From the summary, you could be excused for thinking that the article it's talking about is rubbish. You'd be wrong. The subject of the mass density of space is a lot deeper than you might think if you're not a theoretical physicist. The article is actually remarkably good at laying out and discussing the problem. In fact, the subject is a bit like Feynman diagrams themselves: initially they look like simple cartoons (which they are) that can't have any deep meaning ... but they can. Definitely worth a read if you have an interest in, and basic understanding of, the modern ideas regarding particles and fields.

The real puzzle to me is how easily VCs part with scads of money without, apparently, bothering to hire a couple of decent physicists (or mathematicians or security experts, as appropriate, in the case of security snake oil) beforehand. I have been hired in the past to point out the obvious "this can't work", but only when alarm bells have begun to ring -- after VCs had parted with ~$40m. Somehow, it seems that a dynamic CEO, expert in public relations and putting together cool Powerpoint, causes the parts of brains responsible for skepticism to shut down, to the point that spending a tiny fraction of the requested money on a professional independent opinion somehow seems like a silly idea.

Huh? Patent cases are heard by federal courts (usually; there are other venues, such as the US International Trade Commission). Judge Gilstrap is a Federal Judge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

I am frequently amazed at how willing VCs tend to be to provide money while at the same time being unwilling to express skepticism, even to themselves, about the claims of some of the companies they fund.

Some time ago, after a particular VC firm had dumped $40m into a "security" (for which read "snake-oil") company, the company suits happened to make a closed-door presentation which, unknown to them, a handful of people with practical security expertise had been invited to attend. A VC representative was also in attendance, although he did not speak. When we recommended, after the talk, that the listeners have nothing further to do with the company product, the VC representative sought one of us out (it happened to be me) and the end result was that I spent a day at the company facility, towards the end of which I had a short meeting with the VC representative and explained at an intelligent layman's level why the product could never work. The money pipe closed that day. But I remain puzzled as to how $40m could have been dumped into a scheme that was so obviously flawed.
 

Huh? On my "saved" queue I have dozens of movies that Netflix marks "unavailable" and can't actually ship, but using some warped logic the company seems to think that they still carry them. And there are dozens more that I want to put on my queue that Netflix doesn't even pretend to carry. And all of these DVDs are available for purchase on Amazon (and, I suppose, available via torrents).

With each of their mis-steps I get closer and closer to dumping Netflix and going back to buying movies.

The Netflix management never seems to have understood what has made them successful. As soon as they started producing "original content", I thought, "What is this? If they have the money to create a series, then why aren't they spending it enhancing their core business and making more movies available to their subscribers?" I've stopped wondering that, because I now realise that, amazingly, Netflix management simply doesn't get it. I think we are watching, in painful slow-motion, the early stages of what promises to be a long, drawn-out death if they don't come to their senses.

Even most physicists don't understand Feynman's point that QM is called "mechanics" for a reason: it's a set of mechanical rules for getting the right answer. It tells you nothing about how the universe operates behind the scenes so as to produce the same answer as QM. Feynman's little easy-to-understand book on QED should be read by everyone who thinks that QM is more than a tool for performing calculations. (And read Tegmark's book for an example of what happens when an intelligent person reads meaning into QM.)

Regarding the actual article: at first sight, this looks like a great experimental verification of something that no one (as far as I know) doubted; but it's always good to confirm another prediction of QM that appears bizarre to us.

Yes; as you say, in the 2002--2004 timeframe they were great. My experience was that it all started to fall apart when 64-bit machines came along. For a year or more Mandrake's 64-bit repositories were full of broken packages that simply would not install. I kept with them as long as I could, through the change to Mandriva, but nothing seemed to improve very much so I eventually switched the up-and-coming shininess that was *buntu. Which was great for a few years, before their quality control went the same way as Mandrake's had done :-(

Some stores no longer carry parts, and some carry a reduced inventory. But some stores still carry a decent supply of components ans similar small, useful items. We have two Radio Shack stores in the closest city; one is essentially useless and simply directs me to the other store (but I frequently try it anyway, since it's the closer of the two). The other one isn't half bad, and almost always has what I need. I shall certainly miss it if it goes away.

I taught myself X from scratch last year. I didn't find it hard at all. In fact, I found it a whole lot easier than either of the fancy modern GUI toolkits that I looked at first and tried to use to implement the project I was working on.

Out of desperation born of lack of progress over an extended period, I thought I'd take a look at X. And suddenly it became easy to get the interface to behave *exactly* the way I wanted instead in somebody else's idea of what I should want.

And the documentation was complete, correct, and easy to follow. I didn't have to keep asking people for help (often, with no resolution). In a word, both the documentation and the code for X are mature. Which I submit beats bleeding edge every time if you're trying to build something robust.

I've been using ZFS on Linux for about a year. I can summarise my position on the experience with two words: it's magic.

It is still tricky to run one's root system off ZFS (at least on Debian). That, I think, is for those who are brave and have to time to deal with issues that might arise following updates. But for non-root filesystems, ZFS is, as I said, magic. It's fast, reliable, caches intelligently, adaptable to a large variety of mirror/striping/RAID configurations, snapshots with incredible efficiency, and simply works as advertised.

Someone once (before the port to other OSes) said that ZFS was Solaris' "killer app". Having used it in production for a year, I can understand why they said that.

Can someone who has tried this tell me whether two particular bugs that were present throughout the life of Plasma 4 have been fixed (OK, you may not think these are bugs, but I sure do: I can't imagine how they were ever allowed to persist, since to me they seem to violate pretty basic requirements of GUI behaviour):

1. If one has a menu present (for example, by pressing the K-Menu button), does an incoming notification still cause the menu to disappear, so you get the delightfully random experience of clicking on whatever happened to be under the item you were about to click on?

2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)

Putting aside the entire issue of software patents, the legal standards for invalidating a patent are rather high. I have seen many patents which we would all likely agree should be invalidated either for obviousness or because there's prior art; but actually meeting the necessary criteria to prove that conclusively to a judge or jury would have been impossible.

It has evolved this way because of the built-in assumption that the Patent Office does its job correctly, and therefore patents are assumed by courts to be valid and there is a fairly heavy burden imposed to prove otherwise. If the assumption is valid, then this isn't an obviously-bad system; but if it isn't valid, then it quickly becomes an expensive, frustrating situation for defendants.

Yes, I price the e-book versions of my books between $3 and $4 for essentially that reason. I do feel guilty that the various e-book "standards" don't allow for anything remotely resembling decent typesetting, so people who read my books on electronic devices are having a definitely less-than-optimal experience. On the other hand, I go to great lengths to ensure that one doesn't see (as I have seen with e-books from big publishing houses) howlers such as the word "you" presented as "y-" "ou".

I believe that the way e-books *should* have been done is to compile TeX on the fly. That way gorgeous output could have been presented on all devices. Frankly, I wouldn't take e-books seriously at all were it not for the undeniable fact that these days the bulk of my sales occur in that medium. I think my view of e-books is decidedly colored by how poor they have turned out to be (as a reading experience) compared to what they could have been.

If anyone cares, I am: http://www.sff.net/people/N7DR.

Yes, I find that more than half the time I am charged the tax rate for the city in which the post office that serves my address is located; which is about triple the tax rate that actually applies at my address. I put this down to the use of some database somewhere that uses 5-digit ZIP codes instead of 9-digit ones to determine the tax rate.

And the vast majority of the companies that overcharge me in this way simply ignore requests to fix the problem. I vote with my dollars, and tell them that I'm doing so, but none of these companies (i.e., the ones who don't immediately respond and correct the tax on the order) has ever cared enough to fix the problem even after my complaint.

I have to wonder if it's even legal for a company to charge me tax that I shouldn't be charged. What do they do with the money? One assumes they send it to the city in question, but in any case the whole system seems remarkably free of any checks or chances to correct errors.

I've never been a fan of LaTeX, but I use TeX for novels, and have done for about two decades now.