You are confusing the concept with the implementation. There's the abstract concept of a song. That abstract concept could be implemented as a videoclip, as a set of guitar chords, or in many other ways. But in the end it's the same concept. Different physical implementations, same abstract concept.
The 60 LnS thick hadron stop, and neutrinos getting to a detector 60 nS too soon is just plain suspicious.
Well, if neutrinos can go through iron instantly that would have awesome implications. For one thing, they would go instantly from one side of the earth to the other. This would be very easy to check, since it would be a difference of more than 40 milliseconds to light speed travel.
My first thought was what if neutrinos do not interact with gravity at all? In this case spacetime would be flat for them and they would take the short straight line instead of following the curved spacetime. Unfortunately this would account for much less than the observed 60ns.
There's mass along the path, but it's evenly distributed. On the earth surface we have a special name, "below", for the direction where most of the mass of the earth is located. This is what is meant by "curvature of spacetime", it's an uneven distribution of mass.
I was making a conjecture that maybe this uneven distribution of masses could have some effect on the neutrinos.
cattle are fed corn, because it is heavily subsidized
Obvious solution: end farming subsidies. If meat gets more expensive, import it from third world countries, where cattle is raised on the range. Use import duties and quotas to enforce good environmental practices in the producing countries.
Everybody wins, including the corn farmers who will end the monoculture that damages their soil. By rotating crops like alfalfa and soybeans they will need much less fertilizer.
The analog nature of the neuron isn't really the key to making "artificial brains" - the problem is simply scale.
Agreed.
We will never be able to produce enough of these chips and tie them together well enough to produce anything conventionally interesting
Shall we cue here all the "never" predictions of the last century? By the year 1900 there were lots of experts predicting we would never have flying machines, by 1950 experts were predicting the whole world would never need more than a dozen computers.
Moore's law, or should we say Moore's phenomenon, has been showing how much electronic devices scale in the long run.
The worst code I've seen is almost invariably produced by EEs
How does that compare with code produced by business or art school majors who want to try out being a programmer?
All EEs who aren't old enough to have been retired long ago have taken courses on logic design. Things like state machines or indirect addressing come naturally to them. Software is a natural evolution from circuit design.
Because, except for hobby or training, it doesn't make sense.
There was a time when one used lots of 555 chips. Today you have the 12F675 PIC in the same eight pin format that can do almost everything the 555 can do without any external components. A 12F675 cost about $1.60, which is $1 over the price of a 555, but the lack of external components and the added flexibility will compensate for that.
The same can be said of most discrete logic chips. Unless it's a very simple logic function, it makes more sense to use a PIC than to assemble a circuit from TTL or CMOS chips.
it would be idiotic to have a law on the books that made letting the parking meter run out on your car a CRIME, just so that if someone ever robs a bank down the road, and then parks there car at an expired meter... that they can be arrested and tossed in jail for that.
This is spot on. Unfortunately, both sides of the debate commit the same mistake. One often sees people in civil liberties organizations worried about surveillance cameras, for instance.
The problem should be illegal surveillance, not the cameras. The difference between a plainclothes police officer standing at a corner and a surveillance camera is how effective the watcher can be. If it's legal for the officer to watch a street no one should complain about a camera doing the same. A camera increases the effectiveness, but the same is true of binoculars or hand held cameras.
I think any such allegations about creating a special situation for automated surveillance weakens the arguments for civil liberties in computer use. A crime is a crime, no matter which tools are used. This should be true no matter who is accused of the crime, law enforcement or common citizen.
If she'd eaten less protein and not been a woman, she probably would've been fine
It was an MD specialized in orthopedy and traumatology who diagnosed her osteoporosis as being caused by her vegan diet. According to him, a vegan diet is very delicate and must be carefully tuned to the individual metabolism.
Funny thing is that her identical twin was my coworker. Apart from their faces, they didn't seem sisters. They were in their mid-forties and the vegan twin seemed ten years older than her sister who ate everything. She was overweight, had grayish, nearly white hair, while her sister had black hair with just a few white strands and a perfect figure for her age. Since I often had lunch with her I know she didn't diet, she just ate everything in normal amounts.
An anecdote isn't data, of course, but these twin sisters would be a perfect argument against veganism.
do you think an auto mechanic could get an appointment with his US Senator?
Absolutely, yes! You would get one if you tried. If you were to arrive at your senator's office in Washington and there were a lobbyist there with a check for $10k who do you think your senator would see first? You.
All marketeers know that word of mouth is the best advertisement. Imagine you were choosing a new car to buy, would you trust more the advertisements or the opinion of someone you knew who had one? Your senator knows that any voter who is motivated enough to travel all the way to DC to meet him is an active member of his community and will bring more votes than a lot of advertising.
The recent financial meltdown was a result of deregulation (Glass-Stegall repealed).
No, it was a result of regulations to avoid discrimination by banks against people living in low-income neighborhoods. In a free market the junk mortgage bubble would have never happened.
The problem is when an industry writes its own regs
Which is always. When there's a commission in Congress to write a regulation, are you there? No, because you do not have time to be in Washington all the time. Lobbyists are paid to be there.
Your argument about advertising isn't true, because people do not sell their votes to advertisers like that. You don't sell your vote, why do you think other people would? But regulations are a different matter.
It's not a question of buying votes, the trick is to be there when the details are written into the regulation. No matter who is elected, the people in Congress have too many issues to know intimately every detail. When it comes to cross the t's and dot the i's there will be a corporation lobbyist there to "help".
And the more regulations there are, the more "help" your congressman will need.
A 1.5 ton pickup truck today carries the same cargo as a 1.5 ton truck did in 1981. A desktop computer today is more powerful than the biggest supercomputer they had in 1981.
Yes, the relative evolution of machinery has improved the productivity of some workers more than others.
in most cases, there have been no long term studies as to safety
Every plant in the wild, every living being, has thousands of mutations. How do you plan on having long term studies of safety for that?
There's nothing magic about genetic engineering, it's just about introducing a gene into a plant directly instead of through cross breeding.
As a matter of fact, it's safer doing it that way because they know which genes they are introducing. When you cross a plant of wheat with another one you are getting a random mix of the genes in both plants, you have no idea exactly of what will be the result.
Ever have a percutanous nephrolithotomy? I can't recommend it.
Never heard of it. But I know someone who broke an ankle because she stumbled on a crack in the pavement. Spent four months in bed and needed crutches to walk for over a year afterwards.
It turned out that due to her vegan diet her body had a serious calcium deficit. To absorb calcium into bones we need some enzymes that come from animal products, such as beef and fish. Without those enzymes one needs to eat a surplus of calcium and that could have side effects, such as kidney and gall bladder stones.
I prefer to stick to my varied omnivorous diet. We evolved that way over millions of years and it's not a new fangled diet based on philosophical concepts that will change the way our digestive system works.
Congress shall make no law... prohibiting... the right of the people peaceably to assemble
A corporation is the assembly of a number of people, called "shareholders", who have a certain common interest. The rights of a corporation are the rights of its owners.
Corporations are treated as persons in some respects because they have duties and obligations. If corporations didn't have those characteristics how would you enforce contracts? Who would you sue when you bought a car with a defective design?
Corporations have so much political strength not because they are rich, but because they really care about the issues they lobby for and against. For a media corporation, for instance, a certain detail about copyright law could mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy, for you it means paying a few bucks more to watch a film or listen to a song.
The only way to reduce the power corporations have in politics is to deregulate as much as possible. The more you regulate everything the more power you give to corporations
If you think of raw energy, let's say running an electric generator connected to a treadmill, humans are way too expensive.
A human can produce, roughly, one kilowatt-hour per day of work. Check your electricity bill to see how much it costs. Now find someone who's willing to work a full day for that pay.
No matter how harshly you treat them, even a slave would cost several orders of magnitude more.
many other countries still have great respect for those that do manual labor.
Name one.
most manual labor jobs have not seen in increase in wage in almost two decades
Because those jobs will never show an improvement in productivity. There's a limit on how big a wheelbarrow a man can push, beyond that you need a truck and then it ceases being manual labor.
I have no doubt many people love doing manual labor, but as a hobby, not as a job. You may be willing to take up gardening instead of paying to use a gym, but you wouldn't pay another guy for the right to dig his garden.
Back in the early '80s, I remember being impressed by a pogo-stick hopping robot just because it could keep it's balance. That's amazing progress for 30 years when you think about it.
If there existed any use at all for a robot hopping on a pogo stick they would have developed it further. I remember the robot you mention and I also remember thinking why would anyone want that.
A robot capable of following visually a moving ball is something entirely different. Tracking an object over an arbitrary background would allow some extremely useful capabilities.
May I mention robots-driven vehicles on normal streets?
Slashdot Mirror
The persistence relies on physical objects
You are confusing the concept with the implementation. There's the abstract concept of a song. That abstract concept could be implemented as a videoclip, as a set of guitar chords, or in many other ways. But in the end it's the same concept. Different physical implementations, same abstract concept.
The 60 LnS thick hadron stop, and neutrinos getting to a detector 60 nS too soon is just plain suspicious.
Well, if neutrinos can go through iron instantly that would have awesome implications. For one thing, they would go instantly from one side of the earth to the other. This would be very easy to check, since it would be a difference of more than 40 milliseconds to light speed travel.
My first thought was what if neutrinos do not interact with gravity at all? In this case spacetime would be flat for them and they would take the short straight line instead of following the curved spacetime. Unfortunately this would account for much less than the observed 60ns.
There's mass along the path, but it's evenly distributed. On the earth surface we have a special name, "below", for the direction where most of the mass of the earth is located. This is what is meant by "curvature of spacetime", it's an uneven distribution of mass.
I was making a conjecture that maybe this uneven distribution of masses could have some effect on the neutrinos.
if there's an effect here, it should probably be related to neutrinos-through-matter vs neutrinos-through-vacuum
That, or interaction with the gravitational field. Neutrinos from the supernova traveled through essentially flat spacetime, far from any masses.
cattle are fed corn, because it is heavily subsidized
Obvious solution: end farming subsidies. If meat gets more expensive, import it from third world countries, where cattle is raised on the range. Use import duties and quotas to enforce good environmental practices in the producing countries.
Everybody wins, including the corn farmers who will end the monoculture that damages their soil. By rotating crops like alfalfa and soybeans they will need much less fertilizer.
Some teddy bears have even worse implications...
Us normal people don't need a video game to point us in the right direction, we do it without thinking. Sad, eh?
Sad to think how much of a douchebag you seem to be. Perhaps playing games would improve your attitude.
Postgres still requires that the developer and DBA actually talk to each other every once in a while, whereas Oracle does not.
Oracle requires that the developer and DBA actually talk to each other all of the time. It's not like Postgres.
If there's one event that tipped us into the Singularity that should be the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s.
Or maybe the invention of the scientific method, but that happened centuries before, too much could nave happened in between.
The analog nature of the neuron isn't really the key to making "artificial brains" - the problem is simply scale.
Agreed.
We will never be able to produce enough of these chips and tie them together well enough to produce anything conventionally interesting
Shall we cue here all the "never" predictions of the last century? By the year 1900 there were lots of experts predicting we would never have flying machines, by 1950 experts were predicting the whole world would never need more than a dozen computers.
Moore's law, or should we say Moore's phenomenon, has been showing how much electronic devices scale in the long run.
The worst code I've seen is almost invariably produced by EEs
How does that compare with code produced by business or art school majors who want to try out being a programmer?
All EEs who aren't old enough to have been retired long ago have taken courses on logic design. Things like state machines or indirect addressing come naturally to them. Software is a natural evolution from circuit design.
Why not?
Because, except for hobby or training, it doesn't make sense.
There was a time when one used lots of 555 chips. Today you have the 12F675 PIC in the same eight pin format that can do almost everything the 555 can do without any external components. A 12F675 cost about $1.60, which is $1 over the price of a 555, but the lack of external components and the added flexibility will compensate for that.
The same can be said of most discrete logic chips. Unless it's a very simple logic function, it makes more sense to use a PIC than to assemble a circuit from TTL or CMOS chips.
it would be idiotic to have a law on the books that made letting the parking meter run out on your car a CRIME, just so that if someone ever robs a bank down the road, and then parks there car at an expired meter... that they can be arrested and tossed in jail for that.
This is spot on. Unfortunately, both sides of the debate commit the same mistake. One often sees people in civil liberties organizations worried about surveillance cameras, for instance.
The problem should be illegal surveillance, not the cameras. The difference between a plainclothes police officer standing at a corner and a surveillance camera is how effective the watcher can be. If it's legal for the officer to watch a street no one should complain about a camera doing the same. A camera increases the effectiveness, but the same is true of binoculars or hand held cameras.
I think any such allegations about creating a special situation for automated surveillance weakens the arguments for civil liberties in computer use. A crime is a crime, no matter which tools are used. This should be true no matter who is accused of the crime, law enforcement or common citizen.
If she'd eaten less protein and not been a woman, she probably would've been fine
It was an MD specialized in orthopedy and traumatology who diagnosed her osteoporosis as being caused by her vegan diet. According to him, a vegan diet is very delicate and must be carefully tuned to the individual metabolism.
Funny thing is that her identical twin was my coworker. Apart from their faces, they didn't seem sisters. They were in their mid-forties and the vegan twin seemed ten years older than her sister who ate everything. She was overweight, had grayish, nearly white hair, while her sister had black hair with just a few white strands and a perfect figure for her age. Since I often had lunch with her I know she didn't diet, she just ate everything in normal amounts.
An anecdote isn't data, of course, but these twin sisters would be a perfect argument against veganism.
do you think an auto mechanic could get an appointment with his US Senator?
Absolutely, yes! You would get one if you tried. If you were to arrive at your senator's office in Washington and there were a lobbyist there with a check for $10k who do you think your senator would see first? You.
All marketeers know that word of mouth is the best advertisement. Imagine you were choosing a new car to buy, would you trust more the advertisements or the opinion of someone you knew who had one? Your senator knows that any voter who is motivated enough to travel all the way to DC to meet him is an active member of his community and will bring more votes than a lot of advertising.
The recent financial meltdown was a result of deregulation (Glass-Stegall repealed).
No, it was a result of regulations to avoid discrimination by banks against people living in low-income neighborhoods. In a free market the junk mortgage bubble would have never happened.
The problem is when an industry writes its own regs
Which is always. When there's a commission in Congress to write a regulation, are you there? No, because you do not have time to be in Washington all the time. Lobbyists are paid to be there.
Your argument about advertising isn't true, because people do not sell their votes to advertisers like that. You don't sell your vote, why do you think other people would? But regulations are a different matter.
It's not a question of buying votes, the trick is to be there when the details are written into the regulation. No matter who is elected, the people in Congress have too many issues to know intimately every detail. When it comes to cross the t's and dot the i's there will be a corporation lobbyist there to "help".
And the more regulations there are, the more "help" your congressman will need.
A 1.5 ton pickup truck today carries the same cargo as a 1.5 ton truck did in 1981. A desktop computer today is more powerful than the biggest supercomputer they had in 1981.
Yes, the relative evolution of machinery has improved the productivity of some workers more than others.
Computers. Office jobs are much fewer but better paying than 30 years ago.
It's just that it kind of goes against the grain of the industry right now, parts people sort of don't like him as I'm sure you can understand
I understand the horse wagon industry didn't like the people who started manufacturing automobiles at the end of the 19th century.
the protections or legal climate or something just isn't there
Yes, they tried this against automobiles.
Every time an inventor complains that the existing industry is holding him back it means his invention isn't really that good.
in most cases, there have been no long term studies as to safety
Every plant in the wild, every living being, has thousands of mutations. How do you plan on having long term studies of safety for that?
There's nothing magic about genetic engineering, it's just about introducing a gene into a plant directly instead of through cross breeding.
As a matter of fact, it's safer doing it that way because they know which genes they are introducing. When you cross a plant of wheat with another one you are getting a random mix of the genes in both plants, you have no idea exactly of what will be the result.
Ever have a percutanous nephrolithotomy? I can't recommend it.
Never heard of it. But I know someone who broke an ankle because she stumbled on a crack in the pavement. Spent four months in bed and needed crutches to walk for over a year afterwards.
It turned out that due to her vegan diet her body had a serious calcium deficit. To absorb calcium into bones we need some enzymes that come from animal products, such as beef and fish. Without those enzymes one needs to eat a surplus of calcium and that could have side effects, such as kidney and gall bladder stones.
I prefer to stick to my varied omnivorous diet. We evolved that way over millions of years and it's not a new fangled diet based on philosophical concepts that will change the way our digestive system works.
Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble
A corporation is the assembly of a number of people, called "shareholders", who have a certain common interest. The rights of a corporation are the rights of its owners.
Corporations are treated as persons in some respects because they have duties and obligations. If corporations didn't have those characteristics how would you enforce contracts? Who would you sue when you bought a car with a defective design?
Corporations have so much political strength not because they are rich, but because they really care about the issues they lobby for and against. For a media corporation, for instance, a certain detail about copyright law could mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy, for you it means paying a few bucks more to watch a film or listen to a song.
The only way to reduce the power corporations have in politics is to deregulate as much as possible. The more you regulate everything the more power you give to corporations
If you think of raw energy, let's say running an electric generator connected to a treadmill, humans are way too expensive.
A human can produce, roughly, one kilowatt-hour per day of work. Check your electricity bill to see how much it costs. Now find someone who's willing to work a full day for that pay.
No matter how harshly you treat them, even a slave would cost several orders of magnitude more.
many other countries still have great respect for those that do manual labor.
Name one.
most manual labor jobs have not seen in increase in wage in almost two decades
Because those jobs will never show an improvement in productivity. There's a limit on how big a wheelbarrow a man can push, beyond that you need a truck and then it ceases being manual labor.
I have no doubt many people love doing manual labor, but as a hobby, not as a job. You may be willing to take up gardening instead of paying to use a gym, but you wouldn't pay another guy for the right to dig his garden.
Back in the early '80s, I remember being impressed by a pogo-stick hopping robot just because it could keep it's balance. That's amazing progress for 30 years when you think about it.
If there existed any use at all for a robot hopping on a pogo stick they would have developed it further. I remember the robot you mention and I also remember thinking why would anyone want that.
A robot capable of following visually a moving ball is something entirely different. Tracking an object over an arbitrary background would allow some extremely useful capabilities.
May I mention robots-driven vehicles on normal streets?