I think that the approach commonly taken to achieve some form of AI (curiosity as an example) through programming methods may be a flawed way of going about it. We probably should go about the problem in a similar way to how biological systems developed various aspects of AI. That is, build a system that has some basic rules for its operation that tends to form a system where curiosity and intelligence in general is an emergent property rather than one that is strictly programmed into the system. Take an existing system with some degree of "creativity" inherent in it and model our own technology to at first, mimic the natural system and over time, we tweak the system to suit our purposes as It is extremely difficult to build such systems from scratch.
With a contract you can generally point out exactly where obligations to do work were unfulfilled. In this court case, it took 40 million dollars of lawyering to get to the heart of the matter. I suspect that contracts are more easily enforced.
The lawsuit alleged that EDS, now owned by HP, had fraudulently misrepresented itself in a sales pitch in 2000 for the system, leaving Sky to pick up the pieces and take on heavy costs as it implemented the system itself. EDS, on the other hand, said Sky did not know what it wanted, and kept introducing new requirements, making it difficult to deliver.
and
“If other representations become more important than contracts themselves, it could indicate that contracts effectively have no value,” he said. It also potentially risks Entire Agreement Clauses, which exist in most supplier contracts and insist that only terms in the contract are legally binding, rather than any other representations.
It almost sounds like Sky was suing EDS for not finishing work that their sales claimed they could do but wasn't actually in the contract. EDS/HP claim in response that they couldn't actually fulfil the claim anyway as Sky kept changing what was asked of HP/EDS throughout the ordeal. Further, there's concern that the decision weakens the strength of cotnracts compared to marketing/sales' claims...
Not all prions are bad. Yeast for example have several prions that serve essential functions in the cell. The problem with human prions is that they are defective, they form plaques and damage cells while converting healthy proteins to defective ones.
Chemists use Acetic acid as a solvent for certain reactions (chemistry labs in college for me) so although I knew that Acetic acid freezes near room temperature because of our use of it as a solvent, I didn't really take the time to notice whether or not it floated.
Carbon's phase diagram shows quite clearly that Graphite becomes the less stable form as temperature and pressure increase to a sufficient degree. So bringing Graphite to these conditions would indeed convert to diamond as you freeze it out of the liquid phase.
Synthetic diamonds are for the most part, industrial grade which tends to be opaque unlike gem quality natural diamonds which are transparent, contain Nitrogen and don't fluoresce under UV like synthetic diamonds generally do. Synthetic diamonds are synthesized in rapid fashion which leaves two major crystal phases in the finished material which is responsible for the fluorescence under UV light. Any transparent synthetic diamonds tend to either be devoid of Nitrogen (crystal clear) or have a yellowish tinge to them caused by Nitrogen in the crystal. Natural diamonds have Nitrogen in them but they form in such long periods of time that there is only one major crystal phase in them and the Nitrogen has migrated to regions in the crystal in such a way as to leave the diamond clear instead of yellow. So yes diamonds can be synthesized cheaper than those dug out of the ground. However, they are not quite the same as of today's technology and can often be differentiated from natural diamonds because of minute differences in their characteristics.
Bismuth, Silicon, Germanium and Gallium are all elements that have a solid phase that is less dense than their liquid phase. Acetic acid I hear is less dense in its solid phase but I haven't had a chance to verify this.
The cost of something depends on quantity and demand/supply. So if it took 3,000$/kg to mine these diamonds from these gas giants, it wouldn't be profitable to mine enough of them to decrease the overall cost of diamonds below this value. If the supply of Diamond crashes to the point where the demand pushes up the cost of Diamonds enough that mining them from these gas giants is profitable then the price would still be at least what it cost to mine them from these planets. The only way that diamond values would crash would be if mining them were dirt cheap, which is very very unlikely. Now from the point of view of Uranus and Neptune, these Diamonds aren't just lying around, they're hard to get at which makes them quite rare and therefore precious.
Normally when you try to melt a Diamond, the Diamond converts to graphite first and then melts. When the material freezes again, it isn't Diamond anymore. In the case of the article, the Diamond is under so much pressure that it no longer converts to Graphite before melting. When the liquid freezes again, it isn't Coal but Diamond.
40 million atmospheres is the kind of pressure that you'd measure under 400 million meters (400,000km) of material at a density of 1 g/cm^3 at a constant 1 g. Uranus and Neptune's gravity field is near 1g give or take and the density is not much more than 1g/cm^3 so the pressure in the core can not be 40 million atmospheres as there isn't ~400,000 km of material sitting above the core. Given that Uranus has a radius of ~25,000 km, density of ~1.27 g/cm^3, surface gravity of 8.7 m/s^2 and that the gravity field drops off roughly linearly with depth, the pressure is probably about a tenth of what TFA says diamond started to melt. Either someone dropped a zero where it didn't belong or Diamond isn't fluid in these planets' cores.
without exposing every contributor to prosecution for violation of US export controls?
If each of us contribute a dollar to a common fund based outside the US and that fund is used to build a server farm outside of the US's jurisdiction then how do you propose that the US prosecutes even a tiny percentage of the contributors? I would imagine that chargin two million Slashdotters with violating US export restrictions would be fairly difficult to make stick.
I would imagine that at some point in the future, the US govt. will ban proxies as they allow individuals from target countries to circumvent an outright ban.
There's nothing stopping a separate legal entity from doing so however. So hypothetically, Sourceforge could fork into separately funded/controlled operations to get around the ban. Correct?
I have a hard time believing they'd need 192 servers whether they used Linux or not.
This is the same government that made a deal with Microsoft to pay them regardless of whether Microsoft's software was actually installed. That doesn't sound like the kind of logical decision making that leads to entertaining the notion that 230 students might not need 192 servers after all.
I suspect that the more servers that were used, the more MS gets paid in the deal. Combine that with governments' tendency to buy a lot of stuff that it doesn't need and the reasoning for using 192 servers becomes all too clear.
The contract stipulates that Microsoft gets paid regardless of whether schools actually use their software. So while the schools may not be forced through contract to use MS software, it doesn't matter to Microsoft as they still get paid for non-existent software.
1) Dawkins' personal opinions are just that: opinions. 2)Behe asserts that irreducible complexity essentially makes evolution between species impossible. This of course is a lie shown to be vacuous on multiple occasions. Behe continues to parrot them. The bias of the ID movement is obvious. The entire sham of religion pretending to be ID depends on ignoring all available evidence in favor of a book written by cave dwelling story tellers pretending that it's God's word. 1) Which of my statements are provably false? 2) You're allowed to do anything you want except call your ignorant, unfounded assertions science because it would be a lie.
But even I have to admit the problem modern biology has with answering his objections is quite telling.
Bull shit. ID is the modern equivalent of the flat Earth "theory" and just about as ignorantly stubborn about the universe.
Their excuse: "evolution did it - don't ask how we know, just believe it".
You sir are an idiot.
That, to me, sounds more like religion than science. At least a religion admits when they ask you to believe something on faith.
Another lie. Isn't Intelligent Design the creationist's science or is that exactly what you're trying to call evolutionary biology? ID is the political re-wrapping of creationism to avoid being called out as the religious garbage that it is. That is disgustingly dishonest and hypocritical to boot unless "thou shalt not lie" doesn't apply to the faithful.
Simple. It never expires. She seems to have a very very distorted idea of what "free and open dissemination of information and literature" means. Apparently she thinks that information needs to be controlled by its author(s) in order to be open or some such nonsense. It's an extreme sense of entitlement.
Linear accelerators have contributed to saving far more lives than these errors have taken. Fortunately, these kind of errors are comparatively rare and not the menace to health that the summary leads one to believe.
Not only that, if you look at the "artwork" its self, it's just a glossy black cube. That is the most baffling thing to me about it. The fact that someone would actually pay 4 grand to own an otherwise featureless black cube for a week.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the approach commonly taken to achieve some form of AI (curiosity as an example) through programming methods may be a flawed way of going about it. We probably should go about the problem in a similar way to how biological systems developed various aspects of AI. That is, build a system that has some basic rules for its operation that tends to form a system where curiosity and intelligence in general is an emergent property rather than one that is strictly programmed into the system. Take an existing system with some degree of "creativity" inherent in it and model our own technology to at first, mimic the natural system and over time, we tweak the system to suit our purposes as It is extremely difficult to build such systems from scratch.
With a contract you can generally point out exactly where obligations to do work were unfulfilled. In this court case, it took 40 million dollars of lawyering to get to the heart of the matter. I suspect that contracts are more easily enforced.
and
It almost sounds like Sky was suing EDS for not finishing work that their sales claimed they could do but wasn't actually in the contract. EDS/HP claim in response that they couldn't actually fulfil the claim anyway as Sky kept changing what was asked of HP/EDS throughout the ordeal. Further, there's concern that the decision weakens the strength of cotnracts compared to marketing/sales' claims...
Not all prions are bad. Yeast for example have several prions that serve essential functions in the cell. The problem with human prions is that they are defective, they form plaques and damage cells while converting healthy proteins to defective ones.
blockquote>In natural diamonds, there is typically little if any response to short-wave ultraviolet, but the reverse is true of synthetic diamonds.
You're right. I really should have said what part of the UV spectrum I was talking about specifically.
Never underestimate the power of Debeers to advertise away common sense.
Chemists use Acetic acid as a solvent for certain reactions (chemistry labs in college for me) so although I knew that Acetic acid freezes near room temperature because of our use of it as a solvent, I didn't really take the time to notice whether or not it floated.
Carbon's phase diagram shows quite clearly that Graphite becomes the less stable form as temperature and pressure increase to a sufficient degree. So bringing Graphite to these conditions would indeed convert to diamond as you freeze it out of the liquid phase.
Synthetic diamonds are for the most part, industrial grade which tends to be opaque unlike gem quality natural diamonds which are transparent, contain Nitrogen and don't fluoresce under UV like synthetic diamonds generally do. Synthetic diamonds are synthesized in rapid fashion which leaves two major crystal phases in the finished material which is responsible for the fluorescence under UV light. Any transparent synthetic diamonds tend to either be devoid of Nitrogen (crystal clear) or have a yellowish tinge to them caused by Nitrogen in the crystal. Natural diamonds have Nitrogen in them but they form in such long periods of time that there is only one major crystal phase in them and the Nitrogen has migrated to regions in the crystal in such a way as to leave the diamond clear instead of yellow. So yes diamonds can be synthesized cheaper than those dug out of the ground. However, they are not quite the same as of today's technology and can often be differentiated from natural diamonds because of minute differences in their characteristics.
Bismuth, Silicon, Germanium and Gallium are all elements that have a solid phase that is less dense than their liquid phase. Acetic acid I hear is less dense in its solid phase but I haven't had a chance to verify this.
The cost of something depends on quantity and demand/supply. So if it took 3,000$/kg to mine these diamonds from these gas giants, it wouldn't be profitable to mine enough of them to decrease the overall cost of diamonds below this value. If the supply of Diamond crashes to the point where the demand pushes up the cost of Diamonds enough that mining them from these gas giants is profitable then the price would still be at least what it cost to mine them from these planets. The only way that diamond values would crash would be if mining them were dirt cheap, which is very very unlikely. Now from the point of view of Uranus and Neptune, these Diamonds aren't just lying around, they're hard to get at which makes them quite rare and therefore precious.
Normally when you try to melt a Diamond, the Diamond converts to graphite first and then melts. When the material freezes again, it isn't Diamond anymore. In the case of the article, the Diamond is under so much pressure that it no longer converts to Graphite before melting. When the liquid freezes again, it isn't Coal but Diamond.
40 million atmospheres is the kind of pressure that you'd measure under 400 million meters (400,000km) of material at a density of 1 g/cm^3 at a constant 1 g. Uranus and Neptune's gravity field is near 1g give or take and the density is not much more than 1g/cm^3 so the pressure in the core can not be 40 million atmospheres as there isn't ~400,000 km of material sitting above the core. Given that Uranus has a radius of ~25,000 km, density of ~1.27 g/cm^3, surface gravity of 8.7 m/s^2 and that the gravity field drops off roughly linearly with depth, the pressure is probably about a tenth of what TFA says diamond started to melt. Either someone dropped a zero where it didn't belong or Diamond isn't fluid in these planets' cores.
If each of us contribute a dollar to a common fund based outside the US and that fund is used to build a server farm outside of the US's jurisdiction then how do you propose that the US prosecutes even a tiny percentage of the contributors? I would imagine that chargin two million Slashdotters with violating US export restrictions would be fairly difficult to make stick.
I would imagine that at some point in the future, the US govt. will ban proxies as they allow individuals from target countries to circumvent an outright ban.
There's nothing stopping a separate legal entity from doing so however. So hypothetically, Sourceforge could fork into separately funded/controlled operations to get around the ban. Correct?
It rubs pretty much everyone at Slashdot the wrong way so why don't we all chip in to create a mirror site or something based outside the US?
This is the same government that made a deal with Microsoft to pay them regardless of whether Microsoft's software was actually installed. That doesn't sound like the kind of logical decision making that leads to entertaining the notion that 230 students might not need 192 servers after all.
I suspect that the more servers that were used, the more MS gets paid in the deal. Combine that with governments' tendency to buy a lot of stuff that it doesn't need and the reasoning for using 192 servers becomes all too clear.
The contract stipulates that Microsoft gets paid regardless of whether schools actually use their software. So while the schools may not be forced through contract to use MS software, it doesn't matter to Microsoft as they still get paid for non-existent software.
Well isn't that lovely. Demonstrably corrupt.
1) Dawkins' personal opinions are just that: opinions.
2)Behe asserts that irreducible complexity essentially makes evolution between species impossible. This of course is a lie shown to be vacuous on multiple occasions. Behe continues to parrot them.
The bias of the ID movement is obvious. The entire sham of religion pretending to be ID depends on ignoring all available evidence in favor of a book written by cave dwelling story tellers pretending that it's God's word.
1) Which of my statements are provably false?
2) You're allowed to do anything you want except call your ignorant, unfounded assertions science because it would be a lie.
Bull shit. ID is the modern equivalent of the flat Earth "theory" and just about as ignorantly stubborn about the universe.
You sir are an idiot.
Another lie. Isn't Intelligent Design the creationist's science or is that exactly what you're trying to call evolutionary biology? ID is the political re-wrapping of creationism to avoid being called out as the religious garbage that it is. That is disgustingly dishonest and hypocritical to boot unless "thou shalt not lie" doesn't apply to the faithful.
Simple. It never expires. She seems to have a very very distorted idea of what "free and open dissemination of information and literature" means. Apparently she thinks that information needs to be controlled by its author(s) in order to be open or some such nonsense. It's an extreme sense of entitlement.
Linear accelerators have contributed to saving far more lives than these errors have taken. Fortunately, these kind of errors are comparatively rare and not the menace to health that the summary leads one to believe.
Not only that, if you look at the "artwork" its self, it's just a glossy black cube. That is the most baffling thing to me about it. The fact that someone would actually pay 4 grand to own an otherwise featureless black cube for a week.