I've done a number of simple searches on both Cuil and Google to see how the results compare. Despite Cuil's claim to have more indexed pages, Google is consistently giving me a larger number of results, and they tend to be more useful, as well.
Someone needs to tell these cuil guys that it's quality, not quantity, and they're currently failing at both.
We don't have any materials that we can use to contain a fusion bomb, and also an internal combustion engine would be a very very inefficient way to use that energy, most of which would be heat or radiation as opposed to expanding gasses.
Quit making general statements about liberals and how bad they are. That is also a remarkably poor way to "debate" with people, mostly because you leave the idea that the person that you're talking with is, in fact, a person, and not a faceless mental construct that you've built up about a category of people that you dislike.
I did respond to your original post detailing exactly how large a gulf there was between the two situations, and I am disappointed to see that you have not responded to that.
This idea of the government 'going back on a promise' skips the idea that the promise violated the Constitution. I hear that the US armed forces undergo regular training about how and why to refuse an illegal order. If "most of the country" [citation needed] thinks that doing illegal things that violate the very idea that the law has any meaning in this country, then "most of the country" has not bothered to think of the long-term consequences of laying down a rule that says that 'anything the executive branch says or does should be legal'.
I am, in fact, furious, and calling for heads, because the administration did go back on a formal oath to me: to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Eliminating a system of checks and balances and violating the Bill of Rights--you wonder why I use the word treason?
Patriotism is not defined as criticism of one's country, but it has been defined as the last refuge of a scoundrel. I would hope that upholding the laws of the country, and the ideals it was founded on, would never be seen as being unpatriotic. One of those ideals, however, was indeed the freedom of speech and dissent. Or is this country already perfect, that we do not and shall never need reform?
Defending the country is not treason. How nice of you to redefine criminal activity as defending the country. Do I get to rob a jewelry store and do the same thing? Or is that only reserved for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'?
If the telcos get immunity (thus proving that the Nuremberg Defense is good for something), does that mean that the people who ordered them to do illegal things should stand trial?
Apparently you're unaware of the magnitude of the crimes that you offer an apology for. I would not hesitate to describe them as treasonous, myself.
Also, you're equating two things which are not remotely the same, which is very poor form for an argument.
Quite frankly, you give the impression of being an idiot, or worse: someone who is deliberately ignorant of the principles involved in the subject at hand. On top of that, an Anonymous Coward can construct a better argument than you, and your response is---well, that's funny. I don't see you addressing his point at all...
The difference between those two sets of crimes is that one of them was of national scope and involves constitutional law.
Also, your argument is flawed: few here are arguing that this kid should not be punished. Most people seem to agree with you that the severity of the punishment is excessive. Also, it has been recognized that the kid probably won't serve anywhere near that amount of time, if he serves any time at all.
On the subject of the wiretapping, I hold that there is no "good faith" involved. Every citizen should know what's in the Bill of Rights. That a wiretapping program without judicial oversight is illegal is obvious---damn near self-evident. "Trying to help out" my ass. Even if you are so misguided as to believe that the government has any right to spy on its citizens, rest assured that the telecoms corporations were not so deluded. The only legal argument they have to stand on is the Nuremberg Defense.
Question: If you support telecom immunity, do you then also support the public trial and criminal conviction of the elected and appointed officials responsible for the illegal actions?
Cracking is also part of the natural process. Basically, all fossil fuels start out as proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids; the basic building blocks for carbon-based life as we know it.
What happens in step two is those carbon structures get broken down into smaller pieces. This is called diagenesis, which is a generic term that describes how sedimentary rocks change when you bury them under other layers of rocks. This process produces kerogens and bitumens from our original organic material.
Step three is the same process as refineries use to turn relatively useless alkanes (those with more than about 30 carbon atoms) into useful ones, except they call it catagenesis when it happens naturally.
Alkanes can be synthesized in a lab, but few people bother. The wikipedia article on alkanes provides several methods.
For synthetic production of fuel, look up the Fischer-Tropsch process, which creates hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and thermal depolymerization, which is supposed to do to organic matter in hours what the planet takes millions of years to do.
As far as how much plant matter it takes to create petroleum, a study by one Jeff Dukes of the University of Utah put the figure at 98 tons of plant matter per gallon of gas, as far as natural production is concerned. However, that figure is not very useful. Probably it would be best to say that one gallon of gasoline requires about five kilograms of carbon in the form of crude oil (depending on the crude), and the processes for getting from plant to crude are not efficient.
Oh, and as for formulas, the natural production of petroleum is pretty complex, and easier to deal with as a group of parallel processes than with a specific formula (or many).
There is lots and lots of information related to this on the internet. One good way to find information would be to look up presentations and materials from petroleum geochemistry or organic geochemistry courses, and check out books that they reference.
As a practical matter, if your computer can evaluate positions 30+ ply in the future, whether or not it really "understands" the overall strategic situation is a moot point. Beyond that, the point about endgames is inaccurate for a number of reasons. For one, there's the fifty move rule, which will draw the game even if the chess engine is stupid. For another, endgame tables enable computers to play all endgame scenarios with six or fewer men perfectly. Thirdly, even without endgame tables, the problem of mate becomes vastly simplified by decreasing the number of pieces. Having more and subtler heuristics is good until a point (I believe I read a good explanation of this in the book Behind Deep Blue by Feng-Hsiung Hsu), but searching deeper tends to end up giving better answers, as a rule of thumb.
All else being equal, a bishop is slightly better than a knight because you can set up a position with the knight on the side of the board where all of the knight's potential moves can be covered by the bishop. In terms of chess engines, one way of evaluating pieces (which can be extended to positions in general) is the number of moves they have: more is generally better. I don't remember offhand what the preferred method of board evaluation is these days, though; that method may have been superseded.
Now, as to your actual point, I think that nothing is black and white. Not even chess.:)
Point three is called cracking. A quick google search finds some moreinformation pretty quickly, and if you have disposable funds, this or this seem like pretty good resources. There's also a Journal of Petroleum Geochemistry, if you're interested.
Lab re-creation is not really necessary; the commercial form of cracking is called petroleum refining.
The formula for producing oil actually starts with microbes, in the form of algae. The process in a nutshell:
1) (optional) Runaway global warming and high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere produce a global anoxic event, similar to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico but spanning the entire globe. Algae reproduce in vast numbers, die, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Rather than decay, they form a thick black mud tens of meters deep.
2) Over millions of years, the mud is folded under other rock layers.
3) The mud gets deep enough so that it is under lots of pressure and correspondingly high heat (60 to 120 degrees C) which break down the molecular bonds of the organic compounds that make up the mud, producing straight-chain hydrocarbons (i.e. crude oil).
4) (optional) The oil seeps upwards to the surface and gets trapped in a pocket of impermeable rock underneath the Middle East.
Gold leaf? Did I understand you correctly? The stuff that's 1/250000 of an inch thick, or the really thin stuff? There's probably not any gold inside the drives worth recovering--if it is still used in hard drive manufacture. I am struggling to find a reference for that, but I would expect it not to be the case. Gold is used increasingly rarely in electronics these days, as it's rather expensive.
Yes, but it learns what your most visited websites are, and does it rather quickly. To get to slashdot, I type "s, down arrow key, enter". To go to our company website I type "m", El Reg is "r" (or "BOFH"), XKCD is "x", etc.
I don't bother having any of these things bookmarked; it would take more time to pull them up that way. Now, for someone who does not save their browsing history, this is not such a useful feature. Otherwise, I can't really understand why people don't like it: what sort of web browsing do you do that would make it slower or more inconvenient to have your most-visited websites higher in the results list?
Yes, it will be a large upheaval for the US to change how we build our cities. But to look at the way things are and say "Oh, I don't see that changing. We're just not like that," is stupid. The underlying causes for the transition are implacable; change is therefore inevitable. What you're describing is a culture fueled by inefficient use of heretofore cheap energy---a temporal fluke, as it were. Yeah, we're set up to pay an extremely high cost for the sins of our fathers, but the natural laws of the universe aren't going to change just because we want them to. We can delay it for a while, but people need to wake up to the fact that this is going to bite us in the ass, soon, and will require drastic changes to our culture and infrastructure. This is your reality check. Deal with it---you have no other option.
"Worst" in what sense? He's been remarkably effective as a leader. I mean, why would we be talking about impeachment if he was the incompetent bumblefuck that everyone paints him as? If you're saying 'most morally reprehensible president', then he's probably pretty high on the list.
Yeah, but they were demoed at the same time. There's a video on YouTube.
Either way, this is old news with new branding. How they expect to capitalize on this is my question, perhaps I should RTFA. This seems like a prime candidate for open source, though: not a killer app in itself, but the technology could probably become part of a number of interesting applications.
Gene Ray is not really saying anything (except perhaps that Darwin was--if not entirely wrong--wildly optimistic). The closest he comes to making sense would be that during each 24-hour rotation, the Earth experiences 24 hours of sunrise, sunset, midday, and midnight. Note that this is not what he actually says, but it's the closest sensible interpretation. For further enlightenment, I would direct you to an entertaining research paper on the subject.
Reign of terror? You must be thinking of a different Jack Thompson. This seems more like a punch line to me.
Seriously, when it comes to ambulance-chasing frothing-at-the-mouth nutcase walking jokes, Ol' J.T. takes the cake. And then sues Hostess for making it...
This discussion is rather academic, however, as one of the largest problems with antimatter is creating and containing enough of it to be useful for experimentation. Creating and storing enough antimatter to be useful in a weapon is probably reserved for science fiction exclusively. H-bombs are much more efficient to produce, and equally useful as weapons---which is to say, not very.
Why did you bother posting this? Honestly. "Here's why I, a non-physicist, think is wrong with this plan." What hubris. If you want to know how the experiment is going to be performed, read the abstract! It's quite readable, and even has pretty pictures and diagrams.
Somewhere in the article(s) it mentions that exponential increases in intelligence would probably equate to exponential increases in resources. There are physical limits to intelligence that we'll run into sooner or later--there will be a point where we can't shrink that transistor, or find another part that is smaller that does the same task.
If I understand you right, you're implying that the movie Fight Club had a vapid ending. I would like to note that Chuck Palahniuk said that he liked the movie ending better that the one he wrote.
For my part, the Pixies have never sounded better or more appropriate than in that final scene. Also, I believe that in terms of the film's intended message (rejection of the values of T. Durden), having something positive happen to the narrator as a result of the rejection is almost necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done a number of simple searches on both Cuil and Google to see how the results compare. Despite Cuil's claim to have more indexed pages, Google is consistently giving me a larger number of results, and they tend to be more useful, as well.
Someone needs to tell these cuil guys that it's quality, not quantity, and they're currently failing at both.
But they do generate at-home income!
Just not for her.
We don't have any materials that we can use to contain a fusion bomb, and also an internal combustion engine would be a very very inefficient way to use that energy, most of which would be heat or radiation as opposed to expanding gasses.
Quit making general statements about liberals and how bad they are. That is also a remarkably poor way to "debate" with people, mostly because you leave the idea that the person that you're talking with is, in fact, a person, and not a faceless mental construct that you've built up about a category of people that you dislike.
I did respond to your original post detailing exactly how large a gulf there was between the two situations, and I am disappointed to see that you have not responded to that.
This idea of the government 'going back on a promise' skips the idea that the promise violated the Constitution. I hear that the US armed forces undergo regular training about how and why to refuse an illegal order. If "most of the country" [citation needed] thinks that doing illegal things that violate the very idea that the law has any meaning in this country, then "most of the country" has not bothered to think of the long-term consequences of laying down a rule that says that 'anything the executive branch says or does should be legal'.
I am, in fact, furious, and calling for heads, because the administration did go back on a formal oath to me: to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Eliminating a system of checks and balances and violating the Bill of Rights--you wonder why I use the word treason?
Patriotism is not defined as criticism of one's country, but it has been defined as the last refuge of a scoundrel. I would hope that upholding the laws of the country, and the ideals it was founded on, would never be seen as being unpatriotic. One of those ideals, however, was indeed the freedom of speech and dissent. Or is this country already perfect, that we do not and shall never need reform?
Defending the country is not treason. How nice of you to redefine criminal activity as defending the country. Do I get to rob a jewelry store and do the same thing? Or is that only reserved for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'?
If the telcos get immunity (thus proving that the Nuremberg Defense is good for something), does that mean that the people who ordered them to do illegal things should stand trial?
Apparently you're unaware of the magnitude of the crimes that you offer an apology for. I would not hesitate to describe them as treasonous, myself.
Also, you're equating two things which are not remotely the same, which is very poor form for an argument.
Quite frankly, you give the impression of being an idiot, or worse: someone who is deliberately ignorant of the principles involved in the subject at hand. On top of that, an Anonymous Coward can construct a better argument than you, and your response is---well, that's funny. I don't see you addressing his point at all...
The difference between those two sets of crimes is that one of them was of national scope and involves constitutional law.
Also, your argument is flawed: few here are arguing that this kid should not be punished. Most people seem to agree with you that the severity of the punishment is excessive. Also, it has been recognized that the kid probably won't serve anywhere near that amount of time, if he serves any time at all.
On the subject of the wiretapping, I hold that there is no "good faith" involved. Every citizen should know what's in the Bill of Rights. That a wiretapping program without judicial oversight is illegal is obvious---damn near self-evident. "Trying to help out" my ass. Even if you are so misguided as to believe that the government has any right to spy on its citizens, rest assured that the telecoms corporations were not so deluded. The only legal argument they have to stand on is the Nuremberg Defense.
Question: If you support telecom immunity, do you then also support the public trial and criminal conviction of the elected and appointed officials responsible for the illegal actions?
Cracking is also part of the natural process. Basically, all fossil fuels start out as proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids; the basic building blocks for carbon-based life as we know it.
What happens in step two is those carbon structures get broken down into smaller pieces. This is called diagenesis, which is a generic term that describes how sedimentary rocks change when you bury them under other layers of rocks. This process produces kerogens and bitumens from our original organic material.
Step three is the same process as refineries use to turn relatively useless alkanes (those with more than about 30 carbon atoms) into useful ones, except they call it catagenesis when it happens naturally.
Alkanes can be synthesized in a lab, but few people bother. The wikipedia article on alkanes provides several methods.
For synthetic production of fuel, look up the Fischer-Tropsch process, which creates hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and thermal depolymerization, which is supposed to do to organic matter in hours what the planet takes millions of years to do.
As far as how much plant matter it takes to create petroleum, a study by one Jeff Dukes of the University of Utah put the figure at 98 tons of plant matter per gallon of gas, as far as natural production is concerned. However, that figure is not very useful. Probably it would be best to say that one gallon of gasoline requires about five kilograms of carbon in the form of crude oil (depending on the crude), and the processes for getting from plant to crude are not efficient.
Oh, and as for formulas, the natural production of petroleum is pretty complex, and easier to deal with as a group of parallel processes than with a specific formula (or many).
There is lots and lots of information related to this on the internet. One good way to find information would be to look up presentations and materials from petroleum geochemistry or organic geochemistry courses, and check out books that they reference.
As a practical matter, if your computer can evaluate positions 30+ ply in the future, whether or not it really "understands" the overall strategic situation is a moot point. Beyond that, the point about endgames is inaccurate for a number of reasons. For one, there's the fifty move rule, which will draw the game even if the chess engine is stupid. For another, endgame tables enable computers to play all endgame scenarios with six or fewer men perfectly. Thirdly, even without endgame tables, the problem of mate becomes vastly simplified by decreasing the number of pieces. Having more and subtler heuristics is good until a point (I believe I read a good explanation of this in the book Behind Deep Blue by Feng-Hsiung Hsu), but searching deeper tends to end up giving better answers, as a rule of thumb.
:)
All else being equal, a bishop is slightly better than a knight because you can set up a position with the knight on the side of the board where all of the knight's potential moves can be covered by the bishop. In terms of chess engines, one way of evaluating pieces (which can be extended to positions in general) is the number of moves they have: more is generally better. I don't remember offhand what the preferred method of board evaluation is these days, though; that method may have been superseded.
Now, as to your actual point, I think that nothing is black and white. Not even chess.
Point three is called cracking. A quick google search finds some more information pretty quickly, and if you have disposable funds,
this or this seem like pretty good resources. There's also a Journal of Petroleum Geochemistry, if you're interested.
Lab re-creation is not really necessary; the commercial form of cracking is called petroleum refining.
The formula for producing oil actually starts with microbes, in the form of algae. The process in a nutshell:
1) (optional) Runaway global warming and high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere produce a global anoxic event, similar to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico but spanning the entire globe. Algae reproduce in vast numbers, die, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Rather than decay, they form a thick black mud tens of meters deep.
2) Over millions of years, the mud is folded under other rock layers.
3) The mud gets deep enough so that it is under lots of pressure and correspondingly high heat (60 to 120 degrees C) which break down the molecular bonds of the organic compounds that make up the mud, producing straight-chain hydrocarbons (i.e. crude oil).
4) (optional) The oil seeps upwards to the surface and gets trapped in a pocket of impermeable rock underneath the Middle East.
Gold leaf? Did I understand you correctly? The stuff that's 1/250000 of an inch thick, or the really thin stuff? There's probably not any gold inside the drives worth recovering--if it is still used in hard drive manufacture. I am struggling to find a reference for that, but I would expect it not to be the case. Gold is used increasingly rarely in electronics these days, as it's rather expensive.
What do you imagine the alternative is? Feel free to respond via email, if you like. (myslashdotusername)@gmail.com
Yes, but it learns what your most visited websites are, and does it rather quickly. To get to slashdot, I type "s, down arrow key, enter". To go to our company website I type "m", El Reg is "r" (or "BOFH"), XKCD is "x", etc.
I don't bother having any of these things bookmarked; it would take more time to pull them up that way. Now, for someone who does not save their browsing history, this is not such a useful feature. Otherwise, I can't really understand why people don't like it: what sort of web browsing do you do that would make it slower or more inconvenient to have your most-visited websites higher in the results list?
Yes, it will be a large upheaval for the US to change how we build our cities. But to look at the way things are and say "Oh, I don't see that changing. We're just not like that," is stupid. The underlying causes for the transition are implacable; change is therefore inevitable. What you're describing is a culture fueled by inefficient use of heretofore cheap energy---a temporal fluke, as it were. Yeah, we're set up to pay an extremely high cost for the sins of our fathers, but the natural laws of the universe aren't going to change just because we want them to. We can delay it for a while, but people need to wake up to the fact that this is going to bite us in the ass, soon, and will require drastic changes to our culture and infrastructure. This is your reality check. Deal with it---you have no other option.
Mine will not.
Why, yes, I do cry into my pillow every night...
"Worst" in what sense? He's been remarkably effective as a leader. I mean, why would we be talking about impeachment if he was the incompetent bumblefuck that everyone paints him as? If you're saying 'most morally reprehensible president', then he's probably pretty high on the list.
Yeah, but they were demoed at the same time. There's a video on YouTube.
Either way, this is old news with new branding. How they expect to capitalize on this is my question, perhaps I should RTFA. This seems like a prime candidate for open source, though: not a killer app in itself, but the technology could probably become part of a number of interesting applications.
Gene Ray is not really saying anything (except perhaps that Darwin was--if not entirely wrong--wildly optimistic). The closest he comes to making sense would be that during each 24-hour rotation, the Earth experiences 24 hours of sunrise, sunset, midday, and midnight. Note that this is not what he actually says, but it's the closest sensible interpretation. For further enlightenment, I would direct you to an entertaining research paper on the subject.
Then we should paste a caption on you that says "Backups: Your doin it wrong."
Reign of terror? You must be thinking of a different Jack Thompson. This seems more like a punch line to me.
Seriously, when it comes to ambulance-chasing frothing-at-the-mouth nutcase walking jokes, Ol' J.T. takes the cake. And then sues Hostess for making it...
Oh god.
I'm going to be haunted by the ghosts of William Strunk and my fifth grade English teacher tonight...
This discussion is rather academic, however, as one of the largest problems with antimatter is creating and containing enough of it to be useful for experimentation. Creating and storing enough antimatter to be useful in a weapon is probably reserved for science fiction exclusively. H-bombs are much more efficient to produce, and equally useful as weapons---which is to say, not very.
Why did you bother posting this? Honestly. "Here's why I, a non-physicist, think is wrong with this plan." What hubris. If you want to know how the experiment is going to be performed, read the abstract! It's quite readable, and even has pretty pictures and diagrams.
Somewhere in the article(s) it mentions that exponential increases in intelligence would probably equate to exponential increases in resources. There are physical limits to intelligence that we'll run into sooner or later--there will be a point where we can't shrink that transistor, or find another part that is smaller that does the same task.
If I understand you right, you're implying that the movie Fight Club had a vapid ending. I would like to note that Chuck Palahniuk said that he liked the movie ending better that the one he wrote.
For my part, the Pixies have never sounded better or more appropriate than in that final scene. Also, I believe that in terms of the film's intended message (rejection of the values of T. Durden), having something positive happen to the narrator as a result of the rejection is almost necessary.