Hearing this makes me think of Detroit. Its population is constantly shrinking and much of the city is in disrepair. I've ridden greyhound busses through it a few times and you pass mile after mile of boarded up, dilapidated buildings.
It makes one wonder what the city would be like if it ended up being completely abandoned, sort of like Rome after the fall of the empire.
Most likely there would be a half-attempted cleanup effort, but it would probably fail. Demolishing buildings isn't cheap. Returning the land to it's natural state is even more expensive, not to mention nature would probably do it herself over a slightly longer time frame.
even though it has an atomic number of 3 and is therefore fairly abundant in the universe at large.
This may be off-topic, but, in fact, for having such a small atomic number, lithium is incredibly rare in the universe. Pretty much all of it was produced shortly after the big bang, with there being effectively no process by which it is produced in stars.
Even more interesting is that fusion processes no longer yield energy when elements heavier than iron are produced, hence why heavier elements are so rare.
So while asteroids may be a good source of rare elements, they too are finite. It's possible to imagine a super-civilization considering heavy elements and lithium to be rare and valuable.
Umm...what batteries are you referring to that are dirty, nasty, and hard-to-recycle? Lead-acid batteries, sure, I'll grant that. But that's not what is being proposed for electric cars.
With regards to life, I recall hearing that the newest generation of lithium batteries last far more cycles than your laptop's battery, though I cannot provide a link at the moment.
As for ultracapacitors, yes they're neat and could work. But the battery tech we have now is much closer to reality than our current ultracapacitor tech. Should ultracapacitors work out, we'll be grateful we started building the infrastructure to support our battery-powered cars.
From what I read of CL's lawyers earlier releases, it seemed that they could indeed have withstood and won any court battles that would have come their way.
If you read your Greek philosophy (such as Plato), however, you would know that there are plenty of arguments stating that ethics/morality/good are not artificial, but a law of the universe, woven into its fabric such as pi or e. That may sound very new-wave, hippie, and "vibes, man," but it can be thought of in terms of a scenario. Given a scenario when someone is faced with a choice, the good choice (provided there is one...different matter though) would be good regardless of the existence of god or whether we were intelligent machines (cough cough). Instead, it's the good choice, because for that scenario the nature of the universe dictates that it's the good choice just like if you drop a bunch of marbles down the stairs, they're going to fall the exact same way every time if you repeat the initial conditions.
Thus, ethics wouldn't be artificial at all. We wouldn't invent ethics, we would discover them.
If you're telling me that everything I've heard about Conficker the past few weeks has been one massive coordinated April Fool's joke, I am going to be pissed.
That would mean that I made all this popcorn for nothing.
But I'm interested in how they think the trait for intelligence gets passed on. It might be important to note what causes the genetic defect. It could be a change in a site that is actively expressed, or it could be a change in whether the area of the chromosome responsible for the brain function is activated. There are still lots of gaps in our knowledge in what causes gene expression because it's based upon more than just start and stop codons, but also on the structure of the molecule. It could be possible that environmental factors changed some physical element of the gene causing it to be expressed again, though to me that sounds almost as much of a soft sci-fi nightmare as "genetic memory." Perhaps someone who is a geneticist can shed some light on possible vectors for this hereditary intelligence.
Because if the authorities say they will destroy the information, I have complete faith that they will remain true to their word. Yep, complete trust. No worries.
They can just send it on to the Orwellian "Ministry of Privacy" and I'm sure all record of my DNA test will just vanish!
Because evacuations, preparations, and repair related to this volcano are going to be nothing compared to what will be needed when geologists start warning us that Yellowstone is about to blow.
the march to phase out incandescent lights in favor of CFLs has already begun. I personally am concerned about the five years until this product will be released. As of yet we have no plan for disposing of CFL bulbs and even if we did that wouldn't stop many foolish people from simply throwing them in the trash anyway.
The cost of the mercury polluted into the environment from CFLs far outweighs any energy savings they may incur over incandescent lights.
I'm all for enforcing do-not-call registries, but there are plenty of culpable white-collars who've caused a lot more damage than bugging people at dinner time and yet have not seen any court-issued penalty.
Granted, with regards to the recent turn in the economy, the robber barons had plenty of help from Ordinary People(TM) and Congress Inc.
When matter emits electromagnetic radiation, it doesn't emit continuously over all wavelengths. Instead, it emits electromagnetic radiation at only a few frequencies. (This corresponds to the different energy levels of electrons...) For example, one most noticeable bands (and most frequently used to measure the relative velocity of distant objects) is emitted by Hydrogen with a wavelength of 21 cm.
You can tell how fast something is moving by taking a spectrograph of the light emitted from it and then measuring the emission lines. The difference in wavelength between the observed emission bands and the known elemental emission bands (Such as the Hydrogen 21 cm) yields the redshift or blueshift of whatever you're observing.
Except that begs the question as to if the human could learn to control it. Is an adult mind adaptable enough to create a whole new set of motor functions for a limb it wasn't built to control?
And not only that, but the federal government is making me prove my tax statement when I say, "I don't owe you any money." What is this world coming to?
You know I was frustrated with the people who thought they knew how to solve Rubik's Cubes. So I went out and bought one, switched two of the corner tiles and gave it to people to solve. Nothing has ever satisfied the evil side of me more...other than putting tape on my cat's paw...
True, the fallacy of my argument is that I failed to illustrate the function as a universal. However, the function of sum can be derived from observation of the universe. Newton's laws show that the acceleration of an object is proportional to the sum of it's forces. If one experiments with multiple forces on an object, this relationship is easily observed. From this relationship, the observer can derive a "net force" function, essentially the same as a sum function. Since the physics of the universe display the sum relationship without any human invention, the concept of "together with" exists beyond invention.
And yet, as many before me have already noted, the argument about the source of math, has no instrumental purpose (intrinsic purpose...well, lets not get into that) other than to keep me from doing any real work.
One unit together with one unit yields units that are two in number. This happens regardless of human observation, thought, categorization, what-have-you. Everything else follows.
And speaking of observation...Schrodinger's cat is dead.
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Hearing this makes me think of Detroit. Its population is constantly shrinking and much of the city is in disrepair. I've ridden greyhound busses through it a few times and you pass mile after mile of boarded up, dilapidated buildings.
It makes one wonder what the city would be like if it ended up being completely abandoned, sort of like Rome after the fall of the empire.
Most likely there would be a half-attempted cleanup effort, but it would probably fail. Demolishing buildings isn't cheap. Returning the land to it's natural state is even more expensive, not to mention nature would probably do it herself over a slightly longer time frame.
even though it has an atomic number of 3 and is therefore fairly abundant in the universe at large.
This may be off-topic, but, in fact, for having such a small atomic number, lithium is incredibly rare in the universe. Pretty much all of it was produced shortly after the big bang, with there being effectively no process by which it is produced in stars.
According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Natural_occurrence, lithium is about as common as krypton.
Even more interesting is that fusion processes no longer yield energy when elements heavier than iron are produced, hence why heavier elements are so rare.
So while asteroids may be a good source of rare elements, they too are finite. It's possible to imagine a super-civilization considering heavy elements and lithium to be rare and valuable.
Umm...what batteries are you referring to that are dirty, nasty, and hard-to-recycle? Lead-acid batteries, sure, I'll grant that. But that's not what is being proposed for electric cars.
This http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/tesla-electric-car-batteries-non-toxic-recycled.php is closer to it.
With regards to life, I recall hearing that the newest generation of lithium batteries last far more cycles than your laptop's battery, though I cannot provide a link at the moment.
As for ultracapacitors, yes they're neat and could work. But the battery tech we have now is much closer to reality than our current ultracapacitor tech. Should ultracapacitors work out, we'll be grateful we started building the infrastructure to support our battery-powered cars.
From what I read of CL's lawyers earlier releases, it seemed that they could indeed have withstood and won any court battles that would have come their way.
And then they read up on the TPB trial...
If you read your Greek philosophy (such as Plato), however, you would know that there are plenty of arguments stating that ethics/morality/good are not artificial, but a law of the universe, woven into its fabric such as pi or e. That may sound very new-wave, hippie, and "vibes, man," but it can be thought of in terms of a scenario. Given a scenario when someone is faced with a choice, the good choice (provided there is one...different matter though) would be good regardless of the existence of god or whether we were intelligent machines (cough cough). Instead, it's the good choice, because for that scenario the nature of the universe dictates that it's the good choice just like if you drop a bunch of marbles down the stairs, they're going to fall the exact same way every time if you repeat the initial conditions.
Thus, ethics wouldn't be artificial at all. We wouldn't invent ethics, we would discover them.
Bleagh...enough philosophy for one night.
Or around 3 times the GDP(yearly) of Jamaica.
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
If you're telling me that everything I've heard about Conficker the past few weeks has been one massive coordinated April Fool's joke, I am going to be pissed.
That would mean that I made all this popcorn for nothing.
But I'm interested in how they think the trait for intelligence gets passed on. It might be important to note what causes the genetic defect. It could be a change in a site that is actively expressed, or it could be a change in whether the area of the chromosome responsible for the brain function is activated. There are still lots of gaps in our knowledge in what causes gene expression because it's based upon more than just start and stop codons, but also on the structure of the molecule. It could be possible that environmental factors changed some physical element of the gene causing it to be expressed again, though to me that sounds almost as much of a soft sci-fi nightmare as "genetic memory." Perhaps someone who is a geneticist can shed some light on possible vectors for this hereditary intelligence.
Because if the authorities say they will destroy the information, I have complete faith that they will remain true to their word. Yep, complete trust. No worries.
They can just send it on to the Orwellian "Ministry of Privacy" and I'm sure all record of my DNA test will just vanish!
Because evacuations, preparations, and repair related to this volcano are going to be nothing compared to what will be needed when geologists start warning us that Yellowstone is about to blow.
the march to phase out incandescent lights in favor of CFLs has already begun. I personally am concerned about the five years until this product will be released. As of yet we have no plan for disposing of CFL bulbs and even if we did that wouldn't stop many foolish people from simply throwing them in the trash anyway.
The cost of the mercury polluted into the environment from CFLs far outweighs any energy savings they may incur over incandescent lights.
Granted, with regards to the recent turn in the economy, the robber barons had plenty of help from Ordinary People(TM) and Congress Inc.
It was my impression that any legal ambiguity surrounding viruses had been cleared long ago.
I'm imagining this weird future city where the buildings slowly rose and fell as energy was stored and withdrawn.
I'm sure somewhere you just gave some engineer an extremely bad case of insomnia.
When matter emits electromagnetic radiation, it doesn't emit continuously over all wavelengths. Instead, it emits electromagnetic radiation at only a few frequencies. (This corresponds to the different energy levels of electrons...) For example, one most noticeable bands (and most frequently used to measure the relative velocity of distant objects) is emitted by Hydrogen with a wavelength of 21 cm.
You can tell how fast something is moving by taking a spectrograph of the light emitted from it and then measuring the emission lines. The difference in wavelength between the observed emission bands and the known elemental emission bands (Such as the Hydrogen 21 cm) yields the redshift or blueshift of whatever you're observing.
then all you're doing is running some unpaid pest control service.
Except that begs the question as to if the human could learn to control it. Is an adult mind adaptable enough to create a whole new set of motor functions for a limb it wasn't built to control?
And not only that, but the federal government is making me prove my tax statement when I say, "I don't owe you any money." What is this world coming to?
it would be unethical!
What has the world come to when such a statement is modded +5 Funny as opposed to +5 Insightful?
You know I was frustrated with the people who thought they knew how to solve Rubik's Cubes. So I went out and bought one, switched two of the corner tiles and gave it to people to solve. Nothing has ever satisfied the evil side of me more...other than putting tape on my cat's paw...
it doesn't deal with the most destructive invasive species known, a resilient and adaptive primate known as Homo Sapiens.
"Modeling Supernovae with a Supercomputer controlled by the Aperture Science Supercolliding Superbutton"
True, the fallacy of my argument is that I failed to illustrate the function as a universal. However, the function of sum can be derived from observation of the universe. Newton's laws show that the acceleration of an object is proportional to the sum of it's forces. If one experiments with multiple forces on an object, this relationship is easily observed. From this relationship, the observer can derive a "net force" function, essentially the same as a sum function. Since the physics of the universe display the sum relationship without any human invention, the concept of "together with" exists beyond invention.
And yet, as many before me have already noted, the argument about the source of math, has no instrumental purpose (intrinsic purpose...well, lets not get into that) other than to keep me from doing any real work.
And speaking of observation...Schrodinger's cat is dead.
someone will try to take their son in an "antique" 2008-model car and he will say, "But Dad! It's not safe! Gasoline explodes!"