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Overall good points, but the anecdote about using sodium for power plant bus bars is ridiculous.

Aluminum has twice the conductivity of sodium. A bus bar made of aluminum the weight of a city bus (14 tonnes) takes about 434 gigajoules of energy to smelt: that's about half an hour's worth of power from a 500-MW power plant.

I don't actually know how heavy these bus bars are, I used the weight of a city bus for pun value, the point is the energy cost of the materials is negligible compared to the power output.

One can get to this result without knowing any formulas (like myself) with Wolfram Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6+km%2Fs+in+1.1+km%5D/

Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth.

I don't think its fair to say that it isn't even achievable in theory. If you could write a bit of data into every atom of a piece of silicon, 2^64 corresponds to 860 micrograms. I would start to agree that pushing much beyond 128bits is crazy as that puts us into the truly collosal range of cubic kilometers of memory Though there are things smaller than atoms...

That being said, even the most wildly optimistic projections about the rate of increase in memory would put such a piece of memory at least 20 or 30 years out.

Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth.

I don't think its fair to say that it isn't even achievable in theory. If you could write a bit of data into every atom of a piece of silicon, 2^64 corresponds to 860 micrograms. I would start to agree that pushing much beyond 128bits is crazy as that puts us into the truly collosal range of cubic kilometers of memory Though there are things smaller than atoms...

That being said, even the most wildly optimistic projections about the rate of increase in memory would put such a piece of memory at least 20 or 30 years out.

Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth.

I don't think its fair to say that it isn't even achievable in theory. If you could write a bit of data into every atom of a piece of silicon, 2^64 corresponds to 860 micrograms. I would start to agree that pushing much beyond 128bits is crazy as that puts us into the truly collosal range of cubic kilometers of memory Though there are things smaller than atoms...

That being said, even the most wildly optimistic projections about the rate of increase in memory would put such a piece of memory at least 20 or 30 years out.

Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth

So? There are more efficient encodings than one byte per sand-grain, you know.

As it turns out, 2^64 is much smaller than Avogadro's Number, the number of molecules in a mole of a chemical compound. If you could find a way to encode information in a 3D hunk of silicon, such that you needed slightly more than 1000 atoms to store each byte, 2^64 bytes of storage would amount to a bit less than one ounce of bulk silicon, occupying less than one cubic inch.

I FULLY expect to see secondary storage approaching this density within the next few decades, and I fully expect that there will be good reasons to support it in a flat address space.

Because with huge servers and clustering you can get some insanely huge numbers when it comes to HDD space. But as I'm sure we all know when it comes to a 128 OS, we are usually talking about addressing, ala 16bit, 32bit, 64bit.

You don't need 128 bits for addressing. 2^32 is "only" 4 gigabytes, which was always achievable in theory and actually achieved in practice over a decade ago.

Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth.

Being able to process as much as 128 bits in one CPU-instruction is nice, and SSE extensions allow that. But neither size_t nor off_t need to exceed 64 bits. Ever... In fact, in the amd64 instruction set, only 48 bits can be used to address memory — the rest are for the CPU instruction, so that both the operation and the operand fit in one 64-bit word. The amd64-architecture is thus "limited" to 256 TB — that's the largest RAM an amd64-machine can have and the largest file and amd64-machine can mmap.

64-bit systems were truly useful, because — by making size_t and off_t the same, they allowed software to be rid of having to segment access to files, which could, potentially, be too large to memory-map in their entirety (many legacy mmap-implementations are still limited to 2- or 4-Gb files). 128-bit systems are not adding that benefit...

(And, of course, most systems — including even the most modern Linux and BSD — still have rather poor mmap-implementations, compared to their highly-optimized read and write calls... But that's another topic...)

You may have better luck pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Wow, the propaganda machine is on overdrive today

Projecting much? Your response is disingenuous scaremongering. You guys are like Intelligent Design advocates, constantly shifting from one justification to another as each is debunked, each one flimsier than the last, with the only constant being the judicious abuse of scientific language to instill fear and doubt in ordinary people. Yes, you are exactly like Intelligent Design advocates.

It produces CFC114 emissions in the enrichment process.

Enrichment consists of passing vaporized uranium through membranes to separate out the heavier isotopes. It doesn't emit CFFs or anything else as a matter of course. That one older plant does is an artifact of that plant and not the process itself. The USEC plans to replace that plant.

Also, the one primary source I found for the CFC114 information mentions 800,000 pounds per year for two plants, which means that it's around 400,000 pounds now, equivalent (using your numbers) to 1.5e9 kg of CO2. That refined uranium generates 8e8 megawatt-hours. Coal generates 1,970 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. So had the electricity supplied by nuclear been produced by coal, we would instead have emitted 7.1e11kg on CO2. That's approximately five hundred times less CO2, and starting to get into negligible territory. And that's 1) using a relatively inefficient enrichment process, and 2) not recycling the enriched fuel in any way. Do you want to compare that to the CO2 used to manufacture and maintain wind turbines (don't forget transportation), or the quite toxic chemical soup used to manufacture photovoltaic cells?

The rest of your post is similarly misleading, and not worthwhile to debunk in detail. In brief, the noble (I don't know why you capitalized it) gas fission products are managed and harvested (as we've known how to do for 50 years --- read the date on that paper), not simply emitted into the atmosphere. Even if they were emitted, they have very short half-lives, and would contribute insignificantly the background radiation level. Remember, noble gases are insert and don't bioaccumulate. But since they're not simply vented, it's a moot point anyway.

Your phytoplankton reference is the worst kind of scientific pandering. It's not CFCs that are the primary danger, but rather the acidification of the oceans caused by their absorption of CO2. We've already established that coal emits quite a bit more CO2.

As for Yucca mountain: a granite facility with no groundwater permeation probably would be better, sure. Let's use or make one.

Nevertheless, Yucca isn't bad. Even a 5.5 "aftershock" is hardly enough to damage a secure facility. (If these shocks even exist: a source would be nice here.) Long-term corrosion information, because it's a gradual process, can be extrapolated from short-term experiments. Corrosion doesn't suddenly accelerate three hundred years out, as you imply. And remember: by the time nuclear waste even gets to a storage facility, it's already radioactively decayed into longer-lived isotopes that simply aren't that dangerous. As for groundwater permeation: first of all, the waste is put in containers specifically designed to avoid water contact. Second, even if water were to erode these containers, the radioactive waste within is highly insoluble and vitrified, so contamination would be low. And even if contamination were something

more to the point, it's not that so many people will see a keyboard on a daily basis:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=workforce

Each is 2.7mm thick

That's 30 sheets of copy paper.

If the average US citizen was 35 years old, overweight, and tends toward depression, this would be completely unsurprising.
Given that the average American is 37 years old and 20-30% of Americans are not just overweight, but obese...
Depending on what "tends toward depression" means, this study might have just found that gamers are perfectly normal.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=journalists

and

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Public+relations

I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything actually fancy(getting both occupations graphed, over time, would have been nice).

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=journalists

and

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Public+relations

I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything actually fancy(getting both occupations graphed, over time, would have been nice).

It even knows the meaning of life!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+meaning+of+life%3F

And the location of god!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=where+is+god%3F

It even knows the meaning of life!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+meaning+of+life%3F

And the location of god!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=where+is+god%3F

"But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort."

This is now an absurd claim, at this point. WolframAlpha returns you the answer to any problem by just typing it in.

Take for example one I just made up as I was typing this:

Limit as x -> 0 of (sqrt(sin (x-5)) + tan((y- pi/2)^2)) / x(y-2)^2

And bingo, it gives the answer, as well as gives the series expansion:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Limit+as+x+-%3E+0+of+(sqrt(sin+(x-5))+%2B+tan((y-+pi%2F2)^2))+%2F+x(y-2)^2

Besides, an Open Textbook can be modified, updated, support the development of new resources, homework sets, etc. by the teachers themselves. So they can leverage the MASSIVE amount of prep work they all do anyway. But with a closed book system, these teachers all have to reinvent the wheel for themselves, as they cannot share their efforts based on a copyrighted book.

They'd try WolframAlpha.
That's it!

They'd try WolframAlpha.
That's it!

They'd try WolframAlpha.
That's it!

It's not hard to estimate at all. Gasoline, electricity... it's all energy. At today's prices, you're paying about $0.25/kWh* of useful energy in the form of gasoline. Electricity is in the range of $0.05/kWh to $0.10/kWh, potentially less if you take advantage of off-peak rates.

* http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(price+of+gasoline+in+America)%2F(30%25+*+13kwh%2Fkg+*+gasoline+density+in+kwh%2Fgal)

http://www20.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=one+mole+of+sodium+chloride - this is the best answer imho.

Oddly enough, for 58.443 (which someone quoted below as the "accepted" value), Wolfram Alpha returns 20-22M~~58.4464210, where M is "the" Madelung constant, which, according to MathWorld, refers to the Madelung constant for NaCl.

This will be much more useful if it allows for approximate numbers and widely-used but inaccurate numbers. "1.4 math" should return 7/5, sqrt(2), and a bunch of other things. "3.142857 and math" should return "22/7" and "approximate value of pi" and probably a lot more.

Wolfram Alpha suggests things like this if you just enter a number.

Actually, the accepted weight is 58.443 thats why Bing didn't show any NaCl results.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+mole+of+sodium+chloride
Wolphram Alpha calls it 58.4

so much for significant figures.

If give it 58.4 it returns: frequency of the note A#

I thought one of you would have posed this question by now:

Does this crap sound vaguely similar to the puffery of
Wolfram "BBBBBBBBbaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrfffffffffffffffff" Alpha?

Yours In Topology,
K. Trout

Wolfram seems to have this covered too.
Interesting site.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nacl

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.futron.com%2Fpdf%2Fresource_center%2Fwhite_papers%2FFutronLaunchCostWP.pdf&ei=x41_SrKENIiOMfr1wfQC&usg=AFQjCNGWxyLcQ6kz0fkpoeZYV1Rvxy3LVw&sig2=VbrRLcMg4Jx_lykdc2xgqA

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301

Both of these place the average cost per pound of getting something into orbit at about $4,000 USD. Now, if we discount that getting people anywhere they could live without Earth-based support would be far more, and go with the best-case number of $2000 USD /pound, and assume that the average person weighs 130 lbs (we'll only send skinny people) ... that's $260,000 USD per person.

Given that the total yearly GDP of the Earth is 46 Trillion, if we expended 100% of our resources to getting people off the planet, we could send 10^12 / 26*10^4 is a little under 40 million people offworld per year. Thus, it would take 50 years to reduce the global population by one half in a very generous fairytale scenario where everyone works in concert to move people offworld and GDP remains constant despite losing people to colonies (possibly by keeping population constant, thus negating the benefit.)

The numbers are so literally astronomical that I didn't feel a citation was necessary, but there you go, even in fairytale world, it's a very difficult undertaking. In the real world, it's not a reasonable suggestion.

Pfft. Who uses Google for unit conversions when there's something so much better?

Well... maybe you're right.

2-We do get get aid, but we don't get "billions".

The United States gives Pakistan 23 billion dollars in aid per year.

http://www73.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+wolfram|alpha+turing+complete%3F

forgot this: http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=your+mother

Input: Is alpha original work?
Ouput: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

Seems worthy of copyright to me.

In all those cases, you would be the author (assuming we are talking about your work in Garage Band, and ignoring the monitor display since it is uncopyrightable). Therefore you would claim the copyright.

However, in Wolfrum Alpha's case, you contribute no original content (a search string). Nor can the data that Wolfram gives back to you (facts) be considered original content eligible for copyright protection. However, their method of organizing the data IS protectable by copyright, if it's creative.

Look at this search. None of the data would be protected, and I doubt that the organization top-to-bottom would be. But the organization plus the color would be. You couldn't reproduce a close replica of the presentation.

Not legal advice. Although if yoy want my legal advice, it can be yours for a modest* fee.

*Fee includes cost of sending me to law school.

Cue the elves / orcs analogies. MSFTers appear to hate innovation so much that they cannot even tolerate it in other companies. That could make MSFT eligiable to be classified as hate-group and its minions thus guilty of hate-crimes for their activities.

Micro$haft marketeers saw Wolfram Alpha and revved up the astroturfers to all but drown out discussion of it. It's amazing that a johnny-come-lately can issue a few press releases and scores of minions bury every trace of the original. Wolfram Alpha works from a pool of vetted resources and that is a major difference from Yahoo and Google.

I managed to try it out while it was posted on the firehose, and the very initial impression was good. Gradually, however, I noticed that it was just dumping data on my lap, and left it up to me to sort it out. It reminded me a bit of Wolfram Alpha, except half of the information was wrong (and if I gave it names, most of the information was wrong).

Even within the presentation, they point out the flaw of having to sift through the mess and pick out the irrelevant information.

I don't think it's useless, I mean it does provide you with many links that you'd normally not get on other search engines, at least when you enter something unique as a query. But as far as actually placing relevant information in brackets (location:... history:... personal-information:...), it doesn't do a very good job.

Also, if something is truly unique, you'll get a better result in wikipedia anyway (in terms of how its arranged, anyway). And if you want more accurate info dumps, Wolfram Alpha currently does it better.

Whatever you may think of their pricing models and market shares, it remains that Microsoft's net profit margin is 25% whereas Apple's is a mere 16%. (WolframAlpha)

Microsoft 1, Apple 0.

"Relatively large"?! It cooks an area 10mm^3 in volume, which WolframAlpha tells me is a sphere of radius 1.337mm. Quite small. Even the most elite surgeon would destroy orders of magnitude more tissue than that just getting to the site.

you seem to be forgetting exactly how much 12% of 1.4 billion people is. its almost 170 million people. Thats a very big market.

http://www27.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=internet+users

I didn't believe you, so I checked. If you wave your hands in the air and assume that IQ is a perfect measure and that it is a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, my calculation says that 12% of the population falls below an IQ of 83.3752 (this is according to R, the command is `qnorm(0.12, 100, 15)`, or `qnorm(0.12, mean=100, sd=15)` if you prefer clarity).

Wolfram Alpha can also come up with the answer, I'm not sure I like the form of the input (but maybe there is a clearer way; the Mathematica form on the resulting page certainly makes more sense to me, but Alpha doesn't like it):

http://www10.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Quantile+12+Normal+Distribution+100+15

Or here.

Two errors with that claim. First, as others have posted, Bing is a re-branding of MSN Live or whatever it was called. Second, it is a response to Wolfram Alpha which, unlike the marketing initiative from MS, is something new. MS has a pattern of re-naming failed products like Live to hide bad reviews or avoid the downside to brand recognition.

Apply the lessons learned elsewhere. When you see a product or service from MS spewed in a media blitz, especially one touted as being new, look around for the target of MS' copying and if that copy is a re-tread of an earlier, failed product. In this case, the original being copied is Wolfram's Alpha.

Seriously, Wolfram|Alpha crunches the numbers and it's pretty revealing. Pass completion from 1970–present was a team low in 1973, Bradshaw's fourth year on the job. Don't even get me started on his highly inconsistent touchdown pass rate before the late-1970s...

Seriously, Wolfram|Alpha crunches the numbers and it's pretty revealing. Pass completion from 1970–present was a team low in 1973, Bradshaw's fourth year on the job. Don't even get me started on his highly inconsistent touchdown pass rate before the late-1970s...

http://www09.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dog+%2F+xbox

http://www09.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=atari+%2F+dell

Hmm Wolfram doesn't understand either.

http://www09.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dog+%2F+xbox

http://www09.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=atari+%2F+dell

Hmm Wolfram doesn't understand either.

I really should make a website akin to letmegooglethatforyou.

http://www29.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+tablespoons+of+mercury+to+lbs

0.882 lbs.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Hg density: 13.534 g/cm^3

2 tablespoons is 29.57 cm^3

2 tablespoons of Hg: 29.57 cm^3 * 13.534 g/cm^3
Result: 400.2 g ~= .882 lbs

http://www47.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iss This link works slightly better as it will use geolocation based upon your ip address.