Electronic stability control and ABS are hugely important to drive safely? Hahaha. Clearly nobody ever taught you how to drive.
If you take a moment and learn how to properly threshold brake, your braking times will be LESS than with an ABS car if you just panic stop and hold the pedal to the floor.
Traction control is just nanny shit...if you need a computer to cut throttle because you are losing traction obviously you can't drive for shit and should stay the fuck off of the road.
This whole engineer cars to the lowest common denominator is a shame....do we really need all of these thoughtless morons commanding 4,000 pound hunks of plastic, metal and glass? NO.
While it may be the case that a skilled driver can brake better than an ABS system, I'll just note that ABS isn't meant to help you stop more quickly - it's to give you more steering control during your stop. As much as they get derided, Consumer Reports testing experimentally demonstrated this behavior dozens of times over a decade ago.
The speed makes me think of what would happen to a rotating sphere that spins so fast the outer portions become relativistic and undergo both spatial and temporal changes relative to the inner core.
The abstract says that the graphene is micron sized, so
... but how do these "trawlers" get to see what's on, say, a Facebook page if viewing permission has been given only to a limited set of trusted people? Does Facebook permit trawlers access to such restricted information? Do they use subterfuge to get past the restrictions? How?
Hasn't it been a problem in the past that giving friends access to your information also gave facebook "apps" installed by those friends the same access? I'm not sure whether this is still the case.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked? I don't mean from a security standpoint, I mean because people feel the need to hack them so they can do what they want.
Doesn't that mean they should just buy something that isn't so limited in the first place? Or is this one of those "we buy a locked device because we want to hack it" sort of things...
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC. I've said this before: Apple doesn't implement features unless it can make them easy to use and understand and nicely designed. They don't start with a feature list and then make crappy implementations of them so they can add a bullet point to the list. They also look forward not backward and simplify where possible (eg. mandating use of h.264 instead of divx and hundreds of other formats.) If you find this approach philosophically abhorrent then use something else please and accept there are those of us that like it that way.
I don't think that's the reason people hack them anyway, they hack them because they can and for bragging rights.
The question that matters to my not tech savvy but not tech illiterate parents is, "can it play the movies I downloaded?" The answer is "no" or the AppleTV and "yes" for most of its competitors. That ends the consideration of the AppleTV.
Sony removed OtherOS citing worries about piracy, despite the fact that the system was uncracked after years of OtherOS inclusion.
Very shortly after its removal, various groups publicly announced their intention to crack the system specifically because of the OtherOS removal. They very quickly succeeded, and now Sony is going to have to live with nearly instant cracks of every version of their firmware because they riled up the wrong people. Piracy is now trivial on the PS3, with the usual caveat of no online multiplayer, all thanks to some executives irrational fear of at the time nonexistent pirates.
It's a pity that the executive in question will probably be rewarded because the current rise in piracy proves that he was right about the menace of game copiers in the first place!
Or perhaps the fact the fact they have changed the rental overdue agreement substantially several times has played a part. They went from no overdue fees to "Gee, it's a week late? It's yours!" with virtually no fanfare. I may be exaggerating slightly, but not much!!!
In 1999 or 2000 they changed the policy while I had a dvd rented and sitting in my college dorm. The result was that I had a fraction of a day less to return the rental. Of course, since they changed the rules after I had checked out the disk, I didn't know this. When I brought it back and was told I owed a late fee, I still had my receipt with the return deadline listed, which the manager agreed showed clearly that my return was, in fact, on time. But he said there was nothing he could do (which was nonsense, I'd seen them selectively remove late fees before). I didn't pay the fee despite years of letters from BB and never did business with them again.
I also got about a dozen BB customers to switch to Netflix. I like to think that I contributed, in a very small way, to this bankruptcy.
Ya we need to look in to this. Despite the name, Rare Earths aren't. There are plenty of them. Of course they have to be mined, refined, and all that shit. That is largely left to China simply because China pays people shit and has no safety or environmental standards. However as you accurately note, they are important, we need to be supplying ourselves.
And China's escalation here, if it's real, may directly lead to the end of their monopoly on world supply. That would be a huge economic and strategic loss.
Japan isn't self-sufficient in the food area either. I hear they get most of their food, especially rice, from China. I've heard some estimates that if the food they get from China were to disappear and weren't replaced, they'd be facing starvations in about a month (though I don't have a citation on that, so that may be wildly inaccurate). Not to mention that Japan is militarily defenseless against China, and even if China didn't feel like getting their hands dirty, they could always tell North Korea to start acting up at Japan. In other words, Japan doesn't really have a strong foothold to be poking China like this. I guess they have a lot of faith that China will agree to a diplomatic solution.
More likely though, the bureaucratic head of the Japanese coast guard was pissed off at another part of the bureaucracy and wanted them to lose face. Or maybe he just decided that the last decade-long recession to hit Japan was pretty nice, so he should do his best to make sure the current one lasts that long too by sabotaging manufacturing dependent on those rare earth exports.
The Core i7-860 spanks everything AMD has at $280 @ newegg, there's only a few odd benchmarks AMDs $300 top six-core CPU wins.
Except that:
1- The top AMD six core is actually $275, not $300. 2- The AMD motherboards are cheaper, you can easily save at least $100 on that. 3- The AMD motherboards are more likely to work with future CPUs (Intel has already changed sockets between Nehalem and Sandy Bridge... again). 3- A 6 core CPU is probably more future proof than a 4 core one (even if those Intel cores are more powerful individually than the AMD ones, not arguing that).
I agree with you that the AMD advantage is smaller at this price point than at the $100-$200 one, but the advantage is still real.
If you're willing to overclock, the i7 can easily get a 50% boost for the $50 cost of a larger heat sink that has the side effects of being silent and keeping the temperature of your heavily overclocked chip well below the stock chip with the stock cooler.
You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell. Seriously, the battery life on the iPad, even under heavy use, is considerable and more than adequate for a student's needs. They will be back home and able to charge the device before it runs out of power.
What to do when you forgot your iPad?
Probably the same thing that people do when they forget their notebooks. And, let's be serious - it's far _LESS_ likely that a student will forget an iPad, which is light and cool and fun compared to them forgetting a collection of notebooks which are heavy and boring and dull.
Any other hypotheticals you'd care to throw out there?
You obviously have never met humans. It's a lot easier to remember a giant heavy thing that a light fun thing. Oops, I left my iPad next to my bed last night instead of putting it in my backpack. Too bad the backpack felt exactly the same with and without it. Oops, I forgot to charge my iPad last night. Seriously, have you met any kids in the last 10 years? At any given time, a quarter of the cell phone toting kids in high school have either forgotten their phone somewhere or forgotten to charge it. The iPad's going to be worse, because it's used for learning, not exciting socializing.
The iPad's battery life is terribly short. If a kid needs to use it in most classes throughout the day and then for homework at night (which will already be pushing its single charge limits on a busy 16 hour school + study day), they only get one chance to remember to charge it.
Also, while the iPad is good for quickly flipping through pages, it's nowhere near as good as a textbook. Most everyone in advanced science or math classes (and I'm probably foolishly discriminating against history, psychology, etc. here) spends a lot of time with several (>2) pages bookmarked and accessed several times a minute while sorting out new concepts in challenging problem sets. This is mostly a software problem, but as of now the available reader software is going to make this more painful than it is with a textbook. Furthermore, the low resolution of the iPad screen just can't compete with the 300 dpi printing on an 11" tall textbook, so the information that took 3 textbook pages flips will now take several more pages of on the iPad.
For that matter, students drop things all the time. Textbooks get bent a bit. iPads shatter.
Apparently the iPhone4 (yes, the article mentions an iPod Touch 4 which has only 256 megs of RAM, but comments from users on this gen of iPhone affirm the benchmark result) is much slower than phones like the Nexus One in HTML5 tests and uses twice as much battery charge to run the same program at half the framerate. From the comments, it looks like the iPhone 4 is almost identical to the first gen Droid in this benchmark, except for the double battery burn issue. And oddly enough, switching to a Flash version on the Android phones results in much higher performance than was seen with HTML5. Someone with a hacked iPhone should run the Flash version to find out whether Flash>HTML5 in iOS.
Yes, this is just one particular benchmark, and it says nothing conclusive about hardware or platform. It does make for an interesting early comparison, though, doesn't it?
Where this myth came from, I have no idea, but I've yet to see any real world evidence that it's anything other than a myth, and that includes demonstrations from Roman reenactors trying desperately (and often hilariously) to justify it.
Ignoring the argument of why the Romans wore their scabbards on the right, there's plenty of conclusive evidence that they in fact did so.
Roman art is, as usual, our best source of information on Roman culture.
In Econ 101 he would have read about the price curve that suggests that fewer people will buy at $6 but maybe not so much fewer that it isn't the better price for his business.
But he's beaten your Spaniard, so he must have studied and in studying he would have learned that man is mortal, so you can clearly not choose the cup in front of him.
2) Buy 30 simple calculators as you suggest, and then have students solve problems with them in class several times before the exam so they can get used to them.
In any case, I always like giving exams that aren't incredibly time consuming. If I have a 1 hour exam period I aim for reasonable students finishing in about 40 minutes, though I know they'll probably spend the rest of their time going back and checking answers, trying to work out parts they didn't understand, etc. It gives a nice time cushion for the ESL students.
So let's see if I understand the situation. They are ruthless competitors who make highly popular games and use their strength to push out competitors. Nothing they are doing is illegal, but of course people are whining about it anyway.
Sounds like the system is working as intended.
Remember that it was revealed a few months back that Zynga reused graphics (of buildings) from Age of Empires in its games. That's rather blatant copyright violation for profit. I think Ars did a story about it.
When it crashes, you, the pilot, absorbs the entire forces involved. Chances of survival are dimmed if not non existent.
That plane is an experimental plane for one.
Secondly, I see planes like that at my local airport with gasoline engines (single engine in the rear - I forgot what they're called.). This plane isn't out of the ordinary when it comes to any crash abilities or lack thereof.
Lastly, have you ever flown in a Cessna 172? It's a tin can with an engine. The trick is not to crash - hence all the safety training pilots go through even for the Sport Pilot license.
It also moves very slowly. Unlike airline crashes, most passengers walk away from private plane crashes. The stories with fatal endings get more coverage and skew the news reports.
The article writer should have at the very least emphasized the word "what."
"In virtue of WHAT is it true that..."
In other words, how can we get away with saying "there could have been Aliens" when none of the things that actually exist could have been Aliens?
I don't see how this is such a conundrum. It's like wondering how it could be true that my backpack could have contained a flashlight, even though none of the objects currently in my backpack could have been a flashlight.
Yes to your explanation, yes to your opinion on the topic, and an even bigger yes to your criticism of the wording of that sentence.
The Hurt Locker was an amazingly good movie. Intense, interesting.
I found the characters to be contrived caricatures. The film almost seemed like a parody of itself, filled with the kind of overly stylized, cliched, and rather shallow scenes South Park would show to make fun of an overblown director.
Another example: that service for syncing an iPhone with your computer. iTunes won't start without that installed and running.
Not quite true. The only way I can get iTunes to communicate with my iPod Touch 3gs is to run it once, get an error message saying "an unknown error has occurred," close it, stop the service, restart iTunes, and click past the warning dialog telling me the useless service isn't running. Every time!
If we were able to park our craft on an asteroid with a stable and well known trajectory it seems to me that we could hitch a free ride to the outer planets. Granted we would need some serious boosters to attain sufficient escape velocity but if such an asteroid could be found it would solve some problems. We have some seriously bright minds at NASA/JPL so I don't believe I'm the first person to think of this. Europa anyone?
To land on an asteroid, using technology remotely related to what we have now, it's going to have to match the velocity of the asteroid. Doing that negates any energy savings gained by the technique. Alternatively we could do a normal gravitational boost off of an asteroid, but the eccentric ones probably don't weight enough to help much. Or we could make super durable probes that can handle a tens of km/s collision with the asteroid, in which case we can then get our cheap ride to wherever it goes.
Re:"We're probably going to do that THIS century"
on
Look For AI, Not Aliens
·
· Score: 2, Funny
We were probably going to do that [invent AI] LAST century. "If we're any example"... don't use us as an "example" until we've actually done it.
In 1983 I was a year away from getting a CompSci degree and attended the party for my "analysis of algorithms" GTA that was getting her MSc in AI. She said frankly at the party that the turning point was a system that actually *understood* language as well as a human 3-year-old, the point where we start understanding and creating arbitrary longer-than-4-word sentences. And that she was aware of no system on Earth that could.
I'm still not, and that's a good 40 years after it was first expected. HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969. 10 years of hard work after that, computers have the whole Internet to troll for text, sound,images to learn from.
I'm not saying there's zero progress or that it can't be done. But it's become and extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, not something to wave your hand and say "it'll happen, so just use us doing it as an example". Heck, we aren't doing that for fusion any more, and at least we have a THEORY for that, it's "merely" very hard engineering.
But our advertising technology far surpasses expectations!
"The Ambassador Of Death" sounds like the type of phrase Fox News would like. Is Iran intentionally angling for Fox attention? Why?
If violent anti-American factions around the world haven't been allied with the Republican Party for the past nine years, this has been the most uncanny series of mutually beneficial coincidences in modern history.
is right. Myers criticism may be off the mark but Kurzweil's speculation about brain design, like some much of his other speculation, is bullshit. His basic argument in the blog post is that the amount of information in the human genome constrains the amount of information (and the complexity) required to design the brain. This thesis is wrong on a bunch of levels but let's take the most obvious. The amount of information in the genome is the amount of information that the "body" (to simplify) requires to replicate or create parts of itself. The amount of information required is relative to the machinery which is going to interpret it. There is no reason to believe we are dealing with a Turing machine here where the amount of bits required for a program to perform a function is going to be more or less consistent across languages and platforms (assuming similar complexity of the code). The machine interpreting the bits matters. So while the body may only need "50 million bytes" to create itself we may need many, many more millions of bits to specify how to build it. Just consider the complexity of protein folding.
Exactly so. The genome information assumption is absurd and arbitrary. It's like assuming that because I can buy a book an Amazon by transferring 1500 bytes of information to Amazon's website I can thus recreate that book inside a simulation using only 1500 bytes of code. In both this case and the issue of brain complexity, the mechanism for transforming the initial information into the finished product is far more complex than the "input data."
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He's making fun of people who believe without evidence in the invisible hand of the free market with regards to broadband competition in the US.
Everybody's always picking on Ayn Rand.
Electronic stability control and ABS are hugely important to drive safely? Hahaha. Clearly nobody ever taught you how to drive.
If you take a moment and learn how to properly threshold brake, your braking times will be LESS than with an ABS car if you just panic stop and hold the pedal to the floor.
Traction control is just nanny shit...if you need a computer to cut throttle because you are losing traction obviously you can't drive for shit and should stay the fuck off of the road.
This whole engineer cars to the lowest common denominator is a shame....do we really need all of these thoughtless morons commanding 4,000 pound hunks of plastic, metal and glass? NO.
While it may be the case that a skilled driver can brake better than an ABS system, I'll just note that ABS isn't meant to help you stop more quickly - it's to give you more steering control during your stop. As much as they get derided, Consumer Reports testing experimentally demonstrated this behavior dozens of times over a decade ago.
The speed makes me think of what would happen to a rotating sphere that spins so fast the outer portions become relativistic and undergo both spatial and temporal changes relative to the inner core.
The abstract says that the graphene is micron sized, so
v = PI*D*w
D = 1E-6
w = rotational frequency = 1E6 Hz
v = 3 m/s
Sadly, not relativistic.
... but how do these "trawlers" get to see what's on, say, a Facebook page if viewing permission has been given only to a limited set of trusted people? Does Facebook permit trawlers access to such restricted information? Do they use subterfuge to get past the restrictions? How?
Hasn't it been a problem in the past that giving friends access to your information also gave facebook "apps" installed by those friends the same access? I'm not sure whether this is still the case.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked? I don't mean from a security standpoint, I mean because people feel the need to hack them so they can do what they want.
Doesn't that mean they should just buy something that isn't so limited in the first place? Or is this one of those "we buy a locked device because we want to hack it" sort of things...
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC. I've said this before: Apple doesn't implement features unless it can make them easy to use and understand and nicely designed. They don't start with a feature list and then make crappy implementations of them so they can add a bullet point to the list. They also look forward not backward and simplify where possible (eg. mandating use of h.264 instead of divx and hundreds of other formats.) If you find this approach philosophically abhorrent then use something else please and accept there are those of us that like it that way.
I don't think that's the reason people hack them anyway, they hack them because they can and for bragging rights.
The question that matters to my not tech savvy but not tech illiterate parents is, "can it play the movies I downloaded?" The answer is "no" or the AppleTV and "yes" for most of its competitors. That ends the consideration of the AppleTV.
Sony removed OtherOS citing worries about piracy, despite the fact that the system was uncracked after years of OtherOS inclusion.
Very shortly after its removal, various groups publicly announced their intention to crack the system specifically because of the OtherOS removal. They very quickly succeeded, and now Sony is going to have to live with nearly instant cracks of every version of their firmware because they riled up the wrong people. Piracy is now trivial on the PS3, with the usual caveat of no online multiplayer, all thanks to some executives irrational fear of at the time nonexistent pirates.
It's a pity that the executive in question will probably be rewarded because the current rise in piracy proves that he was right about the menace of game copiers in the first place!
Or perhaps the fact the fact they have changed the rental overdue agreement substantially several times has played a part. They went from no overdue fees to "Gee, it's a week late? It's yours!" with virtually no fanfare. I may be exaggerating slightly, but not much!!!
Pam
http://www.talksocialnews.com/
In 1999 or 2000 they changed the policy while I had a dvd rented and sitting in my college dorm. The result was that I had a fraction of a day less to return the rental. Of course, since they changed the rules after I had checked out the disk, I didn't know this. When I brought it back and was told I owed a late fee, I still had my receipt with the return deadline listed, which the manager agreed showed clearly that my return was, in fact, on time. But he said there was nothing he could do (which was nonsense, I'd seen them selectively remove late fees before). I didn't pay the fee despite years of letters from BB and never did business with them again.
I also got about a dozen BB customers to switch to Netflix. I like to think that I contributed, in a very small way, to this bankruptcy.
Ya we need to look in to this. Despite the name, Rare Earths aren't. There are plenty of them. Of course they have to be mined, refined, and all that shit. That is largely left to China simply because China pays people shit and has no safety or environmental standards. However as you accurately note, they are important, we need to be supplying ourselves.
And China's escalation here, if it's real, may directly lead to the end of their monopoly on world supply. That would be a huge economic and strategic loss.
Japan isn't self-sufficient in the food area either. I hear they get most of their food, especially rice, from China. I've heard some estimates that if the food they get from China were to disappear and weren't replaced, they'd be facing starvations in about a month (though I don't have a citation on that, so that may be wildly inaccurate). Not to mention that Japan is militarily defenseless against China, and even if China didn't feel like getting their hands dirty, they could always tell North Korea to start acting up at Japan. In other words, Japan doesn't really have a strong foothold to be poking China like this. I guess they have a lot of faith that China will agree to a diplomatic solution.
More likely though, the bureaucratic head of the Japanese coast guard was pissed off at another part of the bureaucracy and wanted them to lose face. Or maybe he just decided that the last decade-long recession to hit Japan was pretty nice, so he should do his best to make sure the current one lasts that long too by sabotaging manufacturing dependent on those rare earth exports.
Japan grows about 10% more rice than it consumes. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#Production_and_export.
Except that:
1- The top AMD six core is actually $275, not $300.
2- The AMD motherboards are cheaper, you can easily save at least $100 on that.
3- The AMD motherboards are more likely to work with future CPUs (Intel has already changed sockets between Nehalem and Sandy Bridge... again).
3- A 6 core CPU is probably more future proof than a 4 core one (even if those Intel cores are more powerful individually than the AMD ones, not arguing that).
I agree with you that the AMD advantage is smaller at this price point than at the $100-$200 one, but the advantage is still real.
If you're willing to overclock, the i7 can easily get a 50% boost for the $50 cost of a larger heat sink that has the side effects of being silent and keeping the temperature of your heavily overclocked chip well below the stock chip with the stock cooler.
What to do when the battery dies?
You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell. Seriously, the battery life on the iPad, even under heavy use, is considerable and more than adequate for a student's needs. They will be back home and able to charge the device before it runs out of power.
What to do when you forgot your iPad?
Probably the same thing that people do when they forget their notebooks. And, let's be serious - it's far _LESS_ likely that a student will forget an iPad, which is light and cool and fun compared to them forgetting a collection of notebooks which are heavy and boring and dull.
Any other hypotheticals you'd care to throw out there?
You obviously have never met humans. It's a lot easier to remember a giant heavy thing that a light fun thing. Oops, I left my iPad next to my bed last night instead of putting it in my backpack. Too bad the backpack felt exactly the same with and without it. Oops, I forgot to charge my iPad last night. Seriously, have you met any kids in the last 10 years? At any given time, a quarter of the cell phone toting kids in high school have either forgotten their phone somewhere or forgotten to charge it. The iPad's going to be worse, because it's used for learning, not exciting socializing.
The iPad's battery life is terribly short. If a kid needs to use it in most classes throughout the day and then for homework at night (which will already be pushing its single charge limits on a busy 16 hour school + study day), they only get one chance to remember to charge it.
Also, while the iPad is good for quickly flipping through pages, it's nowhere near as good as a textbook. Most everyone in advanced science or math classes (and I'm probably foolishly discriminating against history, psychology, etc. here) spends a lot of time with several (>2) pages bookmarked and accessed several times a minute while sorting out new concepts in challenging problem sets. This is mostly a software problem, but as of now the available reader software is going to make this more painful than it is with a textbook. Furthermore, the low resolution of the iPad screen just can't compete with the 300 dpi printing on an 11" tall textbook, so the information that took 3 textbook pages flips will now take several more pages of on the iPad.
For that matter, students drop things all the time. Textbooks get bent a bit. iPads shatter.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=19681
Apparently the iPhone4 (yes, the article mentions an iPod Touch 4 which has only 256 megs of RAM, but comments from users on this gen of iPhone affirm the benchmark result) is much slower than phones like the Nexus One in HTML5 tests and uses twice as much battery charge to run the same program at half the framerate. From the comments, it looks like the iPhone 4 is almost identical to the first gen Droid in this benchmark, except for the double battery burn issue. And oddly enough, switching to a Flash version on the Android phones results in much higher performance than was seen with HTML5. Someone with a hacked iPhone should run the Flash version to find out whether Flash>HTML5 in iOS.
Yes, this is just one particular benchmark, and it says nothing conclusive about hardware or platform. It does make for an interesting early comparison, though, doesn't it?
Where this myth came from, I have no idea, but I've yet to see any real world evidence that it's anything other than a myth, and that includes demonstrations from Roman reenactors trying desperately (and often hilariously) to justify it.
Ignoring the argument of why the Romans wore their scabbards on the right, there's plenty of conclusive evidence that they in fact did so.
Roman art is, as usual, our best source of information on Roman culture.
Look at this, for instance: http://www.romanarmy.net/images/Pages/articles/artweapons/artwep2.jpg.
In Econ 101 he would have read about the price curve that suggests that fewer people will buy at $6 but maybe not so much fewer that it isn't the better price for his business.
But he's beaten your Spaniard, so he must have studied and in studying he would have learned that man is mortal, so you can clearly not choose the cup in front of him.
1) Tell students to use dead tree dictionaries.
2) Buy 30 simple calculators as you suggest, and then have students solve problems with them in class several times before the exam so they can get used to them.
In any case, I always like giving exams that aren't incredibly time consuming. If I have a 1 hour exam period I aim for reasonable students finishing in about 40 minutes, though I know they'll probably spend the rest of their time going back and checking answers, trying to work out parts they didn't understand, etc. It gives a nice time cushion for the ESL students.
So let's see if I understand the situation. They are ruthless competitors who make highly popular games and use their strength to push out competitors. Nothing they are doing is illegal, but of course people are whining about it anyway.
Sounds like the system is working as intended.
Remember that it was revealed a few months back that Zynga reused graphics (of buildings) from Age of Empires in its games. That's rather blatant copyright violation for profit. I think Ars did a story about it.
...I see a potential problem:
When it crashes, you, the pilot, absorbs the entire forces involved. Chances of survival are dimmed if not non existent.
That plane is an experimental plane for one.
Secondly, I see planes like that at my local airport with gasoline engines (single engine in the rear - I forgot what they're called.). This plane isn't out of the ordinary when it comes to any crash abilities or lack thereof.
Lastly, have you ever flown in a Cessna 172? It's a tin can with an engine. The trick is not to crash - hence all the safety training pilots go through even for the Sport Pilot license.
It also moves very slowly. Unlike airline crashes, most passengers walk away from private plane crashes. The stories with fatal endings get more coverage and skew the news reports.
The article writer should have at the very least emphasized the word "what."
"In virtue of WHAT is it true that ..."
In other words, how can we get away with saying "there could have been Aliens" when none of the things that actually exist could have been Aliens?
I don't see how this is such a conundrum. It's like wondering how it could be true that my backpack could have contained a flashlight, even though none of the objects currently in my backpack could have been a flashlight.
Yes to your explanation, yes to your opinion on the topic, and an even bigger yes to your criticism of the wording of that sentence.
The Hurt Locker was an amazingly good movie.
Intense, interesting.
I found the characters to be contrived caricatures. The film almost seemed like a parody of itself, filled with the kind of overly stylized, cliched, and rather shallow scenes South Park would show to make fun of an overblown director.
**/****
I had the same thought.
Another example: that service for syncing an iPhone with your computer. iTunes won't start without that installed and running.
Not quite true. The only way I can get iTunes to communicate with my iPod Touch 3gs is to run it once, get an error message saying "an unknown error has occurred," close it, stop the service, restart iTunes, and click past the warning dialog telling me the useless service isn't running. Every time!
If we were able to park our craft on an asteroid with a stable and well known trajectory it seems to me that we could hitch a free ride to the outer planets. Granted we would need some serious boosters to attain sufficient escape velocity but if such an asteroid could be found it would solve some problems. We have some seriously bright minds at NASA/JPL so I don't believe I'm the first person to think of this. Europa anyone?
To land on an asteroid, using technology remotely related to what we have now, it's going to have to match the velocity of the asteroid. Doing that negates any energy savings gained by the technique. Alternatively we could do a normal gravitational boost off of an asteroid, but the eccentric ones probably don't weight enough to help much. Or we could make super durable probes that can handle a tens of km/s collision with the asteroid, in which case we can then get our cheap ride to wherever it goes.
We were probably going to do that [invent AI] LAST century. "If we're any example" ... don't use us as an "example" until we've actually done it.
In 1983 I was a year away from getting a CompSci degree and attended the party for my "analysis of algorithms" GTA that was getting her MSc in AI. She said frankly at the party that the turning point was a system that actually *understood* language as well as a human 3-year-old, the point where we start understanding and creating arbitrary longer-than-4-word sentences. And that she was aware of no system on Earth that could.
I'm still not, and that's a good 40 years after it was first expected. HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969. 10 years of hard work after that, computers have the whole Internet to troll for text, sound,images to learn from.
I'm not saying there's zero progress or that it can't be done. But it's become and extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, not something to wave your hand and say "it'll happen, so just use us doing it as an example". Heck, we aren't doing that for fusion any more, and at least we have a THEORY for that, it's "merely" very hard engineering.
But our advertising technology far surpasses expectations!
"The Ambassador Of Death" sounds like the type of phrase Fox News would like. Is Iran intentionally angling for Fox attention? Why?
If violent anti-American factions around the world haven't been allied with the Republican Party for the past nine years, this has been the most uncanny series of mutually beneficial coincidences in modern history.
Any other candidates for a course like this? I thought Braid had some pretty deep storytelling.
And I thought Braid's storytelling wasn't up to the par seen in my age 13 creative writing class.
is right. Myers criticism may be off the mark but Kurzweil's speculation about brain design, like some much of his other speculation, is bullshit. His basic argument in the blog post is that the amount of information in the human genome constrains the amount of information (and the complexity) required to design the brain. This thesis is wrong on a bunch of levels but let's take the most obvious. The amount of information in the genome is the amount of information that the "body" (to simplify) requires to replicate or create parts of itself. The amount of information required is relative to the machinery which is going to interpret it. There is no reason to believe we are dealing with a Turing machine here where the amount of bits required for a program to perform a function is going to be more or less consistent across languages and platforms (assuming similar complexity of the code). The machine interpreting the bits matters. So while the body may only need "50 million bytes" to create itself we may need many, many more millions of bits to specify how to build it. Just consider the complexity of protein folding.
Exactly so. The genome information assumption is absurd and arbitrary. It's like assuming that because I can buy a book an Amazon by transferring 1500 bytes of information to Amazon's website I can thus recreate that book inside a simulation using only 1500 bytes of code. In both this case and the issue of brain complexity, the mechanism for transforming the initial information into the finished product is far more complex than the "input data."