Re: Black magic
Still makes no sense.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
I don't think black hole shenanigans are sufficient for this kind of action.
While supernovas can kick charge particles, in particular iron nuclei to considerable cosmic-ray energies over long distances of plasma surfing, the neutrino cannot be gripped by electromagnetic forces.
Once created, it's off.
And neutrino spectra from supernovae stay safely below 90 MeV AFAIK.
It is also about 2 orders or magnitude more than can be achieved at the LHC collision point once it reopens.
We observed 28 neutrino candidate events (two previously reported), substantially more than the Formula expected from atmospheric backgrounds, and ranging in energy from 30 to 1200 TeV. With the current level of statistics, we did not observe significant clustering of these events in time or space, preventing the identification of their sources at this time.
Yep, that's 0.0002 Joule. In a neutrino. What the hell?
My tax money at work! More like this!
The ability to trace rolled-out modules to clearly specified requirements (known as "traceability" since the early 80s or so) really never caught on, right? Well, if you don't have one, you can at least plausibly deny everything. "Our Software Assurance is shit, honest m'lord".
I wonder WHAT ELSE is in that gaming software.
Embraced, extinguished, extortioned, upgraded, unsecuritized, left to flap in the wind, innvationunbotherized incompatibilitized, opendocumentfomartized, walled gardened, apiundocumentized, apisurrepetitiouslychangerized, notuspportized, ballmered, fudded, EULAed, intellectually propertized, linuxcommunisted.
The death of Microsoft cannot come soon enough, and I do hope it is a horrid, messy one.
Gettysburg Adress: Still Balderdash after 150 Years
James Bovard, November 19, 2013
I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals.
The fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks.
Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”
The main lesson from the Gettysburg address is – the more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln’s rhetoric cannot be judged apart from the actions he authorized to enforce his “ideals”:
In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” President Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.
On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] — men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”
On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman lived up to his boast — and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.
General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops “make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.” The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.
Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. His abuses set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.
It somehow reminds me of Connection Machine's "active memory" idea. I think. Regular expression processing in massively parallel hardware? Time for reading!
"Automata processor cuts through NP-hard problems like they're butter"
Just No.
Going overboard with headlines much, El Reg?
What next? Free energy found by combining lifters with homeopathy?
"Planted Motif" problems are NP-complete only as I read on Jimbo's big bag of trivia (NP-hardness may well mean that the problems is way, way harder). Even Micron's new approach at SIMD processing is not going to crack large NP-complete problems significantly faster - speedup is linear, but the cost still increases exponentially with the problem size, so no joy.
And why do I have to go and google for Micron's documentation.
It's time that El Reg mirrored the appropriate image for this article onto its site.
Apparently there is some confusion about how multicore is in competition with GPGPU processor. Newsflash: They are complementary. So cramming more Intel CPUs in there is good, as long as you can afford the gas turbine to power them and the Freon recirculator remove the waste heat, but this wont cause the GPGPUs to be dropped on the floor.
Still waiting for NVidia or AMD to attached ARM cores to their boards, so that the motherboard becomes just a dispatcher.
1) It's "premise"
2) It's not the end of Moore, but of his observation
3) What Moore observes is clear and has nothing to do with "advances in size/power/energe/storage/connectivity/bandwidth/price" wishy-washyness: " the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years" (and the price of the end product will be the same)
4) THOSE TIMES ARE OVER. The economic vagaries of going to XUV already say as much.
5) Deal with it.
> but we have long since moved on from the single notion of cramming more transistors on a lump of sand.
LOLNO. Still waiting to run Windows properly on multicore.
but in the end a modicum of sanity won through and funding was found
Is this code for "they stopped sulking like enormous gay elephants throwing toys out of massive prams, sucked it down and went back to their hobbies"?
DON'T tell me all the bills hadn't been through in September already. That's how the military did it.
Btw, how are the Zumblatt DELUXE FAILVESSEL and the Gerald Ford DEATHTRAP/USELESS AS THE BISMARCK CARRIER SERIES coming? Can we please transfer the money to space exploration?
The US is a permafailtrain of formaldehyde-laden FEMA trailers full of bad decision making and of non-decision making by a bunch of well-moneyed bipartisan controlfreaks.
NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration
"Any hiccups in funding for plutonium-238 production could put planetary science into a tailspin and delay, strip down, or smother nuclear-powered missions. The outlook among scientists is simultaneously optimistic and rattled.
The reason: It took countless scientists and their lobbyists more than 15 years just to get lawmakers’ attention. A dire 2009 report about “The Problem,” authored by more than five dozen researchers, ultimately helped slip the first earnest funding request into the national budget in 2009. Congressional committees squabbled over if and how to spend $20 million of taxpayers’ money — it took them three years to make up their minds."
And don't get me started on "Obamacare" which turns out to be just another voter trolling biz. Are the troops out of Afghanistan yet, "Head Held High"? Yeah. How about Obama's "Asian Pivot" (i.e. encircling the nation that holds a few trillion of your debt and is an important trading partner). Yeah ... that nation. At least we have Janet Yellen with her hand on the money-printing press. Hold on to your gonads, that nation is going places real soon now.
The SAS cannot just drop into Russia. They have at least to tell the FSB first, otherwise the rubberhosing will be applied on the incorrect recipient.
Here is a little story about "unnanounced operations" by the CIA in Turkey, for instance. It's a fun read:
Personally, I like Scott Aaronson's quite a lot:
Quantum Computing Since Democritus
under which we find: