Well, one is tempted to mention the fact that Bing has been made only for the purpose of stealing users and customers from Google who built a search engine for the purpose of making information more accessible and easy to find.
hahahahahahahahahahaha
You believe the story that Google was an altruistic project that magically happened to make money?
A couple guys had an idea. They then used the idea to make money. The only thing that stands out is that they were initially against advertised-funded search, but as soon as they saw the prospect of making money they caved on that one. They had good influences on the industry (banner ad elimination) and bad ones (buying doubleclick, eliminating privacy). On the scale of evilness, there's no meaningful difference between Google and Apple or Microsoft or Honda.
Since you know all about this stuff, where's the best spot to dig for this uranium that's proven by math to be in the entirety of the earth?
His link shows that it's very cheap to pull it out of seawater at an energy cost about 100 times lower than that of oil, natural gas, etc, for the next 5 billion years. I assume there's enough mixing that you can just park your separation rig by some big river and go at it.
It's not like we don't have a culture of denial here in the US. We wiped out the American Indians pretty remorselessly. That's pretty close to genocide, but it doesn't get taught that way in our schools. Every nation tries to overlook the terrible things its done in the past. People and countries are pretty much all the same, wherever you go.
When did you go to school? In CA in the 80s and 90s it was certainly presented as a genocide.
Re:Philosophy should have never been....
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
... considered a seperate "branch of knowledge" since if you study people like plato, Plato says thus:
"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers."
(Plato, Republic, 380BC)
I think many ancient philosophers would find it strange we consider things seperate, in the last little while we've tended not to see things holistically like ancient philosophers did.
Most well known ancient greek philosophers would also be baffled that our "natural philosophy" comes from observation of evidence rather than constructing internally consistent arguments with no basis in the natural world.
I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.
In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?
Test the same sites with Firefox. Notice how the javascriptless sites actually run faster in Firefox, and scroll far more smoothly. Now install Adblock and try not to smirk as you load things in half a second that take Chrome 5 seconds. Enjoy.
my ex girlfriend worked for apple and told me that an agreement with microsoft was in effect to keep the mac os off the "buy a disk install on your hardware" circuit since microsoft knows os would be adopted in droves.
The number of people who buy and install an OS, even a completely legitimate one, is pathetically small compared to the number who receive their OS with their hardware.
Framingham is not America and America is not the world. While this report might hold true for a statistically insignificant group in one country, it tells us nothing about human evolution over the whole planet.
The traits described probably have more to do with proximity to the local McDonalds, than anythiing about "survival of the fa^Hittest"
Only blame the summary. Stearns made no such generalization.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Almost all Americans are willing to embrace technology, but few really embrace science. In fact, a large number are overtly hostile to some branches of science (especially the biological sciences). The majority seems content to retain an ignorance of science in general, or perhaps fear that they are incapable of understanding it.
Agreed. And Americans are mostly willing to embrace technology that's been well advertised as either cool or sexy. Even the very well educated non-scientists in America (read: humanities professors) are largely fearful of or hostile toward science. When I've been in France and Germany, that's not been the case.
Also, regarding the GP's rejection of the zombies-represent-fear-of-science hypothesis, look back to early zombie movies. They tend to clearly state that the zombies arose because of some new phenomenon that was pulled (and distorted) from relatively avant garde science of the day. Just wait - we'll soon have zombies based on gamma ray bursts or the sequenced human genome.
Without mortar, with just granite blocks on top of each other, it is more than 2000 years old.
I can't help but wonder when mankind began to suck at building anything that should last more than a few years....
You have something of a point, sort of, but in addition to the problems pointed out by the other responses, you forgot to scroll down in that Wikipedia article and notice that the Aqueduct of Segovia has been reconstructed multiple times. Also note that we think of it as special because it's still there, whereas most other aqueducts collapsed 100-1600 years ago.
People rarely link to Anandtech in summaries, instead giving links to much more superficial articles. Pcper.com is the other really nice site when it comes to consumer SSD issues.
Why figth against a stupid corp like Amazon, if you can simply use real books (no DRM here, you can give then to your friends, sell, etc) or use a better - and open - option like one netbook with PDF reader? For me, Kindle is a expensive and useless toy.
This comes up with every Kindle article, and I tend to respond. A netbook, or anything else with a backlight, can't compete with a Kindle's readability. Of course there are other ebook readers, and there are also paper books, but the Kindle really is quite useful if you travel and want to bring a lot to read. Also, if you want to only read free (as in beer or speech, your choice) material you can do so on the Kindle. The DX, at least, reads pdfs without any conversion, and both versions read txt and several non-Amazon ebook formats.
Everything that comes into a black hole comes back out eventually via Hawking Radiation. It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.
> But what I want to know is, why hasn't anyone mass produced a Thin CRT yet?
They've been prototyped -- 10 years ago, I was convinced that the future of television was the Field Emission Display (FED) after I saw a demo at CES. Absolutely *beautiful*. The best of all worlds. Bright, saturated, distortion-free, and viewable from angles just like a regular CRT.
Basically, coat a sheet of glass with colored phosphors, and put individually-addressable solid-state electron sources behind them. To light up a particular phosphor group, turn on the emitters behind it to make it glow. Unfortunately, the technology went nowhere.:(
The CIGS PV cell is called "thin film" because the photoelectric sandwich is deposited as thin layers on top of a GLASS plate. Oh, and they apparently are (very) moisture-sensitive, so having them last 20-25 years will be difficult.
The substrate isn't necessarily glass. Flexible metal substrates have been used already by other companies. They do bend, and they're encased in a flexible moisture barrier and offered with a warranty that lasts as long as the lifetime claims. I don't think that the companies selling these would be willing to offer the warranty without a reasonably good expectation that the cells would actually last that long.
It seems unlikely that these will weather very well, so we'll have to see how they cope with thermal cycling and storm stresses. Nice to note that things have moved along since I worked on Si photovoltaics - it's taken longer than I expected, though
They'll be sold with a 20 year warranty, and trust me: they wouldn't be willing to offer that warranty without being confident that they wouldn't have to pay up regularly.
And for that matter how do you enter a benzene ring into a search query?
You can do exactly that in Scifinder - draw the molecule and search papers and patents for it. It's the one thing I've done in Scifinder that really benefited me over using Web of Science.
As for which countries can be trusted. Ones with secular governments that keep religion out of government policy and decisions.
The EU, America, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and others I think can be trusted.
Of course the previous American government was pretty worrying. Hopefully American citizens have learnt their lesson, and hopefully the republican party will fix themselves. They've been catering to the loons, and that's dangerous for everyone.
America has a colorful and long history of overturning small nations because their dictator or democratically elected government has displeased us. If I were a small nation that disagreed with America's ideology (which does include stuff like assassinations and coups in order to help spread business interests), I don't think I'd trust America. Israel frequently claims to be halting settlement of Palestinian-majority areas followed by revelations that they're funding and encouraging that settlement. I wouldn't trust them either. In military matters I do feel that I could trust the EU, NZ, and Australia.
This is why they aren't overly concerned with Vista's shitty performance, and this is also why they haven't been breaking their balls trying to fix it.
I think they might not be overly concerned with Vista's shitty performance re: games because when there are other OS options to run the same game on the same hardware (take WoW on Vista, Wine, and OSX for example), Vista runs it the fastest.
When it comes down to it, if food products are larger but do not provide additional "food value" to go with the size, the only benefit would be for those trying to lose weight, since there is less food "value" for a given mass. 1000 calories of something grown in space may take up more room, but it is still only 1000 calories worth of food. Now, if you take a plant that on Earth provides 1000 calories and when grown in space it provides 1500 calories, THEN that would be worth looking at.
A reciprocal argument can be made about mass-farmed food on Earth. Generally the calorie content is higher in industrially farmed foods while the nutrient content is lower. Therefore it's a problem for those looking to lose weight because getting the required calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, etc. are diluted relative to the calories that come along with them. Furthermore, since grains (the source ofproblematic omega-6 fatty acids) replace leaves (the source of important omega-3 fatty acids) in industrial meat farming, some important nutrients are very difficult to consume regardless of the amount of calories consumed. Supplemental nutrients are often added to make up for these deficiencies, but considering that nutritionists have only vague ideas of which nutrients matter, whether quantity or ratio matter, or whether seemingly unimportant chemicals are necessary to properly utilize the nutrients that we know are important, this doesn't have a reliable effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one is tempted to mention the fact that Bing has been made only for the purpose of stealing users and customers from Google who built a search engine for the purpose of making information more accessible and easy to find.
hahahahahahahahahahaha You believe the story that Google was an altruistic project that magically happened to make money? A couple guys had an idea. They then used the idea to make money. The only thing that stands out is that they were initially against advertised-funded search, but as soon as they saw the prospect of making money they caved on that one. They had good influences on the industry (banner ad elimination) and bad ones (buying doubleclick, eliminating privacy). On the scale of evilness, there's no meaningful difference between Google and Apple or Microsoft or Honda.
Since you know all about this stuff, where's the best spot to dig for this uranium that's proven by math to be in the entirety of the earth?
His link shows that it's very cheap to pull it out of seawater at an energy cost about 100 times lower than that of oil, natural gas, etc, for the next 5 billion years. I assume there's enough mixing that you can just park your separation rig by some big river and go at it.
It's not like we don't have a culture of denial here in the US. We wiped out the American Indians pretty remorselessly. That's pretty close to genocide, but it doesn't get taught that way in our schools. Every nation tries to overlook the terrible things its done in the past. People and countries are pretty much all the same, wherever you go.
When did you go to school? In CA in the 80s and 90s it was certainly presented as a genocide.
... considered a seperate "branch of knowledge" since if you study people like plato, Plato says thus:
"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers." (Plato, Republic, 380BC)
I think many ancient philosophers would find it strange we consider things seperate, in the last little while we've tended not to see things holistically like ancient philosophers did.
Most well known ancient greek philosophers would also be baffled that our "natural philosophy" comes from observation of evidence rather than constructing internally consistent arguments with no basis in the natural world.
This has all happened before, and it will happen again.
I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.
In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?
Test the same sites with Firefox. Notice how the javascriptless sites actually run faster in Firefox, and scroll far more smoothly. Now install Adblock and try not to smirk as you load things in half a second that take Chrome 5 seconds. Enjoy.
my ex girlfriend worked for apple and told me that an agreement with microsoft was in effect to keep the mac os off the "buy a disk install on your hardware" circuit since microsoft knows os would be adopted in droves.
The number of people who buy and install an OS, even a completely legitimate one, is pathetically small compared to the number who receive their OS with their hardware.
Framingham is not America and America is not the world. While this report might hold true for a statistically insignificant group in one country, it tells us nothing about human evolution over the whole planet.
The traits described probably have more to do with proximity to the local McDonalds, than anythiing about "survival of the fa^Hittest"
Only blame the summary. Stearns made no such generalization.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Almost all Americans are willing to embrace technology, but few really embrace science. In fact, a large number are overtly hostile to some branches of science (especially the biological sciences). The majority seems content to retain an ignorance of science in general, or perhaps fear that they are incapable of understanding it.
Agreed. And Americans are mostly willing to embrace technology that's been well advertised as either cool or sexy. Even the very well educated non-scientists in America (read: humanities professors) are largely fearful of or hostile toward science. When I've been in France and Germany, that's not been the case. Also, regarding the GP's rejection of the zombies-represent-fear-of-science hypothesis, look back to early zombie movies. They tend to clearly state that the zombies arose because of some new phenomenon that was pulled (and distorted) from relatively avant garde science of the day. Just wait - we'll soon have zombies based on gamma ray bursts or the sequenced human genome.
Meanwhile, in Segovia (Spain), the Roman aqueduct is still up & running : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct_of_Segovia
Without mortar, with just granite blocks on top of each other, it is more than 2000 years old. I can't help but wonder when mankind began to suck at building anything that should last more than a few years....
You have something of a point, sort of, but in addition to the problems pointed out by the other responses, you forgot to scroll down in that Wikipedia article and notice that the Aqueduct of Segovia has been reconstructed multiple times. Also note that we think of it as special because it's still there, whereas most other aqueducts collapsed 100-1600 years ago.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667
People rarely link to Anandtech in summaries, instead giving links to much more superficial articles. Pcper.com is the other really nice site when it comes to consumer SSD issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
Thanks for ending my agonizing 30 seconds of wondering whether I was wrong through 5 years of grad school.
As opposed to the liberal belief that...killing an unborn child is good.
I'm an Objectivist libertarian, and my beliefs are in fact based on rationality.
beep...boop...DOES NOT COMPUTE! How'd rationality lead you to think that "liberal belief" includes the idea that killing an unborn child is "good?"
Why figth against a stupid corp like Amazon, if you can simply use real books (no DRM here, you can give then to your friends, sell, etc) or use a better - and open - option like one netbook with PDF reader? For me, Kindle is a expensive and useless toy.
This comes up with every Kindle article, and I tend to respond. A netbook, or anything else with a backlight, can't compete with a Kindle's readability. Of course there are other ebook readers, and there are also paper books, but the Kindle really is quite useful if you travel and want to bring a lot to read. Also, if you want to only read free (as in beer or speech, your choice) material you can do so on the Kindle. The DX, at least, reads pdfs without any conversion, and both versions read txt and several non-Amazon ebook formats.
Everything that comes into a black hole comes back out eventually via Hawking Radiation. It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.
> But what I want to know is, why hasn't anyone mass produced a Thin CRT yet?
They've been prototyped -- 10 years ago, I was convinced that the future of television was the Field Emission Display (FED) after I saw a demo at CES. Absolutely *beautiful*. The best of all worlds. Bright, saturated, distortion-free, and viewable from angles just like a regular CRT.
Basically, coat a sheet of glass with colored phosphors, and put individually-addressable solid-state electron sources behind them. To light up a particular phosphor group, turn on the emitters behind it to make it glow. Unfortunately, the technology went nowhere. :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_emission_display
Isn't that roughly how an OLED display is put together? If so, maybe you'll have cause to celebrate in the next couple years.
The CIGS PV cell is called "thin film" because the photoelectric sandwich is deposited as thin layers on top of a GLASS plate. Oh, and they apparently are (very) moisture-sensitive, so having them last 20-25 years will be difficult.
The substrate isn't necessarily glass. Flexible metal substrates have been used already by other companies. They do bend, and they're encased in a flexible moisture barrier and offered with a warranty that lasts as long as the lifetime claims. I don't think that the companies selling these would be willing to offer the warranty without a reasonably good expectation that the cells would actually last that long.
It seems unlikely that these will weather very well, so we'll have to see how they cope with thermal cycling and storm stresses. Nice to note that things have moved along since I worked on Si photovoltaics - it's taken longer than I expected, though
They'll be sold with a 20 year warranty, and trust me: they wouldn't be willing to offer that warranty without being confident that they wouldn't have to pay up regularly.
There are these places called "libraries". They have books there, and you can read them for free. You can even take them home with you!
We don't want your socialized literary communes, commie!
And for that matter how do you enter a benzene ring into a search query?
You can do exactly that in Scifinder - draw the molecule and search papers and patents for it. It's the one thing I've done in Scifinder that really benefited me over using Web of Science.
How did this crap get modded "informative"? What in the HELL do Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend have to do with influenza?
I won't believe anything until Oprah tells me it's right.
And yet Obama has gone to extreme lengths to "engage" Iran, and that hasn't helped much either, has it?
It seems to be one of the few things he's done with unarguably positive effect.
As for which countries can be trusted. Ones with secular governments that keep religion out of government policy and decisions. The EU, America, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and others I think can be trusted. Of course the previous American government was pretty worrying. Hopefully American citizens have learnt their lesson, and hopefully the republican party will fix themselves. They've been catering to the loons, and that's dangerous for everyone.
America has a colorful and long history of overturning small nations because their dictator or democratically elected government has displeased us. If I were a small nation that disagreed with America's ideology (which does include stuff like assassinations and coups in order to help spread business interests), I don't think I'd trust America. Israel frequently claims to be halting settlement of Palestinian-majority areas followed by revelations that they're funding and encouraging that settlement. I wouldn't trust them either. In military matters I do feel that I could trust the EU, NZ, and Australia.
This is why they aren't overly concerned with Vista's shitty performance, and this is also why they haven't been breaking their balls trying to fix it.
I think they might not be overly concerned with Vista's shitty performance re: games because when there are other OS options to run the same game on the same hardware (take WoW on Vista, Wine, and OSX for example), Vista runs it the fastest.
When it comes down to it, if food products are larger but do not provide additional "food value" to go with the size, the only benefit would be for those trying to lose weight, since there is less food "value" for a given mass. 1000 calories of something grown in space may take up more room, but it is still only 1000 calories worth of food. Now, if you take a plant that on Earth provides 1000 calories and when grown in space it provides 1500 calories, THEN that would be worth looking at.
A reciprocal argument can be made about mass-farmed food on Earth. Generally the calorie content is higher in industrially farmed foods while the nutrient content is lower. Therefore it's a problem for those looking to lose weight because getting the required calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, etc. are diluted relative to the calories that come along with them. Furthermore, since grains (the source ofproblematic omega-6 fatty acids) replace leaves (the source of important omega-3 fatty acids) in industrial meat farming, some important nutrients are very difficult to consume regardless of the amount of calories consumed. Supplemental nutrients are often added to make up for these deficiencies, but considering that nutritionists have only vague ideas of which nutrients matter, whether quantity or ratio matter, or whether seemingly unimportant chemicals are necessary to properly utilize the nutrients that we know are important, this doesn't have a reliable effect.