Furrfu!

> Government builds capital on swamp ...

It's not, actually.

I suppose the confusion arises because of G. Washington's investments in trying to drain the Great Dismal Swamp, but this on the Virginia-NC border, not the site of Washington DC.

> No one fucking cares, I know this because ... its going away and no one is saying loudly 'we can import your google reader feeds, move to us!!!!!'.

Actually, that's exactly what feedly was saying on their home page last night. They seem to have a good feature set, and run on all the platforms I care about, but their servers buckled under the load yesterday, so maybe not.

So for those wondering how this came up all of a sudden, my guess is that it has to do with the background for this "Table Titans" page, which was (apparently) riffing on a twitter exchange between Rob Donoghue and Logan Bonner.

I don't do the twitter myself, and I'm not affiliated with Table Titans or PVP.

However, unlike you ignorant whippersnappers, I do keep up with the geekly webcomics. You may vacate my lawn at your convenience.

As far as I can tell from the article, the basis of the complaint is that vendors object to the fact that searching on their brand name or model name brings up stuff that's not theirs, and they believe that having these search results show up confuses consumers about who made the products in the search result.

So, if this is the case, then it's like, I go into a physical store, and say to the salesman, "I would like to buy an Apple laptop computer," and the salesman produces a computer, and says "Here is an Inspiron laptop computer, it has many wonderful features." The salesman neglects to mention that the Inspiron is an alternative to, rather than an example of, an Apple computer. The accusation is that the salesman is trading on Apple's good name to sell non-Apple merchandise.

It's similar to when people complain about sponsored search results not being easily distinguished from non-sponsored results.

There are several solutions to your problem.

One is to disallow password authentication via SSH. Then you can have weak passwords locally on the machine, and use public key authentication for remote access.

A second one is to only allow remote access to a special account with a long password, and then, when logging in remotely, su to the main account with the short password. This is a bit brittle, but would work.

A third is to re-examine how you're using your system -- you probably don't actually need to supply passwords all the time. There are other distros besides Ubuntu, and, contrary to what you might have heard, logging in as root to do system maintenance is both reasonable and allowed.

Having negative temperatures be "higher" than positive ones actually makes a lot of thermodynamic sense. For one thing, it lets you preserve the notion that heat naturally flows from hotter things to colder things.

Formally speaking, it's more natural to think in terms of the inverse of temperature, 1/T, sometimes called beta. In the limit of very large positive beta, that's nearly absolute zero, and is the low-energy end of the spectrum. A beta of zero is full disorder. Negative beta corresponds to high energy systems that nevertheless have some order, so that the concept of temperature can be (formally) defined.

It confounds your (well, my) intuition, because "ordinary" systems generally obey the rule that the more energy they have, the greater the number of states the system can be in, but that's not an actual law of physics, it's just the usual case.

It's actually not quantum mechanical, at least not explicitly, but it requires that the system in question have an ordered state that is at a high-energy bound.

A classical system that does this is an array of magnetic dipoles in a magnetic field. When all the dipoles are aligned against the field, the system is fully ordered, and is in its highest-energy state. If you look at deviations from this state, what you find is that all of them increase the entropy (because the state is fully ordered), and decrease the energy (because the state is an upper bound for energy), which means that the ratio of delta-E over delta-S, or dE/dS, is negative. Thermodynamically speaking (again, classically), dE/dS is (one definition of) the temperature T.

It's hard to tell if this is secretly really a quantum effect -- my example uses magnetic dipoles, which are arguably a quantum thing, either because of spin or because electronic orbitals that don't collapse because they're quantum states. But you don't need quantum mechanics in principle -- what you need is a low-entropy, high-energy state of the system with nearby states that have more entropy and less energy.

I can't think of a fully classical example that does this, but someone clever might be able to.

I actually got this negative-temperature question on my Ph.D. qualifying oral exam, and I totally kicked its ass.

So there is a trope in the engineering world that the safest reactors are the ones that are confined to paper studies, or, to put it more timely, to PowerPoint slides.

It's true that the LFTR reactors don't have the same failure modes as the pressurized light-water reactors, but they still have the same basic issue, namely that there is a very large amount of power-generating capacity in a relatively small volume. Even pebble-bed reactors, similarly touted as "intrinsically safe" during their design phase, have had a radiation-release accident -- scroll down to "Criticisms of the design" on that Wikipedia page. The lesson (which I learned from Charles Perrow and Fukushima) is that complex systems with high power densities are intrinsically hazardous, because unexpected interactions (which arise from the complexity) tend to be highly destructive (because of the power density). LFTRs are less complex, and so less dangerous, than PLWRs, and that's good, but it doesn't make them safe.

The stupid cliche you hear over and over again is true -- safety is a process. You can design reactors so that the safety process is easier to implement, but what actually makes things safe is conservative management schemes that retain the redundancy and margin for error that the process demands, and not cutting them out because of the money, or, worse, because of complacency induced by faith in the design.

There's another industrial safety joke, particularly applicable to complex systems -- accident analysis consists of filling in X and Y in the phrase, "Nobody imagined X could happen whlie Y was true."

My experience with my Nexus 7 is that getting an Android tablet from Google means you get updates regularly. My Nexus 7 shipped with 4.0.4, and is now up to 4.2.1, in under a year. I expect the Google phones are similar.

Same way I read everything, Pinky.

> When will candidates who are actually qualified to represent science ... be the representatives of science with regard to political decision-making?

You know that Steven Chu is secretary of energy, right? And that the department of energy has a Basic Energy Sciences division which gets a lot of federal science money?

And wasn't there a slashdot story about a physicist-turned-congressman lately?

I mean, yes, I'd like it if it happened more often, and I'm not defending Lamar Smith's qualifications, but it's childish and petty to pretend that it _never_ happens.

An "x86 app" is an app that someone has compiled for x86 and only given you the binary.

Open-source apps are not generally architecture specific. If you have source code and development tools, you can build it on whatever you like, and ARM is pretty mature in this regard. Several Linux distros have ARM ports already, including Debian and Arch, and probably Fedora, and there's a FreeBSD ARM project, also, if you're allergic to the GPL.

And there is Android, for which the OS is natively ARM, even if the app-land is Java.

This ability to mix and match software and hardware in ways not anticipated by the creators of the software or the hardware is exactly why open source is awesome.

Conjecture on my part, but when you pay for an account, you give them some information, so that they can get their money. To a non-infringing free downloader, the cap is an inconvenience, and some fraction of them will be willing to pay to make it go away. To a copyright-infringing free downloader, paying to remove the cap requires them to identify, and possibly incriminate, themselves, so it's more of an obstacle.

This explanation is incomplete, of course, since presumably the uploader is also on the hook for copyright violation, and you have to register an account to upload anything (I think), but there are few uploaders and many downloaders, so the explanation above could still work on average.
 

It actually sort of already works in "Linux", since there's a working Netflix app for Android.

I've never done it, but presumably this means that you can run it on your Linux desktop by running an Android device emulator with the Netflix app.