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Somehow, they misspelled the Stanford System.


Usually its always a caste based environment where elite well connected white males have meetings with their friends to decide the fate of your business or your job, while at the same time giving themselves a raise and reducing your salary.

Somehow there is a bit of irony to it. Stanford University [of Elitism, West Coast] has all but fallen in line with the Ivy League in the East Coast where the only thing new is an outright lack of Midwestern students. You'd have to:

1. Declare them a minority
2. Force universities to accept them under the most favored terms (Works for the spies and International Students who take up unrightful amounts of the class), and
3. Make sure there is no "unreasonable condition" such as maintaining a grade inconsistent with known performance given a certain instructor or non-standard courseload *cough*Harvard*cough*.


Google on the other hand is going about this in a completely different way, the idea is good, lets see how far Google can take it. On the other hand, we should not let Google be the last corporation like this, we should use the Google model in future businesses. The model seems to work, its profitable, and its not based on abusing workers. As much as Americans complain about Chinese sweatshops, lately it seems child labor and sweatshops are a good idea for the US economy, its better to have the sweatshops than the prisons.

  As Google has taken their policy right from Stanford, by no means do you have a meritocracy there. Since they are a private entity, they are outright having their cake and eating it. Thankfully there are places that keep this kind of thing in check, such as France and non-globally exploited European countries(read: ones that shield heavily against offshoring) that would probably keep Google (and anyone who helped them) in the dark.
  When Google starts having to look actively for putting work in the Midwest with the same advantages as now (and not as a mock effort ala the Miers nomination) and the full opening of their services. When that is done, they will have made the first steps to ridding themselves of problems found from their use of the Stanford System.

  As for China, I do not see any logic to exchange one prison for another. Regardless, I'm not going to help make what kills me by helping globalization. That's given that the bullet is fired from a gun made with low-quality steel, by a government of equally low quality, with the order sent by electronics that are a hazard not to be touched. To them, I say "Cao ni ma de." - and I'd put even odds on Sam "Boss Tweed" Walton understanding that one as well.

Wrong on every count.

But of course that's about par for the course.

We have one of these in the office building adjacent to me at a DOE lab. In fact, when it was installed, it was a big deal. Some of us got together, walked over, and (with girlish glee) used it (one after another.) It was a little underwhelming.

We have one of these in the office building adjacent to me at a DOE lab. In fact, when it was installed, it was a big deal. Some of us got together, walked over, and (with girlish glee) used it (one after another.) It was a little underwhelming.

I'm already deeply invested in F@H for Firefox http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= teampage&teamnum=39299

People could join Team Firefox's Folding@Home team http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= teampage&teamnum=39299

"Diesel cars can emit 25 to 400 times more mass of particulate black carbon and associated organic matter ("soot") per kilometer [mile]. The warming due to soot may more than offset the cooling due to reduced carbon dioxide emissions over several decades, according to Mark Z. Jacobson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University." LINK

Ah. I guess I'm not yet adding Folding@Home. They had a beta test of their BOINC client, but they don't seem to have anything BOINC-related available right now.

It does help to renice the main process to lowest priority though.

If you liked Seti At Home, try Folding At Home. Help cure alzheimer's among other diseases with your spare cpu cycles. Check it out: http://folding.stanford.edu/ http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000673058540/ http://teamhackaday.com/

I still think we're better off folding@home than hunting afar

I think you are taking about the orginal storage tower?

http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures /display/0-4-Google.htm

The current consensus, it may surprise you, is that the question is undecided.
It may be possible to communicate (via entanglement) faster than light in a 'many worlds model'

Available here. I think this will explain the device much better than the other links that were posted.

I did a quick search and came across a paper summarizing past research. It seems that some methods 'cheat' to simulate PCR and other use methods which simply aren't possible to achive on a macroscopic scale. I don't understand why people are criticizing what would essentially be a super cheap (by comparison to the expensive traditional lab equipament) chip which can do this in minutes. Keep in mind,microfluidics is helping revolutionize lots of areas of biology. It's already being used to create microchips that can detect individual genes in a blood sample given to it.

Here is the text from Microfluidics: Fluid physics at the nanoliter scale:
http://thebigone.stanford.edu/quake/publications/R evModPhysJul05.pdf

Polymerse chain reaction PCR is a process used to
exponentially replicate double-stranded DNA, allowing
even a very small amount of DNA to be amplified into a
sufficient amount for sophisticated analysis. PCR involves
a three-step thermal cycle in the presence of a
reagent soup: i heating the solution to melt the DNA
by separating each ds-DNA into two single strands; ii
cooling so that DNA primers and DNA polymerase enzymes
bind each strand annealing; and iii warming
slightly to promote the base-by-base DNA replication
by the polymerase extension. Ideally, each PCR cycle
doubles the number of double-stranded DNA molecules.
Integrating PCR into microfluidic devices has been
achieved by many groups, typically by cycling the temperature
of a microfluidic sample to replicate the standard
macroscopic PCR Wilding et al., 1994; Burns et al.,
1996; Cheng et al., 1996; Woolley et al., 1996; Schmalzing
et al., 1997; Belgrader et al., 1999; Khandurina et al.,
2000; Chiou et al., 2001; Hong et al., 2001; Lagally, Emrich,
and Mathies, 2001; Lagally, Medintz, and Mathies,
2001; Auroux et al., 2004. An alternate strategy involves
pumping solution through various temperature zones to
mimic PCR Fig. 35a Kopp et al., 1998; Liu, Enzelberger,
and Quake, 2002, whose benefit is that cycle
time no longer depends on the time required to heat or
cool the solution and its surroundings. Another approach
exploits high-Ra buoyant flows to perform PCR
in a steady temperature profile without an external
pump Krishnan et al., 2002; Braun et al., 2003. The
basic idea involves establishing a large convective flow
whose roll fills the experimental cell. This flow advects

FIG. 35. Color in online edition Polymerase chain reaction
PCR in a steady temperature field. a Solution is driven
along a channel that winds through temperature regions i,
ii, and iii designed to cause DNA melting, extension, and
annealing. Thus the temperature profile seen by the solution
matches a standard PCR cycle. Reprinted with permission
from Kopp et al., 1998. ©1998 AAAS. b A PCR reactor in
which temperature gradients drive a convective fluid flow that
takes suspended DNA molecules through a temperature profile
designed to resemble that of PCR. Reprinted with permission
from Braun et al., 2003

DNA molecules Pe1 through the variable temperature
profile in the fluid. By properly designing the experiment,
the temperature profile experienced by DNA
can be made to resemble that of conventional PCR, thus
allowing the chain reaction to proceed. The underlying
convective flows have been established in two ways: i
uniformly heating the bottom plate and cooling the top
plate enough to drive Rayleigh-Benard convection at
Ra106 Krishnan et al., 2002, or ii heating the fluid
inhomogeneously Fig. 35b at Ra104 to establish
laminar convective flow Braun et al., 2003. Finally,
DNA molecules advect with the flow along the bottom
of the cell towards the center of the roll, but also move
outwards via thermophoresis itself poorly understood,
leading to trapping in a ring so long as Pe1 Braun and
Libchaber, 2002.

Actually no, I've been following light field rendering for sometime... I direct you a Stanford paper on the light field camera from 2002 http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfvc/wilburn-l fcamera-spie02.pdf So, is the press release a "break through" or incremental?

With some improvements to the manufacturing technology, we could have a revolutionary camera based on a large, flat plate of microlenses, scaled up to whatever the manufacturing allows, or even multiple plates tiled together, with the software allowing for the seams. And that's it - you could stick them to anything - phones, for example, or walls or whatever.

The linked paper shows how to use Fourier processing for (re)focusing the data on any point, but with a large enough plate you could also get enough parallax for a limited 3D result.

It'd also avoid the limited-aperture optics issues we're running into with sensor size vs lens size. You can scale them (or tile them) up, collect a lot more incident light & get a lot more resolution too, without having to shrink the sensor elements further or use a ginormous conventional lens. The bigger you make these things (or the more that are tiled together), the better & more flexible your result. There's more data to process, of course, but that's what Cell is for, isn't it?

Quote from the abstract of the paper: "This paper contributes to the theory of photograph formation from light fields." Apparently he knows he didn't invent it. He's contribution, yet again from the abstract, "The main result is a theorem that, in the Fourier domain, a photograph formed by a full lens aperture is a 2D slice in the 4D light field." which has nothing to do with the paper from 1996. Plus, the guy came up with a camera that could capture the light field in one shot instead of requiring an array of photographs. If you've been to siggraph for the last 8 or 9 years, you should know better.

From the stanford websire, you can see the image of the array of photograph needed in 1996 (taken either by an array or cameras or a single camera manipulated by a robot arm): http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/light/coherenc e_preview.jpg

It's a pitty people are modding you informative, your post is ignorant at best.

If you look at this site: Stanford Lightfield Project. You will see that the basic premise behind defining a light field and mathematically manipulating it has been around sine the 30's. Whats cool here is the camera. In fact being in the photography business myself, I was just telling my father a couple months ago about how it would be easy to refocus an image if there was a lense that just captured a grid of images with slightly different perspectives from each cell. Refocusing the light field is a pretty obvious benefit to this system, I would deem not worthy of a patent, as it is just a way to mathematically manipulate a light field.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/lightfield/ If you've attended siggraph for the last 8 or 9 years you yawn with me.

It turns out AMDs can in fact help cure cancer:

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-diseases.html#Canc er

From stanford.edu:

use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism

Fair use here in Canada though (not looking for a backing link, but I'm sure of this) does allow making of "backups" or alternate copies of something once you own a single copy.

There's no reason *not* to be confused by the article. It's a pretty subtle phenomenon, described in an astoundingly sloppy writeup. Hard to believe it took three people to write something which is neither complete nor coherent, and which doesn't even give you enough key words to search for more information.

The Gravity Probe B homepage has a far better introduction to the experiment. (Go to "classroom" -> "story of GPB" for a concise intro.)
http://einstein.stanford.edu/

In short, general relativity predicts that a massive rotating object (like the earth) distorts the space around it in such a way that nearby objects that are locally at rest are actually rotating slightly when compared to distant stars. (Locally at rest means that, for example, if you put some guy in a box with any measurement apparatus he could imagine, his measurements would show that the box isn't rotating.) This doesn't happen in Newtonian physics, and Gravity Probe B should be able to measure it and compare it to what one predicts using GR.

The effect is usually called "frame dragging," or the "Lense-Thirring Effect."

Behind the Gravity Probe B is here and here . It is a fascinating read, esp. about the gyroscopes.

"The four gyro rotors are made of fused quartz, fabricated to an extreme level of material homogeneity and then ground to the near-absolute sphericity (Figure 1). The spheres are round to within 40 atomic layers, which is proportionally equivalent to an Earth-sized sphere with surface height variations of only 16 feet...."

"It's one thing to have a virtually perfect gyro rotor, but that alone does not provide the necessary performance for this experiment......The electric fields center the rotors to a few millionths of an inch. They did not perform the spinning up electrically, however. Instead, they directed a precise stream of helium gas, traveling at nearly Mach 1, at the rotors. It takes about half an hour for the rotor to reach full speed, and it loses less than 1% of this speed over 1000 years in the super-vacuum of the cavity."

Also - what do you suppose Blobmouse thinks of all this? Some mice get all the good mutations..

"virtual VLF antenna"...
The HAARP Wikipedia entry shows the HAARP operating at 3-10Mhz, which puts it squarely in HF (3-30 MHz, 100-10 meters wavelength), not VLF which is 1000 times lower in frequency (3-30 KHz, 100 kilomter to 10 kilomter wavelength)

You are way off. "Fair use" isn't a specific law, it is a set of factors that must be considered in a copyright infringement case. Read up on it. You can't definitively say "there's no fair use law covering this" because fair use is non-specific. It's a huge grey area.

Four (five?) factors:

1. The purpose and character of your use. Since this is done to help protect people, it seems this is a slam dunk. And since the Supreme Court indicated in 1994 that this is the "primary indicator of fair use", I suspect it is enough.

2. The nature of the copyrighted work. Again, considering the spyware issue, this seems a slam dunk for fair use.

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken. In this case they took the whole thing, but that only makes sense in this context. You can't take part of a program very easily. This factor probably has less meaning in electronic formats. You can, for instance, copy only a page of a PDF from a website if the PDF the supply is a whole book. Similar with software. It's generally all or nothing.

4. The effect on the use upon the potential market. Well, I guess that's the point here. This might actually act against the use of it, but it's a "bad" market, so this probably won't play up well. Which leads to the fifth unnoficial factor.

(5.) Are you good or bad? (Not a real factor, but often used to rationalize decisions.) This one speaks for itself. Given the judges discretion, I'd hope this one is obvious to them.

One phrase: 8 cores + with 16/8 K cache per core and **one** L2 cache.
[ ... ]
So is this an 8-port L2 ? What is the latency on it when all 8 cores are busy? etc... I think we'll find this core will suffer greatly from this point.

I think you'll find that Sun engineers have thought of all that. In fact, here is a paper that specifically addresses all the points you've mentioned.

Basically, the answer is that it doesn't appear to be a problem for two main reasons. The first is that each core has up to four active threads at once. The cores have zero overhead for switching between one of the four hardware threads and another, as compared to continuing to execute the same thread. In fact, "thread select" is one of the stages of the pipeline, and the cores are designed to constantly switch between threads so that of the available-to-run threads, the least-recently-used one is selected on each cycle.

As a result, simply having to switch threads due to L2 / memory access will not impose any penalty. For the core to sit idle and any time to be lost due to waiting on memory, all four hardware threads would have to be unavailable to run. And there are four threads, unlike (say) Intel's chips that have Hyperthreading with only two threads. Increasing the number of threads increases the chance that at least one will be available to run. For example, with 2 threads that have a 50% chance of being available to run at any given time, the odds of having none that are runnable are 50%^2, or 25%. With 4 threads and the same 50% chance, the odds of having none that are runnable are 50%^4, or only 6.25%. The results are four times as good with 4 threads as they are with 2 threads.

Now, given that you have a limited amount of real estate on that silicon, the question then becomes: what is the best way to make use of it? If you have to choose between 4 threads per core with limited L1 cache and 2 threads per core with more L1 cache, which is a better choice for minimizing memory access problems? Maybe increasing the number of threads is a more effective strategy than increasing the size of a cache. Remember, the goal of Niagara is throughput for workloads that naturally have tons of threads. Blocking a thread to wait on L2 cache essentially doesn't matter as long as your core isn't sitting idle because all its threads are blocked. The PDF I linked to indicates they evaluated the projected workloads and found that increasing the size of the L1 cache didn't really increase the hit rate much, so it would seem that increasing threads per core might really be a better use of the real estate.

To elaborate on that for a second, the real serious hit is going to be when the system goes to memory. That is going to take one of the threads out of the game for a long, long time. Having to wait a while on L2 cache is not nearly as serious a problem, because although it does prevent the thread from being runnable, it only does so for a relatively short time. As long as the total bandwidth to the L2 cache isn't too low, access time for the L2 cache isn't going to make much difference either way.

The second main reason this isn't likely to be a problem is that the L2 cache is broken into 4 banks. Each of the 8 cores connects to the L2 cache banks through a crossbar interconnect, so each cache bank can be talking to a different core simultaneously. So, no, it's not an 8-port L2 cache, but it does support four accesses at once by interleaving, so contention for the cache probably isn't a significant problem.

Also, one other little minor detail to keep in mind: the SPARC architecture specifies register windows, and the Niagara implementation of SPARC has 8 register windows, with 16 registers per window (because when changing windows, you shift two 8-register positions). Each thread has its own set of register

This according to the Debian language shootout.

Those benchmarks are interesting to analyze but they're meaningless for really evaluating language performance. The larger (and more powerful) C++ standard libraries give it a significant penalty in such tiny program comparisons, but those same libraries often give it a considerable advantage in real programs (consider this as an example of another trivial program where performance is hugely in C++'s favor, due entirely to good libraries and the power of templates).

C++ code is not appreciably different from C code except where specific constructs are used, and the run-time costs there are small and quantifiable while the programmer efficiency gains can be enormous. C++ is, in general, as fast as C.

I know you're kidding -- but farside imaging exists now. Look here - it is a continuously updated false-color map of the Sun. Of course, the far side data are not a true photograph, but a reconstruction made from measurements of sound waves that propagate all the way through the star.

The Discovery Channel is part of the Disney network, and so is the History channel. The same people bring you lots of spiritual "research" and even do not mind to ask children to check their "psychic skills".

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic occurred during World War I. WWI produced perfect conditions for a flu. Large camps, bad food, bad water, lots of other illnesses and of course plenty of dead and wounded victims. Most people fighting during this time were young men, not older men nor female. Read more at http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/ They give some interesting numbers.

I like Sauerkraut, but I rarely use it to combat a viral infection. You may want to check your source of information.

Stolen from: http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/

Am I the only one, having a somewhat strong immune system, that is not in the least bit worried about a pandemic?

A string immune system is not garuntee that you will survive. The 1918 flu killed a lot of healthy people.

The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/

The 1918 virus sometimes killed completely healthy people in killed overnight.
"Some people would go to bed healthy and never wake up."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/flu/fluepidemic. html

This was one of the flus that worked so fast the immune system couldn't keep up.

and if that happens, the temperature would be back at 2000BC levels, oh noes.
(I just read some stuff over here here , sounds quite rational but this whole discussion has got the better of me)

Shawn is right right, you can only do simple things with it, but it is one of the best tools for those things that it does.

I agree. For simple things it rocks.

I recommend using Redhat if you're going to use Rosegarden.

I prefer to use Mandriva, but for audio editing nothing (Linux) beats Fedora thanks to Planet CCRMA.

I have a mandibular excess, causing TMJ "pain" and massive nightly grinding.

Have you ever heard of Orthognathic surgery? It's getting pretty sophisticated now, using CT scans to develop 3D models and Computer-aided surgical planning to assist doctors with surgery. It costs a fortune, but some health funds cover it. The company, Materialise, can use colour stereolithography to make a prominent nerve that runs along the lower mandible visible within a transparent model. This helps Orthognathic surgeons, because handling that nerve is one of the tricky parts of the procedure.

You are wrong. There are multiple theories which fully take into account all observations while positing an ever-existing universe.

As an added bonus, they have testable differences from the standard Big Bang theory, some of which (such as low-frequency gravity waves) we're working on detectors for even now.

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." ()

The Hindu parts were explained to me by Hindu friends; I'm more of a Spinoza pantheist (an "essential monist" if you want to get into that level of detail, but I disagree with Spinoza in that he claimed God had no personality).

You may find Panentheism more palatable than Pantheism - Panentheists believe that reality is a subset of the divine, that God is larger than the universe. This belief system is highly compatible with the teachings of Jesus and Moses, and neatly eliminates at least one of the objections to religious dualism that pantheists like myself always bring up. Panentheisists share the love of the physical world that informs pantheism (as do the Judeo-Christian groups who take Genesis 1:26 seriously) because they recognize it as literally divine.

Define "macro" and "micro".

Ya, I like speciation, and agree all your points here are good. We've begun to see the edges of it.

Why is macroevolution a priori a bad idea?

For one thing I see no evidence to show how evolution might explain the Cambrian Explosion. Claiming evolution explains the differences between single celled organisms and man seems a bit premature. Also, in reading about evolution and Geology I find some truly odd things that seem swept under the rug at times. Pushing for an older age so that evolution can have more time is one past example.

Some would interpret bad designs like these as evidence of "whatever works first" randomness, rather than careful and intelligent crafting of a pinnacle of creation.

I find your response very refreshing here, and it is well considered, though "pinnacle of creation" may be a straw-man.

Personally I wonder about the notion of a "reasonably intelligent designer" versus this "devinely intelligent designer" that appears to get bandied about. Engineers, scientists, and programmers are not perfect and do make mistakes. Design is an iterative process, in some ways much like evolution. Also there are tradeoffs and hidden reasons for things that are not always apparent on first, or even umpteenth inspection. (According to the Bible, even Jesus let one of his best friends die because he was busy elsewhere...)

Would a "reasonably intelligent human-like designer" actually have no place in any conceivable scientific theory regardless of any factual evidence? (I think you've already given me a "no" on this, but that's not a common answer from what I've seen. Usually it's: "ID cannot be a thoery, and even if it could here's one completely random example taken in isolation that collapses the whole thing." Often with a "So Nyah!" at the end.)

Macroevolution has pretty strong evidence in favour of it; I don't see why that's a challenge to your faith, though.

For one, I'm not exactly sure what I believe and/or have faith in myself. For another it really isn't my faith I worry about. It's more the battling, small-mindedness and ill behavior on both sides of the argument. (Which I've watched my whole life, and yes, sometimes even my own gut-reactions to things are very negative. This is a battle between worldviews, or may become one if we're not careful.)

Note: For someone who believes in a very real and active God, the creation story is very important. For one thing it is a key ingredient in several arguments against evil. I've personally rejected Christianity because of my personal psychology and certain events in my life, but I have many Christian friends who I do not consider "idiots" for their beliefs.

Those who hold doggedly to a literal interpretation of the Bible while glossing over the actual content of Jesus's message would likely get much the same treatment as the Pharisees.

Unfortunately doggedness and ignorance can be found on both sides of the debate. (And any claims for or against the personal virtues of one group or another seem more inflammatory than useful. You don't seem like the type to assume I'm a Pharisee before I've so much as thumped a bible or mentioned 6000 years.)

You're thinking of Gravity Probe B http://einstein.stanford.edu/, another tour de force of ultra-precise instrumentation. That mission has now finished and they're analysing the data.

The WCG is still a for profit project and any scientific outcome will go to paying customers. Why should I spend my money on it?
I'll better run Folding@Home client as I do see scientific publications rolling out the door and results are open to anyone to use.
http://folding.stanford.edu/
http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-diseases.html

The WCG is still a for profit project and any scientific outcome will go to paying customers. Why should I spend my money on it?
I'll better run Folding@Home client as I do see scientific publications rolling out the door and results are open to anyone to use.
http://folding.stanford.edu/
http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-diseases.html

The WCG is still a for profit project and any scientific outcome will go to paying customers. Why should I spend my money on it?
I'll better run Folding@Home client as I do see scientific publications rolling out the door and results are open to anyone to use.
http://folding.stanford.edu/
http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-diseases.html

Due to the small scales, this has no influence on the devices you mention. The devices you mention make mostly use of the discrete energy levels of the electron in the atom. This can be just as well explained with classical radiation theory. It is just more complex, but people have attempted this and succeeded partially.
Furthermore, present day QM is not what many people learn in school, but is based on certain paradigms. Most common is the de Broglie interpretation (http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1929/brog lie-bio.html, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/) but just as with many other theories there are still many open questions wich leave room for improvement/change of the theory.

This does not change the fact that the true theory must conform to all the correct predictions that QM does. I doubt Mills' theory is correct, but also he stands on the shoulders of giants in his search to an alternative theory. Many people write theories that are local, just to give a recent one which has a lot of text that is understandable to non QM/RM people: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0508104

I was wondering how this World Community Grid stands up to Folding@Home?

I'm a member of a F@H team and it seems like there are a lot of people participating. Are these efforts competing against one another or are they different areas of study? I don't quite understand.

Also, I know that the F@H client can run in the background and take up no system resources, only unused processor cycles, (which is part of the reason I use it.) Does the World Community Grid project's clients take up a lot of system resources...?

Not to mention that nuclear fission is the cleanest, safest, most abundant practical source of energy on the planet at the moment.

Solar energy is the cleanest, safest and most abundant. As someone commented in an earlier Slashdot article, 1 million terawatt hours of solar energy falls on the Earth's surface each day. The problem is that we can't capture it economically. However the plants seem to be absorbing it quite efficiently. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book (!).

Even harnessing a small fraction of the world's wind power could produce 72 terawatts - the equivalent of 35,000 nuclear reactors - which is more than enough for the world's energy needs. I think you'd have an uphill battle arguing that nuclear power is cleaner or safer than wind power. I'm not saying wind power is entirely without problems, but they are small potatoes compared to the problems with nuclear power.

Yes, nuclear is cleaner than coal. Unfortunately that's faint praise. It's still pretty dirty.

The 2nd key point is that the amount of energy it takes to build and run nuclear energy plants and all the processes that go with it, means that it takes 7-10 years before nuclear power plants achieve net CO2 reductions (compared to wind power that takes 3-6 months). -- http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/TNEPArticlesNucl ear.aspx

As for the claim that nuclear fuel is abundant...

TNEP contributor and co-author Senior Lecturer at UNSW and Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University Mark Diesendorf wrote recently in the Canberra Times that "Nuclear power stations themselves do not emit CO2. But the nuclear fuel cycle is a complex process with many steps, some of which are large users of fossil fuels. The corresponding CO2 emissions have been calculated by several authors who are independent of the nuclear industry, most recently by Jan Willem Storm Van Leeuwin, a senior consultant in energy systems, together with Philip Smith, a nuclear physicist. As we might expect, they find that the energy inputs, especially to mining, milling and enrichment, depend sensitively on the grade of uranium used. For high-grade ores (i.e. those with at least 0.2% uranium oxide) the energy inputs are indeed much less than the electricity generated. But, the quantity of known uranium reserves with ore grades richer than this level is so small, that it would only last for a few decades at the current usage rate. For the more common low-grade ores (i.e. 10-20 times less concentrated than the high-grade ores), Van Leeuwin and Smith find that the total fossil energy consumption in uranium mining, milling, enrichment and power station construction becomes so large that nuclear power emits more CO2 than an equivalent gas-fired power station." -- http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/TNEPArticlesNucl ear.aspx

In any event, it is a non-renewable fuel, so it's hardly worth getting excited over.

All that the environmental nuts caused was for us to burn MORE fossil fuels at diesel plants. So much for saving the planet.

The environmental "nuts" want you to walk to the local shops instead of driving an SUV, to turn off the lights when you're not home, to wear a jumper instead of turning up the thermostat, to invest R&D in renewable energy sources rather than fossil or nuclear fuels, and to stop falsely claiming that opposition to nuclear is the same as support for diesel.

I personally oppose nuclear on economic grounds. Once again, from my favourite environmental scientist, because he writes some interesting stuff, Mark Diesendorf.

Mark Diesendorf again writes that "Nucle

Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment doesn't seem to support your point. The idea Searle attempts to explain isn't that there's no difference between regurgitating information, and actually understanding it. Indeed many of the arguments against AI claim that 'only' machines that externally demonstrate intelligence, but lack a conscious mind, and an ability to actually understand that information, can exist. It's precisely this that Searle tries to demonstrate in his experiment--- the exact opposite of what you seem to be relying on.

Just for an example of how a machine could 'regurgitate' a highly articulate explanation of a certain problem vist: http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/relativit y.html.

It seems that my computer can offer a good explanation for a myriad of differing problems, but, I still doubt that there isn't any difference between this and understanding those problems.

The Turing experiment, I believe would support your opinion. Turing's major claim is that if you, as a third party observer, couldn't tell the difference between a computer and a human through blind dialog--- then that computer is intelligent. For one, this test judges intelligence through how well a machine relates to our particular brand of social interaction. It doesn't seem fair to say that something isn't intelligent if it's incapable of human communication. If an intelligent alien species that communicated through beams of light, or sonar, were to analyze our species this way, we would quickly be determined not to demonstrate intelligence. It also heavily relies on the social and conversational abilities of the judge in the situation. Many template based bots, whom most people would agree are not intelligent, have tricked judges into believing they're intelligent. An entertaining programming pass time involves creating bots and attempting to fool random individuals into having deep personal conversations with them. In the end Turing's method seems too subjective, and it doesn't seem entirely logical. It isn't apparent that a machine that only seems to be intelligent can't exist, and I would assume this could also be true for human beings ;).

John Searle argued against this using a parody of the Turing Experiment, the "Chinese Room" experiment. This thought experiment involves an intelligent human being, interacting with the outside world via a proxy of a limited symbolic interface. Through this interface he can place answers to given questions in the Chinese language by following a complicated program, or rule book, without understanding a word of Chinese. In essence, he claims to have crated a machine incapable of ever being intentional. His second claim is that no rule book exists that would allow you to, as the operator, to understand Chinese.

While I agree with Daniel Dennett that this is just intellectual sleight of hand, and in the end Searle's experiment makes several logical errors that fail to prove that intelligent machines can not exist; I don't believe it either proves, or disproves, the possibility of zombie machines existing.

so why link to http://www.stanford.edu/ and http://google.com/ on the links page? and post a gmail account [or should it be googlemail.co.uk over here ...]