The problem is that what a quantum physicist refers to as a "wave function" does not directly relate to the EM waves themselves. What's being referred to is that the specific properties of a particle (location, momentum, time, etc) is not deterministic, but rather probabilistic. And when you plot this function, the result looks remarkably "wave-like" in that the probabilities are not continuous, but rather they have highs and lows, or peaks and troughs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Enter Heisenburg and his "uncertainty principle." it holds true that you cannot know all properties of a particle until you measure them, but until you measure them ALL possible states are not only possible... but in fact the particle is *actually* in all possible states at the same time. It's only when you measure it, does the particle "choose" where it wants to be. This is called "collapsing" the wave function - of all the possibilities that it can be / is, it suddenly resolves to only one of those possibilities.

So to answer the question: it has nothing whatsoever to do with radio.

Where things get even more interesting, is that two particles can have a causal relationship in their states - that is, while they might both have wave functions, when once of the pair resolves where it is, the other of the pair resolves itself as well to match it... even though no communication occurs between them. the second particle might never have been measured, and yet it's wave function still collapses when you measure the first particle. This is known as "quantum entanglement," or what Einstein famously referred to as "spooky action at a distance" because it happens faster then "c".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I haven't read TFA, but I have to believe they're somehow making use of this phenomenon.

weylin

And... I am not a physicist, but my college roommate now holds a PhD in the field, my dad was an astronomer, and I'm a devoted viewer of PBS's "spacetime" youtube series. So I'm a "lay" physicist.
https://www.youtube.com/channe...

This sounds an awful lot like a Bayesian Trap, also called a Base Rate Bias. See here for a decent explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

weylin

Funny, that sounds an aweful lot like corporate America. I wish "humor" tags would be apropos here, but no....
Weylin

Interestingly: Christianity was 1000-1500 years old at the time. And Islam is about that old now.

Incandescent bulbs are hot from heat, not IR. There's a lot of IR, as well, which may make this kind of coating worthwhile; but, the heat will still radiate.

The only problem with this is that there is NOONE in the US that Apple can go to for manufacturing.

Apple was, for a long time, a die-hard "Made in the US" organization. Eventually, though, they got to the point where American Manufacturing was just completely unable to manufacture their products. And it's not just the individual plants - it's the entire manufacturing chain, from mining to final product assembly. Obama even asked Steve Jobs what Apple needed to manufacture the iPhone in the US. His reply? To paraphrase: "it can't be done."

This seems to be a good writeup:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

Weylin

You're missing the point.

Richard Stallman *****HATED***** copyright. Hated it with a passion. He found the very concept repugnant. So, he wrote the GPL to essentially say "do whatever you want with this, just don't say you invented it from scratch and don't prevent anyone else from doing the same." The GPL is essentially about removing copyright restrictions, and preventing someone else from re-implementing them back onto the same body of work.

So, while copyright law does in fact make the GPL enforceable, the whole pint of the GPL is to use copyright law to remove copyright. Hence why it's often called copyleft - compared to a normal copyright, it's kinda the logical opposite.

And if we're getting into poop-flinging on "logic 101" I recommend studying what logic actually is. Formal Logic; Informal Logic (aka Natural Language Logic); Symbolic Logic; Mathematical Logic... there's several different types of "logic." This discussion revolved primarily around the informal variety, which your parent post used correctly.

Weylin

Like this, where the materials used were the wrong ones and caused even survivors to go through difficult tragedies.
weylin

I remember playing around with my dad's 10MB MFM on the Wang PC-clone (80386 at 20MHz and a Turbo button that would take it to 25MHz) that he borrowed from work in '85 when I was 7 (he worked at Wang as a computer imaging scientist and engineer). It was a half-height drive (which for those who don't know means it only took up a single 5" slot) and could store oh-so-much more than I could throw at it at the time.

He also brought home an 85MB MFM full-height drive (two 5" bays) for me to play with to see if I could get it to work with that same computer. After struggling for a week he brought me a DIP and said "here, try swapping this with the one that's installed" (it was an experimental PROM BIOS chip, though I didn't realize it at the time). Worked fine after that.

Not quite old enough to remember the FM drives. The IDEs were a god-send; the MFM's ISA expansion cards were massive (>12" long?), and a pain to deal with (all those jumpers -shudder-).

Weylin

Assuming *at most* that the 20GB tracks are on the outside of the 3.5" drive, I would say that makes - 3.5"? I'm not certain you would necessarily want to advertise that....

What you say is true for power-users, but an average user has neither the requisite understanding, nor desire, nor availability to do the manual labor necessary.

My wife doesn't know the first thing about auto-updates beyond asking me "hey I'm getting this pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, do you know why I'm getting it?" And I just don't have the time to do it on her laptop regularly. I don't auto-update everything on her laptop and periodically I'll update her software (about every three or fours months, like I did for 4 hours yesterday), but for some things it's a necessity in order to get the bona fide security patches she actually needs in a timely manner.

Weylin

The problem with having everyone use only a single version is that while known-problems would get patched, unknown-problems would bite the ENTIRE network and take it down again all at once. Diversity has its downsides, but a slight amount is a good way to prevent that.
Weylin

Midshipmen majoring in Computer Science at the US Naval Academy (my major and alma mater, class of '00) are indeed cognizant of Admiral Hopper, though I don't think there's anything specifically that teaches about her contributions. Part of this (and here I start to hypothesize) is the relative age - ADM Hopper's contributions, though extremely important and noteworthy, are relatively recent, in comparison to the rest of what goes on at USNA - the goal is, after all, to provide highly technically-trained graduates to drive ships, not go on to academic careers. Much of the infrastructure and heritage stems from the people and events of the Revolutionary War (aka "War for American Independence") through World War II, heavily favoring the mid- to late-1800's. Operational topics before and after that (and during, to give meaning and context to the heritage) are taught in classroom settings. But though ADM Hopper's contributions to the field of computer science are important, at best it's the contributions that are taught (not the name), and definitely not in an operational context (she spent her entire career as a reservist and rarely was operational).

Weylin