of astronomy. The size cutoff is somewhat arbitrary, so there's no harm in giving in to a little romantic nostalgia and stretching the definition a little to include tiny little Pluto.
This will surely get me labelled as a grammar nazi, but for the love of God don't use "begs the question" as a substitute for "raises the question"! Begs the question means something completely different. There are many good substitutes for the phrase "raises the question", but there are few substitutes for "begs the question"... using it incorrectly needlessly narrows the conceptual lexicon.
1. Go to grocery store.
;)
2. Pick food off shelf.
3. Pay.
4. ???
5. Eat.
From step 4, I take it you're not the one who does the cooking in your house?
What an awful person you are, having fun at the expense of Alzheimer's patients. Consider youself lucky they so easily forgive and forget.
http://www.bash.org/?4281
I for one would pay a great deal for such an invention.
16 kHz should be enough for anyone ;)
Indeed... not to mention the fact that a guy taking his eyes off the road to reach down at least knows he isn't paying attention to the road, and will probably have the urge to look back up if his attention is diverted too long. A person with a HUD, on the other hand, could get lulled into a false sense that what he is doing is safe.
This "improvement" is idiotic. The thing which most limits the quality of a VoIP call is delay and jitter, NOT the sampling rate. Guaranteeing the quality of a telephone conversation over the internet is tricky because the internet was originally designed for best-effort packet delivery, with no guarantees on packet delay, sequence, or even (at the network layer) delivery.
If anything, this feature reduces end-to-end quality by doubling the amount of data being sent down the pipe, as you'd need to buffer more data at the same transmission speed to correct for jitter. Brillant!
In Soviet Russia, electrical bacterium overlords welcome you!
I suppose airlines might attract customers to either ornithopter flights by offering a "Big Dipper" discount...
Maybe my understanding of IQ is a little outdated, but I thought an IQ of 100 was defined to be the midpoint, no matter how smart or dumb the overall population was. That means (depending on how you define "midpoint") about half the population in each generation would be stopped from breeding. Assuming the upper half doesn't start breeding at double their replacement rate, this sounds like a recipe for extinction to me.
OK, so maybe I'm being needlessly anal over some trivial point. This is slashdot, after all...
You're welcome.
No, he's much cooler than that...
He whistles into the phone line. Like all Real Men who don't need modems.
I strongly agree with your sentiment that there are times when great risks should be taken to achieve great rewards. However, when it comes to the STS, I have two objections:
1) The rewards from the shuttle program aren't particularly great. We live in an age of computers and robotics, so it seems to me that developing automated systems to do basic things like satellite repairs would be a logical use for the dollars currently used to send humans on routine missions. Apollo at least had romance and glory to justify the risks to human life... the same cannot be said of STS.
2) The risks are insufficiently addressed. Major portions of the design of the shuttle are deeply flawed, and the current approach is to apply patches rather than fundamentally redesign the vehicle. It isn't possible to draw the risk down to zero, but there is a different between courage and carelessness when it comes to risk.
No, it calls home like a good little boy.
Hayden is an important man. Important men (when intelligent enough) are constantly worried about how history sees them after they die.
By this impeccable logic, I suppose all men of high rank can be expected to be scrupulously honest at all times.
Now that we've got that settled, I can go back to channel surfing between reruns of Clinton's impeachment hearings and Bush's State of the Union address. In POTUS we trust.
...you do not talk about fight-like-a-girl club. For obvious reasons.