I'm just curious. Where is it illegal to have weapons on a civil vessel? Most blue water cruisers have something to deal with possible shark attacks, and they have distress flares which are rather effective short range weapons. The usual argument against arming civil vessels is that it would create an arms race with the pirates; the second one is that the bad guys are much more likely to be good at using them than ordinary mariners.
Historical note: In Moby-Dick the Quaker-owned whaler Pequod has a whole gun rack. When chased by pirates the captain attempts, successfully, to outrun them - but it is pretty clear that in the worst case those guns would simply get handed out to the people on board best equipped to use them.
This is nonsense. Labor is typically quite a small part of the cost of electronic products. (In fact, before the rise of China automated assembly was doing very well, but Chinese labor undercut it and the products were redesigned for manual assembly. I actually costed one product line that had been largely automated and discovered that hand assembly in China cost almost exactly the same. But the company owners regarded "manufacturing in China" as some kind of dick-swinging club that they aspired to join. Yet products could easily be redesigned for automation again.)
You underestimate how little money companies are prepared to save by betraying their countries.
Have moderated "flamebait" a post in which I attempt to explain the paradox of induction, and moderated up your post in which you simply misinterpret what I wrote, you are writing rubbish.
It's not flamebaits, moderators, it's opinion -- and it's based on demonstratively clear thinking
It isn't: it shows an utter lack of insight into human thinking processes. Because you're an engineer, you simply feel able to dismiss whole realms of human experience as "crazy shit". This is flamebait for you to get your friends to moderate: Have you thought for a moment that the biggest societies run by engineers were the former Soviet Union and the current Chinese dictatorship? Have you thought about why? Because engineers tend to reject all what they see as pink fluffy cloud thinking and pointless arguments about the difference between "what works" (for some value of works) and "proof". The amazing thing is that you are able to sit there in Montana writing this stuff because of a lot of people who had degrees in humanities.
I've looked at your website and realised that you aren't a scientist, you are basically an engineer. They are different...engineers tend to take science for granted and ask "how" questions rather than "why" questions. You're arguing about how science works, but from your misconceptions, not from experience. Oh, and given your rants about Muslims, how many do you meet up there in Montana?
You're assuming that assertions with no weight in evidence have equal value with those assertions which have support in evidence
Where do I make that assumption? You are just making trolling attacks on things I didn't write because, in reality, you don't have an answer.
The reason that science shows regularity is because science looks at what is real
And that is a circular argument. You have assumed "reality" is regular, therefore science looks at "reality" and finds regularity. Ignoring your objectivising of "science", you really do not seem to have a clue about epistemology, and your knowledge of philosophy is sub-Aristotelian. In fact, you're almost as blinkered as one of those Muslim students cited.
By the way, I am not a reductionist and I believe that arguments about "God" are almost always the theologically illiterate arguing with the theologically ignorant. But you missed that, because you do not understand the difference between blindly accepting "science", and accepting that science is an incredibly useful toolkit that explains how, but it cannot explain why and therefore is not a complete explanation of everything.
I could actually apply your argument to that idiot who keeps forecasting the end of the world. If he gets the date wrong maybe he didn't dig deep enough. He predicts the end of the world because he expects it to happen (and interprets everything that goes right in his life as a sign from God). He believes that the Bible is the only approach to understanding the Universe. If one revelation fails, he will wait for another.
Your arguments are analogical or circular, and then you resort to announcing that "believe" means different things according to context. From the point of view of a sociologist of religion, you are using religious thinking.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not a relativist. I just believe that "religious" thinking is part of the way our brains cope with reality, because what we perceive as reality is actually a lot of analogies. Any scientist who thinks that he or she is 100% free of religious modes of thinking and completely objective is slightly deluded. Accepting that science involves a small kernel of unprovable and untestable assumptions is, in fact, just being objective.
You appear not to understand that yours is a circular argument. Scientists assume that there is order in the universe and it is discoverable. They then rely on induction, which assumes that regularity. Finding more evidence of regularity does not prove anything. It strengthens the argument, but that is not proof. You consider it to be proof because you have assumed to be true what remains to be proven - that induction is completely correct. This is the black swan argument: the first 10 swans I find are white so I hypothesise that all swans are white. Other scientists repeat my result, and so based on thousands of observations you, on your reasoning, would conclude that we have "proven" that all swans are white. But black swans do exist.
You give away your lack of understanding when you use the word "prove" and end up with "tend to find".
Your assumption that more evidence for a statistical assumption constitutes absolute proof is quasi-religious, and you know you cannot justify it, which is why you resort to weasel words.
They speak to the fears of the middle and upper classes
Actually, they speak to the fears of skilled working class people who think they are middle or upper class and want to be told how to think so as to get in when they apply to the Rotary or the Conservative Party.
I have studied psychology and sociology of religion, Far from seeing religion is "just mythology", once you have understood the implications for human society of mythology, you start to see mythology and religion everywhere. "Market economy", "Free markets" and the international elite of bankers and bank economists are aspects of the religion which has largely replaced Christianity in the West. The mythology of the inevitable triumph of capitalism is a powerful and destructive mythology, as influential as was Communism. Like Communism, it claims to be based on "facts" about the world which are in reality remarkably unverifiable. The only way to fight mythologies is to understand their strengths and weaknesses. By regarding them as powerless, we play into the hands of the people who use them to manipulate society.
Doing science implies a belief that there is order in the universe and that it is discoverable. Science involves inductive logic, which assumes regularity. You could call this a "philosophical" belief, but as the core assumption is unprovable it is really religious.
When we talk about scientists being atheistic or irreligious, we tend to mean that they don't accept ideas which are regarded as pretty silly by most of the people in serious university theology departments - and no, I don't mean "Bible colleges".
Have you ever used a high end inkjet printer like a Designjet? Or seen an Indigo working? Or even a high end office inkjet printer like a Ricoh Gelsprinter? (Ours is well over 20000 pages so far and has never blocked or thrown a bad page).
You really cannot compare a disposable bit of plastic with what inkjet technology is capable of. It's like saying that a BMW 5 series is useless for getting anywhere because Chinese kids' tricycles suck.
Although Cambridge has given up and now uses the American term in fundraising, they were not in fact U of C alumni (and nor am I, to declare an interest). That's because if you go to Cambridge and graduate, you remain a member of the University for life or until the Senate votes you off, though obviously with no official title and unpaid. Same with Oxford.
Technically, therefore, Harvard was founded by members of the University of Cambridge.
The old joke is that graduates of Oxford intend to run the country (which they almost invariably do) while graduates of Cambridge don't care who runs the country so long as they get to do something interesting. Given how immensely successful Harvard has been, the rule obviously applied in this case.
Milk cows have to be allowed pregnancies to keep producing milk. What happens to all those calves? (Disclaimer: we buy all our meat in small quantities from a sustainable producer. We don't eat much meat, but what we do is of very high quality). If the USA changed direction from quantity to quality, a lot of problems would evaporate.
Orwell went to Eton, so he's literature. (And yes, I agree. Orwell was writing about a dismal, dark dystopia which was actually meant to be the BBC. The question is, why would anyone want to read about a dismal, dark dystopia with no flashes of insight? ++!interesting.)
Also, Kornbluth sadly died young, before Kingsley Amis (writing in the UK) argued for the respectability of science fiction.
Actually, I think that "IP" is now the number one problem. What's more, as the USA tries to expand its IP empire abroad, a backlash is inevitable.
The present system means that corporations can attempt to prevent innovation in others while not having to do anything about it themselves. It is, in effect, like the medieval guild system that is hitting the economy of Italy, or indeed like the theocratic regimes in Iran or Sa'udi Arabia. It all went wrong when the USPTO ceased to be a cost center and become a profit center, and a whole new class of "IP lawyer" saw the opportunity. Not to mention the entire economy of parts of Texas.
It is one of the very few science fiction books that predicted the future, right down to context sensitive advertising on flat screens and the takeover of government by capitalism gone berserk. I'm surprised it isn't as well known as 1984, because Orwell got most of it wrong while Pohl and Kornbluth got an awful lot right.
In the UK, lawyers are not supposed to comment on cases in which they are not involved. This is precisely to prevent touting for business like this. Do American bar associations not have similar provisions?
I would like to see any engineering projects of any complexity that you have successfully carried out. Your design weight is, I think, simply unachievable with reasonable life on real roads. I do not think you have any idea of the working stresses on an automotive chassis, including absorbing the vibration from your IC engine, and you don't appear to have considered hills. Also some of the observations on your website are incorrect; the Volt on its IC engine is not nearly as economical as a Prius. And the reason that the Volt and the Prius ar the size they are is that the cost of hybrid technology has not scaled down, so until now it has only been available at a price where people expect a mid-size car. Toyota is now scaling down slowly. Your 350kg three people carrier will be unreliable, unsafe, uncomfortable and expensive, because those are the tradeoffs.
I don't know where you learned thermodynamics, but you were surely sleeping in class. An IC engineis between 25 and 40% efficient depending on technology. An electric motor/battery combination is around 60-70% depending on battery losses and whether the motor has a gearbox. But the battery is charged by generated electricity which has to come from somewhere, usuallly by burning coal or gas. The outcome is that, in reality and in terms of fuel use per passenger kilometre, electric cars are no more efficient than a Prius or a modern turbodiesel with an automated gearbox.
In fact, although better batteries are the main need, not a lot can be done to improve EV efficiency further. Unless most power is generated by renewables- it isn't - the benefits of EVs compared to state of the art IC-based systems are pretty marginal.
B2G just sounds like an evolution of webOS. When i saw your sig I assumed you thought so too, as the key is also the one that enables developer mode on webOS phones.
However, memory only uses more power if it is constantly being accessed; the refresh power is constant if the data is not changing. More power will be used at initialisation, this is true, but the point about phones is that they rarely reboot.
There may be a penalty but they seem to be working on it.
As a former RI member when I lived in London, I applauded their move. Google for why they did it, and understand why many people do not take Greenfield seriously.
That we are migrating to Blackberry. They had a problem. They fixed it. They will doubtless work day and night to prevent a repeat. Apple doesn't have a real business class market, and until they have their first major cloud systems failure and we see how they handle it, we will not know if they are any good at it or not.
It is like recruiting CFOs: if the guy has only ever worked in a successful company, how do you know how he will deal with a crisis? Nothing but success is usually due to luck rather than talent.
Just an observation; I don't advocate stress testing new drives. It may kill bad drives, but it may also seriously weaken ones that pass. If you have the time, a soak test at average load is possibly better.
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Historical note: In Moby-Dick the Quaker-owned whaler Pequod has a whole gun rack. When chased by pirates the captain attempts, successfully, to outrun them - but it is pretty clear that in the worst case those guns would simply get handed out to the people on board best equipped to use them.
You underestimate how little money companies are prepared to save by betraying their countries.
It isn't: it shows an utter lack of insight into human thinking processes. Because you're an engineer, you simply feel able to dismiss whole realms of human experience as "crazy shit". This is flamebait for you to get your friends to moderate: Have you thought for a moment that the biggest societies run by engineers were the former Soviet Union and the current Chinese dictatorship? Have you thought about why? Because engineers tend to reject all what they see as pink fluffy cloud thinking and pointless arguments about the difference between "what works" (for some value of works) and "proof". The amazing thing is that you are able to sit there in Montana writing this stuff because of a lot of people who had degrees in humanities.
I've looked at your website and realised that you aren't a scientist, you are basically an engineer. They are different...engineers tend to take science for granted and ask "how" questions rather than "why" questions. You're arguing about how science works, but from your misconceptions, not from experience. Oh, and given your rants about Muslims, how many do you meet up there in Montana?
Where do I make that assumption? You are just making trolling attacks on things I didn't write because, in reality, you don't have an answer.
And that is a circular argument. You have assumed "reality" is regular, therefore science looks at "reality" and finds regularity. Ignoring your objectivising of "science", you really do not seem to have a clue about epistemology, and your knowledge of philosophy is sub-Aristotelian. In fact, you're almost as blinkered as one of those Muslim students cited.
By the way, I am not a reductionist and I believe that arguments about "God" are almost always the theologically illiterate arguing with the theologically ignorant. But you missed that, because you do not understand the difference between blindly accepting "science", and accepting that science is an incredibly useful toolkit that explains how, but it cannot explain why and therefore is not a complete explanation of everything.
In New England they executed Quakers, whereas that crypto-Catholic Charles II ended their persecution.
Your arguments are analogical or circular, and then you resort to announcing that "believe" means different things according to context. From the point of view of a sociologist of religion, you are using religious thinking.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not a relativist. I just believe that "religious" thinking is part of the way our brains cope with reality, because what we perceive as reality is actually a lot of analogies. Any scientist who thinks that he or she is 100% free of religious modes of thinking and completely objective is slightly deluded. Accepting that science involves a small kernel of unprovable and untestable assumptions is, in fact, just being objective.
You give away your lack of understanding when you use the word "prove" and end up with "tend to find".
Your assumption that more evidence for a statistical assumption constitutes absolute proof is quasi-religious, and you know you cannot justify it, which is why you resort to weasel words.
Actually, they speak to the fears of skilled working class people who think they are middle or upper class and want to be told how to think so as to get in when they apply to the Rotary or the Conservative Party.
I have studied psychology and sociology of religion, Far from seeing religion is "just mythology", once you have understood the implications for human society of mythology, you start to see mythology and religion everywhere. "Market economy", "Free markets" and the international elite of bankers and bank economists are aspects of the religion which has largely replaced Christianity in the West. The mythology of the inevitable triumph of capitalism is a powerful and destructive mythology, as influential as was Communism. Like Communism, it claims to be based on "facts" about the world which are in reality remarkably unverifiable. The only way to fight mythologies is to understand their strengths and weaknesses. By regarding them as powerless, we play into the hands of the people who use them to manipulate society.
When we talk about scientists being atheistic or irreligious, we tend to mean that they don't accept ideas which are regarded as pretty silly by most of the people in serious university theology departments - and no, I don't mean "Bible colleges".
You really cannot compare a disposable bit of plastic with what inkjet technology is capable of. It's like saying that a BMW 5 series is useless for getting anywhere because Chinese kids' tricycles suck.
Technically, therefore, Harvard was founded by members of the University of Cambridge.
The old joke is that graduates of Oxford intend to run the country (which they almost invariably do) while graduates of Cambridge don't care who runs the country so long as they get to do something interesting. Given how immensely successful Harvard has been, the rule obviously applied in this case.
Milk cows have to be allowed pregnancies to keep producing milk. What happens to all those calves? (Disclaimer: we buy all our meat in small quantities from a sustainable producer. We don't eat much meat, but what we do is of very high quality). If the USA changed direction from quantity to quality, a lot of problems would evaporate.
Also, Kornbluth sadly died young, before Kingsley Amis (writing in the UK) argued for the respectability of science fiction.
The present system means that corporations can attempt to prevent innovation in others while not having to do anything about it themselves. It is, in effect, like the medieval guild system that is hitting the economy of Italy, or indeed like the theocratic regimes in Iran or Sa'udi Arabia. It all went wrong when the USPTO ceased to be a cost center and become a profit center, and a whole new class of "IP lawyer" saw the opportunity. Not to mention the entire economy of parts of Texas.
It is one of the very few science fiction books that predicted the future, right down to context sensitive advertising on flat screens and the takeover of government by capitalism gone berserk. I'm surprised it isn't as well known as 1984, because Orwell got most of it wrong while Pohl and Kornbluth got an awful lot right.
In the UK, lawyers are not supposed to comment on cases in which they are not involved. This is precisely to prevent touting for business like this. Do American bar associations not have similar provisions?
He has no standing, there is no plaintiff and no defendant. Doesn't his Bar Association have rules about bringing the profession into disrepute?
I would like to see any engineering projects of any complexity that you have successfully carried out. Your design weight is, I think, simply unachievable with reasonable life on real roads. I do not think you have any idea of the working stresses on an automotive chassis, including absorbing the vibration from your IC engine, and you don't appear to have considered hills. Also some of the observations on your website are incorrect; the Volt on its IC engine is not nearly as economical as a Prius. And the reason that the Volt and the Prius ar the size they are is that the cost of hybrid technology has not scaled down, so until now it has only been available at a price where people expect a mid-size car. Toyota is now scaling down slowly. Your 350kg three people carrier will be unreliable, unsafe, uncomfortable and expensive, because those are the tradeoffs.
In fact, although better batteries are the main need, not a lot can be done to improve EV efficiency further. Unless most power is generated by renewables- it isn't - the benefits of EVs compared to state of the art IC-based systems are pretty marginal.
However, memory only uses more power if it is constantly being accessed; the refresh power is constant if the data is not changing. More power will be used at initialisation, this is true, but the point about phones is that they rarely reboot.
There may be a penalty but they seem to be working on it.
As a former RI member when I lived in London, I applauded their move. Google for why they did it, and understand why many people do not take Greenfield seriously.
It is like recruiting CFOs: if the guy has only ever worked in a successful company, how do you know how he will deal with a crisis? Nothing but success is usually due to luck rather than talent.
Just an observation; I don't advocate stress testing new drives. It may kill bad drives, but it may also seriously weaken ones that pass. If you have the time, a soak test at average load is possibly better.