You and your significant other (if you have one) can't make vitamin C, which you both need to survive and reproduce, but would you say that you're not self-replicating?
At my school JAVA is the main language used, especially at the lower levels, but there are required courses in C, UNIX (part of the C course) and MIPS assembly. One of the elective courses is C++.
You mention several times about "the primitive heritage of our reptilian mind", but you seem to overlook the fact that it wouldn't have evolved that way if it didn't work. "Taking advantage of other people" is a successful strategy in some cases, and even a colony of perfectly logical, individualistic robots would have a few that would take advantage of the others.
You also strike me as the sort of person who, when being mugged, would willing give up rather than defend oneself in even the slightest way, thus ironically making mugging people a profitable occupation.
It's not "you should carry a gun because you're gonna get raped/mugged/etc if you don't", it's "you should carry a gun just in case" just like you should have a first aid kit and spare oil in your car.
Have YOU ever used a chainsaw?
I have, many times, including two summers of work cutting down trees and clearing brush along a fence-line. I have had chainsaws kick back at me (although you have to be a little careless to let that happen, if you don't cut with the tip it can't kick back at you), and I have never had the chainsaw move more than six inches when kicking back. If you READ the manual and keep two hands on the chainsaw at all times then you can easily prevent it from kicking back into anything important. Frankly, I found the chainsaw to be one of the more harmless tools to use.
And as for location, there's no place on earth where the rainfall would possibly exceed the needs of a densely packed urban population, without conservation.
I'm not sure why it's "heinous" advice to say "avoid writing code that won't compile and will have to be backed out"... It's "heinous" to remove a useful tool just because some compliers aren't/weren't standards compliant.
"For comparison, NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.3 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
0.6% of the federal budget is not a lot of resources to be devoting to the promise of space travel, especially considering the possible rewards.
As for commercial benefits, there are some (and there are other, non-commercial benefits), but why does a government agency have to do things that have commercial benefits? Won't, you know, companies do that? Government agencies can do research that my have no other benefit than to simply increase our understanding of the universe, or do research that isn't profitable but still useful.
I read about these squirrel suits some time ago in Popular Science, and they cannot be practiced with in a wind tunnel because they move you... it's not possible to stay in one place and just fall with these things.
It's because we're lucky enough to have the Columbia river running right through us. That, and all the rain we get means you can just stick a dam any old place and it'll work.:)
Okay, while the word "watts" doesn't imply a time interval, the fact that it's supposed to be a replacement for a conventional power station implies that it will run for a long time at a wattage X, and it's reasonable to assume that the wattage they quoted (27 megawatts) is the wattage that the device is supposed to produce over this long timespan. In other-words, given the context of the sentence the most reasonable parsing of the sentence "it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy" would be that the device produces 27 megawatts over a long period of time.
The it's easier to see how the sentence parses if you replace "thermal energy" with "heat"; the sentence then becomes "it would produce 27 megawatts worth of heat", which given the context makes perfect sense.
Watts is joules per second, so saying "it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy" means that if you totaled up all the energy released in a single second by this reactor it would total to 27 megajoules.
The sentence parses fine as is: it simply means that this thing produces 27 megajoules a second, forever.
As a more concrete example (with smaller numbers) saying that a lightbulb "will consume 60 watts of electrical energy" is just another way of saying "it's a 60 watt bulb."
Wow, that's kind of eerie how well it works.
I propose we work on a "United Fanboi-ism Theory" that will integrate all possible "fanboyisms" into one giant, multidimensional formula.
The key difference is the incredibly short time frame the bomb produces 1% of the energy of the Sun. This is helped by the Sun releasing energy in essentially the slowest possible way. (The sun is self limited, in that when it gets too hot from too much fusion occurring it expands slightly, lowering the rate of fusion until it cools down.)
I don't find it odd at all that for a short period of time the largest fusion bomb ever tested produced 1% of the sun's energy. I can produce accelerations in the hundreds of G's simply by smashing my fist into a wall and likewise say that "for less than a millisecond I produced forces hundreds of times stronger than the pull of Earth's gravity" and be technically correct.
Because it IS a Predator-B.
From the first link: "A Predator B unmanned aerial system has been acquired by NASA's Dryden Flight Re-search Center to support Earth science missions and advanced aeronautical technology development. The aircraft, named Ikhana..."
I know, reading the articles, I must be new here.
Evolutionary "pressures" do not need to be great for it to work, but it works faster with greater "pressures."
For example, imagine a species of fish that wanders into an underground cave. Pigmented skin takes a tiny bit more energy to grow than un-pigmented skin. In the dark it doesn't matter if your natural un-pigmented flesh color is neon yellow, as nobody can see you anyway. Eventually the species will evolve to have no pigments in their skin, because those fish who don't will save that tiny bit of energy, and so far as I know all cave fish species have no pigments in their skin and are the natural color of their flesh, a pale white.
This suggests to me that evolution will eventually remove the appendix, or modify it to some other purpose (so that its benefits outweigh its costs) even if the "rate of death before reproduction" from appendicitis is very low, although it will take a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
In any discussion? In any POST the likelihood of dissing Microsoft approaches one.
You and your significant other (if you have one) can't make vitamin C, which you both need to survive and reproduce, but would you say that you're not self-replicating?
One Grand Coulee Dam.
At my school JAVA is the main language used, especially at the lower levels, but there are required courses in C, UNIX (part of the C course) and MIPS assembly. One of the elective courses is C++.
Maybe you should try turning the monitor on then. :)
Puget Sound, not Peugeot Sound.
</Spelling NAZI>
I think you're right about what needs to happen to Microsoft for it get better.
Looking at www.whitehouse.gov (via http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.whitehouse.gov) it appears that George Bush's Whitehouse has penguins in it already.
You mention several times about "the primitive heritage of our reptilian mind", but you seem to overlook the fact that it wouldn't have evolved that way if it didn't work. "Taking advantage of other people" is a successful strategy in some cases, and even a colony of perfectly logical, individualistic robots would have a few that would take advantage of the others.
You also strike me as the sort of person who, when being mugged, would willing give up rather than defend oneself in even the slightest way, thus ironically making mugging people a profitable occupation.
If more people got angry and passionate about the often BS laws that are proposed and passed, perhaps there'd be less of them.
It's not "you should carry a gun because you're gonna get raped/mugged/etc if you don't", it's "you should carry a gun just in case" just like you should have a first aid kit and spare oil in your car.
You have a permit for that comment, Citizen?
Have YOU ever used a chainsaw? I have, many times, including two summers of work cutting down trees and clearing brush along a fence-line. I have had chainsaws kick back at me (although you have to be a little careless to let that happen, if you don't cut with the tip it can't kick back at you), and I have never had the chainsaw move more than six inches when kicking back. If you READ the manual and keep two hands on the chainsaw at all times then you can easily prevent it from kicking back into anything important. Frankly, I found the chainsaw to be one of the more harmless tools to use.
That's what they WANT you to think!
*puts on tinfoil hat*"For comparison, NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.3 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
0.6% of the federal budget is not a lot of resources to be devoting to the promise of space travel, especially considering the possible rewards.
As for commercial benefits, there are some (and there are other, non-commercial benefits), but why does a government agency have to do things that have commercial benefits? Won't, you know, companies do that? Government agencies can do research that my have no other benefit than to simply increase our understanding of the universe, or do research that isn't profitable but still useful.
I read about these squirrel suits some time ago in Popular Science, and they cannot be practiced with in a wind tunnel because they move you... it's not possible to stay in one place and just fall with these things.
It's because we're lucky enough to have the Columbia river running right through us. That, and all the rain we get means you can just stick a dam any old place and it'll work. :)
Okay, while the word "watts" doesn't imply a time interval, the fact that it's supposed to be a replacement for a conventional power station implies that it will run for a long time at a wattage X, and it's reasonable to assume that the wattage they quoted (27 megawatts) is the wattage that the device is supposed to produce over this long timespan. In other-words, given the context of the sentence the most reasonable parsing of the sentence "it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy" would be that the device produces 27 megawatts over a long period of time.
The it's easier to see how the sentence parses if you replace "thermal energy" with "heat"; the sentence then becomes "it would produce 27 megawatts worth of heat", which given the context makes perfect sense.
Watts is joules per second, so saying "it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy" means that if you totaled up all the energy released in a single second by this reactor it would total to 27 megajoules. The sentence parses fine as is: it simply means that this thing produces 27 megajoules a second, forever. As a more concrete example (with smaller numbers) saying that a lightbulb "will consume 60 watts of electrical energy" is just another way of saying "it's a 60 watt bulb."
Wow, that's kind of eerie how well it works. I propose we work on a "United Fanboi-ism Theory" that will integrate all possible "fanboyisms" into one giant, multidimensional formula.
Exactly! Remember "The enemy's gate is down!"
The key difference is the incredibly short time frame the bomb produces 1% of the energy of the Sun. This is helped by the Sun releasing energy in essentially the slowest possible way. (The sun is self limited, in that when it gets too hot from too much fusion occurring it expands slightly, lowering the rate of fusion until it cools down.) I don't find it odd at all that for a short period of time the largest fusion bomb ever tested produced 1% of the sun's energy. I can produce accelerations in the hundreds of G's simply by smashing my fist into a wall and likewise say that "for less than a millisecond I produced forces hundreds of times stronger than the pull of Earth's gravity" and be technically correct.
Because it IS a Predator-B. From the first link: "A Predator B unmanned aerial system has been acquired by NASA's Dryden Flight Re-search Center to support Earth science missions and advanced aeronautical technology development. The aircraft, named Ikhana..." I know, reading the articles, I must be new here.
Evolutionary "pressures" do not need to be great for it to work, but it works faster with greater "pressures."
For example, imagine a species of fish that wanders into an underground cave. Pigmented skin takes a tiny bit more energy to grow than un-pigmented skin. In the dark it doesn't matter if your natural un-pigmented flesh color is neon yellow, as nobody can see you anyway. Eventually the species will evolve to have no pigments in their skin, because those fish who don't will save that tiny bit of energy, and so far as I know all cave fish species have no pigments in their skin and are the natural color of their flesh, a pale white.
This suggests to me that evolution will eventually remove the appendix, or modify it to some other purpose (so that its benefits outweigh its costs) even if the "rate of death before reproduction" from appendicitis is very low, although it will take a very long time.