Yes, I wasn't referring to the actual laws, but instead the fact that you can't prove or disprove whether nuclear fusion is really possible.
Of course it is possible, they have been doing it for tens of years now. Whether it can be economically feasibly is a completely different issue of course.
If you completely lost power, the magnetic field would disappear, the plasma would instantaneously dissipate and lose energy and the fusion reaction would come to halt.
With fission the danger is that the reaction is
self-sustaining. With fusion it is not, unless the plasma can somehow be made stable, say by pressure at the core of the sun.
These reactors are inherently very safe.
So far (or at least until very recently)you have even been able to get more energy from them than you put in, that's how safe they are!
The physical laws behind fusion are in fact fairly well understood and has been understood for a while now. However a technical implementation is quite a different issue. The plasma in the tokomaks has temperatures similar to those at the core of the sun and is extremely
difficult to control. That has been the difficulty
since attempts at controlled fusion started in late 60s or around that time.
Well, as you noticed yourself, the ice floats in water, therefore the displacement is only partial.
The point is that the wieght of ice is the same as the weight of water obtained by melting the ice.
The amount of water displaced by a floating object (say a ship) is proportional to its weight.
That's why the level of water does not change.
It would be impossible to
model air flow by calculating the interactions of every single particle that might affect the paper.
By virtue of the Moore's law and nanotechnology
we will have computers so powerful that we will be able to analyze and predict the bahaviour of every molecule of the paper and, in fact, every atom of the universe.
You don't doubt the inevitability and the historical necessity of the technological progress, do you?
A common misconception. Scientific theories do not get either proven or misproven. They describe the experimental data well or not so well. That is the difference.
After all, who needs to be able to spell when there is spell check and why learn the rules of grammer and style when Word has a grammer and style checker as well?
On a calculator doing x.xx * y.yy will display as many digits as will fill the screen. It dosen't mean that any of those
digits after 2 decimal places are significant....
What are you talking about? You will get four significant digits after the decimal point on a calculator as you very well should. It is amusing that people rant about other people being ignorant only to demonstrate their own ignorance.
Exactly. When you have a differential equation which is unstable with respect to the boundary
conditions you typically get solutions with exponential divergence.
Very roughly, that means that you lose one bit of precision per iteration. Therefore to produce
accurate long-term weather forecasts you will need
observation made with hundreds of accurete digits
after the decimal point, which is quite absurd.
because the P4 doesn't support SMP, and the next few revs of Xeons will be based on the PIII until they are
scrapped for the 64-bit Itanium.
Intel release an SMP version of P4 (Foster) just a few weeks ago. New Xeons are based on P4. Itanium will probably never become a mainstream machine as it is supposed to be quickly supplanted by McKinley next year.
Unfortunately, as long as the masses remain uneducated, we're fighting a
losing battle. I don't know what can be done to counteract this, but I sure it hope somebody else can come up with
something, and soon -- before people like me are no longer able to access these things, and are no longer able to realize this
common fallacy.
I feel rather bad about you fighting a battle with the uneducated masses. Let me give you some advice, which I hope you will find useful:
First never fight with anyone uneducated. God knows what dirty tricks they might use.
Second, never fight with the masses. You are unlikely to win.
It would really be rather terrible if people like you are no longer able to access things and to realize this common fallacy, but I am sure somebody else can come up with something and soon.
The "nothing about the structure of the brain that's not duplicable" springs from the fact that neuron behavior is pretty simple in the broad strokes - the parts we don't understand are more related to dynamic interactions - which are also straightforward to implement in software.
The behavior of individuals neurons is very complicated and still not at all well-understood.
Computer models for even an individual neuron are fairly involved. The original Hodgkin's and Huxley's model (for which they received a Nobel prize) for the giant squid axon is a system of three equations with partial derivatives. You can imagine how much computation would be involved in computing these for all ~10^11 neurons in the brain.
An individual neuron might have tens of thousand synapses through which it communicates with other neurons. The computational complexity of this is mind-boggling and, moreover, very little is known about how neurons communicate and form connections.
The real world is rather dumb and boring. I'm serious. In the real world, if you have a chair and somebody sits on it, it might break. That won't happen in the virtual world because the chair knows it's a chair and its job is to support something.
.....
In the real world nothing has a purpose except we try to make purposeless things do the best they can for us. And that's why the world is a mess. I'd much rather build Lego with a Lego simulator where you can press clear at the end and all the things pop back in their boxes.
What a sterile and appalling outlook.
How can you hope to understand intelligence,
perhaps the most complex and intricate phenomenon known to people, with a worldview like that?
If you strip life of its mystery, what do you have left?
His attitude makes one wonder, whether for some people computers are just ways of escaping the intolerable boredom of existence.
Popularity of Tolkien, role-playing games, and similar imaginary world themes with the computer crowd seems to provide at least some evidence for that.
I think it's very important to understand that there's no magic to consciousness...
The topology of the information processing membranes are more complex than we can sort out just yet, but there's nothing about the structure of the brain that's not duplicable by silicon hardware...
Also important to notice is that to implement the human mind in hardware (as opposed to wetware), we'd need something on the order of a 10 teraflop supercomputer.
These are very strong and specific claims that do not seem to have much foundations. I wonder where the numbers you are citing are coming from.
A Bibliography is an exhaustive list of *every* work that has something to do with your paper. For this paper, that would mean
your Bibliography would run on for *pages*. You would have to list every single source that not only you used, but were used in
the books you used, as well as any sources even relevant to music distribution.
A Works Cited page is what you have here - a simple list of the works of other authors that you have cited.
Your English teacher was only partially correct.
From Oxford English Dictionary.
Bibliography:
A list of the books of a particular author, printer, or country, or of those dealing with any
particular theme; the literature of a subject.
I watched the film again and the analogy between the tight rope walker and Frank Poole is not entirely unreasonable, although somewhat questionable. I still object to the term "dispose" though.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it is possible, they have been doing it for tens of years now. Whether it can be economically feasibly is a completely different issue of course.
With fission the danger is that the reaction is self-sustaining. With fusion it is not, unless the plasma can somehow be made stable, say by pressure at the core of the sun.
These reactors are inherently very safe. So far (or at least until very recently)you have even been able to get more energy from them than you put in, that's how safe they are!
The physical laws behind fusion are in fact fairly well understood and has been understood for a while now. However a technical implementation is quite a different issue. The plasma in the tokomaks has temperatures similar to those at the core of the sun and is extremely difficult to control. That has been the difficulty since attempts at controlled fusion started in late 60s or around that time.
Roi est mort. Vive le roi!
Well, as you noticed yourself, the ice floats in water, therefore the displacement is only partial. The point is that the wieght of ice is the same as the weight of water obtained by melting the ice. The amount of water displaced by a floating object (say a ship) is proportional to its weight. That's why the level of water does not change.
It would be impossible to model air flow by calculating the interactions of every single particle that might affect the paper.
By virtue of the Moore's law and nanotechnology we will have computers so powerful that we will be able to analyze and predict the bahaviour of every molecule of the paper and, in fact, every atom of the universe.
You don't doubt the inevitability and the historical necessity of the technological progress, do you?
That "incorrect assumption" is knowan as the Archimedean law.
A common misconception. Scientific theories do not get either proven or misproven. They describe the experimental data well or not so well. That is the difference.
Obviously you are not using Word to post this.
What are you talking about? You will get four significant digits after the decimal point on a calculator as you very well should. It is amusing that people rant about other people being ignorant only to demonstrate their own ignorance.
Very roughly, that means that you lose one bit of precision per iteration. Therefore to produce accurate long-term weather forecasts you will need observation made with hundreds of accurete digits after the decimal point, which is quite absurd.
Yes, I call it scientific. As to the quality of the science - I don't know enough to have an informed opinion.
Slashdot is certainly an unusual forum to discuss scientific publications.
Anyway, I'm just saying that the Constitution doesn't give us rights; it enumerates inherent rights.
Inherent in what sense?
An interesting guy. However it does sound like a case of sour grapes.
Intel release an SMP version of P4 (Foster) just a few weeks ago. New Xeons are based on P4. Itanium will probably never become a mainstream machine as it is supposed to be quickly supplanted by McKinley next year.
I feel rather bad about you fighting a battle with the uneducated masses. Let me give you some advice, which I hope you will find useful:
First never fight with anyone uneducated. God knows what dirty tricks they might use.
Second, never fight with the masses. You are unlikely to win.
It would really be rather terrible if people like you are no longer able to access things and
to realize this common fallacy, but I am sure somebody else can come up with something and soon.
Hope this helps.
That makes reading this comment very difficult indeed.
Lack of imagination is an unfortunate affliction.
The behavior of individuals neurons is very complicated and still not at all well-understood. Computer models for even an individual neuron are fairly involved. The original Hodgkin's and Huxley's model (for which they received a Nobel prize) for the giant squid axon is a system of three equations with partial derivatives. You can imagine how much computation would be involved in computing these for all ~10^11 neurons in the brain.
An individual neuron might have tens of thousand synapses through which it communicates with other neurons. The computational complexity of this is mind-boggling and, moreover, very little is known about how neurons communicate and form connections.
The real world is rather dumb and boring. I'm serious. In the real world, if you have a chair and somebody sits on it, it might break. That won't happen in the virtual world because the chair knows it's a chair and its job is to support something.
In the real world nothing has a purpose except we try to make purposeless things do the best they can for us. And that's why the world is a mess. I'd much rather build Lego with a Lego simulator where you can press clear at the end and all the things pop back in their boxes.
What a sterile and appalling outlook. How can you hope to understand intelligence,
perhaps the most complex and intricate phenomenon known to people,
with a worldview like that?
If you strip life of its mystery, what do you have left?
His attitude makes one wonder, whether for some people
computers are just ways of escaping the intolerable boredom of existence.
Popularity of Tolkien, role-playing games, and similar imaginary world
themes with the computer crowd seems to provide at least some evidence for that.
The topology of the information processing membranes are more complex than we can sort out just yet, but there's nothing about the structure of the brain that's not duplicable by silicon hardware...
Also important to notice is that to implement the human mind in hardware (as opposed to wetware), we'd need something on the order of a 10 teraflop supercomputer.
These are very strong and specific claims that do not seem to have much foundations. I wonder where the numbers you are citing are coming from.
Can you point to any specific evidence for that?
Any examples?
Your English teacher was only partially correct.
From Oxford English Dictionary.
Bibliography:
A list of the books of a particular author, printer, or country, or of those dealing with any particular theme; the literature of a subject.
I watched the film again and the analogy between the tight rope walker and Frank Poole is not entirely unreasonable, although somewhat questionable. I still object to the term "dispose" though.