Nebraska man, the first pre-human ancestor who was ever found was actually a pig. Go figure. Since then we've had several partial chimp skeletons and one chinese guys lunch (peking man) proclaimed our earliest ancestors. I'll see it when I believe it.
1) Right, new voting equipment will be a good thing. Hopefully the new system will also work well unlike in New Mexico. Their electronic system was evidentally quite a problem.
2) Agreed, both candidates kind of sucked this election. Bush has some good ideas and I like his leadership style (delegation not micro-management), but some of his tax ideas are so stupid. I'm not a Gore fan. Frankly I find it ironic that you like Joe Leiberman, a candidate who is far more religious than Gore.
3) The electoral college isn't going anywhere. It is meant to balance both popular and regional will in the election of the president. It does so pretty well. Gore barely won the popular vote. Bush won the geographic area of the US by a landslide. Gore won solidly in the urban areas, but Bush had good showings in both many suburban and all rural areas. You may not like this, but do we want the political process to be dictated by the needs of NY, LA and Chicago while neglecting the heart land of America? This is the most likely outcome of a purely popular election.
Gore won't concede. He's shown that already. Do not blame other Democrats for his pro-litigation stand since most of them don't agree with it either. Gore knows that his only chance at the presidency is now. In four years he will be running from a weaker position and he will have lost a significant amount of support because of his actions to date. I already know many Gore supporters who will not vote for him in 4 years no matter what happens because of his behavior during this election.
IIRC correctly this may be the major downfall of the Itanium. The Itanium uses some sort of preprocessor to translate x86 instructions to the EPIC instructions the chip actually uses. It performs some optimizations as it does this to parallelize these instructions as much as possible to increase speed. Still this means the chip will have the same sorts of problems as the Pentium Pros did, they will run significantly slower on older 32bit software.
IIRC, AMD on the other hand will be bringing out a chip which is essentially 2 32bit athlon cores stuck together and linked to produce a 64bit processor. It essentially needs no translator and runs 32 bit and 64 bit equally well. This coupled with the fact that Itanium has been going nowhere slow has me looking toward AMD for a good 64bit solution.
Seems to me that you are drastically underestimating the difficulties inherent in creating true sentience.
Computers follow orders well. We tell them what to do and they do it. Computers are also good at logic. Computers are not good at intuition nor are they especially good at proofs or problem solving. Having done design work I can confidently say that intuition is necessary for it. In short I have seen no proof that this computer will not logic itself into a corner from which it cannot emerge.
Sentience also requires lots of computing power. I have heard that one human brain does more work than every silicon based computer on the planet and I believe it. Steven Hawking said that modern computing is teaching the brains of a meal worm to do interesting tricks. I have seen very little to indicate that a true thinking computer will work faster or more efficiently than a human at the same job. I doubt that a thinking computer will, for instance, retain its ability to do fast arithmatical calculations (after all, we didn't).
In short some of the basic assumptions that this argument uses may not be viable. Thinking computers may not be capable of the strong intuition and problem solving needed to do design. Thinking computers also may not be capable of outperforming us mentally at all.
Digital movie making is not about picture resolution and quality. It is not really about using optical effects instead of digital effects. It is mostly about film distribution.
Making 1000 prints of a movie for opening night costs a lot of money, say several million for a big release. Doing the same thing on digital costs significantly less. Thats really why the studios want to go digital. Even a cheaply filmed movie gets expensive really quickly. You can shoot a movie for $4000 but you can't release it for less than several hundred thousand.
As for effects, well yes, all digital means you save a generation in editing but the studios don't really care about that. All effects today are done on computers, effects are not optically composited. They are digitally composited. Switching to digital means you don't have to transfer the footage to digital to do the effects work and then transfer the footage back to show the movie. Cutting out this annoying and time consuming process is probably the real reason Lucas is so keen on digital. It makes the effects heavy movies he likes to make significantly easier to create.
The big question is how good is a movie which is shot and edited digitally, like Ep 2, going to look when shown on 35mm film at the local theatre. Remember, there are limitations on current filming techniques too (you can't read signs on most moving objects for example) so hollywood is not considering this for the look of the end product.
The number of EE degrees is dropping but at the same time the number of CompE degrees has been steadily increasing. After all, the EE and CompE degrees come out of the same department in most schools and the difference is only a handful of classes. The pull of compsci is also not helping EE, when the can get more money for a bachelors in CS.
The french judge then went on to demand that yahoo build a device called the Maginot Firewall to filter out all offending users. The Firewall is very difficult to circumvent directly, but incredibly easy to circumvent via ISPs in Belgium and the Netherlands.
1) Assuming perfectly defect free nanotubes above the single fiber level is implausible. Nanotubes work fine as single fibers, however stringing them together requires either using them in some sort of fiber composite or somehow connecting the tubes together to form some sort of tube honeycomb. A honeycomb cannot be assume to be defect free so properties will be degraded and a composite will weight the fiber properties with the weaker but tougher matrix.
2) Nanotubes will likely be quite brittle no matter what form they take. This poses big problems. The usual method for overcoming this is by compositing them with a weaker but tougher matrix, but that will lower the end strength of the composite.
3) Construction of tall buildings and the like requires big compressive loads. Tube/fiber composites suck in compression because the fibers buckle before they ever even get close to their ultimate strength. This is a problem if you wish to build a space elevator since such a structure is bound to have huge compressive loads at its base.
Speaking of series being run into the ground...
on
Dune: House Harkonnen
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· Score: 1
Is the new Robert Jordan book any good? The last 2 were sooo long and sooo dull. Please Lord, let this one be interesting...
Question - Does anyone know whether this will be any good? I was watching the Dune movie (the long version) on sci-fi a while back and I kept thinking how it hadn't aged especially well. A lot of the effects just don't look good, or even worse, look like obvious special effects.
This doesn't really help when arguing with your boss, but every one is missing a big advantage to flex time.
The big advantage to flex time that a lot of poeple don't see, is that its actually cheaper in terms of civil infrastructure. Having everyone go to work at 9 and leave at 5:30 creates huge traffic and equipment use spikes. Highways are not designed for average traffic across the day, they are designed for the rush hours when the traffic load is an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the day. The same goes for buses and subways and everything else that transports people. By increasing the length of the "rush hour" using flex time, the peak traffic load goes down significantly. The existing civil infrastructure works better and needs fewer upgrades. Everyone saves tax money.
I would not be surprised if there is a significant spike at 9am in many other areas as well due to the start of the work day. Things like electrical power, telephone use, and others most likely all have a similar spike.
Alrighty, i've seen some presentations on these kinds of things. The basic problem in current aircraft design is that aircraft can handle multiple times the acceleration the human body can. The F-16 can already take g-loads that would have its pilot's brain squishing out his/her ears. And thats still a 4th generation fighter mind you, not the 5th generation like the F-22 which probably can outperform the pilot even worse...
Once you remove the pilot a lot of interesting ideas become possible since you just ditched about 25% of the aircraft's weight and a majority of the physical requirements. Entirely new designs become possible because you don't need a cockpit etc...
This is a great idea then except for one thing. The Air Force is expecting the next generation of air combat to be quieter than the previous generation. The F22 can fly in passive mode and at least locate (if not target) enemy aircraft from the noise they put out (like their active radar, radio chatter etc). Things like IFF are ariel bulls-eyes in these cases. Also a continous transmission like the UCAV would put out isn't going to be much better. There is a great benefit to having a self contained fighting aircraft in this case which is something a UCAV is not and most likely never will be. AI is nowhere near where it needs to be for these things to be fully autonomous instead of simply unmanned.
As for men pulling triggers being unneccessary, dream on. One of the most important parts of combat is making sure the enemy doesn't know where you are. Would it be wise to create a remotely accessible database (which could conceivably be hacked) showing where all your aircraft are at any given time? It would be a target list if the enemy got a hand on it and could exploit it. Think security here.
Computer hardware is measured on sports court size. However evidentally the medical industry has switched to some sort of fruit scale, i.e. a tumor the size of a grapefruit...
They are probably selling the DCs at a net loss hoping that game licensing will make up the difference, hence Sega is losing money. Also, the PS2 is not a year late. It is in fact probably being released too early since many of the tools to develop for PS2 are kinda crappy as I've heard. As for the hardware and graphics issues, PS2 is not being used to its full potential yet so an accurate comparison is not really possible. Wait a year and compare DC to PS2.
People are screaming that the PS2 games suck. Look at the original set of PSX games. Not very good either are they? Yet many of the second generation games rocked, compare Twisted Metal 1 to 2 for example. Big improvements were made. What killed the Saturn and may kill the DC? The later generation games sucked and sega stopped really supporting their console. What is happening now, well Sega is already starting to stop supporting their console... Get the picture?
The current highest jump and also the fastest speed set by a human was set by an air force jumper in the fifties or sixties. He went up basically into space in a helium balloon, jumped, and came all the way down. I think he broke his leg somewhere in the process and several times he got into flat spins that nearly blacked him out or killed him because without air he couldn't control his descent.
The whole thing was done to see if someone would have a chance to survive a bailout from a space capsule at extreme altitude. His record still stands because no one, not even him, has been stupid enough to try again yet.
Actually the Founding Fathers did intend it this way. Look up the Whiskey Rebellion in your American History book. George Washington actually led the US army (the only time a president did so) to inforce what was in many ways essentially a "sin tax".
If I remember correctly the American political process is based on the concept of the informed voter. This is to say that the voter knows and understands the issues and votes for the candidate which he/she most agrees with.
My problem with half of these "rock the vote" kind of programs is that they create largely uniformed voters. They say to go out and vote, but they do not arm to voter so that they can accurately and effectively participate in the political process. Its just a pep rally to get people involved in the "voting experience."
This is crap. I would much rather have the unintelligent and uniformed voters out there sit on their asses watching MTV, ESPN, etc. rather than voting for the candidate that has the best smile/most hair/biggest advertizing budget. To put it simply, these idiots are watering down political process. My vote is effectively worth less for every moron that votes irrespective of how they vote.
In conclusion, if don't know who the candidates are and you haven't studied the issues, then don't vote.
Question, is the Groove Transciever Open Source etc? I know that many OS MMORPGs are basing a large part of their servers off of IRC servers. If this technology is freely available, then the expensive server end of OS MMORPGs may have a very valid workaround that would remove an almost prohibitive cost from the system.
IMHO, a lot of this is kind of inherent in Japanese culture. Japanese women were given equal rights relatively recently as cultures in developed nations go (the treaty ending of WWII). As such Japan seems to have a whole lot of chauvenism hidden under is polite and distinguished exterior.
Video games are wonderful. I play them all the time. The big problem with them as far as I can see is not violence. The violence of video games is no more graphic or realistic than what kids see in movie or TV on a regular basis. In fact it is dramatically less realistic than the real world due to the limitations of computer graphics etc. Besides, most kids are smart enough to realize that these are games.
The problem is this, americas children and teenagers are overweight and getting fatter. This is a serious problem and the dramatic increase in video games/gaming isn't helping. Video games build problem solving and other skills, this is good. However, over use means a loss of hand-eye coordination and physical fitness. America as a nation needs to get outside an play some ball with its friends.
True, but the isolated school shootings which are so prominent lately are not the works of gangs. They are the work of isolated individuals or small groups of individuals. The key word there is "isolated". No only from each other but also from other people close to them.
I would agree that net communities have effected gang violence very little. However I would also so that Quake effects them very little as well.
The idea that 3D shooters are some form of katharsis for America's youth is ludicrous. It has been psychologically disproven, you cannot compartmentalize violence in this way. Embracing violent behavior in one location tends to create violent behavior everywhere else as well.
Why is adolescent violence going down then? Because most adolescent violence is caused by people who don't have a sense of "belonging". This is not to say that being a loner means you are a killer, but a common thread in a lot of these teen shootings is that the shooter didn't have many/any close friends. Interviews with the other students go like this "I didn't know him very well but he was always very nice." Getting the picture. The internet changed all that because now, while a young geek can't find people like him at school, he can find them on the net. He "belongs" somewhere in cyberspace. Hence the drop in violence.
Note I am not advocating geek profiling or anything like that. I am saying most school shootings involve loners. It is an observable trend. Thanks to the internet non-social loners in meatspace are much more likely to have a social life in cyberspace.
The idea of "landing" connotates a solid surface, which Jupiter lacks. Also a theoretical sphere, as typified by x^2+y^2+z^2=r^2, in fact does not have volume (though it encloses volume) it is all surface.
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Nebraska man, the first pre-human ancestor who was ever found was actually a pig. Go figure. Since then we've had several partial chimp skeletons and one chinese guys lunch (peking man) proclaimed our earliest ancestors. I'll see it when I believe it.
1) Right, new voting equipment will be a good thing. Hopefully the new system will also work well unlike in New Mexico. Their electronic system was evidentally quite a problem.
2) Agreed, both candidates kind of sucked this election. Bush has some good ideas and I like his leadership style (delegation not micro-management), but some of his tax ideas are so stupid. I'm not a Gore fan. Frankly I find it ironic that you like Joe Leiberman, a candidate who is far more religious than Gore.
3) The electoral college isn't going anywhere. It is meant to balance both popular and regional will in the election of the president. It does so pretty well. Gore barely won the popular vote. Bush won the geographic area of the US by a landslide. Gore won solidly in the urban areas, but Bush had good showings in both many suburban and all rural areas. You may not like this, but do we want the political process to be dictated by the needs of NY, LA and Chicago while neglecting the heart land of America? This is the most likely outcome of a purely popular election.
Gore won't concede. He's shown that already. Do not blame other Democrats for his pro-litigation stand since most of them don't agree with it either. Gore knows that his only chance at the presidency is now. In four years he will be running from a weaker position and he will have lost a significant amount of support because of his actions to date. I already know many Gore supporters who will not vote for him in 4 years no matter what happens because of his behavior during this election.
Downfall is an overstatement, perhaps I should have said "major drawback." Ah well I'm an engineer not a writer for a reason I suppose.
IIRC correctly this may be the major downfall of the Itanium. The Itanium uses some sort of preprocessor to translate x86 instructions to the EPIC instructions the chip actually uses. It performs some optimizations as it does this to parallelize these instructions as much as possible to increase speed. Still this means the chip will have the same sorts of problems as the Pentium Pros did, they will run significantly slower on older 32bit software.
IIRC, AMD on the other hand will be bringing out a chip which is essentially 2 32bit athlon cores stuck together and linked to produce a 64bit processor. It essentially needs no translator and runs 32 bit and 64 bit equally well. This coupled with the fact that Itanium has been going nowhere slow has me looking toward AMD for a good 64bit solution.
Seems to me that you are drastically underestimating the difficulties inherent in creating true sentience.
Computers follow orders well. We tell them what to do and they do it. Computers are also good at logic. Computers are not good at intuition nor are they especially good at proofs or problem solving. Having done design work I can confidently say that intuition is necessary for it. In short I have seen no proof that this computer will not logic itself into a corner from which it cannot emerge.
Sentience also requires lots of computing power. I have heard that one human brain does more work than every silicon based computer on the planet and I believe it. Steven Hawking said that modern computing is teaching the brains of a meal worm to do interesting tricks. I have seen very little to indicate that a true thinking computer will work faster or more efficiently than a human at the same job. I doubt that a thinking computer will, for instance, retain its ability to do fast arithmatical calculations (after all, we didn't).
In short some of the basic assumptions that this argument uses may not be viable. Thinking computers may not be capable of the strong intuition and problem solving needed to do design. Thinking computers also may not be capable of outperforming us mentally at all.
Digital movie making is not about picture resolution and quality. It is not really about using optical effects instead of digital effects. It is mostly about film distribution.
Making 1000 prints of a movie for opening night costs a lot of money, say several million for a big release. Doing the same thing on digital costs significantly less. Thats really why the studios want to go digital. Even a cheaply filmed movie gets expensive really quickly. You can shoot a movie for $4000 but you can't release it for less than several hundred thousand.
As for effects, well yes, all digital means you save a generation in editing but the studios don't really care about that. All effects today are done on computers, effects are not optically composited. They are digitally composited. Switching to digital means you don't have to transfer the footage to digital to do the effects work and then transfer the footage back to show the movie. Cutting out this annoying and time consuming process is probably the real reason Lucas is so keen on digital. It makes the effects heavy movies he likes to make significantly easier to create.
The big question is how good is a movie which is shot and edited digitally, like Ep 2, going to look when shown on 35mm film at the local theatre. Remember, there are limitations on current filming techniques too (you can't read signs on most moving objects for example) so hollywood is not considering this for the look of the end product.
The number of EE degrees is dropping but at the same time the number of CompE degrees has been steadily increasing. After all, the EE and CompE degrees come out of the same department in most schools and the difference is only a handful of classes. The pull of compsci is also not helping EE, when the can get more money for a bachelors in CS.
The french judge then went on to demand that yahoo build a device called the Maginot Firewall to filter out all offending users. The Firewall is very difficult to circumvent directly, but incredibly easy to circumvent via ISPs in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Just a few problems with these nanotubes.
1) Assuming perfectly defect free nanotubes above the single fiber level is implausible. Nanotubes work fine as single fibers, however stringing them together requires either using them in some sort of fiber composite or somehow connecting the tubes together to form some sort of tube honeycomb. A honeycomb cannot be assume to be defect free so properties will be degraded and a composite will weight the fiber properties with the weaker but tougher matrix.
2) Nanotubes will likely be quite brittle no matter what form they take. This poses big problems. The usual method for overcoming this is by compositing them with a weaker but tougher matrix, but that will lower the end strength of the composite.
3) Construction of tall buildings and the like requires big compressive loads. Tube/fiber composites suck in compression because the fibers buckle before they ever even get close to their ultimate strength. This is a problem if you wish to build a space elevator since such a structure is bound to have huge compressive loads at its base.
Is the new Robert Jordan book any good? The last 2 were sooo long and sooo dull. Please Lord, let this one be interesting...
Question - Does anyone know whether this will be any good? I was watching the Dune movie (the long version) on sci-fi a while back and I kept thinking how it hadn't aged especially well. A lot of the effects just don't look good, or even worse, look like obvious special effects.
This doesn't really help when arguing with your boss, but every one is missing a big advantage to flex time.
The big advantage to flex time that a lot of poeple don't see, is that its actually cheaper in terms of civil infrastructure. Having everyone go to work at 9 and leave at 5:30 creates huge traffic and equipment use spikes. Highways are not designed for average traffic across the day, they are designed for the rush hours when the traffic load is an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the day. The same goes for buses and subways and everything else that transports people. By increasing the length of the "rush hour" using flex time, the peak traffic load goes down significantly. The existing civil infrastructure works better and needs fewer upgrades. Everyone saves tax money.
I would not be surprised if there is a significant spike at 9am in many other areas as well due to the start of the work day. Things like electrical power, telephone use, and others most likely all have a similar spike.
Alrighty, i've seen some presentations on these kinds of things. The basic problem in current aircraft design is that aircraft can handle multiple times the acceleration the human body can. The F-16 can already take g-loads that would have its pilot's brain squishing out his/her ears. And thats still a 4th generation fighter mind you, not the 5th generation like the F-22 which probably can outperform the pilot even worse...
Once you remove the pilot a lot of interesting ideas become possible since you just ditched about 25% of the aircraft's weight and a majority of the physical requirements. Entirely new designs become possible because you don't need a cockpit etc...
This is a great idea then except for one thing. The Air Force is expecting the next generation of air combat to be quieter than the previous generation. The F22 can fly in passive mode and at least locate (if not target) enemy aircraft from the noise they put out (like their active radar, radio chatter etc). Things like IFF are ariel bulls-eyes in these cases. Also a continous transmission like the UCAV would put out isn't going to be much better. There is a great benefit to having a self contained fighting aircraft in this case which is something a UCAV is not and most likely never will be. AI is nowhere near where it needs to be for these things to be fully autonomous instead of simply unmanned.
As for men pulling triggers being unneccessary, dream on. One of the most important parts of combat is making sure the enemy doesn't know where you are. Would it be wise to create a remotely accessible database (which could conceivably be hacked) showing where all your aircraft are at any given time? It would be a target list if the enemy got a hand on it and could exploit it. Think security here.
Computer hardware is measured on sports court size. However evidentally the medical industry has switched to some sort of fruit scale, i.e. a tumor the size of a grapefruit...
They are probably selling the DCs at a net loss hoping that game licensing will make up the difference, hence Sega is losing money. Also, the PS2 is not a year late. It is in fact probably being released too early since many of the tools to develop for PS2 are kinda crappy as I've heard. As for the hardware and graphics issues, PS2 is not being used to its full potential yet so an accurate comparison is not really possible. Wait a year and compare DC to PS2.
People are screaming that the PS2 games suck. Look at the original set of PSX games. Not very good either are they? Yet many of the second generation games rocked, compare Twisted Metal 1 to 2 for example. Big improvements were made. What killed the Saturn and may kill the DC? The later generation games sucked and sega stopped really supporting their console. What is happening now, well Sega is already starting to stop supporting their console... Get the picture?
The current highest jump and also the fastest speed set by a human was set by an air force jumper in the fifties or sixties. He went up basically into space in a helium balloon, jumped, and came all the way down. I think he broke his leg somewhere in the process and several times he got into flat spins that nearly blacked him out or killed him because without air he couldn't control his descent.
The whole thing was done to see if someone would have a chance to survive a bailout from a space capsule at extreme altitude. His record still stands because no one, not even him, has been stupid enough to try again yet.
Actually the Founding Fathers did intend it this way. Look up the Whiskey Rebellion in your American History book. George Washington actually led the US army (the only time a president did so) to inforce what was in many ways essentially a "sin tax".
If I remember correctly the American political process is based on the concept of the informed voter. This is to say that the voter knows and understands the issues and votes for the candidate which he/she most agrees with.
My problem with half of these "rock the vote" kind of programs is that they create largely uniformed voters. They say to go out and vote, but they do not arm to voter so that they can accurately and effectively participate in the political process. Its just a pep rally to get people involved in the "voting experience."
This is crap. I would much rather have the unintelligent and uniformed voters out there sit on their asses watching MTV, ESPN, etc. rather than voting for the candidate that has the best smile/most hair/biggest advertizing budget. To put it simply, these idiots are watering down political process. My vote is effectively worth less for every moron that votes irrespective of how they vote.
In conclusion, if don't know who the candidates are and you haven't studied the issues, then don't vote.
Question, is the Groove Transciever Open Source etc? I know that many OS MMORPGs are basing a large part of their servers off of IRC servers. If this technology is freely available, then the expensive server end of OS MMORPGs may have a very valid workaround that would remove an almost prohibitive cost from the system.
IMHO, a lot of this is kind of inherent in Japanese culture. Japanese women were given equal rights relatively recently as cultures in developed nations go (the treaty ending of WWII). As such Japan seems to have a whole lot of chauvenism hidden under is polite and distinguished exterior.
Video games are wonderful. I play them all the time. The big problem with them as far as I can see is not violence. The violence of video games is no more graphic or realistic than what kids see in movie or TV on a regular basis. In fact it is dramatically less realistic than the real world due to the limitations of computer graphics etc. Besides, most kids are smart enough to realize that these are games.
The problem is this, americas children and teenagers are overweight and getting fatter. This is a serious problem and the dramatic increase in video games/gaming isn't helping. Video games build problem solving and other skills, this is good. However, over use means a loss of hand-eye coordination and physical fitness. America as a nation needs to get outside an play some ball with its friends.
True, but the isolated school shootings which are so prominent lately are not the works of gangs. They are the work of isolated individuals or small groups of individuals. The key word there is "isolated". No only from each other but also from other people close to them.
I would agree that net communities have effected gang violence very little. However I would also so that Quake effects them very little as well.
The idea that 3D shooters are some form of katharsis for America's youth is ludicrous. It has been psychologically disproven, you cannot compartmentalize violence in this way. Embracing violent behavior in one location tends to create violent behavior everywhere else as well.
Why is adolescent violence going down then? Because most adolescent violence is caused by people who don't have a sense of "belonging". This is not to say that being a loner means you are a killer, but a common thread in a lot of these teen shootings is that the shooter didn't have many/any close friends. Interviews with the other students go like this "I didn't know him very well but he was always very nice." Getting the picture. The internet changed all that because now, while a young geek can't find people like him at school, he can find them on the net. He "belongs" somewhere in cyberspace. Hence the drop in violence.
Note I am not advocating geek profiling or anything like that. I am saying most school shootings involve loners. It is an observable trend. Thanks to the internet non-social loners in meatspace are much more likely to have a social life in cyberspace.
Note to Mike Bridge:
The idea of "landing" connotates a solid surface, which Jupiter lacks. Also a theoretical sphere, as typified by x^2+y^2+z^2=r^2, in fact does not have volume (though it encloses volume) it is all surface.