You wouldn't guess from the summary that the article title is "Going up! Cosmic elevator could reach space on a cable made of diamonds".
Breaking news: Slashdot submission headline less hyperbolic than TFA's headline.
In other news, Satan cuts ribbon to celebrate the opening of a new ski resort. Film at 11.
Headline seems a little misleading
That's science "journalism" for you.
since when does the govt issue virus alerts?
In Norway we have something called "Datatilsynet". It's not private. It can't be private.
Are you giving away your freedom and privacy to private entities?
Presumably by "it's not private" you mean "it's not a private entity, it's a public entity" (in an article discussing privacy, the term "private" in the sense of the private sector of the economy should be used with care, to avoid confusion; perhaps Norwegian has separate words for "not part of the public sector" and "not to be made available to the public", but "private", in English, can mean both).
For those curious about Datatilsynet, here's their English-language Website.
The Civil War was not about the oppression of slaves (contrary to popular belief). It was about the crushing of dissent.
I never said what the Civil War was about. I was merely responding to what appeared to be a complaint about the South's way of life having been destroyed; if that's what they were referring to, much of that way of life should have been destroyed, so the destruction of that way of life wasn't a bug, it was a feature.
Sadly, although the 13th Amendment to the US constitution finally added one more freedom that the Constitution defended, the "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" clause left a rather large loophole through which several states snuck (not that the North was a land of rainbows, magic ponies, and racial equality).
(And not that the Southern states were paragons of freedom even for white people, especially white people who wanted to teach slaves to read and write or didn't particularly want to participate in patrols hunting down runaway slaves.)
Vienna has two N's, and Germany's capital is actually a very decent place to hide from the NSA in the wake of the concern over spying on Merkel.
So you're wrong but you feel right, that's a false relief.
And the Soviet Union disappeared a while ago, so burni2's "during the cold war" argument is a bit silly at this point in any case.
No you don't. You just don't realize that the people who fled here in the 17th century to avoid the oppressive regime in England created a whole new oppressive regime for the indigenous people. And it was so rampant into the 18th century that they wrote an entire constitution (that didn't apply to said indigenous people, or the slaves that were imported) to try and protect it. Then in the 19th century, half the country tried to repress the other half - destroying their entire way of life.
If you're referring to the Civil War, the way of life that was destroyed was based on, err, umm, the oppression of slaves, so destroying that way of life was a good thing.
And we can't forget McCarthysim - oooh, that was a really good one, followed by the Hoover FBI.
Hoover did that sort of thing well before he was head of the FBI; see, for example, the Palmer Raids.
If you compile the same program in a high level language for a complex processor and a simple processor, they'll produce the same result. Each operation on the complex processor may correspond to several instructions on the simple processor, but ARM's bet with big.LITTLE is that reduced power consumption in a simple processor's instruction decoder makes up for that difference.
For big.LITTLE, the difference between the instruction decoders isn't an issue of different instruction sets; to quote their big.LITTLE Processing with ARM Cortex-A15 & Cortex-A7 white paper:
The central tenet of big.LITTLE is that the processors are architecturally identical. Both Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 implement the full ARM v7A architecture including Virtualization and Large Physical Address Extensions. Accordingly all instructions will execute in an architecturally consistent way on both Cortex- A15 and Cortex-A7, albeit with different performances.
so each instruction on the complex processor would correspond to the exact same instruction on the simpler processor.
As that paper says, "It is in the micro-architectures that the differences between Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 become clear."
But if we are indeed simply creatures computer generated in some sort of matrix then the chunks of code that create our reality could be inserted in the program at any time, or several times after being withdrawn several times. So a universe that exists in code would not have to have linear events and cause and effect that are locked to a clock.
A universe that exists in code would not have to have cause and effect at all within the universe; thinks could happen as a result of the whim of the programmer, who is outside the universe.
And that has nothing to do with relativity, in any case, so it's not a defense of the argument that, somehow, relativity frees us from the notion of cause and effect.
If God is efficient then what better way than to create the universe as an illusion with computer code at its base?
If your God knows a more efficient way that you don't know, there would be a better way. Don't assume that your intuition about efficiency necessary corresponds to reality - or, for that matter, that your God is efficient.
It would be infinitely more efficient with a single God.
Nothing obliges the universe to be efficient.
Seventeen would put us back to square one, who created the first of the seventeen?
They have always and will always exist. They were not created.
A single God, has always, and will always exist.
Lenin zhil, Lenin zhiv, Lenin budjet zhit!
There is no other solution or explanation.
Nope, plenty. Maybe there were 21 gods on the committee, for example.
"As long as there's no faster-than-light travel, "X happens before Y" is an invariant - it's true in all reference frames. "
This is completely wrong
The person to whom I was replying was talking about causality, so I was only thinking about events separated by a timelike interval; for those, "X happens before Y" is an invariant.
Yes, for event separated by a spacelike interval, the time order of events can be different in different frames, but there can't be a causal connection between those events, so, no, special relativity doesn't make causality go away. I should've been in less of a hurry and indicated that the invariance of time order applies only to events for which there could be a causal connection.
As long as there's no faster-than-light travel, "X happens before Y" is an invariant - it's true in all reference frames.
No. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/... and for the longer version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... In these examples, the doors either close at the same time for the observer stationary with respect to the barn, or at different times for the observer running with the pole.
OK, sorry, should have said ""X doesn't happen after Y" is an invariant" (there don't exist reference frames such that X happens before Y in one frame and X happens after Y in another frame).
something from nothing, or at least the physical from the non-physical. Lets all just admit that there is a single Holy God, who created the physical universe as we know it. He has always, and will always exist in spirit (non physical). For reasons unknowable to us He decided to create the physical universe - logically there is no other possibility.
How about "A committee of seventeen gods, all of whom have always and will always exist in physical form, got together and, for reasons unknowable to us, decided to create the physical universe."?
Yes.
Sadly, "Mathematical Proof That The Laws Of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, As Currently Understood, Allow A Vacuum Bubble To Expand To The Point That It Becomes The Universe" would probably not fit well in the title bar of a Web browser window and require word wrapping in the head of the page, not to mention attracting far fewer clicks, so they didn't choose that as the title, they chose something less accurate but shorter and with more "click me!" zing.
Yup, I kinda wish someone would come up with a mathematical proof for geocentrism just to have something to have an FYI for the laity, so people don't go off the deep end over stuff like this.
Well, the frame of reference of the Earth is an inertial reference frame, and, in that frame, the Earth doesn't move, everything else moves, so, in that sense, a geocentric solar system, a heliocentric solar system, and a "center of mass of the solar system"-centric solar system are all just a mathematical transformation away from each other, so, if "the Earth doesn't move" counts as "geocentrism", that should take care of it.
"The Earth doesn't move, and everything orbits around it in simple circles or ellipses", however, is another matter. That's not going to happen with Newtonian mechanics or Einsteinian mechanics; Earth just doesn't have enough mass to put the center of mass of the sola system anywhere near its center.
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry
